A Collection of Random Thoughts

Many times throughout the writing and editing process, lines, thoughts and entire segments of stories wind up completely cut from the final product. In addition, there are one-liners and stand-alone observations that have no home in the body of an otherwise well-crafted story.

In the interest of minimizing the amount of digital waste on my hard drive, I’ve dredged through the edited clippings and reclaimed some of the more interesting ones to share with you:

• Paul, my brother-in-law, is much skinnier than I am. He neglected to bring a bathing suit when he and the family came to my house to go swimming. I had to tell him I couldn’t lend him one of mine because he’d be swimming in it.

• I woke up with a cleaning bug a few weeks ago. When my wife Debbie asked what I was doing upstairs for so long, I confessed that I had just cleaned the shit out of the bathroom.

• This past Earth Day I took inventory in my office: styrofoam cuppa joe, regular trash can full of paper, aerosol spray can and SUV keys. I better go hug a tree, PRONTO.

• I think Jerry Van Dyke's brother is a Dick.

• I never cut the cards because I don't like to play god. But somehow I have no problem shuffling.

• Observation from a Jew in the South: Between my house and my sister's: 9 churches, 1 mosque, zero synagogues. This explains why I didn't get a Seder invite. The Torah Belt this is not.

• Try as I might, I just can't wrap my head around why someone would go to great lengths to jump into an enclosed space with a real bear.

• Odd, isn’t it? As kids we couldn't wait for gym class; as adults we’d rather solve for x than go to the gym.

• The 9.5 oz. can of Edge shave gel says '35% MORE than 7 oz. size' - no duh! And lemme guess, a 6-pack of Coke is 600% the size of a single can?

• I frequently sweep the house. Not so much because it's dirty. I figure curling is my best shot at an Olympic medal and I need the practice.

• If I were any kitchen utensil, I'd be a Ginsu knife because I'm sharp, I'm cheap and most women laugh when they think of me in their drawers.

• Proof that my dog is smarter than me: I was fully outside in the pouring rain trying to coax her from the doorway. Standing at the door, she cocked her head and peed on the floor.

• My friend Jack is a press technician at the U.S. Mint. He goes to work to make money.

• I’m not a fan of the piñata. First, they now make them out of indestructible reinforced corrugated cardboard. Second, I recently witnessed 14 kids nearly kill each other for a few packs of Nerds. The birthday boy was crying.

• A broken hip is like a save-the-date card from death.

• Once the war is over and the economy bounces back I'm hoping they'll work on getting good pizza in Atlanta.

• Candles are the gift that says "I had no idea what to get you and I had THIS lying around the house."

• This morning I was moving 0 mph in a 65 mph zone. In most places this would be considered an obstruction. In Atlanta I was making good time.

• Howie Mandel was funnier when he had hair.

• The iPhone is definitely the single greatest gadget ever invented.

• Watching The Goonies on DVD with my kids reminded me how much better this movie is than so many best picture winners.

• If every song was written by John Hiatt there would be no bad music.

• I recently had to explain to a Starbucks barista that The Onion is satire. I gave him a dollar tip. He'll need it.

• A trip to Cold Stone Creamery never disappoints. Unlike that crap they try to pass off as sushi at Costco.

• If I could go back in time I'd use blue finger paint on the kindergarten picture my mom hung on the fridge. Red clashed with the wallpaper.

I hope you enjoyed a little break from the norm. I look forward to sharing more random thoughts in the future, but I'll have to write a bunch of real articles before I have enough to do this again.

Poll Dancing – The Modern Age of Politics in America

It’s beginning to make sense to me why you have to be 18 to vote. Before you can make an informed decision about who gets impeached next, you have to understand the intricacies of your favorite candidate’s sexual proclivities. Not surprisingly, 18 is the age of consent (unless you live in the South or the Midwest, or your last name is Spears, or you are a teenager that attends high school with similar-aged teenagers of the opposite – or same – sex). You’re also supposed to be 18 before you are allowed to see an adult movie, unless you’re famous, in which case you’re allowed to star in pornographic “private” home videos solely created to meet contract obligations with mass online video distributors.

