no.15 - Mr. Two Belts

As if to signal my spiral into dementia, I noticed at the end of the day yesterday that I was wearing two belts.

This is not normal.

I clearly remember late in the afternoon feeling a loop on my jeans and vaguely admonishing myself for forgetting to put on a belt that morning. It was at this point that I must have put another belt on, failing to notice the one I already had on.

And yet... I was sober the whole day.

no.14 - the Litterbug of Fayette

Yesterday I had a small, perfect moment.

It was trash day in my neighborhood. As I walked with my daughter down Fayette street, a wide orange trash truck came trundling along in the opposite direction.

Fayette is long and narrow and it only goes one way. As a result, a small traffic jam of cars was accumulating behind the truck as it stopped at each home. I've been stuck behind these trucks myself and I know it isn't fun. But there is nothing to be done. Only a complete idiot would honk.

And just one moment later, such an idiot arrived.

A woman, smoking menthols, and wolfing down a Peppermint Patty, stopped short at the end of the line and began laying on the horn.

As I turned at the sound, a silvery wrapper came fluttering out her window. I stared and waited.

Littering makes me so furious that I want to make sure I am seeing an actual littering event before I step in and get all ragey. The woman with a love for all things minty obliged my need for proof by flicking the last, sticky bits of trash from her fingers and out into the street.

I scooped up my three-year old daughter and stormed towards the car, considering how to proceed without swearing, yelling or hitting.

Then, I did the perfect thing:

I bent down and picked up her trash without a word.

She looked at me dumbfounded. Her mouth hung open a little, (but not enough to let the cigarette fall) and she said "I'm sorry."

no.13 the Mosquath

My wife calls it the Mosquath. It looks like a very small moth, but there is something disquietingly un-moth-like about it. At least half a dozen of these awful creatures have invaded our home and I expect more to come.

Unlike a normal moth, who can be charming, like a romantic dullard who thinks every light is the moon, the Mosquath shun the light. (The plural and singular are one in the same, like moose.) They stick to the darkness, fluttering by only when they think you aren't looking.

They are the perfect shade of grey that somehow blends into everything. When you bolt upright, and snatch at them, they often vanish before your very eyes.

A close examination of the Mosquath (in some circles called the Mothsquito) reveal their nature; that of an unholy union between moth and mosquito with a few hairy strands of cockroach DNA thrown in to make it uglier. Such a thing should be impossible, but to watch the mosquath buzz and zag like a mosquito with it's enemic tattered wings and it's repellent body like a soft roach, is to know that something awful has evolved.

A real live dead Mosquath for your viewing pleasure

no.12 - the Titleist

The problem began twenty years ago, when, during the film, "The Last Emperor", my friend Sean leaned over to me and, rasped in an old and frail voice:

"I was - the last emperor."

We were both convinced the movie was going to end with those words, as Emperor Pu Yi visited the site of his former glories.

The movie does not end that way, but it's pretty close.

Since then, when I see the titles of films - especially Academy Award winners - I feel compelled to predict how the title will be incorporated into the film. This happens against my will. Regardless of how little information I actually have about the movie, I am powerless but to allow the scene to unspool in my mind's eye.

Even though I have not seen any of the films listed below, I need to warn you that this post could still contain spoliers. I might guess critical plot points, but I might also ruin the films for you by planting ideas in your head.

• La Vie En Rose
  Let's start with an easy one. Obviously Marion Cotillard sings it. But, I will go a step further and suggest we hear it over the very end of the film, as Edif Piaf dies and the camera pans slowly away from her bed.
  (As an aside, do you have any idea how many near fatal car crashes Edif Piaf was in? Three! ...and a few years after she died, her widower husband Theo Sarapo died in fatal- car accident. How do they show this in a serious biography without it seeming like "Final Destination 4:Paris"?)
  
  
• Juno and Michael Clayton
  These are also gimme's since they are each characters in their films. Nevertheless I get a strong impression of George Clooney shaking hands and speaking his name in a offhand business way then holding the back of his neck, whereas Juno gets called "Juno" by her mother a lot. "Juno, come inside," "Juno, say something pithy.", "Juno, don't get pregnant," etc.
  (As another aside, wasn't there also an academy award nominated movie last year about a pregnant girl called Junebug? )
  
  
• Charlie Wilson's War.
  This one is a little harder, but I can see it now, Philip Seymour Hoffman is pounding a shoe on a table shouting with great emotion, "This is Charlie Wilson's War, God damnit!"
  
  
• There will be blood
  Daniel Day Lewis, all veiny and red in the face with rage, places his hand on the ground and growls "There will be blood" and then there is guitar music.
  
