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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
When you get to be my age, it’s important to get every extra little edge you can. I’m nearly thirty-seven years old. So it could all go up in smoke tomorrow; I’ve got to grab life by the short and curlies while I’ve only got the one foot in the grave.
Of course, sometimes those extra edges come back to bite me in the ass. Like today, when I made a trip to my local drug store to restock on magic elixirs and rejuvanatory tonics.
“According to the gubment, I might as well be snorting Skittles.”
Specifically, I went to grab a new bottle of glucosamine and chondroitin. That’s the snake oil du jour for decrepit old bastards like me with wonky joints. The doctors tell us these big three- and four-syllable words keep our knees and elbows from swelling up like throbbing ouchy cantaloupes. Again.
The bottle says this:
“These nutrients promote long-term joint flexibility and ease of motion.”
That’s near the top. After that, there’s an asterisk, which references this leetle itty-bitty text at the bottom, barely visible with the naked eye:
“This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent disease.”
Jeez. Thanks a lot, Dr. Bringdown. Can’t a man enjoy his placebo in peace? According to the gubment, I might as well be snorting Skittles.
Anyway, I’ve been taking these sugar pills for a while and my knees have felt pretty good for a near-cadaver, so why stop now? In fact, I decided today to up the dose, for that extra ‘edge’ I was talking about earlier.
That’s where the aforementioned ass-biting comes in. You’d think I’d have learned by now. People in their golden years are supposed to fear change. Must be the Alzheimer’s.
At any rate, I noticed at the druggist’s today that the pills come in a new ‘triple strength!!‘ style. And the bottle was only a couple of bucks more than my puny old wussified ‘single strength’ pills. Of course, the important math didn’t occur to me. If, as the FDA suggests, the pills are doing zero good in the first place, then zero times three still equals zero. But I didn’t go there. The Alzheimer’s, remember?
(Well, one of us has to remember. Try taking notes or something.)
So what went wrong? It’s the pills. I was ready for them to be three times the strength. I might have understood if they were three times the price. But I just shook one out of the bottle, and I’m pretty sure it’s three times the size of the old pills. The regular strength kind are caplets, smallish and soft and easily swallowable. The new ones?
They’re huge. Huge. They look like horse pills. And I don’t mean ‘pills you feed to horses’, either. I mean, they’re the actual size of freaking horses. Saddles and all.
Look. I’ve done a lot of thinking tonight about these pills. And quite a bit of online medical research. And I have yet to identify an orifice I can fit these things into. Not a bodily orifice, anyway. Maybe — maybe — I could stuff one into the fireplace. Or the bathtub. Short of that, I’m not seeing it. And neither is my esophagus.
On the other hand, I’d prefer that my knees not snap in half, if it’s at all avoidable. And at my age, those leg bones are like cardboard. If the pills are doing anything at all, it’s worth a shot. So I’ve got three choices: trade these stupid footballs in for a bottle of the old caplets, slice them up with a pizza cutter into manageable pieces, or find some way to swallow the things. Like stuffing them down my throat with a plunger, or washing them down with water from a high-pressure fire hose.
Come to think of it, it’d probably be easier to just stop walking now, or using my joints at all. I can’t have that many years left, right? How much worse can it get?
Permalink | 5 CommentsFirst, a quick Braves bit over at Bugs & Cranks:
Elevator Baseball — The Braves go up; the Braves go down. Do they go up again?
And now, more baseball-inspired tomfoolery.
I’m sitting here watching the artificially engineered spectacle that is the MLB Home Run Derby. This is the hypefest that started it all in the other sports. Without this event, we might never have been blessed with the NBA Slam Dunk contest or Three Point Shootout, the NHL Skills Competition, or the NFL’s Strongest Man, Fastest Man, or Best Hands Pro Bowl events.
