Scott Merritt's Funny Little World

Craigslist Doesn't Want Atlanta To Have Bread

2014-02-12T17:39:00.003-05:00

In the midst of one of the worst ice storms Atlanta has seen, there's a digital war happening on a free ad listing service.

Craigslist is the well-known, go-to online location for virtually anything you can imagine. If you're a Cuban midget with a fetish for hairy amputees, you can connect on Craigslist; if you're in need of a lawnmower and you want to buy it from someone who may or may not murder you when you arrive to pick it up, you can find it on Craigslist; and if you're looking for the season's hottest, most hard-to-find items, go to Craigslist.

Unless the season is winter, and the item is one of the ridiculous things people run to the store to buy when snow sets in. That's right: don't you dare list bread, milk or eggs for sale on Craigslist if you want to try to turn a profit.

One of the basic principles of economics is supply and demand. When supply is high and demand is low, it's a buyer's market. When supply is low and demand is high, sellers set the price. So naturally, when the snow started falling and people started panicking and buying bread, a capitalist with wicked PR sensibilities took to Craigslist and listed a loaf of bread for $65... clearly as a joke.

10 hours and a great many disapproving emails later, the ad was flagged and removed by Craigslist. It's interesting to note, however, that the listing did experience a fair amount of viral sharing. And it's also nice to know that plenty of people saw it for the joke it was.

Here are the original posts:

Broadcast news stories:

Here's some of the fun:

Post by Radio 105.7.

Aw Hell naw someone in Atlanta tried to sell bread on Craigslist for $65!!
— Denay (@DenayKrishauna) February 12, 2014

"@hot1079atl: Loaf of Bread For Sale On #Craigslist! View Scenes From #Atlanta #Snowstorm: http://t.co/qOquNJnZBi pic.twitter.com/AFl8qq2uMW"WTH
— Click Here (@PepIsRIZZight) February 12, 2014

I saw it as well lol RT @AcademikPeso: Just saw a pic of a loaf of bread on Craigslist for $75 in Atlanta. I cried real tears on sight. Lol
— Ricky Tan (@Moonshine_ATL) February 12, 2014

Mann deez folks sellin loafs of bread on Craigslist 😭😭😭😂 only in atlanta
— D.White (@kd_grind_hard) February 12, 2014

It's bad that people in Atlanta are selling milk, bread, and eggs on Craigslist for crazy prices during this storm process. #snowpocalypse
— Jason McDowell (@Jmacfsu24) February 12, 2014

I'll starve before I buy a loaf of bread off Craigslist for 65 dollars. Atlanta got it wrong again.
— #sadgirlBrie (@Brieyonce) February 12, 2014

#Craigslist #atlantageorgia #atlantaga #atlanta #forsale #bread #smh #wow #weatherstorm #weather… http://t.co/THFioisPqE
— Bougie Chick (@Bougie__Chick) February 12, 2014

— ✨King✨ (@1BerlinAgent1) February 12, 2014

Loaf of Bread For Sale On #Craigslist! View Scenes From #Atlanta #Snowstorm: http://t.co/5CMkLNqSJS pic.twitter.com/dAyNjrDMtL
— Hot 1079 Atlanta (@hot1079atl) February 12, 2014

apparently people are selling loafs of bread on craigslist in Atlanta right now
— Will Rollins (@_Bromeo) February 12, 2014

Why is bread is such high demand in Atlanta?
— GIRL NEXT DOOR (@VickiesAndCiroc) February 12, 2014

Wheat bread people probably prepared. RT @BrendanLLM: meanwhile, in Atlanta... pic.twitter.com/KD11KWsHHH
— Adam Rowe (@BlueDevilLair) February 12, 2014

Hey Atlanta, $65 for a loaf of wheat bread & $5 per egg. It might be sold already but it's worth a shot if ur hungry pic.twitter.com/4Gi7rPIWNe
— Evan Chasteen (@echasteen) February 12, 2014

😂😂😭😭 Atlanta wilding!!!!!! $65 for a loaf of bread, $5 a egg
— JAY (@iiamleesa) February 12, 2014

Have y'all seen the craigslist post for $65 loaf of "Arnold's" bread? Supply and demand baby. #Atlanta #Icestorm
— KING™ (@savoythegreat) February 12, 2014

Dude on craigslist selling a loaf of bread in #Atlanta for $65 lmao Hustle in all type of weather I tell ya
— Dame Dizzle (@DameDizzle) February 12, 2014

People are selling bread and eggs on Craigslist.... $65/loaf and $5/egg. #atlanta #Icepocolyps2014 #snowmonster
— Frank Arsics (@Frank_Arsics) February 12, 2014

They selling bread on craigslist for $65 for this storm in Atlanta😂😂😂
— CliffGantt (@I_AmCliff) February 12, 2014

File this in "what the hell?" file. Pro tip, don't pay $65 for a loaf of bread. #craycray http://t.co/nupNsSzWlq
— Alan Raymond (@AlanRaymondWX) February 12, 2014

Hey #Hothlanta - if you forgot your bread, this guy on Craigslist has you covered for only $65! (Eggs are $5 each.) http://t.co/2xBcekESgP
— Bobby Blackwolf Saga (@BobbyBlackwolf) February 12, 2014

RT Need a loaf of bread? There's one for sale on Craigslist. Oh, and individual eggs, too. #StormWatchOn2 http://t.co/dgF33dL1L4”
— Tawney Patterson (@TawneyPatterson) February 12, 2014

Meanwhile in Atlanta if you need a loaf of bread, bring $65. Pickup only. http://t.co/nSjpfJLMOC
— Chris Negron (@CNegronWrite) February 12, 2014

Priceless RT @AliDegan: Need a loaf of bread? There's one for sale on Craigslist. & individual eggs. #StormWatchOn2 http://t.co/is6n0q65gP
— Daniel Shmalo (@360venturelaw) February 12, 2014

$5 per egg...bruh...“@BigB0SSRoss: Y'all.... RT @Ja_men: Need bread? Check Craigslist 😂😂😂 http://t.co/qwVw4iO6sG”
— Sydni. (@SydniKay) February 12, 2014

Need a loaf of bread? There's one for sale on Craigslist. Oh, and individual eggs, too. #StormWatchOn2 http://t.co/Ic86ZsEVug
— Jason Durden (@JasonDurdenWSB) February 12, 2014

I read someone is selling bread for $65 on craigslist in #Atlanta due to the snow storm!! #onlyinthesouth
— Eva Hendrick (@HendrickEva) February 12, 2014

With the impending winter storm, bread is going for $65 a loaf in Atlanta
— Hercilia Samos (@LazoSzekula) February 12, 2014

"A Loaf of Arnold 100% Whole Wheat Bread - $65" Opportunism in #Hothlanta. http://t.co/3OdVuNfMcG (No sale without the milk.)
— Thomas L. Strickland (@thomasls) February 12, 2014

Dang. This loaf of bread with a red twist tie is too far away. We're in Decatur. http://t.co/4E6Q83CNAX
— Meghan Arias (@meghanarias) February 12, 2014

What?? RT @CassandraYoung And now...you, too, can own a loaf of bread for $65. http://t.co/DJ7vfB0mJf #SnOMG #WhatHashTagAreWeUsing #Atlsnow
— Bluebird Patch ATL (@BluebirdPtchATL) February 12, 2014

Lmfaoooo Atlanta selling 65$ bread http://t.co/U2ErqqQ4Mu
— Jebs (@JebssbeJ) February 12, 2014

Due to the snowstorm someone is selling a loaf of bread on Craigslist for $65, eggs for $5.00 a piece. pic.twitter.com/SUA3cdRCxb
— Everything Georgia (@GAFollowers) February 12, 2014

UPDATE:

Various news outlets and blogs are reporting on the $65 bread:

And it's a meme:

Reddit posts:

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1xo5ym/with_the_impending_winter_storm_bread_is_going/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Atlanta/comments/1xo92g/65_for_a_loaf_of_bread_ridiculous_craigslist/

Justin Bieber Killed!

2010-12-08T01:03:00.001-05:00

There are precious few opportunities to bond with your children before they get old enough to know better than to hang around with their parents. I recently had one such opportunity, when I lost a bet with my wife, Debbie, and brought my 11-year-old daughter to see Justin Bieber in concert.

Debbie and I secretly bought a pair of tickets when they went on sale and decided we’d surprise Amanda on the day of the concert. When I explained why I was home early from work, Amanda’s reaction almost warranted a visit from the local ambulance corps. That would have resulted in our selling the tickets to the sold out show to some lucky last-minute kid whose reaction would undoubtedly also have required the services of the paramedics, and so on… creating a nightmarish domino-effect of tween death thanks to Justin Bieber. I can see the headlines now: Justin Bieber killed!

I’ve always enjoyed walking around and people watching in the venue before a concert. This time was no different, except that I was with Amanda, who A) has an unparalleled passion for shopping, and B) was clearly in cahoots with the merchandising crew. We fought our way to the front of the line, which was abuzz with overexcited tweens and parents willingly forking over too much money for t-shirts, stickers, posters and anything else on which you could print a teen idol’s likeness.

Being a strict parent, I set a spending limit for Amanda. After telling the tattooed gent with the aggressive facial hair that she wanted the “cute” t-shirt ($35), she used coercion tactics on par with those utilized by Scotland Yard, to persuade me to buy her tattoos ($10, purchased solely so the guy helping us wouldn’t think I was judging him), a useless wand that flashes a variety of colors ($12, and slightly more useless today), and a few other costly trinkets. Confident that she had successfully extracted every last nickel from my very tight pocket before the show even began, we found our seats.

Inside the arena, I and a bunch of other poor saps who lost rock, paper, scissors matches with their spouses sat playing with our collective iPhones while our girls discussed important topics like which Justin Bieber song was the best and whether or not he’d play it tonight (he would). They also each argued that he’d definitely notice them because they were his biggest fans ever, and he would know (he wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t).

As the lights dimmed, a countdown timer starting at two minutes appeared on the screens. The crowd screamed louder with every passing second. By the time the clock reached one minute, my earplugs were doing as much good as if I had chosen to leave them back home in the box instead. At 30 seconds, I wondered how the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora could still be listed as the loudest sound ever heard by humans. It’s a miracle nobody was bleeding to death from his or her ears (headline: Justin Bieber killed!). At 10 seconds, the entire arena began counting down together, all the way to zero, when in an explosive climax, appearing right there on the screen for all to see was… a three-minute commercial for Xbox 360. It was about as big a letdown as a seventh-night Hanukkah gift.

As an aside, if you’ve never been treated to the sound of thousands of pre-teen girls screaming together in an enclosed space, here’s a handy reader service tip: you’d probably be more comfortable removing a splinter with a belt sander.

During the opening notes of the first song, Amanda pulled my shoulder down to proclaim, “This is my favorite Justin Bieber song!” She would issue the same declaration to me during the opening notes of every song performed that night.

Immediately following an on-screen close-up of Bieber in which he smiled and flicked his head and famous hairdo almost imperceptibly, causing a frenzy of screaming and tears one would only expect to see in newsreel footage of the Beatles invading America, I decided it was time for my eardrums to take a break. On my way out, I noticed that all the dads in attendance had the pale blue light of a smart phone illuminating their faces as they checked email, played games and updated Facebook statuses – a totally appropriate sign of the times for a concert starring a kid who was discovered on YouTube.

The loudest screams of the night happened after I returned, when Bieber floated over the crowd in a steel-framed heart and declared, “I think I just saw my special girl.” The teen to whom he was referring was brought to the stage in a heap of tears, serenaded and presented with a bouquet of roses. She will have an amazing story to tell for the next two or three years, when her feelings about the experience magically transform from unmitigated elation to severe embarrassment about having been there in the first place.

In fairness, Bieber is a jack-of-all-trades. In addition to singing and dancing, he played drums, guitar and piano. And we were treated to a four-minute video montage of him singing at various stages of childhood. In the interest of political correctness I'll only say that he was as good then as he is now.

Even after drawing the short straw and occupying a seat at this concert, I’ve managed to draw a few conclusions:

It doesn't take much to make 10,000 tween girls scream like Daniel Stern in the movie Home Alone,
After this concert I could probably realize significant benefits from a cochlear implant,
Despite my reluctance to attend the concert at first, I would happily do it again thanks to the joy I witnessed through my daughter’s eyes, and
If you were a young girl in the right target demographic, Justin Bieber did in fact kill.

Shooting the Hooch… and here’s hoping the clerk behind the counter is named The Hooch

2010-08-06T01:26:00.007-04:00

While it sounds like it could be a lot of fun, if anyone ever suggests Shooting the Hooch, you shouldn't think twice before absolutely refusing to go under any circumstances. If you make the unfortunate decision to do it "because we've never done it before and it sounds like so much fun," you should know that there are many ways to spend a day that would result in more fun. Among them: using your feet to judge a contest to see who can drop an anvil the hardest, eating a bushel of bananas right before paying a naked visit to a hungry mosquito farm (which incidentally seems to be my back yard), or having open heart surgery.

The Hooch refers to the Chattahoochee River, a 430-mile river that flows through Georgia, Alabama and Florida. Shooting refers to yet another preferable activity you should consider, as long as you’re doing it to yourself.

Nonetheless, we chose to make a go of it. Our second mistake, and one that I as a Jew should have known to avoid, was departing from Helen, Georgia, a Bavarian-themed town that you’d swear was right out of a Krofft brothers television show. As we were getting ready to pay the three dollar fee at Helen Tubing, the clerk recommended that we purchase a stick, which was, for all intents and purposes, a stick. She told us that we’d “probably find it useful to push off if you get stuck on any rocks.” I reluctantly forked over another five bucks for the stick and we were on our way.

We boarded a school bus and began to make our way to ‘the start,’ or as we Yankees call it, ‘the dry riverbed.’ Ten minutes later we got off the bus (mistake number three), we each took a heavy duty water tube – hot pink – and we set off for a three hour tour that didn’t result in the kind of comedy we’ve all come to expect from such a tour.

