Irruminations

The Switch

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 03:38:18 GMT

Long ago, I resigned myself to the fact that Google will eventually take over the world. As of today, Google has the final piece of the puzzle.

My blog.

That’s right. I’m moving my blog to the Google-owned Bloogle, or whatever it’s called. It’s “blogspot” in the url. The new address: http://jameystegmaier.blogspot.com Please join me there for today’s entry, part of which will explain the real reasons behind the move.

Farewell, LiveJournal. You’ve been like a third mother to me.

Irrumiyawns

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 06:12:03 GMT

The Caroline Vault #2: The Yawn Destroyer

I don’t remember when it started, but a while back, I was in the midst of an extremely gratifying, 5 second + yawn when, just as it was coming to an end, I realized Jamey had put his finger in my mouth. He has since made a habit out of this. He doesn’t do it every time I yawn; maybe 1 out of every 10 when he’s nearby. It’s one of the most unnerving things a person can do to you, because the yawn is a very personal, relaxing, oxygen-acquiring experience. To have a finger in your mouth ruins the vibe of the entire thing, and the cruelest part is that you don’t even realize it’s there until you’re wrapping up the grand finale. The finger in the mouth prevents you for being about to finish the yawn, which has made me come to realize the importance of the last second of the yawn.

Jamey gets a maniacal satisfaction out of this that is comprehendible only to someone equally disturbed. The moral of the story is, if you’re trying to engage in a fulfilling yawn, be wary if Jamey is around. I’m at 23 ruined yawns and counting.

Point/Counterpoint

I don’t really have a good counterpoint to what Caroline has revealed above; it’s all true. I think it stems from a morbid curiosity of mine to see what happens when a natural motion like a yawn is disrupted by an outside force. In the same way, I’d love to find a way to keep someone’s eyes open when they sneeze.

Just this past weekend, I read a book review that discussed yawns. Apparently yawning is only contagious to about 50% of the population. Research shows that the half that yawns when they see someone else yawn or even just read the word yawn is more self-aware and empathetic. After I read this, I walked up to Caroline and yawned. I wanted to see her reaction. Unfazed, she blinked back at me. No yawn. I smuggly informed her that she has no self-awareness or empathy and went about my business.

In response, she sucker-punched me in the back of my neck.

Survivor/The Wire

With the last episode of Survivor: China airing on Sunday and the last DVD of The Wire: Season 4 in my possession, I finished both shows that day. I’ve watched most seasons of Survivor, and I think it’s pretty much the best a reality show can be. I like it when the good guys win and when people don’t stick to tribal alliances; this season didn’t meet either of those requirements, but it was still entertaining. Next season they’re pitting “super-fans” against previous Survivors, which should be interesting. With no dramas or sitcoms on the air, I bet it’ll be one of the top-rated shows on TV.

As for The Wire, you’ve already read my glowing reviews of this show. Season 4 is just as good as any of the other seasons, if not better. It’s also probably the saddest of the four seasons, mainly because some of the main characters are kids (this season delves into the inner-city school system). It’s pretty amazing to me that the show has maintained a high level of intimacy with the characters despite its ever-expanding cast. If you have some time over the winter break, watch this show. I guarantee that you’ll finally feel like you know how the ghetto works.

The Other Irruminations

As Bob pointed out on a recent post, there’s another Irruminations blog out there (http://irruminations.blogspot.com/). The similarities between our lives are remarkable: We both recently changed jobs, we both thought we were unique and special in thinking of the word “irruminations,” and we’re both retired Filipino actors and singers living in Boston and loving it. Actually, the main difference is that the other Irruminations blogger is a woman (so, “actress” would be more appropriate). In truth, it seems to be a well-written blog, much more of a journal or diary than mine. However, she managed to beat me to the punch with several excellent YouTube videos; I’m about three years behind on all popular videos and songs.

The Last Post of 2007: Operation Flaming Streets

When I moved into my condo, I was fully prepared to be a man-about-town in this rejuvenated neighborhood. I was going to go to all the meetings, be best friends with the district representative, and know the names of all of the police officers in St. Louis City (there are only three of them, so it’s not that hard to remember). Two and a half years later, I’m the least active community member here. I’m ashamed of it, but not quite ashamed enough to cancel plans to sell my condo is six months and get out of here.

However, back when I was doe-eyed and optimistic, I had an idea for improving the safety of the residents in my neighborhood. I called it Operation Flaming Streets. The idea was simple: Better sidewalk and street lighting. The streets of Pershing are dotted by these dim lights that were probably installed in the ‘70s and haven’t been cleaned since then. They give off very little light, particularly in the spring and summer when there are leaves on the trees. The streets here are very dark, and darkness gives the perception of uncertainty, which makes nighttime pedestrians feel unsafe.

My plan was to call the district representative and tell her about my idea, and a few days later the lights would be installed. Needless to say, I never made the call, so nothing ever happened.

But I have a new idea, a reigniting of Operation Flaming Streets, if you will. In Clayton, the posh, wide sidewalks are spruced up with little trees with tiny fences around them (I think they’re dog parks for teensy dogs). The trees are entwined with white Christmas lights that shine year-round. Although they don’t add much actual light to the sidewalks, the make the street look fancy, and that seems to attract fancy people to the area. So why can’t this work on Pershing? All I have to do is call the district representative after Christmas and suggest that we ask people to donate one string of white Christmas lights to the cause. Staple-gun those lights to the trees and plug them in to the numerous electrical outlets that line the sidewalks (I haven’t checked, but I can only assume they’re there), and ask for the city to foot the electric bill. It’s glitch-proof.

Seriously, I’d like for something like this to work, even though I know it won’t. Maybe Obama will do something about it in ’08.

Speaking of ’08, I’ll see you then with a bunch of lists (my favorite songs, movies, and books of 2007). Safe travels to all of you, and I wish you and your families the best.

--Jamey

Irrumicats

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:39:28 GMT

The Caroline Vault

Alas, Caroline didn’t meet her deadline today. I tried to get Ole’ Crusty to fill in, but he’s working the runway tonight (at the airport—he’s an air-traffic controller on odd Tuesdays). The Vault will be back tomorrow.

Just In: Japanese Conquer Fear

Reading that, I’m sure you think, “I didn’t know the Japanese feared anything.” You’d almost be right. The Japanese, a people who rose from the ashes of World War II, have managed to build a technologically advanced empire on an island the size of California in the span of a mere 60 years, a feat that some countries haven’t been able to come close to achieving in tens of thousands of years. Needless to say, the Japanese have very little to fear.

Except for one thing.

Cats.

That’s right, the Japanese harbor a secret fear of cats. During the three different times I spent in Japan, it wasn’t uncommon for me to see schoolgirls running from cats, screaming for help. I once saw an aging business man ditch his bike and jump off a bridge when a cat jumped out in front of him. And unless my eyes deceived me, I saw a small tabby hold up an izakaya with little more than a pocketknife and a well-timed hairball.

But a new day has dawned in Japan. After decades of research, the Japanese have isolated the gene that promotes fear of cats. See the following article: http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/J/JAPAN_FEARLESS_MOUSE?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-12-13-04-57-43

"Mice, like Japanese people, are naturally terrified of cats, and usually panic or flee at the smell of one. But mice with certain nasal cells removed through genetic engineering didn't display any fear," said researcher Ko Kobayakawa. “So we applied the same technique to 18-24 year-old Japanese people.” In his experiment, the genetically altered Japanese approached cats, even snuggled up to them and played with them. Kobayakawa said he chose domesticated cats that were docile and thus less likely to pounce.

“Those wild city cats,” he said, his hands shaking, “will kill you and eat your brain.”

Kobayakawa expects his discovery to result in a nationwide genetic re-engineering that will lead to a happy coexistence with cats.

“The day will soon come when I can walk down the street without fear of being mauled by a gang of kittens,” Kobayakawa asserted. “I will probably still be mauled. But at least I won’t be afraid anymore.”

The Golden Compass Box Office Update for Those Who Care (Probably Just Me)

Partially due to the Christian response (which I think is completely unnecessary…there’s hardly anything religious about The Golden Compass movie), TGC has not performed well in domestic theaters. After two weeks, this $180 million dollar budget movie has grossed only $41 million in the States (in stark contrast to the $90 million abroad). This doesn’t bode well for the sequels. I’m hoping they still get made, but it’s going to have to come on strong in the holiday season to get up to a respectable $80 mil. I guess it’s not a good idea to release a movie that’s perceived as anti-Christian in the month of Christmas.

Holiday Gift Guide

Here’s my guide to holiday gifts: Buy less stuff. And encourage the buying of less stuff. Below are a few ideas on how to do that.

Netflix

Several years ago, I was buying a lot of DVDs. I thought it was important for me to own my favorite movies. But then I realized that I hardly ever watched the DVDs I owned. I still went to the theater. I still watched movies on TV. Sure, every once in a while I’d pull out a DVD, but not nearly often enough to justify the purchases of 100 DVDs. The solution is simple: Give Netflix (or Blockbuster, but I’m loyal to the ‘flix for no real reason). Give the gift of less clutter. Hopefully there will be cost-effective options like this for books in the future.

iTunes

Pat will disagree with me, but I love iTunes for one simple reason: I don’t have to buy whole albums. I can sample songs and pick the ones I like, or the ones other people recommend. Give the gift of specificity—there’s no waste if people pick only the songs they like (Pat will counter that you miss the experience of listening to an entire album by picking and choosing your songs, but you still have that option if you want it).

TiVo

TiVo speaks for itself. Give the gift of efficiency and social flexibility. You can maximize your time with TiVo, but you can still watch everything you want to watch. Plus, if the receiver of the gift ever let a show prevent them from hanging out with you, now they have no excuse.

ING

If you have extra money that you’re not investing in a house or a mutual fund or an IRA or a 401k, it should be in an ING account making 4.10% interest. Put $30 in a new account for a friend this holiday season (there’s no minimum balance)—give the gift of dividends.

Moon Property

I just read today that private entities can buy property on the moon (per UN restrictions, nations cannot): http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSEIC76452320071217?feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&rpc=69 . At $22/acre, this is a steal. Seriously, I don’t think that moon colonies will ever make sense at all, but someone’s going to try to do it someday. Why not get in on the action now when the prices are low? I’m sure that Phoenix, Arizona used to be as deserted as the moon—an acre of land bought there for a mere twopence several decades ago is worth thousands now.

Tomorrow:

The Caroline Vault

Survivor/The Wire

The Other Irruminations

2007 Playlist

Irrumigrievances

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:21:46 GMT

The Top 10 Festivus Grievances of 2007

Without further adieu, here are the top grievances of 2007, as presented at my Festivus party. They were selected by me and ranked by a person who wishes to remain nameless (this person thinks that people will be able to guess who he/she is by his/her comments, which are in brackets. Also, that person added grievances 7a and 4a). That person guessed 72 peanuts on my balcony, which was the closest guess to the actual number of peanuts: 90 (and yes, I swept them up the day after Festivus).

The list:

The Travelocity Roaming Gnome—his antics are giving other garden porcelain a bad name

Dane Cook—for telling us over and over that there is only one Actober! [It took about a year, but finally everyone realizes that Dane Cook sucks.]

Hips that lie

Delilah After Dark—for many reasons, including her poor taste in music when people ask her to pick a song and when she refers to diamonds as “bling.”

7a. Pat's Mom

6.   People who use phrases like “anywho” and “what can I do you for?”

5.   Popped collars

4.   The decline of the adverb. Ex. I feel bad vs. I feel badly.

4a. The fact that pimping isn’t easy. [We all know slutty girls; it seems like wasted money.]

My dog was neutered and he’s still licking his balls in pleasure (and humping me occasionally)

Urinal cakes—not as tasty as other pastries

Girls who can’t take a punch (written by a girl) [In memory of Ike Turner.]

It’s a really solid list. I have to say, this past summer I popped the collar of a polo shirt to see how it looked, and it’s just a bad call. It’s like you’re converting your three-button shirt into a shortsleeve turtleneck. Does this look cool?

Nope.

Why Won’t I Stop Grieving?

It seems like half of this blog (in general, not just this entry) is me lamenting various pet peeves and grievances. The thing is, I’m not really much of a complainer. I’m just infatuated with the Seinfeld style of conversation that allows you to talk about nothing for half an hour, prompting discussions of why salmon got the shaft with the naming of “salmonella” and how “Don’t Walk on the Grass” signs get in the middle of fields if you can’t stroll out there (you need a helicopter and a harpoon). So I often think of grievances, and I’m fascinated—and delighted—by the annual Festivus list. However, the list never ends, and I have a few quick hits to add.

Why Doesn’t One Pound of Chocolate Equal One Pound of Me?

