August 2005 Archives

We're baaaaaaack. The new apartment was inspected last Tuesday, okayed between then and last Thursday, and we began moving stuff that same night (thanks to Mrs. Dave's brilliant idea of hiring a couple of local kids to help with the move). The movers hit our place like a human-sized ant swarm, tossing our stuff into their truck in an hour-forty-five, and depositing it in the new digs in less than an hour. They descended upon us at 7:45 and were gone well before 11. I guess never unpacking half your shit has its advantages. Of course, you have to unpack it all again eventually, but I'm just glad we didn't have to move multiple times before ending back up a floor lower than we started.

The place is good but not quite finished - there's a lot more stuff to be done in the rest of the building so we have to put up with stuff like no bathroom shelving, a mirror taped (TAPED!) to the wall in the bathroom, no closet rods (yes, we're living out of wardrobe boxes), and dust and crap all over the (new bamboo) floor from the contractors walking all over the place. Oh, and the brand new washer/dryer we got? Broken. And the student washer in the basement that eats quarters like they're Hershey's miniatures? Also broken. My sense of smell from taking repeated whiffs of our stanky-ass old laundry? Yup, broken.

...and it is NOYCE.

Got a second walkthrough of the renovated apartment. We are pleased. Sweet bamboo flooring throughout most of the place, a slightly larger bedroom (with slightly less closet space), a brand-new kitchen with a metal sink (no more shattering our glasses on the porcelain), and what will soon be a nifty little breakfast bar counter with some slick quasi-Asian bar stools to accompany it (our purchase).

For those of you who knew our apartment, our kitchen is now the office, the office is gone, the living room is now half-living room, half-kitchen, the washer-dryer are now where the stupid cabinet outside the bathroom used to be (and stacked on top of each other!), and our bedroom/bathroom are more or less where they were before. Well, except everything is one floor lower, which will make moving back in SO easy. Oh, and we even get a schmancy black-and-white checkerboard entryway with some light blue trim all around. Nice enough to tap-dance on.

The town inspector comes tomorrow to deem it inhabitable. If he finds anything serious enough to delay our scheduled Friday move date, I'm cracking skulls.

Let's see how this works...

Sat 10/08 Boston to Baltimore = 400 miles, 8 hours, plus another 50 miles/1 hour to Alexandria.
Mon 10/10 Alexandria to Philly = 140 miles, 3 hours.
Tue 10/11 Philly to DC = 140 miles, 3 hours.
Wed 10/12 Alexandria to Burlington = 540 miles, 11 hours.
Thu 10/13 Burlington to Albany = 150 miles, 3 hours, no show.
Fri 10/14 Albany to Atlantic City = 280 miles, 5 hours.
Sat 10/15 Atlantic City to Boston = 340 miles, 6 hours.
Sun 10/16 Boston to NYC = 200 miles, 4 hours.
Mon 10/17 NYC to Boston = 200 miles, 4 hours.

Total: ~2500 miles, 50 hours. Oy. I guess I was buttering up my car for a reason.

And I say that in my best Eddie Andelman voice.

After having a little run-in with a post in the parking lot at work a couple weeks back (the post is there to keep cars from hitting the fire hydrants, but it makes it easier for you to hit the post), I thought I'd make it up to the car this weekend and take it in for a little TLC. Saturday I finally pulled out a gift certificate that Mrs. Dave had given me for Christmas, and had the car detailed. If you've never had it done to your car, and you've owned your car for more than a year or two (or your car has existed for more than a year or two), it's probably a bit gritty on the floor, the upholstery is faded, there's gunk in your dashboard, radio, vents and console...your car's a mess but it's nothing you'd ever want to clean up yourself.

Well.

They had the thing for nigh on three hours, and even after I saw the bill for what it would have cost, I'd say it was worth it. It's a five-year-old car, but you couldn't tell after they were done with it - the steering wheel gleamed, there was a luster all across the dashboard, the vents were clean, the radio was degunkified. They even cleared the leaves out of the space between the trunk opening and the bottom of the rear window, and even went so far as to lift up the head rests and dust underneath them. Oh, and of course they waxed and buffed the whole thing, to the point where it almost hurt my eyes to look at it when the sun was out. I officially now own a Sexy Car. It's gawjus.

So now that it had gotten the Bryl Cream treatment on the outside, it was time to give it the oil treatment on the inside. I took it in Sunday for an oil change and fuel system treatment; it drank that stuff right up. I guess once you get your car all duded up, it'll drink whatever you give it.

And after all of this spiffing up of the car was done, and I had it all gleamy on the outside, I took it home, parked it in the driveway, where our tree promptly sneezed pollen all over the thing, dropped a few leaves into the windshield gutter, and then we got three inches of rain that night. Whee.

