A half billion blogs...sigh

Blogger reports that by the end of 2010, more than a half billion people had created blogs using Blogger. So what are the odds that anyone is ever going to read your blog now? Even if you browsed a blog a minute 24/7 for a year you'd only see about 525,600 blogs. And that would be only 1/100 percent of the blogs out there. And the number keeps growing.

That sucks. It just reinforces my theory that if everyone is famous, no one is.

There should be a test you have to take before you can create a blog. And then you have to commit to maintaining it for at least a year or they come and remove your little toe or something like that. It would give us serious bloggers a  more level playing field to post on.

I remember when there were only 50 million or so blogs out there that you had to compete with. You had a snowball's chance in hell back then to be read. Now you have a snowball's chance to set up shop on the sun to be read.

Good thing I have no delusions about ever breaking away from the blogger pack and being noticed. I miss the good old days when you had to type out your prose, poetry or fiction and submit it to tons of obscure publications in order to be rejected. At least you knew that at least one person was reading your stuff. And if you were lucky, you'd get an impersonal rejection slip to prove someone had at least looked at the first page of your manuscript.

It's not like I read other people's blogs either. Oh I tried to. But every time I started following some one, they wrote a "I'm closing my blog" post and stopped posting. Because it takes a lot of energy to keep cranking out blog posts knowing the only people who read them are doing so by accident after googling topics like, "are clams really happy."

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over thinking you are going to get a different outcome. I'd say that pretty much applies to blogging.

Carrot on a stick

I am convinced that our lives are pretty much motivated by things that are happening in the future. It keeps us moving in the present. There is nothing like a vacation, holiday, big event or upcoming birthday dangling in front of you like a carrot on a stick to keep you going.

Unfortunately, vacations end, holidays fly by, and birthday cakes (or carrot cakes) are eaten and then your brain frantically darts around looking for something else to look forward to. The problem with once a year carrots like vacations, Christmas and your birthday is that they come and go once a year but they linger on your credit card statements.

You're better off putting baby carrots on a twig for things like your favorite television show, your daily downtime before going to bed or dessert. These unfortunately, are carrots fraught with obstacles such as reruns, cancellations, children with monsters in their closets and an expanding waistline from looking forward to dessert a bit too much.

To this day, I get a charge out of buying something new. It's the process I look forward to more than the having something new. I love doing Internet searches to compare products and then order them. I love tracking them online to see when they are going to be delivered. And I love finding the package on my doorstep. But when the package is opened, part of the joy is gone. Because what do I have to look forward to, now?

Buying things is another baby carrot. It is hard to live in the now, especially after years of conditioning as a child to cling to something to look forward to as your motivation. My 4-year old daughter is constantly telling me the things she will do when she grows up (which to her is when she turns five). It reminds me of how much of our youth we squander wanting to grow up. And then we squander the rest of our lives trying to find something else to look forward to or moping about the past.

Is it even possible to live totally in the now? Everything seems so geared towards the future. Clocks and calendars rule our lives. Our lives revolve around meeting some kind of schedule. Sometimes I think the only way you could possible live totally in the now would be to be stranded on a desert island. But I suppose even then, you'd be thinking about being rescued and ordering things on Amazon.com.

I'm not even sure what now is. We actually seem to be constantly moving between the past and the future with now being the Jello you are trying to pin to the wall. You can always look back on the now, the future now is always a bit fuzzy and frankly more appealing. Because you are never sure what it is going to be like and you can imagine it anyway you want.

Which leads me once again back to wondering where it all ultimately ends up. Because isn't the ultimate carrot on the stick attached to the Grim Reaper's scythe?

Happy Birthday Harry!

Google tells me it is is Harry Houdini's 137th birthday today. He has been dead, however since Halloween night in 1926, so I don't imagine he will be up for blowing out the candles on his cake. But then again, he was the escape king, so who knows.

Actually in addition to being adept at escaping from handcuffs and straight jackets, Houdini also was obsessed with debunking mediums who claimed to communicate with the spirits. Pity he's not around to take on Zack from the Ghost Adventurers.

I read a lot about Harry Houdini when I was a kid. My interest in him was sparked by watching a movie about him starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Interesting enough, Tony Curtis' real name was Bernie Schwartz and Harry Houdini's real name was Ehrich Weisz. And one of Tony Curtis' first lines in a movie (a period piece about knights in armor) was, "Yonda is the castle of muh fadder." Tony Curtis grew up in Brooklyn. I think his best movie was Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe.

But I digress.

Houdini died of a ruptured appendix after being punched in the stomach by a fan who heard that the escape artist had such great stomach muscles he could sustain a blow in the bread box without flinching. He failed to warn Houdini before he tested this theory, however, and Houdini didn't have time to tense up his muscles for the blow. So he didn't escape death. He died a few days later on Halloween night.

His wife, Bess, ironically held seances on Halloween for years after Houdini's death because he reportedly told her if there was an afterlife, he'd send her a message, "Rosabelle believe." It was a line from a play that his wife performed when the couple first met. Bess stopped holding seances after about ten years because she never heard from Harry. This is before EVP recorders had been invented, so that may be the reason.

Magicians throughout the world, however, continue to hold seances hoping to hear from Harry and maybe talk him out of some of the secrets to his escapes. But so far Harry is laying low. I think all of these people are trying to get in touch with him on the anniversary of his death. Maybe they should try his birthday instead.

