bigtiny sez....

Le Petite Chanson-Noir

2008-10-05T21:52:00.000-07:00

It was such a cliche, I meet a mysterious woman in a seedy bar, she accepts my offer of a drink and my small advances, until many drinks and several hours later we stand together in the mouth of the small, dirty alley sharing a warm embrace.

I can smell her perfume and the bourbon on her breath as I lean in for another passionate kiss. We've been here for at least half an hour, and one of us should suggest retiring together to somebody's apartment or hotel room.

I hesitate to speak. My mouth is occupied. But that's not it. Her name has slipped away in the cloud of bourbon that's surrounding the inner folds of my brain. Was it Nancy or Heloise? No, something more modern like Britney or Madison? That's not it either.

We end our kiss and I lean into her body, my face nuzzling the side of her neck as I drunkenly struggle for words. What was her damned name? She hugs me tightly and it heightens my frustration as I again try to remember her name.

Suddenly, it comes to me. Linda. That's right, pretty Linda, and just as suddenly I feel the icepick thrust into the back of my neck. Pain and shock explode in my head as the tip of the ice pick makes its way steadily through the tissue and bone of my neck, finally poking its way out of the front of my throat, and I begin to fall, sliding noiselessly down the front of her coat.

Definitely a cliche.

I could've been somebody...

2008-09-23T23:56:00.000-07:00

I was in 10th grade and things were rocky at home. My father and I had never gotten along well. How does one get along with an abusive megalomaniac? Dad was a foreman with a company that installed underground utilities for other companies, the majority of the work being digging trenches, burying conduit, and pulling cable through it for the phone company. He was a proud blue collar worker. After 8 years with the company and a reputation as one of the toughest, most productive foreman, he was head of a large crew and taking down a cool $5.60 an hour.

We didn't get on well, and as I grew older and matured, our relationship deteriorated. He was particularly unhappy about my aspirations as a musician and took every opportunity to let me know about it. I could never understand what his problem was until I grew old enough to realize that music was one thing (maybe THE one thing) that I could do reasonably well, but that he had absolutely no ability to do. He couldn't carry a tune with a bucket. I don't think he could tell which of two pitches was higher or lower. He didn't take well to the notion that there was anything he could not do, and found the idea that I could possibly to something that he couldn't to be particularly repugnant.

On this particular afternoon, I was home after school, practicing my trumpet. I was in my bedroom, but happened, between Arban's exercises, to hear him pull up in the front driveway. I remembered that I had locked the front door, so I rushed to the living room to open it to avoid aggravating him.

As I pulled the door open, he was getting out of his candy apple red Maverick, lunchbox and hard hat in hand. He was wearing his usual work outfit, a short sleeved blue work shirt, stained and patched blue jeans that he only wore for work, and worn cowboy boots. He was a smaller man than me, five feet eight inches tall with a slender yet broad chested build. He wore his hair on the longish side and sported a full beard and mustache. His popeye-esque forearms bulged and were covered with light hair, bleached by days spent working in the sun. He was covered with dirt from head to toe, damp with groundwater and perspiration.

As I stood there holding my trumpet, waiting for him to enter the house, he glared at me across the yard and said "Playing music is no way for a man to make a living."

And try as I might, I could not avoid the thought that invaded my mind at the very nanosecond that his comment ended -- "I've just received career advice from the Mole Man"

Things went downhill over the next few years...

Baby talk

2008-09-17T21:18:00.001-07:00

I've mentioned it in this blog before, but it's an amazing technological time we live in. Everyday, people from all economic strata use and benefit from amazing technologies. It's also a great time for design and the meeting of design and techology. iPhones, iPods, computers, medical devices, cars, you name it, these devices are ubiquitous and influence peoples lives in ways that I think we as a society, don't fully understand.
There's one industry though, that I've noticed for the amazing leaps in design and function in the past several years. No, it's not sports cars, it's not the Segway, it's not Apple. It's the baby products industry.

I live in a neighborhood that contains, well let's face it, a lot of yuppies. These couples are having kids left and right these days, and because I live in an urban environment, it's possible to observe them out walking or running errands, all with their kids in tow. The first thing that caught my eye was the heavy duty, jogging mommy stroller. These things are amazing: lightweight construction from the latest industrial materials, large wheels with substantial titanium frames, carrier sections (you know, where the baby hangs out) that can be totally closed off into weatherproof little enviro-bubbles for junior's total comfort, plus pouches and slots and pockets for all of the modern accutrements, including the ever-present bottle of water. And they fold up into a slender package with a handle on one end that weighs less than junior.

Next, is the car seat. Again, an great design. A federally approved molded seat that straps into the car to securely hold junior in the event of any kind of mishap. If there's a bad accident and junior gets thrown from the vehicle, he merely slides down the road in the ever-protective car seat. But that's not all. The car seats are now being designed so that you can just leave junior in the seat, remove the seat from the car, and carry the seat around with a sun hood included. And some of these car seats even snap into the above mentioned industrial stroller. Amazing.

I have no doubt that at least some of the principals and materials used in these devices have filtered down from the space program.

I remember when I was a kid...you rode on mommy's lap in the front seat until you were a little enough pain in the ass to ride in the back seat. There were no seatbelts, let alone modularized federally approved cocoons for baby's protection.

But then, my mom never went out and jogged when I was an infant...

Industry

2008-09-13T07:16:00.000-07:00

Most of us, as we travel through life, acquire a nemesis or two. Holmes had Moriarty, Superman had Lex Luthor, Tom had Jerry. I've had my share of them, schoolyard bullies, underpaid bosses with Napoleonic complexes. But one of the worst I ever had was my sixth grade teacher -- Miss Murray.
Miss Murray and I were chemically predisposed to hate each other. You know the feeling, you walk into a room and meet somebody you've never seen before in your life and the hair stands up on the back of your head and you just don't like the motherfucker! That was me with Miss Murray. It was a crappy school year and we fought, oh we fought, tooth and nail throughout the year. I was upbraided for talking in class, my grades were all above "C"s (which was demanded by my crazy father, but that's another story) and since the numbers couldn't be made to lie, report cards always noted problems with my 'attitude' and 'comportment'. I hated that bitch!
To counter, I used my razor wit to humiliate Miss Murray whenever possible. I was on the lookout for ANY inconsistency in her behavior, directions given to the class, anything! It became obvious, even to my father (this was a man who used to take new teachers a belt and instruct them to 'whip my ass' if I caused them any trouble) that something was not quite right between Miss Murray and I. I even tried to be moved to the other sixth grade teacher's class, but was turned down by the principal and told that I should learn to 'get along' with Miss Murray.
Things continued to deteriorate until The Report incident. This was a milestone in my academic career. The event that taught me that teachers were sometimes, nay MOST of the time, out to get me.
One day in geography class, Miss Murray assigned us all to pick a country and do a report on it. The report was big , I forget the required word count but it was a big project and worth a substantial portion of our grade. I decided that I was going to put Miss Murray in her place. I was going to do the best damned report she'd ever seen...she'd have to give me an A and oh how it would gall her. I then set to work.
First I had to pick a country. I wanted something exotic, but not too exotic. Somewhere with a rich history, about which plenty of information was available, but foreign enough to be not well known or understood by my classmates. After several days of consideration I found the perfect country -- The Phillipines. I then set about learning everything I could about this country and its history. I was a varacious reader as a child. I usually read two to three books a week for fun, plus whatever reading I needed to do for my schoolwork. I tore through books, maps, journals, magazines to prepare for this.
Then the writing began. The requisite four drafts were required before I got the final version. If Shakespeare had written about geography, he would have had to work to match this tome. I mean, I nailed it. The rich history, the indigenous peoples, terrain, current statistics on crops, GNP, you name it. This thing rocked. Then I went to work on the final phase -- sexing it up.
The Report as it became known in my family, was a work of art. It was like an artifact produced in the scriptorium of The Brothers of the Order of Saint Robin the Cowardly. It was ensconced within handmade covers of heavy cardboard hand painted and lettered, and bound with leather laces. It included a forward signed by the Secretary of the Library of Congress (actually I wrote and signed it, but it was pretty good...), a table of contents, bibliography, and index. The text, as previously stated, was excellent and informative. Flowing languidly throughout and drawing the reader into the previously unknown world of Luzon, Manila, Quezon City, etc. Then, the coup de grace, pictures! I raided every National Geographic and periodical I could find to illustrate every point of The Report with maps, graphics, staistics, photographs, satellite imagry, you name it! Remember, this was LONG before the days of personal computers and wikipedia...I went through three pairs of scissors goddammit!
Finally, the day came. The Report was due and I was set to deliver it to Miss Murray and watch her plunge into the depths of despair as she realized that not only would she have to give me the best grade ever for this work, but that a Nobel or at the very least a Pulitzer, were not out of the question. I loaded The Report into a wheelbarrow for transport to the bus stop, then wrestled it into the seat next to me for the journey to school, where, with the help of three friends, I delivered it to Miss Murray's desk.
There is a look that comes to the eyes of an animal when it is threatened. It's a feral set of the eyes that conveys a mixture of pure fear, hatred, and aggression. I've seen it in wild boar, snakes, and raccoon in the field. This is the look I saw in Miss Murray's face as The Report was delivered. Surprisingly, she had no snide comment or complaint at the time. I should have known something was up. You see, at the tender age of, whatever age it is that one is in sixth grade, I had not learned of the lengths a paranoid, hateful adult would go to in order to save face. It never occurred to me that a teacher would actually do what Miss Murray was about to do to one of their young impressionable students.
A week later, we got our reports back. As I carried The Report back to the desktop next to mine, with the help of a couple of classmates, I was bemused by Miss Murray's total lack of comment. I opened the front cover to find my grade staring me in the face - F
You know that camera shot that has become very cliche in movies these days? The one where the camera is in a full face shot of the protagonist and does a zoom in and a pull out (by moving the camera I suspect) at the same time to convey shock, awe, and surprise??? Picture that shot on me!!! I couldn't believe it. F. I searched frantically through The Report. No red ink. No comments. Just a big F. Ahhh, what cunning! What guile! Now it was I who was forced to assume the position of the supplicant and ask Miss Murray about the grade. I skulked up to the desk and asked "Miss Murray, I don't understand about my grade." "What don't you understand Keith?", she asked. "Well maam, you've marked an F at the beginning of The Report, but there are no corrections or comments. I don't understand why I got an F." And then it came. The Explanation. "One of my pet peeves is when a student cuts up National Geographics to illustrate a paper." she said.