Judging solely by the river’s average depth during our tubing trip, the Hooch contains, in total, approximately six gallons of water. It also contains about the same number of rocks as the moon, the Kuiper Belt and Snooki’s head combined. The five dollar stick did come in handy, but only as a weapon I used to beat out my aggression on the river, the rocks, the pink tube with which I was saddled, and anything else I could find that didn’t start its day alive. On at least one occasion, I also thought about how I could have used it to beat the clerk who had the temerity to use the word “if” when explaining the likelihood of our getting stuck on rocks.

In any case, I feel it’s my civic duty to provide all my readers with the mother of all public service announcements. Here’s a brief, but complete, synopsis of what you can expect when taking part in this barbaric activity:

Step 1) Float for 20 feet, get stuck on rocks,
Step 2) Climb out of tube,
Step 3) Pull tube for 300 yards, slip and fall often, jabbing yourself in the ribs with the end of the five dollar stick, all the while scraping major bodily joints on sharpest possible rocks,
Step 4) Climb back on tube, flip over backward, repeat step three twice, then skip to step five,
Step 5) Carefully climb back on tube, float for 20 feet, get stuck on rocks, hopelessly try to push off rocks with five dollar stick,
Step 6) Curse whosever stupid idea this was, climb out of tube, spend no less than 60 seconds beating tube with five dollar stick,
Step 7) Pull tube for 300 yards, slip and fall often, jabbing yourself in the ribs with the end of the five dollar stick while issuing expletive-filled diatribe to all within earshot,
Step 8) Climb back on tube, flip over backward again, ask rhetorical question about who would ever think this was a good idea,
Step 9) Climb back on tube, float for 20 feet…

Repeat steps 1-9 for approximately three hours.

In spite of a few dozen scrapes and sprained joints we did manage to make it to the end of the run. In retrospect, spending three hours splashing ourselves in the face with ice cold water and systematically dropping to our knees and elbows on sharp gravel would have achieved the same result in a cheaper and more pleasurable way.

After gladly surrendering our tubes, I thought about the lessons I learned. First and foremost, never participate in any activity whose name suggests something so exquisitely awesome and fun that you just have to do it no matter what (cruising the Inside Passage also makes this list). Second, if you do choose to ever Shoot the Hooch, make sure to bring a psychiatrist, a stick and 50 million gallons of water. And third, if you happen to see me there, beat me with the stick before I pay my three dollars.

A Collection of Random Thoughts

2009-04-28T01:25:00.002-04:00

Many times throughout the writing and editing process, lines, thoughts and entire segments of stories wind up completely cut from the final product. In addition, there are one-liners and stand-alone observations that have no home in the body of an otherwise well-crafted story.

In the interest of minimizing the amount of digital waste on my hard drive, I’ve dredged through the edited clippings and reclaimed some of the more interesting ones to share with you:

Paul, my brother-in-law, is much skinnier than I am. He neglected to bring a bathing suit when he and the family came to my house to go swimming. I had to tell him I couldn’t lend him one of mine because he’d be swimming in it.

I woke up with a cleaning bug a few weeks ago. When my wife Debbie asked what I was doing upstairs for so long, I confessed that I had just cleaned the shit out of the bathroom.

This past Earth Day I took inventory in my office: styrofoam cuppa joe, regular trash can full of paper, aerosol spray can and SUV keys. I better go hug a tree, PRONTO.

I think Jerry Van Dyke's brother is a Dick.

I never cut the cards because I don't like to play god. But somehow I have no problem shuffling.

Observation from a Jew in the South: Between my house and my sister's: 9 churches, 1 mosque, zero synagogues. This explains why I didn't get a Seder invite. The Torah Belt this is not.

Try as I might, I just can't wrap my head around why someone would go to great lengths to jump into an enclosed space with a real bear.

Odd, isn’t it? As kids we couldn't wait for gym class; as adults we’d rather solve for x than go to the gym.

The 9.5 oz. can of Edge shave gel says '35% MORE than 7 oz. size' - no duh! And lemme guess, a 6-pack of Coke is 600% the size of a single can?

I frequently sweep the house. Not so much because it's dirty. I figure curling is my best shot at an Olympic medal and I need the practice.

If I were any kitchen utensil, I'd be a Ginsu knife because I'm sharp, I'm cheap and most women laugh when they think of me in their drawers.

Proof that my dog is smarter than me: I was fully outside in the pouring rain trying to coax her from the doorway. Standing at the door, she cocked her head and peed on the floor.

My friend Jack is a press technician at the U.S. Mint. He goes to work to make money.

I’m not a fan of the piñata. First, they now make them out of indestructible reinforced corrugated cardboard. Second, I recently witnessed 14 kids nearly kill each other for a few packs of Nerds. The birthday boy was crying.

A broken hip is like a save-the-date card from death.

Once the war is over and the economy bounces back I'm hoping they'll work on getting good pizza in Atlanta.

Candles are the gift that says "I had no idea what to get you and I had THIS lying around the house."

This morning I was moving 0 mph in a 65 mph zone. In most places this would be considered an obstruction. In Atlanta I was making good time.

Howie Mandel was funnier when he had hair.

The iPhone is definitely the single greatest gadget ever invented.

Watching The Goonies on DVD with my kids reminded me how much better this movie is than so many best picture winners.

If every song was written by John Hiatt there would be no bad music.

I recently had to explain to a Starbucks barista that The Onion is satire. I gave him a dollar tip. He'll need it.

A trip to Cold Stone Creamery never disappoints. Unlike that crap they try to pass off as sushi at Costco.

If I could go back in time I'd use blue finger paint on the kindergarten picture my mom hung on the fridge. Red clashed with the wallpaper.

I hope you enjoyed a little break from the norm. I look forward to sharing more random thoughts in the future, but I'll have to write a bunch of real articles before I have enough to do this again.

Poll Dancing – The Modern Age of Politics in America

2009-04-02T01:11:00.003-04:00

It’s beginning to make sense to me why you have to be 18 to vote. Before you can make an informed decision about who gets impeached next, you have to understand the intricacies of your favorite candidate’s sexual proclivities. Not surprisingly, 18 is the age of consent (unless you live in the South or the Midwest, or your last name is Spears, or you are a teenager that attends high school with similar-aged teenagers of the opposite – or same – sex). You’re also supposed to be 18 before you are allowed to see an adult movie, unless you’re famous, in which case you’re allowed to star in pornographic “private” home videos solely created to meet contract obligations with mass online video distributors.

For my money, it’s a relief that nobody under the age of 18 has any idea that the internet is nothing more than an all-you-can-eat buffet of anything and everything remotely sexual. And I’m not talking Sizzler here. This is the real deal. Fortunately children and teens only navigate to safe sites like Wikipedia, where little information is correct, but it’s a useful resource to do vital school research about the history of important historical and cultural subjects like the Jonas Brothers. Of course, Facebook has caught on, but that’s really just a diversion created by the online porn industry to keep you nearby.

Speaking of websites, some prominent Politicians have made recent news after visits to an entirely other league of “social networking” sites. Politicians have a long history of getting caught having torrid affairs and raising the ‘political bar’ (if you know what I mean). Case in point: New York’s recent former Governor, the sanctimonious “steamroller” of New York, Eliot Spitzer. It seems that Spitzer, when not bringing down major prostitution rings, was keeping others in business. Client #9, as he was affectionately known by Albany insiders, had a “thing” for a girl named Kristen, Ashley or Silda, depending upon who you asked and when. The difference is in the cost of their company and the basis of their relationship. Let’s compare:

Silda – Cost: Free. Relationship: Lawfully wedded wife.
Kristen/Ashley – Cost: Four hour/$5,000 minimum. Relationship: Who cares? I don’t know what she did for $5,000, but whatever it was she must be awfully good at it.

Client #9 experienced a profound error in judgment when he asked his friend Kristen to come over and play. A brief analysis of the situation would lead anyone to the conclusion that if you don’t want anyone, including your lawfully wedded wife Silda, to find out about Kristen, this transaction is best handled with cash. It’s easy to fly under the radar with a random $30 charge on the old AmEx, but $5,000 is a bit of an eyebrow raiser – especially when the charge is for Ralph’s House of Escorts and Lawn Maintenance. Is it possible that New York’s former Attorney General and recent Governor was so sex-addled that he forgot he wasn’t supposed to tell his wife about the great hooker he just hired? “She looks just like our daughter, honey! She reminded me of home and how much I love my family.”

Spitzer resigned his post immediately after the media spit out his bones (Ha!). Lieutenant Governor David Paterson was immediately sworn in, declaring he had a “clear vision for the future.” Seemingly for comedic purpose, Paterson is legally blind. In any case, he almost beat himself to the podium when he declared, not ten seconds later, that he had cheated on his wife – at a Harlem Days Inn that charged by the hour. It wasn’t quite the Mayflower Hotel, like in Spitzer’s case, but then it probably doesn’t really matter to a guy who can’t see the room.

Nevertheless, sex scandals and politics have gone hand-in-hand since the dawn of time. Among the legions of political heroes involved in such scandalous activities, these few best illustrate the ones that rocked the world one bed at a time:

Bill Clinton, President of the United States
Clinton’s presidential ‘inkwell’ spilled over on an overzealous intern named Monica Lewinsky who had a thing for powerful guys who resemble W.C. Fields, blue dresses made from materials that would make Rosie from the Bounty commercials hang her head in shame, and Churchill length Cohibas that Fidel Castro himself later requested back in a hand-written letter to Clinton.

John F. Kennedy, President of the United States
Political analysts attribute Kennedy’s overwhelming 1960 victory to being widely recognized by people who passed through one of New York’s major air travel hubs. It’s a little-known fact that prior to entering politics Kennedy worked as a shoeshine boy at LaGuardia Airport, which back then was known as Fiorello’s Discount Air Strip and Vaudeville Palace. Kennedy became enthralled with a local Vaudevillian performer then known as Norma Rae, saw her skyrocket to worldwide fame and made it his life’s work to bed down with Marilyn Monroe.

George Washington, President of the United States
Now this guy had a reputation for sleeping around. Anyone who has visited a location on the continent of North America has come across a sign bearing the words “George Washington slept here.” One natural question that has been asked a thousand times is, “Where are all the ‘James Buchanan Slept Here’ signs?” Well, my investigation is over. I’m happy to report that Buchanan, who was the only president that was single, has shingles hanging all over San Francisco, Miami and the East Village. Draw your own conclusions.

Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, Mayor of Arlington, Washington
When your mayoral duties involve updating your Myspace profile, you’re likely to get young voters to the polls. Turning to the internet for information, male voters far and wide came across photos of the candidate on her Myspace profile page wearing nothing but her bra and panties. Debate tickets sold out faster than a Beatles reunion concert, although there is no record of exactly what was debated, where she stood on the issues or whether or not her opponent even showed up.

Richard Nixon, President of the United States
Surprisingly, Nixon – who was involved in the biggest hotel-related political scandal in history – somehow couldn’t manage to shoehorn sex into the story.

In an effort to be as fair as possible, I’d like to offer this list of politicians who have never had anything to do with sex scandals:

Oil or Transmission Fluid: What’s the Differential?

2009-03-09T03:37:00.003-04:00

Of the many puzzling events that somehow led me to where I am today, the one I question most is why I was ever hired to work at Jiffy Lube when I was 16. The events of this past week were a reminder that I am unconditionally unqualified where it relates to automotive repair and maintenance.

Last week, my brother-in-law Paul performed several highly technical repairs on both of my cars. Every one of these repairs involved using specialized filthy mechanic tools that are inexplicably kept in a toolbox that cost more than a standard-issue passenger jet.

For reasons that must be analogous to why I’m always asked to disrobe when I go to the doctor for a sore throat, Paul started every repair by removing a wheel from the car. As he began to replace parts I couldn’t identify or locate on either vehicle, I began to ask the most logical questions that came to mind. One such exchange occurred while he was replacing the brakes on my Toyota Prius:

Me: Did you bleed the line?
Paul (with a baffled glance in my direction): Did I what?
Me: I meant do you need me to loosen the restrictor plate?
Paul: (no response)
Me: I’m just trying to help.

This line of questioning ended with Paul shaking his head in disgust and getting back to work. The entire process reminded me of the job I never should have had.

Nearly 20 years after I went for the initial interview at Jiffy Lube, I still know as little about cars as somebody can know and still be able to operate one. Back then I somehow passed muster with the management and was hired as a technician.

Upon hiring me, Gary, the Jiffy Lube manager handed me a training manual and instructed me to read through it before my first day of work. While I didn’t get through the entire manual in the allotted time, I did manage to read all the way to where it said “Training Manual” on the front cover.

Since I didn’t even have a learner’s permit yet, I had to ask my friend Andrew Wagner, who owned a 1964 Ford Fairlane, to drive me to work every day after school. In exchange for the daily ride, I had to agree to two things: 1) I would get him two bottles of transmission fluid per week – not for his transmission, but because transmission fluid is the most slippery substance known to man; and 2) I would allow him to pour the transmission fluid on the ground under his wheels and “light ‘em up” on the cul-de-sac where I lived. Watching him lay a half-inch of rubber on the ground, accompanied by the massive cloud of smelly smoke, still makes me laugh today. As an aside, the tire tracks were still there on the ground five years later.

In any case, my job was ill-fated from the start. Given my assigned work station in the lower level of the facility, my extraordinary inability to perform even the simplest of tasks, like changing the oil (which is, by all accounts, the primary reason for the existence of Jiffy Lube), went unnoticed by everyone but Pat, the other guy who worked the lower bay. Pat taught me the finer points of the ten-minute oil change, and while I admit that I didn’t understand a word he was telling me, I did learn that as long as there were guys like Pat around, I would never have to do this kind of thing myself.

Nevertheless, I mastered the art of removing the oil from all sorts of cars. My job required me to let the upper level guys know when the oil tank was completely drained so they could refill it with new oil. On more than one occasion I was guilty of forgetting to replace the bolt, or “spark plug,” thereby allowing all the new oil to drain right back out the bottom and into the collection bin. I was the only one who found this to be even remotely amusing.

Suffice it to say, I am not the person you want tooling around under the car unless the situation is entirely limited to retrieving a ball, a Frisbee or some other non-automotive item that has nothing to do with the car other than sheer proximity. Even then, there are probably better people for the job.

