…but it’s funny to Tivo “30-Minute Meals” and watch it in slow motion, or as Ray might say, “slo-mo.”
Rachel Ray is Scary
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Yearly Archives: 2006
Come On and Zoom Zoom Zooma Zoom
My latest radio obsession is a little show called “This American Life,” which I record on the Inno each morning for later consumption. I’ve always been a fan, especially of Sarah “Goth Becky” Vowell, but I haven’t been able to make the time for them until the XM. They tell the best stories.
This morning’s installment was “lies at 10 years old,” Act I being the story of a kid who was cast for the first season of “Zoom,” but then was cut. He’s apparently dealt with this loss by continuing to tell people all his life that he was in the cast. Sad.
Anyway. Damnit. Now I have that song in my head.
And now you do, too.
The Freshmaker
I now know through keen scientific observation that when one dumps a half a packet of Menthos into a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke, a fountain erupts from the bottle. Learning such things first-hand is one of the joys of keeping younger people around. Will, Dad, and I went to the market specifically to purchase several bottles of Diet Coke and a few packs of Menthos, just for this purpose. In fact, for what other reason does anyone actually purchase Menthos?
Anyway. I am here in up-state New York. It is nice. It is nice because I am no longer in a city where an old man will scold you for suggesting that he might move away from the subway doors to let other people onto the train. It is nice because my Pops is smoking the turkey outside today, so the house smells good inside and in some locations in the great outdoors. There are horsies here and chickens and cats and dogs and books to read and Glüwein in the slo-cook. And there are more Diet Coke bombs to be made.
So. You’re The Assman.
On Oct. 8, 1993, many Americans were introduced rather uncerimoniously to a longstanding tradition known as the Friars Club roast. On that evening, actor Ted Danson took the stage in blackface—during a roast of his then presumed sweetie, Whoopi Goldberg. It caused a firestorm of controversy, though Goldberg herself had written much of the bit and fiercely defended the performance and Danson.
Through that incident, many Americans have been made aware of a fierce brand of comedy that sometimes toys with racism to be funny. It’s there. You can argue that it shouldn’t be or that people should grow a spine over it, but it’s there.
You just gotta be careful if you choose to go and use it. Michael Richards, eh, not so careful.
The whole thing makes you wonder, when the heck are white people are going to get the message once and for all, that it becomes less and less cool every day to insult a man for his complexion, and that it is especially not cool if you do it by using that word. Dear white people: You no longer own, or even lease, that word. You are not to use it, period. Not with the “ah” at the end and certainly not with the “r” at the end. Just for good measure, let’s avoid “niggardly,” too. I know doing so patronizes the masses and kills a perfectly good adjective, but “miserly” works just as well and has just as many syllables.
On the other hand.
I’ve never done standup. I’ve come close. You know. Karaoke. And I’ve threatened to do standup at Dremo’s. But I haven’t. So I can’t imagine what that feels like, to know that you’re drowning up there and to hear affirmation of that screamed at you by those who have ostensibly shown up and paid to see you do this. It must be infuriating. It must be very tempting to go there, to venture into the living room and to come out with something awful, something about hanging one upside down and shoving forks in places, and then to go that one step further, as did Michael Richards.
I’d like America to give Richards a pass, only because I think we owe him one. For years, the man entertained you and you and you with his mugging and his pratfalls, sometimes to the point of making you think, how did he DO that?. It was unprofessional and foolish of him to go there, certainly. Wrong place wrong time, and worst of all, it wasn’t funny. But, foogit. He’s Kramer. Cosmos Kramer. Give break. Right?
All Systems Are Gopher
While many of you were worshipping Jesus today or watching the football or producing sparkling academic treatises or lounging in your beachside homes, I was putting together computer workstations.
Well. Not all day. I showed up at the new office at 10 a.m. as asked, and they weren’t nearly ready. With a few hours to kill and a grumbelly belly, hunted and devoured an omlette sandwich at a Cosi. I then went to the Borders That Looks As If Built Into The Sidewalk. I can always kill an hour there. Until, of course, I flew by Ex Girlfriend Unlucky Enough To Have Met Me In Crazier Times Than These (she may retain some level of anonymity in this post because that describes like five people). Oy. What were these odds? Granted, her office is near the Borders That Looks As If Built Into The Sidewalk, as is the friendly former place of Free Wings On Tuesday (FWOT), where we went weekly. So perhaps the odds were better than, say, the odds of Artie Lange saying, “No, thanks. I just couldn’t.” After all, I’m horning in on her ‘hood here. (Sorry.) But still, there was a “small world” feel to it. And, it was a fly-by, which is what it probably should have been, so, long story short, I ended up back at the office a wee little bit earlier than requested.
The staff there today and I shot the bull in our beautiful new conference room for awhile then went out for gyros and salad. Just as we began eating, the movers came in to move our chairs to other quarters. Moving is hell. After lunch, the station setting upping began, and it is not work for pussies, my friends. There is griming around on the floor and grunting and there are artistic considerations and comfort considerations and technical considerations to be met. And some of the offices don’t even have all the furniture or all the peripherals yet, so there’s guessing.
My office is all set, of course. And I can share two lovely things about the new place, which is like a spaceship compared to the old joint, by the way. I speak almost not only figuratively: The rooms light up on their own when you enter a room. They tell me they wanted to conserve power, but I know better: They wanted to make it more like a spaceship.
And we toured the server room, which is much larger than the old one and which actually has a rack for everything, rather than half of the equipment being stacked up on shelves. And I’m standing there with two of my co-workers marveling at the new server room, and then it occurred to me: Jessicacita would be laughing at me right now and calling me a nerd. Heck, if she’d seen this, she might even be making a little nerdtenna gesture at me.
Anyway. I unfortunately have to actually show up before nine tomorrow, an event they’ll be covering on tomorrow’s Today, like that time when David Blaine lived in that water bubble. There’s a meeting I have to be at and some peoples’ complaints I might need to meet.
Random quoth…”An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” — M. Ghandi
Just Not Horny Enough
I like Christina Aguilera. That’s one guilty admission, from me to you. Christina Aguilera is all right in my book. I liked her in her “Come On Over Baby†days—I even have that CD, though I bought it for a dollar at a used CD store in Edinboro, Pa. I thought her “Beautiful†song was unusually affirming for a ladysinger of her ilk. And I like the decade-bending of her latest work. Except.
Except she had a full compliment of horns on SNL this week and did not use them. All they did was provide that percussive “Bop. Doo-dot. Bow.†on “Ain’t No Other Man.†As I watched it I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them, you know, I could hear them thinking, for this I spent 14 hours a day in a practice room through my late teens and early 20s? Christ. You’ve got a full compliment of horns and you’re trying to create echoes of the big band era. Write them a chart or something. Let them wail.
The appearance did nearly redeem itself with her duet with Tony Bennett. But not quite. I would have been happier to see him perform with Jane Monheit, or to have seen the time allotted to those HORNS in the first act.
Jessicacita and I watched The Station Agent…a weird but worth-watching film. It has a midget in it. I don’t really think there’s much more that needs to be said.
Here at my office, we’re getting ready to move. We’ll move on Fry-day, even. And there are people coming in to the office apparently considering moving in to this space, so periodically, people will pass my office at that sort of “just browsing†lumbering pace—and sort of look in. It makes me want to jump on my chair and start acting like a chimp.
If I get through the week without throwing my own poop at somebody, someone owes me a cookie.
I think my Mama will like the new theme I just found and altered today. It appropriates from a design of yore that she was fond of because mamas like to see pictures of their kids when they’re kids, and she was just telling me that she thought the one I’d just gotten were a little too “generic.†I like it. I’m still detailing. But I like it.
Begone The Dog And Pony Show
I have discovered two terms that distinguish different forms of mind-boggingly stupid statements made by Republigoats and their accomplices.
A “Tartlets Tartlets Tartlets” is a phrase or idea that is so unfathomable that if you attempt to argue it to yourself long enough, it loses all meaning. See “Friends,” “The One With The Stoned Guy,” guest starring Jon Lovitz. President Bush’s stance on stem cell research is an excellent example of a Tartlets Tartlets Tartlets.
An “If It Weren’t For My Horse” is a phrase or idea that is so utterly stupid that it should cause you to heed comedian Lewis Black’s warning about it: “Don’t—don’t think about that sentence for more than three minutes or blood will shoot out your nose.” If you’re unfamiliar with this iconic comic routine, please search for it at YouTube.