All I'm saying is that his spirit is probably in a better mood on his birthday than his death day.

Anyway, happy birthday Harry!

The Tim Reaper

Over the years, I've posted quite a few Photoshopped images of myself that bear a striking resemblance to the Grim Reaper. Well, they bear a striking resemblance to what popular culture tells us the Grim Reaper looks like. After all, if you've seen the Grim Reaper, odds are you aren't here painting a picture of him.

If the truth were told, I don't really think the images I've posted are intended to be the Grim Reaper (more like the Tim Reaper). I just like the mysterious quality of them. So in that sense they are like the Grim Reaper. We are fascinated by the Grim Reaper. I don't think its that we are intrigued by death as much as we are intrigued by what comes after (if anything).

I know some people profess a firm belief that nothing happens. Or those with a religious bent attach a time of judgement to the after life. I think the righteous ones are engaged in wishful thinking. I believe all of the judgement is going on in this life. Hopefully after we die we leave all of that crap behind and get on with whatever we exist for.

I think it is the fascination with the afterlife that keeps crap shows like Ghost Adventurers in business. I confess to actually watching the show, more to have background noise on while I work on my computer than anything else.  And if you are lucky enough not to know anything about Ghost Adventurers, it is a reality show  featuring three self-styled paranormal investigators who lock themselves in old buildings that have a reputation for being haunted. I think the show host, Zack, is about as sharp as a river rock.

Zack is a muscle bound moron with a really bad haircut. He and his camera and sound guy walk around with night vision cameras and EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) recorders bumping into chairs and shouting for spirits to pinch and push them. Most of their evidence of the afterlife seems to be EVP that are unintelligible until Zack interprets them. Apparently most spirits have the enunciation skills of Sylvester Stallone playing Rocky.

Zack and his band of bozos also bring in experts to review their grainy footage. These experts generally resemble those fat Goth people who hung out in alleys back in high school smoking cirgarettes and plotting to overthrow student government. Zack also interviews witnesses who work in many of abandoned buildings he investigates. The witnesses are often night watchmen and caretakers who only recently been out of rehab.

If the garbage they uncover on Ghost Aventurers are truly examples of what happens after we die, I'd prefer the theory that we just end. Because mucking about in the basement of an abandoned hospital throwing pebbles at gibbering buffoons would get old for an eternity (though I wouldn't mind chucking rock at good ol' Zack's head). What would be the point? The cliche answer is that these are spirits caught between worlds because they have unfinished business, usually because they met a violent or untimely death. Tell me, what kind of unfinished business would you have in the crawlspace of an old speakeasy?

The other illogical thing about the whole ghost theory is the mathematics of it all. If dying an untimely death doomed you to hanging out where you died, the spirit world would resemble Disneyland on a weekend. Wars and natural disasters alone would keep packing the spirits in between worlds trying to figure out how to string words together in an EVP recording device.

I do hope there is something after we die. Science tells us that energy is neither created nor is it destroyed, so I'm hoping the means we continue. And I don't really want to be sucked back into the universal ether without awareness. I'm one of those selfish people who clings to his fantasy of being unique and individual even while being connected to the universe.

I guess I'll see eventually. I'm in no hurry though.

I could have been a contender

"I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody.
Instead of a bum...
...which is what I am.
Let's face it."
--Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront

There's nothing like a middle aged man's birthday to bring on the self examination of where he's been and where he is. It's not that I feel like turning my birthday party into a pity party, but I do ponder the young man's dreams versus the old man's reality.

It is useless to regret the paths we followed to get where we are. But I sometimes feel pangs that I never wrote a best selling novel or became a successful artist or musician. If I voice these feelings I get the proverbial "it's never too late." These kinds of statements generally come from people who haven't crested 40 and come to the harsh realization that what you are when you are middle aged is generally all you ever will be.

I know there are people who achieve great things in their twilight years. Colonel Sanders was a complete failure until his mid to late 60s when KFC finally took off. He died, however, having lost the rights to his own name.

I wonder if he was cremated and if so, was he original recipe or extra crispy.

But I digress.

I really don't think I want fame like I did in my younger years. I've lived long enough to watch too many famous people take an all too public nose dive, especially when they reach middle age. And in the grand scheme of things, who gives a rip whether or not people you don't care about  recognize you in public and want a piece of your fame by demanding your autograph or having their photo taken with you.

As I reflect on where I am, the greatest role I ended up playing with my life was to become a father. Now granted I waited until an age when many people were becoming grandparents to become a father. But I truly feel like I would have been a failure if I hadn't become a father. I may not have written the great American novel, sold a painting or played guitar to a sold out audience, but sometimes, in the eyes of my young children I feel like a rock star.

So maybe I am somebody.

Fifty something

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I thought turning 52 was a non-monumental birthday. Now I discover turning 53 is in the same non-monumental ballpark. At least I'm still seven years away from turning 60. I do imagine AARP will up their onslaught to get me to join. I will continue to resist until I actually do become a retired person. And having two small children, it is safe to say that is quite a ways in the future.