!!!!!!

Everything within my peripheral vision blurred. I was shocked...no, I was hurt.....no, I was pissed off! WHAT!?!? "But you never said that using these materials was not allowed" I said. "That's irrelevant, I don't like it and because you've done it, you get an F. I won't discuss it further."
As I drug The Report into the kitchen on the sledge I'd made with my coat and some tree branches, my mother asked how it went. I told her what happened. She couldn't believe it. Even the old man was livid. The next day they accompanied me to school, stormed the principal's office (where they were able to see my endowed chair for the first time) and insisted on a parent-teacher-principal conference to discuss Miss Murray's total mishandling of my education. The fact that the principal had not allowed me to change classes should have been a clue. It was deemed that Miss Murray had acted totally within her prerogative in this matter and I was an asshole.
After a brief vacation I was back to school and ready to do battle for the remainder of the school year. I recovered from the F by getting "A"s on everything for the remainder of the year and went out of my way to make Miss Murray as miserable as possible. She did likewise. Later, I moved on and the incidents of my sixth grade year moved to the back of my conciousness.
It was just the other day that I realized that Miss Murray, despite herself, had actually done me a great service. She had taught me that I should not expect to be treated fairly. That people to whom I would be responsible would not always explain themselves or make their expectations clear, but would still insist on my producing the work they wanted.... In short, she made it possible for me to survive in the corporate world based on my experiences with her.

She was still a bitch.

Mr. Creosote's food science....

2008-09-07T00:14:00.000-07:00

I like to eat. Really. I appreciate well prepared food, be it some regional peasant fare or expertly crafted haute cuisine. I like to cook too, and I'm pretty good at it. I refuse to use a recipe and tend to like to prepare simpler, straightforward dishes. Sometimes after watching a cooking show or perusing a menu on the window of a fancy restaurant, I like to play a little game where I think about ideas for dishes that, frankly, sound uhhh, not so good. Here's a few ideas:

-tuna pudding
-peanut butter soup with canned asparagus spears and cranberries
-angel hair pasta with stewed prunes
-waffles with anchovy paste
-oatmeal with braised eel
-baked trout stuffed with parsnips and Brachs caramels
-pan fried calves liver with orange sauce
-egg rolls stuffed with cottage cheese and vienna sausages
-gaspaucho of strawberries, waermelon, peaches, and oysters with a chicken fat meringue

Isn't this fun? The best part is that one will hopefully never have to eat any of this! I've fantasized over the years about collecting these kinds of ideas for a while then doing a cookbook. Would you buy it? Maybe I can get Rachel Ray involved.....

A Rose By Any Other Name...

2008-09-03T21:15:00.001-07:00

I was walking home from the grocery store yesterday and a flight of urban pigeons caught my eye as they flew toward me. As usual, a couple of them were flying precariously low, so that as they came closer I instinctively ducked. When this happens I'm not near as concerned that a pigeon is going to collide with me as I am that one is going to shit on me. It's happened.

Anyway, all of this got me to thinking about...err...shit!

I know this isn't an attractive topic for the old blog, but think about it -- for something as useless as shit, the human race has come up with a lot of words for it. They say Inuits have 100 different words to describe snow. I decided to see how many words came to mind to mean shit. Here goes:

shit
crap
caca
dung
cowpie (specialized)
manure
spoor
droppings
guano
excrement
turd
feces
scat
ordure

That's about all that I can some up with. 14. That's 14 words to describe something that's useful for two things, fertilizer and medical diagnoses. Is this one of the reasons that people from Japan tell me that English is a hard language to learn?

An Urban Love Story

2008-08-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

We sat opposite each other on the Red Line. She was petite, brunette, with a subtle beauty that catches the eye. I was smitten. I cast occasional glances her way, careful to look away before she caught me, until she did. My smile was answered with one of her own. Her eyes darted around the rumbling subway car as I stole yet another look and we flirted silently, until we eventually reached my stop.

As I departed the train and walked down the platform, I felt a tap on my arm. Could it be? And as I turned, yes, it was her, not only the same stop but she wanted to speak to me! Shy men wait their lives for an event such as this. Thoughts of courtship, unbridled passion, nestbuilding and even children quickly ran through my mind as I faced her. "Yes?", I asked. "Dolphins on Pluto eat pond sludge", she said. And with that she smiled and wandered away to find a seat on the nearest bench and await the next train....

Truth in Advertising

2008-08-22T21:48:00.000-07:00

I haven't owned a television for several years now. I know, I'm weird. I had to get rid of the my TV because if I have a TV I'll...well....watch it! All the time. I mean, I'd eventually have to get a feeding tube IV and be cathatarized. The other reason I can't own a TV is commercials. When I was in 8th grade, I was taught, as part of my multimedia class, about nefarious techniques used by advertisers. You know, bait and switch; food design in ad layouts; that sort of thing. Being an already cynical youth, and one of reasonable intelligence, I jumped on this like syrup on pancakes. Every advertisement became an exercise in 'spot the bullshit' for me and I became very good at it. For me, advertising, particularly TV advertising, is an exercise in being insulted. Because advertising is generally very insulting. At least to me it is. I often wonder about most other people because advertising clearly works. Companies spend millions of dollars doing research about human psychology, buying trends, you name it, and they continue to spend billions on advertising, so it must work.

Now I can watch TV on my computer. Oh joy. And I have been watching...and I have been insulted.

But I'm not here to rant about that. I'm here to talk about a particular ad I've seen lately that fascinates me. I've seen this ad interspersed with TV shows and movies on a popular web site for watching movies and TV shows. I don't know if it actually airs on broadcast TV, but since it's there alongside ads for fabric softener and Hungry Man TV dinners, assume it does.

This ad is for Trojan condoms. Okay, stop giggling, we all know what they're for. It's not the potentially titillating nature of the product that has me so fascinated about this ad. It's the fact that it is grossly insulting to the consumers who are the targets of the ad.

In the ad, there is a goofy soundtrack playing over a scene in a bar. There are several 'ladies' in the bar surrounded by pigs. That's right PIGS!!!! Real life farm hogs standing on their hind legs drinking and standing around. One of the pigs goes to the men's room, buys a condom from the handy Trojan dispenser, and is transformed into our typical 20-something, half shaven, shirtail out, denizen of vacuous city, who then saunters out and up to one of the aforementioned 'ladies', apparently a shoo in for Kama Sutric bliss.

The first time I saw this ad I was dumbfounded. I mean, this would be like WalMart ads featuring characters out of 'In the Heat of the Night' or McDonald's ad showing....well typical McDonald's customers!!! I mean, how does that work?!? Then I thought "Ahhh, they're targeting women as consumers of condoms" but if that was the case, the scenario would not be the PIG buying the condom from the dispenser in the Porcine/Men's lavatory.

So advertisers and their corporate clients have finally done away with any edifice of metaphor. They've stripped down their message to the essence, like Orwell's Newspeak they've done away with all of the frills and windowdressing and gotten down to the core of the message "you're all pigs until you buy what we're selling and we're not afraid to tell you so....because you're all too stupid to even realize what we're saying about you"

Gotta go, Battlestar is on.....