The notion fermenting that the Democrats who bulldozed the Republigoats were “conservative Democrats” is an If It Weren’t For My Horse—as is that idiocy’s twin idiocy that Madame Speaker-Elect Nancy Pelosi is some kind of Communist Goon Hippie Dope-Smoking Communist Faerie Communist Goat-Humping Pagan Communist (not that there’s anything wrong with that). No, friends, what happened was that the Democratic Party stopped taking America’s pulse with its thumb.
There was nothing more striking about the 2006 mid-term drive than the strident message against the President’s Dirty Big War. I can’t recall a single Democratic TV spot I saw that didn’t tout the candidate’s stance against the Iraq war and that didn’t accuse the opponent of licking the President’s belly button.
Contrast this election season with 2004: Dennis Kucinich said “the war is wrong,” and all the other candidates looked around and said, “Who farted?” And then Howard Dean bellowed, “The War Is Wrong!” and started getting results, so all the other candidates started trying to say the same thing but couldn’t quite hold their mouths right, so they ended up saying weird things like “The War Has Cheese!” And then Howard Dean got up in front of a crowd and transformed into a giant horny lizard creature and had to drop out of the race, leaving all the other candidates to run around in scatters screaming “The War Has Cheese!” “The War Has Cheese!” “The War Has Cheese!” And then John Kerry went snowboarding, causing George W. Bush to “win” “reelection.”
Remember?
Anyway. No way in Topeka did the Democrats win this by wearing Duncan Hunter masks. The ideas that swept the Democrats in were overwhelmingly “progressive” and do not in any way resemble the ideas put forward by the Republigoats. Sorry, Bob Schieffer.
Pelosi has some excellent stuff tacked to her clipboard, including the idea of fully enacting the 9/11 Commission recommendations. A novel idea: America needs to stop flapping its gums about that tragic event to actually manage the problems that were caused and revealed by it.
And we’ll do it, no matter what labels they’d like to slap on the Dems who are taking the saddle.
Get ready. Stuff is about to happen.
(Also published at The Smirking Chimp.)
Six-Word Novels
The challenge: Write a novel in six words.
I chose to synopsize 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ahem.
Monolith. Evolution. Crazy computer. Monolith. Evolution.
Lenny Gold Is Not Afraid
Anyone else notice—okay, you probably didn’t notice—that the comic who played “Lenny Gold” on last night’s episode of “Studio 60” was none other than the famous and brilliant Fred Stoller?
Nice cameo for Fred! What a great show to appear on, and a damned cool way to do so. Now. Let’s see if this excellent program makes it to six episodes.
Helping The World Change Channels!
An odd truth in life, or at least something that seems to have been true for me always: You will always learn the most valuable things in the least likely of places.
This morning, the youngster what works in our office stuck his head in my door and asked me if anyone could use our online member directory. I said yes. He said he was talking to a woman who was having problems with it, and he re-asked the question. I said anyone should be able to use it. He said okay.
A few hours later I was passing the front deks after just having heated up the frozen thai meal I had for lunch, and I herd him on the fone again, this time saying, “…maybe it’s your computer…” Ouch. I told him to forward the call to me.
There was, of course, a slight language barrier since the caller was from Vietnam. And there was another barrier, too, in that I’m not sure she’d ever used the interweb before. But here’s the thing about a phone call like this: It’s not just about giving her some pat advice and getting her off the phone. Your call isn’t going to work until you win her over, until you convince her that you’re in control of the call and that you know what you’re talking about regarding the product. The call doesn’t work until you convince her that her only option is to stop fighting you and to cooperate.
I don’t know how, specifically, you steer such a call into this critical mass. I think, for one, it’s tenacity. You stick with it and you don’t tell her it’s “probably her computer,” you don’t tell her that unless it is and you can point to a specific solution. You understand that for the first five minutes of the call, she’s not going to listen to you, and she’s going to lie to you, or at least she’s going to not understand how to tell you what her Web window says. But you somehow insist that she does, and she does eventually. Eventually, you steer her toward the desired result, and she’s relieved and happy and feels like she’s learned something, and then, always, you offer her your name and direct phone number, so she feels like she knows someone at your organization. She’s not a member yet, but this one experience might get her to join.
I spent a year doing customer service for a company that used to make universal remote controls. I was in the regular call center until they moved me over to “Euro,” which took calls from the United Kingdom. And that’s where I learned how to do this. Because once you can to walk a Scot through programming a remote control, you can walk anyone through anything on the telephone.
So I remind myself now: Learning comes from the oddest of places.