One Squirrel's Quest for Collectible Toys

In Helsinki, Finland, there is a squirrel who runs into a grocery store a couple of times a day and steals Kinder Eggs. It then unwraps them and makes off with the toy inside.

"It removes the foil carefully, eats the chocolate and leaves the store with the toy," Lindroos said. However the tiny delinquent -- who clearly has no social conscience -- leaves the wrappers behind.

I can't blame the squirrel really. People are nuts for the toys contained within the chocolatey goodness of Kinder Eggs. Like this person, who has a nice site about his collection.

Incidentally, Kinder Eggs are contraband in the US, because they represent a choking hazard. Strangely, you don't hear reports of Euro kids choking every day on a some-assembly required plastic frog dressed like an army man, but there you are. American kids are dumb little monkeys just waiting for the chance to lodge something in their windpipes. No two ways about it. Like turkeys in the rain. And yes, I know turkeys don't drown in the rain.

More information about why Kinder Eggs are not available in the US.

Star Wars Kinder Egg toys, which for some reason are hippopotamuses dressed as various Star Wars characters.

The Kinder Surprise Experiment, which studies "Geographical variance of toy quality in Kinder Surprise".

The Returnering, Part Two

I've been gone for a while, I know. But things in the world in general have been going, let's face it, pretty poorly since I stopped writing here. Also, the stock market fell three hundred points yesterday, and that can't be a coincidence.

So what have I been doing these many months?

What happened was, I got really into that Deadliest Catch show on the tv, so I joined up. For half a year, I stood on the deck of The Time Bandit with other known felons and reprobates, while 40-foot waves slammed me around like a rag doll. I learned from these gentle, aromatic individuals how to hold mighty crustaceans aloft and say, over and over again, things like "Red gold!", "Now that's crab!" and even, when I couldn't help myself--when the sheer unadulterated joy of freezing to death and hurting tasty sea life got the better of me--"Hoo!"

Good times, I tell you. They don't show you all the hijinks we get up to out there on the high seas, either. Somehow, no matter how many times you see a naked man running out of his bunk with a five pound crab dangling from his nose, it just never gets old.

But all that's over now.

It's time for a return to My Life as an American Gladiator, America. It's time for rambling diatribes about inconsequential things, more untrustworthy reviews of 1970s horror movies, more clams, more Cthulhu and, god damn it, more Jurgen Prochnow.

Not every day or anything. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Not a Dry Eye Patch in the House

Did anyone watch the premiere of Pirate Master last night? I'd like to pretend I'm above that sort of thing, but I admit to you freely, I watched almost half of it. It was so terrifyingly poor that I don't know if I could stomach another episode. It's even less interesting than Survivor...on Pirate Master, a bunch of tools in eyeliner sit around with nothing to do in between curiously uninvolving challenges wherein they have to do things like row boats around papier-mache skeletons. At the end of the season, one person will be left and will get his or her hand chopped off and replaced by a hook or something. I don't know. The show's producers are obviously aware it's a little tedious, and so put in some stringent rules about the women on the show needing to wear very revealing tops at all times. Good thinking, there.

One of the eyeliner-wearing would-be pirates gets voted as captain of the ship, and immediately sets about being super-annoying by talking in a pirate voice, and taking things seriously despite the fact that everyone is clearly just this side of giggling. In the voting at the end, the pirate crew can vote off one of the captain's nominees, or declare a mutiny, in which case the captain is kicked off. It all seems needlessly complicated.

Not to spoil it for you, but the most enjoyable contestant was kicked off in the first episode. I only caught the second half, but every time they showed him, his tagline was Scientist/Exotic Dancer, which I guess is kind of like Fighter/Magic-User without the magic missiles.

I picture him straining over a microscope, struggling to isolate that elusive strain of euglena that explains everything. Enraged, he sweeps the microscope aside and shakes his fist at the uncaring nature of the universe: "If only I could prove to these fools that their methods are unsound! I ... I.... I gotta dance!"

"Strokin'" starts up on the tinny speakers of the lab as scientist/exotic dancer gyrates in a revolving petri dish, pulling off his chemical-spattered smock. Middle aged women rush at him, but he holds them at bay, in awe of his equations.

If only I could have Scientist/Exotic Dancer on my business card!

PS if you must, check out his ridiculous website, where you can learn annoying things like the fact that his dog is named Machiavelli.

Turkey Time

Internet reprobates subject themselves to torment for your potential pleasure, screening the IMDB worst-100 reviewed movies and reviewing them for you. Thrill to the majesty of "3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain", starring Hulk Hogan, amongst others.

Passive-Aggressive Notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers.

Particularly enjoyable are the desperate pleas for bathroom decency and the plaintive "You Must Wear the Unitard Provided".

Note: Some swears may lurk within. If you are of the type who flee from the swears, flee now. Away, into the night, swear-free. The little swears may be caught in your hair, or clinging to your linty sweater like cat hair.

Goodbye Blue Monday

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

He gave up writing novels a few years back, when it seemed he had said what he wanted to say. But he left us beautiful books like Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions. When I was a completist teenager (as opposed to the obsessive completist thirties person I am now), I would obsessively eye my Vonnegut collection and think to myself "I only need Happy Birthday, Wanda June. Why don't I own that?" Thinking that I had to own every little word, even if it meant there would be no more books to discover, no new words.

I read his work slavishly, and I hope some of the wisdom within those pages sunk in somehow.

Vonnegut's writing was morose and melancholy but, like Twain, he seemed to believe in the secret goodness of people. There were always transcendent moments of beauty in his short, blurby style, like the moment that Circe Berman sees Rabo Karabekian's secret for the first time in Bluebeard. I won't ruin it for you.

And there was a large sense of our own ridiculousness. His often glib, "Go take a flying f*ck at the moon" philosophy betrayed a conscience that was deeply concerned with man, and especially with America. His outrage at the path of America these last years was a much-needed voice. While he seemed to say that all men are just animals, just living out lives alone, he was warning us against the greedy and dangerous men who are harming America so greatly, and the apathy with which the country is letting it happen.

Hopefully, old Kurt hasn't come unstuck in time, and isn't being bothered reliving the past.

Let's remember him with the Tralfamadorian greeting from Slaughterhouse Five:

"Hello. Farewell.

Hello. Farewell."

So it goes.

Fear of Skeletors

Deep down, in my heart of hearts, I'm afraid I'm starting to look a little like Rumsfeld.

What a Country

Yesterday, we spent a few hours wandering around San Francisco, on a quest for Japanese snack food. You see, we went to Japan on vacation a few weeks back, and now we miss being in a country whose obsession with soft drinks and snack foods borders on the insane.

San Francisco's Japantown, in case you're wondering, is pretty much exactly like being in Japan. There are a couple of big buildings there that house large indoor malls that are chockablock with noodle shops, bookstores, video stores, and craft stores where you can buy the ever-important tiny glass animals. And I don't use the word chockablock lightly, so you know this is true. Just like in Shinjuku in Tokyo, the big stores are Kintetsu and Kinokuniya.

Anyway, Japan was a crazy good time. I ate fried crickets, raw horsemeat, grated mountain yam which is frankly hideous and Lovecraftian in its snottiness, and (accidentally) whale. I hiked the old Nakasendo Road (which, in the 16th century, nobles would travel yearly from Kyoto to Tokyo at the behest of the Emperor) between two towns restored to their Edo period appearance. I went to a Yomiuri Giants vs. Yakult Swallows baseball game in the Tokyo Dome, where the singing and dancing fans put our own baseball audience to shame.

In Kyoto, I saw the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kinkakuji, the subject of Yukio Mishima's novel about a deranged Zen acolyte; the Zen rock gardens at Ryoan-ji and Daitoku-ji, which are so austere and beautiful I couldn't believe I was seeing them; the eighty-foot giant Buddha at Nara, where sacred deer roam the temple complex grounds and surround you if you show the slightest inclination to feed them; and the Rashomon Gate at Tijo (it rained just like in the story and movie.)

Anyway, I'm trying to write a travelogue about the vacation, but we miss it already, and we were in Japantown trying to recapture some of the tastes and feel of the country.

We ended up finding a good place stocked with rice crackers, cold green tea, Pocky, and shrimp chips. The best moment of the day by far, though, came when we were walking by a tea shop next to a Japanese video stall. An elderly Japanese man was proudly brandishing a new VCD to show to his family, and as we passed I glanced down to see what his prize could be:

Yakov Smirnoff on Broadway.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Honestly, I'm a little tired of Talk Like a Pirate Day. Pirates have overstayed their welcome. I don't mean my pirate houseguest who's been staying with us since early June, infecting us all with beardmites and eating all our limes. No, you're fine, Blind Pete. I mean conceptually.

Every once in a while we must, as a culture, reexamine the hierarchy of these core comedy concepts, presented here in random order, and judge which will reign supreme for the coming year:

Pirates
Zombies
Monkeys
Aliens
Robots
Salad

The top three are the comedy premiership, if you will. The lowest three are relegated to the conceptual second division, where they must fight it out with newcomers, or risk falling forever into comedy limbo, where it is only a matter of time until they are referenced on a family sitcom.

