A Surfeit of Eels

Living in the Present

2009-09-14T09:53:00.001-07:00

It occurred to me that this page had not been updated in a very long time, and I had been fairly active keeping it up. Indeed, it had been over three years since I'd written a word on these pages.

As far as I know, all the principle players still exist. And we've added a few more to write about, notably the Maven, a character worthy of her own book.

Black Friday

Last friday was the September 11th, eight years on. I found myself very reflective on the day, reflection that became a black depression.

I realized that when I saw pictures or film of the towers failing, the image I really saw in my mind was a country falling into the blackest eight years of its history.

We went mad in 2001. We were so mad that we let down our guard and let the pirates, the robber barons, and the strong men run the show. We thought we needed evil men to battle the men who did evil to us. What we didn't realize was that evil men aren't precise weapons. They will fight our enemies when it is convenient for them to do so, but mostly what they want is power. Power which we gave them.

We demurred, fearful of "The Terrorists", while our leaders wrecked the foundations of our country.

We let the stupid in. We reveled in it. It pervades our culture. The fabric of our nation is not easy to clean.

We're stuck with the stupid.

Five Not So Easy Pieces

2006-04-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

Possessed either by the living ghost of Jack Nicholson or the imaginary ghost of obsessive-compulsive Adrian Monk, last night I walked away from a fast food stand in desperation.

I have a theory, it goes like this. Fast food sells because of two primary factors: predictability and limited choice. Both factors make the fast food transaction as fast and pleasant as possible for both the buyer and the seller. Fast food joints that haphazardly ignore these core business factors will cease to remain in business under a fast food model.

I was working online in a public space. One of our local malls, keenly aware of the growing "mobile office" trend, has set up quite pleasant work spaces scattered throughout the mall, usually near a store that sells coffee or chocolate. I spent the day in a comfortable chair with a small desk, WIFI, and power, sipping a iced chai latte from the nearby Starbucks stand. As a departure from my normal mobile office, the "Teashop Office" as I call it, it was nice.

El Cigarro Grande appeared in the late afternoon with his duo of Seussian spawnlings, adorable boys (Pix and Pox) pleasantly happy to see me and beg me to take them to the Apple Store (which was 20 paces away). I packed up my things and we visited the Apple Store, where I discovered Pix and Pox's fascination with Apple computers had more to do with the "child's table" and less with anything else. After a brief browse for new iPod earplugs (Shure, $299? You must be joking...) we made our way to the food court to find something resembling dinner.

The spawnlings gravitated towards the Sonic for burgers while I wandered the food court looking for something else. I found a little sandwich place, Which Wich, looked up at the menu, spied "#1 Turkey, Turkey Reuben" and made my choice.

I approached the "Order Here" sign and stood for many seconds, 30 inches in front of employee staring down at some kind of inventory report. After many seconds, the other employee who was manning the sandwich line, called out the order taker's name to alert her to the presence of a customer. She looked up at me glumly and the obligatory first question slithered out.

"May I help you?"

I was prepared. "Yes, please. I would like a turkey reuben."

"What would you like on that?" she responded.

"Well, just a turkey reuben, please."

"Do you have your sack?"

At this point, it dawns on me that her line of questioning did not coincide with my expectations. A turkey reuben, like a BLT or a grilled cheese, is one of those sandwiches that comes fait accompli in my realm of experience. And what was this sack she was asking about?

So, I asked. "My sack?"

"Yes," she said, jabbing her pencil at a row of numbered sacks off to one side of the counter. "You need a #1 sack for turkey."

The ground began to tilt beneath me.

"I need a #1 sack for turkey?" I repeated, trying to understand.

"Yes, you need a #1 sack for turkey. Then you write on it what you want on your sandwich."

"Ah, but I just want a turkey reuben." I pointed at the menu board. "Right there, it says '#1 turkey, turkey reuben'."

"Yes, it does," she agreed, "but we need to know what you want on it. You need a #1 sack for that."

"I just want a turkey reuben, though." I pleaded.

She sighed heavily and pulled out a sack from behind the counter. With her pencil, she scribbled a large "#1" on the sack. Then she asked, "What kind of bread do you want?"

I supplied the obvious, world-wide, need I say only, answer: "Rye, please."

She sighed again and pushed the sack towards me. She jabbed her pencil at a printed line on the sack which read "White" and "Wheat", which check boxes next to them.

"We only have white or wheat."

"But, I want a turkey reuben..." I retorted.

She stared at me.

I surrendered. "Alright, alright. Wheat, please."

"OK, what else do you want on it?"

Now, I am getting a little annoyed. "Well, traditionally, a turkey reuben has turkey on it."

"OK, turkey. " she said, "That's a #1. Is that it, just turkey, then?"

"No," I said, "in addition to turkey, a turkey reuben has three other things on it."

"We normally make it with saurkraut." she admitted.

"Yes, yes," I nodded vigorously, "a turkey reuben has saurkraut on it." Now I was breaking through!

"Do you want saurkraut on it?"

I stared at the girl for a long moment. Then, I slowly repeated "I just want a turkey reuben."

"OK, a #1 with saurkraut." she concluded, scribbling on the sack.

"See that board up there?" I asked, pointing behind her.

She didn't turn her head when she answered patronizingly, "Yes."

"Well," I continued, "it clearly lists 'turkey reuben' and next to 'turkey reuben' it also clearly lists three ingredients: swiss cheese, saurkraut, and thousand island dressing. Now, I won't quibble with the lack of rye bread or whether or not russian dressing is or isn't the same thing as thousand island, but you obviously already know what goes on a turkey reuben."

"Yes," she admitted, "but those are just suggestions."

"I was not suggesting I wanted a turkey reuben, though. Ordering a turkey reuben should not require me to fill out a questionaire on my personal turkey reuben preferences. This is a fast food restaurant in a mall food court. I did not come prepared with a #2 pencil or the appropriate mind-set for test taking. A turkey reuben is a sandwich with a well- known and rather rigid recipe of precisely five invariable ingredients, two of which you've choosen to vary and the other three you seem to want to pretend don't matter. I did not come here to order some kind of improvised sandwich jazz medley on the turkey reuben. I wanted a turkey reuben because I knew exactly what I would get with a turkey reuben. So, right now, I am going to walk away from you and not order a turkey reuben, or anything else. Have a good day."

I strolled across the food court to the Chik-Fil-A, where I ordered a chik-fil-a sandwich and an iced tea. The only question I was asked was "Sweet or Unsweet" (answer: unsweet). Within moments, I had given the helpful cashier a small sum of money in exchange for exactly what I ordered and expected. Kudos to Chik-Fil-A for understanding and meeting with such precision the nature of the fast food business transaction.

Fine Food

2005-09-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

As I have stated before, I like to eat. One of my favorite past-times is discovering a great new place to eat with the Brain, and then sharing our discovery with our gaggle of friends. I love to cook, too, and I often try to cook dinner for friends as well. Just last Sunday, for example, I made up a batch of tomato and pea risotto for a small dinner party. Risotto is one of those "foot intensive" dishes - the cook (or some unlucky helper) must stand at the stove, stirring and slowly adding liquid to the rice continuously for about 30 minutes. However, the ingredients are almost always simple. Arborio rice, butter, onion, garlic, broth, and parmesan form the foundation, while the cook's improvisation floats above it. The adjuncts rarely involve more than a handful of additional ingredients -- you could add saffron and wild mushrooms or truffles, or just some lemon zest and lemon juice, or, as I did, some tomatoes and peas.

It's the ingredients, of course, that matter. Take my butter for example. Central Market has recently started carrying Reggiano butter. This is butter made with the same milk, from the same cows, as Parmesan Reggiano. It is absolutely fantastic, with a delicate parmesan aroma and tang. I've been serving it at room temperature, sprinkled with smoked Spanish sea salt and a hunk of bread. And I've been using it in my risottos.

Between the dining and feeding my friends, I derive some of the most intense happiness in my life. There is something so very primally pleasing about ensuring that a person gets not only nourishment of the body, but an experience that nourishes the mind and spirit as well.

Anyway...

Let's talk about the Chinese. I have always maintained - in fact, I've been told by Chinese friends - that the Chinese do not often eat something because it is good, but because it is expensive. I've been to two Chinese weddings, massive affairs of eating these, and this "fact" was borne out. The most awful things served - the things even the Chinese guests only nibbled politely at before turning to tastier stuffs - were, yes, the most expensive.

Of course, Europeans and their descendents spend inordinate amounts of money and time consuming rotted milk. Who am I to judge?

Well...for your enjoyment, I present the following AP wire snippet:

Chinese Eatery Sold Donkey in Tiger Urine

September 08,2005 | SHANGHAI, China -- A restaurant in northeastern China that advertised illegal tiger meat dishes was found instead to be selling donkey flesh -- marinated in tiger urine, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The Hufulou restaurant, located beside the Heidaohezi tiger reserve near the city of Hailin, had advertised stir-fried tiger meat with chilies for $98 as well as liquor flavored with tiger bone for $74 a bottle, the China Daily reported.

Isn't that delightful?

Ride: The Jacksboro Loop

2005-08-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I did a solo ride from Dallas to Fort Worth to Jacksboro. This was one of those "I'm bored" rides. I had originally only intended to go over to Lake Worth to discover if Vance Godbey's still existed (it does). Then I found myself on Jacksboro highway and I just sort of decided to see where it went. Well, Jacksboro, d'uh.

Here's the first leg (Dallas-Love Field to Downtown Ft. Worth). This is pretty boring flat-top.

At downtown Ft. Worth, at the Courthouse, I turned up Jacksboro Highway to find Vance Godbey's.

Once I found Vance Godbey's, I just sort of kept going, all the way to Jacksboro, where I stopped at Herd's Burgers (see this and this). Nummy!

After stopping at Herd's Burgers for a burger and a coke, I headed back to Dallas via Bridgeport and then Bridgeport to 114 back to Love Field.

All in all, a pretty nice ride. About 200 miles, just shy. The area around Jacksboro is lovely, I'll have to take ECG and TLB out there, maybe next week? And a trip to Vance Godbey's is certainly in order...

Hog? No, Rat!

2005-08-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

I got rid of the Harley this weekend, happily trading it for a Triumph Rocket III. I am quite content with the switch. To quote what I said to ECG Saturday, I didn't realize how bad off I was until I rode the Rocket.

You can compare the two bikes here at PowerSports Network.

I had always intended to get a Rocket, but my timetable was accelerated by events last week. The Lord Bastard, who owned a first-model-year V-Rod, had decided to trade his bike in for a BMW K1200LT, a bike that both he and the missus could ride comfortably together. I'd like to point out that up to this point in his life, the thoughts Triumph and Rocket had never crossed his mind. However, after his visit to the BMW dealer on Thursday, which also happens to be our local Triumph dealer, he sends me an email on the order of:

Blu! I went to look at the BLW K1200LT today and I saw this amazing bike, the Triumph Rocket III. I am going to get me one!

My response was, having basically controlled my desire for almost a year with regard to the Rocket was, and I quote:

If you get a Rocket before me, I will kill you.

Not that I ever thought I would be playing keeping up with the Joneses with anybody. But, it became a matter of honor to me. TLB only had 700 miles on his three-year-old V-Rod and was now about to poach the bike I had been coveting, but denying myself, for months while I "did my ass time" on a Harley.

So on Friday, I took the Harley down to the dealer and made a deal for the graphite Rocket they had in stock. Then I made plans with TLB to show up on Saturday and look at the bikes with him, as he contemplated his purchase. I made no mention that I had, already, closed the deal on my own Rocket.

On Saturday, at the appointed hour, I rode into the dealership on my new Rocket. As it so happens, the Lord and Lady Bastard were standing in the parking lot, having just finished their own test ride of the beemer. The Lady Bastard saw me coming. The conversation was reported to me as follows:

Lady: Here comes somebody on a Rocket.

Lord (glancing up): Yup, that's a Rocket.

(pause)

Lady: That sort of looks like Blu on that Rocket.

Lord: Nonsense. Blu has a Harley.

(pause)

Lady: I think that's Blu on that Rocket.

Lord (paying attention now): Yeah, looks like it. I guess he test-rode it.

(TLB waves at Blu as Blu pulls up)

Lord: So, what do you think?

Blu: I like it. In fact, I think I'll keep it.

(Blu puts keys to Rocket in his pocket and smiles. The truth dawns on TLB.)

Lord: Why you gaddam-son-of-a-bitch!

(TLB proceeds to punch Blu, lovingly of course.)

Of course, the above scene, so carefully planned and explained to even the staff at the dealership, paled in comparison to what transpired when ECG showed up at the dealership, fully expecting TLB to have a new Rocket, but not expecting your humble narrator to also have one.

I believe, had I a video camera, I would have had documentary proof of what exactly a conniption is. This video, had I been able to make it, would have replaced all previous definitions, printed or otherwise, and then been enshrined in the Library of Congress for posterity. All future references to the word would have simply read:

Conniption, see El Cigarro Grande Learns the Truth, Saturday, July 30th, 2005, 3:03 PM, Library of Congress, Video by Blubrik

I work with boobs every day

2005-07-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

"Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is defending his cameo appearance in 'Wedding Crashers,' the sexy comedy the Drudge Report called a 'boob raunch fest.'

'In Washington, I work with boobs every day,' joked McCain during an appearance on NBC's 'Tonight Show with Jay Leno.'

McCain was responding to Leno, who noted Matt Drudge ran a headline last week screaming that the Republican was starring in a 'boob raunch fest."

-- WorldNetDaily: McCain on sexy film: 'I work with boobs every day'

Now the sycophantic, blow-hard gadflies like those at the Drudge Report are projecting their morals onto what films a Republican senator, veteran and prisoner of war should and shouldn't appear in? The man spent seven years in the Hanoi Hilton. He's earned all the boobs he can get.

I'd not lift a finger to save a single Republican currently in office except John McCain.

Big Mother

2005-07-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

"The irony is that, although news reports paint a bleak picture, independent statistics show that life has become less dangerous for kids in recent years -- with violent crime in particular dropping by 38 percent since 1975. The short spin cycle of cable TV may anoint a new child victim every week, but the actual numbers are far less grim: of the 800,000 kids that go missing each year in America, only 150 cases involve what the Justice Department calls 'stereotypical kidnappings,' in which a child is taken by a stranger and either held for ransom, abused or killed. Scores more 'missing children' are teenage runaways or 'throwaways,' abandoned by their parents. 'Truly, the real news story of the last 10 years has been the astonishing decline in crime,' says Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, a New York City child psychologist. 'But we are assaulted by a media that is more interested in scaring people, so it is almost impossible for parents to assess the real level of risk. And of course, there is no shortage of people willing to sell products based on those fears.'"

-- Salon.com Life | Big Mother is watching

It has been my contention for years, without any proof other than simple reason, that crimes against children have not grown in past years. There are not necessarily more murderers and pedophiles stalking our children than there were, oh, 25 years ago. What we do have more of, however, is the 24-hour cable news cycle, which didn't exist before. With nothing to report, CNN and its ilk will report whatever tragedy last occured, no matter how long ago, to fill airtime. Look at Fox News and its dubious fixation on the disappearance of this teenager in Aruba, what, eight weeks ago now? While tragic, it's not news anymore, and yet Fox is still dedicating plenty of airtime of talking, smirking heads to it.

Parents can lower their anxiety not by monitoring their children more, but by controlling their own consumption of the 24/7 news cycle. If you really want peace of mind, turn the TV off, or at least off of Fox and CNN.

Crappy Happy Face

2005-07-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

I've begun a new obsessive-compulsive behavior at work. As I walk around people's cubes and offices, if they have a white board with any space on it, I draw a crappy happy face.

I have no idea why I feel like doing it (utter boredom?) or what it means. But, there's definitely something going on inside.

Loving Weird and Weirder

2005-07-14T16:05:00.000-07:00

It scares me that I actually live near people like this.

In Fort Worth, Texas, an intoxicated woman involved in a collision got out of her car to investigate and was killed when a beer truck accidentally rammed one of the cars into her (and the truck driver, too, was found to be intoxicated) (January).

-- NEWS of the WEIRD - Current News

Still, gotta love NotW.

I'm still on my Scientology kick. Today, while waiting for my computer to finish some work, I decided to read Wikipedia's entry on L. Ron Hubbard. Fascinating. I was particularily impressed with his ignoble career in the navy during World War II. Still, he pulled down, according to Forbes, $40 million a year; not bad for a hack with a navy fetish.

Contegrity

2005-07-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

Chuck the Eater is a member, or at least participant, in Contegrity. He sends me little daily quotes like this one...

I think that some major human relational alterations are going to be due before too long. There is a need for fundamental, strategic alterations in our relationships from I'll get mine to We all need to get ours. And if that alteration doesn't happen, things will get worse and worse until it does.

If we're going to have a base for resolving pollution, disease, war, poverty, crime, and so on, we need to give up the base for exploitation, cheating, dominating, protection, and avoidance. Otherwise, we cannot resolve these issues.

Ken Anbender from Belonging To Life
(Special Program, January 2002)

...every now and then. My respect for Chuck is pretty high, so there must be something to these guys. Check it out: Contegrity.

Of course, my fear is that Contegrity is a Scientologist front organzation for recruiting Xenu worshippers...but that's just crazy-thought...

Wonkamaniac

2005-07-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

An op-ed just appeared on Salon.com which I really empathize with. You can read the full text at Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Me & the chocolate factory.

I am in almost complete agreement. Although I don't have a candy fetish like the author, I did wish, when I was 10, that I was Charlie Bucket. I felt like Charlie Bucket, after all. I saw in him what I wanted to see in myself, and how I wanted to be. When my classmates were into the Wizard of Oz, I was into Wonka and Oompah-Loompahs. And the movie has remained fresh and true for me ever since.

Just a week ago, over the July 4th weekend, I watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for the upteenth time with some friends in a beachhouse filled with adults and children. I still felt my chest tighten with hope when Grandpa Joe uses his tobacco money to buy Charlie a Wonkabar, then deflate with terrible sadness when they don't find a golden ticket and Charlie resigns with "The ticket probably makes the chocolate taste funny, anyway." I still smiled when "crippled" Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) stumbles and then gracefully tumbles when he first appears. I still chuckled everytime Wonka confuses a parent with his twisted logic or warns one of the awful children that their choices are about to cause their doom (his quiet, bored pleading with Veruca, "Please...Don't...Stop...", which can be read two distinctly different ways, as she throws a tantrum and falls to her demise, causes me to burst out laughing). And I still fought back sobs when Charlie gives back the Everlasting Gobstopper saying nothing but "Mr. Wonka...?" and laying the candy on the table next to him.

Charlie Bucket is my model on how a person should act, with fecund decency and deep kindness, even when faced with his own mistakes and errors. My fantasies are fulfilled, just like Charlie's, when he wins what he most wanted in the world.

Sniff.

Bad Review

2005-06-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, you find gems in some of the most amazing places. Take this well-written diatribe from an Audible subscriber regarding L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield: Earth bloat-a-thon:

Believe it or not, John Travolta's career-wrecking bomb of a movie is actually better than this book. What makes the movie better is that they cut out most of the dumber plot elements (90% of the book's 1000 pages). I kept reading this book thinking that there must be something in it worth reading, because it has sold millions of copies. Turns out there isn't. Most of the story is just plain stupid. It insults the intelligence of anyone who reads it. It is honestly very difficult to explain just how terrible this book is to anyone who hasn't read it. There are just too many long rambling chapters that expect you to accept ludicrous and poorly written events and characters. For example: bad guys who are made up of colonies of intelligent bacteria, who are lead by a royal caste of former circus performers and who explode in the presence of radiation. After their defeat we are introduced to a shark-headed banker alien who likes to chew mint, which he picks from an old lady's garden in England somewhere. Anyways, you're expected to believe a primitive human from Colorado acquires all the knowledge of the bacteria-people (with their help no less), teams up with a group of Scotsmen and leads a massive and very boring rebellion against a race that has conquered dozens of galaxies. Then the humans of course win and acquire the bacteria-people's assets and become really really wealthy. Wondering why this wasn't in the movie? Because it's stupid that's why, but it really is the plot. Don't believe me? Really bored? Try reading this and be thankful it's the abridged version, the full one is worse.

-- "Aaron", Reviewing Battlefield: Earth

I've never read B:E, nor will I ever. I did go see the movie, dragging friends along for what I knew was going to be a really awful experience. But then, I actually like bad movies -- it's so bad it's good kind of movies. While some of my friends merely groaned and squirmed, wishing for the pain to end, I laughed mirthfully at the ridiculous plot, characters, costumes, events, and special effects. It was awful. It was wonderful.

Speaking of Mr. Hubbard, Salon has been running some interesting articles on him, Tom Cruise, and Scientology:

Stranger than fiction -- A Review of Dianetics

Missionary Man -- Tom Cruise and Scientology

The Press vs. Scientology -- A look at the relationship between CoS and the Press

Scientology's War on Psychiatry -- self-explanatory

More Cool This American Life - Godless America

2005-06-24T14:32:00.000-07:00

A fascinating episode discussing whether or not this country is founded on an idealogy of the seperation of church and state.

Most fascinating is the discussion of the history of Christian activists' attempts, for over a hundred-fifty years, to amend the Constitution to include various "Christian" amendments (five times since the Civil War such an amendment has come up to Congress, and five times these failed, voted down by Congress).

And Julia Sweeney's monologue at the end, about her attempts to explore her spirituality by attending church and reading the Bible, pretty much sums up my feelings entirely. And it's really funny, too.

This American Life - Godless America

Just Cool - The Sanctity of Marriage

2005-06-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

I subscribe to This American Life podloads from Audible. Last night, as I couldn't sleep for coughing and choking on snot, I decided to catch up on my backlog in my iPod. As the hours crept into the early morning, I listened to the Sanctity of Marriage episode. It was absolutely fascinating. If you have any interest in marriage (I think anyone human does), go take a listen.

You'll need RealAudio (or get an Audible subscription) and an hour of earspace.

And, while you're there, listen to anything else. This is one of the best programs in American media today. My absolute all-time favorite is Fiasco!, which I think I've mentioned before.

Big Bird Saved -- But...

2005-06-24T07:50:00.000-07:00

Big Bird and National Public Radio won a reprieve Thursday as the House restored $100 million that had been proposed as a budget cut for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The 284-140 vote demonstrated the enduring political strength of public broadcasting, whose supporters rallied behind popular programs such as 'Sesame Street,' 'Postcards From Buster' and 'The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.'

The Public Broadcasting Service undertook a high-profile campaign to rescind the proposed cut. Lawmakers were flooded with letters and phone calls.

The vote came as the House worked on a $142.5 billion spending bill for health, education and labor programs for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.

-- Salon.com News | House won't cut public broadcasting funds

Woot, but at the same time, the CPB is still under attack by right-wing apparatchiks:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose chairman is under fire for complaining about what he considered liberal bias at PBS, chose a former Republican Party co-chairman Thursday as its president and chief executive.

Patricia S. Harrison, the assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, was selected after three days of closed meetings by the corporation's board of directors. She was co-chair of the Republican National Committee from 1997 to 2001.

-- Salon.com News | Public broadcasting names new president

So we still have to remain wary and protective of one of the few remaning truly unbiased sources of public news and information left in this country.

Broken Beak

2005-06-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

I was recovering from a losing bout of the flu. I'd been cooped up in the house, alone with an ancient diabetic cat in more dire straights than myself and a crippled dog, limping from an old injury she sustained to her leg as a puppy. Enough of this, I thought to myself, I'm bored and hungry. I showered, dressed shabbily in a bright blue hawaiian shirt, and, already woozy from the effort, shambled out of the house and made my slow way to the nearest cafe for a late, light lunch al fresco. The sunshine and modest exercise would do me good, as would a helping of food of reasonably decent quality. I'm no doctor, but I do know there's nothing healthy about sitting in a dreary house all alone with nothing eat, even if you are still tinging at the corners with influenza.

The cafe was nothing special, although it had an excellent patio shaded by an enormous wisteria trained to a lattice above head. I turned in my order for some pasta and salad, then went outside with a glass of tea and a few breadsticks to find a table in the warm shade. The breadsticks I took for the local grackle and sparrow population.

After seating myself, I began breaking the breadsticks into tiny morsels. A young grackle, canny to what was going on, hopped up on the edge of my table directly across from me, eyeing me with his left, then his right eye expectantly. I carefully tossed a crumb at his feet, which he snatched up immediately and swallowed, looking back at me, asking for more. I obliged him with a larger piece that he had to fly away with to break into smaller pieces. I tossed some handfuls of crumbs to the ground, and the other birds came flocking out of their hiding places in the shrubbery, chittering and chirping excitedly at the prospect of a meal.