Under Wraps

2008-08-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

I had another in a series of aggravating experiences yesterday. 'Series' is probably not the correct word, since I've been having this same bad experience, with increasing frequency for the past several years. Now, you might imagine that I was about to describe having a tooth filled, or being a pall bearer at a funeral and dropping the casket, or having the new assistant at the doctor's office dig around repeatedly for 10 minutes looking for a vein from which to draw blood. But I'm not.

No, the aggravating experience I've been having has been in just trying to open things that I buy. That's it. Just trying to open things. Used to be, you bought a bag of chips, grabbed the top of the bag on either side and pulled and whammo! the top seam opened and it was crunch time. Buy a record album, quick run along the open side of the jacket to split the plastic, pull the rest of the plastic off and it's off to happy tunes land.

Nowadays, you grab a bag of chips at the top and pull it apart and the whole bag rips in every which direction and chips are everywhere except where you'd like to eat them! CDs, forget about it! Even if you do manage to get the plastic wrap to split and peel, they could make a lunar orbiter out of this stuff, trying to remove all of the anti theft stickers (disguised with the title of the CD to make you think that it's there for a good reason) is nigh on impossible.

Do products that we buy everyday really need to be wrapped this securely? Is there some conspiracy among manufacturers to simply not allow me to access and enjoy the product I've spent my hard earned dollars on? What about the molded, hard plastic on cardboard stuff that electrical accessories come in? You know, there's a lot of it in any typical Radio Shack. Mon Dieu!!! The cardboard won't peel away and the plastic is like steel!

And then there's overpackaging. You know what I mean. You buy an mp3 player the size of an iPod (or an iPod for that matter) and the box is literally 10 times the size of the device it holds. And inserts containing warnings in 56 languages and 47 chinese dialects. I mean, come on, it's a friggin' mp3 player, right? It's not radioactive material off to some weapons lab or biological waste from an Army germ warfare lab!

Anyway, I really don't understand what's behind this phenomenon. Maybe it's an issue with the machining that makes the packaging materials. Or the machinary used to actually package the goods. I just wish I could open my vitamins without spilling them all when trying to remove the 'safety shield' under the lid!

That's Entertainment!!!

2008-08-13T00:46:00.000-07:00

In today's television landscape of glitz, bad sitcoms, and reality crap it's hard to find anything worthwhile on commercial tv. This was not always the case. When I was young (the heydey of American television) many of the shows were well written (often by writers who went on to fame as novelists), well acted, and well, entertaining. Yes, the humour was often naive and the censors were strict, but still, many of these shows overcame these limitations to provide very well made, entertaining television. It's also interesting to note that these shows were made on a much more rigorous schedule than today's shows, none of the actors, writers, or directors were making the kind of astronomical salaries that today's 22 years wunderkind 'actors' pull down for their 'work'.

As a case in point, I'd like to talk about one of my all time favorite tv shows. This show was fairly successful in its day. I remember watching it every week with my family. It's lead characters were a whiny voiced, almost fascist authority figure, a rebellious, scheming subordinate, and an ensemble of wacky everymen. I'm talking about McHale's Navy.

This show had so much going on that it was a pleasure to watch every week. You knew from the opening credits that this was not just another WWII sitcom. This show had one of the hippest scores of any tv show. The theme is an ultra hip west coast jazz tune that just swings its ass off. Then there's the actor who plays McHale. You could NEVER have a lead in a prime time sitcom today who looks like Ernest Borgnine. A chubby, gap toothed, swarthy mediterranean type, Borgnine looks like a Greek fisherman or an Italian butcher (so much so that he won as oscar for playing one, but that's beside the point), but he carry's serious acting chops to the job. He's perfect as the lovable, free thinking, world savvy leader of a PT boat crew in the South Pacific. Joe Flynn, who always played the bad guy in the sixties Disney pictures, you know, the scheming Dean who wants to expel the protagonist college student, or the authoritarian corporate boss who's got it in for the lead, is perfect as Capt. Binghampton, McHale's commanding officer, and nemesis. The comedic genius Tim Conway plays Ensign Parker, McHale's XO (Executive Officer) and the crew is populated by a plethora ex-vaudevillians, borscht belt comedians, and young up and comers at the time (including Gavin McLeod, future captain of the Love Boat). There's even a Japanese prisoner who unfortunately, is treated like a cross between a family pet and a house slave on a souther plantation.

But I think that McHale's Navy is even more than just a fun, entertaining show. I think a case could be made for it being an anti war satire...a precursor to MASH. Being made in the early 60's, the show didn't spend a whole lot of time confronting political and social issues of the day head on, but you never see anybody killed on the show...never any actual war. And McHale and his crew spend about as much time and energy as possible NOT being in the regular navy as one could imagine.

The writing is very tight and snappy. Plenty of quick one liners and all kinds of brilliant physical comedy from Conway. And everybody on the crew seems to be from Brooklyn! +:-) One recent episode listed the writer as Joe Heller, and I'm pretty sure this is the Joseph Heller who went on to write 'Catch 22'.

So if you get tired of seeing "MILF Beach' and teenage soap operas and want to see a throw back from the golden age of television, check out McHale's Navy.

"If a tree falls in the forest......"

2008-08-12T02:54:00.000-07:00

I read an article yesterday about a rock formation in Arches National Park in Utah (and yes it was an arch) collapsing. Apparently this rock arch was a popular sight in the park for generations. Presumably these formations were formed by erosion of the rock, mostly by water I would think, over millions of years. The final death blow was caused by further erosion, I'm guessing from rain, wind, and possibly chemicals in the atmosphere.

Ever wonder what it might have been like to be there the very second that the arch fell? Or when a big hunk of ice shears off of a glacier (or these days the Arctic Ice).

I was wondering if there were other arches in the Arches National Park. I'm guessing there are. I wonder how many of those will go in the next few years. Can you imagine if they all fell at once? Now that would be something!

And what would happen to the park? Would people no longer go to the Park to hike around if there were no arches, just some new piles of pretty red rocks? Would they have to rename it? They'd probably have to call it something like 'Rubble National Park' or 'New Terrainia Hiking Grounds'.....

This Old House...

2008-08-09T17:26:00.000-07:00

Living in the city affords one many opportunities to see interesting architecture. But I'm not talking about new architecture, or even classic architecture. Actually, I'm not talking about architecture at all, but it was a good opener. I'm talking about buildings. I live in a city that's been around for a while, so there's a lot of old buildings that have been repurposed again and again over the years. In the old days though, they often marked buildings so that you can tell when they were built. In newer buildings (by that I mean buildings from the last 30 years or so) there may not be so many discrete date plaques or whatever, but you can sometimes tell from the shape of a building or some other indicator its relative age or original purpose. I you really pay attention to these things you can sometimes get an interesting archeological perspective on run of the mill buildings you walk past everyday. I'll list a few from my neighborhood so you can see what I mean:

-One side of my building borders the back parking lot for a large building that is sort of mini mall. It's owned by a local University and is a massive building (about half a city block long) four stories high. The upper levels are used by the University for classrooms and offices. The street level has a sporting goods store, a Japanese market, and a bunch of Japanese restaurants. The lower level has a health club. Since they bought it 10 years ago, the University has dressed up the outside of the building with awnings and accoutrement that display the University's name. However, due to the general size and shape of the buiding, and the name and date carved in the concrete at the top of the main facade, you can tell that this was once a large Sears store and warehouse.

-down the street theres a single story strip of buildings that are dated from the 1940s and houses a bicycle shop and a children's book store. I has large windows in the front that have always caught my eye. Something about the proportion of the windows to the rest of the building reminded me of something. Then one day I noticed, carved into the top of the front facade "Cadillac". What's also interesting is how small a showroom was in those days.

-further down the street there's a dormitory for a local University that looks totally out of character with the rest of the neighborhood. I used to live in an apartment building directly behind this dorm, before it was a dorm. It's an old Holiday Inn from the 1960's.

-my favorite one from the neighborhood -- there is a restaurant that, when I first moved here 25 years ago, was a Greek restaurant. It has a concrete courtyard in front of it with some al fresco tables. The building itself is rather odd (those crazy Greeks) -- one side of the building is just a one story box (almost looks like an addition) and the other side has high facade with a crazy curved roof. I always thought it was some wacky modern architect thing. It's now a Japanese-Korean restaurant. I happened to mention it to a friend who is actually born and raised in the area who told me.....It's an old Arby's Roast Beef !!! It never occurred to me that a recontextualized Arby's would fool me, but fool me it did!

