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September 11, 2008

Not too long ago I heard that some schools are trying to save money by not buying cafeteria trays. How exactly is this supposed to save money? I’m not sure because I thought all cafeteria trays in 1953, the same year they purchased most of their food. And which trays are they getting rid of? What if schools start getting rid of the trays that had the compartments? Remember those? You’d have your magical mystery meat in one compartment, a scoop of irradiated vegetables, a square of red jell-o with salad dressing poured on it to give it some flavor, and some kind of fruit from a can. There was one year I’m pretty sure my school got a special deal on prunes because we got prunes every day. Sometimes the prunes were compressed into squares and covered with gravy and served as meatloaf. That was a bad year because there’s nothing worse than having to go to P.E. and do laps around the track an hour after you’ve had prunes.

But I digress. I can sort of understand getting rid of the flat trays that are just for carrying plates. We all at some point experienced the humiliation of someone tripping us and sending a plate full of reconstituted library paste mixed with lard, feed corn, and magical mystery meat flying across the room. What exactly was that stuff, anyway? I once asked a cafeteria lady and after she stopped scratching her goiter and took the cigarette out of her mouth she just grunted, "the other brown meat". We all had our suspicions about where the cafeteria food came from. There were signs up in the bathroom that said, "Flush twice, it’s a long way to the kitchen", and while they didn’t look like they were official that doesn’t mean they weren’t put there by the school. And then there was the time Mr. Tibbles, our class guinea pig, ran away. At least the teacher told us he ran away, but where does a two-pound guinea pig run away too? Back to Guinea? Even if he could have gotten there it still doesn’t explain why we found cedar shavings in the spaghetti later that week.

But I digress. Maybe it really was beef in the school food, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Grade A. How could we all be expected to make high grades when the food we were getting rated, at best, a C-? But I digress. At least school food was better than camp food, although camp food had the advantage that we only had to eat it for a week. When you’re out roughing it in the wilderness it does make sense that you would have to hunt down and kill your own meals, but not when the meal is bacon and eggs that have been sitting so long they’ve formed an entirely new organism. And then there was the chipped beef on toast, which we always had on Wednesdays. For a while it wasn’t so bad. At least we didn’t have to chase it down and stab it with a fork. Then someone mentioned that the hospital just down the road always performed circumcisions on Tuesdays. Still, it could have been worse. It could have been chipped prunes on toast.

September 4, 2008

For some reason having a Monday holiday just throws the rest of my week out of whack. I know everyone hates Mondays, but taking Monday off is really just adding on to the wrong end of the weekend. Friday and Saturday are when everybody cuts loose, and Sunday’s the recovery day. When Monday’s a holiday it just adds one more day of recovery time, one more day when you sit around the house thinking, "I’d sure like to do something…" in between naps. The ideal day for a holiday is Friday. How much work really gets done on Fridays anyway? There’s a reason Fridays are casual days: they’re the day the boss usually doesn’t even bother to come in, and the lackeys who do show up spend most of the day sitting in their cubicles thinking, "I should probably do something…" in between naps. Fridays are the days when most people leave work to go to lunch and then don’t bother to come back. They’re really the perfect day for a holiday because you can sleep late and get that early jump on the weekend you could have gotten last week if the boss hadn’t chosen that particular day to actually come in for a change and actually stick around for most of the day, hanging around your cubicle in his Bermuda shorts and waiting for you to finish that earnings report. Now that I think about it, though, maybe it wouldn’t be such a good thing if everybody took Fridays off because they’d be so excited about having the whole weekend ahead of them that they’d be out crowding up all the movies and parks and other places I’d go myself. I’m thinking of something my father used to tell me. "It would be a great thing if everyone used public transportation," he said, "because then I’d never have a problem finding a parking spot." It makes perfect sense. The next time a Monday holiday rolls around I think I’ll take off the Friday before, then come in to work on Monday. And the best part is there won’t be anybody here to interrupt my nap.

