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September 7, 2007

It seems like children’s toys are being recalled every day now, either because they have lead paint or sharp edges someone just realized that the new improved Bild-O-Briks (now with 30% more arsenic!) were a bad idea or maybe the toys just too darn fun and had to be taken away from children who might experience happiness. I’m all for these recalls, but at the same time I wonder why no toys were ever recalled when I was a kid. Then again the toys I played with, even the ones with thirty-seven thousand tiny detachable parts and a high rate of spontaneous combustion, were probably the least dangerous thing I played with. Rocks, sticks, old car stereos, black widow spiders, razors, and a snakebite kit were just some of the things my friends and I would throw at each other, and when playing hide and seek I discovered that an old refrigerator is almost as good a hiding place as a garbage can. One kid in my neighborhood had a treehouse that was twelve feet off the ground and made of drywall and cardboard held together with duct tape, chewing gum, barbed wire, and one or two rusty nails to give it stability. Then there was the chemistry set I spent hours playing with. In spite of including chemicals like sodium cyanide and sulphuric acid I guess it wasn’t recalled because it was an educational toy (and came with 30% more arsenic!). And was it ever educational.

Among other things I learned that when you set a block of styrofoam on fire it’s really hard to put out, and will leave a permanent mark on the carpet. Also a rubbing alcohol flame is hot enough to melt lead. My parents were pretty sure that if I survived I was going to grow up to be a chemist, although my approach to things was less scientific and more, "Hey, what happens when I pour sulfuric acid on the driveway?" If I grew up to work in a laboratory my colleagues would probably take everything dangerous away from me so I’d never be able to come up with anything really exciting. We’d be called into the boss’s office at the end of the week and asked what we’d discovered, and one guy would say, "A cure for male pattern baldness!" Another would say, "Deep fried mushrooms that have zero calories!" And I’d say, "If you put vinegar and baking soda in a test tube and put a stopper in it really fast the test tube will explode all over your pants!"

But I digress. When I used up all the chemicals in my chemistry set I started making trips to the drugstore to buy new ones, and to stop for a lime phosphate or maybe a sarsaparilla or a chocolate malt. Remember the good old days when you would go to the drugstore to get a Moon Pie and a Doctor Pepper? Now a drugstore is a place you go when you need pool toys shaped like Spongebob, scented candles, Halloween costumes in April, patio furniture, old car stereos, paperback books, black widow spiders, and a map of Belgium. Occasionally you can even get drugs there, but they’re getting harder to get, especially cold medicine. A while back some people who obviously got the wrong kind of education from their chemistry sets discovered that cold medicine isn’t just for curing colds–it can also be used to make methamphetamine, which will clear out your sinuses, your esophagus, your hypothalamus, and your duodenum. What’s wrong with these people? I can’t figure this out. You have to have a brain to be able to do the kind of advanced chemistry needed to make drugs in your kitchen, but you also have to be unbelievably stupid to turn your kitchen into a toxic waste site that could explode at any time. As Albert Einstein once said, the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits. I’m pretty sure people who make methamphetamine started out with brains but, at some point, they were recalled.

August 31, 2007

A drought is a strange event. Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and even tsunamis are all horrible, often tragic events that come in suddenly, sometimes with no warning, or not enough warning, but then they disappear, often as quickly as they came. Flood and tsunamis recede, wildfires burn out all their fuel or, hopefully, are stopped, and tornadoes just spin themselves out. A drought is less predictable. A week goes by without rain, then another week. You notice that the grass is getting brittle and dry and the ground is rock hard. Then the grass turns the color of sand and even the air seems brittle with the dryness of it. The weather reports become numbingly uniform: sunny every day, and even reports of record-breaking temperatures become repetitive. Something in the back of your mind says that this is wrong, but the heat saps any energy you might have for thinking about it. Instead you congratulate yourself on not at least not living in a place like Arizona, where the four seasons are tolerable, hot, really hot, and ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