Anyway, these are some of the gems in my neighborhood. If you live someplace where you haven't been around to witness the evolution of the buildings in your area, and particularly if you live someplace that's been around a while, with a bit of history, then, next time your out and about, pay attention. See if you can spot the older buildings that have been reused and see what you can figure out about them. it's fun.

Think about it!

2008-08-07T18:16:00.000-07:00

We live in a fast paced, technologically fascinating world. When you think about it, it's really incredible how far we've advanced in some ways (I'm talking about technology here) and how much of that advancement has occurred in the relatively near past. If you think about it, a human being's day to day life didn't really change that much between pre-Egytpian days and about the late 1800s. I'm talking about the down and dirty details of day to day living. If you took a person from 1500 b.c. and 1500 a.d they both lived a short life span, were probably dirty most of the time, defecated in a hole in the ground, had a good chance of dying from a plethora of diseases which have been eradicated today, didn't get enough to eat, were probably exploited by some government, chuch or both...well, you get the picture. The details of their lives just were that much different.

Now in the past 100 and some odd years, things are amazingly different in many ways. In 1902 the average lifespan of an American male was 49 years. The industrial revolution brought lots of new technologies which changed things indoor plumbing, clean water, ways to insure that there were healthy crop yields, transportation, aviation, quantum physics...it's really amazing.

What's really amazing to me though is how much we take these things (and new ones) for granted. The human being is so adaptable that some pretty astounding things become pretty common in our conciousness pretty quickly. Here's a few of the things I often think about that leave me shaking my head:

- When I'm driving down an interstate, perhaps noticing the hilly rises where clearing was done to make way for the highway, I often just imagine the total absence of the road, any other roads, the cars, houses, everything. Then I think about what it would be like to be a native American standing in that spot, surrounded by wilderness (and quiet), and figuring out how to actually live and thrive.

-Whenever I fly (which is not too often...I hate flying for a variety of reasons) it absolutely astounds me, when I stop to really think about it, that I'm inside of a big piece of metal hurtling through the sky. Not only that, but when I get at Cleveland airport or wherever I've gone, I've travelled further in a few hours than the pioneers could have in a year, and done it a lot more comfortably with far fewer hardships. Don't even get me started about fighter jets!

- So it's 1998 (I think) and I'm standing in my mother's living room watching CNN. They are broadcasting live (LIVE!!!) images from the Mars rovers which have just landed. I can hardly breathe. I'm looking at the surface of fucking Mars 90 minutes hence. Now, years later, the rovers, which had been designed to last something like 90 days are STILL working and sending back valuable scientific data. And you never hear anybody mention it. HELLOOOOOOO!!!!

- I can sit down at my computer at home, fire up my original iSight camera, fire up iChat (or use the comparable hardware and software for a non-mac platform) and video conference with my cousin in Tokyo. Okay, I don't have a cousin in Tokyo, but you get what I mean. I remember when I was a kid, all of the futurist exhibitions always had a video telephone. I remember when I was an older kid, AT&T prototyped them in some areas. They could never get them to work (which I think really means that they could never figure out how to screw consumers enough on it to make it worth their while). Obviously, this is just one of the benefits of the Web. Really, what do you think DaVinci would think if we could pop him into present time and showed him the web (after he was treated in a rubber room for a few years, that is) ???

- I go to the office softball game, slide into second and break my leg. I go to the hospital and get an Xray -- A PICTURE OF MY BONES!!!! Later, after I heal, I'm having trouble with my back and I get an MRI -- A PICTURE OF MY INSIDES!!!! What are you, kidding?!?!? It wasn't that long ago that doctors were sawing off legs with no anesthesia or performing frontal lobotomies (though I sometimes think that some of them still would if they could get away with it). And now they can do an MRI, get a 3D image of my heart, isolate it, and if they want, pull a chunk out of the image and look at it in cross section!! And we don't even think twice about it. I'm 50 years old, and even after I was out of high school in the mid-70s if you had explained to a laymen like myself that in the near future there would be a machine called an MRI and described what it would do, I would told you to lay off the saki....

Anyway, you get the idea. My point is not so much about technology as it is that we should try to think more about taking things and even more importantly, people for granted. It's very easy to do.

Tips for Happy Living

2008-08-05T11:13:00.001-07:00

I am, at 50, what's called a 'confirmed bachelor'. That's a nice way of saying that I've spent so much of my life alone, I'm no longer fit to live in close society. My dear mother, before shedding the mortal coil, used to call me a bohemian because I also happen to be a musician and, well a bit of a lazy slob. I tend to live an artistic and intellectual life as much as possible and don't place a lot of importance in the trappings and activities that most people do. Okay, I'm weird.

I was noticing that there are a plethora of materials out there; magazines, tv shows, etc. that help people to live what I call a 'normal' (notice the quotes) life. You know, magazines like Good Housekeeping, Home and Garden, New Bride, TV Guide, Health and Guns and Ammo. These things often feature articles on how to effectively do the things that 'normals' like (or feel they need) to do. I thought it would be nice to have a list of things that might help one to be a more effective misanthropic bohemian. So here are my 10 rules for effective living:

1) Never clean something today that can wait until tomorrow, or until six months from now for that matter. Cleaning is one of the most futile activities mankind engages in. For one thing, no matter what you clean or how well you clean it, it will soon be dirty again and require another cleaning. I think this is just a scam by the big chemical companies to sell their cleaning products. Also, I'm a firm believer that from a health perspective, people these days are really getting to be sissies. It's because everybody keeps cleaning and disinfecting everything all the time. You body needs a chance to be attacked by germs and build up antibodies, otherwise you might as well move into a plastic bubble!

2) Never, and I mean NEVER spend money on a piece of furniture unless you really require it's functionality. How much furniture do you really need? A table and a couple of chairs? Something to lie down on to sleep? That's pretty much it, right? It's unbelievable to me that people actually go to big tacky stores and spend thousands of dollars on 'fine' furniture. Not only that but they spend the rest of their lives afraid to use it and, you guessed it....CLEANING IT! Nah, only buy what you absolutely need -- a couple of folding tables from Office Depot and some chairs. Maybe a bookcase. Note that if you work in an office, there are often opportunities to pick up old office furniture at great prices. And if you live in a city, especially if there is a college in town, the street can be a great source for the few things one really needs.

3) It's always better to eat out than to eat in. I HATE grocery shopping! It requires a lot of effort (geez it's almost like manual labor), congregating in buildings full of lots of people, and spending bunches of money on overpriced, usually low quality items. No, much better to spend a little more for food prepared by a trained professional and served by professionals in a congenial environment. Plus there's no cleaning to do afterward.

4) Only an idiot makes a bed after sleeping in it. This is one that I've REALLY never understood. You make a bed, you sleep in it, you make it, you sleep in it. Change that to you sleep in it, you sleep in it, and you've saved time and effort and lost nothing. The only time a bed should be made should be when it's new, or when replacing the bed clothes (approximately once every 3 years).

5) Social interaction is highly overrated. When one spends a vast amount of time contemplating the world in which one lives, the extraordinary game playing skills needed to get along with people tend to become dulled. I've found that the duller these skills get, the clearer my thinking process gets about things that matter to me, like string theory and why does stuff always get caught between the back teeth on the left side of my mouth after I eat Mongolian food? Sitting around at a party trying to interact with someone who regards a Macchiato and bran muffin at Starbucks as the pinnacle of their day just requires too much psychological gamesmanship and wakefulness.

6) Refrigerators are really just cold time capsules. They should never and I mean NEVER be cleaned. Opening the fridge should be like examining the geological record of the past several years of your life.

7) Never wear clothes in the house. This will cause them to wear out faster and just make you uncomfortable. Plus it makes it less necessary to 'over launder' (wash one's clothes too often).

8) Never answer your door if you're not expecting a visitor. That's it. They can buzz until the doorbell stops working...if they didn't call first, I don't answer. And neither should you.

9) Laundry should be an exotic event -- like a full eclipse or the alignment of the planets. Laundry has been made by many people to be too much like a hobby or something. Clothes should be laundered only after everything you own needs it. Doing the laundry should consist of a minimum of paraphernalia -- clothes in pillowcases (no baskets), a single detergent (no pre-wash, no bleach, no softeners or deoderizers....just soap for god's sakes), and coins for the machines (unless you can get them to take slugs or work without money). Doing laundry should be regarded on par with cleaning the reactor rods at a nuclear power plant for mental hygiene.

