"You love the Ukulele," Sweetie told me the other day, and it's true. I do. I tend to be a fan of the more-unusual instruments, because the more-unusual instruments make the songs that they're being used to play quirkier and more unpredictable (or less predictable, however you want to say it.)
Sweetie was commenting on my finding the latest Ukulele Cover Version of a song I liked already. In this case, it was a cover version of a-ha's Take On Me, with Ukulele, done by a group called Shiny And The Spoon:
Shiny And The Spoon aren't the only people to ever cover Take On Me via Uke: Here's a version that predates them by almost 18 months:
That version doesn't have the sweetness that Shiny And The Spoon's does, but it is faster, and it has those all-important dramatic pauses. Too many musicians overlook the dramatic pause as a musical effect. That's what killed Bach, for example -- doctors theorize that if he'd used a dramatic pause a little more often, he'd have survived that bread factory explosion.
In between those two versions, mctrmt posted this version of Take On Me:
It is possible to cover the song without a ukulele. I wasn't sure, at first, why you'd want to do that, but A.C. Newman showed me it's possible and can be okay.
Sara Bareilles lent a stripped-down acoustic-y version:
As did "Anni B Sweet."
Then again, if you think the song sounds good stripped down and ukuleled, consider it as a choir version:
And while that's pretty good, this is by far the Most Awesome version of the Already Awesome Song:
(And I couldn't finish this up without putting in the literal version, so here that is:)
Not a single one of the 3 Good Things is the Super Bowl win. I mean, sure, I won the bet with Sweetie and The Boy and that means that I and the Babies! will be wearing Saints gear pretty soon, but the weekend was so chock full o' good things that the Super Bowl didn't even make the cut!
1. Thanks to the coupons, at least the movie was free. Sweetie and I tried to take Mr Bunches and Mr F to their first real movie in a real theater, opting for a 10 a.m. showing of Ice Age 3 on Saturday. (It was actually Mr Bunches' second trip to the theater. But the last time, when Sweetie tried to take just him, he wouldn't leave the parking lot, so that doesn't count, right?) We got into our seats about 9:52, with me thinking that the Babies! would last 8 minutes until the movie started, before getting restless. But then the movie started late, Mr Bunches got nervous about all the people and the dark, and Mr F bumped his head on the seat, forcing us to abandon our seats and wait in the hallway for a few minutes. We tried again, and they watched about 10 minutes of the actual movie -- but we had to leave when Mr F's boredom prompted him to roll like a log across the front of the theater.
2. Nobody was hurt in the disaster. During their naps yesterday, I had to repeatedly head into the Babies!'s room to calm things down and remind them that naptime is for sleeping, not for piling mattresses on top of Mr F, or stripping down and trying to jump off the dirty laundry basket in the closet. The lesson didn't take: the picture to the right is the scene that greeted me at 4 p.m. when I went in to "wake them up." That's in quotes because they hadn't bothered to actually sleep.
3. I got the regular 'puter working again, finally. After our laptop broke down, then got repaired, I needed to reactivate the internet service for it to begin using it again, and I'd been putting that off because of how time-consuming and tedious I thought it would be. But by Friday, I was tired of having our tiny 'puter and not having access to all my actual files and writings and stuff, so I took advantage of getting home from work early on Friday to get on the phone to my wireless provider and find out how to de-activate the netbook and re-activate the laptop. She walked me through the complicated process as follows:
Her: "Plug in the card, then click "Tools,", and "Activate."
Me: "Done. Now what?"
Her: "Now you're done."
I'm glad I could fix things like that.
(But it was good to get the laptop going again, because then I didn't have any more tiny screens to squint at, and we could use all our music again, and I had my stuff saved on the hard drive, stuff like my novel the After -- and I finally got to update that over on 5 Pages.)
(Sweetie, on the other hand, took advantage of the return of the laptop to download some Lady Gaga songs.)
Now that the Super Bowl is over, you can think about other stuff, like actually going and doing what some of the ads on the Super Bowl told you to do. First up: Get that vacation rental that Unitard recommended.
Have you seen Unitard? You watched the entire game plus pregame, right? If not, then check this out:
Like all superheroes, Unitard makes a good point. In this case, that vacation rental commercial drives home how STUPID it is to pay for a hotel room when you could get a whole house or a condo.
What's a hotel room, about 10x10, with a desk and a bed and an uncomfortable chair? Why pay for that when you could spread out through one of the whole luxury houses or condos they've got for renting on Vacation Rental.org?
Unitard -- who's my new hero -- doesn't just know how to get up and over a counter in style. He knows how to VACATION in style, and you should follow his lead. With Vacation Rental.org, you'll get more space for less money, resulting in a better vacation.
The other day, on the Dan Patrick Show, Jets Quarterback Mark Sanchez was asked how he would rather watch the Super Bowl: In person, in New Orleans, or at home. He said "At home," and explained that his reason was that it still hurt him that he wasn't playing in it.
Then, last night I saw on the news a story about a gathering of men who've never missed seeing a Super Bowl in person. These four guys (I'm not sure if they're a group, or just four guys who happen to share the same trait in common, that trait being an ability to spend a person's college tuition on seeing a game) have made it to all Super Bowls, from Super Bowl 1966 to Super Bowl 2010, where they were treated to a dinner by the NFL. (With ticket prices for Super Bowls in recent years averaging nearly $3,000 apiece, the NFL should've done more than give these guys some prime rib and a pat on the back.)
To TMQ, oddly specific includes setting a kickoff time for 5:28 p.m., as opposed to 5:30 p.m., and includes setting a contract at $451,000 instead of some other number.
Those numbers are no more, or less, specific than TMQ's preferred numbers, though: TMQ seems to think that there's something less specific about 5:30 p.m. than there is about 5:28 p.m., and he finds it absurd that someone would be so specific as to make a contract worth $451,000 rather than $450,000.
TMQ, in doing so, engages in the kind of uneducated snobbery he tries to decry; he feels superior to those people he claims are absurd for being so specific -- while not understanding that there's nothing more, or less, specific about either number: $451,000 is no more specific than $450,000. Both are numbers, and both are exact, specific numbers. $450,000 is an exact, specific number, and $451,000 is, too, and, for that matter, $451,929.32 is an exact, specific number, and it's no more, or less, exact or specific: In each case, the number is carried out to the same number of significant figures, and significant figures determine how specific you're being.
5:28 p.m. is exactly as specific -- because it's measured to the same degree -- as 5:30 p.m. What TMQ means is that 5:30 p.m. feels more general, and it feels more general because that's the number we all mentally round 5:28 p.m. to. If someone says something starts at 5:28, we all decide "that's about 5:30" and round it to that. Likewise, $450,000 seems less specific -- because it requires that we remember only two actual numbers plus placeholding zeroes, so we can easily remember it and it seems more general.
But people are oddly specific -- and they like to be oddly specific. Think of a number, right now, between 1 and 100. Got your number?
Mine was 43 (mine's always 43). I can't say what your number was (but feel free to leave it in a comment, if you'd like) I bet it was not a round number: I bet you didn't pick 10, 20, 30, or a number ending in 5, either; I bet you picked something ending in a 3, or 7, or 2 -- an oddly specific number, or one that seems so, anyway (because it's no more specific than 10, or 50). Ask others to do the same: I bet they'll never pick a number ending in a zero or 5 -- and they'll refuse to pick a "round" or not-very-specific number even though they don't know why you're having them pick a number.
TMQ, though, wants to make fun of people for picking oddly-specific numbers, so we can make fun of him for doing so because in the very act of making fun of the rest of us, TMQ has revealed that he's a pseudo-intellectual who doesn't understand the things he wants to mock. Numbers are specific only to the degree of significant figures they use; and people like oddly specific numbers, as evidenced by the score predicted by the Old Man Whose Been To All The Super Bowls; asked to predict a final score, the Old Man said Saints 35, Colts 32.
Why'd he pick those numbers, instead of any other two pairs of scores? After all, there are only a few scores a football game can't end in. A game can't end up 1-0 or 1-1, and that's about it; beyond that, all scores are possible. A game could be 2-0, or 3-2, or 4-3, and so on, with some scores being less probable than others. (4-3, for example, is pretty improbable because it would be one team scoring two safeties while the other scores only a field goal. Such a game is possible, but not likely.)