On your way home from work each night you start counting the number of neighbors who are watering their yards, the ones who stand out because their grass is a patch of emerald in a sea of buff and sepia. You get wicked ideas about sneaking into their yards and cutting their hoses with a pair of garden shears in the middle of the night. One morning you notice a spider hanging in her web next to your house. She’s brown and white speckled with big yellow dots on her abdomen. You saw her early in the spring, just like you watched her mother, her grandmother, and a whole line of her great-grandmothers going back several years. You’ve wondered about her because you know the drought affects everything up and down the food chain, and you haven’t seen as many rabbits, snakes, or even squirrels as usual. This spider, like you, is not native to North America; her ancestors probably came with yours, around three centuries ago. She’s nocturnal so it’s strange that she’s still out on a sunny morning when the temperature is already higher than it would be at noon in a normal year. You notice that she’s getting fat, and that’s good. In a month, maybe less, she’ll wrap her eggs in a tight, round purse. Producing the next generation will be one of the last things she does. You look closely and see that she’s got something large, a bumblebee maybe, swathed in white silk. She holds it with her front legs while she sucks greedily at it. You feel good that even in a drought death and life go on as usual.

August 10, 2007

So I was so excited about having my learner’s permit that I only waited a year and a half before getting serious about finally getting a license. You’re probably thinking that was a really long time, but, hey, I’m the sort of guy who would procrastinate but I can’t seem to get around to it. Why so long? Part of it at least is that for a long time I was sure I was cursed. I don’t believe in fate or destiny or Emily Post, and yet I believe we have to play the card we’re dealt. Mine just seems to be all jokers. But I digress. It goes back to the first time I took the driving test, back when the car I was using was a Model T, and I didn’t even get out of the parking space.

Then there was the first car I owned, or, more specifically, the first car my parents bought for me. It was a 1968 Mannar, the official car of Sri Lanka, and I’m pretty sure it had been driven to the United States. The seller was offering it for a song but, after hearing me sing, he asked for three-hundred bucks instead. It sat in the garage for a while and then was eventually given to a guy who drove it until the engine exploded, which was the second day he’d had it.

I needed help. I needed driving experience, but where does someone my age go for driver’s education? It’s not like I live in New York where, if you suddenly discover at 3:00am you need a fake schnozz and glasses, a plate of calamari, and some mulch, you can either run down to the all-night novelty-seafood-and-garden-supply store on the corner or you can call the one that delivers. No, I live in an area where, if there are stores within less than a mile of a neighborhood the developers make sure to put up a twenty-lane road between them so you can’t even drive over if you live nearby–you have to sail down the road to the exit ramp, get on the interstate, go to the next exit, turn around, and come back just to get to the other side of the street. I called several places where they either laughed at me, told me they had fake schnozzes and mulch but no calamari, or had their phones disconnected.

Finally I reached a guy who didn’t discriminate in his driver training business. Amazingly he called me one afternoon while I was on the bus. And you’d be surprised the nice things people will do when you’re driving around in a car that has STUDENT DRIVER pasted on its windows in big yellow letters. People were so considerate: they did things like tailgate, pass me on a double-yellow line, and even pull their car off onto the shoulder and let it burst into flames–all to assist me in my education! Finally I went to take my test. I filled out the forms and did the prerequisite half hour of throwing up in the bathroom. My instructor told me the tester would be very businesslike, very professional, so it didn’t surprise me when we got in the car and he said, in a very businesslike and professional way, "Damn, this is a really nice car." Then, in between pointing me along a route that took us on six right turns in a big circle around the building, he asked me tough questions about the weather and whether I liked baseball. I tried my best to get the answers right, fearing that the curse of either my driving history or the Chicago Cubs would sink me. After what might have been the longest seven minutes of my life we pulled back up to the building and he said those magic words every one of us wants to hear: "Come on in and get your license." I’m licensed. I’m official. Not only can I drive, but I can do it legally now. Like most other people I have a little plastic card with the worst picture of me ever taken and a number that’s ten pounds less than my actual weight. I’m ready to get out there. I have a license to drive. Consider yourself warned.

