The blogger who laughs

"A king made me a clown! A queen made me a Peer! But first, God made me a man!"

--Gwynplaine, The Man Who Laughs

The Man Who Laughs was a book written by Victor Hugo in 1869 that was made into a silent film in 1928 that ironically you couldn't hear the man who laughs laughing. Not that he probably did much laughing. The main character, Gwynplaine, is the son of a lord who pisses off the king. The king has a permanent smile carved into Gwynplaine's face as punishment for his father's treachery and the boy is sold to gypsies who abandon him in a snow storm. He rescues a baby girl held in the frozen arms of her dead mother and is in turn rescued by a traveling vaudeville producer and eventually becomes a clown in the producer's sideshow.

The plot gets more and more complicated. The baby girl Gwynplaine rescued is blind. She grows up and falls in love with Gwynplaine oblivious to his hideous grin. And Gwynplaine is afraid to tell her about it for fear she will be repulsed and reject him (obviously they never kissed). I could go on and on unraveling the plot line, but you can google it for yourself if you are interested. I only bring it up because I stumbled across The Man Who Laughs while I was searching for an image of a sad clown for yesterday's post about singing the grays. Or more correctly I stumbled across a photograph of Conrad Veidt, the man who portrayed Gwynplaine in the movie. It was a pretty disturbing image. And interestingly enough it was the inspiration for the original Joker character in the Batman comics.

Life is pretty interesting like that. One minute you are searching for a photo of a sad clown and the next you are discovering an obscure 1928 silent film that spawned the Joker. And then you can't help but Photoshop your face on the image of the man who laughs.

Go figure. I guess I get the last laugh.

Blogger sings the grays

And I guess that's why they call it the blues

Time on my hands could be time spent with you

Laughing like children, living like lovers

Rolling like thunder under the covers

And I guess that's why they call it the blues

--Elton John, I guess that's why they call it the blues

If you really listen to Elton John's song, I guess that's why they call it the blues, you never really discover why they call it the blues. I was staring out of the train window this morning at a gray and rainy Monday morning and tried not to feel blue. But then it dawned on me that I was feeling blue because it was gray and not blue. So shouldn't they say you are feeling gray instead of blue?

"Feeling blue" is yet another idiom that we follow blindly as difficult to trace as why something is none of your beeswax. Ironically we can sing about "blue skys, nothing but blue skys" and be riding high with the bluebird of happiness on our shoulders and not be concerned that singing the blues is usually associated with the feeling you get when someone rips your heart out and plays ping pong with it.

I'm nominating gray as the new blue. Every time I would normally use the term blue to describe feeling depressed, I am committed to using the word gray in hopes that it will catch on and restore some sense of order to the universe. Once that is accomplished I will take on a few more of the things in life that don't make sense, like why Dancing with the Stars and American Idol are so popular. Both of those shows really make me feel gray. Not that I watch them. I am still proud to say I've never seen American Idol.  And I've only been in the room when my wife is watching Dancing with the Stars because she wanted to see Kate Gosselin dance. Kate and her ex husband are a couple of other things in the world that don't make sense.

And while I'm ranting about things that don't make sense, I want the people who made the Verizon wireless commercial about the mother throwing a pirate party for her kid and having a cowboy performer showing up know that when they say she has the "pirate paper plates" they are in fact showing plastic pirate plates. This is just wrong from a continuity standpoint and it totally throws off any credibility I could have for your 3 or 4 G network.

Not that I give Verizon any credit for anything. My experience with FIOS internet and television bundled with their telephone package is very similar to the experience I had purchasing Sea Monkeys as a child. I was heartbroken to discover that they weren't in fact monkeys and FIOS doesn't in fact offer high speed anything, especially high speed customer service. Even Magellan couldn't navigate their Web site and make his way to a customer service rep. If he did, they'd just give him a "thank you for your question about Verizon's wireless television spot. We are sorry you objected to the use of plastic pirate plates instead of paper ones. If you call our technical help line between the hours of  2 and 2:15 a.m. (GMT) one of our technicians from Bombay will schedule a time for a service rep to respond to you."

It will be once in a gray moon before I ever do business with Verizon again.

I don't care if it rains or freezes

I don't care if it rains or freezes,
long as I got my plastic Jesus
sitting on the dashboard of my car.
Comes in colors, pinks and pleasant
glows in the dark cause its iridescent,
take it with you when you travel far.
Get yourself a sweet Madonna,
dressed in rhinestone
sittin' on a pedestal of abalone shell.
Going ninety I ain't scary
cause I got the Virgin Mary
assuring me that I WONT GO TO HELL!!!


-Plastic Jesus (Cool Hand Luke version)

Just as there are books you must read to be considered well-read, there are movies you must see to be considered well-seen. Now granted not all of the "great" books are page turners, nor are all of the "great" films stuff that rivet you to your seat afraid to go to the bathroom for fear you'll miss a single scene. Part of this is due to the generational nature of "greatness" when it comes to books and films. For example, Moby Dick is on the must read list and Herman Melville was considered a rock star writer in his time. Now Moby Dick reads more like the technical manual from whaling textbook and makes a better doorstop than a great read.

I'm sure I am offending the English Lit majors of the world, but I don't count them as my target audience for this blog anyway and if any of them wander in here and read this I suggest that their break is over and they should get back to serving double tall, no foam decaff lattes at Starbucks with the rest of their English Lit brethren (and don't think I don't get the irony of the Starbucks reference in relation to Moby Dick).

I think great films stand a bit more of a chance to remain great when generations collide. Oh, there is a disadvantage that many of them are in black and white and can't compete with 3-D technicolor with surround sound and scratch and sniff technology. But some films just hang in there. Like Cool Hand Luke for instance. It probably is the greatest Paul Newman film there is. And since he is dead, there probably won't be a greater one. It is right up there with Steve McQueen's the Great Escape for great spit in the face of authority films.

Cool Hand Luke is one of those films you always find yourself quoting at odd moments. I mean there is no better quote than the warden of the southern chain gang prison (played by Strother Martin)  that Paul Newman is sentence to (for the terrible crime of cutting off the heads of parking meters with a pipe cutter) than "What we have here, is a failure to communicate."

There is the great hard boiled egg eating contest. And the memorable scene where Paul Newman strums a banjo while sitting on his prison bunk and softly sings his own version of Plastic Jesus. That my non-existent virtual friends is the definition of greatness.

Of course, the problem with randomly referencing bits and pieces of scene and dialogue from a film you saw for the first time in your youth is that, unless you are at your 30-year high school reunion, no one has a clue what you are talking about. I can say "What we have here is a failure to communicate" until I'm blue in the face and most of my younger co-workers just stare at me, blink and go back to texting. I get the same reaction when I say, "Badges, badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges" from Treasure of the Sierra Madre or "Is it safe," Sir Laurence Olivier's  great line from The Marathon Man.

I hate being thought of as THAT old man blathering on about how I used to be able to buy five candy bars for a quarter when I was a kid (which I could, btw). It is sad to have this database of archaic knowledge in my head and have people look at you like you are wearing spats and bowler hat (which were way before my time...I would be more of the Angel Flight suits and platform shoes generation).

Oh well, none of it matters anyway, as long as I have my plastic Jesus sitting here on my computer.

Gobbledygook

I found this great content analysis tool online called Gobbledygook Grader. You copy text into it and it "evaluates your written content (press release, brochure copy, etc.) and checks for use of gobbledygook, jargon, cliches and over-used, hype-filled words."

I decided to drop in my last post to see what my Gobbledygook quotient was. I was bit nervous when I hit the go button, but I was pleasantly surprised when the report generated gave me a score of 100 out of 100 and told me, "This release contains 0 words that are considered gobbledygook (they're overused and lack specific meaning)."

So it has officially been validated that I don't write gobbledygook after all! The report does say that anyone who reads my blog needs to have at least a 12th grade education to understand what I've written, so this explains why I don't get much traffic at my site.

