I didn’t take this job to make friends, and believe me, I haven’t!

So my better half wanted to rent Twilight, and I didn’t want to watch it, but I figured, “Welllll, she did come to the hospital for me on forty separate days last summer, so I guess I could do this for her.” The film proved to be so entertaining that I was moved to say so on Facebook, whereupon I was openly mocked by my own cousin. Rather than fly out to Brooklyn to slap him around set him straight in person, I’m saving the brass knuckles frequent flier miles for later as I explain to y’all in tale-of-the-tape style

Why Twilight Was a Better Movie than The Dark Knight, aka The Steaming Pile

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT / STORYLINE:
Twilight presents us with Bella, a high school senior who splits from her mother and stepfather in Phoenix so she can move in with her father, whom she hasn’t seen in ages and who lives in a small town in Washington state. She meets Edward, who falls for her hard but can’t commit to her, seeing as how he’s a vampire and he’s liable to get overexcited and drink all her blood. (Same excuse my brother gives women to this day, come to think of it.) So the two men in Bella’s life want to care for and protect her, but they’re not quite sure how, and the general awkwardness between her, her parents, her new schoolmates, etc., makes you sympathize with the character and draws you into the film.

Steaming Pile gives us a guy who dresses up in black and talks funny (that’d be your hero there) and a guy who wears a jacket that clashes with his vest (that’d be your villain there). There’s a third guy who starts out good but then turns bad because half his face gets blown off and a woman dies. I think he should just be grateful he doesn’t bleed out through the open wound on his face but that’s just me.

ADVANTAGE: TWILIGHT

ACTION / SPECIAL EFFECTS
Twilight gives you some razzle-dazzle shots of the vampires scattering through the forests of the Pacific Northwest, scampering between treetops like six-foot-tall spider monkeys. (They can fly, these vampires can.) The highlight there was a memorable intramural vamp-versus-vamp baseball game which went a little something like this. There are some okay fight scenes where bodies get thrown about in the manner of Superman II, which is always nice. But probably the most impressive was a shot early on where a van spins out of control in the high school parking lot and is about to crush our Bella, but Edward swoops in out of nowhere and pushes the van away with one hand, leaving a gigantic dent in the side door. The shot gets maximum impact because it’s just the two actors and the near-fatal van, no CGI nonsense — it really looked like they both should’ve been killed. There’s that character development payoff again.

Steaming Pile gives you some combative car chases impressive in their waste of pyrotechnics, but it’s nothing that Doug Liman hasn’t done better twice in one decade with Mr. and Mrs. Smith and The Bourne Identity. Steaming Pile also gives you some fight scenes between Goodguy and Badguy which would probably be real exciting if you could see what was going on at all and figure out whom to root for.

ADVANTAGE: TWILIGHT

CINEMATOGRAPHY:
Twilight was filmed in the Pacific Northwest; loaded up with blues and greens, every shot looks invitingly rainy and cool.

Steaming Pile was filmed in the second circle of Hell, the better to hide the plot holes.

ADVANTAGE: TWILIGHT

ACTING:
Twilight has a bunch of unknowns putting in credible performances.

Steaming Pile has a bunch of overpaid fatcats picking up a paycheck.

Oh, okay, okay, we all love the Heath Ledger, and it’s really a shame that he was a jackass who continued to abuse drugs even after he became a father and who probably deserved to die young and alone taken from us too soon. That being the case, I don’t think anyone can give a fair assessment of his portrayal of Purplesuitbadguy just yet. In a few years people will be able to see the performance for what it was — the best part of the movie, but that ain’t sayin’ much.

ADVANTAGE AND WINNER BY TKO: TWILIGHT!! TWILIGHT UBER ALLES!! TWILIGHT FTW!!

-
-
-

Any Progress Since Then?

Folks, here’s the deal. I’m as sick of looking at that last post as you are and I have to get it pushed down quick. But I’ve been busy and not real inspired to write anything new. So, I scurried through the archives and came up with this, written about two years ago, presented to you in its original, unedited format. It actually might become sort of pertinent since I’m working on something that could look back to this; or it might not. If someone could get Desmond to wire a note to Sawyer and have them pass it on to me that’d be a help.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - –

It’s usually about 120 minutes after noon before I can finally manage facing the day. I dress myself — I’m a prodigy that way, something that potential employers seem to have overlooked. I choose from among three or four pair of Urban Outfitters trousers that always stay in heavy rotation, jauntily set off by a plain T-shirt in three-guesses-or-less-yes black. The last thing to go on are my Adbusters Blackspot (TM) Shoes.