About two months in (I know, I’m just as shocked as you are) I was given an instruction I couldn’t recall having gotten before. The customer wanted to check the “differential.” Now, I clearly recalled my Sequential Math II teacher Mr. Hoolan discussing this concept a few weeks earlier, so my challenge was trying to figure out exactly what subtraction had to do with the underside of a Ford F-150. I felt silly about all those complaints I had in school that ‘I would never need to know any of this in real life.’

As I wracked my brain, Pat sensed trouble and came to the rescue. He showed me where the differential fluid was and handed me what looked like a bottle of caulk with a flimsy rubber point and a handle on the back of it that made air go in and out. I putzed around pretending to do something around the area Pat showed me for about five minutes and gave the all clear to the guys upstairs. Still today I wouldn’t be able to identify this region on a truck. And I’m reasonably certain the device Pat handed me was a joke since it made fart sounds when I moved the handle back and forth.

Several weeks later, and for reasons still unclear to me, I was “promoted” to work in the upper bay. This meant interaction with the customers and learning to identify an entirely new set of parts. I lasted for exactly one vehicle in the upper bay.

The owner of that vehicle, a brand new Chevy conversion van, came in for a simple oil change. I took care of it with ease, closed the hood and waited for someone to pull it out to make room for the next car. When nobody got in to pull it out, Gary the manager told me to take care of it. Never having driven a car before – let alone a van that needed much more clearance around sharp corners – I got behind the wheel, put it in drive and cut the wheel hard to the right. Keith, one of the upper bay guys, went out front to direct me.

It wasn’t so much the horrible, loud screech I heard that made me realize my Jiffy Lube days were over; the look on Keith’s face said it all. As did the owner of the van, who said it all and then some – and very loudly, might I add.

I cut the wheel way too tight, drove the side of the van right into the corner of the stone building and dragged the entire side along the wall for a good two feet, thus ending my storied career as an automotive repair technician.

Nowadays I rely on Paul to help me out with my auto repairs. And I do wish I could help instead of standing around asking dumb questions and hoping he doesn’t order me to fetch him a tool I won’t be able to identify, but I know myself too well.

I’m not completely hopeless, though... Paul asked me to come over this Saturday and to pick up a muffler bearing on my way. I’ve made a few calls and nobody seems to carry them, but this should be a piece of cake.

My Late Night Meal With Kelvin

2009-02-11T01:16:00.001-05:00

New York may be the city that never sleeps, but I don’t recommend arriving there hungry after 1:00 a.m. On a recent trip to my former hometown, I made that mistake and found myself foraging for food in all the wrong places.

I realize there are dining establishments that stay open all night, but I had the added bonus of arriving in town just in time to greet the next ice age, global warming be damned. Setting off on my sustenance-seeking adventure, I quickly realize that the distance I was willing to travel by foot from the front entrance to the hotel was directly proportional to the integer following the minus sign in the wind chill factor.

Just under the wire a mere ten feet from the hotel’s doors, I found a typical New York convenience store, and by typical I mean one whose dining options were limited to Top Ramen, some weird vacuum packed Lebanese meat product, canned Chef Boyaredee macaroni and cheese and an assortment of breath mints.

Thinking of my health, I opted for the $3.49 can of mac and cheese. On the walk back to my room (which I expected would be enough exercise to work off the humiliating, sodium-laden can of shame I was about to eat), I mentally prepared for what was to be the most disappointing and depressing mac and cheese experience of my life. Unfortunately I had no idea just how disappointing... the room, while nice, was not furnished with a can opener, a bowl or a working microwave oven. Chef Boyardee’s smiling face on the label began to mock me as I suited up to continue the most dismal gastronomic adventure in New York City history.

Dispensing with the walking distance equation to which I initially held myself, I saw that salvation for my hunger lay just two blocks away in the form of a meximelt, a soft taco and a crunchwrap supreme. Taco Bell was a marginally better option (measured in units NASA had to invent because atomic units weren’t small enough) than the unopened can of despair still sitting in the room. Since temperature could now only be properly measured in degrees Kelvin, I literally ran for the border.

As I waited to order, the combination of hunger, cold, exhaustion and self-loathing somehow worked in concert to open my eyes to the secret of Taco Bell’s success. This is an empire built around a menu where virtually every item is identical, with the exception of the order in which the ingredients are arranged. My personal thanks go out to whoever saw fit to invent a whole new ‘fourth’ meal, one that I’d be enjoying in the hotel in a few short, freezing minutes. I’m not ignorant to the damage that can be done by eating this kind of food (for that matter, neither is anyone within a 50-foot radius of me in the hours immediately following a bean burrito experience), but I do have an affinity for any food involving cheese, beef, sour cream, and sometimes bacon.

Unable to run back to the hotel due to the cryogenic freezing of my body’s tissues as I made my way through the ice-covered tundra of New York, I thought about the amount of things that happen outside in the city with reckless disregard for the weather. In fact, worse than the hosts of Today Show, who are protected from the elements by Al Roker and his mighty Doppler weather radar weight loss machine, are the legions of crazy tourists who populate the Today Show plaza on a daily basis.

These people, who clearly are nuts, stand outside for hours, often in oppressive weather, just for the promise of getting a second of airtime during which they instantaneously transform from a miserable, tired tourist into a raving lunatic frantically waving at scores of viewers who will make fun of them for being there in the first place. Invariably someone goes home bummed when Al delivers the weather from directly in front of them, causing that person’s lifelong dream of waving at a camera to go up in smoke.

Upon my arrival back at the hotel, I broke into my faux-Mexican feast, only to find out that I was short-changed by one meximelt. My Jewish side complained that not going back to resolve this catastrophic infraction would be a sin; my logical side, which threatened to beat the Jewish side to a pulp, won – despite the fact that a meximelt, in all its gooey, melted delight would have been worth the trouble.

The quest was over. I may not be MacGyver, but I found a way to feed myself. Which reminds me… If you know of a food drive, I have a non-perishable canned food item that I need to donate. As long as you don’t mind that it’s frozen solid.

Scott Just Posted This Article

2009-01-30T01:00:00.005-05:00

I just discovered I have OCD. Not in the traditional sense like normal abnormal people. I don’t feel the urge to straighten out the disaster on my desk and I don’t wash my hands every three minutes. I do, however, have a crystal meth-like addiction to updating my status on Facebook. My recently acquired iPhone (status: Scott is phoning it in – hahaha) is the technological Purell that makes it all possible no matter where I am.

When I’m not updating my own status, I find myself consumed with checking up on everyone else’s. In fact, when I poked (more on that term later) around, I noticed that more messages are being transmitted on this website than the sum total of communications that happened between when the Phoenicians’ developed the first alphabet (pretty much our current alphabet with the exception of the letter P for reasons nobody understands, which led directly to the First Russian Uprising of 1242 – later renamed the Prussian Uprising, just to stick it in the face of the Teutonic Knights, who defiantly added a silent K to the beginning of their titles because they thought Teutonic Nights sounded too much like a Jenna Jameson movie they had recently rented) – and Al Gore’s invention of greenhouse gas. As an aside, Jack Ray Tompkins, a carnation farmer from Gretna, NE would argue that when his wife Bobbie Anne moved out, he was truly the first to realize the damage that could be done by greenhouse gas (his status: Jack Ray’s greenhouse only seems to fill with gas after he eats broccoli). While Jack Ray considers legal action against Mr. Gore, I’ll get back to my story.

For eons, which are classified as ‘three month increments’ in internet terms, Facebook’s primary users were high school and college students. That has all changed. In fact, while I’m not old by any stretch, a younger coworker of mine named Dayna recently assured me that unless I do something immediate and drastic, I will be the proud owner of a one-way ticket for the short bus to Squaresville. That moment marked my crossing over the social networking event horizon and into a black hole where my parents both registered for Facebook accounts before I did.

As I updated my status for the 11th time today (Scott is writing again), it occurred to me that things have changed a lot since I was in high school. We didn’t have email, text messaging, instant messages, Facebook or Twitter, but our communication methods, while rudimentary, suited us well.

These handy comparison charts illustrate the fundamental differences between today’s popular communication technologies and the caveman-like ways by which we communicated:

Another interesting thing pointed out to me by Dayna is that the popular Facebook ‘poke’ isn’t nearly as innocent as it seems. This discovery has the potential to lead to serious trouble if you go around randomly poking people. Judging strictly by the dozens of people who have poked me, male and female, I’m a pretty popular guy in Facebook territory. By Dayna’s definition, I’m getting more action than Linda Lovelace at Studio 54 in 1977.

I really have grown attached to Facebook, but I think I need to detox. At least until I wake up in the morning. Scott is finally done with this article and is off to bed.

A Really Bright Idea Whose Time Came Too Early

2009-01-20T02:27:00.004-05:00

Some ideas sound like a lot of fun to me. Only when it’s too late do I begin to question my sanity and in turn question how I made the complex series of decisions that have gotten me this far in life. This past weekend was no exception.

As the parent of a Cub Scout, I am frequently presented with opportunities to “bond” with my son. My bonding battle cry consists of 50 percent “gung ho” and 50 percent “mercy.”

I’ve never been much for camping. Growing up we never went camping. In fact, growing up we never went anywhere but to my grandparents’ house in Fort Lauderdale. Given that my sister and I had to share a terrace as our sleeping quarters, the annual pilgrimage to the “South” Bronx typically involved as many insects as camping, but with worse ventilation and a greater risk of being force-fed weird fruits like figs (without the cakey Newton covering) and dates, and Metamucil-flavored tea. Not to mention moth balls.

The point is that camping to me is just another form of self-torture. If I have the means to pay for a climate-controlled room with a clean bed and bathroom I don’t have to seriously argue with myself about getting up to visit in the middle of the night, why would I opt for a tent?

Even more torturous was the Cub Scout camping trip we participated in a few months ago. All the families were to meet at the beginning of a 15-mile bike trail to ride as a group to the campsite. This is possibly the worst idea ever developed by modern man. Though the bike trail was considered “level one,” the better part of the group riding the bikes was apparently at a skill and fitness level that could only be properly measured with carefully placed decimal points.

Adding another layer of “bonding” to that experience, we had the pleasure of dragging our sleeping quarters to a flat piece of land and building a shelter to shield us from the night that had arrived a good hour before we did. If there’s anything worse than setting up a tent, it’s doing it by the light of a campfire.

The next morning held even less appeal as I tried to sit back on the bike seat and realized I would be riding the entire 15 miles back to the car while standing fully upright on my pedals. For the record I also held my entire mid-section several inches from the car seat on the drive home.

I thought the Scouts had finally made a decision with parents like me in mind when they planned an overnight trip to the Fort Discovery science museum in Augusta, GA. We would spend the day exploring the museum, sleep among the exhibits and leave after a few classroom sessions the next morning. This idea, it turns out, was about as bad as the bike ride, only with fewer Constitutional freedoms and inalienable rights.

When we arrived, our tour guide “Eddy” began listing the rules for our stay. He verbally rattled off a list of 62 rules (really!) to a group of Cub Scouts that didn’t hear a word he said. Rules 47 and 48 were the ones that troubled me the most. The doors to the museum would be locked at 8:00 PM, and lights out was at 11. I stifled a sudden urge to pick up a poster tube from the gift shop and start yelling “Attica! Attica!” and began to deal with the fact that I would be a prisoner on lockdown inside a fun, interactive science museum surrounded by dozens of children with all the self-control of a toy poodle whose owners just came back from a two week vacation.

I also noticed that Eddy had a commitment problem. He really liked to use the phrase “pretty much,” and he used it in pretty much every single sentence he said:

Me: Can you please point me to the men’s room?
Eddy: It’s pretty much right around the corner behind that statue of Pythagoras.
Me: Who?
Eddy: Pythagoras. He pretty much invented triangles.
Me: Are you sure it's not a theorem designed to measure the length of the hypotenuse in right triangles?
Eddy: Pretty much.

Among the exhibits that demonstrated important scientific principles, like Bernoulli’s and inertia, we found mind-bending technologies like:

“The digital character recognition device.” We were instructed to write anything we wanted on a piece of paper using our own handwriting, place it into the device and press the start button. The device was connected to a screen that would display an exact digital version of what we had written. This amazing scientific breakthrough was a standard flatbed scanner;
“Remote facsimile communication device.” You guessed it. A piece of outdated office machinery most offices outside the Third World don’t use anymore; and
“MagLev train.” This was interesting technology that would have been more compelling had it not been stuck to the track as if it were welded in place.

During our exploration, we came upon the perfect location to set up camp. This exhibit showed how phosphorescence, when exposed to light, made any shadow cast on it stand out. A glow-in-the-dark wall faced a strobe light that flashed every five seconds, and it was the only exhibit fully enclosed with a black curtain to keep the light out. This would be our overnight home.

Beating the rush, we quickly moved our belongings to our private sanctuary and rolled out our sleeping bags, thus making us the envy of all in attendance. It proved a decent choice until the next morning when the museum was powered up (at 7:00 AM!) and we were awoken by a 10,000 watt flashing alarm clock with a five-second snooze reprieve. This, my wife explained, was our penance for claiming the most private refuge in the entire museum.

I can’t say I’m necessarily looking forward to the next big trip, but I’ll go. At this point I know what to expect:

Any time I am forced to spend a night in a sleeping bag, my kids will refer to me as Mr. Cranky Pants the next day,
No matter how many times I do it, I will never understand why anyone would go camping unless they are under duress, and
No amount of begging before these major planned trips will ever get me out of going on them.
Pretty much.

It’s a Rescue Mission, Technically

2008-12-30T23:01:00.001-05:00

After years of building large collections of digital music and picture files, I recently decided it was time to organize it all in a meaningful and remarkably tedious way. Looking back, this is a job that should only be attempted after winning the lottery, eradicating all crime and doing away with world hunger, each of which would be easier and less time-consuming than organizing your digital photos.

Having transferred my iTunes library onto my newly purchased portable hard drive, or “floppy disk” for those of you still donning a beeper, I began the process of moving my photos to a single location. Throughout the process, I looked forward to seeing the pictures I took on a trip to Paris several years ago. Hundreds of CDs and folders later, no France pics.

Well, as it turns out I thought of the last possible place I could have the pictures stored. The laptop I used back then was essentially dead, sitting in my bottom night table drawer. I tried to fire it up last night and see if they were there. As I suspected, it wouldn’t start up. That’s when I took the little mini screwdriver to it and disassembled the entire thing looking for the hard drive. Keep in mind, my technical skills where it relates to computers can be summed up in three words: “on/off switch.”