Pirates, as I said, are pretty much crapped out. As enjoyable as The Pirate Movie was, let's put away the shiny pants for a while. Monkeys, much as I hate to say it, are too easy. Even when they're smoking cigars. And aliens. Well, how many times can you make probe jokes?

I propose the comedy trifecta for the coming year:

Zombies, Robots, and Salad.

These three concepts grow all the more impressive when combined. Thus: "Jesus Christ, get a load of that robotic salad zombie!"

Sorry, pirates.

OH! THE FISH HITS! FIGHT!

If you're anything like me (and I hope for your sake that you're not), you spent a large portion of your formative years playing Nintendo. Not Super Nintendo or your Wii. No. Nintendo, with ROB your Robotic buddy and Duck Hunt and Gyromite and Oktoroks. That Nintendo.

We didn't have eighteen buttons and a magic wand. We had two miserable buttons, one of which didn't always do anything.

To tell you what a hep cat I was in high school, I would get together with my friends, go to Blockbuster video, and rent a Nintendo game that we would play slavishly for hours, with only a twelve pack of hyper-sugary soda to sustain us.

And what was the game that ate so much of our time? Black Bass. That's right. A fishing game. Black Bass was great because everyone could sit around and root on the person holding the tiny, uncomfortable, non-ergonomic Nintendo controller as they tried to land a video fish, fighting with both the A and B buttons...OK, just the B button...to bring that baby in. You'd hold that B button for all you were worth, until the pleasing reeling sound changed to the hated, grating your line is going to break! sound (the two sounds were, in fact challengingly similar.) Then, you'd have to hold off on the reeling for a while and wait, while that beautiful pile of pixels sat there in the video water, mocking you.

And then, if you were lucky, you had that pile of pixels in the net, and the moment of truth would arrive--TOO BAD! IT'S SMALL! Words that the video fisherman (and most other kinds of video men, obviously) spend their lives hoping not to hear.

Perhaps the best part about Black Bass was that you would play for hours and hours and, well, hours, and finally get to the highest level of the game. At this level, the fish were huge. Half the size of our 19" portable screen. And from what we could tell--and I want to emphasize here that my friends and I played this game probably more than anyone else on the planet...possibly more than the developers--there was no way to land them.

You'd get them so, so close to your video net, and those bastards would jump, and they'd fight, and OH! THE FISH GETS AWAY! I tell you, it brings tears to my eyes.

And now, I pass this gift on to you.

Black Bass on everyvideogame.com

The Lion Content

I just saw a headline on CNN that said Mountain Lion Bursts Into Man's Home. Besides the obvious "well, we probably have been bursting into that mountain lion's home for years now," I kind of hope the guy was sitting around watching teevee in his underwear and the lion came crashing through the window.

"Hotcha!" it would say. "Get me! I'm a mountain lion! Raar!"

Cheetos would be spilled.

Also, I heard NPR babbling away today about lions. I don't remember in exactly what context, but I know they mentioned lions. Lions are on the rise. They're bursting into people's homes! There could be one under your desk right now! A small one!

The Poo Brew Review

I found out a few weeks ago that a coffee shop near my work sometimes stocks the rare and expensive Kopi Luwak. Kopi Luwak, in case you've never heard of it, is sometimes known as Civet Coffee. What makes this coffee different?

It's pooped out by a small mammal. Here's a picture of the pooper now:



Luwaks eat coffee berries at Indonesian coffee plantations, selectively choosing only the ripest berries. The coffee berries pass through the luwak, where they are partially digested. The luwak then excretes the berries, as small mammals are wont to do, wherever he feels like. Then, some fortunate soul harvests the nuggets of luwak feces. Through some esoteric process, the beans are (hopefully) cleaned, and ready to be roasted and brewed.

I convinced a few coworkers that it was essential that we try this coffee, so we cruised down to the cafe and shared a fifteen dollar cup between four of us.

The ordering process was less grandiose than I had anticipated. I was hoping there'd be a luwak hanging out on the counter and, when he heard you place your order he'd sigh, grab a newspaper, and trudge off to the toilet. Instead, the owner made a nice drip cup for us.

The coffee is very good. Maybe not fifteen dollars a cup good, but good. The (erk!) digestion process removes much of the acidity of the beans, so it's very smooth. I am in recent years a wimpy milk-in-the-coffee type of guy, but I drank this black with no ill effects on my stomach. It was rich and aromatic and, I have to say, not terribly reminiscent of jungle animal poo.

I did have a moment's doubt. I mean, there was no certificate of authenticity presented to us before we took a sip. I mean, anything could have digested the beans. A cat, a dog? The owner's infant child? But what can you do? Something ate and partially digested that stuff, and I say more power to it.

As one of my coworkers pointed out, it seems OK to eat the excreta of a cute and unfamiliar Indonesian animal. "Dog shit coffee," on the other hand, doesn't sound nearly so appealing.

Half a Decade of This?

Yes, it's true. My Life As An American Gladiator, the site that capitalizes everything, even the small words, has been around for five years. True, the last couple of years have been no great shakes, but let us not reflect on that.

Let us think, instead, of all the good brought into the world through the possibly tireless efforts of this blog. Did you know that this blog has, of its own accord, been saving clams from linguini in the long stretches between posts? It's true.

OK, that's not true.

But still, five years, that's pretty good.

The blog's old and cranky now, at five. It's the dog that's not a puppy anymore, and passes gas unexpectedly when company's over. It's the can of potatoes that you're pretty sure has botulism since it technically expired three years ago, but you're reluctant to throw it out since you've never seen something burst from a botulized can before and are watching it in the interest of science.

And yes, things have been lean here at the blog for the past, oh, eighteen or twenty months. The blog is busy, what with the clam saving and the staying out all night drinking with Steven Seagal and Anthony Michael Hall. But this blog promises to try harder in the next five years. It promises to deliver more Jurgen Prochnow content, more three-quarter-screen diatribes about trivial and unimportant things, and of course, carefully hidden typographical errors that you can note in your journal.

Salut!

The World Cup Report

So, we're into the second round of the World Cup, and I'm enjoying it with a gravity that makes people really regret talking to me at work.

I've watched all but about two of the games. I even made it through Tunisia v. Ukraine, a match in which two guys were carded for slipping into comas on the pitch, such was the blistering pace of the contest.

The USA is, of course, out. And frankly, they deserve to be. Bruce Arena, the coach, is soon to become the only man ever fired for not knowing how to use his Johnson. In fact, I'd say the USA played like eleven guys without a Johnson between them.

OK. Five people got that joke.

Also, the US commentators need to be killed slowly, with the possible exception of Tommy Smythe, who says "Arr! There's the boolge in the ool' onion bahg!" which is really cool and weird. Number one on the hit list is Marcelo Balboa, an ex US defender who now commentates on the games and says one of the following phrases every three seconds:

• I'm a fan/not a fan of...
• Phenomenal!
• I'm going to have to go back to...

Marcelo, you are awful. Please be quiet or at least less whiny. If I hear you complaining about the refereeing one more time, I'm going to put gum in your flowing locks.

One of the other ESPN commentators kept referring to a "row" in the England side, by which he of course meant a fight or disagreement. But he was pronouncing it like "roe", and therefore sounding like a complete turd.

My heart is really with England to win it all, but I don't see how they can beat any of the really good teams like Argentina or Germany. And god forbid, an England game should come down to penalty kicks. It's a well-known fact that English players cannot score penalties. So, they'll slog onward, in quiet desperation, and almost...almost win.

I must return to my TiVo now.

Watching
Tonight, our filthy television addiction will end. That's because The Amazing Race ended last week and 24 ends tonight. 24 is problematic, because it's frankly kind of Red Dawn-ish and implies that the entire fate of the country is dependent on one guy who likes to torture people maybe a little more than is strictly necessary, and on one sys admin who seems to be the only person with government clearance who actually knows how to do anything worth doing. But I am hooked on that show. They kill off major characters glibly, which keeps you on your toes. And get this: not only is the guy from Warlock in it this season, but Robocop and/or Buckaroo Banzai too!

This non-television-viewing will only last a couple of weeks, until the World Cup starts. Then, of course, I will be a permanent fixture on the couch, and will only rise for beer trips.

Speaking of watching, we went to the movies for the first time in what seems like months (because it actually was months) this weekend. And what did we see? What modern masterwork could coax us from the comfort of home? Why, Poseidon, of course.

We saw Poseidon because the other two movies we kind of wanted to see, The DaVinci Code* and Over the Hedge, were sold out. I suspect most people in the theater were there for the same reason, and were as a result marginally annoyed when no crazed Opus Dei members were hiding out on the Lido Deck, waiting to spring out and stab someone, and no huggable Garry Shandling-voiced turtles went ambling down the blood-drenched floors of the cruise ship's ballroom, which had so recently been the scene of New year's revels and was now turned into a hideous pile of limbs and sorrow.

Poseidon was not entirely unenjoyable as vacuous entertainment goes, though it is curious to note that Wolfgang Peterson, director of Das Boot, is now making remakes of campy 70s disaster movies. Here's a brief summary of the movie, for those of you who might actually get in to see a movie that you kind of wanted to see in the first place: a big cruise ship get hits by a big wave and flips over. Then, everyone dies but about seven people, and those people either die or don't die, depending on how much you want them to die. I will say that I didn't mind so much when most of the people didn't, in fact, die. This would have really bothered me in, say, The Perfect Storm, where I was definitely rooting for the storm five minutes into the movie. You get about five minutes of character development at the beginning of Poseidon, which is almost enough to make you really regret settilng for this movie, and then the wave hits, and people die. Kurt Russell is in it, too, and is surprisingly unannoying.