To get a fair sample, I ran another test with a different post and scored a 97 out of 100 because I used one gobbledygook word: resonate. But to make up for it, you only need to have an 11th grade education to understand the post.

Another cool feature of the Gobbledygook Grader is that it creates something called a "Word Cloud." A word cloud graphically depicts word use frequency by displaying key words from your text in font size that relates to the number of times the word is used. The theory is that words related to the theme of what you are writing about should be bigger than other words. I was pleased to see the the biggest word in my first word cloud was train (the post was about my daily commute on the train). The biggest word on the second word cloud was "humor."  It was a post about my sense of humor.

I wish I had a badge to post on my blog now that certifies me Gobbledygook Free. But then people would probably misread it and assume I'm giving away free gobbledygook.

Communication is such a fragile thing.

Off the beaten tracks

You see the world from a different perspective commuting by train. Commuter trains use tracks that were built for freight trains. They usually exist on the alleyways of cities, following the path of least resistance carved out a century or so ago by near slave labor. You slip in and out of the city via the back door.

My train enters and exits the city via a mile long tunnel dug at the turn of the century through the heart of Seattle. It is a time portal free of cell phone signals and light. Your only view is your own reflection in the window. You pass through it in silence wondering vaguely if you'll ever exit. But the squeal of brakes and dim light snap that morbid fantasy as you pop out the other side squeezed between garbage strewn embankments and the windowless walls of the backs of waterfront buildings.

I am lucky though in my commute. My train travels north of the city on tracks that follow the shoreline to avoid Seattle's many hills. It passes through train yards filled with acres of waiting freight cars tagged with faded graffiti. Strangely there are no people in the train yards, only ghosts of hobos and train tramps avoiding bulls or cinder dicks bent on busting heads.

The train passes through the yards and past an armory with army vehicles that look as though they've never moved in decades. And then the train passes through a valley sorts, lined by wilderness shielding the manicured suburbs from the tracks. The wilderness is broken by the occasional overpass. On some mornings you can see shapeless bundles of transients zipped into sleeping bags sleeping cave dweller like under the top edge of the overpass.

The train approaches the locks and passes over a bridge over the waterway that connects Lake Union with the Sound. Occasionally the train must stop and wait for the drawbridge to lower after letting an expensive sailboat pass through. The Iron Horse, especially one simply conveying freight that talks, is no match for rich men's toys.

After passing through a few more miles of wild terrain outside of Ballard, the tracks run past marina's, parks and then simply relatively untouched coastline to the west. To the east modest houses with expensive views perch shoulder to shoulder on cliffs. They have traded the security of a backyard for a water view that could turn into beach front given heavy enough rains and a strategic mudslide.

During cruise season, the train races Alaska bound ships sporting tourists from the East coast and Asia marveling at the scenery that I get to see every day (sans an expensive drink with a paper parasol stuck in a pineapple chunk hanging on the glass rim). Cranes standing on one leg, stare at the cruise ships, keeping their backs to the train. They seem more comfortable with strange things that live on the water than the noisy line of metal that passes by four times in the morning and four times in the evening.

At points you are so close to the shoreline that you can imagine that the train is gliding on the water barely inches from the tips of bald eagles patrolling the shores. During times of high winds the spray of the sound actually splashes against the window, adding to the illusion.

I know my commute is drawing to a close as we pass under a pedestrian overpass that bridges a parking lot and Saltwater Park. Then we pass a few houses that have migrated from the cliffs to the beach front on the west side of the tracks. Finally we pass an oil facility that has somehow managed to take ugly hold on a portion of the land just past the City of Shoreline and just before the City of Edmonds. Two minutes later we roll past a dog park, a marina and some waterfront restaurants and glide into the station.

I love this commute.

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade, even if you are allergic to lemons

I don't know why I am a "glass is half empty" kind of guy. I suppose part of it is because it is more amusing to make fun of the dark side of life than the bright side. There are very few successful stand up comedians who make a living dwelling on the positive.

Not that I am a stand up comedian. I fancy myself a pessimistic humorist with lugubrious tendencies. And other than annoying co-workers in the hallway, I confine my humor to writing. So I don't do stand up. I do sit down. I'm a lugubrious sit down pessimistic humorist. It's my niche and I'm carving it as deep as I can.

I wrote my first lugubrious sit down pessimistic humor piece in a junior high school creative writing course. It was about the time I tried shaving for the first time so there may be some connection there. It was an essay called, "How to survive in a school cafeteria." It was a bit amateurish. But I was only in the 8th grade. I don't recall exactly how it went, but the gist was that you don't piss off school cooks or essentially you'll never get another unbroken taco at lunchtime. Apparently this resonated with some of the school cooks at my junior high school because they cut the essay out of the creative writing class book we published and taped it up in the school kitchen.

I never did get another unbroken taco in junior high school.

I didn't write much humor in high school except for a few scathing letters to the school paper dissing on the student body government. I did write a few lugubrious short stories and some very maudlin poems. I think this prerequisite for a teenager.

It wasn't until I was in college writing for the school paper as a journalism major that I started writing humor again. I even had my own humor column. Ironically the arts and entertainment editor rejected my first piece about how awful the food service was in the dorm cafeteria (sound familiar). The first column I got published was one about "saving the slugs" on campus. The Pacific Northwest is infamous for disgustingly huge slugs that would race across the sidewalks on my college campus at...well a slugs pace. Inevitably they would be stepped on and you'd see these gross slug carcasses spotting the sidewalks on your way to class. Someone scrawled "Save the Slugs" on a wall on campus. Thus the inspiration for my column about a movement to save the slugs.

It was a classic.

I wrote my humor column for two years until I graduated. And though I had a small cult following on campus, the chairman of the Journalism Department never recognized my humor writing as a marketable skill and frequently urged me to focus on "straight" journalism. I eventually did hone my ability to write boring crap to survive, but I never lost my love of pessimistic humor with a side of lugubriousness.

So you can see where blogging saved my soul. I was able to fulfill my dream that I had when I graduated from college to become a humor columnist and prove my Journalism Chairman was wrong. Well, technically I'm not a columnist and my dream involved actually making a living writing this way. So fortunately I have a day job.

So I like to think of the lemon as half full.

To shave, or not to shave (a post about beards, not bards)

I think I was in Junior High when I shaved for the first time. Not that I needed to, mind you. I probably nicked more pimples than whiskers during that first shave. It just seemed such a rite of passage to me. Having facial hair meant I was a manly man. In retrospect, it just meant I would have to make a decision every day for the rest of my life whether to shave or not to shave.

I have made it very clear in many posts that I am not a fan of repetitive, mundane tasks like making the bed, mowing the lawn or changing my underwear. There is something very Sisyphean about shaving. Once you start, your only choices are to keep shaving or grow a beard. Most of my adult life I have chosen the latter. Now granted in my younger days it was fairly sparse and pitiful looking, but I grew it none the less.

I started with a mustache that pretty much looked like I'd stuck a false eyelash on my lip. By college I tried growing a full beard. And by "full beard" I mean I allowed the eyelash to multiply on my chin line. I cringe when I look at photos of my beard back then.

I gave up on the beard for a few years, cursing my DNA for not giving me the ability to grow a beard of ZZ Top proportions if I wanted to. I think it was some time in the late 80s or the early 90s that I jumped on the goatee bandwagon. I was starting to lose the thin face of my youth and I deluded myself that a goatee would help mask my double chin. Again, photos from that era proved just the opposite. I might as well painted a neon arrow on my chin pointing out the extra ones.

Finally, to mix it up, I just let my beard grow out. Aging may not have given me the ability to go full Grizzly Adams, but I could finally grow a beard that didn't totally look like moss on the north side of a tree. I kept the beard for several years, shaved it off briefly when I got married five years ago, then grew it back. A few months ago, I shaved it off again on impulse. Several weeks later, my daughter was sitting on my lap and asked me, "Daddy, what is wrong with your face?"