August 3, 2007

People often have landmarks in their life. For many it’s when they’re old enough to drive, or when they’re old enough to vote, or when they’re old enough to drink. In my case if you add when I was old enough to drink to when I was old enough to drive, well, mixing those two is a bad idea.

Let me start over. I’ve known for many years that a driver’s license would be a good thing to have. For one thing when I get asked for identification and hand over my Commander USA Fan Club card people tend to look at me a little funny. Pardon me, but it does say that the signatory promises to remain an all around good guy forever. Sure! For another thing if I’m ever driving along and get pulled over a cop is probably going to do more than look at me funny when I hand over the card that declares me an official tan line inspector.

But I digress. I took driver’s ed, but that was a few years ago, so I decided the first thing I needed was a learner’s permit. You can’t learn without one, just like you can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat.

But I digress. So I went down to the DMV, taking my state-issued ID card. It had expired, but I figured, this is the same place where I got it, so it should still be a valid ID, right? Wrong. I knew I was in trouble when I saw the woman behind the counter, the same woman who’d flunked me on two previous driving tests. She had an eggplant-shaped body, buck teeth, and a beehive hairdo that scraped the ceiling. Also, I’m pretty sure that red rubber stamp that says, "FAIL" is permanently attached to her hand. She explained, politely speaking at the top of her lungs, that the only valid form of identification she would accept was a birth certificate. Now, it’s been a few years since I was born, and if I was given a certificate I don’t remember, mainly because I was a little distracted at the time. All I do remember clearly is seeing some guy with a mask over his face and asking him, "Is this a stickup or a re you just ugly?" Of course I didn’t tell any of this to Bee Hive, and, in fact, I barely managed to escape having the word "FAIL" printed on me as I dashed out the door. After doing a little checking around I found I could get a copy of my birth certificate downtown from a nice woman who sits behind bulletproof plastic, because, you know, there’s no place more dangerous than a records department. So I went back to the DMV. For reasons of dramatic tension I didn’t mention previously that I went by bus. Of six DMV offices in the county the bus only goes to one, on a special route that runs every two hours. Strictly speaking the bus actually goes near it. And strictly speaking it depends on how you define "near". For instance, at 27 light years, or one hundred fifty eight million, three hundred seventy thousand million miles, the star Vega is "close" to Earth.

But I digress. Once I got out of the bus I had to cross an interstate exit ramp, climb a hill, cross a busy road, then navigate through a parking lot where teenagers were zipping in and out, either taking their driving tests or celebrating getting their license. Why is it so difficult to get to the DMV by bus? Because anyone who needs to go to the DMV drives there. No one takes the bus there, and by no one I mean me and five other people: three students, a woman with a baby, and a guy who I’m pretty sure was older than me. And since it was January the DMV employees were generous enough to let us and about thirty other people stand outside on the sidewalk. As the crowd inside thinned out we were allowed to enter the building in groups of three. I was given a ticket with A223 printed on it and took a seat by the window, waiting for my number to be called. At one point a man walked through the crowd, stopped to look around at us, and said, "See y’all in five years." I wasn’t so optimistic. After calling A220, then A221, then A222, the DMV loudspeaker started calling for B187, then C075. I was afraid they’d decided to skip me entirely, but then my number was up. I handed in my application, fee, and sat down at a computer to answer forty-seven questions about whether or not tractors carrying hazardous waste are required to stop at four-way railroad tracks with a blood alcohol level of 3.1459276 in the rain at night. Finally I finished and joined my fellow bus riders across the street at the bus stop for a two-hour wait. Six of us went in. Five came out empty-handed.

