I have encouraging news for those of you who think that our law enforcement professionals have completely given up on the War on Drugs. Police in Tucumcari, New Mexico recently showed the country who’s in charge by arresting a man who had lost control of his car and crashed into a snow drift.
Lest you come to the conclusion that the Tucumcari police force is particularly harsh, or even a tad confused — as far as I know, grill-planting your car into six feet of snow is not
a crime in any part of New Mexico — the arrest was made after police noticed tracks in the snow between the man’s car and the bottom of a nearby bridge, where he had apparently stashed 238 lbs. of marijuana.
After treating the man for a head wound, the police confiscated the 200 lbs. of pot and charged him with possession of 150 lbs. of an illegal substance with intent to distribute. According to up-to-the-minute news reports, he is now in jail awaiting trial for something something something involving 75 lbs. of primo weed.
And if that wasn’t enough heroism for one day, the Tucumcari police haven’t forgotten about the littlest victims of the War on Drugs. Striding purposefully into the local elementary school, they wowed the kids with their tale of concern for the public at large that this 50 lbs. of areyouhungry?ManI’mstarving not make it into the hands of the vulnerable children of the community. To further drive home their poignant “Just Say No” message, they conducted a thorough raid on the kids’ lunch boxes, making sure to relieve them of some of the more dangerous Ho-Hos and peanut butter and potato chips and juice boxes and M&Ms.
So don’t tell me the police aren’t looking out for our welfare. They’re totally stoked.
In sports news, Maryland Governor gets cracking on live lobster display as warning to Indianapolis Colts not to be shellfish, butter warning goes unheeded. Then it gets weird.
So I was reading this magazine article the other day and what impressed me most was that it was proof that the indomitable hopefulness of the press lives on. As a general rule, the press seems to believe that if you give something a name (think “Brangelina”), it’s yours forever. This particular article was about the different generations that have emerged since World War II, and by giving the generations names, and promising to feed them and to play with them and to take them for long walks every day even when we have a lot of homework and to clean up after them even when they poop on the carpeting, they seem to feel we readers would somehow buy into letting the press keep them. They talked about the Baby Boomers and Generation X and Generation Y and Generation Pants-Way-Too-Far-Down-To-Possibly-Cover- Your-Butt-How-Are-You-Not-Embarrassed-To-Be-Seen-In-Public-Like-That? and a slew of others I’m probably too senile to remember.
My own generation falls somewhere between the true Baby Boomers and Generation X, and the media has decreed that we are to be called the Sandwich Generation, primarily because after the most recent economic meltdown, that’s pretty much all there will be left for us to eat. I’m sorry, I read that wrong; apparently we are the
Sandwich Generation because people are living longer and we are sandwiched between caring for our elderly relatives and raising our children at the same time.
This got me thinking about my own situation. The kind of generation gap I find myself in is not one of having to care for my parents, who are still very independent as long as you don’t count the occasional phone call from them that starts with, “WHO IS THIS?! DO YOU KNOW WHY I CALLED YOU?” Instead, I find myself to be the sandwich spread in what I am officially dubbing the Technology Sandwich Generation. The people of my generation are caught between the elderly who are generally confused by technology but want to learn just enough to be dangerous and the small alien life forms in our households who seem to be born knowing not only how to download porn onto the TiVo, but also how to keep us from watching it finding it and grounding them for doing such a bad, bad, inappropriate thing.
In my case, it started with the VCR. For those of you born after, say, the premiere of Melrose Place, there used to be a way to watch your favorite movies and TV shows by recording them just like you do now, except instead of having all of the information compressed into a format that hamsters could play Frisbee with, you recorded the show onto a cassette that looked like and weighed about the same as your average brick. This was amazing to us because, for the first time, viewers could set a timer on the machine and not even have to be home when the show was on. Stop snickering, you kids. And while you’re at it, get off my lawn.
Of course, not everyone understood the technology behind this miracle right away. I realized there was a problem when my mother started canceling social activities to stay home and watch TV. At first, I was concerned that she was developing some sort of social phobia. It wasn’t until I watched her trying to record a movie off the television that I realized what was wrong.
“I can’t leave”, she would whisper anxiously, “If I leave the room, the machine might stop recording.”
