There has been a recent proliferation of events that suggest that the 80s may not quite be over yet. Or enough time has passed that people have forgotten what a colossally bad decade it was. As far as I remember it, the 80s pretty much sucked until some dude with a ridiculously large top hat and the name of a frequently used punctuation mark brought rock n’ roll back from the dead.
Growing up in 1980s Greenlawn, NY, about as far from the San Fernando Valley as is humanly possible, the local girls frequently asked to be gagged with kitchen utensils, they used words like tubular (which coincidentally inspired a musician named Mike Oldfield – later known to the rest of the world as Slash – to compose some ‘tubular’ music I’m sure I’d know if I heard it, and they all wanted to date Nicolas Cage. My point is, for as bad as they were, the fads in the 80s were infectious. Which leads to breaking news in 2007….
“Alpharetta teen takes 2nd at world Rubik's Cube contest.” Or so reported the Atlanta Journal Constitution on October 12. 2007! I can’t fault the newspaper for running this spectacular news, though it has seemingly gotten trapped in a space/time continuum.
For all the ridicule Georgia takes about its level of sophistication, no other state can lay claim to 18-year-old Chattahoochee High School senior Andrew Kang (eat it, Arkansas!). Kang, it was reported, had just returned from the World Rubik's Cube Championship in Budapest, Hungary, where he managed to solve a Rubik’s Cube in 10.88 seconds. In fact, this Apharettan overachiever gets frustrated when it takes him more than 15 seconds to solve the Cube. For reference, I still have an original Rubik’s Cube that was given to me on August 30, 1982. My quickest solve time: 25 years and counting.
About two years into my cube-solving fury, I became enamored of another 80s fad. Everyone within three years of my age wanted to be able to breakdance like Turbo and Ozone in the classically bad movie Breakin’. Well hold onto your backspins, folks: breakdancing is back! A video posted on Newsday’s website documents the grueling 'Breakdancing Battle of the Year' competition held in Braunschweig, Germany this past Saturday night. Not surprisingly, South Korea took the title again with “an athletic display that appeared to defy the laws of gravity.”
I don’t doubt it takes a lot of talent, but shouldn’t this have happened two decades ago? That’s when I was heavily into breakdancing. I was a white, middle-class Long Island kid with no ability whatsoever to dance (though I am still really good at the "White Boy Overbite," a dance move I proudly displayed at a friend’s recent wedding), donning parachute pants and a listening to a cassette tape called Electric Breakdance, which featured such urban rhapsodies as “Jam On It” and “White Lines.”
According to my only black friend at the time, Anthony Burrows, these were the songs with the beats that could get me to move. And because breakdancing required erratic moves, I thought it was right in my wheelhouse. Unfortunately, my moves were considered more eccentric than erratic.
While Greenlawn was no South Bronx, I still managed to do my part in embarrassing myself in front of anyone who would watch. Decked out in my black and gray parachute pants (zippers fully open, drawing attention like a peacock displaying its tail feathers), I invited our paperboy into the house to see me do the world’s fastest backspin after school one day. Using the paperboy as my conduit, I figured word would spread quickly through town once he saw my awesome talent.
I figured that the best way to maximize my spin speed on the hardwood floor was to use a good deck of KEM playing cards… the expensive plastic ones that come in their own hard-shell case. Cards strewn across the living room floor, I proceeded to backspin my way to local stardom, until five seconds later when I began to drift on the surprisingly slick cards and the side of my head slammed into the corner of the coffee table. Danny laughed.
This triumphant injury was trumped only weeks later by my friend Justin Silverstein. While wearing parachute pants and a red-and-black, Michael Jackson "Thriller" leather jacket, he broke his nose while showing the entire neighborhood how well he could do ‘the worm.’
Nevertheless, my plan worked. Danny spread the word about my miracle backspin to everyone. But by the time I was through being grounded for destroying my mom’s good canasta cards, breakdancing was out and big hair was in.
The one thing that I haven’t seen covered in the news yet is the resurgence of Pig Latin. Here in Atlanta, teenagers have suddenly started speaking Pig Latin at an alarming rate. Whenever I find myself near a group of teenagers, I hear them working hard to obfuscate their words to commoners in a tongue that barely qualifies as non-English. If they want to exclude me, they’d do better to speak Standard English with a Southern drawl.
But since I’m now officially a resident of the greater Atlanta region, I might as well do my best to fit in with the local population. I offer the final paragraph of this column to the local teenage set in a language they can understand.
Ow-nay at-thay e-thay eighties-ay are-ay ack-bay, I-ay ully-fay expect-ay it-ay oo-tay e-bay ont-fray age-pay ews-nay en-whay I-ay olve-say y-may ubik’s-Ray ube-Cay. Once-way I’m-ay inished-fay, I’ll-ay imp-pray y-may eanie-Bay aby-Bay ollection-cay, et-gay a-ay acky-Hay ack-Say and-ay ake-may ure-shay y-may ation-stay agon-way is-ay operly-pray outfitted-ay ith-way a-ay iamond-day aped-shay aby-Bay on-ay oard-Bay ign-say. Y’all.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
The Secret of Homeowner Debt Explained
I have been a homeowner for about four months now. I intentionally joined the ranks of the literally dozens of other happy homeowners across the United States, but I’m also beginning to understand how a perfectly content homeowner can quickly turn jaded and miserable. We’ve dealt with more than our share of surprises since moving in: the heater blew: $1,000; leaky tub: $650; new springs for the garage door: $275; new caulk for the ashram: what exactly is an ashram, and why does it need caulk?
The first time I saw the house that ultimately became mine I nearly fainted. I attribute this to a combination of the house's natural beauty, the excessively hot temperature outside and the blow dart in my neck. It seems the guy who lives across the street bought some “toys” for his kids on a recent business trip to Namibia. Having traveled for work myself, I made a habit of bringing home local knick knacks for the kids, but I question whether poisonous darts make good gifts. Kids will... use..... theeese..... oibnwarvrl.leaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Sorry - blacked out there. So anyway, after seeing the house, I knew it was “The One.” Real estate agents know when they're taking you to The One. They spend all that time showing you dozens of surprisingly decorated houses that make you wonder whether the current owners are visually impaired, and question their motives where it relates to what qualifies as presentable.
Working closely with the existing owners of The One – all of whom are played by local out of work actors – they make sure that everything is in order, that the house looks perfect and that the colonies of insects living within the walls of the house are properly wrangled and fed.
When my agent brought me to The One, I knew it immediately. As soon as I walked in, I felt at home. The open floor plan was exactly what we had been looking for; the kitchen was fully updated with stainless steel appliances that would sit idle, but would look pretty, until we sell; the huge yard gave me no indication that it would work in concert with my finicky ride-on lawnmower to ultimately become my biggest nemesis. This was definitely it.
The first night in the house was great, assuming you don't mind desert-like heat and a complete lack of furniture. The central air conditioning system, which was invented for the sole purpose of breaking down on oppressively hot days, was unwilling to cooperate with the simplest of commands.
Me: Set temp to 74.
Air conditioner: No.
Me: Set temp and hold at 74.
Air conditioner: No.
Me, getting really agitated: (click, click, click, click) Set temp to 60.
Air conditioner: Listen, dude. You're the new guy here. Why don't you go find a floor to sleep on and leave me alone?
This led to my very first service call as a homeowner… to the air conditioner repairman who kindly only charged me double for coming out for an emergency appointment on a Saturday night. He explained that while he technically knew what was wrong, I would have to pay an additional $1,000 in order to properly fix the unit. That was a relief considering we were just in the process of endangering our own lives by setting all our extra money on fire.
Fast forward two weeks. If you do not yet own a house, take note: The ‘American Dream’ is not a term meant for the actual home owner. If you want a good taste of the American Dream, I encourage you to get a job servicing any of the million things that will go wrong in some new unsuspecting homeowner’s house.
In the two weeks following our closing, I contributed more to the state’s revenue stream, by way of the Georgia contracting community, than the combined value of every Van Gogh painting ever sold at auction. This phenomenon clearly explains why new homeowners typically find themselves in the most debt they will ever be in. It’s like a homeowner hazing ritual designed and perfected by real estate agents, the contracting community and credit card companies.
Worst of all, it’s perfectly legal. As I read back through the hundreds of papers I had to sign at the closing, I found a paper headlined “Ha Ha, You Idiot!” that details a requirement on my part to single-handedly employ at least half the population of the City of Atlanta, including suburbs, for a minimum of 14 months, but not to exceed greater than half the net value of the assets of the electorate, based on the accrual method of accounting. Since nobody has ever taken the time to actually read every single document at a closing, lawyers have a long-running joke about slipping in insane documents like this one that are perfectly legal and binding once you sign them.
We’ve finally worked through the pain of actually becoming homeowners and we’ve accepted that the dozens of contractors we have employed will be part of our lives for the long-term. With every mortgage payment we make, we realize that for every penny we build in equity, some random contractor will earn two, courtesy of the Merritts.
Now we just have to learn to deal with neighbors. Speaking of which, does anyone know of a good antidote for Namibian blow dart poison?
The first time I saw the house that ultimately became mine I nearly fainted. I attribute this to a combination of the house's natural beauty, the excessively hot temperature outside and the blow dart in my neck. It seems the guy who lives across the street bought some “toys” for his kids on a recent business trip to Namibia. Having traveled for work myself, I made a habit of bringing home local knick knacks for the kids, but I question whether poisonous darts make good gifts. Kids will... use..... theeese..... oibnwarvrl.leaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Sorry - blacked out there. So anyway, after seeing the house, I knew it was “The One.” Real estate agents know when they're taking you to The One. They spend all that time showing you dozens of surprisingly decorated houses that make you wonder whether the current owners are visually impaired, and question their motives where it relates to what qualifies as presentable.
Working closely with the existing owners of The One – all of whom are played by local out of work actors – they make sure that everything is in order, that the house looks perfect and that the colonies of insects living within the walls of the house are properly wrangled and fed.
When my agent brought me to The One, I knew it immediately. As soon as I walked in, I felt at home. The open floor plan was exactly what we had been looking for; the kitchen was fully updated with stainless steel appliances that would sit idle, but would look pretty, until we sell; the huge yard gave me no indication that it would work in concert with my finicky ride-on lawnmower to ultimately become my biggest nemesis. This was definitely it.
The first night in the house was great, assuming you don't mind desert-like heat and a complete lack of furniture. The central air conditioning system, which was invented for the sole purpose of breaking down on oppressively hot days, was unwilling to cooperate with the simplest of commands.
Me: Set temp to 74.
Air conditioner: No.
Me: Set temp and hold at 74.
Air conditioner: No.
Me, getting really agitated: (click, click, click, click) Set temp to 60.
Air conditioner: Listen, dude. You're the new guy here. Why don't you go find a floor to sleep on and leave me alone?
This led to my very first service call as a homeowner… to the air conditioner repairman who kindly only charged me double for coming out for an emergency appointment on a Saturday night. He explained that while he technically knew what was wrong, I would have to pay an additional $1,000 in order to properly fix the unit. That was a relief considering we were just in the process of endangering our own lives by setting all our extra money on fire.
Fast forward two weeks. If you do not yet own a house, take note: The ‘American Dream’ is not a term meant for the actual home owner. If you want a good taste of the American Dream, I encourage you to get a job servicing any of the million things that will go wrong in some new unsuspecting homeowner’s house.
In the two weeks following our closing, I contributed more to the state’s revenue stream, by way of the Georgia contracting community, than the combined value of every Van Gogh painting ever sold at auction. This phenomenon clearly explains why new homeowners typically find themselves in the most debt they will ever be in. It’s like a homeowner hazing ritual designed and perfected by real estate agents, the contracting community and credit card companies.
Worst of all, it’s perfectly legal. As I read back through the hundreds of papers I had to sign at the closing, I found a paper headlined “Ha Ha, You Idiot!” that details a requirement on my part to single-handedly employ at least half the population of the City of Atlanta, including suburbs, for a minimum of 14 months, but not to exceed greater than half the net value of the assets of the electorate, based on the accrual method of accounting. Since nobody has ever taken the time to actually read every single document at a closing, lawyers have a long-running joke about slipping in insane documents like this one that are perfectly legal and binding once you sign them.
We’ve finally worked through the pain of actually becoming homeowners and we’ve accepted that the dozens of contractors we have employed will be part of our lives for the long-term. With every mortgage payment we make, we realize that for every penny we build in equity, some random contractor will earn two, courtesy of the Merritts.
Now we just have to learn to deal with neighbors. Speaking of which, does anyone know of a good antidote for Namibian blow dart poison?
Friday, October 5, 2007
Legal White Powder Found in Atlanta
Where I used to live in New York, snow was a welcome addition to the dreariness of winter. For about five minutes. That’s about how long it took for all the frolicking adults to realize it was the start of months of shoveling, skidding across multiple lanes of traffic (note, this particular problem is not limited to snow and ice on Long Island), dodging wayward snowballs, and constantly chasing after smaller kids and trying to explain why they shouldn’t eat yellow snow.
One of the reasons we chose Atlanta as our new home is that it doesn’t really get any snow. Until now. As soon as we arrived, someone came up with the novel idea – an idea so crazy it’s a miracle Ted Turner isn’t involved – of covering a giant hill at Stone Mountain Park (named after native Georgian Civil War General Stone M. Park) with the powdery white stuff. After taking measurements, officials decided using snow would be easier and “slightly more legal.” Thus Coca-Cola’s Snow Mountain was born.
I’m not one to brag about my foresight, considering I haven’t had any since I was a seven days old (shout out to Rabbi Yehoshua Krohn!), but it seems obvious to me that this plan was flawed from the start.
For one, I loosely understand the physics of ground temperature and snowfall (no I don’t), and I’m familiar with what constitutes cold enough weather to sustain snow outdoors (it has to be really, really cold). Okay, I’m not even sure the rules are considered part of physics – they may be calculus or pharmacology, but the point is that according to the most recent Farmer’s Almanac, “Not only does Atlanta get maybe a dusting of snow at a time, if that… the city shuts down like a bathroom after Rosie O’Donnell stops in for a number two when any trace of snow is in the forecast, so everyone can go to Publix to get milk and bread.”