So last week I started growing my beard again. I had forgotten the awkward stages of growing a beard. You have to go through this period where people look at you as if you just stepped out of Skid Row and are going to harass them for spare change. I have to say I have made about $2.75 just walking from the train to work.

Last night when I got home from work, my daughter looked up at me and asked, "Daddy, what is wrong with your face, why are you not shaving?"  I just shook my head.

I have to admit that I feel more comfortable with a beard. Whether or not it hides my double chins, it is kind of like wearing a mask. I also like the feel of it. I like compulsively scratching my chin like Gabby Hayes and muttering, "Dag nab it." (Anyone under 50 will have to Google that reference) I like being in good company with great men throughout history who have sported beards like Lincoln, Van Gogh, Freud, Blackbeard the Pirate and Bluto from Popeye.

And best of all, I think my beard makes me look like that guy on the Dos Equis commercials who is billed as the most interesting man in the world.

Stay thirsty my friends.

Full moon over my hammies

I still get a kick out of knowing it is a full moon without seeing that it is a full moon. Living in the perpetually cloudy Pacific Northwest makes moon intuition even more important. Because in some months you never see the sky let alone the moon.

I sense the moon more through the behavior of others rather than myself. The crack heads and screamers on the streets in downtown Seattle seem more agitated and vocal than usual. Oh the scientists will tell you it is a myth that the moon affects behavior, but I base my belief on observation, not rote statistics. The nuts get nuttier when there is full moon. And the "normal" go nuts.

As an interesting side note, I can't find anything on the Internet explaining how the phrase, "going nuts" evolved into a synonym for going crazy. I suppose it has something to do with a nut being cracked open. And when a person's normal facade gets cracked open you get a glimpse of the nut inside. That's the best I can come up with because the phrase is a hard nut to crack.

I crack me up sometimes.

But I digress.

Does the moon really affect how we act? It makes sense to me that it could. Because if the gravitational pull of the moon can affect the ocean in the form of high and low tides, is it that much of a stretch that it could affect a creature who is largely made up of fluids? Couldn't the moon's gravity sucking on our brains trigger out of the ordinary behavior? Or am I pinning a bad rap on the big rock in the sky that is only noticeable because it reflects the light of the sun?

I know my kids have been acted moonstruck for the past few days. I came downstairs last night after putting my daughter to bed and immediately looked out the kitchen window to try and get a glimpse of the moon. Sure enough it was there grinning it's lunatic grin at me in almost its full glory as it literally mooned me. I didn't need any other explanation for why it took two hours to get her to fall asleep in between discussions of wanting ET to come visit her. She has never seen the movie. It had to be the full moon.

And speaking of odd behavior, you might be wondering what is the genesis of the image at the top of this post. Well, when I was thinking about how the moon triggers odd things, I wondered if this was the source of the werewolf myths (you know, full moon turning people bit by wolves into werewolves). Then I started wondering why there were just werewolves. Why weren't there other animals that people turn into at the full moon? Why not werecats, wererats, werecows or weresheep? And since hogs were still on my mind from yesterday's post, I started wondering why there weren't any werehogs or werepigs. That made me think about Denny's and their Moon Over My Hammies breakfast sandwich that I'm sure the makers of Lipitor and Crestor idolize.

I think you see where the image came from. Blame it on the full moon.

His corn and his hogs

My father used to say things like, "Them's his corn and his hogs." I would generally just stare at him blankly and go back to watching television. If I thought about it at all, I just assumed he was saying that if your neighbor's hogs had gotten loose in his own corn field then it was basically his problem and not yours. I figured it was his own version of Voltaire's "cultivate your own garden" quote.

To this day, I really don't know if that is what my father really meant when he said "Them's his corn and his hogs." I do catch myself interjecting it into conversations now and then just to enjoy the blank stares and puzzled looks.

But knowing that Google knows everything, I Googled the phrase expecting to get page after page explaining the origins of the idiom. And near as I can figure, the idiom doesn't exist. Which leaves me with this amazing revelation that, in a world where there isn't any original thought, my father had one. Or he was just messing with my mind.

I did discover that there is quite the relationship between hogs and corn. Apparently there was a practice called "hogging off" a field where the farmer would harvest corn by turning pigs loose in a cornfield in the fall. I'm a bit unclear whether this meant the hogs would get fattened up this way or merely eat the corn stalks leaving the ears of corn for the farmer to pick up. I'm betting on the former.

Regardless, this is where my father could have picked up the phrase. Though he never really lived on a farm. His parents did raise chickens though. So I am surprised that he didn't say "them's his corn and his chickens." He never really talked about chickens at all come to think of it.

He did say something about "zapping when he should have zipped" or visa versus. I always assumed that had something to do with sex, but again, a Google search shows that once again my father was the creator of his very own idiom. That's two. And here I struggle to come up with a blog post title that 3 million other people haven't already used.

My father did use the phrase "none of your beeswax" a lot, too. I know he didn't come up with that one. I Googled it and it has been used a great deal. No one really knows what it means, however, other than being a nonsensical way of telling someone to mind their own business. Some sources claimed it was first used in 1925 in the Broadway musical, "No No Nanette." But it doesn't explain why something isn't someone else's "beeswax." I would think "it's none of your earwax" makes more sense.

Anyway, I think I will create my own hybrid idiom based on my father's idioms stirred together with a bit of beeswax. Here goes, "Them's his cornwax and his hogs zapping when they should have zipped." Whew hoo! In a few days, after the Googlebots have searched through my blog, they'll find that gem and I will be the one and only reference anyone will find!

I am so proud.

Stop me before I watch the Spike Network again

Not a week since I admitted I'd watched several episodes of the Deadliest Warrior and I'm back confessing that  I lifted up the black curtain of the Spike Network and watched another scab picker of a program: 1000 Ways to Die. It is a docu-drama type show that reenacts incredibly stupid ways people have died. It is dedicated to proving Darwin was correct.

I didn't mean to watch this program. But once again I was on the elliptical machine with the lousy cable selection at my gym scanning through trash television for something to distract me from my eight miles on the machine. And there it was, a guy chugging beer driving a steamroller round and round until he needs to relieve himself. He hops off the steamroller and goes into a Honeybucket (a port-o-potty to some). Kicker is he forgets to put the brakes on the steamroller. It proceeds to gather steam and rolls over the Honeybucket, crushing the idiot. And as if it weren't enough to show a graphic reenactment of this stupidity, SPIKE brings in a medical specialist to describe in great detail what it would look and feel like to be inside a port-o-potty when a steamroller flattens it (and you).

The show proceeds to with its macabre countdown with a moronic narrator scripted with some of the worst puns I've ever heard (and I realize that is ironic coming from me). For example, referring to the guy killed by the steamroller who had consumed two six packs of beer before the accident, the narrator says something to the effect of "This beer drinking binge left him flat." I wonder if I can get a job as a scriptwriter for the show.

So I watched a half hour of people's lives ending in stupid ways: two drunks hijacking a giant hamster ball and rolling off a cliff, a nagging wife electrocuted running a lawnmower over an arch welder power cord, a stowaway freezing to death in the cargo hold of an airplane and bank foreclosure officer shooting in an Army/Navy surplus himself in the forehead with a .22 caliber pistol disguised as a ballpoint pen (while he was serving the store owner with a foreclosure notice.

I am so ashamed. But I did have enough willpower to switch channels when the next reality program came on: Jail. I couldn't take watching another 30-minutes of human wreckage being booked into holding cells in Portland, Oregon. I do have some standards.

Bird Bullies

I was standing at the train platform this morning in my usual spot thankful that it is Friday and I'll get two mornings where I can sleep in until 6 a.m. instead of the usual 5:45 a.m. (I have two small children) when I noticed a crow behaving oddly. I suppose it is redundant to say a crow is behaving oddly. Crows are pretty odd birds to begin with.

I say it was a crow, but it could have been a raven. They look alike to me. I realize that is probably being a birdist, but hey, they are all big, black birds. Oh, I know  a raven is supposed to be bigger than a crow, but you can also run across lots of big crows.

