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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Man, this is the hardest I’ve worked on a ‘holiday Monday’ in a long time. All I’ve done today is write, write, write. And even something that you’ll soon see — on another web site.
(Heh? Heh? How’s that grab you, eh? Folks, if that doesn’t get you all lubed up and itchy, then… well, frankly, that’s not terribly surprising.
But it gets me lubed up and itchy, so just be happy for me about that. And if you like, you can live vicariously through my, erm, lubed up and itchy bits. If you want. ‘Cause we tight like that.)
Anyway, more on that news in a few days, when the piece actually goes into virtual print. Or when I get a message back from the site owner, saying he’s had a change of heart… and I should have a change of meds. Either way, it’s new material, so that’s cool.
Everything else today is going to be ‘quick hit’ and random, I’m afraid — my brain is half-fried from overuse, and I’ve got a show in a couple of hours, so it’ll have to do.
(And the show is at some previously unheard-of location south of the city somewhere, in uncharted territory. MapQuest says that it’ll take me thirty to forty minutes to get there.
I call ‘hogwash’! Those bastards have never seen me navigate — I could spend thirty minutes finding my way into the place from the parking lot. Come to think of it, I really should have left this morning. Dammit.)
Hey, speaking of ‘quick hits’, there’s one I just noticed: It’s okay to call ‘hogwash’, and it’s fine to call ‘poppycock’. You can even call ‘poppywash’, if you like.
But don’t try calling ‘hogcock’. That’s a paddlin’, right there. Sicko.
Here’s an ‘only child’ line you can use, if you like:
‘Yeah, I’m an only child — I scared my parents out of having more kids. To this day, my father introduces me as ‘when good sperm go bad’.‘
I lied, just a little, way up there — I’ve mostly been writing all day, but I spent ten minutes watching ESPN this afternoon. Any idea what was on? Try the World Unified Arm Wrestling Championships.
Which brings up a couple of questions, frankly: first of all, was there ever really a need for competing arm wrestling federations? ‘Unified’ sounds impressive and all, but how serious a problem was this, really? We’re not talking about East and West Germany here. Was a simple merger of the six people in each group really out of the question?
Also, I wondered what the winner would receive for the title. In boxing and wrestling, you get a belt. In football and baseball, you get a ring. What’s the prize for arm wrestling? A wristwatch? A gold sleeve? A tennis bracelet, maybe? I’m just asking.
Oh, and by the way — ESPN is going down the shitter. Arm wrestling? What’s next — international tiddlywinks? The quarter-bounce quarterfinals, Midwest fraternity division? The national bingo qualifiers? Dammit, if you don’t have any real sports to put on, just loop highlights of Jeanette Lee playing pool for eight hours between SportsCenter and prime time. At least that has some entertainment value. Sheesh.
Finally, another story of my poor eyesight and addled brain, much like this one, from a few days ago:
I was having breakfast this weekend, and saw that my wife bought a new, healthier kind of maple syrup. I glanced at the bottle, and thought I saw the following claim:
‘One-half the crabs of Mrs. Buttersworth!’
Damn. Who knew Mrs. B. was such a slut? And how do they measure such things, too — who knows for sure if it’s exactly half?
One thing’s for sure — I have been way misinformed about how they make syrup. But damned if I don’t want to visit the factory now. That’s a field trip that’ll stick to your ribs! Woo hoo!
Permalink | 1 CommentI was reminded again today of one of the more depressing aspects of being me: I have zero artistic talent whatsoever. None. Bupkis. I do art like William Shatner does ‘subtle’. As in, ‘not at all’.
But occasionally, I’m pressed into service, and I have to struggle through some artsy-type nightmare or other. Like when I wasted a full night making banners for the site. And that quarter-assed attempt at artwork is about the limits of my capabilities, which is frankly rather sad. A chimp could piss in a paint can and smear it on the walls to better aesthetic effect than I could manage with a month of prep time, an art history class, and a staff of easel folders. I do many things — not many things well, granted — but I don’t do art. Not if I can help it.
(Which is actually pretty liberating, in its own twisted way. It’s frustrating to be fairly bad at something, but see glimmers of hope and talent and improvement. The entire golf industry, for example, relies on this phenomenon. If Granny Nine-Strokes didn’t get lucky every once in a while and bang one onto the green from a hundred yards out, she’d quit the damned sport and go back to her knitting. It’s those small victories between all the horrible sucking that keep us coming back.