In order to create this winter wonderland in the heat of the Bible Belt, organizers imported a battalion of snow-making machines – the same kind you’d find on a mountain in Vermont or New Hampshire during the ski season, which generally comprises fall, winter, spring and most of summer. They do not use these machines during the two weeks known locally as ‘Quick: we can swim’ when temperatures are likely to reach as high as 62 degrees.
The blowers were fired up on October 2, which happened to be the same day that Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue declared October "Take a Shorter Shower" month due to the current drought. He also suggested not running the water while brushing your teeth, but that one seems to be pretty well covered already here in Georgia. According to statistics, the average person can save between three and seven gallons of water by skipping their legs below the knees while taking a shower. Over the course of a year that amounts to more than 2,000 gallons – which can be used by Pepsi, Coca-Cola’s biggest competitor, to fill 12,810 sport bottles of Aquafina water.
In spite of the drought, the snow machines were firing full-fledged snow, which when mixed with the 80 degree weather that day turned into full-fledged water before hitting the ground at a rate of 38 gallons per minute, in effect creating the world’s most elaborate lawn sprinkler system.
Finally bowing to the public outrage of wasting a total of 1.2 million gallons of water as the community deals with a drought of epic proportions, the park has decided to halt its lawn-watering program. Displaying a profound understanding of the situation, Stone Mountain Park’s public relations manager Christine Parker said, “We've already sold tickets, and we can't just stop. That would be like a water park just deciding to turn off the faucets.” (Humor writing is easy when you have quotes like this to work with.)
After paying the equivalent of the combined annual tourism revenue of the entire Caribbean to promote Snow Mountain, Coca-Cola publicly endorsed the decision to call it off. In related news, Stone Mountain Park is in sponsorship talks with other soft drink companies.
Now disappointed children across the Atlanta region will be forced to wonder what getting snow caked under your shirt collar, head first at a high rate of speed feels like and they’ll never know the joy in getting knocked over by a snow-tuber who has gone astray as they try to climb back up the hillside in the slippery snow, but they will always remember the time when politics got in the way of a good time, thanks to Governor Sonny Perdue – a man who wasn’t chicken to say what he felt. (Come on, how can I let a name like this slip by twice without saying anything?)
One of the reasons we chose Atlanta as our new home is that it doesn’t really get any snow. Until now. As soon as we arrived, someone came up with the novel idea – an idea so crazy it’s a miracle Ted Turner isn’t involved – of covering a giant hill at Stone Mountain Park (named after native Georgian Civil War General Stone M. Park) with the powdery white stuff. After taking measurements, officials decided using snow would be easier and “slightly more legal.” Thus Coca-Cola’s Snow Mountain was born.
I’m not one to brag about my foresight, considering I haven’t had any since I was a seven days old (shout out to Rabbi Yehoshua Krohn!), but it seems obvious to me that this plan was flawed from the start.
For one, I loosely understand the physics of ground temperature and snowfall (no I don’t), and I’m familiar with what constitutes cold enough weather to sustain snow outdoors (it has to be really, really cold). Okay, I’m not even sure the rules are considered part of physics – they may be calculus or pharmacology, but the point is that according to the most recent Farmer’s Almanac, “Not only does Atlanta get maybe a dusting of snow at a time, if that… the city shuts down like a bathroom after Rosie O’Donnell stops in for a number two when any trace of snow is in the forecast, so everyone can go to Publix to get milk and bread.”
In order to create this winter wonderland in the heat of the Bible Belt, organizers imported a battalion of snow-making machines – the same kind you’d find on a mountain in Vermont or New Hampshire during the ski season, which generally comprises fall, winter, spring and most of summer. They do not use these machines during the two weeks known locally as ‘Quick: we can swim’ when temperatures are likely to reach as high as 62 degrees.
The blowers were fired up on October 2, which happened to be the same day that Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue declared October "Take a Shorter Shower" month due to the current drought. He also suggested not running the water while brushing your teeth, but that one seems to be pretty well covered already here in Georgia. According to statistics, the average person can save between three and seven gallons of water by skipping their legs below the knees while taking a shower. Over the course of a year that amounts to more than 2,000 gallons – which can be used by Pepsi, Coca-Cola’s biggest competitor, to fill 12,810 sport bottles of Aquafina water.
In spite of the drought, the snow machines were firing full-fledged snow, which when mixed with the 80 degree weather that day turned into full-fledged water before hitting the ground at a rate of 38 gallons per minute, in effect creating the world’s most elaborate lawn sprinkler system.
Finally bowing to the public outrage of wasting a total of 1.2 million gallons of water as the community deals with a drought of epic proportions, the park has decided to halt its lawn-watering program. Displaying a profound understanding of the situation, Stone Mountain Park’s public relations manager Christine Parker said, “We've already sold tickets, and we can't just stop. That would be like a water park just deciding to turn off the faucets.” (Humor writing is easy when you have quotes like this to work with.)
After paying the equivalent of the combined annual tourism revenue of the entire Caribbean to promote Snow Mountain, Coca-Cola publicly endorsed the decision to call it off. In related news, Stone Mountain Park is in sponsorship talks with other soft drink companies.
Now disappointed children across the Atlanta region will be forced to wonder what getting snow caked under your shirt collar, head first at a high rate of speed feels like and they’ll never know the joy in getting knocked over by a snow-tuber who has gone astray as they try to climb back up the hillside in the slippery snow, but they will always remember the time when politics got in the way of a good time, thanks to Governor Sonny Perdue – a man who wasn’t chicken to say what he felt. (Come on, how can I let a name like this slip by twice without saying anything?)
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Useless New Crimes Coming Soon to a City Near You
Question: What is the most dangerous crime currently plaguing our nation? If you guessed “terrorism,” you probably spend too much time in front of the TV, reading newspapers or breathing. You need to wipe the crumbs off your chest, get in the car and drive straight to the nearest house of worship, because right now you don’t have a prayer. The most dangerous crime today, at least in the forward-thinking and open-minded metropolis of Atlanta is… you guessed it: baggy pants.
Atlanta used to be a town with plenty of social problems like homelessness and poverty, and the crime that goes along with them. It also used to have a traffic congestion problem due to the highway infrastructure that became outdated slightly before the invention of the Conestoga wagon. But that’s all history now.
A city council edict in 2006 ruled that homelessness and poverty would officially be called ‘cultural gems’ in Atlanta, thereby putting an end to the problematic aspect. And traffic ceased to be a problem when urban planner Harold Morland spilled his coffee on the only existing copy of the latest traffic study - just before he was to present it to the traffic board and instead diverted attention by somehow managing to get OJ Simpson arrested again.
If you’re any kind of American, you’re probably wondering why parachute pants weren’t banned back in the 80s. Well, smarty-pants (ZING!), it turns out that native Atlantan and Atlanta City Councilman Clarence "CT (because the M doesn’t work on my keyboard)" Martin, the person responsible for thinking up the baggy pants ordinance, was too busy inventing the “Youthmobile,” a fleet of innovative vehicles designed to jam up the city’s traffic even worse than before.
Councilman Martin said he's tired of seeing “these young whippersnappers” wearing their pants down around their knees. His ordinance would make exposed underwear and sex in public equivalent offenses. I hate to agree, so I won't. When you think about it, you realize that these two offenses truly are nothing alike. Going out on a limb, Martin shocked the city by alleging that, "It kind of doesn't make sense. It is hard for people to walk."
Case in point: according to a story in the New Orleans Times Picayune, a 16-year-old Louisiana kid decided to go on a robbery spree. He managed to elude authorities on several occasions, but was finally caught only after his baggy pants fell down - which caused him to stumble and fall as officers chased him. I think the moral of this story is obvious: if you don’t wear baggy pants and you are a criminal, New Orleans is where you want to be.
Breaking new ground for Georgia, Councilman Clarence “The Cactus” Martin is including both sexes in the proposed legislation.
“But Scott,” you must be asking, “Aren’t baggy pants a predominantly male thing?”
To which I reply: That’s why the ordinance also outlaws “whale’s tails” for women. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I’m guessing it has to do with the grotesquely obese.
As the debate drags on endlessly, older residents are forming what is described as a “belt brigade” that could one day patrol the streets to urge kids to pull up their baggy pants. (Brief off-topic reminder: Ted Turner is still the more insane Atlantan, but Clarence “The Enforcer” Martin runs a close second.)
Imagine the choices police would have to make if Councilman Clarence “Product-of-the-Georgia-publick-schol-sistem-and-prowd-of-it” Martin gets his way: An old woman is being mugged in a coffee shop parking lot while an otherwise law-abiding, but baggy-panted, youth is inside purchasing a jubmino double-shot decaf caramel mocha stoccato libretto frappe (cost: $106.88 per gallon). If you’re a cop witnessing all this lawlessness, how do you decide which kind of doughnut you should get?
Silly as it may seem, the baggy pants problem is seemingly reaching epidemic proportions. A quick glance at the news reveals that proposals to ban baggy pants are starting to ride up across the nation. Concerned citizens in fashion Meccas like Mankato, MN, Charleston, WV, Trenton, NJ and Pine Bluff, AR are all seeking similar ordinances.
Support for such a ban is spirited. Johnnie Doctor, Sr., a Miami pastor whose quote I am including simply because I love his name, suggested that Miami consider the baggy-pants ban, saying “who the hell wears pants in Miami, anyway?”
So as the debate rages on, Atlanta's poverty-stricken homeless cease to be poverty-stricken homeless, and the traffic here still remains gridlocked between the hours of 3:30 am and 11:55 pm, Monday through Friday and on alternating weekends, we can all think about how insane you must have to be in order to be a city councilperson.
In the meantime, I’ll be tightening my belt and wearing a red baseball cap. They outlawed blue last week.
Atlanta used to be a town with plenty of social problems like homelessness and poverty, and the crime that goes along with them. It also used to have a traffic congestion problem due to the highway infrastructure that became outdated slightly before the invention of the Conestoga wagon. But that’s all history now.
A city council edict in 2006 ruled that homelessness and poverty would officially be called ‘cultural gems’ in Atlanta, thereby putting an end to the problematic aspect. And traffic ceased to be a problem when urban planner Harold Morland spilled his coffee on the only existing copy of the latest traffic study - just before he was to present it to the traffic board and instead diverted attention by somehow managing to get OJ Simpson arrested again.
If you’re any kind of American, you’re probably wondering why parachute pants weren’t banned back in the 80s. Well, smarty-pants (ZING!), it turns out that native Atlantan and Atlanta City Councilman Clarence "CT (because the M doesn’t work on my keyboard)" Martin, the person responsible for thinking up the baggy pants ordinance, was too busy inventing the “Youthmobile,” a fleet of innovative vehicles designed to jam up the city’s traffic even worse than before.
Councilman Martin said he's tired of seeing “these young whippersnappers” wearing their pants down around their knees. His ordinance would make exposed underwear and sex in public equivalent offenses. I hate to agree, so I won't. When you think about it, you realize that these two offenses truly are nothing alike. Going out on a limb, Martin shocked the city by alleging that, "It kind of doesn't make sense. It is hard for people to walk."
Case in point: according to a story in the New Orleans Times Picayune, a 16-year-old Louisiana kid decided to go on a robbery spree. He managed to elude authorities on several occasions, but was finally caught only after his baggy pants fell down - which caused him to stumble and fall as officers chased him. I think the moral of this story is obvious: if you don’t wear baggy pants and you are a criminal, New Orleans is where you want to be.
Breaking new ground for Georgia, Councilman Clarence “The Cactus” Martin is including both sexes in the proposed legislation.
“But Scott,” you must be asking, “Aren’t baggy pants a predominantly male thing?”
To which I reply: That’s why the ordinance also outlaws “whale’s tails” for women. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I’m guessing it has to do with the grotesquely obese.
As the debate drags on endlessly, older residents are forming what is described as a “belt brigade” that could one day patrol the streets to urge kids to pull up their baggy pants. (Brief off-topic reminder: Ted Turner is still the more insane Atlantan, but Clarence “The Enforcer” Martin runs a close second.)
Imagine the choices police would have to make if Councilman Clarence “Product-of-the-Georgia-publick-schol-sistem-and-prowd-of-it” Martin gets his way: An old woman is being mugged in a coffee shop parking lot while an otherwise law-abiding, but baggy-panted, youth is inside purchasing a jubmino double-shot decaf caramel mocha stoccato libretto frappe (cost: $106.88 per gallon). If you’re a cop witnessing all this lawlessness, how do you decide which kind of doughnut you should get?
Silly as it may seem, the baggy pants problem is seemingly reaching epidemic proportions. A quick glance at the news reveals that proposals to ban baggy pants are starting to ride up across the nation. Concerned citizens in fashion Meccas like Mankato, MN, Charleston, WV, Trenton, NJ and Pine Bluff, AR are all seeking similar ordinances.
Support for such a ban is spirited. Johnnie Doctor, Sr., a Miami pastor whose quote I am including simply because I love his name, suggested that Miami consider the baggy-pants ban, saying “who the hell wears pants in Miami, anyway?”
So as the debate rages on, Atlanta's poverty-stricken homeless cease to be poverty-stricken homeless, and the traffic here still remains gridlocked between the hours of 3:30 am and 11:55 pm, Monday through Friday and on alternating weekends, we can all think about how insane you must have to be in order to be a city councilperson.
In the meantime, I’ll be tightening my belt and wearing a red baseball cap. They outlawed blue last week.
Monday, September 17, 2007
What the Helsinki? Is This for Real?
Today’s guitarists just aren’t made like they used to be. When I was 11, I showed an interest in learning to play guitar. After months of prodding, my parents bought me a second-hand Martin six-string acoustic that acted as my springboard to complete failure as a rock star. I spent years practicing, plenty of money on equipment and lessons, and an inordinate amount of time trying to ‘make it’ with girls who I knew were into musicians.
Today’s award-winning guitarists don’t spend the money on lessons, the time on practicing, or even the money on equipment. In fact, they don’t even use guitars when they perform. Welcome to the world of competitive air guitar.
I know what you’re thinking: Competitive air guitar? What’s next, the imaginary World Series? Nascar while running and making engine sounds like ‘whaaaaaaaaaaaa (shift to a lower octave) whaaaaaaaa?’ Get serious. This is big business, though it makes you long for the days of Tiptoeing Through the Tulips with the likes of Tiny Tim.
