You didn't miss that much

These are some of the topics I thought about posting on but was too lazy to write up:

* I crashed my old company's 60th anniversary party at Morton's and had some free lamb chops and bourbon -- but was secretly disappointed I wasn't thrown out.

* "24" put an Elisha Cuthbert scene in a distinctive house that is very, very frequently used as a porn set.

* I think the two main things in life that I don't want are cancer and responsibility. Not necessarily in that order.

* Living in one of the best food towns in America, I've been able to avoid eating in crappy chain restaurants for more than a decade. I spend one lousy day in the suburbs, and I end up patronizing a TGI Friday's AND a Bennigans. A trip to Chili's would have given me the insipid trifecta.

* Traditionally the purest definition of irony is "the firehouse burning down." I now have a better one: "Getting blown by a woman wearing an abstinence bracelet." Apparently her niece had given it to her, and she put it on to be nice.

I still love the view out my window

Not everyone agrees, but I still prefer my urban scenery to "nature". This is my nature, this is my environment, this is where I live.

That is so not right

Well, that backfired

So the Phillies signed Rudy Seanez. He's one of those relief pitchers who bounces from team to team. When I saw the signing hit the wire, I thought to myself, "Man, how old is that fucker? Seems like he's been around forever." So I went to baseball-reference.com, checked his birthdate, and ... oh. He's exactly my age.

Son of a bitch.

They had them by the register. I'm not made of stone.

Honestly, how big a loser geek do you have to be to blow three bucks on these mints?



I'd like to think that I'm only just barely over that line, and not way, way beyond it. I'd like to.

I'm no Gandalf

But I'm getting better with the smoke rings. And I like the way they photograph.

Who's the asshole here?

The scene: I'm at Walgreens buying dried cranberries, a cream soda and a small tin Spider-Man lunch box (impulse buy). A very attractive woman in a hurry and a short skirt -- the type who probably is used to guys being awfully happy to help her out -- taps me on the shoulder and says, "Can I go ahead of you? I only have one thing."

I say, "I've got three," and turn my back. I can't deny enjoying the annoyed noise I heard behind me.

I can't plan for shit

I find that people are often surprised by what I'm into, really into, especially because different people meet me from different contexts. I remember the horror in one person's voice when she was flipping through my CDs and asked, "Why do you have a Cardigans album? Holy shit, why do you have ALL the Cardigans albums?"

No one would mark me as a country guy, and I'm really not, but with Stevie Ray Vaughan gone and Pizzicato Five broken up, the #1 show I want to see any time possible is Junior Brown.



Well I checked his tour schedule, and he's playing the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay the week I'm in Las Vegas in January -- an hour after my flight leaves. And there's an Indian stripper I'd love to take to that show. Goddamnit.

More tales of laziness

I live in a small apartment. It doesn't take much to keep clean, and I usually do a half-decent/half-assed job of maintenance cleaning, but I just don't want to. So I might get a maid.

But it's kind of embarrassing to hire a maid service for a glorified studio. In my head, I see her showing up and thinking, "He needs me to clean this?" Really, there isn't even two hours worth of work to do. So I feel like I need some kind of other excuse to have a maid come over.

Hiring a naked maid would be an excuse. I've found more than one ad for this kind of service, and although I'm actually more concerned about the cleaning than the nudity, the pretense gives me a plausible reason I would go to the trouble of hiring someone just to avoid five fucking minutes of vacuuming.

The funny thing is, as Kiki points out, that the pretense is supposed to work in the other direction: For most clients, the cleaning is actually an excuse to ogle a naked woman. But most clients aren't sick-in-the-head lazy.

Further bonus with the naked maid: Given that she'll assume I'm a pervert anyway, I won't have to do a porn sweep and hide the case for "Suck My Ass, Win Valuable Prizes".

You never hear people say "hanky panky" anymore

I have a dry cleaner in my building, but I go down the block because I like the motherly Korean lady who runs the place. I took my vacation laundry in today, and while she sorted through it, she said, "Ai-ya! Lipstick all over this shirt. You have some hanky panky?"

I think there are people other than doctors and priests who need confidentiality rules.

All my stories have strippers

Several loose ends and stray threads got tied up on this trip to Las Vegas. The top 5 things I learned:

1) I think I know things, but I don't know dick. About betting football, partly, but it's a good thought to keep in mind generally.