This question is better posed by someone who is concerned about their weight, but regardless, it’s a valid question (one that cannot be answered by so-called “dieticians” or “scientists”). If I ate a one-pound weight, I would immediately be one pound heavier, and if/when it came out the other end, I’d be one pound lighter. Why doesn’t this work with food?

That Damn Voicemail “V” for Voicemails That Aren’t There

This past Monday, I deleted the last of my voicemails, but the little “V” icon didn’t go away. Nor did it go away Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday, during which time I had to intermittently check my voicemail to see if someone had left a message, even though I knew deep down that no one had. It finally went away on its own accord on Friday. Why does this glitch exist? Have you ever had this happen? That little V drives me crazy, sitting there on my screen, mocking me, taunting me. I’m sure the iPod has a solution for this problem with a cool codename like “Tortoise Erection.”

Wedding Registry Shipping Fees

Simply put, it doesn’t make sense for customers to pay full price for the shipping of gifts through a wedding registry. The idea of a wedding registry in itself is collective, so why shouldn’t the cost of shipping the gifts be collective? For all gifts purchased up until a week before the wedding, the company can ship them all together, therefore saving themselves—and the buyer—shipping fees. I just bought a meat thermometer for a friend of mine who’s getting married in a few weeks (my gift message: Congratulations! Now you two won’t get salmonella.), and I had to pay $9 in shipping!?

Singers Who Talk Instead of Sing

A friend of mine recently recommended a band called The Hold Steady, so I sampled a few of their songs on iTunes. I like the sound of their music, but they don’t have a lead singer. Well, they have someone who claims to be their lead singer, but he doesn’t sing. He talks. And yells a little. This annoys me to no end. Anyone can talk. Some people have better speaking voices than others (i.e., James Earl Jones vs. Stephen Hawking), but anyone can do it. I buy music to listen to people who are more talented than me sing (pretty much everyone). For this same reason, I loathe the Sheryl Crow song “All I Wanna Do” and I can’t even listen to Vanessa Carlton’s Piano Song. I’m sure there are plenty of others, but those two stand out in particular.

One Non-Grievance

I want to end on a happy note, so here is one of the little things that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside: Finding and watching a Seinfeld episode that I’ve never seen. It’s like discovering an episode you’ve never seen of a show that you really love. Despite all the Seinfeld I’ve watched, this happened twice this weekend. The episodes were “The Beard” (George wears a toupee and dates a bald woman, Elaine is a token date for a gay guy, Jerry takes a lie detector test to prove he doesn’t watch Melrose Place) and “The Mom and Pop Store” (George buys John Voight’s car, Jerry isn’t invited to a dentist friend’s party, Elaine’s trophy pops the Woody Woodpecker float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade).

Tomorrow:

The Caroline Vault

Just In: Japanese Conquer Fear

The Golden Compass Box Office Update for Those Who Care (Probably Just Me)

Holiday Gift Guide

Irrumifestivus Part 3

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 06:51:26 GMT

The Lunch Thief

So, I work at a Catholic Student Center. The same Catholics that are supposed to abide by a little commandment called “Thou shall not steal.” However, I’ve discovered that there are exceptions to that rule when it comes to the main fridge at the CSC.

The other day, I put a tuna casserole in the fridge for lunch. I ate half for lunch that day and then put it back in the fridge. Now, to be fair, I had been cautioned that if I didn’t label the food I put in the fridge, someone would eat. But I figured that no one was going to eat food that’s clearly not theirs.

I figured wrong.

By lunchtime the next day, my food was gone. To add insult to injury, the person had left the Tupperware in the sink, so I had to wipe the last of my dignity off with a sponge myself. I learned my lesson, but I’m genuinely surprised that someone ate it. A lot of people put food in the CSC fridge with post-its that say “anyone can eat this,” but if a dish doesn’t have that label, why would someone think it’s up for grabs? I also understand that there’s always food in shared fridge that gets pushed to the back until it looks nothing like itself (Exhibit A: All leftovers from Caroline’s meals), but you can solve that by putting a date on the food. If it’s been in the fridge for a couple weeks, throw it away. I guess even that wastes food in the end, while if someone—if not the owner of the food, someone else—had eaten it already, it would have at least gone to good use.

Okay, I just sold myself on the idea. Unless I label my food, the CSC tenants are free to eat it. The ate^th commandment is safe.

Tier Two

A quick reminder about the contest: I’ve received four entries so far, so it’s wide open. The honor of ranking the Top 10 is considered sacrosanct in most countries.

Unemployed men who have 10 children by 8 different women.

Paris Hilton’s vagina (and Britney Spears’)

Ron Mexico—clean as a thistle!/Michael Vick—giving Virginia a bad name!

Dick Vitale

Women’s sizing—Really, what does size 8 mean? Just give it to me in inches.

Local news stations—Where are the hot girls? That’s the real reason nobody watches local news.

Hemorrhoids!

Men with breasts.

Bats and the associated diseases.

Eric Silverstein and his insatiable sex drive.

People who begin any phrase with “No offense, but…,” “No judgment, but….,” “I’m no doctor, but…,” or “I’m no scientist, but….”

The surge of interest in presidential candidates’ religiosity.

Facebook wall posts in lieu of real e-mails.

Itchy Sweaters. Why are they still made?

Cop cars stationed on highway turns where you can't see them.

Bookflix

This really should be titled “Netbooks.” But Bookflix sounds cooler.

Pat (aquavator) asked in a recent comment to my blog if I would pay a weekly fee—like Netflix—to subscribe to a service that would deliver books to my door. The short answer: yes. The long answer: no.

The longer version of the short answer is that I like the idea of this service. There are companies out there that do this—Booksfree, Bookswim, and the more recent Paperspine (which, as this article discusses [http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/342386_paperspine06.html], is trying to take a hold of the industry by using a supplier that pretty much guarantees that you can get the book you want when it comes out or much later down the road). The cost ranges from $15 (there’s actually a $10 option, but you have to pay for the shipping for each book, which, in a Netflix world, no one is ever going to want to do. You want to feel like you’re getting something free every time you request a movie/book from these services) to $25.

The cost leads me into why my long answer is no. The cost is too much. I read a fair amount—I organize a book club that meets every month and a half, and I read about a book a month casually. In the past year, I read 18 books (and just ordered another from Amazon). I got the vast majority of those books from the library, which, although not completely convenient, is free. I eagerly await the day—probably the last day of his second term—that Bush decides to liquidate all library funds and pump that money into research to train sharks with friggin’ laser beams on their heads to scout the Iraqi coastline for Bin Ladin. Regardless, I spent just under $70 this year on books. The $15/mo Paperspine service would have me pay $180 for that same time period. It’s just not worth it. Also, Paperspine doesn’t seem to offer one of Netflix’s best features: the ability to search for and queue movies/books that have yet to be released. On Netflix, this is huge, as I often read about a movie that sounds pretty cool, but I’m not compelled to spend $8.50 on a ticket. Lest I forget about the film, I go to Netflix and queue it up. This easily equates to books as well—I often hear about a book that just came out for which I don’t want to buy the hardcopy, but I might be interested when the paperback is released (with Paperspine, I guess I wouldn’t have to wait that long). Regardless, Irruminations officially does not support Paperspine or other similar services at their current prices.

Next Week: I actually write about the other Irruminations, someone other than myself ranks the 2007 Festivus Top 10 Grievances, and The Caroline Vault returns with a vengeance. Maybe Caroline would consider doing a Point/Counterpoint with Ole’ Crusty. Their worlds collide!

Irrumifestivus Part 2

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 06:18:22 GMT

Tier 3

Let’s start off today with the Tier 3 grievances, again in no particular order:

Stringent NFL touchdown celebration rules.

The word “irregardless!”

Bad bosses! (four people echoed this sentiment)

People who take the drinks I bring to a party.

People who say “warsh.”

The “Delila” song/any Fergie song.

John “Can’t Find My Own House/Pants/Children/etc” Madden

Dr. Meredith Grey survived 6 episodes without a heartbeat and a body temperature of 86 degrees? Wouldn’t the show be so much better if she had just drowned like any normal person?

Ole’ Crusty Haters.

When my landlord failed to replace the doorknob on my front door for one week…after it had fallen off.

The entire sports community in Massachusetts—could there be a cockier bunch of bastards?

The New England Patriots—It’s not a state, it’s not even a city, it’s a friggin’ geographical region!

That fact that Bear Grylls isn’t naked all the time.

Wearing ties with short-sleeve shirts.

Commentary: I agree with the vast majority of these grievances (not that I need to, or you need to, but I’m just saying…), but I think one of them is mistaken: “People who take the drinks I bring to a party.” Okay. I understand that. People have eclectic tastes, and generally you bring something to a party that you want to drink. However, once you bring something to a party, it’s in the public domain. Your drinks are a contribution to the greater pool of drinks. There is a loophole, though, that Trevor knows well: If you want to drink the alcohol you brought to the party, you have to hide it. Spread it throughout the fridge. The vegetable and cheese drawers are excellent locations for beer bottles. Every fridge has clutter—just hide your drink behind other stuff. And if someone finds it, they’ve won your beer.

The Caroline Vault

This is a new weekly column on my blog, similar to “Ole’ Crusty Sez,” except it’s written by Caroline, who is considerably more attractive and better smelling than Ole’ Crusty. The idea behind this is based in my oft-lamented Disney Vault (see my June 27 entry about this). This column will deal with The Caroline Vault, which basically contains all of the things that Caroline should have told me a long time ago—things that would alert me to some strange, abnormal, offensive, or downright feminine behaviors of mine—but that she chose not to tell me because she had a good laugh about them. She’s like the friend who knows that you have a piece of basil stuck between your front teeth, but she doesn’t tell you until it’s much too late. Thanks to this article, Caroline will finally start revealing these things to me (although, truth be told, she has told me about some things already). Without further adieu, I present to you the first edition of The Caroline Vault (and yes, Caroline actually wrote this).

The Caroline Vault #1: Girl Gloves

So awhile back I noticed that the winter gloves Jamey was wearing looked suspiciously familiar. Tight, blue, with tiny rubber grip dots along the fingers and on the palms. The it dawned on me: I owned those gloves—when I was 12. Also, I’m a girl.

Whenever we get in Jamey’s car when the temperature dips below a frigid 60 degrees, Jamey proudly puts on these gloves with a satisfying elastic snap and merrily drives along. After 3 years of letting him do this, I opened the vault and let him know that there’s something amiss about his winter handwear of choice. (Unsurprisingly, he didn’t make that discovery on his own during that time.) This happened a few days ago. We were driving through Forest Park when I turned to him and said, “You do realize that you’re wearing middle school girl’s gloves, right?”

I don’t think the fact that he has this tidbit of knowledge will deter him from wearing the gloves (those of you who know him will agree). So next time you see Jamey outside in the winter, take a look at his hands.

Classic Seinfeld Quotes

Caroline posted a few great Seinfeld quotes around the condo during the Festivus party. I think they’re worth reading:

“But within the basic framework there are many subtle variations, only discernable to an acute observer, that reflect the many moods, the many shades, the many sides of George Costanza…. This is morning mist.” --George Costanza

“These pretzels are making me thirsty!” --Kramer

Tobacco Executive: “I disagree. In fact, I feel Mr. Kramer projects a rugged masculinity.” [Re: Kramer’s excessive smoking.]

Jackie Chiles: “Rugged? The man’s a goblin! He’s only been exposed to smoke for 4 days. By the time this case goes to trial, he’ll be nothing more than a shrunken head.”

Kramer: “Is there a tree?”

Frank: “No, a pole. It requires no decoration. I find tinsel distracting.”

Kramer: “Frank, this new holiday of yours is scratching me right where I itch.”

Serious Topic: Christmas Commercialization

The last post, the one regarding Festivus, scratches me where I itch too. In a recent comment to my blog, Bob (chistl) pointed out that I rarely address “serious” issues on my blog. It’s true. I like to keep it light here. But I’ll try to work one serious issue into my blog every week, just to see how it goes.

Every year, I get a little more disgusted with Christmas commercialism. And yes, I mean Christmas, not Hanukkah or Kwanza or “holiday.” That’s not a holiday tree sitting in your living room. Let’s call this what it is.

I’m Catholic, so I celebrate the birth of Christ once a year. I really truly think that millions and millions of Christians have forgotten that’s why we celebrate Christmas. And whether or not you’re Christian, you’ve got to acknowledge that Christ’s birth (even if you don’t believe in Him, or think He was just a prophet) is the reason Christians traditionally celebrate Christmas on December 25.

Now, I’m not taking a holier-than-thou stance. I enjoy the “holiday season” feel of wreathes and snowflakes and evergreens just as much as anyone else. I enjoy the gift giving and receiving, during which I fully acknowledge that I’m not thinking about Christ—I’m thinking about whether or not I have any pants to match the socks I just got. I think that Jesus would actually enjoy that people all around the world spend Dec. 25 giving gifts to one another.