10) The food pyramid is a myth created by Scientologists. Eat what you feel like eating and we all know that that's beer and Snickers bars. The hell with this fabrication of an idea called 'nutrition'. A healthy diet is any eating regimen that you enjoy and by which your body produces enough energy to allow you to successfully walk from any point in your apartment to the bathroom and back.

bonus) Homeowning is for suckers. Why would anyone take a large chunk of cash and give it to the bank, expend all of the energy required to move into a new house, have to pay taxes on that house, have to maintain and/or repair that house, be stuck for the next 30 years not only living in the same place but PAYING for it, and then buying enough tables at Home Depot and lugging used chairs and bookcases home from streetcorners to fill it up??? This is totally insane. Only a madman would even think up such a scheme.....

Oh, the humanity!!!!

2008-08-04T22:02:00.000-07:00

I've been reading articles here and there for the past couple of years about a resurgence in the technological development and use of dirigibles. Apparently there is a lot of development going on to develop airships using new materials for the 'balloon' part and safer, less flammable gases to fill them.

A trip on the web pulls up a bunch of pages for companies who are building these things. I read about one a few months ago that is literally a football field long. They can lift enormous amounts of weight. I mean, these things sound great to me!!!

Funny thing though. I live in a major city in the Northeastern US. There's a lot of shipping and commerce going on around here and yet, the only place I've EVER seen a dirigible is floating over a baseball game or a parade. It seems like the couple of years that I've been reading about these things would be enough time to actually get some of them up in the air and in use for more industrial applications than advertising, but I've never seen one, or heard anything about infrastructure for them or anything.

Engineering questions/problems aside, these things seem really interesting to me and it seems like with the modern materials and such, we might expect to see one floating around with some shipping containers suspended below them or something. And wouldn't it be an interesting way to travel? I'd much rather take a flight across the US that takes a couple of days and during which I can really see the landscape below, if I've got the time...you know, a vacation rather than a business trip. Personally, I look forward to seeing these things soon.

If anybody reading this has seen any of these new dirigibles being used as something other than a flying billboard, leave a comment.

H2O

2008-08-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

I rented some DVDs the other day. They included a series from PBS called 'Carrier', a documentary series about life onboard the Nimitz aircraft carrier. Some of the footage featured the guys who work on the flight deck (one of the most dangerous places in the world to work by the way). These people have to work wearing colored shirts that designate what job they do, vests, gloves, ear protection, and helmets. I noticed that the vests are called 'camelbacks' and are actually bladders that are filled with water before going to work. There's a tube that allows the person wearing the camelback to draw water throughout the day. This very handy when you work in a place where the average temperature (when you're not in a desert climate which is even worse) is around 115 degrees.

Then I started thinking about a trend that has developed over the past twenty years or so that really annoys me -- every bozo in the world carrying bottles of water around with them every second of the day, as if they worked the flight deck of the Nimitz. I used to wonder how this trend had come about, but now I know. A few years ago I was diagnosed with type II diabetes. One of the things I did to try to combat the condition was to hire a personal trainer and start working out. One of the first things my trainer told me to do was to start drinking at LEAST some God-aweful amount of water per day (I can't remember exactly how much), because I really needed to hydrate. Remember that word, hydrate. Apparently, unless you're carrying around a bottle of water all day (or using one of the aforementioned camelbacks) you're not hydrated enough. Then started noticing that every diet plan in the world recommends, you guessed it, consuming vast amounts of water everyday to lose weight. Now, I'm an old guy so I remember the days before all of this nonsense. People went about their business, stopped and had a drink of water now and then, and generally seemed fine. People today, carrying around their water bottles in the special little pocket for it in their backpacks don't look any different to me than they did 30 years ago before all of this began. So, I think the benefits of hydration (or over-hydration) are bull. The reason trainers and diet gurus tell you to drink a lot of water is simple -- it bloats you and staves off between carrot stick hunger.

Now, some people point out that their bottled water is healthier than tap water and tastes better, despite study after study that has shown that most of the bottled water sold in this country doesn't taste any better nor is it any healthier than what runs right out of the average kitchen tap. Once again, a whole generation has fallen for a bunch of Madison Avenue crap. I remember once, before all of this bottled water bunk started, there was a shopping center in a town in Florida where I grew up. By shopping center, I mean shopping center, not a mall. Outside of the grocery store stood a machine offering a gallon of 'better tasting', 'healthier' water for the price of one dollar. You provided your own container (old gas can, recycled laundry detergent bottle) and this machine would dispense a gallon of this golden nectar from heaven. It was later found that this wonder machine was simply hooked up to a garden hose, which was hooked into the external faucet of the shopping center.

So I say stop carrying around a water bottle all day. If you need a drink of water, find a fountain, hose, or kitchen sink and pour one. If you're going to carry a bottle around and nip on it all day make it Jim Beam!

The Sky is Falling, the Sky is Falling......

2008-08-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to me that for the past several years, America has waged a war that's been reported to be costing upwards of 2 billion dollars a month to sustain, the nation's infrastructure is crumbling, the price of gas has gone through the roof, causing many people to have to seriously curtail their activities, and twice this past week I've read pieces about the poor state of the US economy that failed to mention any of these indicators. Instead, both articles mentioned the closing of multiple outlets by Starbucks and Bennigans. HOLY SHIT!!!! Starbucks and Bennigans are closing?!?!? How can this possibly be? What are we going to do if the majority of traffic intersections in this country don't have Starbucks on opposing corners?

It is truly amazing to me that Americans have such a bloated,false sense of entitlement about everything. People complain that the cost of gas is causing hardship. How many American families have more than one car? How many people get up every morning and drive all by themselves to work and back in a vehicle that could transport at LEAST four people? What, nobody believed the warnings over the years about the cost of gas? How many of these people have several LCD TVs in their house and spend big bucks every month on cable TV, internet access and cell phones?? Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying people should not necessarily have these things, but we're a LONG way from horrible economic conditions that existed in some parts of this country in the not too distant past. Sure things are getting tight. My guess is that they'll get even tighter, but people really should stop whining so much about it. After all, they're not closing ALL of the Starbucks and Bennigans, so people can still go out for some fine dining and drinks and catch an $8 Macchiato on the way home...

I see that now Uncle Sam is going to bail out all of those poor overextended homeowners who can't afford to pay the mortgages they never should have gotten in the first place. It's interesting to me that the government can't maintain and execute the emergency funding and orgranization required to help handle the aftermath of something like Katrina, but when every little mega consumer whose about to lose that MacMansion that they could never really afford anyway starts whining, then hey, let's add another few hundred billion to the tab. Dont' get me wrong. I have no problem helping a home owner who buys a house within their means and tries to pay the mortgage with the best of intentions and gets sideswiped by economic forces they can't control. But that's NOT what's going on here. And the ONLY reason the government (aren't these the Republicans who are always saying that government should stay out of peoples' lives whenever legislation is proposed to spend money for schools or welfare programs?!?!?!?) is jumping in so quickly is to bail out their big finance banking cronies.

But I digress.

What I really wanted to say to everyone is this: Calm Down. This is capitalism. The sky is not falling. It's just business as usual.

Oh and before I go, really, the fact that the oil companies once again had yet another huge profit making quarter is really just a coincidence. Really. The oil and fuel markets operate on natural economic principals that are just too complex to explain to the layman, but rest assured, there IS NO relationship between the fact that most of you are getting FUCKED over gas and these companies are cleaning up big time. Really.

New and Improved.....RIGHT!!!!

2008-07-31T19:22:00.001-07:00

A recent trip to the grocery store tweaked my ever-present disdain for corporate America and their condescending attitude toward the American consumer.

I love butter. I mean, I LOVE butter. My mother used to tell the story of how she had a pound of butter out on a kitchen table softening as she was baking something and she looked up to find me, at 2 years old, gleefully stuffing wads of half-softened butter down my gullet. True to my habitual self, when I need butter, I whip over to the dairy section and grab my favorite box of Land o Lakes butter (salted) with the pretty picture of the Native American on the box. Did Native Americans invent butter or something?!?! Anyway, the other day I grab my butter, along with the other items I needed, headed home, stored my groceries and quickly returned to my favorite activity.....staring at the ceiling. Later that evening, I opened my new box of butter and was surprised when I pull out a stick of butter that was half as long as the usual stick of butter. That is, an 1/8 pound stubby of butter. At first I wondered whether there had been some industrial packaging incident at the factory, then I was shocked to see a little red circle on the box announcing the "...new convenient half stick..." or some such nonsense. Then I got a bit pissed off. I mean, WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT HERE !!???!!??!! I can see packaging butter in a box that only contains two sticks for people who just don't eat the much butter. I can see packaging butter in a one pound block (hell I'd buy it in 20 pound blocks !!!). But I fail to see any substantive reason to cut the traditional 1/4 sticks in half....it just doesn't improve the product in any way. And THAT is what pisses me off so much when companies pull this kind of bone headed stunt. Who do they think they are helping by doing this? Is there a segment of our society who can't afford dinner tables large enough to accommodate dinner AND a full stick of butter? Are half sized butter dishes the new rage? Of all of the things that Land O Lakes might do to improve their products is this the best they could come up with???