The official governing body of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships is appropriately named U.S. Air Guitar. Their aim it is to “take our nation’s unofficial pastime out of the bedroom and put it up on the world stage.” According to the website, “In a time when U.S. military and economic leadership faces unprecedented criticism around the world, it is our belief that air guitar represents one endeavor our country can dominate without controversy.”
So in short, watch out Osama. America won’t be taken down without a fight. And as long as we have a solid championship-level air guitarist competing on the world stage, America will no longer be the subject of the world’s criticism.
U.S. Air Guitar is also responsible for maintaining the Air Guitar Hall of Fame, which includes legendary figures like 2003 U.S. and world champ David “C-Diddy” Jung, who is known for wearing a backwards Hello Kitty backpack on his bare chest, and 2006 U.S. champ Craig “Hot Lixx Hulahan” Billmeier, whose style is a postmodern mix of punk, flamenco and metal.
When I think of the hours my friends and I spent ‘jamming’ and ‘getting tight’ in the garage with our real instruments, it seems such a colossal waste of time. All we needed to do to get some notice was to put on a cassette of our favorite band and play imaginary instruments just as well as the real Motley Crue.
This year’s fake guitar playing championships were held at real New York City concert venue Irving Plaza. Inexplicably, the ‘event’ was held in front a sold out crowd of screaming fans, dozens of photographers and news cameras from all three major networks, MSNBC, CNBC and FOX News. With all those photographers on site, it’s a wonder nobody caught Rod Serling on film.
Just prior to the competition, crowd favorite Andrew “William Ocean” Litz said, “If I don’t walk away with the U.S. title and at least 3-4 broken bones, I haven’t done my job tonight.”
After a tough evening of pretending to play guitar, New York’s own Litz somehow defeated defending champ Hot Lixx Hulahan and Rockness Monster to take the title and represent the United States at (lord, forgive me for the fact that this is not a joke) the Air Guitar World Championships. On a related note, Litz did not break any bones, but his pride is probably plenty damaged.
At the end of the competition, all the pretend rock stars took to the stage to perform what was described as an ‘all-star rendition’ of Freebird – a song that’s overplayed even by those who don’t really play.
As an aside, I always thought that my best chance at ever representing my country on the world stage was to be on an Olympic curling team. Now that air guitar is an option, I have officially changed my tune. My real talent, however, lies in steering wheel drumming. Once someone sanctions that, I will definitely enter the competition.
As “William Ocean” travels to Finland to represent Team USA in the giant pretend guitarists of the world competition, all the other fictitious fingerpickers have to hang their heads in shame for not being able to win a contest that requires exactly no skill whatsoever to win.
As for me, I have to head out to the store to pick up a few things: a DVD copy of ‘Air Guitar Nation’ (a documentary described as “very good” by Joel Siegel, just moments before he decided to give up in his fight against cancer), a new set of strings for the real guitar I’ll be strumming while pretending to watch, and a block Finlandia Swiss to remind me of the utter cheesiness of the Air Guitar World Championships being held in Helsinki.
Today’s award-winning guitarists don’t spend the money on lessons, the time on practicing, or even the money on equipment. In fact, they don’t even use guitars when they perform. Welcome to the world of competitive air guitar.
I know what you’re thinking: Competitive air guitar? What’s next, the imaginary World Series? Nascar while running and making engine sounds like ‘whaaaaaaaaaaaa (shift to a lower octave) whaaaaaaaa?’ Get serious. This is big business, though it makes you long for the days of Tiptoeing Through the Tulips with the likes of Tiny Tim.
The official governing body of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships is appropriately named U.S. Air Guitar. Their aim it is to “take our nation’s unofficial pastime out of the bedroom and put it up on the world stage.” According to the website, “In a time when U.S. military and economic leadership faces unprecedented criticism around the world, it is our belief that air guitar represents one endeavor our country can dominate without controversy.”
So in short, watch out Osama. America won’t be taken down without a fight. And as long as we have a solid championship-level air guitarist competing on the world stage, America will no longer be the subject of the world’s criticism.
U.S. Air Guitar is also responsible for maintaining the Air Guitar Hall of Fame, which includes legendary figures like 2003 U.S. and world champ David “C-Diddy” Jung, who is known for wearing a backwards Hello Kitty backpack on his bare chest, and 2006 U.S. champ Craig “Hot Lixx Hulahan” Billmeier, whose style is a postmodern mix of punk, flamenco and metal.
When I think of the hours my friends and I spent ‘jamming’ and ‘getting tight’ in the garage with our real instruments, it seems such a colossal waste of time. All we needed to do to get some notice was to put on a cassette of our favorite band and play imaginary instruments just as well as the real Motley Crue.
This year’s fake guitar playing championships were held at real New York City concert venue Irving Plaza. Inexplicably, the ‘event’ was held in front a sold out crowd of screaming fans, dozens of photographers and news cameras from all three major networks, MSNBC, CNBC and FOX News. With all those photographers on site, it’s a wonder nobody caught Rod Serling on film.
Just prior to the competition, crowd favorite Andrew “William Ocean” Litz said, “If I don’t walk away with the U.S. title and at least 3-4 broken bones, I haven’t done my job tonight.”
After a tough evening of pretending to play guitar, New York’s own Litz somehow defeated defending champ Hot Lixx Hulahan and Rockness Monster to take the title and represent the United States at (lord, forgive me for the fact that this is not a joke) the Air Guitar World Championships. On a related note, Litz did not break any bones, but his pride is probably plenty damaged.
At the end of the competition, all the pretend rock stars took to the stage to perform what was described as an ‘all-star rendition’ of Freebird – a song that’s overplayed even by those who don’t really play.
As an aside, I always thought that my best chance at ever representing my country on the world stage was to be on an Olympic curling team. Now that air guitar is an option, I have officially changed my tune. My real talent, however, lies in steering wheel drumming. Once someone sanctions that, I will definitely enter the competition.
As “William Ocean” travels to Finland to represent Team USA in the giant pretend guitarists of the world competition, all the other fictitious fingerpickers have to hang their heads in shame for not being able to win a contest that requires exactly no skill whatsoever to win.
As for me, I have to head out to the store to pick up a few things: a DVD copy of ‘Air Guitar Nation’ (a documentary described as “very good” by Joel Siegel, just moments before he decided to give up in his fight against cancer), a new set of strings for the real guitar I’ll be strumming while pretending to watch, and a block Finlandia Swiss to remind me of the utter cheesiness of the Air Guitar World Championships being held in Helsinki.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
…And the Home of the Braves
After more than three months living in Atlanta, we finally ventured out to do things the locals do. Our first activity was attending the Atlanta Braves vs. New York Mets baseball game at Turner Field, which is named for modest, wealthy businessman and local Lunatic Laureate Ted Turner. The fact that they were playing a New York team, albeit not the good New York team, was at least comforting.
As is the case with most new stadiums, Turner Field features all sorts of activities and diversions designed to make you forget how much you paid for the seats that are undoubtedly too far from the field to see any of the actual action, not to mention the parking fee that allows you to park in a lot that requires you to walk only slightly further than if you had left your car in your own driveway.
We managed to ignore most of the pre-game activities and elected to go straight to the field-level front row for an opportunity to get up close to and possibly meet members of New York’s second-best baseball team. Armed with official Rawlings Major League Baseballs purchased just an hour prior, my two kids and I pushed our way to the front. Just then, a buzz began to our left: autographs were being signed. Not officially knowing anyone on the Mets’ roster, we jockeyed for position to get our baseballs signed by some random Hispanic guy in a Mets uniform. From what I gather, his name is “O~~ﮟ~D.” I don’t think he played that day, but then my seats were far enough from the field that I was able to actually see Shea Stadium, so I’m not the best person to ask.
After getting O~~ﮟ~D’s signature, we were asked to find our seats, which required an uphill hike, a camel and a sherpa. The ambient southern-laced calls of “cold beer!,” “wieners!” (which I think is funny to yell in a baseball stadium), and “cotton candy!” were beginning. Which of course reminded my kids that they were rapaciously hungry.
Any person who ever sees us at a baseball game would think we never feed our children. When they are at home they barely eat enough to survive, but at a baseball stadium they have tapeworms. Not wanting others to think I’m starving my kids, I invariably wind up spending the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Belgium on snacks, drinks and other sundry items. What’s worse is that Turner Field is the one stadium in the free world that actually allows you to bring in food, drinks and snacks. Judging by my cash-flow that day, I single-handedly covered their losses for everyone in my section who brown-bagged it.
Before this game, my only experience with Braves fans was when I watched the Yankees sweep the 1999 World Series in person at Yankee Stadium. But it was the televised games on TV where I became familiar with the Tomahawk Chop, a ‘chopping’ arm-wave, accompanied by a droning chant, made by Braves fans to support the team when they rally. I always hated the Tomahawk Chop, but now that I’ve witnessed it in person performed by some 45,000 Braves fans, I can appreciate how truly irritating it is.
Silly as these traditions may be, I realized every team’s fans have them. In The Bronx, we tend to yell out crazy things like “Let’s Go Yankees” followed by a foot-stomping bum, bum, bum-bum-bum. Where do they come up with these things?
As the Mets took the lead, and we as a family rooted them on (lesser of two evils), some Tomahawk Chump got into a verbal spat with my wife:
HER: Yay!
HIM: Yeah.
HER: YEAH!
HIM: We’ll see.
HER: Yeah. We will see.
HIM: Huh…
HER: Yay!
In the midst of all this, I had my first experience on the big screen. I’ve attended countless games at various New York stadiums, but it’s at my very first game in Atlanta that I finally make the Diamond Vision screen cut. Yet everybody in my family managed to miss it because of the heated exchange happening at precisely that moment. So now I had a decision to make: do I tell my family that I miraculously appeared on the screen at exactly the moment when nobody was paying attention? Or do I simply bite my lip and avoid the perjury card that will surely be thrown my way? I had no choice but to avoid my family altogether and instead tell the stranger sitting to my left.
Plenty of other people made the screen that day. Mostly people wearing the team’s colors or holding homemade signs supporting the team. Lucky for us, there were several times the cameras caught a large group of fans who had created single letters to spell out an entire thought. This never works. Especially when they are baseball fans that are dumb enough to have gotten drunk on stadium-purchased alcohol. At different times, while being broadcast on the Diamond Vision screen, their signs said “O-G- -B-R-A-V-E-S” and “G-O- -B-R-A-V-S-E.”
Every Sunday, the Braves allow kids between the ages of 4-14 run the bases after the game for free (cost of photos every parent will purchase from the Braves website: $12.99 and up). So with the score 3-1 Mets, we left in the bottom of the 9th inning so we could stand on a line with what amounted to the combined population of all the US Virgin Islands, Guam and Puerto Rico (including The Bronx and the entire Major League Baseball roster).
Judging by the amount of Tomahawk Chanting we heard, either Hank Aaron himself had come out of retirement to reclaim the Home Run title or Osama bin Laden had been captured on the field. I left the line to see what was happening. The Braves managed to rally one run in, making the final score 3-2.
When I got back to the line (with a mile-post marker that said the wait would be 70 minutes), my family was nowhere to be found. I can only hope that the person who posted those signs was fired.
I caught up with the family, walked onto the field and my imagination ran wild. I never really dreamed I’d be a baseball player, so other thoughts of childhood rushed back into my mind… getting in trouble for hitting my sister; being grounded for turning the TV knob too fast; being hit in the face with a line drive that nearly required reconstructive surgery. It was still cool to be on a real Major League Baseball field – and my son, who firmly believes he’ll play on a team with Derek Jeter one day, was in all his glory.
We left lighter in the wallet and a little daunted by the whole Tomahawk Chop thing. Regardless, it was a fun day out and we’re lucky to have moved to a town where they have a baseball team. But we learned a lot. Next time we’ll bring our own snacks, our own sherpa and a sign that says “B-A-R-V-E-S- -T-S-I-N-K.”
As is the case with most new stadiums, Turner Field features all sorts of activities and diversions designed to make you forget how much you paid for the seats that are undoubtedly too far from the field to see any of the actual action, not to mention the parking fee that allows you to park in a lot that requires you to walk only slightly further than if you had left your car in your own driveway.
We managed to ignore most of the pre-game activities and elected to go straight to the field-level front row for an opportunity to get up close to and possibly meet members of New York’s second-best baseball team. Armed with official Rawlings Major League Baseballs purchased just an hour prior, my two kids and I pushed our way to the front. Just then, a buzz began to our left: autographs were being signed. Not officially knowing anyone on the Mets’ roster, we jockeyed for position to get our baseballs signed by some random Hispanic guy in a Mets uniform. From what I gather, his name is “O~~ﮟ~D.” I don’t think he played that day, but then my seats were far enough from the field that I was able to actually see Shea Stadium, so I’m not the best person to ask.
After getting O~~ﮟ~D’s signature, we were asked to find our seats, which required an uphill hike, a camel and a sherpa. The ambient southern-laced calls of “cold beer!,” “wieners!” (which I think is funny to yell in a baseball stadium), and “cotton candy!” were beginning. Which of course reminded my kids that they were rapaciously hungry.
Any person who ever sees us at a baseball game would think we never feed our children. When they are at home they barely eat enough to survive, but at a baseball stadium they have tapeworms. Not wanting others to think I’m starving my kids, I invariably wind up spending the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Belgium on snacks, drinks and other sundry items. What’s worse is that Turner Field is the one stadium in the free world that actually allows you to bring in food, drinks and snacks. Judging by my cash-flow that day, I single-handedly covered their losses for everyone in my section who brown-bagged it.
Before this game, my only experience with Braves fans was when I watched the Yankees sweep the 1999 World Series in person at Yankee Stadium. But it was the televised games on TV where I became familiar with the Tomahawk Chop, a ‘chopping’ arm-wave, accompanied by a droning chant, made by Braves fans to support the team when they rally. I always hated the Tomahawk Chop, but now that I’ve witnessed it in person performed by some 45,000 Braves fans, I can appreciate how truly irritating it is.
Silly as these traditions may be, I realized every team’s fans have them. In The Bronx, we tend to yell out crazy things like “Let’s Go Yankees” followed by a foot-stomping bum, bum, bum-bum-bum. Where do they come up with these things?
As the Mets took the lead, and we as a family rooted them on (lesser of two evils), some Tomahawk Chump got into a verbal spat with my wife:
HER: Yay!