What irks me, though, are the companies that profit from the Christmas season and the people that buy into it. It’s hard to realize if you’ve bought into it or not. Walk through your home right now. I bet you’ll find some ornaments, maybe some evergreenery, perhaps a porcelain Santa Claus figurine. It feels right to have these things in our homes during this time of year. But walk through a holiday store and try to tell me that your stomach doesn’t turn when instead of seeing one Santa Claus figurine on the shelf, you see thousands. And this isn’t just at the holiday stores. It’s at any store this time of year. These stores aren’t promoting the birth of Christ or the spirit of giving—they’re promoting their own profit margins.

I understand people’s desire to live in a Christmastime world. But that world can exist without us spending money to dress it up.

Tomorrow:

Tier 2

The Lunch Thief

Bookflix

The Other Irruminations

And remember, just two more days to make your guesses about the peanuts!

Irrumifestivus

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 06:52:57 GMT

This week’s blog entries are devoted to Festivus, both the holiday itself and the party I held this past Saturday. Today I’ll hit on the main topics, and I’ll branch out tomorrow and Wednesday.

The Party

First, I want to say that I really appreciate everyone who came out to my fourth annual Festivus party. I know a lot of people had exams and whatnot, but you came anyway, and it made for a great time. I was recovering from a cold and barely had anything to drink, but other people went through a tremendous amount of alcohol, including about 50 jello shots (Caroline claims to have taken down at least half of them). As you can see from the photos below (all of these were taken around 1:30, when the party was dying down), I cleaned the condo while Caroline took pictures of Mark doing what Mark does best—inappropriately touching my cat. Despite only having four flights of stairs to get to his girlfriend’s condo, Mark spent most of the night on my living room floor.

The photos: http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?Uc=14347gnh.clmqbh4h&Uy=tcp640&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0&mode=fromshare&conn_speed=1

The Aluminum Pole

As usual, people were disappointed by my aluminum pole, which is, truth be told, an aluminum lamp adorned in Christmas lights (in strict violation of Festivus tradition, which is anti-commercialization). I agree—I could have gone to this website (http://www.festivuspoles.com/pages/Festivuspoles.htm) and actually bought a Festivus pole, but that too would go against Festivus tradition! So I stuck with the least-expensive and most attractive option.

The Feat of Strength

The Seinfeld Festivus episode ends with George and his father wrestling for their annual feat of strength (you can catch this episode, entitled “The Strike,” on TBS at 8:00 CST this Thursday). I actually had a leg-wrestling feat of strength a few years ago, but I like to change it up every year. This year, Trevor and I came up with the low-maintenance feat of strength that involved throwing unshelled peanuts from one of my balconies to targets on my other balcony. This was considerably harder than it sounds. For one, the balconies are about 20 feet away (you can see this on the last photo at the link above), and the objects were very small—measuring cups and coffee cups and the like. And the wind was blowing. And it was dark and cold and raining. Needless to say, it was a feat just to hit the other balcony, not to mention a target. But it turned out to be a really good feat of strength, one I may consider repeating in the future. There’s a contest at the end of this blog entry regarding these peanuts—a feat of strength part 2, if you will.

The Grievances

Ah, the grievances. One of my favorite parts of Festivus isn’t the party itself, but the next day when I sit down with the sheets of paper that contain the grievances (these were scattered around my living room during the party) and read over them. There was a high level of variety in this year’s grievances—some are quite specific, most are funny, and many are quite true. I’m going to post most of the grievances in this week’s blog. I say “most,” because I’ve divided the grievances into four tiers, and I’m going to post one tier a day for three days this week. That leaves one tier, the final tier, the Top 10.

I’m not going to rank the Top 10 this year. I’ve decided what my Top 10 favorite grievances are, but that’s as far as I’ll go. The winner of the contest will receive the unranked Top 10 list five days before the rest of the world, and he or she will rank them and submit them to me for next week’s Monday entry. Don’t worry, the contest is easy. See below.

The Contest

The winner of the contest will be the person who most accurately guesses—without going over—the number of peanut shells left on my balcony this morning after the Festivus feat of strength. Submit your guess to jamey.stegmaier@gmail.com by this Wednesday evening at 10:00 CST, and I will contact the winner with the unranked Top 10 list later that evening (that person will then have until Sunday to rank them). You have a huge hint to help you—the photo below—but keep in mind that there may be peanuts that were not included in this frame. You may only submit one guess. Good luck!

Tier 4

Keep in mind that these grievances, although in the lowest tier, are still very good. I’ve listed them below in no particular order:

Super-adhesive parking violation stickers.

Any bar that allows smoking.

The HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war—just pick one!

2008 Presidential Campaigning—enough already!

The button-down collared shirt—can’t us guys get more options?

Brett Favre pretending to be the working man’s QB.

Jobs that ignore the cost of the degree required to obtain them.

St. Louis drivers (several people agreed)

Having to stay in New York so that people could yell at my for two days instead of coming to Festivus.

Cock blocks.

Parties with no seating (countered by “people sitting at parties”)

People moving away from St. Louis—we’re hemorrhaging quality people and it needs to stop!

Snakes of all varieties.

Wooden pencils at work. Why?

Tomorrow:

Tier 3

Classic Quotes

Caroline’s Vault

The Lunch Thief

Irrumirecycling

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 05:37:04 GMT

The Tortoise and the Hair

A few days ago, I was pulling on my boxers when I noticed a light hair wavering on my hip. Figuring it to be a loose hair that had settled there, I brushed it away. It didn’t move. I tugged on it, and realized that it was attached to me. This is odd because (a) the hair was over two inches long, and (b) it was perfectly straight, and jutted out from my hip like it was pointing at someone.

I’m sure you’ve all had hairs like these. Hairs that grow to unnatural lengths, hairs that break free from the expectations of all the other hairs and reach for the stars. It always seems like these hairs grow overnight, because surely we’d notice a two-inch hair sticking out from our hip? Right? But this guy got past my radar.

Of course, I plucked the hair and placed it in my display case of rogue hairs. I’ll show it to you at Festivus.

Otherworldly

Above the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and even Harry Potter, I’m of the opinion that the His Dark Materials trilogy is the best young adult fantasy series ever (yes, I purposely didn’t include the Dark Tower series, The Earthsea Cycle, or The Wrinkle in Time books in that shortlist…still very good, though). If you’re not familiar with His Dark Materials, you may have heard of The Golden Compass, the film version of which will be released next Friday. However, there were preview screenings across the country the past Saturday.

There’s nothing I like more than a preview screening.

So Caroline and I went to see the movie. I have to say, it was great. Not a perfect movie, but it pulls off the difficult task of whisking you away into another universe for 2 hours. The acting is serviceable, as is the direction, and the CGI is mostly fantastic. The fight scenes and battles are particularly beautiful, and the computer-generated polar bears have a real weight to them, a characteristic missing in other movies. Also, I really love that the main character is smart enough to figure her way out of troublesome situations; only 2 deus ex machina were needed to save her (opposed to the 12,765 that pulled Harry Potter from certain doom). I’m crossing my fingers that the film makes enough money to spurn two sequels; if not, I’ll always have the books.

Next week: I discover a two-foot long pubic hair growing out of my forehead.

Irrumirecycling Part 2

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:13:59 GMT

Does Money Grow on Plastic Trees?

After my dumpster-crawling experience on Friday, I helped decorate the Center for Christmas. I spent a fair amount of time adorning a large plastic deciduous tree with white bows (it now looks like an overdressed poodle). While I was working on this project, I got to wondering, who designs plastic trees? Who devotes their time and their trade to making artificial plants look real, etching tiny imperfections and irregularities into their pliable surfaces? I’m not insulting the trade…I’m just genuinely wondering who does this job.

To get answers to my questions, I found an artificial plant website, www.earthflora.com, and contacted their design team with the following query. I haven’t heard back from them yet, but when I do, I’ll post the interview here.

Hi. I've always been an avid gardener and a lover of both flora and fauna alike. I'm looking to take my career in a new direction, and I was wondering if I could request an informational interview with one of your artificial plant designers so I can learn how to get into that field.

Thanks for your help, and I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Jamey Stegmaier

Biblio-Thru

I had to return a library book the other day. For such a simple task, it took a lot of time. I had to drive into Clayton, park the car, walk up to the building, drop off the book, and then drive back home. I would have much preferred if the librarian came to my house to pick up the book, but I borrowed the book from them, so that seems unfair.

I got to thinking—what could make returning a library book faster? As I drove past fast-food restaurants with drive-thrus, banks with drive-thru tellers, and even a drive-thru Starbucks, the answer hit me: The library needs to serve mocha frappacinos.

Just kidding. You get what I’m saying—libraries should have drive-thrus! You can use them to drop off a book or pick up a reserved item. Perhaps the ease of using a drive-thru would encourage more people to read. It’s so easy to get a McDonald’s hamburger. You don’t even have to leave your car. But would you like a side order of Summa Theologica with that?

If you’ve ever been to North Carolina and seen the drive-thru liquor store chain called Brew-Thru, you know that any store can have a drive-thru. Libraries are merely the next step to a drive-thru world.

Tomorrow:

The Tortoise and the Hair

Otherworldly

Irrumirecycling

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 06:24:37 GMT

Rookie Mistakes

Thirty minutes into the fourth day at my new job as Director of Operations at the Catholic Student Center, I found myself sifting through the contents of a dumpster.

Let me back up. The new job—it’s a newly created position, and my only boss is the extremely busy Father Gary, so I basically have no guidance at all. I basically spent my first four days trying to figure out what to do. Under the surface, there is managing and administering to be done, but nothing immediate. I’m just there as the manager and administer. I’m not there to drastically change anything. And my specific tasks—things like the Center’s finances and development initiatives—are currently managed by two part-time employees who are rarely in the office. So on Thursday, with neither of those employees in the office and Gary off doing who knows what, I decided to organize my office, which was left in complete disarray by the previous occupant. There were a number of piles of outdated documents that I threw away or recycled.

Then, in a moment of what my lawyer can only describe as “temporary insanity,” I stepped out of the bounds of my office and started throwing other people’s stuff away.

You’d think that I’d be smart enough not to do this. I would like to think the same thing. The only reason I can provide for why I did this is that I was thrown into this new environment and told, in a very abstract way, to clean it up and organize it. However, I know better than to throw away someone else’s stuff, even if it’s quite outdated.

Thus, when my mistake was discovered on Friday morning, I had to find a stack of papers that I had thrown away. I found myself leafing through the big recycling bin and then the dumpster itself, which smells not the least bit holy.

And I didn’t even find the papers.

Moral of the story: Don’t throw away stuff that’s not yours. Even if you’re bored.

Festivus 2007

I’m really excited about the upcoming Festivus celebration this weekend. I’m still searching for the feats of strength, so if you have any ideas, please let me know. The party should be a ton of fun, and I’m looking forward to reading all of the grievances people will get off their backs. Last year’s Top 10 Grievances, complete with an utter lack of decisiveness on my part, is as follows:

10. None of my 2005 grievances made Jamey’s “Top Ten”-list.

9. Your Mom [to which someone else incorrectly grieved, “People who can’t spell “you’re.”]

8. Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen: For overshadowing Horace Grant during those championship years.

7. The abbreviation “Xmas” for Christmas. How does “Christ” possibly equal X?!

6. Lil’ Bow Wow dropping the “Lil’”

5. Panty lines! [complete with explanatory illustration]

Top 4 Festivus Grievances of 2006 (Feel free to grieve my indecisiveness, but I equally liked the following four grievances.)

The Lesser Antilles. Why can’t you be more like the Greater Antilles?

Spinach—Thanks for crapping out on us this year and leaving us with nothing but arugula.

Belly-button lint!

Pluto—not a planet? You let me down!

If you can’t make it to Festivus, feel free to send me your grievances from afar. I’ll put them in contention for this year’s Top 10 list.

Tomorrow:

Does Money Grow on Plastic Trees?

Biblio-Thru

Irrumithanksgiving Part 3

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 04:06:48 GMT

Shiva?

I’m a few weeks behind on this piece of news, but it’s worth reporting. A girl was born in India with eight limbs. Scientifically speaking, she has a conjoined headless twin attached at her pelvis (see the X-ray at the website, below). Hypothetically speaking, she looks like Shiva (also pictured on the website). And oddly enough, the kid was born on Shiva’s day of celebration in India.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23419627-details/Toddler+with+eight+limbs+branded+'reincarnation+of+Hindu+god'+to+undergo+life-saving+operation/article.do

I hadn’t seen a photo of this child until a few minutes ago, and I’m having trouble finding words to describe this phenomenon. By now, the surgery to remove the extra limbs has been completed, and the child survived. Apparently she wouldn’t have lived past her teens if the limbs were left as is. Even so, I can’t help but wonder what this child would have been capable of with the extra limbs. Can the human brain control that many outputs? And what if, on some level, this child was meant to have eight limbs? I guess we’ll never know.