So, in summary, Poseidon is a movie.


*And yes, I hear your fevered cries: The DaVinci Code sucks! I'm sure it probably does. But I have to see it--it's got Jurgen Prochnow in it. And that guy from Bosom Buddies everyone likes so much.

Misanthropy in Small Doses

There's this show on TLC or Discovery or Home Surgery Channel or whatever called "Honey, We're Killing the Kids!" Being a supporter of well thought-out homicide in all its myriad guises, I was crestfallen to learn that this show is not actually about airlifting your children to a deserted desert island where you get to hunt them, Most Dangerous Game style. No, what's really happens on the show is that parents who let their kids eat big macs three times a day are given a frightening glimpse of how their children will look when they're forty if they continue down the road to gustatory perdition.

An elfin woman who looks like the kind of person who enjoys holding ding-dongs just out of reach tells them awful things until they cry, and then she sets about making their children eat cous-cous and wheat grass.

I think there are a couple of things that need to be discussed about this program:

one: These kids are horrific hellbeasts who really could benefit from a little killing, pimply little jerks who could be redeemed by the sorts of lessons that only the occasional cold-blooded murder can provide. They curse at their parents, cry when forced to drink milk instead of soda, and generally make a really good argument for sterilization.

two: The commercial for the show features a woman in line at the grocery store. She's complaining because her child won't eat anything but butter and gin. And hey, presto! the kid morphs into the forty-year old version of himself as he will appear if he keeps on eating and not exercising. The mother recoils from this hideous vision, this nightmarish visage before her, flabby and bald. Very effective for scaring parents, I'm sure, but what about the actor who's playing Cautionary Hideous Man in the commercial? How would you like to be that guy, whose very appearance can reform the eating habits of a generation, lest they swell and sweat into just such a shmoo-like atrocity?

I wonder what the audition was like?

Those Who Can't

When you're not updating your blog with japery and bonhomie of your own, remember always to link to the japery of others.

Case in Point: Tremble on balls

The mirror was an unnecessary extravagance, in my opinion, because I sincerely doubt I would need (or want) to see myself in a full-length mirror, wearing nothing but a hooded sweatshirt, t-shirt, and brown socks. It is not a good look. In fact, it's probably the second-worst look; add a wizard hat and it's officially the worst look. You should never be in a position where you're a wizard hat away from the worst possible look a man can ever present.

Words of Wisdom

When you're eating baby carrots, under no circumstances should you think about toes.

In fact, as a general rule, just don't think about toes ever.

*shudder*

Half and Half Nastiness

Is it so much to ask? I mean, I can overlook the fact that these half and half tubs mysteriously don't need to be refrigerated, and don't seem to go bad, well, ever. And the fact that they're called "Mini-Moos", while disturbing in the sense that it calls to mind liquefied baby cow, can be glossed over. But...I ask you,

Can we make a Mini-Moo that doesn't ejaculate all over my leg every time I open one?! For the love of God!

The Leprechaun Ladder

I know, I know. I've been gone a long time. A really long time. Like maybe so long that you were searching around for me, and you almost went so far as to look in the freezer and in the sock drawer, but you drew the line, because that would be a little silly. But I wanted to wait until I had something really trivial to discuss before I broke my silence.

And the thing is The Leprechaun Ladder.

Now, I'm not big into St. Patrick's Day, though I can get behind any holiday whose general thrust involves drinking lots of Guinness and Shamrock Shakes. The whole pinching thing seems a little gratuitous, but who am I to judge?

One of my neighbors has taken St. Patrick's Day to a weird new level: he's installed a ladder from his lawn to the roof of his front porch...and it's got little leprechauns climbing it. At least I assume they're leprechauns. They could be little green-clad James Brolins for all I know. And the ladder is one of those rope ladder deals like you see in pirate movies. So maybe they're pirate James Brolin homunculi?

But there are several two foot tall bearded effigy persons scaling the ladder. One of them may or may not have a knife in his teeth. And the one at the top of the ladder is just cresting the gutter. Would that not scare the crap out of you if you were a kid living in that house? Totally leaving aside any association with the fine Leprechaun series of films, just knowing that several unheimlich little green freaks are climbing onto your roof could really do a number on you. Like every day you pull up to the house and from the back seat of dad's Volvo you steal a glance at the one at the top of the ladder, and you can swear that he's higher than yesterday.

But your dad allays your fears, possibly by telling you that they are tiny roofers, wanting only to shingle and dance, with a tiny hydraulic nail gun.

It's odd is what I'm saying.

I can't wait to see what he'll have out for Easter. Maybe an Easter Bunny drum circle or animatronic stone-rolling-away-from-the-cave-mouth display.

Clockwork Dentistry

In my continuing quest to plumb the very depths of dental anguish, I visited my dentist to get three more fillings this weekend. Somewhere between novocaine shot 7 and 12, I noticed that the dentist was chatting with the dental assistant about music.

Apparently, the receptionist at the office had made some musical choices that were driving the dentist to distraction. He was telling the assistant how music these days is just noise, but he was quick to add that when he was a kid, his parents hated his music too. I thought that was well and good. After all, you want a rather staid, unhip dentist, don't you? I mean, you don't want a dentist who's going to be rocking out while he's repeatedly jabbing high-speed rotational devices into your gumline.

"Yes," he said. "The surest way to drive someone crazy is to play music they can't stand."

The assistant laughed.

"There was even a movie where they drove this kid crazy with music. He was a hoodlum. In a gang. And they drove him crazy by strapping him into this chair and playing music he hated. Beethoven. It's called conditioning. This gang kid would just freak out every time he heard Beethoven."

The dentist chuckled.

I was about to correct him, in spite of the fact that the right side of my jaw, my entire tongue, and pretty much all of my nose were completely numb. But, again, who wants a hip dentist? I don't want a dentist who understands Kubrick movies, or calls me his droog. I just want a dentist who's absolutely, and with no questions asked, going to stop drilling when I make a piglet sound.

That's the sum total of my requisites for the dentist-patient paradigm. Just stop drilling when I make the piglet sound.

Then, he dropped a drill on my head, and we all had a good laugh.

Falling

Some days have passed since my last post. The more perceptive among you might even call it a month. The Christmas season is almost upon us. I can tell because people in my neighborhood are trying to signal passing space aliens with their yard decorations. There are a lot of lights. I think I saw Mothra circling one particularly impressive display featuring some glowing Jesi. That's understandable, since Mothra has always been known to favor glowing messiahs.

So what has been happening in this long month of radio silence? I turned 34 in November, that's one thing. While it's true that birthday wishes may be a little late, it's never wrong to try to get in my good books.

The birthday was a memorable one. The wifely friend and I had a great dinner, drove to the not-terribly scenic Altamont area. Oh, and we fell two miles in one minute.

How that happened was that the night before my birthday, feeling fine and glowing like a million candle-power Jesus from birthday scotch, the wifely friend informed me that we were going skydiving. Now, this wasn't entirely unexpected, as I had mentioned in a sort of vague way that I had always wanted to try it. I'm not known for my EXTREMEosity in general, but I just felt like I should do something that involved being harnessed to another man and pushed from an airplane.

So we woke up early the next day, after a mostly restful slumber, and drove out into the boondocks. We checked in at the hangar, where a smiling woman told us we should go sit on the nagahide sofas and watch a terribly important video which would tell us why we were basically fools for doing this, and not to come limping back to them when we ended up, broken and bleeding, in the fields of Altamont. Really, if something goes wrong when you're skydiving, you're not going to be doing a lot of suing, or a lot of anything, so I don't know why you sign all those waivers. Unless one of the myriad forms they gave us was a solemn oath not to return to the hangar in an amorphous, non-corporeal state, and haunt the bejeezus out of the place.

The video was a guy who resembled a young Uncle Jesse from the Dukes of Hazzard sitting behind a desk and mumbling for half an hour. It was pretty noisy in the hangar, and I couldn't hear a word of what the guy was saying. But I figured it's pretty straightforward: This is really dangerous, what with the jumping out of a plane and all, but you probably knew that.

The day was quite foggy, so we ended up sitting around in the hangar for about an hour and a half. The hangar was full of skydiving guys. I don't know where these guys came from, but it was pretty clear that they were into skydiving in a big way. They were all standing around, watching Revenge of the Sith on a projection teevee, and every once in a while wandering to the doors of the hangar and grumbling. They couldn't wait to get up there.

I think a lot of them got into it for the clothes.

I thought parachute pants was just a term for ugly pants, but there really are skydiving pants. Kind of baggy nylon pants. One guy had en-fuego flamejob pants and a matching hat. Another guy had a jumpsuit with little batwings that unfurled when he raised his arms. They didn't mix much with us, as we lounged on a sofa, asking each other every two minutes "So, are you scared?"

I'm not going to tell you I wasn't scared. Mostly, though, I just wanted to get up there and jump.

