Month: January 2004

My name is Dave Thomas. It doesn’t matter if I introduce myself as David Thomas or David B. Thomas, I still get, “Huh, like the founder of Wendy’s? As if it might have escaped my attention. “It used to be one in ten people said, “Like the guy from SCTV? and I usually liked those people, and one in 50 would say, “Like the guy from Pere Ubu? and I always liked those people.” One year for Christmas my mother gave me and my father coffee mugs that say, “Yes, my name is Dave Thomas. No, I don’t have a daughter named Wendy. No, I don’t make hamburgers” On the bottom it says the cup was made by Thomas Tiles, so I assume there is a fellow sufferer out there who decided to cash in. I wish I had thought of it.

Having shared the name of a famous hamburger pitchman for decades, I have learned firsthand that if a name can be lampooned in any way, the namesake has probably heard it a hundred times. I could meet someone named Delicious Chocolate Pudding and I would say, “How do you do, Mr. Pudding”

All this is preliminary to what I am about to post. I know I have the same name as the late burger baron. Don’t bother pointing it out. You have been warned.

My friend Greta, who I’m sure has heard her fair share of Garbo jokes, hipped me to a site called Googlism, which does some kind of fancy internet magic and pulls together quotes about any term or name you enter. Here’s a sample of what you get for me:

dave thomas is truly the biggie man
dave thomas is covering his eyes with his hands in mock fear
dave thomas is a bigot
dave thomas is a life
dave thomas is a woodturner based just outside the picturesque village of shere
dave thomas is spared immortalization by way of clumsy cartooning
dave thomas is currently not yet a bronze member
dave thomas is an original american folk hero
dave thomas is wanting to go out in the parking lot and fight defending his own lie
dave thomas is available for viewing with windows media player
dave thomas is the perfect fit
dave thomas is revealing his inner workings
dave thomas is an award winning canberra cannon
dave thomas is leading the charge for legislative action to add a state fossil to michigan’s popular list of identifiable symbols
dave thomas is resigning his position after only three weeks
dave thomas is
dave thomas is your superior technical advisor
dave thomas is prominent in the worldwide ruby community
dave thomas is an unashamed packrat
dave thomas is not blues
dave thomas is 20th
dave thomas is one of the most underrated geniuses in the country
dave thomas is hot as
dave thomas is mentioned
dave thomas is sitting in the booth behind us
dave thomas is sexy
dave thomas is cool
dave thomas is getting a chance to do something like this
dave thomas is particularly proud of his customer service
dave thomas is a wonderful man
dave thomas is to blame

Want to see some other Dave Thomases I found on the web? <a href=”Of course you do.

If I were given the choice between opening a door marked “All-Day Meeting” or another one marked “Five Minutes of Root Canal” I would stop and think hard for a moment and then say, “This is a stupid metaphor”

If it’s even a metaphor. I know it’s not a simile. Or an analogy. Maybe it’s an allegory.

I’ll start again.

Today I drove to Raleigh for a meeting on the grounds of what used to be called Dorothea Dix Mental Hospital and is now probably called something else. “I wondered if, like the Simpsons when they visited Ned after he went loopy, I would be given a sticker that said “SANE”” This was a meeting of very smart and committed people volunteering their time for an extremely worthwhile cause, and I was happy to be involved. But dang, y’all.

First of all, and I won’t belabor this point, it’s time we abandoned the business suit, for men and women. ‘Nuff said.

Then there are the roundtable introductions, which no one ever hears, since we’re all practicing our own in our heads. I think the woman to my right said, “Hello. I am a leopard. Grrrrrr”

And then there’s PowerPoint. “Can you see this in the back? No? Okay, I’ll just read all the slides out loud. First, a little background. Millions of years ago, after the Earth cooled and developed an atmosphere…

I will admit that my mind tends to wander a bit during an all-day meeting, and then it starts to get me in trouble. I find myself imagining the most inappropriate thing I could do at that particular moment. “What could I do right now” I wonder, “that would be incredibly embarrassing, but not so embarrassing that I would have to leave town? But that doesn’t satisfy me. “What could I do right now that would be so embarrassing that I would have to leave town tomorrow and never return? Before I know it, in my mind I am naked and dancing on the conference table singing “Inna Gadda da Vida in Elmer Fudd’s voice and throwing poppyseed muffins at people. Then I have to go to the men’s room and think about lost puppies until I can keep a straight face again.