For my money, it’s a relief that nobody under the age of 18 has any idea that the internet is nothing more than an all-you-can-eat buffet of anything and everything remotely sexual. And I’m not talking Sizzler here. This is the real deal. Fortunately children and teens only navigate to safe sites like Wikipedia, where little information is correct, but it’s a useful resource to do vital school research about the history of important historical and cultural subjects like the Jonas Brothers. Of course, Facebook has caught on, but that’s really just a diversion created by the online porn industry to keep you nearby.

Speaking of websites, some prominent Politicians have made recent news after visits to an entirely other league of “social networking” sites. Politicians have a long history of getting caught having torrid affairs and raising the ‘political bar’ (if you know what I mean). Case in point: New York’s recent former Governor, the sanctimonious “steamroller” of New York, Eliot Spitzer. It seems that Spitzer, when not bringing down major prostitution rings, was keeping others in business. Client #9, as he was affectionately known by Albany insiders, had a “thing” for a girl named Kristen, Ashley or Silda, depending upon who you asked and when. The difference is in the cost of their company and the basis of their relationship. Let’s compare:

• Silda – Cost: Free. Relationship: Lawfully wedded wife.
• Kristen/Ashley – Cost: Four hour/$5,000 minimum. Relationship: Who cares? I don’t know what she did for $5,000, but whatever it was she must be awfully good at it.

Client #9 experienced a profound error in judgment when he asked his friend Kristen to come over and play. A brief analysis of the situation would lead anyone to the conclusion that if you don’t want anyone, including your lawfully wedded wife Silda, to find out about Kristen, this transaction is best handled with cash. It’s easy to fly under the radar with a random $30 charge on the old AmEx, but $5,000 is a bit of an eyebrow raiser – especially when the charge is for Ralph’s House of Escorts and Lawn Maintenance. Is it possible that New York’s former Attorney General and recent Governor was so sex-addled that he forgot he wasn’t supposed to tell his wife about the great hooker he just hired? “She looks just like our daughter, honey! She reminded me of home and how much I love my family.”

Spitzer resigned his post immediately after the media spit out his bones (Ha!). Lieutenant Governor David Paterson was immediately sworn in, declaring he had a “clear vision for the future.” Seemingly for comedic purpose, Paterson is legally blind. In any case, he almost beat himself to the podium when he declared, not ten seconds later, that he had cheated on his wife – at a Harlem Days Inn that charged by the hour. It wasn’t quite the Mayflower Hotel, like in Spitzer’s case, but then it probably doesn’t really matter to a guy who can’t see the room.

Nevertheless, sex scandals and politics have gone hand-in-hand since the dawn of time. Among the legions of political heroes involved in such scandalous activities, these few best illustrate the ones that rocked the world one bed at a time:

Bill Clinton, President of the United States
Clinton’s presidential ‘inkwell’ spilled over on an overzealous intern named Monica Lewinsky who had a thing for powerful guys who resemble W.C. Fields, blue dresses made from materials that would make Rosie from the Bounty commercials hang her head in shame, and Churchill length Cohibas that Fidel Castro himself later requested back in a hand-written letter to Clinton.

John F. Kennedy, President of the United States
Political analysts attribute Kennedy’s overwhelming 1960 victory to being widely recognized by people who passed through one of New York’s major air travel hubs. It’s a little-known fact that prior to entering politics Kennedy worked as a shoeshine boy at LaGuardia Airport, which back then was known as Fiorello’s Discount Air Strip and Vaudeville Palace. Kennedy became enthralled with a local Vaudevillian performer then known as Norma Rae, saw her skyrocket to worldwide fame and made it his life’s work to bed down with Marilyn Monroe.

George Washington, President of the United States
Now this guy had a reputation for sleeping around. Anyone who has visited a location on the continent of North America has come across a sign bearing the words “George Washington slept here.” One natural question that has been asked a thousand times is, “Where are all the ‘James Buchanan Slept Here’ signs?” Well, my investigation is over. I’m happy to report that Buchanan, who was the only president that was single, has shingles hanging all over San Francisco, Miami and the East Village. Draw your own conclusions.

Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, Mayor of Arlington, Washington
When your mayoral duties involve updating your Myspace profile, you’re likely to get young voters to the polls. Turning to the internet for information, male voters far and wide came across photos of the candidate on her Myspace profile page wearing nothing but her bra and panties. Debate tickets sold out faster than a Beatles reunion concert, although there is no record of exactly what was debated, where she stood on the issues or whether or not her opponent even showed up.