My pasta and salad arrived, and the young grackle came back to the table. He perched on the edge and watched me just out of arms reach. I ate the salad, but left four small cherry tomatoes, which I don't care for much anyway. I popped these open with my knife, then slid the bowl over to the bird. He danced back, then moved forward to the bowl as my hand withdrew. He inspected the tomatoes carefully with both eyes, then prodded them. Grabbing one of the pieces, he cackled with what I could only assume was complete delight and flew away. I turned my attention to my pasta, glancing up to watch the other birds still nervously attacking the numerous crumbs on the ground. Every minute or so, the young grackle would return -- I could recognize his scrawny body and green-black head now -- to steal another piece of tomato, cackle merrily, and fly away. I paid him no more attention.

My prescription for curing the flu wasn't that efficacious, although it did feel good to get outside in the warm air and sun. I walked home, feeling both better (warmer) and worse (more tired) than before. I put myself to sleep early, hoping that upon waking the next day I'd find myself rid of the obnoxious virus once and for all. Sadly, I woke the next morning more stuffed than before and looked forward to another dull day locked away in my house sick and alone once more.

As the late afternoon approached and the pangs of hunger with it, I again decided to stroll down to the cafe and get some more sun on the patio beneath the wisteria. I showered, dressed in the same loud blue shirt since I had hardly worn it at all the day before, and once again dizzily walked down to my little cafe. Too sick or lazy to change, I repeated my order for a simple bowl of pasta and a salad, grabbed a glass of tea and a few breadsticks, and settled myself outside in the warm shade of that lovely wisteria vine.

My food came quickly, really before I'd had a chance to begin feeding the birds. No sooner had my plates arrived, than that certain young grackle landed on my table. His beak was wide open, as if he was panting. Fearlessly, he stepped right up to the edge of my salad bowl and looked in. I greeted the young bird politely with a tip of my tea glass, welcoming him to lunch once again but firmly demanding that he refrain from poking at my salad until I had finished with it. I moved the bowl away from him, yet he did not dance away in avian wariness as expected. He simply stood there, open-beaked and silent, looking at me.

I looked back, and wondered about his wide-open beak. I examined him closely. I could have reached out and scooped him up in my hand as easily as I could grab my glass of tea, he was so close. I frowned, drawn in by sadness, when I realized his beak was open because the lower half was snapped and broken, dangling down from the bird's face at a slight angle. Blood crusted the base of the beak where it had become detached from his skull. He couldn't move it, broken as it was. I supposed he'd flown into plate glass window and broken it.

The bird moved closer to me. I reached into the salad bowl and offered him a morsel of lettuce. He nudged it with his broken beak, but having lost the ability to pinch anything between the two halves, tossed his head right and left in pain and frustration. I removed the cherry tomatoes from the salad and smashed them open with my fingers, setting the exploded orbs at the bird's feet. The grackle poked at them, wiggling his exposed tongue in the juices, but he couldn't lift anything up to swallow.

I grimaced and tried to ignore his struggling while I ate my pasta. I glanced up at him once or twice, considering what I could or should do. I could easily grab the bird, as he stood less than a foot away from me on the table and showed no fear of my hand when I offered him food. I imagined that if I did grab him, he'd panic and injure the beak further, perhaps ripping it off entirely. And if I did manage to grab him safely, I wondered if I could repair the beak at all. I'd saved small birds -- blue jays specifically -- before, long ago as a child. I had nursed them back to health with eyedroppers of milk, cornmeal, and powdered multi-vitamins. So, though I could certainly feed the young grackle with an eyedropper of mush, I couldn't imagine how I could reattach the dangling bloody beak.

The grackle serenely closed his eyes while I ate in contemplation. He must have realized he couldn't eat the food I offered him. Perhaps he was reflecting on his dire situation for the first time. So I marveled at him, skinny, green-black, and dangling beak. I wondered what he was trying to communicate, if anything at all. He had no fear of me. He stood there, next to my plate making no move to steal food, with an air of patient calm. He recognized my bright blue hawaiian print, I decided. I looked like some brilliant blue grackle god to him. I posed no threat to him, perhaps even could offer him succor. After all, I'd fed him the day before. He was so calm standing next to my plate, eyes closed, so resigned, so sad.

I reached out towards the bird. He opened his eyes, a little nervous as my hand approached, then he shuddered and closed his eyes again. He stood stock still while I closed my hand across his back and looped my fingers around his neck and under, ever so carefully, his broken beak. His tail feathers spread in anticipation. I held my hand and fingers loosely about his warm, soft, fragile body. He squinted one eye, glancing at me again, then closed it. His tail feathers relaxed like a sigh. I gave him a name then, whispering low so only he would hear it -- Sebastian.

I answered Sebastian's silent prayer with the smallest amount of pressure and an unflinching moment of humanity.

No Brainer

2005-06-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

In the first study to map brain function during orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain governing emotional control is largely deactivated.

'The fact that there is no deactivation in faked orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really happening in the brain,' said neuroscientist Gert Holstege, presenting his findings Monday to the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

In the study, Holstege and his colleagues at Groningen University recruited 11 men, 13 women and their partners.

Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanner needs activities lasting at least two minutes and the men's climaxes didn't last that long. However, the scans did show activation of reward centers in the brain for men, but not for women.

-- Salon.com Life | Brain areas shut off during female orgasm

A Helpful Hint

2005-06-20T08:15:00.000-07:00

Salon.com News | Goss claims he has idea where Bin Laden is: "Asked whether that meant he knew where bin Laden is, [director of the CIA] Porter Goss responded: 'I have an excellent idea where he is. What's the next question?'"

Destroying PBS

2005-06-20T07:21:00.000-07:00

"The Bush administration is introducing a political agenda to public broadcasting. They are using the lame pretext that PBS is somehow liberal to justify it into a propaganda organ for the government. That is precisely what the board of CPB was set up to prevent 40 years ago; it is there to be a firewall between public broadcasting and political pressure. Ken Tomlinson is a disgrace to the purpose of that board, he has a political agenda and is engaging in a raw display of ideological bullying. The right-wingers in the House of Representatives are backing his power play with a threat to cut off funding for PBS entirely."

-- Molly Ivins, Destroying PBS (AlterNet)

Help save PBS from the Radicals in Washington. There is nothing biased about PBS. This is just one more grope for absolute power by the Right.

Write your congressperson and tell them you support PBS as it is.

Anecdote #2531-B

2005-06-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

Today at lunch, the Brain demanded that he get a new phone. He is traveling to Las Vegas next week and, having lost his phone on his last business trip, needed a new one. Chuck the Eater was driving, since my truck was in the shop getting a tow-hitch installed.

Trying to be practical and responsible (to work), I suggested that we eat near the Cingular Wireless store to save time. This left us with pitiful and pitiable choices for lunch.

We narrowed our poor choices down to the Corporate Burito Palace (aka Chipotle) and the Dreary Salad Bar (aka Souper Salad). We deferred the choice to the Brain, who despises both. He selected the Dreary Salad Bar.

Lunch was predictably dull, consisting of lettuce. Sigh. We chowed down quickly and almost silently, all three of us not really enjoying the food and in no mood to talk about it.

After eating, we skipped next door to the Cingular store to get the Brain a brand-new Motorola Razr. As we entered the store, a handsome young man behind the counter called out to us, "Welcome to Cingular über Alles!"

I was a bit shocked, not expecting to run into any national socialists in my daily grind, but I let it pass. The Brain and I began chatting with one of the drones, when another customer walked in the door and the cheery young man called out again, "Welcome to Cingular über Alles!"

This must stop!

"Excuse me," I said, addressing the young man. "What did you just say?"

He looked a bit surprised, but he answered, "Um...welcome to Cingular Wireless?"

Chuck looked at me similarly confused (Why are you accosting this harmless young man, Blu?), but had a good laugh -- being german-light himself -- when I told him what I thought the fellow had said. The young man, of course, didn't understand at all.

If you are more like the young man than Chuck, you may edumacate yourself here.

Swallow Hard

2005-06-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

I had posted a scathing indictment of the Christian Right's obscene use of Terri Schiavo (and the lies they told about her condition in order to further their agenda). I removed the post after I read it in a calmer state and I realized that I had fallen into the same trap -- using a suffering woman's condition and death to score political points. Needless to say, however, I was completely disgusted by the Right during the whole affair and by the schoolyard-bully-excuses Right idealogues are scrambling to now that the autopsy report is available. I strongly urge anyone who paid even passing attention to this circus to read the entire report. Now on to something lighter...

Yesterday afternoon, the unthinkable happened: my linux workstation locked up. Not only did it lock up, but my graphics card came crashing down in ruins. I must admit that I should take some blame for this myself, as I had tried to patch the kernel to install graphics drivers for my nVidia card a day earlier, and something tells me the two were related. As having a working workstation at work (how poetic!) is extremely important, I knew that I needed to replace my video card toot-sweet, as Truly Scrumptious would say.

Fry's, the huge (and rather crappy) electronics super-store is about 1 minute away from my workplace. So, I grabbed Chuck the Eater by the collar and told him were going to Fry's for a meeting, a video card, and a cup of joe -- all, frankly, quite true.

Once at Fry's we found the video card section and I started combing for something appropriate for a linux box. I selected an ATI Radeon 9200 for $79. It even had "linux" as a supported operating system listed on the box. Box in hand, we went to the coffee shop in the center of the store to have our meeting and get some coffee. There were two employees there -- an older woman in a green smock behind the counter and a younger woman near the cash register in the middle of the shop. Neither of them were within 10 feet of the gigantic "Order Here" sign with an arrow pointing at an empty counter. Minion-like, I stood were I was silently commanded to and waited for one of them to take my order.

The girl at the cash register blinked and smiled doe-like at me. The woman behind the counter fiddled with the espresso machine. After a minute or so, the older woman croaked at me, "She [the younger woman] can take your order."

I nodded and approached the younger woman at the cash register.

"I'd like an espresso and a poppyseed muffin, please."

She blinked. "A poppy...seed...um...muffin...ok..." Fumbling, she rang up a muffin. "What else did you want?"

"And an espresso."

"Um, ok." The young girl looked at her cash register, then back at me. She picked up a laminated piece of paper covered with barcodes, flips it over once or twice, scanning for espresso, I presumed.

"What did you want again?" she asked, putting the sheet down.

"I'd like an espresso and a poppyseed muffin." I repeated.

Pain crossed the pretty doe-eyed girl's face. A slightly older man, also a Fry's employee, came over and started chatting with her going to see Batman Begins. She turned away from me to acknowledge him. After a few moments of chit-chat, she seemed to remember that I was a customer and turned back to me.

"I'm sorry, what did you want?"

"An espresso and a poppyseed muffin, please." I repeated. Again.

The pained look returned. She glanced at the beau. He shrugged and looked at me, trying to force a polite smile.

Finally, she said, "What's that?"

Had my eyes had legs they would have jumped from their orbits. I was standing in a coffee shop. Behind me, a woman was cleaning an espresso machine. Above her, a gigantic, clearly legible menu began with the word espresso, just above cappucino and latte.

"It's an espresso." I said tersely, reveling in the tautology.

The young doe-eyed girl called across the shop to the older woman. "Can you help me, please" The older woman sighed heavily, as she must now stop adjusting the espresso machine and come help this girl who I surmized was the village idiot of Fry's Electronics. The woman stomped over, a flabby cigarette dangling from her lips even though she had no cigarette dangling from her lips.

"Yeah? What?" she growled at me.

"I'd like an espresso and a poppyseed muffin." I repeated. Again.

The older woman pressed a button and the register rang up an espresso. She marched back behind the counter and began to pull one while I paid the girl. I turned, walked over the counter, and the older woman presented me with a large styrofoam cup containing a thimble of hot black sludge.

"Anything else?" she croaked.

"And a poppyseed muffin."

"You want that heated?"

"Please."

She plodded over to the muffin case, selected a muffin, flung it into the microwave for a few seconds, and then gave it to me. Muffin and espresso in hand, I sat down with Chuck to try to enjoy them.

I lifted the cup to my lips and took a sip. My face contorted in pain.

"Too hot?" inquired Chuck kindly.

"No! It's awful!" I sputtered. "That's the worse espresso I've ever had in my life. It's like she just scraped up some tar off the blacktop outside and mixed in some stagnant water." I hand ed the cup to Chuck. "Here. Try it."

That -- offering some foodstuff just stated as terrible to a dining companion -- is an interesting phenomenon. It is obviously instinctual. It must be something like Great Thundering Monkey God! This thing I have just tasted is really bad! It must be poisonous. Yet, I have survived and can help my tribe with this hard-won knowledge. Here, member of my tribe, taste it, too, so that you will know it is bad and not eat of it again, if you do not die tasting it.

Chuck, having evolved slightly further than myself, sniffed it and refused. I took a few more sips to confirm that this was indeed the worst espresso on the planet, then turned my attention to sharing the muffin and talking shop with Chuck. We solved the problem (a work-related problem involving how to script around bad software), left the shop, paid for the video card, and returned to work.

The espresso hung around though, having tarred my tastebuds thoroughly, and hours later at dinner it required the better part of a liter of San Pelligrino to finally wash it away.

More Fun at Fry's can by found at the following sites:

Dreamy Banality

2005-06-15T06:39:00.000-07:00

I actually drafted this some weeks ago. It's been sitting in my box, thought I might as well post it.

In the middle of the night, I shot awake from a nightmare. It was one of those falling down the tunnel Vertigo moments, and I'm glad I escaped it. As I lay there listening to the pre-dawn birds chirp and the stream below my window gurgle, I reflected on what had just scared me so much.

It would be almost impossible to describe the dream in cogent detail, but here is the executive summary:

The Brain had become a Republican.

Was the dream itself scary? No. Nothing awful happened. No monsters appeared. I was not chased down and eaten. In fact, everyone in the dream, which consisted primarily of documentary footage of a Republican senate campaign in Wisconsin, seemed nice and polite.

Apparently, my dream-self was some kind of reporter, or perhaps the forementioned documentary's maker. I followed the candidate, your typical grey-suit-slick-hair politico with a huge grin, through his daily paces on the campaign trail. At campaign headquarters, while the candidate and his campaign workers (all white, all over thirty) shared mint tea and sugar cookies, I would try to ask a few questions to nail them down on their positions and opinions -- Are you a fiscal or social conservative? Are you a federalist? Are you a neo-conservative? -- only to be offered empty platitudes -- Why, son, I'm a man who loves America! Don't you? -- or tea and cookies.

The Brain was mixed in with the campaign workers, laughing and chatting with them. Every now and then, he would come over and offer me the mint tea and cookies with the utmost sincerity. I'd refuse them -- I just didn't want them. The third time I refused them though, he frowned and asked me "Why don't you love America?"

I woke up in a cold sweat, panting "Oh, god! Oh, god!", so relieved I was that it was only a dream.

With nothing much happening in the dream to warrant being a nightmare, I wondered why it had shaken me so. Then it occured to me that my subconscious was attempting to show me, in exacting detail, the banality of evil.

This State is Straights-Only

2005-06-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

Texas Governor Rick Perry signed a resolution last week to amend the Texas constitution by banning same-sex marriage. As the amendment must be approved by voters in November, the resolution was only ceremonial, but it represents Governor Perry's disregard for the rights and needs of GLBT Texans.

Upon signing the bill, he responded to a question about how he would tell gay and lesbian war veterans returning home from Iraq that they could not marry. He responded that "Texans made a decision about marriage and if there's a state that has more lenient views than Texas, then maybe that's a better place for them to live."

If you are gay and live in Texas, pretty soon you'll have to drink from the gays-only water fountain, it seems.

Now, I don't really care about gay marriage that much -- hardly at all, I think it's a non-starter -- but I do care about blatant discrimination and laws intended to make one targeted segment of the population so inequal and so uncomfortable that sum effect (and, in fact, stated intention) is to ride them out of town on a rail.

I take cold comfort in knowing that I didn't vote for these backward-thinking Taliban. But it pains me daily when I consider that people I work with, know, and love voted for them simply because they were Republicans.

Chuck's Immoral Breakfast

2005-06-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

I lean back and look out the window. Chuck the Eater apologizes, as he always does, for the ancient sour milk smell of his car. He's calling it that fairgrounds smell now. But we both know the truth. It's the smell of children puking up and spilling milk in the backseat. It's the smell of parents who've gotten used to the smell of puked up milk in the backseat.

"We had a great breakfast Sunday." I open. "Went to Breadwinners. The Observer kept saying it was a great place for breakfast and brunch for so many years, so we just decided to go."

"How was it?" Chuck asks.

"Good. Pretty good. I ordered a chicken salad sandwich. The Brain got a French Eggs Benedict. That's Eggs Benedict served on croissant with Medrange, rather than English muffin with Canadian bacon. It was huge. He only ate half of it, because he wanted chocolate cream pie for desert. And he brought home cookies. So, I guess he liked it."

"I guess so."

"It's much better than Cafe Brazil. An order of magnitude better. Same kind of stuff - eggs, skillet potatos - but better. Nicer. The Brain was surprised at how nice it was."

"What did you have, again?" Chuck wants to know.

"Chicken salad sandwich. I was thinking hard about getting biscuits and gravy. But, if I ordered them, I'd feel like I had a rock in my stomach the rest of the day. I love biscuits and gravy, but...you know...chicken salad for the win." I sigh, wagging a finger in the air. I hadn't realized how much I regreted passing over the biscuits and gravy.

"I'll have to go there for Father's Day."

"It'll be crowded. You'll need a reservation."

Chuck thinks about this for a second.

"Have you ever eaten at Ham and Eggs?" he asks.

"Nope."

"Well, it's like the opposite end of the spectrum. We went there breakfast Saturday before last. The owner is from New York. Everyone calls her Jackie-O. She's disabled. She rides scooter through the restaurant and has a parking space reserved out front that says For Jackie-O Only."

Where is he going with this?

Finally, Chuck zeroes in on the target. "I had biscuits and gravy."

I wince. "Wow. Great." Bastard can eat whatever he wants. "Were they good?" Duh!

"Well," he smiles, "the biscuit was the size of a loaf a bread and they served my gravy in a gravy boat. The portion sizes are immoral."

I sputter a laugh. "Immoral?! Can I have that?"

"Sure." he says, pleased with himself on all fronts.

The Starbelly Mystery

2005-06-13T07:19:00.000-07:00

And you thought the Onion was joking when it headlined Starbucks to Begin Sinister 'Phase Two' of Operation...

Recently in Dallas, a new chain of sandwich shops, Potbelly, began to open. The first store was obviously too slick and too corporate to be anything but a chain. The second merely confirmed my suspiscion that we were under assault by yet-another-corporation.

Not that I dislike Potbelly. In fact, the one I eat lunch at (about once every two weeks) is just fine. The sandwiches are good and the people in the store seem genuinely, if unctuously, friendly. The chili is good, though somewhat over-beany and sweet to actually be called chili in Texas (see below). One should avoid the vegetable soup, which is gruelly, sweet, and devoid of vegetables.

Being generally suspiscious of corporate food marketing, I had wondered who was bank-rolling Potbelly. Obviously, there are some deep pockets here. McDonalds? Could be, after all, they steam-rolled Chipotle into affluent neighborhoods recently.

So, I looked at the Potbelly website. Very cute. Just a small-time sandwich shop making it big. But the aw-shucks small-time background seems a little contrived.

Hmmm...going national with sandwiches...hmmm...

Then, I ran across an interesting building at the corner of I-75 and Campbell in Richardson (North Dallas). The half-finished building looked familiar, but different, something like a mutant fetus. My first instinct was it's another Potbelly. My second instinct was no, it's something else, something familiar...

Then I recognized that certain architectural cue...it was a Starbucks. And it was a Potbelly. Together.

A Starbelly.

Phase Two has begun.

And now...Chili, Chili, Chili...

For reference, here is the recipe for chili. Note: Beans are served as an optional accompaniment on the side.

Serves 6

3 tablespoons ancho chili powder or 3 medium pods (about 1/2 ounce), toasted and ground
3 tablespoons New Mexico chili powder or 3 medium pods (about 3/4 ounce), toasted and ground
2 tablespoons cumin seeds toasted in a dry skillet over medium heat until fragrant, about 4 minutes, and ground
2 teaspoons dried oregano preferably Mexican
7 1/2 cups water
1 beef chuck roast (4-pounds), trimmed of excess fat and cut into 1-inch cubes
2 teaspoons table salt plus extra for seasoning
8 ounces bacon (7 or 8 slices), cut into 1/4-inch pieces
1 medium onion minced (about 1 cup)
5 medium cloves of garlic minced
4 - 5 small jalape o chiles cored, seeded, and minced
1 cup crushed tomatoes or plain tomato sauce
2 tablespoons lime juice from 1 medium lime
5 tablespoons masa harina or 3 tablespoons cornstarch
ground black pepper

1. Mix chili powders, cumin, and oregano in small bowl and stir in 1/2 cup water to form thick paste; set aside. Toss beef cubes with salt; set aside.

2. Fry bacon in large, heavy soup kettle or Dutch oven over medium-low heat until fat renders and bacon crisps, about 10 minutes. Remove bacon with slotted spoon to paper towel-lined plate; pour all but 2 teaspoons fat from pot into small bowl; set aside. Increase heat to medium-high; saut� meat in four batches until well-browned on all sides, about 5 minutes per batch, adding additional 2 teaspoons bacon fat to pot as necessary. Reduce heat to medium, add 3 tablespoons bacon fat to now-empty pan. Add onion; saut� until softened, 5 to 6 minutes. Add garlic and jalape�o; saut� until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add chili paste; saut� until fragrant, 2 to 3 minutes. Add reserved bacon and browned beef, crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce, lime juice, and 7 cups water; bring to simmer. Continue to cook at a steady simmer until meat is tender and juices are dark, rich, and starting to thicken, about 2 hours.

3. Mix masa harina with 2/3 cup water (or cornstarch with 3 tablespoons water) in a small bowl to form smooth paste. Increase heat to medium; stir in paste and simmer until thickened, 5 to 10 minutes. Adjust seasoning generously with salt and ground black pepper. Serve immediately, or preferably, cool slightly, cover, and refrigerate overnight or for up to 5 days. Reheat before serving.

Dog Food

2005-06-10T09:20:00.000-07:00

The Straight Dope: Is coprophagia dangerous?: "Dogs are also notorious coprophages, doing it mainly to gross out their owners."

Man, ain't it the truth? I have an adorable and sweet-natured dog, Coda, an Italian Greyhound who has lately become a very picky eater. I also have an ancient diabetic cat on his last legs. The cat has become so old and frail that he is not very likely to use his litter box unless he is sleeping in it.

Meanwhile, I am trying my best to find a food that the dog will eat. Once she was easy-to-please with Science Diet and Iams bones for snacks. Now, she turns her nose up at everything. Lately, I've tried feeding her Dick Van Patten -- which I'll microwave slightly to improve its aroma (Note: This dog food looks, feels, and smells a great deal like summer sausage. Nice for squeamish owners, bad for vision-impaired drunk frat boys). She snorts at and refuses the food publically, but sneaks off during the night to eat it.

That is, unless she finds an errant glucose-laced cat dropping lying around. Since I find precious few such droppings in the cat's litter box or about the house myself, I think I may have finally deciphered what my dog is telling me. I present a super-mini movie script of the encounter:

INT. BLUBRIK'S KITCHEN - MORNING Blubrik sleepily goes to the refrigerator and removes a sausage-like log of Dick Van Patten dog food. He slices off a half-inch piece, uses his fingers to break the meat into pieces into a bowl, then puts the bowl in a microwave. BLUBRIK (sleepily) Coda! Are you hungry? INT. BLUBRIK'S BEDROOM - CONT. Coda the dog bounces out from under the covers and charges out of the bedroom. INT. BLUBRIK'S KITCHEN - CONT. Coda charges into the kitchen and sits down at Blubrik's feet, wagging her tail. The microwave rings. Blubrik removes the food from the microwave. Coda stands up with excitement and expectation. Blubrik sets the food down in front of her. BLUBRIK There you go, some nice Dick Van Patten all heated up and in nice bite-size pieces for you. Coda sniffs the food. CODA (snorting derision) This Dick Van Patten crap ain't the crap I want! I want that cat crap. No, not the crappy cat food -- though admittedly I liked that once, too -- but the cat's crap. The crap. The C-R-A-P!

Oh, well. At least my house is cleaner.

USSR-R-US

2005-06-08T15:27:00.000-07:00

Why do authoritarian governments always end up producing the same propaganda, apparently by the same artists, even?

Take these posters from the late Soviet Union, for example...

...and compare them with a MARC (commuter rail service between Baltimore and Washington D.C.) poster...

Welcome to your very own Orwellian Nightmare.

