Monday, January 31, 2011

Poor Driving


I was riding my bike home from work through a couple inches of slush last week. People often double park on narrow roads leaving just enough room for another car to sneak through, and inexperienced drivers like to slow to a crawl and creep through these narrow spots. When I'm riding my bike I can see a foot of space on each side when they go through, but I'm sure it looks much narrower when you're driving. A car was going through one of these slots but freaked out in the middle and hit the brakes. I was right behind and had to stop and stand there. His car got stuck and in his haste he floored it spraying me with road grime. I had on my rain suit, which makes me look like I'm working on an Alaskan crab boat, so I was but a bit perturbed. The driver freed himself and I caught up with him and knocked on his window at the next intersection. I yelled some nonsense about not driving like an idiot, and he tried to roll down his window but accidentally hit the button to roll down the back window. It then occurred to me that getting sprayed with slush is not worth getting shot over, so I rode away before things got out of hand. There's a fine line between being a pushover and being the target of a gun wielding maniacal motorist.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

A Good Year

I went through a brief and ill-advised period in high school where I thought it would be fun to learn how to golf. There was a course near my home where I went a couple times to play 9 holes with my old neighbor. Whenever we would pay, the total for both of us would be $19.45. Every time we went, the same old guy would charge us and when the $19.45 price popped up he'd say, "Good year for the allies." In spite of being nearly done with high school, I never had any idea back then what he was talking about.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Facebook Searching

My friend Tyrus works in advertising. He also happens to have the exact same name as his father. People in advertising (and I suppose a lot of other people in office jobs) use Facebook to look up people who work at other companies, people who they correspond with but don't really know. It's a handy way to visualize the person on the other end of the phone who you talk to every day but secretly loath for making your life difficult. Except Tyrus told me that he has his Facebook profile blocked from search, but his dad does not. That means anyone in advertising who searches for Tyrus finds his dad, and comes away with a totally messed up idea of who they're dealing with on the phone every day.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Magic Tricks in the Bathroom


I try to use hand dryers instead of paper towel in public restrooms. I don't like them, but let's face it, saving the world's not easy. We all have to do our part to try to keep down the volume of paper trash pouring into landfills. Most hand dryers are useless, breathing tepid air onto your hands and doing nothing to actually dry them. The exception is the Dyson Airblade hand dryer. If you're not familiar, you stick your hands into it and slowly remove them, and the air blasts the water off your hands. Using one is like a combination between a magic trick and a game of Operation since you don't want your hands to actually come into contact with the hand dryer. The posture of dipping your hands in and slowly removing them makes you feel as though you're onstage at some children's museum performing magic tricks.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

The Japanese Bar


There's a sushi joint not far from my work. They sell cans of saki for $8, but these cans are not listed on the menu. A friend warned me about them, and both times I've visited this restaurant, I've drank two cans. It wasn't until tonight that a friend pointed out the expiration date on the canned saki was in July of 2009. The date on the can is the only thing I understand since the rest is written in Japanese, so for all I know the date listed might be the time that this particular saki becomes drinkable. Maybe we're getting a deal and not actually buying expired saki. That said, this saki is 19% alcohol and comes in 200ml cans. My math on the deal works out like this: 19% alcohol is almost 40 proof, and normal hard liquor is 80 proof. So this saki is about half the strength of straight hard liquor. The can is 200ml, while a normal Coke can is 350ml. After thinking about these variables for about 30 seconds, I'm unable to determine exactly what all this math means, but honestly, I'm pretty sure it all has something to do with the saki being expired.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Skiing News Coverage

I'm pretty sure that someone at the local news TV station in Utah was getting free gear from our shop in exchange for airtime. My proof is simple. Whenever nothing newsworthy was happening in Utah, which was frequent, the local TV crew would arrive at my shop and ask us what they could shoot. We'd help them do stories on how much cheaper it is to buy lift tickets at our store (the last one on the way up the canyon!) or how we had a massive rental fleet (and would deduct the price of a high end rental if you ended up buying the skis from us). When I'd catch one of our segments on TV, it would look more like a Paul Harvey commercial than a news report. On one hand I have to applaud them for helping support local businesses. On the other hand I find their ethics deplorable, but my ski shop bosses PR savvy impressive. You don't get those kinds of results hiring a PR agency, but handing out some free skis gets the job done in no time.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Game Time Decision