AARP would have an easier time recruiting new members if they came up with a new name. I for one don't have any burning desire to be part of an association of people whose only reason for associating with each other is that they are aging rapidly. I suppose they make up for the challenges of recruiting by raking in multiple payments from the older members who forget whether they've paid or not.

Ironically, as I type this I am listening to Pandora Radio and an ad for AARP came on. Is it my music selection?

I think AARP should change their name to the WBWA -- Wise But Wrinkled Association.  Or maybe, WAAWBA -- Wise Ass And Wrinkled Butt Association. Or better yet, NDYA -- Not Dead Yet Association.

I don't mean to diss on the AARP, but I can get just as good discounts with my AAA membership and I don't have the stigma if being an old fart immediately associated with it. But enough dumping on the poor old AARP.

We will be eating at our regular Mexican restaurant tonight. I don't say our favorite Mexican restaurant because the food is really quite mediocre. We just like going there because our kids can make noise and have meltdowns with a minimum number of dirty glances being shot in our direction. I am not looking forward to the Mexican version of happy birthday being sang to me by bored servers while I wear a sombrero. But I will do it for the kid's sake. Though when we went there on my son's birthday last year he was terrified when the servers converged on him with a candle stuck in a scoop of ice cream and the sombrero. I'll try and maintain my composure.

I wonder if they give you a discount if you are a member of AARP?

Happy St. Patrick's Day

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Copycats

Just so you can't find the answer to everything by Googling it, I never could find a satisfactory explanation as to why someone who mimics someone is called a copycat. We have three cats and they don't seem to spend much time doing anything but eating, sleeping, crapping and puking. Though this being St. Patrick's Day, it opens up a debate over whether they are mimicking your average Irish wannabe.

I find it ironic someone came up with the phrase, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" likely to justify plagiarising some one's original idea. Not that I think there is an original idea. Google has burst that self-delusional bubble. Google any original idea you may think you have and you'll find someone has beat you to it.

Or they may all be copycats.

It is hard to conceive of original thought in a society where much of learning it done through rote repetition. The key to educational success is often the ability to memorize versus an affinity for abstract thought. This becomes increasingly the case as the arts are eliminated from curriculum to make way for the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic.

Let's face it, if there were original thought, there would be no fashion, fads or trends. Things catch on because our herd mentality requires we go with the flow to avoid sticking out. Even the people who rebel against popular trends and fashions do so in sheep like flocks. Body piercings, tattoos and Mohawk haircuts are a perfect example.

Being a race of copycats probably has to do a great deal with survival. If you see your neighbor avoid being consumed by a saber tooth tiger by poking it with a sharp stick, you wouldn't go far by trying to be original and tickle it with a feather to avoid becoming lunch.

And I imagine most great inventions come about by building on someone else's great idea and just tweaking it a bit so that it works smoother. If this wasn't the case, we would still be watching black and white televisions.

Oh well, I need to go make some copies.

You can't cry at the happiest place on earth

I first visited Disneyland when I was 15 years old. It was part of a trip my sophomore year in high school. I was in the marching band and we were performing at half time of a then LA Rams and San Francisco 49er's game. All summer I'd sold light bulbs, washed cars and picked up garbage at the Idaho State Fair to raise money to pay for the trip.

It was my first flight on an airplane and the first time I'd stayed in a hotel without my parents. We flew into San Diego and toured the zoo and Sea World. Then we boarded a bus and drove to LA. We spent one day at Disneyland where we were supposed to march down Main Street. But it was raining so we didn't get to perform.

Disneyland had always been one of those mythical places to me. I'd grown up watching Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on a black and white television every Sunday night. Every now and then they would feature the amazing rides at Disneyland. It was always tantalizingly out of reach for me.

Vacations for our family always consisted of packing up my father's 1940s era Chevrolet with camping gear and driving to either the Sawtooth Mountains or McCall, Idaho on the shores of Payette Lake. We never stayed in hotels or motels and we most certainly never left Idaho.  Disneyland was pretty much not in the picture.

So having the opportunity to go to Disneyland when I was 15 was pretty cool. Even in the rain, I was pretty awestruck at the time. Back then, there were still in the A, B, C, D and E ticket mode. This was 1973. E tickets were the big rides like Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion. A and B tickets were stuff like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and the tea cups.

I bring up Disneyland and my nostalgia over my band trip because I just got back from a trip to Disneyland with my family. And I have to tell you, it's a lot different going there now then it was 38-years ago. For one, I was pushing a stroller with my 4-year old daughter in it while my wife pushed another stroller with my 2-year old son in it. It is amazing how your priorities shift when you go to Disneyland with your kids. Instead of dashing as fast as I could to get in line for Space Mountain or Thunder Mountain Railroad, we maneuvered our strollers down Main Street to have breakfast with the Disney characters at the Plaza Inn.

Gone are the tickets, too. You buy one day passes or three-day park hopper passes for the price of a small car to have unlimited access to Disneyland or California Adventure and all of the rides. Unlimited access actually means unlimited access to the infamous Disney lines that deceive you into entering a ride queue thinking it is short only to discover it loops back on itself a million times through an intricate maze of chains and stanchions. We must have waited in line 45 minutes for the Dumbo ride for a 20-second flight in the flying elephants.

