Who knows? The good news is that tons of ideas have been popping into my head lately: blog posts, essays, books, movies. The bad news is that I haven't written a single thing that I'm not embarrassed to show people. I remain undaunted.

Yankee Pot Roast is up and running again, after a brief hiatus. This is good news for all the people out there that love to read, but don't actually know how. Everyone else will have to continue to read The Onion.

I'm still convinced that Emily Deschanel is attractive, but my wife disagrees.

Speaking of the Deschanel sisters, I picked up the She & Him album, but I can't decide whether I like it or not.

My dog got a haircut and I don't like it.

Eh.

Labels: random thoughts

When people who are my parents' age think of Gordon Jump, they probably think of the Maytag repairman, a man who had nothing to do because of the reliability of the product.

When people my age think of Gordon Jump, they probably think of him as a bicycle shop owner who tried to molest Arnold Jackson and his friend Dudley on Diff'rent Strokes.

I'm having trouble thinking of him as both of these things.

Labels: Gordon Jump, random thoughts

The little monorail that takes you from gate to gate has this computerized lady voice that just said, "Once they start closing, doors will not open again." Really? They have no mechanism to prevent these doors from crushing someone that's not quick/smart enough to get out of their way? I find this a little hard to believe, but I'll also say that I did decide to walk instead of ride the thing.

When people wear Roca Wear clothing, is that pronounced "Rocka-wear" or "Roh-ca-wear." I've been saying it the first way, but if I'm wrong, I need to know immediately. I'm already not cool enough.

This hub and spoke airline model of doing things is killing me. Some schmuck misses his takeoff time out of Houston at 7am, and my 3:15pm flight to Newark out of Atlanta is delayed an hour and thirty-five minutes? How is this possible? Why don't they just fly planes on a regular route where the one that comes in goes back out to the same place? Am I crazy to think that?

Literally as I was typing that last bit, they pushed my flight back another 40 minutes. For a guy that doesn't fly that often, I have pretty bad luck with it.

Can I admit that I don't like Quizno's? Is that going to really offend anyone? I've never gone there where they have completely screwed up my order. They also need an efficiency expert to come in and let them know the proper way to get sandwiches out the door.

Labels: Atlanta, random thoughts

When I was a kid, I used to love making things out of popsicle sticks. That was my absolute favorite thing to do in arts and crafts. I was pretty terrible in art class. I was the kind of kid that drew pictures where the people were as big as the houses and the trees looked like lollipops. Also, we had this art teacher who was like the meanest lady in the world, and since I was an irredeemable goofball, she had me sitting in the corner with my head down more often than not.* But man, when they put the popsicle sticks down on the table, I was the king. They'd just drop a ton of sticks on the table with a boatload of the Elmer's glue and I'd just go to town and make whatever the heck I wanted.

*I just thought of a story that has nothing to do with this, but I felt like I should tell it anyway, because I think it illustrates just how awful some adults can be to kids and how easy it is to forget what it's like to be a kid. When I was in the 2nd grade, I really liked fish sticks. I don't know why. I just did. So whenever the school lunch was fish sticks, my mom wouldn't pack me a lunch. She'd give me a quarter or 35 cents (or whatever lunch cost back then) to buy my lunch. I hadn't yet learned to gamble, so this wasn't a risky proposition.** Anyway, at some point during this school year, they took fish sticks off the menu. I was devastated, as were a couple of my friends. We asked our teacher what we could do about it and she suggested that we put together a petition (and also explained what a petition was). So, we wrote out a small paragraph on a piece of notebook paper, and got the entire class of 2nd graders (not just our class, this was some 90 kids) to sign it. I was really proud. It was basically, on a very micro scale, democracy in action. We saw something didn't like and we mobilized to try to fix it. Sure enough, the whole class got called into the principal's office a few days later. She asked us who was responsible, and my friends and I proudly took credit. She then spent 10 minutes yelling at the class for doing this and how dare we question the school and the school board and how she was very disappointed at us. Then, she sent the rest of the class out, and berated me and my friends for another 10 minutes. Once we all started crying (or at least looked as though we were going to), she dismissed us. I don't specifically recall, but my really nice teacher***, had to be stunned by this. And in hindsight, I'm completely stunned that an educator (the head educator of the school no less) would discourage children this way. It's one thing if the petition wasn't going to do anything (it probably wouldn't), but to yell at us for trying to fix something the right way? It's horrifying. Tell us that you're proud that we tried to do something and you'll send it to the school board, then put it in your drawer and forget about it. We were 2nd graders. We probably would have forgotten in a day or two. So, whenever I feel like I forget what it's like to be a kid, I remember this, because I think the worst thing that you can do, the most unforgivable sin, is crush the innocence of a child.

