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.

It’s a Rescue Mission, Technically

After years of building large collections of digital music and picture files, I recently decided it was time to organize it all in a meaningful and remarkably tedious way. Looking back, this is a job that should only be attempted after winning the lottery, eradicating all crime and doing away with world hunger, each of which would be easier and less time-consuming than organizing your digital photos.

Having transferred my iTunes library onto my newly purchased portable hard drive, or “floppy disk” for those of you still donning a beeper, I began the process of moving my photos to a single location. Throughout the process, I looked forward to seeing the pictures I took on a trip to Paris several years ago. Hundreds of CDs and folders later, no France pics.

Well, as it turns out I thought of the last possible place I could have the pictures stored. The laptop I used back then was essentially dead, sitting in my bottom night table drawer. I tried to fire it up last night and see if they were there. As I suspected, it wouldn’t start up. That’s when I took the little mini screwdriver to it and disassembled the entire thing looking for the hard drive. Keep in mind, my technical skills where it relates to computers can be summed up in three words: “on/off switch.”

After removing approximately as many screws as I believe come in a standard space shuttle, I had a pile of random parts, any of which could be the hard drive. Considering all the parts were hard, this was a difficult elimination process. My first step was to rule out anything with blades. The ‘fans’, as we computer geeks call them, resemble a little itty bitty version of one of those old 400 watt box-style fans that my dad used to put in the window on hot days to save money when he was too cheap to put on the air conditioning (note, it was cooler outside than in the family room). So with the fans out of the way, I began to systematically search each individual piece looking for a sticker, a label or a heat stamp marked “hard drive.” Keep in mind, these parts are extremely small. When you get inside one of these things, you begin to realize why they need tender little 6-year-old Chinese hands to assemble them in the first place.

Having located no such markings on any item, I took the next logical step, which was to walk around with the magnifying glass I needed to see the parts and show everyone in the house how big my eye looks when I do “this!” After completing that useful step, I refocused my attention on what I refer to as “The Real Housewives of Orange County” for approximately 42 minutes. Spoiler alert: this show sucks – and Billy should get rid of Quinn before their brains begin to interact and create a dangerous black hole of dumb.

Back at my workstation, I ruled out my next piece of computer – the DVD drive. This was easy to spot given the fact that it had since fallen on the floor and opened to reveal the contents I forgot to remove. As a side note, I’m selling a copy of Fletch Lives on DVD (no box) in case you know of anyone who might be interested. Next, I set all the parts out on the table in size order, starting with the screws measuring about three atoms across and working my way up to the frame of the screen, which only my dog was able to disassemble further.

After laying out every part – minus the two parts I had already discarded – my nine-year-old daughter walked over and asked, “Daddy, isn’t this the hard drive?” I smirked, kind of shook my head a little, and responded, “don’t be silly, honey, I KNOW that’s the hard drive. I’m trying to make sure there are no parts here that need to be recycled.” Another note: the hard drive was attached to a piece of the laptop body that was simply removed with a pressure switch – no need to remove so much as a single screw.

Hard drive in hand, I made my way to Best Buy to find out how the Geek Squad could rescue my files. I suppose I could have simply taken the entire laptop with me and saved a lot of time and aggravation, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to play with the magnifying glass.

Upon my arrival at the store, the clerk at the door insisted on tagging my hard drive (size: 2.5 inches x 3.5 inches – no Jewish jokes, please) for a return. I had to explain that I was gentile (I’m in the Bible Belt, for crying out loud), and that this was not a return, but a job for the Geek Squad. I made my way to the back of the store (where the Jews are forced to go for ‘de-lousing’) and found a geek to talk to. He explained that their fee for any data recovery would START at $99! “$99?!” I exclaimed, tipping my Jewish hand just a tad too much for comfort, in retrospect. “Or you can buy this ‘hard drive enclosure’ for $51.99,” he added, showing me how simple it would be to install my laptop hard drive in it and connect it to my computer with the USB. How those little barcodes connect things to computers I’ll never know.