I imagine there's some LoL (no pun intended) executive who got a big bonus for his new 'development idea'..."ahhh, I've got it, smaller buttersticks. That's it....people need sticks of butter half as large as we give them today!!!"

PUHLEASE!!!!

Now it's on to the tuna aisle. So these bozos are selling fish that's had every bit of flavor steamed out of it. They sell a food product that's laced with mercury. Now, they think that people are so stupid that we can't tell that even though the 3 oz. can of tuna still weighs 3 oz., the ratio of tuna to water (or oil) has dropped significantly.

Everybody knows that prices increase over time. I don't think anybody would be surprised that a 3 oz can of Chicken of the Sea that cost 99 cents 8 years ago will probably cost more now. But no...why would corporate American risk the possibility of people deciding not to buy tuna because it's too expensive? They can just make sure that they're never required to list how much actual fish is in the can, then lower the amount of actual fish anyway, and keep the price the same forever. People will never realize it, right? I mean, come on, the consumer is too fucking stupid for that. Never mind that a can of tuna that used to provide enough fish flavored sawdust for 4 sandwiches now provides enough for 2.

What'll it be by 2025? A can of tuna will still be 99 cents. Upon opening the can, the consumer will be presented with 2.95 ounces of cold mercury-laced broth with a single, delicate FLAKE of tuna floating luxuriously in its midst. So, all you'll need is 10 cans to make a sandwich. How Zen.

But hey, at least the price didn't go up!!!

the Duke

2007-09-29T06:56:00.001-07:00

What is it about John Wayne? Big, craggy, always the same character, and most films are pretty mediocre (if not worse) from a film critics perspective. Politically the guy was just to the right of Attilla the Hun.....but you know, I LOVE John Wayne movies! I don't know why....there's something about his character portrayal that resonates.

Maybe it's because I come from a southern family and upbringing. Some of the attitudes and behaviors from great Wayne films were observed in houses in which I was raised. Maybe it's the larger than life story telling, another staple of my upbringing. My folks could tell stories about events in their lives and stretch them for hours, eliciting comments like "yes....I knew Aunt Mabel was an official Ninja...I saw the paper that says so...." or "you know uncle Waldo once kicked Patton's ass in a bar fight, right? Not only that, but when Omar Bradley started to stick his nose into it, he got a taste of the Florsheims too..." (everybody knew that NOBODY in my extended family could afford Florsheims!!!)

Coming from an upbringing like this, I guess itt's easy to understand why I would find pleasure in seeing Wayne's portrayals of the larger than life Tom, Chance, or John who's done it all and is a man not to be trifled with. A guy who can knock you down with his ham sized fist one minute and be pouring whiskey down your throat and clapping you on the back the next. It's all about the character and the characters we all grew up with and know.

Wayne, for his immense presence and 'larger than life' bluster is, in fact, an everyman....he's your dad (remember the arguments with playmates at 8 years old..."my dad can beat up your dad...."), your grandad....he's uncle Sam.

I can't fully explain it....all I know is that when I see that replay of Wayne actually shooting Liberty Valance (not Jimmy Stewart), or Chance Buckman putting out those oil rig fires while being shot at by Communist freedom fighters, or John Chance showing his buddy Dean Martin 'tough love' and helping him get off the alcohol and get back to being a bloodthirsty deputy, or John T. McCandles staring down his grandson's kidnapper Richard Boone, and finally Rooster Cogburn facing several bandits across an empty field (led by Robert Duval) yelling "Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!" after Duvall taunts him, I feel like I'm back in the Saturday theater of my youth thinking about how the Duke reminds me of someone.....and how, when the movie's over and I'm at the office the next day or grocery shopping, that everyman seems to no longer exist.

A day in the life....

2007-09-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

I stopped off at 7-11 on the way home to pick up some bread, milk and a helicopter. Just as I was putting the key in the front door the typically flimsy bag broke, sending milk, bread slices, and aviation parts clattering across the front porch.

I need a vacation!

How about stuffing some corn husks in a pillowcase?

2007-06-28T18:25:00.001-07:00

While I was at the theater the other night, the now common string of commercials was playing before the feature started. I HATE this, but there's nothing I can do about it. The last commercial was for a mall franchise called 'Build a Bear'. The commercial left me wide mouthed and speechless. It took me several minutes to realize that it was actually a commercial not some subversive Fellini-esque parody of a commercial.
I hate...no I FUCKING HATE malls and all of the stupid franchises that have been invented as part of the burgeoning mall culture in this country. A bunch of bored, ignorant shit heads walking around a manufactured utopia of over priced stores buying shit that they don't need from companies who only want to get their money......it makes me want to puke. But I digress. I just wanted to convey how much I hate the mentality of the people who think up these concept stores for the mall culture...and that's part of what left me speechless after seeing this commercial.
You see, I can't fucking BELIEVE that our culture has disintegrated to the point that we need a whole chain of stores that sell NOTHING but mix and match stuffed bear (and doll) parts! I mean, I could get behind someplace where you take your kids and they actually learned how to make a stuffed toy....that would be cool....but no, we get 'Build a Bear' with it's fucking smarmy tone, selling manufactured joy to the denizens of Malltopia and their kids. And the arrogance! They package this shit like it's something people actually need! And being a mall franchise I can only imagine the ridiculous prices they get for this crap....
I remember, SNL used to do a recurring skit about a mall store called 'Just Tape' that sold only tape (the sticky kind)...the running joke was that somebody would always call looking for audio tape....anyway, you KNEW that this was a joke.

These people aren't joking....

Movie Nostalgia

2007-06-28T18:06:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, here was nothing l loved to hear more on a spring or summer afternoon than "we're going to the drive in tonight!" I LOVED the drive-in. Sitting in the family car, or later in my high school beater, eating home popped popcorn out of brown paper shopping bags and cracking the old cooler for a cold Dr. Pepper, while watching my favorite movie stars a 40x80 FOOT movie screen...it was excellent! When we were really young we'd actually get into our PJs before we left the house so that we could just sleep in the car....then get carried into the house without rousing...what a life! I remember sneaking out of my grandparent's house when I was 10 to go sit on the fence of the drive-in that was next door to their neighborhood and watch 'Bonnie and Clyde'. I couldn't have even gotten in to see it at that age, but there it was, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway (Faye Dunaway!!!) 40 feet high and blasting their way through anybody that got in their way! THAT was a good night!

As you can probably tell, I miss the drive in. The other night, as a I sat in the local megaplex, watching a latest blockbuster on a screen marginally bigger than the average home tv screen, listening to some gang banger who had visitation rights that day talk on his cell phone, I began to think about the drive in. Then I started to wonder what the drive in would be like tonight if they had survived...that is, what would they have had to have DONE to survive?

1) Admission would be about $10 a head...even with 4 in the car and 3 of your friends in the trunk, that still gets expensive
2) They would have had to have developed some ultra high-tech scanning apparatus that would detect:
-drugs
-weapons
-any refreshment (food, beverage, etc.) not from their concession stand
-oh....and anybody in the trunk!
3) They'd have to have and enforce a "no loud stero policy" (actually given what goes on in theaters these days...this is probably not true)
4) They'd have to install electric fences and sensors around the perimeter of the drive-in
5) they'd probably have to have a 'mirror image' of the drive in behind the screen and show another feature on the backside of it at the same time as the feature on the front (actually 'front' and 'back' would probably be meaningless)

Doesn't sound like much fun, does it?

Carryalls

2007-06-21T16:52:00.000-07:00

I was coming up out of the subway today and I noticed a young woman coming down the escalator with a GINORMOUS 'hand' bag. This thing was made out of leather, was about 3 times as big as she was, was so heavy that it was dragging her down the escalator like a horse drawn carriage, and looked like if one unfolded it it could be used as an open air shelter in the Iraqi desert. The little thing looked exhaused hefting this thing left, right, forward, back, its sides bulging like those old Xmastime paintings of Santa Clause arriving down the chimney with a loaded bag of goodies.
I understand the need for carry bags in an urban environment, I've even been known to load my cell phone, iPod, a couple of geek computer books, and a hard drive into a backpack once in a while, but this seems to be getting out of hand. Is it really necessary for people to carry around bags loaded with 40-50 pounds of detritus? What IS this stuff they're all carrying around anyway?
Well let's see. There's the billfold, books, unbrellas, headphones, laptops, the ever-present fucking bottle of water (another fad I detest...does anybody remember water fountains!!!????), shoes, and that's all I can figure out that people are carrying around for the most part. But look at the bags...there's gotta be more. What could t be?
I think that if I was going to torture myself carrying around a big heavy bag like that, I'd make damned sure that I had some head-turning material in there.
Imagine you lug your bag through a crowded subway station, find the last space on a crowded bench, open your bag and pull out a SEA TORTOISE!!! THAT would turn some heads, huh? Or one of those giant, tavern bartop jars of pickled pigs feet! You know, get people to wondering a little bit.
Maybe I'd get together with a friend and open up the bags and have a sack race...I dunno. There's just GOT to be something better to do, or a better reason to put one self through the drudgery of carrying one of these things around all day just to have a bunch of little stuff that you don't really NEED with you.
Or maybe there's a burgeoning market for burros about to appear.....