Slice of Life

2005-06-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

Is the study and exhibit of human bodies morbid? If you would take your children to see the ubiquitous plastic "Invisible Man" exhibit at your local science museum, why would you have a qualm about showing them the real deal?

Salon recently had an article about the U.S. tour of Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, wherein real human corpses are plastinated, dissected, posed, and displayed to the public.

Frankly, I think it's cool. Admittedly, the idea induced the willies in me when I first read about Gunther von Hagens and his original museum in one of Rick Steves' travel books. But, having seen some of the examples of the exhibit on the web, I can say that I think it's really fascinating. Of course, Salon pointed out that one of the knock-off Chinese exhibits might be a little creaky, leaky and down-right sneaky (Look, mommy, there's a bullet hole in that man's head!), and you can't help but imagine Vincent Price or Lon Chaney lurking somewhere just out of sight. I mean, Herr von Hagens is slightly creepy himself.

Compare for yourself:

Creepy, but not surprising. It takes a bit of a twist of mind to come up with a process like plastination, after all. (More interesting info on the good doctor can be found at Wikipedia and nndb).

But, all well and good, I say. Many Americans spend most of their lives in dread fear of death. We like to childishly pretend it doesn't happen (We'll live forever in heaven!), we go to funerals and try to pretend we've just stepped into the deceased's bedroom (The mortician did such a good job. Grandpa looks like he's asleep.), we litigate and moralize against risky activity, and we tell our children elaborate lies to cover up truth about death.

Nothing like a flayed dead man holding out his own skin to you to shake your belief structures.

Speaking of flayed skin and creepy men, one of my all-time favorite websites is The HiStory of Michael Jackson's Face. Enjoy.

Weird or What?

2005-06-08T09:09:00.000-07:00

June 8, 2005 | Boston

On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States.

The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres' hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton's kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom.

Salon.com News | Man with chain saw, sword is let into U.S.

Grunion!

2005-06-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

Just too cool for words. The extremes some animals will go to to mate...

"California grunion spawn at night on the beach, from two to six nights after the full and new moon, beginning a little after high tide and continuing for several hours. As a wave breaks on the beach, the grunion swim as far up the slope as possible. The female arches her body, keeping her head up, and excavates the semi-fluid sand with her tail. As her tail sinks, the female twists her body and digs tail first until she is buried up to her pectoral fins. After the female is in the nest, up to eight males attempt to mate with her by curving around the female and releasing their milt as she deposits her eggs about four inches below the surface. After spawning, the males immediately retreat toward the ocean. The milt flows down the female’s body until it reaches the eggs and fertilizes them. The female twists free and returns to the sea with the next wave. The whole event can happen in 30 seconds, but some fish remain on the beach for several minutes. (The Gulf grunion spawns during the daytime, and has smaller eggs.)"

Grunion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Plus, grunion is such a great word, so fun to say. Use it on your friends, or better yet, insert it into your post-coital pillow talk...

Wow, baby, you screw like a grunion.

Man Sues Toilet

2005-06-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

Salon.com News | Man sues for $10M in toilet explosion

While trying to ignore the news about Michael Jackson, de-frocked porno-consuming priests, and 7-year-old axe-murderers, I smiled when I read this...

A man who says he was severely burned when a portable toilet exploded after he sat down and lit a cigarette is suing a general contractor and a coal company, accusing them of negligence.

I mean, I am very sorry the man got hurt, but, hell...didn't he remember all those dire warnings from when he was a kid hiding in the neighborhood drain pipes with his friends to smoke daddy's cigs...

Chuck's Right

2005-06-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

Chuck the Eater is a big proponent of personal integrity and critical thinking. Our lunch discussions regularly traverse the political and religious landscape, touching on the profound and unprofound questions of the day.

Here's an archtypical Chuck quote:

Your life after your death is probably just like your life before you were born.

Perfect and concise. Today, he sent me the more wordy version today, apparently the "Quote of the Day" from Contegrity.com -- so, I thought I would share:

"The whole conversation about death is a boogeyman, and there's not much real interest in it. If you are in time, then what happens when you run out of time, or what happens when you die? But instead of that being an interesting question or a very great mystery, it is seen as an affront.

It's fascinating that people bother themselves some with what will happen when they die. Nobody bothers themselves about where they were before they were born. It was the same place. Why isn't that a big dilemma? Where were you? How did you get here? Where did you come from? That could be pretty interesting. But that's not as much of an affront."

Ken Anbender from The Fulfillment of Time
(Special Program, January 2004)

xxx000xxx

Nazi is as Nazi Does

2005-05-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

- Hermann Göring, Reich Marshal, at the Nuremberg Trials

Big Kahuna Burger

2005-04-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

I like the fine things.

I don't eat fast food unless forced to by dire circumstances. When I eat at home, if it comes out of a box or bag, it better be a base ingredient like flour or rice. I make my own mayonaise (which is both trivial, inexpensive, and, contrary to popular belief, as safe as any other correctly handled foodstuff).

As my friends can attest, I prefer to dine, when not cooking for myself, at the upper end of the restaurant spectrum. When I go to a new city, my first question is usually something along the line of what is the best, most regionally unique restaurant that I can find here?

Still, I am not immune to the lure of a perfect burger. My own skills at burger making are generally satisfactory, if not above-average, and I have experimented with various ways of preparation (my current favorite is ultra-traditional: an oak charcoal fire, 85% lean grass-fed beef, salt and pepper, medium-rare).

I am constantly on the lookout for the Big Kahuna Burger. Well, the Big Kahuna Burger of Dallas, anyway. I know where the true Big Kahuna Burger resides; that would be at Kincaid's in Fort Worth. Worth the trip, but it requires some planning.

But where in Dallas could I find that elusive, truly great burger?

I've always been generally dismissive of Fuddrucker's and Purdy's. The quality is there, but something indescribable about the burgers at both of these chains keeps them leaden.

For many years, I held Chip's in high esteem. Ball's Burgers, as well, can satisfy the craving well-enough, but still comes shy of being the Big Kahuna.

Phil Romano's Who's Who Burger joint in Highland Park Village (Mr. Romano birthed Fuddrucker's upon the world, as well) somehow managed to capture what I remembered as the essential flavor of a Kincaid's burger, and has held the Big Kahuna trophy for about a year. You could do worse than eating here.

But, as of last night, I found Dallas' very own and true Big Kahuna Burger. What's more, I found it only through a series of unfortunate events.

My power was switched off yesterday. And I have out-of-town visitors. From Boston. Those kind of visitors who claim that 75 degrees is terribly hot and miserable. With children. The hungry kind.

Needless to say, the power company in question has been fired and our power is now being ably handled by another company.

Still, last night, with no power and guests proclaiming heat exhaustion and starvation, I piled the lot of us into the truck and headed off for, I supposed, a Sonic. This qualified as an emergency situation, after all, as my guests had not bathed, either.

Then, inspiration struck. I had seen on my many traversal across the city, an drive-up, sit-in-your-car hamburger joint on the other side of town. Worth a try, I thought, It couldn't be worse than Sonic. I steered us in that direction.

The joint in question is Keller's, on Northwest Highway. You pull up in your car, blink your lights, and a waitperson comes out to take your order. Real basic stuff here - burgers, shakes, fries.

Within a few minutes of ordering, sizzling hot burgers are propped up on our windshield. The smell of grease and meat and onions wafts into the car. A miniature feeding frenzy occurs as people grab for their burgers.

One bite...

...and everyone in the truck exclaims in their best Samuel L. Jackson voice, Mmmmmm! This is one tasty burger!

At long last, a Dallas burger worth popping a cap into some motherfucker for.

Her Highness, Lady Bastard

2005-04-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

It's official. As of last Saturday, the Lord and Lady Bastard were married at an exceptional and beautiful ceremony at the Hotel St. Germaine in Dallas. The Brain and I attended as groomsmen, and over dinner at the reception, the subject of the Lady Bastard's proper title came up.

Using the recent marriage of Charles and Camilla as a template, we decided that the Lady Bastard's official title is Her Highness, the Lady Bastard Consort. Despite the Lady Bastard's queenly demeanor in her wedding gown (she was the spitting-image of Catherine de Medici), we sadly informed her that she could not style herself Her Royal Highness.

Everyone in House Blubrik wishes the Lord and Lady the very best and our enduring love.

The Haunted Future

2005-04-20T21:06:00.000-07:00

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference ... I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.

John F. Kennedy
Speech before the Houston Ministerial Association
Sept. 12, 1960

The Taste of Fear

2005-04-15T11:51:00.000-07:00

Fear is not something I believe many modern Americans taste very often. Oh, certainly, they taste the discomfort of a job interview or review, the uneasiness that accompanies standing up before a group of people to present some information, or the general queasiness of receiving the direct attention of strangers. Some do, of course, possess pathologies and suffer from excruciating forms for fear. But for the vast majority of us, fear is something we've done away with, a primitive, basic emotion that has evolved into a more modern caution and insularity. Americans don't like fear very much at all -- for esthetic reasons. It's a dirty, uncomfortable emotion.

Which is why I find myself quite surprised by the intense level of fear I am experiencing in my daily life. I mean mouth-drying, stomach-churning fear. The fear one feels before leaping off the abyss.

Why? I am seriously contemplating a complete and utter career change. I am considering a blind-charge into a career that I have no formal training for, but which I dream about, have dreamt about since I was a child, and which I may have some talent for. I am contemplating abandoning the cushy paychecks of a job I otherwise find dreary and unfulfilling for a stab at the unknown and unknowable.

And, boy, am I scared.

The Case for Wierdness

As many things in my life begin, this began with a dream. I dreamed I was making a movie.

Rewind - A very long time ago, I made several movies. Five minute silent films with my father's Super8 camera. I made primitve attempts at stop motion photography and other ultra-naive attemps at special effects. I directed my friends in a film about a desperate battle against a child-eating, red-white-and-blue basketball from outer space that shot laser beams at its victims. The laser beams came courtesy of my father's permanent markers and scribbling directly on the film. Believe it or not, the beams came out pretty well. And, I made music videos to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and that awful disco warhorse The Fifth of Beethoven, both well-received during a middle-school era talent contest long before MTV existed. Childhood pleasures, to be sure, but ones that have lingered long after they should have been wiped away by the passions, cares and worries of adulthood.

Fast-forward - What movie I was making in that dream, I don't know. What it was about, I don't know. But, I had fun doing it. I went to work at the Salt Mine that day, thinking about it in a low-key way. As I logged in for business and my Instant Messaging client come up, I got a friendly message from El Grande which sent my life skipping out of its well-worn rut:

Blu, your dreams will set you free.

Synchronicity happens. Within the day I'd spoken with a co-worker who possessed over $10, 000 of professional HD-Digital film making and editing equipment he used to document family and friends, but didn't feel he had the talent to use creatively. I approached him bluntly, asking him to come to the breakroom for a meeting. He thought it was about work.

"Would you like to make a movie?"

He nearly jumped out of his seat. Once he recomposed himself, he smiled hugely, said of course he wanted to make a movie, and asked about the script.

"I'll take care of that." I replied calmly.

I perused eBay for likely bids for equipment. I spoke to another friend with an artisitic bent about storyboarding and pencilled in a meeting with another who is an amateur composer. When I purchased my copy of TurboTax for my taxes that evening, I picked up a copy of Screenwriter Professional as well.

I loaded the script writing software on my computer, fired it up, and immediately found myself confronted by emptiness - the white page. Here now I sat before the very symbol of how far I needed to go. I needed to fill that page up, it and several dozens of pages after it, with a stream of ideas that other people would find interesting.

The cursor winked at me, silently taunting time to put up or shut up. The page demanded filling, and I felt the first pang of what-the-fuck-are-you-doing fear. A wrote a scene. I rewrote it. I rewrote it again. I went to screenwriting websites. I mumbled to myself, Are you such an idiot?

Hand in hand, the urge to make the leap and the fear of doing it have grown larger and stonger. Intellectually, I know exactly what's going on here. Fear is our most basic survival mechanism. It is fear that saves your life from danger. Fear is the prescience of pain. It tastes like salt and metal. It implodes inside your chest, sucking at your guts.

As I was sitting watching TV last night, even the XTerra commericals were mocking me with their backing music:

Stay as you are and you won’t make a difference
stay as you are and you will never mean a thing
stay as you are and you won't make a difference
I hope your full control in your little hole is worth it

Scary thought.

Friday's Quote of Horror

2005-04-15T09:12:00.000-07:00

One man, upon getting up in the morning, blew his nose so violently that "to his horror his left eye extruded from the orbit. With the assistance of his wife it was immediately replaced and a bandage placed over it." Afterward the eyelid was swollen but apparently there was no permanent damage.

Fascinating. I have rarely read of something both so horrible and Pythonesquely funny. For more stomach churning facts, walk your eyes, orbits intact, over to Uncle Cecil's Straight Dope.

European Toilet Paper Holder

2005-04-01T09:48:00.000-08:00

User:Bishonen/European toilet paper holder - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The toilet paper holder has been an important facet of European bathroom design since antiquity. Distinctly European in origin, they have been a part of Western culture since their invention in the mists of pre-history. The symbolism and design of these fixtures has changed over the centuries, but they continue to occupy a central place in bathroom layout as well as in the emergent construction of a specifically European identity.

Read it, enjoy it, and remember!

Quote of the Day

2005-03-23T15:45:00.000-08:00

Julian E. Zelizer, a Boston University history professor who specializes in congressional trends, said a conservative Republican movement that "built itself in the 1970s around attacking government has become the party of big government since 2000."

"Starting with the war against terrorism and climaxing with Congress intervening in [the Schiavo] case, we see a GOP that is quite comfortable flexing the muscle of Washington, and a Democratic Party which is increasingly finding itself in favor of limiting government," Zelizer said.

Well...duh.

The Dream Machine

2005-03-22T08:12:00.000-08:00

Vivid dreams are part and parcel for my sleeping cycle. Here is last night's...

Part The First

Invited to a yacht party, I meet Harrison Ford. He's nice, and listens to me compare and contrast powered yachts to sailboats. He seems to agree that sailboats are superior, or at least more fun. We retire to a boardroom on the yacht for a more private discussion.

"You know," I say, "the first time I saw you I was twelve years old." I wonder why I say this, but I continue. "No, that's probably not true. I have a vague recollection of seeing American Graffiti before Star Wars."

He laughs politely.

I press. "Do you have a production company?"

"Yes." he replies.

"Well, I'd like to come work for you. I don't know what I'd do, but anything would be better than working for the House of Horrors."

He smiles, "Mid-life crisis?"

I shake my head. "Not exactly. Just mid-life non-crisis. I'd welcome a crisis. A crisis would be exciting."

"What can you do?" he asks.

"Well," I dissemble, "I don't know. I can write, maybe, but I don't have a screenplay or anything." I gently lie. I do have a screenplay, or at least an idea for one. Doesn't everyone? But I decide maybe he'd be more interested in me without a screenplay. The very novelty of the idea...

"Hollywood's pretty terrible. Do you want to be famous? Famous sucks."

I shake my head. "Yah, I understand Hollywood's awful. As for being famous. Not really. Revered by my peers or the chic-geek set, perhaps, but not recognizably famous to Billy Joe Bob and Wilma Sue."

"Famous sucks." He repeats. "Look at me."

"You look great, for, what, a hundred and two." I reply.

"I don't live in Hollywood. But, still, look at me." He opens his jacket and his guts spill out.

"That's famous." he says, looking at his intestines on the floor. "It sucks."

Part The Second

I am sitting with a crowd of expectant people on rusting, metal folding chairs in a parking lot. A white satin drape has been pulled across a open garage in the side of a on old red-brick warehouse. A beat-down drummer sits besides the drape, smoking a cigarette. In front of him stands a lonely snaredrum.

A hand appears from behind the satin drape, making an elaborate "OK" signal. The drummer flicks his cigarette away and begins a bombastic drumroll.

"Ladies and gentlemen, members of the International Julie Andrews Fan Club," he begins to shout, "I present to you, live and in-person, Ms. Julie Andrews!" He lifts a kazoo to his mouth and blows a dum-ta-da-dum-ta-dum and the satin curtain is pulled aside.

A matronly plump Julie Andrews in a red gown steps out into the afternoon glare in front of us. We clap. No one stands up.

"Thank you, all." she begins, "Thank you for coming to see me today."

Someone shouts "I love you, Julie!" I look around to see who shouted, but everyone is sitting in stoney silence.

"For my first song, I'd like to sing I loves ya, Porgy."

The drummer-kazoo player pulls out a pianica and begins to blow Gershwin's tune. She sings.

I loves ya Porgy
Don't let him take me
Don't let him handle me
And drive me mad
If you can keep me
Porgy I wanna stay here
With you forever
I got my man

She moves close enough that I can see her liverspots on her arms clearly. I study her matronly arms. They are fleshy, but betray strong muscles underneath. She lifts heavy objects with those arms. I can count the freckles and trace her sinews.

Someday I know
He's comin' back to call me
He's going to handle me and hold me
It's gonna be like dyin' Porgy
But when he calls me
I'll have to go

She's crying now. She comes right up to me and presses her face to mine, transferring her tears to my cheeks. I sit there, frozen. How does one respond to a singing, weeping Julie Andrews when she touches you? I elect to pretend I am dead.

I loves ya Porgy
Don't let him handle me
With his hot hands
If you can keep me
I wanna stay here
With you forever
And ever ever and ever
Ever and ever
Porgy I got my man

She finishes the song, the pianica whimpers off the coda. With the back of her hand, Julie Andrews wipes the snot dribbling out of her nose and snorts.

"That was written by George and Ira Gershwin." she informs us. But now it's just me, Julie Andrews, and the drummer-kazoo-pianica player. It's getting dark.

She sighs and sits down on a rusty chair beside me. Reaching up behind her head, she pulls off her auburn wig, letting her naturally grey hair tumble out. Her mascara is smeared, and that and her wild grey hair make her look very much like a Japanese ghost. The drummer lights another cigarette.

"Did you like it? The song?" she asks.

"I loves ya, Porgy? Yah, I liked it."

"Makes me cry."

"Me, too."

She begins to dismantle herself. The earrings come off and her earlobes fall down and touch her shoulders. She pops the blue contacts out of her eyes, revealing cataracts beneath. With a sharp click, she removes her sparkling white teeth, revealing yellow-grey stumps.

"Did you like the yacht?" shes asks.

"I prefer sailboats."

She turns her back to me and motions for me to help her unzip the dress. I give it a yank, and she steps out, not naked but wearing a flabby grey fleece jogging suit.

"Sailboats are slower." she says, sitting back down and turning her melted face back to me.

I agree. "Yes, but they make you part of themselves. Like riding a horse or playing guitar."

She nods. "Very poetic. Did Harry give you that job?"

"I don't think so. Maybe we're still talking about it."

"Well, did you take a good look at me?" she glances at me. Her cataract-dimmed eyes widen. She smiles, crooked, yellow, black. "I'm famous."

Millipede!

2005-03-18T13:17:00.000-08:00

Could IBM's Millipede mean the end of dedicated PDAs and MP3 players for good? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Years and years ago, I read an article in some engineering magazine about a scientist who was predicting that by 2010, we'd have low-power or no-power terrabyte memory the size of a credit card.

Well, it looks like he was fairly accurate, especially with the dates involved. But, he got the size all wrong. Our terrabytes will come on silicon significantly smaller than a credit card (more like a postage stamp).

Think of what this implies. A terrabyte of flashable memory on your computer means no more disk drives (why have them?). It means things like being able to instantly turn your computer on and off, even in the middle of applications. Why? Since there is no longer any latency (in fact any difference) between long-term, large-storage but slow memory (the disk drive) and short-term, high-speed memory (RAM), the concept of "safely shutting down" the computer (which really just means "write everything in memory out to disk") goes out the window.

It's just cool.

Jacket of Bugs

2005-03-16T11:55:00.000-08:00

As some of you may know, I just returned from a 4-day excursion into the state of Arkansas on motorbike with El Grande. My badge of honor from this trip (around 1200 miles, I think) is not the mild case of hypothermia I endured (for it was breathtakingly cold on the last day coming home), but the hundreds of dead bugs that seem to have embedded themselves in my recently purchased leather jacket.

Which begs the question, do I break out the saddle soap?

Your Duck is Number 1, 203, 763

2005-03-15T16:15:00.000-08:00

France. It's in Europe, you know, and somewhat unpopular with a segment of the American hoi polloi. Still, I found myself there with six friends last fall. Rive and Data finally got married, a Chateau marriage in France, and we met up with them in Paris to celebrate. Wanting to splurge, I selected La Tour D'Argent for dinner, on the advice of my hair-stylist who is French.

La Tour D'Argent (which translates to The Silver Tower, and more loosey-goosey to the Tower of Money) has been serving food in Paris since 1582. It is over-the-top elegant, with a ground-floor entrance and parlor which leads to a tiny elevator operated by a tuxedoed attendant, who lifts you up to the grand room of the restaurant, a giant window view of the Ile de Louis, the Seine, and Notre Dame.

It was our first night in Paris, and our French was not quite up to snuff yet, creaky and musty from resting unused too long in Texas. The staff moved about our large party with professional efficiency. While my companions looked at the menu, I asked for the carte des vins, which proved to be an encyclopedic volume of wine. Biting my lip, I asked the sommelier where I would find the côtés du Rhône and chateauneufs. He flipped to page 375 and sniffed as he pointed out the wines I was interested in. I scanned them quickly, noticed a good year bottle of Vieux Telegraphe and ordered it with my belaboured French: juh voodray uhn...uhn...oohn bootayeh deh veeuh telegraf, sihvooplay.

I must point out at this time that La Tour D'Argent is a palace of meat - duck meat, to be precise. Pressed, boiled, roasted, rolled - if you can do it to a duck, La Tour has probably done it. The restaurant invented canard a l'orange, after all. To this palace of ducky death, I had brought two vegetarians, the Cheese and his Missus. As I scanned the menu (no prices printed on it, by the way) for something - anything - not made of duck, my brow began to sweat.

Our waiter returned to take our orders, and I tried in my own way to explain that mes amis la were les vegetarians. The waiter cast a doubtful glance at them, as if perhaps they might explode any moment, but nodded and replied it would not be a problem. While the vegetarians fought their way to some veggie comestibles, Rive and Data ordered the canard a l'orange, and the Brain and myself decided to split le canard tour d'argent. Our waiter glanced at us and advised that the canard tour d'argent was a bit strong tasting, perhaps we'd like the a l'orange.

"Why say you strong?" the Brain inquired.

"Because, sir, it is cooked in its own blood, which becomes the sauce." the waiter replied.

The Brain smiled and says, "That's formidible!" The waiter nods and writes the order down.

We also ordered the fois gras for an appetizer.

It dawned on me that the proper drink to have with fois gras was sauterne, so I summoned the sommelier back to the table. The conversation went like this:

Me: Sir, we would like some sauterne with our fois gras, if it pleases you.

Him: Of course. How much?

Me: We would like a little...a little...a...well...a small half-cup each.

Him: (sniffing derisively) Sir, we do not serve wine in cups.

Me: (quivering) A glass. A glass, I say. If it pleases you. Thank you.

The sauterne - in glasses - arrived with the fois gras. The meal proceeded apace. The whole, uncooked ducks were brought to the table for viewing, Voici vos canards, mesdames et messieurs, then whisked away to the kitchen for pressing and cooking. When the ducks reappeared, they were cooked and sauced. Our blood-cooked duck basked in a shallow grey-black pool of cooked blood.

It was good. A little scary, but quite tasty.

While I was eating and talking to my friends, the owner of the restaurant, who must be ninety, came over to my side and asked me a question beginning with "How..." and ending with "...you?". My brain freezes. I barely even heard him. "How...blah blah blah....you?" What did he just ask me?

Two options spring to mind. Microseconds tick by. He's waiting for an answer.

"I call myself Blubrik."

I knew it was the wrong answer the moment the words left my mouth. I didn't need the Brain's cackling, choking sputter to tell me I'd just put a big sign around my neck - Hello! I'm an Idiot!

To his credit, the owner only smiles and shakes his head slowly.

"No, sir," he repeats slowly, "I asked, how does it go with you?"

"Oh!" I recover, "It goes very, very well! Very well! Thank you!"

The Brain wastes no time in telling the rest of the table.

As the cheese course approaches, I once again brace for the sommelier. For you pleasure, the conversation:

Me: Sir, with the cheese we would like some red wine, something a little rustic.

Him: Of course. What kind?

Me: I do not know, really. Something like a countryside wine.

Him: (sniffing derisively) Sir, we do not serve countryside wine.

Me: (quivering) A côté du Rhône would be perfect.

Him: (nose pointing to ceiling) Very well, sir.

