me’s blog

By the time I arrived home after work today it had started to rain, yet the sun was still shining brightly.  I ran inside to grab my camera, not knowing whether I could capture even a fraction of the intensely beautiful golden rain I saw falling from the sky.  No dirty jokes please.  This was freakin’ beautiful.  One of the pictures came out pretty good, so I’m sharing it with both of my faithful readers.  As Tyra Banks would say, here is your best shot.  Enjoy!

Happy Friday, faithful readers!  As a reward for putting up with my frequently verbose and occasionally borderline-lunatic rantings and ravings about soap operas and restroom signage and oh so many things in between, I thought I’d offer the six of you an irresistibly joyous little ditty to start your weekend off right. 

Alphabeat (my current favorite band) has just released not one but TWO videos for their second single.  It’s their follow-up to their brilliant debut "Fascination", a song which you may remember falling in love with just a couple weeks ago right here.

If you have somehow managed to dislodge that song from your brain, get ready for another equally infectious track that will have you bouncin’ up and down and singing along with its hooky chorus and its closing "doot-doot-doot"s long after the song has ended.  It opens with the line "I was not looking for arty farty love" and just gets better and better from there. 

So without further ado, here are the original UK video and the new US video for "10,000 Nights Of Thunder" by Alphabeat.  I personally prefer the UK version, mainly because it keeps the full original version of the song intact, complete with copious amounts of increasingly manic "doot-doot-doot"s at the end.  Okay, here we go.  Compare, contrast, but most of all, enjoy!

My coworker spotted this sign in a public restroom during her trip to Virginia Beach last week, and graciously shared it with me upon her return.

Let’s see.  Where to begin.  Okay first of all, seriously?  You have GOT to be freaking kidding me.  Is this really necessary?  And if so, for whom?  What’s the intended demographic here?  I’ve known puh-lenty of alcoholics and addicts in my day, people who would swallow or snort or drink just about anything and ask questions later.  I can say with absolute certainty that despite the numerous stories of people hitting rock bottom that I’ve heard while in recovery, stories which frequently include waking up covered in one’s own vomit and/or piss, NOT ONCE has anyone ever mentioned drinking from a toilet or a urinal.  From a urinal?  How would one even drink from a urinal if one wanted to?  And why bother?  It’s not as though a urinal provides an overflowing abundance of water anyway.  Besides that, the angle is all wrong - especially those low urinals for the vertically challenged down at the end of the row.  Better stretch first, or you could throw your back out!  Perhaps a straw would help, but fortunately that would be an unlikely find in a public restroom.  A silly straw would probably be ideal, but that might just make the whole thing look silly.

Is this gross misuse of public facilities unique to men and their urinals, or do women have their own version of the sign in their "hygiene lounges"?  I find it rather difficult to imagine a woman drinking from a urinal, but not a whole lot more difficult than imagining a man drinking from one.  Admit it, the visual is a tough one to put together.  Maybe this sign is meant for children, which brings to light a whole other set of concerns.  Has this great nation’s once enviable educational system deteriorated to a point where children are no longer taught the fundamental difference between water that is drinkable and water that people have peed in?  Is this the whole point of the "NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND" movement?  Was it shortened for catchiness and commercial accessibility from its original name, "NO CHILD LEFT To Drink From Where Someone’s BEHIND Just Defecated"?

Perhaps I’m being closed-minded and this is just another hip new trend that has somehow passed me by, thus prematurely casting me in the role of the curmudgeonly old man whose three recent hip replacements have ultimately failed to replace any trace of bygone hipness, leaving me to gently rock on my rickety porch while pointing a wrinkled, liverspotted finger at today’s youth and chastising "those crazy kids and their loud music and their wacky toilet-slurping ways".  My sincerest apologies for the unwieldiness of that last sentence.  "When I was your age, we drank out of Britta pitchers and our sentences were never more than 21 words long!"

But I think the pièce de résistance on the sign has got to be the inclusion of the phrase "Non-Potable Water."  Um, if you’re moronic enough to go drinking out of toilets and urinals and if you find yourself incapable of comprehending the first part of the sign, chances are you probably don’t know what the word "non-potable" means either.  Hell, the only place I’ve ever even heard the word "potable" is when they have that stupid "Potent Potables" category on Jeopardy, a category which I inevitably bomb every time.  It just seems to be a pointless addition to an already rudimentary sign, unless of course Alex Trebek was the impetus for the sign’s creation in the first place.  Oh my God!  That’s it!  Alex Trebek is on a one-man mission to drain every drop of moisture from every urinal cake in every public restroom across America!  I’d imagine potables don’t get much more potent than that. 