I have to hand it to Disney. They are geniuses at maximizing the opportunities to separate happy visitors from their life savings. After plunking down your four or five hundred dollars to get your family into the happiest place on earth, they employ their mass merchandising resources to extract out hundreds more for character dining experiences. Then they deploy photographers at strategic photogenic spots to snap your family photos and soft sell you on buying the memories online.

And, after winding your way through a beautifully landscaped maze of Pixie Hollow to have your children meet Tinker Belle (dutifully photographed by the Disney photographer), you find yourself exiting through a gift shop exploding with Tinker Belle merchandise. More than once we had to shake off our weariness and speed wheel the strollers through stacks of glittering bobbles before the protests of our children reached the critical meltdown stage.

It was hard to believe after gazing wearily at the throngs of people at Disneyland that we as a nation are still in the recovery stage of the recession. As we walked  toward Cinderella's Castle, we passed a couple comforting their daughter as she threw up a corn dog. I began to focus on the crying of other children pushed to the edge by one too many moments of happiness. And I felt remorse at the terror I instilled in my own children by taking them through the Haunted Mansion. My two-year old son and four-year old daughter weren't quite ready for what I used to think of as harmless cartoon like ghosts. As the famous stretching room just inside the mansion began descending, my son uttered a heart wrenching, "I want to go home."

It was then that the irony of crying at the happiest place on earth stuck me. You have to love mass marketing.

Better moons

The future is no place
To place your better days
--Dave Matthews, Cry Freedom

Damned moon anyway. We walk on it and slice golf balls across its craters and it still beckons to us with its desolate siren's song. So close and yet so far, it full moons us periodically and smacks its crater ridden ass, mocking us for pining away for a ball of rock and dust.

The moon is a master trickster, too. I remember when I was 19 years old, driving all night from Boise to Denver with a 25-year old lady friend who would briefly be my girlfriend before ditching me for a irritating unemployed actor from New York. We were going to Denver to pick up a goat she'd left with her ex-husband's in-laws and an antique sewing machine. It's a long story.

Anyway, we were taking turns driving her Toyota pick up. It was a stick shift which at the time I had little experience driving. But most of the driving was on the Interstate so there wasn't a lot of shifting involved. I don't remember what time it was, but my friend was sleeping in the passenger seat and I was staring at the occasional lights of oncoming truckers hauling freight. Suddenly the moon appeared on the horizon bigger than the UFO in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

It was the first time I'd seen the moon in its incredible Hulk mode framed by the horizon versus  its Herb Villachez  (the little guy from Fantasy Island) mode dwarfed by clear sky. I was freaked and awestruck. And no sooner than the moon had exploded in my face, it retreated to it's proper fifty cent piece size in the sky.

In case you are interested, we made it to Denver, loaded up the goat and the sewing machine (which my friend retrieved by climbing through the window of a house in the boonies outside of Denver) and headed back to Boise. The goat rode in the pick up bed and crapped on my sleeping bag. This proved to be prophetic for my future relationship with the girl I'd driven to Denver with.

But I digress.

I sometime feel sorry for Neil Armstrong. Having been the first man to walk on the moon (we think), there had to be this nagging feeling when he returned home that there wasn't much else he could do to top that experience. I feel even more sorry for Buzz Aldrin. It must have really sucked to follow Neil Armstrong around at parties saying, "I walked on the moon, too" and having people pat him on the head and say, "That's nice" and move on to refill their wine glass. But I feel the most sorry for Michael Collins, the astronaut who stayed in the Apollo capsule while Neil and Buzz bounced around on the moon. It must have been like driving to Grand Canyon and never getting out of the car.

Before I got off on tangents about goats, sewing machines and walking on the moon, the reason I was inspired to write this post was seeing the almost full moon in the sky the other night. It always catches me off guard. I'm not sure why it should. I always feel the full moon before I see it. This time I saw it around the same time I was listening to Dave Matthews sing Cry Freedom with the philosophical line, "The future is no place to place your better days."

I look up at the moon after hearing that lyric and realize that there is no better moon than the one that is in the sky now. And it wouldn't be any better if I was standing up their with a golf club slicing balls into the Milky Way like Alan Shepard did (he had to one up Neil Armstrong somehow).

It is such a simple concept, yet one that is so hard for most of us to grasp that we waste an awful lot of the now by living for the future. I imagine even the goat that crapped on my sleeping bag lived in the now. But then again what else does a goat have to look forward to.

Oh well, enough waxing and waning poetic on the moon.

Queen for a day

I suppose Photoshopping my face on Queen Elizabeth's body and calling this post "Queen for the Day" could be misconstrued by some people. I have never really had any burning desire to dress up in women's clothing even in the privacy of my own home...not that there is anything wrong with it even if it is a bit bizarre and not accepted by a majority of white bread society (or vanilla society if you want to dredge up old sore subjects...its a long story from another blog post).

And no the man with his face Photoshopped on a Queen's body isn't protesting too much. For some reason, it just cracks me up. Besides, using Photoshop saves me the trouble of having to wear a corset and squeezing into those shoes.

I have never really accepted the concept of royalty anyway, queen or king (and I've Photoshopped my face on my share of kings so there). With the exception of Republicans and stupid people (a redundancy, I know), I pretty much believe everyone is more or less equal if not equally well mannered.

I find it ironic that Americans, people raised in a country that rebelled against the aristocracy, gets all ga-ga about royalty. We spout rhetoric about everyone being equal yet we elevate our elected officials and celebrities to royalty status because we just can't shake our peasant ancestry.