I'm sure that most everyone has had a joke at the expense of (not necessarily because of) The Family Circus cartoon at one time or another, but this past Sunday's episode left me scratching my head for lack of an explanation as to exactly why it was funny.

After attempting to find the cartoon in question on the Family Circus website (whose designer, amusingly, misspells the cartoonist's name as "Bill" - check the metatext in the Google search results - and doesn't know how to escape frames properly), I'm forced to describe the cartoon instead.

Frame 1: one of the kids is making a "dribble castle" at the beach. A dribble castle, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, consists of digging a hole deep enough that you get below the water table, and get a fistful of sopping-wet mud. The mud is then allowed to dribble through your fingers, and you can slowly build up towers and walls that pretty much resemble the Sagrada Familia. At any rate, the kid in question is pretty far along in his masterpiece, which doesn't resemble the Spanish cathedral in question so much as it resembles a collapsed sheet cake.

Frame 2: The tide has come in, flattened the sheet-cake-castle only slightly, and (presumably) soaked the kid, who is sitting in the middle of a receding wave...bawling his eyes out.

Now, I can understand how this might be amusing in a Nelson Muntz point-and-laugh kind of way, but Bil Keane has never been one to rely on schadenfreude for his laughs. So Bil...wtf, dude?

The fact that the wife came up with the brilliance of the last entry here almost barely makes up for this quote of dumbfounding idiocy:

"Well, 'Petagine' is obviously an Italian last name, but what's up with his first name? 'Roberto' is definitely NOT Italian."

The mind boggles. BOGGLES.

Mrs. Dave and I took in the Sox-Sox game at Fenway yesterday. David Ortiz came to bat in the first inning, and the White Sox infield shifted around as they normally do for the lefty slugger - the second baseman played short right field, the shortstop played a shade over from where the second baseman would normally play, and the third baseman basically played just to the third-base side of second base.

He came up again in the third inning with a runner on first base, and I noticed that the alignment had shifted some - the third baseman was now at the shortstop position, the shortstop was where he was before, but the second baseman was in on the dirt instead of halfway between the infield and the right fielder.

My mind started racing as to why they might have changed the alignment so much - maybe the third baseman was playing closer to his normal position so that he could make it to third base in case the runner decided to take an extra base, or maybe they were deliberately trying to make Ortiz hit the ball the other way to prevent him from advancing the runner, and the pitcher trying to pitch him away to accomplish that. After the first pitch, I idly wondered aloud.

Mrs. Dave: It's probably because they need to hold the runner on first.

Mr. Dave: ...

Don Orsillo: ...Kapler SWINGS and lines a base hit into left field, and it's a one-run game!

Dave: Y'know, they were saying in the paper that the Red Sox had three Jewish players in their lineup the other night.

Mrs. Dave: Oh, is that a record or something?

Dave: No, someone just happened to notice it.

Mrs. Dave: Who were they?

Dave: Let's see if you can guess.

Mrs. Dave (in about ten seconds): Gabe Kapler...Kevin Youkilis...and Adam Stern.

Dave: Wow.

Mrs. Dave: I AM THE SHIT!!

Ladies and gentleman, I give you the latest object of my wrath: MusicToday, which now has a new nickname (see above). The story:

Last week, Guster suddenly put tickets on sale for their November 18th and 19th shows in NYC (a venue whose name I won't mention, because I harbor a burning hatred for places that whore themselves out to corporate naming rights but still overcharge me for funnel cake. Not that I've ever actually eaten funnel cake, or that they probably even serve funnel cake at this hoity-toity looking place. But, as usual, I digress.). They did so through MusicWheneverTheFuckWeFeelLikeIt.com.

Now, MusicWheneverTheFuckWeFeelLikeIt.com and I already have a history - back in 2003, they prematurely announced a Blues Traveler show and put tickets on sale for a gig whose CONTRACT HAD NOT EVEN BEEN SIGNED YET. The contract ended up falling through, and in the notification email we got that the show had been cancelled, they made no mention of the fact that they had fucked up. Instead, they tried to refund only the face value of the tickets, not the """""""convenience charges""""""" (no amount of quotation marks will truly do justice to the sarcasm that is dripping, nay, gushing from my voice. Damn, again, I digress.).

Well. A few indignant emails and phone calls later, I managed to make them see the error of their ways, and I got my 30%-of-the-ticket-cost-for-hitting-"print" charges back.

Fast-forward to present day. Or, um, to Saturday. I'm online, I'm ordering tickets for night 1, and I choose the will call option because I don't feel like paying priority mail charges on top of the $4.90 per $35 ticket charge. TicketBastard will at least mail you the tickets at no extra cost, but MusicWheneverTheFuckWeFeelLikeIt.com says if you don't wanna pay, you've gotta go will call. Ok, whatever, just gimme my damn tickets. And now I'll just add night 2 to my order and we'll be good to go. $160 poorer, but good to go.