The method in which technology is welcomed into my parents’ home has not changed much since then. The way it works is like this: A new technology is announced, and my father immediately goes out and buys one or more of whatever it is just so he can say to his friends, “Oh sure, I bought the first one of those when they came out. Of course, they don’t make ‘em like that anymore…” My father then magnanimously bestows one of said technological wonders on my mother, who promptly “forgets” where she put it, mainly so she doesn’t have to learn how to use it. This triggers the paternal Discussion About Why Your Mother Doesn’t Appreciate How I’m Trying To Make Her Life Better, followed immediately by the maternal I Stopped Listening To Him Ages Ago Because I Also Refuse To Wear My Hearing Aids Rebuttal. While all of this is going on, my children have re-wired all of the TVs in the house to receive free HBO (Ha ha! Just kidding, HBO. Please don’t arrest me.)
The latest was the new cellphone. Phone conversations with my mother all have the same basic arc, starting with a formal introduction as if she was a telemarketer, transitioning smoothly into the Guilt Portion and then plunging rapidly into Confusion.
Mom: Hello, dear. This is your mother speaking.
Me: Hi Mom. How are you?
Mom: Well, I just hope you weren’t worried about me.
Me: Why would I have been worried? Is everything OK?
Mom: When you didn’t hear from me for a few days.
Me (now legitimately concerned): What happened? Is Dad OK?
Mom: Oh yes. My cell phone died, so your father bought me a new one. It’s so complicated. I don’t know what any of the buttons do.
Me: Well, what kind of phone is it?
Mom: You know. The same as my refrigerator.
I consider this a successful phone call because, despite the confusion, I’ve already ascertained a few key pieces of information: Nobody in my immediate family has died, my mother has a new cell phone that appears to resemble her refrigerator, and odds are good that my mother and father are not currently talking to one another, which actually gives me time to help my mother. At the same time, I also now have a lifetime, free subscription to Netflix, thanks to my kids.
While I’m confirming with my mother that she’s not actually trying to make phone calls using her refrigerator, I make a mental note to speak to my kids about hijacking content off the internet; later on, I change my mind. They could be doing a lot worse. They could be smoking. Or pulling an Ivana Trump on an airplane. Or robbing the taxpayers of their life-savings.
Just in case anyone was worried about what else could possibly happen after I reported the End of The World As We Know It back in September, I bring you now Michael Menkin, inventor of the Thought Screen Helmet. In his selfless quest to save humanity from the Alien Mind Control Invasion From Hell, Mr. Menkin is hand-crafting helmets in his home that will not only put the tin foil helmet industry to shame, but will also help the rest of us readily identify the people who should be under close medical supervision, mostly because they will be wearing ridiculous hats.
In a photo on his website, www. StopAbductions.com, Mr. Menkin appears to be an industrious, grandfatherly type who, if he were not clearly insane, looks like he would make a good
small-town mayor or perhaps even a relatively benign mall Santa. So how did Mr. Menkin get involved in the business of gluing Velostat into aviator helmets and baseball caps to prevent the aliens from scrambling people’s thoughts, you ask? Well, turns out he spent his career working for a whole slew of government agencies and large, technology-based corporations, like NASA and Boeing. He’s pretty well irradiated at this point, would be my guess.
Anyway, I can’t argue with someone who is so clearly delivering the kind of entertainment that makes you laugh until your fillings fall out performing a public service. Just read this stirring testimonial from a faithful customer in Kentucky:
Since trying Michael Menkin’s helmet, I have not been bothered by alien mind control. Now my thoughts are my own. I have achieved meaningful work and am contributing to society.
I’m sure I can speak for the rest of society when I say, “Thank goodness!” and also, “Ha ha! Please stay in Kentucky!”
The website also thoughtfully gives instructions on how to make your own helmet, should you feel that the invasion is imminent. The trick here, apparently, is to make the helmet as quickly as possible before the aliens gain control of your tiny little mind and then shove the helmet into a cabinet and LOCK THAT BABY UP.
You read that right. The aliens are an advanced race that can fly through the galaxies and control our minds , but a Schlage is beyond them. No word on the site as to what you’re supposed to do when the aliens can’t get to your helmet in the locked cabinet, but your brains are unprotected.