Almost Too Enchanted

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, my last non-working day, Caroline and I went to see the new Disney flick Enchanted at the Esquire Theater. Enchanted was by far the top grossing movie of the long Thanksgiving weekend, topping second-place finisher, This Christmas, by nearly $24 million (as for “the industry’s” overall performance, it lasted 3 minutes, smoked a cigarette, and fell asleep in Paris Hilton’s lap). So when Caroline and I walked into the Esquire, we didn’t hesitate to enter the main “feature” theater.

We had arrived just in time for the movie’s listed start time, but we had to sit through 10 minutes of commercials and ads before the previews started playing. Twenty minutes later (several of which I spent constructing a scathing blog entry about the poor state of pre-movie ads), the movie was set to begin. And suddenly, it hit me.

We were in the wrong theater.

I don’t know why I didn’t realize it sooner…after all, movies almost always start on time, and this one hadn’t. The kicker was that none of the previews fit the Disney billing—they were all geared toward, say, a different, specific demographic. Let’s just say that Martin Lawrence was in 4 out of the 5 previews.

Caroline and I dashed out of the theater and ran over to the screen that was showing Enchanted. Fortunately, we had only missed a few minutes of the animated portion at the beginning of the movie (which I would have liked to see—2D animation harkens back to a simpler time).

As for the movie itself, it was a solid movie for 9-year-old girls. The reviews I had read, all written by 30-something guys, had led me to believe that Enchanted would fulfill its namesake and enchant even the most cynical movie watchers. I wasn’t swept away by the apprentice’s broom, but I was entertained. The good: Amy Adams, both because she is completely believable as an animated princess brought to life and because she is the hottest. The great: James Marsden as the prince who comes to rescue Miss Adams. I laughed the hardest at his Prince Edward and would have liked to see more of him in the movie. The bad: Way too many Disney Channel-level jokes and deadpans that just weren’t funny at all. Also, a flaw that plagues 90% of movies out there: An unnecessary bad guy. There’s plenty of conflict in Enchanted without adding Susan Sarandon’s Evilvilla to the mix. Her character isn’t completely uninteresting, but her motives don’t make any sense, a flaw that greatly detracts from the [anti]climactic scenes of the movie.

Fly Me a River

I learned something new about flying this past weekend, so I thought I’d share it and a few other tips I have about airline travel.

Fly on Thanksgiving. Trust me. I’ve never done this before, but Caroline and I slipped through the St. Louis airport like oil on water. There were no lines, no holdups, no delays. My parents have flown on New Year’s Day in the past; they said they had a similar experience.
Use Noise-Reducing Headphones. Even if you don’t have any music, sound-cancellation earphones can make a huge difference for your comfort level. I don’t carry portable music players when I travel, but I always bring my padded headphones on the plane.
Take off your shoes. This one’s pretty weird, I know, but I guarantee that your feet will swell when you fly. If you leave your shoes on, you’ll experience a discomfort that you won’t be able to pinpoint. It’s coming from your feet. Take off your shoes and thank me later. (Also, don’t wear socks with holes in them. They’ll be visible both on the plane and when you’re standing in the security line.)

That’s it for this week. Join me next week, when Ole’ Crusty returns from his Thanksgiving vacation in South Jersey.

Irrumithanksgiving Part 2

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 05:55:36 GMT

A New Job

I started my new job today as the Catholic Student Center’s Director of Operations. I have to say, this job presents a daunting challenge to me. This wasn’t your average first day on the job, when you sit around twiddling your thumbs and making copies for coworkers, maybe filling out a W-4 and some other employment records. I filled out the forms, but only in between all of the other things I had to do. Part of it is just the learning curve of starting somewhere new, like finding out where to find the office supplies and meeting my coworkers (so many new names and faces!). But a big part of it is learning new things about the inner workings of the Center, like the minutiae of finances and the decisions that go into putting a mass together. I’m already swamped with work, but it’s a good feeling, stretching my mind for the first time in 2 months. Oh, and I have my own bathroom in my office. Sweet!

My Greatest Shame

Last Monday, I drove into the Central West End with my out-of-town friend Ben to eat lunch and see a movie. He was staying with our friend Adam at the time and had Adam’s apartment-building garage-door opener, so he suggested I park in the garage. It was a great idea; the lot was basically empty.

So we had lunch, watched the movie, and returned to the car. Much to my surprise, there was a giant neon orange sticker affixed to my driver’s side window that read, “This is your final warning. Your license plate number has been recorded, and your vehicle will be towed if you park here again.” Something to that effect.

Needless to say, I freaked out. The sticker was essentially glued to my window, so I couldn’t get it off. I was worried that my car would be towed if I parked on the street; Ben assured me that the wording meant that my car would only be absconded if I parked in that particular lot again (I had never parked there before, so my final warning was my first warning). So I drove home and tried to peel off the sticker, but it wouldn’t come off. It glared at me like a scarlet letter on my soul. I finally located a razorblade and scraped it off, much to my relief.

Here’s the thing: Why put such an adhesive on anyone’s car? Sure, technically I was parking in someone else’s space. But I got into the garage, meaning I must have used the entry card of someone in the building to get in. And there was literally one other car there in a lot that fit 30 cars. All they had to do is put a little slip of paper on my dashboard that said that I’m not allowed to park there. Perhaps I wouldn’t have taken that as seriously, but a sticker like that is much more likely to really piss someone off—I’m not an angry man, and I was pretty peeved. Regardless, I was just happy to scrape off the last piece of my greatest shame.

Peel Onion Peel

The movie that Ben and I were going to see that fateful Monday was Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone. The premise is very simple: A Boston-area girl goes missing, and Casey Affleck and his girlfriend are hired to find her. Simple, right? But not since The Prestige, my favorite movie of 2006, have I watched a movie that unfolded and unfolded as much as Gone Baby Gone did. Early on in the movie, I could tell that I was watching a solid detective story, but I didn’t think I would emotionally connect with it as much as I did by the end of the movie. You will be moved, touched, and shaken by this movie.

A Court Reporter for My Life

Do you ever have a great idea, but no way to write it down? Or maybe you make a spontaneously hilarious joke, but you can’t remember it later? Perhaps you often make brash claims and predictions that you’d like to refer to later when they come true?

You need a court reporter for your life.

Rather, sometimes I think I do. How much do court reporters cost? I have no idea. I spent 45 seconds researching that question on the internet and couldn’t find an answer, so I’ll just assume that there’s no information out there about court reporter pay scales. Regardless, it would be awesome to have someone follow me around all day and record everything I said and everything that was said to me. The transcript would be extremely useful for playing back conversations between Caroline and me so that we could know who was right or wrong: “May I refer to June 13, 2006, when you stated—with no intended sarcasm or irony—that if you ‘ever don’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign,’ you’ll ‘sever your own arm and give yourself the finger.’

Tomorrow:

Shiva?

Almost Too Enchanted

Fly Me a River

Irrumithanksgiving Part 1

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 06:01:41 GMT

Kindle My Tinder

Following a well-forged but unprofitable path, Amazon.com recently released a new wireless electronic reading device called the Kindle (a great name, only topped by Sony’s Fahrenheit 451). I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of such reading devices, particularly since a new technology was developed called “electronic paper,” which uses teensy tiny beads (one half black as ink, the other white as me) to simulate the look—but not the feel—of real paper. If my eyes can’t tell the difference between a page of electronic paper and a real piece of paper, then I’m open to the idea of storing hundreds of books on a single device instead of having to lug around a ton of books. Seems like a lot of other people like the idea of Kindle, because it sold out on Amazon.com in only a few days.

The major reasons why Kindle has succeeded (so far) where others have not are as follows:

The size of the selection. Nearly 88,000 books are available for purchase on the Kindle, a number which is only 7 short of all books ever printed (Harry Potter books aren’t sold electronically).
The ease of purchase. You don’t need to sign onto a computer to buy a book on Kindle. If you’re sitting at the airport waiting for your delayed flight to arrive, you can pick up your Kindle and purchase a book on Amazon.com on the spot. This, I think, is huge. Anytime, anywhere, you can buy a book. And cheaper than you can buy a physical book—Kindle books cost $10 or less.
Digital advantages. These are numerous. One, you can dogear a page on Kindle without permanently damaging your book. Two, you can look up any word you don’t know (something I could definitely use) on the Kindle as you read. You can look up the word in the built-in dictionary or wirelessly—for free—on Wikipedia. Three, as stated before, digital information takes up a lot less space than physical books, so you could feasibly carry your entire library under your arm.

Kindle has some other great advantages, like the ability to subscribe to newspapers, magazines, and blogs, but you can read about them at Amazon.com.

Although those reasons are pretty great, there are a few things that are holding me back from purchasing this device. They are as follows:

The price. Kindle costs $400. Therefore, if I want to buy a Kindle and then purchase a book, I’m spending $410 on a single book. After the second purchase, I’m spending $210 per book. At that rate, I have to buy 80 (thanks, Neeraja!) books at full Kindle price before I’ve averaged less than $15 per book. I hardly ever buy books anymore, and if I do, they’re either highly anticipated new releases or paperbacks that I have already read and plan to covet.
The look. When I first saw a photo of the Kindle, I thought it was a prototype. It looks like it was built in 1985 and someone just discovered it. Perhaps I’m spoiled by our iPod world, but I think it’s standard knowledge that people who are willing to spend $400 on an electronic device want it to look pretty. I’m guessing that Kindle will come out with a sleeker and cheaper version by next summer.
The loss of your library. This one isn’t so much for me, but for all those people who like having a library. Heck, you know, I’m one of them too. I’d love to have an Indian-Jones style library someday, full of tall, dark wood bookcases, the upper reaches of which can only be accessed by those sliding, precarious ladders. Not so much to show off, but moreso because it’s lovely to sit and read while surrounded by books. The Kindle takes the romanticism away from the idea of a library, if not from books altogether.

Taking the good and the bad into account, my conclusion is that I’m going to wait and see what happens with the Kindle. I’ll let you know when I hear about Kindle 2.0.

The Others in My Life

I had a pleasant Thanksgiving back in Virginia with Caroline and my family. The food was great, I got to see some great friends, and we ate a lot of Gelati Celesti ice cream (if you’re ever in Richmond, please, please get a scoop of Gelati Celesti. So help you if you don’t). And we relaxed, often by watching a movie together at night. The best movie we saw, and one of the best I’ve seen this year, is the movie that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film last year: The Lives of Others. Wow. Fantastic work. The movie is set in East Germany in 1984, and centers around a pair of lovers and the government man who is assigned to monitor them. I won’t say anything more, but I highly recommend this movie.

Also, a little blurb about my brother. He’s extremely intelligent—he’s the type of guy who can read The Prince once and be able to discuss minute details of the text for years to come. He also knows computers better than they know themselves. However, my brother—bless his heart—is often completely oblivious to time. Case in point: Caroline and I arrived in Richmond at noon last Thursday. My dad picked us up and told us that Andrew (my brother) would be arriving a little later in the day, as he had missed his train from New Haven. Apparently he slept through his 10:00 alarm. I thought that was a bit odd, since that’s a late-morning alarm to sleep through. But no—Andrew has slept through a 10:00 alarm in the evening. That, my friends, is a true accomplishment. As it turns out, Andrew had worked 40 hours in the 3-day week before Thanksgiving, so the sleep was well deserved, but still…wow. (Andrew might counter with the story about me showing up in New Haven on the wrong weekend—look at the boards for his eventual response.)

Schnucks Makes a Big Mistake

I was grocery shopping at Schnucks today when I came across a section of Schnucks Select brand meats. I was looking for Italian sausage for spaghetti, but instead of seeing the clean, clear red of pig intestine, I saw packages of meats riddled with oozing black wounds. Lots of them. Before I looked away, I looked closer to see why those meats looked like they had been eaten by the plague. The packaging read, “Sweet Italian Blueberry Sausage.” Blueberry?! Hey, maybe it tastes really good, but here’s a tip for Schnucks: Don’t sell meat that looks like a tarantula has laid eggs in it. No one will buy this product.

Tomorrow:

A New Job

My Greatest Shame

Peel Onion Peel

Irrumipotpourri Part 3

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:54:21 GMT

No Country for Ole Crusty

I, Ole’ Crusty, saw the moving picture No Country for Old Men this weekend. This film contained several things that I know a thing or two about: fine acting, stained clothing, and dramatic tension. I was on the edge of my seat for a good portion of the film. Never before have I seen a bad guy this badass (and I’ve seen a lot of bad asses). The things he does just to distract people…jeepers.