HIM: Yeah.
HER: YEAH!
HIM: We’ll see.
HER: Yeah. We will see.
HIM: Huh…
HER: Yay!
In the midst of all this, I had my first experience on the big screen. I’ve attended countless games at various New York stadiums, but it’s at my very first game in Atlanta that I finally make the Diamond Vision screen cut. Yet everybody in my family managed to miss it because of the heated exchange happening at precisely that moment. So now I had a decision to make: do I tell my family that I miraculously appeared on the screen at exactly the moment when nobody was paying attention? Or do I simply bite my lip and avoid the perjury card that will surely be thrown my way? I had no choice but to avoid my family altogether and instead tell the stranger sitting to my left.
Plenty of other people made the screen that day. Mostly people wearing the team’s colors or holding homemade signs supporting the team. Lucky for us, there were several times the cameras caught a large group of fans who had created single letters to spell out an entire thought. This never works. Especially when they are baseball fans that are dumb enough to have gotten drunk on stadium-purchased alcohol. At different times, while being broadcast on the Diamond Vision screen, their signs said “O-G- -B-R-A-V-E-S” and “G-O- -B-R-A-V-S-E.”
Every Sunday, the Braves allow kids between the ages of 4-14 run the bases after the game for free (cost of photos every parent will purchase from the Braves website: $12.99 and up). So with the score 3-1 Mets, we left in the bottom of the 9th inning so we could stand on a line with what amounted to the combined population of all the US Virgin Islands, Guam and Puerto Rico (including The Bronx and the entire Major League Baseball roster).
Judging by the amount of Tomahawk Chanting we heard, either Hank Aaron himself had come out of retirement to reclaim the Home Run title or Osama bin Laden had been captured on the field. I left the line to see what was happening. The Braves managed to rally one run in, making the final score 3-2.
When I got back to the line (with a mile-post marker that said the wait would be 70 minutes), my family was nowhere to be found. I can only hope that the person who posted those signs was fired.
I caught up with the family, walked onto the field and my imagination ran wild. I never really dreamed I’d be a baseball player, so other thoughts of childhood rushed back into my mind… getting in trouble for hitting my sister; being grounded for turning the TV knob too fast; being hit in the face with a line drive that nearly required reconstructive surgery. It was still cool to be on a real Major League Baseball field – and my son, who firmly believes he’ll play on a team with Derek Jeter one day, was in all his glory.
We left lighter in the wallet and a little daunted by the whole Tomahawk Chop thing. Regardless, it was a fun day out and we’re lucky to have moved to a town where they have a baseball team. But we learned a lot. Next time we’ll bring our own snacks, our own sherpa and a sign that says “B-A-R-V-E-S- -T-S-I-N-K.”
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Headline Hogs: Atlanta Edition
Every city has something special it’s known for: Seattle has the Space Needle, Starbucks and grunge rock; Chicago has deep dish pizza and Al Capone; New York has celebrities like Regis and the Naked Cowboy; and Atlanta gets stuck with all the social misfit headline hogs.
You name the crazy headline, I guarantee someone from Atlanta is involved – most likely Ted Turner. Ted is one crazy old coot – and Atlanta’s most successful businessman. He is both wealthy beyond imagination and certifiably insane. He has a habit of saying downright ludicrous things such as “Jimmy Carter was a great President”; he launched a campaign to get rid of some harmless fish in a Montana lake just because he wanted different fish in it; and he casually donated $1 billion to the United Nations because “They do good stuff.” But perhaps the most telling insane character trait he possesses is the fact that, according to Wikipedia, he has always had a special place in his heart for professional wrestling.
But Teddy isn’t the only headline hog in Atlanta. Just this week, 44-year-old Atlanta resident Richard Jewell made headlines for his untimely death. Jewell, for those of you who don’t remember, was wrongly accused of planting a bomb in Atlanta’s Olympic park in 1996. Unfortunately for Jewell, Ted Turner’s CNN led the media charge in eviscerating him.
Fortunately, when he was cleared, Turner extended an olive branch to Jewell in the form of two obstructed-view, upper reserved level tickets for any Atlanta Braves weekend day game, played on a Wednesday night, where the starting pitcher is knuckleballer Phil Neikro, who won a team record 23 games in 1967.
Another of our headline hogs stole the spotlight from Julia Roberts to become the first one Americans think of when they hear the term ‘runaway bride.’ Proud Georgian Jennifer Wilbanks is the perennially surprised-looking woman who faked her own disappearance in 2005 just so she wouldn’t have to marry her fiancé, John Mason. Wilbanks said she was “scared to marry John Mason because she is afraid of an imperfect world” - which she would see really, really vividly. Incidentally, Wilbanks was also cast as an understudy in the Gwinnett County Players’ production of ‘The King and I.’ (Zing!)
While no Richard Gere, Mason’s less-than-ravishing Southern looks and questionable sensibilities make you wonder whether her eyes are bigger than his brain. He vowed that he would remain with Wilbanks even after she made national headlines for running from him. Even the Dalai Lama would take a spot in line to beat some sense into this idiot.
Last year, Wilbanks and Mason officially broke up, after which she promptly sued him for $500,000, which includes a share of royalties from a book deal he never would have gotten without her story. If she wins, I just hope she uses the money wisely and hires a plastic surgeon to take her ‘surprised’ facial expression down a few notches to something like ‘really interested.’ As a side note, Ted Turner sued her for “not staying on the lam long enough” and for “robbing CNN of valuable redundant news reports.”
If there’s anything we’ve learned from TV programming over the years, it’s that a good medical thriller sells. Andrew Speaker, a.k.a. the TB guy, is another headline hog that calls Atlanta home. He’s also the target of a smear campaign by Ted Turner for drawing more attention to TB in Atlanta than he ever did with Turner Broadcasting. Speaker, as you may recall, is the newlywed who honeymooned in Europe Jason Bourne-style. He then flew back under the radar and crossed the U.S. border - all the while being infected with tuberculosis (which is widely known to be fairly harmless if you’re already dead).
When he found out about the severity of his illness, Speaker did what any rational person would do: he boarded a pressurized airplane full of people and pretended to be healthy for six hours. He did this because, as he claimed later, he had been fearful of dying if he didn’t return to America. Apparently, Speaker thought that ‘the Al Qaida method’ was infinitely better: Take out a whole airplane full of people instead of just dealing with your insanity by yourself.
After all this drama, it was later discovered that the tuberculosis strain Speaker actually had was just MDR, not XDR, which begs the question: Which satellite radio provider really is the best? I mean, one has Howard Stern, but the other has all the baseball programming. Decisions, decisions….
Now that I have first-hand experience with living and working in Atlanta and dealing with the locals on a regular basis, I’m beginning to understand why this town is such a hotbed of controversial headline hogs. Things are usually so slow and polite here that people, sooner or later, are bound to lose their minds - in the spirit of Michael Douglas in the movie ‘Falling Down.’ Case in point: it took precisely 7 hours and 43 minutes of living here before this transplanted New Yorker dropped his first F-bomb at a four-way stop sign where every polite participant insisted someone else go first. It’s no wonder why Atlanta needs some headline hogs to shake things up a bit.
Clearly, Atlanta is rife with insanity of all sorts. There are plenty of people doing plenty of stupid things here, and there’s no telling who the next big headline hog will be, or when their story will break. But a word of advice to those looking for the notoriety: No matter what you do, be prepared for Ted Turner to be crazier.
You name the crazy headline, I guarantee someone from Atlanta is involved – most likely Ted Turner. Ted is one crazy old coot – and Atlanta’s most successful businessman. He is both wealthy beyond imagination and certifiably insane. He has a habit of saying downright ludicrous things such as “Jimmy Carter was a great President”; he launched a campaign to get rid of some harmless fish in a Montana lake just because he wanted different fish in it; and he casually donated $1 billion to the United Nations because “They do good stuff.” But perhaps the most telling insane character trait he possesses is the fact that, according to Wikipedia, he has always had a special place in his heart for professional wrestling.
But Teddy isn’t the only headline hog in Atlanta. Just this week, 44-year-old Atlanta resident Richard Jewell made headlines for his untimely death. Jewell, for those of you who don’t remember, was wrongly accused of planting a bomb in Atlanta’s Olympic park in 1996. Unfortunately for Jewell, Ted Turner’s CNN led the media charge in eviscerating him.
Fortunately, when he was cleared, Turner extended an olive branch to Jewell in the form of two obstructed-view, upper reserved level tickets for any Atlanta Braves weekend day game, played on a Wednesday night, where the starting pitcher is knuckleballer Phil Neikro, who won a team record 23 games in 1967.
Another of our headline hogs stole the spotlight from Julia Roberts to become the first one Americans think of when they hear the term ‘runaway bride.’ Proud Georgian Jennifer Wilbanks is the perennially surprised-looking woman who faked her own disappearance in 2005 just so she wouldn’t have to marry her fiancé, John Mason. Wilbanks said she was “scared to marry John Mason because she is afraid of an imperfect world” - which she would see really, really vividly. Incidentally, Wilbanks was also cast as an understudy in the Gwinnett County Players’ production of ‘The King and I.’ (Zing!)
While no Richard Gere, Mason’s less-than-ravishing Southern looks and questionable sensibilities make you wonder whether her eyes are bigger than his brain. He vowed that he would remain with Wilbanks even after she made national headlines for running from him. Even the Dalai Lama would take a spot in line to beat some sense into this idiot.
Last year, Wilbanks and Mason officially broke up, after which she promptly sued him for $500,000, which includes a share of royalties from a book deal he never would have gotten without her story. If she wins, I just hope she uses the money wisely and hires a plastic surgeon to take her ‘surprised’ facial expression down a few notches to something like ‘really interested.’ As a side note, Ted Turner sued her for “not staying on the lam long enough” and for “robbing CNN of valuable redundant news reports.”
If there’s anything we’ve learned from TV programming over the years, it’s that a good medical thriller sells. Andrew Speaker, a.k.a. the TB guy, is another headline hog that calls Atlanta home. He’s also the target of a smear campaign by Ted Turner for drawing more attention to TB in Atlanta than he ever did with Turner Broadcasting. Speaker, as you may recall, is the newlywed who honeymooned in Europe Jason Bourne-style. He then flew back under the radar and crossed the U.S. border - all the while being infected with tuberculosis (which is widely known to be fairly harmless if you’re already dead).
When he found out about the severity of his illness, Speaker did what any rational person would do: he boarded a pressurized airplane full of people and pretended to be healthy for six hours. He did this because, as he claimed later, he had been fearful of dying if he didn’t return to America. Apparently, Speaker thought that ‘the Al Qaida method’ was infinitely better: Take out a whole airplane full of people instead of just dealing with your insanity by yourself.
After all this drama, it was later discovered that the tuberculosis strain Speaker actually had was just MDR, not XDR, which begs the question: Which satellite radio provider really is the best? I mean, one has Howard Stern, but the other has all the baseball programming. Decisions, decisions….
Now that I have first-hand experience with living and working in Atlanta and dealing with the locals on a regular basis, I’m beginning to understand why this town is such a hotbed of controversial headline hogs. Things are usually so slow and polite here that people, sooner or later, are bound to lose their minds - in the spirit of Michael Douglas in the movie ‘Falling Down.’ Case in point: it took precisely 7 hours and 43 minutes of living here before this transplanted New Yorker dropped his first F-bomb at a four-way stop sign where every polite participant insisted someone else go first. It’s no wonder why Atlanta needs some headline hogs to shake things up a bit.
Clearly, Atlanta is rife with insanity of all sorts. There are plenty of people doing plenty of stupid things here, and there’s no telling who the next big headline hog will be, or when their story will break. But a word of advice to those looking for the notoriety: No matter what you do, be prepared for Ted Turner to be crazier.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
The Pistachio Ice Cream Industry Should Say “mmm goy sai”
Being a New Yorker, I know that every culture’s dining experience is unique. Every cuisine has its own set of outstanding attributes. Among the best is Chinese food. Take-out or dine-in, no matter which Chinese restaurant option you choose, you know you’re in for a delectable delight - as long as you don’t mind skipping dessert.
As far back as I can remember, a Chinese food dining experience was an event to behold. After sitting down in the restaurant’s dining room, I always enjoyed taking in the view. The usual decorations always were ever-present: the dragons, the red paper lights (with what was purported to be actual Chinese writing on them) and the panoramic Chinese vistas living on too-old posters hanging behind shoddy picture frames. One has to wonder if the Chinese culture really is so greasy, old and insipid – or is that just how it’s represented here in America? Having visited Mainland China myself, I can say, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it is the single kitschiest country on the planet.
From the beginning to three-quarters of the way through, a Chinese dining experience is terrific. Fried appetizers are the standard: egg rolls (the contents of which nobody should ever really ask about), shrimp toast and the pu pu platter – which, once you get past the ridiculous name and the fact that you could potentially use it as a weapon – is the coolest appetizer on Earth.
Speaking of fried foods, it should be noted that dragons were the first creatures to fully succumb to the effects of LDL, which electronically savvy readers will recognize as the technology which allows you to watch Iron Chef in high definition.
Eating the main course of a Chinese meal is an event in and of itself. The entrees are artful and colorful, and always floating in some kind of a salty, randomly-colored sauce. Beef with broccoli and pork lo mein are always delicious (the latter being, inexplicably, the root of a longstanding cold war between the Chinese and the Italians about who invented spaghetti and what it should be called. It’s tough to conjure up an image of what ‘lo mein and meatballs’ would look like).
When it comes time to undo the top button on your pants, however, everything in the Chinese Restaurant Play Book and Operating Manual really falls apart. The single Chinese contribution to the dessert forum is a sugary piece of cardboard wrapped around a piece of paper.
Think of the other cultural offerings for capping off your meal: Italians have cannolis; the French gave us crème brulee; America has apple pie. Even the Greeks stepped up with baklava. The Chinese? The fortune cookie, which is easily the worst invention in the history of edible food.
How can a culture so well rounded in its other gastronomic offerings concurrently be so abysmal at dessert? The most surprising part about the fortune cookie is that nobody who has ever gotten one has actually looked forward to the cookie part. The fortune inside is always the attraction. Isn’t it strange that a culture like ours, which goes out of its way to “save room for dessert” is more interested in reading a piece of paper with words of faux wisdom or vague prophecy than it is in actually eating the miserable confection? For added amusement, it helps to add the words “in bed” to the end of whatever fortune you get. So you wind up with “To move a mountain, one must begin with a single pebble – in bed,” which makes no sense at all, unless you’re about five or six zombies deep. Then it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever heard.