“$51.99 is a little more than I really wanted to spend on this project,” I explained.

“Well, we do have a pretty liberal return policy; 30 days with a receipt,” he whispered with a wink. Looking at his name tag, I realized he was speaking my language.

“That sounds like a swell idea, Mordechai.”

I took possession of the loaner and made my way back home.

Just a few minutes later I was browsing the files from my dead, and now mutilated laptop. Lo and behold, I found a file folder: “pics to burn on CD.” Empty. After searching further, I located a folder called “work.” A few clicks later and voila… the dog pees on the floor. Several seconds go by and I realize nobody else even knows about it, and it ain’t gonna clean itself up. I get the paper towels, Spot Shot, Clorox wipes, Swiffer and a mop. I know there’s a way these things can work in concert to create cleanliness. I call my daughter, the one who gave me the assist on the locating the hard drive. She runs into the room excited, only to find out that daddy has made a bigger mess out of a puddle of pee and a handful of cleaning products than he made on the kitchen table with the old laptop, which by the way, didn’t need to be disassembled at all to begin with. She took hold of the cleaning process and let me finish the manly task of trying to locate my pictures from Fwonce.

In a flash, I drill down through the work folder ‘Work/Scott/Ruder Finn/Air France/Events/Press Trips/Lacroix/Pictures.’ There it is! Success! A folder full of a couple hundred pictures from the trip to Paris. I quickly copied them to my digital file folder and burned a CD of them just in case.

At that point, I removed the old laptop hard drive from the loaner enclosure, boxed the loaner back up and prepared it for its return from whence it came. The pictures are safe.

Which is more than I can say for Billy. He has no idea that Quinn is ready to have “the talk.”

A Revolution in New York

New York governor Eliot "The Hooker Booker" Spitzer has resigned his post amid a scandal that involves him paying thousands of dollars to several prostitutes for their services. Spitzer claims he didn't inhale.

Lieutenant governor David Paterson will become the state's first black governor and only the third in the nation since Reconstruction. He is legally blind. So much for a vision for the future.

More to come...

How I Bought My Ticket to Hell

I have a few theories about exactly when and where I actually bought my ticket to Hell. Any reasonable and sound person who believes in the supernatural could point to a wide array of things I’ve done in my life to explain my eventual, assured, eternal damnation.

I wasn’t the kind of kid that pulled the legs off spiders or burned ants with magnifying glasses. And I’m not the kind of adult who practices patently criminal pastimes outside the occasional traffic infraction, as evidenced by the summons recently found in my mailbox which featured a few snapshots of my Toyota Prius driving through what was seemingly a red traffic signal. The evidence, including close-ups of my license plate and an actual DNA sample left at the scene, made it difficult for me to argue it wasn’t me driving. Damn revolutionary imaging technology. But the $70 I spent to make that indiscretion go away is nothing compared to what I have to look forward to.

It’s not that I really went out of my way to assure myself a blistering infinity. My life has simply been filled with decisions that needed to be made and hunger that needed to be addressed. Who could blame someone for being decisive and sticking to their guns?

The first such instance was when I became newly-minted intern for iconic local rock station WBAB on Long Island – the youngest on the roster, in fact. I was proud of my unpaid position and saw it as the perfect excuse to leave my family behind on Rosh Hashana, the biggest of the varied Jewish holidays where families gather to feast on bland food and celebrate collective self-loathing and misery.

As it happened, legendary Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora was scheduled to visit WBAB that very day. It’s not so much that I wanted to meet Sambora, but he was my meal ticket to teenage popularity and possible sex with a really hot girl.

