I'd like to announce that I'm off hiatus for the duration of this post. Then, after the post is done, I will be back on hiatus. I'll be off doing other things. Maybe I'll be having a sandwich.

I just don't want you getting comfortable. Got to keep it edgy, jack.

*ahem*

Cabbies I Have Known

I have been flying around this questionably great land of ours with alarming frequency lately. This allows me to spend quality time with my favorite people: cabbies.

A couple of weeks ago I had the singular experience of being driven around by a clearly insane Thai woman who tried to force me to charge my phone in her cab.

"YOU HAVE PHONE?!" she cried as I stepped into the minivan.

"Yes. Yes I do." I smiled. I thought she was being motherly, trying to make sure that I had brought all the necessary items for a trip.

"WHAT KIND OF PHONE?!" she demanded. Incidentally, I should add that she really spoke all in caps.

"Siemens?" I replied meekly.

"YOU CHARGE YOUR PHONE!" she yelped and began to fumble in the glove box. "I HAVE CHARGER!" She found the charger and thrust it at me menacingly.

"No. No. I've just charged it, you see." I brandished my nine dollar phone.

"CHARGE?" she assayed once again.

"No, really. It's fine."

She stared back at me quizzically, almost woundedly. And gave me a "hmmmm." It could have been a "hmmmmph." I'm not sure. I just hoped it was not a "Hmmm, I think I will drive you into a cement pillar at high velocity, Siemens-phone-charger-rejector!"

I slid the door of the minivan shut and we were on our way to the airport. The airport is about ten minutes from my house, and I go the same way every time. I told her "Go down Williams, left on Sutter." [the names of the streets have been changed in this post to protect the innocent].

She replied "No."

"No?" I repeated, but added a question mark.

"No. We go on Meadow. Faster." I was frankly a little puzzled. Not only was she refusing to take me the way I wanted to go, but she seemed to be saying she wanted to take a road which didn't go through to the airport. It ends about a block away from my house, in an open corridor filled with giant weeds that look like they want to eat small dogs. There are plans to put Meadow through, but unless it was going to take us the better part of two years to drive the block and a half to Meadow, it wasn't going to work.

I started to object but she was on the case. She made it to Meadow and turned right, into the mouth of the open corridor. She was thrown momentarily, evidently trying to decide if she could drive through the open corridor (and a square mile of military base the lay between us and the airport).

I screeched "NO ROAD!"

"Oh!" she said, and swung the van around, apologizing profusely. In fact, she swung the van right back through the intersection, against a red light and through oncoming cars. I emitted a series of small "ah! ah!" sounds as we narrowly missed Focuses and Hondas.

But then, we were on Meadow. Headed in completely the wrong direction.

She recovered her composure. "We take freeway." she said.

"No. Go back and take Williams."

"I don't think soooo," she drummed her fingers on the dash. "Traffic."

I said "Listen, there is no traffic right now. We'll be there in ten minutes."

"You want to bet?" She turned back to me and grinned maniacally. "You miss your flight. What time your flight?!"

"I've got an hour and a half. We'll be there in ten minutes. I promise you."

She made tutting sounds, but gave in and duly drove me to the airport, on Williams, without killing me. And we made it in ten minutes. But I did get to hear lots and lots about the cabbie. I think people become cabbies for the express reason of complaining to strangers about how miserable they are. It must be fun for your passengers to know that you are one missed check away from putting your head in the oven, as you propel them down busy streets at high speeds.

She had been a translator, she said. And a stewardess. She had made lots of money at those occupations, but she said they were boring. Now she was struggling to make ends meet. She told me how much her rent was. How much her cab rental was. Exactly how much money she made. By the end of it I could have filled out a loan application for this woman.

She also told me she was from Thailand. She said something about "in her country", and I asked what country she was from. "THAILAND!" she screamed as if she were at a Thailand High School football game.

"Must be nice there," I said, hoping to distract her from any more suicidal thoughts.

