An Entirely Other Day

Tough as Nails

You know how cowboys will jump off their horses and grab errant calves by the horns and bring them down and turn them over and tie their legs up? That’s how I cut my kids’ toenails.

They sit on the divan in my bathroom and I sit on the floor in front of them facing away, and I wedge a leg under my arm and hang on for dear life as they kick and buck and just generally claim that I’m tickling them while I wave what amounts to a knife around. Ha ha! Fun! And if you end up maimed, well maybe next time you’ll sit still.

But recently, instead of leaving heel-shaped dents in my back with their free foot, they’ve found a new way to try to keep me from providing basic hygiene. Looking up and over my shoulder, I had this conversation with Tom:

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you going blonde?”

“Blonde?”

“On the top of your head, in back. Like Lex Luthor.”

“Ah. You mean ‘bald.’”

“Bald!” he says, and laughs.

So I tightened my grip on his leg and tickle away.

Axe, Not the Body Spray

“OK, dude, I’m sorry. But you seriously need to get over it.”

“I know! I’ve tried. I… can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Look at you! What the hell are you doing mooning over some chick? It’s embarrassing.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I do. Everybody does. Get over it.”

“But she’s… so hot.”

“Yeah. I know. Which is exactly why you’re never going to get anywhere. She’s taken.”

“Maybe if I—”

“No. Seriously. Stop it.”

“She gave me a bit of her hair…”

“Yeah. About that. Creepy.”

“And I nearly had to kick that guy’s ass—”

“Stop. Not a good thing. You’ve spent the whole trip acting like a love-struck idiot.”

“Idiot? Idiot? I am Gimli, son of Gloin, and the Lady Galadriel of Lothlorien—”

“Dude. Let it go.”

Along a Continuum

I’m standing in line at the gas station, with my half-gallon of caffeine and bubbles, and the guy in front of me gets his turn and shuffles up to the counter. He’s sort of gaunt and weathered and a wind-breaker hangs loosely on his shoulders. He puts something that looks like a small electric razor to his throat and turns it on. A sharp buzzing starts.

“Do you have cell phone minutes?” he whispers, the sound barely rising above the machine.

“No,” says the cashier, totally unshaken. “But you can get them at the 7-Eleven across the street.”

“Thanks,” buzzes the guy and switches off the razor. He turns and shuffles out, headed for the cross-walk. I buy my soda and as I turn to leave, the woman behind me comes up to the counter.

“Marlboro Lights,” she says. “Two packs.”

Mechanization and Standardization

I have this little speech that I like to give to business types anytime they need convincing that building (expensive) software to do what (cheap) humans are currently doing is a good idea. They’re usually older, the business types, and wary of computers either out of unfamiliarity or because they were burned on previous projects. They know that you can call a temp agency and get people trucked in to do various jobs, and that seems both simpler and more comfortable than buying all that hardware and paying mole-people to make it work. Given an infinite number of monkeys with Excel, you can produce the client reporting.

(And for those of you who live in 2007 where the idea of having human beings actually touching data is out of the misty past, I bring news from the rest of the world: It’s cold out here, cold as death. The vast majority of business in this country is done in the exact same way your forward-thinking uncle did his taxes in 1986. “That machine? Oh, that machine has the client billing Access database. Don’t touch it.”)

The speech goes like this:

“The primary benefit of computers in most business situations is two-fold: mechanization and standardization. The computer can automatically produce regular results. They not only scale, producing more, but don’t fumble-finger, producing more consistently.

“Here’s an example: Eli Whitney.

“He invented the cotton gin, a tool for mechanization. Human labor — literally, slaves — used to have to pick seeds from out of the cotton by hand, a painfully slow process. The cotton gin was an automatic apparatus to do the same thing — it could be run faster, longer and more reliably than human labor, producing exactly the same result. Mechanization is about speed and scalability.

“He also promoted the idea of interchangeable musket parts, essentially pushing for standardization. Rather than requiring a craftsmen to build an entire musket from scratch — with potential variations in quality — standardized parts let anybody pull pieces out of a bag and snap them together into a gun that was just as good as the next. Standardization is about consistency and repeatability.

“Together, mechanization and standardization set the stage for the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history!

“And we can do the same for the company!”

I didn’t say it was a good speech.