Okay, maybe ‘blessed with’ is going a little far. How about ‘burdened with, to make the sports television fat cats a few million more bucks of walking-around money’? That’s probably closer. But I’m not interested in disparaging these contests. Instead, I’m here to help. As usual.
“The dunk contest gets some attention, but honestly now — how many ‘open-court’ dunks are there in an actual NBA game? One? Three? None? I mean, assuming Golden State isn’t on defense. Obviously.”
See, the reason the Home Run Derby has been so successful and lasted so long is that it represents the crucial, most intriguing matchup in the game of baseball — the battle between pitcher and batter. Then, it bastardizes that battle into an unrealistic, lopsided farce. The pitcher is told to soft-toss fat easy pitches over the plate, like a father chucking meatballs to his kid at a Little League practice. Then the batters swing themselves out of their jock straps, trying to launch the ball four hundred feet or more. And why?
Because we’ll watch it, of course. At least, enough of us will watch it to justify selling the ads for car insurance or home computers or whatever the network decides to shill between swings.
And the reason you may not have heard of some of the other ‘skill-fests’ above is that they haven’t yet found the true essence of their respective sports. The dunk contest gets some attention, but honestly now — how many ‘open-court’ dunks are there in an actual NBA game? One? Three? None? I mean, assuming Golden State isn’t on defense. Obviously.
Clearly, the non-baseball sporting diversions need a bit of advice on how to plan their All-Star festivities. So here are a few suggestions for how our various pro leagues can better represent themselves:
NHL Hockey: The current skills contest is okay, I guess. But who cares if a guy can go top shelf and break a plate with a slapshot at twelve paces? Hockey’s still all about the fights — so let’s have a competition for the enforcers, already.
How’s this: Pick the meanest, brawliest, thuggiest guys in the league. Each one gets three punches to the jaw on some schlub from the audience. Most teeth knocked out wins the prize — and a new house (and medical expenses) for the volunteer. Everybody wins!
NBA Basketball: What’s the truly crucial skill in hoops? Not dunks — too rare. Ditto three pointers. Hell, most guys only shoot a handful of times per game. So what, then?
Dribbling. There are thousands of dribbles every game; you practically can’t play basketball without them. But can Jason Kidd dribble on broken glass? Can Tony Parker crossover past a nest of live cobras without travelling? How long can Allen Iverson dribble while walking over hot coals? I for one would like to find out.
NFL Football: In football, it’s the chess match between the quarterback and defensive players that offers the most intrigue. Let’s take a cue from baseball and make things a little lopsided — but this time, let’s throw the defense a bone.
The scene: a lonely QB in the backfield, with none of his pesky lineman friends around. Each defender gets five hits, with a five-yard run-up. Whoever knocks a piece of equipment the furthest down the field — the ball, a helmet, a protective cup, whatever — wins.
And the Pro Bowl is in the offseason, so those quarterbacks have all kinds of time to heal up. Sweet.
NASCAR Auto Racing: One word: Chicken.
Three more words: High-speed. Oval. Chicken.
Now we just need to find somebody on the circuit who knows how to turn right, so we can get the cars pointed at each other. This one’s a work in progress.
MLS Soccer: I have no idea what really drives this sport. They could do ‘jogging down the field’ competitions, maybe. ‘Best hooligan fans’? ‘Most creative drawing an offsides technique’?
Seriously. No idea whatsoever.
IFOCE Competitive Eating: They don’t really have an ‘All-Star’ competition, so far as I know. But that Nathan’s hot dog chowdown between Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut on the 4th got me thinking. Cramming your gob full of food for twelve minutes is one thing. But can these guys eat a marathon, the way they swallow a sprint?
I’d like to know. So here’s my proposal: if Kobayashi and Chestnut remain one-two atop the IFOCE standings, with no other real challengers, I say they should have a one-on-one faceoff, to settle things once and for all:
Eat Sonya Thomas, currently ranked number four in the world in the IFOCE rankings. At a slender 105 pounds. Or roughly the weight of Eric ‘Badlands’ Booker‘s left foot. Those guys could totally eat her, in twenty minutes tops.