"Thailand is number one," she replied [and I hasten to point out that I am merely describing actual events here, and not trying to stereotype anyone. If you have a problem with the depiction of the Thai cabbie, you can email me and I will seek her out and let you know you are on her side. Maybe there will be a class action suit.] Then she grew serious, looking at me in the rear-view and pulling her Risky Business style Ray Bans down her nose. "Sir, Thailand is number one," as if I had been arguing that no, in fact, Kazakhstan was clearly number one, with Thailand a distant sixth. And then she began to hum.

A little later, she did impressions. She was talking about tips, and which nationalities give the best tips. This led to a long impression of Indian cab-riders giving her thanks and blessings for the safe ride. More likely they were thanking her for not killing them. I made the mistake of giggling confusedly at her Indian passenger impression, so she continued for a good two minutes. It was a stellar impression, of course, and in no way offensive to the Indian people.

Somehow we made it to the airport, and I tipped her, for the impressions more than anything else. I strode into the terminal with the "Man, did I just almost get killed there?" feeling that only a truly insane cabbie can give you.

Hiatus Intermission

Not to disturb the hiatus here, which I think is going really well, but I have to tell you that I saw Lenny Kravitz playing the piano with his ass today.

It wasn't something I was prepared for.

I happened to be flipping the channels, which I do on my lunch hour. I come home from work, make a sandwich, and flip the channels on the teevee. The problem was that there was no soccer to watch, you see. The English season is over, and now my beloved soccer channel shows Australian Rules Football highlights at noon. That's just fine. There was even a period of my life where I considered myself somewhat knoweldgeable on Australian Rules Football.

People would say to me, as so often happens, "Kaf, that Australian Rules Football, I mean what the hell is up with that?"

I don't know why people would question me about Australian Rules Football in this way. It could have been the small pin that I wore on my lapel that said "Ask me about Australian Rules Football, mate."

And I would listen as they complained about how all it is is a bunch of guys jumping around, catching the rubgyish ball and knocking their tender parts against each other with furious anger. I would think to myself "They just don't understand the excitement of Australian Rules Football. They'll never know why you have to bounce the balls every ten steps, or why the little refs by the goalposts wear fish-and-chip-shop outfits." And I would feel sorry for them, a little.

I want to make it clear that my watching of Australian Rules Football was in no way inspired by Paul Hogan or any of the Crocodile Dundee canon. There were no "Put a shrimp on the barbie" tee shirts. And I have even actually been to Australia, but all I really remember about it is that is was insanely hot and there were parrots. I was eight, I think.

But to continue, I don't watch the Australian Rules Football anymore is what I'm saying.

So I was flipping the channels and found myself on MTV just as a video was coming on. "How odd!" I thought. After all, MTV doesn't show videos anymore, do they? That's what all the deathly cool disenfranchised types say now, I believe. "MTV doesn't even show videos anymore!" they seethe, and know that they have spoken a crushing truth, and indicted the kids of today with their cruel incisiveness.

The little video thing in the corner said it was Lenny Kravitz, and I thought "Wow. Lenny Kravitz. Do people listen to Lenny Kravitz?" I mean, I remember him doing that "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" song, which was a big hit, and the kids, they danced, but has there been a transmission from Lennyland since then?

Incidentally, I really like the name Lenny Kravitz, because it reminds me of the big guy from Of Mice And Men, and Spinal Tap, and the neighbor from Bewitched, who may or may not have been called Mrs. Kravitz.

But there was Lenny. The video started out with him getting out of bed with two women. Two women! Lenny Kravitz is obviously getting it on with some regularity, or at least he really wants you to think that he is. And it continued with Lenny and his band living the rockstar life. I think even the keyboard guy was allowed to live the rockstar life in this video. But he wasn't like that weird Prince and the Revolution guy in the medical scrubs, so he fit in OK.