20-17 210 times 17-14 162 times 27-24 152 times 13-10 142 times 24-17 121 times
From that -- another set of Statistics That Sound About Right, a website I've really got to get around to creating -- it appears that the most common score in a football game, for one team or another, is 17; one team or another scored 17 points 493 times. 17 points is generally scored by getting two touchdowns, two extra-points, and a field goal (but you could get to 17 nowadays through three field goals, a touchdown, and a two-point conversion, or five field goals and a safety.)
The next most common score is 24 -- a team scored 24 in a game 273 times in that probably-not-very-reliable table.
So the most common scores by teams, according to that most-likely-fictional answer, are 24 and 17. If you were going to predict the outcome of the game -- any football game in the NFL-- you'd be smart to pick 24-17.
Which, by the way, was the final score of the first game the Saints lost this year -- to the Cowboys. They lost 24-17 in New Orleans, ending their hopes for an unbeaten season.
(Also, the Jets scored both the most regular scores in their playoff run: they put up 24 in a win against Cincinnati, and 17 losing to the Colts.)
With those articles floating around my mind, I decided to, for today, talk about how you might want to watch the Super Bowl by reviewing my own history of Super Bowls and how I watched them -- doing so because how I watched the Super Bowl in many cases, has turned out to be more memorable than the games themselves, at least insofar as I recall the details.
I don't recall details of almost any Super Bowl I watched since I began watching them back in the late 1980s. I can recall the teams that played, in most years, but I don't recall many specific plays or features of the games (or the commercials). Instead, I remember where and how I watched them, making those Super Bowls Past part of the history of my life, a yardstick whereby I can measure how I've progressed (or not) and see myself through the prism of time... and also give you (and Mark Sanchez) some advice on how to watch the Super Bowl, or not.
And, because remembering where and how I watched the games also brings to mind certain details of the games themselves that do stick out, I'll take my oddly specific memories of some games and provide you with some oddly specific predictions for today's Saints-Colts matchup.
I'll count them down from farthest in the past to most recent, and I'm not reviewing every Super Bowl -- just the ones that stick out in my mind. And I'm using not the NFL Numeral System preferred by the NFL, but the numbering-by-year system the NFL should use, because it makes more sense. Who uses Roman Numerals? It's impossible to remember which Super Bowl was which, using Roman Numerals, unless you count by year and then convert to Roman Numerals, and I don't want to get math involved in my football.
1. Super Bowl 1990:
Teams/Outcome: 49ers 55, Broncos, 10. Where I watched it: I watched this game sitting in the dorm room where my younger brother, Matt, lived while he attended UW-Milwaukee for about a semester before giving up on college. Matt lived in that dorm with a group of guys who had ridiculous nicknames -- names like Noodles, if I recall, and shortly thereafter left the dorms to live in an overpriced student house off campus, a house they shared with a ferret. I would have driven down to Matt's dorm from my parent's house, where I was still living in 1990, a fact I remember because I recall that in this Super Bowl, I bet against my boss, Todd, at the gas station where I was working, in Hartland. We'd bet on the game, and I got the 49ers. Our bet was that the person whose team won got $2 per point scored. What I recall about the game was that the 49ers just... kept...scoring, and I spent most of the game sitting on the uncomfortable desk chair that comes with dorm rooms, at one point making a call to my boss when the score exceeded 50 for my team.
Advice I can give you, and Mark Sanchez, about how to watch the game: Get plenty of seating, where ever you're going to be. The dorm room had a floor, two desk chairs, and two beds -- for a bunch of guys to watch a game. I staked out the desk chair early on so I wouldn't end up sitting on a bed next to a guy named Noodles, but either way, I was doomed to spend the game uncomfortably.
Specific detail of the game I can recall, and apply to today's game: That was the fourth Super Bowl for Joe Montana, and his first against the Denver Broncos, who came into the game with the much-heralded John Elway leading them. Joe seemed to take it personally, throwing for an estimated 53,000 yards, maybe to prove his point that he was the real great quarterback in the game. This year, everyone's talking about how great Peyton Manning is, and not commenting as much on how great Drew Brees might be by comparison. I therefore predict that: Drew Brees will take it personally, and will throw a touchdown pass of 68 yards.
2. Super Bowl 1991: Teams/Outcome: Giants 20, Bills 19.
Where I Watched It: By this time, I'd moved out of my parents' house and into the mouse-infested apartment on 21st street in Milwaukee -- back when 21st street was still in the kind of terrible neighborhood where a serial killer could kill 17 people and not attract much attention. (That really happened, not far away from the apartment where I watched this game, and during the same period of time.)
I lived in that apartment with my friend Flan, who'd found the apartment and who'd taken the better bedroom. Flan, though, had gone to watch the game at his dad's house. I don't recall why I wasn't going anywhere to watch the game, but I didn't. I watched it at our apartment, alone, in Flan's room because he had a bean bag chair and the better TV and I assumed (correctly) that he wouldn't be coming home that night, so he wouldn't mind my using his room.
That game was before I really cared about the Buffalo Bills -- it was the start of what Cruella De Vil might call my magnificent obsession with them -- but I had them in my first-ever Super Bowl bet with my brother Matt. We'd bet $50 plus a team jersey, and I had the Bills.
I fell asleep in the third quarter of the game -- that was the start of my habit of doing that, too -- and woke up only for the final drive, where the Bills got the ball not-quite-close-enough for a final field goal attempt that went wide right, sending the Bills on to loserville for four years.
That's something funny about championships: Two teams make them, only one wins -- and the loser is often deemed to be terrible, the butt of jokes for years and years. The Bills went to four straight championships, lost all four, and are deemed synonymous with failure. Only in America, and particularly only in football, can you finish second four years running and be deemed a loser. Teams that never make the playoffs get more respect than teams that get there and lose, and America needs to do something about that. As Jerry Seinfeld noted, though, people hate silver medal winners and second place finishers: Silver medalists, he said, are awarded for being the best loser -- nobody lost ahead of them. "Congratulations," he said, "You almost won."
Advice I Can Give You and Mark Sanchez About Watching The Super Bowl Based On This Game: While Flan's bean bag was comfortable enough, and his TV nice enough, it was awkward sitting in someone's bedroom, without their knowledge, watching a game. I'd say not to do it. Specific detail of the game I can recall, and apply to today's game: Not being a big Bills fan -- yet-- I wasn't terribly upset when they lost because the game at least had an exciting ending to it. (I was more upset about the $50 plus the jersey. Those jerseys are expensive.) But I do recall the kick, that being one of the more dramatic moments in Super Bowl history -- and it was destined to be so, no matter how it turned out, because people think in terms of one-play outcomes (but that's for another day.) Missed field goals are a hallmark of this year's playoffs, too, and so I will make the oddly specific prediction that The Colts' kicker will miss a field goal, wide right, from 43 yards out.
Where I Watched It: I've lumped these two together because they marked the two of the three Super Bowl parties I've ever attended or thrown. I watched the Packers-Patriots Super Bowl with a group of law students at a friend's house, with about 20 or 30 people there, including a bunch of people I didn't know. I watched the Broncos-Falcons Super Bowl at Sweetie's apartment, about a year after we started dating, with a bunch of friends we'd invited over for the occasion.
In each case, the Super Bowl was less than fun; watching a game with a group of people, whether or not they're close friends, means distractions from the game, or, to put it another way, it means not watching the game. When you get a group of people together, they talk and make comments and a part of your attention is diverted from watching the game to conversing with them (and to making sure nobody takes your seat when you get up to get more snacks)(and to making sure that nobody notices how often you get up to get snacks.)
Sporting events are strange that way: While you might get friends together for any number of let's-watch-this type of evenings, only sports are deemed "Things You Can Distract Others From Watching." Imagine if your friends invited you over for a movie night, and throughout the movie you kept talking, about the movie and the things the movie reminded you of and your job and how tired you were going to be the next day, and other movies you'd seen. They'd throw you out.
But invite friends over for a Super Bowl, and they'll talk. And talk. And, probably, keep track of just how many snacks you're eating. The idea, I think, is that you're not supposed to watch sports, really -- it's just a mechanism to get people into the same room, the way "lettuce" is a mechanism to get "salad dressing" into my mouth.
I don't like that -- when I decide to watch a game, I want to watch it, and I mostly only talk (just a little) about the things going on in the game. Granted, a football game doesn't require the same level of attention and focus that, say, the movie Memento does, but still: I want to watch the game, not talk about your dumb job.