After removing approximately as many screws as I believe come in a standard space shuttle, I had a pile of random parts, any of which could be the hard drive. Considering all the parts were hard, this was a difficult elimination process. My first step was to rule out anything with blades. The ‘fans’, as we computer geeks call them, resemble a little itty bitty version of one of those old 400 watt box-style fans that my dad used to put in the window on hot days to save money when he was too cheap to put on the air conditioning (note, it was cooler outside than in the family room). So with the fans out of the way, I began to systematically search each individual piece looking for a sticker, a label or a heat stamp marked “hard drive.” Keep in mind, these parts are extremely small. When you get inside one of these things, you begin to realize why they need tender little 6-year-old Chinese hands to assemble them in the first place.

Having located no such markings on any item, I took the next logical step, which was to walk around with the magnifying glass I needed to see the parts and show everyone in the house how big my eye looks when I do “this!” After completing that useful step, I refocused my attention on what I refer to as “The Real Housewives of Orange County” for approximately 42 minutes. Spoiler alert: this show sucks – and Billy should get rid of Quinn before their brains begin to interact and create a dangerous black hole of dumb.

Back at my workstation, I ruled out my next piece of computer – the DVD drive. This was easy to spot given the fact that it had since fallen on the floor and opened to reveal the contents I forgot to remove. As a side note, I’m selling a copy of Fletch Lives on DVD (no box) in case you know of anyone who might be interested. Next, I set all the parts out on the table in size order, starting with the screws measuring about three atoms across and working my way up to the frame of the screen, which only my dog was able to disassemble further.

After laying out every part – minus the two parts I had already discarded – my nine-year-old daughter walked over and asked, “Daddy, isn’t this the hard drive?” I smirked, kind of shook my head a little, and responded, “don’t be silly, honey, I KNOW that’s the hard drive. I’m trying to make sure there are no parts here that need to be recycled.” Another note: the hard drive was attached to a piece of the laptop body that was simply removed with a pressure switch – no need to remove so much as a single screw.

Hard drive in hand, I made my way to Best Buy to find out how the Geek Squad could rescue my files. I suppose I could have simply taken the entire laptop with me and saved a lot of time and aggravation, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to play with the magnifying glass.

Upon my arrival at the store, the clerk at the door insisted on tagging my hard drive (size: 2.5 inches x 3.5 inches – no Jewish jokes, please) for a return. I had to explain that I was gentile (I’m in the Bible Belt, for crying out loud), and that this was not a return, but a job for the Geek Squad. I made my way to the back of the store (where the Jews are forced to go for ‘de-lousing’) and found a geek to talk to. He explained that their fee for any data recovery would START at $99! “$99?!” I exclaimed, tipping my Jewish hand just a tad too much for comfort, in retrospect. “Or you can buy this ‘hard drive enclosure’ for $51.99,” he added, showing me how simple it would be to install my laptop hard drive in it and connect it to my computer with the USB. How those little barcodes connect things to computers I’ll never know.

“$51.99 is a little more than I really wanted to spend on this project,” I explained.

“Well, we do have a pretty liberal return policy; 30 days with a receipt,” he whispered with a wink. Looking at his name tag, I realized he was speaking my language.

“That sounds like a swell idea, Mordechai.”

I took possession of the loaner and made my way back home.

Just a few minutes later I was browsing the files from my dead, and now mutilated laptop. Lo and behold, I found a file folder: “pics to burn on CD.” Empty. After searching further, I located a folder called “work.” A few clicks later and voila… the dog pees on the floor. Several seconds go by and I realize nobody else even knows about it, and it ain’t gonna clean itself up. I get the paper towels, Spot Shot, Clorox wipes, Swiffer and a mop. I know there’s a way these things can work in concert to create cleanliness. I call my daughter, the one who gave me the assist on the locating the hard drive. She runs into the room excited, only to find out that daddy has made a bigger mess out of a puddle of pee and a handful of cleaning products than he made on the kitchen table with the old laptop, which by the way, didn’t need to be disassembled at all to begin with. She took hold of the cleaning process and let me finish the manly task of trying to locate my pictures from Fwonce.

In a flash, I drill down through the work folder ‘Work/Scott/Ruder Finn/Air France/Events/Press Trips/Lacroix/Pictures.’ There it is! Success! A folder full of a couple hundred pictures from the trip to Paris. I quickly copied them to my digital file folder and burned a CD of them just in case.

At that point, I removed the old laptop hard drive from the loaner enclosure, boxed the loaner back up and prepared it for its return from whence it came. The pictures are safe.

Which is more than I can say for Billy. He has no idea that Quinn is ready to have “the talk.”

A Revolution in New York

2008-03-12T11:47:00.003-04:00

New York governor Eliot "The Hooker Booker" Spitzer has resigned his post amid a scandal that involves him paying thousands of dollars to several prostitutes for their services. Spitzer claims he didn't inhale.

Lieutenant governor David Paterson will become the state's first black governor and only the third in the nation since Reconstruction. He is legally blind. So much for a vision for the future.

More to come...

How I Bought My Ticket to Hell

2008-03-05T01:23:00.003-05:00

I have a few theories about exactly when and where I actually bought my ticket to Hell. Any reasonable and sound person who believes in the supernatural could point to a wide array of things I’ve done in my life to explain my eventual, assured, eternal damnation.

I wasn’t the kind of kid that pulled the legs off spiders or burned ants with magnifying glasses. And I’m not the kind of adult who practices patently criminal pastimes outside the occasional traffic infraction, as evidenced by the summons recently found in my mailbox which featured a few snapshots of my Toyota Prius driving through what was seemingly a red traffic signal. The evidence, including close-ups of my license plate and an actual DNA sample left at the scene, made it difficult for me to argue it wasn’t me driving. Damn revolutionary imaging technology. But the $70 I spent to make that indiscretion go away is nothing compared to what I have to look forward to.

It’s not that I really went out of my way to assure myself a blistering infinity. My life has simply been filled with decisions that needed to be made and hunger that needed to be addressed. Who could blame someone for being decisive and sticking to their guns?

The first such instance was when I became newly-minted intern for iconic local rock station WBAB on Long Island – the youngest on the roster, in fact. I was proud of my unpaid position and saw it as the perfect excuse to leave my family behind on Rosh Hashana, the biggest of the varied Jewish holidays where families gather to feast on bland food and celebrate collective self-loathing and misery.

As it happened, legendary Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora was scheduled to visit WBAB that very day. It’s not so much that I wanted to meet Sambora, but he was my meal ticket to teenage popularity and possible sex with a really hot girl.

Weeks prior to the Sambora Incident, after years of what can only be classified as passive stalking, I finally summoned the courage to convince my friend Brian Clermont to ask out the hot girl from the music booth at the Commack Flea Market for me. When she said yes, I knew I needed to impress. This was, after all, the most sought after girl in all of Commack. Her mane of tall, stiff 80s hair represented the Holy Grail for all male flea market shoppers within a 10-mile radius. Long story short, I told her I was a bigwig with a local music outfit known as the biggest rock radio station on Long Island and promised I’d bring her to meet then next rock star that came through the doors. How can I help it if Sambora was a Goy with no respect for my predicament or my religion? What choice did I have?

More recently, I’ve become acutely aware of my religious heritage. I’m relatively certain that in my beloved town of Loganville, there are more people who have ridden in an actual space shuttle than have drawn a shamus across a line of Hebrew text in a Torah. Now, I define this next issue more as self-preservation than denial of heritage, but eight months into my Bible Belt residency none of my neighbors knows that I’m Jewish yet. Not that I’ve given them any real clues.

For instance, I would bet the house (the one I risked my life to wrap in Christmas lights) that I was the only Jew in town climbing across the roof to ensure that Santa could easily locate us when it came time to pony up with the presents. But that was only after I went with the family to a tree farm, saw in hand, to physically cut down the perfect pine tree so we could put it in our living room and decorate it with all sorts of non-Jewish bric-a-brac.

But the worst of all offenses may be when I attended a pig roast one Yom Kippur, the holiest of all High days in the Jewish faith. Yom Kippur is the Jewish equivalent of confession, only you don’t actually confess your sins to anyone; instead you atone through the majesty of starvation while sitting in a crowded temple all day with a bunch of other starving Semites. When the hunger hallucinations begin, the Rabbi might begin to take the shape of a raw porterhouse steak with legs, like on Tom and Jerry. In the hours before sundown, when you are legally allowed to eat again, delirium has set in, making matzo seem like a viable food option. But I digress….

One fateful year, when I was about 20 years old, my friend Tony was attending college and invited me to the aforementioned pig roast at a frat house. Being a passive zealot, I failed to realize that the day of that particular non-kosher pig’s reckoning happened to be the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Considering I had already paid my $20 (non-refundable for those of you keeping score), there was no way I wasn’t going to attend. So as my family wallowed in self-loathing after paying ten times as much for temple tickets, I ate pork directly off a swine carcass on a spit.

At this point it’s all academic for me. If sex, drugs and rock and roll aren’t enough to make me Mr. Applegate’s new Lola, turning a blind eye toward my religion is sure to do the trick.

But religion has a funny way of getting even. Case in point: the flea market girl never answered my calls again after Richie Sambora outed me as an unpaid member of the hangers-on club of Long Island; it wasn’t until after the Christmas lights were hung that I realized only about half the strands worked; and I got food poisoning from the undercooked fraternity pig.

So maybe Hell is really delivered in small doses immediately following religious infractions. Not that it matters. In my eight months here the only religious practice I’ve followed is yelling “Jesus Christ” and flipping the bird to what have to collectively be the worst drivers in the world.

If He Says It’s 150 Inches, He May Not Be Lying

2008-01-08T23:41:00.000-05:00

Every year there is one place every consumer wants to be but few have the opportunity: freezing on a line outside Best Buy to see if they will have a Nintendo Wii so their kids can be less disappointed about what they didn’t get on Christmas morning.

A scant few weeks later, the electronics industry takes over in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (a.k.a. Bill Gates’ platform to inflate his ego only slightly less than his checkbook). Here is where they unveil new products of all shapes and sizes that cost more than most of the people talking about them make in a year. Among other things, here is where you will see the next game system consumers won’t be able to find in stores for at least 26 months.

In order to gain admission to this extravaganza of over-hyped and ultra-expensive gadgets and gizmos, you must meet strict requirements, which solely include breathing. I was lucky enough to qualify for credentials along with what seems to be the entire population of the states of Maine, Delaware and South Dakota, including pets.

This was the first time I visited the show, and I’ve learned a few things which may be helpful for those of you out there who plan to attend in the future.

If your credentials don't arrive in time, the only electronics you will see on day one consist of mobile communication devices attached to the ears of angry would-be show goers complaining to friends, spouses and co-workers about standing in a miles-long line waiting for their passes. As a rule, this line is not designed to move in any way. Considering the town we’re in, many people were disappointed to find that there was no buffet when they got to the front.
Automotive technology, as far as I can see, has advanced at an astonishing rate. For reasons nobody fully understands, every single product is designed in the form of a very hot female. For some reason, these females are always situated in front of some sort of visual device that generally contains a map on a screen.
The sales people, or exhibitionists, at each booth distract from the real purpose of the trade show floor: collecting swag. In fact, there are people who go to the show for the sole purpose of getting corporate branded pens, flashlights and hats from the exhibiting companies. The wheeled suitcases these people drag around the show floor make it easy to spot and trip over them.
Car stereos now come with embedded purple neon lights, thus completing the visible spectrum of colors. Finally.
Televisions are getting larger. Some companies unveiled plasma screens up to 150” in size. Nobody, with the exception of Bill Gates (more on him later), has a wall big enough to handle a screen of this size. Nevertheless, consumers will buy them just to have them. The companies know this, and are appropriately developing a 300-foot screen for next year so consumers can open their own drive-in theaters.
Bill Gates still has way too much money. This fact is evidenced by the size of the Microsoft booth at the show. For reference, the booth is approximately the size of four football fields, if the football fields were each the size of the former polar ice caps.
Speaking of cold, I’m almost certain that Las Vegas is not really located in the Nevada desert, but rather in Nome, Alaska.
Moving about on the show floor requires precision timing and a willingness to ‘go with the flow’, especially when you’re in near an area that’s particularly popular (Las Vegas). Successful navigation is based on your ability to break off from one throng of people and join another moving in a different direction.
Wear comfortable shoes. I do not recommend Bass Elite dress shoes for men.
Small Chinese electronics companies looking to break into the US market will take a small booth at the Consumer Electronics Show. For some reason, every single one of these companies includes the name of the town where they are headquartered in their name. For example: Ying Ho (Shanghai) Electronics. Imagine Micro (Redmond) soft or XM (Washington, DC) Satellite Radio.

These tips should prove useful to anyone who can’t find a way to avoid coming to the Consumer Electronics Show in the future. But before I go, I think it would be a great disservice if I didn’t share a few pointers about Las Vegas in general:

When you land at the airport, you will get your first expensive lesson as you pass the slot machines – and get to the taxis. The beginning fare is somewhere in the double digits and they charge by each 1/11 of a mile (this is totally true). The good thing is that some entrepreneur somewhere is working on finding a way to turn taxi meters into gambling devices.
No matter how short the Strip seems to be, walking the entire thing on foot is an all day affair. And it’s a walk that causes blisters the size of cherry tomatoes on your foot.
Vegas shows, like any of the 77 different versions of Cirque du Soleil in town, will run you approximately two months’ salary. Taking your girlfriend out to one of these shows legally qualifies you to become engaged.
Slot machines still don’t pay out much in the way of profits. If you’re looking to walk away with money from a machine in the casino, I recommend the ones marked ATM. They’re not nearly as glitzy and exciting, but they have the best payout percentage in the casino.
The Wynn is one of the nicest new casinos on the strip. Given its ultra-elite status, Steve Wynn is considering charging a cover just to get in. Keep this in mind when you walk by the small, seedy gambling halls as you look for a nice place to play.
Las Vegas is, according to the map people, in the middle of a desert. You wouldn’t know this by the millions of gallons of water you will see in fountains, Venetian canals and mirages in front of every hotel. Georgia governor Sonny Perdue should consider building casinos all over the state in order to solve its current drought issues.