The video went on, and if the words weren't actually "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" they were pretty damn similar, so I am confident in telling you that Mr. Kravitz may be fresh out of ideas. Eventually, Lenny and the band were playing live to an impressive amount of people, so I assume that either they were compensated for their attendance at the video shoot or that people actually do listen to Lenny Kravitz. And Lenny was getting into it. He was yowling and humping the ground and kicking his legs into the air like a demented, greasy Rockette, and just as the music reached its fever pitch, its climactic creschendo, he did it.

He played the piano with his ass.

I appreciate that there are precedents for this rear end revue, this rear end sonata, like Jerry Lee Lewis and maybe Liberace if he had had too much Cold Duck. But it just kind of brought me up short, like maybe everyone in the band and everyone in the crowd, compensated or not, would just fall suddenly silent and say as one "Dude! You're playing the pianno with your ass!"

Because there are only a couple of meanings possible when you break into some cheeky ivory-tickling during a performance:

1. That you've been raised to such a Bacchanalian state of ecstasy by your own performance that clearly the only option is to play the piano with your butt.

or

b. That the music is so bad that it doesn't matter what part of your body you're using. Hell, the drummer could hit the high hat with his nipples for all the difference it would make.

And then the video pretty much ended, with Lenny having a quiet moment that the director probably thought was very Graduate and complex, but which really should have been Mr. Kravitz thinking "I just played the piano with my butt, and they didn't even care. I'm going to sleep with three women tonight, and maybe a koala bear."

At least in Australian Rules Football, they don't play the piano with their butts. No more MTV for me.

What The Hell Kind of Hiatus Is This Anyway?

I'd just like to say to the person who called my cellphone 5 times recently, that I am not Carlos. I don't know much, but I know that.

I should make it clear that from our limited conversations, I wasn't sure whether the caller was Carlos or wanted me to be Carlos. But it was clear that there was some sort of Carlos negotiation taking place.

And I should mention that it was in Spanish too, the talking from the phone. And before the call would come through, there would be a voice in Spanish, which was an operator, I guess, saying something that I'm pretty sure was about alpacas, then this gruff voice would say "Carlos!"

Sometimes he would say "CARLOS!" in a anguished sort of way, that suggested maybe he was in some dire peril, and needed Carlos to extricate him. Maybe someone was after him. Maybe he was in jail. Maybe someone was after him AND he was in jail. But I don't want to think about that. Some poor guy, maybe being chased around a cell by his crazed bunkmate, who had fashioned some crude shiv from bedsprings and skin, and all he can do is stop at the payphone when maybe the cellmate drops his spring-and-skin shiv, and reach out in the darkness to Carlos, hoping against hope that somehow Carlos has got the bail money, perhaps from pawning his CD collection or rare 19th century daguerrotypes.

And here I am on the other end of the phone, distracted from some excruciatingly boring work task, and yelling into the phone "I AM NOT CARLOS!"

So I'm sorry, man. Or Carlos. Either way.

Hiatusing.

I know, I have been hiatusing regularly of late, but you'll just have to find your japery elsewhere for a while.

The Wisdom of Spam

I'd just like to personally thank one Ms. Wilhemina Judi for her thoughtful email, lovingly entitled "U R STUPID DUMBASS IF YOU PAY RETAIL PRICE FOR SOFTWAREZ".

Gosh, Judi, you're right. I m stupid dumbass. It took your insightful subject line to make me see that. If only more people would truly get to know their target demographic before making the sales "pitch". Other recent emails include "Hey jerkoff gET wAReZ", "U R assHole with tEEny bro", and "Molester of livestock, buy my tasty toner cartridges!". OK, I made that last one up. You can tell because the capitalization made a modicum of sense.

But can you imagine if this surefire strategy branched out into other products? Like Best Foods (Hellmann's East of the Rockies, so I'm told) could have a bold new "Jesus Christ why aren't you buying our mayonnaise you malformed freak?!" campaign. Or "Not a soul exists that doesn't find you odious and repellent -- now drink Miller Lite, chump!"

