I Laugh, therefore, I AM

Keep in mind that I do live alone. . .

. . . And I do enjoy a tidy apartment.

When one has a little bitty flat of 560 square feet (720 including the balcony), the least little bit of clutter does become a bit amplified.

Workout clothing strewn about, a couple of dishes left in the sink, or even some DVDs left on the Tivo makes me "grrr!" about my living space.

Don't even get me started on that old bottle of Old Spice Body shampoo in the shower that won't get thrown away. . . .

This unpacked suitcase was the one I took to Seattle and has been left on my living room floor for five days now.
(And yes, those are boxer-briefs; the underpants-hybrid of My People)

"Grrrr!"

. . . Yeah, I know.

It sort of looks like when my beagle would throw up.

But it’s really very good. And it even contains a complete protein since it has beans and nuts.

It’s Friday. I’ll probably have a big honkin’ Chicago style pizza delivered tonight. With anchovies.

Labels: Raw Food

About five months ago, I came across a really good program on the local PBS station. I forget what it was, but it was really interesting; something having to do with the history of sewers in Chicago I think.

Since it was actually entertaining, of course, it was being broadcast during the annual pledge drive. Just as I was really getting into this program, the host of the pledge drive came on and began his plea for money. These breaks in the program seem to last about five hours before the really good programming resumes.

Why is it that the only time PBS broadcasts anything really good, it’s always during a pledge drive? Whenever the pledge drive isn’t going on, PBS’s normal lineup of programming consists of two-hour, four part documentaries like “Nepalese Operas of the Late-17th Century†or equally riviting, “The Formation of Dew.â€

They were giving out a really cool gift if you gave a sizeable donation and I wanted it. Of course, I would have donated to PBS anyway . . . . it’s simply what My People do. We're absolutely bonkers over donating money to PBS.

Like I said, this was five months ago and guess what I received in the mail yesterday? My really cool gift.

I don’t even want it anymore now.

Speaking of PBS pledge drives, I can give you an inside scoop here.

I once volunteered to work the phones for an afternoon during one of those pledge drives. I’m sure you’ve seen it - - - the jovial host is telling you what an absolute cretin you’ll be if you don’t donate while the phones are ringing away behind him. The camera pans to the volunteers who are smiling away, answering the phones as they ring and take pledges.

Here’s the scoop - - - Have you ever seen a pledge drive where the phones weren’t ringing away? That’s because most of the phone-ringing is caused by the volunteers calling each other. We were told to do that while on camera to make it look like lots of pledges were rolling in.

Mostly, we were telling dirty jokes to each other; thus the smiles.

Labels: WTTW Chicago

Labels: Chicago, Two Prudential Plaza

Okay, I was on a plane for a total of nine hours during this past weekend.

I have developed the following ten rules for fellow passengers.

1. If you’re a small woman who stands all of four-foot-three, you do not need to lean your seat all the way back. You just don’t. Especially if the guy behind you is six-foot-three. Have a little consideration.

2. You do not need to speak to your wife next to you in your loudest voice during the entire four hour flight. Especially if you’re an annoying redneck with a mullet speaking to your redneck wife. You just don’t. You’re annoying the entire cabin. A lot.

3. Just because you’re a guy, that doesn’t automatically give you permission to sit with your knees spread four feet apart. No one will think you’re less of a man if you sit with your knees close together. Well, they will but just get over it.

4. You don’t have to constantly gaze at what I’m doing on my laptop during the entire trip. I’m not watching porn. I’m watching back-to-back episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond. That’s it.
(Okay, that was actually me watching my seatmate’s laptop the whole time).

5. Please go pee before you get on the plane. You know that the flight attendants will have the aisles blocked with their beverage carts the moment we reach our cruising altitude. You’ll have the next three hours to pee all you want, so just hold it.

6. If your seatmate (me) has his nose in a book, that means he probably doesn’t want to visit with you. If the book is a 700-page biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, that probably means he’s a very boring person to visit with anyway. Please find something else to occupy your time.

7. When exiting the aircraft, do not suddenly halt the moment you reach the end of the gangway, causing ten passengers to tumble over you. Please proceed just a little further into the terminal before readjusting all your baggage or figuring out where you need to go.

8. The flight attendants are mainly there for our safety in the event of an emergency. Requiring more peanuts hardly constitutes a flight emergency.