July 27, 2007

GPS devices and detailed street maps and easy-to-read driving instructions have been available on the Internet for a while now, but for some people that’s just not good enough. Now some companies are using advanced satellite technology to take pictures of neighborhoods or actually driving around in vans making panoramic shots of neighborhoods. Now privacy issues are one thing–if you have a neighbor who likes to stand in his living room window in his underwear, or, heck, if you ARE that neighbor, your picture’s probably already on the Internet somewhere, but how helpful are these pictures really going to be? What is they take the pictures on trash pickup day? I know people who would follow all the driving directions, holding their GPS device in one hand and have color printouts of pictures of their destination and who would still say, "This can’t be the right place. Where are all the trash cans?" The fact that these pictures are panoramic also gave me an idea. Back when I was in school (shortly after the invention of the daguerreotype) they would sometimes have a class picture day when we’d all gather in the gym and a special camera would be used to take a picture of all of us that was a foot long and would only fit into a frame sold, amazingly, by the company that made the picture. Also, they could give us a great deal on some stereo equipment and a used car.

But I digress. Since they would actually turn the camera to get all of us into the shot a friend of mine decided to keep moving so in one of those pictures he shows up four times. Imagine if we did that while someone was out making panoramic photos of our neighborhoods. People would then see the pictures and say, "Hey, who’s that guy? There he is again! There is again…does he ever wear anything other than underwear?" If only we knew when they were coming to take the pictures we could do all kinds of crazy things like put scarecrows in our yards, or put up giant facades so our neighborhoods actually looked like downtown Paramaribo. (If you know where that is, give yourself five bonus points.) Just imagine the conversations of the guys in the van: one says, "Hey, this place looks familiar." And the other one says, "Right. When were you ever in Suriname?"

But I digress. Here’s a really crazy idea: take your house, apartment complex, condo, tipi, igloo, hut, hogan, lean-to, cottage, gazebo, bungalow, hostel, haunt, battleship, domain, bomb shelter, adobe dwelling, cave, or whatever you live in and move it two blocks down the street. Then in about six months move it back. Do this on a regular basis. Also, put your trash can out at weird times. Soon no one will be able to find your house, including you. But look on the bright side. You might end up living somewhere better than where you are now.

July 20, 2007

So the price of popcorn is going up, which is bad because already families have to take out a mortgage just to enjoy a night at the movies. And I don’t know about you but I just can’t fully enjoy a movie unless I have some popcorn, even though I usually finish it before the trailers are over. The reason the price of popcorn is going up is because so much corn is being turned into biofuel. It’s a bad trade off: the price of gasoline is, theoretically, going to go down because we’ll be putting corn in our tanks–as if anything could make the price of gas go down–but the price of popcorn will go up. So it’ll be cheaper to drive to the movies but more expensive unless we stick with Jordan almonds. Why don’t they take something no one likes and turn that into biofuel? How about brussels sprouts? And what is it about Belgium that, for such a small country, they’ve managed to produce the most vile vegetable known to man?

But I digress. It’s bad enough that corn, which can actually be pretty tasty, is being turned into something other than food. In fact it’s bad enough that for a long time corn hasn’t even been used as food for cows. Mad cow disease came from cows being fed chopped up cows, and not only was that a spectacularly bad idea but it’s no wonder cows went mad. If I were eating a burrito and someone told me it was made from my Aunt Doris I’d probably go around the bend too.

But I digress. The worst thing is that corn isn’t just being turned into biofuel: it’s being turned into corn syrup. What is corn syrup? It sounds like something you might put on corn like "pancake syrup", which makes it the second-most unappetizing term that starts with "corn". Corn syrup is in everything. It’s in soft drinks, salisbury steak, chicken fingers, and even some foods. I picked up a can of corn and corn syrup was one of the ingredients, down below partially hydrolyzed benthic decarbonathylenizene and red dye number 432. Here’s a wacky idea: stop putting corn syrup in everything and see if it can be used as fuel instead. I know there’s a possibility it might make cars stop running and then we’ll have to walk and we’ll end up with corns on our feet that can then be turned into biofuel.

But I digress. There must be something else that can be used to replace corn syrup. Maybe monosodium glutamate can do it, whatever the heck that stuff’s made from. Probably brussels sprouts.