As for my suit, it is charcoal gray and unremarkable except for the label, which declares “Pronto Uomo: Firenze” Because this is the year 2497 and I am Buck Rogers, I was able to take out my subspace communicator and send a text message during the meeting to Memsy, who told me that “Pronto Uomo is Italian for “Ready Man” Surely he is one of the lesser superheroes. “We’re leaving in five minutes” “I’m ready!

Mark holding court in Hell – photo by Primo

I’m sure you’re all readers of Maxim magazine, if not subscribers, so you already know that my favorite bar, Hell, was awarded “Bar o’ the Month in the January issue. Since I love the bar and all who sail within in her, I will pretend that recognition from Maxim is a good thing.

“My favorite piece in the current issue is called “How to Spot a Bunny Boiler” It advises me that if a woman cleans her bathroom weekly and always has plenty of toilet paper on hand, she has obsessive compulsive disorder and I should “keep a shrink on speed dial” I would be worried if I thought anyone actually read this magazine as opposed to just looking at the cheesecake pictures of C-list, D-cup pseudo-celebrities.”

The first time I went to Hell I hated it and swore I would never go back. It was hot and dirty and the pool tables sucked. Then, like many people, I was drawn in by the charms of owner Mark Dorosin, everybody’s favorite attorney/professor/elected official/playwright/bartender. Mark used to drive by my friends’ house during Saturday afternoon yard parties and yell, “Hey you kids, go to Hell! This was before he knew them. I’ve already chronicled Mark’s vision for the bar and the result in a piece I wrote for the Independent Weekly celebrating Hell’s fourth anniversary, so here I’ll just say that I’ve never been to a bar that inspired so much loyalty other than the now-legendary Hardback Café.

I don’t go there as often as I used to “and it would be physically impossible to go there more often than I used to – Ryan and I once figured out roughly how much money we had spent in Hell and it was more than I put down on my house”. But I was there last week for Trivia Night when two young women came down the stairs and stood looking about tentatively. If they had come on Maxim’s recommendation, they were probably a bit disappointed to find a room full of people trying to remember who fought the Crimean War and the name of the transsexual tennis-playing eye doctor from the 1970s.

One of the problems with exposing myself to reality TV is that I also expose myself to TV commericials, and I will buy anything anyone tells me to. As a result, I found myself on Wednesday driving about 20 minutes round trip to pick up a Hardee’s Low Carb Thickburger. “How did they make a fast-food hamburger with so few carbohydrates? I asked myself. I got it home and found the secret: no bun – it’s wrapped in lettuce. It’s not bad, really. It’s kind of like a giant ground beef spring roll. But I don’t think I’ll be making any more 20 minute round trips to get one. “Mike and Chris have promised that at their next brunch, in consideration of any low-carb dieters, they’re going to make meat waffles. I can hardly wait.”

While finishing off the No Bun Weirdburger, I remembered another time I went considerably out of my way to eat something ultimately disappointing. When I lived in Tokyo, my aunt and uncle came to visit and we went to Kyoto. My aunt went out for a walk one morning and returned to the hotel unable to talk about anything but the cinnamon rolls she had smelled from a small bakery. She went on about it all day long, and made me promise that I would go with her the next day to negotiate the purchase of these items, since I had been in Japan for several months by that point, honing my smiling and pointing skills.

We set out the next morning at roughly the crack of dawn “she really was like a kid on Christmas day” and found the “bakery in question, which looked more like a machine shop. But there was no denying the intense aroma of cinnamon baked goods. I found someone who worked there, who reacted the way many Japanese do when they encounter a foreigner, which is roughly the way they do when they encounter Godzilla. I finally managed to convince him that we weren’t there to step on cars, but wanted to buy what they were baking. The delight on my aunt’s face when I emerged holding a bag of goodies was almost spiritual. We each removed one item from the bag, and took a big bite of … something with the consistency of a building material. Perhaps a wood laminate, or polycarbonate. It was undeniably cinnamon, but to this day I’m not entirely certain it was food. Somewhere I have a picture of my aunt trying in vain to bite through hers, with a there-is-no-Santa look on her face.