Did you catch that? That’s right, my shoes are from Adbusters, the magazine / nonprofit whositz that’s been a thorn in America’s fascist big business war-mongering side for close to 20 years now, baby! These guys don’t just hate the Republicans, they hate Clinton and Gore even more! You think John Kerry is going to solve anything? You’re so naive. My shoes know better than that.

The shoes themselves? Here goes. Black over their entire surface with the exception of a silver-dollar-sized circle that’s entirely white: a parody of a corporate logo. They’re made from hemp, providing not just a grainy texture but also the impression that I’m down with the stoner lawbreakers who flout the laws that make marijuana against the law. Laws? Your laws mean nothing to me. Watch me jaywalk on out of here, you square.

Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up. The sole looks like it’s made from an old automobile tire… because it is! I’m walking around on a pair of Pirellis! My footprints leave people guessing: Man or Car? And you call crushing your Pepsi cans “recycling.” Pffft. You’re probably just getting around to installing those low-energy light bulbs, right? That doesn’t impress me. I don’t even use light bulbs. I live in the dark.

Oh right, the shoes. They’re about as tall as an iPod nano and just a little bit longer than a foot. Size Nine, if you please. The heel and toe are capped with additional recycled rubber while the rest of the shoe is made from that eco-friendly hemp I was talking about earlier. The two pieces of fabric that form the shoe are patched together roughly with the stitchwork exposed, giving it a raw, do-it-yourself, I’m-not-from-the-suburbs look.

But wait, there’s more! The tip of the right shoe has a red dot on it, reminding the wearer to “kick corporate ass.” Seriously! It says so right on the Adbusters.com site! A warning that I’m not just alternative and underground and politically cynical, I’m violent as well. Dangerous, even.

I hate to act like I’m attached to my possessions — that’s way too Ugly American. But I have to admit these shoes mean a lot to me. They remind me that I’m an outsider. I may be a friendless, jobless, hairless underachiever living on money from home, but at least I have interesting shoes.

They can’t take that away from me.
-
-
-

The Bad Guys Won

So yeah, I must have been fourteen when I first became a Mets fan, if for no other reason — no, for the sole reason that they were favored by my older brother, whom I idolized at the time. In fact it was only a couple years after becoming a Mets fan that I wrote an essay outlining what an icon he was for me. The essay was part of the application process for the private high school I attended junior and senior year after I washed out of public school by cutting class for days at a time and skipping final exams in hopes that somebody would pay attention to how screwed up I was inside. Guess it worked.

Anyhow, in the intervening years I gradually became disenchanted with my brother, whom I came to view as an underminer. Our relationship was pretty complicated for a few years there but now it’s a lot simpler: We don’t speak to each other. HA HA HA HA, just fuckin’ with you bro. Kind of. But that’s not the point. The point is, I had become a Mets fan for life! and it’s all his fault!

So I followed the team and watched closely as they triumphed on Page Game Six and then took their potential dynasty and pissed it away into the expectant cups of the random drug-testing program. I was more or less paying attention up until 1991, when I got what scientists call a “girlfriend,” who in short order became a “fiance” and “incredibly unfortunate wife.” At that point I went, Hmmm, sex with a blonde, baseball. Sex with a blonde, baseball.* The title for this chapter is “Sorry Darling, You Lose.”

So I pretty much skipped the Mets in the 90s — good decade to miss it turned out. But then we head over to 2000, we got the Subway Series, this is my ‘team,’ I have to watch, right? The blonde still hadn’t come to her senses at that point (still hasn’t actually) and she’s still the one that [REDACTED -- We get the picture, whether we want to or not -- Ed.] but it’s the Mets and it’s the World Series and how can you not want to see baserunning errors by the immortal Timo Perez? How can you pass that up? That’d be like passing on the future of Scott Kazmir for ten innings out of the wrong Zambrano! Who does that?

