yes, I know I’ve used this photo before

I went to Atlanta last week for a conference and stayed in the Westin Peachtree, which unfortunately is a lot less Blade-Runneresque than this photo would indicate. It did have the distinction, however, of being the only hotel I’ve ever stayed where my room actually looked like the room pictured on the web site “albeit less dramatically lit”.

The entire outside wall of the room — wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling — is one big window, which allowed me a bird’s eye view of the CNN Center and Olympic Centennial Park or Centennial Olympic Park. Whatever. The park where the bomb went off. Since my room faced west, it also meant that every afternoon the sun bore in like an angry deity, causing the A/C to work frantically and continuously to keep the room from reaching sauna levels. It does seem a bit hubristic to build a giant glass sunlight-collecting structure in a state known for being, you know, really hot.

The hotel also has a bar on the 74th floor that revolves, which sounds like a good idea until you hop on. After one beer you think you’re about to hurl.

Forget all that, though. The hotel featured the smartest thing I’ve ever seen in a rented room: a shower curtain rod that bends outward. Perhaps there are people who enjoy the sensation of a plastic shower curtain blowing against their wet legs as they bathe, but I’m not one of them. I don’t know whether it was Mr. Westin or Mr. Peachtree who thought of this, but whoever it was deserves the Nobel Prize for Bathroom Fixtures.

I was in Atlanta for work, at a convention of people who do medical coding for a living. I didn’t know anything about coding before I started my new job, and I know precious little a whole lot more about it now, but suffice it to say that everything that goes on your chart “and your bill” at a doctor’s office or in a hospital — your medical history, your symptoms, your diagnosis, the treatment — has a code assigned to it. In addition to coming up with several potential band names “Coxsackie Virus, Glasgow Coma Scale” I learned about the next iteration of the international medical coding schema the U.S. is considering, which depending on who you believe is either right around the corner or never gonna happen.

“If I had to use one word to describe it” said the presenter, “that word would be specificity” I’ll say. Suppose you go to the doctor’s office having been “struck by a hit or thrown ball” Of course they would want to put that down on your chart “W21.0”. But is it really necessary to distinguish which type of ball: football “W21.01”, soccer ball “W21.02”, baseball “W21.03”, golf ball “W21.04” or basketball “W21.05”?

There are also codes to describe observations made by the admitting nurse or physician. Do you know anyone who could be described with:

R46.0: Very low level of personal hygiene

R46.1: Bizarre personal appearance

R46.2: Strange and inexplicable behavior

Hell, do you know anyone who can’t? That pretty much covers your average Saturday night in Chapel Hill.

My favorite codes are ones that probably aren’t going to get used very often, but I promise you, they really do exist:

W61.4: Contact with turkey “domestic” “wild”

W61.42: Struck by turkey “domestic” “wild”

W61.43: Pecked by turkey “domestic” “wild”

W61.49: Other contact with turkey “domestic” “wild”

“The instructor read the last one and said, “I don’t even want to go there””

After the session I asked the instructor if you would still use W61.42 if someone struck someone else using a turkey as the weapon. Then we had one of those uncomfortable moments when you’ve just said something really odd assuming the other person would know you were kidding and in fact the other person thought you were serious and you don’t know if it would be better to interrupt and tell them you were kidding or just act like you were serious. Or at least I had one of those moments.

We’ve often heard that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, and not just because “ghoti can be pronounced “fish” or because we say things like “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes when we mean “Let’s see if people think this is a good idea” or “weapons of mass destruction when we mean “fabricated excuse to use those bombs that have been lying around”

English is a rich language, which is nice for poets, but can often be a hazard when clarity is desired. I got a phone call Saturday afternoon from what sounded like a very nice woman looking for the YMCA. I said, “You have the wrong number” She said, “I’m sorry” only I thought she was saying it in the interrogative, “I’m sorry? way, instead of the “I apologize way. So I said it again, more slowly and deliberately: “You have the wrong number” Which I’m sure she took to mean, “How dare you disturb me” When she said “I’m sorry again, I realized she had in fact been apologizing, so I apologized, too. I think we were both on the same page and singing from the same hymnal when the rubber met the road, and that no bad blood had passed over the dam.

I studied Japanese when I lived in Tokyo, and people always ask me if it’s a hard language to learn. It’s a hard language to read, because you have to memorize something like 500 characters to even be able to read a newspaper, but it’s not as hard to speak, and mostly because Japanese seemed to my unscientific analysis to have less variation than English. For instance, if you’re explaining something to someone in English and the concept begins to dawn, your interlocutor might say, “Oh, I get it or “That makes sense or “Now I understand” In Japanese, at least in my experience, 90 percent of the time the other person will say “naruhodo” which means something like “it becomes clearer” Much easier for the language student.