But with art — like basketball, archery, and enjoying ballet — I don’t have those glimmers of hope. I suck, from beginning to end, consistently, every time I try. So eventually, I stopped trying. Basketball and archery have been good to me, and never asked me back. Thanks to my wife and my comedic aspirations, respectively, I sometimes have to bite the bullet and sit through a ballet or struggle with Photoshop. Just when I think I’m done, they pull me back in.)
Anyway, here’s the thing — there’s a little powwow for area comics going on tonight, and those of us hoping to find paid work have been encouraged to bring along tapes of our work, if we have them. Which I do. But said tapes aren’t labelled, which is where the art crap comes in.
See, I thought it would be cool to be just a little bit different. Nothing too outlandish — no stereograms of my name or pics of me wearing nothing but a Charlie Chaplin bowler and moustache on the label. Still, I figured even I could do better than black text on a white background, yawn, stretch, boooo-ring.
That’s when I had the bright idea to make the tape labels look like the site. See, I’m putting the URL on there anyway, in case anyone wants to see how I waste the rest of my free time when I’m not doing standup. So why not use the colors here — light and dark blues, with white text — on the labels? Then it all seems tied together, right? Planned, and shit. Why, if I were a more important person — like a businessman, or an entrepreneur, or a bag lady — that would be called ‘branding‘.
(Of course, as it is, it’s called ‘wasting an entire damned Sunday afternoon‘. But I digress.)
So, I fiddled around, and cursed my more-autistic-than-artistic sensibilities, and finally — finally, after hours of hopeless bullshit — worked out labels that I don’t think completely suck donkey ass.
(They only mostly suck donkey ass. Or they suck most of a donkey’s ass, leaving one little patch dry and unsuckified. Or maybe they suck most donkeys’ asses, but certain donkeys are exempt, for some reason. Like the really huge-assed donkeys, or maybe donkeys with no asses. I don’t know. It’s possible I’m overthinking this, just a tad.)
Anyway, I went through all of that, and found label sheets for the printer, and calibrated those, and finally got everything working, and labelled the damned tapes.
And then, after I was all finished, I looked at one of them. And it was fine… except I noticed that if you actually held the tape, as though you were putting it into a VCR, the labels were all wrong. My name on the spine was upside-down, and the label on the face was facing away. But that’s okay. I decided it didn’t bother me.
tick tick tick tick tick…
Well, I do want to look professional. Still, that’s a lot of work, scraping all those labels off. It’s fine.
tick tick tick tick tick…
Man, that does look pretty bad. But nobody notices those things, right? They can read it, and then turn it over and flip it around to play it. It’s cool.
tick tick tick tick tick…
Goddamnit. That’s it — they’re coming off. I’m such a douchebag.
So, I spent another hour peeling the bastards off, printing out more, and plopping them on in a way that won’t keep me awake at night. The moral of the story, folks? To paraphrase our beloved Dean Wormer:
‘Flighty, dimwitted and perfectionistic is no way to go through life, son.‘
(It doesn’t help that I do a pretty damned good job with ‘fat, drunk and stupid’, either.)
Damn, I hate art. Meh.
Permalink | 5 CommentsWhat the hell is wrong with people, anyway?
(Yeah, yeah, I know — I could start about three-quarters of my posts that way, more or less. ‘What the hell is wrong with scalpers?’ ‘What the hell is wrong with the weather?’ ‘What the hell is wrong with pandas?’ Or, most often, what the hell is wrong with me?’
Eh. It’s Friday. I’m in lazy weekend mode. Get over it.)
Anyway, here’s my latest beef — apparently, tonight is the annual Great Guinness Toast, an event that in years past has been celebrated with much hoopla, hops, and hullaballoo.
(But mostly hops, ’cause that’s what’s in the beer. It is the Great Guinness toast, after all.)
So, I’m a big fan of Guinness. I drink it. I buy it for the house. I’ve attended Guinness Believer events — and even waxed poetic and soggy about it afterward. And I’m a proud member of the 1759 Society.
(And a charter member, I might add, back when you had to pay $17.59 for a lifetime membership. And don’t think it doesn’t cheese me off that now any old drunken schmuck can join, and mooch off my hard-earned pennies dontaed to the cause.
I want a return to the old days… you know, when only drunken schmucks with seventeen bucks and change could join. Now, it’s just meaningless. Bah.)
Hell, I was even responsible for naming our softball team ‘Team Guinness’. I’m a fan, is all I’m saying. So when I heard from a buddy of mine that tonight is the 2005 Great Guinness Toast, I expected something… well, great. Some hype. A buzz. Fanfare.
I was sorely disappointed. What little faith I had left in humanity is waning.