The Mets again went from penthouse to shithouse with shocking speed and, loyal fan that I am, I dropped them to spend more time cooking up paranoid fantasies about the Bush Administration. Then in 2005 right before I was diagnosed with cancer I got hooked into following the team again based on an offhand comment in an e-mail from, wait for it, my brother! This guy pops up everywhere! Because of him I went online combing through the partisan blogs in search for intel and perspective about a trade that didn’t look so good for the good, sorry bad guys.**

I have to thank him for that at least, because that’s what led me to join and eventually write a daily column for Metsgeek.com, where I have been lucky enough to make some of the best friends of my life. And yes, they do exist in real life and I’ve seen them, unlike the plenty of my own friends that are all above me. Deez guyz (and galz) have been an incredible source of support as I grapple with dying too soon. Last week they went so far as to send me a carepackage that moved me to tears as I tried to reconcile their kindness with my lifelong belief that I am fundamentally unlikeable. In addition to the weeping the silliness of the gifts eventually lead to some giggling and laughter.

Best medicine.

* For those of you listening at home you may want to pantomime with your hands as you figuratively “weigh” your options
** Mets sent Kris Benson to Baltimore for John Maine and Jorge Julio, who turned into Orlando Hernandez. Score one for Omar.
-
-
-

What a Waste it Is to Lose One’s Mind — NDE #6.5

The first thing I noticed was that I couldn’t get this picture out of my mind, the one of the lousy tennis player with the gigantic tits.

You know who I mean – the one that never really could play tennis, but she was so hot* that she went on to star in music videos made by the Church of July Jr. ? That one. I came across a photo of her online on June 27, 2008. And no, for your information, it wasn’t a “porno” site, I haven’t looked at those in months in years ever. It was a site where Met fans can follow a game as it’s going on and post insightful comments like “Delagdo! El esta en fuego!!” or “Nice job Castillo, almost got it out of the infield this time.” In some ways that might be considered more embarrassing than checking out a porn site, but you know I’m not here just to look good.

Anyhow one of the jokers on this one site had that personality disorder where you always need to be the center of attention, what do they call that again? bein’ a dick? The dick’s dick would feel feisty sometimes and during the course of the game he’d post a hot** picture or twelve and on this night it was of the aforementioned tennis lady who’s better known for her set than her game and match. Picture went up, I saw it, woo woo, all right now let’s go back to the game and see if the Mets have learned how to get a runner in from third base with one out.

Problem was, after about a half hour I noticed that I kept seeing that picture of Big Blonde everywhere I looked. I was trying to follow the game but her carcass kept popping up, getting in between me and the diamond. I’d look away from the computer screen and she’d disappear (or maybe not, it’s hard to remember) but when I came back so would she. It was like Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, except that while the gremlin on the plane had the decency to keep still, Ol’ Busty McBreakPoint had started to bounce around all over my field of vision like Mario dodging barrels in Donkey Kong.

I quit watching the game — I couldn’t see it anyway — and tried to solve the problem by going to bed. That worked out great until I began having a dream that I was in my own kitchen crawling on the floor in search of Vicodin. I couldn’t even see the kitchen properly because there was a throbbing black dot taking up half my field of vision. I’ve heard that some concussion victims have headaches that feel like there’s a heartbeat on the brain. That’s exactly what it felt like as the most brutal head pain in my life woke me up and sent me to the kitchen for 1 no 2 no 3 no 4 Vicodin. I’m living the dream!

I hoped without reason that things would be all better the next day. Nope. I was still getting some image persistence, but now I was having problems integrating images as well. I’d see you right in front of me, but when the two halves of the brain had a conference to integrate Right Eye and Left Eye, they reconciled the info about as well as Arthur Andersen. You’d only have 3/4 of a face by the time I was through with you. Might have been cool if I was a Picasso fan or peaking on acid, but I wasn’t. That goes double for what happened at the dry cleaner that afternoon, where the cashier I’ve seen over a hundred times had the face of a gargoyle and wouldn’t stay in one place long enough for me to hand her my $Twenty.

It doesn’t sound like this guy should be driving, does it? My wife came to the same conclusion riding shotgun while I weaved around whichever traffic lane looked like it was in the middle. I seem to recall her hair turning white as she screamed that I needed to “slow down” or maybe even “stop” — I was too busy bouncing my ball of confusion to notice that we were about to hit the car in front of us at a cool 40mph.

