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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
(As promised, things are getting hot ‘n’ heavy over at the nearly-newly-revamped Bugs & Cranks baseball extravaganza. Since last we met, I’ve posted the poser How Many Schmoes Would an Old Lowe Mow… and the quasi-Biblical The Rules of Entradement.
Even now, there’s a new ‘Wednesday Walk Watch’ on deck, and possibly something about the Chipper Jones contract extension. And you know how exciting contract extensions can be. Check out the site, if you have a chance; soon enough, it’ll all be different. And then where will you be?
In the meantime, here’s some non-baseball stuff. Like anyone would want to read that. Sheesh.)
Look. By no means do I want to morph this site into an ‘a funny thing happened to me on the way to the office’ blog. And I realize that my last non-weekend post concerned the walking portion of my commute to work. I like to mix things up as best I can, and there are an awful lot of topics to cover.
However.
Today, on that same walk to work from the car, I noticed something else odd and unsettling that I’ve never seen before. And I have the short-term memory of a retarded garden slug, so if I don’t mention it now, it’s going to be lost forever. I’m sure you don’t want that hanging over your heads — and neither do I. So here goes. Apologies in advance for any repetition in the setup.
” I don’t drag you into my own sordid little farm animal-public official-breaking news story ordeals. Show me the same courtesy, is all I’m asking.”
I was on my way to work today, walking the few blocks from my car to the office.
(Sound familiar? Too bad, junior. We’ll branch out soon enough, just you keep reading and see.)
Now, I’m not an especially nosy person by nature. If you have a secret, for instance, it’s safe with me. Actually, most secrets are safer than safe with me, because if you come to me with a really juicy, hush-hush secret and you obviously want to tell someone, I’ll likely try to discourage you from divulging it by feigning lack of interest.
Except I won’t be feigning. I really don’t want to know. Honestly. It’s probably something disturbing about you, or someone you know — or worse yet, someone you and I know — and I’d frankly prefer not to see the person involved in a whole different light based on some bit of knowledge that I was never supposed to hear in the first place. It’s none of my business, and it makes me all scrunchy inside, and it’s an awful lot of unnecessary pressure to remember who I can tell, and who I can’t tell, and which TV stations get exclusive scoops, and exactly whose farm animals were involved, and how many public officials could lose their offices over this, and so forth. Really, just leave me out of it. I don’t drag you into my own sordid little farm animal-public official-breaking news story ordeals. Show me the same courtesy, is all I’m asking.
However.
That doesn’t mean I’m above gently poking my honker into the private lives of people I don’t know, just for the sake of curiosity. Particularly when that honker-poking is done anonymously, surreptitiously, and with precious little possibility of backlash of any kind. If I could just satisfy the few nosy cells in my person with an act or two of clandestine nosiness, then I could have my cake and spy on it, too. It’s win-win.
So that’s what I do. I’m barely conscious of it sometimes, but I do slake my occasional nosy thirst by ducking briefly into strangers’ private lives when they’re least expecting it. And when they’re unlikely to catch me doing it. And most important, when they’re not even around in the first place.
I’ll admit it. I’m an other-people’s-cars peeker-inner.
I peek. I’m a peeker. I’m not proud of it. But that hasn’t stopped me yet. And so, on the way to work this morning, as I passed the row of parked cars on the street, I craned my neck just a little to the side, set my shifty eyes a-darting, and I peeked into the front window of each car I passed. The seats, the dashboard, the console, the mirror adornments — I saw it all. Each vehicle a snapshot of the person who’d driven it there — some messy, some neat, some dusty, some clean, cluttered or immaculate, kitschy or minimalist, each front seat was a little vignette telling a story of the life or lives that included that car. There was personality there. Individuality. Creativity. Toilet paper.
I stopped in my tracks near the front bumper of the last car. ‘Toilet paper?‘
Indeed. I scanned the street for any other pedestrians, and finding none, I took two steps backward for another glance inside the car. And there it was, plain as day. Sitting underneath the dashboard, in a little tray probably meant for soda cups or spare change or spare oil filters or something, was a roll of what appeared to be heavy-duty two-ply quilted cotton ass paper. Minus several sheets for god-knows-what, and all of a sudden I was ruing the day those few curious bones had grown in my body. Of all the things to keep close at hand while you’re driving, can toilet paper really be tops on someone’s list?
Don’t get me wrong, now. I realize that a car can be a messy place. You might spill your coffee, or drop a sandwich, or own a precocious and persnickety incontinent mutt who dribbles on your backseat like a Harlem Globetrotter running a keepaway drill. I understand that. It happens.
But I’d argue that toilet paper is not your best defense against long-term stains and odors once these sorts of things happen. You want to keep Wet-Naps in the car, I’ve got no problem with that. A roll or paper towels in the glove box, perhaps? Fine thinking, I say. You have a box of industrial-strength Depends and a bucket of water for rinsing in the back seat? Your child/grandpa/stupid incontinent mutt will thank you one day for your foresight. Well played, indeed.
But toilet paper? What it lacks in jack-of-all-trades absorbency, it’s also missing in strongman-hero toughness. Flimsy, papery and fragile, there’s frankly no application for which toilet paper could possibly be the best option.
Unless.
As I stood pondering the possibility that someone out there was carrying toilet paper in their car and using it precisely in the way that Nature and god and that squeezy Charmin guy intended, three thoughts dawned upon my stunned mind.
Thought the First: If you’re using toilet paper in a car at, say, seventy miles an hour on the highway, then you must have some serious foot control on the pedals. One wrong swipe and you could go careening off a cliff somewhere. That’d be a tough one to explain to the insurance adjustors.
Thought the Second: If the toilet paper is there for ‘afterward’, what the hell happens to the ‘during’? Either there’s a hole in the middle of this guy’s drivers’ seat, or I do not want to know what’s in his glove compartment.
Thought the Third: I really need to stop nosing around other people’s cars on the way to work.
So, for the rest of my commute I kept my eyes forward, my head up and was never again tempted by the ride of another. Whatever the hell happens in some of those cars out there stays in those cars out there, and that’s just the way i like it.
And if I ever drive past some bunch of wadded-up Charmin on the side of the road, I’m done. I’m taking the frigging bus before I want to think about what’s going on there.
Permalink | 2 CommentsSometimes life sends you an omen. Like our TiVo finally screeching to a halt on Friday, just a few hours before the NCAA ‘Sweet 16’ basketball game I desperately wanted to watch.
And sometimes, we ignore those omens. Like when I hooked my laptop up to the TV, streamed the game over our internet connection, and watched anyway.
Only to see my team’s collective ass handed to it on a hardwood platter, in one of the saddest displays of barely basketball since the wheelchair kids took on the neonatal ward patients at the local hospital. The preemie kids might have even shot better in the first half than my team — though, of course, they don’t rebound especially well. You don’t go banging down low in the paint when your soft spot hasn’t grown over yet. It’s just common sense.
The point is, my team is now out of contention for the national title, as has eventually been the case every season since I started this site.
(Come to think of it, they did win a championship just a couple of months before I began. Holy hell, maybe I’ve been jinxing them the past few years.
Or maybe they need to run the half-court offense more efficiently, work on their free throw shooting and do a better job of denying the pass into the high post on defense.
Yeah. I think I’ll go with door number two in this case. If the universe is conspiring to shoot my team in the foot because I’m over here making tasteless jokes and being snarky a few times a week, then I don’t know how the hell the system works in the first place, so screw it.
Also, look at Jim Belushi. He’s tasteless and snarky all the time, and a huge Chicago Cubs fan. If the ‘jinx’ thing were true, then they’d never have a prayer of winning anything again, either.
I mean… wait. Oh, shit.)
Anyway, my annual interest in college basketball has now waned to nothing. I’m proud of the team this year — for a squad unranked in the preseason and picked to finish 8th in their conference, making the round of 16 is nothing to sneeze a skyhook at.
Still, it’s always sad when the team you live and die with finally floats belly-up on the surface of the water. So before getting out the skimmer and flushing the memory of this season altogether, I thought I’d take a look back at the disappointments of Marches past. Feel free to check them out, but I warn you — it’s not pretty. Where the hell was this blogging idea of mine back in March of 2003?
End-of-Basketball Season Posts, with Selected Representative Quotes in Which You May Sense Some Subtle Pattern:
March 25, 2004: Yes, I’m Bitter — But I’m Right, Too, Goddamit
“I really wanted to care about basketball this weekend, and now… well, now I just don’t. Not until October, at least. And CBS does suck ass — Billy Packer’s a big fat weenie, there’s nothing good about Jim ‘Nancyboy’ Nantz, and I’ve got Clark Kellogg’s ‘flush with flava‘ right fucking here.”
March 19, 2005: It’s March — and I’m Mad!
“So, no basketball talk around here this weekend. The sport is dead to me. Dead. At least until next fall. March Madness can suck my ass.”
March 16, 2006: A Maddening March
“Which means, I don’t frankly give a polkaing Pekinese posterior what the hell happens to any other fricking team for the rest of this lousy, time-wasting, poopy tournament.”
March 13, 2007: Tournament? What Tournament?
“So, I’m out. As far as I’m concerned, basketball is over, at least until the fall. I’m not watching any stupid games, I’m not filling out any stupid brackets, and I’m certainly not listening to any more stupid Gumbels. I’m in full-out boycott mode. March Madness can suck it from three-point range.”
March, 2008: On blogging hiatus. Team didn’t make tourney. Would’ve been ugly and profane. Again.
Christ, I love hate college basketball. When does baseball season start, already?
My weekdaily walk from my car to the office takes me past a large condo complex. The building has been undergoing renovations for what seems like decades — it’s like they decided to install those newfangled ‘electrical fixtures’ at the beginning of the last century, and just never stopped updating. They probably said, ‘As long as we’re here, we might as well wait for granite countertops and security systems and fiber optic cabling to be invented, and install those, too.‘
They get high marks for forward thinking. But several million points off for having units left unoccupied while the contractors twiddle their thumbs waiting to install food synthesizers and holodecks and voice-controlled garbage disposals in all the condos. At some point, you just have to decide you’re behind the times and sell to old people. Not every place can be ‘trendy’, and there’s no shame in taking octogenarians’ money.
Unless you’re bilking them out of life insurance or false teeth cash. Then there’s a little shame. Possibly a lawsuit. Could be jail time. And plenty of crotchety old cane waggling. Which is something you never want to be on the business end of.
“They get high marks for forward thinking. But several million points off for having units left unoccupied while the contractors twiddle their thumbs waiting to install food synthesizers and holodecks and voice-controlled garbage disposals in all the condos.”
But back to the condos.
Lately, the owners of this perpetually-updated high rise seem to be concentrating on the outside of the building, rather than the inside. Perhaps they’ve finally exhausted all of the currently-viable options indoors, and are now ready for a few years of really cutting-edge landscaping to pull the whole thing together. Some kind of self-watering grass or flowers that bloom on command. Something overly expensive and complicated, probably.
(And I’m sure it’ll confuse the living shit out of any bees or butterflies in the neighborhood. Knowing this place, they’ll relocate those and install their own, anyway. It should only take a few more years to engineer bees that hum Yankee Doodle and inject aloe vera if they sting you. Why call it quits now, when a comprehensive paradise is so close at hand?)
I was walking past the place this morning, on the opposite side of the street, when I heard an odd sound coming from the condo yard. I’d never heard this particular sound before, and yet it was oddly recognizable. It was high-pitched, rhythmic and sounded a little something like this:
‘BWEE-ting! BWEE-ting! BWEE-ting!‘
By the third ‘BWEE!‘ or so, I knew it was the caution signal for some sort of vehicle backing up. The sound was sort of cute and whiny, so I figured maybe the landscapers had themselves a golf cart over there. Or, given where it was, some sort of sod-planting Segway. Or a Fisher-Price flower planter. Who knows with those people.
That’s when I turned to look, and saw the enormous mega-sized strip-mining-strength bulldozer gingerly backing over a section of the lawn. In no way did the dainty little noise coming out of it match the formidable size and scoop and wheels the size of hot air balloons. If I were an engineer installing the back-up warning signal on this behemoth, there’d be no wimpy ‘BWEE’ or ‘ting’ involved. If the real engineers had any sense of proportion at all, when this monstrous mound of machinery is thrown into reverse, a voice like James Earl Jones’ would bellow:
‘BACKING UP! BACKING UP! ALL YOU PUNY BITCHES BETTER HAUL ASS BACK THERE, BECAUSE I’M BACKING. THE HELL. UP.‘
Instead, the thing makes a sound like some battery-powered Tonka toy, and you’re supposed to know from that Tinkerbell tone that six thousand pounds of Caterpillar steel is bearing down on you. It hardly seems fair, frankly.
Of course, for all I know, that big hulking thing actually isn’t made of steel. I wouldn’t put it past those condo weenies to have equipment made out of aluminum over there, or some kind of inflatable bulldozer doohickey. Only the latest technology for those bleeding-edge folks.
Now, if they actually get tenants in there before the year 2048, I’ll be impressed. Maybe they can offer bulldozer rides as incentives. At least until it backs up and mushes someone who thought the sound was an ice cream truck coming down the street.
Me, I like the James Earl Jones idea. Dude could make a little extra cash with some voice work, and there’d never be another industrial vehicle backing-up accident again. Plus, think of the Darth Vader lines he could slip in, just for fun. ‘Luuuuke… I am… BACKING THE HELL UP!‘. Or ‘I find your lack of GETTING OUTTA THE WAY WHILE I’M BACKING THIS BITCH UP disturbing.‘
It’s just a win-win all around, I’m telling you. Why am I always the one who has to think of these things?
Permalink | No Comments(With baseball season approaching, I’ll likely be doing a bit more posting over at Bugs & Cranks in the next few weeks.
[For those interested, a big fancy site revamp is in the works over there, too. The new B&C v2.0 will be hitting the ground right around Opening Day, so stay tuned for that. Oh, whatever shall I wear to the red carpet premiere?]
As it happens, the party’s already started with yesterday’s posting of the inaugural Wednesday Walk Watch. Who can resist taking a walk the longest? Who’s got the twitchiest trigger this side of the Grapefruit League? And can anyone manage to post an on-base percentage lower than their batting average? All of this and more will be revealed in the Wednesday Walk Watch series. Once the season has the common decency to actually start, that is.
Meanwhile, today’s post is right here in your grubby little browser. Get readin’, cowpoke.)
I’m having a problem watching television.
Just a few weeks ago, the missus and I bought a new TV. Finally. Our previous set was from the last millennium, showing its age and in no way ‘HD-ready’. In fact, it’s safe to assume it was entirely HD-unprepared. I’m fairly well convinced that the television didn’t even believe in HD; it probably thought hi-def was just some sort of wild theory cooked up by the scientists to scare small child televisions. If it knew the truth, its antenna would shrink all the way up inside it.
” I’m fairly well convinced that the television didn’t even believe in HD; it probably thought hi-def was just some sort of wild theory cooked up by the scientists to scare small child televisions.”
The problem, however, is not with the old television. It’s gone now, off to that cathode ray tube playground in the sky. Rust in peace, old friend.
The problem also seems not to be with the new television. I haven’t had any troubles with it since I lugged the cursed behemoth up three flights of stairs because our local UPS driver is too damned lazy to do his job. The new TV sits there, like it’s supposed to. It turns on and off when you ask it to, like a good little electronic monkey. And I can almost feel most of my vertebrae again. So that’s not the issue.
And the TV itself seems to be on its best behavior. As soon as the set is on, sounds and pictures spew forth from it, as usual. All of the dancing, swirling pretty lights and colors that keep us entertained as a society so we don’t go doing crazy things like reading or talking or solving the current financial crisis. Hey, as far as I’m concerned, when Big Bang Theory is on, the world stops for a half an hour. If you need to show me something or tell me an important bit of news or ask my opinion on sustainable global fiscal management policies, you’ll just have to wait. Or catch me during a commercial; right now, Leonard’s building a go-kart or something, and Sheldon’s going to say something snarky about Heisenberg. You leave now. Very busy.