It cracks me up that the royalty in ancient Egypt brought about their downfall by so much inbreeding to protect the royal bloodlines that they eventually could only produce royal progeny that could play banjos in Arkansas. Hollywood celebrities should pay particular attention to this lesson from history.

I suppose everyone harbors this secret (or not so secret) desire to be the one who must be obeyed. I march up and down the hallways where I work mumbling, "Make it so" and "You're fired, get the hell out of Graceland" all the time. No one pays any attention to me.

Perhaps if I came to work dressed like Queen Elizabeth, they would pay more attention.

Sticking to your guns

stick to one's gunsFig. to remain firm in one's convictions; to stand up for one's rights. (Fig. on a soldier remaining in place to fire a gun even when all appears to be lost.)

As I write this post, I am listening to a loop of The Civil Wars performing Barton Hollow and Poison and Wine. It is a byproduct of my OCD nature to obsessively listen to news songs I really like until I am sick to death of them. So far, I'm sticking to my guns that The Civil Wars are going big time.

That leads to my first digression. Since I make a living trying to pry people's hands off from those guns they stick to so stubbornly, I'll let you in on a little secret. There isn't much anyone can do to change some one's mind once they have they have it set on something. If you grew up having your father repeat over and over that there is no car like a Chevrolet and that Fords suck, chances are you will share that conviction and stubbornly stick to your guns. Unless...and here's where my job as a marketing person comes in...unless someone plays on the many psychological factors that make you hold onto the conviction that Chevy's are the only car to own.

I think the key is determining whether it really is your guns you are sticking to or someone else's guns. And I'm not trying to be Freudian here, either. Because I believe that a conviction isn't a conviction if it was drilled into you and you adhere to it by the sheer thread of rote indoctrination by an authority figure. The way to overcome pseudo convictions is to teach a person to cultivate independent thought and challenge the conventions of their fathers. If your father's conviction stands the test of your own filters of what is right or wrong than it can truly become your own conviction.

Then you can stick to your guns and no one can make you holster them.

That being said, if I am trying to target a group of people to have a conviction about a particular issue or product, I don't throw my troops charge of the light brigade style into a wall of people sticking to their guns on polarized sides of an issue. I take aim at those people staring blankly at their guns trying to figure out how to load them and which direction to point them.

Elections are decided not by hardcore Republicans or Democrats. And elections are not decided by some asshole waving a teabag. Elections are decided by tipping those people waffling in between the hardcore far left and right.

On a personal note, I have to admire people who stick to their guns as long as they are sticking to guns for things I believe in that lean more towards the left than the right. If not, they can just stick their guns.

I'm sticking to my guns on that.

The Civil Wars

I don't normally devote blog posts to embedded videos or songs I like, but since it has been quite awhile since I've been inspired by new music, I decided to step out of my usual box of distractions and digressions and just say I like The Civil Wars. I could go on and on about haunting melodies and moody lyrics, but just click on the video below and listen for yourself.

Now you have a right not to like this music, but for the life of me, I don't know why you wouldn't. And who wouldn't love a song that started out with "I'm a dead man walking?"

I have to tell you, I found myself wanting to get a Dobro guitar and start belting out blues after listening to White playing his in this song. There are no gimmicks. There is no Lady GaGa hype here. It is just raw talent. Go to Youtube and listen to some of their live performances of the song (including a gig on the Tonight Show). You'll discover none of this music was the product of recording studio tricks. It's about as real as you can get.

Well enough of my gushing.  I'll try to keep my next post on topic for Dizgraceland.

Not that I know what that might be.

The elephant in the room

There was a time in the heyday of my blog that I had quite the affinity for Photoshopping my face on various animals and inanimate objects such as quesidillas, whale vomit, and kimchi stew. In one post in which I had Photoshopped my face on a bear, I mentioned that the one animal I'd never quite figured out how to Photoshop my face on was an elephant.

It is not easy to Photoshop your face on an elephant. The trunk presents the biggest challenge because it prevents you from using your real nose when placing your face on the elephant. And the trunk hides the mouth, so you can't really use your own mouth on the elephant either (and by using your mouth on the elephant I don't wish to imply anything kinky).

So the only thing you can really use to make yourself recognizable when you try and put your face on an elephant is your eyes, eyebrows and glasses.

I haven't really perfected it yet, but I think I've made pretty good progress on the elephant front.

Why, you may ask, is it so important for me to Photoshop my face (or technically my eyes) on an elephant? Because it is there.

Ha, ha, ha....

But seriously, it isn't that I have a great affinity for elephants. I wouldn't say they are my totem animals in the tradition of our Native American brethren. I also wouldn't say I have the qualities of an elephant, especially if it is true that an elephant never forgets. Because at times, I can't remember shit. Though I do hold onto grudges for a long time. And Mr. Akley, my 7th grade PE teacher better hope I never see him hobbling across a crosswalk in his walker when I'm behind the wheel. And if he happens to be with Mrs. Gussie my 5th grade teacher or Mr. Steele, my driver's Ed teacher, it ain't going to be pretty.

But I digress.

