Gray Matter

If someone leaves a comment on a post I made a while back, I'll still know about it because it'll show up in my e-mail. Anyway, someone did and when I read it, I noticed my new format made the links invisible... they were white, the background was white... you know the story.

So now we're all a whiter shade of gray.

Lighten up, Francis.

My office is right off a lab and often I’m in and out of there all day. So when someone sees me at my PC or in the restroom with my safety glasses on, I usually get a comment. I’ll answer with a smarmy but pleasant “You can never be too safe!” or “Safety is NO accident!” but what I really want to do is punch the guy in the face and yell “Always wear your safety glasses!” Am I supposed to be so self-conscious that I constantly check myself insuring that my attire is appropriate? I’m busy… I’m going right back into the lab after I shoot off this e-mail or take a quick whiz… why should I bother taking off the stupid things?

And ANOTHER thing!

When someone sneezes, he should get a single “bless you” not more. On Planet Jim, he wouldn’t even get one. Why the heck do we say anything at all? Why do you need to be blessed after a sneeze and why in the world would anyone say “Gesundheit’”? We don’t say “Dankeschoen” and we don’t even get the name of their country right! I wonder what people said during WW2? I’m gonna start saying “liberty” whenever anyone sneezes.

Anyway, this wasn’t my gripe… well, not my main one anyway. I’ll go along with one “bless you” but if I sneeze twice, I don’t want another. Fine, if I past the five or six mark you can throw in the “Are you gonna make it?” or something but I want nothing between one and five, ok?!

Ya got that?!!

The Erins

I swear, with Erin, it always seems like there are two or more kids in the house. Of course, it's a given that when I call home from work and Liam's at school, the house will sound like a playground.

"Does Erin have a few friends over?"

"No. It's just Erin."

But this morning, I walked past Erin who was sleepily standing in the living room and went to the master bedroom at the other end of the main hall. I heard footsteps starting at my end of the hall and continue down towards the living room and I assumed Liam had arisen.

Something made me wonder and I looked in Liam's bedroom where he was fast asleep.

And that's not the first time this has happened. We nicknamed her "Sneaky" as a companion to Liam's "Squeaky" before she was even born. Liam's nickname stuck around for a while but, although Erin's never really caught on, she's always lived up to it.

Smoky Treats

I don’t have a problem with people smoking cigarettes. In fact, I kind of like smoke-filled bars and I’m fervently against the government prohibiting smoking in them. If a bar owner wants to have a smoke-free bar, let him ban it… likely a smart move given the recent animosity towards smoking... and the people that can’t abide a whiff of smoke within a hundred yards can flock to his place (and note I use the androgynous “his” here).

I don’t smoke myself and I think it’s a pretty stupid thing to do… but hey, it’s a personal choice. I tried it once or twice when I was in high school hanging out on the corner with the guys in the Motley Crue concert tees. As I was standing there coughing and feeling stupid and embarrassed, I realized that if I pushed through the initial discomfort and lousy feeling, I would be doing so solely because of peer pressure. I’m not saying I never did anything for the “approval” of others, but smoking cigarettes wasn’t one of them.

Anyway, like I said, I don’t have a problem with smoking. But what I DO have a problem with is the fact that so many smokers seem to think that tossing a cigarette onto the ground isn’t littering. If someone let their dog crap on their lawns or if someone tossed an empty Big Gulp cup in front of them, they’d probably get upset but they seem to see nothing wrong with casually flinging their spent butt out their disgusting, smoke-reeking car onto the side of the street where it rolls slowly across the asphalt until it joins hundreds of its brothers and sisters in the pile against the curb.

Living in the ultra-suburbia that is northeast of Atlanta, I spend plenty of time in traffic and sometimes I find myself in line behind a smoker. And, if they get to the end of their smoke while I’m behind them, invariably they toss it to the street. I’ve probably seen one of them get to the end 40 or 50 times and I think only once did the smoker not throw it out of his car. And when I beep, I don’t even think they know why I’m honking my horn at them. Even WITH my waves and tossing motions.

Gadzooks!

I gotta figure out how to widen this thing.

Once again you've failed me, Starscream.

Kerry and I previewed Transformers and other than a few scenes involving a sinuous female lead and a mention of the term “masturbation”, both of which will slip through his head, there were a few scenes that I thought might possibly disturb Liam: the scene where a sand-burrowing Scorponok stalks a group of soldiers and a ”sad” part where a good-guy Autobot is hog-tied by government agents. All the rest was robot-on-robot violence and, yes, one could argue that any violence is bad but that “one” probably never had a 6-year old boy.

We got him a chapter book based on the movie and had him read it then I read it to him and went through some of the scenes with him. We went through all this because it’s a PG-13 movie and normally we wouldn’t even consider taking him to it but he’s been into Transformers since before I ever saw it mentioned on the Net as even being considered for a movie.

So I took him, we shared a big Coke and he got a popcorn of his own (I rarely have more than a handful… I’ve never cared for the stuff), and we watched the slam-bam flick.

Liam loved it. But not the parts that I thought were cool… like Optimus Prime and Bonecrusher falling off an overpass locked in combat or the badass Megatron as a plane-thing not even slowing down as he smashes into Prime. He did like the cool, fast transformations which were done very well but the parts he liked involved the smaller robots, Frenzy who could turn into a boom-box and another one that was a cell phone but became a tiny rabid machine-gunning robot.

