Month: January 2004

I’m feeling a bit random today, and luckily the random absurdity has been piling up. I saw the sign pictured above during a recent visit to UNC Hospitals. I thought it was a bit zen for a traditional western medicine establishment. “Actually, I first noticed “Remember 3C and thought, “There must be a ‘Remember 2B,’ and drove around until I found it. My apologies to anyone who had recently had a major organ removed who might have been waiting on the sidewalk in a wheelchair.”

At the hospital, I also saw this, on a Mustang. I will make no further comment other than to direct your attention to the handcuffs hanging from the rearview mirror.

There’s a banner ad that keeps popping up on Yahoo aimed at people who suffer from acid reflux “or GERD, which will always sound like an East German weightlifter to me”. It reads, “Bowl of pasta, or bowl of pain? Bowl of Pain needs to be the name of a band right now. Get on it, people.

The Hardback Café used to put a chalkboard out front with the specials on it. One day it read, “Gazpacho: the cold soup of Spain” a quote from the Pepper’s Pizza menu. Later in the day someone changed it to “the cold soup of pain” and still later it read, “the cold soup of space” I can never hear gazpacho mentioned without thinking of that and telling the story, often to people who have heard it four or five times.

Finally, randomly, I got an email from a friend the other day who is a highly-accomplished professional in his field. He was mortified to notice that he had let the Microsoft Word autocorrect feature get a bit away from him. In a proposal to a client, he meant to say he would “provide coaching and feedback to others” What he actually proposed was that he would “provide coaching and feedback to otters”

If that’s a real job, I want it.

After five years I have come to the conclusion that, as sweet as he is, Hastings is not the sharpest flea comb in the drawer. Let’s just say it’s a good thing he’s domesticated. As with most cats, he is primarily concerned with eating, napping, parasitically sucking up body heat, and chasing imaginary rodents. He used to be really good about eating. I would put a small bowl of dry food down in the morning and he would stand there until he finished it, and that was that. Then, during last year’s ice storm, I really screwed up. I felt bad for making him stay in a cold house all day while I decamped to places restored of power, so I started giving him a snack at night. The first time I did it, he looked at me with an incredulous expression that seemed to say, “What?! You mean you can feed my anytime you want?! And from then on I was doomed.

For the past year he has followed me around relentlessly, and meows plaintively whenever I walk into the kitchen. Any time I stand up, he is on me like a cheap furry suit. And of course, he greets the dawn by jumping on my bed and putting his nose in my mouth. “”Oh, you’re awake? Well then you might as well feed me.”” I finally got tired of it and inaugurated the Full Bowl Policy two weeks ago. Many of my cat-owning friends keep a bowl of dry food constantly replenished and their cats eat whenever they feel like it. Sure, some of them are a bit, er… zaftig, but they also aren’t leaping around like Chinese acrobats on the Ed Sullivan show every time you get up to go to the bathroom.

On Day One of the FBP when I filled his bowl to the brim, Hastings thought it was Kitty Christmas. Since then he’s gotten used to it, but whenever I top up the bowl he looks at me as if to say, “I’ve never loved you more” I think he’s gained maybe a pound, and for him that probably isn’t a bad thing.

But has it changed his behavior? Has it my eye. He still meows at me when I walk past the cabinet where his cat food is kept. When I point to his full bowl, he kind of shrugs and goes, “Oh, right” And he still wakes me up in the morning and tries to herd me downstairs when I head for the bathroom. I realize he’s an animal, but like some kind of pathetic parent with a child vying for a spot in a magnet school, I want him to be exceptional. “Then again, as far as intelligence goes, I’m the one trying to reason with a cat here.”

Maybe he needs a tutor, or some flashcards.

A few weeks ago, Jean came over for dinner and gave the hairy eyeball to my stove, which I’m assuming has been here since 1978 when the house was built. At first I was confused because I thought it was pretty clean, and not just by my pathetically lenient standards.

“You know you can get new trim rings and drip pans” she said. What? Of course I don’t know that. Who the hell knows that? I didn’t even know those objects had names, although “trim ring and “drip pan seem pretty straightforward. If something has to be purchased at Lowes or Home Depot, I usually assume it’s going to have some kind of specialized and esoteric name that I will neither know nor be able to deduce. It wouldn’t surprise me if these things on my stove were called plattrens and cronnets.

Anyway, my 26-year old stove now has brand new decorative hardware “one of the odder gifts I’ve received, I must say”, and it does liven it up considerably. But now I have to worry about getting fingerprints on my shiny new cronnets. Err, trim rings.