Another note: For the Broncos/Falcons game, I invented a pool called "Super Bowl Bingo," a Bingo game featuring squares marked with stuff that could happen during the game or commercials, things like The AFC kicks a 30+ yard field goal. I thought that'd be a fun way to bet on the game with all our friends, more fun than a "Final score" pool. I was wrong. Super Bowl Bingo was a disaster, as it meant that nobody could watch the game -- they were constantly checking their Bingo Cards: Was that a 5-yard run? To the left? Did that commercial have a green car in it? And they talked more -- distracting me from the game. Advice I Can Give You and Mark Sanchez About Watching The Super Bowl Based On This Game: Don't watch it with others. And, if you do, don't worry how many Seven Layer Bars someone's eating. That's their business, not yours. Also: Make your Super Bowl bets simple. Specific detail of the game I can recall, and apply to today's game: I don't recall a single moment of the Broncos/Falcons Super Bowl -- Bingo distracted me far too much. As for the Packers' Super Bowl, the game began with a first-play, or early-play, long touchdown pass for Brett Favre's Green Bay Packers. But I've already predicted one of those. That game also featured Desmond Howard running back a kickoff for a touchdown, something that's happened in other Super Bowl. There have been blocked punts in the Super Bowl, too, but never a Blocked Punt Returned For A Touchdown, so I'm going to predict this: The Saints Will Block a Colts Punt, and Return the Punt 43 yards for a touchdown.
4. Super Bowl 2007:
Teams/Outcome: Colts 29, Bears 17.
Where I Watched It: This game, I watched at our house with the then-they-really-were-babies Babies!, who'd been born just a few months before. We watched it downstairs in our family room, on the big screen TV we'd splurged and bought for the family (justifying it, back then, by noting that Sweetie really liked to watch movies and The Boy and I liked sports, so it made sense for us to spend a lot of money on a big-screen TV for those purposes. Nowadays, though, Sweetie rarely watches TV downstairs, preferring, if she's going to watch TV, to do it up in our room away from the mess and noise. The Boy, meanwhile, used his own money to buy himself a Playstation 3 and a fancy TV and watches almost everything in his room. Our big-screen TV is mostly used, these days, to watch Little Einsteins.)
What I remember most about this game is that going in, I had my annual bet with The Boy in which we both, at the start of the playoffs, pick teams we think will win -- dividing the playoff teams up evenly and betting a t-shirt on the outcome. I had both the Colts and the Bears before the Super Bowl -- so I was guaranteed a win. But Sweetie was on The Boy's team (I had Mr F and Mr Bunches and Middle), and she likes the Colts, so I let them have the Colts anyway, but they had to give me odds -- if the Bears won, I'd get a sweatshirt, not a t-shirt.
Then, Devin Hester returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown, and I celebrated and began rubbing it in: You're going to lose, I taunted The Boy, only to watch as the Bears faded away little by little, leaving me buying Sweetie and The Boy Colts' t-shirts.
Also, midway through the game, we had to go give the Babies! a bath and put them to bed, so I missed a chunk of it.
Advice I Can Give You and Mark Sanchez About Watching The Super Bowl Based On This Game: Have your Babies! bathed ahead of time, and set the game to tape. You may not think you're going to get pulled away from the TV, but what if you are? And you miss the most dramatic moment in Super Bowl history? And the next day, everyone's talking about it and you have to say What? I missed that, I guess. That always happens to me. (It happened, in fact, with the Janet Jackson halftime show -- which I watched most of before going to get more food, missing Nipplegate. I didn't even know anything had happened until after work the next day, when I heard something on the radio while driving home.)
Specific detail of the game I can recall, and apply to today's game: Devin Hester's runback, which I'm pretty sure was the first play of the game. That was the fastest score ever to start the game. I'm going to go opposite, here. The longest time passed in a Super Bowl before a score, ever, was 26 minutes, 55 seconds (The Panthers vs. the Patriots*, Super Bowl 2004). I'm going to predict that The First Score Won't Happen Until 2 minutes Into The Third Quarter. 5. Super Bowl 2008: Teams/Outcome: Giants 17, Patriots* 14.
Where I Watched The Game: Again, I watched it in my own house, with just the family, including the Babies, who were now 1 1/2 years old. The two most memorable things about this game were that, first, I was rooting against the team I had in the bet: I'd ended up with the Patriots* as my entry, and I didn't want them to win, because they're cheaters. I'd never liked the Giants and Eli Manning very much, so I found myself in the odd role of having to root for a team I didn't like, with a quarterback I didn't like, against a team that, if they won, I'd get a t-shirt. (But they'd be 19-0 and I didn't want cheaters to get rewarded, so I rooted against them.)
The other thing I remember is that we had to be very quiet in rooting: Mr F was almost a year-and-a-half, and was becoming a bit of a nervous boy who didn't like loud noises. We didn't know that, yet, as Mr F hadn't been exposed to a great many surprises in his 16 or so months of living. He was, that night, when Eli Manning threw that great pass and David Tyree made that great catch, and we all jumped up and cheered and yelled and Mr F burst into tears and tried to go hide. After that, we all had to cheer quietly, so as great things happened, we'd whisper Yeah! or Excellent! while being very careful not to startle Mr F. Advice I Can Give You and Mark Sanchez About Watching The Super Bowl Based On This Game: It's very hard to whisper a cheer. Practice it. Or put a movie on for the Babies! upstairs, so they can watch without getting scared. I'm surprised I didn't think of that. Specific detail of the game I can recall, and apply to today's game: The David Tyree catch, of course, sticks out in my mind -- more so than the touchdown reception that put the Giants ahead for good shortly thereafter. It was an improbable, thrilling, spontaneous moment that came at a time of the game when tension was high, earning it a spot in the most-memorable-plays pantheon. How many Super Bowls can you say that about?
In all the Super Bowls I've watched, only a handful of plays stick out: Wide right. Tyree's catch. Santonio Holmes' TD last year against the Cardinals, arms outstretched, toes dragging. Favre's long pass against the Patriots, and his run down the field to celebrate. Don Beebe chasing after Leon Lett to knock the ball out of his hand just before the end zone -- a startling, admirable display of effort in a foregone game. That's about all that springs to mind. So the odds are that there will not be a memorable play in this game -- after XLIV Super Bowls, I can only remember a few great plays, making great plays a statistical improbability in the Super Bowl, but I'll go ahead and predict an oddly specific great play, anyway -- and, like I always go for 43, I'm going to go for my usual suspect here, too: The Fake Punt. I therefore predict that there will be a fake punt for a TD, and that it'll come from the Saints. In the fourth quarter. With 5:33 left on the game clock. On fourth-and-two.
(How's that for oddly specific, TMQ?)
As for where I'll be watching the game, I've applied all my lessons, and here's the plan for the game: I'm watching it at home, on our big-screen TV, with just immediate family. We've got plenty of seating: Two couches and two chairs. We've got snacks ready to go, the kind of food that just needs to be heated up or put in a bowl and the kind of food that can be piled on a plate to reduce the number of trips to the kitchen to get more, reducing the people monitoring me. I've already set the game to tape, ready for Babies!-style distractions of any sort.
Which leads me to my final oddly-specific prediction: I predict that during the game, there will be three spills on the carpet, at least one of which will leave a stain. There will be two times that The Boy complains about me pausing the game to go take care of the Babies!, one of which pauses will be engendered by Mr F being pantless. And there will be three commercials about which Sweetie declares Terry Tate was better.
Between now and April, you should be planning on moving. That's the only way you'll get a free $8000, thanks to the Home Buyer Tax Credit.
The $8000 comes from the federal tax credit for homebuyers, a program that was extended and expanded recently. Before, it applied only to "first-timers," people buying their first house (or first house in a while). But now, if it's your first house, or if you've been renting for a couple years, or if you've lived in your current house for 5 years or more but want to upgrade or downgrade, you can qualify for up to $8,000 in tax credits by buying a house. ($6500 for the people who've been living in their house for 5 years).
In order to qualify, you have to be one of those kinds of people-- new, first-timers, or more-than-5-year vets of the homeowning gig, and you have to have a binding written contracst to buy the new house by April 30, 2010 (and close by June 30, 2010.)
Even the income limits have been expanded: You singles making up to $125,000 qualify, and married people can earn up to $225,000 (it phases out after that, so if you make more, check with an accountant to see what you'll qualify for.
This week, to keep things interesting, and to get away from Sweetie's bland responses on why she likes the Hunks, I've decided to do the entire thing in Limerick form!