Weeks prior to the Sambora Incident, after years of what can only be classified as passive stalking, I finally summoned the courage to convince my friend Brian Clermont to ask out the hot girl from the music booth at the Commack Flea Market for me. When she said yes, I knew I needed to impress. This was, after all, the most sought after girl in all of Commack. Her mane of tall, stiff 80s hair represented the Holy Grail for all male flea market shoppers within a 10-mile radius. Long story short, I told her I was a bigwig with a local music outfit known as the biggest rock radio station on Long Island and promised I’d bring her to meet then next rock star that came through the doors. How can I help it if Sambora was a Goy with no respect for my predicament or my religion? What choice did I have?

More recently, I’ve become acutely aware of my religious heritage. I’m relatively certain that in my beloved town of Loganville, there are more people who have ridden in an actual space shuttle than have drawn a shamus across a line of Hebrew text in a Torah. Now, I define this next issue more as self-preservation than denial of heritage, but eight months into my Bible Belt residency none of my neighbors knows that I’m Jewish yet. Not that I’ve given them any real clues.

For instance, I would bet the house (the one I risked my life to wrap in Christmas lights) that I was the only Jew in town climbing across the roof to ensure that Santa could easily locate us when it came time to pony up with the presents. But that was only after I went with the family to a tree farm, saw in hand, to physically cut down the perfect pine tree so we could put it in our living room and decorate it with all sorts of non-Jewish bric-a-brac.

But the worst of all offenses may be when I attended a pig roast one Yom Kippur, the holiest of all High days in the Jewish faith. Yom Kippur is the Jewish equivalent of confession, only you don’t actually confess your sins to anyone; instead you atone through the majesty of starvation while sitting in a crowded temple all day with a bunch of other starving Semites. When the hunger hallucinations begin, the Rabbi might begin to take the shape of a raw porterhouse steak with legs, like on Tom and Jerry. In the hours before sundown, when you are legally allowed to eat again, delirium has set in, making matzo seem like a viable food option. But I digress….

One fateful year, when I was about 20 years old, my friend Tony was attending college and invited me to the aforementioned pig roast at a frat house. Being a passive zealot, I failed to realize that the day of that particular non-kosher pig’s reckoning happened to be the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Considering I had already paid my $20 (non-refundable for those of you keeping score), there was no way I wasn’t going to attend. So as my family wallowed in self-loathing after paying ten times as much for temple tickets, I ate pork directly off a swine carcass on a spit.

At this point it’s all academic for me. If sex, drugs and rock and roll aren’t enough to make me Mr. Applegate’s new Lola, turning a blind eye toward my religion is sure to do the trick.

But religion has a funny way of getting even. Case in point: the flea market girl never answered my calls again after Richie Sambora outed me as an unpaid member of the hangers-on club of Long Island; it wasn’t until after the Christmas lights were hung that I realized only about half the strands worked; and I got food poisoning from the undercooked fraternity pig.

So maybe Hell is really delivered in small doses immediately following religious infractions. Not that it matters. In my eight months here the only religious practice I’ve followed is yelling “Jesus Christ” and flipping the bird to what have to collectively be the worst drivers in the world.

If He Says It’s 150 Inches, He May Not Be Lying

Every year there is one place every consumer wants to be but few have the opportunity: freezing on a line outside Best Buy to see if they will have a Nintendo Wii so their kids can be less disappointed about what they didn’t get on Christmas morning.

A scant few weeks later, the electronics industry takes over in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (a.k.a. Bill Gates’ platform to inflate his ego only slightly less than his checkbook). Here is where they unveil new products of all shapes and sizes that cost more than most of the people talking about them make in a year. Among other things, here is where you will see the next game system consumers won’t be able to find in stores for at least 26 months.

In order to gain admission to this extravaganza of over-hyped and ultra-expensive gadgets and gizmos, you must meet strict requirements, which solely include breathing. I was lucky enough to qualify for credentials along with what seems to be the entire population of the states of Maine, Delaware and South Dakota, including pets.

This was the first time I visited the show, and I’ve learned a few things which may be helpful for those of you out there who plan to attend in the future.