Wow, suddenly the phrase "suck it, Trebek!" takes on a whole new meaning.

The good news is that the writers’ strike is over, and new episodes of my favorite shows have now returned to the airwaves.  The bad news is that this influx of new programming seems to be having an inversely proportional relationship to the manageability of my life.  As you may know, I’m a bit of a tv addict.  The majority of what I watch is quality television, which means that my Thursday nights have turned into a burdensome night for my poor little DVR.  Ugly Betty, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, 30 Rock, and The Office are all automatically recorded on Thursday, though by the end of this season I’ll probably have given up on Grey’s, since I now feel like I’m watching it out of obligation rather than interest.  (I just re-dropped Desperate Housewives from my Sunday roster because of a similar feeling.)

But these shows are not the problem.  The problem is that during the strike - and, more specifically, during the week I had off for Christmas break - I rekindled ill-fated relationships with General Hospital and One Life To Live, two soap operas I hadn’t watched since my passed-out days spent on various people’s couches before getting sober.  I’ve been DVRing them EVERY DAY SINCE, watching them either late at night during the week or as a marathon on the weekends.  And now I cannot stop watching them.  I need help.  I am outing myself here as a soap opera addict because I truly believe that a person is as sick as his secrets, and that letting something like this out and asking for help is the first step towards a successful recovery.

As evidence of the effects that this brutal addiction can have on a sane, healthy person and his sentence structure, here is an instant message that came out of me recently while chatting online with a friend:

"You see, Nikolas recently lost the love of his life, Emily, when she was strangled by the Text Message Killer, and now Nikolas refuses to have his lethal brain tumor surgically removed because one of its side effects is that it allows him hallucinations of Emily, hallucinations which he can see, touch, kiss, etc., so instead he’s taking an experimental drug offered to him for $10 million by Doctor Devlin, who’s secretly leading a double life as the hitman who just tried to take out mob-boss Sonny but ended up accidentally shooting Sonny’s 10-year-old son Michael in the head instead."

[Side note: Although little Michael is still in an air-quotedly "permanent" coma, I am pleased to report that Nikolas has since decided to have his tumor removed.  Don't get too excited.  He's made the decision, but he hasn't had the operation yet.  He finally said goodbye to Emily yesterday.  It might've been touching if I hadn't been shouting at the tv for the past three months for him to just get the damn operation already.]

Now I will be the first to admit that both General Hospital and One Life To Live - and pretty much every soap I’ve ever watched - are downright crap.  I’m not being immodest when I say that watching them is beneath me, and I’d venture a guess that most people who watch them probably feel the same way, albeit perhaps subconsciously.  Both shows are written in a way which seems to insult the intelligence of even the most chuckleheaded of viewers and, despite a few distinguishing traits and varying levels of acting skill when handling the borderline-retarded material, all of the characters share one common characteristic which trumps all the others and which cannot be ignored.  They are all dumb as a box of… um, soap.

The formula is as simple as the characters.  Scenes are extremely short, playing to the limited attention spans of an MTV-influenced America.   Each scene starts with a subtly bludgenous refresher of how the last scene in that particular storyline ended.  How stupid are these people that they can’t remember what was said a mere handful of seconds ago?  Then the conversation proceeds a few millimeters, and it becomes obvious that the scene is about to end because something is on the verge of happening.  But nothing does end up happening, because right as it’s about to, the camera hovers on one of the actors just long enough to make the viewer wonder whether that actor has forgotten his or her next line, and then the scene ends.  This bizarre phenomenon presents a two-fold problem.  Since nearly everyone on a soap opera has any number of closeted skeletons, their long scene-ending pauses make them seem both unbelievably stupid and, perhaps more importantly, incredibly suspicious.  Then, when they need to be reminded of what just transpired when we revisit them a few minutes later, the inate dimness of the other characters in the scene is underscored by their apparent obliviousness to how weird and suspicious their scenemates are acting.  It’s a horrendously vicious cycle of stupidity perpetuated by stupidity. 