I never would’ve seen it coming.

-
-
-

*She’s not hot, she just has ridiculously large gazongas that will probably require back surgery when she hits her 40s
**Hot should be read as “hot” throughout but I haven’t budgeted for enough quotation marks in this piece

-
-

TESTY? WHO’S TESTY??

Oh man, oh man, people I am freaking out over here! I’m freakin’ out! I mean I am just about to hit the CEILING folks, it feels like any second there is a going to be an eruption so violent that I’m going to explode into Dr. Manhattan only to have that Alien burst through my electric blue six pack. Anger! Anger! Kenneth Anger! Rage against the Kenneth Anger! Smash dishes, gnash molars, bash brothers, Crash Davis! Pick up the first thing handy and hurl it at the television screen! Remember you don’t own a television! Worry about visual disturbances caused by brain tumors! Panic about mental confusion! Forget what chemo fog does to your whachamacalit! Fall off the stool and land on your guitar and hope the wife didn’t hear that noise! Fall on your way to the bathroom and sprain your leg and get a blood clot! Captain we are sitting ducks here! FALL BACK, FALL BACK!!

Jeez, what’s he so worked up about?

Well, there’s that whole dying of cancer thing, that’s listed in this one book as a possible source of stress. Possibly. And I am going under the knife, the CyberKnife, in about five hours, so that’s been kind of on my mind, seeing as how if that doesn’t do the trick it’s only a hop skip and a jump to doggie heaven. I admit it, I’m a little distracted here.

And I have to admit a lot of this PMS daylong panic attack is my own fault, what with my drinking 20 ounces of French Press every morning brewed with, I don’t know, four tablespoons of beans. (Followed on by the daily venti latte and the continuous IV drip of iced tea.) Makes a guy a little short SHORT jumpy JUMPY WHO SAID THAT!!

And here again, I can only blame God myself for having such poor motor skills and coordination and balance that I instantly fumble just about anything I grasp, as if my fingers were coated in olive oil. I mean, when you drop the soap three times in one shower, that’s just an invitation your own fault. Why I ordered the tumors specifically to grow on the cerebellum I’ll never know. I must not have been thinking clearly. Chemo brain: Also my fault.

So yeah, your man here would be ready to snap in two by his ownself, without any help from the demons. I don’t need the demons right now, you know? This would be a great week for them to take a holiday and go pester someone who really deserves it, someone like Mugabe or Madoff or Alex Rodriguez. Cut me some slack for once demons, cut me some slack.

But no. They’re working overtime the last few days.

I don’t mean, like, personal demons, like regretting everything I have ever done in my life since I was nine and not being able to tell anyone about how I killed some guy once but he totally deserved it. I’m talking about, you know, the Car Key Gnomes from the Far Side. The imps who make the laptop crash right before I have a chance to save what I’m working on. The leprechauns who snatch away the one file that I know has always been there, right there in that same folder for seven years, right until the time I actually need it for this year’s 1040. And the pixies who move my cell phone from the coat pocket where it always is to the one where it never is, keeping me fumbling for it long enough that I miss the call from my doctor, which to be fair is just as well because I would probably have dropped the phone anyway and there’s never a rush to get bad news.

Still, demons, fuck off and give it a rest. I can lose my mind on my own.

-
-
-

Worth exactly what you paid for it

People always ask me, they say “Simmons, what do you think of the way the markets have been acting, what do you think I should do here.” And I always tell them, “Knucklehead, I think you should learn to pronounce my name first, that’s my advice.” I mean, seriously, how hard can it be? S-I-M-O-N-S. You got a single vowel “I” followed by a single consonant “M.” Last time I was trolling the grade schools they told me that combination adds up to a long vowel sound. (They also told me to stay away from the playground.) Just look over there at Mr. Edie Brickell, nobody’s calling him Paul “Simmon.” Although maybe they would if he were at a Renaissance Festival because it kind of sounds like “Persimmon.” He could be pouncing around the woods with a floppy hat and some love beads, busting out ‘Greensleeves’ on the Autoharp…

Maybe not. Anyway, yeah, money… and how to get invest it. It’s funny, I can remember the first time somebody acted on the financial advice I’d given them. Ages ago I told my mother-in-law she couldn’t get hurt buying some Chevron; she bought just a bit of it and within a year or two it had doubled. Then she complained because it went down 20%. She was kind of that way. During 2002 I pitched her a bond fund and she had me run it by her accountant, who billed me $150 for the meeting and told her it was too dangerous — something I was too young to understand. Over the subsequent five years it returned a cumulative 50% tax free. More important, she’s dead.