By now, it's getting late and the restaurant crowd has diminshed to our table and one other. We sate ourselves on cheese and wine, stairing out across Paris at night. It's a lovely site, and no better city exists on Earth.

As we prepare to leave, our waiter brings us two postcards. On one side, a painting of the original canardier. On the back, an odd, freshly printed sentence:

Your Duck is Number 1, 203, 763.

AlterNet: What Jesus Wouldn't Do

2005-03-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

AlterNet: What Jesus Wouldn't Do

I have long considered the current path the Christian Right has choosen to follow as profoundly un-Christian, focusing on one or two blood-raising issues (abortion, gay issues) to the exclusion of a more nuanced and complete Christian ethic. It's nice to see that at least a few other people agree with me.

My Teabag is Broken

2005-03-04T13:03:00.000-08:00

Everyday, about 3 in the afternoon, I engage in the ancient ritual of drinking tea. I developed this habit after a trip to Europe, where tea or cafe in the afternoon was de rigeur. However, my afternoon teas are rarely attended with crustless finger sandwiches, scones and Devonshire clotted cream. It's usually me, a styrofoam cup, a dribble of hot water from the coffee machine, and a bag of mint-green tea.

I'm going to talk about broken tea bags, European tea orgies, and God, so hang in there with me.

We were in Bath, in England. Bath is a lovely city of museum-quality Georgian houses, a pretty river, a pretty Abbey (really, a cathedral), and the ancient Roman Baths. It was me, the Brain, the Big Cheese and the Missus. We'd enjoyed a leisurely afternoon inspecting the baths and had moved to the Pumproom above them for a full tea service. A Harry Potter-look-a-like waited on us, or I should say, we generally waited on Faux Potter to serve us. Young and cuddly-cute in that Harry Potter-way, I suspect he spent much of his time investigating some Faux Hermione's girlish magic in some nearby dark closet. Or maybe a Faux Snape. But I digress, almost to the point of slash fiction. I must draw a line somewhere.

Vincent Vega would no doubt say, "Harry Potter's not much of a waiter." I'll leave it at that.

High tea at the Pumproom was servicable (when served), though mildly inadequate. We'd not actually eaten lunch, so I was quite hungry. While I was still enjoying my little sandwiches, the larger, fattier tray of scones and cakes was brought to the table. I resigned myself to having to fill up on sugaries rather than tomatoes and cucumbers.

A few days later, we found ourselves in London, once again having tea. This time, we went to the rooftop of Harrod's, a reasonably respected location for good high tea. The service was impeccable (and highly managed) and the sandwiches were stellar. The tomato sandwiches, in particular, were note-worthy. Tomato sliced paper-thin, a sprinkle of salt, a crunch of pepper, and fresh wheat bread meticulously devoid of crust. These I devoured along with the other fingerling sandwiches of salmon, cucumbers, and egg salad. I commented to my partners on how happy I was with the tomato sandwiches. The Cheese, likewise, opined on their superiority.

The manager came to clear our table of the empty sandwich plates before the sweeter comestibles were brought to the table. Through my mind went the words, Ask for more. Ask for more. But I did not.

Apparently, however, Mr. Al-Fayed hires psychics at Harrod's. The manager stepped away from the table, then turned back and asked, "Would anyone like more sandwiches?"

"Yes, please," I replied, "I'd like another slice of tomato sandwich, please." The Cheese, not wanting to be left out, requested the same. The Brain and Missus, content, said nothing.

Now, allow me to descibe a plate of finger sandwiches at Harrod's precisely: a white plate, 10 inches across, with five finger-sized planks of sandwiches, 1 inch by 1.5 inches by 4 inches. Each sandwiches consists of a different subject: one tomato, one cucumber, one watercress and salmon, one egg salad, one ham or other sliced meat.

In asking for "another slice of tomato sandwich", one would suppose I would get the following: a white plate, 10 inches across, with precisely one finger-sized plank of tomato sandwich, 1 inch by 1.5 inches by 4 inches.

Harrod's, in addition to hiring psychics, apparently hires generous ones. The Cheese and I each received: a white plate, 10 inches across, with five finger-sized planks of tomato sandwiches, 1 inch by 1.5 inches by 4 inches.

The Brain and the Missus were quickly enlisted against their will to help reduce the number of tomato sandwiches extant on our plates.

As far as high teas go, that was the best one ever.

Now, God. Let's talk about this guy for a bit. I saw one of his bumper stickers yesterday. This is not hard in Dallas. God's made a fortune on bumper stickers. This one, in particular, was apologetically liberal, though. It said:

God is not a Republican (or a Democrat)

That's what I mean by "apologetically" liberal. Rather than make a simple, true statement (God is not a Republican), God apparently felt it necessary to apologize obtusely for this statement (by way of being fair to Republicans who thought God was a member of the G.O.P. and might be upset to learn he was not) by informing us that he's also not a member of the Democratic Party, either. One presumes, therefore, he has fled the major party system for the Libertarians or the Greens or whatever, but ran out of space on the bumper sticker to continue further disclaimers.

It occured to me that perhaps what God was trying to tell me on this bumper sticker of his was that he's not anything. That is to say, what God really wanted the bumper sticker to say was:

God is not Human

That'd about cover it, for humans anyway. Then it occured to me that this has a similar problem. He's correctly removed himself from the set of human possibilities, but forgotten to disclaim the other possibilities as well. He'd need to cover God is not Canine, for example, lest his bumper sticker consumers become schismatically confused.

A recursive loop of sorts ensues, with the bumper sticker becoming much to large to read while passing, let alone sitting in grid-lock for any reasonable amount of time. God, however, being God can come up with one bumper sticker that does the job:

God is not God

Whew!

The nice thing about this is that it's true. God is not God. God is. And God is not. That is to say, God is everything you cannot understand and God is not anything you can understand. To say you know God is to commit the ultimate lie, for your comprehension of God is so limited and so futile, only hubris of the highest order could bring you to that conclusion. You only know that you do not know God.

God is not what you think God is.

Likewise, you cannot possess a personal relationship with God, for God is ultimately impersonal, since a personal relationship requires a person -- a human -- to exist. To believe you can, again, is utter hubris. And pride goeth before the fall.

God is and is not.

Ah, but the Bible says that God created Man in his image. Quite true, God did create Man in his image, in precisely the same way that and with as much effort as the Sun creates its image upon a million, billion waves of the sea. We briefly reflect God, like a wave reflects the Sun. And we are as like God and as near to God as the image in the wave is to the Sun.

But to strive for God, to strive for the ultimate and unknowable, and to love and cherish and delude yourself about the very thing you can never know, that is beautifully, poetically human.

Now, my teabag is broken. Apparently, the box of mint-green tea currently in the office kitchen is faulty. The strings are improperly attached and come loose from the bag with the slightest tug. Meaning, I have to fish the teabags out of the tea with my fingers.

Oh, Harrod's, wherefor art thou?

Today's Quotes

2004-10-19T06:05:00.000-07:00

"If Fascism comes to America it would be on a program of Americanism."

-- Huey Long

Oh, and this one, too...

Public split on whether Bush is a divider.

-- CNN

Blubrik Eats Crow...Nummy!

2004-09-01T08:12:00.000-07:00

As I was leaving the Mothership last Friday, I received a call on my cell phone.

"Blu, we have a serious problem. What is this color?" asked Super Daddyman.

"It's blue." I said with the cocky self-assuredness of having not been significantly wrong in a professional capacity in many years.

"You're sure? Blue, you say? The Subasians think it's yellow."

"Nope, blue. Absolutely."

"Alright. Can you think of any tests we can perform to prove it's blue?"

"I'll log on tonight when I get home from the airport and run some."

"Great! Thanks!" Super Daddyman chirped happily as he hung up the phone.

I spent the weekend sending numerous emails on the qualities and properties of the color blue and how this color that we were witnessing could not possibly be yellow. The Subasians violently disagreed, claiming I obviously had no idea what color blue was and wouldn't know yellow if it bit me. I stood my ground. Blue, I would say, and that was that.

This continued through the weekend. I performed tests that supported my blue-tinged conclusions, and the Subasians denied them. On Monday evening, I presented conclusive proof that the color was quite blue and the Subasians fell silent.

I have since learned that when the Subasians fall silent, you're in trouble.

On Tuesday morning, at 8 A.M., Hoss the Boss calls me.

"Blu, have you checked your email?"

"No, Hoss." I replied, groggily. "I'm still asleep."

"Well," he said gravely, "the Subasians proved the color was yellow."

I was logged in one minute later.

Sure enough, the Subasians had spent Monday evening proving the color in question was in fact yellow. Very yellow. So yellow in fact that only an idiot could claim it was blue. The report was very long and very detailed and not a little smug.

"Yes, it looks like it's yellow." I dourly admitted to Hoss. "I will have to eat crow today, won't I?"

Hoss agreed and left me alone to contemplate how I would face professional humiliation.

Admittedly at first, I was angry at having been proven so very wrong. Then I began laughing. I pictured the Primordial Goo detecting a severe imbalance in my karma and deciding to teach me a lesson. I had been right about so many things at work for so many years, I had stopped questioning my own conclusions. If my right brain concluded some color was blue, my left brain no longer felt it worthwhile to perform even the most perfunctory of fact checks. I considered some things my sensei would say to me on this and laughed again.

I concluded being wrong wasn't so bad. It was rather healthy in a way. Still, being healthy and being pleasant aren't exactly coterminus.

I spent the day, a very long day, painting in the new color to get the project done by Wednesday morning. When I was done, at 9 P.M. that night, I transported myself to Smith & Wollensky for a quiet, late dinner.

"What would you like, Mr. Blubrik?" asked my waiter, Joe.

Without looking at the menu I ordered. "I want a glass of Oban, neat, and that ribeye there, medium rare."

"Nothing else? No salad, creamed spinach...?" asked Joe.

"Nope. Just the scotch and meat, please."

"Bad day at work?" he asked sympathetically.

"Oh, comme ci, comme ca." I sighed.

Joe patted me on the shoulder and said, "I'll bring you a double, on the house."

As I sat there and waited for my drink, I considered that crow might taste quite a bit like steak and smiled.

The Good, the Bad, and the Californian

2004-08-30T13:30:00.000-07:00

The Salt Mine's Great Mothership exists in California, in San Jose. From time to time, I am called upon to visit the Incredibly Absent Orange Grove to deal with problems and issues that only my personal presence can fix. Also, I have visited the region for Aikido reasons as well since my dojo's parent dojo resides in the east bay area. I look forward to these visits, since they place me within driving distance of San Francisco (i.e., the City), a city which I adore.

The City is jaw-droppingly beautiful. I wouldn't compare it directly to Paris, a city which derives its beauty from its perfectly balanced eye-level architecture and it's sinuous river-hugging shape. The City instead derives its beauty from terrific landscape and weather: low mountains, ocean, bay, hills, pillowy cloud banks, and ancient trees. However, like Paris, it is a city which demands visiting anytime one comes within sight of it, and any first visit to the United States should encompass at least one full day in the City.

The first night I visited the City, many years ago alone and on business, I did two things. First, I ate at Scoma's on advice from a colleague. It was wonderful, though a more recent repeat dinner suggests my memories of that meal are somewhat better than contemporary reality. Second, I dipped my finger into the Pacific Ocean, being the first time I had ever seen it or any ocean, and tasted it. Interesting habit of mine that, and I am not certain where the urge came from. I have since sampled the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and yes, they all taste different.

The Brain, also a employee of the Salt Mine, but of significantly higher rank than myself due to his alien-like intellect and astonishingly good luck, happened to be present at the Great Mothership at the same time for other reasons. We resolved to visit a restaurant of quality within the boundaries of the City one evening, and after making a few failed attempts to secure reservations (on a Wednesday night!), we finally selected Fleur de Lys.

Fleur de Lys is a french restaurant, if the name didn't give it away. Eating french in the City is unusual for me. Normally, I prefer to locate something more ethnic. For many years, I've tried to locate good chinese spots in the City, with only moderate success. House of Nanking is excellent, though divey, and Ton Kiang has fantastic dim sum. Coming from Texas, any half-way decent chinese food is better than what I can get at home.

I've brought this up in meetings at the Mother Ship, where we have many chinese-american employees. On one visit, I turned to Nancy, a button-cute cantonese-american woman, after a meeting and mentioned my quest to find excellent chinese food in the City.

"You sound like you've never had good chinese before." she replied.

"I come from Texas. Our chinese food sucks." I replied.

Nancy seemed perplexed, as did the other people in the room. "But Texas, and Dallas, has a huge chinese population. Surely..."

"No," I said shaking my head, "as far as I know, it all sucks. I've asked the chinese and chinese-americans at the Salt Mine in Dallas, and even they say the chinese food in Dallas sucks."

"I wonder why?" mused Nancy.

"Well," I answered in all seriousness, "for one thing, it's all cooked by mexicans."

It is at this point that the differences between a Texan speaking a truism plainly and group of Californians, who are steeped in P.C. speech patterns until their brains have pickled, become vividly apparent.

They all jumped. I don't mean they looked surprised or mildly bemused. I mean they all, six or seven people, jumped as if I had pulled a severed head out of my computer bag and tossed it on the table.

"Oh my word!" blurted Nancy. "We don't say mexicans here. It's not very, you know, P.C."

"Oh," I said, "I see. Well, then, it's all cooked by hispanics, and being that it's Dallas, Texas, most of them are probably from Mexico. I am sure that a sizeable number of them are also from Guatemala and various other countries in the region with few cubans and puerto ricans tossed in for spice. But in Texas, it's usually safe to assume if you see a tan-skinned person who speaks spanish in a kitchen, they're from Mexico. Not always, but usually. You could take those odds to Vegas."

Fast forward to last week, and I am sitting with Cheung having dim sum for lunch and I asked, "So, how come I can't find any haute chinese restaurants in the Bay Area. I mean, there are lots of very good chinese restaurants, but nothing stellar, nothing like fine dining chinese."

Cheung didn't miss a beat. "Because chinese people are cheap." he said flatly before barking cantonese at the woman pushing a cart past us. He looked back at me, frozen and holding a siumai dumpling uneaten before my gaping mouth.

"Hey!" he shrugged, "I'm chinese and I'm cheap! We're all cheap!"

So much for P.C.

---

On the way to City, the Brain and I discussed the merits and demerits of moving to and living in the Bay Area. I am deeply moved by the clouds and mountains, the Brain, less swayed by natural beauty alone, morbidly dwells on the the area's two most obvious draw-backs: the cost and the traffic.

As he sees it -- probably correctly -- any place I would likely want to live in the Bay Area would be both ruinously expensive to a Texas-bred mind used to monstrously large houses and surrounded by impenetrable traffic. If I point to areas between the City and San Jose -- Los Altos, Mountainview, Palo Alto -- and areas north and across the bay -- Sausalito, Tiburon, even Sonoma -- as the areas I would most likely want to live in given my scant knowledge of the area, the Brain gives me a "told you so" look. Paris, he says, would be just as expensive, but have significantly less traffic. I'll point out that Paris requires fluency in French, and he shrugs his shoulders and accuses me of being lazy. I point out the the French might not be too crazy about accepting American ex-patriots at this point in history, he points out that while George W. Bush might have trouble finding a french person who didn't want to shove a three-day-old baguette up his backside, americans fleeing the Idiot Tyrant might get a sympathetic nod of approval.

We arrived at the restaurant on time. It became immediately apparent to us that perhaps, just perhaps, I should have inquired after the dress code. We are dressed as for work -- jeans, tatty sneakers, and comfortable shirts -- and no one else was. It's ties and jackets, black dresses and jewels.

Two women stood at a podium near the door. The first, taller with a shock of wild red hair, greeted us with a laughing smile as I announced ourselves for the reservation. The second woman, a shorter, closely-cropped Aryan blond in a black suit-dress, frowned visibly.

"Reservations for Blubrik at 8:45." I said.

"Ah, yes," chirped the red-head, "right on time!"

The blonde coughed politely. "Ahem. We do have a dress code."

"Ah, so I see." I said, glancing apologetically down my scruffiness. "Oh, well, we'll..."

"Perhaps", the blond continued icily, "you can return to your hotel and change into something?"

The dangling sentence offers up several humorous completions, but I responded with, "Well, we just drove up from San Jose."

Her face squinted sourly as she weighed the distasteful business decision before she said, "It'll just be a moment."

We sat at the tiny bar and tried to fly natural. Within a few minutes, the perky redhead came to fetch us, thanking us for being so patient, and escorted us to the rear of the restaurant, to a corner table surrounded by thick red curtains on two sides. The message was clear: we will let you to eat here, but don't expect us to let you to be seen eating here. While some people might be offended, we took it in stride. After all, it's their business how they want to run their business and they were making an exception for our attire. We were thankful, for this promised to be an excellent meal.

Indeed, we were rewarded for suppressing our indignation, for the although the table was carefully hidden behind curtains, it was far from sound-proof. I could easily over-hear the conversations at other tables as well as the occasional wicked snipe (sometimes in French) at the snobs sitting at those tables by the staff near the kitchen door. Furthermore, the mirrors of the restaurant actually allowed me to spy on the main room, putting faces to voices, and generally having a good time snooping.

We glanced at the menu -- tres haute -- and ordered the following:

To start, we'd share the trois foie gras tasting with two glasses of sauternes n'importe pas quoi. For myself, petit pois vichysoisse followed by venison atop salsify. For the Brain, a salad of root vegetables followed by quail stuffed with ris de veau. With this, a bottle of El Molino pinot noir. After the main course, a shared plate of cheeses and a chocolate soufflé. The restuarant kindly rounded out the meal with two amuse bouches, an heirloom tomato geleé -- yes, you read that right, tomato jello --and a precious miniature skillet of escargot, a balsamic vinegar and berry sorbet as a palate cleanser, and a tiered tray of petits forts with the check.

We ate with gusto.

When we were sated and contemplating the drive back to San Jose, the Brain mused that the meal had quite possibly been the best meal we had ever eaten. We compared notes and I decided he was probably right. We paid, thanked the redhead for accomodating us, and left.

Now, I mused wistfully on the way back to the hotel, I have yet another reason to find a way to make the City my home. I began to wonder if, upon moving to the area, I could manage to drop mexicans from my vocabulary.

Sound Familiar?

2004-08-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

To think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just another attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand the question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action; fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man... Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.

Thucydides, the Father of History, writing about the day in 415 B.C. when Athens sent its glorious fleet off to destruction in Sicily.

U.S. Versus Them

2004-08-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, I am watching the Olympics in the evening. Now, I've actually been to an Olympics and I can tell you for certain that American Olympic coverage is crap. Not only is it crap from the point of view the scanty and patronizing coverage it gives to most events, but it plumbs whole new levels of crapiness with its so-called announcers. I am not generally indisposed towards the expert announcers, former athletes with keen eyes and sharp minds who can actually assist the viewer in understanding what is going on. I reserve my contempt for the inevitably obnoxious anchorperson who's job it is to announce the names of the contestants and prattle off some tidbit about them before leading us into one of those awful "personal segments" they show us for 10 minutes instead of (gasp!) the actual Olympic events.

So, here I am earlier this week, watching the women's gymanstics team competition when the Russians enter the floor lead by Svetlana Khorkina. Our Fearless Announcer begins to talk about what a princess (in the worst sense) she is, how she just barely practices, and how she posed for some pictures for a disreputable magazine. Translation: she's a bitchy Russian slut. Her performance is sub-par, which is grist for the announcer's mill, who might as well drop any pretext of politeness and just call her a washed-up, used-up hag and be done with it.

Later in the evening, coverage shifts intermittantly to women's swimming, where American darling Amanda Beard is given lavish attention. Indeed, a two-minute segment of Ms. Beard in a bikini, being doused by water while the camera zooms into her bosoms and crotch, lycra-covered but otherwise exposed for accurate evaluation by even the feeblest imaginations, proceeds the match she is about to participate in.

Perhaps the dear reader doesn't see the humor in this, so I'll spell it out...

Pretty Russian Gymnast with attitude gets down and dirty for magazine: bitchy slut.

Pretty American Swimmer frolics in water, wiggles her tits, and smiles copiously on national TV: wholesome girl next door.

Now, are we alone in the world guilty of such guilessness? Most certainly not, but that doesn't excuse it.

Curtains for Mrs. Beasley

2004-07-28T21:55:00.000-07:00

I admit it. I killed Mrs. Beasley. But we'll get back to that.

In my sophomore year in high school, I was selected to be the stage manager for our school's spring production of A Black Comedy. Being stage manager meant that it was my job to handle everything that went on backstage before, during, and after the production. I memorized the entire script. I oversaw the creation and placement of the sets, the recording of the actors' blocking, the lighting cues, the sound cues, and pretty much else that goes on behind the scenes during a production. It was great stuff and I loved every minute of it. Everything that is, except that I reported to the student director, Cindy, a frumpy senior with wad of black curly hair, thick black-rimmed glasses, and a Mrs. Beasley doll.

Part of my job was to oversee the flying of the backdrops between acts. The backdrops hung from long poles that stretched horizontally across the back of the stage. These poles were attached to rigging rising up to the top of the theater, then back down to counterweights, were one or two people could easily lift or lower (fly) the backdrops. We quickly discovered that with the proper weights removed, a person could stand on the counterweights and fly himself to the top of the theater as well. This we did to our endless delight, despite the danger, the vertigo, the pinched fingers and cable-burned hands. I spent a great deal of my time introducing my staff and the actors to the practice. Eventually somebody figured out thay you could lower the backdrops all the way to the ground, sit precariously on the pole, and have another person or two lift you up -- riding atop the backdrop pole -- to the upper reaches of the stage, some forty feet up. Heady stuff.

Cindy the student director would come backstage, Mrs. Beasley in tow, and chide us that what we were doing was very dangerous and Mrs. Beasley just might get very angry and make her tell a teacher what we were up to -- for our own good, of course. I'd respond by trying to get her to take a counterweight ride herself. She'd look at Mrs. Beasley, say a couple of words to the doll, then look at me and say, "Mrs. Beasley thinks you're dumb."

Cindy would never criticize anyone directly, not as long as Mrs. Beasley was around. It was always "Mrs. Beasley thinks you said that line too quickly" or "Mrs. Beasley thinks you sound like a dying moose when you say that" or "Mrs. Beasley thinks your accent is awful" or "Mrs. Beasley thinks you're dumb." Frankly, I was getting more than a little annoyed with Mrs. Beasley. She wasn't the director and she wasn't a student. Sure, she'd had a pretty good gig on TV for a while, but that was years before. That still didn't give her the right to criticize us.

You might be wondering why we accepted criticism from a doll at all. Well, I'll tell you. Drama students have an immense capacity for self-delusion. Usually this manifests itself in the damn, I'm a great actor or everybody loves me kinds of delusions, but self-delusion is essential for one to be an actor at all. If you can't delude yourself into thinking you're an early twentieth-century english aristocrat walking into his luxe manor, how can you expect to delude an audience? Thus, when Cindy spoke to Mrs. Beasley, and when Mrs. Beasley spoke back, we accepted it as perfectly natural and took Mrs. Beasley for a spiteful little bitch wanting to relive her moment in the spotlight through us.

By the week of the play, tempers were frayed. Some of my set crews' work had gotten behind schedule because we were playing with the rigging too much and painting too little. My friend Joey, an excellent artist who went on to Julliard on scholarship, was responsible for turning the canvas and cardboard set pieces into the walls of a posh country manor. Mrs. Beasley criticized him mercilessly and rather unfairly. Joey, who was a very sensitive artist, came to me in tears one afternoon.

"If that Mrs. Beasley says another thing about my color choices," he burbled at me, "I'll kill her."

Joey was one of my best friends and I loved him. I couldn't stand to see him cry.

"No, Joey," I said, "I have something better in mind for that little bitch."

...

On the day of our first dress rehersals, as Cindy was examining the costumes and sets before our first run-through, I came across Mrs. Beasley sitting quietly and alone in the empty theater. Sneaking up behind her, I threw a hand over her mouth and snatched her up under my arm. I ran backstage, hid the doll in a cardbox, and waited for Cindy to end her inspections and take her place in the seats. We lowered the curtains in preparation for the first act.

I quickly began giving orders. Strike the set. I want nothing but a black backdrop. Lower bar number three, the one we always play with. Lights, I need a single spot right here. Someone bring me some rope and duct tape.

From outside the the curtain, we heard Cindy shout, "Curtain!".

And the show went on.

The curtain parted not on a country manor, but a black void. A single white spot shot down from the center of the void onto the back curtain. I motioned with one hand to the boys manning the rigging to slowly lower bar number three.

