Don't write the blog if you can't do the time and I am older than Hawaii (the state)

I skimmed through an article in today's paper about an upturn in people getting sued over things they wrote online in blogs or in comments on blogs. Not that I am a fan of frivolous lawsuits, but professional writers are held accountable for what they write, so its about time the amateurs stopped assuming free speech means they have license to spout hate and lies without consequences.

I know I've been guilty of criticizing things in my blog, but I have always tried to draw the line at not making personal attacks on any individual or group. And I always emphasize that any of my criticism is my opinion based on my experience.

It surprises me that it has taken this long for the legal system to venture into the online libel world. I know that I did a great deal of research into what could be done to get damaging blogs removed from the Web a year or so back. And the harsh truth was that you could do very little. Blogger doesn't censor or get involved with disputes over content. You can complain to someone's Internet provider, but that is basically useless, too, unless you can prove someone is committing a crime. And up until now, there seemed to be very little libel law that could be applied to the Web.

Not being a lawyer, I am assuming there still aren't laws that prevent damaging crap to be posted on the Web. From the article I read, most of the law suits seem to be filed in civil courts. And the average person can't afford to file a suit against someone because of a blog. So even though lawsuits are being brought against a few abusers, I bet there are millions of other bloggers out there getting away with verbal murder.

I doubt whether new laws would be effective policing the Web, but I do think the entities hosting blogs should have higher standards and rules of conduct for people who use their services. Blogger shouldn't just ignore abuse, it should investigate complaints and bar the abusers.

On a totally unrelated and random note, Hawaii  the 50th state on August 21, 1959 and just celebrated its 51st year of being a state. That makes me older than bubble wrap, which turned 50 last year, and the state of Hawaii.

Now that is a crime.

Whatever works

I want to come out and say right from the top that I am not a big fan of Woody Allen. I find most of his movies to be autobiographical variations on the same neurotic theme based on Woody Allen's favorite subject: Woody Allen. And though they are always well-crafted and scripted, they generally annoy me in the same way I am annoyed by sitting in the same room with anyone from New York. I can't stand their accents and I'm sick of hearing how great New York is compared to the yokels in the rest of the country.

So with that declaration out of the way, I was skeptical when I was flicking through the On Demand movie selections and ran across a movie I'd never heard of called Whatever Works. The only reason I considered it was that it starred Larry David, the genius behind Seinfeld. And although I find him annoying for many of the same reason I am annoyed by Woody Allen, I also think he is funny. But even though I saw that Woody Allen had written and directed the film, I decided to give it a try.

The film centers around lifelong New York resident (where else does anyone in a Woody Allen script live) Boris Yellnikoff , a former Physicist turned chess teacher. Yellinikoff, like every Woody Allen character, suffers from frequent anxiety attacks, insomnia and hypochondria. Yellnikoff fancies himself a genius and pretty much thinks everyone else in the world is an idiot (again something he has in common with Woody Allen). Yellnikoff also thinks life is basically pointless (he limps from jumping out of a window in a failed suicide attempt), as is religion, relationships and people in general and he rants about this to anyone and everyone, including the audience watching the film (an annoying little plot gimmick that could have been left out of the script).

Yellinikoff meets a naive Mississippi runaway named Melodie St. Ann Celestine who is a couple of decades younger than him (similar to all of the women Woody Allen has been involved with)  and allows her to stay at his apartment. He rages at her and begins to her impressionable young mind to match his world view. His creed when it comes to love, is "whatever works" versus true love conquers all. Ironically, while molding the young girl's mind, Yellinikoff softens his own rigid view. Melodie falls in love with Yellinikoff and he marries her.

I started out not liking the movie. The dialogue began as classic Woody Allen intellectual, neurotic babble. But then when the Melodie character was introduced, something changed. I got drawn into the storyline and really ended up loving the movie. Maybe it was Larry David's personality overcoming Woody Allen's ego. But the film was smart, funny and entertaining. The plot twists were absurd, yet clever. Maybe I'll even give another Woody Allen film a try.

What can I say, Whatever Works works.

The six-year itch

August 4th was my sixth year anniversary of blogging. My very first blog post title was, "No, I'm not a rabid Elvis fan" in which I tried to deny any obsession with Elvis despite the fact my blog was called Dizgraceland and I called myself Tim-Elvis. Me thinks the blogger doth protest too much.

After six years, my blog is still called Dizgraceland, but my Web name is no longer Tim-Elvis. For awhile, I called myself Tim-Id. Finally, I just changed it to Time.

I used to pride myself for my blog longevity. Near as I can tell, most people stop blogging after a couple of weeks. A few die hards stick with it for a few months. Some even make it past a year. I don't know of anyone who has blogged for six years. I think I am truly a Methuselah in the blog world now.

My blog has never really had much of a following. I used to think it was just a matter of time before I got discovered and would be an Internet celebrity. After six years, I can safely say that isn't going to happen. I am sure there are many reasons why very few people read my blog. For one, I read very few other people's blogs. Oh, I used read some regularly. But most suffered the malady that infects almost all bloggers. Blogging regularly is a major time and energy suck. It can also be an emotional roller coaster. So most of the bloggers I read have long since stopped blogging. Their blogs remain like an abandoned gas station that went belly up when they moved the Interstate.  

Back to why people don't read my blog. Since I started blogging to basically indulge my frustrated muse, I don't really write the type of stuff that most people give a rip about. It is probably why I could never get any of my fiction published. And there is this niggling little realization I've come to as I've aged along with my blog. I'm really not as good as a writer as I think I am. Or thought I was. The beauty of a blog, though is that it doesn't matter. No one pays me to write this so it doesn't have to be good.

I kind of blame social media for chipping away at the fabric of the blog world, too. With Twitter and Facebook sucking people's attention spans away, very few people have the patience to read or write a blog anymore. It's a pity. When I used to have people who would read my blog and comment, it was kind of like a social book club where people would share their views on the topic. A blog used to be like a cracker barrel you could sit around telling jokes while you whittled on a stick.

Not that I have ever sat around a cracker barrel. I'm old, but not that old.