So, there once was a man from...
Um.
I once knew a guy who... Um.
Darn. I'm stumped. Okay, scrap that. This week's Hunk of the Week is:
Oliver Martinez!
You don't know him without you have seen the sex scene in Unfaithful, which should be remembered as "That movie that appeared to be advising couples to reinvigorate their marriage through murder," but instead is known as "That movie which made Diane Lane famous enough to give her a part in The Perfect Storm, even though her part in the Storm movie had her playing the fiance of Marky Mark, who is approximately 30 years younger than her." And also, it had Oliver Martinez in it.
Oliver Martinez played the character of "Sexy Guy Who Likes To Read And Also Finds Older Women Very Attractive." There are tons of those around, right? He thus joins the pantheon of entirely-fictional characters made up by, and for, women, including:
Sexy vampire who likes Goth girl for, instead of in spite of, her depression, and
Cool surfer guy who nevertheless develops responsibility while still maintaining great tan and killer abs, and
Guy in commercial whose wife uses all their credit card points on a dress for herself instead of a fabulous vacation for both of them, and yet he not only doesn't get mad, he loves her more for it. (Not pictured, but trust me, he exist
I'm going to write a movie starring all those guys, and make more money than Avatar and Titanic combined.
Speaking of which, here are two points I'd like to raise about Avatar:
1. Do you think that soon, James Cameron is going to make Titanic Avatar, in which Jack comes back from the dead, via an avatar, and meets Old Decrepit Rose and gives her an avatar and the two of them can live together forever, and, if so, do you think that movie would be awesome? Me, too.
2. Don't the avatars look a little like Thundercats?:
"Is it true, Zoe Saldana? Do we look like Thundercats?"
"Maybe just a little, guy who was also in Terminator. Just a little. Plus, is it just me or do the two young Thundercats appear to be missing pants in that picture?"
How am I the only one to notice that? Because I'm smarter than most everyone? Or better looking? (I think it's probably a little of both.)
Anyway, Oliver Martinez was probably also in other movies, but I only remember him as The Guy Who Raised The Bar For Me. Previously, I thought it was good enough to like reading and be a sensitive guy. (I'm not sensitive, but I can usually pretend that I know what Sweetie has been talking about and make some kind of comment that makes her think I was listening/caring.) Now, though, I've got to be a guy who likes reading, is sensitive, and who also doesn't ever eat pizza for both breakfast and dessert in the same day:
I bet he's sucking in his gut.
Thing That Makes You Go Hmmm About Him: He's French. Isn't that enough? Also, his dad was a Spanish professional boxer. And he first rose to fame in the movie "Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil," which I can only assume was a biopic about Soleil Moon Frye, who is beloved by the French, and probably also the Spanish, too.
Also, he placed 15th in something called The 101 Sexiest Celebrity Bodies, a show which aired on USA in 2005. Diane Lane, his co-star in Unfaithful, placed 96th. Richard Gere did not place on that list, but only because by then he was 113 years old, legally dead, but somehow still filming, with the Olsen Twins, a never-released romantic comedy tentatively titled Five Times As Old Equals Five Times As Romantic.
(While women create roles based on "The Men They Wished Existed," men create movies based on "Rules They Wished Applied In Real Life." That's how "Pretty Woman (Falls In Love With Older Guy)" gets made, as well as how other equally-improbable movies get made, movies like "Kevin James Has A Shot At A Supermodel" and "Rob Schneider Doesn't Work At Arby's As A Night Manager.")
Here's another thing that makes you go hmmm about Oliver Martinez: He was never in a Law & Order, ever. And yet, Sweetie still knows who he is! Strange but true! (I once thought about pasting my picture onto the TV set so that Sweetie would think I'd been in Law & Order. And also to cover up the spot where I let Mr Bunches draw on it one day.)
Reason I Assumed Sweetie Liked Him: He was really good at sex in Unfaithful.Really good. Like, I should be taking notes good. Here's some snippets:
He's like a Sex Professor (which is another job that men would create in the movies. "Richard Gere is The Sex Professor.")(That movie doesn't even need a plot. It'll be released in 3 months.)
Actual Reason Sweetie Likes Him: "He's so sexy."
More specific, please, Sweetie, you're getting kind of general with these reasons. "I like his face. It's very sexy."
Come on, Sweetie, saying I think he's hunky because he's sexy is like saying that's a circle because it circles things. Give me something to work with here. What is it about his face?"How many times do I have to tell you? It's beautiful. His eyes, his lips, his nose."
Point I'd Like To Make About Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him: Sweetie, he was really good at the sex. Really. Most people probably don't even realize he has a face...
...on the other hand, by pointing that out, I've unwittingly raised the bar further. Sorry, guys. Now we have to be sensitive and like reading and finds older women attractive and has a face that is magical and be good at sex.
At least I've got one of those things. And luckily for me, Sweetie is younger than me, so that counts as two. Which one should I work on next, I wonder?
Have you ever stumbled across something and thought to yourself, "I could go into business selling those and make millions?" I have.
I first had that thought when I was going to get rich selling glowing neon necklaces at Summerfest in Milwaukee -- buy them for $0.25 each and sell them for $1.00 each, and sit back and count the profits all the way to Richville (Richville is located in California, in case you were wondering.)
That didn't work, but you know what might? Selling sunglasses. See, where people don't want neon glow necklaces, they do want sunglasses. They need sunglasses, to avoid sun glare and squinting and ... sun.
And I can sell them those sunglasses -- buy buying wholesale sunglasses from this site I found, and then reselling them at a profit. It's genius. It's like the neon glow necklaces idea all over again, but good.
The wholesale sunglasses I found are a great deal, too: A dozen for as low as $17 or so, which means that I could buy tons of them and myself up as the Sunglass King of Wisconsin. (Or, you know, they could be used in your business, whatever that might be. But don't do it! Don't compete with me!)
Just before I got married to Sweetie, I made a mixtape to take on our honeymoon road trip to New York. The other day, I found that tape and decided to tell the story of our honeymoon through the songs on that tape. This is part 11; click here for the Table of Contents.
From every vacation I've ever taken, I've got photos hanging on the wall of our home or my office.
From our Las Vegas trip, I have a collage of all the casino signs. The Washington D.C. weekend getaway with Sweetie -- nothing says romance like a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court -- led to a couple of shots of the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Statue Of Some Guy Outside Our Hotel being put up.
Our honeymoon was actually where I began that practice, and from our Honeymoon I hung up exactly five pictures. Four are in my office: Times Square, a statue of Atlas holding a globe, the Statue of Liberty, and the World Trade Center.
The other picture is me, leaning against the empty locker Doug Flutie used in the Buffalo Bills' locker room. That picture isn't in my office; instead, it hangs in our family room, a position I picked because at the time I hung it, when we moved into our house back about 7 or 8 years ago, the spot where I hung the picture was a place where, I imagined, I'd see it a lot.
The spot where the Me-In-Front-Of-Flutie's Locker picture was originally hung was just above the bookshelf that served the dual purpose of holding books and blocking the electrical outlets the home inspector said never to use when he inspected our home. He'd gone through, room by room, looking things over and judging them and deciding whether or not we should buy the house, and then he took us through, room by room, too, and pointed out little things here and there, things like "You should get a railing for the front walk," and the like. When he got to the family room, he pointed to a grouping of electrical outlets, something like a power-strip only more home-made looking, jutting out from one molding, affixed to that area securely. It looked none-too-safe, even to my untrained eye.
"I don't know what that is supposed to be," he said, "But don't ever use it." I was, thereafter, afraid to even touch the outlets, even to remove them, so I just left them, leaving them there the way I'd left some of the more alarming-looking wiring in our garage alone. The people who owned the house before us apparently fancied themselves some sort of electricians, but they were obviously wrong about that, and obviously deranged, judging by their wiring.
Instead of hiring an electrician to fix it, or remove it, I hid the outlets behind a bookshelf, and put books and the downstairs phone on that shelf. And then I hung, above the bookshelf, the Flutie-Locker picture, doing so because the layout of the room, and how I had the room set up at the time, suggested that I'd be spending a lot of time in the reclining chair in that corner, reading and watching TV under the glow of the small lamp, looking up occasionally to remember the time that I stood in front of Doug Flutie's locker.
