Category: neck deep in the zeitgeist

I try to be efficient. For instance, when I weigh myself in the morning, rather than just waste that time standing there, I do it while I’m brushing my teeth. “Apparently my toothbrush weighs 47 pounds.” While I’m waiting for the shower to heat up, I clean the litter box. When I’m making an omelet, I start the pan warming up before I beat the eggs. I estimate that these and other efficiencies save me up to three minutes a week, which I can use in far more worthwhile and productive endeavors like listening to the music of Shooby Taylor.

Go to this page RIGHT NOW and download “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and gather a crowd before you play it. Trust me. Thanks and a tip o’ the hat to Adda for that one.

And in a further attempt to drive you off my site, please welcome Proud Icelander to the list of must-read blogs. Here’s a picture of him and me in Reykjavík. Why yes, I think we might have had a drink or two.

researchers at the candle factory

I’ve spent the last couple of hours watching the Rally of France and the Rally of Spain. I love rally racing. “Of course I do: it’s foreign and hard to find.” You get to see little tiny cars going very fast sideways on logging roads, public roads, and through ancient villages where the cars are literally driving over people’s doorsteps “and nearly their toes”. In the Rally of Sweden this year, one driver raced a moose for about a hundred feet. Plus you get to see cars do this. “I nearly bought a Ford Focus because of its success in the World Rally Championship, until I realized that the one I could buy at University Ford would not have a quarter of a million dollars worth of racing parts in it.”

Compared to American sports figures, the drivers are incredibly modest. They say things like, “I’m really slow today. My opponents are driving very well and there’s just no way I’m going to catch them. And I got really scared on that last stage” It took me a while to get used to it. When you hear them swearing via the in-car camera it’s in a foreign language, so it sounds cute. They say things like “Oyo! when they’re about to drive off a cliff. I hope it’ll catch on here, but I kind of doubt the average NASCAR fan is going to get excited about watching Citroëns and Peugeots compete in a sport traditionally dominated by Finns.

Now that I’ve talked about that, I feel I can safely mention that Primo and I went candle shopping Tuesday. We went to the tritondous Buy Yourself a Lifestyle Mall and examined the waxy offerings of Expensive Barn, Expensive Hardware and Eddie Bauer Home-My-God That’s Expensive. Then we found the candle store. I think it’s called The Great American Candle Company, or possibly T.G.I. Candles.

We discovered that candles are divided into four categories: candles you want to eat, candles that are okay to smell, candles that are not okay to smell, and candles that smell like total ass. “Primo looked at the Seaside candle and said, “What does that smell like? Pine trees and low tide?” I rejected New Car Smell, Litter Box, and Feet, and chose Nantucket “which does not smell like whaling” because I liked the chalky blue color, and Sage, because it was one of the few that fell into Category Two. In retrospect, Nantucket was not a good choice. They’ve been sitting in my living room since I brought them home, and now my house smells like cheap aftershave. “I suppose it would be Old Spice.” Every time I walk in there I expect to see a guy named Vic sitting on my couch in a Member’s Only jacket.

now THAT’S the back of a banknote

The designers here at the Plooble Bureau of Printing and Engraving have been working overtime in the realization that Plooble shoppers need something other than a Fitty. After careful consideration, the Currency Committee has selected a group of esteemed Plooblers to be honored on our banknotes.

“Click the thumbnail to make ’em grandiose.”

Please be advised that printing out these notes and circulating them may be a violation of applicable laws in jurisdictions less enlighted than the Untidy State of Plooble. “My apologies to the counter staff at Quizno’s who received a Fitty in the tip jar, courtesy of Primo.”

If I spent half as much time on my job search as I do on this blog, I would be president of IBM by now. “I had to say that before my dad did.”

Despite the fact that I have made my living for the last 14 years as a professional communicator, I often talk, um… wrong. I have a real problem with pronouns, for instance. Last week I was on the phone with an HR Lady and in answering her question “How did you learn about our company? I told her, “I met the president of the company at a party and he asked him to send me his resume”

I once sent an unsolicited email to an ad agency who I hoped might hire me. I figured I could take a jauntier tone and wrote, “I write like a champ in any media” Moments after I hit send I realized I had just made a grammatical error in a sentence extolling my skills as a writer. Guess what? Never heard from them. I’m sure they were happy that I gave them a quick reason to avoid reading the rest of the email, like the way I felt when I got cover letters with typos in the first line. Or the time I got a resume addressed to me as Pubic Relations Coordinator.

I wish.

When I worked for the newspaper I called people all the time, and some of them didn’t want to talk to me. On more than one occasion this exchange occurred:

“Hello, this is David Thomas from The Chapel Hill News”

“Yes?

“Fine thanks, how are you?”

My greatest fear was that I would one day end a professional conversation with “I love you” This probably says something really peculiar and/or pathetic about me, but hey, I don’t keep any secrets from you.

I have walked up to a receptionist more than once and said, “This is David Thomas” like I was on the radio or something. “And I’ll be right back after this short break” I’m always happy to find I’m not the only person who has problems with everyday talkifying. When I worked at Big Telecommunications Company Who Sucks and Laid Me Off, a friend walked into my cube one day and announced, “Hey, it’s Alyssa! That’s what we say on the phone, hon, not what we say in person. Still, it was endearing.