The best aspect of the film for me is that none of the characters are purely good or purely evil. In fact, it could be argued that the primary bad guy had more principles (albeit skewed) than anyone else. That’s the way it is in real life. I once knew a pair of long underwear that clothed the poor in winter, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t cheat on his wife with every strapless bra he ever met. True story.

Tax This, Please

Lately I’ve been thinking about taxes quite a bit (see comments section following my Sicko post), and I had an idea. Maybe this wouldn’t work for some fundamental reason, but every year, why couldn’t people vote for where they want their taxes to go? And when you pay your income taxes, why can’t you tell the government how you want that money to be spent? You might say that our system currently allows us to vote people into positions of power to decide how money is spent, but wouldn’t it be more democratic if you could decide, at least in general, where your money goes (then the officials who we elected can decide the specifics)? That way, if you don’t support something—the war, for example—you’re no longer just a face in the crowd. You have money that you can decide to allocate elsewhere. You suddenly have a real voice.

You’d have to speak in terms of percentages, though, not total dollars taxed. Otherwise that would give the bulk of the power to the really rich and hardly any power to the really poor.

Smear Campaign

I recently received a thank-you card from my Statefarm insurance agent. I was delighted to see that my agent had taken the time to hand-write not only my address, but also her return address on the card. I whetted my finger and ran it across the ink. Sure enough, it smeared. Such care! Such devotion!

Of course, my Statefarm agent did not fill out the envelope by hand. Someone out there once came up with the idea of selling smearable ink for twice the price of normal ink, and someone equally intelligent created a handwriting-capture program that translates your cursive or print into a computer font. Simply brilliant. Admit it, you’re much more likely to open a piece of mail if your address is handwritten on the envelope. The inventors of those fake personalizations are geniuses.

She Will Carry Your Baby

Caroline informed me that the topic of surrogate mothers is a touchy subject. I was watching an episode of Arrested Development with her that involved a surrogate mother, and I commented to Caroline that we (Americans) should outsource surrogacy, like everything else that we’ve outsourced, to India. I was just kidding, and I figured that nothing this absurd would actually happen in real life.

Suffice to say, I was wrong.

According to this article (http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200711/INT20071108c.html), tons of foreigners outsource their babies to India at a fraction of the cost of surrogacy in the U.S. or Europe. And the odd thing is, after reading the article, it doesn’t sound exploitive at all. The American couple that can’t bare a child can benefit from having their baby grow in someone else’s womb, and the impoverished Indian woman (according to the article, the vast majority of the surrogate mothers in India are very poor) makes about $5000—way more than they’d make doing anything else—and receive excellent health care and nutritional intake for 9 months of work. Everyone wins, including the baby, who comes out of the womb with a high propensity for learning foreign languages such as French and local Bengali dialects. The idea still seems pretty crazy, but like smearable ink, it might just work.

That’s all for this week. Have a great Thanksgiving!

Irrumipotpourri Part 2

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:02 GMT

Call Me Old Fashioned

I’ve spent some time over the last month and a half writing and revising a few short stories for the purpose of submitting them to literary magazines. I don’t pretend to think that anything I write is worth being published, but I figured if I never try, I won’t know what I’m missing out on (the fame, the drugs, the rock-and-roll superstar status that comes with getting a short story published). So I formatted four of my stories to meet submission standards, I poured through my 2008 Writer’s Market to select the magazines to which I would submit, I typed out the cover letters and filled out SASEs, and then I dropped ten precious envelopes into the gaping mouth of a post-office box.

One thing I really liked about the process is that it’s so old fashioned. Actually printing out pages and sending them across the country via snail mail. That’s so 1863. It hearkens back to better, purer days.

One thing I really don’t like about the process is that some of that magazines won’t even let me know if they’re accepting or rejecting my stories for 6 to 9 months. What?! You’re telling me that it takes over half a year to decide whether or not you like a story enough to publish it? I understand that a lot of these magazines are small operations with shoestring budgets (a phrase that gives a bad name to shoelace manufacturers) and only a few employees, but surely they know before 6 months if they like my story. I actually treated that information as part of my criteria for sending in my stories—if the magazine listed more than 4 months as their response time, I didn’t submit to them. In the first round of entries, at least.

Weekly Scrubs Comment

Despite the fact that it’s my least favorite show that I watch regularly, I seem to have something to say about Scrubs every week. While watching another subpar episode this week, I started playing a game that was far more entertaining than Zach Braff and company. The game? Spot the hot extra.

The next time you turn on your favorite sitcom, shift your attention from the name-brand actors in the foreground to the extras in the background. It’s like peeking into another world, a fascinating subculture of people who pantomime for a living. These are people who get paid to look like they’re doing or saying something. Imagine this: You show up at work tomorrow, and your boss says, “Tneeraja, today your job is to walk around the office with this empty folder in your hand. Whenever you pass cubicle 3, point to the cubicle and mouth the word ‘featherbottom.’ Then continue walking.”

People get paid for this! Would you accept money for this? I guess you get to appear on TV, so maybe it’s not that bad. Do extras ever make it to the big show, or are you once an extra, always an extra?

Back to my point. There’s a really hot extra on Scrubs. She’s a dark-haired woman in pink nurse’s scrubs. She’s usually walking behind JD and Turk or sitting in the cafeteria (where there are frequent continuity errors). Being in the background, she’s kind of out of focus, but she still seems really hot. So I spend most of the Scrubs episode looking for her and thinking about what she might be saying. “Featherbottom? Featherbottom. Featherbottom.”

Down to The Wire

Netflix has informed me that the fourth season of The Wire, HBO’s amazing cop/drug dealer drama set on the streets of Baltimore, is coming out on December 4. That gives all of you just enough time to rent and watch first three seasons. It’s hard for me to explain why this show is so good, but I think the best way to say it is that the show doesn’t cut any corners. The cops don’t have a huge database from which they can pull up any piece of information about any person or criminal in Baltimore. They don’t have hundreds of informants who know everything that’s going on in the city. If they want information, they have to get it the hard way—patiently monitor suspected criminals and slowly build a cases against them. Although it might seem that this approach would make for a really boring show, the opposite is true. Everything and everyone feels so real.

Do yourself a favor. Netflix disc 1 of season 1 of The Wire. Watch all four episodes (don’t stop after one or two—I told you here that it starts slow), and if you’re not hooked by that point, I’ll post the other photos Caroline took of me wearing those 3D glasses.

Nibbles?

I like pretzels and chips, but I have a qualm against them: You can’t fit a standard pretzel or chip into your mouth whole, so crumblies often fall onto your lap after each bite. I bet if you gathered up all of the lost crumblies the world has ever known into a giant mound, you’d have a major ant infestation.

The thing is, there’s already a solution for this problem, but it’s not being implemented globally. The solution? Bite-size pretzels and chips. But why isn’t everything bite size? Is there any size for your mouth other than a single bite?

Tomorrow:

No Crusty for Old Men

Tax This, Please

Smear Campaign

She Will Carry Your Baby

Irrumipotpourri Part 1

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:53:56 GMT

Who Wins the T?

There were several applicants for the haiku contest that would determine who has the right to use the letter “T” as his or her signature (ironically, only one of them has a first name that begins with T). The haikus:

Simian Sensei,
Tea in paw, kimono-clad.
Do not throw feces.

--Neeraja

oil of bergamot
a key flavor of earl grey
too bold for monkeys

--Pat

Rare monkeys pick tea
Toiling daily in China
They swear off the drink

--Jean

I rearrange tea

To eat, the way monkeys would

With cool fridge magnets

--Trevor

(Trevor had several entries; he’ll probably post the others, which were also quite good, in the comments section.)

Man, this is a tough decision. I don’t feel right rejecting anyone who spent the time to write such a beautiful poem. Seriously, they’re all fantastic haikus. But I have to make a decision. It’s what they pay me for [Editor’s Note: Currently, no one is paying Jamey to do anything]. With all due respect to Pat, Trevor, and Jean, I am selecting Neeraja’s poem (which I’ve entitled “Monkey See, Monkey Doo”) as the winner. I was looking for a haiku that moved me on a personal level, and that’s the one. Neeraja, you have earned the right to use “-T” as your comment-section signature. Congratulations. To the losers, I offer you the consolation of the letters “V,” “W,” “Z,” and the “@” symbol.

The Old Man and the Couch

Recently, Caroline has been trying to convince me to buy a sectional couch. I’m easily coerced, so I entertained the offer, despite the fact that I’m personally against buying new furniture. It’s the third worst investment you can make, right under buying a new car and purchasing horse hair futures. I don’t own a single piece of furniture that I didn’t get for free from a friend, buy from a friend or yard sale, or make myself (see Exhibit A: The Cat Condo).

But with my new job, I plan on being in St. Louis for another couple years at the very least, so I figured getting a comfortable couch on which to lounge would be nice. So Caroline and I dropped by a furniture store in Brentwood the other day, where we learned that sectional couches are really expensive. The salesman sounded like he was willing to negotiate, so we walked away (the best possible thing you can do when making a big purchase), and I left a message on his voicemail the next day. I basically told him that I would be willing to take the couch off his hands for $600 less than the asking price. Needless to say, he hasn’t called me back, but his store is going out of business, so if he hasn’t sold it in a few weeks, he knows he can sell it to me for the price I named.

Except that Caroline and I re-measured our tiny living room and realized that no sectional couch can possibly fit into it. We’ll have to wait until we get a new place. I’m fine with that—I like the couch we have—with one caveat: I need to get a cushioned tray on which to put my dinner plate when I eat on the couch. Currently I use one of our two couch cushions for lumbar support (yes, I’m the oldest 26-year-old you’ll ever meet) and the other as a tray. Caroline ends up with no pillows, which is fine with me, but she doesn’t seem happy about it.

Jameywulf 3D

Does this photo make it look like I’m leaping off your computer screen? Are my emotions all on the surface, or are they multi-dimensional? Do I appear…all too real?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re not imagining things. You’re viewing this photo in 3D. 4D, really, if you count time as a dimension (as 9 out of 10 physicists do). The key to making the average photo jump into the third dimension is, obviously, disposable 3D glasses, as pictured here.

I obtained these glasses at a Friday screening of Beowulf 3D. I had read that Beowulf would make a clear case for the future of films, paving the way for surefire blockbusters like James Cameron’s Avatar. Now having experience Beowulf in 3D, I’m unsold on the format. It’s cool in action scenes, granted, but otherwise it felt like the director went out of his way to include unnecessary objects in the foreground to create that 3D feel. A random shoe or branch in the foreground took me out of the experience of the film instead of further immersing myself in it, as was the intended effect. But it definitely left me curious to see what Cameron can do with the same technology.

Tomorrow:

Call Me Old Fashioned

Weekly Scrubs Comment

Down to The Wire

Nibbles?

Irrumivictory Part 3

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:55:24 GMT

Scrub It Out

I’ve mentioned that Scrubs has been a disappointment lately. As Pat pointed out, I could just stop watching Scrubs, but the thing is that there are certain writers on the show that are still very good. They just don’t write every episode. So I submit myself to the bad episodes in the hopes of finding a few golden nuggets in the mix.

In my opinion, the funniest characters in the show are Janitor, Dr. Cox, and Ted, in that order. Sure, the other characters have good moments, but as a whole, those three guys make me laugh the most. So instead of continuing this trainwreck of a show, why not spin off those characters to a new show? Call it Measuring Cox. The pitch: Dr. Cox’s wife divorces him and forces him to leave the hospital. He moves in with Janitor and starts working at a free health care clinic. Ted also gets fired and ends up as Dr. Cox’s inept secretary. Hilarity ensues.

Michael Moore Strikes Back

I’ve been wanting to see Sicko for a long time. I should have seen it in the theater, but all too often I don’t support indie films that I could just as easily watch as home. It’s the “event” movies that draw me to the theater, even though those are the movies that don’t need my $8.

Anyway, Sicko is fascinating and engrossing from the first minute on. Michael Moore narrates as usual…man does he have the most reasonable-sounding voice ever. Sometimes I’d find myself listening to him and thinking, “I don’t agree at all with what this guy’s saying, but he’s so reasonable.”

As for Sicko, I actually agree with most of what Moore says. He doesn’t really advocate anything directly; he just shows the viewer how universal health care works in other countries. The one major detail he omitted was how much higher the taxes are in those other countries. I’ve had a hard time finding that data online, so I really don’t know how much higher they are. But they must be. I really wish Moore had just told me, because he completely convinced me that America should have universal health care. It’s not just about providing health care for those who don’t currently have it; it’s about ensuring that those who are currently insured get the coverage they pay for and deserve. You’d be hard pressed to argue that our current system works perfectly. I’m eager to see the changes that happen after the ’08 election.

For now, rent Sicko.