• If your credentials don't arrive in time, the only electronics you will see on day one consist of mobile communication devices attached to the ears of angry would-be show goers complaining to friends, spouses and co-workers about standing in a miles-long line waiting for their passes. As a rule, this line is not designed to move in any way. Considering the town we’re in, many people were disappointed to find that there was no buffet when they got to the front.
  
• Automotive technology, as far as I can see, has advanced at an astonishing rate. For reasons nobody fully understands, every single product is designed in the form of a very hot female. For some reason, these females are always situated in front of some sort of visual device that generally contains a map on a screen.
  
• The sales people, or exhibitionists, at each booth distract from the real purpose of the trade show floor: collecting swag. In fact, there are people who go to the show for the sole purpose of getting corporate branded pens, flashlights and hats from the exhibiting companies. The wheeled suitcases these people drag around the show floor make it easy to spot and trip over them.
  
• Car stereos now come with embedded purple neon lights, thus completing the visible spectrum of colors. Finally.
  
• Televisions are getting larger. Some companies unveiled plasma screens up to 150” in size. Nobody, with the exception of Bill Gates (more on him later), has a wall big enough to handle a screen of this size. Nevertheless, consumers will buy them just to have them. The companies know this, and are appropriately developing a 300-foot screen for next year so consumers can open their own drive-in theaters.
  
• Bill Gates still has way too much money. This fact is evidenced by the size of the Microsoft booth at the show. For reference, the booth is approximately the size of four football fields, if the football fields were each the size of the former polar ice caps.
  
• Speaking of cold, I’m almost certain that Las Vegas is not really located in the Nevada desert, but rather in Nome, Alaska.
  
• Moving about on the show floor requires precision timing and a willingness to ‘go with the flow’, especially when you’re in near an area that’s particularly popular (Las Vegas). Successful navigation is based on your ability to break off from one throng of people and join another moving in a different direction.
  
• Wear comfortable shoes. I do not recommend Bass Elite dress shoes for men.
  
• Small Chinese electronics companies looking to break into the US market will take a small booth at the Consumer Electronics Show. For some reason, every single one of these companies includes the name of the town where they are headquartered in their name. For example: Ying Ho (Shanghai) Electronics. Imagine Micro (Redmond) soft or XM (Washington, DC) Satellite Radio.

These tips should prove useful to anyone who can’t find a way to avoid coming to the Consumer Electronics Show in the future. But before I go, I think it would be a great disservice if I didn’t share a few pointers about Las Vegas in general:

• When you land at the airport, you will get your first expensive lesson as you pass the slot machines – and get to the taxis. The beginning fare is somewhere in the double digits and they charge by each 1/11 of a mile (this is totally true). The good thing is that some entrepreneur somewhere is working on finding a way to turn taxi meters into gambling devices.
  
• No matter how short the Strip seems to be, walking the entire thing on foot is an all day affair. And it’s a walk that causes blisters the size of cherry tomatoes on your foot.
  
• Vegas shows, like any of the 77 different versions of Cirque du Soleil in town, will run you approximately two months’ salary. Taking your girlfriend out to one of these shows legally qualifies you to become engaged.
  
• Slot machines still don’t pay out much in the way of profits. If you’re looking to walk away with money from a machine in the casino, I recommend the ones marked ATM. They’re not nearly as glitzy and exciting, but they have the best payout percentage in the casino.
  
• The Wynn is one of the nicest new casinos on the strip. Given its ultra-elite status, Steve Wynn is considering charging a cover just to get in. Keep this in mind when you walk by the small, seedy gambling halls as you look for a nice place to play.
  
• Las Vegas is, according to the map people, in the middle of a desert. You wouldn’t know this by the millions of gallons of water you will see in fountains, Venetian canals and mirages in front of every hotel. Georgia governor Sonny Perdue should consider building casinos all over the state in order to solve its current drought issues.

All these tips are designed to help you plan your trip to Las Vegas and future trade shows held at the opulent Las Vegas Convention Center. The best thing I can do for the public is to share these tips with my readers in hopes that you will someday do what I did and skip the mortgage for three months prior to coming out.