But I digress.

Anyway, this big black bird was circling around a telephone pole. Or maybe it was a power pole because I think they put all of the fiber optics lines that telephones use underground these days. I'm not certain why they don't do the same with power lines.

But back to the crow (or raven). It would circle around the pole and then swoop down at this big seagull sitting on the pole. I am certain it was a seagull because they are pretty hard to mistake for any other bird. And I read Johnathan Livingston Seagull and saw the movie. I don't think the movie was as good as the book, though.

This seagull was about twice the size of the crow. But still this crow flies round and round and swoops in at the seagull on each loop. It was like the crow was playing chicken with the seagull. Just to clarify this, the crow wasn't acting like a chicken, he was playing chicken. Though I don't know why they call it "playing chicken." I can honestly say I've never seen chickens running at each other to see which one will swerve out of the way first. And are chickens really "chicken?" If they were, they wouldn't always be crossing roads, now would they?

But the crow was obviously targeting this poor seagull who finally had enough and flew off from the pole. And I'll be darned if the crow didn't chase it. I watched them do dog fight maneuvers above the waterfront. Though I don't know why an air battle got to be known as a dog fight since I've never seen a flying dog.  Anyway, this crow didn't let up and I watched him badger (another odd animal phrase that makes no sense if you really think about it because a badger is the last thing you'd want to annoy) the poor seagull until I lost sight of them behind the senior center that is located across the street from the train station.

While this was all going on there were several other seagulls gliding around doing whatever it is that seagulls do. But not one of them paid any attention to the crow harassing the seagull. You would think they would have said to each other, "Hey, that crow is picking on Waldo. Let's go kick his crow butt." But no. None of them lifted a feather to help.

So it got me to think, what recourse do birds have when they encounter bird bullies? There aren't any bird police or bird lawyers that I know of. They can't file bird restraining orders or no fly zone writs. They are just pretty much SOL.

I thought about this for awhile. Then my train came.

Forgive me father for I have watched the Deadliest Warrior on the Spike Network

If you are unfamiliar with the Spike Network, it is a cable based network that, near as I can tell, only broadcasts testosterone laced programming. The only time I watch it is when I am at the gym and can't bear to watch another episode of the Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network or stomach back to back episodes of King of Queens. My gym only springs for basic, basic cable so there isn't much to choose from.

Anyway, normally I will watch a program called the Unit, a series about a covert military unit that only deals in black ops. It deals with the day to day family lives of men trained to rip your head off and crap down the hole. Woven in with the mundane assassinations and blowing up foreign capitols is the subplot of the wives of the men in the Unit. It is riveting.

But I digress.

The other day the Unit wasn't on. What was on was a series called the Deadliest Warrior. The premise of this reality show is that members of a group called the Fight Club team up with scientists to analyze in great depth what the outcome would be if famous warriors from different eras in history were pitted against each other. For example what would happen if an Apache warrior ran into a Roman Gladiator at a bar and got into a dispute over peanut shells? Or who would win a belly bumping contest, a Samurai or a Viking?

The scary thing about this show is that there is a group called the Fight Club and that they get to play with sharp objects. This is role playing and historical reenactment on steroids. These guys hack away and club anatomically correct dummies and then ooh and ahhh at the wounds they've inflicted. Then they smack each other on the butt and fist butt a lot. It is totally whacked.

But I watched back to back episodes. Just in case you are curious, an Apache warrior can whoop a gladiator (but I bet not Spartacus) and a Samurai has the upper hand when fighting a Viking. The show determines this by inputting the data gathered as the fight club hacks up the dummies with the appropriate weapons for the appropriate warrior. They then run a computer program that averages the number of times either genre of warrior would win. The show then recreates the ultimate showdown battle an reveals which warrior wins.

It is pitiful that I watch this and kind of enjoy it.

BTW, a ninja can beat a Spartan by throwing ground glass in his eyes. I don't think this is very sportsmanlike.

If only you thought like me and not like you

Is it possible to think exactly like someone else? Or do we hear what we want to hear coming out from an other's mouth and let our brain Spackle over the cracks of our differences until we truly believe another thinks like us?

I believe we can have similar thoughts, but none of us really think the same about everything. And that is the boogie man in the closet when it comes to communicating with others. Actually it is the boogie man in the closet when it comes to communicating with ourselves.

How many times do you catch yourself thinking, "I can't believe ___ does (or thinks or believes) ____." I think that all the time. But lately I've been catching myself and reminding myself that other people act and think the way they do because they aren't me. All of the iterations of life experience and environment that influence how people think have got to make each individuals' thought patterns as unique as their fingerprints. It is a miracle that any of us think the same about anything.

This helps me understand the incomprehensible like why anyone would become a Republican or a born again Christian. Well, at least it helps me accept it. The problem is, I observe that many people who lock their thinking into a pretty extreme thinking pattern (like being a Republican or born again Christian) firmly believe at that point that that is the only possible way to think and they shut out any possibility that any other viewpoint could be valid.

This realization also helps me understand how my old friend Siddhartha could achieve enlightenment and then have difficulty sharing it with others. Siddhartha's path to enlightenment was woven with his own unique thought patterns. Most of us would have simply sat under the tree with the best intentions of sitting there until we were enlightened, but given up when we began hallucinating about a BLT sandwich. Even Buddha's step-by-step instructions would be more or less useless since they only documented his path to enlightenment based on his viewpoint.

Oh, I suppose you argue that by being enlightened, the Buddha had stepped out of his individual viewpoint and was looking at things from a universal point of view (points of view?). But still, the people he was trying to teach were still stuck in their own private Idaho mindset.

It reminds me of my experience with mathematics. I have never been particularly enamored with numbers. I can deal with them, but I don't get all euphoric when trying to calculate pi to the nth decimal. But because I was better than average in a normal math class in school, I was placed in advanced math classes in junior high.  I went from being the head of my class in regular math to the village idiot in advanced math. By the time I was in high school, I was floundering around in advanced calculus like a banjo playing hillbilly in a French cafe trying to order lunch. I didn't understand  a word that was being said to me. At one point after coming in before class for some tutoring from the calculus teacher, she simply shook her head and patted me on the arm.

This experience taught me several things. First, it is better to be the best amongst the worst than the worst amongst the best. Second, I would never become a physicist. Third, if you don't speak a particular language well or at all, speaking louder and louder doesn't really make a difference. Finally, my brain is not hardwired for advance mathematical calculations. I simply don't think the same way as mathematicians. But conversely, they don't think the same way as me. So to coexist we simply have to acknowledge that and continue living in our parallel universes tolerating each other but not really understanding each other.

I have always prided myself as having a pretty good sense of humor. So the realization that none of us think and see the world exactly in the same way cuts deeply into my own sense of my sense of humor. I have to accept that sometimes a whoopee cushion is just a whoopee cushion and that what cracks me up often confuses others.

Which leads to my daughter's favorite joke: Why did the chicken cross the playground?
Answer: To get to the other slide.

I think it is kind of funny, too.

Divine rituals of the daily routine

My children remind me of the importance of ritual that stems from daily routines. If things don't happen in pretty much the same way every morning, there is a ripple in the force that turns into a Tsunami by their bedtime. Sometimes it is the ruts that keep us on track.

It is not that I don't like variety. But there is something soothing about sameness uninterrupted by the unexpected. As a public transit commuter, I take the same train at the same time every day and try to sit in the same car (if not the same seat) for each trip. I follow the same path from the train station to my office and turn on the lights in my office in more or less the same pattern each day.

My rituals are not so rigid that I would classify myself as OCD, but they are fixed enough that I get agitated if they are disrupted. For example if for some reason I can not take my usual train home because of a meeting and have to take a later train it snowballs into a major routine shift that messes with my psyche. For one it puts my ritual stop at the gym on the way home from the train station in jeopardy. I must then decide whether to skip the workout (which messes with another ongoing routine), cut it short (which reduces the effectiveness of the routine) or workout as long and then mess up the routine at home with my children (which ripples into the dinner and bedtime rituals they are ingrained in).