Okay, so maybe they shouldn’t actually eat Sonya Thomas. She probably wouldn’t go for it — and anyway, she’s in the top five; she’s kind of a celebrity now. People would probably notice when she stopped showing up to eat her own weight in dill pickles or whatever.
So how’s this — make a mold of her body. Fill it with SPAM. Give the top two guys a fork and let them dig in, one on each end. Whoever reaches the navel first wins. Who wouldn’t watch that? I know I would.
Hell, if it’s anatomically correct, I’d probably even TiVo it. Two guys chowing down on a life-size tinned-meat mannequin with lady parts in all the right places? Even Joe Morgan commentary couldn’t ruin that.
Permalink | No CommentsI have this problem.
I have hair. On my head. That’s not the problem, exactly.
But I’m also straight, don’t have dandruff, I’m not balding, not hiding gray hair, and I’m over twelve years old. And that, from a shampoo buyer’s standpoint, is a problem.
Because there are no shampoos marketed specifically for me, or my kind. Instead, we’re awash in a sea of girly hair products, medicinal tonics, and ‘no more tears’ kiddie concoctions. There’s no shampoo for regular guys like me who don’t — and don’t want to — spend a lot of time concerned about our ‘dos. We’re simple folk. We just want to shampoo. We don’t want conditioners. We don’t gel, or spritz, or mousse.
“If a fluffy towel and a sunny day was good enough for caveman coifs, then it’ll do just fine for mine.”
Hell, I don’t even dry my hair. If a fluffy towel and a sunny day was good enough for caveman coifs, then it’ll do just fine for mine. Have you ever seen a Neanderthal with bedhead? Me, neither.
I knew early on that finding a shampoo would be a problem. I used that ‘tearless’ J&J baby shampoo as a kid, and I milked it as long as I could. I used it at twelve. At fourteen, I hung with it. At sixteen, I was still sudsing up like a toddler. But eventually, it became ‘weird’, apparently, so I looked for another shampoo.
If it weren’t for sleepover parties in high school, I might still be lathering up with the Johnsons today. It’s true what they say — kids whose shampoo bottles aren’t still Oscar the Grouch-shaped can be so cruel.
After as little thought as possible, I settled on my first ‘adult’ hair care product — Ivory Shampoo. It’s not a perfect choice, but it’s the best I could do at the time. I worried for a while whether it was a little ‘delicate’ for the image I was shooting for. Overnight trips are one thing — but facing the same kids in the dorm every day with the wrong kind of shampoo? That could have set my social calendar back by a matter of years.
Happily, no one said much about my Ivory. And I was encouraged a few weeks into my freshman year when the very-good-but-very-gay hairdresser — the only ‘barber’ facsimile in our small college town — asked me what I used on my hair. When I told him, I thought he was going to faint. He nearly ran himself through with his pinking shears in dismay, and waxed poetic throughout the haircut about ‘Vidal’ this and ‘Masson’ that, and how my follicles needed to be defoliated — or my foliates needed to be defollicled? Something like that. I didn’t may much attention, frankly. Nor did I change my hair care strategy. At that point, I thought I had a shampoo for life.
So, of course, a few years later they stopped making Ivory shampoo. At least, I couldn’t find it any more. Maybe they found it caused cancer, or scurvy, or a kid overdosed on it somewhere. Or maybe my huffy hairdresser friend wrote his Congressman and got it banned somehow. I don’t know. I just know I needed a new shampoo. Again.
I settled on Pert Plus. I wasn’t happy about it. But that’s my problem — what the hell else is out there? There’s no ‘Guinness Extra Stout Hair Foam’ available. Major League Baseball doesn’t endorse any shampoos that I know of. And ‘Gee, Your Hair Smells Like Fresh-Cut Grass and Nachos’? Forget about it.
Still, the “P-squared ‘poo” has its advantages. There are no flowers or anything too frilly about the packaging. The bottle is big, so I don’t have to restock very often. And there’s conditioner in the bottle, apparently, so I don’t have to take an extra step in the shower or worry about any hair cutters committing shear seppoku on the basis of my product choice.
(Plus, here in Boston there are plenty of barbers. Real barbers — grumpy old men with forty-year-old chairs and clippers to match. Those guys don’t care what you shampoo with, any more than they want to know what brand of toothpaste, toilet paper, or tater tots you buy.
For the record: Aquafresh, Cottonelle, and Ore-Ida.
Hey, I said they don’t care. But I can still pretend you do.)
So Pert Plus is fine, I suppose. It’s not ‘SportsCenter Shampoo’ or Man Show ‘Juggy-Endorsed’ or anything good like that. But it does the job, and I don’t have to do any thinking about it.
Until I run out. Like this weekend.
For the past three days, I’ve been Pert-less. So I’m at the mercy of whatever my wife uses on her hair, and that’s no good at all. Between the fruity-smelling stuff and the ‘Tea Tree’ nonsense — which doesn’t smell like tea or trees, I can assure you — there’s nothing I’m very comfortable squeezing out of a bottle and rubbing on my scalp. The best I’ve been able to manage is something called ‘Suave’ — which sounds like it might be made for a man. But it’s not. If I took ‘Suave’ on a sleepover, I’d wake up hung by my underwear on a coat hook.
So tomorrow, I’ll stop by the drug store and see what I can find. Probably, I’ll find Pert Plus again, and go back to my usual ways — boring, perhaps, but safe and easy. Or maybe I’ll run into something new — some shampoo developed just for my demographic: the ‘no-muss, no-fuss, no-fancy-gooey-crap’ kind of hairgrowers.
My fingers are crossed for the ‘grass and nachos’ stuff. With that kind of shampoo, I might grow my locks long, so I could smell it all day. Mmm-mmmm!
Permalink | 7 CommentsTwo more Braves bits over at Bugs & Cranks to get things started:
Home Sweet League — Thank the gods we’re not playing those damned American Leaguers any more
And:
Looking Back, Springing Forward? — At the halfway pole, are the Braves a thoroughbred, or glue factory fodder?
Now, on with the show.
My mother-in-law was in town for a few days this past week. She and my parents come to Boston every summer (separately, of course, lest we risk a reprise of “The Wedding Reception Chicken Dance Debacle of ’96”), and after eight years of visits, things are starting to get a bit complicated. Specifically, we’re not sure where to take them.
That’s not to say that we’ve run out of places to take them. Boston’s a big place, and it’s pushing four hundred years old. There are thousands of historic sites and museums and exhibits and ‘George Washington’s cousin’s wife once peed on this rock‘ plaques to last a lifetime of tours around here.
The problem is, we’ve seen a few of them now. And if you’ve seen one peed-on rock, then you’ve pretty much seen them all. And we’d hate to have our guests thinking that Boston has nothing more to offer than what we’ve already shown them. So it’s a challenge to keep the tourist treks ‘fresh’ for repeat visitors.
“That’s approximately the point where I stopped being a mature, sober(ish) adult on a tour, and turned into a squealing ten-year-old boy with a Pixie Stix rush.”
For first-timers, it’s so much easier. We take baseball fans to a game at Fenway Park. Foodies, we escort to Legal Seafood or to one of the excellent local sushi houses. Families and shoppers can spend a day at Faneuil Hall.
(And for the love of Boston cream pie, don’t try to sound that last one out, if you’ve never heard it pronounced. I did that once, and it wasn’t pretty.)
But what to do with folks who’ve done all that — and walked the Freedom Trail downtown? And strolled through Boston Common? And watched fireworks by the Charles River, checked out Plymouth Rock, trekked to Salem for the witch museum, AND walked the deck of the U.S.S. Constitution?
Short of finding them their own rock to pee on by the Old North Church, I don’t know, either. So it’s a good thing my wife is around to think of places to take our visitors. Because there’s plenty enough pee on the streets of downtown Boston as it is. Or so I would assume.
This time around, the missus outdid herself. Not only did she work out a schedule including two restaurants her mother hadn’t been to and a museum exhibit featuring a well-known artist, she slipped something in for me, too — a tour of Fenway Park.
It might seem odd that a baseball guy and Fenway fanatic like me had never toured the field before. But a stadium tour isn’t like a baseball game. I go to games every chance I get — which, with the ticket prices at Fenway, is basically whenever I can finagle another mortgage from the bank. But you can’t spell ‘tourist’ without ‘tour’, so for the ‘behind-the-scenes’ Fenway experience, we had to wait for a visitor. And our chance came this weekend.
Most of the tour was pretty straightforward. We sat in the grandstand, and on one of the roof decks, and the perky Sox tour guide instructed us in the history, trivia, and minutiae of Fenway Park. It was interesting and enlightening stuff, but it paled in comparison to the latter bit of the tour, when we were allowed onto the warning track, facing the mighty Green Monster itself.
That’s approximately the point where I stopped being a mature, sober(ish) adult on a tour, and turned into a squealing ten-year-old boy with a Pixie Stix rush. On the field at Fenway? Standing on the hallowed ground of Sox heroes past and present? Without hopping the fence and being tackled by burly security guards? Eeeeeee!
As we prepared to walk onto the crushed brick surface of the track and gaze up at the Monster towering thirty-seven feet above us, our tour guide puckered her brow into a stern little look and told us:
“Now, many tour groups don’t get to go onto the field. This is because some people like to reach down and scoop up part of the track to take home as a souvenir. So don’t do that and ruin it for everyone else. I’ll be watching you out there, and if I see anyone bending over to scoop up a handful, I’ll be very upset.”
Fair enough. Far be it from me to be part of ‘the problem’ at Fenway Park — least of all when it comes to keeping the field pristine. I was quite happy enough with my close-up camera shots of the Green Monster and the field-level snaps of the diamond below.
Still.
It’d be nice to say I know what the warning track at Fenway Park feels like. I could sort of feel it crunching underfoot, but I wasn’t actually touching the field, exactly. Surely I couldn’t give up my one chance to physically contact a part of baseball history. Could I?
No. I couldn’t.
So I slyly bent to one knee to ‘tie’ my shoe, which was, of course, in no need of retying. Craftily checking both ways, I prepared to carry out my plan — an open-palmed rub in the Fenway warning track grit. I swear on the popsicled head of Ted Williams, I was only going to rub the track. No scooping.
As I reached out toward my destiny, I heard a crunch and a loud ‘Ahem!‘ behind me. I looked around to see the tour guide, with her face all scrunched up again, slowly shaking her head at me, as if to say, ‘Don’t. You. Dare.‘
(I know that look well. My wife gives me that look all the time. My mom used to give me that look. The dog gives me that look. My boss gives me that look. I’m pretty sure when we walked into Fenway, the statue of Ted Williams outside gave me that look.
He’s just pissed about the ‘popsicled head’ comment. Frozen old ballplayers are so sensitive.)
Clearly, the jig was up. She could see my well-tied shoes. She knew my kneel was a ruse. And while I hadn’t done anything yet, she was certainly not letting me put my hands anywhere near that warning track. So I did what any self-respecting Fenway fan would do in that situation.
I licked it.