9. The airplane is there to fly you from point A to point B; not to provide a fine dining experience. If you find yourself wanting to complain about food, ask yourself this question: “Can your kitchen fly?â€

10. If your baby is screeching at the beginning of the flight so loud that it sounds like a psychotic pterodactyl and you’re able to quiet the little one for the rest of the four-hour flight, the airline should award you and yours with free round trip tickets. Period.

Now, please turn your attention to the flight attendants for a safety demonstration. . .

I got a call from American Express this morning at work. They were suspicious of three transactions on my credit card. Here’s why. . .

They had sent a new credit card to me recently - - you know, one with an updated expiration date. Apparently, I never got it.

But someone else did.

Yikes.

This person had somehow activated a PIN number on this card and took out a hundred dollar cash withdrawal from an ATM machine. They tried it again and were blocked from doing so.

Then, they filled up their gas tank. Twice.

I knew these weren’t my transactions because I ONLY use my American Express card for car rentals (It comes with car rental insurance).

The nice woman at American Express wanted to send a replacement card to me and needed my social security number for security purposes.

“I’m not comfortable giving out that information on a call that I didn’t initiate,†said I.

She understood. Actually, she thought that was pretty smart of me.

I called them back, cancelled the account and they’re sending the necessary papers for me to sign, gave documentation to me to file a police report, etc. Of course, I’m not responsible for these charges. I never even received this card, nor did I activate it.

I had other questions. What personal information did this person need in order to activate the card and assign a PIN ? Apparently, they had my social security number.

I filed a police report and relayed that info back to AmEx fraud dept. I also put a protection alert thingy on my social security number.

I have an idea how this happened.

Next to the mailboxes in my apartment building, there's a big recepticle for paper recycling. I get so much junk mail that I'm pretty haphazard about tossing everything in there. That container would be a gold mine for any maintenance worker wanting stuff like this.

More than likely, I tossed the new credit card in there.

But still, just knowing someone did this. . .

Eeewww!

Here’s a lesson for you folks. . .

Don’t ever think this stuff can’t happen to you. Keep a close eye on your bank accounts. Online banking enables you to monitor it. Every day if you need to.

And also, don’t give out any personal information unless you initiate the call.

And be very careful about shredding your mail, especially credit card offers and any other items with identifying information.

I feel dirty and violated.

Okay, I'm going in for a Silkwood scrubdown now.

It goes without saying that I had a fantastic time in Seattle with Lorraine, her family and friends. There was food, incredible food. To say “that woman knows how to cook†would be the biggest understatement ever.

I was truly honored to partake in her annual Autumn Feast on Saturday night. To say that the food was incredible would be the biggest understatement ever.

However, the best part was getting to shop for everything with Lorraine and cook with her in her kitchen. Cooking with Lorraine has got to be one of my favoritest things to do.

I arrived on Friday evening. Lorraine met me at the airport after coming straight from work. She looked all corporate-y in her work attire. Hugs and kisses were exchanged.

The Child was at her first high school dance which is exactly where a high school freshman should be on a Friday night. She arrived later that night and I was shocked to see how much she had grown! That kid is definitely going to be breaking the hearts of many a high school boy.

Next day, Lorraine and I spent about five hours shopping for her Feast. While we were shopping at Pike’s Place Market (which Seattleites simply call “The Marketâ€) there was a panhandler who had this fat little guy with him:

. . . tomorrow afternoon.

Tomorrow (Friday) I’ll be in misty, moisty Seattle visiting Lorraine and her lovely family and friends.

(Does a happy dance)

This means that I have a million things to do tonight which I’ve put off until now.

By a “million†I mean “fiveâ€.

1. Get a haircut so that I don’t arrive looking slovenly. Airplane-hair is bad enough in itself.

2. Do laundry so that I have clean underpants. Those high-falutin’ Seattle folks probably wear clean underpants.

3. Get my prescription refilled so I don’t, . . . well, . . . die on them.

4. Pack my just-laundered underpants.

5. Most importantly, download new music for my iPod. It’s a four-hour flight and I need all the distraction I can get.

For a guy whose in his late forties, I’ve kept up pretty well with technology.

I update my cell phone every two years. I need high-speed internet. I do all my banking online. I’m the go-to guy for Mom and Dad’s computer questions.

But one thing I don’t think I’ll ever understand is texting.

I mean, it’s just so inefficient.

For example, I took a typing class when I was a freshman in high school. Mind you, this was back in the day when we didn’t even have electric typewriters in the classroom, much less a computer keyboard.