I had a lot of people telling me that year I didn’t know what I was talking about. Well that’s always been the case, but I’m talking about the markets. I was a broker, sorry, financial advisor for Morgan Stanley, and my second day in telemarketing, sorry, production was, wait for it, 9/11/01.* You may recall stocks didn’t do so hot that year or next, so I tried to focus on bonds, sorry, fixed income. I tended to “focus” on them with such obsessive analysis that by the end of the day I would have a 100% ideal portfolio, sorry, ladder, but I wouldn’t have made any calls letting prospects know it existed. Oops.

It’s just as well though, because invariably, when I would finally meet the customer, sorry, decision maker in person, he or she would react in disgust at my appearance. No, it wasn’t because I was too homely — I was too young. On the phone I could rattle off info about duration, yield-to-worst, tax-equivalent anything, but when my baby face walked in their door it was “What does this kid know about bonds? Rates are low these days –and in the 70s and 80s they were really high! How could this youngster possibly know or understand that?” Um, by reading a book maybe? and by putting Paul Volcker’s stand against inflation into its proper historical context while pointing out that globalization has created international competition so fierce that producing nations should probably be more worried about a deflationary lost decade than anything else? You feelin’ lucky punk?

They never felt lucky, and they never got lucky, either. They passed up the tax-free bonds yielding 5%, waiting for rates to go higher, and unless they sunk their money into those wacky muni mousetraps called ARPS, they must still be waiting. Bitterly obnoxious kid 1, old dudes 0.

So you should really take my advice seriously when it comes to everything money. And my advice for where to put money today? Not a fuckin’ clue.

But thanks for listening.

-
-
-
*That was also five days after I had finished my three-week sales training course, conducted in WTC1.
-
-

-

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. The alternate Wednesday came and went with no reports from the chemo wing. But I have a note from my doctor with the perfect excuse — my chemo session was canceled, or as the doctor put it, aborted. Look, you can even recognize his handwriting, right under the part where he says to fill a prescription for 200 Vicodin.

See, it went like this. I came down with a UTI the night before and I — wait, that was a couple weeks ago. Ah, hang on, yeah, I was totally wiped out from too much Dilantin and too little sleep and — no, that was still two weeks ago. They ran an MRI of the brain and found that four out of eight lesions surveyed were growing — yeah, that was still two weeks ago, but that’s where our story begins. Unless you’d rather I push it back to what my lousy childhood was like and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. (Ed. — works for us.)

All right, so let’s push it up to the non-chemo Wednesday, February the 18th, just a couple days after I celebrated my 38th. I meet with my radio-oncologist and he recommends treating the brain tumors with something called CyberKnife. I agree because the name sounds cool and on the web site there’s a picture of the device, which uses a robotic arm to circle your head and accurately hit you with its laser beam. Thing is we have to run it by the insurance company first, send them a tweet along the lines of “Hey this guy’s about to die, will you pay for him to not die, get back to me whenever.” It turns out the CyberKnife was actually developed from an assembly line tool used to manufacture cars, so I’m thinking if the insurance company balks I can work out some kind of Modern Times scenario with General Motors. I mean the bailout and all, it’s only fair, amirite?

Christ on his throne, 400 words in and we’re still a week away from this past Wednesday. Wrap it up motherfucker God! All right all right. Insurance company says okay, so all I have to do next is meet with a neurosurgeon and have my 19th MRI and my 20th CT scan and fill out a living will and then we’ll be all set, right? Well we would be except for that calf sprain I obtained by taking a stumble in the middle of the night two weeks ago, back when I was all dizzy from the too-much-Dilantin-too-little-sleep business I told you about earlier. The neurosurgeon said last Tuesday I should have an ultrasound to rule out a blood clot. I relayed to this news to my oncologist the next day.