  
• Into the Wild
  Hal Holbrook looks off into the distance, while talking to his grandson. "Well, you're really into the wild now kid," he says and end of scene. The next scene is a campfire.
  
  
• No country for old men
  Javier Bardem grumbles "This is no country for old men" before shooting an old guy.
  
  
• Atonement
  I imagine the word "atonement" is snuck quietly in near the end, probably as depressing wrap-up art house film narration like: "And so it was that I sought atonement but did not find it, and that was the undoing of us all."
  

Please do feel free to correct how wrong my mind's eye is via the comments below.

no.11 - Irregardless

When I hear someone use the word "irregardless" I immediately think less of them. Its not that it isn't a real word - that point is somewhat debatable when you consider how fluid language is. It's that I get the impression they want to show their intelligence with an important-sounding word.

The word "irrespective" would be a better choice. It is an actual word; fully recognized in all dictionaries, major and minor. But outside of an academic presentation you are unlikely to ever hear it. "Irregardless" on the other hand, is far more commonly used, as in:

"Irregardless, sir, I am going to have to ask you to reboot your MacBook and step back from the Genius Bar."

But if this mashing together of the words "irrespective" and "regardless" has created a bastard child word, why can't I just accept it?

Forced and needy, "Irregardless" is an insecure word desperate to be loved and it's not. It wants to impress - but it doesn't. "Irrespective" sits confidently by, an actual word, and for the few professorial types who use it, it comes naturally off the tongue. "Regardless", meanwhile, is quite put out. "Irregardless" sends the sneaky message that "Regardless" isn't good enough. It needs more make-up and better clothes.

Most of all, I hate how highfalutin it is. But I am forced to admit that my tingle of superiority on this matter means that "Irregardless" isn't the only pompous one around.

no.10 - Zeta Reticuli

In the entire history of mankind, there has never been a story subjected to more cut-rate reenactments and craptastic special effects than Barney and Betty Hill's now legendary tale of alien abduction.

They were the first alien abductee case, ever. Or at least they were the first people to remember being abducted. Or at the very least, the first people to come forward after being abducted. Or, perhaps, at the very, very least, they were first people to believe they had been abducted by extraterrestrials.

In my youth, I watched as a pre-Darth Vader James Earl Jones and his wife were abducted in the made for T.V. movie, "The U.F.O. incident" about the Barney and Betty Hill case. I was glued to their tale as it was repeated, again, on an episode of the short-lived "Project U.F.O" series. On "In Search of..." I watched grainy interviews and glimpsed their awkward drawings by the Hill's themselves. Each of these productions, and many more to follow were accompanied by an incompetent reenactment usually involving terrible, dated even for the time effects, or, worse, no effects at all, leaving all the action off-screen.

Yet, despite their awful production values, each reenactment had something to offer. Separately they were nothing. Together they created an archetype.

I truly wanted to believe the Hill's story. They believed it themselves! Who would not want to believe in intelligent beings visiting us from outer space because the intelligence we have here on Earth is, let's face it, disappointing.

My friend Ralph and I planned for what we hoped would be our eventual close encounter. In the mid to late 1970's flying saucer landings were so common that they happened both in the worlds of the Brady Bunch and C.H.I.P.S - it was only a matter of time before they came to us and we were prepared.

If either of us was abducted, we'd leave our sneakers behind in the shape of a V or, if a stick were present, a triangle. This was our way to let each other know that the disappearance was extraterrestrial in nature. To our credit, neither of us pranked the other, though I admit I was tempted.

Of course, neither of us could have actually been abducted by aliens. Abduction implies being taken against one's will. I would have raced, barefoot, like a greyhound at the dog tracks my father loved to get on board a U.F.O. They need not have bothered with their floaty space ray thingy. I really wanted to talk to these guys and explain that I was ready for whatever future-space-knowledge they wanted to impart. If they had a spare phaser, I'd be cool with that too.

It had not yet come out that aliens were alleged sexual deviants fiddling with reproductive organs.

I loved the idea of getting away from Earth. I'd aways loved space and I felt more at home with the idea of traveling between stars than I did living in the suburbs.

But in spite of my plans and my hopes, all that bad blue-screen and terrible acting must have left a subliminal impression on me that it was a fiction. What a shame. All the cracks and seams in their story began to show.

Barney and Betty's description of the aliens darn well nails the make-up effects for an episode of "The Outer Limits" - one which, coincidentally aired the week before the incident. Betty's Star Map of Zeta Reticuli was shown to be painfully random.

Even as reports of abductions became more common, and the myth of Roswell grew to eclipse the so-called "Zeta Reticuli incident" no one ever produced a single piece of concrete evidence and I was left stranded here on Earth with no way "home".

no.9 - beef shovelers

143 million pounds of improperly inspected beef has been recalled across the United States and a nearly equivilent amount of bullshit will be on it's way shortly to keep you from panicking because the recall will affect beef products dating to Feb. 1, 2006.

That's right, the USDA is recalling meat you, and more probably, your school age children, have already eaten.

Workers at the Westland/Hallmark Beef company shoveled cows too sick to stand, right into the food supply. Yum! This, of course, seems impossible, but they did use forklifts when kicking and cattle prods proved ineffective.

You could ask yourself a lot of questions about who these dim-witted cow-shovelers were and what they were thinking; foremost of which is, "Were they vegetarian?"

Dr. Dick Raymond, USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety has said:

"We don't know how much product is out there right now. We don't think there is a health hazard, but we do have to take this action."

And the action they are taking? It appears to involve time traveling back to your cookout last summer and kicking over your hibachi. It sounds absurd, but surely that makes more sense than suggesting you scrape the remaining undigested beef out of your bowels and post it back to the good folks at Westland/Hallmark.

I'm curious how google's ads are going to take this? Look to the right... are they linking to Omaha steaks?

no.8 - my morning chocolate

I recently decided that my breakfast of choice is a snapped off chunk of high quality chocolate. (70% Cocao or more, please.) I love chocolate and hate coffee, so this seems to me a logical compromise. At 40, I now require a small caffeinated push in the morning.

I have not had coffee since the forth grade, when, on my pediatrician's advice, my mother served me a cup, black, every morning for a week. He said it might get my behavior under control. In a bit of bizzaro-world logic usually reserved for comic books, the conventional wisdom was that caffeine had the opposite effect on children who where hyper-active.

As my fourth grade teacher can attest, it did not work.

The experiment was quickly discontinued. I now wonder if the pharmaceutical companies were behind this logic, so that when they introduced Ritalin, they could truthfully say that other courses of treatment were found to be unsuccessful.

This exuberance I once struggled to control (or, at least, was asked to control), has now evaporated and now I crave some kind of caffeinated boost. The trouble is, chocolate is very, very delicious. As such, now, much like the pediatric medical community, I tend to over-medicate.

no.7 - the Beagle

A Beagle has just been awarded the highest theoretical honor in the dog world; best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

The choice was described as a "crowd pleaser". If this is true I would suggest the crowd take closer look at this unscrupulous and ill-tempered little animal.

At the age of six I was brutally attacked by a pharmacist's Beagle named "Sammy". While this dog was not directly involved in the Son of Sam case, I did imagine the two dogs had a kinship and possibly a correspondence. To this day I bear a three inch long scar on my face. It is faint thanks to plastic surgery, but still clearly visible for anyone who wants to see.

From this experience I learned the Beagle is one of the top ten dogs most likely to bite you. They are snappy little things. The Beagle does not, however, rate as one of most dangerous dogs because it's small statue and general lameness keep it from being a threat to anyone but small children. This is part of what makes them such a foul breed. They only attack the small and the weak because they aren't just mean, they are sneaky cowards.

What the Westminster judges were thinking is a baffling mystery. Beyond my personal feelings about the Beagle (which are admittedly strong) I still take exception to the choice. The beagle is a squat, wall-eyed, tone-deaf creature which reeks like a wet carpet unless vigorously treated with pet shampoo. How to choose this over noble breeds like the Collie or the Husky? Is it that this particular Beagle was perfectly squat, wall-eyed, and smelly? Remember, this contest is just a veiled endorsement of Eugenics, holding each dog to an idealized standard.



Okay - maybe I hate Beagles more than I should, but what else can be expected when one has been mauled in the face. Just ask Rachel Bilson about whom I know almost nothing, but who also suffered at the gapping maw of this beast.

As an aside, can you get Hot Dogs in the stands at the Westminster Dog Show?

Don't worry Snoopy - I know you aren't really a Beagle and I still love you.

no.6 - cybersquat

For the uninitiated, here is how cyber-squatting works:

Someone buys a domain, (a web address, like puppies.com) and then sits back like a spider on the in a web until someone else wants it. They offer to sell it, nearly always for some insane amount, hoping they will become rich.

While they wait for the fly, the cyber-squatter might put nothing up. But more frequently they put up a "helpful" search page, which is really just a way to generate a little money. Pretty much everything you click on a cyber-squater's page is going to be an ad.

It's one thing to sit on a domain for a while because you plan to do something with it. It's quite another to hold it so you can extort a ridiculous sum.

The term squatting is something of a misnomer. In real life, squatters take up residence in abandoned spaces and use them. Even if they are using the space to get high on smack, they are still using the space. Cyber-squaters don't use the space at all. In fact, they own the space. It's kind of the opposite of squatting. They are more like parasite's latching on to the name you want.

The sad part is that if you wanted to post a little site for your Grandma Mimi and their squating on GrandmaLili.com, they will ask for far more money that you are willing to pay. They don't want you. They want the International consortium of Grandmother Mimi products to shell out big. Sure, they don't exist, but they might one day and that's good enough for squatting. (BTW: GrandmaLili.com is still available)

Lurking behind the the cyber-squater is an even an even lower creater - the Typo-squatter.

The Typo-Squatter buys a domain name that is literally a typo of a popular site - yahoo.cm for example. The user is then lead in to a world of hidden ad-clicks. (and, invariably, pop-ups and porno ads.)

In fact, the entire nation of Cameroon is typo-squatting on the ".com" suffix with their own lucky ".cm" suffix, redirecting every single ".cm" typo to an ad-based web search. Way to go Cameroon! What a goldmine!

For the geographically impaired, Cameroon neighbors, Nigeria, innovators in the field of long distance spam-scams. Perhaps this scheme was dreamt up at a border party.

no.5 - the thuggish pod

10 years ago I had the jarring experience of seeing dolphins up close for the first time. They were in a tank at Sea World and one paused at the window to appraise me with it's cold milky eye. This was not flipper, nor was it one of the hyper-intelligent beings described in the Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This was a cold creature spoiling for trouble.

Years before that encounter, I had the brief but exciting notion that I should become a marine biologist and learn to communicate with dolphins. But I was warned by a classmate named Jessica Auster-Levy not to believe the cuddly dolphin hype.

Jessica had worked with dolphins and she explained that while they were beautiful animals, they could be cranky, they could bite and, with their long muscular bodies that swim all day long, they can knock the holy piss out of you if they are so inclined.

Not so different from dogs, except for the swimming, but still there was a lingering fantasy about a secret intelligence much like our own, and there was hope for communication beyond my dog's "Feed-me, Walk-me, Pay-Attention-to-Me-Puh-Leeeez!" barks.

Now comes the ugly discovery that, indeed, they may be just like us.

They, too, kill for fun.

The U.K. Telegraph reports that gangs of dolphins off the coast of British Isles are murdering baby porpoises. They actually used the word murder and they link to video of a thuggish pod of dolphins pounding a baby porpoise to death, and then playing with it's mangled corpse.

This has been going on for quite some time, but nobody could believe it. Like a parent blinded by love, marine biologists kept making excuses, hoping to explain the behavior away.

They're competing for salmon.
They're protecting their pods.
They're accidentally swimming into that baby porpoise over and over again.

Now, I'm afraid, they've run out of excuses. They can't even find a motive, beyond the psychotic pleasure of battering a porpoise to death.

What happened out there in those waters? Did the dolphins finally tire of humans being unable to tell the difference between porpoise and dolphin? You'll be able to remember now. Porpoises are smaller and are less capable of defending themselves.

I am glad, now, that I did not pursue a career cetacean communication. Imagine spending twenty years trying to crack the code, and when you do, that milky-eyed, grin-faced dolphin punk looks up at you and says "Oi! piss off. My mates an' I got murder to do."

no.4 - mercurial fishes

I remember seeing mercury for the first time in junior high. My science teacher held up a small vial of the silvery liquid and, if I remember correctly, he poured it onto the lab table and proceeded to tell us how dangerous it was.

I did not listen. How could I? It was beautiful! I wanted to touch it. I wanted to push it around and play with it.

I did not want to eat it.

Later, in high school, our chemistry teacher brought out the mercury again. He too poured it out — though he was more responsible and kept it contained to a tray. He told us how some juniors the year before had spilled some in the hall. Mercury is not easy to clean.

It was still beautiful, shimmering there in the tray as Mr. Beals (yes, uncle to the star of Flashdance) carefully explained how mercury was absorbed into the skin and poisoned the body. I still wanted to touch it. I still wanted the play. And when he explained that mercury was so dense that you could walk across its surface, provided you could keep your balance, I could not help but fantasize about playing in a mercury pool.

I still had no desire to eat the stuff.

A few weeks back, there was a report that 20 restaurants in New York had so much mercury in their tuna, that just six pieces would exceed levels set as acceptable by the EPA. What no one was talking about was the rest of the tuna supply, because last time I checked, tuna was not coming out of the Hudson. If Tuna vended or mongered by fish mongers in New York have high levels of Mercury, then what about the rest of the country?

My thoughts turned to those luscious sushi grade chunks of tuna at my local market. The ruby red translucence makes my mouth water. I want to crust them in cracked pepper and sear them on in an iron skillet for the briefest of moments, so the center remains red, and raw and delicious.

But now, I'm afraid, I have no desire to eat the stuff.