Things didn't work out that way. All these years later, the room has undergone several configurations as couches get replaced, chairs got wrecked by cats and thrown out, our old TV got replaced by the new big TV, our old coffee table with The Boy's name carved into it got taken by Oldest when she moved out and replaced by the new expensive coffee table that was subsequently wrecked by the Babies!. Through all that, plus even more new couches, playpens, the addition of satellite TV in our bedroom upstairs, and the purchase of a reclining chair for the bedroom when Sweetie was pregnant with the Babies! and needed a comfortable place to sit upstairs, the Flutie Locker picture hung above the bookshelf, even as the bookshelf ultimately got emptied of books (because the Babies! were throwing them at each other) and as the bookshelf got bolted to the wall (because the Babies! would knock it down and expose the Dangerous Outlets), and then the Flutie Locker picture got moved a couple of times, as furniture was rearranged and as the Babies! got tall enough to remove things from the wall, but not old enough to understand why they shouldn't do that...
... and now I don't know where it is.
Which is why it's not pictured here. But I still remember the picture, and my pose, and even what I was wearing in it. I remember telling Sweetie I'd be right back, and following our guide into the locker room, getting excited about maybe meeting some Buffalo Bills. (It was only later that it really sunk in that this was May, and that there would be no Buffalo Bills around.)
The Bills' guy led me through the locker room, which looked like every other locker room I'd ever been in except that it didn't have lockers with doors on them. Instead, the players had stalls, open to everyone, most of them empty. A few, including Doug Flutie's, had some shoes in them, or some other gear that I assumed had been left behind. Overall, though, the effect was less than impressive, and the impression I was left with was This is just like a high school locker room, really, which would have seemed disappointing except that at the time, I hadn't known what to expect, at all, so there were no expectations to crash. Looking back now is when I can see that it should have been disappointing: The locker room didn't look professional or glamorous or glitzy at all. It just looked like a locker room, and from this perspective later, I can see that I should have been let down, but I wasn't.
Instead, I was excited to be standing where all those Buffalo Bills I'd been watching on TV for so long had stood, had changed, had put on their shoulder pads and geared up to play football and go to the playoffs and get into those Super Bowls, standing where they'd consoled each other after Wide Right and the blowouts and the almost-wins, where they'd gathered to end up the season after each of the losses in the Super Bowls.
Standing in front of Doug Flutie's locker! I handed my camera to the guy showing me around and asked him to take a picture, as he'd done for Sweetie and I in the end zone out on the field. Then I had to struggle with how to stand, a question that arises anytime I'm in a picture. What's the best pose for this picture? Awkward and upright and arms hanging limply, like I'd done when I got my picture taken with Justice Scalia? Hands on my waist, arms akimbo, and brash?
I never know how to stand, not just in pictures, but anytime I have to stand, period. Standing is not something we instinctively know how to do, after all. That is, we know how to stand, but we stand unconsciously, unselfconsciously, just going ahead and standing up without thinking about it. But once we do think about it, standing becomes a task, and an awkward one at that. Think about it right now, as you sit reading this: think about standing, and it'll seem tiring and uneasy to you. I bet the first thing you thought of is my feet would get tired, and they would, because standing makes our feet tired, but we don't think about how tired our feet are until we begin thinking about standing. So it's actually thinking about standing that makes our feet tired.
And then think about where you'd be standing, hypothetically, and how you'd stand, and, if you're like me, suddenly you won't know what to do with all your limbs and your head and your posture. Lean against something? Look directly at people? Shift from foot to foot to keep your feet from getting too tired? Slouch? And what, for god's sake, do I do with my hands? I never know what to do, with those thoughts going through my head. Standing in line, for rides or the bank or the grocery store, causes me the same dilemma. Standing and waiting for anything poses those problems. Which is one reason why I'm lucky that my bank now has a TV behind the teller, so that I'm distracted during my wait -- not distracted from my boredom, but distracted from my thoughts of how to stand in line without seeming awkward, thinking all the while Where do I look? Should I chat with others?
I ran through all those options as I stood in front of Flutie's Locker, and ultimately chose as my pose a casual leaning up against the locker wall, one hand on my hip, the other holding me up on the wall of the locker. I'm wearing a gray sweatshirt -- a Parkersburg, West Virginia sweatshirt that I still have -- and my jeans and a goofy look on my face, the kind of look that says I don't know how to stand in front of Doug Flutie's locker but I'm very glad to be here in the presence of a locker Doug Flutie has also stood in front of.
And then, as so many things do in life, it ended, anticlimactically, with the picture being snapped, me walking back out of the locker room, meeting up with Sweetie again, and continuing our honeymoon, leaving as the two records of that moment only my memory and the picture.
We went from that unexpected highlight -- a weary, bleary trip to the Bills' stadium as a sideline to the rest of our day suddenly turning into a tour of the stadium and a photo-op -- on with the remainder of our day, which was uneventful but fun. We drove from the stadium back to Buffalo proper, and located a mall where Sweetie wanted to stop off and do some shopping. She wanted to look for some souvenirs for the kids, and maybe do some shopping herself. On vacations, I'd learn over time, Sweetie's preferred method of shopping is to browse malls and stores. She likes to shop on vacation, and I suspect that she likes to shop when not on vacation, too, but doesn't shop as often as she would like to out of financial concerns. I am of the opinion that Sweetie could shop more but doesn't, so that she can be fiscally responsible. On vacation, Sweetie cuts loose -- just a little-- and shops more, doing so (I believe) for the same reason that I eat even worse, nutritionally-speaking, on vacation: because that's the time to do it.
We spend so much of our life living within the rules, rules set by others, or society, or our own dictates of what is proper or right or fitting, that vacations are necessary. Bosses expect us to be at work, and to stay at work, and to work while we're there. We have to keep the car filled with gas and get dinner made and grocery shop and pay the mortgage. We impose on ourselves additional requirements, trying to eat healthy and work out and clean out the garage at least every so often, or mow the lawn as often as we absolutely have to (but not as often as our neighbors would like). Vacations are a time to break from all of that, to eat desserts at lunch as well as dinner, to eat out every day (one requirement I have of vacations is that I won't grocery shop or cook), to go to museums or tours or ride roller coasters, to stop at a gas station and get a snack even though it's pretty close to lunch. On vacations we can relax and do those things that we'd do all the time, except life won't let us.
A honeymoon as a vacation is a little different because while you're trying, on the one hand, to let down your guard and relax, have some fun and enjoy life, you're also still relatively new in the relationship (for most honeymoons, at least) and your relationship has just changed from pretty serious to So serious it takes a court to break you up, so there is on a honeymoon a feeling of I should try to put my best foot forward, and that tension makes a honeymoon both better and worse than other, regular vacations: It's better because you're learning to relax with your new husband or wife, but worse because you can't really relax, not the way you might if you just were on your own, or the way you will relax in a few years when you've been married long enough to stop sucking in your gut when she's around.
Sweetie was a little hesitant about wanting to shop after the trip to the Bills' stadium, but she need not have been. I'd tried to plan the honeymoon so that Sweetie could have fun, and enjoy it, and that included letting her go shopping if that's what she wanted to do. (Since Sweetie and I had never gone on vacation together before, outside of the trip to Parkersburg to visit her mom, I wasn't sure what she'd want to do on vacation.)
I assured her it was okay to go shopping, and in fact said I wouldn't mind because it'd give me a chance to go sightseeing, which is what I like to do on vacations. (In the back of my mind, I secretly also hoped that we'd run into one or more Buffalo Bills, now that it was more firmly on my mind. That kind of thing seemed possible to me, given that the city was small. Pro football players have to live somewhere, after all, and if they lived here they might well be at the mall, browsing through Pottery Barn at the same time as us, right?)
I didn't mind Sweetie going shopping, as I said, because I wanted her to have fun on our honeymoon, or as much fun as our limited funds allowed us, and also because I might see Buffalo Bills on the way, but beyond that, I didn't mind because another thing I've always liked about traveling is seeing new malls.
There's something exciting to me about a mall -- the self-contained world of the mall, with dozens or more stores, all together, with food courts and shops I might never see otherwise (like luggage stores) and places to hang out (back when I was a kid, malls had arcades), has always been kind of an exciting place to me, going back to when I was a little kid and there were only a few malls that we ever went to.
There was Brookfield Square, which was about 20 miles from our house when I was a kid, a trip that was far enough away to make going "to the mall" an event that didn't happen all the time. That was the main mall we spent time at, as kids in the arcade and getting our back-to-school clothes at J.C. Penney's, which was, conveniently, just across from the arcade. There were other malls around, back then, but they were farther away and so we went to them less frequently. Those malls became more exciting and exotic seeming simply by virtue of their inaccessibility. (It didn't hurt that one of those far-away malls had an ice skating and a river, stocked with goldfish, in it.)