July 13, 2007

Is it just me or are billboards a wonderful invention? Without them, for instance, we’d be subjected to pristine views of fields that haven’t yet been plowed under to make room for condos and office complexes, and we’d never be able to guess that there are fast food restaurants, hotels, antiques, last month’s rodeo and goat roast, next month’s flea market, strip malls, and strip clubs at the next exit because no one ever bothers to look at the smaller road signs the highway patrol uses to advertise those things.

Billboards are almost as great as restaurant marquees. Sometimes I think I’d like the job of putting signs on the marquees of restaurants. It seems like it would be pretty easy: just forget how to spell, and learn to replace letters like Q or E with the number 5. The best part if you get to spell out such exciting phrases as, "Try our smoky bacon cheeseburger. Its mokin." I actually saw that once, and, let me tell you, if you haven’t had a bacon cheeseburger that was mokin then you don’t know what you’re missing. Neither do I, for that matter. And it’s a job that gets you out in the open air, or at least out in the open smog.

Once when I was a teenager and staying at a friend’s house we discovered that somebody down the street had rented a marquee and parked it in a front yard. It was one of those that said, "Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s Forty", so we went down and changed it to say, "Sorry Dorky Hollywood Loft". Or at least we would have if we’d had access to a computer anagram generator. Or if we’d been overachieving dweebs, instead of just underachieving dweebs.

But I digress. Speaking of technology, is it just me or is the greatest new advance in technology the animated billboard? It is just me, isn’t it? Actually it’s not even me. The only person who’s really excited about the animated billboard is the local proctologist who uses them to show a commercial that shows off his skills as a ballroom dancer. I suppose that’s better than showing off his skills as a proctologist. If you don’t know what a proctologist does, by the way, I’m not going to tell you. Let’s just say that the feeling you get when a normal doctor hands you the bill is a feeling you’ll get twice when you visit the proctologist. But I digress. Animated billboards are really amazing because, no matter what they’re advertising, they all basically have the same message: "Driving isn’t complicated and dangerous enough already. Watch a commercial while you’re travelling at highway speed!"

July 6, 2007

In the good old days there were phones and there were movies, and the two were completely separate. For some reason they remained this way for centuries, even thousands of years, dating back to the time when phones were so primitive you had to put your finger in a circle with a number on it then turn a screw-like thing all the way around before going up on your rooftop to yell, "Hey Frank, what celebrities have been put in jail lately?" And then you and Frank could go and watch a movie starring the celebrities who were in jail, only those days the movie would be carved in stone. Then motion pictures were invented, allowing completely untalented people (like Frank, for instance) to earn salaries larger than the gross national products of smaller European countries.

But I digress. Now we’ve got phones that can play movies. This is the sort of news that makes you want to go up on your rooftop and dance naked. Not because you’re happy, but rather because you can now get someone to hold that phone and actually make a movie of you dancing naked on your roof that your phone can then send as a file to Frank who will pass it along to his agent who will pass it along to a free video site where "Man dancing naked on rooftop" will be viewed approximately one million times.

But I digress. The latest advance in phone technology is that, while in the good old days of, oh, a month ago, people had to press the same button on their number pad to "text" all-important messages like "WHERE R U UR L8", because taking twenty minutes and pressing the same button seventeen times is more efficient than calling someone and speaking to them or leaving a message, now new phones come with a tiny digital keyboard approximately the size of a post-it note. Gone are the old days of inefficient texting! Now all you need is your $500 phone, a needle, and a microscope! This advance is called an "upgrade", which is a very important word in technology. It combines two words, "up", meaning something that will eventually fall on you because you really had to stretch to put it on the top shelf, and "grade", meaning something you hated to get in school. But of course "upgrade" is a good thing. If you only learn one word of technologese, learn "upgrade". I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come upon a group of techie people talking about terabytes and file sharing and DOS and shocked them into impressed silence with my knowledge of "upgrade". And in case you’re wondering, "upgrade" means "thing you will spend three weeks learning how to break". Don’t worry, though, because you’ll have plenty of time to figure out how to use your new phone when you’re arrested and put in jail for dancing naked on your rooftop. Yes, it is true that non-celebrities can be put in jail, but, fortunately, that short video clip of you will be viewed so many times that you’ll become a celebrity, and believe me, there’s nothing more popular in jail than a naked dancing guy. I believe they call the jailing of such a person an upgrade.