The other hard thing about blogging for any length of time, especially as you age, is writing something new. I can't tell you how many times I've started writing a blog post thinking I've come up with a gem of a new topic only to discover that the reason it was flowing so easily and familiar like was because I'd written about it a couple of years ago. Sometimes I've found I've written the same blog post two or three times. Perhaps this is more a flaw in my aging mind than a pitfall of blogging.

If I have had any regrets after six years of blogging, its just that I can't be as open and honest in a personal blog like I naively thought I could be when I started blogging. There are now whole industries out there that mine the Internet for bits and pieces of personal information. And what you used to think was harmless to share with the world can be used in amazingly devious ways. It is a stalker's paradise.

Anyway, despite the boredom, burnout, fear of stalkers and lack of inspiration, I keep blogging. Perhaps I'll get a t-shirt that says, "Keep on bloggin' " kind of like those "Keep on Truckin' " shirts from the 70s. 

Or have I already done that? I'd better search my blog archives.

Ugly Americans

 

North Vikings don't be blue,

Frankenstein was ugly, too!

All right, clap, clap-clap.

All right, clap, clap-clap.

--East Junior High Cheer circa 1972

One of the vast dis-services Hollywood and the television industry has done is fooled us into thinking that there is a world out there populated by attractive, articulate and well-dressed people who rarely age or have weight issues. It is perhaps why I rarely venture out on my lunch hour. Because barely fives minutes after I take light rail uptown I catch myself wanting to scream "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape" like Charleton Heston in Planet of the Apes. Because a trip into downtown Seattle is like a trip to a totally different world populated by people who make apes look pretty damned attractive.

It is my own fault. I wanted to buy a backpack since I have been walking a mile to and from the train station these days. And my shoulder messenger bag is getting old and just doesn't cut it on longer hikes than a block. And since I am basically cheap when it comes to buying things like backpacks, I couldn't stomach forking over $80 in a luggage store for essentially a bag for my lunch. So I wandered into the downtown Ross.

If you aren't familiar with a Ross, Dress for Less store, I congratulate you. A Ross is a discount store. It is just like a Marshalls or a T.J. Maxx. They all carry "named" brand merchandise that wouldn't sell at major retailers because it had a defect or was just plain ugly. I rarely buy clothes at such stores, but I do occasionally buy things like backpacks there. Because they are pretty dirt cheap.

The problem with a Ross and particularly a Ross located in the seedy belly of downtown Seattle is that it attracts the same people who you normally see on the corner of Third and Pine in downtown Seattle screaming about government conspiracies and grabbing their crotches. Ross is one of those downtown stores you basically want to get in and get out of as quickly as possible before you are wedged into a rack of holiday sweaters by four large women with baby carriages loaded with a minimum of three scream kids each.

When I entered the Ross, I half way hoped I wouldn't find what I was looking for. Because if I did, it meant I would have to stand in line at the check stand with 40 other people. I weeded through about 100 back packs tangled together on wall racks, rejecting anything plaid or garish. That left about two back packs for me decide between. I opted for a Swiss Army backpack made ironically in China for the same people who make the Swiss Army knives (which has always baffled me because Switzerland is supposedly neutral on everything so why do they need an army or knives).

I hustled over to the checkout line that wound around in a configuration that would have made Disney proud. There were about ten checker positions, but only about four checkers. Of them, only one seemed to be focused enough to process more than one customer every ten minutes. One checker dealt with the same customer the entire time I was in line and was still dealing with her when I left. They seemed be engaged in a tug of war over a plastic hanger that a shirt had been hanging on that the customer was buying. Apparently Ross' policy is to keep all the plastic hangers but the woman buying the shirt believed it should go with the shirt.

The checker who finally helped me was nice enough though I could tell her heart was not fully into checking the eight or nine pockets in the backpack I was buying to make sure I wasn't trying to secret any plastic hangers out of Ross. After I paid for the thing she slipped it into a large Ross plastic bag so that I could walk back to work proudly displaying that fact to everyone in downtown that I was a discerning shopper and spent my lunch hour at Ross.

I suppose my rambling point here was that there wasn't a single person in Ross or within a three block radius of the store when I left who didn't look as though they'd been mugged with an ugly stick. I suppose I am being harsh in judging the people pawing through the crap at Ross. But even if ugly is only skin deep like its cousin beauty, I'm willing to bet it has pretty thick skin.

As long as I'm messing with cliches, I will have to admit that ugly, like beauty, is also in the eye of the beholder. And I imagine the people I think are ugly don't think I'm any George Clooney, either. But even allowing for my standard of what constitutes as ugly, Ross had more than its fair share of people who could have been employed full time at a carnival sideshow.

So what is it about places like Ross that become lightening rods for the good-looks impaired? Is it economics? Do people with money have more options for masking their ugliness? Because you don't walk into a Nordstrom and see near as many ugly people and if you do, at least they are dressed in natural fiber clothing that fits.

I'm being unfair with Ross. They aren't the only store that has a higher per capita number of ugly people. There are other places that attract even uglier people. State fairs and Denny's also seem to be places where ugly people flock. I find it particularly ironic that the ugly people at state fairs seem to love to go through the livestock barns and make fun of the pigs.

 It would be an interesting study to survey people going to Ross, Denny's and the Puyallup Fair to determine why they are hotbeds of ugliness. I imagine the results of the study could be titled, "It's not pretty being ugly."

I've been trying to finish this blog post for days and it's getting pretty ugly. So I'll stop digging the hole I'm in and stop. I hear there is a sale on at Ross and I want to get there before it gets too picked over.

Monkeying around with my muse

I believe the Monkey Playing Cymbals merits some more explanation. So if you click on the link on the left (the highlighted "Monkey Playing Cymbals" text) you will find the first blog post dedicated to the little bugger. He eventually took on a life of his own and had his own blog for awhile. But he gave that up because he has a very short attention span (he is a monkey after all) and in all honesty, he is only a mechanical toy that doesn't really work.