All these tips are designed to help you plan your trip to Las Vegas and future trade shows held at the opulent Las Vegas Convention Center. The best thing I can do for the public is to share these tips with my readers in hopes that you will someday do what I did and skip the mortgage for three months prior to coming out.

Ig-pay Atin-lay and the Resurgence of a Guy Named Erno

2007-10-26T01:46:00.000-04:00

There has been a recent proliferation of events that suggest that the 80s may not quite be over yet. Or enough time has passed that people have forgotten what a colossally bad decade it was. As far as I remember it, the 80s pretty much sucked until some dude with a ridiculously large top hat and the name of a frequently used punctuation mark brought rock n’ roll back from the dead.

Growing up in 1980s Greenlawn, NY, about as far from the San Fernando Valley as is humanly possible, the local girls frequently asked to be gagged with kitchen utensils, they used words like tubular (which coincidentally inspired a musician named Mike Oldfield – later known to the rest of the world as Slash – to compose some ‘tubular’ music I’m sure I’d know if I heard it, and they all wanted to date Nicolas Cage. My point is, for as bad as they were, the fads in the 80s were infectious. Which leads to breaking news in 2007….

“Alpharetta teen takes 2nd at world Rubik's Cube contest.” Or so reported the Atlanta Journal Constitution on October 12. 2007! I can’t fault the newspaper for running this spectacular news, though it has seemingly gotten trapped in a space/time continuum.

For all the ridicule Georgia takes about its level of sophistication, no other state can lay claim to 18-year-old Chattahoochee High School senior Andrew Kang (eat it, Arkansas!). Kang, it was reported, had just returned from the World Rubik's Cube Championship in Budapest, Hungary, where he managed to solve a Rubik’s Cube in 10.88 seconds. In fact, this Apharettan overachiever gets frustrated when it takes him more than 15 seconds to solve the Cube. For reference, I still have an original Rubik’s Cube that was given to me on August 30, 1982. My quickest solve time: 25 years and counting.

About two years into my cube-solving fury, I became enamored of another 80s fad. Everyone within three years of my age wanted to be able to breakdance like Turbo and Ozone in the classically bad movie Breakin’. Well hold onto your backspins, folks: breakdancing is back! A video posted on Newsday’s website documents the grueling 'Breakdancing Battle of the Year' competition held in Braunschweig, Germany this past Saturday night. Not surprisingly, South Korea took the title again with “an athletic display that appeared to defy the laws of gravity.”

I don’t doubt it takes a lot of talent, but shouldn’t this have happened two decades ago? That’s when I was heavily into breakdancing. I was a white, middle-class Long Island kid with no ability whatsoever to dance (though I am still really good at the "White Boy Overbite," a dance move I proudly displayed at a friend’s recent wedding), donning parachute pants and a listening to a cassette tape called Electric Breakdance, which featured such urban rhapsodies as “Jam On It” and “White Lines.”

According to my only black friend at the time, Anthony Burrows, these were the songs with the beats that could get me to move. And because breakdancing required erratic moves, I thought it was right in my wheelhouse. Unfortunately, my moves were considered more eccentric than erratic.

While Greenlawn was no South Bronx, I still managed to do my part in embarrassing myself in front of anyone who would watch. Decked out in my black and gray parachute pants (zippers fully open, drawing attention like a peacock displaying its tail feathers), I invited our paperboy into the house to see me do the world’s fastest backspin after school one day. Using the paperboy as my conduit, I figured word would spread quickly through town once he saw my awesome talent.

I figured that the best way to maximize my spin speed on the hardwood floor was to use a good deck of KEM playing cards… the expensive plastic ones that come in their own hard-shell case. Cards strewn across the living room floor, I proceeded to backspin my way to local stardom, until five seconds later when I began to drift on the surprisingly slick cards and the side of my head slammed into the corner of the coffee table. Danny laughed.

This triumphant injury was trumped only weeks later by my friend Justin Silverstein. While wearing parachute pants and a red-and-black, Michael Jackson "Thriller" leather jacket, he broke his nose while showing the entire neighborhood how well he could do ‘the worm.’

Nevertheless, my plan worked. Danny spread the word about my miracle backspin to everyone. But by the time I was through being grounded for destroying my mom’s good canasta cards, breakdancing was out and big hair was in.

The one thing that I haven’t seen covered in the news yet is the resurgence of Pig Latin. Here in Atlanta, teenagers have suddenly started speaking Pig Latin at an alarming rate. Whenever I find myself near a group of teenagers, I hear them working hard to obfuscate their words to commoners in a tongue that barely qualifies as non-English. If they want to exclude me, they’d do better to speak Standard English with a Southern drawl.

But since I’m now officially a resident of the greater Atlanta region, I might as well do my best to fit in with the local population. I offer the final paragraph of this column to the local teenage set in a language they can understand.

Ow-nay at-thay e-thay eighties-ay are-ay ack-bay, I-ay ully-fay expect-ay it-ay oo-tay e-bay ont-fray age-pay ews-nay en-whay I-ay olve-say y-may ubik’s-Ray ube-Cay. Once-way I’m-ay inished-fay, I’ll-ay imp-pray y-may eanie-Bay aby-Bay ollection-cay, et-gay a-ay acky-Hay ack-Say and-ay ake-may ure-shay y-may ation-stay agon-way is-ay operly-pray outfitted-ay ith-way a-ay iamond-day aped-shay aby-Bay on-ay oard-Bay ign-say. Y’all.

The Secret of Homeowner Debt Explained

2007-10-16T00:47:00.000-04:00

I have been a homeowner for about four months now. I intentionally joined the ranks of the literally dozens of other happy homeowners across the United States, but I’m also beginning to understand how a perfectly content homeowner can quickly turn jaded and miserable. We’ve dealt with more than our share of surprises since moving in: the heater blew: $1,000; leaky tub: $650; new springs for the garage door: $275; new caulk for the ashram: what exactly is an ashram, and why does it need caulk?

The first time I saw the house that ultimately became mine I nearly fainted. I attribute this to a combination of the house's natural beauty, the excessively hot temperature outside and the blow dart in my neck. It seems the guy who lives across the street bought some “toys” for his kids on a recent business trip to Namibia. Having traveled for work myself, I made a habit of bringing home local knick knacks for the kids, but I question whether poisonous darts make good gifts. Kids will... use..... theeese..... oibnwarvrl.leaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Sorry - blacked out there. So anyway, after seeing the house, I knew it was “The One.” Real estate agents know when they're taking you to The One. They spend all that time showing you dozens of surprisingly decorated houses that make you wonder whether the current owners are visually impaired, and question their motives where it relates to what qualifies as presentable.

Working closely with the existing owners of The One – all of whom are played by local out of work actors – they make sure that everything is in order, that the house looks perfect and that the colonies of insects living within the walls of the house are properly wrangled and fed.

When my agent brought me to The One, I knew it immediately. As soon as I walked in, I felt at home. The open floor plan was exactly what we had been looking for; the kitchen was fully updated with stainless steel appliances that would sit idle, but would look pretty, until we sell; the huge yard gave me no indication that it would work in concert with my finicky ride-on lawnmower to ultimately become my biggest nemesis. This was definitely it.

The first night in the house was great, assuming you don't mind desert-like heat and a complete lack of furniture. The central air conditioning system, which was invented for the sole purpose of breaking down on oppressively hot days, was unwilling to cooperate with the simplest of commands.

Me: Set temp to 74.
Air conditioner: No.
Me: Set temp and hold at 74.
Air conditioner: No.
Me, getting really agitated: (click, click, click, click) Set temp to 60.
Air conditioner: Listen, dude. You're the new guy here. Why don't you go find a floor to sleep on and leave me alone?

This led to my very first service call as a homeowner… to the air conditioner repairman who kindly only charged me double for coming out for an emergency appointment on a Saturday night. He explained that while he technically knew what was wrong, I would have to pay an additional $1,000 in order to properly fix the unit. That was a relief considering we were just in the process of endangering our own lives by setting all our extra money on fire.

Fast forward two weeks. If you do not yet own a house, take note: The ‘American Dream’ is not a term meant for the actual home owner. If you want a good taste of the American Dream, I encourage you to get a job servicing any of the million things that will go wrong in some new unsuspecting homeowner’s house.

In the two weeks following our closing, I contributed more to the state’s revenue stream, by way of the Georgia contracting community, than the combined value of every Van Gogh painting ever sold at auction. This phenomenon clearly explains why new homeowners typically find themselves in the most debt they will ever be in. It’s like a homeowner hazing ritual designed and perfected by real estate agents, the contracting community and credit card companies.

Worst of all, it’s perfectly legal. As I read back through the hundreds of papers I had to sign at the closing, I found a paper headlined “Ha Ha, You Idiot!” that details a requirement on my part to single-handedly employ at least half the population of the City of Atlanta, including suburbs, for a minimum of 14 months, but not to exceed greater than half the net value of the assets of the electorate, based on the accrual method of accounting. Since nobody has ever taken the time to actually read every single document at a closing, lawyers have a long-running joke about slipping in insane documents like this one that are perfectly legal and binding once you sign them.

We’ve finally worked through the pain of actually becoming homeowners and we’ve accepted that the dozens of contractors we have employed will be part of our lives for the long-term. With every mortgage payment we make, we realize that for every penny we build in equity, some random contractor will earn two, courtesy of the Merritts.

Now we just have to learn to deal with neighbors. Speaking of which, does anyone know of a good antidote for Namibian blow dart poison?

Legal White Powder Found in Atlanta

2007-10-05T01:28:00.000-04:00

Where I used to live in New York, snow was a welcome addition to the dreariness of winter. For about five minutes. That’s about how long it took for all the frolicking adults to realize it was the start of months of shoveling, skidding across multiple lanes of traffic (note, this particular problem is not limited to snow and ice on Long Island), dodging wayward snowballs, and constantly chasing after smaller kids and trying to explain why they shouldn’t eat yellow snow.

One of the reasons we chose Atlanta as our new home is that it doesn’t really get any snow. Until now. As soon as we arrived, someone came up with the novel idea – an idea so crazy it’s a miracle Ted Turner isn’t involved – of covering a giant hill at Stone Mountain Park (named after native Georgian Civil War General Stone M. Park) with the powdery white stuff. After taking measurements, officials decided using snow would be easier and “slightly more legal.” Thus Coca-Cola’s Snow Mountain was born.

I’m not one to brag about my foresight, considering I haven’t had any since I was a seven days old (shout out to Rabbi Yehoshua Krohn!), but it seems obvious to me that this plan was flawed from the start.

For one, I loosely understand the physics of ground temperature and snowfall (no I don’t), and I’m familiar with what constitutes cold enough weather to sustain snow outdoors (it has to be really, really cold). Okay, I’m not even sure the rules are considered part of physics – they may be calculus or pharmacology, but the point is that according to the most recent Farmer’s Almanac, “Not only does Atlanta get maybe a dusting of snow at a time, if that… the city shuts down like a bathroom after Rosie O’Donnell stops in for a number two when any trace of snow is in the forecast, so everyone can go to Publix to get milk and bread.”

In order to create this winter wonderland in the heat of the Bible Belt, organizers imported a battalion of snow-making machines – the same kind you’d find on a mountain in Vermont or New Hampshire during the ski season, which generally comprises fall, winter, spring and most of summer. They do not use these machines during the two weeks known locally as ‘Quick: we can swim’ when temperatures are likely to reach as high as 62 degrees.

The blowers were fired up on October 2, which happened to be the same day that Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue declared October "Take a Shorter Shower" month due to the current drought. He also suggested not running the water while brushing your teeth, but that one seems to be pretty well covered already here in Georgia. According to statistics, the average person can save between three and seven gallons of water by skipping their legs below the knees while taking a shower. Over the course of a year that amounts to more than 2,000 gallons – which can be used by Pepsi, Coca-Cola’s biggest competitor, to fill 12,810 sport bottles of Aquafina water.

In spite of the drought, the snow machines were firing full-fledged snow, which when mixed with the 80 degree weather that day turned into full-fledged water before hitting the ground at a rate of 38 gallons per minute, in effect creating the world’s most elaborate lawn sprinkler system.

Finally bowing to the public outrage of wasting a total of 1.2 million gallons of water as the community deals with a drought of epic proportions, the park has decided to halt its lawn-watering program. Displaying a profound understanding of the situation, Stone Mountain Park’s public relations manager Christine Parker said, “We've already sold tickets, and we can't just stop. That would be like a water park just deciding to turn off the faucets.” (Humor writing is easy when you have quotes like this to work with.)

After paying the equivalent of the combined annual tourism revenue of the entire Caribbean to promote Snow Mountain, Coca-Cola publicly endorsed the decision to call it off. In related news, Stone Mountain Park is in sponsorship talks with other soft drink companies.

Now disappointed children across the Atlanta region will be forced to wonder what getting snow caked under your shirt collar, head first at a high rate of speed feels like and they’ll never know the joy in getting knocked over by a snow-tuber who has gone astray as they try to climb back up the hillside in the slippery snow, but they will always remember the time when politics got in the way of a good time, thanks to Governor Sonny Perdue – a man who wasn’t chicken to say what he felt. (Come on, how can I let a name like this slip by twice without saying anything?)

Useless New Crimes Coming Soon to a City Near You

2007-09-26T02:48:00.000-04:00

Question: What is the most dangerous crime currently plaguing our nation? If you guessed “terrorism,” you probably spend too much time in front of the TV, reading newspapers or breathing. You need to wipe the crumbs off your chest, get in the car and drive straight to the nearest house of worship, because right now you don’t have a prayer. The most dangerous crime today, at least in the forward-thinking and open-minded metropolis of Atlanta is… you guessed it: baggy pants.

Atlanta used to be a town with plenty of social problems like homelessness and poverty, and the crime that goes along with them. It also used to have a traffic congestion problem due to the highway infrastructure that became outdated slightly before the invention of the Conestoga wagon. But that’s all history now.

A city council edict in 2006 ruled that homelessness and poverty would officially be called ‘cultural gems’ in Atlanta, thereby putting an end to the problematic aspect. And traffic ceased to be a problem when urban planner Harold Morland spilled his coffee on the only existing copy of the latest traffic study - just before he was to present it to the traffic board and instead diverted attention by somehow managing to get OJ Simpson arrested again.