August 28, 2008

Sometimes it’s impossible to believe Albert Einstein was right when he said, “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity” because there just couldn’t be that much hydrogen in the universe. It started after my flight home was diverted to a different state because of bad weather and a need to refuel. Didn’t the pilot know he needed to refuel before he took off? Wouldn’t something like that be kind of obvious? I look at the gas gauge in my car before I go anywhere, knowing that, even if I did run out of gas, I could get out and walk. It’s kind of hard to do that in a plane. I didn’t ask any of this, though. You don’t ask the pilot stupid questions, especially when he’s outrunning a hurricane. That’s like going through the security line and being sarcastic with the security people, although I have discovered that you can get them to smile with questions like, “Does this strip-search make me look fat?”

But I digress. I thought about asking the pilot why, instead of going East, we couldn’t just go North, since that’s where I was headed in the first place, but I was secretly happy to have my flight diverted in the hopes I would get another bag containing approximately four peanuts. Several years ago I heard about an airline executive who figured out that he could save the company $25,000 a year by removing one olive from the salad served on long flights. That kind of thinking can quickly drive you crazy, of course, and in the case of airline executives it’s a very short trip. If you remove two olives, that’s $50,000, and if you remove the quarter of a cherry tomato that’s another $15,000, and the next thing you know you’re asking, “What if we removed the oxygen masks that pop out in the case of an emergency?”

But I digress. Our flight was diverted to an airport that was so small we couldn’t even get off the plane because those stairs they wheel up to the plane were being used by the technicians to replace a light bulb. So we waited and refueled and I hoped my connecting flight would wait the seventeen hours my fellow passengers and I had to wait for the fuel to be pumped out of the ground, refined, put into a tanker truck, and finally piped into our plane. And then we had to watch the safety video again. When did the long boring talk the flight attendants used to give us about how to properly fasten a seatbelt get replaced with a snappy video of a woman with silicone cheeks and way too much collagen in her lips telling us not to smoke while a guy who looks like a sumo wrestler in a leisure suit demonstrates the flotation device hidden under our seat? I realize asking that is like asking, “How much money could we save if we got rid of those flotation devices?”

But I digress. Once we got off the plane it was obvious the gate stewards were having a contest to see how many people they could get to line up and not be helped. Since I missed my connecting flight I went straight to the gate of the next flight to my home—which of course was at the other end of the concourse. After waiting in line for a day and a half to talk to the gate steward I finally was about to talk to her when she picked up her microphone and screamed, “This flight is overbooked and there are 3,690 people on standby who take priority over anyone who missed a connecting flight, so if you’re one of those people you can go to Hell! And thank you for flying with us.” At this point I could have asked why airlines are stupid enough to overbook flights, or, for that matter, why people on standby take priority over people whose plane got sent to the wrong state and an airport that hadn’t been updated since the Wright brothers were flying. I also thought briefly of snatching the boarding pass of one of the people about to gaily march into first class. I’m pretty sure I could convince the gate steward that, yes, I really was Doctor Parvati Chakresarkandyn. Instead I decided to go and ride the airport monorail system to the airline’s main help desk which was, of course, located at the other end of the airport. As I was riding the monorail a man who looked like Ray Davies, or possibly Art Garfunkel, grabbed me and, with a manic look in his eye, asked me if I knew where the smoking lounge was. I told him I knew a gate steward who would be happy to help him find it. As I was walking to the help desk I kept hearing announcements on the intercom: “Mr. Roger Bolenciewczcwzw, your plane to Spokane is being held at gate T97. Mr. Roger Bolenciewczcwzw, please report to gate T97.” And all I could think was, Who was Mr. Roger Bolenciewczcwzw that he was so important that his flight got held while mine couldn’t wait? And why was Mr. Roger Bolenciewczcwzw riding the monorail asking strangers where the smoking lounge was when any intelligent person—any person who wanted to reach their destination–would have been at gate T97 hours ago? Finally I got to the help desk which consisted of one person who was too busy playing computer solitaire to help anyone and a row of black phones that, judging from the cracks in them, had been slammed down repeatedly. And I could understand why when I spoke to Al. I felt sorry for poor Al, who had to live with the knowledge that he’d be sleeping in his own bed that night, who was stuck in a cubicle where the only food he had was whatever he’d brought from home or what he could get out of the office vending machine and didn’t have the advantage of paying $27 for a single slice of cold pizza and a soft drink, Al who was, understandably, exasperated with me for asking such stupid questions as, “What time does that flight leave?” and expressed his frustration by sighing repeatedly. It’s completely understandable that, having provided me with information, Al would ask, “Are you sure you want to be on the earlier flight?” That would be the one that would be taking off in four hours instead of eight, and I have to admit I was having so much fun I thought about my options for at least four nanoseconds. Al, wherever you are, thank you. It took a genius like you to make me question the wisdom of a man like Albert Einstein.