There, I said it. The monkey isn't real. Oh, he is a real object, but he doesn't really talk or move outside of my imagination. This may come as a great shock to anyone who already followed the monkey on my blog. But at least I now have the monkey off my back.

I really shouldn't blame the monkey anyway for not having interesting things to blog about. I could blog about many things going on in my life, but unfortunately, since this is a public blog, I have learned the hard way not to share too much personal information on the Web.

I used to think it was okay to just blurt out anything about my life and history. But a brush with a stalker and a heightened awareness of identity theft and fraud have made me err on the side of caution as to what I talk about.

I will say that I have been trying to sell a 1978 Bally Playboy Pinball machine online. I'd bought it about 12 years ago in my bachelor days. It took up the better part of my family room in my old house. For the past five or so years, it has taken up a corner of my garage covered with blankets. It is a great vintage machine that actually still works. It is just like a machine I used to play at the Student Union Building when I was in college and the Playmates depicted on the machine were Hugh Hefner's favorites. Since he never seems to date anyone under 23, I imagine they have long since retired.

Anyway, I have trying to sell the machine at a site called Mr. Pinball. Right after the ad went live, I received this e-mail:

-- 

Hello,

Do you still have the above item for sale for sale?i would want to know the present condition as well and arrange for the shipping myself,i';ll like to know if you would accept a cashier cheque.....kindly email me back as soon with your final asking price.i reside in U.K and your quick response will be highly appreciated.

Thank you.

In the good old days, I would have been elated and trusting about receiving such an inquiry. But I was immediately skeptical, especially since Mr. Pinball warned buyers and sellers about scam artists trying to bilk people with a scam whereas they send a counterfeit cashiers check for more than the amount of your item (to cover shipping and your inconvenience). The check apparently clears and you wire the shipping money to an address designated by the scammer. Then the bank discovers the check is bogus and you are libel for the money you've wired.

So even though I figured the e-mail was a scam, I replied to "Mr. Perry Bridge" who for some reason lived in the UK but had no command of the English language or any apparent knowledge of pinball machines. I sent a few photos of the machine and said I'd accept a check but wouldn't ship until it cleared the bank (this was before I'd done research on the cashiers check scam). 

Mr. Bridge fired back this e-mail:

Hello,

Thanks for the quick response.i will be buying the machine you have

for sale,so kindly reserve it for me.However, the payment will be

deliver to you this week or next week...So please as soon as you

receive the payment, get it cashed immediately, deduct the money for

the item and send the remaining balance to the shipping agent that

handles the shipment via Western union money transfer. Moreso, I'll be

giving you an extra $40 for keeping this item for me till the

shipper's come for the pick up and to know you're selling this to me.

So in view of the above, Here are some of the details I will need for

final issuance of the Check or MoneyOrder to you.

(1) Full Name

(2) Mailing address, not p.o.box please

(3) your direct telephone number both home and cell.

Once you get back to me with all the above informations, the payment

will be issued out immediately and it will be sent to you.

hope to hear from you.

Best regards.

Perry

All of my red flags were flying full mast at this point. I did a quick Google search and discovered Mr. Perry Bridge who uses the e-mail addresses "king.kuyt0009@yahoo.com" and "king.kuyt0009@gmail.com" was quite the active buyer. He had used the exact same e-mail trying to purchase several other pinball machines, a horse trailer, a horse, and various other big ticket items online that would require a hefty shipping cost wired back to the shipper (who we can bet was Mr. Perry Bridge). 

Okay, all of this depressed me. There was a time when a cashiers check was pretty much as good as cash. Now if you sell something online, you are pretty much stuck using Paypal or only selling for local pick up and demanding cash. 

I thought about goofing with Mr. Bridge like I used to do with the Nigerian spammers in the old days. But, although it would waste the spammers time, I didn't have the energy. 

I realize that this was a major digression from writing about the monkey, but I think in a roundabout nonsensical way, it was relevant. The moral is that, not all monkeys are as they seem to be and there is a lot of monkey business on the Web.

The sun also rises in Seattle

After a long, rainy winter and a long, rainy spring followed by a rainy June, we finally have some warm, sunny weather in Seattle. And even after all of the bitching about the rain, people are already complaining about how hot it is.

It is simply the nature of people who live in this place of endless gray drenched greenery. I personally like a more moderate climate. Give me temperatures of about 70 to 75 degrees max and I'm fine. I don't really mind rain as long as it is in moderation. I just get sick of day after day of drizzle and drabness. So even the relatively high heat is a welcome change.

Growing up in Idaho, I got used to summers that often erred on the unbearably hot side. To me summer was the dead time. No matter how much you watered things in the summer there, they were brown and brittle. I spent most of my summers hunkered down in my room with the shades drawn waiting for the sun to go down. So I can kind of relate to how vampires must feel, if, they existed.

I can't believe I've resorted to blogging about the weather. My creative muse seems to wax a wane a great deal lately. My Monkey Playing Cymbals is ignoring me right now. He has been smug since he had an extended cameo appearance in Toy Story 3. I hate to break it to him, but the movie just furthered the stereotype that Monkeys Playing Cymbals are annoying little shrieking villains who narc on their friends. I suppose it isn't really a stereotype in his case.

I do miss the monkey being more active in inspiring my writing, however.

But I digress and I am sure most people don't have a clue as to what I'm talking about. But either you know the monkey or you don't.

It sure is hot out.

Always after me lucky charms...

When I was a kid, I was big on lucky charms. No, not the cereal. I mean objects that brought you luck. They came in all shapes and sizes. They could be simple as a shiny penny or a pretty rock. Or a feather or a four leaf clover.

Rabbits feet were hot items as lucky charms for awhile. I'm not sure why they were considered lucky. They certainly weren't lucky for the rabbit. You used to be able to buy them at grocery stores or Dime Stores. I assume they fell out of favor as lucky charms when the animal rights advocates pointed out that a rabbits foot was put to better use on the rabbit than on a key chain.

I was thinking about lucky charms recently not because I believe in them, but more at why people project attributes such as luck or magic on an inanimate object. It dawned on me that nothing has power until we empower it to have that power. If you really believe something brings luck, you kind of stack the deck psychologically that it really has that power.