I can only hope.

I just booked a hotel at an alarmingly cheap rate from a shady looking internet travel site. So cheap and shady I called them to make sure it was on the up and up.

It seems to be both up and up, so I can only assume my room will be HAUNTED!, like in all those terrible shows you see on the Travel Channel where charming Bed and Breakfast owners in Georgia give straight-to-camera accounts of the time that someone dressed in a Civil War uniform massaged their inner thigh in the guest bathroom. Then, they make it perfectly clear that you should under no circumstances come to their Bed and Breakfast and give them lots of your money for the privilege of maybe having your inner thigh ectomplasmically massaged or perhaps getting woken up by a clumsy apparition stumbling to the toilet at three in the morning after a heavy bout of otherworldly beer drinking.

I suspect the HAUNTED! hotel thing only lasts til they get you to the hotel. Once you're there, the hotel staff is not going to want to expend the effort of simulating HAUNTING! They're not going to get up all hours of the night and bang pans or moan and wail or stand outside the window and throw frogs at you.

Anyway, I'll let you know if I get sucked into the television set or anything.

Braking Away

I return to you from bizarre car difficulties.

I drove home at lunch a few days ago, parked in my garage, and pulled up the handbrake. S-N-N-K-K-K! It sounded like something broke! I pulled my hand away from the handle and gingerly pressed in the release button on the brake. Nothing! It wouldn't move.

For half an hour I did battle with my handbrake. I wiggled. I jiggled. I even at one point got a rubber mallet and hit the button like a redheaded stepchild. No dice.

Finally, I sucked in my courage and called AAA. A tow truck guy showed up, and I had to explain that my brake was stuck on. He gave me a look that said "We tow truck drivers live for these moments. We yearn to come to your home and do something incredibly simple, perhaps involving a twilliger rod, and make you feel foolish and lame."

He hopped in the car and wiggled. And jiggled. He cursed and talked to me about the bewilderment he felt at waking up one day and realizing he was a "tow guy". He complimented my bouganvilleas. But he could not get the brake off.

"Don't worry," he said "I'll call my mentor".*

While we waited for his mentor, he explained to me that it was not really possible to tow my car to the dealership (where they would relieve me of several paychecks) because the car was parked head-in in the garage, and to tow it out would wreck the transmission. We, of course, could not roll it out of the garage because the brakes were stuck on. He explained a complex procedure involving a flatbed tow truck and applying soap to the rear wheels. I felt it was best not to question him.

His "mentor" showed up. This was the supremo tow guy, who had taught tow guy #1 all he knew. The second guy exploded with derisive laughter and made unkind insinuations about tow guy #1 and his lack of physical prowess. I, as a thirty-two year old man who had called AAA to fix my handbrake, was also referred to as "weak". This new guy, who looked kind of like one of the old circus sideshow strongmen of yore, bald with a handlebar moustache, climbed into the car and began jiggling. He demanded use of my visegrips, which I gladly supplied. **

He gave it a go for another forty minutes, the sweat pouring off him and into my upholstery. He detached things. He bent and deformed things...

But then! The brake was released!
I drove to the car dealership, my handbrake limply hanging. my center panel sadly askew, forever rent asunder.

When I got there, of course, the smarmy service representative lifted his eyebrows in a "I am clearly dealing with an idiot" sort of way when I told him about the problem.

Anyway, long story long, it cost me many, many clams, my car was in the shop for two days and I had to rent the worst car in the world: a bright red Chevy Cavalier, which I believe still holds the title of Official Car of Humility.

At least it said Enterprise on the license plate frame.





* I immediately thought of the old Shazam live action kids' show which for some reason I think of when I hear the word "mentor". Didn't that guy have a "mentor" who used to drive around in an RV or something? He was kind of like the superhero support vehicle, I guess. Maybe he carried spare gold boots in case Shazam lost a heel. Or was it called Captain Marvel? I have got to brush up on this stuff.