Everything is connected.

I know rationally that there is no cause and effective connection between the rituals of routine and reality. Stepping on a crack really doesn't break your mother's back, but who wants to do it intentionally just in case there is something to it? We learn as children that there is magic in ritual. You get a good grade on a test because you had your lucky rock in your pocket, not because you studied or have a good memory.

Churches know there is magic in ritual. It bolsters faith much more than miracles. And even miracles usually have their root in ritual or routine.

There is even routine to how I break up my routine. For example, I alternate the color clothing I wear from day to day. If I wear black slacks and shoes one day, I need to wear brown the next. I have one belt, but it is reversible black and brown.

Television is fraught with ritual and routine. How many people build their schedules around a favorite program? Okay, DVRs are changing that, but still you need to record "your shows" and watch them at "your time" to find that peace that a routine provides.

Movies, television and books repeat the same plots over and over because that is what comforts people. Villains lose and heroes win. If some rebel writer comes along and reverses the role, they are merely following the ritual of rebellion. Doing the opposite of a routine is simply another routine. Being consciously different is the no different than being subconsciously the same.

Perhaps it is nature that is the source of our need for ritual and routine. Everything in nature comes in waves and patterns that repeat and cycle like clockwork. Don't get me started on Fibonacci numbers (a numbering system based on the rate at which rabbits reproduce). Perhaps our daily routines and rituals are our macroscopic mimicking of the microscopic world of the atom and subatomic particles. We are pulled along the orbit of our lives by the gravity of our routines.

So give us this day, our daily routine and forgive us our rituals. For they etched on our DNA and keep us going down that middle road I've been harping on, to enlightenment.

Show us the Facebook you had before you were blogging

I have begun to think that blogging is my middle road to enlightenment. In August, I will have been hiking this path for six years. That is about the time it took my good friend Siddhartha to flick the switch on his enlightenment. So I imagine mine is just about to shine as well. That is, if I don't get distracted by some bright and shiny object along the way. After all, I do like my digressions.

I find it interesting that we always associate light with spiritual awakening. Yet we shut our eyes when we meditate. Personally, I do my best thinking in the dark. For the past three years I've had plenty of time at night to think while I sit in the rocking chair in my daughter's room waiting for her to fall asleep. It is a very peaceful time as I listen to the same lullaby CD over and over and watch the colors of the night light fade in and out. The white noise of a fan we keep on to help lull our dear one to sleep adds to the reflective atmosphere.

Sitting there is a rare opportunity to be still. But even as my body sits still, my mind races. It is so much harder to still the brain than it is the body. Thoughts shriek at the speed of light (there's the light again), refiring synapses of long forgotten memories and moments and trying to piece together meaning out of the fragments of my life.

I suppose the fragments are the meaning. I think that is what the Buddha was saying. Buddhism doesn't have a creation story or an afterlife. They aren't relevant to the now. I suppose that makes sense. If you always live in the past or live for the future, you are going to miss what is happening right now. And that is a great loss. You can never regain the now.

I am beginning to sound like a fortune cookie, which I posit was the inspiration for Twitter. Both impose a limit on imparting wisdom in 140 characters or less. Not that there is much wisdom imparted by Twitter.

There I go digressing again.

This entire discussion has made me think of the lyrics to a Beatles song: "I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in, and stops my mind from wandering. Where it will go. Where it will go." It is okay for the mind to wander as long as it eventually finds its way home.

Do you suppose that is what Siddhartha's mind was doing while he sat under the tree pondering enlightenment? Was it wandering through the invisible ties that connect everyone and everything? It is said that he was able to uncover every memory of every life he had ever lived. Did he tap into the time space continuum and surf the fourth dimension?

I think of that fourth dimension when I run on the treadmill. I think about folding time in half and then quarters. I force myself not to look at the timer. Because the minute I look at a clock, time unfolds and becomes heavy again. And then the heaviness seeps into my feet and the workout becomes a burden again.

Once again the treadmill becomes my symbol for trying to understand something that perhaps can't be understood. Or more accurately, can't be put into words. A treadmill to me is the sound of one foot running. It is so unlike running outside. Oddly enough I prefer it to running outside. I find it more difficult to fold time outdoors because there are so many distractions...traffic lights, dogs barking, traffic, rain, hills, puddles...third dimensional things. The treadmill is a constant, middle of the road running of the mind.

Oh well, enough sitting under the tree for now. Perhaps if I keep this up I'll have achieved enlightenment by my six year blog anniversary.

But then what will I do?

On the treadmill to Nirvana (not the musical group)

I was at the club jogging on the treadmill on Sunday. Normally, I like to watch the Food Network while I workout and stare at the food I am not supposed to enjoy anymore. The Food Network programming has enough commercial breaks spaced evenly throughout their programs that I can usually judge how much time I have left in my workout without staring obsessively at the timer on the machine. Unfortunately there wasn't anything appetizing on the Food Network so I ended up watching a PBS program about Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the original Buddha.

This turned into a challenge for me on more than one level. First it was PBS and there were no commercial breaks so I had no point of reference for how long I had left in my hour-long jog. Second, I had to suppress a certain amount of guilt at thinking I was suffering by jogging six miles when Siddhartha was pretty much spending years hanging upside down on trees, sleeping on nails and eating a grain of rice a day. Then there was the whole enlightenment thing.

I am no newcomer to Buddhist teaching. Of all organized religions, I think it comes closest to capturing my imagination. I even spent a couple of years as a Buddhist. It was a more radical sect that I joined to impress a woman I was dating at the time. I stopped being that particular brand of Buddhist after I stopped seeing the woman and after I became annoyed that all these Buddhist's seem to do was chant for stuff. The woman that talked me into joining was a starving artist and was convinced she had chanted a new car into her life. I kept thinking at the time if she had chanted a new car into her life she might have chanted for a nicer one. But I guess the Buddha gives to the needy, not the greedy.

Regardless, I don't think chanting for material things is technically Buddhism. The PBS program confirmed my suspicions. After being born into a privileged and sheltered life as a Prince, Siddhartha discovered that suffering (in the form of disease, aging and death) existed in the world. Then he set out to figure out a way to overcome that endless cycle of suffering. He tried out a couple of gurus. Although he was an excellent student, he still didn't feel as though he was any closer to his goal of overcoming suffering. So he tried asceticism (a path of self-deprivation that is supposed to lead to spirituality) and meditation. Still no enlightenment.

Finally Siddhartha decided that mega starvation diets, not bathing, eating or sleeping was too extreme for achieving enlightenment. He accepted a bowl of rice pudding from a local maiden and decided life looked better on a full stomach. He then chose the "middle ground" a moderate path to enlightenment that didn't require extreme indulgence or deprivation. He simply sat under a tree until the truth came to him.

And what was the truth? Where there were actually four of them. First, there is suffering (which is what started him down the whole spiritual path in the first place). Second, there is a cause for the suffering (we having cravings for lots of crap we don't really need). Third, it is possible to eliminate suffering by eliminating our cravings for crap. This is called achieving Nirvana (again, not the music group). Finally, there are eight things you need in order to achieve Nirvana and not crave for crap any more:right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood,right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

Okay, I was okay with the first three truths (knowing there is suffering, knowing what causes it and knowing it is possible to over come it). But I got annoyed that the fourth truth tacked on another eight things that in turn probably come with lots of conditions, foot notes and legal disclaimers. I think what I need is a copy of Enlightenment for Dummies.

What I did glean from my 60-minute immersion into the birth of Buddhism on PBS was that after Siddhartha became enlightened and the Buddha, he simply learned to accept where, when, what and who he was at the moment. And that you get there by not being miserable by not having what you don't have (and probably really don't need). This contradicts the very nature of what I as a marketing person do for a living: convincing people they truly need what they do not have and when they get it they need much more of it.

Does that make me an anti-Buddha?