I think the same applies to religion or politics. You have to give an entity or institution power before it has any over you. Ditto with relationships. You have to give up power to another person before they have any over you. Conversely they have to give up power to you before you have power over them.

The beauty of this theory is that if you recognize that you are the one empowering anything to have magic, luck, healing properties or power to cleanse your soul or psyche than you are really the source of the power. So you don't really have to give it away. You just need to use it.

I suppose this is too simple of a theory to catch on. It also wouldn't be too popular because it eliminates the ability to blame your circumstances on someone or something else and forces you to take responsibility for everything that happens to you. You can't blame things on bad luck, god's will, mother nature or your parents. If you are in a bad relationship, lousy job, crappy neighborhood or have a bad haircut, it is something you have the power to control or gave up that power to put you there.

Okay, I'm not saying you can control the weather (but you can control putting yourself at its mercy). And maybe you can't control some diseases, but you can control how you treat your body to allow yourself to get sick. I am suggesting that before you blame fate and the blue bird of happiness for crapping in your cereal you retrace the steps that got you in the situation you are in. Then seize the reins of power and get the hell out of dodge.

More power to you if you do.

Random acts of randomness

After rambling yesterday about the maddening quality of repetition and sameness in life as we age, I was remiss in not pointing out that the occasional encounter with a random thing does break up the mundaneness of it all. Point in fact: I was driving to the train station this morning on my usual route encountering the usual traffic at the usual places and stopping at the usual lights when I noticed a watermelon in the gutter next to the road.

This struck me as odd. One might expect an apple or an orange perhaps, cast off from a passing car. But you don't normally see a whole watermelon just sitting there down and out in the gutter wondering why part of its ambitions to be part of a summer picnic had been thwarted. This was a whole, unscathed watermelon, mind you. It hadn't been tossed in the gutter. It had been placed or perhaps rolled there. The only thing odder fruit to be found just sitting in the gutter would be a coconut or perhaps a pineapple. But even those could have accidentally fallen out of some one's grocery bags. Watermelons, however, don't just happen.

Now granted this watermelon was in the vicinity of a real estate office that is surrounded by life sized fiberglass models of animals. There is a life sized elephant, a giraffe, a gorilla and I believe a zebra. It is a virtual Noah's Ark of fake animals staged for some unknown reason under a tree in front of the office. But these have been there for several years and have merged into the sameness of my everyday experience driving to the train station. The watermelon is a new anomaly.

I am actually quite fond of random things. They spice up the mundane. I was in a lawyer's office with my family the other day signing some papers when a transient looking gentleman popped in the front door and proclaimed that there was a live opossum outside and he just wanted us to know about it because we had small children with us. The lawyer thanked him and returned to pointing out where I needed to date, initial and sign a document. I had to resist the urge to jump up and say, "Hey kids, let's go out and play with the live opossum. They are lots more fun than the dead ones we have at home."

I work in downtown Seattle so I am actually pretty used to random things. One of my co-workers was waiting for the bus outside our building a couple of years ago when a man wheels up to him with a shopping cart loaded with hams and asked him if he'd like to buy one. I debate sometimes whether this was a random thing or just odd. This is a fine line we are talking here.

Since I am contradicting my post from yesterday anyway, I must say that I find any movie done by the Coen brothers an exception to the rule when it comes to breaking out of the hackneyed plot realm. I love their films because they epitomize a sort of organized randomness. It is refreshing in a "I don't really understand it, but here's something I haven't seen before" way.

Kind of like the watermelon in the gutter this morning.

8:52 a.m. in the garden of good and evil

It is kind of pitiful to think that I am only fifty something years old and I've run out of things to say. I've begun to understand why old people repeat themselves all of the time. Because the older you get, the more life seems to just repeat itself. You see the same movie and television plots over and over. Politicians spout the same rhetoric over and over, and the news reports the same stories over and over.

Sometimes I think the only way to be innovative is to lock yourself in a room, pull the blinds and ignore the rest of the world.

Though sometimes I believe I am blissfully obtuse about what is going on around me in the world. I watched the film, Battle in Seattle last night. It was a dramatization of the riots that took place in Seattle when the World Trade Organization met here in 1999.  Until I watched the film, I never really had a clue what the WTO was and why people were protesting it here. I live in the Seattle area and work in downtown Seattle. I was here during the riots and I pretty much only knew they were going on because it messed up my bus schedule at the time and I saw stuff about it on the local news.

I was oblivious to the whole Grunge music scene that was born in Seattle as well. Here Nirvana, Soundgarten and umpteen legendary groups were performing at clubs around town and I was totally unaware of them until Kurt Cobain blew his head off with a shotgun. So by the time I was aware I could have seen them perform for next to nothing, their concert tickets cost a fortune.

Apparently not being able to keep up with the latest on everything is another symptom of aging along with repeating yourself. By the time I am aware that something is cool, it has become uncool. It is really hard to be cool when you are middle aged. It will become nigh impossible when I am considered elderly.  Though this is why Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World is my hero. He is the only near geriatric character I know of in the popular media who is cool.

But I've said that before so there I go repeatedly repeating myself again.

Sigh...

In the zone

Under no circumstances would I consider myself an athletic person. I was more content as a kid to go to lay in my room in the summer and read books than joining a little league team. It is not that I didn't like to play baseball or football or other sports. I was just wasn't built to be a jock and I had little in the way of talent when it came to running, jumping or throwing.

Oh, I had a competitive nature, just no skills to back it up. So I shied away from competitive sports until I was in junior high and participated as a necessary evil to get service points and be recognized as a well rounded student in anticipation of getting into a good college. And though I tried hard in wrestling, basketball and tennis, I was less than mediocre in all of them.

I was an 'A' student in everything but physical education. I hated it with a passion. And one of the things I hated most about it was running. My 7th grad PE instructor used running as a punishment so I grew to loath it. I developed a psychosomatic cough I'm sure was related to running the dreaded "cross country" in P.E.