And after an hour and a half, Anakin had turned into a Sith Lord, and the sky cleared. We shuffled out to the plane with our instructors, to whom we would soon be strapped, and boarded the very, very little plane. In a skydiving plane, there are two benches, lengthwise, in the cabin of the plane. You sit basically on the lap of your tandem jump instructor (hence the witty No Farting sticker on the wall of the plane). On the way up, something suddenly occurred to me: I'm in a plane, 10,000 feet off the ground, and the door is open.

The door is open!

When I'm on a normal flight, I often get thoughts like "I wonder what would happen if the door opened right now?" I always figured all the passengers would be sucked out to their certain demise. But no, it's just cold. And rather unnerving, of course. But we weren't stopping at 10,000 feet. No, we were going up to 14,000 feet.

And soon we were there.

I was first to go out the door...or rather, I went before the wifely friend. A bunch of the skydiving devotees who had come up for a dive went barelling out before us. These guys just can't wait to get out that door. I imagine when they fly on commuter flights, it's all they can do to keep themselves from running to the emergency door and launching themselves out.

The guy strapped to my back was a little shorter than me, which made the waddling dynamic probably very humorous as we wobbled to the door, which I will again remind you, was open. I had been given instructions when we were on the ground, along the lines of "lean your head back on my shoulder after we jump. Then we'll freefall for a minute or so. Make sure you wave to the camera." We had opted to get a DVD of our jump, to ensure that if we survived, we'd be able not only to bore people with the story aurally, but visually as well.

Then I was at the door, my toes outside the plane, wondering in a distracted sort of way why the instructor gets a helmet and I don't. It turns out, incidentally, that it's so, if he hits his head on the wing of the plane on the way out, he doesn't get knocked out and pull you 14,000 feet to certain death. There is no way for the jumper to release the chute, you see. That suddenly occurred to me as I felt the thin air buffeting me.

The instructor pulled my head back, so the video guy could capture my expression, which , in retrospect, was one full of despair and second thoughts. Then, I stuck my tongue out to say "Hey. No big deal, man. I'm extreme! ...Can we just go back in the nice plane and shut the door and--"

And my instructor began to rock me back and forth. One...Two...

Three! He pushed me out of the plane, and we were falling.

At least, I think we were falling. There's about zero sensation of falling, when you are free falling from almost three miles up. You're so high up, you could be rising, falling, going sideways. It's hard to tell. There's a few seconds there where you're accelerating exceedingly fast. Then, you reach "terminal velocity" and just stay at that speed.

My head was not on my instructor's shoulder. It was craned forward, looking down at the brown fields miles below. My mouth was open, in an expression that can only be described as AAAAAAA! Looking at the video now, I can see my face doing that great flapping thing that you see in astronaut movies, my open mouth filling with air.

It's hard to breathe in free fall. Well, maybe that's not the best way to describe it. there are two factors: One, your brain is totally overloaded by the fact that you are not standing on anything, that the ground is just unbelievably not there, and is in fact way, way down there, and you're seeing a pretty incredible view beginning to get larger, but slower than you'd think. Two, air is pushing into your mouth and nose very rapidly, so you're really inhaling the whole time. Exhaling is the hard bit. You have to work a little bit, and push the air out.

And I found myself going Woooooo! as we spun circles and continued our fall. Just like those turds you see on extreme sports shows. It's inevitable. The wifely friend, in the video, gives the double-peace sign, Nixon-style, for a good three thousand feet. She has no idea why.

I opted for the secret devil signs so popular at early eighties Motley Crue shows. Again, I have no idea why.

And then, after nine thousand feet of free fall, my instructor tapped my shoulders and released the chute, taking us from 125 miles per hour to 10 miles an hour in about a second. I was a rag doll. And we drifted down, looking at what view we could see on this somewhat cloudy day. I could see Oakland in the far distance, and the San Francisco Bay.

My instructor said "OK, I'm just going to loosen the harness a little bit here."

I froze. For just a fleeting second, the thought crossed my mind: "He's going to kill me. He probably does this all the time. He's going to kill me and kidnap my wife and live in Buenos Aires." And he loosened the harness, and I dropped just a little bit, and he didn't kill me. My testicles were very grateful for the loosening of the harness, by the way. That thing was tight.

He said "Now this is how you steer the chute. You pull on this strap to go to the right." He pulled the strap and we lurched sickeningly down in a spiral to the right.

My stomach quailed.

"And this strap to go to the left." Another spiral.

"Woooaaggggg!" I said, profoundly. this spiralling was making me very nauseated, which is kind of funny, since jumping out of the plane didn't bother me much. But it's the change from wafting gently down, to spiralling and picking up speed as you spin.

I've always had a problem with the spinning. I have gotten ill on the Teacups at Disneyland. Anything that spins you and makes you aware of a migration spineward in the internal organ region is not, well, my cup of tea.

"Can we not do that please?" I said, but I don't think he heard me.

"You try it now!" he said. And I did, spiralling and almost, but not quite, vomiting on him.

And then we were down. The ground came rushing up, and I grabbed my instructor and hugged him. A hug that expressed these things: thanks for not killing me there, you know with the harness thing; and that was the coolest damn thing ever.

And it was the coolest thing ever. If you've thought about jumping from a plane, preferably with a parachute and a sensible and non-suicidal individual strapped to your back, I am here to tell you that you should do it.

Unless you die. Then, you probably shouldn't have.

Enjoy the Buffet

The wifely friend has been pushing me tofuwards in small steps.

"Look honey," she'll say slyly at the store. "It's a steak substitute. I bet it tastes just like steak!"

And she can, of course, sense my resistance to the meatlessness of these substances she brings home. She is attuned to subtleties undetectable to the untrained ear, like when I say "You want me to eat that?" or "Will you please stop buying all this meatlessness?"

But I give in, I give in. As the meat-like sculptures invade our home, shaped into steaks and little hamburger patties, and I think even a rack of lamb once.

And I face an internal struggle. I know it doesn't taste like steak. It doesn't have the texture of steak. Hell, I eat steak once every six months, so why do I need to substitute some meatless hoax in its place? But the wifely friend has my best interests at heart. Or my heart's best interests. Or something. Maybe she's convinced my heart will actually explode from a lifetime of meat consumption, and not from an excess of tenderness as I promised in my wedding vows.

This is an actual faux-steak product I'm referring to here, by the way, though I can't remember its name. I do remember that it was made out of Seitan, which is wheat gluten and is apparently not pronounced the fun way. And in the end the wifely friend even had to agree that it was pretty awful.

But I have come to know and love the products of Morningstar Farms. And as an aside here, I don't want to suggest that meatlessness is the product of some unspeakable biblical evil, but we've got wheat gluten named Seitan, and an entire line of frozen soy products named after Lucifer Morningstar? I rest my case.

Morningstar Farms make "grillers", which are soy hamburgers, and "breakfast patties" which are, well, soy breakfast patties. And they are really, really good. I hypothesize that they are so good because they are really greasy and taste like they might possible be bad for you. They seem so bad for you, they might even have meat in them. That's just the kind of thing I'd expect from Lucifer Morningstar Farms after all.

So I eat the meatlessness a couple of times a week and I am proud to announce that I will live forever, my veins pumping pure soy and my heart nothing but a pile of wheat gluten. But I'll be alive, dammit!

And with all the frightening meat problems lately, your Mad Cow and your Bird Flu, maybe meatlessness is the only answer.

At least until the Toflu strikes.

The Salad Paradigm—Carpathian Detente

This salad that I'm making now - oh man, it's like confetti. It's got color and texture and little stringy things. And olives. It's like when they'd go to Puerto Vallarta on the Love Boat and they'd go to the market and buy all that crap and maybe somebody would get a cursed pinata or something (and Doc Brikker would learn the true meaning of love, by learning that sometimes you have to let that special lady go).

And in the pinata would be my salad, but it would be such a good and important salad in the greater scheme of things that it would beat that cursed pinata right back into the fiery depths of hell. That's the kind of salad we're talking about here.

Blow Football Was Robbed

TV Cream's Top 100 Toys [via boingboing]
This is a great collection of toys I remember fondly. Most of them we didn't have ourselves, but I either yearned for them, coveted them, or have, indeed, never heard of them. This is a British site, so being raised by diffident and bespectacled British parents gives me more chance of having seen these, but most are universal.

I spent a good hour and a half reading through the very amusing summaries. Some highlights are the Shaker Maker, Magic Rocks, Big Trak, and the toy I coveted the most richly and longingly as a boy: Subbuteo.

This list reminded me of another soccer game: Blow Football, which sounds like Diego Maradona's autobiography but is not.

Blow Football was a game my grandparents sent from London one year. I use the term "game" loosely here, since it consisted functionally of two straws, two plastic goals, and a ping pong ball cunningly disguised as a soccer ball. I think there may have been some cardboard goalies, too, but I can't be sure. The idea was that you would set up the goals, and two intrepid players possessed of stronger than average respiratory systems would, well, blow through the straws and attempt to blow the football into the goal of the opposing player. Production costs, I'm guessing, were pretty low on this baby. Hours of fun were no doubt to ensue. All I remember ensuing was a lot of saliva ejected onto the coffee table.