If you’re any kind of American, you’re probably wondering why parachute pants weren’t banned back in the 80s. Well, smarty-pants (ZING!), it turns out that native Atlantan and Atlanta City Councilman Clarence "CT (because the M doesn’t work on my keyboard)" Martin, the person responsible for thinking up the baggy pants ordinance, was too busy inventing the “Youthmobile,” a fleet of innovative vehicles designed to jam up the city’s traffic even worse than before.

Councilman Martin said he's tired of seeing “these young whippersnappers” wearing their pants down around their knees. His ordinance would make exposed underwear and sex in public equivalent offenses. I hate to agree, so I won't. When you think about it, you realize that these two offenses truly are nothing alike. Going out on a limb, Martin shocked the city by alleging that, "It kind of doesn't make sense. It is hard for people to walk."

Case in point: according to a story in the New Orleans Times Picayune, a 16-year-old Louisiana kid decided to go on a robbery spree. He managed to elude authorities on several occasions, but was finally caught only after his baggy pants fell down - which caused him to stumble and fall as officers chased him. I think the moral of this story is obvious: if you don’t wear baggy pants and you are a criminal, New Orleans is where you want to be.

Breaking new ground for Georgia, Councilman Clarence “The Cactus” Martin is including both sexes in the proposed legislation.

“But Scott,” you must be asking, “Aren’t baggy pants a predominantly male thing?”

To which I reply: That’s why the ordinance also outlaws “whale’s tails” for women. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I’m guessing it has to do with the grotesquely obese.

As the debate drags on endlessly, older residents are forming what is described as a “belt brigade” that could one day patrol the streets to urge kids to pull up their baggy pants. (Brief off-topic reminder: Ted Turner is still the more insane Atlantan, but Clarence “The Enforcer” Martin runs a close second.)

Imagine the choices police would have to make if Councilman Clarence “Product-of-the-Georgia-publick-schol-sistem-and-prowd-of-it” Martin gets his way: An old woman is being mugged in a coffee shop parking lot while an otherwise law-abiding, but baggy-panted, youth is inside purchasing a jubmino double-shot decaf caramel mocha stoccato libretto frappe (cost: $106.88 per gallon). If you’re a cop witnessing all this lawlessness, how do you decide which kind of doughnut you should get?

Silly as it may seem, the baggy pants problem is seemingly reaching epidemic proportions. A quick glance at the news reveals that proposals to ban baggy pants are starting to ride up across the nation. Concerned citizens in fashion Meccas like Mankato, MN, Charleston, WV, Trenton, NJ and Pine Bluff, AR are all seeking similar ordinances.

Support for such a ban is spirited. Johnnie Doctor, Sr., a Miami pastor whose quote I am including simply because I love his name, suggested that Miami consider the baggy-pants ban, saying “who the hell wears pants in Miami, anyway?”

So as the debate rages on, Atlanta's poverty-stricken homeless cease to be poverty-stricken homeless, and the traffic here still remains gridlocked between the hours of 3:30 am and 11:55 pm, Monday through Friday and on alternating weekends, we can all think about how insane you must have to be in order to be a city councilperson.

In the meantime, I’ll be tightening my belt and wearing a red baseball cap. They outlawed blue last week.

What the Helsinki? Is This for Real?

2007-09-17T01:57:00.000-04:00

Today’s guitarists just aren’t made like they used to be. When I was 11, I showed an interest in learning to play guitar. After months of prodding, my parents bought me a second-hand Martin six-string acoustic that acted as my springboard to complete failure as a rock star. I spent years practicing, plenty of money on equipment and lessons, and an inordinate amount of time trying to ‘make it’ with girls who I knew were into musicians.

Today’s award-winning guitarists don’t spend the money on lessons, the time on practicing, or even the money on equipment. In fact, they don’t even use guitars when they perform. Welcome to the world of competitive air guitar.

I know what you’re thinking: Competitive air guitar? What’s next, the imaginary World Series? Nascar while running and making engine sounds like ‘whaaaaaaaaaaaa (shift to a lower octave) whaaaaaaaa?’ Get serious. This is big business, though it makes you long for the days of Tiptoeing Through the Tulips with the likes of Tiny Tim.

The official governing body of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships is appropriately named U.S. Air Guitar. Their aim it is to “take our nation’s unofficial pastime out of the bedroom and put it up on the world stage.” According to the website, “In a time when U.S. military and economic leadership faces unprecedented criticism around the world, it is our belief that air guitar represents one endeavor our country can dominate without controversy.”

So in short, watch out Osama. America won’t be taken down without a fight. And as long as we have a solid championship-level air guitarist competing on the world stage, America will no longer be the subject of the world’s criticism.

U.S. Air Guitar is also responsible for maintaining the Air Guitar Hall of Fame, which includes legendary figures like 2003 U.S. and world champ David “C-Diddy” Jung, who is known for wearing a backwards Hello Kitty backpack on his bare chest, and 2006 U.S. champ Craig “Hot Lixx Hulahan” Billmeier, whose style is a postmodern mix of punk, flamenco and metal.

When I think of the hours my friends and I spent ‘jamming’ and ‘getting tight’ in the garage with our real instruments, it seems such a colossal waste of time. All we needed to do to get some notice was to put on a cassette of our favorite band and play imaginary instruments just as well as the real Motley Crue.

This year’s fake guitar playing championships were held at real New York City concert venue Irving Plaza. Inexplicably, the ‘event’ was held in front a sold out crowd of screaming fans, dozens of photographers and news cameras from all three major networks, MSNBC, CNBC and FOX News. With all those photographers on site, it’s a wonder nobody caught Rod Serling on film.

Just prior to the competition, crowd favorite Andrew “William Ocean” Litz said, “If I don’t walk away with the U.S. title and at least 3-4 broken bones, I haven’t done my job tonight.”

After a tough evening of pretending to play guitar, New York’s own Litz somehow defeated defending champ Hot Lixx Hulahan and Rockness Monster to take the title and represent the United States at (lord, forgive me for the fact that this is not a joke) the Air Guitar World Championships. On a related note, Litz did not break any bones, but his pride is probably plenty damaged.

At the end of the competition, all the pretend rock stars took to the stage to perform what was described as an ‘all-star rendition’ of Freebird – a song that’s overplayed even by those who don’t really play.

As an aside, I always thought that my best chance at ever representing my country on the world stage was to be on an Olympic curling team. Now that air guitar is an option, I have officially changed my tune. My real talent, however, lies in steering wheel drumming. Once someone sanctions that, I will definitely enter the competition.

As “William Ocean” travels to Finland to represent Team USA in the giant pretend guitarists of the world competition, all the other fictitious fingerpickers have to hang their heads in shame for not being able to win a contest that requires exactly no skill whatsoever to win.

As for me, I have to head out to the store to pick up a few things: a DVD copy of ‘Air Guitar Nation’ (a documentary described as “very good” by Joel Siegel, just moments before he decided to give up in his fight against cancer), a new set of strings for the real guitar I’ll be strumming while pretending to watch, and a block Finlandia Swiss to remind me of the utter cheesiness of the Air Guitar World Championships being held in Helsinki.

…And the Home of the Braves

2007-09-06T01:41:00.000-04:00

After more than three months living in Atlanta, we finally ventured out to do things the locals do. Our first activity was attending the Atlanta Braves vs. New York Mets baseball game at Turner Field, which is named for modest, wealthy businessman and local Lunatic Laureate Ted Turner. The fact that they were playing a New York team, albeit not the good New York team, was at least comforting.

As is the case with most new stadiums, Turner Field features all sorts of activities and diversions designed to make you forget how much you paid for the seats that are undoubtedly too far from the field to see any of the actual action, not to mention the parking fee that allows you to park in a lot that requires you to walk only slightly further than if you had left your car in your own driveway.

We managed to ignore most of the pre-game activities and elected to go straight to the field-level front row for an opportunity to get up close to and possibly meet members of New York’s second-best baseball team. Armed with official Rawlings Major League Baseballs purchased just an hour prior, my two kids and I pushed our way to the front. Just then, a buzz began to our left: autographs were being signed. Not officially knowing anyone on the Mets’ roster, we jockeyed for position to get our baseballs signed by some random Hispanic guy in a Mets uniform. From what I gather, his name is “O~~ﮟ~D.” I don’t think he played that day, but then my seats were far enough from the field that I was able to actually see Shea Stadium, so I’m not the best person to ask.

After getting O~~ﮟ~D’s signature, we were asked to find our seats, which required an uphill hike, a camel and a sherpa. The ambient southern-laced calls of “cold beer!,” “wieners!” (which I think is funny to yell in a baseball stadium), and “cotton candy!” were beginning. Which of course reminded my kids that they were rapaciously hungry.

Any person who ever sees us at a baseball game would think we never feed our children. When they are at home they barely eat enough to survive, but at a baseball stadium they have tapeworms. Not wanting others to think I’m starving my kids, I invariably wind up spending the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Belgium on snacks, drinks and other sundry items. What’s worse is that Turner Field is the one stadium in the free world that actually allows you to bring in food, drinks and snacks. Judging by my cash-flow that day, I single-handedly covered their losses for everyone in my section who brown-bagged it.

Before this game, my only experience with Braves fans was when I watched the Yankees sweep the 1999 World Series in person at Yankee Stadium. But it was the televised games on TV where I became familiar with the Tomahawk Chop, a ‘chopping’ arm-wave, accompanied by a droning chant, made by Braves fans to support the team when they rally. I always hated the Tomahawk Chop, but now that I’ve witnessed it in person performed by some 45,000 Braves fans, I can appreciate how truly irritating it is.

Silly as these traditions may be, I realized every team’s fans have them. In The Bronx, we tend to yell out crazy things like “Let’s Go Yankees” followed by a foot-stomping bum, bum, bum-bum-bum. Where do they come up with these things?

As the Mets took the lead, and we as a family rooted them on (lesser of two evils), some Tomahawk Chump got into a verbal spat with my wife:

HER: Yay!
HIM: Yeah.
HER: YEAH!
HIM: We’ll see.
HER: Yeah. We will see.
HIM: Huh…
HER: Yay!

In the midst of all this, I had my first experience on the big screen. I’ve attended countless games at various New York stadiums, but it’s at my very first game in Atlanta that I finally make the Diamond Vision screen cut. Yet everybody in my family managed to miss it because of the heated exchange happening at precisely that moment. So now I had a decision to make: do I tell my family that I miraculously appeared on the screen at exactly the moment when nobody was paying attention? Or do I simply bite my lip and avoid the perjury card that will surely be thrown my way? I had no choice but to avoid my family altogether and instead tell the stranger sitting to my left.

Plenty of other people made the screen that day. Mostly people wearing the team’s colors or holding homemade signs supporting the team. Lucky for us, there were several times the cameras caught a large group of fans who had created single letters to spell out an entire thought. This never works. Especially when they are baseball fans that are dumb enough to have gotten drunk on stadium-purchased alcohol. At different times, while being broadcast on the Diamond Vision screen, their signs said “O-G- -B-R-A-V-E-S” and “G-O- -B-R-A-V-S-E.”

Every Sunday, the Braves allow kids between the ages of 4-14 run the bases after the game for free (cost of photos every parent will purchase from the Braves website: $12.99 and up). So with the score 3-1 Mets, we left in the bottom of the 9th inning so we could stand on a line with what amounted to the combined population of all the US Virgin Islands, Guam and Puerto Rico (including The Bronx and the entire Major League Baseball roster).

Judging by the amount of Tomahawk Chanting we heard, either Hank Aaron himself had come out of retirement to reclaim the Home Run title or Osama bin Laden had been captured on the field. I left the line to see what was happening. The Braves managed to rally one run in, making the final score 3-2.

When I got back to the line (with a mile-post marker that said the wait would be 70 minutes), my family was nowhere to be found. I can only hope that the person who posted those signs was fired.

I caught up with the family, walked onto the field and my imagination ran wild. I never really dreamed I’d be a baseball player, so other thoughts of childhood rushed back into my mind… getting in trouble for hitting my sister; being grounded for turning the TV knob too fast; being hit in the face with a line drive that nearly required reconstructive surgery. It was still cool to be on a real Major League Baseball field – and my son, who firmly believes he’ll play on a team with Derek Jeter one day, was in all his glory.

We left lighter in the wallet and a little daunted by the whole Tomahawk Chop thing. Regardless, it was a fun day out and we’re lucky to have moved to a town where they have a baseball team. But we learned a lot. Next time we’ll bring our own snacks, our own sherpa and a sign that says “B-A-R-V-E-S- -T-S-I-N-K.”

Headline Hogs: Atlanta Edition

2007-08-30T16:15:00.000-04:00

Every city has something special it’s known for: Seattle has the Space Needle, Starbucks and grunge rock; Chicago has deep dish pizza and Al Capone; New York has celebrities like Regis and the Naked Cowboy; and Atlanta gets stuck with all the social misfit headline hogs.

You name the crazy headline, I guarantee someone from Atlanta is involved – most likely Ted Turner. Ted is one crazy old coot – and Atlanta’s most successful businessman. He is both wealthy beyond imagination and certifiably insane. He has a habit of saying downright ludicrous things such as “Jimmy Carter was a great President”; he launched a campaign to get rid of some harmless fish in a Montana lake just because he wanted different fish in it; and he casually donated $1 billion to the United Nations because “They do good stuff.” But perhaps the most telling insane character trait he possesses is the fact that, according to Wikipedia, he has always had a special place in his heart for professional wrestling.

But Teddy isn’t the only headline hog in Atlanta. Just this week, 44-year-old Atlanta resident Richard Jewell made headlines for his untimely death. Jewell, for those of you who don’t remember, was wrongly accused of planting a bomb in Atlanta’s Olympic park in 1996. Unfortunately for Jewell, Ted Turner’s CNN led the media charge in eviscerating him.

Fortunately, when he was cleared, Turner extended an olive branch to Jewell in the form of two obstructed-view, upper reserved level tickets for any Atlanta Braves weekend day game, played on a Wednesday night, where the starting pitcher is knuckleballer Phil Neikro, who won a team record 23 games in 1967.