The problem comes a few seconds after flipping on the set. Just when I’m getting engaged in a show, when things are juicing up and looking interesting– everything goes away.
No picture. No sound. No juice. Nothing.
Then it comes back, with the action jumped ahead a couple of seconds.
And then gone again, the TV as black as the soul of an infomercial copywriter.
Then it’s back. And gone. Back. And gone. Lather. Rinse. And forget about enjoying your show, because the resulting time-lapse train wreck is virtually unwatchable.
Not that I mind the cutaways, exactly. I’m used to watching videos on the web — no, not those kind of videos, you hairy-palmed perverts — so I’m familiar with the lag you might get with video buffering, or a blip in the connection. But in the case of online video, the clip returns to whence it interrupted. It’s a little disconcerting, but you don’t miss anything.
Not so with the television trouble here — which is actually some kind of satellite trouble, or decoder box issue or inferior cable cockup, and I really shouldn’t be suggesting it’s the television’s fault. Although it was the TV that gave me a full-body hernia and repeatedly threatened to squash me like a ripe pudgy tomato every time I inched it up another stair. But I blame UPS for that. It’s not the television’s fault their doughy delivery tomatoes are all wussies.
Anyway, whatever technical snafu is going on, the upshot is that three to five seconds of live-action drama — or South Park poop jokes, or Iron Chef ingredient unveiling, or whatever it is we happen to be watching — is simply lost to the ether. The show winks out, and when it comes back, something’s happened and we don’t know what the hell it was.
And dammit, I can’t watch TV that way.
It’s bad enough when it’s some police drama or other. We get subjected to a lot of ‘And the murderer is–‘ or ‘Okay, okay, I buried all the bodies in–‘. And then we never hear the good bits. But if it’s CSI or Law & Order, that’s no dealbreaker. We always figure the bad guys will get locked up or shot or thrown off a building at the end, anyway, so why sweat the details? You catch a couple of witty one-liners and a labwork montage, and you’re good to go. The episodes are pretty much all the same; they just rotate actors and felonies around to make different stories. Police drama Mad-Libs. No biggie.
But there are more important considerations here. What if I’m watching the Simpsons, and I miss the Mr. Plow song? Or Bear Grylls is about to shove some filthy giant bug or worm or eyeball down his gullet, and the obligatory ‘Oh, blimey!‘ doesn’t make it down the wire? Worst of all, what if Good Eats is on, with Alton in the middle of explaining how to brine a turkey and he tells us to add six cups of–
Well, six cups of what, dammit? Orange juice? Chicken stock? Absolut Cintron? Antifreeze? FOR THE LOVE OF THANKSGIVING IN SPRINGTIME, BALDY, WHAT’S THE SECRET INGREDIENT? DON’T MAKE ME COME DOWN THERE AND WHIP YOU WITH A UNITASKER — I WANT ANSWERS, COOKING MAN!!‘
Clearly, it’s more stress than I can bear. Also, I’ve been cooking with a lot more vodka lately. Which mostly means ‘drinking it’, since I don’t know how to work the oven. Or the refrigerator. Or the microwave.
Also, evidently, the new TV. Either that, or the satellite box is yearning to join its old buddy up in obsolete technogadget heaven. It’s probably time to get a new converter-slash-TiVo doohickey.
Meanwhile, I’m taking advantage of the situation to watch some shows I just really, really hate. I figure this way when I miss something, I won’t really care. Also, I only have to see half the show or so, since the receiver keeps winking the rest away. Much more tolerable this way.
See, a lesser man might just forget about watching TV at all. Me, I’m turning it to my advantage. And I don’t have to read or talk or devise innovative budgetary strategies to pull the economy out of the crapper or anything. I just have to suffer through twelve minutes of Two and a Half Men, distributed across its regular thirty-minute time slot.
Say, maybe this ‘television problem’ isn’t so much of a problem, after all. Sweet.
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