August 7, 2008

It’s exciting that the Olympics are beginning on 08/08/08, but don’t the Chinese use a different calendar? I know the Chinese zodiac is on a twelve-year cycle. I was born in the Year of The Dog, which, according to what I’ve read, means I’m loyal, hardworking, and spend a lot of time licking myself. As a kid whenever we went to Chinese restaurants I always enjoyed reading the placemat and finding out that, for instance, George Washington, Winston Churchill, and Marlon Brando were born in Years of The Rat, and Albert Einstein, Orson Welles, and Confucius were born in Years of the Rabbit, while Shirley Temple and Salvador Dali were born in Years of The Dragon, and I’d get more and more excited about what famous people were born in a Year of The Dog, and the only person listed was David Niven. And for years I sat and ate my kung pao shrimp thinking, "Who the hell is David Niven?" Learning that I shared a Chinese Zodiac sign with a guy who’d been in a few Pink Panther movies wasn’t exactly a high point of my childhood. But I digress. I know the Chinese calendar is different because the Chinese New Year falls at a different time every year, which must make things interesting for the people who organize the big ball dropping in the middle of Tiananmen Square. I guess they’ve decided to go with the Gregorian calendar, though, since 08/08/4075 just isn’t nearly as catchy. Then I heard that they’re not just stopping with holding it on 08/08/08. They will begin eight minutes after 8 o’clock, and there will be eight people lighting the Olympic flame which will be exactly eight feet high. The stadium is 888,888 square feet and has seating for 80,000 people. The opening ceremony will be divided into eight separate parts and there will be eight events held every day. Organizers are being given a special banquet where there will be eight courses served. They’ve also changed things so that now only eight countries are allowed to participate, and there will only be eight events because, let’s face it, no one watches synchronized basket weaving anyway, although this used to be one event where all participants were guaranteed a medal because in all previous Olympics there were only three people competing. This year there will be eight. Things will be even tougher in four years, especially during the winter Olympics which I’m pretty sure will begin on December 12.

July 31, 2008

In my office we’ve been asked to cut back on our power usage lately. We’ve mostly been turning off lights. I’ve also tried working with my monitor turned off but that mrfl skrg qbm lpn. But I bdjpwzdd. In the hallways the maintenance guys have unscrewed one fluorescent bulb in each of the overhead lights so we only have half the light, but they leave the lights on. I can’t help wondering whether there isn’t still some electricity being used. Someone once told me that his grandmother would go through the house each evening tightening the light bulbs in their socket because she was afraid electricity would leak out during the night. This was back in the day when telephones didn’t have buttons but had a handle on the side that you’d crank. Logically I know there isn’t any electricity leaking out because there’s only electricity being used if the circuit is completed, like the time I stuck a key in a light socket to see what would happen. Now, you’re probably thinking, "He stuck a key in a light socket? What an idiot!" but I can prove I’m not an idiot. I used a pair of pliers with rubber handles to stick the key in the light socket, perfectly insulating myself from electric shock. If I were an idiot I wouldn’t have used the pliers. And I learned two very important things from that experiment. The first is, if you stick a key in a light socket you’ll get a lot of cool sparks and the lights in the school gym will go dim for about thirty seconds. The second is, once you’ve stuck your key in a light socket you won’t be able to get your locker open again because the key will be partially melted.