I have a cherished memory of this game, though, for reasons that are frankly lost in the weft of time. I remember setting up Blow Football and playing with my father on that Christmas Day, and him turning a peculiar shade of crimson as a pack of Pall Mall Reds every day caught up with him, and we reached somewhat of a stalemate, with the ball hovering mid-table, neither side able to gain an advantage. It ended with us both collapsing in tears of laughter, and I don't remember ever playing the game after that.

Some googling leads to:

Blow Football Balls
Make your own Blow Football (using a cereal box)
Antique 1910 Blow Football
Improved Version of Blow Football (certainly much more impressive than the one I had)

Not Nearly Enough

I saw a really tragic commercial the other day on the electric television.

It was along these lines.

Frighteningly smooth man's voice: "How much would it take to get you to listen to a radio station? Two hundred fifty dollars? What about twenty-five hundred dollars"

Sultry, yet sort of perky woman's voice: "That sounds good."

FSMV: "What about twenty-five THOUSAND dollars? Tune in to KOIT at seven-thirty each morning to find out how you can win twenty-five thousand dollars."

SYSOPWV: "For twenty-five thousand dollars I'd listen all day! What kind of music is it?"

FSMV: "Lite rock! At KOIT."

Now, if you're not in the Bay Area, you may never have been exposed to KOIT, but I am guessing the devil and his minions have established base camp in most urban centers, where they broadcast the audio equivalent of velour. And I thought, would it be worth it?

How long would I make it, enduring instrumental arrangements of Rocket Man and John Tesh live performances? Would the irreparable psychological damage of prolonged Celine Dion exposure be forgotten in the face of 18,000 after-tax dollars?

And how sad is it for KOIT to bribe people to listen to their preprogrammed journey through the unchallenging side of adult oriented rock, the would-be winners' eyes glazing over, their skin growing sallow and baggy as Music Box Dancer washes over them in a cool breeze of torment?

Curse you KOIT. Curse you. It's not enough.

Two Dorks that Pass in the Mid-Morning

I was on my way in to work this morning, stuck in rather heavy traffic, when a guy in a Range Rover pulled up alongside me and shouted something. I didn't hear him, because I was being extra-dorky by listening to Sisters of Mercy* at high volume.

I turned down the tunes and looked at him. "I went to Miskatonic University too!" he cried.

Aha! A fellow dork had spotted the dork-signal "Cthulhu Saves" sticker on the back of my Golf! This has only happened once before in the seven years or so that I've had that sticker. And that time, it was an alarmingly hairy and lonely-looking guy at an Orange County Chevron station who attempted to involve me in a conversation that seemed destined to involve twenty-sided dice, fishpeople, and a scene-by-scene deconstruction of Re-Animator.

Impressed, I flashed him a thumbs-up and a smile, and we drove off, each a little dorkier for the experience.

I'd like to add, parenthetically, that these chance drive-by encounters can leave one a little discomfited if one pulls up at the next stoplight immediately next to the person who has just conversed with you. Is the burden now upon you to continue the car-to-car communication, referencing something on the other person's car? Like a Jack-in-the-Box antennahead? "I see you've got a Jack-in-the-Box Antennahead!" you could yell, for instance. Or do you just smile? Do you have to wave? Would rolling up the window seem rude?

These things worry me.


*"This Corrosion", if you must know. There, now you've got an earworm**. Sisters of Mercy are perhaps the dorkiest Goth music available, with their twelve minute remixes for no good reason, and what was with those cop sunglasses? The singer was like the Goth Ponch, for God's sake. Sisters of Mercy are, in this humble non-reviewer's opinion, roughly analagous to KMFDM in dorkiness.
**Typing this word too quickly may result in the tragic if somewhat amusing typo "rearworm"***.
***Rejected title for the porno version of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Things that Are Really Not Very Good At All When Warm

#87: Ranch Dressing

Quick!

1 Go look at pictures of baby sloths!

Blatantly stolen from the pleasing greengabbro.net.

2 The streak may be over. Something stung me this morning while I was jogging. Thirty three years without a bee sting and it all comes crashing to a halt beside a lake in San Bruno. Oh the humanity!

I can't prove it was a bee. It could have been anyone of a small and stingy nature, I guess. Jogging, sadly, is not a sport that features instant replay, so we can't go to the replay booth for a slo-mo review. All we can do is watch my right ear get more swollen as the day goes on.

Big laughs.

Dead Can Dance Post..Now Dead

I just spent twenty minutes writing a post about going to the Dead Can Dance show in Oakland on Thursday, but Blogger barfed and now my post is lost in the aether, much like a diaphonous goth blouse. So, here are the abbreviated highlights.

The show was great, and we agreed that it was a great old person show. The doors opened at 8, and the band was on by 8:20. I'm sure there were lots of upset goths (if that's not redundant) who got there at 9 and essentially missed half the show. They played for two hours, and we were home by eleven. We agreed this was the best of all possible worlds.

Two guys sat behind us and would not shut up. There were beautiful, hymnlike songs, with Lisa Gerrard singing solo. The entire theatre of hundreds of people were utterly silent except these guys who, every song, would crow "Oh man! I can't believe I'm hearing this song! Tears, man! I have tears!"

They would gush about how much they loved every song, making it very clear, very loudly, that their feelings were terribly important.

And "Hey man, after the show! Let's get some beers! And some weed! You can put your bike in my car! And..."

SHUT UP!

I finally had to tell them to be quiet. I know I'm easily annoyed at conerts and movies, but without fail I'm sitting by the loudest people in the theatre, in some horrible karmic punishment. But really, I paid sixty dollars each for these tickets, and I don't want to hear about your feelings or your post-concert plans.

And, I have to say, they were generally quiet after that, and nobly refrained from kicking my chair or wiping boogers on me.

And we were home by eleven! Sad, really.

Essssss... No! Wait! I Mean Arrrrrrr!

Indeed , mateys, 'tis Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Why not mix it up a little this year and try talking like a pirate who is fact a duck disguised as a pirate?

For Your Rodent Pleasure

Something is in the ground at the Kafkaesque homestead.

EXHIBIT A was the mounds of earth multiplying in the back yard. EXHIBIT B was the odd and somewhat disconcerting behavior of the neighborhood cat gang (note: I am not specifically speaking here of Cat Town, which I enjoy linking to whenever possible, because it contains pictures of cats wearing headwear, and that's important for America). What was happening was this: one representative of the neighborhood cat gang (usually a rather dapper little grey and white number) would trespass into our back yard and then sit and stare at the ground for hours at a time. Of course, having lots of first-hand experience with cats laying around and generally not doing anything, we were not too alarmed by this impressive display of inertia. But this cat was alertly staring into the corner of the lawn area (I call it the lawn area, because I think one day I may put a lawn there, and not because there is an actual lawn item there at present. There are rocks, dirt, and weeds, not necessarily in that order.) like a cat version of the Blair Witch Project.

This tipped us off that something was up, ground-wise.

At first I thought we had moles. And moles are great. They wear little plaid vests and charming Victorian eyeglasses. In the morning, they peek their heads out of their little holes, carrying a candle and wearing a jaunty nightcap. They also bring to mind the psychedelic Spiderman foe, The Molemen. Just to be thorough, I should also mention that Molemen are also featured in the not as charming, but you'd have to say interesting, series of Residents albums. Sure, moles still destroy your plants, but they're weird enough that you can almost forgive them.

Then, I described the symptoms to variety of people well versed in the rodent arts, and they assured me what I was facing was a gopher.

Gophers are single-minded about destroying your garden. They don't wear plaid vests or squint in the sun. They don't go for wild rides with Mr. Toad of Toad Hall, or gambol down rivers with their friend the weasel. They have giant fangs and, as if that's not bad enough, as soon as you tell someone you have gophers, chances are pretty good that person will launch into stirring rendition of one of three, or possibly all three, scenes from the movie Caddyshack.

Frightening.

Still, I wasn't that worried about our back yard, since as I have mentioned, it's a barren wasteland suitable only for filming 1950s Mars movies. Then, we spent many back-breaking hours redoing our front garden, freeing it from the shackles of junipers and ugly white rocks, and ushering in a new age of feather grass, Mugo pines, and a particularly nice flowering cherry tree. The mounds started appearing in the front yard soon after, and one day one of our grasses was pulled into the earth, cartoon-like.

Clearly, the time had come for action.

I went to a local nursery and asked for one of those gopher deterrent devices that you bury in your yard. You put batteries in the device, and every 30 seconds or so, it whirrs into life, emitting sonic vibrations that send your gopher nemesis into apoplexy, so determined are they to get away from the shaking menace. Maybe the device plays Guns n Roses too. I don't know. It sure worked for the ATF that time in the Koresh compound.

So I went to the counter and said, in so many words, that I am less than a completely formed man because I want to gently dissuade my rodent squatters, instead of, variously, sucking them out of their warm burrows with a tremendous vaccuum cleaner, driving stakes into their trembling gopherbodies, gassing them, or blowing them up. "I don't want any, you know, trouble," I said to the nursery lady.

After all, I'd hate to get to the afterlife, and find of bunch of pissed off grub-munching vermin are running the show, and none too happy about the whole genocide thing.

So I wanted the humane alternative, the sonic sound wave emitting super-robot machine from the future that would drive my little gopher chums to the very brink of madness and possibly over that brink. Maybe they'd run out into the street and get run over. Hey, not my fault. I didn't gas you, gopher buddy. Or drive a giant stake into your head.