After my six-mile jog on the treadmill to enlightenment, I sat in the locker room pondering some of things I'd absorbed during my workout. When you run on a treadmill while seeking that path of enlightenment you definitely are forced to stay on the middle ground or you'll fly off the thing. And once you are through with your workout, the suffering subsides as well. I do believe the Buddhist concept that we are all the Buddha and that everything is connected (though there were a few fat, hairy men in the locker room that I don't enjoy the thought of being connected to in any fashion).

I also believe that I sweat a disproportionate amount for a person of my size even though I had just ran for an hour.

Days of our blog

I woke up this morning thinking it was Thursday. I was quite bummed by the fact. It wasn't until I got to work and e-mailed someone who doesn't work on Fridays and got their out-of-office message that I finally realized it was actually Friday.

Now I am bummed that it is casual Friday and I am not wearing jeans. I'm tempted to whip off my slacks and lounge around in my boxer briefs. But no one needs to see that. It even conjures up a mental image that creeps me out.

And why do they call them slacks when you have to wear them to work? Shouldn't they be called works?

But I digress.

I wondered why this week was dragging. So the little crack in my space time continuum has been spackled and my body clock can speed back up to Friday mode. Not that I feel much like speeding up anything. The cold I got from my kids has worked its way into a nasty little sinus infection. They feel so raw that if you turned my face inside out, I'd look like Freddie Kruger's stunt double.

I am not sure what the purpose of a sinus is other than to function as a snot cistern when I have a cold or an infection. I'm sure that is another mental image no one needed after picturing me sitting around in my boxer briefs.

Back to more pleasant but still mundane topics. I am still dabbling with Foursquare, the odd social networking site that allows "friends" to track your whereabouts when you check in via your phone with a Foursquare app. It appeals to my obsessive nature to accumulate things. Because the more you check in, the more points you get. I am the "mayor" of about eight places now because I have checked in the most at those places. One of them was the gym I work out in. I even got a "gym rat" award for checking in there so much.

Up until yesterday, I didn't have any "friends" on Foursquare. One I don't really know anyone who would bother to use Foursquare and two, I was embarrassed to invite any friends I know to join because frankly I don't like the idea of them knowing where I am all the time. Regardless, some stranger sent me a notice saying he wanted to be one of my friends. At first it kind of creeped me out the way it would if Idaho Senator Larry Craig was in the stall next to mine in the men's room tapping his foot at me. But then I decided to go ahead and accept the invitation.  Apparently the guy takes the same train as I do to and from work. It is a weird social network.

I'm also still Twittering away thinking it may drive some more traffic to my blog. Why I care at this point whether anyone comes to my blog is beyond me. And it hasn't really worked anyway. The only people who seem to follow me on Twitter are ones who want to send me hot, sexy photos of them if I pay for a password. I'm tempted to offer to exchange photos of me sitting in my office in my boxer briefs with them just to teach them not to be nasty spammers. But my luck they would end up in some other spammer scheme to sell photos of middle aged men in boxer briefs via some Web site. Then some of my Facebook friends who actually know me might end up seeing them and unfriend me.

Social media can be a complicated thing. Maybe I should have called this post, "As the Blog turns."

The Great Composters!

I don't really have strong feelings one way or the other about composting. I was just staring at the compost bin in the kitchen at our office and I had this idea for a great ad campaign for some composter company that could use images of great classical composers hawking composters as "the Great Composters." 

I mean Beetoven is a natural for a compost ad:

Few people know that Ludwig Van BEEToven was one of the world's great composters as well as a great composer. And if he were alive today, he'd tell you that our new Slopco Great Composters line is one classical composter. 

Today's composting hint: Beets are fully compostable. But Beetoven's Fifth Movement isn't.

I come up with enough pearls like these in any given day to string several impressive necklaces, but so far my genius flys pretty far under the radar. Case in point was my idea for the Crockpot Restaurant. I can't wait for that concept to heat up.

Sometimes when I blog I feel like I'm just shuffling around in an old robe, muttering to myself and opening cans of cat food.

But I digress.

Although I am in marketing, I really wish I'd pursued a career path early on as a copywriter at an ad agency. Of course if I had, I'd probably be standing in an unemployment line muttering to myself and wondering why I'd been replaced by some hotshot young copywriter who could tweet award winning copy in 140 characters or less while I was whipping out gems like "The Great Composters."

I suppose we follow the meandering paths through life for a reason.

Hey is for horses and other idiotic idioms

 I tried Googling this idiom and got various versions including, "Hay is for horses, and sometimes cows, pigs would eat it if they just knew how." But I'd always remembered it as "Hay is for horses, but pigs won't eat it." I couldn't tell why I remembered it that way. I think I heard it for the first time on some movie and it became forever etched in my gray matter. It is a pity I can't retain useful information as well.

Regardless, it is an annoying thing to say (as are most idioms). They come out of our mouths like an idiomatic tourettes syndrome. When Googling the "hey is for horses" line, I found thread after thread of people fixating on the stupid idioms they learned from their parents. And I cringe because I say some of these things:

See ya, wouldn't want to be ya.

Well...deep subject for such a shallow mind.

Hello...hell's low and heaven's high.

(when someone trips) Have a nice trip, see you next fall.

(when someone asks if I got a haircut) More than one.

I am so ashamed. I don't want to say these things but they are so ingrained into my involuntary speech monitor that I can't seem to reel them in.  I do have to say that I found a few funny ones to add to my arsenal while doing my search:

(when someone says they are going to the bathroom) Mention my name and they'll give you a good seat.

(when someone say they "wish" something would happen) Put your wish in one hand and take a dump in the other and see which one gets filled sooner.

Oh my god. Please don't let me start saying those things, too. Damn you Google!

Dizgraceland: America's Crock Pot

Being a marketing professional, I recognize the value of a good tagline. So I have been toying with the idea of adding one to Dizgraceland calling it Dizgraceland: America's Crock Pot. I think this works on many levels. On one level, I throw a bunch of ideas into a post, put the lid on and let them cook in the Internet ether for awhile until they get all soft, mushy and tasteless (though mostly they are tasteless to begin with). Then I open the lid and slop them onto a plate.

On another level crock pot could just be a play on the words "crack pot." Either way, I think I'm on to something here. Of course, it could be Dizgraceland: America's Crock Post. But that may be a bit too cerebral for most people.

And speaking of crock pots, I had this great idea for a restaurant. There is this chain of successful fondue restaurants called the Melting Pot that make a fortune off from people essentially cooking their own food at their table and charging them much more than if a chef cooked it for them. What if I open up a chain of restaurants called the Crock Pot. The principle would be the same. A smarmy waiter would come to your table, introduce himself as David and plop a crock pot down in front of you. You'd order all of the traditional ingredients and David would bring them right to your table where you'd plop them into the crock pot. Then David would fire it up (he needs to earn a tip, you know) and six to eight hours later you could dish out one tasty crock pot treat for the entire table.

Oh, I know what you are thinking, what are the customers supposed to do while they are waiting that six to eight hours for their meal to cook. Simple: this is where David sells them bottle after bottle of overpriced wine. Everybody knows that wine and liquor is where the big markups are in the restaurant biz. And that's where you make your major big bucks in this scheme.

I'm thinking of trademarking this idea and then selling franchises right out of the chute.  I could be the next Colonel Sanders. You'd see my picture on a big sign outside of each Crock Pot.

I'm thinking the restaurants themselves could be done up in 50s retro style. I think I still have enough old diner dishes left over from my obsessive thrift store shopping days to outfit at least two or three of the flagship restaurants. I've even thought of some of the great entrees we could offer up:

Mamma's Mac and Cheese (heart) Attack

A Chicken in Every Crock Pot special

Dynamite Chili Surprise

Sloppy Jo-Jo Crock Pot Pie

Here's the Beef Crock Pot Roast

A Crock of Chips and Potted Fish

And for those interested in Continental cooking:

England's Own Spotted Dick in a Crock Pot

Pizza in a Crock Pot

Can't Be Beet Borscht

Three Little Perogies

For dessert (for those with another six hours to kill after dinner):

Ritz Faux Apple Pie in Crock Pot

Chip or Get Off the Crock Pot Chocolate Cake

Pudding in a Cloud Surprise

Yum!