First of all, I had lunch at a local Irish pub. Not the most authentic of its kind, even in Boston, but still — obviously Irish. Guinness on tap. Shamrocks all over the place. Fish ‘n’ chips on the menu, apostrophes and all. And was there one advertisement, or one word spoken, about any sort of Guinness-geared festivities? No. Not one. Disappointing.
But that’s fine, I thought. They’re really not a proper pub. Surely, I can check online and find a more suitable establishment for the occasion. So, I tried the Guinness web site. Nothing. Nothing at all. No mention of a toast, or a gathering, or anything. Yow.
So, in desperation, I tried searching Yahoo! News for ‘Great Guinness Toast‘.
Go ahead. Click the link. Go on — see what I saw. I’ll wait.
See? That’s slim fucking pickings, folks. In all of the vast online domain, there are exactly three references to ‘da Toast’. They’re all local entertainment notes from piddly little papers in Pittsburgh, Toledo, and Bradenton, Florida. That’s just sad.
Boston has nothing? Nobody, nationwide, in New York or L.A. or anywhere else, has hyped this event? The website has no mention? Have people all gone fucking crazy? Damn.
I don’t know. And right now, I don’t care. My buddy and I are going out — to somewhere passably Irish — and we’re going to drink Guinness tonight. All night. And at some point, we’ll raise a toast, even if no one else will. We’ll have our Guinness Toast, and dammit, it’ll be Great, with a capital ‘G’. Screw the website. To hell with the lack of hype. Fuck da po-lice. We’ll raise our glasses high, knowing that somewhere out there, our Toledan and Bradentonian and Pittsburghesian comrades are doing the same.
We may lament how far the world has fallen — this used to be our goddamned Christmas, people — but we’ll make the best of it, ne’ertheless. And maybe — just maybe, if you read this in time — you’ll do the same. So toast with me, gentle reader, at midnight tonight, to times gone by and toasts and adventures yet to come. We may be the only ones in the world who are going to bother, but at least we’ve got each other, right?
Um, right? Hello? Where’d everybody go? Meh. Buncha wussy wine cooler drinkers, probably. Pffffttt.
Permalink | 4 CommentsSpeaking of screwing up at work — see the last post, in case you missed that particular embarrassing little gem — I’m watching The Professional right now. On DVD. My wife bought it for me for Valentine’s Day, because she kicks all kinds of ass.
(Yeah, I know. I’ll tie it back in to the work thing. Keep your pantaloons on, there, Fredo.)
So, anyway, things are always going screwy at work, one way or another. I’m a programmer, and somehow I got stuck with babysitting this crap-ass legacy system for our group. I don’t know how, exactly — maybe I pissed somebody off, or lost a drunken bet I don’t remember. Or maybe it’s just karma, for all the annoying shit I’ve done in my life. Who knows?
Anyway, this system sucks ostrich ass. Feathers and all, seriously. It’s full of holes, fragile as hell, and everyone who was around when the bastard was built is gone now. Probably in loony bins somewhere, but that’s not the point. The point is, between this thing going down every ten minutes, and all the shit at work that I actually break myself, people are constantly running into my office, asking why some thing or other isn’t working, or why they get an error screen, or why their mothers never loved them.
I’m supposed to have all the answers, somehow. And I can see the people coming, with that look on their face. Concern. Anger. Fear.
(And a little bit of horny. Hey, I’m a sexy programmer — who can blame them?)
Anyway, back in the real world… when they come down the hall, looking for me — with that look — I always want to say the same thing to them. I never say it, but I always, always, always want to. The same quote, from The Professional. From Stansfield, to Mathilda, in the mens’ room in the DEA office, just the way he said it in the movie:
‘What filthy piece of… shit did I do now?‘
Classic. One day I’ll say it. Probably to one of the bosses, in a fit of wild, giggly abandon. And they’ll either get it, and say, ‘Hey, cool flick. And don’t talk to me like that, you douchebag.‘ Or they won’t get it, and I’ll be fired. Still — it’ll be cool. I just thought I’d share.
Okay, that’s it, then. I’m signing off, so I can watch the fireworks at the end of the movie. Man, that scene at the end with the Sting song always gets me. Who says romance is dead?
Permalink | 2 CommentsYou know, it’s one thing when I don’t edit posts around here, and find typos later. That’s maddening. Embarrassing, even.
But it’s quite another when I send an email to my boss — my female boss — without double-checking the wording. And then checking the message in my outbox, to see if I’d remembered to mention some little detail, and finding that I asked for:
‘more time for [project X], so I can get my dicks in a row.‘
Good lord. Whaddaya think my yearly evaluation is gonna say about that? Jeez.
Permalink | 4 Comments
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