The end result is that pretty much nothing ever happens.  It’s not quite as bad on General Hospital, where the writers can use the Port Charles mafia and the titular hospital to jack up the frequency of the occurrence of situations with somewhat high stakes.  And I’ll admit that there really are some talented actors on there who manage to make the writers’ most transparent stalling tactics and banal dialogue somehow seem genuine.  Still though, not much ends up happening.  Over on One Life To Live, however, all of it is poorly-acted crap about relationships and paternity issues and business deals and, come on, who cares?  I don’t, and yet I watch.  Every freakin’ day.  Fortunately on DVR I can get through the two shows in about 90 minutes, but still, that’s 90 minutes a day.  Clearly, I have a problem.

A friend of mine once observed that someone should edit each daily episode of every hour-long soap opera down to a 5-minute recap, which could then be viewed online.  What a perfect solution!  Why hasn’t anyone cashed in on this?  Then I’d only have 5 minutes to catch up on every day per show, which is about how much time each episode’s loosely-defined "action" would take once you boil it down and get rid of all the fat. [I don't cook, so I apologize if my cooking metaphors are unfavorably mixed.] 

It’s the deeply addictive nature of these truly sucktacular shows that simultaneously fascinates and terrifies me, mainly because I cannot entirely fathom what it is that makes them so addictive.  The only theory I have is that the way I feel when I watch these shows sort of parallels the way I felt many years ago when I would do coke.  I always felt like it wasn’t the actual drug itself that was making me high, because most times I found the drug itself to be rather weak and its effects fleeting.  What kept me high, I think, was more the psychological awareness that I would need to do more every 15 minutes or so.  I think that’s how the soaps are too.  It’s obviously not any feeling of satisfaction I get from the show itself that keeps me coming back for more.  On the contrary.  It’s the inherently dissatisfying nature of the show and the resulting need to come back for more that keeps me coming back for more.  GAH!

So now I turn to you, my faithful readers, in this my hour of need.  Have any of you ever found yourselves victims of this horrifically sinister conspiracy?  And if so, how did you manage to free yourself from the Vulcan death-grip it had on your soul?  I am not familiar with any rehab facility that specializes in treating this particular disease, nor am I aware of any Soap Opera Addicts Anonymous meetings in the area.  Therefore, dear readers, please help me.  Any tips or advice or anecdotes of personal experience would be greatly appreciated.  ‘Cuz now that the good tv shows are back on the air, and now that it’s so unbelievably gorgeous outside, I WANT MY FRIGGIN’ LIFE BACK! 

Is that really too much to ask?

Sorry folks.  As a result of blogging at work on a computer that has no sound, apparently I posted the wrong videoclip for my current favorite song - "Fascination" by Alphabeat - in my Footloose blog last week.  What I posted was the remix version which, while decent enough, doesn’t come close to matching the irresistible energy of the original version.  Since I literally dared my three faithful readers not to dance to the video I posted and then provided the clip for the subpar and not even remotely Footloose-inspired remix, I figured I’d better right this heinous wrong before the villagers come after me with torches and pitchforks after successfully remaining seated and still for the entire remix video.  Though I guess it would only be three people coming after me, which is kind of a funny image….

So here we go again.  I assure you that this time I’m posting the correct video for the original version of the song, accompanied by my sincerest apologies for last week’s mistake.  It’s Friday, which is a perfect time to crank up the volume and enjoy the hell outta this infectious confection.  Once again, I dare you not to get up and dance. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Fascination" by Alphabeat.

Here’s a little anecdote for those who wonder where I get my sense of humor.

One year ago today, my then 68 year-old father had knee replacement surgery.  As most men of a certain age seem to be, he was nervous and somewhat inherently distrustful of the hospital staff.  It wasn’t so much the fear that they didn’t know what they were doing, but rather a more general and understandable concern that goes along with putting one’s ability ever to walk again into the hands of virtual strangers.  Also he was in a Prince George’s County hospital, so while he knew and trusted his surgeons, there were no assumptions or guarantees of stellar care in the days after the operation.  My sister and I agreed to take turns sleeping in a chair in the hospital room for a few nights.  That way whenever he opened his eyes he’d see a face that he knew, and if he woke up in the middle of the night and needed anything, we’d be there to help out.  SuperMom took the day shifts.