Speaking of elephants, I am not sure why Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, was called the Elephant Man. He didn't look anything like an elephant. Nor do I understand why elephants are the symbol of the Republican Party. Maybe it is because Republicans are huge asses and elephants have huge asses.

That seems like as good a note to end on as any other.

Beano for the brain

The problem with mental flatulence is that it can't be attributed to too much fiber in your diet. For my own part, I attribute it to not having enough creative outlets. So every now and then I just hop up manically and start letting loose random ideas with very little merit.

For example (and I feel bad about exploiting the misfortunes of others), it dawned on me that this would be an excellent time for an investor to buy one of the Great Pyramids of Egypt and have it moved stone by stone to some place in the United States, maybe a WalMart parking lot for example. Then whoever bought it could market their company as truly one of the great wonders of the world. If you threw in some camels, you could have all kinds of opportunities for hump day promotions, too.

I have several of these types of ideas on any given day. The problem is, my talents are for coming up with big ideas. But I have very little interest in the practical aspects of implementing them. The big challenge in any great idea is overcoming the petty details and obstacles thrown in their way by operations and logistical people. No matter how loudly I shout, "Give me solutions, not problems," most people ignore me.  Perhaps this because am often shouting this on the bus or train at random strangers who aren't privy to my grand ideas.

I wish I could figure out a way to get recruited by some big think tank where I got paid beaucoup bucks to come up with big ideas. And after I'd passed forth these pearls, I'd leave it up to some other swine to string them together into a necklace. I'd be in hog heaven.

The problem is, someone other than myself would have to recognize me as a creative genius before they would offer me a six-figure job passing brain farts every day. It's the same problem I have getting my blog to go viral and capture the world's attention.

I suppose it is all in how you define genius. Thomas Edison once said that "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent inspiration." Most of the population, however, seems to think that genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent regurgitation. I prefer to think genius is closely aligned with original thought. And the more original ideas you have, the more of a genius you are.

Notice I said original ideas, not good ones.

Not that I think there is a lot of room for original thought in the world anyway. I've expressed my frustration on more than one occasion about having what I thought was a cool idea only to Google it to find out that about a million other people had the same cool idea. And don't cliche me with "great minds think alike" crap. Mediocre minds think alike.

I'd like to think great minds digress a lot, too.

Anyway, I was thinking of changing the title of my blog to Beano for the brain.  But a quick Google search has shown that several other people have gone down that path, so I'll pass on it.

Besides, I am the only Dizgraceland and I'd hate to see all the brand equity dissipate by trying to freshen it up with a cheap play on words. A man has to have a place to pass on his ideas without someone wanting to beat the dog.

I feel so much better now.

Computing in the fog...er cloud

I had a post almost complete yesterday when blogger belched and it evaporated into the computing cloud that Microsoft is so proud of touting on its television commercials. I haven't a clue as to what key combination I hit that made the post disappear. God only knows where or when it will turn up.

I was going on about how silly it seems to refer to Web based computing as the cloud as if it was some new invention to use software that wasn't housed on your PC or laptop. Before personal computers and the Internet, people used remote terminals hardwired or connected via a modem to a mainframe computer. So it isn't like it is a new concept. Just instead of tapping into a mainframe, we're tapping into a network of servers.

I used to consider myself fairly tech savvy. I worked as weekend computer operator on an IBM mainframe computer for the Idaho State Department of Transportation when I was in college. It was kind of a pain in the ass job because you had to work two rotating 12-hour shifts. One week you'd work from 11 p.m. to 11 a.m. The next weekend you'd work from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. You'd get every third weekend off. It wouldn't have been so bad if it was the only job I had, but at the time I was also working full time at the local public library and carrying a full load at college. So for almost two years I was working 64-hours a week and going to college. There we some weekends where I'd work all night at the computer job and then go work at the library, get off and go back to the computer job.

I drank a lot of coffee back then.

The computer I worked on took up a room the size of a small gymnasium. The CPU sat in the center of the room and rows of large magnetic tape drives surrounded it. And being a computer operator back then involved essentially being the machine's bitch. There was a monitor and keyboard console at the front of the room along with a card reader. You'd feed a stack of punch cards containing computer code -- usually COBALT or something like that -- into the card reader. That would be processed by the CPU and then, depending upon the program, the monitor would beep at you to go retrieve a numbered tape from an adjacent tape storage room and load it on one of the tape drives.

Sometimes you'd load a tape and the computer would access one small bit of data and then ask for a different tape. I used to curse at the programmers who ran jobs that asked for 40 or 50 tapes. If I wasn't loading and unloading tapes, I was loading paper on a large chain printer the size of a coffin that sat in the back of the room. And if I wasn't loading paper on the printer, I was carting stacks of three-part carbon forms to a room behind the computer room that housed a machine known as a burster. You'd load the three part paper stack into it and it would burst the three copies apart into three separate stacks and spit out the ribbon of carbon paper between the copies.

Although it was mind numbing work at times, I got so I preferred the days and nights when lots of jobs had been submitted because the alternative was 12 hours of sitting there with nothing to do but pace around the
CPU and check in on the monitor every 30 minutes to make sure the thing was running. In addition to housing the data for the department of transportation, the computer also housed all of the state's driving and driver's license records. So it had to be up 24-hours a day because cops would call in to their control center when they made a traffic stop to check some one's license. The control center would in turn would tap into the computer records via remote terminals.