** I felt almost manly there for a minute, having visegrips in my toolbox. I didn't mention, of course, that I am terrfiied of the visegrips, and imagine them accidentally vise-gripping on parts of my body, maiming me hideously and leaving me to stagger the darkened streets with visegrips dangling from various body parts, frightening children and maybe becoming the topic of an In Search Of one day.

No man can eat 100 Peeps

Solitary

Things have been lonely and sad in the Kafkaesque household. The wife is out of town for days at a time on business. I eat solitary dinners, chatting with the cat about the 9/11 hearings. I watch movies. I make terrible sounds on the gueetar. I put off the chores.

But something happened this morning that showed me I am truly losing it, that my isolation has turned to some sort of sickness: I was leaving for work and realized that I forgot to drink coffee. That's right. I forgot to grind the beans, get out the filter, heat the water. All that stuff. I mean, if I had just forgot one step, like putting the filter in the little Melitta cone, that would be understandable, but totally missing the entire coffee element of my morning? It's worrying.

It's like forgetting to unzip your pants before going to the bathroom. Or wondering why you're not at work, when you forgot to drive your car there.

I fear for my mind.

Oh, also, and for no reason: Cthulhu v. The Superheroes Lenticular

What are lenticulars? Those crazy plastic thingies that seem to change or move as you look at them from one angle or another. Very popular with religious novelties, as I'm sure you are well aware. Like from one angle Jesus is giving the sermon on the mount or something, and then from the other angle -- Bam! Crucifixion!

On the Loss of Opportunity

We just got a new roof put on our house. That means we are no longer roofless people, as we were for a couple of days there while people who really looked a lot like carnies tore off our shingles. That sounds like a terribly miscalculated budget surgery, doesn't it? "People who look like carnies tore off my shingles!"

I know, gross.

Anyway, we got this new roof, which is very nice and made of steel and isn't thirty years old. Also, It doesn't send shakes flying off every time there's a wind over twenty miles an hour. So that's nice.

But it struck me today, as I was watching these faux-carnies up there wielding nailguns and drinking alarming quantities of Squirt (alarming because where do these guys pee? Are they peeing in my yard? Can I detect that in some way? Is there a pee-sniffing dog I can rent? But then, aren't all dogs really pee-sniffing dogs, when you come right down to it?). These guys are almost done with the job, and I missed out on a great opportunity: if I had paid them just a little bit more, and roofs are already pretty pricey so another few clams wasn't going to make much difference, I wonder if they would have worn big fluffy animal costumes while they worked on my roof.

Can you imagine how great it would be to be driving down a street and see a six foot frog nailing flashing to a skylight? Maybe a giant fluffy raccoon tiptoeing along the patio covering, teetering at the edge of the atrium?

Hindsight is 20-20 I guess.

The End of Days

In high school, a couple of friends and I would stay up all night playing insanely long games of RISK* until, inevitably, fisticuffs would ensue or someone would freak out and ruin the game.

One particularly exciting game featured my friend T massing an army too large to be held by the relatively small confines of Siam. He had not just the Vs, my friends, but the Xs. He must have had seventy armies on Siam.

Another friend, K, had retreated into Australia, perhaps hoping to live out his days peacefully in New Zealand or Western Australia, with his paltry five or ten armies. Maybe they would take up subsistence farming, or film a blockbuster fantasy trilogy with Orlando Bloom there one day in the future.

But T was at the border, with a vast force. And the dice came down in judgment.

You may have read in history books about the battle that day, how ten or so plastic Roman numerals held off the onslaught of far superior numbers, how K again and again rolled sixes to T's fours, threes to his ones, impossibly whittling down the juggernaut force until victory was in sight, and his ragtag band of plastic started to believe they could win the day. T's plastic warriors were strewn about the board, crying "Medic!". And no medic arrived.

But a rumbling began in the skies when T was down to thirty or so Roman numerals.