OK, so now we have a book that someone, thank goodness, believes is worthy of being published. My editor, Joelle, is still talking to me, albeit solely by e-mail, and I am still happy with the content at this point, although I will admit to being a bit jealous of it. The art design was done in Australia and the manuscript is now on a slow boat to China to be printed. It’s not even out yet, and already this book is better-traveled than I am.
Now what? Well, times are tough, and despite what you might think, writing is not really a way to get rich, or even a way to keep yourself in change for the parking meter. Not that money is an important factor here. Ask any writer and they will tell you that keeping your integrity is of paramount importance. A writer who lies to his or her readers will never have a loyal audience. I, for example, consider myself to be a writer with just boatloads of integrity. When I write, I try to tell the truth as I see it. I’ve written a book that came straight from my heart as well as from my mind, Lord help us all. I, like my writing comrades, would rather starve than compromise my integrity.
So last week I happened to be having lunch with a friend of mine who still works for one of the same advertising agencies where I used to work. Advertising agencies have also taken a big hit, but their troubles go back much further than the recent economic downturn. Things started to get really dicey for the ad agencies when the TV-watching public discovered that if they videotaped their favorite television shows and watched them later, they could fast forward through the stuff no one really needs to see, like Beyonce trying to convince the world that she actually shops at Wal-Mart. TiVo made things even worse because commercials could be edited out completely. Needless to say, these turns of events got ad execs’ knickers in a big ol’ twist and they’ve had to get even more creative about how to expose an increasingly fickle American public to their clients’ products. It’s such a big deal to them that they have entire departments of executives whose sole job it is to find a way around this problem. My friend Rachel is one of them.
“So you have a book coming out, right?”, my friend asked thoughtfully. ”And you write a blog. Blogs are very popular right now.”
“Well, the blog is doing OK”, I replied modestly. ”I’m having a good time with it…”
It didn’t take her long to come right out with it. ”Do you think the next time you post something you could mention one of my clients?”
I thought this over carefully as I cracked open the ice-cold Diet Pepsi she had handed me. ”Rachel, is that ethical?”, I asked. ”I’m not sure I should be endorsing anything.”
“You know, it pays pretty well”, she said, picking a piece of lint off her Old Navy Three-Button sweater with raglan sleeves. ”I hear publishers aren’t paying as much as they used to…” She pursed her lips for emphasis, and I noticed that the Maybelline Shine Seduction lip gloss she was wearing offered unusual shine and emollient-rich conditioning protection.
“Still, how would it look if every time someone read my blog all they saw was a bunch of odd references to random products?”
I stood up and walked to her living room window in my Reebok Premier Aztrec running shoes. The burden of what she was asking me to do weighed heavily upon my sense of integrity, but luckily for me, the DMX Ride technology in the soles provided extraordinary and long-lasting cushioning. As I gazed out, I could clearly see her Mercedes E-350 sedan with its 268-hp, V-6 engine gleaming in the sunlight.
“No problem”, she Coca-Cola’d with a smile, as she Oxycleaned the IKEA-brand “Billig” table with inset drawers where we had Ethan Allen our lunch. ”It was just a thought.”
Drink ice-cold, refreshing Coke. You need Coca Cola. You are getting sleeepyyy....
In my last post I wrote about what it was like to sit down and write a book that was not only supposed to make people laugh but also was supposed to deftly and professionally hide the fact that I had absolutely no book-writing experience whatsoever. I apologize if I scared any of you away from a writing career completely, what with my references to clinical depression, confusing outline notes that even I don’t understand, and faking my own death to avoid litigation, but tough toodles, as we used to say in the hip street parlance of the Bronx. This kind of thing isn’t for the faint of heart.
If you’re still with me, I’d like to move on to the editing process and why I’m now convinced that a Supreme Dictatorship is the only form of government that really works. In a past life I spent a lot of time in the conference rooms of many of the major advertising agencies in New York City, and the only thing I walked away with — other than a really cool stapler, some paper clips, the occasional pen and a lot of free coffee — was that nothing good ever comes from decisions that are made by committee. Decisions that should have been no-brainers and taken no time to decide were stretched into endless battles of ego and spectacular demonstrations of insecurity. The only time anyone knew when a meeting was actually over was not when the issue had been resolved, but when the coffee urn was empty.