Richard Nixon, President of the United States
Surprisingly, Nixon – who was involved in the biggest hotel-related political scandal in history – somehow couldn’t manage to shoehorn sex into the story.

In an effort to be as fair as possible, I’d like to offer this list of politicians who have never had anything to do with sex scandals:

Oil or Transmission Fluid: What’s the Differential?

Of the many puzzling events that somehow led me to where I am today, the one I question most is why I was ever hired to work at Jiffy Lube when I was 16. The events of this past week were a reminder that I am unconditionally unqualified where it relates to automotive repair and maintenance.

Last week, my brother-in-law Paul performed several highly technical repairs on both of my cars. Every one of these repairs involved using specialized filthy mechanic tools that are inexplicably kept in a toolbox that cost more than a standard-issue passenger jet.

For reasons that must be analogous to why I’m always asked to disrobe when I go to the doctor for a sore throat, Paul started every repair by removing a wheel from the car. As he began to replace parts I couldn’t identify or locate on either vehicle, I began to ask the most logical questions that came to mind. One such exchange occurred while he was replacing the brakes on my Toyota Prius:

Me: Did you bleed the line?
Paul (with a baffled glance in my direction): Did I what?
Me: I meant do you need me to loosen the restrictor plate?
Paul: (no response)
Me: I’m just trying to help.

This line of questioning ended with Paul shaking his head in disgust and getting back to work. The entire process reminded me of the job I never should have had.

Nearly 20 years after I went for the initial interview at Jiffy Lube, I still know as little about cars as somebody can know and still be able to operate one. Back then I somehow passed muster with the management and was hired as a technician.

Upon hiring me, Gary, the Jiffy Lube manager handed me a training manual and instructed me to read through it before my first day of work. While I didn’t get through the entire manual in the allotted time, I did manage to read all the way to where it said “Training Manual” on the front cover.

Since I didn’t even have a learner’s permit yet, I had to ask my friend Andrew Wagner, who owned a 1964 Ford Fairlane, to drive me to work every day after school. In exchange for the daily ride, I had to agree to two things: 1) I would get him two bottles of transmission fluid per week – not for his transmission, but because transmission fluid is the most slippery substance known to man; and 2) I would allow him to pour the transmission fluid on the ground under his wheels and “light ‘em up” on the cul-de-sac where I lived. Watching him lay a half-inch of rubber on the ground, accompanied by the massive cloud of smelly smoke, still makes me laugh today. As an aside, the tire tracks were still there on the ground five years later.

In any case, my job was ill-fated from the start. Given my assigned work station in the lower level of the facility, my extraordinary inability to perform even the simplest of tasks, like changing the oil (which is, by all accounts, the primary reason for the existence of Jiffy Lube), went unnoticed by everyone but Pat, the other guy who worked the lower bay. Pat taught me the finer points of the ten-minute oil change, and while I admit that I didn’t understand a word he was telling me, I did learn that as long as there were guys like Pat around, I would never have to do this kind of thing myself.

Nevertheless, I mastered the art of removing the oil from all sorts of cars. My job required me to let the upper level guys know when the oil tank was completely drained so they could refill it with new oil. On more than one occasion I was guilty of forgetting to replace the bolt, or “spark plug,” thereby allowing all the new oil to drain right back out the bottom and into the collection bin. I was the only one who found this to be even remotely amusing.

Suffice it to say, I am not the person you want tooling around under the car unless the situation is entirely limited to retrieving a ball, a Frisbee or some other non-automotive item that has nothing to do with the car other than sheer proximity. Even then, there are probably better people for the job.

About two months in (I know, I’m just as shocked as you are) I was given an instruction I couldn’t recall having gotten before. The customer wanted to check the “differential.” Now, I clearly recalled my Sequential Math II teacher Mr. Hoolan discussing this concept a few weeks earlier, so my challenge was trying to figure out exactly what subtraction had to do with the underside of a Ford F-150. I felt silly about all those complaints I had in school that ‘I would never need to know any of this in real life.’

As I wracked my brain, Pat sensed trouble and came to the rescue. He showed me where the differential fluid was and handed me what looked like a bottle of caulk with a flimsy rubber point and a handle on the back of it that made air go in and out. I putzed around pretending to do something around the area Pat showed me for about five minutes and gave the all clear to the guys upstairs. Still today I wouldn’t be able to identify this region on a truck. And I’m reasonably certain the device Pat handed me was a joke since it made fart sounds when I moved the handle back and forth.