I say all of this because now, at this juncture in my middle aged life, I find myself running. Oh, not all the time, but for the past year I've just about gone to the gym everyday. And to mix up my workout, I alternate between an elliptical machine and jogging on the treadmill. The longest I have jogged on any given day is an hour, but believe me, that is something that I would never have dreamed I would attempt a year ago, let alone accomplish.

After a year of doing this, I have built up enough endurance that I'm not gasping for breath after three minutes. But psychologically, I have to say I dread running as much as I did as a teenager. I just wish I could achieve that "zone" they talk about where you get euphoric, pumped with the chemicals released when you exercise vigorously. I even try bending time like I've written about so that an hour running on the treadmill only seems like a few minutes. But I get pulled in by the gravitational pull of the ticking off of the seconds on the treadmill clock, turning the hour into an eternity.

But as much as I dread it, I force myself to go to the gym everyday. It is too easy to string together excuses for not working out into stopping all together. And then, instead of dreading going to the gym, I'd dread looking in the mirror.

Lost Verizon

Last fall, just before my annual fee was due for my independent Internet provider, I decided to look into consolidating my telephone, Internet and television into a "bundled" package and save the hassle of dealing with three different providers. Supposedly I would save money, too. I was inundated with direct mail from the major companies like Verizon and Comcast claiming each one was the best. I ended up choosing Verizon FIOS, because something about fiber optics just sounded cool and Verizon seemed to be cheaper than Comcast.

Big mistake.

Verizon was already our telephone provider (mainly because they were our only choice in the area we live in). And I must admit that getting the Internet and FIOS television set up was pretty simple. I was replacing Direct TV as our television provider (who I never heard boo from until I cancelled). I'd had satellite television for many years and had never been thrilled with DirectTV's incomprehensible pricing and program selection. I was also not thrilled that occasionally the signal would disappear during inclement weather and customer service would simple tell me that occasional signal loss was common if it was raining.

I live in the Seattle area. Enough said.

So Verizon dug around our property and installed fiber optics cables for our television, Internet and telephone. I set up a single billing account and got a sweet selection of premium and HD channels. It all seemed to work okay, though I don't really see a difference between regular and HD channels. But then again that could be my television. And I like the on demand feature that Direct TV didn't offer (until after I dropped them). But I didn't like that the signal would pixelate occasionally and the troubleshooting guide could only tell me that I should make sure my television was connected to the fiber optics cables.

My biggest problem with Verizon isn't the television, the Internet or the telephone. They all work. My biggest problem with Verizon is their stinking Web site. I have been using the Internet Highway since it was a dirt road and I have never experienced a more frustrating Web site and terrible customer service. First of all you can wander on their site for days without finding the information you are looking for. All I want to do is see what services I am paying for and how much. And, although the Web site claims this is possible, it  just sends me into a loop continuously asking me to enter my user name and password whenever I try and access this information.

My other big problem with Verizon is that they sold all of there service rights in Washington to Frontier Communications and beginning July 1, everything is switching to the new company who swears that we won't notice any change in our services. As a person who works in marketing, this statement makes my blood run cold. It is a statement fraught with snake pits of despair. I am sure our service will change. And even if it doesn't change, it means it will continue to suck the same way it did with Verizon.

The sad thing about all this is that I don't think anything would be better with Comcast. Oh they probably wouldn't have sold their assets in Washington, but I seriously doubt I'd have any luck navigating their Web site to see my account information. Plus I don't like their television commercials showing customer service people helping their customers use their televisions for Karaoke. This is wrong on so many levels.

I am not sure why we even have a home telephone anyway. We never use the land line. And Verizon's wireless service was too expensive to use even if we'd bundled it with the rest of the package. I actually am not sure I even want a phone period since I have made it clear on many occasions that the telephone is the devil.

The only thing I really want is a fast Internet connection and on demand television. I don't give a rip about the 400 channels of crap or local programming. Just let me watch episodes of Treme, Gravity, Party Down, Spartacus Blood and Sand, Dexter, True Blood and some almost first run movies any time I want and I'm a happy camper.

I am a simple man.

So in the long run, I guess I don't give a rip that I won't be paying whatever I'm paying for television, phone and Internet to Verizon. Let's just hope that Frontier doesn't panic and just sell everything to Comcast.  Maybe someone could plant the idea in Apple's corporate brain that they should just take over the world and run everything. I bet you could find your bill on their Web site (and even download it on you iPod or phone). But then I'd have to get one.

Sigh...

North of going south

Elvis at the Hard Rock in Puerto Vallarta

An adoring Elvis fan in Puerto Vallarta

It has been more than a week since I posted because I have been on vacation with my family in Puerto Vallarta. I did have computer access while I was south of the border and could have posted, however, I have learned from blogging for almost six years that you don't broadcast to the world when you are out of town.

There are other things you learn from blogging. If you have a blog open to anyone (which is the only way to do it if you want anyone to read it) you also shouldn't post pictures of your family or identifiable personal information that can be used by identity thieves. In addition you probably shouldn't use your blog as a confessional, diss on religions, political parties or your right wing or born again brothers. Anything that would trigger a visit  from Homeland Security is probably not a prudent thing to blog about, either.

But I digress.

Although I had Internet access in Mexico the last thing I really wanted to do was sit in my room blogging, Tweeting, checking in on Four Square or updating my Facebook page. It was an all inclusive resort, so the only thing I wanted to do was go to the beach, the pool, the restaurant and the bar. It was also 85 degrees and sunny everyday so if I hung out in the room posting every day, I would have pretty much have deserved the title of pathetic loser.

 I tell you, I love Mexico. I love the contradictions of the culture. I love the consistent inconsistency. You can order the same dish at a restaurant every day and it will be different every time. And although there are signs posted about dress codes and restrictions on the pool use, no one (staff or customers) pays the slightest bit of attention to them. I also love the fact that you can see a construction project going on and come back five years later and see the same construction project going on without any apparent progress. And I love the fact that the only music they seem to play in resort hotels is Michael Jackson't Thriller album. Finally, I love that you can say, "Stay thirsty my friends" to a bartender a hundred times and they still smile at you and nod even though they think you are just a stupid, drunken gringo.