At first, you could only see the shadow as the bar lowered into the spotlight but still remained out of sight. A shadow like that of a frumpy trapeze artist. Then the dangling booties came into view and then the blue frock, and finally, the know-it-all smile and square-rim glasses. Mrs. Beasley sat, perched upon a makeshift trapeze -- a loop of rope, tied to the bar overhead. She swayed back and forth slightly.

"Arrrrrrrrrr!" boomed the scream from the auditorium, "Let her down! You let Mrs. Beasley down!" Cindy was jumping up and down on her seat now hysterically. "What have you done?" she moaned, "You're torturing her. Arrrrrrrrr!"

We giggled. Frankly, we thought Mrs. Beasley might actually like being a trapeze artist. But alright then, we'd made our point. Cindy by now had mounted the stage and was circling frantically below Mrs. Beasley's swing. I motioned for the boys to let her down. Only, one boy pulled up and the other boy pulled down, jerking the bar suddenly.

Mrs. Beasley hopped up once, then slid off her rope trapeze. She fell about a foot then caught her chin on the bottom of the loop of rope. The rope snapped tight and her body jerked around, wrapping the rope tightly around her neck. Her little legs gave a kick. Then she went completely limp, hanging by her neck eight feet above us, twisting in the wind.

Cindy let out an anguished wail. "You killed Mrs. Beasley! You killed Mrs. Beasley!" She began trying to leap up into the air, clawing at the doll's dead feet. I turned to the boys managing the rigging and motioned violently for them to let the doll down which they hurredly did. Cindy caught up Mrs. Beasley's corpse as she came hurtling down, unwrapped the rope from around her neck, and clutched the body to her breast. She hunched forward and jutted her jaw out. She pounced across the stage at me. Her breath was ragged and her hair, having been wrenched a dozen times by her hands, was a wild, explosive mess. With her free hand, she was pointing at me.

"You! You killed her!" she hissed with poisonous malevolence, "You...you...you murderer. I hate you! I hate you!" Her last expression exploded in a scream from her throat. I stood there, like the rest of the students, slack-jawed and dumb-founded.

Screaming and crying, Cindy ran offstage and out of the auditorium, clutching the dead Mrs. Beasley tightly. We listened to her scream "I hate you! I hate you all!" for several seconds after the metal doors slammed shut behind her, her wails and screams trailing off into the distance of the parking lot. A car door slammed. Wheels screeched. Then all was silent.

Paula, the assistant student director, who hated Mrs. Beasley as much as if not more than anyone, having found her advice to Cindy repeatedly ignored in favor of the whisperings of a bitchy doll, clapped her hands together cheerfully.

"Puh-laces! Puh-laces, everyone!" she chirped. "Blubrik, will you make sure that the next time the curtain rises there's a set behind it?" She settled into the director's seat with the script and waited for the actors and crew to resume their positions. When the curtain came up again, it was on a manor's drawing room.

Word of Mrs. Beasley's untimely death spread through the Drama and Speech department like wildfire. I was an instant celebrity, and my position as a lead actor in following years' plays was assured. Mrs. Beasley had been the bane of the drama students for three years, and they were relieved that somebody finally had the guts to put an end to that little doll's plastic life and her unwelcome criticisms. That I had actually hung Mrs. Beasley, on stage, in a spotlight, as the first act of our first dress rehersal, only solidified my position as the drama alpha-male, wicked, intelligent and dangerously capable of impassively neutering my enemies in the most embarrassing and public ways possible.

Cindy returned to the play on opening night and resumed her position as director. By then, though, her power was broken and without Mrs. Beasley at her side to prompt her, Cindy was demure and polite to everyone, including myself. She had obviously heard through the grapevine of my political catapult through the ranks and, having tasted my power directly, wanted to get on my good side. Besides, once the play goes on, the director is essentially powerless anyway. But as the stage manager, the show was now entirely in my hands.

"Puh-laces. Puh-laces, everyone." I announced as I looked down at my clipboard of cues and tested my flashlight. On my walky-talky, I ordered the house lights down. I cued the music. My eyes gleamed in the darkness, and I smiled.

With the relish of a vampire biting a virgin neck, I whispered, "Curtain."

Armageddy

2004-07-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

"John got it all wrong." I said. "Well, not exactly wrong, but not exactly right."

El Cigarro Grande nodded slowly, not in agreement, but in wary politeness. Whatever I was about to say would probably offend him. The John I was talking about was St. John the Divine, author of The Apocalypse, or by it's more popularly known title, The Book of Revelation. As a child, it was the one book of the Bible I could really sink my teeth into. Those were my pre-teen years before I could get excited by all the begating.

"Yeah," I continued, "but you can't really blame him. He was chemically imbalanced. And the future isn't as big as it looks."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, mass-time ratio dislocation causes expansion of the event stream as the moments travel backward, so that small things in the future are grotesquely inflated out of proportion to the perceiver in the past. Combine this with a chemically imbalanced brain without the benefit of a localized time-space perception refractoring device, for example your average crystal ball, and you'll get your prophecies all wrong, or at least wildly over-inflated."

"I see..."

"Take John the Divine, for example. After an all-night bender combined with a severe personality disorder and fervent religious belief -- that's a heady cocktail for one brain to handle, you know -- his awareness slip-jumps out of his temporal continuum and into the future. Not so uncommon, anyone can do it with a little effort. So, he's lying on his back, looking up into the future, and he gets it all wrong. First, it's not armageddon, but armageddy. But that's just the most minor of his mistakes."

"Just the first? Please," El Cigarro Grande mumbles, "do go on."

"Yeah," I go on, "he got the name wrong, but that's nothing. He was really bozo with regards to where it occurs. It's not the middle east, but East Middlesex, in Massachusetts. They have a mosquito control project that's very interesting, you know."

"No, I didn't. Fascinating."

"Yeah. Anyway, that's not even the worst of St. John's mistakes. The whole end of the world thing, everyone burning up, dying miserably, rampaging armies, ecetera. In reality, it's just a really large, unfortunate brushfire."

"A brushfire?"

"Yeah. Started by the unsupervised and illegal burning of a pile of leaves. Pretty sad." I sipped on my tea.

"But what," ECG mused, "about the part about the anti-christ. And the number of the beast."

"Oh, that. Pure mass-time ratio dislocation. The beast? No such thing. It's just a bat, a myotis lucifugus, named Booba Bat..."

"A what?"

"A my-oh-tis loo-ciff-a-guss. A Little Brown Bat. Of course, perceived across a couple of thousand years of space-time by a woozy hermit without the benefit of a perception refactoring device, little Booba Bat must have appeared absolutely fucking monstrous. And the whole numbering thing, 6-6-6. That's just a temporal echo. It was only one 6, and that referred to Booba Bat's weight in ounces."

I let ECG think about this for a moment then I plowed ahead.

"Yeah, a bat's not much to base an apocalyptic religion on." I said sympathetically. "I'd tell you about what rapture was really about, but it'd spoil your day." I felt sympathy for him because ECG was a card-carrying, admitted Bible-Thumper with his own replica of the Gutenberg Bible, diligently taking part in the death throes of a subculture trying its best to drag the rest of us back to the 50s or the Middle Ages, whichever came easiest. I don't hold this against him; in fact, it makes him quite endearing to me, one of the many entertaining and seemingly contradictory impulses that guided ECG's life.

"Yeah, the armageddy really isn't all that terrrible. It's just rather smoky for a few days. A few people get some really nasty headaches, and the smell sticks around for a couple of months, but not much else. Little Booba Bat escapes with his life, even."

"So," ECG replies, getting into the spirit of the discussion, "it's really more about the singes of the flesh?"

"Yeah," I nod vigorously, "that's it. And you can see why it'd be hard to get the faithful all pumped-up and frothing at the mouth over a startled bat and a brushfire, no matter how unfortunately large. No, you've got to add inexplicable monsters, extremely vague kabalistic references, gratuitous splashes of Freddy Krueger-like villains, and people dying in droves to make a religion work, to get those juicy faith-based passions whipped to a boil."

By this time, ECG was more than a little uncomfortable with the whole vaguely heretical discussion, so I decided to go over the edge.

"The real end of creation, though. That's very disappointing."

"Ah, now this sounds promising. Do tell."

"Well, I only over-heard the conversation, but it goes like this..."

GOD: Jesus! Turn off the goddamn lights when you leave the room!"

JESUS: Ah, dad! Quit riding my ass.

The lights snap off.

"That's it."

"That's it?" asked El Cigarro Grande, a modicum of disappointment inflecting his question. "What a comfort to know the end of the world appears to be handled by Pauls Jr. and Sr. of Orange County Choppers."

"Yeah. Pretty dull stuff. Like I said, hard to get all religious over it."

"And how exactly did you come to have all of this knowledge?" he asked.

"It came to me in a vision. Fortunately, I wasn't recovering from all-night whoop-ti-do down at the Prophet Bar at the time."

"Get away from me, you heathen." he finally said, kicking backward as hard as he could in the relentless tidal pool of progress.

I Lay About Me My Enemy

2004-07-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

Chuck returns from the Vacation From Hell with the flu. The flu was given to him by his in-laws who decided that despite the fact that their sinus cavities were filled with an abundant supply of mucus, they would have no problem in driving cross-country with Chuck, Mrs. Chuck, Little Chucklette, Baby Chucklette, The Infamous J. (sister-in-law), and The Infamous J.'s daughter, J-Lite. I will leave you to imagine what a week with two flu-ridden, cranky, dyspeptic elderly in-laws and five other people in a somewhat dingy and cramped 800-square-foot beach-cabin must be like. Chuck still hasn't been able to cope with all the details himself since the return.

However, it should be unnecessary to point out that spending a week in tight-quarters with sick people is exactly the sort of thing Black Plagues start from. So not only did Chuck spend his week-long beach vacation with two sick, elderly in-laws, but within a very short amount of time, he had a sick wife, two sick children, a sick sister-in-law, and a sick niece to make him feel more comfortable with his own impinging infection.

And despite the evidence that you can spread the flu to another person with no real effort on your part -- evidence that Chuck himself witnessed first-hand -- he informs me of these details over lunch the following Monday while still obviously suffering from the plague.

"Um, shouldn't you be at home?", I inquire, shying away from him.

"No, no. I'm alright. It's nothing. Probably hay-fever.", he says jauntily blowing snot into a napkin.

The old adage says that shit flows downhill. If shit were virii, I would be the wastedump at the bottom of that hill. As a child, I was often sick with various colds, streps, nasal infections, stomach flus, and monos. If another child entered the room sneezing, I would be deliriously feverish by the end of the day. I was sick so often and so badly, that I underwent several week-long injection treatments. These I detested and I fought bravely against the nurses any time I was forced to undergo one. My struggles were apparently so memorable that as a freshman in college, when I caught a cold from a classmate in Russian class and ended up with a 21,000 white blood-cell count, the nurse who was attending me got a wondering look on her face.

"Blubrik...Blubrik..." she muttered, "Say, your pediatrician didn't happen to be Dr. Boles, was he?"

"Why yes," I slewed back through fever, "he was."

"Oh. My. God." she said, just like like, three entirely separate sentences for each word. "I remember you." She went on to tell me how, when I was three, I had punched and kicked her as she and six other nurses held me down for a series of penicillin shots. Then she stabbed a needle into my exposed butt with a little more job satisfaction than I am certain was necessary. When the blood left my face for more comfortable surroundings in my feet, she helped me limp to a gurney, cooing all the way in self-satisfied tones.

I think about that moment from time to time, times that always coincide with someone blowing snot into a napkin in front of me.

Two days later, my nose and throat begin the ache with the tell-tale signs of impending infection. Long years of first-hand experience inform my actions now. I immediately cease activity, consume vast quantities of vitamin C, some zinc, as much garlic as I can stomach, and drink copious amounts of fluid. The vitamin C and zinc help bolster the immune system. The excess fluid sends the kidneys into over-drive, literally washing the bug out of the body. And the garlic keeps other people a respectful distance away so that they do not infect me with an opportunistic tribe of streptococci or worse.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I can easily work from home. Armed with a fast connection and a Virtual Private Network, I am possibly more efficient at home than I am at work in my cubical (not being distracted by people wanting to chit-chat or hold pointless meetings, for example). My house is quiet, and apart from the occasional demands for attention from Coda Dog or Obie Cat, free of distraction. So, on Thursday, while I sent my subconscience to war against the Evil Rhinovirus armed with freshly forged swords of purest vitamin C, zinc-tipped spears, garlic shields and gallons of water and hot tea, I worked from home. When I became too tired to work, I napped. When I awoke and had no more meaningful work to do, or at least work that I would grant meaning to, I played City of Heroes, one of those "massively multiplayer online" games you've probably heard about where you take on the role of a super-hero in a city beset by crime syndicates and super-villains, mad scientists, monsters, undead and aliens.

Enkidu, my super-heroic alter-ego in the game, is a lone-wolf vigilante-type of character, like the titular character in Lone Wolf and Cub, or, more directly, Grendel. He is eminently capable of swatting down vast numbers of villains and mooks by himself. In this, he appears to be somewhat in a minority in the game, which is designed to deliberately cripple your hero in certain ways so that you must rely on other heroes (i.e., players) to assist you. You (your hero) may, for example, be very, very good at capturing criminals, but very, very bad and keeping them from bashing your skull in. You would, therefore, find a player whose alter-ego was very good at protecting your skull, but not very good at taking down a mook. Thus, everyone is capable of finding a role to play, and so the multi-player part of the game works.

Except for characters like Enkidu, who fly against the expectations of the other players. Enkidu doesn't require another person to help him take down a villain. He can do that quite nicely by himself. He doesn't even require help to take down a horde of villains. He can handle them as easily as any comic-book hero could. He doesn't need to have force-fields or healing auras placed on him to help him survive a fight -- they're nice, but not necessary. He doesn't need another massive hero soaking up all the damage and attention of the villains so Enkidu can beat them up from behind. He doesn't need to rest after a fight or have someone bring him a cup of water to get his strength back. He likes a straight-ahead, toe-to-toe fight.

In other words, he is entirely self-sufficient in a game which tries to deliberately cripple self-sufficiency in the name of "balance".

Therefore, I find I prefer Enkidu to "go it alone", or at least "go it with one or two friends who won't get in the way." This works most of the time just fine, but means that I have missed out on some of the larger grouping aspects of the game. One of these aspects are "Task Force Missions", which are deliberately long and hard missions designed for a large group of heroes to tackle together. I'd never had the time (they take many hours to complete) or the inclination to find upwards of eight people to help me complete one.

But Thursday was different. I was sick and had plenty of time...

...

So, after visiting the tailors at Icon, Inc. and finally deciding on his new suit of armor and what colors to apply to it (blue and gold), he set out to Talos Island to see if anyone needed a hero to participate in the Task Force: Stone mission. He found one quickly enough, and waited while the other heroes gathered. Soon enough, eight heroes had come from across the city to defeat and capture the arch-villain Vandal, leader of the maniacal techno-fascists, the 5th Column.

The task force's leader, Captain Pyric, a bruiser with the ability to exude fire from his body, lead them to the first base where Vandal might hiding, building his robotic mek-men. Sneaking into the base, the heroes came upon the first group of neo-nazis, milling about a cavern-cum-high-tech-hide-out, looking for trouble. From the snippets of conversation the heroes of Task Force Stone could hear, somebody had tipped the 5th Column off.

Enkidu surveyed the opposition. They were numerous, but weak. He'd fought tougher, more dedicated criminals for breakfast. He'd fought bizarre transdimensional aliens, for Bablyon's Sake, and these pitiful pretend-soldiers in their black-and-red uniforms and jack-boots, no matter how many there might be, couldn't even put a scratch his ecto-chitin breastplate. But he held his tongue, and waited for Captain Pyric to give his orders.

These orders were of the most timid character. The heroes would sneak up on the fascists, attempting to place booby traps and smoke grenades to weaken them. Sneak up on them? Weaken them? thought Enkidu incredulously. But he held his tongue.

Slowly and timidly, the other heroes crept forward and planted the booby traps. Enkidu thumbed his sword impatiently. This is not heroic. This is cowardly. But he held his tongue. He was not the leader, after all.

The first explosions went off, and Enkidu's sword sprang from its scabbard. In a flash, Enkidu vanished and reappeared next to the largest, most threatening mek-man he could find and began hacking at the robot's metal armor. Sparks flew, armor fell away, wires disintegrated, and the robot crumpled to ground. Now, this is more like it.

Vandal is still a step ahead of them. Task Force Stone followed the clues to the next secret base, buried beneath the docks of Independence Port. Again, Captain Pyric demanded the timid approach, this while dealing with cell-phone calls from his agent. Magnoman begged off for a few minutes for dietary distress -- bad pizza or something. Enkidu fidgeted. He always turns his cell-phone off before taking a mission. Who wants to have a reporter or agent calling you are surrounded by acid-vomiting zombies in the sewers beneath the city?

Finally, Captain Pyric put away his cell-phone and Magnoman came out from behind the rocks looking somewhat relieved. Once again, they crept forward to another clutch of thugs. We slither like worms, grumbled Enkidu to himself.

Finally, he could take it no longer.

"You do realize," he said, "that I can arrest every 5th Columnist in this base by myself, don't you? I mean, we do not need to be so...circumspect. These thugs are wimps."

Captain Pyric immediately barked back, "If you don't like it, sir, then you are welcome to leave. This is a group effort."

I didn't realize cowardice required a group, thought Enkidu sourly, but he bit his tongue again. No reason to make things worse. He only hoped that Captain Pyric would realize that perhaps Enkidu was only trying to help, only trying to speed things along, only offering his abilities up to the group which here-to-for had pretty much ignored him. Instead, he knew, the Captain had decided Enkidu was a braggard and, worse, a dangerously half-cocked liability to the team. Enkidu resolved to not mention it again and hoped that the Captain paid attention in the next fight. Captain Pyric stormed off, fires blazing off his skin impressively. Enkidu watched him go, comparing the man's brilliant, blazing skin-fires to his own low-keyed glow of ki and wondering if the others would take him more seriously if he ran around setting things a-light. With a shrug, he ran off after the leader.

Captain Pyric rounded a corner into a large group of neo-nazis. Instead of engaging them, he fled, leading them back towards the other unprepared team members. Enkidu immediately engaged the Columnists to stop them. The metaplasmic katana did it's work.

Then cries for help began to come over the comm-link. "We're in trouble back here!" Somewhere, in another part of the cavern, some of the team had run into other 5th Columnists, too many for them to handle. Leaving his current work unfinished, Enkidu ran to find them. By the time he did, Captain Pyric laid upon the ground, unconscious, surrounded by a milling horde of twenty neo-nazis. Enkidu leapt upon them and slew them, standing above the Captain's body.

When the battle was finished and Captain Pyric groggily stood back up, he shot an angry glance at Enkidu. "We'll not have any more of that!" Enkidu shrugged and walked away.

Unforunately, Captain Pyric did not get his wish, and the now fully-alerted 5th Columnists set a more clever ambush of fully-armed mek-men in the next cavern. The heroes charged in and were quickly over-whelmed. Three went down in a matter of seconds, including again Captain Pyric. Enkidu himself found himself surrounded by dozens upon dozens of mek-men and iron valkyries, seized by doubt and wondering if he might have been bragging a little bit after all.

The remaing heroes fled the scene. Enkidu stepped back a few paces so that he could block the entrance to the cave his companions had fled down, setting himself alone between them and the rampaging robots. Suddenly, his read-out began to show that three of the team members were abandoning the mission. Captain Pyric lead the charge out of the dangerous underground base and to the nearest Starbucks, leaving Enkidu, the mentalist Marzz, and the empath Jim Bean to face down thirty enraged, gleaming metal neo-nazi robots.

"Get back!" shouted Marzz over the comm-link, "Enkidu! Get back here before you get yourself killed! There's too many of them. You can't do it alone!"

Enkidu gritted his teeth. Those are fighting words. Building up his power, he leapt into the air. His katana turned into a solid sphere of whirling death around him.

"It's..."

Ten mek-men exploded into pieces as Enkidu's katana connected with their bodies.

"...O..."

Like a peeling a bloody onion, a dozen neo-nazi soldiers fell away, clutching at their opened guts spilling on the floor.

"....K!!"

With one final flurry of silvery, shining death, the remaining horde of evil-doers gasped, exploded, died, fled, or begged for mercy befrore Enkidu and his metaplasic blade. And it was over.

Enkidu ran the back of his bloody hand across his forehead and smiled as he glanced at his armor. It was dripping gore, but he was happy anyway. See? Not a scratch.

As he wiped the katana off on the body of one of the thugs, Marzz and Jim Bean came running up.

"The others fled." Marzz gasped. "They fled. Can you believe it? Heroes that flee?"

"Wusses.", mumbled Jim Bean angrily. The mentalist and the empath looked over the silent room, at the pile of bodies, at Enkidu as he slid the katana into its sheath.

The two younger heroes glanced at each other uncomfortably for a long, silent moment. Then, Marzz spoke up. "I have something I must say to you, Enkidu."

"What's that?"

"When you said you could handle all these guys by yourself. I...well, I thought very badly of you."

Enkidu nodded. "I know."

"But now I know what you're about, what you can do. I know what you were trying to say."

Enkidu realized the young hero was trying to apologize for thinking Enkidu had been a lousy braggard, a self-important newbie. He shrugged.

"That's OK." he said, "But right now, there's an arch-villain threatening the city and its up to us, just us, to bring him to justice. Are you with me?"

Jim Bean and Marzz said, as one, "Hell, ya!" and the three heroes ran off into the depths of the cavernous base to find their destiny. By the end of the day, the nefarious Vandal was resting uncomfortably in his own private cell in Ziggursky Prison.

Sometimes, it's good to be able to lay one's enemy out, viral or imaginary.

Capes for Everyone!

2004-07-21T13:40:00.000-07:00

Capes Return to Paragon City!

While I doubt I will see Enkidu wearing a cape -- he would look as inappropriate in a cape as, well, a neo-samurai warrior in a cape -- there are some people who cannot imagine a superhero without a cape. I am certain the Flaming Q will get one -- a long chartreuse taffeta Versace number, probably.

Enkidu is undergoing a fashion crisis of sorts, in any case. He recently opted to remove his helmet, adopting a more casual David Carradine-in-blue-body-armor look. The Pauli Effect complains that the lack of a helmet makes Enkidu look less threatening, to which Enkidu replies simply by drawing the Metaplasmic Katana and assuming the Unyielding Stance: Is that threatening enough for you?

Still, Enkidu has also toyed with some new body armor (red and gold leaf), but is less happy with the results. The tailors keep assuring him the colors will grow on him. True enough, the ecto-chitin breastplate does grow on him, but it is also very itchy. However, the colors (red and gold) don't look as good on the newscasts as his traditional and very recognizable blue and white. He has his fans to consider, after all. No need to squander his influence on a fit a poor fashion sense.

See more on: City of Heroes

The Salt Mine

2004-07-21T08:38:00.000-07:00

I work for a large company. Not large in the sense of Exxon/Mobil large or US Government large, but large nonetheless. It is a technology company. You are probably using a dozen or so of our products right this very instant, and you don't even know it. You may even use the product I helped design and build as you go about your average work-day -- a few million people do, so the likelihood is rather high. Our products are, in fact, quite ubiquitous and yet invisible to the modern user, even the one I work on, which might sit on your desk right next to you.

Despite the satisfaction that I could derive from knowing these facts -- a job well done, a successful product in the marketplace, etc. -- in truth I glean only a small amount of pleasure from them. Work is generally referred to me and my closest associates as the Salt Mine, a moniker which stems from the fact we work for a large company. My job satisfaction comes from the micro-activities I perform at work -- coming up with an elegant algorithm, or constructing a practical technical solution, or divining the correct answer to a question on the barest sliver of evidence -- rather than the knowledge that my micro-activities (theoretically) advance the macro-activity of the company as it meanders ponderously toward the next product release.

From my position within the Salt Mine, I can see the company lurch and wobble towards these destinations. It never moves fast. It cannot, the institutional inertia is far too great. Sometimes it breaks free of the coefficient of organizational friction and careens out of control briefly. But most of the time it plods along, like a blind giant lead by a thousand lilliputians with quite contrary opinions about exactly where this unseeing monster is supposed to go and who, from time to time, get trod on when they forget to hold the ropes restraining the giant and begin arguing among themselves about whether the beach or the mountains is a better place to put a blind, stumbling, rather unintelligent colossus.

Still, these facts, in and of themselves, do not bother me. I fully realize that I work for a large, ponderous company. While the reader might glean that I think this is a bad thing, I will state for the record it is not. Rather, it's just a dull and pedantic thing. A small company, while rife with the flush of excitement a nimble-footing and the day-to-day goals of a hand-to-mouth existence provide, is also, in my experience, a very stressful place.