I set out Sunday morning in the snow with the promise of freedom toast and a kind word. I turned around and came home ten minutes later after discovering three things:

1. Plooblewagon’s boy-racer low-profile tires love dry pavement, but they get all confused and belligerent when they encounter anything slippy.

2. The vast majority of other vehicles I encountered were SUVs “many of them two-wheel drive, which is the stupidest thing ever” piloted by sorority girls driving far too quickly and running stop signs while talking on cell phones.

3. I don’t like doing things I’m no good at.

“It didn’t make me feel any better when I watched the Monte Carlo rally Sunday night and saw people driving 80 miles an hour on roads I would be reluctant to walk on.”

If you’re from some place that has real winters and you’re aching to scoff at my wimpishness, remember that I live in North Carolina, so we don’t have snow plows, we don’t have snow tires, and we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. And since it doesn’t happen very often, we can afford to avoid the snowy and icy roads and hunker down in slippers-and-pay-per-view mode. Even so I will admit it is a bit ridiculous that one inch of snow will shut down the entire state and cause a run on the grocery stores that resembles the evacuation of Saigon and leaves shelves denuded of milk, bread and eggs. “I’m stealing from some stand-up comedian here, but what is it about snowstorms that makes people crave French toast?”

I was born in New Jersey but I grew up here, so winter weather meant no school. It takes a long time to overcome that nostalgic memory. When I first started working for myself in 1995, I woke up one morning to an ice storm and thought, “Cool! I don’t have to go to work.” Then I remembered that I worked at home, so essentially I was trapped in the office.

White tigers have been in the news a lot lately, and not just because one of them tried to make a sequined canapé out of either Siegfried or Roy. “Like I care which one.” An Argentinean tiger recently gave birth to sextuplets in the Buenos Aires zoo, for instance. There’s so much tiger talk that Yahoo news has a white tiger slide show, where I found two pictures. The first one reminds me of one of W. Eugene Smith’s famous photos, which depending on which Google search you believe is either called The Walk to Paradise Garden, A Walk to Paradise Garden, A Walk in Paradise Garden, Walk Into Paradise Garden or Those Damn Kids Are in the Garden Again.

Now here’s another white tiger cub photo. Could it be any more different? It almost seems as though this tiger has a publicist telling him, “Don’t work the cute angle. The cute angle is overplayed. Go with funny. Gimme some yucks. When I get done with you, kiddo, they’ll be saying Kangaroo Jack who?

original photo Luke Frazza/AFP

When Time Warner Cable announced they would be adding BBC America, I could hardly contain my excitement. I’ve been a huge Anglophile since I was ten years old, and my favorite shows have almost always been British: especially British mysteries. My cat, for instance, is named for Hercule Poirot’s sidekick. He will answer to Hastings but prefers Captain Hastings. “That sounds a whole lot dorkier written down than when I say it.”

Watching BBC America makes it obvious that there are dozens of people in Hollywood and New York who are making a tidy living by copying British shows for American TV. It’s not a new phenomenon, as you may know: Sanford and Son was a remake of Steptoe and Son, Three’s Company came from a show called Man About the House, and the US Congress show on C-Span is a shameless ripoff of Fawlty Towers. Even the apex “or nadir” of American television, the reality show, originated in the UK with a show called Castaway, which dumped a bunch of whiny jerks on a Scottish island and forced them to learn how to make bread and husband sheep. I noticed tonight that Airport, which follows people around Heathrow airport, has been copied for A&E. I turned it off after three minutes when the first situation involved a Southwest employee dealing with a man who had soiled his trousers. That kind of reality I don’t need to see.

My favorite British reality show is called Faking It, in which they give someone one month to learn enough about a particular topic to try to fool a panel of judges into thinking they are experts. One show took a classical cellist and turned her into a club DJ. Another featured a country vicar trying to convince people that he was an Essex used car salesman. In most of the shows, the fakers form a strong bond with their mentors, and often succeed in fooling the judges. This week’s show, however, took a professional video game tester and tried to turn him into a race car driver. He failed horribly, not only in his task, but also in endearing himself to his mentors. At the end of the show, one called him “an arrogant twat” and the other said he hoped never to see him again.

I’m wondering how long the show can last before they run out of plausible subjects for fakery and start reaching too far. “This week on Faking It, we’ll watch as Trevor, a butcher’s apprentice from North London, tries to fool a panel of doctors into believing he’s a brain surgeon”

I’m fascinated by the idea that someone with a month of intensive training can pass as an authority in almost any given field. It’s fun to watch on TV. It’s less enjoyable when your boss seems to have followed the same route.

If you could spend a month learning how to fake something, what would you choose?