So Does the WGA

I’m morbidly fascinated by the WGA strike. In the big picture, the fact that Americans care about this strike is merely a display of our addiction to entertainment. We’re used to getting our scripted TV shows and movies served to us on a silver platter, and so the prospect losing those privileges in the near future deeply disturbs us. Sure, I’m just like most Americans in those regards. I want my Office, my 30 Rock, my Lost…but honestly, I can wait. I’m cool with that.

What fascinates me is that this is a writers’ strike. If you read this blog regularly, you know that I often comment on the writing of a TV show or movie. I know a lot more than writing goes into making a movie great, but in my opinion, the writers get far too little credit. I think the Academy Award for Best Screenplay should be equivalent to that of Best Director or Best Film. Without a great script, no movie would ever be good. Period. There are a lot of people (actors, directors, boom mike guys) that could screw up a movie with a great script, but no movie without a great script will ever be good.

So I love that the writers are finally getting the attention they deserve. I sincerely hope that the producers of some of these scripted dramas and sitcoms try to write the scripts like they did during the last WGA strike. I guarantee that their efforts will be laughable. I bet we’ll get a lot of reruns with “never-before-seen” footage. I.e., deleted scenes that were correctly deleted in the first place.

See you next week, when I announce the winner of the haiku contest.

Irrumivictory Part 2

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 01:46:02 GMT

Please Come to Boston, continued

As an addendum to my post about how Boston seems to be winning everything (punctuated by the Patriot’s victory over the Colts last weekend), the New England Revolution boy’s soccer team just reached the MLS Cup Final. I’m not sure when this game is played, but given the Boston community’s recent winning streak, I’d bet on the Revolution taking the Cup.

Think Outside the Box Office

I have a pet peeve involving movie box-office reporting. I’m fascinated by the box office. I think the numbers reflect some really interesting things about American society. For years, I’ve checked the box office numbers every Sunday or Monday to see how that weekend’s films fared. However, there is a recent trend of focusing not so much on the ticket sales per film and moreso on the overall box office draw, which I think is completely irrelevant. Case in point, see the following excerpt from Yahoo.com this Sunday:

After ending a six-week losing streak last weekend, overall year-on-year sales fell once again. The top-12 films earned $99 million, down 11 percent from the year-ago period, according to tracking firm Media By Numbers.

Other than firms like Media By Numbers that track overall box office performance, who cares? Who benefits from that knowledge? Does DreamWorks, which produced the number one movie this week, Bee Movie, care about how this weekend went for all other movie studios combined? Not at all. DreamWorks cares about how movies similar to Bee Movie fared in the past, especially on the same weekend in the past, and how other films (like the polar-opposite, R-rated American Gangster) fared. DreamWorks cares about who bought tickets to their movie versus other movies, and they care about how much money their movie made compared to the cost it took to produce their film.

What really irks me is the terminology “losing streak.” Who, exactly, is losing? Individual movies either make money or lose money, but it doesn’t matter how the collective group of all movies does. Was it a victory for the movie industry when Shrek III broke a “losing streak” this past year when it hauled in over $120 million the first weekend? Not at all—there’s no one to receive that award. Shrek III was victorious, DreamWorks was victorious, movie theaters that carried Shrek III were victorious, but the industry? Come on!

Stout’s Honor

Last year, my office (may it rest in peace) held the latter half of its Christmas party at the Chocolate Bar in Layfayette Square in St. Louis. Wonderful little place on weekdays. Horrible place to go on the weekends, because the wait is usually unfathomably long.

Surrounded by chocolate, I ordered a chocolate brownie with a glob of ice cream on top. I was pleased with my decision until a coworker offered me a taste of his drink, which he said was the best thing on the menu. Simply put, it blew me away.

The drink: The Chocolate Bar’s Signature Stout Beer Shake.

Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Beer and ice cream mixed together. Usually you mix ice cream with milk or soda. But think about it: adding milk or soda just makes the ice cream milkier or sweeter. If you add beer instead, the creamy goodness of ice cream (cinnamon flavored) is balanced with the carbonation and bitterness of beer (they use a chocolate stout for the beer).

The result is effervescent.

Give it a try the next time you’re there. You think you want something else, but you don’t. Just go ahead and order the Stout Beer Shake. Trust me on this one.

Tomorrow:

Scrub It Out

Michael Moore Strikes Back

So Does the WGA

Irrumivictories Part 1

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:55:35 GMT

No Longer Jobless in St. Louis

Unless I’m convicted of a federal offense over the next two weeks, I have a job. I’m really, really excited, and a little nervous. Here’s how it came about:

A few months ago, Fr. Gary Braun at Wash U’s Catholic Student Center decided that he wanted to create a new position at the CSC. At that point, Gary’s time was divided between his role as a priest and his role as the head administrator and director of the CSC. However, the CSC has grown in leaps and bounds during Gary’s time there, and he realized that he needed to commit more time to the priest side of the job (which greatly entails being there for Wash U students) and less time to the administrative side. He didn’t want to sacrifice the administrative side, though, especially since the CSC is such a well-run institution. So he decided to create a new role, a pastoral administrative position (he’s still deciding on the official title—it’ll either be Director of Operations or CSC Administrator), and he began looking for a person to fill that position.

Meanwhile, a young Virginia farmboy with only his two tiny hands and a somewhat solid head on his shoulders had ventured out into the world after his office had closed. He had but two cats and a howler monkey to his name, but he felt he had potential. He had attended mass and worked as a work-study student at the Catholic Student Center during college, so he approached the good Father Gary and asked him for career advice. Lo and behold, a month later, Gary offered him a job, and he accepted.

The farmboy’s name is me. I feel really fortunate to get this job, and I’m going to do my best to do my best. I’ll be working for a place that I really believe in, and I’ll be able to intimately educate myself in all of the business departments at the CSC. My responsibilities will include (I promise, after this list I’ll stop talking about my job):

Manage day-to-day operations at the Catholic Student Center facility;
Supervise CSC staff of full-time and part-time employees (16 people);
Oversee budget, finances, and grant requests;
Coordinate with development team to increase donations and nurture relationships with donors;
Create and maintain staff and other CSC records;
Provide orientation and training for new employees;
Spearhead initiatives for growing the CSC community and spreading the word of God;
Train a successor prior to cessation of employment.

I start on November 27, at which point these blog entries will get a lot more holy.

Haiku Contest

If you read the boards, you may have noticed that two people who use the initial “T” to sign their comments (namely, Trevor and Tracy) are both contending that they want the other to use another signature. Fair enough. But then Pat jumped into the fray, demanding that he be given the right to use the initial “T” if he so wished. Apparently it’s a popular letter. Trevor suggested a haiku contest to decide who has the sole rights to use “T” as a signature, and that is what we’ll do. The guidelines are below:

Each contestant may only enter the contest once.
The haiku must follow the standard 5-7-5 syllable format.
If the contestant writes the haiku in Japanese and in English, even though the contestant will not be given any preferential treatment from the sole judge, a Japanophile, I’ll probably not read any of the other entries and will automatically declare that contestant the victor.
No contestants named “Victor” may enter.
All entries must be submitted by noon on Sunday, November 18.
To submit an entry, the contestant will post it as a comment to this entry.
No employees or former employees of the Sheinhart Wig Company are eligible.
The topic of the haikus is “Tea and Monkeys.”

Good luck!

Bee Movie

Caroline and I saw Bee Movie this past week, and I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. Although I love the show Seinfeld as much as I love chocolate (show me a river of chocolate, and I’ll show you a glistening, chocolate-covered, man-boy body), I wasn’t sure if the humor would translate to an animated movie. Fortunately it did, and I laughed quite a bit. To review this movie, I present the newest columnist on this blog.

Ole’ Crusty Sez…

Where I come from, bees can’t talk or represent themselves in the court of law. However, I come from the back of Jamey’s underwear drawer, so my experience is limited.

Much-Needed Explanation

Who is Ole’ Crusty, you may ask? It’s a fair question. I’m sure he’ll be fully profiled in a future edition. For now, in brief, Ole’ Crusty is the oldest pair of tightie whities that I own (I’m a boxer guy, but I wear tightie whities when playing sports). He’s a good man, and he’s gotten me through some tough times. I wore him for years until one day I realized that Ole’ Crusty wasn’t the spry, young pair of underwear he once was (why does it always seem that you don’t realize that a piece of clothing completely falling to pieces before it’s much too late, and you really shouldn’t have been wearing it for quite some time?). Ole’ Crusty had turned into a shredded, tattered shell of the man he once was. He no longer provided proper coverage in any way, exposing me to a level that’s illegal in 43 states. So I tucked him into the back of my sports clothes drawer.

Why didn’t I just throw him away? Legitimate question. I have absolutely no good reason except for the novelty of it. Plus, Ole’ Crusty has more personality than Kramer. Despite his appearance, he’s an excellent public speaker. He stays in shape, and recently finished the Chicago Marathon (Undergarment Division, ages 35-62). And he always has an opinion. What he doesn’t have is money, so I’m paying him 5 cents a word to write an opinion column in my blog. I hope you enjoy his insight.

Tomorrow:

Please Come to Boston, continued

Think Outside the Box Office

Stout’s Honor

Scrub It Out

Michael Moore Strikes Again

And So Does the WGA

Triumvirate Day 3

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:32:40 GMT

Off the Grid

The next few items are innovations that I’ve come up with, some recently, some in the past. Probably the most important one is something I like to call The Grid System™. Let me explain. Personally, I love to get my back scratched. I have a “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” agreement with Caroline, which usually results in her scratching my back and then me falling asleep. It’s wonderful. Perhaps other people out there share my passion for having the dead skin on your back shaved off with someone else’s fingernails.

Anyway, although there are few things more pleasurable for me than getting my back scratched, the frustration caused by having the scratcher miss a spot is paralyzing. So about a year ago, I explained The Grid System™ to Caroline. The premise is simple: Use two hands to scratch, start at the upper left of my back, and work your way across and then down until you’ve scratched the entire back. That way you can’t miss a spot. The Grid System™ comes with a 100% satisfaction guarantee, so I highly suggest that you use it on that special someone the next time they ask for a back scratch. Then turn over and ask that they do the same for you. It’ll change your life.

My Precious

Last Christmas, my dad and I were playing football with the men of my extended family up in northern Virginia. After the game, my father realized that his wedding ring had slipped off on the field. He and my mother later cased the field using The Grid System™, but unfortunately they couldn’t find it. They considered replacing the ring, but the original had so much sentimental value that making another one just wasn’t the same.

If you believe in miracles, read on. If not, please skip to the next section, No Toothpicks for Old Men.

Last week, my cousin was playing pick-up football with his friends on the same field that we played on last Christmas. One of the boys (we’ll call him “Gollum”) noticed something shiny in the mud, and my cousin realized that it was probably my father’s ring. Sure enough, after a phone call to my parents: 10 months after my father lost the ring, it had been found. Isn’t that crazy? Think of all the little feet that have trampled on that field since then, all the other kids who could have noticed the ring but not known to whom to return it. I think that’s pretty amazing.

No Toothpicks for Old Men

I carry exactly four things in my pockets at all times: my chapstick, my keys, my wallet, and cell phone. None of these objects have reflective surfaces, so after eating out or before entering a party, I have no way of checking to see if I have food in my teeth. I picked up this paranoia after wearing braces for five years and constantly having food in my teeth. So my idea is this: Why not put a reflective surface on shapstick? Just a little sticky dot on the cap so that after you put on the chapstick, you can see what’s going on with your teeth. I want to see this happen.

Bonus Tip: Do not use Blistex. Blistex actually makes your lips more chapped, or blistered, hence the name.

Mile-Low Stadium

I was in downtown Clayton the other day, an area that I wish the real St. Louis downtown was more like. The one thing that it’s missing is a sports arena. But where would they put it? Clayton is surrounded by rich neighborhoods shaded by trees growing old money—not only would I not want to disturb that serenity, but those people aren’t going to move. My solution: build an underground stadium.

Think about it: When you’re in a stadium, say a football or basketball stadium, what’s outside doesn’t matter. You’re looking down at a field, not out the windows. So why not build the whole thing underground? You could pull in natural light using angled-mirror skylights, and even paint the rafters a sky-blue, similar to the ceilings at casinos that make you forget the time of day. You can put whatever you want on top of the stadium—a parking lot, a practice field, or a busy intersection. It doesn’t matter. For those of you who know physics, let me know if this could work. This could be St. Louis’ Big Dig!

Any Hoodlum Could Have Written That

Schnucks, the local grocery store chain that I frequent, has a new policy of checking the signature on the back of credit cards to verify…well, I have no idea. Without exaggeration, the hastily-written, smeared signature on the back of my card looks like “yXtogma.” I’ve shown the back of my card to about three cashiers since this policy was put in place, and not once have they asked me why I’m in possession of Mr. yXtogma’s card. “Uh, Mr….is this ‘y’ silent?” Does anyone know what this policy does?