2) A burnt orange suit may just look like a slick, stylish brown indoors and at night, but in bright desert sunlight, hoo-boy, it might be pretty orange.

3) For fondue, putting a hunk of rice krispie treat on a stick and dipping it in chocolate is a kick-ass idea.

4) Jesus is only interesting up to a point. And even pretty naked ladies talking about Jesus is only interesting up to a point.

5) If a dancer insists that you exchange cell numbers, sometimes it is because you're going to be friends, but sometimes it's because she's trying to conduct certain types of business off-premises. I should be the last one to be naively unable to tell the difference, but, getting back to lesson #1, I fool the shit out of myself sometimes.

I love October

It's the official start of pumpkin pie season, Michigan is 5-0, the Tigers are in the playoffs, and it's time to bring out the jack-o-lanterns. I always get started with a Mr. Pumpkin Head for Kiki.



In a couple of weeks there will probably be a pumpkin-carving party (with pie). But I'll never be able to match this one.

Ah, memories ... wait, I don't remember

My sister mailed me something she found in an old book that apparently hasn't been opened in more than 20 years since she took it from the house we grew up in. Note the memo on what the check is for.



Apparently no pictures or negatives were found in the vicinity of the check, and for the life of me I can't remember what the gag was. Man, I'm getting old.

Anil, if you're out there, I guess it's safe. I've got nothing on you.

I've had fresh legs since 1988

So it was happy hour, but one of us was late. When she got there, she announced that she was just ex-HAUS-ted. Wow, from what, I had to ask.

Well, apparently she was stuck in the office for an extra hour dealing with West Coast people. "So you were on the phone? And you're exhausted from that?"

I was just giving her a hard time, but it's quite possible this woman has never been tired in her life. Not really tired. And I don't mean that as criticism. I probably haven't been genuinely exhausted since college, when I spent a couple of weekends bucking hay on a prof's farm. Now that'll wear you out. It's hot, ass-busting work.



What she and I do, on the other hand, doesn't make people tired. Basically, I type. I even got a trackball so I don't have to put out the effort necessary to move a stupid mouse around. Work has made me sleepy (especially some writers), but not exhausted.

Truly, in the last 18 years, I doubt I've done anything that legitimately required me to rest afterward, other than play tennis. To see my picture in the dictionary, the word people will have to look up is "sedentary."



That's not bad news to me. I just need a reminder sometimes that I should never act like my life is ever all that tough. Or some jackhole might call me on it over margaritas.

One messed-up broad

It was sunny and hot, but I nevertheless agreed to accompany Kiki (no, the title does not refer to her) to the Gold Coast Art Fair, because I suspected I might get a free lemonade out of it. Fortunately I was right, and it was just outside my door, after all.

The streets of my neighborhood were lined with a couple hundred tents full of paintings, sculpture, jewelry and various crafts, tons of it breathtakingly craptastic. But there was some moderately cool stuff too. I tend to prefer 3-D art to the 2-D kind, and I like when the sculpture looks like something. Say ... a gigantic iron pig.



I must like animals. Even this slightly more abstract acrylic thing seemed cool. Maybe it's hard to tell in this picture, but I think it's a bunch of swan heads. Anyway, I like how it catches colors.



Then we found an sculptor who worked in bronze. A lot of her pieces seemed to have a certain theme. This is called "Now, As I Was Saying..."



And this one is entitled, "A Breakdown In Negotiations" (yes, that's the artist in the background).



There were others, including one of a woman taking a guy down by the neck with a flying headlock. A sweet little girl who was looking around asked Kiki, "Are they all of girls beating up boys?" Even at 7 years old, it only took her about 30 seconds to scope it out -- something has gone wrong in this woman's head.

I wanted to buy her a lemonade for reacting with what seemed like concern, rather than brainless you-go-girlism. But I already had a date.

Orleans Street bridge

Still figuring out the nuances of the camera. On the list of pros and cons of my job -- this is my view when I run to the 7-11 for coffee and Twinkies.

This may become a photoblog

Five years overdue, I finally went to Comerica Park. I've been to most of the retro-modern stadiums now, and Detroit's is as nice as any of them. One thing that stands out is that there's an awful lot of statuary. The giant white tiger is kind of cheesy, even moreso than in Las Vegas.