Two days ago I was on a flight during the Green Bay Packers game. The flight had wifi but not live TV, so I used the wifi to try to stream the game from some shady Eastern European site. They had a feed from Germany with two announcers talking endlessly in a language I find baffling, and even worse, since Delta's wifi wasn't very powerful, I spent most of the game looking at a blinking screen while the video was frozen. Midway through the first quarter, I gave up. I shut everything down and put on a cocoon of silence. By the time we landed I had no idea who'd won, but I knew everyone else would know. I didn't look at TVs in the terminal, left on my headphones, and was prepared to clamp my hands over my ears if the pilot gave any indication of sharing the winner of the night's football games with us. I rushed home and watched the recording, which of course cut out 10 minutes before the end of the game, so I had to go online to find out the final score anyway. The good news is that I could have waited another entire day. No one talked to me about the game, and no strangers (as I'd feared they would) shouted football scores at me as I rode my bike past. Come to think of it, no stranger has ever yelled a football score at me. It's odd what you can become worried about when you fixate too much on one thing. Go Packers.

Also, check out the Claymaker Shirt that my buddy Mike made.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Plain Not Knowing

I was explaining to my old landlord Otto how to build a Tibetan still. It's a way to distill wine into slightly stronger wine using a Crockpot, an open yard, and an extension cord. I doubt that the Tibetans actually distill liquor this way, but this is how I learned to do it. Otto suggested rather strongly that I not engage in building a Tibetan still, and I said something to the effect that, sure, there would be a lot of evaporated alcohol fumes and heat, but that's why you kept it at a safe distance with an extension cord. It was then that I learned Otto has a stake in a few Slovakian distilleries. Turns out that you can only drink a certain part of the alcohol once distillation has begun, otherwise you run the risk of going blind or dying. I always thought that people went blind from drinking moonshine distilled through PVC pipes instead of copper. In the loosely quoted words of a former politician I didn't like, "It's not what you know or what you know you don't know, it's what you don't know that you don't know that can really hurt you."

Sunday, January 23, 2011

The Evidence Room

Newspaper reporters who cover police and crime often end up working closely with cops and consistently using them as sources. Or at least that's what I did, but then again it was a college newspaper and I wasn't very good at my job. During my first week on the job as Police Reporter, the normal PR guy from the police department was on vacation, so they had some lackey stand-in. The normal PR guy would never let our reporters into the department's evidence room to do a story, but this guy didn't mind. He let me and a photographer into what we hoped would be a warehouse full of mounds of illegal drugs, fully-stocked confiscated bars, and untapped kegs. It turned out to be mostly stocked with recovered car stereos, some evidence boxes from actual crimes, and a couple BB guns. This did not look like the party we were hoping for, but I also know that the police were pulling in more fun things then were hitting the shelves of the evidence room. Who polices the college police? Answer: No one.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Surf Lessons are Pretty Much What You'd Expect

It's been my lifelong goal to become proficient at surfing, but I never took an actual lesson until last summer. I'm sad to report that it was basically exactly what you'd expect. My instructor had a mop of bleach blonde hair and spoke with a slow Southern California drawl despite growing up on Long Island in New York. My girlfriend received all the instruction and attention, while I was occasionally pushed in the direction of a wave. There's something shockingly visceral about coming face-to-face with a person who embodies a stereotype of the prototypical surfer that you've considered nonsense your entire life. I wanted to throw his flip-flops in the ocean and shake him until his speech returned to normal.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Online Footprint

My online footprint is extraordinary. Thousands of blog posts, offensive Tweets and just generally really rude stuff that makes it hard to conceal any political leanings or fake opinions. What does this mean for me? I will basically never get a job at Dow Chemical. Any huge company I apply at will have a small army of human resources staff who will comb the internet and find all the times I made fun of Texas, and they'll use that as a reason not to hire me. There's some comfort to be found in sabotaging your own chances of ever working at a place that doesn't hire people with opinions and personality.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Odd Music Tastes

I listen to Belle & Sebastian a lot when I workout. If you're not familiar with the dulcet tones of Belle & Sebastian, I would describe them as toned-down choir boy meets melodic rock. Not exactly the best workout music. I have to listen to it because I lack anything upbeat or even remotely similar to what you'd find on an ESPN Jock Jams album. I used to sit at my friend's house and play her Top 25 most listened-to tracks on her iTunes, and it would invariably be 25 tracks of super heavy, fast-beat pop music. This was not the kind of music she said she normally listened to, but since it was her workout music, it was always at the top of her list. ...that Top 25 list, there's no way to hide from it. It charts out exactly how cool your musical taste is, no matter how rad you think you are. But then again it also shows how much you really workout.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Shutting It Down