That’s a tough way to produce anything, much less a book that people will find funny. Writing, especially humor writing, is a lot like the game Jenga. You spend a lot of time building up and crafting just the right amount of words, put together in just the right way, all aimed at just the right pay-off, and all it takes is for some yahoo to come along and pull out one block in the wrong way and the whole damn thing comes tumbling down. So I was a bit worried about whether the editor I would be working with on my book would want to have a lot of input on what I was writing, or whether he or she would take a “hands-off” approach. Or at least understand my Jenga analogy.
As luck would have it, I was assigned to Joelle. Joelle is a Senior Editor at Sterling and she is worth every penny that they pay her and then some. Our initial conversation about the direction the book should take went something like this:
Joelle: You can get started writing the book now.
Me: Is there anything else I should know?
Joelle: Yes. Call me when it’s finished.
That’s when I knew things were going to go just swimmingly.
I put Joelle, or rather a fictional version of Joelle, through quite a lot in this book and it’s to her credit that she took it with such a good sense of humor. The fictional Editor starts out by questioning whether I have my facts straight and, in a series of increasingly contentious footnotes, we argue our way down the path to Hell together. By the end of the book, neither of us winds up looking very good and my hat is off to her for being such a good sport.
Next time, we’ll talk about how I got started blogging and why unshakeable integrity and a strong moral center is essential to any successful writing career.
It’s official: ”It’s Not PMS, It’s You” will be available at bookstores and online June 1, 2010. 
Here it is on Amazon, and it’s not in the Barnes & Noble online catalog yet, but here it is in the Sterling Publishing Catalog.
Thank you to Amy Reynaldo for the head’s up. Amy, by the way, writes one of the raddest crossword blogs on the Intertubes, and also has a book of her own out which is a must-have for anyone who wants to learn to tackle the New York Times crossword puzzle.
I’m starting to think the scientists at NASA could use a vacation.
Last time, I told you about the team responsible for the Ares I-X test flight and their embarrassing case of rocket inadequacy. These scientists, when threatened with their program’s extinction, became entirely too preoccupied with the size of their rocket and its ability to satisfy the country’s exploratory desires, if you know what I mean.
Now I’m told that NASA has invested a huge amount of time and resources to rescue the plucky little space rover Spirit. Spirit and it’s partner Opportunity, were dispatched in 2004 to roam the surface of Mars to take pictures and collect space samples. Somewhere along the line, Spirit fell through a crack in the Martian dirt crust and got itself stuck in the mud, so to speak.
As a space geek and a patriotic citizen, at least when anyone is looking, it’s not that I don’t appreciate their efforts to rescue the heroic little space buggy. I mean, look at it. It’s adorable. It looks a bit like WALL*E.
It’s the fact that they have gathered some of the greatest engineering and scientific minds at NASA to plot and plan and experiment with different dirt samples in order to figure out essentially how to get a car out of the mud. We’re talking laboratory experiments and flow charts, people in white lab coats and advanced statistical computer programs. These people were into the Spirit rescue.
And the team finally hit upon a plan. Excited beyond belief, they joyously announced to the press today that, after months of experimentation and complex scientific and mathematical analysis, they had figured out how to rescue the little vehicle.
They decided to throw it into reverse.
Surprisingly, the NASA engineers were more than a bit put out when their announcement didn’t receive the elated cheers and Nobel Prizes they were expecting. Instead, accompanied by the sound of crickets, the press collectively looked at each other and said, “How much are we spending on this program again?”
Now, we’ve all gotten our cars stuck in the mud at some point, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (sorry) to figure out what to do in a case like that. My own son, who as a toddler had already spent enough time in the sandbox with his Tonka trucks to understand the concept, witnessed a truck in a similar situation one day and asked, “Why doesn’t he just back it out?”
So I’m thinking we should spend some of our tax dollars to make sure these scientists get some time off. Maybe we should send them to Mars to help push the Spirit out of the mud. I hear you can get a lot of relaxing done when you have 35,000,000 miles to travel.
When I was a kid, everyone wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up. We wanted to walk on the moon and take great leaps for mankind and do flips inside a space ship in zero gravity. Space exploration was still a dream, but it was so close we could taste it, and we all wanted to be a part of something that could change the world. Then Neil Armstrong did it for real in 1969 and I can remember my entire school stopping for the day so the teachers and the kids could all watch the TV coverage in amazement. The NASA space program was the Cool Kid that all the other government programs wanted to be friends with.