While Mom and Amy and I were watching The Price Is Right in the hospital waiting room during the hours immediately following the procedure, someone came in and told us that the surgery had gone well and that they were moving Dad to his recovery room.  A little while later they told us we could go in and see him.  He was not yet conscious, but we sat there for an hour or so until he started slowly opening his eyes.  He was obviously still very doped up and couldn’t even speak, but he did smile when he saw all of us standing around him.

After drifting in and out of consciousness for the next hour or so, he eventuallly began attempting to string sounds together in unintelligibly noble attempts to make words.  As he ambled down the slow road to coherence, some nurses with thick Filipino accents came in to help make sure he was in minimal discomfort.  They adjusted his pillows and his position on them, all the while calling him "Pop" - since he was clearly our father - and asking him if he was comfortable.  Dad seemed to be getting frustrated, which he later told us was because he thought they were calling him "Bob", which led him to wonder if there had been some mixup and maybe he had been moved to the wrong room and was getting the wrong assistance or something.  A valid concern when you’re all doped up and having trouble elocuting your thoughts.

Finally, he managed to emphatically slur together the words, "My name’s not Bob!"

One of the nurses leaned into him and very gently asked him what he would like to be called. 

Dad’s woozy yet perfectly timed deadpan reply?

"’Your Excellency’ would be just fine."

Anyone who’s met me probably knows that I’m not a huge fan of winter.  Sure it can be pretty when snow accumulates, but there hasn’t been much of that ’round these parts lately.  We usually just get a "wintery mix" of sleet and rain and slush, just enough to make it a pain in the neck to go anywhere but not enough to shut down the places we need to go.  And my extremely cold-sensitive appendages make me extremely intolerant of low temperatures.  This year I purchased an inch-thick pair of Alpine socks for $20 (more than I’ve ever paid for a pair of socks in my life), and I wore them so much I literally bore a hole through them.  So that helped.  But no pair of gloves has ever satisfactorily kept my hands warm, and the rest of my body would rather just stay inside under blankets in front of the tv than brave the Arctic outdoors for anything other than a mandatory obligation.

All this is merely background information to help put today’s message into perspective which, perhaps obviously, is that I LOVE SPRING.  Seriously!  It kinda blows my mind a little every year.  I always get a little bit surprised and amazed when the flowers start popping back out and the trees start blossoming anew.  Last summer I had my first go at gardening in the tiny patch of dirt in front of my apartment, and just last week I noticed that some of the things I planted are COMING BACK!  That’s just INSANE!

Some of you may have heard me talk about my favorite day of the year.  It occurs every year, and it falls on or around April 20.  This year was no exception.  It’s the one day after a couple weeks of tentative moves towards spring when, seemingly out of nowhere, the trees can no longer be seen through and winter is officially over.  It’s also the day when everything outside suddenly turns a stunningly incandescent shade of bright, almost yellowish green.  This particularly iris-searing hue only lasts about a week.  Or maybe it lasts all summer but our eyes become used to it.  I’m not sure which.  Regardless, it’s an awe-inspiring phenomenon, one that brings me a lot of joy, and one that should be appreciated as much as possible before it fades. 

Rather than spend too much time trying to describe it, I’ll just show you some pictures I took yesterday en route to work.  We’ll let the green speak for itself.  I assure you that there has been no color-enhancement done to these photos, nor were there any fancy photography tricks or special lighting when the pictures were taken.  Just my digital camera on a cloudy Tuesday morning. 

Once you’ve enjoyed the pics, GET OFF THE DAMN COMPUTER AND GET YOUR ASS OUTSIDE!

After setting the mood last night with some YouTube clips from and inspired by the 80’s, some friends and I kicked off our Sunday shoes and attempted to watch the movie Footloose.  My memories of this movie were spotty at best, primarily because the last time I watched it must have been 15-20 years ago.  I’d completely forgotten that a pre-Garnier Nutrisse SJP was one of Ariel’s giggly best friends.  And apparently John Lithgow never had hair.  The only things I did remember were the movie’s insanely hit-laden soundtrack, the moment when Kevin Bacon slides down the apparently pre-lubed railing in the "Never" dance sequence, Ariel’s red "f***-me" boots, the game of Tractorchicken, the phrase "jump back!", and the guy picking his nose at the dance while "Almost Paradise" played in the background.  [My sister and I used to rewind that particular moment and watch it 50-or-so times on Beta and laugh our butts off 'cuz it's really funny when you're 10.]