But I digress. Thinking about the old days when people had to crank their telephones reminded me that I have an emergency flashlight that has a hand-crank on it. This is a very ingenious thing that gives you something to do when you’re sitting in a completely dark office or maybe even out in the middle of a dark forest waiting to be mauled by a bear. If they really want to save electricity maybe they should put hand cranks on all the office lights, and maybe on our monitors too. Maybe they could give us exercise bikes and hook them up to generators. Wouldn’t that give a whole new meaning to the term "rat race"? The biggest office bonuses could go to the person who generates the most electricity. And while they’re looking for ways to curtail energy use, maybe they could also get the maintenance guys to stop propping the doors open. That’s just letting all the cold air out, which is almost as bad as letting all the electricity leak out.

July 24, 2008

There seem to be a lot of commercials lately promoting the ease with which people can now access everything from their bank account to their home security system to the latest sports news to their medical information from anywhere with just a few clicks of their cell phone, and an extra $300 charge a month. What a great time it is to be alive! I remember just a few short years ago when I first saw someone using a completely hands-free cell phone. For about twenty minutes I thought she was completely crazy because she seemed to be carrying on a conversation with no one and spending a lot of time jabbing at the air with her fingers. Now that I think about it she probably was completely crazy. The person on the other end of the line probably thought so too because, whoever they were, they couldn’t have gotten a word in. She wouldn’t shut up. But I digress. It’s just wonderful to me to think that I could be at an amusement park riding a rollercoaster eating a big wad of cotton candy with one hand and tapping buttons on my cell phone to make sure I have enough money in my checking account with the other. There was a time when I would have thought it would be a good idea to make sure I had enough money in my checking account before I went on vacation to an amusement park, but now I no longer need to worry about little trivialities like being prepared. I’m glad to know I could take a long island vacation and sit on the beach with a Mai Tai in my hand and, instead of doing something stupid like watch the sunset or go for a swim, keep up with how major league lacrosse teams are going. And is there anything cooler than being able to hike up Mt. McKinley and, in the middle of a blizzard, still be able to get that reminder call from my dentist that I have an appointment next month? Wait a minute. Don’t we go on vacation to get away from crap like that? I don’t want to be like the girl in the commercial who complains about how she doesn’t have time to shop because her incredible cell phone coverage means she has to take her work with everywhere. You know who else is watching that commercial? Your boss. And he’s taking notes and thinking you’re a slacker because you take time off for little things like having your own life. The next step is being like the guy in the bathroom stall next to m who insists on answering his cell phone before he’s flushed, which really disturbs me. Now I think I’ve figured out why those commercials for the cell phone company that doesn’t just give you a cell phone but delivers three-thousand complete strangers to follow you around all the time give me the creeps. I don’t want a bunch of people following me wherever I go. It was bad enough when I was a child and my grandmother told me my dead relatives were watching me whenever I did anything bad. I couldn’t help wondering if they were watching me constantly, and had a really hard time getting undressed after that. And then I started wondering if my Uncle Sid was one of the dead relatives watching me, because he was the type who’d be pushing me to do something bad. "Go on," I could just hear him saying. "Take a newspaper. No one’s gonna notice. And could you grab me a Chunky while you’re at it?"

July 17, 2008

So the other night I opened my back door and there were raccoons on my patio. I immediately screamed, slammed the door, and freaked out my wife all at the same time, a hat trick I haven’t pulled off since I mixed cough medicines and was convinced I was riding a flying spoon. With the raccoons safely shut out of the house (I also propped a bookshelf against the door just in case they decided to pick the lock) I started trying to decide whether I should call someone from animal control or, preferably, call on my Mafia connections to perform a "whack". I’m sure you’re thinking that raccoons are sweet, cute little animals with funny bandit faces, but cute is in the eye of the beholder. Just because you put a Lone Ranger mask and a fluffy striped tail on a rat doesn’t make it any less of a rat. Actually that’s unfair to rats which are, I admit, pretty cute with their long noses that give them an inquisitive look. Raccoons are more like badgers, and nobody likes badgers. Trust me. Ask anybody on the street what they think of badgers and they’ll say, "Badgers? We don’t need no stinking badgers!"