I will not rail on American tourists in Mexico. I didn't see that much bad behavior on this trip. And regardless, probably 70 percent of the people at the resort were Mexican and not Americans anyway. On one visit to downtown Puerto Vallarta, I did see the throngs from the cruise ships plodding along like a scene from Night of the Living Tourist, though, melting from the heat and humidity. I saw the look of desperation in their eyes as they pawed through the $4 t-shirts and sampled flavored tequilas, glancing at their wristwatches to make sure they had time to make it to Senior Frogs before they had to pour themselves back on the ship.

My Mexico  t-shirt and Senior Frog days are over. I like to wear a shirt more than once before it shrinks three sizes and becomes a dust rag. And I like to think I have too much gray hair and dignity to do Jello shots and dance on tables at Senor Frogs.

I do give into my vice of purchasing Cuban cigars to smoke while I am in Mexico. I went into a shop that declared it sold only genuine Cuban cigars and was ushered into a air conditioned walk-in humidor where a old gentleman originally from New York who reminded me of Tony Soprano's uncle soft sold me on buying three small Habano's to get a ten percent discount. He showed me his machine that he'd paid $400 for to identify genuine Cuban cigar's from the secret hologram on the box seal.  Then he ushered me to the cash register where he had to use a thumb print scanner before the cashier could give me my 10 percent discount on my 110 peso cigars. I felt like I scammed them because they also gave me a box of matches and a cool little mesh bag to carry the cigars in.

Other than the obvious money making angle, I have to confess I don't understand the whole time share scam. Every Mexican resort town I have ever been too has a cadre of people bent on getting you to spend three hours on a hard sell pitch to invest in a time share in exchange for a free breakfast and cab ride. The minute you step out of baggage claim at the airport you run this gauntlet of people tugging at your shirt sleeve, handing you maps, and insisting they have your shuttle to your hotel. Like Nigerian spammers, they must get enough rubes who have apparently been living in a cave, fall for the scam and get locked in a room with three guys and a PowerPoint selling the merits of vacationing in the same place at the same time for a week out of each year for the next twenty years of your life.

I have always wondered why cruise ships don't have the equivalent of a time share. Then you would at least get the option of seeing different ports on your vacation.

But I digress again.

Despite the time share people and the guys trying to get me to jump into a harness attached to a parachute and be towed around Banderos Bay, I basically had a nice vacation. It helped make up for the torture of ten hours of air travel and near full body cavity search I endured at the gate leaving Puerto Vallarta (I think the security person was also a time share salesperson).

Now that I am back in the land of perpetual precipitation, Mexico is just a dream (which is coincidentally the name of the resort we stayed at).  I will now give it a few days and then start planning for my next trip south.

Maybe I should have bought one of those time shares.

Last laugh

It is with a great deal of self satisfaction that I googled 100 Questions and discovered about 136,000 bloggers posted comments about the first airing of the doomed sitcom. And another two hundred or so reviewers mentioned the annoying laugh tracks.

Sometimes it is nice to know I am not the only one ranting about important issues not related to oil spills, global warming or the death of Gary Coleman.

I am also pleased that others were painfully aware of the laugh tracks and I wasn't just hearing excess laughter along with the normal voices in my head. Sometimes we have to grasp at the small things to confirm our sanity in a crazy world.

And it wasn't just the bloggers dissing on the poor, wayward sitcom. Some bonafide reviewers from the "legitimate" press shared my sentiments that this comedy was no laughing matter. So, I am beginning to question why I am not being paid beau coup bucks to crap all over new programs. I was able to smell this corpse before the other vultures started circling and I will be the first one to admit I have absolutely no credentials other than a well-defined sense of what is bad. So have I gone pro as a reviewer?

Not that I really want to be a professional reviewer. What is a review after all other than an opinion? And we all know that opinions are like assholes because everyone has one. And I think I'd rather be an amateur asshole than a professional one, unless, of course, someone wanted to pay me loads of cash to be one.

Though I do think it would be kind of fun to be a professional reviewer of reviewers. I could call my reviews, An Asshole on Assholes. I'm willing to bet, however, if I started writing harsh critiques of critics reviews you'd hear this squeal of outrage without comparison. Because I do believe that most people who criticize for a living have an innate inferiority complex and very thin skin. So if you turned the unforgiving light of criticism on them, they'd start barking and nipping at themselves like a rabid dog, incensed that someone would dare hoist them by their own petard.

I think the problem with reviewing reviewers would be that no one really gives a rip about them in the first place. If they were somebody, then they wouldn't have to inflate themselves by judging others. And I do realize the hypocrisy I am spouting while judging reviewers and having recently dumped on a sitcom jam packed with unknown actors looking for a break.

Self-awareness while being an asshole is a bitch. So I guess this was my first review of a reviewer.

Laugh tracks

Although I started writing this post about my uncanny ability to tell when a sitcom will be cancelled within three episodes, I can't help but digress and suggest that Laugh Tracks would be a great name for an open mike night on a commuter train. Passengers could take turns using the train PA system to pretend they are stand up comedians.

Okay, maybe not. We'd need a bar car before that would come close to working.

But enough of my digression. I am watching a new series I have never heard of before called 100 Questions. The premise seems to be that a British woman living New York goes to a dating service to find her soul mate and has to answer a 100-question personality test. The first question leads to a flashback to a bad date that brought her to the dating service in the first place.

Presumably each episode will be triggered by one question from the 100-question test. I believe it is wishful thinking on part of the writers to think they can trick the network into keeping the series alive for 100 episodes just to see whether the woman finally meets her soul mate after 100 half hour episodes full of wacky high jinks and overly aggressive laugh tracks.

It is the laugh track that is the key thing signalling loudly to me that the sitcom is doomed. I got the same premonition when I watched Alyssa Milano's doomed series Romantically Challenged. The other signs that that series was doomed included really bad writing coupled with extremely poor acting that even very aggressive laugh tracks couldn't cover up.