I tried to delete my MySpace account a while ago, but after guessing about 15 of my old passwords I gave up. I'm sure that I could call a phone bank in some faraway part of the world and ask for help, but it's hardly worth sitting on hold for 45 minutes just to delete something I don't care about anyway. I remember the URL to get to my page, so I visited it and it looks like it's been infiltrated by hackers. It's that or MySpace has changed so much that I don't recognize it. Either way, I don't recommend clicking on anything on my MySpace page moving forward, regardless of how tempted you are to learn about my favorite movies or quotes. A small part of me looks forward to the day Facebook reaches this same level of relevancy in everyone's lives.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The Replacements


When I started work at the ski shop years ago, all anyone knew about me was that I was from Minnesota. This was incorrect. I'm from Wisconsin, but many people outside of the Midwest don't know where you're from unless it's "the mitten-shaped state." One of my colleagues was in a local metal band, and he tried to connect with me over music. We talked about Hüsker Dü and The Replacements. I knew nothing of these bands, but eager to find common ground with my new co-workers, I agreed that 'Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash' was their finest album. Within months I would discover that this was, in fact, their worst album. But when I finally went to a show to catch my co-worker's band in the act and discovered their cacophony of screaming, metal-on-metal car accidents on stage, I thought that perhaps, connecting over less skull-bleeding sounds, even if they're not quite genuine, is okay.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Human Condition


I stayed with some folks in France who served me a dish with wild mushrooms they'd picked in the woods near their home earlier that day. Mushrooms and eggplant are pretty much the only food that I really hate. I ate their tete de veau (head of calf) earlier in the night, but the mushrooms were too much. It was a bold human who first plucked a mushroom off the ground and ate it. Thousands of years of guess-and-checking on trying different possibly edible plants, leaves, fungi and roots in the forest. Some people died after eating certain mushrooms, so we knew to avoid those. Now we're arrived at a place where all of the information on what one can eat without dying is readily available online, in books and probably on an iPhone app. But do I have any of that information? Of course not. If I ever get lost in the woods by myself and have to find food on the forest floor, it's back to square one.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Staring Contest



I saw my friend Colin at the gym the other day after not running into him anywhere for about a year.  We made eye contact and I smiled and nodded indicating, "Hey, what's up man?" He looked away. As I kept staring at him, I had the thought, "Maybe that's not Colin." He looked up at me and we made prolonged eye contact again, and this time I looked away, second guessing myself. I was sure it was him but the reception was cool, so I decided I'd email Colin later and ask if we go to the gym. A bit later I'm getting out of the shower, and who's my locker right next to? The guy who I've been staring at off-and-on over the last hour. I emailed Colin a few minutes after I left and found out that he wasn't the guy in the gym. So now I have to try to get a picture of this guy I've apparently been acting really creepy towards so that I can show Colin a guy who looks exactly like him.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Crime Pays



I put four empty pint glasses in my girlfriend's purse before leaving one of my favorite neighborhood bars a few months ago. She walked away without any hassle, but investigated what was making her bag so heavy once she got outside and found the pints. She was a little upset that I used her as a smuggler, but I figure it was better that she not know. That way not only could she have more convincingly denied knowing that she was breaking the law if she was caught, but her behavior while walking out would be less self-conscious if she didn't know what was going on. I suppose you could say I'm a coward for not doing it myself, but I would point out that I'm also a criminal genius.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Tip Jar


Look, I understand if you want to put a tip jar. That's cool, maybe someone will drop their spare change in it. But don't give me attitude when you hand me a plastic-wrapped sandwich that costs $8 or pour me a black coffee that costs $2.50 and I don't drop you a tip. We had a tip jar at the bike shop, and I lobbied to have it taken down. Friends of ours were already dropping by with beer once in awhile, and the tip jar cash was all used for beer anyway. Putting it up just put a little extra ink-and-paper in the equation. And based on what I see being collected in these deli and coffee shop tip jars, it's not like they're getting enough money to buy more than a 6-pack anyway. No, these guys are better off taking the tip jar down and just robbing me of a quarter every time I buy something from them since I never count my change anyway.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Puddle Jumper


If you're wearing waterproof boots and you see a big puddle, you pretty much have to walk through it. It's your chance to get back at all those puddles that looked like solid ice but turned out to be slush and swallowed your foot and filled your shoe. One of the greatest joys in life is wearing huge boots and marching through snow banks and ankle-deep puddles with impunity. It's like having a really unimpressive superpower.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Compassion and Lightning Strikes

Several people have confided in me that they've been struck by lightning. For them I have a message of compassion, and a couple facts. First, no one has ever survived a direct lightning strike. The temperature in a bolt of lightning can hit about 50,000F, hot enough to instantly boil every molecule of water in your body. That said, several people each year are actually hit by a branch off a main bolt of lightning, and it's not like I'm in any position to cast aspersions on their story and tell them they weren't really 'struck' by lightning. Doing that would be like criticizing someone who says they were "Hit by a Mack truck" and telling them it was actually just a Freightliner. Most people, I would argue, who say they have been hit by lightning probably had lightning strike a tree near their campsite or car. When these people tell you they were hit by lightning, it is permissible to ask to see their burnt fingernails before showing them compassion.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The Shady Transaction

I did an apartment exchange with a friend's brother. He took my place for the weekend when I was out of town, and in return, he would let me use his place in Canada sometime in the future. I've met him several times, and we get along well, but I wouldn't say that we're close. While I was away and my friend's brother was staying at my house, I noticed a check made out to 'cash' for $500 had been cashed through my account. This seemed like an open-and-shut case: 1. I have never made out a check to cash, and 2. My checkbook was in my kitchen in my apartment. I was absolutely confident that the person staying at my house would not steal a check and cash it, but here I was with seemingly irrefutable evidence that it was happening. What to do, right? So I call the guy and tell him about the cashed check, how I never have written a check to 'cash,' and ask if anyone has broken into my apartment over the weekend. He says everything's fine, and mentions something about, "The crazy things people can do with checks nowadays," which of course sounds like a shady answer to me. So the next day, when I can get more info from my bank on the check, what do I find? A bank error. A teller accidentally took the cash from my account, and there was no shady activity on my account. The money was already back. There's probably a life lesson in there somewhere, but what I got out of it is that my bank sucks big time.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Mistaken Identity

I worked at a ski shop in Utah that was the last stop on the way up to the Salt Lake ski resorts. It was a popular spot for tourists to visit to grab whatever they'd forgotten to pack. Most of our customers came from outside the state. People from outside Utah have a lot of strange ideas of things that go on in Utah. The vast, vast majority of these ideas center around Mormon culture, and almost all of them are completely wrong. The ski shop where I worked was run by a family that was Mormon and its staff was largely Mormon. At least once a week, I'd be standing next to a Mormon coworker and a customer from out of state would stop in, and in the course of buying ski goggles or a lift ticket, say something derisive about Mormons. It was awkward. I wondered how these visitors could feel confident that they could talk like that to everyone in the shop and assume that no one in earshot was Mormon. I finally figured out that it was because their ideas of the Mormons were so massively out of touch, that they thought they'd be able to recognize one from a mile away. That my coworkers did not walk around in billowy white robes and sandals was enough for most out-of-state visitors to assume they were not Mormon.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Take the Internet Away

I used to work at a huge newspaper. My responsibilities included sending mass emails to literally hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to receive the top headlines for the day, the latest tech news, or some kind of celebrity gossip. At the end of every one of these emails we sent, we included a contact email address that people could use to get in touch with us. Without fail, each week we'd receive several angry responses, but the only ones that troubled me were these: "To whom it may concern, I would like to receive your newspaper at home, please subscribe me, here's my mailing address and credit card number." That email with the credit card number would go to about 15 people on the general list, and one of us would forward it to circulation so they could close the gap and actually help the customer. Whenever I received one of these emails, all I could think was, "This person should not be allowed to use the internet."

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Summer Camp Special


I attended a summer camp as a child and the leaders would plan events that they thought would interest us throughout the week. One day they announced that the Flight for Life helicopter would be landing on the middle of our island, and we could gather at the edges of the island to watch the landing and then talk to the crew. They sprayed the island's topside with fire hoses prior the helicopter's arrival, and we stood back getting our faces blown off when it came in. Well, the few of us who showed up. Most people were still out in canoes or swimming, and I was among the unhappy few there to greet the crew. One of the leaders kept urging us over and over to ask the crew questions, and with no interest or any cares, I finally took pity on the crew and asked, "What does this thing run on? Unleaded?" The question was received with laughs and scoffs, but to this day it seems reasonable to me. I've looked it up, and they actually run on Grade A jet fuel, which is like white gas or kerosene. Those poor helicopter pilots thought they'd be so cool landing at a summer camp. My greeting must have been something of a letdown.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Are You One of Those Cops?

I rode my bike between a line of parked cars and a line of cars waiting at a stoplight. When I arrived at the light, I found a police car sitting first in line and ready to go when that light turned back to green. I stopped and looked. No cars were coming on the cross street. This is a dilemma I'm faced with on a fairly regular basis. Do I wait for the red light to turn green, or do I run the red light right in front of a cop and take my chances with the ticket? Most police, I would argue, are not the kind of people who will give you a ticket for running a red light on a bicycle. My solution is simple: I run every red light I can find, regardless of whether a cop is sitting right in front of me or not. I always make sure it's safe to run the light, and so far I have not been ticketed. My logic is that when I finally do get a ticket for running a red light, if I look at it as if the cost of that one ticket is spread across every red light I've ever run, the price will have been very competitive.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Reaching Out to Touch Someone


I was driving through a massive blizzard in the middle of nowhere when my cell phone rang. The ring caught me off guard and felt out of place in the empty countryside. I'd been trying to get a signal earlier with no luck, so I took this as a good sign that if I went off the road I'd be able to reach someone if I needed help. Normally I won't answer if I don't recognize the number, but in this case I made an exception. "Is Ron there?" the caller asked. "Uh, I think you have the wrong number," I said. He apologized and I said it wasn't a problem. What I really felt like saying was, "MAN! You have no idea what's going on right now -- you might be the last person I ever talk to if this road doesn't get better."

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Blood Letting


Alcohol thins your blood. It doesn't clot as quickly after you've had a few beers. That's why bar fights are so savage and crashed bikes during bar rides can turn into such a mess. Or that's what someone told me once. Mind you, he was no doctor, just some guy of an indeterminate job who I used to ride bikes with a bit. After a ride, we'd sit on lawn chairs in our friend's yard sometimes, telling stories and catching up with each other while knocking back a few beers. The friend who gave me the blood clotting/alcohol story would always have bloody knees from crashing during our rides, and they'd never stop bleeding while we would sit in those lawn chairs drinking beer after beer. So there must have been something to what he was saying.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

A New Appointment

I made an appointment with a new dentist for the next day, and 15 minutes after I called and setup the appointment, they called me back and left a voicemail reminder that I had an appointment the next day. It was some kind of reminder service, and to keep my appointment I had to call back and say I'd be there. I'm sure they had the best of intentions with the service, but it fell flat in terms of customer experience. Just out of curiosity, I asked the person when I called to confirm my appointment what would happen if I had to cancel. She informed me of the 48-hour cancelation policy, so I told her I'd be there.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Cape Weather



It's good cape weather this time of year. Besides a Detroit Lions jersey, there aren't many articles of clothing with worse status implications than a cape. I like the idea of a wearable blanket, but in terms of practicality, a cape would be tough to wear while riding a bike, and you'd probably choke yourself the first time you sat on it getting into a car. My friend wore one on a moped once and it worked okay, but I also decided the other day that the worst imaginable injury to have to tell people about would be getting your cape caught in the back wheel of your moped. 
All around bad news. My friend broke his foot at our kickball game, and he even had to tell people at work that it was a softball game. A moped/cape accident would have ruined him.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

McDonalds of Drinking


I love Irish pubs. No matter where you are in the world, if you spot an Irish pub, you can walk in and expect a certain degree of familiarity. They'll have Guinness and the bartender will have an Irish accent. The decor will be dark woods and they'll be playing Gaelic music. It's as if Ireland has some kind of 'bartender abroad' program where they rotate people through locales around the world. I naively assumed everyone like Irish pubs until a friend refereed to them as 'The McDonalds of drinking.' Only now does it occur to me that maybe he thinks McDonalds is Irish since it's kind of an Irish sounding name. McDonalds.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Amish Fliers



Two Amish people were on my last flight. "This is a strange development," I thought. Either they have miniaturized horses that fit in dog carriers under the plane or there have been some developments in the Amish community that I am unaware of. I ended up switching seats so they could sit next to each other and they were very nice. I was tempted to ask if people in their community were also using computers. I'd hate to have them find out that I was going to make fun of them online.