In the Chips

2007-06-18T20:25:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed that potato chip bags have been steadily shrinking for the past few years? Used to be, for $.99 you got about a 17 pound bag of potato chips. I'm talking Lay's potato chips (no one can eat just one!) Then for some reason (I guess potatoes just suddenly started costing 20 times what they used to) that big bag started costing about $4.

Then a few years ago, the marketing wiz' at Frito-Lay decided to play some mind games, I guess to keep us from realizing that they were raising prices, and invented this new size bag, that cost the magical $.99. It held about double what we used to get in vending machines or our lunchboxes when I was a kid. I think this was labelled 'The Big Munch' or something stupid like that.

The other day, I'm down at the sub shop and I figure I'll grab a 'Big Munch' to go with my turkey sub. I was shocked to see that the $.99 bag from Frito-Lay is now about equal size to what we used to get in the vending machine or in our lunchbox!!!

So somebody please tell me -- how much can it POSSIBLY cost to slice up about a 20th of a medium sized potato and fry it, stick it in a little bag and leave it to rot on the sub shop rack!?!?!?!

I mean, we talking POTATOES here right? Lowly tubers that sprout like weeds. Did these hunks of carbo suddenly become some exotic species or something?

So what are our alternatives to the overpriced Frito-Lay fried spuds?? Well, let's see....we can pay even MORE exorbitant prices for 'boutique' locally-produced brands like 'Cape Cod' chips. I'll admit that I like Cape Cod chips, although they can be a bit stout in texture, but again, the price is outrageous for these things.

Let me mention one more thing again -- these are POTATOES!!!!! Well, okay, they have to use OIL and SALT too....I guess that must be where all of this extra cost comes from...yeah, now that I think about it that HAS to be it OIL and SALT! Oh, and I'll bet these companies, ESPECIALLY the MegaSnackolopolis' like Frito-Lay, are paying TOP wages and BENEFITS to their Junior, Senior, and Principal 'Snackware Engineers'. And I'm probably totally discounting the cost of equipping and maintaining the laboratory conditions within which these things are produced -- specialized equipment and 'Snackware Development Technologies' whose costs have to be recouped within a reasonable business cycle. Why I have visions of 'Snackware Engineers', swaddled in enviro suits, moving efficiently from clean room to clean room, supervising millions of dollars worth of robotoid chip producing technology.

Now, let's talk about Fritos.......

scents of smell

2007-06-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

Walking back to work today after lunch, I passed by the back of a locally famous seafood restaurant. Covering the usual plethora of restaurantly odors (garbage, old mops, bleach) was a heavy blanket, a cloud, nee a THUNDERHEAD of the smell of bacon. What is it about this lowly meat that makes it such a great foodstuff? And the SMELL!

And that got me to thinking about smells. Our noses are really amazing things. Pulling scents out of the air, unraveling layer upon layer of aromas to be processed by our olfactory sense. And then there's the nose to brain interface, you know, that weird thing that happens when a smell jogs some latent memory -- for me there are many:

- the smell of a kitchen where coffee is brewing and breakfast (usually including eggs and the aforementioned bacon) is either sizzling on the stove, or has recently been consumed
- the smell of a carnival -- cotton candy and cheap perfume
- brownies baking
- grilled steak on a summer evening

It's amazing that the brain can actually transport you back to a place you remember based on a smell. Or, as in my case, make you want to run to the nearest deli and order a BLT when you've just eaten half a pizza for lunch!

Then I thought about some of my favorite animals - dogs. A dogs sense of smell is approximately 1000 times as acute as a human beings. 1000 TIMES. What must that be like? We've followed Uncle Marv into the bathroom Sunday morning after a Saturday night out at the beer garden....now think -- 1000 TIMES!!!!

We wonder why dogs are constantly sniffing around their environment, why anytime somebody is walking one of them, they are constantly circling trees and fire hydrants with their schnozzes to the ground. It must be overwhelming for them.

So, how come, when one dog 'meets' another, the first thing they do is put their nose up the other dogs' ass?!?! Does having such a powerful sense of smell allow for such discernment in odors that things that smell bad to us (I'm making the wild leap here and assuming that a dog's ass doesn't smell good....who knows, maybe I'm wrong) actually smell good?

And what exactly does define a good smell? I mean, sometimes I'm stuck in an elevator with a man or woman dressed very nicely and the perfume or cologne they are wearing, while smelling expensive, absolutely reeks! You know the smell I mean, like sweat collected from the ass crack of a wildebeast! On the other hand, sometimes the stuff these people wear smells great.

Personally, I've always wondered whey somebody (Lauren, Chanel, etc.) didn't make a perfume or a cologne that smelled like frying bacon. I'd buy it.

...and I don't mean Strippers.....

2007-06-12T20:43:00.000-07:00

I was in the supermarket the other day, someplace I hate to go, and I noticed something I'd never seen before. Now, I typically buy pretty straightforward stuff with a minimum of junk food. I tend to avoid processed foods when I can, don't eat a lot of mixes or frozen dinners, that sort of thing. Believe me, I'm not a health nut - plenty of bacon, wheat thins, and butter go in the basket, but I try.

So, I'm surfing through the overcrowded dairy section looking for butter and what do I run into between the yogurt and the cookie dough (dairy?!?!?) but something called 'cheesecake filling' made by none other than 'Philadelphia Brand' (hey, what the fuck is it with Philly and cream cheese anyway....do they claim to have invented the stuff or something?!?!?).

My mind reeled at the thoughts flooding through it as I stared at this new discovery. Why in the hell would ANYBODY want to eat preprocessed cheese-food crap like this and call it cheesecake. Why is it that cheesecake is so maligned in our culture anyway? A good cheesecake is truly a work of art....I'm not talking about that 'Cheesecake Factory' crap. I mean like the kind you get at small eateries in NY city. Rich, but not overly sweet, made with fresh ingredients and love.....

And while I'm on the subject, why do people insist on taking something like a good cheesecake and dumping all kinds of shit on top of it? I mean, WTF a good cheesecake is not enough for ya', you gotta pollute it with vast assortments of blueberrys, strawberrys, chocolate, and FUCKING WHIPPED CREAM?!?!?!?!

I digress.

So, there is stood pondering these thoughts when the strangest aspect of this product hit me full force. Not only was I confronted by the questionable 'cheesecake filling' product, but it came in one size only A TWO POUND BUCKET!!!! And then I knew...this stuff has nothing to do with cheesecake....this stuff has to do with white trash couch potatos laying around watching the tube and ladling this stuff into their gullets by the gallon.

Somebody probably got a raise for coming up with that product...

Speaking of Darwin....

2007-06-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

Okay readers, I'm here today to talk about monkeys. That's right, monkeys!

I was thinking today, how utterly fascinating monkeys are. They are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, except for politicians, whose closest relatives are of the single-cell variety. I remember a trip to the Bronx zoo years ago, where I watched a silver back gorilla, sitting on a lawn as zoo visitors stood and watched him. He was kingly. It was clear that as far as he was concerned, HE was watching US. I remember that moment when I happened to catch his eye and had the profound feeling that I wasn't really looking at an animal, but that perhaps, just perhaps, just for a second, it was somebody familiar with whom I was sharing a moment.....

Which made me think one of my favorite all time television commercials- it was for luggage (either American Tourister or Samsonite...I think American Tourister) where a narrator talks about the toughness of the latest line of luggage, while on camera a suitcase is placed in a cage with a gorilla, much like my friend from the Bronx, who proceeds to go, well, apeshit trying to 'kill' the suitcase. Big laughs (and awe) at the ferocity and power with which the gorilla attacks his red vinyl clad 'adversary'....

then I remembered Lancelot Link. I'm dating myself here, but when I was a kid, there was a Saturday morning kids' show called 'Lancelot Link'. The show was cast with chimpanzees and starred Lancelot, a trench coat-wearing secret agent chimp whose voiceover was a bad Humphrey Bogart impression, Mata Hairy his Ostrich feather boa-clad girlfriend (who would peel back her lips and screech Laaiiiiiiiiinnnnnncccceeeeee!!!!!) and several other chimps.