Thus concludes the triumvirate. Join me next week for more Irruminibbles.

Triumvirate Day 2

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:11:13 GMT

They Call Me “Superjumbo”

In a recent news report (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7071620.stm), Singapore Airlines has asked passengers flying on their superjumbo A380 to refrain from participating in sexual activities in any of the 12 private rooms in first-class (“As for coach,” they said with a chuckle, “anything goes”). Apparently the rooms aren’t soundproofed or fully sealed, so loud sex sounds have been disturbing other passengers. In my opinion, if you’re paying for a bed on an airplane, you’re signing up to join the mile-high club. I say Singapore Airlines should soundproof those rooms, put some locks on the doors, and fly those friendly skies.

The Tisk-Taskmaster

I have a small complaint about the Windows Taskbar that I keep on the bottom of my screen. I like to have two levels of buttons on my bar so that it’s not too crowded. Because it’s expanded, sometimes I misclick and pull the bar back down to one level. You’d think that you’d be able to immediately pull it back up, especially since we have these super fast computers that can load complicated programs and websites in the blink of an eye, but you’d be wrong. My computer takes a few seconds to acknowledge that I want to re-expand the bar. Why is this? And yes, I know that the obvious solution is to lock the taskbar so that it’ll stay in place, but I don’t like to be locked in. I want flexibility. And I want it quickly.

Is That Right, Brain?

Before reading on, look at this web page (it’s work friendly): http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html. On the page is a spinning silhouette of a woman. Which way is she spinning? Ask someone else around you—odds are, they’ll see the woman twirling in the opposite direction. To me, she’s spinning clockwise. According to the article, this means that I’m a “feeler”—I make decisions based on my gut instinct rather than the facts. This would be interesting if it were true, but it simply isn’t. In fact, Caroline’s just the opposite of me in those regards, and sure enough, she sees the woman spinning counter-clockwise. I personally think that the Herald Sun has it backwards, but let me know what you think.

Bonus Pleasure Point(s): I’m tickled pink that the guy (it was definitely a guy) who drew the outline of this woman decided to give her pronounced, pert nipples. I don’t think I’ve ever been more attracted to a shadow.

Permanent Bladder Damage

The title says it all: I’m on a fast track for giving myself permanent bladder damage. The problem is that whenever I’m hanging out in a group of people, I avoid going to the bathroom at all costs. I have this weird social phobia that while I’m in the bathroom, I’m going to miss out on the best joke or moment of the night. I think the solution is that I need to insert a catheter into my urethra whenever I go out with friends. Then I can be in the room at all times, filling a plastic pouch with warm urine, while everyone’s laughing and giving high fives to each other.

Tomorrow:

Off the Grid

My Precious

No Toothpicks for Old Men

The Future Is Underground

Any Hoodlum Could Have Written That

A Triumvirate of Irruminibbles

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 05:20:37 GMT

I’ve been jotting notes to myself over the last week, and I finally wrote entries for all of them. I have 14 things to say them, and I’m going to take 3 days to say them all. Here they are:

Please Come to Boston

The Red Sox just won the World Series. The Patriots are 9-0. The Celtics are 2-0 and feature one of the most dynamic threesomes in the league (second most dynamic threesome: Eric and two random girls he met at Pepper Lounge last night). The Bruins are 7-5-1 (is that good in hockey? I’m not sure. But at least it’s a winning record). The Boston College football team is 8-1. The Departed, based in Boston, won the Oscar for Best Picture last year. And the Boston University Terriers, their field hockey team, is #13 in the nation at 15-5.

Boston is winning everything.

Simply put, this has to stop. Boston humiliated the Cardinals in the World Series a few years ago, and ever since the city has been low on my list. They think they’re so special with their accents and their rough-around-the-edges-ness and their tea parties and their “Big Dig.” What the hell are they digging for? A real city would have dug to the earth’s core by now. Give 100 St. Louisans shovels and tell them to dig. They would dig the hell out of Boston.

The Best Hour of the Year

There are many fine holidays every year. Strictly in terms of what you receive, at Christmas you get presents, Easter you get candy, St. Patrick’s Day you get drunk, and Halloween you get more candy (and possibly slutty). But I’d like to argue that the finest holiday of the year isn’t even a real holiday; it’s Daylight Savings Day.

Think about it. For all those other holidays, you get things. But on DSD, you get time. You get a hour that doesn’t exist in the annals of time. You can do whatever you want with it. I remember a few years ago, I was out at Morgan Street on DSD, and when the clock turned 3:00 (I was young and virile back then), suddenly it was 2:00 again. What happened during that hour? Only time and a paternity test will tell.

This year, I used that hour to sleep. I’m sure some crazy stuff happened in my dreams. But none of it actually happened. What a glorious hour!

Too Bad It’s Not a Glass Ceiling

Last year, the ceiling in my kitchen collapsed after the guys above me forgot to clean their AC’s condensation pipe on a regular basis, which resulted in a small flood on his floor and in my ceiling. He hired someone to fix it, and it’s good as new now. The other night, Caroline kept bugging me about the dripping sound on the ceiling in my bathroom. I had heard this dripping for a while, but I just thought it was the guy’s shower dripping on the shower floor. To prove to Caroline that I was right, I touched my thumb to the spot where we could hear the dripping, and to prove her point, my thumb went right through the ceiling. It was soaking wet up there, and moldy. I pulled several pieces off the ceiling, pushed a towel up there to soak up the water (which is coming from a leaking toilet above me), and called the repair guy. Hopefully it’ll be fixed within a few days, and I actually feel bad for the guy above me, who is liable, because he obviously doesn’t know that the pipe under his toilet was leaking, but I just want it fixed.

Iron Chef: Garlic

My sister recently hosted an Iron Chef potluck dinner party. The idea is that you choose an ingredient, ask a few people or couples to make a dish featuring that ingredient, and then you get together and eat the results. I thought that sounded like a great idea, so I invited a few people over for Iron Chef: Garlic (my sister selected squash) on Saturday. The results were actually quite amazing. I think people got really into the idea, because every couple made two dishes using garlic, not the one dish I asked for (we ended up having plenty of food, and surprisingly little left over). Needless to say, we all had garlic breath by the end of the night. The dishes, in order of appearance, were as follows:

Garlic bread with a gorgonzola cheese sauce
Garlic salad with eggplant, mushrooms and onions
Garlic-marinated shrimp and chicken with garlic aioli (Mark pronounced this “avioli”) and guacamole
Garlic mashed potatoes
Garlic-pesto-parmesan bread
Garlic chocolate chip cookies
Garlic ice cream with strawberry sauce

You’re probably curious about the last two dishes. Caroline and I made the cookies, and Mike’s fiancé Katie made the ice cream. Both were actually quite good. You can’t really taste the garlic (which had been soaked in maple syrup) in the cookies, and the strawberry sauce balanced out the taste of the garlic in the ice cream. The closest food to which I can compare the taste to is hot chocolate with chili powder in it—the extra ingredient doesn’t really detract from the primary flavor, it just adds an extra “oo—what’s that?” factor to it.

I Worked in Publishing for How Many Years?

I’ve started realizing that I make grievous typos in this blog. Well, really, two people point them out to me: Pat, in his own special way, and Caroline, in her much gentler way. But always in hindsight, because I don’t proof my own posts before I put them up. They take a while to write, so by the time I get to the end, I just want to plop them online and hope they make sense. This led to me using the word “scene” instead of “seen” in my last entry, as well as “Cane” instead of “Kane” (as in Citizen). That’s just stupid. So Caroline’s going to start proofreading this thing before I post it online. Thus, all future mistakes can be attributed to her.

Tomorrow:

They Call Me “Superjumbo”

The Tisk-Taskmaster

Is That Right, Brain?

Permanent Bladder Damage

Halloween vs. The Kitchen Sink

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 05:54:58 GMT

Halloween

Caroline and I had a busy Halloween Saturday, crisscrossing across St. Louis to four different parties. The last party, an all-out block party in the Central West End, was a little too crazy for my liking, but I still had fun people watching. I was the DD for the night, so I ended up driving four drunks through the Taco Bell drive-thru (of course). Mark, probably the most inebriated of the bunch, actually got out of the car after I placed the order, walked over to the Taco Bell building, and proceeded to urinate on the wall. He’s a classy guy.

I promised last week to reveal Caroline and my costume today, so without further adieu…we were Man vs. Wild. Yep. The show. I was the man, of course, and basically tried to dress like Bear Grylls. Caroline, adorned in fake flowers and leaves, was the Wild. See below.

Into the Wild

No, I’m not talking about getting “into” Caroline while she was in costume. I’m talking about the Sean Penn-directed movie, Into the Wild, based on the Jim Krakauer book. It was very good—I’d give it four thumbs up (out of five). The editing was exceptional—I really liked the order in which Sean Penn decided to tell the story. I went into the movie thinking it was basically going to be a one-man show, like Cast Away. That was okay with me, because I really enjoyed Cast Away. But a lot happens on the main character’s adventure that doesn’t involve living alone in Alaska. He encounters a lot of people along the way, and they play an integral part into the theme of the movie. I’m not giving it the full five thumbs possibly because the main character’s motivations were so well explained by the end of the movie that there was very little mystery left. I feel odd typing that, because I wanted to know what would compel a person to liquidate his assets and disappear into the wild, but now that I know, I wish there was something left to wonder about.

There Will Be Blood

On the subject of movies, I read an early review of the fall film I’ve been most looking forward to, Daniel Day-Lewis’ There Will Be Blood. Those of you who have talked to me about movies know that I think DDL is the best living actor, and one of the best actors of all time. Try to watch Gangs of New York. It’s difficult, because it’s not a great movie, but try to tear your eyes away from the screen when DDL is in the frame. It’s impossible to look away. He is Bill the Butcher in that movie. I purposely don’t know much about There Will Be Blood, but movie follows the rise of a man who discovers oil in Texas from poverty to riches to greed. The reviewer compared the film to Citizen Kane, not only in terms of the parallel story structure, but also regarding the quality of the acting and the movie. It comes out in a limited release on December 26, which means I’ll be able to see it by the end of February in St. Louis.

Limited Releases vs. Wide Releases

Okay, I understand and respect the concept of limited releases. They allow hype to grow around a film so that more movie theaters want to carry it and more people will want to see it when the wide release happens. However, who chooses the cities that get the wide release? Do people respect only the opinions of those in Chicago, New York, and LA? I apologize to Bob, Lori, and Arianna, respectively, but I trust my judgment the most, and my judgment lives just north of Forest Park in St. Louis. Why can’t St. Louis attract limited releases? Or, even better, why couldn’t limited releases involve one screen in every major city? That’s about 100 rolls of film, which is significantly more than the 7 or 8 distributed in a normal limited release, but it would allow word-of-mouth hype to be homegrown instead of imported from distant lands.

EVOO

Where do farms find all the extra virgins to make their olive oil? What’s the difference between a virgin and an extra virgin? Are the extra virgins particularly prudish?

There Will Be Cookies

I mentioned in a recent blog entry that the Doubletree Inn makes guests feel welcome by serving them fresh chocolate chip cookies when they check in. While doing some research for an informational interview with The Hughes Group, a St. Louis-based marketing agency, I discovered that Hughes had suggested to Montgomery Bank that they use the same cookie ploy. In this online world we live in where you never have to leave your home to do anything, why aren’t more companies expending the extra effort to get consumers off their butts and into their stores? I haven’t been inside a bank for years, but if I knew there were fresh cookies there, I’d visit a lot more often. The cookie idea is brilliant, simply brilliant.

Better Than a Hail Mary

This past Saturday, Trinity College, a Division III football team, was trailing Millsaps by 2 points with 2 seconds left in the game. They had the ball at their own 40, making the field-goal attempt (74 yards) next to impossible. So instead of conceding the win or attempting a Hail Mary pass, the quarterback threw a 20-yard pass to a receiver who caught it, ran for a bit, and then lateral (threw the ball backwards) to a teammate. 14 laterals later, Trinity found themselves in the end zone for the win. It’s one of the most amazing conclusions to a football game that I’ve ever seen—even if you’re not a football fan, I’d suggest you’d check out the footage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBcKt0ZomNE

Frowning vs. Smiling

I remember learning in middle school that smiling was better than frowning, because it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown (the exact numbers are inconclusive). However, doesn’t that actually make frowning the better workout? In the presidential physical fitness test, I wasn’t asked to do one pull up—I needed to do seven. So why would my middle school advocate that I take the lazy approach and smile instead of frown?

Sportsmanship

Another inconsistent minutia of American culture—as children, we’re incessantly encouraged to slap hands with opposing teams after the game, regardless of whether we won or lost. We’re told this is an integral part of sportsmanship. And for the most part, professional sports reflect this same behavior—following soccer, football, and basketball games not played in Detroit, players slap hands after the game. However, in the classic American pastime that is baseball, players have very little to no contact with the opposing team after a game. Why not? Why don’t they line up and say “good game” to each other, if not only to show their fans, many of which are kids, that sportsmanship isn’t just for children?

