Latest Posts

May 8, 2009

The other day when I got home from work my neighbor called me over. She had a crisis, an emergency, a trauma, a predicament, a pickle, a quandary, a plight, a straight, a hot potato. Well, maybe it wasn’t all that, but it was pretty serious. She had a snake on her patio. Well, next to her patio, but very close to the patio, and coiled up there. She always calls me over when she spots a snake. I’ve never understood why people are afraid of snakes. A fear of weasels and ferrets I can understand because they’re nasty, foul-smelling, worm, hyperactive little beasts, but snakes are generally clean and smooth and laid back. Once as a kid I went to a children’s museum and a group of us got to be photographed with the animal of our choice. I chose the boa constrictor. The woman took the picture and then turned out the lights to develop the picture, and I was left there in a completely dark room with a six-foot boa constrictor around my neck. I’ll admit that I was nervous, but I’m pretty sure the boa constrictor fell asleep. Maybe that’s why I am now the neighborhood snake wrangler. Well, I’m my neighbor’s snake wrangler. I guess technically I’m the wrangler of a single snake that I’m pretty sure is the same one over and over again, which would make snake wrangling a pretty lucrative and easy profession if I could get paid for it. I might even be able to work out some arrangement with the snake.

It was a harmless garter snake, so I grabbed it just behind the head and picked it up. It had milky-white eyes, so I held it out to my neighbor and said, "Look, it’s just about to shed," which caused her to faint. I don’t think it was proximity to the snake that caused her to faint so much as knowing that when a snake sheds that means it’s growing. If she doesn’t know that I won’t tell her, although she does at least know that a milky-eyed snake is about to shed. This change may be what resulted in a myth that snakes go blind during the hottest days of August, which has to be one of the goofiest things I’ve ever heard. What would be the good of going blind during August? They probably want to shed one last time before winter and, let’s face it, during August most of us are shedding anyway. There’s an even goofier myth that snakes milk cows. I don’t know where that one comes from, especially since I don’t know that cows would tolerate being milked by snakes.

I’ve been bitten by snakes several times and, while it was never more than a very tiny pinprick, I suspect it would be a lot more uncomfortable if one bit my nipple. Fortunately that’s never happened to me, although I’ve had snakes in positions where they could. I even had a pet snake once, also a garter snake like the one that enjoys my neighbor’s patio. His name was Slither and he bit me every chance he could get. My father used to enjoy saying he was "mean as a snake", although I’ve never met another snake in my life that was as mean as Slither. I’d feed him earthworms and every time I went to drop one into his tank he’d bite me, which was pretty ungrateful of him. But maybe he was in a bad mood because I overfed him. Slither shed at least twenty-seven times a year, and snakes do get moody and aggressive when they’re shedding. Slither was, I now realize, the ultimate burglar deterrent, although he still would have been even if he’d been as laid back as most other snakes. Once a couple of guys came to do some repairs on the house. These were big, burly construction guys, but as soon as they saw Slither they went to my mother and said, "Lady, if that thing gets out we’re outta here." Slither and I finally decided that the best thing for him would be to let him go. Well, I made the decision and he bit me twelve times as I was taking him out of the cage. I released him on a farm. I wish I could say there was a tearful moment when he raised his head and looked back at me and I said, "Go on, boy, you’re free now," but the truth is I was happy to see him go. And he didn’t look back. He sped right off toward some cows that looked like they needed milking.