From early on, I was geared to like malls and see a trip to a mall as a fun and exciting thing, and it remains so to this day. The mall near where I live now, the mall I've been going to for years and years and years, still seems fun to me, so that when I take the Babies! there on weekends sometimes to play in the mall playground, I still get a little thrill as we go inside, entering usually at the food court so that I can ponder whether or not to get an Orange Julius. (I have always decided not to do so, so far, because I've only had one Orange Julius in my life, one I bought while Christmas shopping with Sweetie, and it seems to me that the second Orange Julius should be reserved for a special occasion, too. In that way, an Orange Julius can stay in the same category as Cadbury Creme Eggs, Egg Nog shakes, and trips to Sonic: something out-of-the-ordinary to celebrate a big occasion.) When I see new stores in "my" mall, I want to go in them just to look -- especially if they're new stores like the "educational" toy store that just replaced the book store in the mall, stores that are not only new but which have interesting new things in them.
The other malls in our city, malls I visit less frequently, are more exciting by comparison, even the World's Saddest Mall (which I wrote about here, and the fact that there are now three posts on this blog talking about malls should convince you I'm not just making all this up) has its share of excitement. The mall on the other side of town -- the East Towne Mall -- I go to about once a year, going there only that often so that the East mall retains its air of excitement and unusual stores.
It's the strange mixture of familiar stores, combined with the addition of stores I've never heard of before, combined with the unfamiliar layouts, that draws me in. The malls become something to experience, rather than just go through, and I wander through any new mall in any city I go to with the look and feel of a tourist, pausing to look at the candy store which, even though it sells the same candy as all other candy stores do, still seems interesting and unique.
It's with that in mind that I went shopping with Sweetie on our honeymoon, the first mall we stopped at being in Buffalo. We wandered through, with Sweetie stopping at some stores to browse, buying a copy of the Armageddon soundtrack on tape, and, I think, buying herself a shirt or two (but I might be wrong), and while Sweetie did those things, I looked at the new- and same-old stores, and took some pictures (I even had some people take a picture of Sweetie and I in front of a fountain in the mall) and mentally compared the Buffalo mall to the Madison malls. I try to imagine, when we take a trip and end up in a mall shopping, what it would be like to live there, to go to that mall to get my shoes or Christmas presents or take the Babies! to play. I wonder where I'd live, and what job I'd have, if we lived and shopped in that city. I try to picture this new strange mall -- so unfamiliar, but stocked with all-too-familiar stores and products, a mixture of new and old, same and different -- becoming my same old mall, becoming the mall I'd stop at on my way home from work, going quickly in to grab what I needed and scarcely noticing the fountain that I once had found so scenic that I'd had my picture taken in front of it.
Later on, after we left the mall, we took the rental car and drove to downtown Buffalo, to look around. It was getting dark, and we were getting tired, but I wanted to see as much of the city as we could, and so did Sweetie. My reasons were the same reasons I want to see anything: I want to see everything, and compare it with my life and imagine what it would be if that were my life. (I'm not sure why Sweetie wanted to see Buffalo. Maybe because I wanted to see it.)
The drive to Buffalo's downtown was the worst part of the day: A day that had begun with a fabulous and not-at-all-scary hotel room and then moved on to getting to walk onto the football field and see the Bills' locker room and then continued with shopping at an exciting new mall ended with a long, straight drive through what appeared to be a city made up entirely of abandoned buildings, and not just abandoned buildings, but buildings which appeared to have been abandoned only after a war had mostly destroyed them. My memory is of the light fading fast over buildings that appeared dirty and crumbling and sooty and scary, buildings where the bodies would be hidden.
Our perception of Buffalo's downtown was no doubt shaped by that drive in, coupled with exhaustion. We were not enthralled. We made it to the business-y section of Buffalo, demarcated by taller buildings and people in ties heading to warmly-lit restaurants, and we drove around a bit, but were disinclined to get out and look around. It was dark by then, and getting a little cold, and there wasn't anything we could see that we wanted to get out and look at or experience -- especially not anything in an area that was surrounded by a postapocalyptic wasteland of factories.
So we turned back around and headed out the way we'd come in, having concluded that "It's not a bad place, I suppose, but it's not much to look at." We made it back to our hotel by the airport, with our honeymoon suite sprawling out around us. I had my camera with the precious pictures of the Bills' stadium and locker room; Sweetie had her bags of stuff from the mall. We called the kids and said hi to them, and turned in for the night, ending day two of our honeymoon.
Last night, I spent a lot of time with Mr F, as Mr Bunches hadn't napped and so he spent the first part of the night sleeping instead of playing, and the second part of the night wanting to be left alone. But Mr F and I had some fun, like:
1. Accidentally playing catch. I was trying to teach Mr F how to play catch with a football. He had the right idea -- get the football and throw it-- but his aim was way off. Or was it? I couldn't tell if it was actually off and he was missing me by a mile, or if he just thought it was funny to send me running around the family room after the ball. He was able to throw it to me often enough that I suspect the latter -- but maybe those throws were the accidents?
2. Watching videos. We played on the 'puter for a while, including relaxing by watching some of Mr F's favorite videos. Then, when those got old, I tried to get him into some new ones. Of the ones I tried out, he liked best:
The Dinosaurs Song:
And, for some reason, he liked this re-enactment of the Star Wars Storybook using vintage action figures.
I liked it, too, except that I got distracted by the terrible error they made when they said that Luke didn't want to leave his uncle's farm. Everyone knows that Luke wanted to go to the academy but Uncle Owen wouldn't let him because he needed him here on the farm! Get it together, George Lucas!
But it wasn't all Mr F and footballs; I did other stuff, too, like eating dinner, which brings up Good Thing number three:
3. At least the vegetables weren't all disgusting. Sweetie, and The Boy, are still on their health kick, which meant that the hot dogs and noodles last night were joined by vegetables: green beans, and corn. I'm trying to put a positive spin on it; if I have to eat "healthy," at least I can have corn, instead of green beans, which are gross.
I then tried to get Mr F to eat a piece of corn, but he pulled it back out of his mouth and tried to wipe it off his hand, only to get it stuck on his face, where it stayed almost all the way through playtime. I just left it there; let kids be kids, I say, especially if the alternative is Taking that kid against his will to the kitchen to wipe the corn off his face, after which he'll get in a bad mood and throw a ball at you, like Mr Bunches did yesterday morning when I wouldn't put a new movie in for him because I was busy helping Mr F get his pants on.
Oh, and the picture today? That's the American Sign Language symbol for some kind of vegetable. Note the expression on her face. Even signing vegetables disgusts right-thinking people.
I know I'm not supposed to like the competition, either law-wise or blog-wise, but I can't help but admire some of the smarter things that others say about topics I, too, am knowledgeable about.
Loan modifications are hot topics right now, and everyone in the world is doing them, it seems -- and charging a bundle for it, when they can. There are ads and lawyers and pro bono groups, all rushing into the mix and saying that they can help you -- but do you need their help?
That depends, and the blog post by American Residential Law Groupcan help you decide. They do a good job of spelling out the parameters of the most popular program (The Home Affordable Modification Program) and of giving you plusses and minuses to use in deciding whether to hire a professional -- like, say, you'll save money doing it yourself, but it's very time consuming and you're already working a full-time job, right?
Information is one of the key things you need in making any big decision, and the blog post by American Residential Law Group -- in fact, their whole blog -- provides you a good foundation of info to begin to make the right choices.
I'm not going to do an intro to this one. I'm just not going to say anything before getting right to the 3 Good Things from yesterday...
1. The song "In The Moonlight" from Modern Family: "Modern Family" is almost, but not quite, my favorite new TV show -- it hasn't replaced Better Off Ted, yet, but it stands a chance, especially if it keeps throwing in stuff like the song In The Moonlight, a song written by the band-member boyfriend of one of the teen girls on the show, and played for the Modern Family after he made a touching speech to win their hearts. He played the song sitting in their living room: But it turns out there's actually a video for it, too:
I love anything that combines uncomfortable moments with great music; it reminds me of my high school dances. (But I really liked the acoustic version on the show better.)
