Archives for the month of: November, 2004

Holidaze

November 29, 04 //
5

OrnamentsNow that the long awaited 4-day week­end has come and gone, at the blink of an eye I might add, it’s time to patiently await the arrival of Christ­mas and more impor­tantly pre­pare for the onslaught of hol­i­day shop­pers, cranky dri­vers and bell ringers. Every year around this time I ready myself for the crazi­ness of the hol­i­days and yet it never really mat­ters because I become caught up in the hol­i­day fever as well.

This year how­ever, my wife and I have already decided that the major­ity of our shop­ping will take place online. We fig­ure by tak­ing this strat­egy we’ll avoid most of the hol­i­day craze when peo­ple are caught in a zombie-like trance to pil­lage and plun­der local Tar­gets, K-Marts and KB Toys for the lat­est and great­est toy gad­get for their chil­dren. Luck­ily, for the time being, my daugh­ter is still young enough where she isn’t entranced by toys but con­sid­er­ing her first birth­day is next month it won’t be long until she’s tug­ging at our pant legs and star­ing up at us with those sting­ing puppy dog eyes.

I’m reminded of John Grisham’s Skip­ping Christ­mas (renamed Christ­mas with the Kranks for the Hol­ly­wood adap­ta­tion), a satir­i­cal view of the hol­i­days. The main char­ac­ters, Luther and Nora Krank, decide that they’ll skip Christ­mas after send­ing their daugh­ter off to Peru for Peace Corps. Luther tal­lies up the pre­vi­ous years expenses for Christ­mas and esti­mates they can save in the thou­sands if they take a 10-day cruise instead of cel­e­brat­ing the afore­men­tioned hol­i­day. Of course chaos erupts and the rest of the book is per­fect mate­r­ial for the typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood Christ­mas com­edy, includ­ing a mad­cap sequence with a plas­tic snow­man and the embarass­ment of set­tling with a scrappy look­ing tree.

It just goes to show that no mat­ter how hard you try to ignore, strate­gize or avoid Christ­mas it’s never going to dis­ap­pear. You sim­ply can­not wipe Christ­mas from your cal­en­dar. It’s the prover­bial mon­key on your back, but in this case he’s wear­ing a santa cap with a 30 pound sack of presents slung over his shoulder. 

Eat Fresh

November 23, 04 //
18

subwaysandwich.jpgAfter work the other day I was feel­ing a bit hun­gry. Lately I’ve been skip­ping out on lunch and break­fast because either I’m too engrossed in what­ever project I’m work­ing on or I for­get to bring the packed lunch (like this morn­ing for instance).

As I’m dri­ving down the road a thought comes to mind, “Wow, I haven’t been to Palermo’s Sub Shop in a few months. Won­der how my Sub mak­ing bud­dies are doing.” I pull up in the park­ing lot and enter the sub place and order the usual; a meat­ball sub with sliced mozzerella on top. After order­ing I casu­ally walk over and get a drink from the soda foun­tain and wait patiently while the “Sub Artist” does his thing.

Even­tu­ally the guy comes over with two sand­wiches? I was in a panic, it was as if all the air in my lungs had been sucked out of me. Why, why, two sand­wiches? That’s when I real­ized, he split the two halves. This is where this sub story gets weird.

The guy takes my credit card, slips it through what I call the “credit crack” and it takes about 15 years to autho­rize the trans­ac­tion. In the mean time we chat about life and even­tu­ally he real­izes the receipt machine has no power. I let out a laugh that exudes a mix­ture of “how funny” and “Dude, what is your prob­lem?” and finally it works.

He hands me the receipt to sign and in an awk­ward moment says, “Well, it’s been great hang­ing out with you man.” Like I said, awk­ward to say the least and yet at one point I think I wanted to give him a hug, thank him for mak­ing my sub and tip him for the ser­vice. In the end I decided not to, think­ing it might have been going against the Sub Mak­ers union.

Some­day, when all of the sub shop artists are replaced by sub-making robots I’ll miss these kinds of moments. 

Half-Life 2

November 17, 04 //
28

Half-Life 2 Review Teaser 

Fidel Castro and the Deli

November 11, 04 //
15

As I was sit­ting in the deli café the other day, wait­ing for my order to arrive, I casu­ally glanced at my sur­round­ings, breath­ing in the details. To my right a cou­ple sat qui­etly munch­ing on their Buf­falo turkey wraps car­ry­ing on a con­ver­sa­tion in whis­per. The wait­ress, a patient young woman who looked to be in her mid-20s silently wiped the front counter clean, and then she smiled faintly and retreated to the kitchen.

Towards the front of the store my eyes care­fully scanned each cus­tomer as they entered the deli. It’s in this moment that I reflect about the appear­ances of human beings. It’s true that as humans we all come in dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes, much like any­thing – like fruit for instance. Today I saw all sorts of apples, oranges, bananas and toma­toes – those peo­ple who pass as both a fruit and a vegetable.

For a moment I looked away for cer­tain that my food was on its way and nat­u­rally this being a casual ser­vice deli it wasn’t. When I looked towards the front of the store again I noticed that unbe­knownst to me Fidel Cas­tro had entered the build­ing and was pay­ing for his Dr. Pep­per. In that moment I thought, “Would Fidel actu­ally drink Dr. Pep­per or would he pre­fer Coca-Cola or a Pepsi?” (Mike thinks he’d drink Iron­beer). Despite my pon­der­ings, there he was, Fidel Cas­tro, at the Big Mini Mart in Rochester, New York. 

Point a Laser at the Moon

November 9, 04 //
13

Remem­ber the laser pointer craze of the late-90s?

At first, only a few indi­vid­u­als owned a laser pointer and these were usu­ally edu­ca­tors or busi­ness folk uti­liz­ing them for their intended pur­pose; as a tool to aide in pre­sen­ta­tions. Before the laser pointer, a busi­ness per­son or edu­ca­tor would have to extend a long rod towards the pre­sen­ta­tion and depend­ing on the medium, whether it be Pow­er­point or “old school” trans­paren­cies, you either resem­bled a school marm wag­ging her ruler at her fright­ened stu­dents or a Jedi knight in train­ing. Truth be told, noth­ing was as effec­tive as the laser pointer, a small pen-sized device that emit­ted a laser at a reach between 50 feet to 20 yards, depend­ing on the qual­ity of the pointer itself.

It didn’t long for the long-haired hip­pies, rebels with­out clauses and the aver­age joe to turn a laser pointer into a device for evil. Shortly after the laser point­ers were intro­duced to the mar­ket at afford­able, consumer-friendly prices every­one and their dog had to have one and I’m sure at one point they weren’t sure why, that it just seemed like a cool thing to use and even­tu­ally it turned into a fad. “Oh, you own a laser pointer? Big deal, I have one here on my key chain and it reaches 50 yards.”

Towards the begin­ning of this craze I’ve seen peo­ple casu­ally pump­ing gas into their vehi­cles, hum­ming to them­selves a John Den­ver song, when all of a sud­den a red dot appears near their upper torso, skid­dishly mak­ing its way towards their fore­head. In this case, the gas pump­ing civil­ian rips the noz­zle from their tank and fever­ishly jumps into their vehi­cle speed­ing away, scared out of their mind. Mean­while, 30 or 40 feet away, a kid on his skate­board snick­ers to him­self and waits for another unsus­pect­ing vic­tim to test his laser pointer on.

I’d have to say the most annoy­ing aspect of this was when these laser point­ers made their way into movie the­aters. There you’d be, immersed in the film when sud­denly a red, blue, green and some­times pur­ple dot would appear near Tom Hanks nos­tril, flick­er­ing away and then dis­ap­pear, only to reap­pear moments later. The per­son with the pointer was usu­ally in the back and some­times you could make them out amongst the rest of the crowd. Other times, how­ever, they would blend in with the rest of the audi­ence, bust­ing a gut as they moved the dot in cir­cu­lar motions on the screen.

I could pre­tend that we didn’t own a laser pointer, but that just wouldn’t be the truth. Of course my brother and I jumped on that band­wagon and for a short period of time we enjoyed “spook­ing” the day­lights out of peo­ple. For exam­ple, we man­aged to annoy the neighbor’s boyfriend to the point where he skate­boarded his way to our house and madly tapped on the side win­dow hop­ing we would show our faces to set­tle the issue. As he tapped, we were rolling on the floor in laugh­ter, our stom­achs hurt­ing from the pain of giddiness.

Today, laser pointer tech­nol­ogy has advanced enough where you could prob­a­bly point a laser at the moon or at the very least imag­ine it’s reach­ing that dis­tance. The pointer craze has sub­sided, replaced by other things to occupy and enter­tain us, but I’ll always remem­ber when the laser point­ers were at their peak, when the pub­lic uti­lized them for wicked pur­poses and when some­thing as sim­ple as a laser on a stick kept us enter­tained know­ing we could spook or annoy some­one with the flick of a switch. 

Living in an Amish Paradise

November 5, 04 //
10

Amish FigurinesThe Amish are an inter­est­ing folk. When I was a kid I couldn’t quite under­stand why they chose to go about their lives with­out the mod­ern con­vien­ances of every­day tech­nol­ogy. It was per­plex­ing to me that inside a typ­i­cal Amish dwelling there were no toast­ers, refridger­a­tors, tele­vi­sions, microwaves or any­thing that ran on electricity.

Instead of using com­mon tech­no­log­i­cal and elec­tri­cal devices, the Amish go about their lives using can­dles, wash­boards, butter-churners and the oblig­a­tory outhouse.

Yet to a cer­tain extent, slight tech­no­log­i­cal advances have been made in order to pave the way or give light to oth­er­wise dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions. For instance, a co-owned Amish alter­na­tive energy firm called Lumileds Light­ing and Sun­Line Solar, Inc. has cre­ated some­thing tech-safe and “Amish friendly”. The device is a light-emmiting diode (or LED) for bug­gies that runs on solar-powered energy.

Ever hear the one about the Amish guy caught in LED headlights? 

6th Grade

November 1, 04 //
14

Class Photo