But I digress. What were the raccoons doing on the patio anyway? Maybe they were there to eat the citronella candles, and for that I would have been grateful. Citronella candles are marketed as being mosquito repellent, but I think it’s a conspiracy to sell surplus citronella which, during World War I, was used to make nylon stockings. I’m pretty sure the industry wouldn’t want this to get out, but citronella is manufactured from the stuff that isn’t even considered acceptable for hot dogs. And it actually attracts mosquitoes. Light up a citronella candle and the mosquitoes immediately know there’s at least idiotic human who wants to relax outside in the glow of a nice candle and not be eaten alive. Citronella candles come in all kinds of shapes, but to mosquitoes they all say the same thing: "All you can eat buffet!" After all the term "citronella" is derived from the car brand "Citroen", which is French for "explodes ten minutes after leaving the dealer’s lot". But I digress. I’ve got a pretty good idea why the raccoons were sniffing around my patio, though, and it has to do with an even lower form of rodent, the land developer. There used to be some wooded areas near my home that were large enough that I’m pretty sure I heard "Dueling Banjos" being played there once. Now they’ve cut it all down and put up warehouse stores and fast food restaurants and they’re currently planning to turn the entire area into an exact replica of the Las Vegas strip. So even though I don’t like them I feel bad for the raccoons. And, next to the land developers, I have to admit they do look kinda cute.

July 10, 2008

Every time an election comes around, at least in the United States, it seems like there’s always a statistic that comes about about how the number of registered voters who bothered to show up and actually vote only amounts to about 0.038%, meaning, basically, that six people made a decision we’ll all be complaining about for the next few years. There’s been a lot of talk about how to prevent this, but I think the biggest problem may be voting fatigue. I’ve got nothing against democracy, but it seems like every other day I’m encouraged to vote for something that doesn’t really make that much difference, like the best Indian restaurant in the city, or my favorite episode from the last season of a TV show I never really watched, or whether I wear boxers or briefs–a question that always makes me ask, "Is there a third candidate?" But I digress. There have even been votes for the new color of M&M’s, asking people whether they prefer puce or chartreuse. Aren’t yellow, green, blue, red, brown, aubergine, sangria, asparagus, periwinkle, and plaid enough? And, more importantly, will I be sued for not putting ™ after M&M’s even though everybody knows I’m talking about the candy that, in spite of their insistence to the contrary, will melt in your hand, especially on a really hot day?

But I digress. I’m all for democracy, but it seems like we have so many choices already it’s hard sometimes to make a choice when trying to decide who’s the best person to represent me, especially in the small local elections where it can be almost impossible to get accurate information about the candidate, beyond the fact that all their advertising has been spray painted on the sides of cars in the mall parking lot. And even when I get the information sometimes it can be even more confusing because I feel like I don’t have enough choices. I might look at a particular candidate for, say, the school board, and think, well, I disagree with her on zoning issues, but her plan to pay some Dutchman to set fire to Lord Snowden intrigues me. I think this is why Winston Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government–with the exception of all other forms of government. At least I’ve been told he said that, but I’ve never found the exact quote. If it’s a true sentiment, though, it doesn’t matter if it was some guy two cubicles down from me who actually said it and not Winston Churchill. Things like that just tend to get attributed to Churchill because he was a smart guy who knew a thing or two about democracy, and I’m pretty sure, unlike the guy two cubicles down from me, I’m pretty sure Winston Churchill never spent an hour and a half looking for his pen only to realize he’d tucked it behind his ear.