2. I won a pretty big case at work, in an unexpected way. I don't want to get all lawyer-y on this blog, so I won't discuss it in detail, but I'm 2-0 this week on a defense I invented.
Still, that wasn't as big or great as...
3. The Guts Ball: A few weeks back, I picked up some super-discounted toys for the Babies! on a trip to Wal-Mart; these were the toys hidden way in the back of the toy department, the toys that hang on a wall, forgotten and ignored in favor of the Hannah Montana Play-Doh Hair Salon and the Zhu Zhu Guitar That Plays Itself. These were toys that were marked down to as low as twenty-five cents. I grabbed a bunch of them and gave them to Sweetie to use as treats for Mr F and Mr Bunches here and there when they behaved.
The other day, Sweetie gave them each one of those treats, little balls shaped like sharks. The trick to these toys, and probably the reason they were marked down to $0.25, is... well: I'll show you in pictures:
Here's the ball, as it appears when you pick it up:
If you need a hair salon dallas, then head over to Splurge Salon. Their premier designers will work with their world class color experts to give North Texas Chic a French Connection -- and make a more confident, better-looking you.
Some ideas are the product of years of hard work, inventive thought, careful study, and diligence.
Other ideas come to you when you hear your wife say the words "Fish garbage."
This morning, on CNN, I saw a teaser for the story about the garbage floating in the ocean, garbage that's not just floating in the ocean but getting into the fish people love to eat/proclaim the health benefits of.
You know what doesn't have poison in it? Doritos. Nobody has ever died from eating Doritos, a fact I looked up on the site "Statistics That Sound About Right."
Okay, to be fair, one thing has died from eating Doritos: The Deacon, a plant that was used by the UW football strength coach to make a very ill-conceived point about nutrition; the coach took two plants and fed one only plant food; the other -- The Deacon-- the coach fed Doritos, DiGiorno pizza, and Oreo cookies (a/k/a "my lunch this Friday"), and also whiskey and beer. Unsurprisingly, the plant died; very surprisingly, 54 UW football players took this as an instruction that they were to eat only plant food, resulting in nearly the entire team winding up hospitalized and needing chelation.
Just kidding! Chelation wouldn't be used to cure that.
Anyway, the point is: Doritos don't kill people, if eaten in moderation. Neither do Raisinets, which now come with "antioxidants."
While I've been anti-antioxidant in the past, all this fish garbage and poisoned spinach has made me rethink my position, and I am now firmly in favor of putting antioxidants, and oxidants, and everything else that's beneficial, into our food. What we should be doing is processing the bejeezus out of our food -- running it through every Rube Goldberg contraption we can think of, mashing out the bad and injecting the good, and then reshaping it into the form of the original food, only sans poison and plus the stuff we need.
Forget eating peanuts; instead, you can eat P-Nutz, which would be processed peanuts ground up into fine powder, coated with a dose of fish oil (good for the brain, and may help prevent deterioration of schizophrenia), then reshaped into a genuine-looking peanut in the shell -- and, as an added bonus, the shell would be edible.
And the benefits go beyond that. Everyone always wants me to eat broccoli even though broccoli, based upon proof provided by two separate TV shows, is clearly not intended for human consumption. People want me to eat broccoli for its claimed health benefits, which include vitamins, calcium, prevention of cataracts, heart disease and cancer, and, I assume, the ability to fly if I can just get away from the rays of the red sun I've been living under.
Here's my solution: Forget eating a foul-tasting leafy plant. Take all those things out of the broccoli, bake them into a Funyun, and have me eat that.
Don't you hate when you finally get up and come downstairs and finish feeding the cats and only then realize that you didn't set your coffee maker up the night before and so you have no coffee? But don't you love, then, when you realize that The Boy is up and you can make him go get the paper? It's the yin-yang of life that gives it its spice, and the 3 Good Things from each day that keep me going despite all the yang.
1. I got through ALL of my work emails yesterday. I try everyday to get through all my emails and reply to them, but I get about 40 a day and have been so busy lately that they were backing up. So yesterday afternoon for two solid hours... okay, two hours that weren't quite solid because I periodically took small breaks to check out celebrity gossip and read comics online... but for two very-nearly-solid hours I read and replied to emails, knocking out 120 of them.
Now, today, I start on my personal emails... and I've still got the laptop to set up... sigh.
2. One of the comics I came across while almost totally focusing on emails was this:
Courtesy of Wondermark. That punchline kills. (Pun intended.)(Always intend the pun. Always.)
3. Mr Bunches got grounded off his crayons. I took Mr F and Mr Bunches grocery shopping last night as a break for Sweetie, and for the most part they behaved pretty well -- Mr F only tried to run off once, and he didn't go far, running only twenty feet back to stand in front of the hot dogs and laugh. Mr Bunches, though, got a little feisty towards the end, refusing to cooperate and keep up in three different aisles, including the salad dressing/condiment aisle.
Mr F likes to get a new pack of crayons each time we go to that store, and especially likes the red crayon from the pack, pulling it out and carrying it with him as we shop. So each time he got testy or naughty, I warned him that if he kept it up, he'd be grounded off his red crayon, and finally I had to pull the trigger on that threat: He was grounded off his crayon for a full aisle, all the way up to the register.
It doesn't sound like a good thing, but it is, because the alternative was me trying to push a giant overloaded grocery cart while carrying Mr Bunches and hanging on to Mr F, so my creative punishment worked to save me that.
It's not too late to sign up for the Green Police: that intrepid band of people who have volunteered to make Glastonbury cleaner and more eco-friendly than ever.
In fact, being a member of the Green Police is the only way you'll get into Glastonbury 2010 because the festival is sold out. So you won't be going to the greatest music and arts festival of the year unless you're going as a member of the Green Police.
The Green Police will be roaming Glastonbury and helping keep it clean: encouraging people to clean up after themselves and take care of the grounds and the environment, handing out literature, and using humor and sex appeal (yes, sex appeal) to see that people become a little nicer to the Earth.
Click one of those links to fill out an application and earn your badge. Or green thumb. I'm not sure how they're demarcating the Green Police these days.
I've been driving a lot lately for work -- in January, I drove about 700 miles for various hearings, and in February I'm already up to 320 in a single day.
I don't always have my camera with me -- and when I do it's sometimes not a good thing because taking pictures while zooming along the highway is probably frowned on -- but when I do have it with me, I like to snap shots of the drive to keep from zoning out and being bored. So here's some highlights of the last couple of road trips I took:
The Best Damn Ham: Yesterday, February 1, I had to drive to Merrill, Wisconsin -- 160 miles one way -- to argue about mortgages. I got to town a little ahead of the time for the hearing, which was lucky because I missed the Courthouse parking lot the first time by and had to then swing around to find it again. When I did swing around, I found two of the greatest signs I'd seen in a long time.
First was the comic shop DorkFather's.
That store was open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day -- except Fridays and Saturdays, when it's open from 9 a.m. to midnight. That tells me a lot about the night life in Merrill.
This sign told me even more:
That was on a restaurant right next to DorkFather's. I believe that I had, in fact, passed a dam along the drive (although I wasn't sure because I'd been looking for the courthouse). I couldn't test the sign's claim, though, because the store was closed. (And I still had to find the courthouse.)
On the drive home, I managed to take this picture:
While traveling at 71 miles per hour and listening to sports talk radio (I'm multitalented.) That's a picture of, I believe, paper mills around that part of Wisconsin. If you've never driven by paper mill country, don't. The smell is terrible and seeps in through even the best-sealed cars. Paper mill country smells like burnt, recycled broccoli. It's disgusting. But the picture was pretty neat.
The Milwaukee Riverwalk: Before that, last week, I'd had to go to Milwaukee to depose a witness. The building where I parked was attached to the rest of Milwaukee via a system of skywalks that didn't exist when I lived there, and I finished early, so I opted to kill some time by walking along those skywalks, which gave me a view of the Milwaukee river, and, even better, a view of this mural/sculpture along the side of a building on the Milwaukee river:
Following that, I walked through a nearly-empty mall, bought some M&Ms and a t-shirt, and went back home. (I mention that in case you've ever wondered what lawyers do when they're not lawyering, but their bosses think they are lawyering.)
Fog That's Hard To See: The drive to Merrill yesterday allowed me to pass two of my favorite road signs, too, ones I see whenever I drive up there. I didn't get pictures of them but I know what they read. One warns of Low Flying Planes, and the other says Watch For Fog. I like that last one, especially, because fog isn't something that usually requires a warning -- it's generally very observable. Before seeing that sign I'd have bet, that nobody had ever said "hoa, where'd this fog come from all of a sudden?" But after seeing the sign, I have to conclude that there can be sudden fog. Sneaky fog. Fog that's unexpected and needs to be watched for.