That’s right. I licked Fenway Park. As I was getting up, I dropped my other knee down, bent over away from our tour guide, and got a big fat tongueful of warning track before rising to my feet and dusting off. I thought I disguised it rather well, but I couldn’t be sure what the guide saw, so I turned around, showed her my squeaky-clean palms, and said, by way of explanation: ‘Mmmrph.‘
It’s kind of hard to talk with a mouthful of crushed brick, and I wasn’t about to open wide enough to give it away. She looked at me for a minute, still scrunchy, then shrugged and went back to telling us about Johnny Pesky’s lumbago or something or other. Meanwhile, I hung behind the back of the group to pick bits of brick out of my teeth for the remainder of the tour.
But I got what I wanted, and got to feel Fenway Park, up close and personal. Even better, I Frenched Fenway Park. That’s going on the old resume, for certain. And now not only do I know how the field at Fenway feels, I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that another championship is on the way.
As a matter of fact… I can taste it.
Permalink | 1 CommentI get a lot of spam.
Occasionally, I’ll wander through my spam folder, just to make sure that none of my actually wanted mail has slipped into there. I’d certainly hate to miss something important, like a message letting me know a long lost relative has died and left me a fortune in Burundi, or that those mortgage offers, fake Rolex ads, and email lottery notifications that I signed up for have finally arrived.
Usually, the messages in my bulk folder are just what I’d expect — a melange of eBay spoofs, fake bank notices, dubious software shills, penis puffening pills, and Bavarian goat porn fetish web sites. But lately, I’ve noticed a growing trend in the sea of spammy subject lines. More and more, the filthy spam spewers seem to be trying to sell us antivirus software.
Uh-wha? That doesn’t even begin to remotely think out trying to compute.
“The stuff spammers mostly focus on are the things people are most likely to abandon caution to gain — scads of cash, fabulous merchandise, and genitalia that can press a doorbell button from the far side of the porch.”
Think about it. The stuff spammers mostly focus on are the things people are most likely to abandon caution to gain — scads of cash, fabulous merchandise, and genitalia that can press a doorbell button from the far side of the porch. Most of us know the filthy spam monkeys can’t really offer these things. But their bread and butter is based on blasting enough blather into enough mailboxes to find the few gentle snowflakes who might go for the ruse. Greed can be a powerful motivator.
(And, based on the contents of my spam folder, so can a penis that doubles as a vaulting pole.
Personally, it seems like that would be a mite inconvenient. The wedgies alone from all the ‘tenting’ would be excruciating. Not to mention all the things you’d knock off countertops, and the elevator buttons you’d accidentally press.
Maybe it’s just me. The spam people send an awful lot of those emails out. Must be something to it.)
But antivirus software isn’t like any of that. It’s protection. And protection’s not sexy. You don’t see supermodels on the cover of glamour mags wearing lead aprons and safety goggles. Shin guards and splash shields won’t get you many phone numbers at the bar. And no man has ever told his special lady:
‘No, no, honey — leave the oven mitts and shoulder pads on and come to bed.‘
What’s more, antivirus software is protection against exactly the sorts of people who peddle spam in the first place. It’s the mass-mailing morons who spread most of the viruses, Trojan horses, worms, and other nasty infectious e-critters out there.
So why in the world would anyone trust a spammer to sell them — or even give them — antivirus software? That’s like taking life insurance from Jack Kevorkian. Or a pre-nuptial agreement from Elizabeth Taylor? Or a pack of condoms from Paris Hilton. It’s just not smart, is what I’m saying.
I think I’ve figured out what they’re up to. It’s all an elaborate social Darwinian experiment. I’ll bet the antivirus spam emails are being sent out by rogue scientists, intent on culling the least intelligent users from the internet. They load up the antivirus emails with the nastiest viruses and worms around, so that the people foolish enough to click on them become immediately and hopelessly infected — thus making the internet a better, smarter, and more habitable place for the rest of the world.
That must be it. It just has to be. And I for one applaud their efforts.
At least, I will applaud them. Just as soon as I get rid of all these damned viruses and worms I seem to have suddenly contracted. Can a brother get a Norton suite over here, please? Little help?
Stupid spammers.
Permalink | 1 Comment
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