But no, she informed me. They didn't have any happy friendly gopher-driver-insaners at the nursery. "Just," she said with something of a twinkle in her eye, "Poison, gas, traps. You know." I was disheartened, but told her that I would look through the selection of medieval torture devices anyway. Maybe there would be a pleasant and quick death device. Like a gopher version of Soylent Green, where the gophers get to view pastoral scenes and listen to soothing music in their final hours, before being processed into Ritz crackers. On the shelf there were the spike traps, indeed, and poison and gas. But there, in the corner of the display, was the prize...the GopherIt.

The GopherIt is an 18 inch, 4 battery-havin', buzzin', beepin' gopher sanity remover the likes of which I have never seen.

So I grabbed it and strode boldly to the counter and crowed to the woman who had denied the device's existence: "You do! You do have a gopher vibrator!"

And then there was a little pause, during which I thought (as I end up thinking quite a bit) "Maybe I didn't really say that out loud."

But, of course, I did. And I have to say she was unrattled.

It does make me think, though. For one thing, I paid $39.95 for the GopherIt. I don't shop for a lot of vibrators, but I'm guessing you could get a non-name-brand knock-off vibrator for somewhere around $20. Also, if I planted vibrators in the yard, maybe I could grow a vibrator tree and start a lucrative new career as an organic vibrator farmer.

So I've got that going for me.

Sell the Ranch

A great idea for Hurricane relief.

Animal Crackers

I think one of my animal crackers has a goiter. And what is that? My god, is it an udder? A monkey with an udder?

I can only conclude that some hideous experimentation has been taking place. That the jar of animal crackers in the break room has become some sort of nightmarish Island of Dr. Moreau, where beaks grow from the crotches of innocent bison, yawning bubos infest the backs of polar bears, and the number of appendages afforded God's creatures cannot even be reckoned in sensical integers.

If I can but find the tasty scientist-shaped cookie responsible for this genetic manipulation, this hubris-damned tampering in the domain of the lord, I promise vengeance to you, my monstrous, deformed cracker friends. Freedom is at hand!

(I am unused to sugar.)

I Believe That Would Be a Plapple

The best thing I heard at the Farmer's Market this morning was when a young woman cried excitedly to her boyfriend "Honey! Try this. It's a pluot. Half plum and half apple."

I Had the Hairpiece Dream Again

It is the simple questions that can drive one to the very brink of madness. Such a question haunts me in the quietness of the night, when the clacking percussion of the clock's march offers no respite, and sleeplessness is the only spectre haunting the halls of my consciousness:

What kind of world are we living in that T.J. Hooker is available on DVD?

French Pop Day

I declare, in an admittedly unofficial sense, today to be French Pop Day. Please, take to the streets playing Stereolab and Air. Be aloof. Be confused about exactly what you should be wearing or listening to. Try a hat. When people ask you why you are wearing a hat, and perhaps even demand that you remove said hat, especially if you are wearing it indoors, which can be construed as rude in some circles, you must act aggrieved and seethe "Eet ees French Pop Day, mon ami." Or, if you feel more rambunctious "C'est le jour de Pop Francais, imbecile!"

Please, no craziness with the baguettes.

More than Full Disclosure

I'd like to broach kind of a tender subject here.

I don't know anything about women. I know that's shocking to hear, coming from a guy who is not only married, but has an near-encyclopedic familiarity with horror movies and D&D.

This fact was brought home to me the other night, a night like any other. The wifely friend (who I am at pains to mention is a woman, and therefore a person I really don't understand in even the most basic way) and I were on the sofa, watching television. I know it's also kind of shocking that an exciting guy like me was sitting around watching television, but I assure you it was something educational, like Australian Rules Football or America's Funniest Police Shootings. Anyway, this was laundry day.

We have a special trade-off that happens on laundry day: she does the sorting, the pre-soaking, the loading, the washing, the removing of tender and fragile items for line-drying, the painstaking removal of lint from the screen, and the transfer to the dryer. I do the folding*. This is not because I have convinced her that folding the laundry is dangerous in any way, like maybe there is a choking hazard involved in vee neck undershirts, or that she may become disoriented by the nineteen black socks that are in some indiscernible way different from each other, and go running off into the night, screaming. For some unknown reason, she finds folding the clothes tedious and annoying, and won't do it.

So that works out.

I was gamely folding my way through the vast Matterhorn of dingey whites and slowly fading blacks*** when it struck me that I should put some underwear on my head. So I did. Now, I know you do this when you're folding laundry too, so don't try to deny it. Sometimes I'll even mix it up a little and hang one of the wifely friend's bras off my ears. And then I'll sit there, as I was at this particular moment, grinning at my wife, waiting for her to notice that I am doing something that is so desperately hilarious that she'll remember why she is so proud to be married to me, her undie-headed king.

I had selected a pair of the briefs that I recently picked up for jogging. Any of you joggers (I should say male type joggers) can testify that jogging in boxer shorts is not that pleasant.

She looked at me, with my briefs all chapeau-style, and said "Well, they're better than boxers anyway."

I was stunned. The briefs slid from my head, obviously as troubled as I was.

"You mean you like tighty-whiteys?" I asked her.

"Well, yeah."

Now, there was a time when I was all about the tighty-whiteys. Up until I was twenty-three or so, I was a tighty-whitey man. I was gripped, cupped, and supported. My junk was warm and safe, like a little baby bird--no, I mean like a particularly large kookaburra--in the cottony softness my Fruit of the Looms provided.

And then, a girlfriend told me one day, as if this was a self-evident truth, "You should wear boxers."

So, like any sane man would do, I destroyed every last pair of tighty-whiteys. I cleansed with a holy fire. I committed underwear genocide of the highest order. And I bought a whole range of boxer shorts. For about ten years now, I've been all boxers. I'll wear them until the elastic is such a half-remembered whisper that my pants are the only thing keeping them on. I have exotic and exciting patterns, like dachshunds in repose, footballs, and a variety of plaids that would boggle the mind of those of you who are easily boggled.

Boxer shorts are better for admiring your physique in the mirror, too. You feel tough wearing the boxers. Like you should be enjoying a cup of really bad coffee on the porch of a log cabin somewhere, maybe lighting a match on your inner thigh to light your cheroot. You want to be striding through the woods boldly, alive as only a man who has no sort of testicular support of any kind can really be.

And now here was my own wifely friend telling me after what is soon to be five years of marriage that she like the whiteys.

And the question that keeps recurring to me, before I go ahead and rout the forces of boxerdom from my drawers drawer, is this:

I wonder how they'll look on my head?*****







*Everything, that is, except the fitted sheet. No man knows how to fold a fitted sheet. It's like trying to fold a lettuce leaf.**

**I'm sorry but I'm fresh out of logical similes, apparently.

***Incidentally, "dingey whites and slowly fading blacks" was the rejected first title of the timeless anthem Ebony & Ivory. Cooler heads eventually prevailed and added the stark contrast so beloved by the entire world.****

****Though, strangely, hated by Jupiter.

*****Incidentally, my wifely friend just read this and denied that she likes the tighties for anything but purely lecherous reasons. So, never mind.

Four The surface of the blog is crystalline and unmoving. Not a wind or breeze breaks the undisturbed, mirror-like level of the disconcertingly white Blogger template. For over a month the quiet has reigned, icy and deathlike. From behind you, you think you hear a sound. But it is nothing. You eat a cheese puff. And suddenly, without notice, without notifying you in writing two to four weeks beforehand and asking you to please send an RSVP and maybe bring that nice ambrosia you always make, with the colored marshmallows that all the kids like so much, and that was held in evidence once on suspicion of having killed a man, though it was later acquitted when it turned out that the guy was not in the best shape, certainly not in any shape to be eating ambrosia anyway, and maybe had kind of a deathwish when you really think about it, I mean really, suddenly it is !My Life as an American Gladiator's Fourth Birthday Spectacular! Perhaps, I hear you say, kind of snottily if you don't mind my saying so, it's a little less spectacular when Mr. Gladiator Blog Writer Guy hasn't been exactly blazing away on the updates for the last year. Well, OK. You have a point. But, undaunted, I press on, continuing the fine tradition of listing my favorite posts of the year. Since there were only about seven posts all year, this should be cake. So, without further ado, the painfully self-aware favorite posts list for our birthday: Bees in the walls! (incidentally, here is an update on the bees in the walls situation: They came back. I heard from my tenants that they were being bothered by thousands of bees pouring out of the walls. Having experienced that myself, I can tell you that it is a little worrisome. It turned out the little darlings had indeed come back and had built a four foot beehive in the wall. Yay for fun!) Expert-ese The Squeegee Incident 

Updates

I just thought I'd drop by and let you know about some important things that have transpired of late.

a. The Taco of Gold
I was unprepared for the discovery one morning of the Taco of Gold. I was in the midst of my daily commute, not suspecting that the proof of the existence of this legendary comestible was mere yards ahead of me. And then, as I entered the 101 onramp, there it was!

Men had given their lives for but a glimpse of its precious lettuce, cheddar cheese, and lard-cooked beef. It had been the subject of song and legend since time immemorial, and now here before my eyes...a roach coach emblazoned proudly with the words El Taco Del Oro!