The Salt Mine is not a very stressful place. The same institutional inertia which forces it to plod its course with snail-like sluggishness, also makes it relatively immune to the storms of the marketplace. So while it might cross the technology ocean at the same speed as a loaded brick, the riders upon it are rather immune to sea-sickness. Instead, they tend to play cut-throat games of Capture the Manager or Pin the Blame on Marketing to alleviate the almost impenetrable dullness of the ride, lest they throw themselves overboard and drown.

Still, my diatribe does not come unbidden to these pages. It was not that I awoke this morning and said to myself, "Time to complain about the Salt Mine." On the contrary, another event occured, one that birthed a kind of epiphany in me, a small bite from the fruit of knowledge that maybe, just maybe, my job was rather dull.

At the Salt Mine, we produce patch notes. Our patch notes read like most patch notes -- Fixed a divide-by-zero error in the message passing structure -- stuff like that. The epiphany came when reading another company's patch notes. In most patch notes, you can see the same kind of errors and patches and statements of how the errors were patched. From most of these, you can assume that life for the engineer over there is just about as dull for him as it is for you.

However, once in a while, and this morning was one of those onces, you read a patch note which makes you cringe with self-realization, a dribble of text which makes you wonder if you can even drag yourself into work today.

This morning, it was...

Fixed a bug when in certain situations a summoned pet could turn evil. [sic]

So, while I am dealing today with handling unhandled exceptions and finding memory leaks, I now have the unwelcome knowledge that at least one engineer sat down at work last week and dealt with the monumental issues of good and evil.

Electing the Vegetarian

2004-07-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

When Jurgen Philips announced that he was running for President, we didn't give him a chance. It wasn't his party affiliation -- he was a moderate, and he identified himself as a Republican. It wasn't his lack of funding -- he had made millions during the Internet Bubble and, unlike the rest of us, had known when to get out. Neither was it his platform -- populist, pro-family, pro-business, with a strong Federalist and individualist undercurrent that played well in the Red States. He's a stand-up guy and a Gulf War veteran with a purple heart. He went to Johns Hopkins to study medicine on a scholarship. He's handsome, with a wife and two lovely children.

We still didn't give him a chance, and, no, not because his father (a german immigrant who fled Nazi Germany and so he could enlist with the American Army) had given him that god-awful name.

No, Jurgen Philips didn't have a chance in hell of being elected President of these United States, despite his wealth, his good-lucks, his perfect family, and his "mainstream" right-leaning politics.

Jurgen Philips was a vegetarian.

"Jay," I told him, since all his friends called him Jay, "you don't believe in eating meat. Who'll vote for you?"

Jurgen seemed perplexed. "What should that matter? I don't believe in eating meat, true. That is my belief. Have you ever known me to insult or ridicule those who believe in eating meat?"

"No," I agreed, "I've never known you to do that."

"And yet," he continued, "you maintain that because I do not believe in eating meat, people will see me as somehow unfit to be President? Explain, please." Jurgen was like this, a crackingly sharp mind always prepared to hear all-sides of a debate openly.

"Well," I began, "yes. Apparently, 90-some-odd percent of the American public say they believe in eating meat. It stands to reason that they would want to vote for someone who also believes in eating meat, someone who shares their beliefs."

He stared at me for a moment, thinking about this. Then, he said, "I am fully capable of being President. I have the experience, I have the education, my politics are sound. I have great ideas for leading the country."

All these things were true. Jurgen had been active in local, state, and national politics for most of his adult life. He had, as a successful businessman, traveled abroad and met with world leaders in business, religion, and statecraft. Everybody liked him. I'd heard some of his ideas for leading the country, and they were great. They were ideas that forced you to slap yourself on the head and say, "It's so simple! Why didn't I think of that?" before you realized who'd told it to you -- Jurgen Philips, the man who always had the best ideas first.

He leaned over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. "Have faith in the American People. Once they meet me, hear me, get to know me, the fact I am a vegetarian won't matter. It's a little thing, what I believe, compared to what I know and what I can do." He smiled, and I believed him.

...

We all joined the Jurgen Philips Campaign for President. I was assigned the task of press secretary. We all worked for free, because we knew Jurgen was the one man fit to be President. He campaigned tirelessly, pressing palms in Littlevilles all over the country, driving himself to cook-outs and barbecues, where he'd stump for hours. His speeches were electrifying. Not in the way a Buchanan or Reagan would electrify with passages of strident nationalism, but in an intellectual way. He knew what he wanted to say to the people, and he knew how to say it so that they could understand it. He never lied, he never fled from the difficult questions. He'd look his questioner in the eye and, without even pausing to reflect, give his honest opinion.

To my great surprise and delight, the campaign took off like a rocket, fueled by Jurgen's ceaseless energy, verve, and dedication. The crowds grew larger and larger. The press took notice, and soon he was making the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows.

And The Question always came up, on every talk show, in every interview, so often you'd think people would get tired of it.

"Mr. Philips," the interviewer would say, as if reading from a script (as often they were), "do you really think the American people will vote for a vegetarian to be President?"

Jurgen would always smile and reply, "Although I do not have a belief that encompasses the eating of meat, my belief does encompass something very dear to me: the American people and this country of ours. Yes, I think -- no, I have faith -- that they'll vote for me. My abilities and qualifications speak for themselves."

A few interviewers would press the issue. "Aren't you just insulting those who believe in eating meat?" or "Shouldn't the beliefs of the President match the beliefs of the people he serves?"

When asked questions like this, Jurgen would reply, "This is a country founded on freedom, physical, religious, and dietary freedom. We recognize that each person has the right to choose his beliefs and to live with his choices. I make no apologies for my beliefs nor would I expect any citizen, vegetarian or not, to apologize for their beliefs."

Not everyone was delighted with Jurgen, however. The far-right wing of the Republican party despised him, as he was a threat to their idealogical meat-eating core. The Democrats feared him, for here was the truly liberal candidate, liberal in the real sense of the word, a man free of pretention, dogma, and vice who spoke with clarity and vision.

When Jurgen proved his mettle and rolled over the other Republican candidates in the first debates, we knew he was as good-as-President. One candidate, a Midwestern Atkins-Friendly senator, had gone so far to carelessly compare Jurgen to Hitler incarnate (who was a vegetarian) before an open microphone. Jurgen simply said, "Senator, I don't believe in eating him, either." and drew a round of laughter and applause from the audience. He winked at me from the dias then, as if saying "See, have faith in the people. They'll never let you down." I nearly cried.

...

The first primaries were rough. Despite a ground-swell of popularity, the far-right wing of the party came out in force. The Midwestern Senator stumped almost exclusively in meat-packing plants, railing against the "immoral voices in the party, voices that do not believe in eating meat." It amused and frightened me that Jurgen could be painted as immoral simply because he didn't believe in eating meat.

The questions and arguments against him became tougher and shriller. "Since you don't believe in eating meat, is it true that you don't believe in the Six Basic Food Groups of the Food Pyramid?" was a common one in the Southern Atkins-Friendly States. Jurgen would tackle this one with, "While I obviously do not believe that meat belongs on the Food Pyramid, since I do not believe in eating meat, this does not mean that I dismiss the fundamental eating guidelines expressed in the Food Pyramid. I equate the Food Pyramid with other progressive documents in the history of humankind, like Hammurabi's Code or the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights."

The Midwestern Senator would declaim these remarks as wishy-washy "Hitler-esque" nonsense, going on to call for the erection of large Food Pyramids in every school lunchroom in the country, "to protect and instruct the diets of our children."

The inevitable questions about meat in school and eating eggs would come up. Jurgen didn't care for meat in school, but he didn't care if a child chose to eat meat in school privately, either. Private meat-eating stemmed from belief, and enforcing belief was not the business of the public schools or the state. Eating eggs proved more difficult for him and required him to refine a tricky message -- he supported eating eggs when there was no other choice (for example, in a cake), but strongly disapproved of it first-choice food for breakfast, especially when other choices, like cereals and fruits, existed.

He vigorously debated any argument that included "healthy", "Atkins-friendly" or "Southbeach-approved" as an adjective. Thus, he found himself constantly debating the "high-protein, low carbs" or the "evils of pasta", subjects on which his opponents (and I) felt he was vulnerable. Jurgen would plunge into these debates wide-eyed and eager, certain that his message of reason would come through. His opponents would try to get Jurgen to utter "Pasta is not evil..." or "High protein, meat-centric diets are not healthy..." as a preamble to his rebuttal, forcing Jurgen to carefully weave his statements lest he offend outright the many Atkins and Southbeach dieters that populated the right-wing of the party.

Finally, he struck gold with "First, as a courtesy, would you please define the word 'healthy'?", momentarily backing his opponents into a corner. Some would, of course, link healthiness with cleanliness, giving Jurgen the out he needed: "As a vegetarian, it's obvious that I can agree that something, like cleanliness, has meaning and import without necessarily being linked to a belief in eating meat. I wash my vegetables, after all." Some would not make the healthy-equals-clean link, excusing the word as a euphemism for "tasty" or just "really, really good for you." Again, Jurgen had the out he needed, since no one could deny that vegetables are both "tasty" and "really, really good" for you.

...

The pictures surfaced late in the campaign and proved the most damaging. The Midwestern Senator quickly jumped on them. They showed a young man, clearly identifiable as Jurgen Philips, eating at a fast-food burger joint with some friends. He was wearing a paper-crown and looked a little bleary-eyed. It was a picture from college, when he was a poor student.

"Do you deny, Mr. Philips, that you are in this photo, clearly shown eating meat?", the Senator railed at one of the debates.

"Yes, that is me, eating a burger with friends." admitted Jurgen stoically.

"I suppose you're going to tell us that you didn't swallow." teased the Senator.

"No, Senator, I definitely swallowed that burger." replied Jurgen.

"Then you admit that you are a hypocrit?" pressed the Senator.

"No," answered Jurgen, "I only admit that this photo shows me eating a burger when I was a student in college. That was over twenty years ago. I believe the phrase youthful indiscretion comes to mind." Laughs and applause went up.

Unfortunately, our numbers went down after the debate. Polls showed that the voters were beginning to doubt Jurgen's sincerity and consistency. Despite his eloquence, editorials began to question the source and strength of Jurgen's vegetarian beliefs. The Midwestern Senator hammered at the same question on the Sunday Talk shows. Rush Limbaugh, who shilled for steak houses, went on the attack and called Jurgen a Veganazi. That was the death-knell for the campaign.

...

Jurgen lost the nomination to the Atkins-friendly Senator. In his concession speech, Jurgen said, "We fought the good fight, but in the end, the American people have spoken and they have selected another man to lead the party to the Presidency. Now I, too, throw my support behind my former opponent. However, for myself, tonight represents the end of my political career."

The next day, with his characteristc lack of rancor, he shook the Midwestern Seantor's hand, wished him the best of luck, and made the round of the TV talk-shows to dissect why his campaign had imploded over the what became called the "Burger Bust". Jurgen was all smiles and grace. I was miserable for him.

We haven't talked much since then. Jurgen, good to his word, left politics and took up a general practice in one of the quaint Littlevilles he had visited during the campaign. He left the Republican party soon thereafter, which he felt had become too beholden to the far-right meat-eaters after the selection of the Midwestern Senator, who had no inclination for dietary tolerance. He's still a vegetarian, and I'm told he keeps a framed copy of the Burger Bust photo on his desk.

Scientists are Cool

2004-07-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

Salon.com Technology | Stephen Hawking changes mind on black holes

also

Black Holes are “Fuzzballs”

The cool thing about scientists, unlike the rest of us plebes, is that real ones can change their minds and admit their mistakes. The articles above describe the imminent loss of a famous (in cosmological circles) bet Stephen Hawking made with John Preskill regarding blackholes:

In 1997 the three cosmologists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist -- that is, whether the interior of a black hole is changed at all by the characteristics of particles that enter it (source).

The terms of the bet were that "information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden and can never be revealed." Dr. Hawking has data that contradicts his original beliefs. Not only will he lose the bet, but Dr. Hawking will present the new data to a conference of scientists in Dublin himself.

While I have only a layperson's interest in and knowledge of blackholes, I appreciate this story for other reasons. I admire persons who choose to engage in difficult discourse, who form opinions from their knowledge and experience, and who, when presented with data that contradict and outweigh their own beliefs, accept their own fallability and alter their thinking. In other words, I admire persons who engage in scientific thinking, whether they are solving the riddle of cancer or choosing a new shampoo to buy.

Dr. Hawking will, with grace and humor, provide an example for the rest of us on how to live as thinking, reasonable people capable of not only holding to strong beliefs, but changing them.

Dr. Preskill will win an encyclopedia from Dr. Hawking, from which he may recover information at will.

Interestingly enough, this is second bet Dr. Hawking has lost to Dr. Preskill (information on the first bet).

Patrick Stewart's Love Shack

2004-07-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

Presented on eBay...

eBay item 2397756436 (Ends 28-Jul-04 16:39:42 BST) - STAR TREK APARTMENT

...and so that we are very clear, I do not lurk through eBay, scrounging for Star Trek memorabilia, I was directed there by my news crawler from The Register. Star Trek Apartment $1M crawled across the top of my screen, buried between Bush to Sign Anti-Phishing Bill and Toshiba to Unveil TV-Capable Laptop.

Of course, my immediate reaction was, Wha' canna' this be, cap'n? I read the article, mildly amused. The article went on for a few hundred words, describing the details of the apartment in as newsworthy-terms as possible. I paused at the phrase convicted science fiction fan to consider the penal implications. Slow day at The Register, I thought. Then, idly I clicked the embedded link to eBay.

I stared at the screen, stunned. A Conradian voice in my mind began to murmur, "The horror. The horror."

My lips pursed. I glanced at the calendar to see if it was, in fact, April Fool's Day. Nope, Bastille Day, and the French, as far as I know, are not big on practical jokes, nor - if they were big on practical jokes - would they seem prone to execute elaborate ones in Leicestershire. As far as I know, the French prefer to pretend that Leicestershire doesn't exist at all. This is not to say that the French have anything against Leicestershire personally or that Leicestershire has, accidently or on purpose, offended the French in the past. It's just that the French prefer to pretend that anyplace outside of France doesn't exist. It's nothing personal.

Once the little Joseph Conrad stopped murmuring, or at least decided to wander off to the mental teapot for a refreshing jolt of really hot tea, the other parts of my brain began scrambling up to my eyes to take a peek.

The lower brain functions, who are quite small and scaly, had to continuously hop up and down to peep outside. They began to wonder if any crew would come with the flat. The hungrier parts of the brain, much larger than the others, nudged the lower functions out of the way. They began to wonder about the kitchen and if the tea would be really hot. Finally, some of the imaginary neurons kicked in, standing as is their wont at the back of the mind and shouting their comments forward. They began to amuse themselves, and anyone else who was within earshot, which, inside a skull is really just about everyone anyway, with the idea of what it would be like to have this flat on Changing Rooms. "This transporter pad has got to go.", they minced speculatively.

Finally, Little Joseph returned with cognitive portions of my brain and his cup of really hot tea. He shooed the other thoughts and processes back to their places, pulled up a very comfortable chair, and stared out the windows of my eyes for a long moment.

Yup, we thought to ourselves, seeing is believing.

I began to wonder who would actually buy it. First, the person must be able, obviously, to afford it. At $1M, this easily removed the majority of prospective buyers from the market. Second, they would have to really like Star Trek. No, strike that, they might be very rich with a obsessive, destructive hatred of all things Trek. Such a person might desire to buy it and destroy it, piece by piece, inch by inch, as if exorcising the very existence of Star Trek from his own and our collective racial memory. Someone like Wil Wheaton, for example. Or maybe Patrick Stewart.

An interesting thing about this whole subject is that I, despite all appearances to the contrary, I am deeply ambivalent about Star Trek and all things Star Trek-y. True, as a young boy, I spent an inordinate amount of time watching original the Star Trek series. True, William Shatner comes to me in visions. True, I have been taken to one Star Trek convention, but I did that out of pure curiosity, the same curiosity that drives one to visit the zoo. And, true, when I was in Las Vegas with a large group of friends and family, I visited the Star Trek Experience, where I seriously debated the purchase of an orignal show communicator prop used (and signed) by William Shatner. I did so not because of the Trek-ness of the thing, but because of my deep and abiding love of theater props. So, despite such evidence to the contrary, I do not, have not, and will not ever consider myself a trekkie, trekker, or whatever such devotees call themselves.

But the truly fascinating thing is the Brain and his trick. Though he has some fondness for the campiness of the original series, the Brain despises all Star Trek after that. He loathes the Next Generation and its Love Boat in Space themes. Captain Janeway renders him comatose and Captain Archer sends him into apoplexy. Still the Brain, despite all of his well-tuned disrelish of all modern Trekdom, can, unerringly and before the opening credits roll, describe the entire plot on any Next Generation episode.

The fact that he can do this bewilders and deeply disturbs the Brain. He is not sure how he gained the ability, as he has never willingly sought to view Next Generation episodes himself. But, during the late eighties, the Brain and I, along with other friends, gathered each Sunday night for dinner and a little television or movie watching. I generally cooked for the group, which placed me in the kitchen from the hours of 6-8 P.M. While I cooked, the rest of the gathering would watch whatever was on TV at that moment. This was almost always, as you probably have now guessed, the Next Generation. As we met every Sunday night for years, the Brain managed to capture through osmosis every episode of the series while I, busy and distracted with preparing dinner, merely snatched a minute or two here and there from the shows.

After considering this, I decided I'd never tell the Brain about the Star Trek apartment on eBay. He couldn't afford it and I'd hate to disappoint him.

Edumacate You Self

2004-07-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I present the above website as a public service announcement. Wikipedia is in close competition with Salon for the honor of my homepage.

OK, the truth. Wikipedia beat Salon for the honor. Why did Salon lose?

It's depressing and it's expensive - two words I hate. I like the words peppy and cheap. Peppy and cheap.

I decided it would be exciting, thrilling, and refereshing to read an encyclopedia for change, especially an encyclopedia that goes out of its way to give topics such as the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everthing (read at your own peril)¹ equal footing to the Life of Pope Clement V (even more perilous to read than the other one).

My current home page is set to select a random Wikipedia page every time I return to it. This is easy enough to setup yourself, simply set your homepage to the following URL, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage.

¹ Note also that Google's calculator has an answer, too.

What Side is Your Bread Bloody On?

2004-07-13T16:18:00.000-07:00

After herding my mother and her friend, Madge, on to the train in Bruges, with directions on how to switch trains in Brussels and a pre-arranged hotel reservation awaiting them in Amsterdam, I turned the Brain and said, "I'll bet that's the last time I see my mother alive."

I was certain that she would forget to get off the train in Amsterdam and would end up in Poland or Belarus.

The Brain patted me on my shoulder sympathetically and said, "It's for the best."

We, too, had a train to catch for Brussels, and then on to the TGV for Paris. I shouldered my backpack and marched off to our train.

...

After about a week in France, we arrived in Arles, a small city in Provence about 90 km north of Marseilles. Arles is a delightful town of old buildings and older still Roman ruins, the most impressive of which is not a ruin at all, but a still functioning Roman coliseum. We had only intended to stay in Arles for two nights, but my body had other plans. While lifting a pair of pants to hang them up in the closet one morning, my back spasmed.

Spasm is not a precise enough word to describe what happened to me. A better description would be a large, invisible man stepped up behind me and punched me just under my left shoulder blade. As hard as he could. With a four foot piece of rebar. Heated. Twice.

With a cry, I collapsed to the ground, where I lay immobilized, barely able to breath. A normal person might, at this moment, think "Well, gosh, this isn't right. Perhaps I should call a doctor." I, on the other hand having never laid claim to normality in any form, found myself on my back, looking up through the open window at a perfectly blue sky, thinking "What a pretty blue sky. It really is stunningly blue. My, my back hurts. That sky sure is blue." Tears filled my eyes at the sight of that blue sky and the sudden knowledge that I, now infirmed by a traitorous back, would not get to see much of it.

I crawled, literally inch by painful inch, to the bed. It took me 10 minutes to go from the window of my room to the bed. When I finally had to go to the bathroom, it took me another 10 minutes to go from the bed to the toilet, which I had to heave myself up on to, wincing and moaning with each breath. The Brain tried to help as best he could, but often his pulling and lifting just somehow made it worse and I had to wave him away.

Lying in bed, itself, was not painful, though it was humiliating. Here I was, on a trip I had planned for years, in a beautiful town in Southern France, on a perfect day, and I was lying in a bed. And I wasn't going anywhere.

Our two day stay extended to five as I recuperated. By the next day, I could stroll slowly and solemny about the town, as long as I didn't lift my arms. By the day after that, I could drive, and we visited the Pont du Gard and Avignon. It was in Avignon, in the Palace of the Popes, that we encountered The Ugly American.

She was old, but not elderly, a woman in the prime of her sixties. She had a wispy blue scarf tied around her huge bowl of white-grey-blonde-blue hair, as if trying to hide her embarassment. Of course, the woman had no shame, being as she was The Ugly American.

The Palace of the Popes is a medieval castle, perfectly intact and impressively large, set atop a steep cliff above the Rhone. It's a museum now, of course, and when you enter it, you are given a black wand that looks very much like a foot-long cellular telephone. As you stroll through the palace, you punch in numbers displayed on cards in each room to hear a pleasant voice tell you about what you are seeing. It's all very simple, clear to anyone capable of dialing a telephone and holding it to a ear. Yet, its use completely baffled The Ugly American.

In the middle of a cavernous room, with remarkable accoustics, she began waving her black wand back and forth in the air, screaming at the top of her lungs, "Helllloooo! How do I get this thing to work? Helllloooo!?"

Unfortunately, I was quite near her when she began her tirade. The Brain was up a flight of stairs, intent on the details the pope's garderobe.

"Helllloooo?! Does anyone here speak English?!"

In all truth, had she not said the last bit, I very well may have stepped up and helped her myself. But she had managed in five-little words to convey everything that is absolutely wrong with Americans.

Does anyone here speak English?

"Of course they do, you embarrassing idiot," I thought, "just not to you."

A pretty young french girl wearing a t-shirt that identified her as an employee of the museum came over, and in perfect, polite English, asked the woman what was the matter.

"This thing," she shouted at the girl, shaking the handset in her face, "doesn't work."

The french girl held out her hand, and the Ugly American gave up the handset.

"Madam," she said, "you just need to press the 'Play' button, see? Here, let me show you." She young girl pressed the large bright green, clearly-labeled PLAY button on the black handset and handed it back to the woman, who held it to her ear. She eyed the girl suspisciously.

"It wasn't working before." she said.

"Madam," replied the girl, "if you want, I'll get you another handset."

The woman declined the offer and without thanking the girl, turned and walked away. A moment later, she began shouting again, this time for her husband. I'd seen him about when the whole fracas began, crouching and slinking away into the treasury hall, no doubt wondering how he might explain their grandmother's sudden disappearance in France to his grandchildren when he got back home.

The young girl watched the woman walk away, and the practiced smile melted from her face to something not angry, not reproachful, but placid and serene. I was about to step up to her and apologize. I wanted to say something like, "Je suis très désolé, nous ne sommes pas tout comme elle." (I am very sorry, we are not all like her.). However, two things about her serene, placid expression stopped me.

First, I knew she'd dealt with Ugly Americans before.

Second, I knew no matter what I said, it would not change her expression: she knew Americans were assholes and my apology wouldn't change that. Her expression derived from the perfect contentment of one absolutely certain of the veracity of her beliefs.

...

The next day, the Brain and I wandered the narrow streets Arles, doing some errands and enjoying the town for one last day. My back was on the mend and we had promised to meet my mother and Madge in Florence the next morning. We intended to take a night train into Italy, arriving in Florence in the early morning. But the train was hours away and at the moment we wanted something to eat. We avoided the touristy-looking spots and crawled up and down the town, looking for something interesting.

At the intersection of three alleys, we found it, a little brasserie named Saveur de Provence, the Flavor of Provence. It was absolutely empty of tourists, and that suited us fine.

As we passed into the brasserie, an unshaven man - obviously the chef - looked up from his cigarette, coffee, and paper to glance at us. His white apron was stained with kitchen colors, browns and reds, so much so that he looked a bit like a color-blind painter. A large woman - obviously the chef's wife - hustled over to us from behind the bar.

"Bonjour! Bonjour!" she greeted us. "Two for lunch? Or coffee, perhaps?"

"Bonjour, madam. Yes, lunch, please, madam." we replied in our very polite, very stilted French.

The Brain describes French as "just like English, only specific and polite." He goes on to add that the way you translate an English sentence into a French sentence and get your pronouns right and your syntax in the correct order is to place an imaginary "sire" at the end of each phrase. Thus, to figure out how to ask for a room in French, you start with your basic English question, "Do you have a room?", make it specific, as in "Is it that you have a room available for renting this night?" toss in the polite words "Sir" and "please" and then for good measure, so you get the tone just right, add an imaginary "sire" at the end.