Which leads me into the fog or cloud or whatever it was I saw while driving to Janesville last week. I took this picture through my windshield about 7:30 a.m.:
Although it's hard to see, if you look at the hazy white line just about the level of the bright white glowing dot, that's a line of clouds, or fog, hanging a little ways off the ground.
This picture shows it a little better:
You can clearly see that (a) I need to wash my windshield, and (b) the clouds -- fog?-- are hanging in a thin layer just off the ground: nothing below it, above it only sky.
And finally, there's the mystery picture. I took this on my drive home the other night, when I was running very late and frustrated by how much traffic there is on the road at 6:30 on a Friday night, traffic that keeps me from getting home and makes me later. I had my phone out to check the time (my watch battery died) and inadvertently snapped this:
A UFO? Military flare announcing that the otherwise-fantastical-seeming premise of Red Dawn has actually come true?
No; it's just the little cruise control light on my steering wheel -- the blur/flare effect being the result of the phone bouncing in my hand as I tried to hit the button to see the time but instead snapped a picture.
I put that in there to show you what drivers (like me) are actually doing when you think they're concentrating on driving, but they're not.
Yesterday was a long day -- a 320 mile drive round trip for work, all in one day -- but a good one. In the multitude of good things that happened to me, though, I picked out 3 that were the best, and, as it happens, all three were Sweetie-related...
1. As I pulled into the driveway at 7 at night, Sweetie began heating up the leftover spaghetti for me so that it was warm by the time I got in the house.That is the definition of true love that I like most: True love is spaghetti warmed up at just the right time.
2. Sweetie didn't get mad that I inadvertently allowed Mr F and Mr Bunches to spill out her expensive shampoo while I ate that spaghetti. While Sweetie did get a little upset that I accused her of not-quite-closing the bathroom door, which I then said let Mr F and Mr Bunches get into the upstairs bathroom and play their new game (Splash each other from the toilet), she accepted my apology when, later, I learned that it wasn't her fault -- Mr F has learned how to get the door open despite child-proofing. Then, she didn't get upset when I ignored the boys' game while finishing dinner, only to go upstairs to clean up and realize that Mr Bunches had poured out about 2/3 of the shampoo onto the bathroom rug. Probably as a defense to Mr F's splashes. I don't know. I've given up trying to figure them out.
3. Sweetie didn't scare me when she asked me to scratch her back. Ordinarily, when Sweetie gets an itch, it's a terrifying experience: She asks you to scratch her back, but her directions are worse than unhelpful; they're mystifying. ("Over! No! Right! Around! Inside!") Then, as I try to follow those directions ("Yellow! 3.14!") she gets upset because I'm not doing it right, which scares me and makes it even harder to scratch correctly. But last night, Sweetie not only gave me good directions, she didn't make me nervous while doing it -- so we had the first successful back-scratch of our lives together.
This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Tony's Pizza. All opinions are 100% mine.
There are two things I love: Pizza and free stuff.
Oh, fine. All right. There are two things I love: My family and friends. Happy, now? Why is it that when we say that we love something we always have to say I love... my family, but also those ranch-flavored corn nuts I bought at the convenience store the other day. Why can't we just take for granted that we love our husbands/wives/kids, the way Wheel of Fortune takes for granted that winners will choose R,N,S,T, L, and E as their letters, and just gives them those?
Anyway, beyond family and friends, I also love pizza and free stuff, and I recently got to combine those two loves into one delicious treat: Tony's Pizza.
Tony's Pizza is on a marketing blitz, and they recently gave me the opportunity to sample their pizza for free -- and sample it I did. (The joke's on Tony's, as I buy their pizza all the time anyway, so I got me some free pizza.)
If you've never had a Tony's pizza, you're missing out. The best part of the pizza is the crust -- and I don't say that lightly, because I'm a toppings guy. But Tony's crust is flaky, and light, and somewhat sweet, and manages to be good all on its own -- so that if you eat the toppings off first, you can still enjoy the crust.
That's not to downgrade the toppings, of course, as I'd never do that. Tony's has all the toppings you'd expect -- sausage, pepperoni, ground beef, supreme, meat trio, and we tried them all. ("We" is me, Sweetie, The Boy, and Mr F and Mr Bunches, who are not so much pizza people as they are cookies people -- so they weren't included in the tasting & deliciousness, other than to fritter around and occasionally feed me pieces of it.)(That was entirely welcomed by me, as it gave me an opportunity to eat pizza, and then have a little more pizza, plus some pizza for dessert.)
I knew we'd like the pizzas, and like them we did, not least because they were free this time. The Boy liked 'em so much, he said we should have a Tony's pizza night each week. (I said: Why just one? Ha, ha!)
But there's more to like about Tony's: The Tech Giveaway. For a limited time only, Tony's is giving away a $500 entertainment and tech gift pack, and entry is both free and easy: You enter by putting a comment on this blog. (Or you could tweet a link to this post, if you want, but if you do that, include the hashtag #TonysPizza.)
Your entry has to include your email address-- but you can send that separate if you want, by emailing me at "thetroublewithroy[at]yahoo.com" (put Tony's in the subject line.)
Commenters & Tweeters will be entered into a drawing to win the tech package, so enter soon! (For official rules, see here: http://izea.com/contest-rules-regulations)
If you're reading, you should be commenting! Here's why!
At the end of every even-numbered month, I'm going to take the names of all the commenters in that two-month period, and put them in a cup and draw out a name; that person will win a copy of one of my books, free of charge. Enter as often as you want -- each comment is a new entry, and it can be on ANY of my blogs. You're already here reading this, so you might as well leave a comment and get some free stuff, too.
What's this all about?
"Thinking The Lions" is about life, only funnier, Specifically my life. I have a lot of ongoing features here. You'll find them collected up at these spots:
Click the link to go to the page to see the posts under that category...
How To Think The Lions (Essays About Stuff...)
The first novella from Briane Pagel: Claudius wanted to be the first man to reach the stars. And maybe he was, but he had blood on his hands when he got there. Buy this haunting psychological horror story at Lulu.com for as little as $1.25. Click the picture to go there.
Are you part of a family? Do you spend money?
If so, then you may be interested in "Family and Consumer Law-- The Blog," a source of information and entertainment about the legal issues that affect anyone who either is a part of a family, or shops. Click the picture to go there!
Ninety-Four
One year can change everything... or is everything can change one year? Read about the year I went to Washington and Morocco. Click the picture to go to the first entry and the table of contents for that continuing memoir.
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Did she really say I would be likely to get a crocodile to babysit the kids? "
Thinking The Lions and 117* Other Ways To Look At Life (Give Or Take) is for sale... all the great essays that no longer appear on this website. The funny (My Christmas Tree Rules!), the timeless ("I Even Have Some Warning Labels Left Over") and the earth-shatteringly tremendous (Velociraptors, My Butt!) are all here. Relive old times with me, The Boy, Older and Middle, Mr F and Mr Bunches, and, of course, the ever-patient Sweetie! All true, all real... and all funny.
Click here to buy the book!
Up So Floating Many Bells Down.
"Up So Floating Many Bells Down" is the first novel I'm posting at "5 Pages," a site where you'll read a novel as I write it, five pages at a time. Read about the year when Sarah's fiance drowned at his bachelor party, sending Bumpy to Las Vegas and Sarah to a group dedicated to proving that the drownings are the work of a serial killer. Click the picture to go there
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Help The Shaw Twins
Mateo and McHale Shaw were born conjoined twins and have had over 20 surgeries in their first years of life. Their medical bills are staggering. The family is accepting donations to help with the boys’ medical expenses. You can send donations to The Mateo and McHale Shaw Irrevocable Special-Needs Trust, in care of the Kohler Credit Union, 850 Woodlake Road, Kohler, Wis. 53044. Please give what you can.
Find out in the first book from "The Best Of Everything!" Essays on pop culture that explore the title question, plus discuss whether Paris Hilton's fame demonstrates that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, asks whether movie monsters have to have saber teeth, examines the impact of Jennifer Aniston's hair, and counts down the seven best showdowns between good and evil! Click the picture to go to the site where you can buy this book.
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This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contact thetroublewithroy@yahoo.com.
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