The words of wisdom in the cookie are often attributed to Confucius, the esteemed Chinese thinker and social philosopher who was the first to recognize the need to do something to make the fortune cookie palatable. Coincidentally, upset by the unpleasant dessert placed in front of him, Confucius was also the first to ask, “Do you have Jello?”
Thus began the tradition of Chinese restaurants offering decidedly bland desserts in place of anything truly inspirational. If you are looking for dessert at any given Chinese restaurant today, your choices will be fortune cookies, Jello, oranges or one of three flavors of ice cream: chocolate, vanilla or PISTACHIO??
By offering these unexciting desserts, the Chinese are all but admitting to their complete failure as a people to develop an edible dessert they can call their own. They have dropped the ball and are now calling it to our attention.
In terms of the ice cream, chocolate and vanilla make total sense. But who ever eats pistachio ice cream outside of a Chinese restaurant? I’ve never seen pistachio ice cream in a supermarket freezer aisle, let alone being able to order it at a good ice cream counter. Yet, at the Chinese restaurant, you’d think it was among the more popular flavor choices. The pistachio industry is evidently guilty of selling the Chinese a bill of goods.
Perhaps the most troubling thing about the ice cream at the Chinese restaurant is the presentation. A silver dish with a single scoop of your flavor of choice - but no syrup, whipped cream, cherries or nuts. You just get the lone, boring scoop of ice cream. And what do they do with it? They stick a fortune cookie on top.
In spite of it all, I will still crave my visits to Chinese restaurants. I’m conditioned to know that, while the bulk of the meal will be second-to-none, the dessert will leave much to be desired. Which is a good thing, because when I’m hungry again in an hour, I can go to the Italian restaurant three doors down. It’s at this point that I will think back to the words of wisdom from the last fortune cookie I received:
“If you want a really good dessert, I recommend Giuseppe’s down the road. Try a fresh cannoli.”
As far back as I can remember, a Chinese food dining experience was an event to behold. After sitting down in the restaurant’s dining room, I always enjoyed taking in the view. The usual decorations always were ever-present: the dragons, the red paper lights (with what was purported to be actual Chinese writing on them) and the panoramic Chinese vistas living on too-old posters hanging behind shoddy picture frames. One has to wonder if the Chinese culture really is so greasy, old and insipid – or is that just how it’s represented here in America? Having visited Mainland China myself, I can say, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it is the single kitschiest country on the planet.
From the beginning to three-quarters of the way through, a Chinese dining experience is terrific. Fried appetizers are the standard: egg rolls (the contents of which nobody should ever really ask about), shrimp toast and the pu pu platter – which, once you get past the ridiculous name and the fact that you could potentially use it as a weapon – is the coolest appetizer on Earth.
Speaking of fried foods, it should be noted that dragons were the first creatures to fully succumb to the effects of LDL, which electronically savvy readers will recognize as the technology which allows you to watch Iron Chef in high definition.
Eating the main course of a Chinese meal is an event in and of itself. The entrees are artful and colorful, and always floating in some kind of a salty, randomly-colored sauce. Beef with broccoli and pork lo mein are always delicious (the latter being, inexplicably, the root of a longstanding cold war between the Chinese and the Italians about who invented spaghetti and what it should be called. It’s tough to conjure up an image of what ‘lo mein and meatballs’ would look like).
When it comes time to undo the top button on your pants, however, everything in the Chinese Restaurant Play Book and Operating Manual really falls apart. The single Chinese contribution to the dessert forum is a sugary piece of cardboard wrapped around a piece of paper.
Think of the other cultural offerings for capping off your meal: Italians have cannolis; the French gave us crème brulee; America has apple pie. Even the Greeks stepped up with baklava. The Chinese? The fortune cookie, which is easily the worst invention in the history of edible food.
How can a culture so well rounded in its other gastronomic offerings concurrently be so abysmal at dessert? The most surprising part about the fortune cookie is that nobody who has ever gotten one has actually looked forward to the cookie part. The fortune inside is always the attraction. Isn’t it strange that a culture like ours, which goes out of its way to “save room for dessert” is more interested in reading a piece of paper with words of faux wisdom or vague prophecy than it is in actually eating the miserable confection? For added amusement, it helps to add the words “in bed” to the end of whatever fortune you get. So you wind up with “To move a mountain, one must begin with a single pebble – in bed,” which makes no sense at all, unless you’re about five or six zombies deep. Then it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever heard.
The words of wisdom in the cookie are often attributed to Confucius, the esteemed Chinese thinker and social philosopher who was the first to recognize the need to do something to make the fortune cookie palatable. Coincidentally, upset by the unpleasant dessert placed in front of him, Confucius was also the first to ask, “Do you have Jello?”
Thus began the tradition of Chinese restaurants offering decidedly bland desserts in place of anything truly inspirational. If you are looking for dessert at any given Chinese restaurant today, your choices will be fortune cookies, Jello, oranges or one of three flavors of ice cream: chocolate, vanilla or PISTACHIO??
By offering these unexciting desserts, the Chinese are all but admitting to their complete failure as a people to develop an edible dessert they can call their own. They have dropped the ball and are now calling it to our attention.
In terms of the ice cream, chocolate and vanilla make total sense. But who ever eats pistachio ice cream outside of a Chinese restaurant? I’ve never seen pistachio ice cream in a supermarket freezer aisle, let alone being able to order it at a good ice cream counter. Yet, at the Chinese restaurant, you’d think it was among the more popular flavor choices. The pistachio industry is evidently guilty of selling the Chinese a bill of goods.
Perhaps the most troubling thing about the ice cream at the Chinese restaurant is the presentation. A silver dish with a single scoop of your flavor of choice - but no syrup, whipped cream, cherries or nuts. You just get the lone, boring scoop of ice cream. And what do they do with it? They stick a fortune cookie on top.
In spite of it all, I will still crave my visits to Chinese restaurants. I’m conditioned to know that, while the bulk of the meal will be second-to-none, the dessert will leave much to be desired. Which is a good thing, because when I’m hungry again in an hour, I can go to the Italian restaurant three doors down. It’s at this point that I will think back to the words of wisdom from the last fortune cookie I received:
“If you want a really good dessert, I recommend Giuseppe’s down the road. Try a fresh cannoli.”
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Help Wanted: Space Shuttle Astronaut / Tile Mason
Is it just me or do they launch the Space Shuttle these days for the sole purpose of repairing what went wrong on takeoff so there are no catastrophes upon reentry? I’m all for safety, but nowadays the phrase “Let’s light this candle” – famously said week after week by Rabbi Mordechai Goldfarb of Congregation Beth Shalom in the quaint Connecticut suburb of Old Saybrook - takes on a whole new meaning.
The Space Shuttle program launched, with much fanfare, in the early 1980s - presumably by a group of engineers who thought that 80s electronica music was so bad that they couldn’t even stay on the same planet with it. The world simultaneously welcomed Soft Cell and bid goodbye to a handful of lucky astronauts who were protesting the death of rock music.
The Space Program was all but dead, and out of the public eye, after a successful series of missions in the 60s and 70s which brought human beings to the surface of the moon. Of course, this WAS the heyday of LSD, so whether or not man actually flew to and walked on the moon remains a true mystery. The only thing that we know for sure is that Tom Hanks was THIS close to walking on the moon but missed his opportunity (as illustrated in the Hollywood blockbuster film, appropriately titled, Tom Hanks Never Walked on the Moon).
In any case, the Space Shuttle program was the next revolution in space travel. The orbiter was able to launch, reenter and launch, again and again. Unless, of course, someone forgot to tighten a screw somewhere along the way.
Such was the unfortunate case with the Space Shuttle Challenger, which completed just nine missions before disintegrating on January 28, 1986 - just 73 seconds into the launch of its tenth mission. This disaster could have been avoided had the O-rings, which in this case were shaped like rhombuses, been shaped like actual O’s. Seven lives, and a vehicle almost as cool as a De Lorean, were lost as a result of a shape problem that could have been solved by any random nursery school teacher.
This disaster brought the space program to a grinding halt – until someone indiscriminately suggested that they build another Space Shuttle and give it a much cooler name. Thus were born the Discovery, the Atlantis and the Endeavour (the last one, by the way, while an American spacecraft, was inexplicably named by a Brit called Reginald Huggins, III – thereby explaining the randomly placed “U”).
Over the years, space shuttle launches became passé, and coverage of launches and landings moved from national broadcast networks to the pages of the Weekly World News, which covers the latest breaking space news you won’t read anywhere else. Included is news like in this actual passage from an article about the planets:
“Last year, the fifty-four-year-old astronomer claimed that not only was Pluto still a planet but that it was inhabited by Irish sheepdogs.”
You can’t make this stuff up. This is clearly news you will see nowhere else.
All remained boring with the shuttle program until February 1, 2003, which was when Cuban percussionist Ramón "Mongo" SantamarÃa passed away unexpectedly as a result of a stroke. Ironically, it was his music that was playing at mission control that day when the Space Shuttle Columbia burned up upon reentry. NASA scientists determined that a hole had formed on the shuttle’s wings when a piece of insulating foam from the external fuel tank peeled off during the launch 16 days earlier.
It is unfortunate that the only way NASA can get headlines anymore is to have a major catastrophe that involves a Space Shuttle. They could probably take a lesson or two from English entrepreneur Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, the world’s recognized King of Self-Promotion.
The end result, however, is that NASA has turned into a bunch of overprotective kindergarten mothers when it comes to its space program. Every single time a shuttle is launched, the cargo bay is filled with heat-resistant black replacement tiles, concrete, grout, a Costco-sized container of Tang and several cases of those diapers the crazy astronaut lady wore when she drove clear across the country at a rate of speed faster than a Space Shuttle, in order to “talk to” (read: kill) a flight attendant who was making whoopee with her imagined astronaut boyfriend. (For the record, I believe her insanity was founded. I mean, who WOULDN’T go crazy with a car full of dirty diapers? Anyone who has kids can vouch for this. But I digress….)
The tiles in a shuttle’s cargo bay are there to replace damage sustained by the tiles on the orbiter when it takes off. Which means, by my calculations, that the space program has essentially turned itself into the world’s most costly unnecessary repair shop. In fact, I’ve been informed by insiders that the bulk of the training that new astronauts undergo involves replacing various parts of the Space Shuttle while in space.
It does seem to be a waste of a space program to simply fix what goes wrong instead of really ‘living on the edge’ like the old astronauts used to do. That’s why they were so revered. They stared death in the face and, in most cases, died doing so - but not without the everlasting acclaim of the American people.
I think our resources are being spent foolishly in space. Case in point: The Jetsons first appeared on TV in 1962 – 45 years ago! – and we STILL do not have flying saucer cars that convert into suitcases. What a waste of technology.
I think noted sci-fi author Larry Niven put it best when he said, “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!" He said that in 2001, which makes me really wonder whether or not he had been conscious for the past 40 years.
Needless to say, the NASA space program will forge ahead. There’s a space station that isn’t going to build itself, there are astronauts in diapers training for their next tile-replacement mission, and there are science fiction writers who need to obviously ignore reality and say ridiculous things about why dinosaurs went extinct.
The Space Shuttle program launched, with much fanfare, in the early 1980s - presumably by a group of engineers who thought that 80s electronica music was so bad that they couldn’t even stay on the same planet with it. The world simultaneously welcomed Soft Cell and bid goodbye to a handful of lucky astronauts who were protesting the death of rock music.
The Space Program was all but dead, and out of the public eye, after a successful series of missions in the 60s and 70s which brought human beings to the surface of the moon. Of course, this WAS the heyday of LSD, so whether or not man actually flew to and walked on the moon remains a true mystery. The only thing that we know for sure is that Tom Hanks was THIS close to walking on the moon but missed his opportunity (as illustrated in the Hollywood blockbuster film, appropriately titled, Tom Hanks Never Walked on the Moon).
In any case, the Space Shuttle program was the next revolution in space travel. The orbiter was able to launch, reenter and launch, again and again. Unless, of course, someone forgot to tighten a screw somewhere along the way.
Such was the unfortunate case with the Space Shuttle Challenger, which completed just nine missions before disintegrating on January 28, 1986 - just 73 seconds into the launch of its tenth mission. This disaster could have been avoided had the O-rings, which in this case were shaped like rhombuses, been shaped like actual O’s. Seven lives, and a vehicle almost as cool as a De Lorean, were lost as a result of a shape problem that could have been solved by any random nursery school teacher.
This disaster brought the space program to a grinding halt – until someone indiscriminately suggested that they build another Space Shuttle and give it a much cooler name. Thus were born the Discovery, the Atlantis and the Endeavour (the last one, by the way, while an American spacecraft, was inexplicably named by a Brit called Reginald Huggins, III – thereby explaining the randomly placed “U”).
Over the years, space shuttle launches became passé, and coverage of launches and landings moved from national broadcast networks to the pages of the Weekly World News, which covers the latest breaking space news you won’t read anywhere else. Included is news like in this actual passage from an article about the planets:
“Last year, the fifty-four-year-old astronomer claimed that not only was Pluto still a planet but that it was inhabited by Irish sheepdogs.”
You can’t make this stuff up. This is clearly news you will see nowhere else.
All remained boring with the shuttle program until February 1, 2003, which was when Cuban percussionist Ramón "Mongo" SantamarÃa passed away unexpectedly as a result of a stroke. Ironically, it was his music that was playing at mission control that day when the Space Shuttle Columbia burned up upon reentry. NASA scientists determined that a hole had formed on the shuttle’s wings when a piece of insulating foam from the external fuel tank peeled off during the launch 16 days earlier.
It is unfortunate that the only way NASA can get headlines anymore is to have a major catastrophe that involves a Space Shuttle. They could probably take a lesson or two from English entrepreneur Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, the world’s recognized King of Self-Promotion.