Because the computer housed driver's license and driving records, the computer room was under 24-hour surveillance by Idaho State Police via closed circuit cameras. The cops were housed in another part of the building so I never met them, but I got to know them via telephone. The were quick to call me saying the "com" was down even when they saw me on the computer frantically trying to reboot to solve a problem.

The only way to escape the fishbowl of the computer room was to slink off into an adjacent data processing room filled with card punch machines manned during the day by a small army of data processing clerks. It was my sanctuary. After a few weeks I started to figure out ways to take naps during the lulls in changing tapes and printer paper. I discovered a custodian storeroom behind the card punch room. In it were stacks of quilted pads used for moving office equipment. I converted them into a makeshift mattress and blankets

We weren't technically supposed to sleep because you were required to check the machine every 30 minutes to make sure everything was running. But I managed to program my body to take 30 minute naps and wake up automatically to stumble into the computer room and check the machine. I wasn't fully awake, so I suppose you could say I was originator of the concept of computing in a cloud or for as the case may be.

Looking back, it all sees so archaic. I probably have more computing power now in my desktop computer than that mainframe had back in 1980. And long gone are the days of programming via punch cards and computer tape. I don't imagine anyone uses the phrase "data processing" anymore. We now surf and float in the clouds, tweeting and interfacing on social network sites.

Even though the technology has evolved and become an inseparable from our lives, the basic concept of computing comes down to a series of 0's and 1's combined in various patterns at an ever increasing speed. But boiling down the complexity of computing to binary code doesn't sound as sexy to marketers trying to keep Microsoft hawking its system snake oil to the ignorant masses.

That's okay. I have always liked the fog and my head in the clouds.

Bad medicine

I don't think all television sucks, just the plethora of programs that have been cloned by the creators of Grey's Anatomy, especially that new one called Off the Map about doctor's working in a remote and undisclosed location in South America that is actually filmed in Hawaii. That show sucks major loads of swamp water.

I watched the first episode on On Demand during a desperate search for something I hadn't seen before. The actor who used to play Lenny on Laverne and Shirley (Michael McKean) guest stars as a tourist who is injured after running into a tree while repelling through the rain forest. His internal injuries are so severe they need to operate on him at the jungle clinic. They discover in the middle of the surgery that they don't have enough plasma on hand so the doctors leave Lenny on the operating table while they go retrieve coconuts. They then hook Lenny up to a coconut IV since everyone knows coconut milk is an excellent substitute for plasma.

Lenny survives the surgery and the coconut milk, but resists being airlifted to a real hospital until he has the opportunity to dump his late wife's ashes in a local lagoon famous for its glow in the dark algae. Apparently this was the real reason for Lenny coming to the undisclosed South American location. No one bothers to ask him why scattering his wife's ashes to get closure wasn't the first thing on his To Do list before taking the canopy ride on a harness through the rain forest. They simply throw his stretcher into a canoe and paddle to the lagoon. Lenny then proceeds to pollute the pristine ecosystem of the lagoon with his dead wife's remains and looks quite relieved. Perhaps this is really because he will have less luggage on his return trip home.

I won't go into any of the other inane and implausible subplots going on in the program but suffice it to say they involved cheesy stereotypes of third world patients gratefully paying the young, beautiful white doctors in chickens to thank them for saving their lives.

I want to go out on a limb here and state bluntly that the biggest lie shows like Grey's Anatomy and Off the Map perpetuate is that people who work in hospitals are attractive and majorly buff. Maybe I'm not going to the right hospitals, but no one in a hospital even looks remotely like anyone from Grey's Anatomy. No one in any hospital I've been in even remotely looks like they have ever seen the inside of  a gym or passed by a box of jelly doughnuts.

These doctor shows also falsely suggest that when you enter a hospital, you are immediately surrounded by surgeons anxiously waiting to remove your spleen regardless of whether there is anything wrong with it. My experience with hospitals is that you can languish for hours in the waiting room filling out paperwork before you get to spend an average of three minutes with someone you assume is a doctor. They generally look at your paperwork, look at their watch and then rush out the door presumably to act busy and distracted with the next patient. None of the doctors I have encountered seem overly enthusiastic about trying any new breakthrough surgery on any parts of my body, either.

But I suppose no one would watch television shows that depicted what doctors and hospitals are really like. Nor would they want to watch television programs about doctors who chose less glamorous specialties than brain surgery and plastic surgery. Dr. McDreamy wouldn't be as dreamy if he was a podiatrist or proctologist now would he? And what makes a person decide to concentrate on such things when they go to medical school anyway. Do they wake up one morning and say, "You know, I think staring at assholes all day is the direction I should take with my medical career."

Of course, I think staring at assholes all day is the direction many people's careers take them.

Butt, I digress...get it?

Anyway, I'll be glad when we get off from the doctor themed doctor drama's and move on to the next theme in the cycle. But please don't let it be more crime drama's or remakes.

I think the new Hawaii 50 sucks, too, BTW.

Snow how, snow way

As predicted, it did indeed dump a great deal of snow here on Tuesday night. By morning we had five inches of snow. But a heavy rain was falling when I backed my car out of the driveway into the now slush filled streets to drive to the train station.