Several weeks later, and for reasons still unclear to me, I was “promoted” to work in the upper bay. This meant interaction with the customers and learning to identify an entirely new set of parts. I lasted for exactly one vehicle in the upper bay.

The owner of that vehicle, a brand new Chevy conversion van, came in for a simple oil change. I took care of it with ease, closed the hood and waited for someone to pull it out to make room for the next car. When nobody got in to pull it out, Gary the manager told me to take care of it. Never having driven a car before – let alone a van that needed much more clearance around sharp corners – I got behind the wheel, put it in drive and cut the wheel hard to the right. Keith, one of the upper bay guys, went out front to direct me.

It wasn’t so much the horrible, loud screech I heard that made me realize my Jiffy Lube days were over; the look on Keith’s face said it all. As did the owner of the van, who said it all and then some – and very loudly, might I add.

I cut the wheel way too tight, drove the side of the van right into the corner of the stone building and dragged the entire side along the wall for a good two feet, thus ending my storied career as an automotive repair technician.

Nowadays I rely on Paul to help me out with my auto repairs. And I do wish I could help instead of standing around asking dumb questions and hoping he doesn’t order me to fetch him a tool I won’t be able to identify, but I know myself too well.

I’m not completely hopeless, though... Paul asked me to come over this Saturday and to pick up a muffler bearing on my way. I’ve made a few calls and nobody seems to carry them, but this should be a piece of cake.

My Late Night Meal With Kelvin

New York may be the city that never sleeps, but I don’t recommend arriving there hungry after 1:00 a.m. On a recent trip to my former hometown, I made that mistake and found myself foraging for food in all the wrong places.

I realize there are dining establishments that stay open all night, but I had the added bonus of arriving in town just in time to greet the next ice age, global warming be damned. Setting off on my sustenance-seeking adventure, I quickly realize that the distance I was willing to travel by foot from the front entrance to the hotel was directly proportional to the integer following the minus sign in the wind chill factor.

Just under the wire a mere ten feet from the hotel’s doors, I found a typical New York convenience store, and by typical I mean one whose dining options were limited to Top Ramen, some weird vacuum packed Lebanese meat product, canned Chef Boyaredee macaroni and cheese and an assortment of breath mints.

Thinking of my health, I opted for the $3.49 can of mac and cheese. On the walk back to my room (which I expected would be enough exercise to work off the humiliating, sodium-laden can of shame I was about to eat), I mentally prepared for what was to be the most disappointing and depressing mac and cheese experience of my life. Unfortunately I had no idea just how disappointing... the room, while nice, was not furnished with a can opener, a bowl or a working microwave oven. Chef Boyardee’s smiling face on the label began to mock me as I suited up to continue the most dismal gastronomic adventure in New York City history.

Dispensing with the walking distance equation to which I initially held myself, I saw that salvation for my hunger lay just two blocks away in the form of a meximelt, a soft taco and a crunchwrap supreme. Taco Bell was a marginally better option (measured in units NASA had to invent because atomic units weren’t small enough) than the unopened can of despair still sitting in the room. Since temperature could now only be properly measured in degrees Kelvin, I literally ran for the border.

As I waited to order, the combination of hunger, cold, exhaustion and self-loathing somehow worked in concert to open my eyes to the secret of Taco Bell’s success. This is an empire built around a menu where virtually every item is identical, with the exception of the order in which the ingredients are arranged. My personal thanks go out to whoever saw fit to invent a whole new ‘fourth’ meal, one that I’d be enjoying in the hotel in a few short, freezing minutes. I’m not ignorant to the damage that can be done by eating this kind of food (for that matter, neither is anyone within a 50-foot radius of me in the hours immediately following a bean burrito experience), but I do have an affinity for any food involving cheese, beef, sour cream, and sometimes bacon.

Unable to run back to the hotel due to the cryogenic freezing of my body’s tissues as I made my way through the ice-covered tundra of New York, I thought about the amount of things that happen outside in the city with reckless disregard for the weather. In fact, worse than the hosts of Today Show, who are protected from the elements by Al Roker and his mighty Doppler weather radar weight loss machine, are the legions of crazy tourists who populate the Today Show plaza on a daily basis.