To me, overall the few and far between action scenes were pretty damn good but the plot was for idiots. Why is it soooo hard to have a half-way decent plot in these things? Huge lame points were rampant but one inaccuracy that I can’t imagine that no one on the set caught was the explanation that Megatron crashed on earth probably because his guidance systems were thrown off by the planet’s gravitational field.

By Earth’s GRAVITATIONAL field?! “Wow, what a surprise… this planet that I’m flying around has gravity!” And why would this throw him off anyway? “Woah, what a confusing shock… it’s pulling me DOWN!”

Of course they meant the Earth’s MAGNETIC field. There must have been at least twenty people in earshot of this statement for the actual take not to mention the rehearsed ones and no one caught this?! Yeah right. Bay must be a true prick if not a single person spoke up.

Or am I just a freak and no one cares about this stuff?

Now all Liam and I do is make up and talk through slow-motion, John Woo-style action scenes involving speeding cars transforming into leaping, missile-launching robots and raining bullets at each other.

Good times.

Airport Musings

One of my typical rants is that a lot of Americans are basically fat and lazy. But I was flying to Minnesota this week and when I got on the underground train that shuttles between the concourses, I realized that there’s always a lot of people that walk the distance. And me? I always take the train.

Maybe the reason people drive everywhere, have to park right up next to where they are going, and never walk anywhere is because everyone’s in such a rush. And when they have time at the airport, they walk. Meaning that if only things weren’t so hectic all the time, people would walk a lot more. And maybe if we’d all just calm down and relax a little, it would be a happier, fluffier world filled with colorful balloons and pink bunnies.

Noooo… I still think we’re just fat and lazy. And, for some reason, at the airport, people get the sudden idea to walk when they have the time. I don’t see people taking the stairs even when they’re much faster than standing around waiting for the stupid elevator. And people still spend half an hour hunting for the parking spot up front even when they could’ve been inside already if they had parked further away and walked.

Still… it’s a good sign, I guess.

I noticed another welcome change on the plane. Usually, after landing and the attendant comes on and says it’s ok to use cellphones, there’s a sudden chorus of people punching buttons and saying “It’s me… we just landed” as if, God forbid, the multitude on the other end of the line should wait 5 minutes to get the absolutely latest update on the trips progress. This time, on both flights, this annoying eruption didn’t happen. Either people are finally getting over the excitement of instant communication (I hope, I hope I hope!) or Minnesotans are less uptight.

Either that or they haven’t learned to use cellphones.

Don’t mess with Red.

Kerry’s been quite the crimefighter lately. At Bethany Beach, my brother-in-law’s skateboard was stolen from under the house we were staying at. A day or two later Kerry spots some teens messing around on what might be the skateboard of interest and a few hours later, she boldly walks under the house…

Let me break in to explain that “under the house” is not a dank, spidery crawlspace or a basement crammed with baby furniture and exercise equipment. At the beach where we stay, all the houses are up on stilts and there are garages, dressing rooms, showers, etc. all under the houses.

Anyway, Kerry sees these same kids shooting hoops in front of a house and, after they ride off on a motorscooter, she walks up, takes a quick look around, and snags the hot board. Take that, youth gone wild!

And then, in response to a “situation” we’ve had in our neighborhood, namely that the guy next door moved down the street and rented out his place to a halfway house for troubled youth. They’re mostly guys in their 20’s and so far, they haven’t really caused any problems but we’d rather not wait around until one of them or one of their co-horts does. Not to mention the dive our neighborhood may be about to take. So we’re planning on moving out of this neighborhood but still staying in the general area. I’ll miss the lot (big trees, leafy green views everywhere, the survival-of-the-fittest experiment that I call a lawn) but a basement and/or a cul-de-sac would be nice.

But I undress…

A guy in our neighborhood made some calls to some county officials but was pretty much ignored. Another neibor tried the same thing but to no avail.



Then...



Enter Mad Dog.



An e-mail here and a call or two there and Kerry gets results! Apparently, the private enterprise running the place has been breaking several codes running a halfway home here and now there’s a U-Haul truck in the driveway.

Adios, meth-heads!

Like my men...

There’s a great line from Pulp Fiction where Tarantino’s character asks the Wolf how he takes his coffee and he responds, “Lotsa cream, lotsa sugar”. I could blog for pages about how cool that is but I’m not… I’m going to blog about coffee.

When it’s the way the Wolf and I like it, coffee’s a beautiful caramel color, warm and soothing. When it’s how I had it today, with skim milk because we ran out of half-and-half, it’s a dingy gray-brown color… like a dead rat.

At work, I take it horribly… with that scary powdered creamer that was concocted in a chemical plant in New Jersey and extra sugar to drown out the disgusting taste. And yes, I only drink coffee at work as a last resort.

But I do love my coffee. I sometimes think of it before I go to sleep. On the weekends, getting the coffeemaker going is the first thing I start on in the morning. The best coffee I ever had was in Puerto Rico. And usually when I talk about the “best” something I’ve had, I include the setting and everything else about it all wrapped up together. Anyway, this was at a fancy hotel southeast of San Juan (I was there for work) and came with one of my favorite breakfasts… a plain bagel with plain cream cheese… and fruit… and this place had a TON of fruit. Cantelope, mangoes, kiwi, papaya, and a lot of others that I have no idea what they were.

“Is that a breadfruit?”

I do like Starbuck’s coffee when I get it when I travel but, to me, it’s only slightly better than the stuff we buy in giant cans and make at home. And no way is it good enough to justify buying a cup of every day on your way to work.

That’s for chumps.