Another of our headline hogs stole the spotlight from Julia Roberts to become the first one Americans think of when they hear the term ‘runaway bride.’ Proud Georgian Jennifer Wilbanks is the perennially surprised-looking woman who faked her own disappearance in 2005 just so she wouldn’t have to marry her fiancé, John Mason. Wilbanks said she was “scared to marry John Mason because she is afraid of an imperfect world” - which she would see really, really vividly. Incidentally, Wilbanks was also cast as an understudy in the Gwinnett County Players’ production of ‘The King and I.’ (Zing!)

While no Richard Gere, Mason’s less-than-ravishing Southern looks and questionable sensibilities make you wonder whether her eyes are bigger than his brain. He vowed that he would remain with Wilbanks even after she made national headlines for running from him. Even the Dalai Lama would take a spot in line to beat some sense into this idiot.

Last year, Wilbanks and Mason officially broke up, after which she promptly sued him for $500,000, which includes a share of royalties from a book deal he never would have gotten without her story. If she wins, I just hope she uses the money wisely and hires a plastic surgeon to take her ‘surprised’ facial expression down a few notches to something like ‘really interested.’ As a side note, Ted Turner sued her for “not staying on the lam long enough” and for “robbing CNN of valuable redundant news reports.”

If there’s anything we’ve learned from TV programming over the years, it’s that a good medical thriller sells. Andrew Speaker, a.k.a. the TB guy, is another headline hog that calls Atlanta home. He’s also the target of a smear campaign by Ted Turner for drawing more attention to TB in Atlanta than he ever did with Turner Broadcasting. Speaker, as you may recall, is the newlywed who honeymooned in Europe Jason Bourne-style. He then flew back under the radar and crossed the U.S. border - all the while being infected with tuberculosis (which is widely known to be fairly harmless if you’re already dead).

When he found out about the severity of his illness, Speaker did what any rational person would do: he boarded a pressurized airplane full of people and pretended to be healthy for six hours. He did this because, as he claimed later, he had been fearful of dying if he didn’t return to America. Apparently, Speaker thought that ‘the Al Qaida method’ was infinitely better: Take out a whole airplane full of people instead of just dealing with your insanity by yourself.

After all this drama, it was later discovered that the tuberculosis strain Speaker actually had was just MDR, not XDR, which begs the question: Which satellite radio provider really is the best? I mean, one has Howard Stern, but the other has all the baseball programming. Decisions, decisions….

Now that I have first-hand experience with living and working in Atlanta and dealing with the locals on a regular basis, I’m beginning to understand why this town is such a hotbed of controversial headline hogs. Things are usually so slow and polite here that people, sooner or later, are bound to lose their minds - in the spirit of Michael Douglas in the movie ‘Falling Down.’ Case in point: it took precisely 7 hours and 43 minutes of living here before this transplanted New Yorker dropped his first F-bomb at a four-way stop sign where every polite participant insisted someone else go first. It’s no wonder why Atlanta needs some headline hogs to shake things up a bit.

Clearly, Atlanta is rife with insanity of all sorts. There are plenty of people doing plenty of stupid things here, and there’s no telling who the next big headline hog will be, or when their story will break. But a word of advice to those looking for the notoriety: No matter what you do, be prepared for Ted Turner to be crazier.

The Pistachio Ice Cream Industry Should Say “mmm goy sai”

2007-08-21T13:39:00.000-04:00

Being a New Yorker, I know that every culture’s dining experience is unique. Every cuisine has its own set of outstanding attributes. Among the best is Chinese food. Take-out or dine-in, no matter which Chinese restaurant option you choose, you know you’re in for a delectable delight - as long as you don’t mind skipping dessert.

As far back as I can remember, a Chinese food dining experience was an event to behold. After sitting down in the restaurant’s dining room, I always enjoyed taking in the view. The usual decorations always were ever-present: the dragons, the red paper lights (with what was purported to be actual Chinese writing on them) and the panoramic Chinese vistas living on too-old posters hanging behind shoddy picture frames. One has to wonder if the Chinese culture really is so greasy, old and insipid – or is that just how it’s represented here in America? Having visited Mainland China myself, I can say, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it is the single kitschiest country on the planet.

From the beginning to three-quarters of the way through, a Chinese dining experience is terrific. Fried appetizers are the standard: egg rolls (the contents of which nobody should ever really ask about), shrimp toast and the pu pu platter – which, once you get past the ridiculous name and the fact that you could potentially use it as a weapon – is the coolest appetizer on Earth.

Speaking of fried foods, it should be noted that dragons were the first creatures to fully succumb to the effects of LDL, which electronically savvy readers will recognize as the technology which allows you to watch Iron Chef in high definition.

Eating the main course of a Chinese meal is an event in and of itself. The entrees are artful and colorful, and always floating in some kind of a salty, randomly-colored sauce. Beef with broccoli and pork lo mein are always delicious (the latter being, inexplicably, the root of a longstanding cold war between the Chinese and the Italians about who invented spaghetti and what it should be called. It’s tough to conjure up an image of what ‘lo mein and meatballs’ would look like).

When it comes time to undo the top button on your pants, however, everything in the Chinese Restaurant Play Book and Operating Manual really falls apart. The single Chinese contribution to the dessert forum is a sugary piece of cardboard wrapped around a piece of paper.

Think of the other cultural offerings for capping off your meal: Italians have cannolis; the French gave us crème brulee; America has apple pie. Even the Greeks stepped up with baklava. The Chinese? The fortune cookie, which is easily the worst invention in the history of edible food.

How can a culture so well rounded in its other gastronomic offerings concurrently be so abysmal at dessert? The most surprising part about the fortune cookie is that nobody who has ever gotten one has actually looked forward to the cookie part. The fortune inside is always the attraction. Isn’t it strange that a culture like ours, which goes out of its way to “save room for dessert” is more interested in reading a piece of paper with words of faux wisdom or vague prophecy than it is in actually eating the miserable confection? For added amusement, it helps to add the words “in bed” to the end of whatever fortune you get. So you wind up with “To move a mountain, one must begin with a single pebble – in bed,” which makes no sense at all, unless you’re about five or six zombies deep. Then it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever heard.

The words of wisdom in the cookie are often attributed to Confucius, the esteemed Chinese thinker and social philosopher who was the first to recognize the need to do something to make the fortune cookie palatable. Coincidentally, upset by the unpleasant dessert placed in front of him, Confucius was also the first to ask, “Do you have Jello?”

Thus began the tradition of Chinese restaurants offering decidedly bland desserts in place of anything truly inspirational. If you are looking for dessert at any given Chinese restaurant today, your choices will be fortune cookies, Jello, oranges or one of three flavors of ice cream: chocolate, vanilla or PISTACHIO??

By offering these unexciting desserts, the Chinese are all but admitting to their complete failure as a people to develop an edible dessert they can call their own. They have dropped the ball and are now calling it to our attention.

In terms of the ice cream, chocolate and vanilla make total sense. But who ever eats pistachio ice cream outside of a Chinese restaurant? I’ve never seen pistachio ice cream in a supermarket freezer aisle, let alone being able to order it at a good ice cream counter. Yet, at the Chinese restaurant, you’d think it was among the more popular flavor choices. The pistachio industry is evidently guilty of selling the Chinese a bill of goods.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about the ice cream at the Chinese restaurant is the presentation. A silver dish with a single scoop of your flavor of choice - but no syrup, whipped cream, cherries or nuts. You just get the lone, boring scoop of ice cream. And what do they do with it? They stick a fortune cookie on top.

In spite of it all, I will still crave my visits to Chinese restaurants. I’m conditioned to know that, while the bulk of the meal will be second-to-none, the dessert will leave much to be desired. Which is a good thing, because when I’m hungry again in an hour, I can go to the Italian restaurant three doors down. It’s at this point that I will think back to the words of wisdom from the last fortune cookie I received:

“If you want a really good dessert, I recommend Giuseppe’s down the road. Try a fresh cannoli.”

Help Wanted: Space Shuttle Astronaut / Tile Mason

2007-08-14T02:38:00.000-04:00

Is it just me or do they launch the Space Shuttle these days for the sole purpose of repairing what went wrong on takeoff so there are no catastrophes upon reentry? I’m all for safety, but nowadays the phrase “Let’s light this candle” – famously said week after week by Rabbi Mordechai Goldfarb of Congregation Beth Shalom in the quaint Connecticut suburb of Old Saybrook - takes on a whole new meaning.

The Space Shuttle program launched, with much fanfare, in the early 1980s - presumably by a group of engineers who thought that 80s electronica music was so bad that they couldn’t even stay on the same planet with it. The world simultaneously welcomed Soft Cell and bid goodbye to a handful of lucky astronauts who were protesting the death of rock music.

The Space Program was all but dead, and out of the public eye, after a successful series of missions in the 60s and 70s which brought human beings to the surface of the moon. Of course, this WAS the heyday of LSD, so whether or not man actually flew to and walked on the moon remains a true mystery. The only thing that we know for sure is that Tom Hanks was THIS close to walking on the moon but missed his opportunity (as illustrated in the Hollywood blockbuster film, appropriately titled, Tom Hanks Never Walked on the Moon).

In any case, the Space Shuttle program was the next revolution in space travel. The orbiter was able to launch, reenter and launch, again and again. Unless, of course, someone forgot to tighten a screw somewhere along the way.

Such was the unfortunate case with the Space Shuttle Challenger, which completed just nine missions before disintegrating on January 28, 1986 - just 73 seconds into the launch of its tenth mission. This disaster could have been avoided had the O-rings, which in this case were shaped like rhombuses, been shaped like actual O’s. Seven lives, and a vehicle almost as cool as a De Lorean, were lost as a result of a shape problem that could have been solved by any random nursery school teacher.

This disaster brought the space program to a grinding halt – until someone indiscriminately suggested that they build another Space Shuttle and give it a much cooler name. Thus were born the Discovery, the Atlantis and the Endeavour (the last one, by the way, while an American spacecraft, was inexplicably named by a Brit called Reginald Huggins, III – thereby explaining the randomly placed “U”).

Over the years, space shuttle launches became passé, and coverage of launches and landings moved from national broadcast networks to the pages of the Weekly World News, which covers the latest breaking space news you won’t read anywhere else. Included is news like in this actual passage from an article about the planets:

“Last year, the fifty-four-year-old astronomer claimed that not only was Pluto still a planet but that it was inhabited by Irish sheepdogs.”

You can’t make this stuff up. This is clearly news you will see nowhere else.

All remained boring with the shuttle program until February 1, 2003, which was when Cuban percussionist Ramón "Mongo" Santamaría passed away unexpectedly as a result of a stroke. Ironically, it was his music that was playing at mission control that day when the Space Shuttle Columbia burned up upon reentry. NASA scientists determined that a hole had formed on the shuttle’s wings when a piece of insulating foam from the external fuel tank peeled off during the launch 16 days earlier.

It is unfortunate that the only way NASA can get headlines anymore is to have a major catastrophe that involves a Space Shuttle. They could probably take a lesson or two from English entrepreneur Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, the world’s recognized King of Self-Promotion.

The end result, however, is that NASA has turned into a bunch of overprotective kindergarten mothers when it comes to its space program. Every single time a shuttle is launched, the cargo bay is filled with heat-resistant black replacement tiles, concrete, grout, a Costco-sized container of Tang and several cases of those diapers the crazy astronaut lady wore when she drove clear across the country at a rate of speed faster than a Space Shuttle, in order to “talk to” (read: kill) a flight attendant who was making whoopee with her imagined astronaut boyfriend. (For the record, I believe her insanity was founded. I mean, who WOULDN’T go crazy with a car full of dirty diapers? Anyone who has kids can vouch for this. But I digress….)

The tiles in a shuttle’s cargo bay are there to replace damage sustained by the tiles on the orbiter when it takes off. Which means, by my calculations, that the space program has essentially turned itself into the world’s most costly unnecessary repair shop. In fact, I’ve been informed by insiders that the bulk of the training that new astronauts undergo involves replacing various parts of the Space Shuttle while in space.

It does seem to be a waste of a space program to simply fix what goes wrong instead of really ‘living on the edge’ like the old astronauts used to do. That’s why they were so revered. They stared death in the face and, in most cases, died doing so - but not without the everlasting acclaim of the American people.

I think our resources are being spent foolishly in space. Case in point: The Jetsons first appeared on TV in 1962 – 45 years ago! – and we STILL do not have flying saucer cars that convert into suitcases. What a waste of technology.

I think noted sci-fi author Larry Niven put it best when he said, “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!" He said that in 2001, which makes me really wonder whether or not he had been conscious for the past 40 years.

Needless to say, the NASA space program will forge ahead. There’s a space station that isn’t going to build itself, there are astronauts in diapers training for their next tile-replacement mission, and there are science fiction writers who need to obviously ignore reality and say ridiculous things about why dinosaurs went extinct.

More Pizza Fun

2007-08-10T09:14:00.000-04:00

The phone rang last night. It was a woman who was looking for the pizzeria for which we get more calls than they do. My simple "Hello" wasn't enough for this lady. She demanded to know whether it was Papa John's that she reached. When I told her she had the wrong number, she insisted that she didn't and demanded to speak to my manager.

I had no choice but to return to the phone, using the very same voice, and say "Hello this is Mark, how can I help you?"

She explained that she had called earlier and asked for another location's number - but that number wasn't working. I suggested, "You might want to consult the Internet."

"THE INTERNET? I DON'T HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION! WHY WON'T YOU JUST GIVE ME THE NUMBER," she insisted. I explained that we were "super busy" and that if she didn't have an Internet connection, she might want to let her "fingers do the walking" and look in her telephone book. I even explained that the poor telephone books have experienced such a downturn in popularity that they would be thrilled to be used. She was not amused.

"Are you serious???" was all she could muster up. I told her yes, and asked if she planned to place an order.

She asked if we delivered to Buckhead. Stifling raucous laughter, I said, "Oh no. That's too far. We don't deliver there." That's when she really lost it.

"Your address is Buckhead - and YOU DON'T DELIVER HERE?"

I didn't expect that. It became impossible for me to keep a straight face. I had to hang up.