These people, who clearly are nuts, stand outside for hours, often in oppressive weather, just for the promise of getting a second of airtime during which they instantaneously transform from a miserable, tired tourist into a raving lunatic frantically waving at scores of viewers who will make fun of them for being there in the first place. Invariably someone goes home bummed when Al delivers the weather from directly in front of them, causing that person’s lifelong dream of waving at a camera to go up in smoke.

Upon my arrival back at the hotel, I broke into my faux-Mexican feast, only to find out that I was short-changed by one meximelt. My Jewish side complained that not going back to resolve this catastrophic infraction would be a sin; my logical side, which threatened to beat the Jewish side to a pulp, won – despite the fact that a meximelt, in all its gooey, melted delight would have been worth the trouble.

The quest was over. I may not be MacGyver, but I found a way to feed myself. Which reminds me… If you know of a food drive, I have a non-perishable canned food item that I need to donate. As long as you don’t mind that it’s frozen solid.

Scott Just Posted This Article

I just discovered I have OCD. Not in the traditional sense like normal abnormal people. I don’t feel the urge to straighten out the disaster on my desk and I don’t wash my hands every three minutes. I do, however, have a crystal meth-like addiction to updating my status on Facebook. My recently acquired iPhone (status: Scott is phoning it in – hahaha) is the technological Purell that makes it all possible no matter where I am.

When I’m not updating my own status, I find myself consumed with checking up on everyone else’s. In fact, when I poked (more on that term later) around, I noticed that more messages are being transmitted on this website than the sum total of communications that happened between when the Phoenicians’ developed the first alphabet (pretty much our current alphabet with the exception of the letter P for reasons nobody understands, which led directly to the First Russian Uprising of 1242 – later renamed the Prussian Uprising, just to stick it in the face of the Teutonic Knights, who defiantly added a silent K to the beginning of their titles because they thought Teutonic Nights sounded too much like a Jenna Jameson movie they had recently rented) – and Al Gore’s invention of greenhouse gas. As an aside, Jack Ray Tompkins, a carnation farmer from Gretna, NE would argue that when his wife Bobbie Anne moved out, he was truly the first to realize the damage that could be done by greenhouse gas (his status: Jack Ray’s greenhouse only seems to fill with gas after he eats broccoli). While Jack Ray considers legal action against Mr. Gore, I’ll get back to my story.

For eons, which are classified as ‘three month increments’ in internet terms, Facebook’s primary users were high school and college students. That has all changed. In fact, while I’m not old by any stretch, a younger coworker of mine named Dayna recently assured me that unless I do something immediate and drastic, I will be the proud owner of a one-way ticket for the short bus to Squaresville. That moment marked my crossing over the social networking event horizon and into a black hole where my parents both registered for Facebook accounts before I did.

As I updated my status for the 11th time today (Scott is writing again), it occurred to me that things have changed a lot since I was in high school. We didn’t have email, text messaging, instant messages, Facebook or Twitter, but our communication methods, while rudimentary, suited us well.

These handy comparison charts illustrate the fundamental differences between today’s popular communication technologies and the caveman-like ways by which we communicated:

Another interesting thing pointed out to me by Dayna is that the popular Facebook ‘poke’ isn’t nearly as innocent as it seems. This discovery has the potential to lead to serious trouble if you go around randomly poking people. Judging strictly by the dozens of people who have poked me, male and female, I’m a pretty popular guy in Facebook territory. By Dayna’s definition, I’m getting more action than Linda Lovelace at Studio 54 in 1977.

I really have grown attached to Facebook, but I think I need to detox. At least until I wake up in the morning. Scott is finally done with this article and is off to bed.

A Really Bright Idea Whose Time Came Too Early

Some ideas sound like a lot of fun to me. Only when it’s too late do I begin to question my sanity and in turn question how I made the complex series of decisions that have gotten me this far in life. This past weekend was no exception.

As the parent of a Cub Scout, I am frequently presented with opportunities to “bond” with my son. My bonding battle cry consists of 50 percent “gung ho” and 50 percent “mercy.”

I’ve never been much for camping. Growing up we never went camping. In fact, growing up we never went anywhere but to my grandparents’ house in Fort Lauderdale. Given that my sister and I had to share a terrace as our sleeping quarters, the annual pilgrimage to the “South” Bronx typically involved as many insects as camping, but with worse ventilation and a greater risk of being force-fed weird fruits like figs (without the cakey Newton covering) and dates, and Metamucil-flavored tea. Not to mention moth balls.