Thus, "Do you have a room?" becomes in your brain, "Sir, please, is it that you have a room available for renting this night, sire?" Voila, perfect French.

The reverse is true going back the other way, of course, and is a great aid to the traveler reading a french newspaper or short-story.

Remembering this is quite simply the key to a pleasant stay in France. As long as you keep your sentences short, precise, polite, and remember to hum "sire" at the end of it in your mind, the French will jump through hoops for you and exclaim, quite honestly, that "You speak French really well. Are you English?"

Much to his chagrin, the Brain learned the hard way that the French are exceedingly prickly when liberties are taken with respect to the polite beginning, middle, and end of a conversation. This is lesson number two for surviving in France. Start every conversation with "hello". Sprinkle the conversation liberally with "sir", "madam", "miss", "please", and "thank you". And, finally, always always always end your conversation with a cheery "goodbye". Once, while we were driving through the countryside, the Brain needed something to drink and we stopped at a convenience store in some small village. He walked into the store, and without thinking simply asked, "Où est les bouteilles d'eau?" to the young lady behind the counter. She looked at him not with anger or displeasure, but with a stark and utterly confused look on her face. The Brain had spoken the sentence quite clearly and she'd plainly understood it. She was confused because he had simply not followed the rules of polite conversation. The Brain calculated his error at once, and a little voice in his head peeped, "Congratulations! You're an Ugly American!" The girl finally recovered from her confusion and directed him to the bottled water. The Brain attempted to repair the situation, switching to his stilted and exceedingly polite French, but it was simply too late, she knew him for exactly who and what he was. He heaved himself heavily into the car and was inconsolable until we reached the hotel.

The matron at the Flavor of Provence sat us at a window table and asked us what we wanted.

"A pastis, please, madam." I replied, "And my friend would like a kir, please." Kir and pastis were brought in due order, along with the carte so we could decide what to eat.

"Pardon me, madam." I said, "but what are the specials of the house today?"

"Ah," she said, smiling, "today have chicken rolls with potatoes and chicken gizzards, fried, with salad."

"I would like the gizzards, please, madam." said the Brain with pep. He knew I'd not eat them, and it would be rude for him to order the special I would eat.

"And I would like the chicken roll, please, madam. And may we have a pitcher of wine, too, please?"

"Of course." She was really quite nice. Like many people in Southern France, she was dark, Italianesque. She was matronly and fit. She spoke quickly and we had to listen carefully to understand her. Everyone in Arles spoke very quickly, we decided since arriving. We had no trouble understanding people in Paris or Burgundy. The Parisians spoke with an accent familiar to our ears and the Burgundians, being mostly farmers, spoke like farmers anywhere, very slowly. But here in Arles, perhaps because of the proximity of the Mediterranean, the people spoke in clippingly fast French, and we struggled daily to understand them.

A few minutes later, she returned with the pitcher of red wine and a sliced baguette. Her husband, the chef, stubbed out his cigarette and shambled into the kitchen. We sat and chatted, sipping the wine and nibbling the bread.

It was at this moment that I noticed a peculiar tinge on the bottom of my piece of baguette. Just a splotch of brilliant red. I shrugged, figuring it to be some red ink that had obviously rubbed off of the plastic bag she carried the bread back from the market in. It never occurred to me that it was what it was. I munged away at more pieces of baguette, flipping them over to inspect the splotches of crimson on their bottoms. I even pointed out the odd color to the Brain, and expressed my ink-rubbing theory to him.

Finally, the matron returned with our entrees. I noticed her left hand was wrapped in a profusely bloody kitchen towel. I pursed my lips in thought. An idea was germinating in my mind. No, I shook my head, too horrible to contemplate.

As she lifted the now empty plate that had held the half-dozen hunks of baguette, the full horror of the situation was there to see on the table, a thick oozy circle of congealing blood that had pooled beneath the plate.

"Oh, my lord!" the matron exclaimed upon seeing the blood on the table. She grabbed another towel from the bar and quickly began to wipe it up, explaining, "Oh, my lord! I am so sorry. See, I cut myself on a knife in the kitchen when I was slicing the bread. Oh, my lord!"

It occured to me that based on the amount of blood extant on the table, the woman had not only cut herself, but had stabbed herself repeatedly. I asked if she was alright, to which she replied that she was fine, just fine. The table now cleaned of the blood, she offered us a cheerful if somewhat strained "bon apetit" and left us to our chicken rolls and gizzards.

I calculated for a moment. Would I die from ingesting this woman's blood? What strange disease was I now in danger of getting? Should I purge? Am I still hungry?

I remembered once, when I was a child, going the refrigerator after play. My mother kept a jar of Ovaltine for me and my brothers to use out on the counter. With the efficiency of a child expert in the making and consumption of Ovaltine, I poured a glass of milk, dumped a ludicrous amount a Ovaltine into it, and stirred. When the drink had turned a rusty brown, I lifted it my mouth and began to inhale the cold ambrosia.

After the three or four impatient gulps, my face twisted into disgusted confusion. What was that flavor? Then it hit me: Oh god, the milk is spoiled and I'm going to die! How much did I swallow? What should I do? Should I throw-up? No, they always say don't throw up if you drink poison! Oh god, I'm going to die!

I gagged and coughed, pouring the rest of the tainted Ovaltine down the drain, then sat on the couch and waited to die. My mother came into the room three or four times, doing motherly things about the house. Finally, she paused and asked, "Honey, why are you just sitting on the couch?"

"I'm waiting to die." I replied.

She looked at me, perplexed. "You'll have to wait a long time, I think. Why don't you go outside and play."

I obeyed her and dragged myself outside to play and wait to die.

This memory flooded back to me as I stared down at my chicken roll and potatoes. I'd hadn't died from the spoiled milk, even though I drank nearly half the glass. I hadn't even gotten sick. Sure, the bread was a little bloody, but it wasn't that much blood. Just a little drop or two on each slice. Nothing to worry about. It was nothing. You probably get more germs just talking to her. Nope, nothing to worry about.

"Was that a load of blood or what?" burst out the Brain, "How much of that shit did you eat, anyway?"

Stabbing my chicken roll with my fork, I glared at him, trying to decide what painful revenge I could exact.

"These gizzards are tee-rific!" he prattled on. "What's the matter? Feel sick? Want a gizzard?"

"No." I mumbled, as I sliced into my chicken roll, taking a bite and thinking to myself, "Technically, I already qualify as a cannibal. Might as well kill him, too. He'd probably taste like this chicken roll."

When we finished and paid, we passed the matron and the chef at the table. They were both reading the paper, sipping coffee, and smoking cigarettes. The chef glanced up at us, then returned to his paper. The matron stood and bowed slightly.

"Was everything fine?" she asked.

"Absolutely," said the Brain. "Let me tell you. We've eaten at many places in France. In Paris. In Burgundy. But this food was the best we've had."

The matron hooted with delight. With surprising visciousness, as if we had suddenly stepped into a long-running domestic fight, she turned to her morose husband-chef saying, "You see! You see! The best in France, they say! They've eaten in Paris and they say your food is better. Your food! You see! What do I keep telling you?"

The chef grumbled and chewed on his cigarette, barely raising his eyes over the paper to look at us or his wife. When we paid our respects to them both and left, she was still yelling at him about how good his food was.

Yes, I admitted to myself, it really was that good.

As we walked back to the hotel, the Brain couldn't help himself. "Was that a lot of blood, or what?"

The Trick of Flying

2004-07-09T14:46:00.000-07:00

As I am a busy person, or at least person who tries very hard to appear like a busy person when anyone is looking, I rarely have time to actually sit down and read a book these days. Furthermore, I am a picky book reader and I consider a poorly plotted or overly bombastically worded book to be a personal affront from the author to myself. Since most authors are bombastic hacks who couldn't plot their way out of an open paper sack with a map, two different and wholly trustworthy guidebooks, a cooperative mule to carry their supplies, and a backlit nuclear-powered auto-compass that infalliably points to the exit, I find most books somewhat lacking.

This is not to say I do not like to read. It's just to say I do not like to read poorly.

The same thing could be said for movies, my taste in which veers widely and wildly across the landscape of cinema, though finding a reasonably plotted movie is even harder than finding a good book. Thus, you can imagine, I've become amazingly bitter and frustrated with regards to my entertainment choices, if one presumes that I want books and movies to form a large part of those choices.

Well, I don't. Nonetheless, I am bitter and frustrated because it seems amazingly hard to find a cuddly book or intelligent movie these days anyway, and I am feeling particularly prickly about this subject right now. I am certain these things exist, in so much as I am certain people live in China though I have never been there. That is to say, I am certain that people have told me that other people live in China, something most of them, no doubt, learned second-hand themselves. Life, one concludes, is mostly hearsay. The lives of other people, therefore, are essentially nothing but meaningless gossip and would never hold up in court.

Then, an interesting synchronicity of events occured at the same time, which, when you think about it, is precisely the meaning synchronicity. To wit:

Super Daddyman advises me to look at Audible.com.

I see a live performance by Ira Glass, who mentions Audible.

I purchase a Palm T3, a device supported by Audible for audio playback.

The Ambiguous Heterosexual tells me the next George R. R. Martin book is just about to come out.

Let's take those events separately.

One: Super Daddyman has dyslexia and reads very slowly. For years, he's been listening to books by downloading them from Audible. For almost as long, he has been telling me how much he enjoys downloading books from Audible and listening to them. For almost as long as that, I have been ignoring him.

Two: Ira Glass is the host/producer of This American Life, a radio program I enjoy but have difficulty making time to listen to. It so happened that he was speaking in Dallas, that I learned he was speaking in Dallas, and that I managed to get two tickets to go see him speak in Dallas. During the engagement, he mentioned Audible as well, which reminded me of all those years of I'd been ignoring Super Daddyman.

Three: I once had a Palm V, which I took to Europe with me. It saved me from many headaches in London and Paris when dealing with the metro systems in those cities. It recorded all the fiddly bits of information that got me from point A to point B safely. After returning from Europe, I lost it. I found it a year later in the garage, at the bottom of a box of unused bicycling gear that had become home to a lovely chameleon. How the Palm had smuggled itself out of the house, into the garage, and to the bottom of this box I have left unplumbed and unquestioned as one of the great mysteries of the universe. Beneath the rotting brilliant yellow jerseys and filthy lycra socks, it had died, with only a lizard for company. Now, as another trip to Europe approached, I resolved to get a new Palm.

Four: The Ambiguous Heterosexual, after not communicating with me or anyone I know for almost a year, sends me a messenge that simply says "NEW MARTIN BOOK JUNE 16" before logging off and vanishing again into the internet ether. He is, of course, referring to A Feast of Crows, the fourth book in Martin's Song of Fire and Ice cycle.

Armed with a new Palm, two recommendations for Audible, and the impending release of the one book I knew I was looking forward to, I downloaded the first three books of the cycle from Audible and listened to them, boning up for the new book. The Song of Fire and Ice Cycle is writing of high-calibre, fantasy novels drenched in ambience and historical attention to detail and lovingly bereft of all the trite, Tolkien-ripped conventions that plague the genre today. I wore the earphones constantly, and counted down the days until the new book was released. I finished the books just in time, on June 14th, and bit my lip.

It is at this time that the narrator will reveal to the reader that the Ambiguous Heterosexual can not be trusted with the facts, though the narrator himself forgot this in the excitement of the moment. June 16th came and went, and no new book appeared. Visits to Martin's website confirmed that the book was not released, was not expected to be released soon, and that Mr. Martin, though he would not say so, was having one hell of a case of writer's cramp.

In sad desperation, I made a dire miscalculation. I selected another book to listen to from Audible's collection, a bulky tome that had high recommendations on Audible's site, and one that I had seen weighing heavily on the bookshelves at every bookstore in the country. I downloaded it thinking, "Well, it'll give me something to do while I wait for Mr. Martin to find a good chiropractor."

I downloaded Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time.

At first, I thought, "Well, it's just the first few chapters, it'll get better." It didn't. I persisted. It got worse. I gritted my teeth. Something couldn't be this bad, could it? It was.

Finally, I sought help. I asked Miss Em if she'd read any Jordan.

"Oh, sure." she said. "I think I've read all of them. They filled me with so much hope."

"Really? Hope?" I asked, stunned.

"Yeah. Hope that they would get better."

I asked the Brain if he'd read any Jordan. He only sputtered contemptuously and demanded, with all due care, that I delete the recordings from my archive.

"How far did you listen?" he asked.

"Till about chapter 25. Nothing had happened."

Miss Em, who was sitting at the table as well, said, "Nothing ever happens. They just go on and on..."

"Delete it." demanded the Brain again. "Save yourself the pain and just delete it."

"Well..." I said cautiously, "I was kind of hoping that a stray photon might strike one of the bits in the file, causing a cascading nuclear chain-reaction that would rearrange the audio data into something more interesting."

The Brain looked at me increduously, "And you expect this to happen?"

"No, not really, but you have to admit it is a possibility." I replied.

"But not a probability." he said, self-assured.

"No, but it would be really keen if it happened. So, I thought I would give it a chance."

In fact, I give the universe a lot of chances like this. The Brain knows this about me and accepts it. What other people define as procrastination or laziness, I define as faith in butterfly effects. A danaus plexippus takes off for a holiday in Mexico and my dishes get done, for example.

The Brain, however, stood firm. "But, you've stopped listening to it, right?"

"Oh yes, I've moved on to something else. Douglas Adams."

Which brings the narrator and the reader to the Trick of Flying. I learned it today while sitting at a table, gazing at a laptop-screen-full of numbers and digits that represent "work" to me, sipping a freshly brewed cup of slightly sweetened Earl Grey iced tea, my earphones on, my Palm T3 in my pocket, and a dead English author nattering on and on in my head about this improbability or that one.

"The trick of flying," Mr. Adams says, "is to throw yourself at the ground and miss."

Talk to the Lobster

2004-07-08T11:37:00.000-07:00

Erstwhile called me up and wanted sushi. A close friend of hers had returned from her Peace Corps duty in Africa and had a birthday coming up. Erstwhile wanted to take her out to someplace special and different. Sushi came to mind. She called me to ask if the Brain and I wouldn't mind taking them out to celebrate.

"Sure, of course." I said. "I know just the place."

"Great! By the way, she's vegan."

"Vegan? Are you sure?"

"Oh, absolutely. One-hundred percent vegan."

"Perhaps," I suggested, "sushi wouldn't be the best idea, if she's vegan. I could cook something..."

"Oh, no!" replied Erstwhile in all earnestness. "She wants to try sushi."

"You do realize," I said carefully, "that according to my understanding of veganism, the practice does not involve the consumption of usually raw slices of fish whereas, on the other hand, the consumption of sushi does, in fact, normally involve said slices of raw fish?"

"Oh, yes, absolutely!" replied Erstwhile cheerfully. "She wants to try it."

We met at Chaya Sushi at 7 P.M. Yama-san, the owner, had recently returned from a trip to Japan where he had gained another rank in sushi-do. Yama-san was a cheerful Japanese man who ruled over his tiny sushi bar like an emperor and would greet you with a boisterous ohayo gozaimasu when you entered his miniscule restaurant. He knew the Brain and I on sight, and bowed deeply when we came in with friends.

Erstwhile's friend, Angie, was a vegan, but she had learned in the Peace Corps in Africa that veganism is an affectatious conceit of a ludicrously fat and wealthy society, where a person can actually not only decide what he will eat each day, but can pay a person to prepare it for him. Such civilized conceits are as pratical in poverty-riddled countries, such as exist in many parts of Africa, as a Rolls-Royce would be on the goat-choked dirt tracks they use for roads there. Angie had spent two years in the poorest of parts of Africa, building wells for villages and digging irrigation ditches. The Africans could feed her goat meat, goat milk, and mullet. Angie quickly realized she could no longer hold to her conceited veganism and expect to survive. As far as sushi goes, she said, once you've seen a live goat killed at the table, cooked, and served to you, watching a man carve little squares of fish off a bigger square of fish so you can eat it is no big deal.

We ordered carefully. I'd tread this path before, initiating a curious neophyte into sushi and sashimi. Once the person grasps that raw fish does, in fact, taste just like cooked fish only "fresher" and that not all sushi involves exotic, raw, scary sea creatures but has many safe havens like vegetables and fried shrimp to harbor in before taking another sally at eels or urchins, he or she relaxes into the experience. Angie was no different, and we carefully threaded our way from "easy" sushi like California rolls to slightly harder morsels like toro sashimi. Angie took everything in stride, tasting and enjoying all the food Yama-san slid before us.

We were sitting at the bar before the glass case that displayed Yama-san's edibles. Prominently perched atop a pile of ice in the center of the bar was a live lobster.

"Yama-san," I inquired, "are you serving lobster tonight?"

Yama-san got a huge grin on his face. "Oh, yes!" he replied, bobbing his head, "Tonight we have, ah, lobster sashimi!"

"Lobster sashimi?" I asked, intriqued, having never heard of lobster sashimi before. "Is it good?"

"Oh, yes! Lobster sashimi! Very suh-weet-uh, very suh-weet-uh!"

I glanced at the Brain, who's eyes were already glittering. "Very well," I said, "could we please have one?"

"Oh, yes!" said Yama-san with a deep bow. He ducked under the noren into the kitchen. A few minutes later, he returned with a huge lobster, twice the size of the one sitting on the pile of ice in the case before us. The lobster was dripping wet and struggling vigorously, snapping its claws at him, at us, and at the whole world in general. He held the lobster up to us for inspection, and we nodded approvingly and exchanged glances.

"Lobster sashimi!" shouted Yama-san proudly as he slammed the lobster done on the cutting board. His display had attracted the attention of the other diners in the restaurant, who all turned as one to watch the chef go about his butchery.

With a single deft, crunching stroke of his knife, he sliced off the whole tail from the lobster. He pushed the squirming lobster body to the side and began to struggle with the tail, flipping it over as it twitched and curled beneath his knife. In two quick cuts, he had removed the meat from the shell, splaying it flat between the thumb and fore-finger of his left hand while his right hand used the knife to dice the still quivering flesh into cubes. Once the tail was cubed, he scooped the meat up with his knife and slid it into the tail-shell. By now, the lobster itself had crawled about a foot away, no doubt wondering where the hell its tail had gotten off to. He picked it up, tsk-ing, and proceeded to stuff a handful of shredded daikon radish into the hole in the back of its body where the tail had been attached. He remarried the tail-cum-bowl of lobster meat and the still furiously squirming and snapping body together on a large glass platter. Then with a huge smile, he gracefully lifted the platter over the bar and set it down in front of us.

"Lobster sashimi! Very suh-weet-uh!" he said again enthusiastically.

The entire restaurant was absolutely, deathly quiet. Everyone was watching us. The patrons were watching us. The staff was watching us. Yama-san was watching us. The lobsters were watching us, one of them clack-clack-clicking his claws at us. He looked like the spunky little guy in old movies who, despite being beat to a pulp by the bully, throws up his fists shouting "Put up yer dukes! Come on! Put 'em up!"

"Domo!" I sputtered. I looked at the Brain, who was looking at me. Angie and Erstwhile were pale as sheets. The lobster was beginning to crawl off the platter toward Erstwhile. The other lobster, sitting on the pile of ice, turned its body to get a better look. Yama-san stood there, smiling, waiting.

I picked up my chopsticks and lifted a piece of the pale white-pink flesh to my mouth and chewed.

It was the best meat I have ever tasted. My eyes widened in surprise. The Brain, seeing my expression, seized up his chopsticks and took a bite. His eyes closed as he chewed orgasmically. Erstwhile and Angie exchanged glances, then took up their chopsticks and dug in. With my left hand, I held the lobster down on the plate while it and its companion in the case watched us. The Brain pointed out that the lobster on the plate was giving him reproachful glances from its eyestalks.

Let me explain the taste of nearly-still-quivering raw lobster meat. It is sweet. Very sweet. It is toothsome. It tastes like clean, fresh water. It tastes electric. The flavor drives through your tongue directly to your medula oblongata, where it bounces off some long-dormant reptilian pleasure center. It conjures up images of chasing down your prey and biting into it. It is suh-weet-uh.

Yama-san smiled happily to himself at our obvious enjoyment. He returned to making other orders of sushi while we finished the lobster.

"All done?" he inquired. The lobster tail was empty and I was still struggling with my left hand to hold the lobster's squirming, snapping body on the platter. Yama-san lifted the platter away, and we relaxed a bit. The trial by fire was over, we thought.

We thought.

Yama-san took the lobster's body and hacked it, length-wise, into two. A lady sitting at a table behind us stifled a shriek. Casually, he flung the now wildly squirming lobster halves onto the hibachi grill, where they independently tried to crawl away. Yama-san calmly returned to preparing other sushi while the lobster halves crawled and crawled and, finally, stopped crawling. After another minute, he lifted the halves away, cracked the claws, re-arranged them on clean platter, and presented the remainders of the lobster to us.

"Look!" he said cheerfully, "It's a girl. Lots of roe! Very good!" He was pointing a long noodle of brilliant red eggs in the cooked body halves. The Brain ate the roe (I am not fond of fish eggs with the exception of Caspian beluga), while the rest of us picked meat out of the claws and legs. Eventually, the lobster was completely reduced to a charred, broken husk.

We'd done it. We'd overcome lobster sashimi. With a vegan. Only Everest remained.

Angie patted her lips with her napkin, setting it on the bar before her. "That was really good." she said brightly.

As we got up to leave, I leaned over to the sushi case and in a low whisper spoke to the luckier, smaller lobster still perched atop his pile of ice, "Gomen-nasai. Odaijini, lobster-san."

Chuck and Marriage

2004-07-07T12:03:00.000-07:00

"Tonight is our anniversary." Chuck announced to me over the urinal wall.

"Oh...really? Are...you...going...to go...eat somewhere?" I said haltingly while fumbling to unzip myself before my T-Positive bladder exploded.

"Well, we planned on going to Abacus, but the baby's sick and it's too late to get a babysitter."

"You know," words coming unbidden to my lips, "you could bring the baby over to my house. I'd watch her."

Chuck looked at me in stark, utter, amazement, the kind of amazement your dog might display if you filled its food bowl, then got down on your hands and knees and began to eat the dogfood yourself.

"No, really!" I continued cheerfully. "I mean, sure I know nothing about changing diapers, but I could watch her. What could go wrong? You and D. go on to Abacus and just bring the baby over."

Chuck still stared at me. "She's sick."

"OK, I know I might have to change a diaper, but they come with instructions, don't they? I mean, really, if any idiot can have a baby, how hard can it be?"

Finally, he said, "I'll have to ask D. She's the social director."

"Suit yourself." Zip.

...

Super Daddyman caught wind Blubrik's Plan to Babysit Chuck's Sick Baby by the time I was 20 feet out of the restroom. By caught wind, I mean that when I left the restroom, he was standing there and I told him the whole thing.

"Woo hee woo!" he snorted, "You changing a diaper? Pull the other one!"

"Oh come on, how hard can it be? If any idiot can have..."

About this time, Hoss the Boss came over, Super Daddyman waving him down in frantically.

"Blu's going to babysit Chuck's baby tonight so Chuck and D. can go to Abacus. He's going to change a diaper." He said "going to change a diaper" like you might say "he's going to have the most horrible experience of his adult life."

Hoss smiled. "Well," he rumbled in his basso profundo, "you're lucky it's a girl, then. Girls are easier. You just have to remember, front to back."

Super Daddyman nodded furiously in agreement and intoned reverantly, "Yeah, front to back."

"Front to back, got it." I chimed it.

"Of course, boys are a different problem altogether." said Hoss. "With them, you gotta watch out."

"For?"

"Projectile Pissing." answered Super Daddyman. I nodded, soaking it all in.

"Yes." continued Hoss. "Once, early one morning while it was still dark, I was changing Sam. I'd removed his diaper and I was reaching for a potty wipe. The potty wipe was all wet, all warm. I wondered about that. Then, I realized, my hand was all wet and warm, too." He paused for effect. "Sam was peeing over and out of the crib, arcing a stream of pee right onto my hand and the potty wipes!" Hoss and Super Daddyman began hooting in laughter.

"Well," I interrupted, "Chuck's not going to do it anyway. I just offered."

...

The next morning, I called Chuck to arrange our regular lunch meeting.

"Happy Anniversary!" I chirped.

"That was yesterday, but thank you anyway." he said dryly.

"Did you go to Abacus after all?" I asked.

"No," he said, "but we did go out."

"How was the pizza?" I inquired, knowing exactly where they'd gone. But I was wrong, but not by much.

"Burgers. Fine. Thank you for asking. Oh, the joys of marriage."