The letter “Q†hadn’t even been invented yet.
The word for “fire†was ‘ga’.

We had these huge, ancient Royal typewriters from the 1940s to learn on. The pic here is exactly the same model we used. Can you believe that?

Every day, we were subjected to a five minute speed-typing test and we’d work so incredibly hard to get our typing speed up. I remember when I finally got up to 80 words per minute, which, let me tell you was quite a feat on these old clunkers.

So, I just don’t understand why so many (young) people use texting. It takes three keystrokes just to input one letter. Heaven help you if you want to use the % symbol or proper punctuation.

I know these kids can text much faster than I, but still, they might manage ten words per minute at best. And most of these are "R U 2"

We speak at 225 words per minute. That is, unless you're from the South like me, then it's about half that. If you're from Wisconsin like Miss Healthypants, then it's more like 5000 wpm which causes me to end up saying "Whaaaat?" every other sentence.

225 wpm is twenty times faster than the best texter. Doesn’t it make sense to pick up the phone and just call someone or at least leave a voice message?

When I was home visiting family in Texas recently, I noticed that my 20-year-old first-cousin-once-removed was texting her dad. I saw this as an opportunity to find out about this mystery and asked her why she didn’t just call him.

She said she really didn’t feel like talking to him.

I can understand that. I love using email at work, especially since I really don’t want to actually speak with anyone unless I have to.

But remember, I broke the 80 wpm sound barrier on a pre-historic typewriter. I’m probably buzzing along here at 120 wpm on a computer keyboard. However, I can probably manage only 2 words per minute texting from a cell phone.

Also, with texting, you don’t really know if the person actually received the communication. I barely know how to even read a text I’ve received, much less compose and send one. I’m sure I’ve received messages that I’ve never even read.

If anyone can tell me what the appeal is with texting, I’d love to hear it.

But for now, I just don’t get it.

On the way to work every day, I’d notice this newspaper stand that said “PEE†on it in big white letters. I never paid much attention to it, just thinking it was a foreign publication like from Thailand or the Philippines.


Finally, I noticed what the real deal was.

Here’s the other side of the newspaper stand. Someone with a juvenile mind thought they were being clever.

Here’s an interesting tidbit for you. . . .

Have you ever cooked rice in a rice cooker and come across that brown, somewhat toasted rice at the bottom of the pot?

Well, in Korea, people love that crusty, toasted rice stuff. As a matter of fact, they’ve even got it as a flavor of ice cream.

But in Japan, it’s highly undesirable.
They don’t like it at all.
It’s called “okogeâ€.

Strangely enough, “okoge†is also the word for a woman who spends lots of time with gay men.

That would be like us engaging in the following dialog over the phone:

"I can't get this okoge out!"

"Use some Comet on it."

"On Miss Healthypants? I don't think that'll work."

"No! On your rice cooker, silly."

"I was referring to Miss Healthypants-okoge. Not rice-cooker-okoge. She won't leave!"

"Well, try some Comet anyway. . . "

Labels: okoge

Labels: Marina City

Growing up in my little-bitty home town in south Texas, I pretty much wanted nothing more than to get out of the state.

Of course, a town in south Texas was pretty much a hillion-jillion miles from the state border, so getting out of Texas was just something people didn’t do where I grew up.

I had been across the border to Mexico a few times. There was church camp in Oklahoma. Once, we drove to pick up my step-sister in Alabama after she visited her grandparents. But other than that, I hadn’t been anywhere.

That’s why I was so excited to learn about a theatre tour to New York City for high school students sponsored by the American Thespian Society. I was 15 years old, a sophomore in high school and desperately wanted to go.

The tour would take place in the summer after school let out. It consisted of three days in Washington D.C., five days in New York City and two days at the Shakespear Festival in Stratford Ontario. It also included hotels, theatre tickets every night including five Broadway shows and travel (by Greyhound bus). We’d have to pay for our own meals and spending money.
The price? A whopping three hundred dollars!

My mom said I could go if I could raise the money myself. (She and Dad would help some, of course, but not much).

I had a job after school and weekends at the local Dairy Queen making a staggering wage of $1.80 an hour. I worked as many hours as I could. I flipped an awful lot of Hung-r-busters.

I finally made enough money to go and off I went with about twenty high school students from various high schools in south Texas. I was one excited kid, let me tell you.