The end result, however, is that NASA has turned into a bunch of overprotective kindergarten mothers when it comes to its space program. Every single time a shuttle is launched, the cargo bay is filled with heat-resistant black replacement tiles, concrete, grout, a Costco-sized container of Tang and several cases of those diapers the crazy astronaut lady wore when she drove clear across the country at a rate of speed faster than a Space Shuttle, in order to “talk to” (read: kill) a flight attendant who was making whoopee with her imagined astronaut boyfriend. (For the record, I believe her insanity was founded. I mean, who WOULDN’T go crazy with a car full of dirty diapers? Anyone who has kids can vouch for this. But I digress….)
The tiles in a shuttle’s cargo bay are there to replace damage sustained by the tiles on the orbiter when it takes off. Which means, by my calculations, that the space program has essentially turned itself into the world’s most costly unnecessary repair shop. In fact, I’ve been informed by insiders that the bulk of the training that new astronauts undergo involves replacing various parts of the Space Shuttle while in space.
It does seem to be a waste of a space program to simply fix what goes wrong instead of really ‘living on the edge’ like the old astronauts used to do. That’s why they were so revered. They stared death in the face and, in most cases, died doing so - but not without the everlasting acclaim of the American people.
I think our resources are being spent foolishly in space. Case in point: The Jetsons first appeared on TV in 1962 – 45 years ago! – and we STILL do not have flying saucer cars that convert into suitcases. What a waste of technology.
I think noted sci-fi author Larry Niven put it best when he said, “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!" He said that in 2001, which makes me really wonder whether or not he had been conscious for the past 40 years.
Needless to say, the NASA space program will forge ahead. There’s a space station that isn’t going to build itself, there are astronauts in diapers training for their next tile-replacement mission, and there are science fiction writers who need to obviously ignore reality and say ridiculous things about why dinosaurs went extinct.
Friday, August 10, 2007
More Pizza Fun
The phone rang last night. It was a woman who was looking for the pizzeria for which we get more calls than they do. My simple "Hello" wasn't enough for this lady. She demanded to know whether it was Papa John's that she reached. When I told her she had the wrong number, she insisted that she didn't and demanded to speak to my manager.
I had no choice but to return to the phone, using the very same voice, and say "Hello this is Mark, how can I help you?"
She explained that she had called earlier and asked for another location's number - but that number wasn't working. I suggested, "You might want to consult the Internet."
"THE INTERNET? I DON'T HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION! WHY WON'T YOU JUST GIVE ME THE NUMBER," she insisted. I explained that we were "super busy" and that if she didn't have an Internet connection, she might want to let her "fingers do the walking" and look in her telephone book. I even explained that the poor telephone books have experienced such a downturn in popularity that they would be thrilled to be used. She was not amused.
"Are you serious???" was all she could muster up. I told her yes, and asked if she planned to place an order.
She asked if we delivered to Buckhead. Stifling raucous laughter, I said, "Oh no. That's too far. We don't deliver there." That's when she really lost it.
"Your address is Buckhead - and YOU DON'T DELIVER HERE?"
I didn't expect that. It became impossible for me to keep a straight face. I had to hang up.
All I wanted to do was take an order. I didn't plan on THIS. Managing an imaginary pizza joint ain't easy.
I had no choice but to return to the phone, using the very same voice, and say "Hello this is Mark, how can I help you?"
She explained that she had called earlier and asked for another location's number - but that number wasn't working. I suggested, "You might want to consult the Internet."
"THE INTERNET? I DON'T HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION! WHY WON'T YOU JUST GIVE ME THE NUMBER," she insisted. I explained that we were "super busy" and that if she didn't have an Internet connection, she might want to let her "fingers do the walking" and look in her telephone book. I even explained that the poor telephone books have experienced such a downturn in popularity that they would be thrilled to be used. She was not amused.
"Are you serious???" was all she could muster up. I told her yes, and asked if she planned to place an order.
She asked if we delivered to Buckhead. Stifling raucous laughter, I said, "Oh no. That's too far. We don't deliver there." That's when she really lost it.
"Your address is Buckhead - and YOU DON'T DELIVER HERE?"
I didn't expect that. It became impossible for me to keep a straight face. I had to hang up.
All I wanted to do was take an order. I didn't plan on THIS. Managing an imaginary pizza joint ain't easy.
Don’t Cut Off Your Armature Despite Your Flux Capacitor
It’s official: I have no mechanical skill whatsoever. This is no big secret. I’ve never really understood how people know how to fix cars, engines and the like. In fact, I’d be better at tying my shoes while wearing boxing gloves.
I am good at simple tasks. Changing light bulbs? Piece of cake! Filling my gas tank? No sweat! Plugging in new household appliances? Probably easy if it’s a normal shaped plug. I’m also good at math, which is how I know that when something does go wrong, I’m going to bounce a check. (Apologies in advance to the first lawnmower repairman who agrees to come to my house.)
It began two days ago – my problem with Bessy, my beloved, ride-on lawnmower. After two weeks of neglect, I finally decided to cut my grass and force my ticks to find a new home. That’s when I discovered that Bessy, who I have taken for a ride exactly three times thus far, has decided to take the rest of the summer off.
When I purchased the mower in question, I knew she needed a new battery. Hence, it has become my custom to use actual jumper cables connected to my actual car battery to fire up ole Bessy. It worked fine – until this week. Upon arriving home from work, I lovingly walked the mower from the garage to the car. Then I gently connected the cables, sat down, and turned the key: nothing. My girl didn’t respond. Her engine screamed, “whawhawhawhawha,” over and over, in vain. She wasn’t moving. I tried again. Turned the key, heard her tease: “whawhawhawha,” but she just wouldn’t turn over. This routine continued for approximately 30 minutes. I’m from the school of thought that says: as long as something has a key, it will start working sooner or later.
Recognizing that my logic was probably not sound, I reluctantly opened her hood and looked for something marked ‘press here if engine will not start.’ This mower didn’t come with that feature. (Note to self: it always pays to buy the more expensive model.) I tinkered with a few things under the hood. Her gas tank was more than half full; her oil looked okay, I guess – for as much as I know about oil; and I think I found her air filter. Feeling like staring at the engine might have done some good, I sat back down and tried to start her again. Inexplicably, my technique did not have the desired effect.
Having had enough, I finally called Paul, a gifted mechanic who is also my brother-in-law. I figured I could have him talk me through what to do. Just like trying to talk a six-year-old through building a Stradivarius. The first question from him was “Does she have gas?” (Note: Paul knows me well). I did double-check, but I confirmed that the Middle East was slightly richer thanks to my laziness and frugality in hiring a landscaping company. The next question was, “Is her battery connected?” Now I have to admit, I may be a mechanical disaster, but these are softball questions.
Jumping directly from questions from Mechanics for Morons to those found in Master Technician Journal, Paul asked me to locate the spark plug. The spark plug? No problem. Just search for something that looks like it could plug a spark, I reasoned. I embarked on a fruitless journey through every engine part, even after receiving a very good tip on how to find it. Paul had pointed out that a thick black wire would connect the spark plug to the Flux Capacitor, in order to create the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity necessary to drive Bessy the amazing three-miles-per-hour I relied on for her to move me across my field of dreams. After looking for a while, I located one thick black wire that really seemed more like a tube to me, so I claimed there were no thick black wires and suggested maybe a red one might have been used in its place. For a guy who really never gets agitated, I sensed that Paul was on the verge of calling me a complete putz.
Living up to his reputation, Paul calmly held back any anger he might have felt towards me at the moment. Instead he patiently explained to me that an engine needs three things to start. If I remember correctly, he said they are: a key, fluids and noise. I seemingly had all the pieces in place. He finally grew frustrated enough to take a drive over to my house and look at it himself – my mission was officially achieved. I was off the hook.
As Paul began disassembling the engine, which appeared to have way more parts than necessary, I stood by and watched in much the same way I used to watch my dad replace wiring in the house when I was a kid. I learned quickly that my role as “the helper” was to stand around and try to look busy helping, or at least appear interested in doing so. I was neither, then or now.
Like a skilled surgeon performing a complicated procedure, Paul made single-word demands for tools. I was right on top of the easy ones, like wrench and screwdriver. It was when he asked for the “12-volt tester” that I began to panic. My best approach to find this mysterious tool was not to simply ask him what it looked like. No, it was instead to systematically rule out anything that I knew WASN’T a 12-volt tester and make a guess based on what was left.
So I began to rifle through the toolbox, a man on a mission. Roughly 90 seconds later, Paul sauntered over, gently pushing my amateur ass aside. In one fell swoop, he fished out the little light with the two wires attached to it (the 12-volt tester, I concluded), giving me one of those “How do you remember to breathe?” sideways glances.
After pulling apart every piece of the lawnmower, Paul decided that the problem was the armature – or the opening in the lawnmower that lets in the light. He also described it as a magneto, which I honestly thought was exclusively the brainchild of a writer for Marvel Comics. None of this seemed to make any sense to me. How any of this has anything to do with why the lawnmower wouldn’t start is beyond me. Luckily for Bessy, Paul was right on top of her, so to speak. He seemed to know exactly how to make her purr for him.
Throughout the process of “helping” Paul, I did manage to get myself filthy and covered in motor oil. Let this be a lesson to you: make sure the cap is on the oil tank BEFORE you turn the ignition key. To an uninformed passerby, I certainly gave the appearance of having worked really hard on this mystery machine. I may not have been able to get her motor running, but it sure looked like I gave it everything I had.
As an aside, I hate going to a parts counter where I’m expected to know every spec of every item I’m looking for, or risk looking like a complete idiot. Today I went down the complete idiot road. Figuring I could get what I needed with the model number of the lawnmower, I found quickly that I was entirely unprepared. And Joe-Bob with the four teeth in his mouth was snickering at my total ignorance. Regardless, we figured it out.
So now all I need to do is switch out the old part with the new one I purchased today. Then I’ll be back in the saddle, ready to transform my property into the lush greenscape I intended for it to be, and proud of a job well done. Which of course is all dependent upon whether or not Paul minds fetching his own tools.
I am good at simple tasks. Changing light bulbs? Piece of cake! Filling my gas tank? No sweat! Plugging in new household appliances? Probably easy if it’s a normal shaped plug. I’m also good at math, which is how I know that when something does go wrong, I’m going to bounce a check. (Apologies in advance to the first lawnmower repairman who agrees to come to my house.)
It began two days ago – my problem with Bessy, my beloved, ride-on lawnmower. After two weeks of neglect, I finally decided to cut my grass and force my ticks to find a new home. That’s when I discovered that Bessy, who I have taken for a ride exactly three times thus far, has decided to take the rest of the summer off.
When I purchased the mower in question, I knew she needed a new battery. Hence, it has become my custom to use actual jumper cables connected to my actual car battery to fire up ole Bessy. It worked fine – until this week. Upon arriving home from work, I lovingly walked the mower from the garage to the car. Then I gently connected the cables, sat down, and turned the key: nothing. My girl didn’t respond. Her engine screamed, “whawhawhawhawha,” over and over, in vain. She wasn’t moving. I tried again. Turned the key, heard her tease: “whawhawhawha,” but she just wouldn’t turn over. This routine continued for approximately 30 minutes. I’m from the school of thought that says: as long as something has a key, it will start working sooner or later.
Recognizing that my logic was probably not sound, I reluctantly opened her hood and looked for something marked ‘press here if engine will not start.’ This mower didn’t come with that feature. (Note to self: it always pays to buy the more expensive model.) I tinkered with a few things under the hood. Her gas tank was more than half full; her oil looked okay, I guess – for as much as I know about oil; and I think I found her air filter. Feeling like staring at the engine might have done some good, I sat back down and tried to start her again. Inexplicably, my technique did not have the desired effect.
Having had enough, I finally called Paul, a gifted mechanic who is also my brother-in-law. I figured I could have him talk me through what to do. Just like trying to talk a six-year-old through building a Stradivarius. The first question from him was “Does she have gas?” (Note: Paul knows me well). I did double-check, but I confirmed that the Middle East was slightly richer thanks to my laziness and frugality in hiring a landscaping company. The next question was, “Is her battery connected?” Now I have to admit, I may be a mechanical disaster, but these are softball questions.
Jumping directly from questions from Mechanics for Morons to those found in Master Technician Journal, Paul asked me to locate the spark plug. The spark plug? No problem. Just search for something that looks like it could plug a spark, I reasoned. I embarked on a fruitless journey through every engine part, even after receiving a very good tip on how to find it. Paul had pointed out that a thick black wire would connect the spark plug to the Flux Capacitor, in order to create the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity necessary to drive Bessy the amazing three-miles-per-hour I relied on for her to move me across my field of dreams. After looking for a while, I located one thick black wire that really seemed more like a tube to me, so I claimed there were no thick black wires and suggested maybe a red one might have been used in its place. For a guy who really never gets agitated, I sensed that Paul was on the verge of calling me a complete putz.
Living up to his reputation, Paul calmly held back any anger he might have felt towards me at the moment. Instead he patiently explained to me that an engine needs three things to start. If I remember correctly, he said they are: a key, fluids and noise. I seemingly had all the pieces in place. He finally grew frustrated enough to take a drive over to my house and look at it himself – my mission was officially achieved. I was off the hook.
As Paul began disassembling the engine, which appeared to have way more parts than necessary, I stood by and watched in much the same way I used to watch my dad replace wiring in the house when I was a kid. I learned quickly that my role as “the helper” was to stand around and try to look busy helping, or at least appear interested in doing so. I was neither, then or now.
Like a skilled surgeon performing a complicated procedure, Paul made single-word demands for tools. I was right on top of the easy ones, like wrench and screwdriver. It was when he asked for the “12-volt tester” that I began to panic. My best approach to find this mysterious tool was not to simply ask him what it looked like. No, it was instead to systematically rule out anything that I knew WASN’T a 12-volt tester and make a guess based on what was left.
So I began to rifle through the toolbox, a man on a mission. Roughly 90 seconds later, Paul sauntered over, gently pushing my amateur ass aside. In one fell swoop, he fished out the little light with the two wires attached to it (the 12-volt tester, I concluded), giving me one of those “How do you remember to breathe?” sideways glances.
After pulling apart every piece of the lawnmower, Paul decided that the problem was the armature – or the opening in the lawnmower that lets in the light. He also described it as a magneto, which I honestly thought was exclusively the brainchild of a writer for Marvel Comics. None of this seemed to make any sense to me. How any of this has anything to do with why the lawnmower wouldn’t start is beyond me. Luckily for Bessy, Paul was right on top of her, so to speak. He seemed to know exactly how to make her purr for him.