That doesn’t mean Japanese is without its pitfalls, of course. My ex-wife knew of one unlucky gaijin exchange student at a Japanese high school who was required to give a speech to the student body at the end of the term: in Japanese. He took the stage and came out with his opening line, which was supposed to be, “Because I am an exchange student I see much of the Japanese lifestyle” Due to three very simple mistakes in that one sentence “he drew out one vowel sound too long, transposed a consonant sound and paused where he shouldn’t have” he instead said, “Because my crotch stinks, I meet many Japanese policemen” Imagine how that would have gone over in your high school. He left the stage before his classmates had picked themselves up off the floor.

I’m definitely off my blogging stride. Here are some of the lame-ass topics I’ve recently considered:

a” Pistachios are good.
b” People should say what they mean.
c” I hate it when people drive slow.
d” Computers can be annoying.

And the winner is… D! Enjoy.

As a confirmed technophile, I’m a little reluctant to admit that I’m peeved with technology at the moment. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love a good computer as much as the next person, but when they go wrong on me, I tend to take it personally. I actually found myself complaining to Jean last week, “Why do these things always happen to me?” as though perhaps there was some overarching technology intelligence that had decided I needed bringing down a few pegs “or that I’m the only person who has ever had a problem with Windows”. I’m sure this is a symptom of some kind of advancing mental illness.

Currently, my laptop is pissing me off. I won’t go into all the details, but I have decided that I no longer want any wireless devices in my life. In order to solve my current problem, I either need to call Linksys, HP, EarthLink or Time Warner. And as you know, whoever I call is going to say I need to call the other three.

Then I get an email announcing a new comment on the post called Ol’ Buttermilk Pie, which you might remember had some more of the Finger Pointing Thing. Messygirl20 posted to ask, “Anybody have any further information?” Further information on what? Buttermilk pie? The Finger Pointing Thing? Turns out that Messygirl20 is just spam; click on her link and you go to some site or other that I decided not to gratify by entering.

Even though I am now getting close to 200 spams a day “I love the Earthlink commercial where the guy says, “I use EarthLink because they hate spam as much as I do”” some of them are still fun. Recent correspondents have included Balloon H. Hindquarters, Spacy H. Pothole and Drunks R. Fatherly. Shelley T. Jacobs sent me an email with the subject tline, “poliomyelitis sweatshirt” Hey, Shelley, make mine an extra large!

I suppose the sheer volume of spam I receive makes this inevitable, but I’ve gotten some lately that I was sure must be real emails, based on the subject line. Not too long ago I got one with “Reykjavik as the subject. Yes, I opened it and no, it wasn’t real.

Still, I continue to be amazed that spammers think I’m going to see beyond the gibberish in their emails to the no-doubt sensible financial or medical advice inside. Yakut E. Amiable sent a message with the subject line, “Geronimo! He opens his pitch by announcing, “Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improviser. His parables are great one-liners” Okay, Yakut! You can refill my prescription!

Several others have taken an even more unusual approach, following the “build sales by insulting your customer maxim. Luisa wrote to wish me “Good morning, good morning, idiot dbt” Veronica Goff’s subject line read, “Please don’t be dumb” Kevin says, “Don’t be such a little fruit cake and Gonzalez says, “I’ve had enough of your bullshit” Sorry, Gonzalez. I promise I won’t… um… do whatever it is I’ve been doing to annoy you.

The one that has stuck in my mind the most, especially considering the ongoing economic situation, is the mortgage offer I got from Elsa Blue. Her subject line read, “The easiest way to refinance: incinerate”

After I brought Plooblewagon home in October, Adda and I had a good time riffing on the various admonitions, threats and warnings in the owner’s manual. “Mazda does a pretty good job of inspiring paranoia, but Volvo takes the prize for excess caution; their TV commercials generally feature cars being driven sensibly in a straight line at reasonable speeds on public roads with a superimposed “professional driver on closed course””

One of my favorite recent examples of namby-pamby intrusive mommyism was brought to my attention by my dad, who several of you have pointed out is Way Funnier Than Me, and who it doesn’t take a clinical behaviorist to figure out is the person I got most of this from. On Saturday he handed me a copy of the Raleigh Yellow Pages, and I was momentarily perplexed until I saw the warning notice printed prominently on the cover. Maybe the small size of the new phone book would lead certain common sense-impaired morons to think it was designed for use in the car. Who knows. Maybe it does need an explicit warning to the contrary. But why should you stop at that?