**I did learn to gamble in 1985, when I was so disgusted by the Chicago Bears that I bet against them in Super Bowl XX with two of my friends (75 cents each), setting a lifelong precedent of lousy bets. I could not pay these debts when I lost and had to ask my dad for money, setting a precedent that would last for some time after this event.

***This teacher saw me in the local newspaper when they did a story about my game show appearance and wrote a lovely letter to me, with a couple of pictures from when I was in her class.

Long rambling asides notwithstanding, my point here is that I don't do a whole lot these days that's as emotionally gratifying to me as building things with popsicle sticks was. In a box, they're just the sad carcass of a delicious sugary frozen treat. When you put them together, they're a frame or a jewelry box for your mom or perhaps a magic wand or ornament for your car's rearview mirror.

So I've got some vacation coming up around the holidays. Anyone have any popsicle sticks?

Labels: random thoughts

[For An Odd Memory, Part I, click here]

I'm sitting at my computer looking at my fantasy baseball team and this popped into my head, so I'm typing it down now, because I know I'll forget.

Every year, my elementary school had several assemblies, wherein they would enlist some portion of the student body to perform for the rest of the student body. Participation was not optional. There was one time that my 4th grade class was forced to perform a Thanksgiving play, in which the general plot was regarding the origin of turkey as the bird of choice for Thanksgiving. When one of the Pilgrims left the chicken in the oven too long, an Indian tribesman came to the rescue with a turkey. I also remember:

a) there were some really corny songs involved, and

b) a line in the play was given to the nicest girl in class who also happened to have a very, thick Latino accent of indeterminate origin (I think somewhere in South America). Anyway, when she noticed that the bird was overdone, she exclaimed, "The shee-ken! Eet's boorned to a creesp!" This sent the audience into an uproar.

Amazingly enough, this isn't what popped in my head first. This only came to me while I was writing about these assemblies.

No, what I remembered before also happened when I was in 4th grade, but as an observer, not a participant. This was right around the time that rap music first gained real mainstream consciousness, so we're talking like 1984 or '85, and rap was still very much Run DMC and very little 50 Cent or The Game (editor's note: if those two people are dated references to popular rap artists, insert a more current artist). The 6th grade class was about to leave to go to Junior High and they were asked, as one last gesture, to perform a graduation performance. The main song of which, was a really, really kind of innocuous rap song about getting ahead that had a line like, "We're talkin' 'bout opportunity, when you try real hard in the land of the free."

And at the end of the line, one of the larger members of the class did that loud "huh uh-huh uh-huh" thing that rappers did back then. It's hard to type or describe, but if you heard it, you'd know what I mean, Anyway, I started laughing really hard. Not at the performance (which, admittedly, probably deserved it), but more at the sound. My teacher started yelling at me to be quiet, but that just made me laugh harder. It got contagious, and eventually seven or ten of the people around me started laughing, including one girl notorious for wetting her pants when she really got to laughing. Of course, she managed to wet herself now, which made us all laugh harder and also made them stop the performance, while they got us under control and took the girl out to go change.