But the sculptures on the walk of fame were better. Hal Newhouser was my favorite.



Next ballpark trip: Fenway in August.

Toys 'R Fun

I finally gave up on film and bought a digital camera. Not a great one, but I found a refurbished 4MP Kodak point-and-shoot that's good enough for my limited purposes and abilities. I'm still figuring out how to get good shots, especially closeups. In good regular daylight I think I'm OK.



But in lower light I don't really know how to handle the flash yet. I tried this practice shot a couple of times, and this fuzzy piece of crap was the best one.



It's fun to play around with though. And I've learned that half of photography is picking the right subject.

More news from the asylum

When we moved to the new building, we got fairly expansive cubicle-style work spaces -- much more space than I need. To keep my desk from being totally empty and sterile, I got a pathetic little plant.



Sometimes a random action figure or bobblehead will appear:



And I printed out a couple of 8X10s and stuck them in $1 frames. I rotated them every couple of months. This being Sports and me being me, I started with this shot of Chris Perry:



Then there was this nice Ivan Rodriguez photo:



But then I went with this famous picture of Cristie Kerr after she won the LPGA's Longs Drugs Challenge.



It's a funny picture, but it has extra resonance for us in the office because we actually know Cristie. Or at least one guy, who played high school golf against her in Miami, knows her. By default, that makes her our favorite women's golfer.

Can you see where this is going? Yes, a couple of months later, out of the blue, I get called in and informed that there has been a complaint. The photo "creates a hostile environment," and it has to go.

Look, I don't really object in principle. Even though it's obviously a joke picture, I understand how it could be viewed as borderline (by a humorless idiot). What bothers me is: 1) This is a management team that does nothing about plagiarists and thieves on staff but got right on my ass about this; 2) They wouldn't tell me who dimed, which makes it feel like a suspiciously chickenshit move; but mainly 3) This picture was never displayed in an in-your-face manner. Partly intentionally, you almost had to be sitting in my chair to see it. It's in the corner, well hidden behind the monitor and not visible to a passerby:



The point being, someone really had to go to some effort to 1) see it, then 2) take offense, then 3) take time out of their day to go bitch about it. Fucking loser.

In the end, it's a picture of a golfer with a golf trophy. Because I can never take this kind of shit without resorting to bitter, obnoxious sarcasm, I immediately replaced it with a picture of our beloved Cristie with a more acceptable trophy:



And I vandalized my own nameplate a little bit.



Right now my only regret is that I didn't quite have the onions to use this picture.

"I'm 37, I'm not old..."

Well, I met a lovely young lady from Senegal with an awesome French accent at Lisa's soiree over the weekend. We went on the traditional symphony+dessert date, and it went nicely. She's smart, she likes Mahler, no complaints.

Except ... at the end when she was giving me the "I had a great time" spiel, she added, very sweetly, that I was proof of why it's better for her to date an older guy. Fuck, I never heard that one before. But I guess I was never older by double digits before. Fuck.

Well, if I want to feel young again, I have the Chicago Pipe Show this weekend. That's a crowd where I'm definitely one of the whippersnappers. I like to think of it as an Adult Entertainment Expo for absent-minded professors, country gentlemen, and Popeye. I never did one of those AEE-style show reports for the pipe show before (I don't think you'd enjoy the pictures as much), but here's a quick version of what I'll be looking for.

With both shows, the coolest thing is that you can meet the towering giants of that culture, the tip of the top. He's probably never heard himself described this way before, but Greg Pease is the Jenna Jameson of tobacco blending.



What would that make Karl-Heinz Joura and Lee Von Erck, other than master pipe carvers? Well, I don't want to push the analogy too far.



The pipe show actually might be better than AEE. For one thing, even if you can never really have a $3,900 Knudsen or Chonowitsch, you can pick up the object of your affection and handle it all you want (just be careful).



Outside the show hall, there will be people making deals from their hotel rooms. The off-site scene always reminds me of Taxi Driver, when Easy Andy is selling guns to Travis Bickle.



In the end, though, the goal is pretty much the same: just taking the time to properly enjoy seeing something beautiful.