These days, however, the Cool Kid has aged into the Annoying Relative Who Has Great Ideas About How Things Should Be Done But Never Seems To Have A Real Job. Oh sure, the space program still exists, but it’s a shadow of its former glorious self. And although plenty of scientists still look to the heavens and wonder what exactly they can set fire to and blast into space because it looks really, really sweet, budget cuts have left them with very little to look forward to.
The NASA Ares I-X Space Penis
Until now. As of yesterday, these rocket scientists, these intrepid hangers-on in a form of exploration that is rapidly disappearing, these brilliant innovators who probably spent a good deal of their teen years being shoved into school lockers, have an Important Message for us. And that message is:
Ours is bigger.
At least that’s how I’m interpreting it, because according to an article on www.npr.org, the guys at NASA seem to be putting a lot of emphasis on the fact that the Ares I is officially “the tallest rocket in the whole world. Bigger even than anything the space shuttle team ever put together. We bet the space shuttle guys wish their rocket was this big.”
Seems like a classic case of rocket inadequacy to me. This whole thing started when the White House looked at the Ares I rocket program and mentioned that perhaps it wasn’t “up to the job” of fulfilling America’s exploratory desires, and the Ares team responded, of course we’re up to the job, haven’t we regularly orbited the Earth all these years? And the White House said, well, maybe, but these days we’d really like to ramp it up a notch, you know? Why should we be satisfied with just plain old vanilla orbiting when we could be going so much farther, so much deeper into unknown territory? A country has needs, for Pete’s sake.
Not surprisingly, the Ares team’s response was to take things into their own hands (sorry) and build a rocket that they describe as “a full 327 feet long, totally solid, ready to go at all times and oh, did we mention that it’s twice as long as any stupid space shuttle?”
Unfortunately for the Ares, the pressure got to the team and the rocket blasted off well before the count-down. Plans for continuation of the program are now back before a review committee. Which just goes to show you: size isn’t everything.
In “Sometimes Love Can Really Mess You Up” news:
Meet Arthur David Horn. Arthur, up until he met his lovely bride Lynette, was a Ph.D from Yale, a tenured professor at Colorado State University, and a staunch Darwinist. He taught a mainstream course in human evolution. He was a man of science.
Why? Do I look crazy?
Then he met and fell in love with Lynette, who describes herself with a perfectly straight face as a Metaphysical Healer. After spending a “revelatory” week in the Trinity Mountains of Northern California with Lynette “looking for Sasquatch” — I’m betting that’s a euphemism on at least two completely different levels — Arthur returned to Colorado claiming that the true origin of modern man is NOT a series of Darwinian evolutionary processes.
It is, he claims, the result of a breeding program instituted by a race of shape-shifting, lizard overlords intent on making us their slaves. Sounds to me like fun was had by all during that week up in the mountains.
In a move that I’m sure was warmly received by a relieved CSU faculty, Dr. Horn resigned from his post and now spends some of his time speaking at conventions such as the “Galactic Gathering”, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Galactic Civilizations, a UFO research group. These conventions apparently draw a large crowd and are seen by the metaphysical community as being both scientific and relevant on the grounds that they are held in the ballroom of an official Doubletree Motel.
“It’s not like a couple of yahoos sitting in their van”, said one attendee.
No, of course not.
This is getting scary. And I owe you all a big apology.
A ticking time bomb?
A while back, I wrote about the introduction of a new sandwich from Kentucky Fried Chicken called the Double Down, which most people agreed was disgusting and unhealthy and clearly an attempt to kill off KFC’s customers and steal their estates (“… if you wouldn’t mind just signing this Power of Attorney form before you eat your delicious Double Down, sir, and by the way, would you like fries with that? Mwa ha ha ha ha….”) The implicit message that I was humorously trying to get across here was that a sandwich made primarily of fried chicken, bacon, more bacon, cheese, additional cheese, still more fried chicken and topped off with something horrifyingly called “The Colonel’s Sauce” should be avoided at all costs if one wished to remain healthy or at least clinically “not dead” for the time being.