Man, elementary school was really awesome in the '80s.

Labels: 1980s, random thoughts

Is anyone else enjoying the hell out the NCAA tourney this year? Even though I'd love to see Davidson make it to the Final Four, it's very important to my financial well-being that Kansas win.

I finished the New York Times Sunday crossword in less than 90 minutes this week. I'm getting too smart. People are going to start to shun me.

It's not that it's hard to get to Brooklyn; it's just hard to get back. Does the F train run once an hour out there after 9pm? What's up with that? Am I supposed to see two G trains before I see an F?

If you want something fun to do on Monday night around 7pm, you should go to see my good friend Todd Zuniga read at the Canteen Issue 2 New York Release Party at Housing Works Used Book Café in Soho.

If you don't watch the show Top Chef, you should. Because food is awesome.

I drafted my fantasy baseball team last night. For the first time in 3 years, I didn't want to vomit while looking at my squad after I finished. Perhaps this means I'll finish higher than 10th this year. Probably not, though.

Does anyone care about Jennifer Lopez's twins, except Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony? If you do, I've got news for you: they don't care about your twins, or anything else going on in your life.

I don't like cinnamon. That's right. I said it.

Live action Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. $216M in box office gross. To say that I'm shocked at that would be the understatement of the aughts. So, with that news, look for my live action version of Captain Caveman in theaters next fall. It's going to star Jason Lee in a hair suit.

If you wanted to write a book review about Elliott Spitzer's non-existent autobiography, you'd have to title it "Elliott Spitzer Swallows His Pride," wouldn't you?

Labels: random thoughts

About 6 years ago, I went out to this bar in the meatpacking district (I can't remember the name of it, though I'm pretty sure it had a number in it. Either way, it's probably closed by now, because nothing like that ever stays open for more than a couple of years). My friend was throwing a party there, so we had the whole downstairs to ourselves. There was the usual senseless debauchery and some debauchery even more senseless than that, and eventually it was time to go.

I'm on my way out of the bar and I look to my left and by the door with a beer in his hand and a cigarette hanging off of his mouth (this was before the smoking ban was in effect in NYC) was Macaulay Culkin. I'm never starstruck and I certainly wasn't in the face of that schmuck, but I remember thinking to myself, "The kid that was in Home Alone is standing right there drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette." I was probably drunk (I was drunk a lot back then), but I remember having a lot of difficulty reconciling the fact that this dude was in a crappy Christmas movie for kids but also getting wasted in front of me. I stood there for a couple of minutes looking at him, and I remember wanting to tell him to go fuck himself, but I didn't.

Everyone deserves some time off.

Labels: random thoughts

... without a fight.

Labels: random thoughts

I'm just wondering at what point a hotel chain thought that it became worth 7 bucks for the convenience of having a can of macadamia nuts in a small refrigerator in my room?

Also, with the room service thing, is having room service so convenient that the prices can be both 50% higher than they would be ordinarily and charge a convenience fee?

Don't get me wrong, you'll never find a stronger proponent of convenience than me. Ask my wife. She hates that I'm willing to go a crappy deli and buy a turkey sandwich when I could by a pound of turkey and a loaf of bread at the supermarket for roughly the same price. I can't be bothered to comparison shop, even on the InterWeb. I feel like in the time it takes me to search out a better deal, I could already be doing something else.

I guess it's my own fault that I'm willing to pay $17 for a club sandwich and $2.50 for a medium sized bag of M&Ms that have been sitting there for god knows how long. I just hate that they know exactly how to take avantage of me.

Labels: random thoughts

Bob Newhart's TV best friend Tom Poston is married to his former TV wife Suzanne Pleshette.

I wonder if he loses any sleep over that.

Editor's note: the esteemed Mr. Tobey has informed me that Tom Poston is, in fact, dead. Thus, he was married to Suzanne Pleshette, past tense. My apologies to the Poston family.

Labels: random thoughts, TV