Continue shopping

Add to cart

Cannot purchase tickets for this event. This is a single cartable event.

Er...uh...dah...whuh? Dammit Hal, open the pod bay doors.

I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.

*grumble*

Oh well, since I'm not paying shipping anyway, it's not like I'd be saving on shipping by doing two separate orders. Ok, finish order, start up another one.

You must wait 5 minutes before placing another order.

Bwuh?! You're actually limiting the amount of money I can spend on your site? Ok, I gotta go take a leak anyway. And this laptop is starting to sizzle my loins.

Ok, bladder is empty, five minutes are up.

Place new order

November 19th

Choose shipping

...and there's no will call option. $3.50 for priority mail, $9 for UPS, or $1,250 for a personal delivery by Coran Capshaw. Since I don't have the $1,250 for a personal delivery or the money for the lawsuit that would ensue from me punching Coran in the mouth after he gave me my tickets, and since any rational human being would assume that because show A had will call, show B should as well, I go to MusicWheneverTheFuckWeFeelLikeIt.com's feedback page. They recommend email rather than phone calls (especially at 8:30 on a Saturday night). So I dash off a quick, comprehensible note, without too many long words, and I wait.

I wait Saturday.

I wait Sunday.

I wait Monday.

I wait Tuesday.

And now, Wednesday, I still have yet to receive a response...and MusicWheneverTheFuckWeFeelLikeIt.com's allotment of Guster tickets for November 19th are sold out. Now I have to go with the only slightly lesser of two eeeeeeevils, TicketBastard. Thanks, MusicWheneverTheFuckWeFeelLikeIt.com!

As I sit here typing this, the cat is fast asleep next to me on the couch. She must be having a great dream about frolicking in a field of catnip and saucers of milk, because she is twitching something fierce. Her lower jaw is jutting out from time to time, whiskers whipping to and fro, tail flicking on occasion, back legs jerking about like she's performing some obscure recumbent martial art. But the funniest part is that her front paw has somehow clenched up to the point where one of her claws has embedded itself in the upholstery of the couch, so even though her glorious dream is telling her to twitch up a storm...her left front paw just can't enjoy it as much as the rest of her body so obviously is.

Would anyone really object if they did away with the musical numbers on "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" Does anyone else find these remotely amusing? And how many short-haired women does it take to play music for an improv show? Are we going to end up with the Susan Powter Orchestra back there? Of course, this is coming from a fan of the original BBC version with meCliveAndersonsayinggoodnightgoodnight, where they did, at most, one musical number per show...and the only good thing about those was hearing meCliveAndersonsayinggoodnightgoodnight say "Richard VRAUNCH".

Other than to get someone's attention from far away, can we all agree that whistling really has no use in society? Mrs. Dave and I attended a show the other night where someone was whistling loud enough to cause cranial bleeding, and perhaps fell small aircraft. Somehow, I have a hard time believing an artist would have his hair parted by a whistle like that, and suddenly rediscover the reason he started making music in the first place, redoubling his efforts to kick out the jams thanks to the mystery whistler.

John Olerud is on the disabled list. Not that this is particularly random, but it's the baseball announcers' way of announcing it that amuses me - he was apparently injured running the bases and injured his hamstring. However, announcers do not say this - they say "He was put on the disabled list with a hamstring." Let's forget for a moment how funny the word "hamstring" is to begin with. With very few exceptions, EVERYONE has a hamstring, do they not? Two of them, actually. Was Matt Clement almost put on the disabled list with a head? Was Nomar out for most of the season with a groin?

Then there's the pronunciation of players' names. A while ago the Minnesota Twins had a player named Pedro Muñoz, and Bob Kurtz and Jerry Remy (the Sox announcers at the time) butchered his last name (moo-NYOHS) just about every way possible. Myoo-nohs, moo-nohs, moo-nyoze, and the extraordinarily difficult myoo-nyohs. I'm not sure what it is about Twins players, but this year's player is Nick Punto. Now, I admit, I don't know if he pronounces it "POON-toh" or "PUHN-toh", but Remy and Don Orsillo have had a field day with another two-syllable name. It's been both of the above, plus puhn-too, poon-too, and pun-to/pun-too, where the "u" is pronounced like the "oo" in "wood". And both of them consistently pronounce it differently from each other, despite sitting next to each other for the sixth Sox-Twins game in a week and a half. Guys, a little coordination, please? For the sake of all Puntos across America.

An interesting footnote...I just heard the Twins stadium announcer over the PA. The voice sounded awfully familiar - turns out it's none other than one Bob Kurtz. I'll have to listen the next time Nick Punto comes up. Or maybe I shouldn't.