I should have been tipped off by the proximity of Cortez, dancing across the slow lane, with his galleons and guns.

b. The Band - Not Really All That Great
There's an amazing record shop called The Record Man in Redwood City. The store is in a guy's house, and the walls are lined, ceiling to floor, with records. I like to go in there and gawk, and pay rather exorbitant prices for Roxy Music and John Cale bootlegs.

A couple of weeks ago, The Record Man had a sidewalk sale, where they put out boxes and boxes of their overstock. I showed up at ten in the morning and spent a few hours rummaging through the piles of vinyl. Records were a dollar each. Double albums two dollars. Box sets, three dollars.

I ended up, it must be said, buying stuff I would normally never have paid more than a dollar for. About twenty albums, including an old Bill Cosby comedy record, an Animals live album, some Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan, that sort of thing. I also went a little crazy and picked up a Band album. Or is it a The Band album? I don't know.

Anyway, I reasoned that I like Bob Dylan, and The Band had played with him quite a bit. I looked at the track listing, and recognized only one song: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. For a buck I figured, what the hell.

My wifely friend was less than pleased with that selection. I would even go so far as to say she mocked me. But I was steadfast. "The Band," I assured her, " Was a very important, you know, band."

She sighed and gave me a look that managed to convey the sentiment that she feared her husband would soon be having his own Lynyrd Skynyrd/Creedence/The Band rockblock, and maybe begin drinking rye.

Well, I waited until I had some "me time", and cued up my The Band album. I struggled through the somewhat twangy harmonies and clearly very emotional ballads. This was not going well. I wanted to achieve some sort of oneness with seventies Americana, but all I was getting was a feeling that I should be driving a Ford pickup, and considering a gun rack.

Then, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down came on". I don't know if it's just me but songs about the glory of the South don't do that much for me. At least I think that's what it was about. But I don't think I ever actually needed to hear it again.

And then I realized with full clarity: I don't like The Band. If you're interested, one very used The Band album. Only 99 cents.

c. Dental and Auto Hyjinx
I had my first dentist visit in many years last week, occasioned by a spectaular molar-breaking incident. I was eating red licorice and somehow chipped one of my molars. I assumed some deviant had put a piece of gravel in my Red Vines, unwilling to admit it was because I had a gaping cavity in the tooth roughly the size of the Moaning Cavern.

So I made an appointment with a dentist recommended by my boss. I had a moment of misgiving about going to the same dentist as the person who writes my performance evaluations.

"Your work is good, but frankly, your teeth give me the creeps. Clean out your desk, Shane MacGowan."

But I needed help to prevent myself from sinking further into dentropy, so I made the appointment. I also had a coolant leak in my VW, so I figured I would kill two birds with one stone and visit my mechanic after the appointment. The dentist is in downtown San Francisco, and the mechanic is over by the ballpark. This seems unrelated, but stay with me.

The dentist, it must be said, was very forgiving, as I confessed the many years that had passed since my last dental genuflection. And then the drilling began. I ended up with three fillings, and the promise that this was but the beginning of a truly impressive series of dental spelunking excursions.

Then, I headed off for my mechanic, my mouth still anesthetized.

I don't know much about cars, but I know this: having your clutch snap at 4pm on 6th and Bryant sucks. That's what happened. I was at that intersection, and when I went to put the car in first, the clutch just snapped, and the pedal sagged to the floor, dead. I began all my tried and true tricks to resuscitate the car. These include swearing a lot, making witch doctor noises, crying out "you're only supposed to have a coolant leak, you stupid car!" and gesturing futilely to the angry woman in the Lexus behind me that I was not going anywhere.

I got out of the car, which was lifeless in the inside lane of three. Heavy traffic zoomed all around me. I knew I had to push the car off to the side of the road, but clearly, no-one was going to stop to let me do that. I looked to the sidewalk, and there just happened to be one of those guys who absolutely live for car-pushing. He was probably forty, and had two younger guys with him. He had a hoodie sweatshirt on and looked kind of like MacGyver. "Hey!" he shouted across the cars. "You need help pushing that?"

Honestly, I think if I had said no, he would have been crushed. Instead, I gratefully said "Yes!" which came out more as "Eeears!" from my novocained mouth.

He and his two friends charged across the oncoming traffic. "You!" he addressed one of the other guys. "You stop these cars. You, get behind the car. Let's do this!"

I think his hair may have rippled in the breeze, even.

I am eternally grateful that they helped me push the car to the right lane. There is no shoulder at all at that intersection, so my poor VW was blocking a lot of people who wanted to get on the freeway. If you happened to be driving that particular way, that was me, sanding a fair distance away from his Golf, in the hopes that the angry masses would not disembowel me for inconveniencing them.

I soon realized that I had wisely forgotten to bring either my AAA card or my cell phone with me, but I found a CHP who called a tow truck for me, and a mere 45 minutes later, one arrived and towed me to my destination for an insane amount of money. My mechanic called me today to let me know he'd be relieving me of another insane amount of money, putting me that much farther from my goal of being wealthy enough to hunt other humans for sport.

But at least my tooth is fixed.

Full Disclosure

I really feel like I should like The Stranglers. Every few years, I get "Always the Sun" stuck in my head, or I suddenly think of "Golden Brown" and can't remember how it goes. So I dredge up a Stranglers Greatest Hits album and play it. And you know what? My Stranglers Greatest Hits album would contain exactly two songs. The rest? Kind of crappy.

update: Actually, "Always the Sun" isn't that great either. "All Roads Lead to Rome"?

The Answer to Any Trivia Question Worth Knowing is "Chuck Norris"

I went to Trader Joe's, as is my wont when I am in need of some substandard cereal and Slovak beer, and a remarkable thing happened: a little Chuck Norris moment.

I took my purchases to the register, and got carded for my exciting Slovak beer purchase. The clerk looked at my driver's license, and immediately got a far off look in his eye. I thought maybe he was impressed at my youthful appearance, or perhaps the organ donor sticker made him covetous of my spleen or liver, which, it must be said, are also quite suprisingly youthful. But no!

My driver's license still has my old address from southern California, you see. This prompted the following inspirational Chuck Norris moment:

"I have a trivia question for you." the clerk said, somewhat conspiratorially.

"Um," I said.

"What...martial artist...lives in your town?"

I wracked my brain. Sure, I knew my southern California abode was a hotbed of Tae Kwan Do, Jujitsu, Judo, really all forms of martial arts. But who could it be? Jet Li, who lives down by the Circle K? Jackie Chan? The shy and private Jeff Speakman perhaps?

"I have no idea."

"Star of Fists of Fury?"

"Nope."

"Played a Texas lawman on TV?"

"Ah! Chuck Norris!"

"Yes, yes," said the clerk, with a tone usually reserved or speaking to the very dim. "I've just finished his autobiography, you know."

I began to worry. The transaction was over, and this guy was sill talking to me.

"He's had quite a life, Mr. Norris."

"Oh. Yes?"

"Yes. One day they should make a movie of his life. It hasn't all been good, but Mr. Norris is the first to say that in his book."

I wanted to tell him that I would be the one. I would take it upon myself, make it my life's work, to film the almost Messiah-like story of Mr. Norris's life, how he rose from the ranks of a disturbingly hairy Bruce Lee foe to star in a syndicated television program loved by the elderly this country over.

Instead, with a tear in my eye, I collected my Slovak beer and eight-pound bag of frozen prawns and wandered out of the store, my life forever changed.

And I Didn't Even Get to Do That

About an hour and a half into clearing our front garden of the ten foot by ten foot pile of rocks, shovelful by shovelful, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, it hit me:

This is the same thing I'd be doing if I killed a guy in Mississppi in the late sixties.

The Grocery Store
A Play in Two Acts

Act I
Doth thy carte offend thee?

I just returned from the grocery store, which for brevity I shall simply call The Really Overpriced Grocery Store That's On The Way Home. On the way inside, I stopped to grab a cart (because I'm a thinker, see?), when something strange caught my eye.

This store has a dispenser of sanitary cart handle wipes.

Ha! I thought. These pathetic snobs can't even touch a shoppping cart that someone before them has handled? What kind of hyper-sensitive society are we living in, anyway? I mean, sure, the last shopper may have had some fingernail fungus or other similar fingernail life-forms going on, but is it really necessary to sanitize the cart handle?

What's the worst that could be breeding on there? Well. Hepatitis C, maybe?

I looked around the store entrance furtively. These shoppers looked clean, but who can really tell? They might be infested with sores, or maybe the scurvy. Honestly, there's some class-A whack-jobs out here. It's like a damn Fellini film.

I grabbed a wipe and wiped that cart for all it was worth. I didn't stop at the handle, either. I sanitized the crap out of that cart, even lubing up the little squeaky cart-tires for good measure. The pina-colada cart-freshener I threw in at no extra charge.

Intermission —Snacks and frozen treats in the lobby
A complex man!

Why is it that the idea of Domino's Cheeseburger pizza fills me with revulsion and cynicism for the future of mankind, and yet I love with a deep and abiding passion the tiny grill-marked burgers of Chunky Sirloin Burger Soup?