I haven’t made a New Year’s resolution in probably five years, ever since the best one I’ve ever made: I resolved to be more superficial. I think most people assumed I was joking when I said it, but not entirely. It’s so easy to become righteously indignant about so much of modern American society, but you know what? It’s also very tiring. In its most noble interpretation my resolution meant I intended to save my indignation for topics that truly deserved it. But it really meant I was giving myself permission to watch reality TV.

I reaffirmed that resolution Monday night when I found myself unable to look away from Average Joe: Hawaii on NBC. It was touch and go for a while “and who knows, I could still escalate to Indignant Level Orange” but I finally decided not to get all bent out of shape about a show that is forcing a beauty queen to spend several weeks in a Hawaiian mansion keeping a smile glued to her face while surrounded by men who up to this point would have been invisible to her. I’m not going to bother finding all their names, but the group includes The Fat Guy, The Fatter Guy, The Even Fatter Guy and The Really Fat Guy, as well as The Guy Who Makes Carrot Top Look Like Cary Grant and The Guy with No Sweat Glands. “After watching the show for 20 minutes I realized I’d rather talk to any of them – even The Dull Guy with the Cold Sore – than the beauty queen.”

I’m once again ready to embrace my superficiality. I have set my Tivo-like device to record the entire series. It should put me in the right frame of mind for some of the other upcoming absurd reality show elimination contests, like Fear Factor, The Apprentice, and The 2004 Election.

For Christmas, <a href=”Jean gave me The Big Book of Being Rude, and to quote Bart when Homer gave him the machine that says “Go to hell at the push of a button, I promise you I will never get tired of this. It offers 7000 slang insults, and that should be just about enough to get me through a new year of job hunting and serving on my homeowners association board.

For instance, I recently found myself drawn into a heated email correspondence among my fellow board members which included the question, “How do we verify the number of squirrels to know if we are being fairly charged for this service? Rather than joining the debate on rodent enumeration technologies, I could have picked a rejoinder from the book and told them all to go and piss up a shutter, which the book indicates is an English expression from the 1910s. Of course, I would probably need to have that one approved by the architectural committee.

The book offers many opportunities to be rude in a modern context “it is not for the PC: no insulting term is left out”, but also gives us the chance to bring some historical insults back into use. Maybe the next time I get four steps into the interview process only to be told that the job is not going to be filled after all, I can seek my retaliatory inspiration from the 16th century and call the HR person a bel-shangle, clumperton, doddypoll or ninnyhammer. And why tell somebody merely to go to hell when you can tell him to go to hell and help his mother make bitch pies? “English, mid-18C: late 19C”.

“A former colleague of mine had a psychotherapist mother-in-law who was apparently far too nice a lady to swear effectively. After being cut off in traffic, she rolled down her window and screamed, “You can wipe your ass on my coat! After Ian and his wife stopped laughing, they explained to her that, not only would no one ever say that, it would in fact be far worse for her than for the other driver.”

The book takes a scholarly tone, giving time periods and etymologies for the words, but some of them seem a bit spurious. Are there really 23 euphemisms for crackhead? “Hubba pigeon” for instance? And how long did “Kuwaiti tanker survive as rhyming slang for “wanker? I for one was on US campuses for far too long in the 1980s and never heard anyone refer to an idiot as a “McFly “”a character in the Back to the Future films” or “dorkmunder “”dork + poss. Dortmunder Union Pils”. Right. So often our insults came from the names of obscure German beers.

Maybe I’ve got a kangaroo loose in the top paddock, but I think some of the insults are just plain dumb. I find it hard to believe that Australians in the 1930s couldn’t come up with anything cleverer than “as silly as a bag” Luckily, they put their best minds to work and a decade later issued the new, improved “silly as a hatful of arseholes”

While amusing, many are not very useful for the average 21st century American. However, should you find the need to insult someone from New South Wales, you might try “cornstalk or “crow-eater” “North Carolinians, by the way, are goober-grubbers.”