June 29, 2007

I always have trouble when I want to mark an occasion or say something with a card. Don’t get me wrong–I have nothing against cards. I’ve gotten some very nice ones (the cat unrolling an entire roll of toilet paper is one of my favorites) and given a lot that pretty closely approximated what I wanted to say. The hardest part is finding the card in the first place because of all the categories: Holiday, Birthday, Congratulations, Anniversary, Condolence, Get Well, Thinking Of You, Blank, Belated Birthday, Belated Anniversary, Belated Blank, and then it breaks down into Funny, Serious, Religious, Funny Serious, From Both Of Us, From Just Me, From Them. The funny ones always have things on the outside like, "Congratulations on turning 39", and on the inside they say, "…for the fifth time!" Or they have a picture of a Mafia guy saying, "Have a whacky birthday…" on the outside, with the punchline, "…anybody who forgets it gets whacked!" Save that one for when you get the belated birthday cards.

And then there’s the anniversary card that, on the outside, says, "Darling, this year I’d like to take you somewhere you’ve never been…" You open it up expecting a tropical paradise or European capital and instead see, "The kitchen!" I think that one comes with complimentary divorce papers. Where do these come from? I imagine there’s a sweatshop full of retired performers from the Catskills who do nothing all day but sit around come up with these. Then there are the hunky, shirtless guy cards, which continue to be produced in spite of the fact that no woman will ever, in her life, buy or receive one of these cards, and the girl in a bikini cards that are produced solely for guys who have no wives or girlfriends and who, if they have friends who give them that kind of card, never will have wives or girlfriends. Where’s the section for the card I really want, though? Where’s the section for the card that says, "Please do not mistake my difficulty expressing myself for a lack of deep, sincere feelings for you. Here is a nicely designed piece of heavy paper that, I hope, will somewhat approximate the emotions I can’t quite verbalize." Where is that section? I guess that would be all of them.

June 22, 2007

There used to be a rule in advertising that sex sells, and sex is still being used to sell a few things, mainly liquor, motorcycles, potato chips, and body spray. Body spray, of course, is men’s cologne in an aerosol can. They could put it in one of those old-fashioned atomizers that snobby women used to keep in their breakfast vanities, but it’s manly to destroy the ozone layer. And the advertising for body spray always promises that, if you wear it, you will be attacked in the streets by strange women. They’ll tear down the walls of your house, throw cars at you, put you in the hospital, and eventually dig up your grave and do horrible things with pieces of your corpse, so it’s not hard to understand the incredible popularity of body spray for men.

But I digress. Advertising used to be pretty simple: two people having sex on a washing machine, for instance, but oddly enough that turned off a lot of consumers so advertising seemed to take up a new principle that surrealism sells. Two guys sitting in a car talking about the alphabet, for instance, is supposed to make you want to buy a root beer float, or a giant robot running down the street will convince you to buy aspirin. Then there’s the friendly-sell, like the commercial about the car salesman who drove three-thousand miles because some guy who lived on top of a mountain expressed an interest in one of the cars. I’m not sure what the message was there because, if someone drove three-thousand miles to sell me a car, I’d be afraid to buy it because then I’d have to drive him home.

Lately, though, advertising is taking on the scare tactic. For instance, there’s the commercial where a guy’s walking down the street and a homeless man asks him for some change. The guy says he doesn’t have any and walks on. Another homeless man asks him for some change. The guy says he doesn’t have any and walks on. Then his head explodes, and the words, YOU NEED LIFE INSURANCE NOW flash up on the screen. That’s not convincing me to buy life insurance–that’s just scaring me. That’s worse than the singing navels, or the two sumo wrestlers slamming into some poor guy from opposite directions. The scary commercials aren’t convincing me to buy anything. In fact they’re convincing me to leave the room whenever commercials come on. If they get any worse they might convince me to stop watching television. Now that’s really scary.