Throughout the process of “helping” Paul, I did manage to get myself filthy and covered in motor oil. Let this be a lesson to you: make sure the cap is on the oil tank BEFORE you turn the ignition key. To an uninformed passerby, I certainly gave the appearance of having worked really hard on this mystery machine. I may not have been able to get her motor running, but it sure looked like I gave it everything I had.
As an aside, I hate going to a parts counter where I’m expected to know every spec of every item I’m looking for, or risk looking like a complete idiot. Today I went down the complete idiot road. Figuring I could get what I needed with the model number of the lawnmower, I found quickly that I was entirely unprepared. And Joe-Bob with the four teeth in his mouth was snickering at my total ignorance. Regardless, we figured it out.
So now all I need to do is switch out the old part with the new one I purchased today. Then I’ll be back in the saddle, ready to transform my property into the lush greenscape I intended for it to be, and proud of a job well done. Which of course is all dependent upon whether or not Paul minds fetching his own tools.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
My Terrifying 30-Minute 3:00 a.m. Standoff
I'm the type of person who likes to do everything late at night. I pay the price when it's time to get up in the morning, but I'm a night owl who (who, who, who) loves to stay up late and really concentrate on what I'm doing with no other distractions. It's fantastic when there truly ARE no other distractions.
One recent night, I finally decided to hit the hay at about 2:45 a.m., but decided I'd be smart by taking my shower before bed – thereby maximizing sleep time when the later morning rolls around. I made my way upstairs into the bedroom and quietly moved, in the complete darkness, to the bathroom. Thus began what was to be the most terrifying night of my life to date.
As you know, we recently moved to the South. The cost of living is cheaper, the weather is better, and you really get maximum value for your money in terms of gross insect poundage. When I turned on the light in the bathroom, what I saw frightened me beyond compare. A palmetto bug the size of a traditional seedless hamburger bun skittered across the counter and parked itself right into the crevice between the sink faucet and the wall.
If you are unfamiliar with what a palmetto bug is, consider yourself lucky. Think: big, disgusting cockroach. Then think: hold big and shiny magnifying glass over said cockroach. Now, put the two images together and imagine that huge disturbing result sitting on your counter. In fact, it's such a large insect that you have to worry about how to best dispose of its guts when it's finally smashed. That, my friends, is the palmetto bug -- the most horrific, nasty-looking, vulgar insect that I've seen to date in Georgia.
Given his clearly pre-planned tactical position, and my complete and utter terror at seeing an insect this huge in my own living space, the clock began to tick on what became a late-night, thirty-minute standoff between bug and man.
In case you haven't yet realized, I am not a 'bug person'. I wince at the mere thought of them. If I encounter a standard-issue spider inside the house, for example, I will immediately find ANYTHING else to do – and exaggerate the importance of getting said thing done, rather than deal with the creepy crawler myself. (e.g., Me to wife: "Sorry, honey, can you get that spider? I'm, uh, working on solving the mystery of the den's light switch. I know it's been 15 years since anyone has seen it operate anything, but I think tonight - right now, in fact - seems high time for me to finally figure it out. Insect spray, by the way, is in the kitchen cabinet. Thanks honey.").
So, back to the horror of my recent run-in with the bug. This gargantuan, pre-historic, six-legged demon is taunting me from the counter, making my entire body convulse in fear. Add to that the realization that, not 10 feet away, lies my sleeping wife - oblivious to my being the main character in the horror movie being acted out on the other side of the wall. I could try to wake her up, I reason, and ask for her help. But my wife is not one to be happy when awakened in the middle of the night. My stomach tenses up more as I realize I have to actually take care of this myself. I recognize that if I try to kill this thing and fail, I will scream. But, if I try to kill it and am successful, I will probably scream anyway. And if said screams awaken my wife, she will surely unleash the Power of Grayskull on me.
As time passes, I literally stand frozen, part of me fearing for my life, another part of me wondering how I could possibly muster up the nerve to use the latest issue of Games magazine, found on top of the toilet tank, to smash this creature back to the hell from whence it came.
In an ideal world, I would have had a heavy clear container of some kind handy so I could just place it over the bug in question, and perhaps by some stroke of luck, God's most disturbing creature would asphyxiate by morning. The trick with this method is, you'd have to place a brick, a file cabinet or the living room couch on top of the container so that the bigger bugs can't simply walk across the room, dragging the container with them (picture the scene from the fine cultural phenomenon known as the television show "Cops" - where a hoodlum runs through yards until he finds a plastic kiddy pool to hide beneath. Then said hoodlum skitters across the yard to safety -- still under cover, pool and all). My palmetto bug seemed pretty capable of re-creating that scene based on the size of his pecs alone.
So, a few minutes have passed at this point, and I still find myself petrified and motionless, staring at my six-legged nemesis. It's at times like this when you tend to feel every little change in atmospheric pressure around your body. Every nerve ending in your body tickles with the fearful thought of something touching you, landing on you or crawling on you. This is what psychologists refer to as "a HUGE deal." I stand fearing for my life with that creepy feeling that something is on me.
As an aside, it is at this point when I relish the idea of someday going back to NY just so I can deal with insects of the right scale. Given their size here in Georgia, they should come with a warning, or be required to have a State-certified, onboard lighting safety system.
Back to the horror I'm living….
I'm so jumpy at this point, flinching and swatting at every part of my body which feels that ghastly tickle sensation. Then, there it is! On the back of my calf (side note: if you ever want to know what a palmetto bug probably feels like on the back of your calf, just take the corner of a paper towel and rub it gently on the area.)
So I just KNOW there's something touching my calf very lightly and I immediately freak out, swatting at this imagined thing as hard as I can – accidentally catapulting the decorative trash can clear across the bathroom in the process. RANG-TANG-TANG!!!!
So much for keeping quiet. The fancy metal trash can with the red flowers on the side sails across the floor and hits the side of the tub with a piercingly loud CLANG. Mental check on wife: still oblivious and sound asleep. Whew!
Taking account of the situation about 20 minutes in: I still have a stubborn mutant insect on my counter. There are now countless empty paper cups, wrappers, and other bathroom trash items strewn across the floor. I still have not managed to use the toilet or take a shower. And I have to be up for work in less than four hours. An increasingly impossible checklist to complete.
I finally get to a point where I need to release some of the 24 oz. of water I drank earlier in the evening. While the bug was comfortable under the cover of his secluded faucet, I knew I couldn't find a way to crush his spirit and his exoskeleton. I just couldn't find the guts to expose HIS – especially since I didn't have a clear shot. I finally had to make my move (away from the bug, but a move nonetheless). I relieve myself for what seems like just 15 seconds. When I came back over to check on my enemy's position, I find to my horror that the sonofabitch is GONE!
All that time - a half hour of complete insanity, and he disappears the second I turn my back! How did he know I was gone? I mean, I understand any animal in fear will take the easiest escape, but this is a palmetto bug. Last I heard, they don't have reasoning skills.
Now I start picking up things from the counter with my fingertips, peeking under them, and then flinging them across the room in fear that he could be hiding beneath or behind virtually anything. Now I'm completely freaked out because he's disappeared. I'm looking everywhere: ceiling, floor, walls. Nothing. Nowhere. He is gone. GONE!
In the meantime, the bathroom is completely ransacked. It's quite literally a reflection of my complete and utter failure to dispose of this demon bug in an efficient and tidy manner. The bathroom's about as much a mess as the dilemma in which I now find myself.
Now I have to try to figure out if I'm just giving up (which I kind of already did upon first seeing this disgusting insect), or if I should continue to look for him. I have several things against me:
- I clearly can't stand the sight of a bug,
- I have a huge mess to clean up now,
- I still need to take a shower,
- It's approaching 3:30 in the morning, and
- While I'd like to resolve the situation, I know that I firmly do not WANT to find this thing again.
Finally I decided the best course of action would be to take my shower in the kids' bathroom and to close the bathroom doors in the master bedroom. The logic of knowing that this pest came from outside the house to use my bathroom without the courtesy of asking does not enter my mind as I secure the bathroom door, knowing full well that he cannot possibly penetrate the one-inch gap between the floor and the bottom of the door.
My uneventful shower in the kids' bathroom was relaxing enough to get me into bed thinking hard about not thinking about the bug.
To add a bit of color to this story, I am not a small man. I have what some consider an imposing-tough-guy-native-New-Yorker look, and I came down to Georgia with no fear. The irony is that I was brought to my knees by a native Georgian less than half my size. It's got a similar storyline as the movie Deliverance, only this was scarier. The native in my story deserved a death sentence - if only because anyone with more than two legs who enters my house without an invite is entitled to die. Hey, I make the rules. I just can't believe what a liberal I am when it comes to actually enforcing them.
Because I lost this standoff, I will keep my eyes peeled, wondering what story that cockroach kin is telling HIS wife as he works his glutes on the elliptical machine. Bug: "I saw another one, Gladys. This time it was male, nearly naked, and swatting around the room like a woman."
The next time around I won't be so kind (yes I will), scared (um, not even fooling myself here), or willing to spend the time to wait for him to make the first move (right, like I'll be the one that takes the offensive). The next time around, I'll be able to finally live up to the macho version of the story that I told MY wife this time:
"Oh, it was no big deal, just a palmetto bug. I smashed it, flushed it and went back to bed."
Sunday, July 22, 2007
The Bible Belt Loops North
I've officially been a Bible Belt resident for approximately two months. As long as I don't mind driving for 40 days and 40 nights to find a synagogue (and I don't), it's fine. What I left behind in New York was the melting pot of religion, culture, dining, acceptance, stress, costly parking, foul-smelling public transportation and skyscrapers that throw bricks off their faces at pedestrians like kids throw water balloons out a second-story window in the 'burbs. Boy do I miss it.
Anyway, last week confirmed my belief that it was a good idea that we moved when we did. While we (the new Southern 'we') have ownership of the Bible-thumping loonies, in a place where everyone and his brother is an ordained minister of some sort, New York is somehow paying the price for being so open.
Being really far from Kansas, Long Island isn't exactly the first place you think of when you hear the word tornado. However, this past week, Dorothy and the gang decided to pay Islip Terrace a visit. Truthfully, if Long Island did have a flat, plainsy, Kansas-like area, Islip Terrace is it. Islip Terrace – and the entire South Shore of Long Island, for that matter – is a barren wasteland of flatness, strip malls and slightly-too-expensive housing. We North Shore types only do two things on the South Shore: 1) go to concerts at Jones Beach, and 2) use it as a cut-through to get to the Belt Parkway.
Back to the point: Islip Terrace apparently did something to piss off Mother Nature. As the region experienced the most violent rainstorm of the past century, a handful of Islip Terrace residents got the rare opportunity to see Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt speed past to try to get their crystals into the vortex of the tornado that opened a hefty can of whoop-ass on the town. Trees three feet wide snapped as easily as Daniel-son's leg in the final scene of The Karate Kid; a shed became dislodged from its foundation and wound up fully in a neighbor's yard (imagine the scene: "See, Mike? I told you I'd get my sawzall back from you one way or another."); and cars experienced damage that I'm sure will be a bitch to explain to the insurance company ("Well, Mr. Adjustor… I can't REALLY explain why the interior of the Taurus is sprouting saplings.)
At least nobody was hurt, and more importantly, Mrs. Cheever's beloved, hand-made wooden tulips escaped unscathed, even as they sat in the window box outside her living room, next to the mammoth tree that took out the power lines that once delivered electricity to the entire town of Islip.
And then there was the rain. THE RAIN! Seeing the pictures of the flooding reminded me of the time I spent in China. China, it should be noted, is a third-world country. They have virtually no infrastructure, including proper drainage, to deal with many of the daily problems they are faced with. When it rained there, everything flooded big-time, and bicycle-ridden men were hard up to deliver food orders to the local Jewish population. (Cultural note: Chinese food in China isn't the same as in the U.S. They use normal containers – not those ridiculous square boxes with the rickety wire handles.) Ironically, after looking at the Long Island pictures, I found myself hungry about an hour later.
What's not so surprising about Long Islanders is that, as evidenced by the photos, they don't seem to care that other cars are literally floating away in several feet of water. There's always some jackass in a four-wheel-drive (usually some wussy-type truck like a Honda CR-V) who just knows his vehicle was made for this exact situation and guns it into the temporary river delta - only to be the next putz calling for help from his brother-in-law that lives nearby and has a boat. These are the same people who fail to realize that it doesn't matter how many wheels you have driving when you're on ice.
As I understand it, the Island has dried out somewhat, and everything is back to normal. Everything, that is, except the sandbox in the Lembeck's backyard, which is now full of wet sand because SOMEONE forgot to put the lid on it before it rained.
To add insult to injury, New York City decided that same day that it needed some attention and immediately exploded. Well, it exploded in midtown. Apparently, people walking through Manhattan aren't jittery enough about potential terrorism. No, the street decided to add to their daily anxiety by spontaneously exploding in the heart of rush hour. A non-terrorist explosion, it caused a powerful steam geyser to spray up into the air. Keep in mind, steam flows freely in the underbelly of the City. The Indians obviously never realized the potential in steam and decided to sell the entire island, Empire State Building and all, to the white man for a West Virginia state quarter, a few nylon fibers and a George Forman Grill.
As New York heals, many devout locals there are seeking help from the Bible to make sense of it all. If they are able to find peace and understanding through it all, more power to them. In the meantime, I have to go warm up my car. Rosh Hashana is coming in a short 52 days and I can't be late for services.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Give Me Independence or Give Me Death
We only had two near-death experiences at our house this past July 4. Both involved children, but only one was prompted by an adult. Thankfully everyone survived. Everyone, that is, but the frog that was found belly up in the pool skimmer.
Since we just moved into this house toward the end of June, Independence Day gave us the perfect excuse to host our first party. First off, this house was seemingly built for parties. The layout is such that Caligula (12 AD – 41 AD) himself used it as the inspiration for his Roman Bath. For those of you who don't know the story of Caligula, it involves a psychotic Roman ruler who was known for his extreme extravagance, eccentricity, depravity and cruelty. He is widely recognized for having been the very first person to utter the words "You're Fired" on national network TV. But I digress...