I know all of this is a lot to digest for one post. But if you want to invest in my little Crock Pot of Gold idea, drop me a line.

A tempest in a crock pot

For some reason this perversion of the phrase "tempest in a teapot" came to me this morning on the train and I was terribly pleased with myself for thinking of something so clever and original. Or course as with most of my clever and original thoughts, my self-absorbed bubble was burst when I did a Google search for the phrase "tempest in a crock pot." Umpteen bloggers and newspaper columnists have been spouting it for several years now.

No offense, but sometimes Google sucks.

Just once I'd like to Google something and find out I am the only one who has thought of it. I had this breakthrough idea awhile back that I'd write a musical version of Dirty Harry. A Google search of course turns up several articles about some guy working on a musical version of Magnum Force, the sequel to Dirty Harry. Personally, I think that is a stupid idea. But Dirty Harry the Musical has Oscar written all over it. It's just a pity that Clint Eastwood couldn't reprise the role with my new vision. No offense Clint, but your best years in front of the camera are past you.

There, I have insulted two icons in one blog post.

After having been thwarted by others already having come up with "tempest in a crock pot," I tried "tempest in a chamber pot." Not as clever as "tempest in a crock pot," but still a bit edgy. Googled it. Been used. Then I tried "tempest in a honey pot" thinking I could capitalize on the Pooh angle (not that far from the chamber pot...pooh...chamber pot, get it). I'll be damned if someone didn't use "tempest in a honey pot." Granted there was only one reference to it so I could probably get away with claiming it was mine.

But Google would know. Google knows everything. Go to Google Earth and they even know where you live and when you put your garbage out.

Think about how nice it was before the Internet existed. You could come up with all these original ideas and feel pretty darned smug thinking they were just your ideas. Millions of people could be blissfully unaware of the other million people who had the same idea.

No offense, but the Internet sucks.

That's three icons dissed on in one post. I'm going to hunker down now and wait for lightening to strike.

App-titude test

Since I basically hate telephones, I am hard pressed to think of any phone as a smart phone. I have a Blackberry, but I am not sure it qualifies as a smart phone anyway. It doesn't seem very smart. The only game I seem to be able to play on it is Brickbreaker and it is just a step above Pong (look it up on Wikipedia).

One thing I hate about smart phones is that they spawned the bastard term "apps" which I am pretty sure is short for "applications." Because you wouldn't want to have to waste your time spitting out those last three syllables saying "applications."

Apps are important to the functionality of a smart phone because they expand the functionality beyond the original purpose of a phone beyond just talking to someone while you are sitting on the john. Apps, usually developed by third party developers who are really just paste eating geeks with way too much time on their hands. These third party developers take something called open source code (which sounds a lot like "open sores code" if it is said too quickly) and create useful apps that allow you to use your smart phone to tell you the temperature in Barcelona even though you live in Buffalo.

The only apps I have on my Blackberry are one that tracks my airline reservations and another that allows me to let any friends who follow me on Foursquare track my whereabouts. If anyone actually followed me on Foursquare they would know when I get on and off the train or go to the gym. Couldn't live without that app.

I don't think it is so much generational that I find apps annoying. I have always prided myself on riding the technology wave. I was the first person in my company to use an IBM PC when they first came out. And I've thrown out more technological advancements than most young people have dreamed about. I just think creating a phone that creates callouses on your thumbs from typing is just wrong.

Don't get me started on texting. I'll use my Blackberry to e-mail, but I draw the line on texting. I saw a commercial this evening for a new phone that uses some new shorthand typing method that allows people to break the Guinness World Record for texting the most amount of text in the least amount of time.

OMG!

Get thee behind me smartphone of the devil!

BTW, can anyone tell me what the hell a 3-G network is and why a 4-G is better (other than it is one more than three). And while you are at it, let me know what a Hemi is on a monster truck?

Sigh...

Bon Voyage to the Enchanted Isle

I bought a new CD of lullabies last week that was simply a collection of piano music. Most of them were beautiful medleys, combining classic soothing songs such as Golden Slumbers and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I played while sitting in the rocking chair in my daughter's room waiting for her to drift off to sleep. I'm not sure how effective it was getting her to sleep, but it effectively made me drift down memory lane.

Back in 1999 I discovered Commodore Cruise Lines. It was this tiny little line that only had three ships at the time I booked a cruise with them: the Enchanted Seas, Enchanted Isle and the Enchanted Capri. I booked the Enchanted Isle because it was cheap, sailed out of New Orleans and sailed to some places I'd never been to before at the time: Cozumel, Jamaica and the Grand Cayman.

At the time I was single and unattached and had gotten over the stigma of traveling alone. I was relatively new to cruising. I'd been on a couple of Carnival Cruises (a bit too big to cruise on alone) and two Windjammer Barefoot Cruises (cool, but a bit small). The Enchanted Isle was an old ship, built in coincidentally the same year as I was born: 1958. It had first been christened the Argentina (then it became the Veendam, Brasil, the Volendam, the Monarch Star and finally the Enchanted Isle)  It had very little of the glitz of modern cruise ships. But it had a certain charm. And it didn't overwhelm you when you traveled alone.

Somehow I ended up in this funky single cabin on the Sun Deck. The cabin was nothing to write home about, but its location was perfect. It was nestled off by itself right outside a tiny piano bar perched on the stern of the ship.  The beauty was that very few people on the ship knew the lounge was there. I couldn't miss it and I soon made it my hang out.

The lounge had huge windows overlooking the stern of the ship. You'd get this stellar views of the ships wake as you plowed first down (or up) the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico. If you've ever been on a cruise out of New Orleans, you'll understand the odd melancholy feeling you get watching the pitch blackness of the water punctuated with the occasional gas flames from oil rigs dotting the Gulf.

What made this lounge perfect other than the lack of crowds, view and proximity to my cabin door was the piano player. The guy seemed to play non-stop and played music perfect for the romantic back drop of the sea slipping away behind the ship. I'd sit there sipping martini's staring in the thick darkness and let the soft piano music wrap around me.

I don't remember many other details about my cruise on the Enchanted Isle, but I'll always remember that piano bar. I took two more cruises on Commodore, one on the Enchanted Capri and another one back on the Enchanted Isle, but neither recaptured the lonely peace I felt listening to that piano music on that first cruise.

Commodore Cruise Lines went belly up in 2001, a victim of rising fuel costs and the marketing power of the mega cruise ship lines. Just out of curiosity, did an online search to find out what became of the Enchanted Isle. After the cruise line went bankrupt, it was laid up in Violet, Louisiana (which I assume means it became the equivalent of broke down Chevy up on blocks in white trash front yard). Someone changed the name of the ship to the New Orleans in September 2003 and then on October 24, 2003 it sailed it's last journey to Alang, India where it was broken up for scrap in December of that year.

If there is an afterlife for cruise ships, I like to think that the Enchanted Isle is gliding around the fourth dimensional waters of the Gulf of Mexico with the soft sounds of a piano serenading the salt air amidst the murmurs of phantom passengers clinking martini glasses in a Bon Voyage toast into infinity.

Clutter Island

No one could ever accuse me of being a minimalist when it comes to my environment. I have always been a collector of curiosities (at least of things that are curiosities to me). One might say I am a connoisseur of the conversation piece. Others might say I accumulate weird crap.

When I was a boy my room was filled with treasures such as a football sized hornet's nest (sans hornets), various rocks, old bottles, Famous Monsters of Filmland models, feathers and other things I couldn't live without. I may have patterned by collector nature after my father. His workshop (a former chicken coop in the backyard that he'd expanded in a two-room shed that housed his power tools and fishing tackle) was crammed with bits and pieces of things salvaged over the years.