Ever since I worked for the imaginatively-named Chapel Hill Newspaper “which made a bold lean forward several years ago and became The Chapel Hill News”, I’ve had a soft spot for local papers. When I’m in a small town I occasionally pick up the paper and see how well their reporters fare at covering the Rotary Club meetings and high school athletic contests and giant tomato sightings which make up the core of community journalism.

If you really want to get the measure of a small town though, the best place to look is the police blotter. “When I worked for the CHN, I was surprised to find that the local perps liked to read of their own exploits, a circumstance which nearly got our police reporter into trouble when she mixed up the street names of two local bon vivants and reported that Heavy D had been caught performing crimes against nature in an alley with another man, when in fact it was Baby D. Heavy D was not pleased.”

Many thanks to Carla, a commentarian over at One Good Thing, for hipping me to The Arcata Eye. It’s a newspaper in Humboldt County, California that has the best police blotter I’ve ever read. Here are a few:

1:41 a.m.
A man and his beige leisure suit were asked to leave a Plaza tavern.

2:34 a.m.
After yelling his way up and down the 600 block of Shirley Boulevard, a man was arrested on a charge of cocktail abundance.

5:25 p.m.
Several frequent flyers got into a hissy-spat over he-looked-at-me-funny-related issues on South H.

12:33 p.m.
A man and his dawg, a big yellow Lab, couldn’t be persuaded to leave the Intermodal Transient Facility so that regular folks could use it for, y’know, catching buses and stuff.

6:25 p.m.
A Valley West motel offered weary travelers all the amenities – cable TV, drinking glasses sanitized for your protection and a dark-hooded freak panhandling for spare change in the lobby.

2:33 p.m.
Everyone loves your dog, lady, but not loose downtown.

7:32 a.m.
A bicyclist wearing a denim jacket nipped into a G Street gas station, snatched a container of fuel injection cleaner and scrammed on his two-wheeled steed. Must getcha high or something.

12:49 a.m.
Cultural festivities on Stewart Avenue were highlighted by a crowbar fight in the street.

3:14 p.m.
Duck or goose hunters turned out to be even less discriminating house-shooters, wounding a home on Larry Street. They agreed to be more careful, but that was of little solace to area waterfowl.

1:02 a.m.
Another adventurer who, armed with naught but a passel of adult beverages, had successfully repulsed sobriety for the night and was determined to share news of his condition with others in the never-a-dull-moment 2200 block of Alliance Road, was defeated by an even sterner foe – the cops, who took him to an unforgiving place of hard right-angles.

So I sit down in front of the computer intending to slap up a picture of the snack table at my new job and maybe one of the bizarrely Orwellian panel in our stairwell, announce the opening of the Chicago photo gallery and ask the question, “Why would I want to drink Pimp Juice?, then get back to horizontally catching up on the TV shows I’ve missed in the last two weeks. Then I check my stats and find that this will be my 100th post. Oh for heaven’s sake. I suppose I can’t just ignore that.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve posted 100 times since I started this blog in October, but it’s not so hard to believe when you realize that I pretty much had nothing to do during the day for all but two of those last 22 weeks. It would be churlish of me in the extreme to complain that I don’t have as much time as I used to now that I’m working, and I don’t expect any sympathy. But man. Having to be someplace 40 hours a week really cuts into your blogging. “I’ve set a goal of being there at least a month before I start spending all my time at work blogging, web surfing and IMing. I think that’s prudent.”

It’s definitely an adjustment. I have newfound respect for all of you whose blogs I read and enjoy who I know work hard during the week and manage to find time to post even once a week, let alone those of you who post every day or thereabouts. When do you shop? When do you eat and do laundry? How do you find time to watch Average Joe: Adam’s Revenge? It has honestly been long enough that I forgot what it was like to work full-time. “Yeah, yeah. Cry me a river.”

I also find that my mind doesn’t wander in blogworthy ways as much as it used to. I saw a truck drive by my office the other day that said “Rude Transportation on the side, and the best I could do was think, “Huh. That might be funny to mention” That was a week ago. Could it be that I am becoming more focused? More responsible? More dedicated to my job? Wow. That’s a hell of a concept. We’ll see.

In the meantime, thanks a lot for stopping by.