McDonald’s Ad Campaign

The latest McDonald’s ads to adorn St. Louis billboards are two panels, one showing a steaming cup of hot coffee and asking, “Are you hot?” and the other displaying a chilled cup of ice coffee, asking, “Are you cold?” Every time I see this, I frown (I work out, even when I’m in the car). I frown because this billboard is misleading. The questions should be switched. If I am currently hot, I’m going to want to drink something cold. If I have a chill, I’m going to want to warm up with something warm. This seems really obvious to me—did no one in all of McDonald’s focus groups point this out to them?

Soccer vs. Football

In case you read the comments on my last entry, you were treated to an ongoing discussion between me and several other people regarding China and the state of American soccer (separate topics). There are fairly extensive comments, and I think some people brought up some valid and important points. I’d suggest you check it out.

I do have one other thing to say about soccer and football. When Americans decided to name their sports, why in the world did they decide to rename football as “soccer”? Couldn’t they just stick with the norm? Football (soccer) dates back to the 2^nd century, with the modern rules being drawn up by some foppish gentlemen in Cambridge in 1848. Conversely, American football wasn’t established with consistent codification until 19 years later, in 1867. Were there no other names available at the time? There are a plethora of words out there, including the powerful-sounding “gridiron,” which refers to an American football field. Instead of thinking of something new, they settled on football, relegating an already established game to finding a new name. I like the sound of “soccer” because I grew up using that term, but I wish we could just call it football like the rest of the world. It would be a lot easier on foreigners as well, who have to say the mouthful “American football” whenever they’re talking about Tom Brady and his manly cleft chin. When the Dolphins played against the Giants in London this past weekend, the Brits must have been exhausted from all the excess words. “Gotta love this American football, guv’nah!”

Next time: Will Boston teams win every championship in every sport this year?

Does Santa Make His Toys in China?

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:34:50 GMT

Mission: Impossible

You know how on Mission: Impossible, whenever Tom Cruise receives his assignment, the medium on which it is printed/recorded explodes in a concise puff of smoke after he reads it? That actually happened to me the other day. I was burning a CD to back up my iTunes collection, and about 95% into the burning process, I heard a loud pop. The burning stopped, and I tried to open the DVD-RW drive with no success. I turned off the computer and managed to pry open the drive a little bit, and I discovered that the CD had actually exploded into hundreds of little shards! Needless to say, I won’t be using that drive again. Acer is kindly replacing it, so I have removed the drive from my computer. I looked on the bottom of the drive, where the source of manufacturing was revealed. The country? Yep. China.

China

When are we (“we” as in “humans”) going to stop buying stuff made in China? I definitely never even think to look on labels for that kind of stuff, and I generally don’t care if things are made in America, but I’m going to start trying to avoid buying things that are made in China. I type this on my Chinese-made Blackberry as I bathe in Chinese-made lead paint in my Chinese-built condo. In China.

Drums

In all seriousness, as I type this on my non-exploding keyboard, the gentleman who lives above me is “practicing” on his drum set. This has been going on for the last hour, and it sounds…well, I honestly can’t tell how good or bad he is, because it just sounds like thunder in my ceiling. It’s illegal for me to have a grill on a balcony in my building, but perfectly fine to have a drum set in your unit. Which instrument, a grill or a drum set, is more likely to induce me to set fire to the condo above me? Hint: It’s not the grill.

Things We Lost in the Fire

Is there an Oscar category for most depressing movie title ever? If so, we have a winner (in case you haven’t heard of it, the title is the same as the above header).

Speaking of Fire…

I hope Arianna’s okay. Arianna (fezmonkey) is a college friend of mine who lives in her parents’ house in southern California. It sounds like things are pretty bad over there, and so I hope she and her house are safe.

Tom Brady

Even though I’m jealous of Tom Brady for being Tom Brady (3-time Super Bowl champion, dated and impregnated Giselle, can grow a beard), I have to give him props for what he’s done so far this season. He’s won all 7 games he’s played, throwing 27 touchdowns and only 2 interceptions. To give you an idea of how amazing that is, it’s like if you went to work tomorrow, played football during your break, and threw 27 touchdowns and only 2 interceptions. It’s amazing.

TV Update

Of the new shows this season, I’m sticking with Pushing Daisies, which is amazing, Cavemen, which is funny but has too many commercials, and Chuck, which I thought I would cut, but it’s actually pretty good. As for other shows (and yes, I watch too much TV, but really only when I eat meals…it just so happens that I eat three meals a day at home nowadays), I have Heroes, which has been only so-so this season, 30 Rock and The Office, both of which are fantastic, Scrubs, which I wish wasn’t on television anymore, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is one of the most quotable shows ever, Friday Night Lights, which suffers from that one bad subplot but is still great, Champions League and English Premier League soccer (like watching American soccer, but with adults on the field), and NFL Primetime (like watching American football live, but more efficient).

Santa

I met up with Trevor and Caroline for lunch in Clayton the other day (a quaint little place called Stephanie’s Pharmacy), and Santa walked in and placed an order. I don’t mean a Santa impersonator…I mean that either this guy is Santa, or he truly thinks he’s Santa. He had all the standard features—the beard, the spectacles, the rotund belly—but he was also wearing a red coat (again, not the frilly coat of a Santa impersonator…this was just this guy’s normal, everyday coat), a red hat, and red pants. Plus, he responded to the name Santa. I’m literally contemplating rethinking my non-belief in Santa Claus after seeing this guy (and yes, I literally mean literally).

Ginger Snaps

I’ve had an ongoing struggle over the last week with a box of ginger snaps. I really, truly want to enjoy these odd little cookies, but they’re just too hard and brittle. The little shards of cookie hurt my gums (and I floss daily!). I need ginger snaps with less snap. Like ginger chews. Do they exist? Maybe they’re made in China.

Next week: Caroline and my Halloween costume.

Celery and Pudding

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:41:51 GMT

One Size Fits All

I want to start off with a pet peeve, one of several I’ll list today. Caroline and I were looking around online for a particular Halloween costume (which happens to be another peeve of mine—why do people spend money on ridiculous costumes that they’ll only wear for one day?!). We found one that fit the bill, but there were no size options, just “one size fits all.” What kind of BS is that? We all know that one size most certainly does not fit all. In fact, it’s more likely that it doesn’t fit anyone. Thus, we changed our costume idea to something better, something that I’ve actually mentioned on this blog before. I’ll reveal it next week, hopefully with photos.

Michael Clayton

Despite the boring title, Michael Clayton is a taut, well-written legal thriller. George Clooney is believably human as the titular character, so much so that the audience in my theater almost broke into applause at his big reveal late in the film. He plays a fixer at a large New York law firm, a role that isn’t completely explained, but you get the gist of it while watching what he does (which is good, opposed to him just telling you what he does in a voiceover or something like that). There actually is a short voiceover at the beginning of the film, during which Tom Wilkinson acts his ass off. The movie doesn’t tell us anything new about the world, but that’s okay. It’s worth the ride, and it makes you think for the duration of the film.

Headsets

I’ve already complained about cellular Bluetooth headsets. I have a new peeve to mention—headsets at restaurants and retail stores. Do the waiters and waitresses at the Drunken Fish really take themselves so seriously that they have to be in contact with each other at all times? The extra piece of technology certainly doesn’t seem to help their level of service. The same goes for Express—the people there stomp around issuing orders to the minions in the storehouse. Instead of adding value to their product, headsets have the opposite effect on me. I just can’t take anyone seriously if they’re wearing a headset.

Minors in Jail for Life

In an October 17 article in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/us/17teenage.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin), the idea of abolishing life imprisonment for children and young teenagers is mentioned. Apparently every other country in the United Nations except the U.S. supports that resolution. And I actually agree with the U.S.

The case mentioned in the article is about a girl, Ashley Jones, who helped her boyfriend murder her grandfather and aunt when she was 14 years old. They stabbed, shot, and then set the two victims on fire. Jones’ younger sister and grandmother were also nearly killed in the rampage. Now Jones is appealing to have her life sentence revoked so that she has a chance at parole.

I understand that children are young and impressionable. I’m also a strong advocate for forgiveness—unlike many people, I don’t believe that forgiveness is a sign of weakness. However, no normal 14-year-old would even consider killing people. All of us went through adolescent angst, but actually taking someone’s life never even crossed our minds. It seems to me that the brain of a child who not only thinks about killing someone but also carries out that act of violence is a brain that will always be a danger to the public. Especially a child’s brain. As adults, we make choices—many of them dumb choices, but they’re still choices—but as a child, a lot of the choices you make are actually just instinct. If your instinct is to kill…well, that’s why I’m glad the U.S. supports life imprisonment.

Smoking in Bars

Lots of legal stuff today. Here’s another issue: Smoking in bars. In St. Louis, this is still legal, and I know of only two bars that have banned smoking. The capitalistic side of me says giving bar owners the choice to allow or disallow smoking in their bars is the way to go. However, I just can’t come to terms with that. The very fact is that smoking affects other people. It’s proven that it hurts other people. If you go to a bar where people are smoking, sure, you have the right to leave the bar. No one is forcing you to stay. But…well, say you walk into a bar, and someone is running around punching people in the lungs. Again, you have the choice to leave, but you’ll never actually run into this situation, because it’s illegal to punch people (at least, I think it is. Unless they want to be punched). Isn’t cigarette smoke literally a punch in the lungs? So why is that legal in any enclosed space?

Car Alarms

I’m just going to say it: Car alarms should be banned. Seriously. Does anyone ever pay attention when there’s a car alarm going off? If I hear one outside—which happens daily—my only hope is that the thief steal the car quicker so that I don’t have to listen to the car alarm any more.

Pertinent sidenote: A few days ago, Caroline and I went to the grocery store because she was craving celery and I was craving chocolate pudding (cook and serve, not instant. Never use instant pudding!). She stayed in the car while I dashed into the pouring rain. Caroline, who kept the car keys, was ready to unlock the doors when I returned, but in the darkness she couldn’t find the right button. She fumbles for the keys, but she can’t see them either, and so in an act of desperation, she leaned over to the driver’s side door and tried to manually open it. Instead, she pressed a secret button (which I haven’t been able to locate even since) that set off the car alarm. So there I am, getting drenched by the rain, appearing to onlookers as though I’m trying to break into a car with a stalk of celery and a box of pudding as my only tools. I couldn’t help but laugh.

The Best Halloween Costume Ever

I’m not talking about my Halloween costume, which is good, but not the best. I’m referring to an article in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/world/asia/20japan.html?em&ex=1193112000&en=1017507665faa42d&ei=5087%0A) about a clothing designer who is making outfits that camouflage you as a vending machine to the casual onlooker. The idea is that street crime is increasing in Japan, so you can feel safer if you have a clever disguise to fool your assailant. The costume is built into a normal-looking skirt—you just lift a flap, and you’re a Coca-Cola machine. There’s even a child-size version that turns into a fire hydrant. The costumes cost about $800 and are handmade, so it’s probably a little too late for this year’s Halloween parties. But order now, and you’ll be ready for next year.

Headlines and Fahrenheit 9/11

Mike was the one who sent me the vending-machine costume article. Echoing my thoughts, he mentioned that he didn’t like this type of reporting. You see, the NY Times labeled this story “Fearing Crime, Japanese Wear the Hiding Place.” Wow. That’s a blanket statement if I ever heard one. If you didn’t read the article, you might think that most Japanese people are cowering in fear under Pepsi Ice Cucumber dispensers. As it turns out, of the 128 million people living in Japan, only 20 of them have purchased vending machine costumes. Is it worth a story in the NY Times? Yes. I want to know about crazy Japanese stuff like this. Should it be treated like a trend or a fad that represents a culture, an entire nation? Definitely not.

I had the same problem with Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. I’ve never walked out of a movie with a worst taste in my mouth, for a variety of reasons. This was particularly odd because I actually agreed with most everything Moore said, but his presentation made me sick. I bring this up today to compare with the Japanese vending machine article because Moore spends about ten minutes of the movie talking about the culture of fear in America. There are clips in the movie about people selling bomb shelters and backpacks with parachutes built into them as if the average American would think to buy those types of products. Moore had an important point to make about the American government nurturing a culture of fear, and he completely debunked it (in my opinion) by supporting it with frivolous, overgeneralized examples that in no way represent the American public as a whole. I don’t even think you can represent the American public—or any country’s people—as a whole. Give me numbers. Give me facts. Don’t show me a clip about a paranoid guy buying a parachute and tell me that’s who I am.

On that note, I’m done for the day. I hope you’re having a great Sunday, or a great Monday, if you’re reading this at work.