How Hot Is It?

It’s apparently so hot in the Pittsburgh and the surrounding regions, known as Pennsyltucky, that people’s brains have melted. Yes, their memory receptors have begun malfunctioning because they are complaining. That’s right, complaining. Lest we forget that six months ago a lot of us had no power, three feet of snow, and little hope of being able to get the kids out of the house and back into school before we went crazy. It must be scorching out there.

I remember sitting in the darkened and frozen cave that was Chez Mongo, wearing full snow gear, exhausted after trying to dig out my car. My wife had put a pot of boiling water on the stove, which was luckily gas powered, in order to raise the temperature to a balmy 46 degrees, so that out cats didn’t rise up and attack us for letting their comfy 70 degree home get chilly. We had been forced to take up temporary residence at my in-laws, which involved packing up a week’s worth of gear for us and our two and a half year old. I remember getting completely unpacked, futon mattress on the floor, with linens on it and clothes out of the suitcase before having the hunch to call our house to see if the answering machine would pick up. One of my cats answered instead informing me that “You better get over here. The house is possessed. One minute darkness, next minute every light and appliance is on full blast. I has a scared.”

Yep, the entire Eastern seaboard was pummeled with snow in February. So much snow, that civil services shut down the government, paramedics told injured people to walk up the road, plow trucks were in short supply and nearly every roof in the tri-state area collapsed. And we all bitched about the cold and the snow and the power outages and the lack of communication and ability to harvest crops and kill rival mafia members. Civilization was crumbling around us as we were forced to *gasp* talk to each other in person.

But that’s all ancient history, now. No one cares about the three of snow that sat on top of their cars. No one bats an eyelash at the thought that if the Sun were to say, “Oh ‘eff it!” and shut off tomorrow we’d be plunged back into cold temperatures. As long as the mercury doesn’t stay on the north end of the thermometer for more than a week we’ll be happy. I mean we could be faced with the prospect of seeing Justin Bieber burst into flames and Lady Gaga might have to stop wearing elaborate costumes and that would be bad. Please, President Obama, invoke sanctions against the Sun and order it to stop being so hot. You are magical and can solve all the world’s problems. You are not some mere mortal in an executive office that has protocol and procedures to adhere to, right? Make the Sun stop. It’s too hot.

Dear God, I have to walk outside, across the grass filled yards, in the bright warm Sun, wearing shorts and stare up at a blue sky that isn’t filled with clouds and a million snowflakes laughing at me with my puny snow shovel. HOW CAN YOU BE SO CRUEL? I have to drive on the open roads, using all lanes, with the windows down, or AC on, listening to reports about beaches and pools and barbecues and concerts and fireworks and baseball games. MAKE IT STOP! I have to see scantily clad ladies laying out and sunning themselves. OH MY RETINAS! (just kidding honey *smooches*) I have to hear the sound of my kid laughing as she splashes around in the pool and gets all tuckered out that she naps for three hours. THE HORROR!

The only thing that gives me solace is that six months from now I’ll be back to breathing heavily as I shovel out the car, frostbitten, flush faced and snotty nosed. That will make it all better. Sigh. Yeah blizzards. Hooray for States of Emergency.

‘Eff you, Sun.

H1-N-Wand: Wave Bye Bye to Swine Flu

Remember when I said that we didn’t have any really useful inventions this century. I was wrong. Here we have, right in time for Christmas and the rest of the flu season, The H1N1 Destroying UV Wand. For $70 + S&H, Hammacher and Schlemmer will send you this space age wonder that will ensure the destruction of 99.98% of the H1N1 virus after five seconds of exposure at ¾” above any surface. ANY SURFACE! That means that tawdry affair you had with the waitress last night in the bathroom of your favorite dive will not yield any harmful side effects….at least from Swine Flu. Any itching or burning sensation you may feel is not from the usage of this product or from Swine Flu. Chances are, it’s another species of living creature. Just think of it. “Hey Rover? Come here boy! You look a little infected.”

Unlike liquid disinfectants that can destroy electronic equipment, the H1-N-Wand, as I now call it, can destroy harmful evil Satanic microorganisms on keyboards and other gadgets that you could not live without, like your iPhone, PSP, and Swatch. Also capable of killing MRSA, mold, and dust mites, the UV-C light penetrates viral and bacterial membranes and destroys their DNA, rendering the microorganisms incapable of reproduction and survival. Killing an entire species has never been so fun. Let the kids try. But watch it around grandma. We want her home for the holidays.

Now, if you want to use it on your ceiling, you are out of luck. The light automatically shuts off if the light is turned upward. This prevents you from pointing it towards your eyes and burning your retinas. It also keeps you from accidentally signaling advanced alien races to our presence in the galaxy, as the light is so powerful, it can be seen a galaxy away. Besides, everyone knows that germs can’t walk on the ceiling so there’s no need to worry.

We’re so sure you can sanitize everything in your home with the H1-N-Wand that we made sure the battery lasts a full 90 minutes after an eight hour charge. After a full day at work, you can spend an hour and a half taking out bacteria and still have time to cook dinner. But, you won’t even notice the time flying by as you kill those blood thirsty, liberal agenda, baby killing bacteria, bent on world domination. This technology is so advanced you no longer have to wash your hands. You can simply wave the wand over your hands. Just think of that healthy glow you’ll see. People will think you were cosmetically irradiated. We’ll never tell.


But wait, there's more. Just so you don’t feel like we forgot anything, make sure you order two H1 N Wands so that you can use one to clean the other after you use it. Call now and place your rush order…..or go buy some bleach. But hey, what’s $3.00 at any store, within five minutes from your home, when you can annihilate all the germs in the world, reducing the chance you’ll ever need that immune system you’ve worked your whole life to build up? You don’t need it. You have the wand.


I know what I want for Christmas. A little common sense in the world.

Head In the Gutter

I’m sitting on my roof. I look out at the world around me, searching for something, some sign of hope. I am in dire need of help and so far I see none in sight. This is bad.

It all started not too long ago. I was doing just fine. I was outside, enjoying the warm weather on this sunny November weekend. But something happened. A wind of change blew in and threw my future into a tailspin.

Now, I’m moving towards the edge of my roof and looking over at the ground, contemplating my options. I could do it. I could just take a step and this would all be over. But something in me hesitates. Maybe it’s some common sense kicking into gear. Perhaps I should try to get some help before I resort to this step.

Soon, I hear silence. The once deafening noise in my head has been replaced with tranquil thoughts. I know my course of action. I walk back to the top to the highest point of my roof. I fill my lungs with air and cry out. As my words cut through the air, a voice calls back. It is my wife. She comes around to the front of the house and looks up at me. She helps me. She offers an unconditional hand to a husband in need. She steadies me. She encourages me that it will be ok. I reach the ground and I know everything is going to be ok. I look at her and smile. I thank her for her help and she says, “Is it finished?”

“Yes!” I exclaim. “The gutters are clean. I guess that sudden gust of wind must have knocked the ladder over. If you hadn’t stopped running the lawn mower you probably wouldn’t have been able to hear me call.” She laughs and thinks about how it would have been funny to see me panic at being stuck on the roof. I tell her I wouldn’t have been there long. “I was actually thinking about trying to shimmy down by the porch but would have probably broke my leg.” She looks at me in puzzlement. “You’re a dumb ass. The last thing I need is to haul you to the hospital because you fell off the roof. Now, get back to work on the rest of the yard.”


“Yes, dear.”




What, did you think I was talking about something else? Nope, I was just on the roof with my head in the gutter.

Remember Days Of Skipping School

We are roughly two weeks into the school year and already kids are skipping. Am I teacher? No. Am I an administrator? No. How do I know this is occurring beyond a completely blind assumption based on my knowledge of the average school going youth? I will tell you.

This morning, around the back of my place of employment, which sits on a hill, overlooking a major road, an act of truancy was observed. Actually, it was more like, “Oh my God, there’s a kid lying dead in the grass behind the building.” He wasn’t really dead, although Ray Brower, as I will refer to him was lying in the grass unresponsive. All you could really see was a shoe, at first. Upon closer inspection, the body of the teen appeared to be sprawled out in the grass, clad in regular clothes, a can of Skoal and an iPod. Hence the unresponsiveness. He was told to move along and from there; your guess is as good as mine.

This delinquency reminded me of my own upbringing. I was never absent from school during the years between first and twelfth. I guess Kindergarten doesn’t count. Yes, I was one of those nerds. Actually, that’s a misnomer. I wasn’t a nerd because of that. I had years of 12 sided dies and playing in the marching band to cause the assignment of that label. For what it was worth, I should have enjoyed the days of calling in a “Lack of Interest” day from school. Of course, I more than made up for it in college. Hell, I skipped graduation. But from the age of five through the age of 18, I went to school every day and never complained. I spoke, briefly, about this feat in It’s Good to Be the King.