Act II
The Manne of Meate Is Surlye

It's my turn. Yes, it's my turn. I know there's an old lady here, but I was here before her. I'm not making some sort of judgment call that I am better then her, although it is important to note that she will probably not be around as long as I will and shouldn't really be eating meat at her advanced age anyway. It's not like I'm taking her seat on the bus. I was here a good 70-80 seconds before she was.

So, the red snapper, please.

Thank you.

But wait, there is more meat that I want from you. Please, do not look at me exasperatedly, as if you had far better things you could be doing. You're either getting me two one-pound packages of ground turkey —the dark meat if you please (I care about my health but only in a token sort of way)— or you're going to be slinging meat for someone else. Maybe breaking a crab's knees with that silver hammer thing, which I will grant you looks kind of fun. The choice here is not "get Kaf his meat or gaily skip through a field barefoot". Okay?

Did you just roll your eyes at me?

Look, I told you I wanted the Rocky Junior chicken. Not Rocky Senior! I don't know what the difference is, either, but I'm already coughing up some serious dough for this chicken because someone thoughtfully slapped a Free Range sticker on it, so I think I should get the choice. Frankly, I'm reluctant to eat a Senior range chicken with this elderly woman standing next to me and eyeing me as if to say "Why, why must you order so much meat, young man?"

Yes, that's all. Thank you for being so surly, Meat Man. You really made my day.

exeunt all

Cingularly Unfunctional

You know what? I'm getting a great deal on my nationwide calling plan! For the ten minutes of each day that my phone actually has a connection, it's great!

But I must say that I'm paying a mere 60 dollars a month for two phones! 60 dollars! That's such a great deal that I don't mind the fact that the phone works neither at my office nor my home. And it has a really cute picture of a smiling panda on the display. And that's worth thirty dollars a month right there. I'm not sure why it has a panda, or how to get rid of it, but I must say that Cingular Wireless gave me a really great deal on this phone.

Nine dollars I paid for this phone! Can you believe it? This phone, that doesn't seem to have a volume control, is awkward, unwieldy, and uncomfortable to use, and whose battery leaps from its protective sheath like a lemming from a cliff every time the phone is more than softly placed on a pile of papers. It is very, very good at holding down papers, by the way, as it displays the comforting message "Network Search" for 23 out of the day's 24 hours.

In fact, this wonderful phone that I am paying only 60 dollars a month for only functions while I am driving to and from work. As we all know, that is the best and safest time for any important and potentially distracting conversations that will take your mind off less pleasant things like, I don't know, brake lights.

I hate talking on the phone while I'm driving. I have enough trouble avoiding the fleet of white minivans going sixty in the fast lane and Johnny Acura Integra going eight thousand miles an hour in the slow lane without worrying about the phone. In fact, I don't even like having a cellphone. I don't want to be reachable, and I also don't want to have to worry about my cellphone popularity.

Everyone else seems to be talking on their phone all the time. They must know a lot of people. And those people must be really interested in everything the phone people are doing. I only got my cellphone so I could call my wife, or she could call me. In case there's some sort of invasion and we can't be near each other. Then we can call each other and spend those last few hours crying into the phone, waiting for our painful deaths.

But, of course, all I really use the phone for is this sort of thing:

"Honey? It's me. What kind of pickles do we buy again?"

So, in the interest of furthering the pickle discourse and to avoid the potentially disastrous mis-purchase of any and all condiments, I called Cingular Wireless. If you've never called them, I highly recommend it. The best thing about calling them is that you have to navigate through a button pressing menu so esoteric and torturously labyrinthine that you have to trick them into talking to you. The only way I managed to get an actual sentient (and I use the term in its broadest sense) human on the line was to press the button for "report a lost or stolen phone". I mentioned this to the being on the other end of the line, complimenting him on his company's dedication to customer service and he said "Oh. Yeah. You have to do that."

"Well, I was wondering if there's a reason I don't get any reception at work, or at home, unless I am in one particular area of the kitchen, hanging out the window where my soft flesh is exposed to nature and may, in all likelihood, be nibbled by ambitious raccoons."

"Where do you live?" he asked speculatively, and I told him.

"Oh. That's a really bad coverage area. Have you tried climbing on the roof, or holding a lightning rod in your teeth?"

Encouraged, I asked him if their merger with AT&T would help my reception in any way.

I think he may have giggled at that. "I, um, I don't think so. Have you considered moving?"

"It hadn't, honestly, occurred to me."

"Well, you do have the panda, right?"

I had to agree that the panda really made it all OK. I should really be glad they aren't charging me more for that little scamp.

"Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

No, Cingular, I guess not.

What?

What's that? Am I still here?

Yes, I'm still here. I was not here for a while. I was even in Hawaii for a while there. But now, resolutely and steadfastly, I am here.

And what knowledge do I bring you from Hawaii? Not much, really. But I brought you chocolate covered macadamia nuts. Everyone brings chocolate covered macadamia nuts. I think you can probably buy them here. But in Hawaii, or in Maui anyway, which is where I was for a while of the while I was not here, they sure have a lot of them. The nuts. With the chocolate. It's a little known fact that you are legally required to buy at least three (3) boxes during your stay on the islands. If you don't, then you anger The God of The Volcano. And then there's trouble.

The God of The Volcano has some sort of royalty deal going with Hawaiian Host, maybe.

Where did we go, exactly? To Hana, which is the best place you can go, if you are going. It's only accessible by driving a menacingly small road that clings to the edge of cliffs and features locals driving very fast over one-lane bridges. But it's nice and mellow and relatively untouristy, after the day-tripper types have returned to Lahaina for the evening. There is only one hotel in town, the Hana-Maui, which is crazy, crazy expensive, so we didn't stay there. We did, however, partake of their extremely good Mai Tais and Pina Coladas. Highly recommended.

As is the Heavenly Hana Inn, a Japanese style bed and breakfast where we spent a couple of nights.

We also stayed in a treehouse for a couple of nights, which was slightly less deluxe and more oh-man-I'm-in-the-middle-of-rainforest. It had exciting features like giant spiders and mosquito netting with holes in it over the bed. The giant spiders didn't seem to be doing that great of a job of combatting the eight million mosquitos, but they assured me they were trying their best. The treehouse also featured an outdoor toilet and shower which made us feel very adventurous and tough, so that was nice. The tree that the treehouse was built in was a guava tree so we'd be sleeping fitfully, dreaming of ungodly predators nibbling our soft underbellies, when we'd be woken by a giant crash as a guava, filled with ennui, finally leapt to its death on the jungle floor below.

All in all, a good trip.



I promise to be slightly less silent in the coming months.

By the way, if anyone has emailed me in the last, say, three months, at the nachtopus.net address, I won't have gotten it. Address any concerns or frippery to kafkascampi AT gmail DOT com. See how I did that there, with the capital letters and all? Smart like a whip.

No Longer at Large

Dave Allen passed away last night at age 68. I grew up watching his very old-school one-man show "Dave Allen at Large" late at night on PBS. When my parents would let me stay up late enough, that is.

Good night, thank you, and may your God go with you.

Some collected Dave Allen quotes

Music to Start a Cult To

You should be downloading Gram Rabbit mp3s.

Cool, kooky, hypnotic music from a little Joshua Tree band.

Also, bunny ears.

Physical Fits

Once again, we have begun to plunge healthward in the Kafkaesque household. Roughly every other day, we wake up at five thirty in the morning (or even earlier, depending on who we are trying to impress with the story) and go for a half-hour jog.

And we are not even being chased by bears or anything.

I've discovered something fantastic about jogging, and I think it's probably why most joggers jog: you can complain about it whenever you want. And any time is the right time to complain about jogging, I assure you. Any lull in the conversation is ideal to issue a low groan and say pathetically (yet impressively) "Ohhh. I woke up at five-thirty this morning to go jogging." [obviously, you may embellish with any time up to 3 am. Earlier than three may stretch plausibility.]

On the days we don't go jogging, I do exercises in the morning. These exercises consist entirely of pushups and crunches, ensuring a minimum of actual results. I call them "crunches" because it sounds really important and rough and tumble. "Situps" doesn't sound anywhere near impressive enough.

I do fifty of each in our guest room, choosing to perform the mighty crunches with my toes hooked under one of our Ikea Billy bookcases with really heavy glass doors. A couple of factors make this placement enjoyable:

1. Each time I struggle to a near-sitting position, I am eye-level with the philosophy and religion shelf, so my thought process is kind of like this: "Aaaaaaagh - oh, the Baghavad Gita As It Is - Aaaaaaagh - I should really finish Violence and the Sacred - Aaaaaaagh - I bet Joseph Campbell can't do fifty crunches - Aaaaaaagh - If he were alive I mean - Aaaaaaagh!" and so on.

2. Every crunch exerts a little more upward force on the heavy bookshelf, and makes me wonder if I correctly installed the little safety strap to the wall. By about crunch #43, I secretly wish for the sweet release of death, crushed under a weighty pile of New German Cinema texts and travel guides for places we haven't been yet.

All of this madcap exercising is occasioned by our desire to be slightly less flabby when we go to Maui next month. I feel confident I won't be much less flabby but at least, when I am gazing at the sunrise from Haleakala, I can groan and say "Ohhhh man. I was up at three am jogging," and put all the other tourists to shame.