Every victory for K was rewarded with a punch in the arm. K laughed these glancing blows off and the dice rolling continued. These two gladiators pushed Is, Vs and Xs to their fate, demanded them up and over the trench wall into the face of a rain of bullets and fire. And every turn, K beat T. Again and again.

And the punches came harder now, with more venom. The laughter in return had an edge of ire.

No-one can now say exactly who was ahead when T launched the doomsday attack, for no-one survived that day. Somehow, Roman numerals started again after that, ekeing out an existence on a cardboard world that had seen the visitation of the perfect weapon. But no crops would grow; the land was ruined and diseased.

And in hushed tones, the legend would be passed from grandfather to grandson, that they may remember the past and not repeat its folly: The Day The Board Was Flipped.



* Yes, friends and neighbors. I was not the coolest kid in high school. I know, your illusions are shattered.

No-One Ever Complains About Airlines

I never get the headphones on flights, because the movies are awful.

I remember watching silently some of Pay It Forward. I wished terrible and surprisingly graphic torture on Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey, my eyes drifting up to the tiny screen as I watched from my tiny chair. I think the airlines should just pull out all the stops and show Beastmaster 2 on every flight.

"Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking...today we'll be cruising at an altitude of 12,000 feet...we'll be serving something hideous for your inflight meal...and after we level out we'll start our feature film...it's a special treat for you today...Akira Kurosawa directs Toshiro Mifune in Rasho-- just kidding! It's Beastmaster 2."

There also seems to be a certain despondency or inappropriateness to some of the film choices. Once, on a transatlantic flight, they showed us a couple of movies, one of which was that awful Anthony Hopkins movie about killing monkeys for fun and profit, and the other was some terrible teevee movie about a single mother dying of breast cancer. It was awful. People were crying in the aisles.

First the monkeys getting turned into ashtrays and wastebaskets, then the single mom languishing away in her hospital bed. Jesus.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the incredibly depressing films featured on this flight...now, Beastmaster 2."

I picked up the wifely friend's wedding ring a few days ago from our dubious jeweler. I'll call him Mo (because that's his real name). He's a giant Persian guy who is clearly on a large variety of drugs. We are trusting him for reasons that are unclear even to us to recast a significant amount of platinum into the right size for the wifely friend's dainty finger. The ring has never fit just right in our three years of marriage.

The last time I saw him, he was putting tiny slivers of sapphire into a water-fountain night-light. As he tried to pick up the little jewels, his hand was shaking like it was possessed by Pzuzu and engaged in a little ecstatic dancing. He glanced up at me and his eyes looked like the Man From Atlantis, or at least The Man Who Has Either Been Swimming in a Hyperchlorinated Pool or Has Smoked Large Amount of Pot.

Also, putting sapphires into an intrinsically worthless piece of plastic like a night-light is something that would only occur to somebody who's really, really high.

"Oh wow, man. I just thought of something. What if we took the goo out of a Renuzit air freshener and filled it with 12 year old Scotch?"

That sort of thing.

Anyway, I was thinking it might be fun to ask my wife to marry me several times throughout the course of the day, in really inappropriate places. Like waiting in line at the Subway, at the bus stop or at Hot Dog on a Stick. Maybe stroll into her work with a big bunch of those crappy tinfoil balloons you see at the grocery store checkout stand and a silk rose and loudly proclaim that I want to make an honest woman of her.

As it turned out, I decided not embarrass her in this fashion, as I am embarrassing enough to her in your garden variety ways. I just got down on one knee on our patio and said "You know I love you, right?", causing just the right amount of panic in her eyes as she thought "Oh no, you've killed someone/slept with an animal/broken my precious cat with wings sculpture," and then slipped the ring on her finger.

In the moment of doing that I realized a couple of things.

One, I will never again get that heartsickeningly worried moment of "Will she say yes?"

Two, that it is important to ask her to marry me every couple of years, just to keep her on her toes.

It's so romantic, it might make her forget that I did, in fact, break her "cat with wings" sculpture.