The point is that camping to me is just another form of self-torture. If I have the means to pay for a climate-controlled room with a clean bed and bathroom I don’t have to seriously argue with myself about getting up to visit in the middle of the night, why would I opt for a tent?

Even more torturous was the Cub Scout camping trip we participated in a few months ago. All the families were to meet at the beginning of a 15-mile bike trail to ride as a group to the campsite. This is possibly the worst idea ever developed by modern man. Though the bike trail was considered “level one,” the better part of the group riding the bikes was apparently at a skill and fitness level that could only be properly measured with carefully placed decimal points.

Adding another layer of “bonding” to that experience, we had the pleasure of dragging our sleeping quarters to a flat piece of land and building a shelter to shield us from the night that had arrived a good hour before we did. If there’s anything worse than setting up a tent, it’s doing it by the light of a campfire.

The next morning held even less appeal as I tried to sit back on the bike seat and realized I would be riding the entire 15 miles back to the car while standing fully upright on my pedals. For the record I also held my entire mid-section several inches from the car seat on the drive home.

I thought the Scouts had finally made a decision with parents like me in mind when they planned an overnight trip to the Fort Discovery science museum in Augusta, GA. We would spend the day exploring the museum, sleep among the exhibits and leave after a few classroom sessions the next morning. This idea, it turns out, was about as bad as the bike ride, only with fewer Constitutional freedoms and inalienable rights.

When we arrived, our tour guide “Eddy” began listing the rules for our stay. He verbally rattled off a list of 62 rules (really!) to a group of Cub Scouts that didn’t hear a word he said. Rules 47 and 48 were the ones that troubled me the most. The doors to the museum would be locked at 8:00 PM, and lights out was at 11. I stifled a sudden urge to pick up a poster tube from the gift shop and start yelling “Attica! Attica!” and began to deal with the fact that I would be a prisoner on lockdown inside a fun, interactive science museum surrounded by dozens of children with all the self-control of a toy poodle whose owners just came back from a two week vacation.

I also noticed that Eddy had a commitment problem. He really liked to use the phrase “pretty much,” and he used it in pretty much every single sentence he said:

Me: Can you please point me to the men’s room?
Eddy: It’s pretty much right around the corner behind that statue of Pythagoras.
Me: Who?
Eddy: Pythagoras. He pretty much invented triangles.
Me: Are you sure it's not a theorem designed to measure the length of the hypotenuse in right triangles?
Eddy: Pretty much.

Among the exhibits that demonstrated important scientific principles, like Bernoulli’s and inertia, we found mind-bending technologies like:

• “The digital character recognition device.” We were instructed to write anything we wanted on a piece of paper using our own handwriting, place it into the device and press the start button. The device was connected to a screen that would display an exact digital version of what we had written. This amazing scientific breakthrough was a standard flatbed scanner;
• “Remote facsimile communication device.” You guessed it. A piece of outdated office machinery most offices outside the Third World don’t use anymore; and
• “MagLev train.” This was interesting technology that would have been more compelling had it not been stuck to the track as if it were welded in place.

During our exploration, we came upon the perfect location to set up camp. This exhibit showed how phosphorescence, when exposed to light, made any shadow cast on it stand out. A glow-in-the-dark wall faced a strobe light that flashed every five seconds, and it was the only exhibit fully enclosed with a black curtain to keep the light out. This would be our overnight home.

Beating the rush, we quickly moved our belongings to our private sanctuary and rolled out our sleeping bags, thus making us the envy of all in attendance. It proved a decent choice until the next morning when the museum was powered up (at 7:00 AM!) and we were awoken by a 10,000 watt flashing alarm clock with a five-second snooze reprieve. This, my wife explained, was our penance for claiming the most private refuge in the entire museum.

I can’t say I’m necessarily looking forward to the next big trip, but I’ll go. At this point I know what to expect:

• Any time I am forced to spend a night in a sleeping bag, my kids will refer to me as Mr. Cranky Pants the next day,
• No matter how many times I do it, I will never understand why anyone would go camping unless they are under duress, and
• No amount of begging before these major planned trips will ever get me out of going on them.
• Pretty much.