May 1, 2009

The other night I was watching the news, and they had one of those ominous messages about an upcoming story. A swirl of red and black shadows appeared on the screen and a deep voice said, "The next time you go into surgery the doctor operating on you could be high. Operating…under the influence. But first-sports!" I guess they figure no one’s getting an operation at ten o’clock at night anyway, so they can postpone such an important story and focus on the world of professional bocce first. And this isn’t the first time I’ve heard a story about the potential perils of going under the knife. A few years ago I heard about a doctor who left right in the middle of an operation because he wanted to get to the bank to deposit a check. And I’m pretty sure we’re all thinking the same thing: if the guy can’t figure out how to use an ATM, should be really be allowed to cut people with a scalpel? And more recently than that I’ve heard stories of doctors sending messages on Twitter right in the middle of operations, making comments about their patients like, "And I thought this guy smelled bad on the outside!" I know there are a lot of handheld devices that make it really easy to send and receive messages, but-and I could be wrong about this-none of them that I’ve seen can be used with just one hand. If I’m lying on the operating room table I hope the doctor is keeping at least one hand in whatever organ of mine he’s working on. On second thoughts, if a doctor’s sending messages in the middle of an operation, maybe it’s better that he’s using both hands to do it. And I can’t help wondering who caught doctors sending messages in the middle of operations. Honestly, I hope it wasn’t family members or friends of the patient. I know doctors are as human as the rest of us. We’d all like to believe doctors are exactly the way they’re portrayed on television-sexy, super-intelligent, and completely dedicated to their patients for fifty minutes before going to spend their off-duty ten minutes getting hammered in a bar then climbing into each others’ beds as the final credits roll. Well, maybe we don’t want them to be exactly like that, but I can’t remember ever seeing a TV doctor get stoned before going into surgery. The only place I’ve seen that is on the news. Actually I didn’t really see it there either because I turned it off before that story ran, but they did try to tempt me with another ominous message. This one said, "Our in-depth investigation uncovered how they’re getting the drugs." Let’s see. Doctors work in hospitals with fully-stocked pharmacies and they have access to prescription pads and not only do they have years of training but the drug companies are constantly sending them free samples, probably with helpful instructions like, "Put on some Steely Dan and take a couple of these with Wild Turkey." Where could they possibly be getting the drugs they’re using to get high as a kite before going into surgery? That must have taken some really tough investigating.

April 29, 2009

When I’m on a long road trip I love checking out license plates from other states. My wife and I will usually bring along a list of all the states and check them off as we see them because, hey, what else are you going to do while driving? You can only listen to the radio for so long before you get way out into the wilds where all you can pick up is either static or else some crazy guy who alternates between reading from the Apocrypha and the Anarchist’s Cookbook before going into a lengthy explanation of how fax machines are tools of Satan. And Satan, according to this guy, is Mikhail Gorbachev, and that’ll get him started on an even longer explanation of how that birthmark on Gorbachev’s head is actually "666", but that’s another story.

After several road trips I’ve noticed some distinct trends in license plate spotting. For one thing, since we almost always start by setting out from Tennessee, I’ve noticed that the first state I can check off the list is almost always Tennessee. And that’s not even one of the weirder things. The weirder things include the fact that I rarely see any of the New England states. Sure, I might see the occasional New York or even Maine plate, but what about Maryland? I thought most New England states were so small, so densely populated, and, in the winter, so bloody cold most people would want to get out of them, and yet I think I’ve only ever seen one Rhode Island plate. Maybe it’s because New England is so densely populated with states too. You can stand in the middle of Vermont and throw bricks and hit somebody in New Hampshire. In fact I’m pretty sure Vermont has an annual Throw Bricks At New Hampshire festival in August. And have you ever tried to look at these states on a map? There’s not enough room to fit the names of each state in, so there are long lines that have the names of the states out in Cape Cod, and when you try to follow those lines back to their respective states they get so tangled up your finger ends up in Quebec. Maybe that’s why nobody from New England ever goes anywhere: the maps are so confusing they’re afraid they’ll never find their way back. Or they’re all in Quebec. And even though I might occasionally see a license plate from somewhere in New England, I know I’ve never seen a North Dakota license plate. Sure, I’ve seen South Dakota license plates, and they’re very nice. They have South Dakota’s motto, "Mount Rushmore–it’s all we’ve got!" But no one who goes to North Dakota ever comes back. In high school I knew a girl from North Dakota and she told me people moved to North Dakota to get away from other people. If you move to a place within twenty miles of another North Dakotan, they’ll complain that the neighborhood’s getting way too crowded. I’ve seen license plates from Alaska. I’ve even seen license plates from Hawaii, which makes me think that must have been one really interesting drive. But I’m pretty sure the only place I’ll ever see a North Dakota license plate will be in the North Dakota DMV, which will be twenty miles away from everything else. And then there’s California. California is the exact opposite of North Dakota. For some reason people in California can’t wait to get out of there, and I can’t figure out why. California seems like a nice place, but setting out on any long road trip the second license plate I see is usually one from California. And it doesn’t matter where we go–there are people from California headed there too. Or maybe we’re just passing them and they’re really all on their way to Quebec.