The episodes all took place on a soundstage and in the middle of the 'plot' for the week, it was common for a music track of zany cartoon music to suddenly occur while the chimps just went crazy, jumpin all over the place with weird camera angles and cuts....it was a gas and I shed many a tear laughing so hard at them.....which brings me to.....

when I was a REAL little kid, there was a tv commercial (we're talking early '60s black and white here) for Red Rose Tea that featureed a 'combo' of red-blazer clad chimpanzee 'musicians' whose leader mugged and had a voice like Louis Armstrong. The rascist overtones aside, this was a hilarious commercial and I remember entertaining my parents on a nightly basis by jumping around in my PJs singing in a 4 year old faux-basso voice "Red Rose.....Red Rose Tea....Yeah!!!"

So what's my point? I guess I"m just trying to say that sometimes life's more fun than a barrel of monkeys!!!!

Next time.

Small and Loud

2007-06-05T19:13:00.000-07:00

Is it me, or are people getting smaller? I keep hearing that Americans are getting bigger and fatter, but whenever I look around, it seems to me that especially the males of the species are shrinking. I live in Cambridge, MA which is college town USA (well at least the Boston area is). All I see anymore are these small feeble looking guys walking around with little or no hair...I mean you could cast a remake of THX1138 with these guys.
I don't mean to sound judgemental. Heaven knows that I'm nothing to write home about (my physique has been referred to one that resembles a Coke machine with a bowling ball on top of it). It's not that I particularly mind or have a problem with them , I just wonder if I'm witnessing some side effect of an organic diet and too much 'quiet time'. These guys also seem to all talk very quietly and be very sensitive...I don't know just something I've been noticing.

At the other end of the spectrum are the hordes of LOUD teenage girls that seem to be everywhere. My personal theory is that squawking at the top of their lungs on their cute little Barbie-colored cell phones has them permanently stuck in OH MY GOD mode. Believe me, you haven't heard anything 'til you've heard a Baaahhhhsthhaaannn accent at 130 decibels.

bigtiny

Only in Cambridge....

2007-06-04T20:15:00.000-07:00

I had a checkup this week. I'm pushing 50 and have developed type II diabetes, so I see my doctor fairly often (every 2-3 months usually). Now, I went out of my way to avoid doctors for years....I hate being touched, prodded and probed, and have always viewed the medical establishment with equal measures of fear and loathing.

Anyway, I had a little problem a few years ago and in treating it, my doctor (who I had just engaged for this particular problem, which means I had just met him) informed me that my blood pressure was rivaling the rate of inflation in Moscow and that we should probably do something about it. From there it was a physical, diagnosis of diabetes, and now I'm a 'patient'.

So, I'm at my checkup the other day, and as he's checking my heart, my Dr. (who I like a lot by the way) says "Aren't you a code slinger?" I told him that I write some PERL at my job as a QA Engineer, but I'm not a heavy duty programmer or anything. I then inquired as to why he had asked.

I'll skip the gory details, but what ensued was a discussion and some tutelage on my part about the boot process and dual-booting windows and linux on a laptop.

Only in Cambridge would I run into a doctor who wants to install Linux "just to goof around with...."

As I was leaving, I told him to call me if he needed more help...something I'm sure he doesn't hear from his patients very often!

Brick and Mortar - RIP

2007-06-03T19:46:00.001-07:00

So, yesterday a friend and I set out to update our percussion setups. We both play wind instruments and are learning to play hand drums -- congas (him) and african hand drums (me). So we go to the mega complex music store and start looking around...pretty bad. They have one each of the most expensive congas, but not whole sets. Their prices are also too high...so my friend inquires about a tumbao to match his conga. The saleschild (who has now clearly progressed to a daily thorazine dose as part of his mental hygiene regimen) mumbles something about the fact that they're not in stock. My friend inquires as to how long it would take to get one (answer: mumblemumblemumble) and then points out that the price they are asking is about $50 more than he's seen it elswhere online, to which he would also have to add sales tax. (answer:mumblemumblewe'llmatchanyadvertisedpricesmumblemumblemumble). My friend replies that if the salesdroid will look up a site on the internet, he can show him a lower price (answer:mumblenointernetaccessmumble).

We leave. Thinking that we understand how to deal with this problem, we head to XXXX's Drum Shop, figuring that a specialy store focused on percussion instruments will be the place to find what we need.

pretty bad....almost no inventory of the stuff we're looking for (or anything else for that matter). My friend inquires about the tumbao. The guy behind the counter (obviously the owner or manager) declares in a loud, clear voice that he NEVER stocks high end stuff, because "you're going to want a specific color, etc." He also wanted more for the items in question if they were ordered.

Now, I LIKE to support local merchants if they provide me with the stuff I need and give me good service. I'm willing to pay more for an item if I can go down to the shop and get it, get advice about it, yack with the guys, etc.

Having said that, I spent a lot of time last night thinking about our experience and trying to figure out what the people that own these businesses are thinking -- why would they expect me (or anyone else) to waste our time coming to their store, just to have them order somehing that we can order ourselves for more money and then have to charge us sales tax???? It makes no sense. The problem that brick and mortar stores have is that they are trying to compete with internet retailers on price alone, and that is a losing game....they can't. The ONLY way these stores will stay in business is to realize that their prospective clientele are the folks, like moi, that WILL support them and pay a little more if they extend themselves and provide good inventory, good service (put the thorazine kid in the warehouse or something), and value add through advice, maintenance help, clinics, instruction, etc.

Based on what I experienced yesterday, both of these establishments should simply close their doors and do business online.

Conspiracy Theory

2007-06-02T07:22:00.000-07:00

Wow, we live in an age of mistrust, don't we? I mean from the dawn of time there have been people (conspiracy theorists) who never take the facts surrounding an event at face value. These people can be pretty funny. You know, the moon landing was televised, Area 51 in Roswell, THERE"S NO SUCH THING AS THE MAFIA (ha ha ha!).....

And you know, the reason people believe these things is because, naturally, there have been conspiracies throughout history....Nixon and Watergate, the Kennedy Assassination, Milli Vanilli....

But as many of these theorists as there are, and as much as we hear that man has never walked on the moon, Oswald had an entourage, and 9/11 was a CIA op, the greatest conspiracy of all time is never talked about....never complained about.....not even acknowledged by most people. I'm talking about a conspiracy that has reduced most average (and not so average) citizens of this and most other countries to nothing more than Pavlovian drones running through a giant maze........what is this conspiracy I'm talking about? Come closer, listen and I'll tell you....

Decades ago, when you wanted a quick lunch, a meal after the movie with your high school sweetheart, an informal stop for a snack with the family, you went to a diner, or a drive in. There, one was served wholesome delicious food, often on real china with silverware. Then they came......the giant fast food chains....everything fast, tasteless, the same whether you ate at one in Lawrence, Kansas or Katmandu, and always served on or in paper or styrofoam. And they flourished. They situated themselves in shopping malls, next to schools; participated in marketing campaigns for TV and Movie collateral (something they learned from the breakfast cereal companies) so that before they could say their ABCs most children could scream "Smurfs at Mcdonald's, Smurfs at Mcdonalds!!!!"

But alas, even though these chains grew by leaps bounds, becoming huge corporations that rivalled some countries economically, even though they operated on profit margins that were never heard of before, even though they employed a cheap labor force of illegal immigrants and high school students that cost them zilch, this wasn't good enough. They had to find a way to cut some jobs, to streamline.....and they found it. These chains pulled off the greatest social engineering feat in the history of mankind. They already had most of the populace frequenting their establishments and paying far too much for unhealthy food, served in an unhealthy (well, aesthetically impaired at least) environment, with bad service, but it was decided at some point that the customers would not only pour their own drinks, server themselves their own condiments, but they would also be responsible for BUSING THEIR OWN TABLES!!! That's right.....after paying relatively exorbitant prices for food that is basically SHIT, these establishments would make it clear that it was the PATRONS responsibility to clean the tables!!!!

And guess what?!?!?! MOST OF THE FUCKING IDIOTS THAT ATE THERE (and let's face it -- that's most of us) BOUGHT INTO IT!!!! They not only bought into it, but if you go into a fast food restaurant today and DON'T clean up your table, in most places people will actually treat you as if you've committed the most serious breach of human decency imaginable.

And nobody talks about it. It's become accepted nee EXPECTED behavior. You have to wonder if the next trend will be cleaning the toilets at Burger King after you use them.....

be gentle, it's my first time.....

2007-06-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

Hello to everyone out in cyberblog land reading this. This is the first in what promises to be a scintillating series of commentary by yours truly Bigtiny. I'll be sharing my views on life, love, and art; communicating what I believe to be important tidbits of information; and just generally howling at the moon. Hope you enjoy it, but if you don't......tough shit.

bigtiny