The party started without a hitch. Drinks flowed freely, kids and the aforementioned former amphibians floated in the pool, lawn darts streamed through the air – aaaaaahh, summertime in the South.
Now, I confess, I'm well-known for being the uncle that flips kids off their rafts in the pool, bumps them in when they're standing on the edge – that sort of thing. In other words, it never really comes as a surprise if some random kid winds up unexpectedly underwater when good 'ole Uncle Scott is around.
So picture the scene: a ten-year-old kid, let's call him "Humberto" for confidentiality's sake, is floating on a tube in the pool, and has been pretty much all day long. Humberto keeps passing comments all day about how small the pool is, how shallow it is, how nobody could drown in it, etc., etc., etc. Essentially, Humberto is at once enjoying the soothing effects of floating in the pool AND mocking the pool for its size, shape, depth, color – even its purported inability to drown people. This, my friends, is what we "writers" call "foreshadowing," or, a process by which part of the story's anatomy is purposefully cut away by an overpaid rabbi from Westchester.
Having had just about enough of this kid's anti-aquatic taunts, I waited until just the right moment to plan my counter-attack. As he floated by me while sitting on top of a tube, he floated by throwing out another pool-related taunt. Just as he passed, I dove under, came up in front of him and flipped him backwards into the water that "couldn't drown anyone." His terrified screams of "NO! NO! NO!" were met by deaf ears as I had finally scored a point back on behalf of my beloved backyard summertime haven.
Figuring I had taught him a lesson, I found myself laughing inside. Until three nanoseconds later, I hear my sister screaming from the pool's edge, "HE CAN'T SWIM! HE CAN'T SWIM!" It took me about a half a second to be under the water, grab him and pull him to safety as he latched onto my body as tightly as an angry boa constrictor might. The terrified look on Humberto's face and the claw marks on my back were testament to the fact that my sister was indeed telling the truth.
My first thought was, "Holy shit, I almost drowned a kid at my very first pool party." My second thought was, "Why didn't anyone tell me that this TEN YEAR OLD KID who has been in the pool all day doesn't know how to swim?"
As soon as Humberto hit the patio, his bathing suit came off with all the swiftness of a Let's Make a Deal contestant trying to win $50 from Monty Hall. Humberto was fine by the end of the day – just a little shaken up. As a last note, I should point out that approximately two hours later, Humberto came back outside and admitted that while his life flashed before his eyes, it was actually "fun." Why I oughta….!
Which brings me to the next exciting adventure of our death-defying party. Just after dinner, the barbecue was simmering down from its red-hot red-meat-scorching glory and the adults were all unbuttoning their top buttons. Which reminds me, if anyone's considering a move to the Bible Belt, good pizza and Chinese take-out aren't the only things you can't find in the south. Again I digress....
The Popsicles were handed out as each kid fought over who would get the last red one in the box. (Note: it's always helpful to have an adult who's willing to take the fall on that one and eat the last red one themselves.) As the children all ran around, Popsicles sticking out of their mouths and scissors in hands, "Barney" decided to approach me as I sat at the post-dinner poker table. Folding a pair of nines to what I was sure was a made two-pair (I was correct, incidentally), Barney asked what I was doing. "Losing!," I snapped, scaring the tip off the Popsicle into his inhaling mouth.
The initial shock was just that: Barney, looking at me wide-eyed for about two seconds before he began turning blue, made a mad dash for the house. I immediately ran after him, yelling his name and hoping to God that the Heimlich Maneuver wasn't just something I had heard about on last season's 'Dancing With The Stars.' Right on my heels was Humberto's dad Louie. I grabbed Barney and flipped him around. Just as I was about to administer the very maneuver whose posters I always laugh at in restaurants, Barney began crying. Once I heard that cry, I knew that he would be fine – and I realized I had left my poker chips unattended. I had no idea what was happening. But I needed to get this resolved as quickly as possible to get back to my stack.
If I didn't know any better, I would have gotten all 'My Name Is Earl' on everyone's ass and gone the karma route. I mean, I try to kill someone's kid in my pool – and almost immediately thereafter, my own kid tries to off himself with a purple superhero Popsicle. Aaaaahh, the joys of summertime fun. I just chalked it up to coincidence and a healthy lack of parenting on my part.
After everyone escaped death without incident, we all retired to the front yard to see the pyrotechnic craptacular that twenty bucks buys you at a supermarket. After all, it was Independence Day. What's July 4th without some rinky-dink little fireworks show that is almost as impressive as a lit cigar, only they smell worse? What do you expect from the local supermarket? I can only suggest that a single Macy's firework shell has more firepower in it than the entire display of "fireworks" they sell at Publix. But how can I complain? I didn't even purchase any fireworks this year. At least a friend brought some.
Our first party at the new house sure was fun. In between trying to make sure that everyone stayed alive, we did manage to drink, eat and have a pretty good time. The seafood cheese dip was outstanding, the homemade salsa someone brought was terrific and my sister is no longer welcome at my parties if she is going to bring ice pops. If anyone is free, I think we're going to be having a Labor Day party, too. Just don't forget the life preserver.
Since we just moved into this house toward the end of June, Independence Day gave us the perfect excuse to host our first party. First off, this house was seemingly built for parties. The layout is such that Caligula (12 AD – 41 AD) himself used it as the inspiration for his Roman Bath. For those of you who don't know the story of Caligula, it involves a psychotic Roman ruler who was known for his extreme extravagance, eccentricity, depravity and cruelty. He is widely recognized for having been the very first person to utter the words "You're Fired" on national network TV. But I digress...
The party started without a hitch. Drinks flowed freely, kids and the aforementioned former amphibians floated in the pool, lawn darts streamed through the air – aaaaaahh, summertime in the South.
Now, I confess, I'm well-known for being the uncle that flips kids off their rafts in the pool, bumps them in when they're standing on the edge – that sort of thing. In other words, it never really comes as a surprise if some random kid winds up unexpectedly underwater when good 'ole Uncle Scott is around.
So picture the scene: a ten-year-old kid, let's call him "Humberto" for confidentiality's sake, is floating on a tube in the pool, and has been pretty much all day long. Humberto keeps passing comments all day about how small the pool is, how shallow it is, how nobody could drown in it, etc., etc., etc. Essentially, Humberto is at once enjoying the soothing effects of floating in the pool AND mocking the pool for its size, shape, depth, color – even its purported inability to drown people. This, my friends, is what we "writers" call "foreshadowing," or, a process by which part of the story's anatomy is purposefully cut away by an overpaid rabbi from Westchester.
Having had just about enough of this kid's anti-aquatic taunts, I waited until just the right moment to plan my counter-attack. As he floated by me while sitting on top of a tube, he floated by throwing out another pool-related taunt. Just as he passed, I dove under, came up in front of him and flipped him backwards into the water that "couldn't drown anyone." His terrified screams of "NO! NO! NO!" were met by deaf ears as I had finally scored a point back on behalf of my beloved backyard summertime haven.
Figuring I had taught him a lesson, I found myself laughing inside. Until three nanoseconds later, I hear my sister screaming from the pool's edge, "HE CAN'T SWIM! HE CAN'T SWIM!" It took me about a half a second to be under the water, grab him and pull him to safety as he latched onto my body as tightly as an angry boa constrictor might. The terrified look on Humberto's face and the claw marks on my back were testament to the fact that my sister was indeed telling the truth.
My first thought was, "Holy shit, I almost drowned a kid at my very first pool party." My second thought was, "Why didn't anyone tell me that this TEN YEAR OLD KID who has been in the pool all day doesn't know how to swim?"
As soon as Humberto hit the patio, his bathing suit came off with all the swiftness of a Let's Make a Deal contestant trying to win $50 from Monty Hall. Humberto was fine by the end of the day – just a little shaken up. As a last note, I should point out that approximately two hours later, Humberto came back outside and admitted that while his life flashed before his eyes, it was actually "fun." Why I oughta….!
Which brings me to the next exciting adventure of our death-defying party. Just after dinner, the barbecue was simmering down from its red-hot red-meat-scorching glory and the adults were all unbuttoning their top buttons. Which reminds me, if anyone's considering a move to the Bible Belt, good pizza and Chinese take-out aren't the only things you can't find in the south. Again I digress....
The Popsicles were handed out as each kid fought over who would get the last red one in the box. (Note: it's always helpful to have an adult who's willing to take the fall on that one and eat the last red one themselves.) As the children all ran around, Popsicles sticking out of their mouths and scissors in hands, "Barney" decided to approach me as I sat at the post-dinner poker table. Folding a pair of nines to what I was sure was a made two-pair (I was correct, incidentally), Barney asked what I was doing. "Losing!," I snapped, scaring the tip off the Popsicle into his inhaling mouth.
The initial shock was just that: Barney, looking at me wide-eyed for about two seconds before he began turning blue, made a mad dash for the house. I immediately ran after him, yelling his name and hoping to God that the Heimlich Maneuver wasn't just something I had heard about on last season's 'Dancing With The Stars.' Right on my heels was Humberto's dad Louie. I grabbed Barney and flipped him around. Just as I was about to administer the very maneuver whose posters I always laugh at in restaurants, Barney began crying. Once I heard that cry, I knew that he would be fine – and I realized I had left my poker chips unattended. I had no idea what was happening. But I needed to get this resolved as quickly as possible to get back to my stack.
If I didn't know any better, I would have gotten all 'My Name Is Earl' on everyone's ass and gone the karma route. I mean, I try to kill someone's kid in my pool – and almost immediately thereafter, my own kid tries to off himself with a purple superhero Popsicle. Aaaaahh, the joys of summertime fun. I just chalked it up to coincidence and a healthy lack of parenting on my part.
After everyone escaped death without incident, we all retired to the front yard to see the pyrotechnic craptacular that twenty bucks buys you at a supermarket. After all, it was Independence Day. What's July 4th without some rinky-dink little fireworks show that is almost as impressive as a lit cigar, only they smell worse? What do you expect from the local supermarket? I can only suggest that a single Macy's firework shell has more firepower in it than the entire display of "fireworks" they sell at Publix. But how can I complain? I didn't even purchase any fireworks this year. At least a friend brought some.
Our first party at the new house sure was fun. In between trying to make sure that everyone stayed alive, we did manage to drink, eat and have a pretty good time. The seafood cheese dip was outstanding, the homemade salsa someone brought was terrific and my sister is no longer welcome at my parties if she is going to bring ice pops. If anyone is free, I think we're going to be having a Labor Day party, too. Just don't forget the life preserver.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Telephone Fun
Settling into a new house sure can be rife with interesting and unexpected events. Case in point: our new telephone number.
Initially, we had our telephone connected by Comcast as part of a triple-play package. It turns out Comcast is a company that wrote the book on how NOT to handle customer service. But that's a story that will be told in another blog entry -- after my television service is completely hooked up and working. Judging by the way it's been going, this may not happen for a long time. But I digress...
After the debacle with Comcast was finally ended, we elected to turn to BellSouth for telephone service. They issued us a new (easy to remember) telephone number, and it's been great - except for all the calls requesting pizza delivery.
As I sit writing this entry, the phone has rung twice with people looking for Papa John's Pizza - a third-rate pizza delivery service akin to Domino's, but with less panache and Italian integrity. At first, we thought we were given their old number, but a quick internet search turned up a single-digit difference between us.
The fun of this is that we do not get upset, we do not shout at the callers and we do not tell them they've misdialed. Rather, we have decided to answer the phone "Good Afternoon, Papa John's" every time the caller ID shows us a name we don't recognize. It's funny how many people just believe you. To date, we've taken orders for:
- 22 large plain pizzas
- 19 large pizzas with some sort of topping
- 53 medium pies
- all sorts of side dishes and drinks
I believe you really need to embrace it when you are faced with a situation like this. There's no real way to fix it without changing your telephone number. So in the meantime, I've been calling Papa John's to see if they're getting my calls.
The First Wheelie - and I Dumped it
So I finally did my first wheelie on a motorized vehicle. Unfortunately, I also dumped it in the process. I get the feeling you're not supposed to let off the clutch so fast when you're riding a lawnmower.
Homeownership has its ups and downs. (Oh! Someone give this guy a rimshot!)
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Waffle House
If you've driven through the South, you may have noticed that there is a Waffle House on virtually every corner. In suburban Atlanta alone, statistics show that there are more Waffle Houses than street lights.
I've never actually BEEN to a Waffle House, but I've seen more of them in the past two weeks than I saw snowflakes in the New York blizzard of '96. Now, I don't have anything against waffles; I rather enjoy a good waffle every now and then. I do, however, have something against gritty-looking, dingy, roadside roach motels that serve what some stereotypically classify as "food," and whose wait staff (I'm arbitrarily going out on a limb here) generally have more nipples than they have teeth.
Though I've tried my hardest to sway them, my kids are dying to go to a Waffle House. We have other options here, including IHOP, Denny's and Cracker Barrell (another place I've never been, but only heard good things about. Future blog entry, I'm sure), so why would we choose the grittiness of such an apparent roadside hazard whose food, and I'm guessing at this point, would probably cause me to experience the equivalent of labor pains? I'm just not sure I want to dine anywhere that requires me to kick off the gastronomic experience with a Maalox aperitif.
What's worse is that there are so many of these restaurants (term used loosely) here that the kids have actually started counting how many they see. This is not a good thing. I now have to listen to someone scream "WAFFLE HOUSE!!!!" every time we need to run to the market.
While I'm on the subject, I have a bone to pick... Was every Waffle House built in 1972? You look inside and it's like a scene out of Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange.' Big paper globe lights of every size, grease stains on the walls, polyester-clad wait staff. How did a chain of low-end eateries become so ubiquitous with that kind of decor? And, hey... has anyone ever heard the term 'corporate logo'???? I mean, it's one thing to have a single store and a low budget, but when you have 35,000 locations within a 10-square-mile area, I think you can afford to throw a few bucks at a design student for something more than non-descript letters on individual square backgrounds that Vanna White herself would be proud to turn. I've even heard that some Waffle Houses have Wi-Fi access!
I realize I'm new to the area, and that some of the local establishments in my old neck of the woods may have seemed questionable (The Shack, anyone?), but I'm pretty sure I won't be hitting a Waffle House anytime soon. Unless I can get the kids to agree to count something else. I know where there are a few Hooters around here.
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