Speaking of talking, allow me to be the very first person ever to write about how electronic mediums medias things have changed communication. I spend far too much time IMing with Adda “at least from a getting-anything-else-accomplished perspective”, and since she’s screamingly funny, I end up typing “lol a lot. I tried to resist it at first as lazy shorthand, but then I just gave in. She is trying harder than I am though, and her current alternative to “lol is “hink” I like it. Hink hink. HOL. Rebecky also went through a similar soul-searching process. She writes “haha!, which is kind of weird but funny, sort of like watching a recent immigrant tell his first joke in English. “I wonder if they’ll make their way into speech. Wanna start a trend? The next time you hear something funny, keep a deadpan expression and say “rofflemao””

Adda and I have realized that most IM shorthand is dishonestly hyperbolic. I mean, seriously, how often are you actually laughing out loud, let alone rolling on the floor laughing your ass off? You wouldn’t be able to type, for one thing. With that in mind, we created a more accurate abbreviation: LQTS – “laughing quietly to self”

Hellooo, ladies!

Yo yo yo. Time for a pizzost in the blizzog.

Mostly I wanted to post that photo, since Rebecky and Myküll liked the last Olympus manual photo so much. This one comes from an Olympus OM lens booklet, and gosh, I don’t know but I’m guessing it’s from the ’70s. I have a mental picture of a Japanese Olympus staff photographer approaching those guys on Daytona Beach or Muscle Shoals or whichever van-friendly shore they were oilily lounging about. I wonder what they were saying to him when the photo was taken, and if he understood it, and if he was glad he didn’t. And I wonder how many people looked at that photo and thought, “That makes me want to buy a new lens” It makes me want to throw away all my cameras. And possibly gouge out my eyes.

Good crop of spam lately. I got a whole bunch for mortgage refinancing, but once again it was the random text that showed up in the Outlook preview panel that made them fun:

My dog is very promiscuous. Take control of your money.

She was a very crafty little dorky head. We have hundreds of lenders to help you get the lowest rates.

His perverse sense of humor nauseated me. Find the best rates for home financing.

I got an email the other day from Pimple J. Channeling, and I’ve gotten five or six from Efrain Cobb, who really wants me to add inches. Efrain Cobb? I’m now apparently getting spam from the 18th century.

I stopped in a drugstore Friday night and was served by a clerk wearing an ill-fitting uniform shirt, with doodles and notes scrawled on her hands in multi-colored inks, an unfortunate nose piercing, and a Spongebob Squarepants sticker next to her right eye. Her nametag read “Beauty Advisor”

WARNING: CAR GEEKERY

After years of reading about them on various gearhead web forums, I bought a K&N air filter for Plooblewagon. They promise more efficient airflow than a stock filter, with increased horsepower and improved acceleration and throttle response. Best 30 bucks I’ve ever spent. There is a noticeable difference, and the engine revs much more freely from 4,000 RPMs to redline. Installing it was easier than changing a wiper blade, as Primo demonstrated when five minutes after I bought my car he was under the hood taking shit apart. The new filter is also supposed to have some effect on fuel economy. I think it either improves it, or cuts it in half. Don’t care. Car faster.

And no Rebecky, I don’t think one would help the Bonneville. But it would double its value.

In addition to being faster, Plooblewagon is also scratchier. The first blemish on its pristine Midnight Blue Mica exterior happened Friday, courtesy of a shopping cart at Lowes. Oh, well. It had to happen sooner or later. I once heard of someone who would take a ball peen hammer and put a dent in his new car the first day, just to get it over with. But I’ve always been able to willfully suspend disbelief and pretend that my car would stay perfect forever. That approach hasn’t worked too well in relationships, either.

Man. This entry is too boring to even proofread. But don’t worry…

Coming soon: more banknotes from the Plooble Bureau of Printing and Engraving.

I should go to bed, but I don’t feel like it. I had an interview today, and for some reason that makes me feel like I get to goof off for the next 48 hours. Putting on a suit is worth two days of lying on the couch watching daytime TV. “For an hilarious account of shopping for interview clothes to help one land a Soulless Corporate Job, check in with the estimable Rebecky“.

Cross your fingers for me. If I’m lucky and get the job, I’ll be able to drive 37 miles to work each day to sit in a cube ranch in a dumpy ’70s industrial building surrounded by strip malls and car dealerships and think of interesting things to say about gray boxes with wires coming out of them.

Should any potential employers happen to be reading this, please be assured that the preceding statement was merely bluster, designed to make me sound cool and anti-corporate to my hipster friends. In actual fact, I love nothing better than thinking of interesting things to say about gray boxes. Robust. Feature-rich. Extensible.

I got pretty fluent in the techno-marcom babble when I worked at Big Telecommunications Company Who Sucks and Laid Me Off, but it can easily become mind-numbing. A like-minded colleague and I were writing a document together, and we realized we had used the phrase “cost effective” about ten times in two pages, so we tried to come up with some alternatives. Our favorite was “cost-o-riffic,” and we accidentally sent the document out for review with that in it. You should have seen the flurry of indignation from the pocket protector crowd.

Every now and then I came across something in a piece of corporate literature that made me think there was someone else out there like me, grinding away in a cube and aware of the absurdity of corporate speak. The longer documents we wrote always had a glossary at the end, which was usually titled “Glossary and List of Acronyms.” One writer realized, rightly, that it’s not an acronym unless it makes a pronounceable word, like laser or scuba. He or she headed the glossary in one document “Glossary and Groups of Capital Letters Used Instead of Words.”

My favorite find came from a basic primer on the telecommunications industry:

The most common enemy of the public switched telephone network is the backhoe.

Perhaps the fact that I laughed for ten minutes after reading that will give you some insight into the state of mind I had attained. And hope to attain again! Really!