June 26, 2008

Lately it seems like I’ve been seeing a lot more bumper stickers that say things like, “Share the road with motorcycles” and “Watch For Motorcycles”. I thought it was weird that they were all on cars until I remembered that motorcycles don’t have bumpers. Am I missing something, though? I know it’s an election year, and maybe I just haven’t been keeping up with the news about Proposition 22832-A, which states, “Drivers of vehicles with three or more wheels shall not henceforth and such anon no longer be not required to provide safe passage or berth for vehicles which consist of two or fewer wheels.” I was planning to vote for it because I was certain it was about getting commies out of the State Department, but maybe I’m mistaken. If I’m wrong I’m sorry, but I’ve always considered motorcycle riders to be people, and I’ve always tried to watch for motorcycles and share the road with them. If all this time I was supposed to be swerving to run them off the road I’m sorry—and now that I think about it that may have been one of the questions I got wrong on my driving test. What’s wrong with motorcycles? I know a nurse who drives a motorcycle, and I can tell you I’ve never had anyone stick a seven-inch needle into my arm with more care and consideration, maybe because, as a motorcyclist, she knows a thing or two about pain. And where would our culture be without motorcycles? If Jack Kerouac had traveled across the country in a Buick rather than on a motorcycle, his book On The Road would have been called Ripping Good Travels, Eh What? Actually there was a book like that. It was written by Nabokov and it was called Lolita. Think about it. Then there was the film Easy Rider. If, instead of riding really cool choppers across the country Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper had driven a Dodge Dart, the film’s climax would not have been a massive drug-induced freakout in a cemetery in New Orleans, but would have been them fixing a photocopier in Yakama, and having a round of martinis while Jack Nicholson sat on it and made pictures of his butt. Let’s face it: if you’re driving a Gremlin, you can’t drive up to a group, spin in a half-circle, and say, “Hey you kids, never suck all the juice out of a tractor!” Well, you could, but it wouldn’t look nearly as cool.

But I digress. Do we really need these bumper stickers? And, if they do, couldn’t they at least include some cool pictures of smoking wreckage? I just don’t see enough twisted wreckage out on the road, and it’s unethical and time-consuming to cause it myself. And while I’m on the subject of bumper stickers, or, actually, because I just wanted to get back to the subject of bumper stickers and didn’t feel like trying to make a logical leap back to it, what’s with the ones that say, “I Brake For” this or that? Are these people saying they don’t brake for things like stoplights? I saw one that said, “I Brake For Unicorns”, which is fine. I brake for any equine animal regardless of whether it has horns, but did the driver of that car not brake for nixies, dryads, or homunculi? That last one I could understand. Seriously, when I see homunculi I hit the accelerator. Those things are vicious. They’ll go straight for your gastroenterologist. It’s true. At least that’s what a guy on a motorcycle told me.

June 19, 2008

You know what kind of people you never see any more? Organ grinders. Do you ever get a feeling of nostalgia for the good old days when you couldn’t walk down the street and either run into an organ grinder with his monkey or slip on a banana peel? I don’t, mainly because the only place I see those things are in old films and cartoons. I never even saw organ grinders when I was a kid, but I thought it looked like a great job going around with a monkey. Actually I never could figure out why the monkey was necessary. Maybe because the organ grinder was holding the organ with one hand and turning the crank with the other, but if he used a strap to hang it around his neck he could always get rid of the monkey, unless people just have an aversion to giving money directly to men with handlebar moustaches and would rather hand it to a small flea-ridden simian. But I digress. Organ grinders seem to have gone the way of men named Aloysius, women named Bertha, and telephone operators. Not that anyone ever saw telephone operators, but we knew they were there. Sometimes I’d like to be able to pick up my phone and, instead of dialing a bunch of numbers, just say, "Sarah, could you get me the Chinese restaurant in Mount Pilot?" And some guy named Mark in Mumbai would say, "I’m sorry sir, how does this relate to your credit card bill?" There are a few things that make me feel nostalgic. I remember when fins on cars disappeared. Well, not exactly, but it’s strange. It’s as though one day I saw cars with fins and then the next day they were all gone. It’s almost like the big computer monitors, which seemed to disappear with about the same level of speed. It’s as though suddenly everyone in the world got a flat-screen monitor delivered at once. Sometimes I wonder what will disappear next. What will make people, in twenty or fifty years, say, "Hey, you know what I never see anymore?" It’ll probably be something we take for granted. "You know what I never see anymore? Light bulbs. Not since they made glow-in-the-dark wallpaper." I get a strange feeling whenever I think about what the future will bring, and what may also disappear in its wake. It’s not exactly nostalgia. It’s like the feeling is the opposite of nostalgia. The worst thing is, whenever I try to explain this to someone they just look at me like I’ve got a handlebar moustache.