Office Water Cooler #1

Topic One: How do you respond if a co-worker follows their sneeze with an "Owwwww!!!!!"

Me, I just ignore it.

Discuss below.

About Last Night's Dream

Last night, I had a dream. It was obviously inspired by Oscar Night, although I can't explain why it happened two nights after the Oscars.

I was in a diner and I noticed Jack Nicholson sitting by himself. Someone had told me earlier in the dream that Jack was super-approachable and that he'd probably love for me to sit down and have a cup of coffee with him. Add that to the fact that everyone else was oblivious that he was there, and I knew that I had to go have a chat with him.

So, I worked my way around the perimeter of the diner to allow myself enough time to collect my thoughts and figure out what my opener was going to be. As I approached his table, who walks into the diner but Tom Hanks!!! Nobody noticed him either. He walks toward me, trying to look inconspicuous. I wanted to play it cool and didn't want to fawn over him, so I decided just to give him a head nod and a tiny greeting.

But instead, I accidentally screamed, "Helllllllllooooooooo Mr. Haaaaaanks!!!!" at the top of my lungs. He gave me a dirty look and rushed past me as swarms of diner patrons start chasing him.

What's more is that Nicholson looked disgusted and shook his head at me.

Songtown - Vol. 14 (Since She Started To Ride)

Artist: Jonathan Richman
Song: Since She Started To Ride
Album: Jonathan Goes Country
Year: 1990
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Hello Song Lovers!

I'm sorry I haven't written about songs recently. As I had previously explained, this feature was starting to make me hate songs. I'm still fully recovered and loving songs again, but I'm going to give it a go just because you deserve it.

Today, I'm going to listen to this Jonathan Richman song over and over until I've decided that I've typed enough.

Do you remember that scene in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure where Pee-Wee has to rescue all of those animals from the burning pet store? First off, do pet stores really sell monkeys? Second off, if you're like me, you've never commiserated more with a movie character than when Pee-Wee continually runs past the snakeaquarium every time he goes to grab another pet. He momentarily stops, sneers and then runs past. But you can tell that he's resigned to his fate that he's going to have to eventually save them too. So after Pee-Wee and the monkey bring every other creature out to the sidewalk, Pee-Wee heads back into the store to face off with destiny. [As an aside, is destiny, by definition, a positive thing? or am I correct in assuming that there can be nightmareish destinies, too?] Pee-Wee emerges from the store with snakes flowing from both hands and does a perfect cartoon-like twirly faint to the ground. Later, a fireman wakes him up and calls him a hero or something.

This is similar to my experience with Jonathan Richman. Except replace the "worst nightmare" tone with a bed-time fairytale type scenario. I didn't know much about him in 1997 or 1998 or some other year. All I know was how awesome the front cover of "Surrender To Jonathan" was.



Every time that I went to Best Buy, I'd browse through every rack in the CD section, I'd flip past this album and give a little smirk. I knew that I'd inevitably need to buy this album, but for now, I had other purchases to make. And so we did our dance for a few months, until finally it had reached the top of my purchase queue. And what a rewarding purchase it was. This one is Top Ten album in my life. Most fans tend to like the Modern Lovers stuff the most, but I don't understand how this couldn't not be anyone's favorite. Every time I listen to it, I do a little fainty twirl and fall prostrate to the ground.

So, the song that I picked to muse about today doesn't even come from "Surrender" so why am I going on so much about it? I don't know. That's the Origins part of the story.

I sat on this album for a few years and didn't explore much else. I bought a few albums, but I never really listened to them. In 2000, I found Gram Parsons and that's when my love affair with country music (aside from Wilco's A.M.) really went into full bloom. So, I did the country thing and a few years later, I decided that I needed to finish my Jonathan collection and I was thrilled to find that he had an album called "Jonathan Goes Country." Could there have been a better idea? Not to me.

[As an aside. I don't know the proper usage of quotes, underlines or italics anymore.]

"Since She Started To Ride" epitomizes Jonathan for me. It seems that Jonathan's character has lost his love to a horse. She'd just much rather be out on the farm "grooming and graining. " God, this is poetry. I've emboldened some real choice lines:

She's got a brown suntan starting just above her collar
Her lower arms they're brown, but the rest is kinda pale
She'd buy Betadine if she only had a dollar
And she'd live out in the pasture if she only had a tail.

And no I don't see her much since she started with horses
No I don't see her much since she started to ride.

Well her jeans they get like a wet saddle blanket
And her boots are like you'd figure
And her car is full of hay
Horses, humans if she had to rank it
You'd bet on they that canter
And them that need fly spray

And you see I don't see her much since she started with horses
No I don't see her much since she started to ride

Candle and fender, barrel and mane
Don't see her much since she started to train
Cannon bone, knee bone, forearm and arm
I don't see her much when she heads for the barn
And she's so satisfied when she's riding and training
She must just love that smell of the barn I would say
She's so satisfied when she's grooming and graining
And she's tired in the evening and she's gone in the day

And no I don't see her much since she started with horses
No I don't see her much since she started to ride.

What is a betadine? I think that was in a Blue Angels thing.

Also of note is how he leads the players into the Solo section..."Go boys...tell 'em all about it!"

Now, I'm not saying that he was the first to use some words of encouragement to push his band into a solo, but when I first Jonathan do this, I knew that I would have to do the same in nearly every song I'd write from there on out. "Michael Junior Gittings on the guitar!" That sort of thing.

Hey, look. It was great talking with you.

TiVo DeTermination

Hello World.

So, if you know anything about me, its probably that I love television and that TiVo is a sacred golden god that I bow to nightly. I've been TiVoing for about three years now and over that time, my love of television has only grown. If you don't know much about Tivo other than that its a hard disk VCR, one of the biggest perks is setting up a "Season Pass" for your favorite series. The TiVo will automatically record every episode of said season. First run. Repeats. You decided what it does.

I won't say how many series that I have Season Passes set up for, but I'll say that its a lot. And I can't say that all of these series are my favorites. But I watch a lot of television late at night and early in the morning and since I have the disk space to record a lot of junk, why not fill it up with as many options as possible?

So working under that philosophy, before last night, I've only had the occasion of deleting one Season Pass. Jericho. This show just tried my patience. It was a prime time soap opera trying to mask itself as this intense thoughtful government conspiracy. I didn't buy it. But I gave it ten episodes to prove me wrong. It didn't, so I deleted it. Of course, after a few months, I got bored and decided to download the rest of the season and watched them all across two or three days. Now, I've been TiVoing and watching Season Two, which is trying my patience even more and could very well be the first Season Pass that I delete twice.

But first. I'm deleting my Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season Pass. I knew the moment had come when I realized that my favorite character was played by Brian Austin Green.




Apparently, there are people who think that the Terminator story has one of the deepest seeded mythologies in the history of Hollywood. I enoyed me some T2: Judgment Day, but I've fallen asleep every time I've tried to watch the first one and I break a household object every time I try to watch this show. I could care less if John Connor saves us from the machines in twenty years.

Its just dumb. The characters are stupid. After eight hours, you'd think that someone would have to seem interesting. That's all it takes for me. If I can look forward to the screen time of just one character, I'm with you until the bitter end. But there's nothing here.

Last week was when I really started having my doubts. Brian Austin Green is from the future. He meets a guy in the future who he decides that he needs to kill. So, he jumps back to the past (our time) and kills this guy. But even after he kills the guy, he's still having "memories" of the future where he's hanging out with this guy. Paradox! Its a paradox!

If this was Lost, the writers would be wanting us to ask, "Why does this dead guy still appear in the future world?" The answer to that question would be an important piece to the overall puzzle. The Terminator writers are just hoping that we don't notice. I noticed! Paradox!!

But, what's my least favorite part of the show? The Sarah Connor narration. I tune in and out of it when it starts because I know its pointless drivel about how special her boy is. The writers want us to think its poignant, but if you catch yourself listening to it, you'll just hear something like, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. When I die, I want to be buried in the earth."

I'll starting writing about songs again soon.

Things I Overheard Yesterday - Vol. 2

So, it wasn't yesterday, but it was Friday, which is really close to yesterday.

Before running off to a little dinner party, I stopped in the local liquor store to buy some bottles of something. The store's stock boy opened the door for me as a Sammy Hagar-ish type song started playing over the store radio. I said thanks and I thought that I was probably done with him. I picked out my beer, and headed to the register. I walked past the stock boy again, but I didn't make eye contact with him. After I had passed him, he said [to me?] "I think this was in a Blue Angels thing." I don't know who he was talking too, but I was determined to have it not be so I ignored it. I continued with my transaction. Thirty seconds later, another guy came in and before he even got over the threshold, the stock boy said, "Yeah. This was definitely in a Blue Angels thing." This time, he was definitely talking to the new guy, but the new guy ignored him as I did.

Here's your quiz:

1. What sort of "thing" do the Blue Angels do? Are they the flip-floppy plane guys?
2. Was it really Sammy Hagar?
   
3. Was he talking to me?
4. Why did he start that conversation with the other guy as if they had been talking about it previously?
5. Why did the other guy just ignore him?
6. Before I arrived, why was the stock boy standing halfway outside of the store trying to catch the rain?
   
7. Was this in a Blue Angels thing?
   

Neverending String Dream 2008 Part 4

Okay, short update. I had a dangerous string dream on Saturday night. It wasn't gum, or string or toothpicks. I don't know what it was, but it was actually attached to my gum between two of my top front teeth. It was a little piece of turkey wish-boney type material that extended down a little further than my teeth. I pulled it and it slowly extended itself. This was a tough piece of turkey wish-boney material, so it took a lot of effort. I did break a piece off at once, but alas, I still kept trying to get rid of all of it. Everytime I pulled, it felt like I was at risk of pulling the entire top of my mouth off.

Neverending String Dream Tally 2008: 4