All I wanted to do was take an order. I didn't plan on THIS. Managing an imaginary pizza joint ain't easy.

Don’t Cut Off Your Armature Despite Your Flux Capacitor

2007-08-10T02:38:00.000-04:00

It’s official: I have no mechanical skill whatsoever. This is no big secret. I’ve never really understood how people know how to fix cars, engines and the like. In fact, I’d be better at tying my shoes while wearing boxing gloves.

I am good at simple tasks. Changing light bulbs? Piece of cake! Filling my gas tank? No sweat! Plugging in new household appliances? Probably easy if it’s a normal shaped plug. I’m also good at math, which is how I know that when something does go wrong, I’m going to bounce a check. (Apologies in advance to the first lawnmower repairman who agrees to come to my house.)

It began two days ago – my problem with Bessy, my beloved, ride-on lawnmower. After two weeks of neglect, I finally decided to cut my grass and force my ticks to find a new home. That’s when I discovered that Bessy, who I have taken for a ride exactly three times thus far, has decided to take the rest of the summer off.

When I purchased the mower in question, I knew she needed a new battery. Hence, it has become my custom to use actual jumper cables connected to my actual car battery to fire up ole Bessy. It worked fine – until this week. Upon arriving home from work, I lovingly walked the mower from the garage to the car. Then I gently connected the cables, sat down, and turned the key: nothing. My girl didn’t respond. Her engine screamed, “whawhawhawhawha,” over and over, in vain. She wasn’t moving. I tried again. Turned the key, heard her tease: “whawhawhawha,” but she just wouldn’t turn over. This routine continued for approximately 30 minutes. I’m from the school of thought that says: as long as something has a key, it will start working sooner or later.

Recognizing that my logic was probably not sound, I reluctantly opened her hood and looked for something marked ‘press here if engine will not start.’ This mower didn’t come with that feature. (Note to self: it always pays to buy the more expensive model.) I tinkered with a few things under the hood. Her gas tank was more than half full; her oil looked okay, I guess – for as much as I know about oil; and I think I found her air filter. Feeling like staring at the engine might have done some good, I sat back down and tried to start her again. Inexplicably, my technique did not have the desired effect.

Having had enough, I finally called Paul, a gifted mechanic who is also my brother-in-law. I figured I could have him talk me through what to do. Just like trying to talk a six-year-old through building a Stradivarius. The first question from him was “Does she have gas?” (Note: Paul knows me well). I did double-check, but I confirmed that the Middle East was slightly richer thanks to my laziness and frugality in hiring a landscaping company. The next question was, “Is her battery connected?” Now I have to admit, I may be a mechanical disaster, but these are softball questions.

Jumping directly from questions from Mechanics for Morons to those found in Master Technician Journal, Paul asked me to locate the spark plug. The spark plug? No problem. Just search for something that looks like it could plug a spark, I reasoned. I embarked on a fruitless journey through every engine part, even after receiving a very good tip on how to find it. Paul had pointed out that a thick black wire would connect the spark plug to the Flux Capacitor, in order to create the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity necessary to drive Bessy the amazing three-miles-per-hour I relied on for her to move me across my field of dreams. After looking for a while, I located one thick black wire that really seemed more like a tube to me, so I claimed there were no thick black wires and suggested maybe a red one might have been used in its place. For a guy who really never gets agitated, I sensed that Paul was on the verge of calling me a complete putz.

Living up to his reputation, Paul calmly held back any anger he might have felt towards me at the moment. Instead he patiently explained to me that an engine needs three things to start. If I remember correctly, he said they are: a key, fluids and noise. I seemingly had all the pieces in place. He finally grew frustrated enough to take a drive over to my house and look at it himself – my mission was officially achieved. I was off the hook.

As Paul began disassembling the engine, which appeared to have way more parts than necessary, I stood by and watched in much the same way I used to watch my dad replace wiring in the house when I was a kid. I learned quickly that my role as “the helper” was to stand around and try to look busy helping, or at least appear interested in doing so. I was neither, then or now.

Like a skilled surgeon performing a complicated procedure, Paul made single-word demands for tools. I was right on top of the easy ones, like wrench and screwdriver. It was when he asked for the “12-volt tester” that I began to panic. My best approach to find this mysterious tool was not to simply ask him what it looked like. No, it was instead to systematically rule out anything that I knew WASN’T a 12-volt tester and make a guess based on what was left.

So I began to rifle through the toolbox, a man on a mission. Roughly 90 seconds later, Paul sauntered over, gently pushing my amateur ass aside. In one fell swoop, he fished out the little light with the two wires attached to it (the 12-volt tester, I concluded), giving me one of those “How do you remember to breathe?” sideways glances.

After pulling apart every piece of the lawnmower, Paul decided that the problem was the armature – or the opening in the lawnmower that lets in the light. He also described it as a magneto, which I honestly thought was exclusively the brainchild of a writer for Marvel Comics. None of this seemed to make any sense to me. How any of this has anything to do with why the lawnmower wouldn’t start is beyond me. Luckily for Bessy, Paul was right on top of her, so to speak. He seemed to know exactly how to make her purr for him.

Throughout the process of “helping” Paul, I did manage to get myself filthy and covered in motor oil. Let this be a lesson to you: make sure the cap is on the oil tank BEFORE you turn the ignition key. To an uninformed passerby, I certainly gave the appearance of having worked really hard on this mystery machine. I may not have been able to get her motor running, but it sure looked like I gave it everything I had.

As an aside, I hate going to a parts counter where I’m expected to know every spec of every item I’m looking for, or risk looking like a complete idiot. Today I went down the complete idiot road. Figuring I could get what I needed with the model number of the lawnmower, I found quickly that I was entirely unprepared. And Joe-Bob with the four teeth in his mouth was snickering at my total ignorance. Regardless, we figured it out.

So now all I need to do is switch out the old part with the new one I purchased today. Then I’ll be back in the saddle, ready to transform my property into the lush greenscape I intended for it to be, and proud of a job well done. Which of course is all dependent upon whether or not Paul minds fetching his own tools.

My Terrifying 30-Minute 3:00 a.m. Standoff

2007-07-24T02:39:00.000-04:00

I'm the type of person who likes to do everything late at night. I pay the price when it's time to get up in the morning, but I'm a night owl who (who, who, who) loves to stay up late and really concentrate on what I'm doing with no other distractions. It's fantastic when there truly ARE no other distractions.

One recent night, I finally decided to hit the hay at about 2:45 a.m., but decided I'd be smart by taking my shower before bed – thereby maximizing sleep time when the later morning rolls around. I made my way upstairs into the bedroom and quietly moved, in the complete darkness, to the bathroom. Thus began what was to be the most terrifying night of my life to date.

As you know, we recently moved to the South. The cost of living is cheaper, the weather is better, and you really get maximum value for your money in terms of gross insect poundage. When I turned on the light in the bathroom, what I saw frightened me beyond compare. A palmetto bug the size of a traditional seedless hamburger bun skittered across the counter and parked itself right into the crevice between the sink faucet and the wall.

If you are unfamiliar with what a palmetto bug is, consider yourself lucky. Think: big, disgusting cockroach. Then think: hold big and shiny magnifying glass over said cockroach. Now, put the two images together and imagine that huge disturbing result sitting on your counter. In fact, it's such a large insect that you have to worry about how to best dispose of its guts when it's finally smashed. That, my friends, is the palmetto bug -- the most horrific, nasty-looking, vulgar insect that I've seen to date in Georgia.

Given his clearly pre-planned tactical position, and my complete and utter terror at seeing an insect this huge in my own living space, the clock began to tick on what became a late-night, thirty-minute standoff between bug and man.

In case you haven't yet realized, I am not a 'bug person'. I wince at the mere thought of them. If I encounter a standard-issue spider inside the house, for example, I will immediately find ANYTHING else to do – and exaggerate the importance of getting said thing done, rather than deal with the creepy crawler myself. (e.g., Me to wife: "Sorry, honey, can you get that spider? I'm, uh, working on solving the mystery of the den's light switch. I know it's been 15 years since anyone has seen it operate anything, but I think tonight - right now, in fact - seems high time for me to finally figure it out. Insect spray, by the way, is in the kitchen cabinet. Thanks honey.").

So, back to the horror of my recent run-in with the bug. This gargantuan, pre-historic, six-legged demon is taunting me from the counter, making my entire body convulse in fear. Add to that the realization that, not 10 feet away, lies my sleeping wife - oblivious to my being the main character in the horror movie being acted out on the other side of the wall. I could try to wake her up, I reason, and ask for her help. But my wife is not one to be happy when awakened in the middle of the night. My stomach tenses up more as I realize I have to actually take care of this myself. I recognize that if I try to kill this thing and fail, I will scream. But, if I try to kill it and am successful, I will probably scream anyway. And if said screams awaken my wife, she will surely unleash the Power of Grayskull on me.

As time passes, I literally stand frozen, part of me fearing for my life, another part of me wondering how I could possibly muster up the nerve to use the latest issue of Games magazine, found on top of the toilet tank, to smash this creature back to the hell from whence it came.

In an ideal world, I would have had a heavy clear container of some kind handy so I could just place it over the bug in question, and perhaps by some stroke of luck, God's most disturbing creature would asphyxiate by morning. The trick with this method is, you'd have to place a brick, a file cabinet or the living room couch on top of the container so that the bigger bugs can't simply walk across the room, dragging the container with them (picture the scene from the fine cultural phenomenon known as the television show "Cops" - where a hoodlum runs through yards until he finds a plastic kiddy pool to hide beneath. Then said hoodlum skitters across the yard to safety -- still under cover, pool and all). My palmetto bug seemed pretty capable of re-creating that scene based on the size of his pecs alone.

So, a few minutes have passed at this point, and I still find myself petrified and motionless, staring at my six-legged nemesis. It's at times like this when you tend to feel every little change in atmospheric pressure around your body. Every nerve ending in your body tickles with the fearful thought of something touching you, landing on you or crawling on you. This is what psychologists refer to as "a HUGE deal." I stand fearing for my life with that creepy feeling that something is on me.

As an aside, it is at this point when I relish the idea of someday going back to NY just so I can deal with insects of the right scale. Given their size here in Georgia, they should come with a warning, or be required to have a State-certified, onboard lighting safety system.

Back to the horror I'm living….

I'm so jumpy at this point, flinching and swatting at every part of my body which feels that ghastly tickle sensation. Then, there it is! On the back of my calf (side note: if you ever want to know what a palmetto bug probably feels like on the back of your calf, just take the corner of a paper towel and rub it gently on the area.)

So I just KNOW there's something touching my calf very lightly and I immediately freak out, swatting at this imagined thing as hard as I can – accidentally catapulting the decorative trash can clear across the bathroom in the process. RANG-TANG-TANG!!!!

So much for keeping quiet. The fancy metal trash can with the red flowers on the side sails across the floor and hits the side of the tub with a piercingly loud CLANG. Mental check on wife: still oblivious and sound asleep. Whew!

Taking account of the situation about 20 minutes in: I still have a stubborn mutant insect on my counter. There are now countless empty paper cups, wrappers, and other bathroom trash items strewn across the floor. I still have not managed to use the toilet or take a shower. And I have to be up for work in less than four hours. An increasingly impossible checklist to complete.

I finally get to a point where I need to release some of the 24 oz. of water I drank earlier in the evening. While the bug was comfortable under the cover of his secluded faucet, I knew I couldn't find a way to crush his spirit and his exoskeleton. I just couldn't find the guts to expose HIS – especially since I didn't have a clear shot. I finally had to make my move (away from the bug, but a move nonetheless). I relieve myself for what seems like just 15 seconds. When I came back over to check on my enemy's position, I find to my horror that the sonofabitch is GONE!

All that time - a half hour of complete insanity, and he disappears the second I turn my back! How did he know I was gone? I mean, I understand any animal in fear will take the easiest escape, but this is a palmetto bug. Last I heard, they don't have reasoning skills.

Now I start picking up things from the counter with my fingertips, peeking under them, and then flinging them across the room in fear that he could be hiding beneath or behind virtually anything. Now I'm completely freaked out because he's disappeared. I'm looking everywhere: ceiling, floor, walls. Nothing. Nowhere. He is gone. GONE!

In the meantime, the bathroom is completely ransacked. It's quite literally a reflection of my complete and utter failure to dispose of this demon bug in an efficient and tidy manner. The bathroom's about as much a mess as the dilemma in which I now find myself.

Now I have to try to figure out if I'm just giving up (which I kind of already did upon first seeing this disgusting insect), or if I should continue to look for him. I have several things against me:

I clearly can't stand the sight of a bug,
I have a huge mess to clean up now,
I still need to take a shower,
It's approaching 3:30 in the morning, and
While I'd like to resolve the situation, I know that I firmly do not WANT to find this thing again.

Finally I decided the best course of action would be to take my shower in the kids' bathroom and to close the bathroom doors in the master bedroom. The logic of knowing that this pest came from outside the house to use my bathroom without the courtesy of asking does not enter my mind as I secure the bathroom door, knowing full well that he cannot possibly penetrate the one-inch gap between the floor and the bottom of the door.

My uneventful shower in the kids' bathroom was relaxing enough to get me into bed thinking hard about not thinking about the bug.

To add a bit of color to this story, I am not a small man. I have what some consider an imposing-tough-guy-native-New-Yorker look, and I came down to Georgia with no fear. The irony is that I was brought to my knees by a native Georgian less than half my size. It's got a similar storyline as the movie Deliverance, only this was scarier. The native in my story deserved a death sentence - if only because anyone with more than two legs who enters my house without an invite is entitled to die. Hey, I make the rules. I just can't believe what a liberal I am when it comes to actually enforcing them.

Because I lost this standoff, I will keep my eyes peeled, wondering what story that cockroach kin is telling HIS wife as he works his glutes on the elliptical machine. Bug: "I saw another one, Gladys. This time it was male, nearly naked, and swatting around the room like a woman."

The next time around I won't be so kind (yes I will), scared (um, not even fooling myself here), or willing to spend the time to wait for him to make the first move (right, like I'll be the one that takes the offensive). The next time around, I'll be able to finally live up to the macho version of the story that I told MY wife this time:

"Oh, it was no big deal, just a palmetto bug. I smashed it, flushed it and went back to bed."