The first night we were in Washington, we went to see Death of a Salesman at a small theatre-in-the-round. Guess who was playing the lead of Willie Lohman? It was George C. Scott. That was my first exposure to the “theatah†and it was a stunning experience, needless to say.

Since this theatre tour was sponsored by the American Thespian Society, it was not a school-sponsored tour. Even though we were all teenagers, we weren’t under any restrictions that a school-sponsored tour might have imposed.

For example, we saw Equus on Broadway. (Leonard Nimoy played the psychiatrist). That was pretty heavy stuff for a 16 year-old country bumpkin to be exposed to and I’ll admit that I didn’t understand a lot of it. But I felt so grown-up and sophisticated, seeing actual nudity on stage and all.

We also saw Bette Midler in The Divine Miss M as well as Grease, Chicago, and Pippin.

In New York City back in 1975, the drinking age was (are you ready for this?) sixteen for beer and wine. It wasn’t school sponsored, so we could drink with the caveat that if any of us got drunk, we’d be flown home at our parents’ expense. We behaved for the most part.

I had my first Heineken beer and loved it, mainly because it was something different than Lone Star Beer. (I had lots of Heineken beer on that trip, by the way).

Oh, and this was 1975 Manhattan; back in the day before Times Square was all sterile and Disney-fied. It was gritty, grungy, full of sleaze, and XXX-this-n-that, just like God intended.

I remember that the subway was 55 cents in New York back then. The subway in D.C. wasn’t even built yet.

One high school girl from a nearby school (Port Lavaca) had sort of crush on me and kept wanting to do naughty things with me on the bus. Like kissing, for crying out loud!

Aside from Jackie-from-Port-Lavaca-with-the-crowbar tongue, it was an incredible experience. That trip definitely had to be the best time I’ve ever had.
Ever.

Upon arriving back to my little-bitty home town, I went back to work, slaving away at the Dairy Queen.

Only this time, I was saving up to go again the next year. . .

Labels: Chicago, Death of a Salesman, Equus, George C. Scott, Grease, Leonard Nimoy, New York City, Pippin

Autumn has finally arrived.

It was late getting here, but it finally made it.

This morning was overcast and there was a definite chill in the air. People on their way to work had donned overcoats for the first time. I call it “pumpkin weather.â€

You may recall that there’s a farmers market every Tuesday in the plaza where I work. The recent change from summer to autumn was reflected in the produce today.

Gone were the ears of fresh corn. Acorn squash had replaced the zucchini. A few remnants of late-harvest tomatoes had managed to limp their way in.

That may sound a little sad, but during autumn comes the glories of fresh apples Lots of them.

Apples. Manzanas. Pommes. Äpfel. Ñблоки

Having grown up in South Texas, I had never been around apples fresh from the orchard. If you’ve never had, say, a Cortland apple fresh off the tree, you don’t know what you’re missing.

Eve definitely knew a good thing when she disobeyed God’s command.

With the arrival of autumn, various squashes are happy to make an appearance.

Along with the cruciferous Brussels sprouts and cabbage sprouts (a favorite of mine)

And a variety of sweet potatoes (I’ll pass, thank you)

The peppers and eggplants are still around, looking ever so tasty.

Apparently, we are blessed with an abundance of apple orchards in nearby Indiana and Michigan which produce an amazing variety of apples. Most of these are not cultivated for mass transport, so you’ll never see them in your average mega-market thousands of miles away.

This morning, I counted 34 different varieties of apples.

Amazing. Simply amazing. . . .

. . . . I want pie.

"As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. . . . "

Labels: Sara Palin, Vladimir Putin

One of the many things I love about Chicago is that you can find just about any type of food you want. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve enjoyed foods from different places. A lot.

I think that’s because there was no foreign food available in my little-bitty hometown in Texas; that is, unless you count a “parfait†at the local Dairy Queen as French cuisine. There was one Chinese restaurant in the next little-bit-bigger town, but that was about it.

In Chicago, there’s an Indian section of town chocked full of Indian, Pakistani and Kashmiri restaurants. Even the main street through that section of town (Devon Ave.) is somehow always clogged with traffic, reminiscent of inner-Calcutta.

So, on Saturday morning, my friend Jack called and woke me up at the crack of dawn (9:00 am) asking if I wanted to join him and Steve at one of our favorite Indian places, a restaurant called Tiffin.

Tiffin features a gorgeous lunch buffet on weekends. I’d never pass that up. The idea of going there for lunch roused me pretty easily.

And, of course, I took photos: