Still here?

Hello, blog. How are you? Haven't seen you much lately as I'm usually pretty busy this time of year. Sorry for neglecting you here in the recent past. I promise to do better. It's been over a week since I really blogged something substantial, and what a difference a week makes. This time last week I was feeling good about the world, my job, myself, having started last Monday off by turning in a student's wallet that I found in the parking lot of my daughter's school. Surely karma would return the favor. This Monday started off with my daughter having a serious temper tantrum meltdown which probably will cost her her first grade field trip to the aquarium next week. Our pregnant front desk person left before 9 this morning because she wasn't feeling well and probably scared herself into thinking something was wrong with the baby. And finally, I ran over and killed a squirrel on the way to work this morning. Fuck! And it's still early in the day! This is one of those days where you wished life had a reset button and you could just start it over again. Tell me why I don't like Mondays . . . .

I'm just wondering...

Are there cars driving around Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad with magnetic yellow ribbons on the back which proclaim, "Support the Insurgency?" Just wondering....

Oops

We all make mistakes in the course of our jobs and lives. Most of them just fall by the wayside with few negative consequences. And then there's Antonio Banderas' appearance on American Idol last week pitching the upcoming Shrek 3.

A good rule of thumb is, if you're going to sit three seats away from one of the heads of Dreamworks studio in order to promote the film, you may want to get the movie's opening date right. Antonio, lost without a teleprompter or cue cards, blows it and says Shrek 3 opens in June. The biggest surprise for me is that Jeffrey Katzenberg's head didn't burst open, revealing a creature that immediately devoured Banderas on the spot. It probably would've been a more merciful and appropriate end to the problem. I have it from a reliable source that his gaff has created more than its share of grief at Dreamworks. I love it when someone fucks up and it's not my fault. And by the way, Antonio, S3 opens on May 18, that's MAY 18, you frigtard.

Time out for spuds

I love Devo. I love their concept that mankind has already peaked and is now devolving. I love their music. So a couple of videos are in order as a musical interlude between posts.

First up, "That's Good." MTV, the same channel that has no qualms about showing videos replete with women with generous gluteals and wearing gold lamé thongs while "shakin' dat ass," didn't want to show this video. My, how times have changed.



Next, "Beautiful World." It's funny that Target used this song in one of their commercials when the song does not sing the praises of a beautiful world like Louis Armstrong's song with the same title. Interesting side note. The members of Devo will allow their songs to be used in commercials, but will not allow the songs to be rerecorded by someone else for those ads. Rather, either the original song is used or the band rerecords the song tailored specifically for the commercial.

Loss for words

Oy! What a week! I want to blog but I can't get my thoughts together sufficiently to make something coherent (so what's new?). I want to write about the shootings on the Virginia Tech campus and about how the lessons that we need to learn and the memories of the victims will soon be lost as we play the favorite American pastimes of second guessing, finger pointing, and endless litigation. I want to write about Liviu Librescu, a professor at VT and a holocaust survivor, who, having already experienced the worst mankind has to offer, died while barricading his classroom door to buy time for his students to escape out the windows. Hero seems too inadequate a term to use here. VT really needs to name a building after this gentleman.

I want to write about what a douchebag Dr. Phil is for immediately blaming video games for this tragedy. Once upon a time when someone did something awful it was said that person was possessed by a demon or devil. Now we blame video games. I guess it never occurred to Dr. Phil that there are simply bad people in the world. I don't think Saddam Hussein or Adolf Hitler ever played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

That's what I want to write, but I just can't get my thoughts together.

An unexpected find

Enough time has passed since my interview a couple of weeks ago to where I can reasonably deduce that I'm not in the running for a job offer. Oh well. I'm pretty happy where I'm at anyway, so it was a no lose situation for me to begin with. Doesn't help that it was one of the crappiest interviews I've ever given. It'd be nice to get some sort of notification that an offer was made to someone else, but there seems to be a rash of spinelessness on campus when it comes to such things. An opportunity gone...maybe another will open up?

Perhaps karma made up for things last Thursday evening. The family and me had a late afternoon appointment that day, so we dined out afterwards rather than risk eating dinner after 7:30 (which just messes up my stomach quite badly). As dinner wrapped up, I suggested a quick stop at a nearby Borders as I wanted to see if a book I had been wanting to read was back in stock. Although it was a school night for our daughter, my wife thought a trip to the bookstore was a good idea, especially given how much our daughter loves to read.

I like Borders because it's reasonably close to work and I can make trips there in the late afternoons when I need to. I'm also very familiar with the layout of the store and where each section/topic can be found. But I must say that I prefer Barnes and Noble and their selection of books. As many times as I've looked, Borders has never carried a Jean Shepherd book, whereas B&N usually has at least two different books in stock by Shepherd.

We arrived at Borders and I headed off for the back corner of the store where the biographies can be found, while my wife and daughter disappeared in the kids section. For Christmas I had put a biography of Jimmy Stewart on my wishlist. Didn't get it. But it was back in stock last Thursday and I grabbed a copy. Around that section of the store are the CDs so I decided to take a look to see what I could find. In particular I was looking for music that I can often find there but not anywhere else. A quick look for the Andrews Sisters was unfruitful, what was in stock already in my collection. Tommy Dorsey? Nope. Les Brown and his band of Reknown? Nothing doing. Glenn Miller? Bingo! The first CD I found was a collection of his better known tunes, but the next one was quite a surprise. It was a two CD set of songs from radio shows sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes from 1939 and 1940 featuring the Andrews Sisters doing the vocals. Up until I saw this set I never knew it existed. I knew I was about to spend more money than I expected to when I walked into the place, but there was no way I was leaving without that CD. Certainly it would be gone if I came back in a few weeks and with my luck of late, I'd never find it online ever.

I left the store with my book and a CD, happy as a kid in a candy store, and raced home to rip the CDs onto my computer so I could listen to them without damaging the original discs. Late Saturday night/early Sunday morning, after completing my tasks as the Easter Bunny, I sat and watched "The Glenn Miller Story" starring Jimmy Stewart. It never occurred to me until the next morning that the movie tied in both the book and the CDs I purchased just a few nights before.

Play dead, Ubu . . .good dog

I've been a pet owner on an almost continual basis since 1976, when my parents got me my first dog. He was a mixed breed with a lot of terrier in his makeup, and it showed in his face and ears. We had him around for a long time, passing away a few minutes before midnight, New Years Eve 1991--just a few months shy of turning sixteen years old. My second dog, who is in foster care with my mother because my wife had seven cats when we moved in together, will turn fifteen this year and doesn't show many signs of slowing down. Currently my wife and I have one dog and one cat, who get along pretty well for being such complete opposites in species. But there are times when it's obvious that the theory that pets can help lower your blood pressure has been completely thrown out the window by those two.

Naturally I've been keeping a close eye on the recent, massive recalls of pet foods. With regularity I've been keeping up with what foods are added to the list each day, looking to see if the food we feed our critters has made an appearance on the list. Fortunately we've dodged the bullets thus far, but I'm still worried that that may change at any time, especially since gluten meal is a component in both our dog and cat's food.

It appears that the culprit is a chemical called melamine, which causes kidney damage, but seemingly is affecting more cats than dogs right now. Melamine can also give the appearance of a higher protein quality to the gluten, which would make it more expensive. The FDA doesn't know how the chemical got into the affected wheat gluten, which raises two questions for me.

One, what the hell has the FDA been doing lately? Where the hell is the USDA? How could a chemically tainted shipment of wheat gluten even make it into the food chain of our pets? Could this happen to the human food supply? So far the FDA is only acknowledging that sixteen animals have died as a result of eating the tainted food, which indicates to me that either: 1. They're early in their investigation, or 2. acknowledging a higher number of pet deaths would reveal that the FDA has been sitting on its bureaucratic fat ass, doing an half-assed job of protecting the food supply. Second, what in the hell are we doing importing wheat gluten from China? The last I checked, America's heartland was capable of producing enough wheat to feed the U.S. population with plenty left over to send overseas to populations that need the food.

It's a scary thought that we're importing wheat products from overseas, something that this incident has shown could be exploited by terrorists quite easily. Thank Jeebus that the "gubmint" is on the job and effectively protecting us.

RIP: Bob Clark

I'm sure to most people the name Bob Clark doesn't ring a bell. However, if you're as big a fan of the movie "A Christmas Story" as I am, you'll immediately recognize his name as the director of the film, and other such classics as "Porky's," "Porky's II: Redneck Boogaloo," and "Karate Dog." So it came as quite a shock to me just now to get word that Clark and his son were killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver at 2:30 PST this morning. Read the story here.

As you can probably tell I'm not a fan of the Porky's movies, never have been, including during my horny, stupid teenager years. And admittedly Clark directed some crappy movies and I wouldn't put him in the same category as your DePalmas, your Sturges, your Capras, your Kurosawas. But he hit the nail square on the head, in my opinion, with "A Christmas Story." Working with Jean Shepherd's colorful stories, Clark crafted an endearing holiday film. Even if you don't like the film you can certainly relate on some level in your past, a Christmas present you so fanatically wanted that you'd run over your own mother to get it. And for me, that's the appeal of the movie--a reminder of Christmases of earlier, simpler times, when Santa was real and the real world was fiction.

First Darren McGavin, now Bob Clark. Rest in peace, Bob; you made one helluva movie. You already knew your film featuring Ralphie Parker and his quest for an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time would outlive you, but I thought you'd have more time.

Holy crap!

I'm a bit nervous to be at work today. They've been doing some work in front of the building, digging out the foundation to do some waterproofing work. For the past couple of months we've had what we've referred to as "The Moat" out front. Today, with the sealing work done, they're starting to fill in the moat, which includes using the hydraulic "masher" to pack down the soil along the foundation. As a result the whole building has been shaking and vibrating today, and it's kind of unsettling given the questionable state of the foundation. Work today has been like being on the Lindsay Lohan Detox Simulator ride at Disney World, what with all the shaking going on.