April 17, 2009

New cell phones, especially the ones with fancy touch screens, have all these things they call "apps". I’m pretty sure that’s short for "applications", but in today’s high-speed, ultra-tech, upgraded, microwave, minimart, pre-fab, fast-food world there’s no room for polysyllabic words anymore. Even "polysyllabic words" has been shortened to just "pols", although polls show that three percent are against this, two percent are in favor of it, and ninety-six percent have no clue what I’m talking about. There are all kinds of apps. Want to find a three-star sushi restaurant in New York and find the exact amount of time it would take you to walk there from Seattle? There’s an app for that. Want to hold your phone up to a speaker in a restaurant because you can’t figure out what that song is that’s playing and it’s driving you crazy? There’s an app for that. Completely lost your mind and need to check yourself in to the closest psychiatric clinic? There’s an app for that-although you’ll need to get the syringe attachment and the Prozac plug-in for your phone. There’s a tiny little piano app, in case you’re the guy in that joke who walks into a bar with a foot-tall pianist. And there’s even a harmonica app which allows you to make music by blowing on your phone, and when you’re done cleaning the saliva off the touch screen you can then actually use your phone to call someone. I’m pretty sure it won’t be long before cell phones come with an ATM app, although for at least ten years people in Italy have been able to use their cell phones to buy sodas from vending machines. This is because, before the Euro, the Italian economy suffered so much inflation that people needed wheelbarrows full of lire to buy anything from vending machines.

What is there not an app for? Well, on my phone at least there’s no app for blocking unwanted calls. When my phone rings with a number I don’t know and I answer it and the person calling me says, "Who is this?" maybe there should be an app to tell them they’ve called the wrong number so I don’t have to do it myself. And there should definitely be an app for blocking any future calls from them because they’re probably going to call back in a minute and say, "Oops, sorry, misdialed again." Technically there is an app for blocking these calls on my cell phone, but I’d have to switch to a plan that’s an extra twenty bucks a month and I’m too cheap to do that just for wrong numbers. On the other hand the unwanted text messages are driving me up the wall. Some guy out there thinks I am a woman named-I’m not making this up-Saharla, and he keeps sending me annoying text messages. Sometimes they’re downright creepy. One morning I was going into work early. Really early. So early I thought maybe I should have just not gone home the night before. And as I was on my way I got a text message from him that said, "Hey Saharla are you awake?" While I give him credit for actually spelling out words like "are" and "you", it was weird that I was getting this message at a time when I just happened to be awake but would normally be asleep. According to my cell provider there’s no way to block unwanted text messages, not even for an extra twenty bucks a month. Oh, sure, it’s possible to do all kinds of other fun things with your cell phone, but you can’t block unwanted messages. The only option is to send the guy a text message or call him and tell him to knock it off, and I’ve done that at least twice now. Each time he’s said, "Oh, I’ll talk to the person responsible for doing that." And I know what he means by that because that’s an expression I’ve sometimes used when I’m too ashamed to admit that I’ve done something really boneheaded. I should just be honest and admit that I’ve done something boneheaded, and am, therefore, the person responsible, but sometimes that’s just really hard to do. Maybe it would be easier if there were an app for it.

February 22, 2009

In 2009 televisions in the United States are going to be switched over to a completely digital signal. We’re being told that this will give us a lot of great advantages, especially even better picture quality because, you know, when you’re watching that show about that guy who travels around the world to taste how different cultures prepare goat penis, you want the clearest picture possible. The problem is for people who haven’t bought a new television in the past few years. Their televisions could, overnight, turn into giant paperweights. Imagine them tuning in to watch the big ball drop in Times’ Square on December 31st, 2008, and hearing the countdown, "…three…two…one…HAPPY…" and then their screen goes black. Wait a minute. I think I saw a movie just like that. Yeah, it started with television screens going black, and then a guy who’d been in a coma woke up alone in a deserted hospital, only to discover that zombies, talking apes, giant spitting flowers, and animal rights activists had all gotten together and buried the Statue of Liberty up to her neck. I saw it on a UHF station. Remember the good old days when every town had their own local station on the outskirts of town that alternated between broadcasting a guy in a leisure suit reading the farm bureau reports and the same guy dressed up as Dracula hosting really awful late night movies? It’s sad, but you just don’t find that kind of quality entertainment anymore.

Anyway, it’s believed that the change to digital television could affect as many as twenty-one million people. Imagine that: twenty-one million people who still have rabbit ear antennas on top of their televisions, and who probably have to get up, walk across the room, and turn a knob whenever they want to change the channel. I know you can buy a converter box for your television, but I worry whether someone who still has a television with an oval screen and radio tubes will be able to install anything they buy at one of those high-tech stores. And at some high-tech stores the salespeople are pressuring customers to skip the box and just buy new televisions. They’re even convincing people to buy those flat-screen televisions, the ones some people mount on their ceilings over their beds because, you know, that whole sitting up thing can be a lot of trouble. Come on, people, you should only put a television screen on the ceiling over your bed if you’re also so lazy and rich that you pay someone to chew your food for you.

But I digress. I can only say that I’m shocked at the idea of a salesperson ever telling someone to buy something they don’t need. What’s next? Car salesmen who don’t tell the truth? The most important question, though, is, why is the government warning people about this potential problem several months in advance, when it’s usually the job of government to wait for several months after a problem has occurred to warn us about it? Probably because, now that the writers’ strike is over, there might actually be something on worth watching next January.

September 18, 2008

Aren’t social networking sites fun? I’ve had people I work with press me into setting up accounts on them, because they’ve said, "Hey, this is a great resource I can use to send you electronic messages you can read at your leisure." Yeah. A way to send electronic messages that would be stored in a database where I can retrieve them when I have time is an amazing thing. Why didn’t anyone think of this as a potential use of the internet before now? I know they can do other things. They can be a place for me to store pictures, and they put my name out there on a vast network where a guy who sat next to me in chemistry class in high school can look me up and contact me. How am I supposed to respond, though? Asking, "So…do you still listen to The Cure?" seems a little goofy, and yet not quite as impersonal as, "So…what have you been doing for the past twenty years?" And the sites allow me to list my friends because, let me tell you, it’s so hard to keep track of who my friends are in real life.

Recently, though, I heard about a social networking site for spies. You may be wondering how I heard about this. Well, have you ever wondered why I’m always dressed in a trench coat and fedora, even when I’m swimming? Have you ever wondered why I occasionally walk up next to complete strangers at the bus stop and say, "The pearl is in the river"? Remember that time when we were in a bar fight and I paralyzed a three-hundred pound guy with a plastic water bottle? Did you ever wonder where I learned that skill? If you’ve never wondered it’s because none of those things are true.

But I digress. I learned about the social networking site for spies on the radio, and I have to admit I felt kind of envious. Yes, we regular people have our own social networking sites, but you know spies have to have one that’s even cooler than ours. Just look at James Bond. Actually don’t look at James Bond until you’ve stopped reading this, but think about all the cool stuff he had. When I was a kid and I’d watch Bond films I’d think being a spy must be the greatest job in the world. You get to travel to exotic lands, meet interesting people, carry the coolest gadgets, and defeat bad guys with amazingly elaborate underwater lairs. Then I went through puberty and the opening credits became the most interesting part of any Bond film for me. But that’s another story. It always amazed me how Q, the gadget guy, would give Bond these amazingly weird devices and somehow he’d always find a use for them. Q could hold something out and say, "Here, James, try this umbrella, it turns into a deck of playing cards." And if Bond was being played by Sean Connery he’d say, "Och aye, what use can ye see for sech a thing, ye wee bugger?" But if he was being played by anyone else he’d cock one eyebrow and say, "Not playing with a full deck, eh Q?" And Q would say, "Very funny, Bond. How old are you now, eighty-three?" But I digress. Imagine, though, the social networking site that James Bond must belong to. Among other things he can contact one of his friends and say, "Och aye", or maybe just, "yo", and then describe the problem he’s having with his grenade-launcher watch. "The grenades keep turning around and coming back to my magnetic cufflinks, and I have to make a daring escape down a ski slope with a sexy woman’s legs wrapped around my head," he might say. And his friend-obviously another spy-would come back with, "Yeah, you have to use your sunglasses that expand into a scuba device to deactivate the cufflinks." And they could all share tips on the best way to get a super villain to get so distracted describing his elaborate plan to seize the entire world’s boron reserves that he can easily be pushed into his tank full of man-eating pangolins. The most obvious advantage, though, is that spies can go there to send messages to their contacts, saying, "The pearl is in the river", without having to go to the bus stop.

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.