The reasons for why I never missed a day of school are simple. My Mother was a Stay At Home Mom and I never got sick. Now, I as well as any other person know that being healthy has nothing to do with skipping school. After all, the movie wasn’t called, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off With a Head Cold. But to that end, I never really wanted to skip school. Overall, I had a pleasant experience. Yes, there were times I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide but throughout those 13 years the good outweighed the bad. Even still, skipping school isn’t primarily about dodging a bully or gym class. It’s about bucking the system and telling Teach’ “I got better things to do.” But for me, I enjoyed being around my friends and having fun with them. I didn’t take school seriously as it was.

During my senior year I had three real classes (Sociology, English, and French V), three electives (Chorus, Band and Gifted) leaving two study halls. A new system was put into place giving students a different option for gym class. Instead of the normal two day a week schedule, we had gym everyday for half of the year then a study hall for the other half. I was lucky in that I had gym the first half. That year was a breeze as I hardly studied and still came out in the top 10% of my class of around 435. Of course, had a couple more kids actually graduated, I could have moved up to 9%.

I could have skipped, though. In fact there was one day I was supposed to skip, senior skip day. Depending on the social environment, it varies as to what day it will fall. The fogginess of approaching my mid thirties has degraded my memory of the rule but I recall it being the 93rd day of school which was also the number of the year in which I graduated. Also, there was a tradition of skipping the day after the class picnic to Kennywood. That had become such a recognized event that even the teachers paid little attention to the syllabus for that day. However, at that point in my scholastic career, I had already gone 11 years with no absences, what was another 87 days. Besides, I could only imagine what awards would await me for completing this mission. Perhaps I'll get a scholarship or maybe a new car. You never know.

As graduation approached, I counted down the days. During the ceremony I waited for my chance. I wasn’t Valedictorian or Salutatorian or even an officer. This was my only distinction among my classmates. When that moment finally came, as stupid as it seemed to other kids, I was proud to accept that honor. As the speaker began to run through the acknowledgements, I waited with anticipation. “One year of perfect attendance.” “Five years of perfect attendance.” Then it came down to it. “Twelve years of perfect attendance.” It was my time. Then, in a twist of fate, I found out that I wasn’t really that special.

Someone else managed the same achievement. Now, I had to share that bright, shiny car and distinction with someone else. How unfortunate? But I wasn’t about to let that deter me. Somewhere nearby had to be a car about to be driven in like on the showcase showdown on Price is Right. As I walked up to the stage, I passed by the other members of the “also ran” club. Their prize was a ruler. That’s right. It looked to be gold plated, but came off looking more like brass. Each one of them brandished it with some pride, but I scoffed at their inability to hold out a few more years for the grand prize.

I reached the middle of the dais and extended out my hand to be shaken. I would have settled for the principal kissing my class ring, but I didn’t want to appear too pretentious. With my other hand I reached out to accept the small box he held out as my reward for my achievement. My heart pounded as I imagined what I would find inside. It could be the keys for sure or maybe even a check for a scholarship.

As I stood there to receive a round of applause with the rest of the lightweights I opened the box. Inside was the same ruler. The only difference was the number of years of perfect attendance etched into its plating. I was crushed. I never had any accolades to speak of in school except the fact that I had been there every day and not earned one. This was my moment. This was my chance to be recognized and I was given the same measure of success as everyone else on that stage.

I got over it a couple of hours later. I even laughed at how silly I was. I didn’t take myself as serious in college as I missed a heck of a lot of classes over those four and a half years. Now that I am a Father and my daughter will begin her education in a few years, I wonder if she will try and sneak one past the judges when it comes to going to school. I probably won’t be as strict considering my own experience. Of course, I will want her to go to school every day and do well. I wouldn’t condone rampant absenteeism but if there was a day she wanted to just blow off for something important or like I said, “Lack of Interest” I wouldn’t become extremely upset but I would expect her to be smart and not camp out on private property like Ray Brower did this morning. That would be an inexcusable absence of common sense.

There's a Nap For That

I felt I had to sneak in one last post before I’m off to tame the OBX on a much needed vacation. Preparation for such an endeavor requires that I take at least a small nap before departing as I am going to be the primary driver for almost all 12 hours of the trip. Of course, we will stop every couple of hours because of my daughter and in-laws. We’ll need to do a diaper change…my daughter, not the in-laws. We’ll also need to make sure my Mother-In-Law doesn’t sit too long because of blood clots. In actuality, I could probably drive the entire distance with no more than a few red bulls, a couple of Stay-Awakes, and an bathroom every now and then. That’s not necessary, though, as my wife will do some of the driving in key locations. But this is all contingent on that nap I must have. One, I know I will undoubtedly not get.

Something always gets in the way when it comes to a good nap. When my wife and I were first starting out living together, it was nothing to take a weekend afternoon and just catch a couple hours of extra sleep. I lived in a town house and didn’t have to take care of the yard and cleaning was an easy task. Even when we bought our first home, we found a few free hours, during the weekend, when we just needed to take a little snooze. Then, our daughter came. Suddenly, nap time took on a different meaning. Instead of catching a few Zzz’s when we weren’t busy, we began using our little one’s nap time as a chance to get things done. That wasn’t always a possibility, though.

My kid is a bit odd in that respect. She can sleep 12 hours through the night, and have a two hour nap in the day time and yet I find that when she’s done, you don’t move. Having creaky hardwood floors in our house doesn’t allow for much sneaking around. When’s she’s 16 it will be a benefit, but for now, it’s a hindrance to grabbing dirty laundry from the bedroom, cleaning the house, or even cutting the grass, outside. The kid is a light sleeper.

I can remember when she was just born, I would get up to feed her every two hours. Those two hours consisted of getting her out of her crib, checking her diaper, getting her bottle ready, feeding her, burping her, changing her diaper, rocking her, and laying her back down. Then I had to go clean up. By the time I was able to get back into bed, it was time to start all over again. Those first three days nearly broke me. I never thought I would get to sleep through another night. And when she went all night without waking up for the first time. My wife and I still didn’t sleep. We kept thinking something was wrong. Why isn’t she making any noise? Is she breathing? Is her blanket smothering her? If I go in there, I’m liable to wake her up, ruining what we have just accomplished. That was one of the longest nights of my life. It’s been downhill ever since with her. She sleeps great at night, but naps are still a fragile balance.

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So, when I declare that I am going for a nap before I make the trek in the Family Truckster, three things will happen.

1. I will be unable to fall asleep.
2. My wife will wake me because there is a spider in the living room.
3. My two year old daughter will bang on the door, because she knows I’m in there.

The only reason she won’t come barging in is because the door is locked. She has the ability to turn door knobs and open doors, now. We confine her to one floor at a time and within our sight. The kitchen and dining room are blocked off and the door to the bedrooms and bathrooms of our ranch home are shut. Our bedroom is the only one she is fascinated with but the door latch isn’t the best. We can lock the door and shut it without fear of being locked out. A simple push on the door near the knob opens the door, easily. While she can turn knobs, her ability to push a locked door open is still limited. Although, while on her little scooter, she can achieve ramming speed. With that mode of transportation she might easily be in the room in no time. Then she will stand on the side of the bed, her head just clearing the mattress, and begin to repeatedly say, “Mup. Mup. Mup.” It looks like I’ll be putting another pot of coffee on while I pack the car.


Footnote:

While I’m gone, I hope I will be able to capture some great images to throw up here. I might even get a moment to do some shirt designs, although my wife will probably shoot me for opening up my laptop while on vacation. I cannot guarantee that I will post anything this coming week because I have an acute sense of survival, but I would like to address the changes made to CafePress while I’m gone. It may spell the end of Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash! The store.

The Curious Case Of Teddy Ruxpin

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

As a child I found myself playing with toys of a more adult nature. Meaning that, as a toddler, I played with LEGOS that were rated at a higher age level that I was. Get your head out of the gutter. My brother had toys that he ultimately had torn down and re-engineered to work faster or do different things. And, in any situation, the packaging for a toy sometimes provided more entertainment than the prize inside.

Most of the time, I played with toys that were previously bought for one of my siblings and did not have a lot of toys bought specifically for me. Probably the first "new" toys I ever received were Kenner Star Wars action figures. Of course, had I been any kind of collecting genius, I would have never opened those cardboard backed, plastic sarcophagi allowing my retirement millions to be sealed in for freshness. When buying a car, they say that it depreciates by about 20% as soon as you drive it off the lot. In the case of Star Wars action figures, it’s similar in that the first thing that happens when you open the packaging is that you lose the little plastic weapons. The next thing that disappears is any removable clothes, such as capes. There’s your 20% right there. Yes, looking back, I think I would have asked for two of every action figure I was bought. One for me and one for the vault.

As I grew older, the toys I had as a young child had sustained my need for escapism from the everyday doldrums of basic cable. However, somewhere just before the middle of the 80's there was a significant change in toy designs starting around the age of eight. Soon, I went from playing with toys rated at a higher age than myself to being jealous of the ones I had missed out on as a kid. By 1983, I had already outgrown my Spider-Man Big Wheel and had moved on to a black Huffy with the bread loaf ribbed seat cushion and a new mode of transportation had arrived for the under seven crowd, the Power Wheel. Think of it, a motorized miniature car that held up to two passengers and required no exertion of energy. I was flabbergasted. How could technology betray me like this? For the last two years I was relying on manual operation of these pedal based devices that in my mind were not built with gender in mind. I mean come on, you give boys, the design that has the metal bar running between their legs while the girl version has none. Have you ever slipped off your pedals and fallen onto that bar? All this time I could have been speeding along at the speed of 2.5 mph down to my best friend’s house. He only lived a quarter mile away. I could have been there in just under ten minutes. Of course, I would have needed a fresh battery for the return trip as it was uphill the whole way. Seeing as how we had to be home before the street lights came on, I’d have to plan on leaving in advance of dusk, but still, why do people take the bus to work? It takes longer to get there but they don’t have to do any of the work.

While most people will tell you they were born too late, sometimes I wonder if I had been born too early. As I got older, the toys became more advanced and kids really were spoiled by the technological wonders as were parents. As a parent, I am not really dreading the time when I will have to read my child a bedtime story in order to get her to sleep. As an actor and general performer, I will probably take great pride in doing different voices and who knows, I may just spice up the story a little. Maybe Goldilocks is addicted to smack and is crashing out during a B&E at the Three Bears house much like Robert Downey Jr. did back in the day. Either way, I would relish in the undertaking. However, growing up, I had to read my own books and how cool would it have been to have been young enough to enjoy Teddy Ruxpin. I was rather jealous of the demographic that he was aimed at and thought it would have been a neat marketing move to have Teddy read other literary works like the ones I was forced to read in school. Just think he collective works of Shakespeare or Tolstoy, read aloud by a talking bear, but only in the voice of James Earl Jones or Patrick Stewart. I don’t think I could stand to hear Hamlet being done by a cartoon bear voice. You can’t capture the angst and melancholy nature of the Great Dane that way. Again, a plethora of batteries would be needed in the case of that idea.

Well into my young adult years kids’ toys continued to advance, making me wish more and more to be a kid again. My friends and I burned late afternoon oil simulating war games behind my house on the grounds of our elementary school. I was nearly old enough to drive and here I was crouched down in a set of bushes with a fake gun looking out for another kid. I’d pop up, unsuspecting, yelling “Bang” or making some other fake gun sound as I shook my hand violently in his direction. After the slow motion carnage subsided I declared in the most whiny of voices, “You’re dead! I got you!” Yes, war is hell, but we relied on the honor system. If you could prove that you shot your friend, usually based on a surprise attack, they had to sit out until the next round. The more physically fit and adventurous kids would climb up onto the roof of the school and hunker down among the discarded tennis balls and kick balls and the few wayward Frisbees and play sniper. They say you never hear the bullet that gets you and in this case, you never felt or saw it, either. Yet, for all our imagination and creativity, there was new toys hitting the market like Lazer Tag and Photon that offered high tech warfare with better accountability. Once I followed around a group of outsiders that staged a battle on our school grounds using Lazer Tag. I kept close to them like a war correspondence reporter watching intently as they stalked their prey. I was so jealous. The next year we decided to upgrade our arsenal to make it more interesting. We didn’t get any new-fangled toys to aid out campaigns. We started using bottle rockets, firecrackers, and roman candles. We still miss poor Jason.

I’m kidding about that last part.

As I graduated from high school and moved onto higher learning, it was time to put away childish things. That was until my dorm roommates came home from the grocery store with a set of suction cup dart guns they found in the bargain bin. We reverted to children and formed our own gang, 8 KROW. We were wannabe gangstas hunting each other down with our plastic gats. The dorm was riddled with saliva stained dart marks along most of the smooth surfaces. We chased one another from our hideout, down the outer hallways, to a neighboring dorm room full of girls. Our blood feud spilled into their bedrooms as innocent coeds were caught in the crossfire. Granted, had this occurred later than 1993, and perhaps not at a location as secluded as the college I was attending at the time, there might have been some campus security involvement and we would have been arrested for carrying guns, albeit a fake green one with orange rubber bullets that stick to walls. Still, we would have seen it as 5-0 trying to get at us and would have probably launched an assault of darts at him in the process. This had to be a sociological phenomenon. Here I was getting older, hurtling headlong into adulthood and I’m chasing around other people like a little kid, giggling all the way.

Now, almost midway into my thirties, I have neither the body nor the free time to endure such frivolous escapades with children’s toys. I spend most of my time lamenting over sticking batteries into my daughter’s ear piercing and annoyingly repetitive gadgets for the three and up crowd. She follows my wife around while she vacuums, Mommy with her Oreck and baby with her little dirt devil toy vac with a detachable hand vac. There is a stockpile on the back porch of unopened toys waiting to get into the rotation. Yet, while I don’t have the time to run off with my dwindling pack of friends to engage in a fake battle or gang initiation, I do find the time to have the occasional tea party and often, you’ll find me doing the lion’s share of the coloring when we are in a restaurant and I’m keeping the little one placated until her noodles arrive. My regression into childhood is now complete. And in a few years I will be reading Green Eggs and Ham to her and doing the role of Sam in some exaggerated and silly voice. Although, I might crash out and falling asleep before she does, I don’t want to keep her in suspense as to how the story ends. If only there was some kind of toy that could do the job for me…..hmmm. I wonder how Anthony Hopkins feels about doing a vocal recording of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish?

Where Have You Gone, Sam Malone?

It’s not that often that my wife will engage in a philosophical discussion about television with me. After all, she is on the board of trustees to the “I Married a Pop Cult Dork” corporation. However, we both do have some mutual favorite shows amidst the sea of crap that has proliferated the airwaves. Our top favorite is Supernatural followed by LOST, Chuck,Bones, Family Guy, and the new Captain Tight Pants (aka Nathan Fillion) series, Castle. Older shows that still clutter my DVR like Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy have slowly degraded in quality or we just don’t have time to watch them. In any case, it was during one of these shows that we truly enjoy that my wife asked the question, “Compared to 20 years ago, does television suck more now?

I actually did a double take. Did she know she was opening up Pandora’s Cable Box? Was she serious? Does she actually want to have this conversation? Then I thought about it. The answer wasn’t as easy as I thought. Did 80’s television shows provide more quality entertainment than today’s lineup? Wow. It was the equivalent to the sound of a one handed, live studio audience member clapping.

I traced my brain for information. I liken my retention of Pop Culture trivia to that of the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Somewhere near the recollection of an argument I had about old Charles in Charge with Beans Baxter versus the new Charles in Charge with Josie “I grew up even more smoking hot than Nicole Eggert” Davis and a similar argument between Old Baywatch and New Baywatch, I found it. The lineup of the original shows I used to adore. Let’s see…and remember, for most of these I was under the age of ten and watched them during their initial run…there was St. Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues, Cheers, M*A*S*H, The Cosby Show, Night Court, Growing Pains (Pre Leo DiCaprio), Hart to Hart, The A-Team, Miami Vice, Different World, Knight Rider, MacGyver, and Family Ties (pre Brian Bonsall). I’m sure there are plenty of others but we can only do so much with the time we are given here at M.A.M.S. Anyway, I looked at that list and compared it to today’s shows. After the third CSI and Law & Order, I gave up. My wife may be on to something here. And let it be noted that two of those 80’s shows exist today, Knight Rider and MacGyver….oh wait, I mean MacGruber.

Taking a closer look, I can remember each one of those shows complete with specific moments burned into my hippocampus. There was Uncle Ned’s alcohol addiction on Family Ties that had me wondering what Vanilla Extract really tasted like. Was Crockett ever going to remember who he really was? I drooled over Teri Hatcher before she ever became a Desperate Housewife and was merely Penny Parker, the singing sensation of Cleo Rocks on MacGyver. There was even a brief series called Otherworld that made Battlestar Galactica’s mythology look like Clash of the Titans. Yet, were these shows really quality entertainment or were they merely a Play-Doh fun factory of processed cheese positioned directly above our brains?

I guess it is really a matter of opinion. Today, reality shows and other non scripted shows clutter up the airwaves. For every Survivor (The First Season) there are ten clones like Pirate Master. The odd thing about these shows that they’ve been on television less than 10 years yet boast more than 10 seasons (Survivor is on like 18.) I think there should be some sort of disqualification right then and there. Yet, for all its time travelling, mind screw job mythology, and unanswered questions, LOST is perhaps the best written show on regular television. Compared to 20 years ago, anything is bound to sound cheesy. The music was kitsch, the plotlines were transparent and wrapped up inside a standard episode time frame. Yet, it seemed as if the shows, and more importantly, the decade lasted much longer than it really did. Now, unlike my wife, I never watched shows like Dynasty and Falcon Crest which did run nearly the length of the 80’s, but the difference is that she saw them in syndication. I’m old enough to have seen almost every episode of M*A*S*H* in its first run, including the series finale when it originally aired.

The amount of really good TV vs. on par entertainment was maybe a ratio of 1:3. But there were sitcoms and dark dramas. Not like today where there’s maybe a handful of actual good sitcoms, five cop shows, two medical dramas, and 16 reality competition shows. Now, there was a few non scripted shows. We had Real People and That’s Incredible…I remember getting a Domino Rally set when I was a kid with a contraption that set the dominoes up for you as you pushed it along. The dominoes were so cheap and flimsy that they fell over once they emerged from the chute. My dreams of setting up an intricate and complex arrangement of dominoes like the one done underwater were shattered as every injected molded domino floated off the bottom of the tub.

Today, most shows last two or three seasons before they turn to crap like Grey’s Anatomy has. The Simpsons is a big exception. ER is another exception but I got tired of watching after Dr. Green died and every episode was marketed as “The biggest shocker” or “You won’t believe what happens” each week. But is there any original cast members left? The last episode I remember watching was when Noah Wylie’s character had a drug problem. Now we have crazy, wacked out doctors having sex with imaginary dead boyfriends. So, maybe the quality has dropped. But then again, the 80’s gave us a pre HIMYM NPH as Doogie Howser, MD, which inspired many kids my age to take up writing our deepest thoughts and dreams on a personal computer, while listening to pre-recorded synth pop melodies on a Casio keyboard in the backgrounds of our bedroom. Kids today are probably still trying to figure out what the hell Neil Patrick Harris was doing in that skit from Saturday Night Live playing the keyboard.

Back in the 80's, we had William Katt in spandex flailing around the sky in The Greatest American Hero. Today, we have William Katt being frozen on Heroes. Trying to become relevant again are we Kring? In my opinion, and yes I will write each and every word of that phrase out, the problem with those lightning in a bottle shows like Heroes and LOST is that they get created by some genius who then turns the show over to a group of other people to produce because they’re off trying to create a new franchise on which to reinvent the wheel using parts already found on their previous shows. The exception is LOST which found its footing again when they came up with an exit strategy after the disastrous Nikki and Paulo season. In all honesty, that really saved the show. Now, instead of trying to give the audience little carrots every season while creating new mysteries to keep the show going, they can plot out the ending and work backwards to logically solve all the riddles built up from day one. See George Lucas’ folly with the prequel Star Wars trilogy. He wanted to tell the story of how Darth Vader grew up from innocent and cute slave boy to bad ass cyborg who force choked his way to the top of the Empire Career Ladder. When you spend an entire movie setting up the kid as a lovable scamp and the chess pieces for the Clone Wars, you end up having to cram 20 years of mythology into two movies to advance the story up until the birth of Luke and Leia. There’s just too much story.

Boy have I digressed. In the end everything ends up being about Star Wars. So, wrapping this whole nonsensical diatribe up, my wife was right in a sense. Television shows in the 80’s were better for the entertainment. I think the writing and plot design has come a long way from being able to make an Ultra Light out of a cement mixer, fan blade, and garbage bags but, for the money, you can’t get better than shows about android little girls whose delivery of lines are Emmy worthy compared to that of Patricia Arquette on Medium. Now, if you’ll excuse me I have go into my brain and check on the examination being conducted to find out which show had the more special “very special episode,” Mr. Belvedere’s episode entitled Wesley’s Friend where Wesley’s friend Danny contracts AIDS through blood transfusion like Ryan White or Different Strokes’ episode entitled The Bicycle Man where Arnold ditches Dudley with Gordon Jump the molester complete with Jesus Juice. Who is conducting the research on this? We have top men working on it now. Top. men.

Super Bowel XLIII

Yes, there is a reason why I’ve misspelled Super Bowl in such a manner. Perhaps, I am just a product of my environment. After all, my hometown decided to show the area’s pride by programming the message board outside the local fairgrounds to celebrate the recent playing of the Super Bowel. This is of course the 43rd consecutive contest of intestinal fortitude, in which we bit down hard, took hold of the handles and passed our opponents.

I can recall the struggle. I took my seat, program in hand, and prepared myself for what was about to come. You can feel it in the pit of your stomach bubbling and churning. You wait for them to pass through that long dark tunnel. Sometimes, you wonder how such big beings can emerge from such a small opening. Once they funnel out though, you know there’s no turning back. You are in it for the long haul.

Our team made some tough movements up and down the playing field but, ultimately, we splashed down with success. There were times when we shook with anxiety, our brows furrowed with sweat. You shift in your seat, uncomfortably until something lets loose and tears the other team a new one. There is nothing so truly delicious and satisfying as dumping all that fear and worry and relishing in knowing that it’s all over. You sigh with relief. You laugh a little. You feel better that it’s all over. Unfortunately, from sitting so long, your but hurts.

Congratulations. Hopefully, we all waved our Irritable Bowels, the most recognizable sign of our explosive spirit. Super Bowel XLIII will definitely go down in history as hard to swallow for the losers.

Eat At Sam And Ella's

Over the last few years there have been numerous reports about contamination in foods.

In 2003, restaurant chain Chi-Chi’s closed down over a hepatitis A outbreak due to contaminated green onions. The largest outbreak in the United States resulted in the death of four people and over 600 cases of illness right in my backyard. Granted, the company was on the verge of collapse due to bankruptcy, but the hepatitis outbreak put the nail in the coffin.

In 2004, Sheetz, Inc. was hit with a salmonella outbreak identified in their tomatoes which were used in their MTO (Made To Order) service. The vegetable was pulled from the menu and Sheetz emerged from the tragedy, still going strong.

In 2007, pet foods were recalled because of melamine contamination. The largest consumer product recall in North Amercan history resulted in the withdrawal of over 60 million cans of food which led to the speculated death of over 3000 pets and numerous cases of kidney failure.

Milk and baby formula from China was also found to contain melamine and, in 2008, a scandal erupted as it was reported, by China, that over 300,000 babies had died from kidney disease.

Also, in 2008, Burger King pulled tomatoes due to salmonella contamination. They have since been added back to the menu.

Get Sam & Ella's Deli on a shirt
from Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash! the store.

Tap water has been investigated for trace amounts of pharmaceuticals including Viagara and antidepressants. It's not some government plot to keep us doped up and reproducing. It's just that filtration of old water is pretty poor. And don't think bottled water will save you, Aquafina is really.....tap water.


I think the only thing safe left to eat is junk food. Twinkies, Cheetos, Soda Pop, and Skittles just became the primary items on the food pyramid.

Free Wii 4 Me: Part Two

Part Two: Wii-Wards

Someone ought to tell me to tone down the puns. I’m beginning to really reach……I guess it could be worse. I could have said, “Wii-ly Wii-each.”

So, in Part One I explained how my Father-in-Law got a Wii for Christmas and I got a little jealous. Now, I am going to outline my plan for getting one for free. Honestly, the more I think about this plan, the more I think I should have just did my Wii site instead. It would have been less work. I just didn’t want to have to pimp my site in order to get referrals. It’s a lot harder to convince people that it’s legitimate. By that token, I decided to do this myself. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I realized I could pull it off in earnest. The gist of this concept relies on me utilizing my Debit and Credit Cards. I’ll try to be as clear and to the point as possible explaining this, but I cannot guarantee that I won’t ramble and spin off into a tangent along the way. Ready…?

STEP ONE: REWARDS CARD

My bank has a program that offers rewards points for purchases using my check card. For every purchase I make in the store using it as credit instead of debit earns me 2 points per dollar. Every bill I pay online like utilities, mortgage, car payment, etc. using my account earns me a bonus of 25 pts per transaction. Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to do the 2 pts/1 dollar method. If I did, my mortgage alone would get me thousands of points each month. Regardless of how I earned points, I didn’t get caught up in the hype of redeeming them right away. They weren’t set to expire anytime soon and the catalog of prizes was a bit laughable.

At first, I didn’t think much of my rewards card. I joined up four years ago when the program began and figured that I would just accrue points until I had enough for plane tickets and hotel stays. Then, I could take my wife on a real honeymoon. We just went to Niagara Falls for a week and she spent most of it with the flu. A couple of airline tickets would probably run me something like 400,000 points. Since I started earning rewards, I’ve accumulated about 100,000. With that I could get a free putter. You see the ridiculousness of the redemption? It’s like that scene from The Jerk where Steve Martin is explaining what you can actually win from the weight guessing game. “Uh, anything in this general area right in here. Anything below the stereo and on this side of the bicentennial glasses. Anything between the ashtrays and the thimble. Anything in this three inches right in here in this area. That includes the Chiclets, but not the erasers.”

Every so often, I’d check in on my account and see how I was doing and I’d also look at the catalog to see if there was any new items that I would enjoy. I skipped the low end stuff like water bottles and travel bags and went right for the items that were worth over 100,000 points. There it was, a Nintendo Wii, and for only 200,000 points! Well, I was half way there and it only took me four years to do that. Just think, I could get a Wii by the time they introduced the next generation of gaming console. In reality, that means that I would have to spend another $50,000 to get it. Sarcasm aside, I decided to check the low end items to see if I could get something I could tolerate. For 2000 points, I could get $4. Wow. That’s 500 points for a dollar. Well isn’t that crap….wait a minute. 500 points for every dollar. I get two points for every dollar I spend and one dollar for every 500 points I redeem. If I redeem my balance now, I would $200. That’s not too bad. I did some checking throughout the rest of the catalog to see what else there was. Here’s a rundown.

$4 Visa Cash Value Award for every 2000 pts
$15 Visa Cash Value Award for every 7500 pts
$25 gift card to GameStop for every 11500
$40 Visa Cash Value Award for every 20,000 pts
$50 gift card to Best Buy for 22,500 pts
$100 gift card to Amazon.com for 40,000 pts
$100 Visa Cash Value Award for every 50,000 pts

Doing some quick math I determined that Amazon, at 400 points to the dollar, has the best point to dollar redemption ratio giving $250 for my total rewards. The straight Visa reward is 500 pts to a dollar, while Best Buy is 450 and GameStop is 460. Suddenly, I began to formulate a plan. Redeem the points for Amazon gift cards and buy the Wii for an addition $50.

STEP TWO: GET MORE REWARDS

Whether I choose to redeem points now for gift cards or cash or wait until I have 200k to get the Wii outright, I decided that maybe I should step up the process a little. Every little bit helps. I went to my bank’s website and looked at their FAQs. Here’s what I found.

Regular Activity
CheckCard purchases - 2 per $1
credit card purchases - 5 per $1
Home Equity Line of Credit access card spending - 2 per $1
Small Business Line of Credit access card spending - 2 per $1
Checks, online bill payments, PIN purchases at point-of-sale, direct debits from checking - 25 per (up to 500 points monthly)
First time use of the first three items above - 5,000 each

Bonus activity
Open an use a new Home Equity Line of Credit - 5,000
Open an auto loan 5,000
Open and use a new Small Business Line of Credit - 5,000
Add direct deposit to a checking account - 5,000
Open a Personal or Student Savings account with a preauthorized monthly transfer (PAT) or any other type of savings account without a PAT - 5,000
Pay a bill for the first time with Online Bill Payment - 5,000
Open a new mortgage - 50,000

I’ve already been rewarded for most of the 5,000 options and I’m not about to get a loan or mortgage just to get a Wii. I already went through my monthly expenditures and found that I average about 2500 points a month through various purchases and bonuses. That still puts me on track for four years until I rack up another 100k. There has to be a way to get more points without having to spend more money than I already do. That’s when it hit me.

STEP THREE: PAYPAL

I found this out by accident. This actually serves another purpose which I’ll explain later. When I was working on my Free PS3 account, I frequently add funds to my PayPal account for support. It’s a long story, don’t worry about it. Anyway, I noticed that every transaction earned me 25 points. That got me to thinking. I can transfer money from my checking account to PayPal for free as long as it takes the usual three to five business days. I can also transfer money from my PayPal account back to my checking account for free as well. What if I set up a revolving door of transactions? The only way to be safe about this was to keep the amounts small. I didn’t want to be overdrawn on either side.

1. I transferred $10 from my PayPal account on a Monday.
2. On Tuesday, I went in and added $10 back to my PayPal account $1.00 at a time.
3. After the cycle was over, I had the same amount in both accounts that I had when I started.

I just made 250 points without spending a dollar.

Ok, it’s not a pretty process and according to the rules, you can only earn up to 500 bonus points per month this way. The concept behind this is to maximize my rewards. If I’m only paying five bills online every month, then I’m only getting 125 points. I’m throwing away 375 points a month, that could be building towards my Wii. It seems petty, but here’s another angle. Forget about the Wii. Think of that 500 points as a free dollar. After four months you can redeem 2000 points for $4.00. You can use that $4.00 to pay off a credit card. In this struggling economy, paying the minimum balance on credit cards isn’t going to cut it. Every little bit helps. If you start redeeming your reward points for cash, you can start to work down your debt. Thanks to Me Vs. Debt for this tip.

STEP FOUR: COMPOUND

In looking at the list of gift cards I can redeem for cash I noticed that perhaps the GameStop route is the best method of redemption. While I lose 40 points on the dollar for the gift cards I also found other ways to get cash from this particular outlet. I recently won an eBay auction for a game. It was for my brother’s birthday. He also has a Wii. Apparently, everyone but me has one. I opted for the Buy It Now button and paid $34.95 for a brand new Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures with free shipping. When I got the game in the mail it was the XboX 360 version. After I calmed down, seeing as how I had now missed my brother’s birthday due to this error. I explained my case to the seller. They apologized profusely and overnighted me the correct game and told me to just keep the wrong one. I suspect that this was more than just shipping error since it looked as if they had to go and buy the correct version which had a price tag of $44.95 on it. Not only did I save close to $15 on the game, I have a free Xbox 360 game to barter or sell. I can take that to GameStop and get some store credit towards my Wii. I don’t know what the trade in value is but it’s free money.I could also just take the cash from the points redemption and buy gift cards for GameStop in my local grocery store. For every $50 I spend I get $0.10 off a gallon of gas. For my 200,000 points I could get $0.40 off resulting in about $5.00 saving overall. That $5.00 can go back towards the Wii fund and now I’ve whittled down the cost further.

If all this seems rather silly and overly complex akin to a Rube Goldberg Device (i.e. Mouse Trap Game), that’s because it is. For all the calculating and planning and spending I could easily just go to the store and buy the damn thing. But this is about something more. It’s about getting it for free. Call me cheap, call me lazy, but these are the little challenges I like to on and see if I can make it happen. It may take a few months to acquire enough reward points or free gift cards, but so what. It’s fun to do. Besides, this will give me just enough time to teach my Father-in-Law how not to throw the controller.

Free Wii For Me: Part One

PART ONE: Wii Didn’t Buy It For You

If you follow my blog with any regularity…..which I know no one probably does…you know I am a pretty enthusiastic gamer and gadget head. For the better part of the decade, all of my gaming has been done on Sony platforms, namely PS One, PS2, and PS3. I haven’t gotten into the PSP for the simple reason that I don’t even like carrying around a cell phone. A PSP is like three times the size.

I also didn’t want to start collecting various game consoles because I barely have time to play anything and I don’t have the money to spend on such things. However, anytime I can get one cheap or even free, well, I’m there. I’ve been trying in earnest to figure out how to do this for the Wii. Now, I can sit here and promote some Incentivized Freebie Website for a Free Wii. But, I know that it requires more work than I can commit to right now. It’s not that I don’t think those sites are trustworthy. After all, that’s how I got my PS3 for free. It was also the subject of my first ever Blog Post here at MAMS. But, I wanted to see if I could do it a little quicker. It took me almost four months to complete the process on the PS3 and I just don’t have the free time.

I really wanted to get a Wii but having to find one in stock or pay $300 for one was a keeping me from just going out and buy one. I also have a friend who has one and they confess that there isn’t a lot of Wii specific games out in the stores. Yeah, there’s Music and Wii Fit, but beyond niche gaming, Wii has just as much available content as my PS3. I had pretty much decided to wait until prices came down considerably. Of course, by then, I could have cashed in on my Free Wii program.

That was, until this last Christmas. I’m turning into my Father when it comes to Christmas presents. It would be easier to get a confession out of a prisoner at Guantánamo than a Christmas list from my Father. Now, when my wife or family asks me, I tend whittle down “what I really want” to “what I would be comfortable with if someone bought it for me.” I mean there are tons of DVDs and games I would love to have, but I hate to see someone pay for something I can find cheaper on my own. I don’t expect my family to sift through eBay or the bargain bins at media stores to find me a cheaper version of what I want. I also tend to become a little particular when it comes to movies. I try to be extremely specific in criteria by telling them middle tier pricing, which usually means “2 Disc Special Edition” and wide screen. This usually results in me getting something else from the list instead. Still, this past Christmas, I decided to be a little sarcastic and said to my wife and her Mother. “I want a Wii.”

I really didn’t expect them to take me seriously, but somehow that stuck in their head. I was serious. I did want one, but I didn’t want them to buy it at full price. When my wife got back from her annual all night shop fest with her Mother, she informed me that there was one Wii left at the store and they bought it. Before I could feign modesty and inform her that she wasn’t supposed to buy me one, she let on that it wasn’t in fact for me. It was for my Father-in-Law. I was a little surprised, to say the least. And it’s not like they just decided to get it for him, spontaneously. He actually asked for it.

To understand what we’re dealing with here is to provide you with a little background on my Father-in-Law. Now, I love the man dearly. I mean my wife’s parents have done more than I can say to help us out. They are extremely generous and a riot. That being said, my Father-in-Law isn’t exactly technically inclined. Well, that’s not an accurate statement. He is a retired technician and is working part time for a company doing contract and prototype work for the government. Test bench work and such. He’s very smart when it comes to mechanics. He’s also a skilled craftsman and has picked up the bass guitar in the last three years. In all, that’s not bad for a 70 year old. But, he’s a bit of a novice on things that involve microchips and small electrical components. He’s constantly messing up the settings on his television remote and the extent of his gaming capabilities is an old NES with Duck Hunt up at his hunting camp.

Needless to say, I am going to have to help him with this thing. It’s kind of like having to train someone new in your job because you are being let go. But, I will be more than happy to set up and teach him the Wii. It might be the only way I get one, for now. Just to show you how much of a good sport I am, I bought him Tiger Woods 2009. Now, if I could only get him to take it out of the box. It’s now the middle of January and it’s still in the closet.

In Part Two, I’ll explain how I intend to get one for free or very cheaply..

I Ought To Be In Pictures

This is a lesson in “Be careful what you wish for.” One of the greatest inventions of the 20th century is undoubtedly the digital camera. For one, the ability to see your picture immediately after you take it eliminates question of whether or not someone blinked. Secondly, the ability to store hundreds of pictures on the camera and then transfer them to an electronic storage device is better than the previous model I utilized which was a shoebox or drawer with hundreds of envelopes filled with random photos. It also makes us a little lazy. Knowing that those pictures are right where you can see them prolongs your ambition to go get them printed. “Well, maybe I’ll just buy a printer and photo paper.” Good Luck, printer ink will cost you a lot of money and so will the photo quality paper. With that in mind, I got my first digital camera for Christmas just before my daughter was born. The prospect of being able to capture hundreds of photos of her every waking moment filled me with a giddiness that could only be rivaled with the thought that I wouldn’t wonder which disposable camera has pictures of her on it and which one has Christmas from three years ago. I still have about five disposable cameras, sitting in a drawer, undeveloped. By now, the film is probably degraded beyond the point of even caring. My daughter arrived and I snapped pictures of everything. I took pictures of her sleeping, her crying, her feet, her nose, her flipping me off…yes, that is correct. After six months, I already had over 500 photos stored on my computer. Unfortunately, I had none in my wallet or in frames on the wall of my home. Suddenly, I felt like the worst parent in the world. People would ask me about my newborn and I had to describe her to them or at least show them a tiny, fuzzy image on my cell phone that was poorly lit. Soon, my wife began complaining that we needed to get actual pictures of her before she graduated college.

This past Christmas she started hinting around that she wanted a printer that could handle digital photos. I remembered the days of trying to get copies of my acting head shot printed out for auditions instead of paying $300 for them to be done by a professional outfit. It would have cost me just as much, if not more to buy the printer, ink cartridges, and paper. But now, they have these little kiosks in stores that will do the work for you. All you need to do is supply the storage device. CD’s, memory cards, and even USB flash drives are accepted in most places and you can manipulate the images right there in the store before buying them. I had a thought. If I could load a bunch of the pictures from my computer onto my 8GB flash drive, I could give my wife a better Christmas present, the actual pictures.

Of course, being the procrastinator I am, I could never find the opportunity to get to a store to do it. I went online and found that I could directly upload the photos from my computer and have them shipped to my house. Now, I realized that I could not get them there before Christmas Day, but the photo albums that my wife would open would be a preview of coming attractions. The quizzical look on her face prompted an explanation and I broke down, telling her that I didn’t buy her a printer, I bought her 228 actual pictures with duplicates. At $0.09 a picture, I couldn’t pass up the chance to have actual photos of my kid from her first six months of life. Eventually, I’ll get around to ordering more but for now, my wife will have her hands full.The Tuesday after Christmas saw the arrival of a pretty good sized box on my front porch. I rushed into the house and tore it open like it was my own Christmas gift and I was, again, seven years old. I began flipping through the pictures and began to wonder. There were no people in any of the shots and I’m not sure, but I didn’t remember going to Disney World in the last 16 months. Soon, I was staring at complete strangers. Who the hell are these people? Where’s my daughter sleeping, crying, and giving me the bird? Where are her feet? I became livid? I called the store and they were of no help. I even went online to the address of the actual service and opened up a live chat session that ended with, “We’ll get back to you.” I checked the box again and there was a packing slip with an email address on it. I figured what the heck, I should at least tell her that I got her photos. Maybe she got mine by accident. The response was positive. She’d ordered pictures at the end of November and had been trying, without luck, to find out what happened since the beginning of December. It just seemed odd that her order waiting almost a month to ship and then went to the wrong person while mine went to her. We both agreed to mail each other our orders with the understanding that our shipping costs would be reimbursed by the vendor. Soon, I had my baby on glossy 4x6’s.

Now, if you think that’s the end of the story, you’re wrong. Two days later, I received an email stating that I would be refunded. There was no mention of the shipping cost through UPS, they opted to refund the entire amount of my order. In essence, I got 456 photos for $8.00. Not too shabby. The next day, I found another box on my front porch. This one came from the photo service. It was another complete order of 456 pictures. I figured that maybe they felt bad and just sent another order and charged me the amount they credited giving me quadruples for the price of doubles. Still, I think I made out ahead of the game. Now, I could give pictures to my family as well as hers and still have pictures for ourselves.

Here it is a brand New Year and in the mailbox yesterday, I found another box. It looked strangely familiar. It was, again, from the photo service and inside was another 456 pictures. I now had 1368 pictures for the price of $8.00 in shipping. So, now when anyone asks if I have any pictures of my daughter I can give them their own personal copy. I can only imagine what the mailman will have for me today.

UPDATE:

As requested...

Regift Wrapped

As I begin to put bags of ripped up wrapping paper out to be taken away by the garbage collectors, I'm reminded of growing up, in my house, where the same wrapping paper made appearances for nearly 20 years. I am also reminded of as I lug seven bags of gift boxes and three tall plastic containers of wrapping paper back into the attic to go along with the three bags of wrapping paper my wife just bought at the store this year. I tell my wife every year that the one thing she doesn't need to buy is paper or boxes, yet another year goes by and I have more to store in the attic. Perhaps it's karma getting back at me for making jokes at my parents' expense. Shall I explain?

It all started at the beginning of the 80's. I was five and up until that point, the Christmas gifts I received were rather big in size. This was partly due to choking hazards in small children, and partly due to being a kid and getting large toys. Just around the age of five, things changed. I was getting away from the large plastic play sets and heading towards the small plastic LEGOs and Star Wars Action Figures. While the boxes began to appear in different sizes, the wrapping paper design stayed the same. I can distinctly remember my Mother wanting us to open presents in a careful fashion. I didn't know why? As a kid, your first instinct is to just rip everything to shreds, looking for the prize inside. It didn't make sense to me that my Mother took the wrapping paper and kept it to the side, once we had extracted the goodies from within its bowels. She even had a paring knife on hand and I remember seeing her folding over the ripped edges and slicing them off, like a baker removing excess crust from a pie. For years, I never knew what to make of this until I was a little older and the truth about that jolly old elf came out like discovering you're inside The Matrix.

Turns out, that my Mother was saving the wrapping paper to use over next Christmas, and hopefully, many Christmas after that. It was nothing to see the wrapping paper used on our Atari at the age of five, show up six years later wrapped around batteries. The older we got, the smaller our presents got, until I was sure I'd be given a gold chain or some other small item utilizing that old wrapping paper. My siblings and I would joke every year that we'd seen that pattern before and every year we'd make sure we'd rip a little more off in order to force our parents to buy new paper. I mean it was totally understandable during the early 80's. Times were a bit tougher then, and you made sacrifices where you could as parents. But, by the time I was in high school, wrapping paper became a cheap product, filling the Dollar Stores across the nation. There was no need to keep using the same paper, year after year. However, my life has gone from one end of the spectrum to the other.

I have no intention of reusing paper once it's been wrapped around a gift. In fact, I'm all for using up as much as possible as I am deficient in the art of wrapping. Sometimes, my gifts to family members are deceiving as they are mostly made up of paper. We've even been able to break my Mom of this old habit, although a trip to Promises and a session with Dr. Phil was needed. But it's gone from famine to feast to gluttony when it comes to wrapping paper. My wife will go out and start to do her Christmas shopping and buy a few rolls of paper. Then she'll get done shopping and prepare to start wrapping and will go out and buy more paper. After Christmas is over and we pack up all the decorations for their pilgrimage back into the attic, I am stuck with two or three shopping bags with half used tubes of wrapping paper. The next year comes and the cycle repeats itself. Each year I tell her that she has plenty of paper and each year she worries that my estimate of the supply is about as sound as the Public Works' assessment of the level of road salt available for the coming winter.

As space becomes a premium in our attic, I'm forced to reorganize, shuffle, and unfortunately break a few things, shoving them into any available slot in the attic. This year is no exception. Now, while we go through a lot of wrapping paper on the gifts, we never get the supply level within acceptable limits. Working within a supply chain environment and understanding the concept of inventory vs. space, I continue to argue the point with my wife that she needs to start using the older paper instead of buying new. Her response ranges from the old paper being just that.old or that the older paper won't cover the larger items and she doesn't want to get stuck. My response is, then get rid of the old paper. I'm still waiting for an answer. Boxes are just as bad and take up even more room. While, it isn't the safest of practices, cardboard gift boxes make for excellent kindling in our wood burner. They burn hot enough to help get the wood started when you build a fire. The ink used to color them white or whatever pattern is probably laced with lead and I've inhaled enough fireplace smoke to probably do some damage later in my years.

So, while I lug bags of paper and boxes back up into the attic, somewhere, close by, a woman is probably laughing at me, reminding me that parents truly DO get it. We make fun of them for being adults and not "with it" in terms of social mores but when it comes to parenthood and life, they would gladly give you the gift of hindsight, no wrapping required.

Complex Simpleton

There are times when I am so utterly brilliant that I am an idiot. When it comes to technology, whether it be a computer or other electronic device I can usually figure it out in five minutes. There's no need for instructions or how-to's. If it has an on button and some sort of display I can usually hold my own on getting it to work. Now, I should preface that statement with this one. If it's a software related issue, I have a 50/50 shot at resolving it. I am better at the hardware problems than I am at the software ones. Consider it science vs. faith. More often than not, people come up to me at work, not to ask me for my help in my actual job capacity, but to help in something either related to their computer or other electronic devices. It's one of my four marketable skills that no employer ever takes advantage of, along with the ability to do a killer impression of Sam Waterston. I'm sure there's a market out there for it, but I haven't found it yet. The level of my technological aptitude would probably make me well suited to work at an Apple Store as a genius, as long as it involves working with iPods and not Macs.

On the other side of that coin, the frosted side of my aptitude mini-wheat is the ability to be so profoundly idiotic that I should come with a plastic bag warning. Just today, while coming into work, I walked into our break room to drop my lunch off in the refrigerator and make myself a cup of coffee. While that seems a mundane and rather simple task, I managed to place my lunch by the coffee pots and attempted to put my coffee mug in the fridge. Once I realized my error, I quickly looked around to see if anyone had noticed.

Perhaps I need more sleep and less caffeine to function. It's like working in idiot safe mode. You sacrifice functionality in order to operate higher functions in order to discern what causes things to go wrong. For whatever the reason, this week offered a typical situation addressing both my utter genius and downright stupidity.

One of our facilities services technicians, which is PC for office handy man, asked me for help in a couple of items. He's a good guy and I've helped him on occasion in the past. The problem vexing him today was that one of the televisions in the lobby was getting no signal from the dish network. Again, it has a button and a display, so definitely it is in my realm of understanding. Anyway, I agree to take a look and fiddle with the thing for five minutes. While most televisions have remotes nowadays, there are still functional settings on the television itself to handle power, channel and volume selection, and usually some kind of menu. Since he only had the remote to the dish receiver handy, I had to try and figure out the problem with only four buttons on the side of the TV at my disposal. While, I was able to access the menu settings and locate a possible fix, I couldn't select any choices in that menu selection because I didn't know which of the four buttons functioned as a "select" or "enter." After having him track down the actual television remote, within two minutes I solved the problem.

After that, he asked me for assistance in hanging a picture in one of the conference rooms. We had some painting done over the weekend and he needed to re hang all the abstract works of art that really don't say anything in particular. They probably come in a catalog for all office decor items. Now, the picture was a simple item, somewhat flatter than the television I had just figured out, but nonetheless it was a solid object. Two hooks on the wall at the top with one at the bottom, containing some sort of safety latch, gave us our guide as to how to hang the thing. After ten minutes we still hadn't got the damn thing up. Let's see, do we hang it by the top first or the bottom? Does it hang on the inside of the frame or this little track that runs along the frame? Are the hooks in the right spot? Well, they have to be, because they were there before the wall was painted. Round and round we went trying to figure out not what was in the painting, but how to get it on the wall.

Finally, we gave up. I had to actually get back to my desk and do my actual job and he had other jobs to attend to that required more urgency than wasting a half hour hanging a silly picture. So, you see, sometimes even the most intelligent of people can be stupid. There has to be some kind of movie reference here that would be a good analogy. Something that sums up the ability for someone so heavily favored to triumph by skill and technique alone, that nothing could defeat them, but it looks like my coffee cup is nearly empty which means my brain will cease to function in a few minutes. What little time I have left has afforded me to the ability to sum up this entire blog post in one picture.

Snakes On A Plane

In part two of the Bailout Blues entry entitled, “Bailout, Bailout, Wall Street Let the Bear Out” I wanted to focus solely on the three numb nuts from the auto industry. It seems someone forgot to invite them to the bailout party and now they want their share. Years of fat paychecks and reliance on high priced oil has led to a decline in auto sales. GM turned resources away from fuel efficient models and funneled them into redesigned trucks and SUVs. Oil went up and sales went down. With that went profits as well. Instead of hacking away at the top (like Executive salaries), they start by laying people off at the bottom and cutting back production. The only thing they did get lucky on was fixing their underfunded pension problems from the earlier part of the decade to produce a surplus. But now, that surplus may be needed to keep them afloat.

This past week, Moe, Larry, and Curly....(actually, it’s more like Shemp since Nardelli just showed up last year) went to Washington to ask for some of the bailout funds. While people travel everyday by commercial airlines and pay high ticket prices and baggage check fees for around $800, these three yahoos decide to use their corporate jets to fly to D.C for about $20,000. I’m sorry, but did anybody bother to tell them why they needed the money or did they just figure they felt left out? When I was in college there were a lot of pan handlers out on the main road through campus. They’d stand there and ask for change as you walked by to class or the bar. On occasion, I did offer up a few bucks, but they failed to realize that they were asking college kids. We have no money. And while they did that, they wore $150 Nikes. Hey, pal, you might want to look the part. If they (The Big Three D-bags) expected to be taken seriously, they should have carpooled to D.C. driving a hybrid. So, onto Washington, pinky ring adorned hands out, looking for cash and finally someone cowboys up.

"You traveled in a private jet? I'm not an opponent of private flights by any means, but the fact that you flew in on your own private jet at tens of thousands itself dollars of cost just for you to make your way to Washington is a bit arrogant before you ask the taxpayers for money."

Rep. Patrick McHenry said what everyone else was thinking. Then, others got in on the act and pretty much blasted the CEO’s hollow pleas for money wrapped up in a snappy commercial for their autos. Then David Scott volleyed this non sequitur, the Titanic’s biggest problem wasn’t the collision with the iceberg. I can only imagine the room got silent for a second and then everyone kind of nodded and understood the analogy. Mouthpieces for the auto makers pleaded that they had already done everything they could to stave off bankruptcy. At that moment, the deafening sound of an alarm went off and Wagoner reached into his pocket to push the “alarm off” button on the key ring to his jet.

This time, the snakes can walk

Here’s my favorite part. To lessen the already glaring injustice of having three multimillionaires show up on private jets asking for a handout they were asked if they would be willing to take a salary cut leaving them with $1.00 a year. I’d love to see the W2 forms on that. Wagoner said he didn’t have a position on that at the time. Mulally understood the sentiment but said he’s fine where he’s at financially. Nardelli said he would. Oh, wait. He already did that a year ago. So, it’s not like he’s going to lose anything more. In fact, don’t feel bad for the guy, he got a severance package from his previous company, Home Depot to the tune of over $200 million dollars. Even though his current total compensation is a mystery beyond the $1.00 salary, I’m sure he was given other forms of compensation. For that matter, none of the big three CEOs make more than $2 million dollars in annual base salary. They make more than 50% of their total compensation from bonuses and other sources. Wagoner totals just over $14 million and Mulally rakes in the most with $21 million. In my best Belloq voice, “I’m sure he’s very comfortable up there. That’s right, isn’t it. He’s very comfortable up there."

Look, I understand that as a CEO you have a very prestigious and high ranking position in a company. You’re the boss. With that position comes a pretty decent pay grade. But that doesn’t give you the right to be a douche bag and lay off hard workers and steal the pensions of those who have worked for a company for 30 plus years. That’s employee loyalty. CEO’s come and go at a fraction of that time. They seem to come in, puff out their chest, take the golden parachutes and jump out of the plane. Let me clue you in to what a real CEO or founder of a company does when his company is in financial trouble. The company I work for started in the home of our founder. He wanted to develop devices to help patients tolerate treatment better. After he got up and running as an established company he found himself in some tough times. He and a few of his backers managed to forgo their own salaries just to make sure they made payroll. He cared that much about the people to take his pay and give it to his employees and to pay his bills in order to keep the doors open. For 32 years the company stayed in business. Some companies decide, in times of financial crisis, that it is best practice to reduce the work force. I know that the founder of a fledgling private company and the CEO of a multi billion dollar company are two different things but it seems to me that if you take care of your infrastructure and keep the foundation solid, growth can occur without weakening the base. If you over inflate the top, the tower falls over. This is why I'd never do well as a business major.

Now, if it wasn’t for the failing economy’s dependency on the auto industry, I’d say let them fail. I'm not even talking about the buying of cars, but the auto industry employs so many people and that is a lot of jobs to eliminate putting unneeded stress on an already growing unemployment rate. But, just like the housing and credit market, it has to work from the bottom up. The consumer has to purchase a car to help shore up the company. Again, there isn't enough bailout money in the world to give each and every individual, in America, over the age of 16 a check to go buy a car. I don't have any suggestions other than the obvious. Get rid of the Big Three's paychecks, bonuses, and other compensation and funnel that into the companies as operating capital, payroll, benefits, pensions, and restructure the companies. It's a long road to recovery but when three jack asses go to Washington on a private plane, why should the blue collar and middle class car owner give them anymore money when they don't even want to drive.

Update 12/16/08
My fellow blogger over at The Blathering posted avery good and hillarious argument towards giving the auto industry bailout funds. Of course, it was disguised in the form of a post about crushing on Jon Stewart, however, I still admit she has a point.

Bailout, Bailout, Wall Street Let the Bear Out

Hey, did you hear? There is a financial crisis going on in the world. Unless you’ve been living under a rock or in an Amish community you probably know that we are smack dab in the middle of a global financial situation that is heading for FUBAR status. Now, I am by no means a financial wizard or a political genius. Funny how I always add that disclaimer before railing something, but it’s true. I do not claim to have all the answers. I just interpret what I feel is going on and twist it by the pop culture teat until it cries, "Uncle." Then I twist some more.

I’m not going to go into a complete history of what’s been going on, nor am I going to point fingers of blame at any Presidential administration. There is enough blame to go around on both sides of the coin. You know the economy must be really bad when Days of Our Lives has to fire Deidre Hall and Drake Hogestyn just to be able to stay on the air for 18 more months. Even fictional television is feeling the burden.

The reality is that we have failed to learn from history and are now forced to repeat it. In another 20 years, we’ll probably do the same thing. Look at the current economical situation in terms of a scene from The Matrix Reloaded where Neo reaches The Architect and finds out that he is the eventuality of an anomaly. The economy functions in a state being where, if it were Utopian, by nature, it would ultimately fail. If it (we) were allowed a choice in matter we would accept it, provided we were given just that, a choice. Granted, the small amount of those who chose to reject it will ultimately grow and eventually the system will crash, reboot, and start all over again. Everything is cyclical.

"Whoa! The Economy is complicated."

The fact that it takes decades at a time is unnoticed and therefore ignored. When it does happen, everybody goes nuts and declares it to bet the biggest disaster since the last time it happened. The benchmark appears to be The Great Depression. Perhaps the geniuses that came up the name for the current situation should have gone with a comparative term such as The Greater Depression instead of the more diluted and less romanticized terms, Global Financial Crisis of 2008, The Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis, or Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.

However, what’s past is prologue. We’re not going to dissect what caused the issue. We’re here to dissect the continually prolonging of the solution. Unfortunately, we can’t go the same route as The Great Depression in terms of fixing the issue. We’re already at war in two countries. The EESA of 08 or Bailout, Rescue, whatever was supposed to purchase “toxic”(….ooh I like that word) mortgage backed securities in an effort reduce uncertainty of the solvency of financial institutions and restore confidence in the credit markets. In other words. The government takes a crap load of money and pays for the mistake supposedly in an effort to give Wall Street a chance to shore up their holdings. Let me ask you this. If you have a friend who is an addict, do you give them access to their vice? “Sure, Bob. I’m glad you admitted that you have a drinking problem. Why not join me in a glass of champagne to celebrate your first step towards sobriety?” Then Bob goes out and kills three people and a dog while driving home loaded. Oh, and Bob decided to stop at three more bars on the way home. Bob is AIG. Yeah, purportedly by the end of October, AIG spent nearly $90 billion of the $123 billion in bailout money. Almost $1 million dollars of whatever money they had was spent on lavish trips to England, Phoenix, and California for retreats of various kinds. Now, all of a sudden, they’re walking up to the front of the lunch line, bowl in hand saying, “Please, Sir, I want some more.” Apparently, AIG handles money the way a compulsive gambler handles flipping a coin. They don’t flip the coin. They put the coin on black 22 at the roulette table.

So, with major financial institutions failing, merging, failing, partying, etc. we sit idly by and wait for the problem to just go away as if we can reboot a computer. Unfortunately, the problem is the blue screen of death and attempts to reboot the economy have been unsuccessful. Now, while it is obvious that Wall Street has a problem with managing money, so do we. It's not that I don't believe that trickle up economics or other euphemisms for giving the money to the people won't work. It's just that I, like so many other people have been digging holes that need to be filled. We get money from the government in the form of stimulus checks that are supposed to be used to go out and by goods and services and yet we spend it on debt reduction. Actually, in this case, that might help. Regardless, there have been numerous chain emails and other discussions around the water cooler about giving the $700 billion to the American people. This won't work either.

If you look at the U.S. population as of 2008, it stands at roughly, 305 million. For argument's sake, let's say that 200 million people own a mortgage or have substantial debt above $50,000. If you take that $700 billion dollars and divide it by 200 million, you only get $3500 before taxes. I don't see anyone paying off a mortgage with that much, unless you are a thimble and your mortgages consist of Boardwalk and Park Place. If you slice it another way, take a $100,000 mortgage and divide that into $700 billion. You would only be able to help 7 million people before you run out of cash.As bad as Wall Street is with money, the general lynch mob is equally bad at math. They are tired of Government screwing up the country and letting us take the fall. Well, guess what? We elected them.

So, what can we do? Personally, as much as I would love to have the Government give me a slice of the bailout humble pie, I'm not in that group of people who are foreclosing on a house or been affected by job layoffs...yet. So, giving me the money to pay off my mortgage doesn't solve the issue. While a lot of folks are in foreclosures because their banks got greedy, a lot of them got there themselves. They either were duped into a deceptive mortgage arrangement or figured that with the banks just giving away money, they could buy huge, half million, dollar homes and have no trouble paying them off in thirty years. Unfortunately, the banks and the economy couldn't wait that long. There's no way to fix this by giving us the money. However, I would have taken an approach much like I would have done had we, as individuals, received the money. Instead of just writing a blank check to these companies. Give them vouchers for operating capital. Make sure they use that money and restructure their balance sheet (aka bankruptcy) so that the money still had went towards becoming solvent, like paying pensions and employee salaries.

If the government had some mythical pot of gold that could be used to give the American people the money instead, I would still expect there to be two kinds of vouchers. One goes to paying a mortgage and only a mortgage. The other would go towards economic stimulus. It could be in the form of a voucher to buy a vehicle and help the auto industry. While, I'm not going to complain when President-Elect Obama pushes through another stimulus package, I believe if their intent is to have us spend the money on goods and services then they should have issued us the checks before the end of October. That way, we would have money to be used for shopping through the end of the year. Think of it like a book of coupons you get at McDonald's or the movie theater. Within the booklet you have several coupons that are good for the purchase of different types of food and drink. If you wait until after the holidays when Obama takes office, a lot of the damage will be done. Regardless of how much they promise stimulus checks in the New Year, the stores are hurting now and people are leery of loading up a credit card now when the banks and credit institutions are hurting. If you miss a payment, the penalties can be severe.

Well, that's my thoughts in a nutshell. For a lot of us this is a scary time where we are stuck banging our heads against the wall while Wall Street tells us they're pregnant. We're just trying to do the math in our heads in hopes that we weren't the one responsible. And while we resign ourselves to having to grow and learn responsibility, Wall Street is out there drinking and smoking with a baby bump. For the rest the country, everything is just status quo. If you're really savvy you can take huge advantages of the situation in terms of buying a car and shopping. Prices will go down, gas has gone down, and auto dealers are hurting for business. If Warren Buffet can afford to play the game with millions of dollars on Wall Street, why can't Mongo the Middle Class mensch play the game on Main Street. So, hang in there, things will eventually start to look up. Just don't hope for the best, prepare yourself for the long haul. After all, "Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness. "