At least 100 Questions redeemed itself occasional with some clever writing. And after awhile, I couldn't help but begin to actually like some of the goofy characters. They just need to tone down that damned self-conscious laugh track or they are going to make it to question number 4 on the personality test.

Full moon alert

No, I am not warning people that I am about to drop trow and moon them. I am actually referring to the impending full moon that will be in the sky tomorrow and wreck havoc with the emotional state of the world as we kind of know it. Though me dropping my pants and mooning people could have the same emotional impact.

It seems like I write about the full moon every time it makes its appearance because I tend to feel it before I see it. I feel more disjointed mentally than normal. And I lose my manic drive to blog obsessively and try desperately get people to read my posts. Though I think I need to pick meatier subjects than beauty bark if that is indeed my goal.

I've lost track really of what my goal is. After almost six years of blogging, the odds of me becoming an Internet sensation are pretty much astronomical. It is a harsh reality that I've had to face along with middle age and the fact that I'll never be rich (or better looking). The full moon somehow exacerbates all of this.

To add insult to injury, I still have these annoying little beauty bark splinters in my fingers. But the plant beds look pretty darn spiffy. They'll just glow in the full moon light tomorrow if the clouds lift. The moon doesn't really have much influence on beauty bark other than making it live up to its name.

Speaking of driving traffic to my blog, Google AdWords tried to tempt me to advertise with them with a $100 worth of free advertising. Every time someone searches for a key word that I associated with my blog it would pop up there on the right of the search. I was almost ready to do this when it dawned on me that there is no single key word that I could associate with my blog that would be flattering or would make someone want to go to my blog when they were looking for something altogether different. And since I don't sell anything, there wouldn't be any real reason to advertise my blog anyway.

No, I need to be content with people randomly colliding with my blog the way random asteroids collide with the moon. I wonder if more asteroids hit the moon when it is full than when it is a new moon?

See how I neatly brought my digression about Google AdWords full circle back to the full moon? That my friends is the sign of a seasoned writer.

Is beauty bark worse than its bite?

I am not by nature a person who enjoys yard work, the operative part of the phrase being "work."

Mowing lawn was a chore when I was a kid. It was something I hated because it entailed rolling out the old gas lawn mower in the oppressive Boise heat, checking it for gas (which in inevitably did not have), dashing down into my grandmother's root cellar where my father stored the gas can (avoiding the disgusting bugs and beetles the size of my fist that lurked there), gassing up the ancient thing and then spending 30 minutes trying to get it started.

Starting involved pulling a cord to start it because, although the internal combustion engine had been invented by this time, cheap lawn mowers did not come with electronic ignitions. In between pulling the starter cord, you had to mess with the choke. To this day I do not know or care what the choke is or was. I just knew that my father had impressed upon me the importance of using it. It was right up there with swearing a gray streak at the lawn mower during the start-up and mowing process. If messing with the choke did not make the lawn mower turn over, I then had to pull the spark plug and clean carbon off from the gap.

When the lawn mower finally turned over, coughing like a TB patient, I'd push it in the blazing sun as it belched out blue smoke. The worst part was when you'd hit a pile of dog crap buried in the tall grass and you'd be assaulted with this putrid smell of warm dog shit, grass and gasoline.

Suffice it to say, I developed a phobia of mowing the lawn that nips at the back of my mind every time my grass reaches the point of no return and requires taming. Fortunately, I now live in the Pacific Northwest and rarely have to mow the lawn in tripe digit temperatures. And I don't have a dog, so I'm generally spared the brown land minds in the mowing process. And now I have an electric lawn mower, so my days of pull starts, chokes and spark plugs are a relic of the past. The worst I have to contend with is figuring out a mowing pattern that causes the least amount of maneuvering to avoid mowing over the cord and sending many volts of electricity flowing through my private parts.

After this long tirade about mowing the lawn, I have to confess that I didn't even have to mow it this weekend. The other advantage to living in the Pacific Northwest is that it rains most of the time. So my lawn got called due to rain. But I did have to engage in the semi-annual spreading of the beauty bark. Beauty bark was not a phenomenon I encountered growing up. The only thing we spread on flower beds when I was a kid was steer manure.

It wasn't until we moved into our current house with its nicely landscaped front yard that I was faced with yet another endless regime in the yard work game. I'm sure beauty bark was invented by a tree cutting service that had piles of bark and tree chips laying around and some industrious tree cutter decided that rather than pay to haul the chips to the dump they could convince some poor schmuck homeowner that there yard would look better if the plant beds were covered with bark.

And I'll admit that plant beds do look better with a nice rust colored blanket of bark covering up the moss and weeds. But the bitch of it all is that you have to lug bag after bag of this crap around your yard and try to spread it thin enough to cover everything without spreading it so thin that a good breeze will leave patches of the old bark shining through.

And you never buy enough beauty bark. It is an undisputed law of lawn care nature.

Since I only spread beauty bark once a year at most, I end up waking up muscles I had forgotten I had when I sling the bags macho like over my shoulders. Which is why I am writing this mundane post today. My muscles are screaming at me that I should have remembered I am not macho. I also have these microscopic beauty bark slivers that managed to work their way around leather work gloves to embed themselves into my skin.

I'd pay somebody to do this crap if I wasn't so cheap. Oh well, that's about all anyone should write about beauty bark. At least until next year.

At least it is better than me writing about the final episode of Lost last night (and about as interesting).

Little glimpses of infinity

Little glimpses of infinity skip off the water spread out before me on the canvas of the gray Sound."
--Dizgraceland, Tweet from the train, May 19, 2010

Okay, so sometimes my tweets come across like a C+ paper in a 7th grade creative writing class. It is often the best I can come up with at 6:45 in the morning before more than two sips of coffee on the train. It is also hard to prolific typing with your thumbs in a form that only allows 140 characters or less.

I suppose my tweets are no worse than the average texting shorthand crap that passes for prose these days. At least I tweet in full sentences. Take this gem for instance:

"The roots of dissent grow deep in the soil of mindless rebellion fertilized by the compost of mental corruption! Priceless drivel!"