“That’s ridiculous!” he said with disgust.

What’s ridiculous? The fact that we’re past 500 words and we’re just pulling in to Wednesday the 25th, the day of the regularly scheduled chemo treatment that never happened, is he ever going to finish this gripping yarn?

“If they think there might be a blood clot they need to look at it now. Let’s abort the chemo and send you over for an ultrasound and see what it shows.” Come to find out it showed (drum roll) a blood clot, which is being treated with Luvonox, which I get to inject into my abdomen every day for the next six months. It’s all right, the abdomen needs a distraction from my attention-whore stoma — that thing actually required a man yesterday to stick his finger directly into the large intestine to clear up a blockage. I was that full of shit.

The worst part is, he hasn’t called back.

-
-

Expiration date

So it was around St. Patrick’s Day a year ago when I almost kicked the bucket, I mean really this time. That was a fun story, but I left out a piece, namely my reaction to the surgeon’s announcement that I might not make it. Here it is, the profound, poetic epiphany that only comes to you when you’re up against the Eternal Footman himself. Ready?

I can’t die now — my wife won’t be able to figure out how to fill out the tax return!

Can you believe this guy? He’s got maybe four hours to live and his overriding worry is adjusting the cost basis on a couple of mutual funds so he doesn’t overpay the Treasury Department by $500. Miserly Bastard he is now.

Well it turns out the jig is up for Miserly Bastard. The 1099s are trickling in, we’ve already got Form 8282, the Schedule D looks hellacious complete — that tax return is just about finished, and maybe our hero is too. I’ve got permission to die on April 15, or maybe April 17 / 18 to make sure we didn’t get audited for claiming the cat.*

Well this won’t do at all. I gotta think of some new mile markers to set up, some of that “Man’s reach should exceed his grasp” kind of jazz, what are those called again? Goals? That can’t be right. Wait, goalposts! That’s it, we need to move the goalposts out. Let’s look at the ol’ calendar for 2009 and see if we can’t find some incentives lying around.

I got one right off the bat, coming up sometime this summer — Metsgeek reunion at Nationals Park! The trip to Pittsburgh was the highlight of last year for me, so I definitely have to keep on the right side of the grass until this one rolls around. Do me a favor guys, try to schedule it for late in the year.

Oh wait, there’s another one on the agenda — 20th High School Reunion! I think it’s cool that they’re going to let me attend even though I actually graduated closer to ‘94 and I’m five years younger than the rest of them. The promise of an open bar in Jersey itself is reason enough to stick it out for October.

Hang on, just thought of something even more important than friendships and money — LOST. By my calculations I’ve sacrificed more than 66 hours just to watching this show, which doesn’t even begin to cover the many nights of confused theorizing, debating the latest developments with my wife, or trolling fan sites using the handle Sawyerblows79. If I’m in for this many pennies I better be gaining some serious pounds by seeing the last episode in mid-2010.

Last but not least I’ll have to keep myself going until the Mets get themselves another World Series title. Owner Fred Wilpon oversees the team with the same care as he manages his own money, so this could take a while. But I’m in no hurry. You might call me a die-hard fan.

-
-

*Would’ve linked to the Kurtis Blow song ”The Breaks” but his label seems to have a niggardly attitude toward file sharing. His company sucks.

-

The price of regress

So yeah, it was about nine months ago when decided to purchase one of those trendy sub-notebooks that everybody was talking about. I settled on an HP 2133 8.9-inch Mini-Note, intending to use it for bloggin’ on the go. It ended up sitting in a box for a few months, but when we donated the second full-size family laptop a while back, it was time for Junior to get some exercise. Here is a short review of the product:

FAIL

Allow me to translate from picture into a thousand words. I found this thing so infuriating to use that I quickly sent it to a watery grave. I didn’t even take the time to ship it somewhere that would recycle its circuitry board, memory chips, et al. I threw it in the dumpster outside my apartment, and I hope that as its toxic chemicals eventually leak into the ground over a period of years, Mother Earth will come to feel a lump in her breast and sue H-P for giving her cancer.

