Random Thoughts

No, I did not fall off a cliff. But thanks for asking. Actually none of you asked. But I’ll just pretend so nobody feels guilty.

I am coming towards the end of some globetrotting. I made it to the island of Mallorca, off the coast of Spain. It’s a great place to be if you’re an older German couple. It’s quite beautiful, but alas, I am not an older German couple. I wandered the alleys of the old city in Barcelona where I was followed by an older drunken Spanish man who spoke no English and seemed to enjoy my ability to speak broken Spanish only in the present tense. He made me hold his beer can while he peed in a street corner. I’m just about to head back to NYC to stand in the shadows of towering structures and worry who is out to mug me, or whose urine I may be standing in. Ahhh travel! I love it…

You’re probably thinking I don’t have any more good material for my tour of the crazy stuff in my neighborhood. You’d be wrong. There’s a whole lotta crazy going on around here. Today I want to show you the Irving Variety store. It’s a cluttered mess of a place filled with cheap crap nobody in their right mind would buy. How this place is still in business, I’ll never know. Apparently there are a lot of people nearby who aren’t in their right mind.

This is what you see when walking past the store on the sidewalk. This is the window to the left of the door. You can see they really live up to the “variety” part of “Irving Variety”. You can get yellow police tape, a hula hoop, and a backpack that has wheels and a retractable handle. Um…I thought backpacks were called backpacks because they are worn on your back.

This is the window to the right of the door. When you look in this window, it seems like the store is in the middle of being robbed — the thieves are dumping all the merchandise close to the door so they can carry it out. Don’t call the police. In fact, this is the way this window has looked for at least the last 8 years. I think the rack of watch batteries has been sitting in the sun for twice that long. If watch batteries were collectible, that rack would be worth a TON of money. However, watch batteries are not collectible, so this is just a rack filled with dead watch batteries in packaging that has been bleached by the sun. My favorite part of this window is the big orange “School Supplies” sign that’s been partially obscured by the clutter. Since when did a dish drying rack and an anti-grease spatter thing become school supplies? School must have changed a lot since I graduated.

The next stop on the crazy tour is my corner store. NOTE: I found that the NYC term for the corner store is the “deli”. New Yorkers call it the deli regardless of whether or not they make sandwiches. That’s crazy too. Anyhow, my corner store is called “Sun Valley Market”. But the locals call it “mole hair”. That’s because the guy who owns the place has a mole with a long bunch of hair growing out of it. I believe this is considered lucky, according to Chinese superstition. I also believe this is considered likely to be a cancerous growth, according to western medicine. You decide.

So, I walked in to mole hair to get a little something sweet and something to drink. They put my drink in a tiny white bag. Upon closer examination, I realized this bag was home-made by cutting and gluing together pieces of paper that have some kind of printed checklist on them. The next time I went in to mole hair, I noticed BIG stacks of home made bags, and they’re sorted according to what specific thing they’ll store. I’ll see if I can get a picture of that, because it’s REALLY crazy. Are paper bags so expensive it’s cheaper to glue together your own? Come on! Crazy.

There are plenty more crazy shops in my neighborhood. But today I’m going to show you one of my crazy neighbors.

This is looking out of my kitchen window, into the kitchen window of the neighbor in the building next door. Note how my neighbor has set up a cardboard blockade. Using something other than curtains to cover your window is the first sign there’s something crazy going on.

Let’s look a little closer…

I can see their kitchen has a mirror image layout of mine — they have the same glass-front cupboards for storing plates and glasses. But what the hell is in there? They seem to be hording tin foil, plastic bags, and all kinds of random Chinese products. They’re even storing stuff on the top of the cupboard. There’s a big cardboard box up there, and maybe a fondue pot. I didn’t know the Chinese liked fondue. There are bowls helplessly buried in the right middle shelf. And at the bottom right, it looks like a paper note. Is it a warning to someone to not take treasured items from the stash? Or maybe it’s instructions on how to remove something from the stash without having it all come crumbling down on you like a game of Jenga.

I’m going to start taking you on a tour of my neighborhood. I’m just going to take you on a tour of the crazy stuff in my neighborhood, though. The rest of it isn’t nearly as fun to write about.

So the first stop on the tour is “Laike PSC (Pre-Selected Closeout)”. This little shop is just around the corner from me. The awning with the store name includes the bit in parenthesis. I’m not just including that to be helpful. Have you ever seen a store name that has parenthesis? If you have to explain part of the store name in parenthesis, that’s a pretty good indication it really sucks. Beyond that, what does it mean to be “pre-selected”? How can you select something before it was selected? This is just the tip of the crazy iceberg here.

If you were to go in this store and say “I’d like a microphone, some binoculars, a comforter, and some ice cream” they would say “here you go”. You might even be able to get a color TV. Sometimes they have one of those for sale, too. And when I say one, I mean just one. Not one model. Must be hard to pre-select those color TVs.

The image of the Laike PSC (Pre-Selected Closeout) comes to you courtesy another crazy thing, the new A9 map search. These folks are giving you street-level pictures with your overhead view. Now THAT’S crazy too.

I got a call on my business phone the other day. The caller ID said “unknown”. This is usually synonymous for “annoying sales call”. Normally I would just let it go to voicemail, but my mail box is totally full and then I’d never know who really called. My mail box is full because I can’t stand getting messages off that phone. Before you can listen to a message the phone wants to slowly tell you the day and time of the call. Emphasis on SLOWLY. “Saturday… November… twelve… two… thousand… five… A… D… at… ten… fifty… nine… p… m… and… twenty… one… seconds…” There’s no way to skip it. So if I have 3 messages it takes about 30 minutes to listen to them. I think the phone is lonely and is trying to trick me into spending as much time with it as it can. But it’s backfiring, because I really want nothing to do with that clingy phone.

Anyhow, the point is that I got this really weird call. I picked up the phone and it was an operator telling me I was getting a relay call. She explained someone was typing stuff and she was going to read it out loud to me. OK, weird. So the operator relays “Hello”. “What electronics do you have for sale?” I say I don’t have any electronics for sale. And that’s the end of my relay call.

Am I being cased by some gang of electronics theives who don’t want me to be able to identify their voice? Or is there a deaf person out there just randomly calling people in the hopes of getting a hot deal on used electronics?

Weird, weird, weird.

What would you say if I told you there was karaoke for dancing instead of singing? Crazy? Or perhaps just the best idea you ever heard! I have been to paradise, and its name is Eye Toy Groove. This is the best thing since the Hulk Hands. Unlike the Hulk Hands, this game can be played by up to 4 people. You see yourself on-screen thanks to a little web cam thingy, and you touch the smiley faces to the beat of the song you picked. The best part is the “freestyle” phase were you flail around like an idiot in a frantic effort to get as many points as possible (the more you move during freestyle, the more points you get). The game lavishes your freestyle with trippy special effects. And it records your freestyle so you can watch it at the end of your turn. There’s just a little wrinkle. The game strips out all the special effects in the recording, so it’s just you in your living room looking like you suffer from some kind of mental disorder. Can you say HILARIOUS? I knew you could.

I brought the game with me to L.A. when I was sent there to do the Stacked promo for Friendster. I had a secret hope that I would play with Pam, Paget, Renee and the other babes of Stacked. Alas, it never happened. Does the Make a Wish foundation fulfill requests like that? I’m not dying of anything, but maybe they sometimes grant wishes just because of how good a wish it is. I mean, come on that’s a pretty good wish.

What is Balderdash?  Balderdash is hours of fun in a box.  And it doesn’t vibrate or inflate.  Balderdash is a game, albeit a poorly named one.  Oh Balderdash game company, please fire the person that named this game.  Or make them spend a full day reciting really bad product names — like sticking a dog’s nose its’ own poo.

Why do I love this game?  Because it requires a bit of a crazy brain.  And my brain is just crazy enough.  The name of the game here is making stuff up about real things like fake definitions for real words nobody ever heard of, or fake plots for real movies nobody knows.  If you and your friends are remotely creative, this may be for you.  Let’s play a round.  I’m drawing a card randomly.  OK, the word is "furuncle".  Nobody knows the real definition, right?  Great.  Now everyone make up a definition.  I’ll wait…

OK, now I’m going to read what you wrote.  And I’m also going to mix in the real definition.  Which one do you think is the real "furuncle"?

• The exclamation made when one has a winning hand in the card game "Hedge Your Bets".
• A term used in science fiction literature to describe an inexplicable gap in time.
• A skin disease caused by the inflammation of hair follicles.
• A needle bearing tree common in Australia.

the answer is here

Movies
are fun.  I like to add in little enhancements to my made-up plots,
like saying the movie starred Gary Coleman and went straight to video.

My toilet is breaking.  It’s not quite broken yet.  It’s breaking.  Something is going on in there and it’s making noise while water is churning and bubbling a bit in the bowl.  Vera and her sister got to experience the bubbling bowl firsthand when they came to visit.   Vera called it my new jacuzzi.  I hope she didn’t take a dip while she was visiting.

I have visitors from sunny southern California.  They were aghast at the cold cloudy weather here.  I don’t understand why we can’t fix that.  I mean, they can move water to areas that have no water.  Why can’t we move hot weather to places that have cold weather?  Let’s just pump in the heat from those sweltering suburban inland areas.

Or maybe we should build giant fans on top of Twin Peaks.  The fans will face the ocean and blow back the fog.  We’ll get nicer weather AND we’ll have a new landmark that people will come from all over to see.  Have you seen the giant fans of San Francisco?  They’re amazing!  Bring earplugs, though.