Well, that’ll teach you all to listen to me. Turns out I was completely wrong on this one. According to the scientists at the Glass Half-Empty Center For Science in the Public Interest, the leading culprit in the “Killer Foods” category is — wait for it — leafy green vegetables. That’s right. Lettuce. Spinach. Frisee, which is clearly not meant to be eaten anyway and actually makes a handy substitute for the Swiffer. All the healthy stuff your mother said was good for you. Apparently, the stuff has more of a chance of being loaded with food-borne pathogens like E. coli, Norovirus and Salmonella than the food at KFC.
So, I apologize for the confusion. If I have it right this time, our choices now are: gorging on fat-laden, vegetable-free foods like the Double Down that have been irradiated for our protection, OR eating healthfully and taking the somewhat sizable chance of dying a horrible death involving severe pain, uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea, and intrusive medical intervention that won’t stop until you code out:
Doctor: I’m sorry, Mrs. Needleman, but your husband did not make it. We did everything we could.
Mrs. Needleman: But Doctor, he was on such a healthy diet. He ate only salad!
Doctor: I’m afraid that’s what did it, Ma’am. He pooped out. But he had the arteries of a twenty year old.
Anyone who has spent a lot of time with a small person below the age of, oh, five years old or so, knows that their sense of humor is just beginning to emerge. This emergence is cute and adorable, but can be alarming to someone who is not used to it. At this point in their joke-telling development, the small child is capable only of repeating any nonsensical, potty-related gibberish that, if it were being told by an adult, would make the person sound mentally deranged:
Child: “Want to hear a joke?”
Unsuspecting Adult: “Uh… sure.”
Child: “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
Adult: “I don’t know. Why?”
Child: “Because it was making a POOP on the BUNNY!” (Hysterical laughter from all 5 year olds in the area)
This is all well and good, but at a certain point, the small person becomes aware of “knock, knock” jokes, a lethal form of humor that is not only easy for them to memorize so it can be told over and over and over and over until you just want to jam a lobster fork in your ear, but has also been used in times of warfare to completely disarm the opposition by boring them to death. One particularly deadly “knock, knock” joke that kids love goes something like this:
Child: Knock, knock.
Adult: Who’s there?
Child: Banana.
Adult: Banana who?
Child: Knock, knock.
Adult: Who’s there?
Child: Banana.
Adult: Banana who?
Child: Knock, knock.
Adult: Who’s there?
Child: Banana.
Adult: Banana who? Is there an end to this joke?
Child: Yes. Knock, knock.
Adult (wearily): Oh my God. WHO’S THERE???
Child: Orange.
Adult: Orange who?
Child: Orange you glad the chicken didn’t POOP on the BUNNY??? (Hysterical laughter from all 5 year olds in the area)
Just kidding. I think we all know the real punch line to that classic. I would have written it out here, but apparently it’s still classified and being used as a torture device at Gitmo.
Which is frankly why I’m so deeply worried about Steve Byrne. Steve is the head of a company that does corporate branding, wherein company logos are seared into the posteriors of corporate lackeys so that they are easily identifiable during the long and arduous cattle drive across the Plains. I’m sorry, my mistake; I’ve been out of the corporate world for a while, and apparently things have changed. Steve helps companies make their products more readily identifiable to consumers.
Anyway, Steve has come up with what he believes is a Big Idea, and he posted it on a business website. Basically, his Idea was to launch a new social networking site based around…. you guessed it, the “knock knock” joke. He believes that a social networking site based on knock knock jokes would break down the walls of prejudice and foster meaningful dialogue between people from different cultures. Ha ha! What a card Steve is! I’m pretty sure he’s never spent any meaningful amounts of time around small children.
As you can imagine, this Idea was not met with the normal amount of appreciation that your typical Big Idea usually receives. Other business executives, who have obviously been through this stage of development with their own children, politely suggested that he increase the dosage of whatever medication he was taking. And shortly thereafter, poor Steve was seen being shoved into the back of a black sedan and whisked off to be interrogated by the Committee to Advertise that Cheney acted Accordingly (CACA).
Did everyone have a good day yesterday? Yes?
No major problems, like, I don’t know…. the world coming to an end? Because according to certain Rapture-promoting websites, September 21, 2009 was your last day to party like it’s… uh….2009. And they have mathematical proof. Hang in there with me, you’ll love this.
I’ve gone on record as someone who does not possess the firmest hold on my math skills, but I’m pretty sure even I can recognize deep psychosis a wobbly grip on reality when I see it. Here is the chart that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the world ended yesterday:
God loves Himself a sine wave
This chart was thoughtfully compiled by someone who runs a website devoted to alerting people to the upcoming Rapture, and if you’re brave enough to click through to it just to prove to yourself that these people really exist, be warned that the color choices on this site are so bright and so heinous that your eyeballs will immediately melt as part of your punishment for being a non-believer.
The lovely ladies, Elaine and Sarah, of the totally rad “Miss In Your Business” advice blog have allowed me to guest-pontificate once again. Feel free to agree or disagree with me, but please go read it and let me know you’ve been there by leaving a comment.
When Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, I doubt he could imagine what a literary classic he had created. One of my favorite parts of the book is when Tom is asked to whitewash a fence and, being a young boy with Much Better Things To Do, decides to palm off this mundane job on the first person who crosses his path. Twain gifted the silver-tongued Tom with superior selling skills and the ability to make others lust after the chance to perform even the most boring task. It’s a wonderful example of literary bait-and-switch.
Twain was required reading in school when I was a kid and even though I don’t pretend to understand why it’s not anymore, I take comfort in knowing that this great work of his has been adopted by the real estate industry as a Strategic Planning Guide. At least someone’s reading it.
I make this assumption because of a news story from KDVR, the Fox News affiliate in Denver, Colorado (slogan: “Fair, yet somewhat chemically imbalanced”) which reported the plight of Jonathan Kyte, a first-time real estate buyer who was told that the apartment unit he had purchased and received the keys to — Unit Number 4 — was his and would be Home Sweet Home for him and his lovely wife and was completely worth the money he had paid for it, but would he mind doing just a bit of repairs here and there first? Just a bit of fixing up, tidying really, to make the unit the kind of place they could call home? The company that listed and sold him the unit, Coldwell Banker, said they TOTALLY would have done it, except that they are heinously slammed with meetings and closings this week and have also been feeling a bit depressed lately what with the market being down and their Mom in the hospital for gall bladder surgery.
And Mr. Kyte, being the nice guy that he is, said sure, happy to help out.
Anything that will make the building a better place in which to live and possibly increase his equity in the investment, right? So Mr. Kyte spent the next six months doing renovations on Unit 4 to the tune of $30,000, and after pouring all that love and their life savings into the apartment, he and his lovely wife lived there happily ever after.
No, that’s what we would like to have happened, except that it didn’t, of course. What actually happened next was that some brainiac sent them a map of the building and it gradually dawned on Mr. Kyte that they were in the wrong apartment. I think that bears repeating, so I’ll say it again slightly differently: the Coldwell Banker people had given him the keys to Unit Number 4 and said “Have at it!” Except that what the Kytes actually owned was the title to Unit Number 5.
This is where it gets good, although not for the poor Kytes. When he called Coldwell Banker and the title company to ask the requisite “WTF???” question, they were both conveniently out to lunch. They never returned his calls and, adding an impressive touch I’m sure even Mark Twain wouldn’t have thought of, declared him a squatter in Unit 4 and kicked him out. Thanks for playing, Kytes.
God, I SO hope he sues.
<Temporarily suspend silliness>
<Begin shameless self-promotion>
I happened to be lucky enough recently to help judge a fairly new crossword puzzle tournament called Lollapuzzoola, hosted by the blogging duo, Ryan Hecht and Brian Cimmet, better known to the crossword world as “Ryan and Brian Do Crosswords” (slogan: “Come on brains, be more smarter!”, which I STILL want to see on a t-shirt, R&B. Are you listening???) If you happen to love crossword puzzle solving and are in the New York area next August, I highly recommend stopping by. It’s a really fun day, and there were free Oreos.
One of the other very nice things that came out of that day was that I was interviewed by Jim Horne for Wordplay, the crossword blog of The New York Times. It was one of the rare, painless interviews I’ve been through, and Jim was kind enough to allow me to flog my upcoming book, “It’s Not PMS, It’s You”, not to mention this website. I forgot to say “Please buy my book” in the interview, so I’ll say it here. Please buy my book. Thank you.