My mother was the opposite. Whereas my father was a compulsive accumulator, my mother was a compulsive eliminator. She was constantly cleaning and tossing things out. I am sure having three boys (four if you count my father) was a nightmare to her compulsively clean nature. But she was amazingly tolerant of most of our various collections.

As I got older, I used to accompany my father to country flea markets. I'd always had an affinity for the paraphernalia if the past. I loved bits and pieces of things that represented history. So I began to accumulate collectible odds and ends of questionable monetary value but priceless to me.

As I got even older I went through my obsession with Elvis stage. That merged with my obsession with collectibles, oddities and kitsch (another word for tacky). About the same time I discovered the Home Shopping Network and then the greatest crap collecting enabler of all time -- eBay.

You starting to get the picture here?

I tried telling myself I was buying all of this stuff to immerse myself in the Elvis phenomenon as background for a novel I was trying to write that involved Elvis and Quantum Physics (I won't bore you with the plot). But I was quickly surrounding myself with mountains of shot glasses, playing cards, license plates, newspapers from the day Elvis died, concert ticket stubs, liquor decanters shaped like the King and even swatches from sheets he reportedly slept on while renting a home in California.

I finally sort of got over the Elvis thing (though I still have some prime collectibles like a limited edition Elvis Epiphone guitar). But I still collected things. I started going to thrift stores and antique malls. I went through a phase of collecting vintage stoneware (Homer Laughlin diner plates, Coronado ware, etc). My house wasn't quite as bad as some of those places you see on the reality television programs about hoarders, but it was pretty bad.

What finally saved me from being crushed by my own clutter was getting married. I'd lived alone for 18 or so years before I met my wife. She shares my mother's minimalist approach to possessions. When we merged households, it was obvious that I needed rethink my lifestyle.

It wasn't easy at first. A part of me died when I packed load after load of mannequins, dishes, sombreros, and pictures of dogs playing poker into my pickup and donated them to the local thrift store. I think I turned over enough crap to my neighborhood Value Village to stock their shelves for a year.

We purchased a new house together and all new furniture. All that was left of my clutter collection was a modest number of boxes and bins that line shelves in our garage and a few prize possessions that decorate one room of our house that functions as my home office.

All and all, I've managed to curb my compulsive desire to collect things. Oh, I admit my work office retains some of my penchant for memorabilia. But it is organized in a quasi-tasteful manner and consists primarily of sports memorabilia and pictures my children have colored or painted.

I am glad I am no longer an out of control collect-a-holic. I still need a certain amount of clutter around me to feed my creative need for organized chaos, but all in all I am happy without out of control piles of crap everywhere. And since we had children, I get plenty of doses of clutter without having to create it myself.

But that's another blog post.

The foursquare.com gospel...

It's not bad enough that I am on Facebook and Twitter, I have been sucked into foursquare.com where I can check in online and let everyone in the world know where I am. There is no real reason to do this other than that you earn points and virtual badges along the way. If you check in enough times at a place you can earn the right to become the Mayor of that location.

I am now the mayor of, Edmonds Station,  the train station I use every morning. Oh there is another guy who calls it Edmonds Train Station who thinks he is the mayor, but I am using the correct name of the station and therefor deserve to be the true mayor of Edmonds Station.

This is one of the major flaws I see in Foursquare (other than that it exists at all). Since users define the place they are checking into a single place can show up several times on maps of what is around you based on your GPS coordinates under different names. Thus multiple people can simultaneously be the mayor of the same place.

How pitiful have I become? I am salivating like Pavlov's dog at the opportunity to become virtual mayor of a place by virtue of me "checking in" on Foursquare every day and being tracked by GPS on my Blackberry. What's even more pitiful is that Foursquare is supposed to be like Facebook and Twitter in that you network with friends who have joined so they can track your whereabouts. And I don't have a single friend on Foursquare because I am too embarrassed to ask my Facebook friends join for fear of what they'll think of me for being part of yet another stupid social network site.

On the plus side my Foursquare check ins and shout outs are fed automatically into Twitter so that all of the spam sites following me on Twitter can know where I am at any given moment.

Is this a great time we live in or what? What possibly can they come up with next to waste time?

Days of our lives (not the soap opera)

It occurred to me this morning as I backed out of the garage for thousandth or so time since we moved into our house how individual days blur together into non-distinct things. We rarely remember days unless they are birthdays or something tragic happened on them like 9-11. But we remember moments and snippets of our existence.

It is a phenomenon of time and memory. Perhaps it is aligned with that fourth dimension I have become obsessed with of late. If we step out of the three dimensional linear world view of time we can fold it upon itself, or stitch together moments into a time cloak that becomes our security blanket of experience.

I used to have a pretty darned good memory. It served me well in the academic world because I never really had to break a sweat and study too much. Most of what I read or heard just stuck. So I tested well and could bluff my way through just about any essay. But I can't say I necessarily understood everything I remembered.

I have to admit that my memory isn't what it used to be. There are various factors in play here. Despite my best efforts, I am aging. And since having children, sleep deprivation and a constant state of chaos have worn have dulled a more than a few of my synapses. And I suffer from a malady typical of adults. I have way to much to think about so some things slip off the dinner plate of my brain.

So days blur together. But I savor moments.

Sometimes at night, when I am sitting in the dark in the rocking chair in my daughters room waiting for to drift off to sleep, I am flooded by moments. The rough cut of my life flickers on the big screen. It is fortunate that the brain doesn't keep a day by day log of the mundane. I'd be tripping over myself when I reminiscence trying to find the remote and fast forward to the interesting parts.

It is fascinating too, how moments can impact your whole life. Mistakes and triumphs make an endless loop in our thoughts. And each time they play they become more ingrained in our history and magnify tenfold from the original moment.

I don't want to resort to Hallmark platitudes touting cliche things like, "today is the first day of the rest of your life" or "live each moment as if it were your last." Such statements cheapen experience. I'd rather treat the moments as a touch of eternity than see them as the next step towards death.

And to think, all of this was triggered by the monotony of my daily routine.

I am sick of hearing about health care reform

I am going to just go ahead and admit it right up front. I haven't a clue as to what it actually means that a health care reform bill has been passed. I have tried sifting through the many "news" reports about it, but I glaze over after skimming through paragraph after paragraph describing the historic nature of it and the ugly process that it involved to pass it. The only thing I do know is that the government will now require everyone to have health insurance and that insurance companies will no longer be able to refuse coverage to people with preexisting conditions or cancel your insurance if you use it because you are sick.

Obviously the reporters writing about health care reform don't say much about what it actually means because they don't understand it themselves (though the MSN Money page has some better info as to what it means). And the scary thing to me is that I am probably more informed about health care reform than your average person (including I'm sure many of the senators and congress persons who debated it). I consider myself a fairly liberal person and have always voted Democrat. This doesn't mean I am a Democrat, I just find them less scary than the Republicans. I would just soon all of them just left me alone.

That being said, I am a bit skeptical about the government managing anything as large as a nationwide health care program. It's not that I don't think everyone deserves health care, I just question the logic of requiring people to buy it or get fined. If you can't afford it in the first place, fining you for not buying it seems pointless. And even if the government had program to subsidize people who couldn't afford it, the problem remains that many of these people would be unaware of the programs because they are illiterate or just plain distrustful of government.

I am also unclear as to whether this reform will improve the quality of care you receive. I've been to the emergency room at my local hospital with a family member and came out thinking we might have been better off applying leeches to suck out the evil spirits than deal with the on call doctors. I don't even have much faith in my regular doctor. The only thing he seems to do when I come in is refill my prescriptions and charge me $250 for 20 minutes of his time.

I do resent that the whole healthcare reform thing is being used by both parties as political maneuvering to gain control. Ironically, it doesn't really matter which party is in the majority, they all still muck about with each other's pet projects to make sure no one ever really gets what they wants, including the general public. It is a great truth that an elephant is a mouse built to government specifications.

I can't believe I am writing about political crap in my blog. I need to get back to focusing on things that really matter, like are clams really happy.