I haven't a clue as to what I meant when I wrote it, but I think it did get an anarchist to begin following me on Twitter (which is a step up from the porn spammers who are trying to sell me passwords to few their photos).

Just so you don't think I only tweet highbrow stuff I'll share another jewel from my tweet archive:

"Watched a woman stand waiting leash in hand while her dog took a dump. When he is done she'll pick it up in a bag. Who is the dumb animal?"

I am not sure why I try so hard to be a "twit wit," the term I've coined for the perpetually over clever tweeters who obviously spend way to much time picking out one liners with their thumbs on their smart phones trying to one up each other. I have no one to one up since as I've pointed out the only people who follow my tweets are spammers and anarchists. And nine times out of ten they stop following out of boredom or because I don't buy their passwords.

I have to say that celebrity tweeters for the most part don't seem to have much in the clever department to say. Perhaps it is because they aren't being scripted. Tom Hanks primarily posts photos of food he is eating on location. William Shatner rambles incoherently, but that seems in character. Conan O'Brien is the notable exception. But then again he was a copywriter before he was a late night star.

I shouldn't diss on the stars. Most of them have like two million followers who I imagine believe that by friending a star on Twitter, you are becoming one of their closest friends.

I suppose I tweet for the same reason I blog, to sharpen my craft. Because sometimes I come up with real pearls like:

"I can't march to the sound of a different drummer because it is raining on my parade. I'm going back in my box to think until it stops."

I said they were pearls, just not necessarily of high quality or clarity.

Way past cool

At what age do you stop being cool? And I'm not referring to the age you should stop trying to be cool. Anyone at any age who tries to be cool never will be. I'm more curious about that point at which no one looks at you and thinks, "He is pretty cool."

I see people of all ages who are way past being cool, at least from my perspective. They are the ones who have embraced a trend. Or they are the ones who embraced a trend many years ago and couldn't quite pry their death grip off it. Ponytails, mullets, Mohawks, DAs, perms, Rasta hair (unless its your religion and you live in Jamaica), neon dye jobs,  Flock of Seagull flips, mousse induced gel-mets or anything else that draws too much attention to your head weren't cool when they were popular and they aren't cool now.

Excessive piercing of anything lacks coolness. Pierced ears on men who were in their 20s in the 80s is okay. Continuing to wear an earring into your 50s and beyond is not. Excessive tattooing also lacks coolness. Calling them "tats" is especially uncool.

On the clothing front, wearing a utilikilt is about as uncool as a guy can get. Wearing one with either an Australian outback duster or leather trench coat AND a ponytail should get you stoned and shunned by the other villagers.

Basically wearing anything "to make a statement" does. It states that you are trying to stand out when you never really will. Wearing a lampshade on your head doesn't make you the life of the party. It makes you an obnoxious drunk.

I suppose going off on a tirade about what isn't cool, isn't cool. But I have never considered myself cool. I have at various times in my life tried desperately to be cool and failed miserably. I wore an Angels Flight suit in the 70s just like John Travolta.  I pierced my ears in the 80s. I had a perm during the same era. At one time in the 90s I sported a pony tail. I have a tattoo that I got when I turned 45.

I am happy to report I have never worn a utilikilt. I have worn a leather trench coat, but it was only when I was trying to be like my friend Gunter (long story that very few people would understand).

There was one time in a bar many years ago that I was feeling cool (beer will give you that temporary illusion sometimes). I was sitting on a barstool at a table with a friend when I noticed a table of attractive young ladies looking over at me and smiling and then whispering to each other and giggling. The more they smiled and stared, the more cool I tried to act. I sat in that stool with my cool Levi's on, striking my best James Dean cool pose when one of the ladies stood up and approached me. She leaned over and whispered in my ear, "My friends and I were debating on which one of us should come over and tell you that your fly is open." She then walked back to her table. I slunk off to the men's room to button my fly.

I do think it is kind of cool to admit that you aren't cool. I actually embrace my inner uncoolness. Since having kids, I have especially become uncool and fully expect to achieve the pinnacle of uncoolness by the time they become teenagers.

I'm cool with that.

Losing it

I realize that since I usually spend the two hours of  "free" time I have each night after putting my daughter to bed multi-tasking (watching television, working on my laptop and eating popcorn) I don't really give my full attention to whatever is on television. This is fine with mindless programs like Man Vs. Food or Dancing with the Stars, but it exacerbates my inability to have a clue as to what is happening on Lost. And since there is only one more new episode until the grand-finale-that's-all-she-wrote-end-of-the-series-whole-enchilada, I am in deep doo-doo when it comes to every figuring it out.

So last night they had a flashback to show the story behind Jacob and the Man in Black (who isn't Johnny Cash, but that would make just as must sense). The show opens with a pregnant woman named Claudia washing up on the island and being rescued by Biblical looking woman who helps her give birth to twin boys (Jacob and the Man in Black who was technically the Baby in Black at that point). After delivering the babies, the woman tells Claudia she is sorry and then bashes her brains out with a rock. She is a very polite murderess.

The woman then raises the babies as her own. At one point she blindfolds them and takes them to a cave filled with light and tells them they need to protect the light because everybody wants it. Anyway The Man in Black (now a Middle Schooler in Black) is visited by the ghost of Claudia who is still pissed about having her head caved in by "the mother" and tells him that she is his mother and he must join "the others" on the island who were shipwrecked at the same time Claudia washed ashore.

Then yadda, yadda, blah, blah, blah and the Man in Black kills his fake mother, fights with Jacob and is tossed into the cave of light where his body is killed and his spirit becomes the black smoke on the island that kills things and deposits polar bears in the jungle.

Makes perfect sense to me. I think it has a Cain and Abel meets the Thompson Twins (who aren't really twins) thing going on.

Oh there was a white rock and a black rock left in a leather bag, too.

I'm going to just go back to watch Man Vs. Food. I think tonight is the rerun of him eating a 12-pound enchilada (speaking of the whole enchilada).

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.