My wife rushed our kids to a local park to make slush angels and lopsided snowmen in the rain. By the time I returned home in the evening, the snow had been reduced to what looked like skid row versions of Frosty the snowman lying in the gutters.

Temperatures are now in the 50s so the bogeyman has retreated into the closet until the next slow news day.

I'm sure other parts of the nation would like to dope slap Seattle for its whining about snow. We are definitely a city of weather wimps. Perhaps it comes from all the rain. It creates a mental mold that is hard to shake off. Even when the sun shines here and the temperatures rise above 60 degrees, people bitch about the heat.

Ironically, I moved here years ago to go to college because I liked the idea of being near water. You would have thought that would lead me to look for colleges in California or Florida, but no, I chose the Pacific Northwest. Forget the fact that when sitcom and screenplay writers want to pick someplace at the edge of the known world, they pick Seattle. When Frasier Crane ran away from Cheers and his ex-wife Lilith, he ended up in Seattle because it is as far as you can get from Boston without going to Alaska. And I'm sure the writers ruled out Alaska because it would be too much of a ripoff of Northern Exposure.

I am used to living in places which are considered on the fringe of civilization and culture. Idaho is also used by screenwriters as a place still waiting to be discovered by Lewis and Clark. I am surprised Kelsy Grammer, star of Frasier, didn't end up in Boise instead of Virginia in the plot of his failed sitcom Hank a few years ago.

I can tell you though, after growing up in Idaho, Seattle is pretty darned urban hip in comparison. But the rain thing is a bummer. And don't get me started again about what happens when it snows here. Also, living here makes you digress a lot.

Is the bogeyman made out of snow?

"A bogeyman (also spelt bogieman, boogeyman or boogieman) is a monstrous imaginary figure used in threatening children. This legendary monster has no specific appearance, and conceptions of the monster can vary drastically even from household to household within the same community; in many cases, he simply has no set appearance in the mind of a child, but is just an amorphous embodiment of terror. Bogeymancan be used metaphorically to denote a person or thing of which someone has an irrational fear. Parents often say that if their child is naughty, the bogeyman will get them, in an effort to make them behave. The bogeyman legend may originate from Scotland, where such creatures are sometimes called bogles, boggarts, boggers, bugaboos or bugbears."

--Definition of bogeyman from Wikipedia

Ironically, the definition of bogeyman could easily be applied to the threat of snow in the Pacific Northwest:

"Snow (also known as blizzard, slush or freezing rain) is a monstrous imaginary figure used in threatening commuters. This legendary weather has no specific appearance, and conceptions of the weather can vary drastically even from household to household within the same community; in many cases, it simply has no set appearance in the mind of a commuter, but is just an amorphous embodiment of terror. Snow storm can be used metaphorically to denote a an excuse employees use to avoid coming to work."

I shouldn't be surprised that people in the Seattle area react so viscerally to the concept of snow. These are the same people who don shorts, tank tops and sandals if the sun peeks through the every present cloud cover. If a snow flake is spotted within a 40-mile radius, people here sack the local grocery stores for supplies and run home to cower under their beds waiting for the Apocalypse.

Oh, I exaggerate slightly. It does snow heavily once or twice here every five years or so. And since much of region seems perched either on the top or the bottom of a hill, most drivers voluntarily drive their cars into a tree or other parked car to get it over with.

I try to avoid being one of those annoying people who drone on about people here not knowing how to drive in snow. Unless you are in the Ididarod driving a dog sled, no one really knows how to drive in snow. I grew up in Idaho where it snowed a lot. And yes, we drove around regardless of how much snow there was, but I lived in a relatively flat place that wasn't quite as populated as Seattle. You could slip and slide and chances are you wouldn't hit anything except an unfortunate squirrel trying to protect its nuts. So it isn't really fair to say people in Idaho were better driving in the snow. They just had more experience and less things to run into.

Still, I get irritated that the media here talks about the possibility of snow as if it were the threat of alien invasion. And nine times out of ten we get a dusting of snowflakes and it stops. Then the media points the finger accusingly at Al Gore and starts ragging on the economy until some new more promising clouds form.

I kind of miss the joy I felt as a kid when it snowed. Snow translated to snowmen, snow forts, snowball fights and hockey games in the streets. Later it meant great skiing at the local ski resort. Unfortunately when I was a kid in Idaho, snow never translated to school closures or delays.

But I do think the bogeyman lived in the coal bin in my grandmother's basement.

Fee, FIOS, Fo Fum...

I pay Frontier FIOS for umpteen hundred channels including most of the premium channels. But the only thing I ever watch anymore are the on demand shows that you can't get unless you pay for the premium channels. The irony is that I never watch the real time premium channels, just the on demand shows. So why do they bother having anything but their on demand shows?

Its not like they make any more money by having the regular premium channels. I don't see the point. If everything is available in the on demand what is the purpose of having scheduled programming that you have to tune into or DVR? It isn't like the commercial channels that need you to watch commercials to pay for them. I'd even be willing to watch on demand programs with commercials you can't fast forward through if someone would simply give me the option of only on demand television.

I have this dream that some innovative cable company will create an option of just paying one fee a month to simply get unlimited on demand television. I don't want to skim through guides trying to figure out what is on. I don't want to have to use the DVR anymore. I just want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it.

 Is this too much to ask out of life?