I'm not one to complain about such things (which of course means "I am definitely, unequivocally and irrefutably one to complain about such things, and even some other things that really aren't even all that related to the first thing even in the most tangential way."), but I saw a Hummer commercial today featuring Mojave 3 music. I don't think it's the end of days, but it just seems a little incongruous. Not as bad as Godspeed You! Black Emperor advertising for Raytheon or General Dynamics or anything, but just a little off.

The New Shirt

I wore a new shirt today. It's nice.

Maybe too nice.

All day people have been stopping by my cubicle and saying things like "Wow, silk?" and "That's the kind of shirt I want to get." and "I am no longer feel worthy to be working in the same building as you." I'll be working along happily (in this case happily is a decidedly relative term), when all of a sudden, I'll become aware of a presence off to my left.

I turn quickly and catch the entire engineering staff eyeing my shirt, cautiously tiptoeing closer like squirrels shyly approaching an offered peanut. Their eyes light on the shirt, and just for a moment, they are spirited away from their humdrum existence, lifted up from the soul-crushing banality of AutoCAD. They are given wings and hope by my shirt, freed from the constraints of their lonely and meaningless existences.

In this shirt, they see their destiny. They want to become better than they are. A mere yard of cotton blend has given them a renewed gusto.

Maybe they will take up rock climbing tonight. Or learn the saxophone.

You could ask every single person you meet today what their favorite animal is, and not one of them would say "the shrimp".

The Sizzler Seduction Scenario

Notes for possible short story/novel/rock opera/religious master narrative:

- A man, Julio, lounges by the all-you-can-eat salad bar of a Sizzler, making lurid suggestions to women using a langostino and drawn butter for visual aid.

- possible love scene involving sex on the salad bar, awkward moment with sneeze guard. Could strategically place pickled beets for propriety/ R rating.

- Educational song explaining that chickpeas and garbanzos are essentially the same thing. Note: Make chickpeas represent the struggle of Native Americans in the last century. What rhymes with garbanzo?

- Can one commit suicide by drinking a gallon of Thousand Island Dressing? Must research or final revelation will be meaningless.

- A gang of langostinos save Julio the salad bar Romeo at crucial moment, teaching him about forgiveness and the redeeming power of love.

- Big closing musical number during which the entire cast pelt each other with Texas Bread and cheap steak.

Thanks to the moderate urging of astute and friendly person Waxy, I have added an RSS Feed, which you will see a link to over there on the left somewhere.

God only knows if it works.

Professional Rememberers

A few nights ago as I desultorily flipped channels, desperately seaching for the 90 minute Knife Auction paid program, I came upon the latest in the string of "wasn't that decade great, you know with the things that we all kind of remember?" show. This one was about the 90s. People were reminiscing about such sweet and distant memories as Britney Spears. It seems so long ago now.

I don't mind these shows, really. At least the 70s and 80s ones were understandable. Maybe there would be a sense of community, and that must be what the viewers are searching for in these programs, where they know they are not the only ones that remember Catch That Pigeon or Funky Phantom lunchboxes or something. And then there's that moment of "oh yeah! Those thing were great/shitty/potentially lethal to toddlers." and that's pretty much it. We move on.

When you're flashing back to the 90s, it's just not the same. Like "Oh wow, you remember PlayStation ONE?! I can't believe we were such fools! And what were those things on that show with the creepy babyhead in the sun? Tellybubbles?"

It's all lost now. We were so innocent, in those days of mobile phones that were marginally larger than the ones we have now. Movies were backwards freakshows like Toy Story, as opposed to Finding Nemo. And according to the program, there were animated television icons named Beavis and Butthead.

Who was doing this goldfish-memory reminiscing? That carpenter guy from Trading Spaces, among others. He was the only one I recognized, anyway. What was the carpenter guy doing during the 90s? Learning to lathe? I don't care about this person and his opinion of U2's Zooropa.

Make me a finely detailed coffee table and be quiet, you bastard.