<End shameless self-promotion>
<Continue silliness in next post>
WARNING: Today’s post contains some terms that might be upsetting to the highly squeamish, such as ‘menstruation’, ‘undergarments’, and yes, I even go so far as to talk about ‘multi-column addition’. If you happen to be one of those people with a delicate constitution, I advise you to turn away now and find another blog post of mine to read. Try the one about the crop circles and the wallabies. It seems to be very popular with the kind of reader who is amused by animals running in circles until they pass out. To each their own, I say.
This isn’t easy for me either, you know. I don’t spend my days reading about underwear patents because I have nothing better to do. I do it primarily as a selfless act of public service, and partially because this is so wonderfully stupid I just had to share it with you.
So if you do turn away, don’t come crying to me when you’re knocked up. I’m going to tell you about a product that could save you the time and trouble of looking at your calendar. Today I discovered that there is actually a patent out for something called “Calendar Underwear”, and it looks like this:
To avoid pregnancy: Don't forget to carry the 1
Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Deb, how on Earth could a pair of underwear that is festooned with hearts and jewels PREVENT pregnancy? Isn’t that sort of thing meant to encourage…. well, that sort of thing?”
Well, of course. But that’s not what the hearts are for, in this case. Apparently, for those of us who are too forgetful to remember when we last had our periods, the inventors of Calendar Underwear have been kind enough to embroider a month’s worth of numbers onto the front of the garment. At the same time, there is a grid above this calendar that holds not one but two heart-shaped clips, one silver and one gold. These clips are there to make sure that the process of remembering the date of your last menstrual period is easy-peasy.
Here’s how it works, and it really couldn’t be simpler. The patent says that you are supposed to put a clip on each of the far sides of the top grid and, moving the gold clip containing a vertical pin from right to left, count the days that you don’t have your period. At the same time, the silver clip, which has a horizontal pin, is moved from left to right to mark the… um, days going backwards from the end of the month? Wait, that can’t be right. No, here it is: As you move the silver clip, add those days to the days marked by the gold clip, carry the ‘1′ and then multiply by the number of days since you last burst into tears in the middle of the supermarket because they were out of the Fudge-Covered Oreos and Tequila you crave so much at certain times of the month. The number you arrive at by performing these calculations is the number of days left until your next period, expressed in pounds per square inch of water weight. Immediately take the Xanax tablet conveniently located inside the silver clip and wash down with a full glass of Merlot.
The only thing the patent doesn’t address is the likelihood in the first place of hooking up with anyone when wearing the same pair of underwear every day for a month.
OK, squeamish people: you can come back now.
Once upon a time, we as a country valued ingenuity and resourcefulness. In fact, rumor has it that our country was founded on those very qualities. Some people are skeptical, but I have proof that the great ideals that America runs on — Dunkin’ Donuts excluded — are alive and well.
Michael Amatrudo, a 51 year old resident of Connecticut, made the news recently for borrowing a trick from the success of the “Cash For Clunkers” program by attempting to sell his aging parents on Craigslist. Having lived with them for over 50 years, he said, he appreciated all they had done for him but was now ready to move on to something newer, shinier and more fuel efficient. Sorry, my mistake: what he actually said was he would be willing to trade them in for a pair of younger parents, a LEGO set, or perhaps a “hot blonde”. 
Mr. Amatrudo later made a point of saying that he was only joking and merely trying to pass time on a rainy day, plus it turns out that the trade-in value for a mom with arthritis and hearing in only one ear just isn’t what it used to be. His wife and parents, who think he’s a hoot and are used to his sense of humor, seem to me to be missing the point.
To me, a story like this makes me wonder what the elder Amatrudos could possibly have done to rack up this kind of end-of-life karma. Operating on the theory that it was wise to be kind to your children because they would eventually pick out your nursing home, my own parents bent over backwards to show me and my sister a good time, and then, when the time was right, fled to Florida in order to escape our greedy little clutches. In retrospect, I have to give them props for forming a pretty decent escape plan.
On the other hand, there are other cultures that handle the aging of their population with less compassion than merely trying to recoup his blue book value, like Mr. Amatrudo. Given the choice between freezing to death on an ice floe like an Inuit elder, or being mauled to death by a bear in the forest like a Native American elder, I will take the trade-in any day. Because if I’m really lucky, I might wind up with a family considerably less idiotic than the Amatrudos.