As all three of my faithful readers will undoubtedly recall, normally I’m a bit of a movie-watching stickler.  But last night the boys and I got all jacked up on Tab, a delicious 80’s cola that turns you into a mind sticker and helps you keep your shape in shape.  I mean after watching this commercial, how could we resist?

Once the Tab was flowing through our veins, all movie-watching etiquette quickly went out the window.  We were all laughing and screaming and joking and having a blast while the movie chuggered (is that a word?) on nobly in the background.  Long story short:  Footloose?  Is filthy.  It’s a shockingly PG-rated movie chock-full of adult language, phallic imagery, homoerotic subtext, and a positively R-worthy pube-n-butt-baring scene in the gym showers which I swear I have no childhood recollection of whatsoever.  Not to mention the fact that Dianne Weist has always looked more than a tad wanton to me, and free-spirit daredevil Ariel (played by Lori Singer) constantly seems to be vibrating on an "electric ear cleaner" of her own.  Where is Lori Singer now?  According to the scant info provided on Wikipedia, she’s a Julliard-trained cellist who most recently performed as a soloist at Carnegie Hall earlier this year.  This cello thing could explain her character’s tendency towards incessant vibration, especially when the actress is so used to having a giant wooden instrument erectly positioned betwixt her thighs. 

But I digress.  At one point during the movie I literally blew my own mind - a lesser-known side effect of drinking Tab.  During the scene when Kevin Bacon and that other dude are playing Tractorchicken, and Kevin gets his shoelace caught on the pedal or whatever, my Tabbed-up brain made the connection that the only reason Kevin wins the game is why???  Because he couldn’t get his… wait for it… foot loose.

Is it possible that I’m the first person to ever think of that?  Shouldn’t that win me a prize or something?  Maybe some red "f***-me" boots?  Or a hose-fight (!) with Kevin Bacon at the car wash?

I’ll let you bask in my moment of brilliance for a bit while you watch the video for my current favorite song, a song obviously inspired by the wild and crazy antics of Ren, Ariel, and the rest of the wacky gang from Bomont, CO.  As my dear groupie David said regarding this video, I dare you not to get up and dance. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Fascination" by Alphabeat. 

Quite possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen in Washington, DC:

Before she passed away, my grandmother would send me a piece of fake gum in the mail every year for April Fools Day.  When my dad was in elementary school, apparently on at least one occasion she slipped a cardboard chocolate bar in his school lunch.
Ha!  Oh how I wish I could have been at that lunch table.

So here’s a little April Fools ritual I’ve honed over the years, inspired
by the playful antics of my dearly departed Sophia Petrillo-esque grandmother, Ann Bailer.  May it bring you as much joy as it has brought me, and as I know it brought her while she was alive.

1.  Purchase a pack of Juicy Fruit gum - no, not Stride - and unwrap it at one end.

2.  Gently slide each of the individual foil-wrapped sticks from the
pack.  Be sure not to remove the small white paper bands which hold
each stick in its place.  Those must remain fully intact inside the
pack.

3.  Carefully unfold each foil wrapper just enough to remove the stick of gum within.

4.  Trace the outlines of however many sticks of gum are in the pack
onto the thin gray cardboard backing from a legal pad or some other
similarly colored, weighted, and textured paper stock.

5.  Cut the cardboard along the outlines, ideally with a paper-cutter.
Just to be safe, err on the side of cutting the pieces just a hair
smaller than the originals.

6.  Wrap each cardboard stick in one of the foil wrappers.

7.  Gently slide each wrapped cardboard stick back into the pack.  Be
careful to get each one inside one of the white paper bands.  This can
be tricky, but just be patient.  Also make sure that the folds in the wrappers are
all facing the same way as you reinsert them into the pack.  This is crucial to selling the prank.

8.  Offer your friends (and, of course, your enemies) a piece of "gum". 

Note:  It’s a good idea to have some real gum stashed in another pocket to give your friends (screw your enemies!) as a reward for being a good sport.  Also, for best results, try pulling this prank in a dark place like a
movie theater or a nightclub.  It actually doesn’t matter though,
because it will quickly become apparent that some people will put
anything in their mouths.

And there you have it.  I have now passed this knowledge on to you, my faithful readers.  If
next April Fools Day rolls around and you happen to remember this, try
it out and let me know how it goes.  If you don’t remember, well, let’s
just say I hope to run into you in a dark place so I can give you something to chew on.

Wait, that TOTALLY came out wrong.