Why so furious? I will start by making excuses like a battered spouse admitting that some of the fault in the relationship was mine. I’m nearsighted and too vain to wear glasses, and my hands sometimes tremble from all the exciting medication I take battling cancer. Between the Mini-Note’s smaller keyboard and the smaller screen, I found it extremely difficult to (a) write and (b) make sure that what I was writing wasn’t littered with embarrassing typos. “Days of lore” — I’ll never live it down.

The Mini-Note isn’t pretending to be big (there’s actually the word ‘mini’ in the name if you look closely), so if I had gone into a Best Buy and tried it out before buying, all of this could have been avoided. Of course, then I would have had to go into a Best Buy. And actually, I don’t think Best Buy sells it. Who else is around here, Circuit City? The Apple store is probably no good… Wait a minute, this wasn’t my fault, this was e-commerce’s fault! Jeff Bezos owes me $600 now!

I also lay plenty of blame on John Sculley for failing to license the Macintosh OS to different hardware manufacturers in the 1980s, allowing Bill Gates to market something called “Microsoft Windows.” I’ve heard of this beast and even tangled with it off and on back when I was still employed, but it’s been All Apple for me since 2003. Reuniting with my old nemesis I am aghast to see the state of him. My reaction is the same as when I first tried PCP — people really use this shit?

Turns out that Windows Vista is slow and unstable, much like Dick Cheney. Whenever I ran any app more taxing than WordPad the MiniNote would groan audibly from the strain, although it didn’t sound like a groan. It sounded like a million tiny demons typing at a million different keyboards, which is probably how the Vista OS was coded together, come to think. Something ain’t right with this software, because it does not play well with others. Take it somewhere with WiFi and watch how neurotic it acts: You have to give it a lot of time and attention and booze to have it connect. Your MacBook and your iPhone, they’re all like Hey we’re here, thanks for the vine.

The Mini-Note wouldn’t even connect to the laser printer I had, which is surprising when you consider they were both made by Hewlett-Packard. Then again, it wasn’t long ago that HP was headed up by someone who called Sarah Palin a “person of great accomplishment.” In hindsight my fervor for the HP sub-notebook should have been more subdued.

-
-

Shootin’ rockets to the moon, kids growin’ up too soon

A partial listing of movies with adult themes that various adults allowed me to see back before I was an adult. We’ve talked about my mortality and my shitter on this blog, but in many ways this post is the most intimately revealing of all — you can look up the films on the imdb and figure out my real age.

First up, Lassiter, the film that turned Tom Selleck from a television joke into a bankable film star. My best friend and I were 13 when his mom took us to a matinee showing of the film, in which Selleck plays a dashing international cat burglar in 1939 London. The first place he burgles is fresh out of cats, but it does have a bored housewife who catches Lassiter in mid-rob and, naturally, disrobes. Six minutes in and there’s already a bare pair right up there, on the screen; couple minutes later Selleck is on top of a nude Jane Seymour. Just a few minutes after that and we get Lauren Hutton riding some guy and then stabbing him with an ice pick, Basic Instinct-style. I thought I might be misremembering that part, so in the interests of science I went to YouTube to check out the first reel. After my fifth viewing I began to think I may have given that “World’s Best Mom” mug to the wrong woman. Apologies, Mama DiBella.

But I can’t sell my own mom short. She did take me to see Flashdance when I was 12 — me and a couple of adolescent sisters who needed help developing insecurities about their bodies, I guess. Or maybe she was hoping the movie would inspire them to be dancers, or welders, I don’t know. What I do know is that she misheard a line from the Irene Cara title track: “Take your pants down and make it happen.” I says to her “Pay attention Mom — she hasn’t been wearing pants for the last hour and a half!”

And then there’s ol’ dad, he doesn’t get off scott free either. Took us all out for an afternoon of family entertainment when I was 12 — Risky Business. My overriding memory of this outing (passing even the generous servings of Rebecca DeMornay) was the moment when two of my sisters busted out an air-drum-solo to that Phil Collins song that plays when they “make love on a real train.” Must have taken hours of rehearsal time, I reckon. After the film Pop asked what I thought and I told him I gave it a boner thumbs up. He said “You were supposed to say you liked it but you didn’t understand it.”

If by “it” we mean “A laid-back parenting approach that lets a 13-year-old watch Purple Rain on cable,” then yes — I don’t quite understand it, but I liked it. Liked it very much indeed.

-