Estimated Value: $500

On Jesus' Birthday, We Got the Gift

FM with BS

When I’m in the car, I mostly listen to KPCC, a public radio station run out of Pasadena City College. I like it more than KCRW, the big NPR station in Santa Monica, because it completely lacks the larger station’s West Side latte-sipping hipster smugness. Or, if it has any West Side latte-sipping hipster smugness, it at least has the courtesy to disappear into nothing when standing next to KCRW, the blinding supernova of West Side latte-sipping hipster smugness. “World-famous music library” and “Become an Angel” fund-raising and special screenings of touching foreign films at the Laemmle, my ass.

In fact, KPCC’s self-produced shows are so relentlessly bland that the promo for one illustrates the show with a brief clip where the host says, “A press conference is scheduled to begin at this hour…” Or, another way, not only are we lazy enough to cover a spoon-feeding press conference as news, but we’re doing it off the schedule we were fax’d. We couldn’t even be bothered to send somebody. And this is the promo.

But at some point in the past year or so, someone at KPCC has been given a marketing budget. They’ve put some billboards up and redesigned their logo and they’ve gained a new on-air tagline: “FM with IQ.”

And, yeah, clever and all, in a West Side latte-sipping hipster smug kind of way. Until you realize that “IQ” is a scale, without any implied value. (“FM” is too, but its value can be presumed.)

The slogan might as well be “FM with Fahrenheit.” Or “FM with Pounds.” Or “FM Without Really Thinking It Through, Because It Sounds Good.”

Which KCRW is already in charge of.

The Christmas Lawn Sculpture Orgy of 2006

My wife is a wonderful, beautiful, amazing woman, who unfortunately has absolutely abysmal taste in Christmas decorations. I come from a long line of colored-bulbs-along-the-eaves people, but Joanne isn’t satisfied unless we’re regularly blowing fuses. Over the years, we’ve moved from eave-bulbs and shrub-bulbs and little illuminated snowmen to eve-bulbs and shrub-bulbs and little illuminated snowmen and big illuminated snowmen and animated illuminated deer and fake illuminated trees and, God help me, a little illuminated igloo with two little illuminated penguins. One of which is wearing a Santa hat. This, of course, doesn’t say “Merry Christmas” so much as “We shop at Wal-Mart.”

But she’s my wonderful, beautiful, amazing wife and so the front law looks like the only thing it’s missing is a rusted out Chevy on blocks. And there things stood, festive and/or tacky as hell, until last year.

Last year, on the night of New Years Eve, someone took all these various lawn sculptures and wireframe simulacra, and, um, arranged them. In sexual positions. Or as close as you can get given how limber most of them are.

The deer were engaged with the snowmen and the snowmen were engaged right back with the deer. The penguins were engaged with each other. The trees and the igloo, thankfully, sat out.

2007 began with my front lawn covered in illuminated perversion. Which made me indescribably happy.

I’ve become enough of an old man that the teenagers who normally barrel up and down our street in their tricked out Scions, blaring their new-fangled music, inevitably earn a fist-shake and a “Why, in my day…” from me. But, on New Years Day, they and their tiny one-track beer-soaked minds, gave me a gift. A beautiful gift that I have cherished since.

And last night, as I hauled the snowmen out of the garage for another go-round, I could only hope that they heard my thank-you. And that they do it again.

Lesson Learned

Donald Knuth said, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” But now I’m thinking that ten-thirty at night, five days after you ship, is no longer in the “premature” time-frame.

It’s been a bad week.

Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be

I once read that if you want to sell someone a piano, you figure out what was on the radio when they were eighteen and play it as part of the pitch. The mark will get all dreamy-eyed and think back to their youth and drop several grand, just out of wistfulness.

This assumes, of course, that they actually enjoyed being eighteen, when they were young and free and having wild, drunken sex on the hoods of moving cars. Instead of, say, sitting inside, writing magazine games on their Atari 400.

And this occurred to me recently, when I was trapped in some department store somewhere and they started piping Cutting Crew through the overheads. Suddenly, I got all dreamy-eyed and started thinking about the vertical-bank period and the free-memory Page 6.

But I also realized, after slightly over twenty years, that the lyrics are:

Ah!
I just died in your arms tonight
I must have been something I said
I should have walked away

Instead of what I’ve always heard in my head:

Ah!
I just died in your arms tonight
I must have been something I ate
I should have walked away

Somehow I think I’m never going to buy a piano.