Marriage, Chuck later says, is something quite horrible, but filled with so many things you wouldn't get otherwise, it balances out to be something just the good side of worthwhile.

I laughed sympathetically and thought, "You poor, poor bastard."

T-Positive, the effect on your body from drinking several glasses of iced tea at lunch.

Dinner with the Lord Bastard

2004-07-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

"Are you coming to the lake with us on Sunday?", I asked. I had rented a ski boat on Lake Texoma for Sunday the Fourth of July. A ski boat without skiers is not very useful and I was attempting to fill it up.

"Yeah, sure." grumbled the Lord Bastard. "What time?"

"We'll have to leave around 8 A.M."

A long pause, then. "I'll have to ask Lady Bastard."

"OK, then. Let me know." I close the window and get back to work. Rive and Data, who had originally planned to go with us had backed out. Data had learned she had been assigned the pager over the Fourth of July weekend and feared being out on a lake, unable to answer a page. These pages would come from our customers, emergency cases.

"But, Data, really." I tried to reason with her, "No one is going to page you on the Fourth. It's the Fourth. Sure, they might page you on the Third and the Fifth, but not the Fourth."

She would not accept this, and refused to take the chance that some disgruntled Briton might just page her on the Fourth out of spite.

Miss Em, in possession of a new kitten, Chloe, also no longer wanted to go, afraid to leave the kitten alone for so long.

"But, Em, really." I tried to reason with her, "Chloe will be just fine for eight hours alone. I have three feral kittens living under my deck and they do just fine days on end without any human intervention."

She would not accept this, and refused to take the chance that despite a few billion years of evolution to help it along, Chloe could not survive eight hours alone in an air-conditioned apartment with ample food, water, toys, and litter.

The Brain had then suggested inviting the Lord and Lady Bastard, which sounded dandy to me.

Now, before I go further, let me explain that the Lady Bastard is a fine, sweet, genteel Texas lady. It is only through marriage that she will earn the title Lady Bastard from her husband, the Right Royal Lord Bastard. The Lord Bastard, on the other hand, has duly earned his title through years of hard effort and single-minded relentlessness in the pursuit of bastardy.

As the Fourth of July drew closer, I had still heard no word from the Lord Bastard or the Lady. It is sometimes the case that the Lord Bastard will order the Lady Bastard to call me so that he can yell his answers to me through her over the telephone. This usually happens when he doesn't want to do something I want to do, but doesn't want to offend me by telling me directly. So, I will get a call from the Lady Bastard, which goes something like this:

Phone rings.

Me: Hello, Lord Bastard (caller-id, of course).

The Lady Bastard: No, it's me, the Lady Bastard.

Me: Oh, hello my lady. How are you and the Lord today?

Lady: Oh, just fine. Thank you for asking. Um, the Lord Bastard wants me to tell you something...

Me: Oh? Alright.

Lady: (yelling away from phone) Bastard! What did you want me to tell Blubrik?

The Lord Bastard: (muffled voice from other room) Is that Blu on the phone?

Lady: (still yelling away from phone) Yes! What did you want me to tell him?

Lord: (still muffled) Tell him I don't want to get up at 8 A.M.!

Lady: (to me now) The Lord Bastard doesn't want to get up at 8 A.M.

Me: Alright, I guess that means you aren't going skiing with us?

Lady: (yelling) Does that mean we aren't going skiing with them?

Lord: (muffled) Unless they want to wait till noon to go.

Lady: (to me) Unless you want to wait till noon to go.

Me: Nope, sorry, can't. Boat is already rented for all-day.

And so on...

So it was that a few days before the Fourth, I had a ski boat rented and no skiers to fill it. About this time, El Cigarro announces to me that he has self-diagnosed himself with severe depression. El Cigarro was a medical student once, so I accepted his statement as completely reasonable.

"Well," I said, "perhaps some sunshine and open water will do you some good? I have a ski-boat rented on Texoma on the Fourth. Rive, Data, and Miss Em cancelled. The Lord and Lady Bastard don't want to get up at 8 A.M. Would you like to come?"

"I have a family." he replies. Despite the fact that the discussion occured over Messenger, I could hear the dreary tones in his voice.

"I counted to four when I said 'you'." I replied. "Everyone is invited."

He thought about it for a second, then said "I'll have to ask the wife. She's the social director."

Of course, I know that he's just said "no". It is well-known among single men that when their married men friends say "The wife's the social director" this translates roughly to "I'll ask, but my wife hates whatever you've suggested, so you might as well never ask me about this subject ever again."

The Brain and I made the most of the boat, nevertheless. We didn't ski, but tooled around the lake, anchored, ate, napped, swam, read, and returned to the dock safely.

As I lay on the couch that evening, showered, cool, and ever-so-slightly sun-burned, the phone rings. It is the Lord Bastard. He's angry.

"Where are you?" he demands.

"Well, at home, watching Six Feet Under. It's the first three episodes of the new season back-to-back."

"Did you go to the lake today?" he asks, icily.

"Well..." I reply slowly. Something is up. "Yes, yes I did."

"Why aren't you here, then?"

It is now that I remember that in the last conversation with the Lord Bastard about skiing wherein he stated that 8 A.M. was much too early to consider waking, that I offered that perhaps after the Brain and I went to lake we could come over for dinner. The Lord Bastard had replied, "I'll have to ask the Lady Bastard. She's the social director." and I had interpreted this normally.

What I didn't remember was that it was the Lord Bastard speaking. In this case, "she's the social director" translates to "I'll ask Lady Bastard, but she'll do whatever I want, so come over whenever the fuck you want."

"I'll be there in 30 minutes." I snapped.

"You're sure?" the Lord Bastard replies, trying to sound caring.

"Of course. Sorry for the misunderstanding."

"Alright." Click.

We arrived at their house exactly thirty minutes later. I gave the Lady Bastard a hug and explained that I was sorry, that it wasn't precisely clear that the Lord Bastard was expecting us. She was all grace and smiles, despite the fact that her dinner efforts were now long cold. The Lord Bastard was all smiles, as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had occured. He was in the backyard, flipping june bugs into his massive, $5000 stainless-steel grill. The june bugs would shrivel up a bit, then he'd press them through the grill with the edge of his spatula. I looked on in horror.

I am not especially religious, but somewhere inside me I think I have a sense that life shouldn't just be wantonly snuffed out. I began trying to shepherd june bugs away from the grill, which was hard because the Lord Bastard had fixed two 100-watt lights above it, which attracted the bugs mercilessly. After a while, I gave up and tried not to pay attention to the insect holocaust.

Then, a june bug landed on my shirt. "This one," I said pointing at the bug on my shoulder, "I've named him Jerome." hoping that perhaps a name would humanize the june bug enough to protect him from the Lord Bastard's spatula and flames.

Jerome sat on my shoulder for a long time, then finally, with a mighty june bug heave-ho, leapt into the air and stumbled into the Lord Bastard's leg. The Lord Bastard gave a grunt of disgust, and flicked at Jerome with his spatula, knocking the bug to the ground. Then he stepped on him.

I pursed my lips. "You didn't need to step on him."

The Lord Bastard eyes were alight with rage now. "He touched me." is all he said.

As I watched hopelessly, another june bug landed on the open grill and began to cook. I felt a deep, terrible pang of sadness as I watched it quiver, shrivel, and blacken.

It's just a bug, after all.

Cleaning for the Maids

2004-07-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

It is an odd fact of life that although I can afford to pay two hispanic women to enter my house each Wednesday afternoon in order to clean it, I must still clean my house before they arrive. I call this cleaning for the maids, and it causes Big Marv no end of pleasure each time I mention it to him.

"You clean for the maids?" he'll ask.

"Well, of course." I say, "I wouldn't want them to pick up anything really filthy."

Big Marv will always follow up with the question, "How much do you pay them?"

The maid service I employ is not, by far, the least expensive in Dallas, a fact I never admit to Big Marv. From empirical data (that is, Chuck) I know that I spend much too much on these two cleaning women. Chuck'll set me up with just one for about a quarter of the price. "And you won't have to clean for her before she comes." he'll add as an inducement.

"They came highly recommended by my real estate agent." I'll reply.

Big Marv, who grew up on a farm, finds my position hilariously untenable.

"Look," I'll say, "when I hired the maids, the 'Maid Manager', or whatever you call her, came over and told me all the things the maids would and wouldn't do. So, I have to do those things they won't do before they show up, or they won't get done. Besides, they've proven themselves reliable. Apart from flooding the upstairs bathroom, breaking the gas stove so that it flamed dangerously all day, and shutting Coda Dog's dog-door repeatedly despite my instructions, they've never done me wrong." After all, I'll think to myself, it's not their fault that the extra shower faucet on the upstairs tub leaks invisibly, it's not their fault that the stove decided to break and flame-out, and perhaps my "instructions", which consisted of putting a small cardboard box of unread mail against the dog-door to hold it open, did not translate to "Leave this dog-door open" in Spanish.

Big Marv will look at me, laughing and shaking his head.

I'll continue. "You don't understand. I need structure like that in my life, otherwise I'll just give over to entropy. I need the fear that two hispanic women who I hardly know will, if I do nothing, see my underwear, my 'personal' reading, and my dirty dishes. If I didn't fear that, I'd never pick anything up and my house would, in most likelihood, be condemned."

Big Marv will think about this for a moment and realize the truth of the matter before he wickedly slides another 10 pounds onto the bar and tells me to hold my head up and hold my stomach in.

This Isn't Shrimp Remoulade

2004-07-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

My mother has a skill for stating the inobvious. Meaning, she has a knack for saying something that contradicts what the rest of us know to be perfectly obvious. I have, at times, wondered how she developed this ability. Did she practice? Was she born with it? If it was genetic, is it a recessive or dominant trait? If I had a child, would I have to genetically test the mother beforehand to make sure that we didn't pass the gene on to the baby?

When I was very young, I promised my mother that, should she manage to turn 65, I would take her to Europe as a reward. I only vaguely remembered this until, as my mother approached 65, she reminded me. I seized upon the opportunity. My other brothers, both older, had maintained during my childhood that I was adopted (being the only blonde in a family of brunettes) and that, unlike them, I wouldn't amount to much. Well, by sixteen my brilliant golden hair had turned dark chestnut (which is the reason I abandoned my faith in God) and by the time my mother brought up the subject of the promised trip to Europe, I was flush with cash from a recent stock option buy-out during the Internet Bubble. My brothers, crippled by disappointing jobs, could not compete. It was my chance to point out that not only was I the only one of my siblings to never have been arrested, but that I was also the only one fully capable of sweeping her off to Europe, all-expenses paid.

During the '90s, my mother suffered a series of personal ups and downs, mostly downs, and mostly forced upon her. In the early part of the decade, she met and married a fine new husband, a sweet Texas Good Ol' Boy named Ralph. Ralph was an author (he had written, among other things, 101 Things to Do With a Texas Cowpatty), minister, and thrice made-and-lost millionaire, a jovial, imperfect man whom my mother adored. She married him at a JP in Podunk, Texas, we're I got to meet my new step-brothers and sisters for the first time. It was the wildest thing my mother had ever done in her life, or so I thought. I was proud of her.

After their marriage, they settled in Dallas. The Brain and I saw them often, and one dinner stands out in particular. She ordered shrimp remoulade, a sort of cajun shrimp cocktail, and when presented with a beautiful example of said appetizer exclaimed, "This isn't shrimp remoulade!"

The waiter, taken somewhat aback, replied, "I assure you, ma'am, it is."

My mother was not deterred. "This isn't shrimp remoulade. I was here not 4 days ago and I ordered shrimp remoulade and this is not what I ordered."

The waiter stood his ground. "Ma'am, I don't know what you ordered 4 days ago, but if you ordered shrimp remoulade, then I assure you, this is what you got."

At this point, I decided I would try to rescue the situation. "Mother," I said, "perhaps you ordered the fried shrimp appetizer before."

She glared at me. I held my hands up in polite surrender.

The waiter persisted. "Ma'am, if you want, I'll take this back to the kitchen and get you whatever you want." At this, my mother turned somewhat petulant and waved the man away.

"No," she said, "I'll eat this...this whatever it is." As the waiter turned to leave she muttered "This isn't shrimp remoulade."

The Brain and I exchanged glances, each of us wondering if perhaps my mother had gone mad. My mother picked at the "isn't shrimp remoulade", claiming to having lost her appetite entirely from the stress of the ordeal. She refused to order an entree and sat glowering at me, the Brain, and Ralph while we consumed our blackended snappers and whole fried catfish.

The moment to order dessert arrived, and the waiter asked me what I wanted. I replied I would be satisfied with a creme brulee (at the time, creme brulee was the hot dessert in Dallas). My mother, who had starved herself from pique during dinner, chirped up, "Oh, yes! I would like a creme brulee, too!" The waiter nodded, taking an order of espresso from the Brain and cake from Ralph.

When the waiter returned and set the creme brulee -- a perfect creme brulee -- down in front of my mother, she glared at it, at me, at it again, and then the waiter. The waiter, having decided that my mother was certainly someone best avoided and ignored, blythely left the table. She tapped at the burnt sugar crust on her dessert.

Then she muttered, "This isn't creme brulee."

Astonished, I said, "Mother, please describe creme brulee to me."

She pursed her lips in thought for a moment while Ralph dug into his cake and the Brain watched, his face impassive but his mind infinitely amused. "Well," she began, "it's like espresso, but with milk in it." I tried to explain to her that, contrary to her description, creme brulee was not a coffee drink with milk in it, but was in fact a custard topped with burnt sugar, but she refused the explanation. Gallantly, the Brain traded his espresso for her creme brulee, and my mother left the restaurant satisfied, but starving.

Within a few weeks, Ralph suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side and unable to say anything except for "shit!" and "goddamn!" and "Jesus Christ!". He obviously had complete comprehension, but had, quite simply, lost the ability to say anything except for the Seven Dirty Words and their assorted kin. The Brain, who had studied linguistics, was happy to inform anyone exposed to Ralph that these words were not only treated unfairly by the world at large, but apparently lived in some word ghetto in a different part of the brain from the rest of the words. Like cockroaches after the nuclear holocaust, they had survived the stroke which destroyed the parts of the brain where the other, happy words lived, leaving Ralph with only "shit-goddamn!-Jesus Christ!" and the other handful of curses for vocabulary.

My mother tried valiantly to care for Ralph, but at the same time, my Great Aunt Margaret was diagnosed with a neural disease that was simply eating her brain out from the inside. About the same time, it became apparent that her father and mother had managed to grow old and infirm as well. In one fell swoop, she moved the entire flock of them to Austin, settling herself, Ralph and my grandparents in a retirement village and placing my aunt in a nursing home nearby.

Ralph survived about two years after the stroke. In the end, I decided that he had been driven mad by the inability to articulate anything. To him, something as simple as "I'm hungry!" came out "Argh, Piss-shit! Argh!" For a man who had lived by words as an author, minister, and business man, I could only imagine it was absolutely and utterly devastating to his sense of self. Ralph descended into curse-laden dementia and passed away.

Soon thereafter, my aunt also died, and within a year or two, my grandfather passed away as well from diabetes. My mother was beaten until she remembered that promise I'd made her so long ago.

"Of course I remember!" I said, "I'll make the arrangements right away." The dates were picked and the Brain and I managed to get four weeks off from work to take my mother and a friend of her choosing to Europe. She selected Madge, her high-school best friend. We sent them guidebooks and tips for traveling in Europe, made all the arrangements, and booked first class tickets on Virgin Airlines.

If you ever have a chance to fly first class (ahem, upper class) on Virgin Airlines to Europe, by all means do so. Suffice it to say that compared to Virgin Airlines Upper Class, riding coach is like going to Europe in a haywagon, in a locked trunk, with no air.

Our first leg on the journey was a lay-over in Boston, where we had some friends with whom we were going to visit for a day before leaving for London. They had just had my god-daughter, and my mother had been proclaimed an official grandmother as well.

We were waiting for our bags in the Manchester airport when I realized something was amiss. The Brain and I had packed extremely light, each of us taking a backpack with as little as necessity demanded for the trip. We had discussed this extensively with my mother and Madge beforehand, and, well, thought they got the picture. It became obvious that they did not when their bags appeared, late, in baggage claim encased in bright orange "HEAVY" stickers.

"What part of 'packing light' did you not understand, mother?'", I asked.

"We're ladies, and ladies require more things than young gentlemen." she replied.

We learned later that ladies apparently require two changes of clothing a day. Considering that we were going to be in Europe for 4 weeks, Madge had managed to pack 56 distinct outfits into her single, gigantic bag. My mother, who never possessed 56 distinct outfits in her life, had somehow still managed to stuff her bags full of 60 pounds of shoes, drugs, and make-up.

"Just who do you expect to carry those bags for you in Europe?" I asked. They did not know, presuming, I supposed, that Europeans were just naturally nice chaps who would volunteer to haul their luggage around for them.

It was about this time that the Brain pulled me aside and said, "You know what's happened here, don't you? You've just become the parent." I had to agree, and running with the idea, I put my foot down. We oversaw the purchase of new, lightweight, portable bags and the judiscious packing of them while we were still in Boston. We explained that it was not necessary to take 4 tubes of toothpaste to Europe; that, amazingly, the Europeans knew how to brush their teeth and would be happy to sell us toothpaste should we run out. The same went for the jumbo jars of aspirin, the quart bottles of Pepto Bismal, and the first aid kits. The remaining 50-odd pounds of clothes, drugs, and toiletries we shipped back to Texas. Even still, my mother clung to an unnecessary amount of shoes, make-up and pills, which she would end up shipping back to the US or throwing away once the reality of Europe finally smacked her squarely in the head.

Had I been keeping the head-smacking score, the final tally would have come to Mother 1, Europe 6.

The Guitar

2004-07-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

Three years ago, in the round-ripeness of my oncoming middle-age, William Shatner paid me a visit.

He was dressed rather plainly, in that smooth black suit and white shirt you see often see him wearing in television appearances. His face was red, but surprisingly youthful. I'd never met him before, never considered meeting him before, and I was surprised to see him. I'd grown up on Star Trek reruns, had dim memories of watching it on Sunday evenings as a baby with my brothers, so I was quite certain it was William Shatner when I saw him.

It was New Year's Eve.

He clucked his tongue at me, shaking his head from side to side.

"This year," he said, "learn the guitar."

"OK." I said. And then he left.

I called the Big Cheese the next day, who in addition to his manifold talents, also plays guitar. I figured he'd know what to do.

"William Shatner told me to learn the guitar this year."

B.C. laughed. "Really? Was it Captain Kirk or William Shatner?"

I grimaced. "It was William Shatner, not Captain Kirk." I said. I could hear B.C. trying not to smile.

"Alright then. What kind of guitar did he say learn?"

I was nonplussed. Was he trying to trick me? "I don't know." I said, "A guitar. With strings. The normal kind. He wasn't very specific."

"Well, there's steel string and classical, bass guitar, slide. What did he say about the kind of music?"

"Nothing." I replied, then brightly I said, "But I don't think he intended for me to strum."

"You'll need lessons." B.C. intoned authoritatively. "I won't teach you."

"OK."

"Well," he said thoughtfully, "when you want to, come over and I'll let you play with some of my guitars to see what you like." I said I would and we said our good-byes. It was January first. I had plenty of time.

Months went by and every now and then I would think to myself, "I need to call the Big Cheese about the guitar..." but, of course, I wouldn't.

In October, the Big Cheese's mother died of cancer. I think it was somewhat sudden, and me and the Brain went to the funeral. Another of B.C.'s students, who also happened to be a minister, presided over the service. We buried her in a small cemetary, under some trees if I recall correctly. It was a nice place.

Later that evening, William Shatner returned. This time, he wore a Star Trek uniform, one of the red ones from the movies with the flap open at the shoulder. He was standing on B.C.'s mother's grave.

"You know," he said, "you really don't have that much time."

...

"He said that?" laughed the Big Cheese when I called him the next day. It was good to hear him laugh, despite the morbid proximity to his own mother's death.

"Yeah," I said, "and he was Captain Kirk, not William Shatner, this time." It had dawned on me earlier that I had never quite understood how important Captain Kirk was to me. How, somehow during all those reruns, Captain Kirk was the only real adult male I paid any attention to. For years, I had always told myself that I was a Mr. Spock Guy, that Captain Kirk was a blow-hard, a bully, and a criminal. Now, I realized that I was a Captain Kirk Guy, that I liked the stilted, halting, bombastic delivery. Captain Kirk was the face I put on my subconscious. Funny that.

We made plans to go look at guitars in the various shops around town the next day. The Big Cheese brought his wife. We'd go in a store, he'd hand me a guitar, I'd pluck at it. Sometimes, he'd play something. Finally, he picks up a La Patrie and plays something "spanish-sounding" by Los Lobos. His wife sang the words.

"That's it!" I blurted out. "That's what I want to play!"

He put down the guitar, a little surprised perhaps, and said, "Well, if that's the case, we need to find you a really good teacher."

...

A few days later, the Big Cheese calls me on my cellphone. "Do you have some time tomorrow afternoon?" he asked.

"Sure, why?"

"There's somebody I want you to meet." He goes on to explain that in a previous career as a recording engineer, he'd recorded an album for Carlo. They'd kept in touch over the years, and he'd made a phone call.

"I asked Carlo if he had any students that would take an adult beginner." he said.

"And what did he say?" I asked.

"He said, 'What makes you think I wouldn't take an adult beginner?'"

So, the next day, we went to meet Carlo at his home. While he and Carlo caught up, I sat quietly. They chatted, I tried not to look nervous. The Big Cheese told me to tell Carlo why I wanted to play guitar. I told him about William Shatner and the grave, which Carlo took very well, smiling and nodding in agreement. He had two new guitars with him at that time, a gorgeous Spanish Rozas guitar he had just returned from Madrid with, and another one, with a less distinguished pedigree. He had brought them back from Europe (as he always does) to help his students. He played both for me. After about an hour, the question finally came.

"Do you want to learn guitar?" Carlo asked.

"Yes. And I'll take the Rozas."

The Big Cheese laughed, "I knew the moment you heard the Rozas you'd want it."

I wrote Carlo a check for the guitar, and he gave me a short list of practice books to obtain.

Now, years later, I have this thing, this new wooden organ of cedar and ebony that I hug to my body. It is a beautiful thing, and the most frustrating thing in my life.

Still...

I can play, and I don't strum.

Coda Dog Speaks

2004-07-06T14:49:00.000-07:00

Coda Dog has a flea. Just one, not more than one, not less than one. One tiny flea. Coda Dog, if you must know, despises this one flea. Despite my best efforts to find, remove, poison, or otherwise eliminate this flea, it persists. I can see the flea occasionally, a tiny brown fleck on her thin brown coat. I'll pick at it, it will leap off my finger to her back again and vanish beneath an eigth of an inch of fawn fur.

Coda Dog turns her head and says to me, "Goddamn it," in her squeaky voice (think of a red-headed, freckled kindergartener saying "tangerine!" -- ok, now, stop thinking of that, it's awful)..."Goddamn it!" See, Coda Dog can cuss. She has an impressive array of foul words. She employs them to great effect via her ears, brows, and snarls.

I figure if dogs can understand language, then I can understand dogs. The Brain, of course, tends to disagree. He claims it is simply the cunning of forced evolution. We, he states, have bred dogs for thousands of years. We, he declaims solemnly, have simply selected and bred for dogs that do the best job of convincing us that they understand what we are saying.

In other words, it's a trick of genetics, an illusion.

Goddamn it.

Surfeit of Eels?

2004-07-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

Something to die from...an obscure reference beyond all obscure references, to be sure.

A surfeit is defined by www.dictionary.com as an overindulgence of food or drink.

In an imaginary place, from another mind more intricate than mine, a man died of a surfeit of eels. This always struck me as a completely absurd way to die, yet somehow it was poetic and beautiful. The image seems apropos for our world today, and in particular, our information world of today...

We are in danger of choking ourselves on a surfeit of information.

The fact you are reading this text right now is proof that if you are not yet dead, the universe, in an effort to restore a more sane balance to the cosmos, will eliminate you eventually.

Personnes Dramatiques

2004-07-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

Any good play needs a cast of characters, and life, like a play, is no different. Thus, so you know who I am talking about, I present my cast of characters...

Blubrik, myself, the writer
The Brain, the thinker
The Lord Bastard, the complainer
The Lady Bastard, his fiance
The Big Cheese, the teacher
Chuck, the eater
El Cigarro, the foil
Big Marv, the trainer
Miss Em, the cat-lover
Rive and Data, the workaholics
Super Daddyman, a new father
Hoss the Boss, the boss
Coda Dog, the dog
Obie Cat, the cat
Mother, the mother