the emperor's new loathes.

among other things i particularly loathe, i particularly loathe the 'customer service'/'help' lines offered by the monolithic companies i have to interact with now and again. im talking about 800 numbers for health insurance, credit card, cable television and cell phone companies:

leopold. whenever you call these bastards, you're first greeted with the ol' 'this call may be monitored for quality assurance' routine, which is so insulting on account of the fact that if the powers that be at one of these companies had ever bothered to listen to even one such recording, these calls could not possibly still be unfolding in the generally asinine, incompetent and inefficient manner for which they are so renowned. there can be no doubt that if these calls are really being recorded, the recordings get tossed into a giant bin labeled 'voices of suckers,' never to be touched again.

loathe. the catalyst for writing this post is actually not the above, which has been going on for as long as i can remember, but rather the relatively recent, endemic prompting to punch in - or sometimes say - your member ID number, social, or phone number, at the beginning of these service calls, before you talk to an actual person. the thing that i LOATHE is that after you type in your number, the friggin operator still asks for it, not a minute later! what could POSSIBLY be the reason for this redundancy? why do i have to convey my member number TWICE before i get to interact with the 'human being'? is it to drive the point home - as if the customer service procedure didn't generally communicate this enough - that im a number, not a person, to these monopolies? is it to screen out possible prank callers before they waste some operator's time? lemme tell you something: if there's a poor sucker on this earth crazy enough to want to waste his time calling these horrible bastards when he doesnt have a cell phone to fix or a medical claim to check, i say let him through, because he is a downtrodden soul who needs all the amusement he can get, from whatever source he can get it.

if you're gonna make me punch in some numbers to identify myself before you let me talk to someone, please fix it so that person knows they're talking to me when they get on the phone. please. is that too much to ask? dont make me jump through hoops for no reason; you're stripping me of my humanity. oxford health plans, im looking at YOU!

the worst part is, you cant rightfully bitch to the representaive you end up speaking to, since they have nothing to do with the design of the process, and generally dont care about anything anyway. but they do make sure to give you a big thank you at the end, for letting yourself be totally raped by the company whose help you sought. well, you're welcome, ya bastard.

28 if.

today is nick's birthday. i almost wrote today was nick's birthday, but his passing (july 03) doesn't change the fact that october 27 is the day he was born. so i celebrate it with this post. ok, maybe i'll throw a dash of reflection/mourning in here as well, but it will be mostly celebratory.

first the dash, though, so i can end on definite high notes. that photo of us above, from the surprise birthday party my mom threw for me senior year in high school (winter 97), was not my first choice for the photo on this post - when i recently decided i would do this post. my first choice was a nice photo of us from prolly within two years of his death, that always seemed to be lying around my mom's old apt. i assume it's still there somewhere - buried within thousands of photos - and will one day be found, but i couldnt find it when i looked recently. i prefer it b/c it's more indicative of what we each looked like towards "the end."

but anyway, i think that's a fairly good metaphor for one of the conditions of losing someone. namely, you dont really get to choose which memories you hold onto, and which fade away over time. it would be nice if my memories of him were mostly a veritable highlight reel of our best shared experiences, rather than a smattering of good, bad and mostly "normal" things we did together, but there seems to be an arbitrary logic to what specific episodes you hold onto.

so your memories largely morph into composite images and feelings of spending time with each other. for instance, i have deeply ingrained memories of us walking to his apt. after school at dalton, all through growing up.

then again, this is quite fitting, as nick and i often talked about how we both agreed with the philosophy behind ray bradbury's short story The Last Night of the World, which we read in mrs. siegel's english class in sixth grade (or was it seventh?). namely, if it was the last night of the world, we'd want to have a fairly normal night, rather than a blow-out, so we could go out just as we lived. so i embrace the "normal" memories of him.

now onto some lighter fare. nick was a wonderful writer, most of all b/c of his voice, which was easygoing and highly articulate, and absolutely unique. i am grateful for having dozens of his emails saved on my yahoo account, and i was debating whether or not i wanted to copy something he wrote to me here; is that too intimate? should i keep his emails to myself, so that they remain something only i possess, and thereby become "extra"-special? well, i dont think id be nullifying these ideas by copying just a snippet. i was scouring his emails for something "appropriate," when i came across the following. it made me laugh out loud, so i knew it was right.

nick was in nepal, responding to an email in which i beseeched him to take an online IQ test i had taken myself:

Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 03:06:08 +0000

Hey what's up. Let me just say my computer does not feel like opening
emode.com, for some reason, which I have to say doesn't bother me all
that
much. I always fuck up things that are supposed to measure your
"intelligence," so I'm sure I would have just fucked that one up and
then
brooded over it. Also, from the fact that you keep hounding me to take
the
test I have to infer that your score was very high, and naturally I
cannot
give you the satisfaction of knowing you have beaten me. Thus, the test
remains untaken.

honest, insightful, and above all, witty. par for the course.

lastly, i want to end by linking to some songs nick loved. we didnt agree on most music, but our musical taste overlapped with these. give em a listen, they're timeless classics.

heart of gold, neil young
woman in chains, tears for fears
senses working overtime, xtc

that's it. happy birthday, man. rip.

(and jesus is it trippy to write those letters.)

forgive them, blogger. they know not what they do.

when i was younger, when my dad and i walked around our old neighborhood, if we passed a particularly dilapidated building, or empty lot, or run-down eyesore of any kind, the old man would make a sweeping gesture with his arm, encompassing the scene, and sarcastically say: 'one day my son, all this will be yours.' it was one of his best running jokes, and sometimes he still does it, if only for nostalgia's sake.

im not sure what that has to do with the following, but im still using it as a segue to announce that - and far from an eyesore, it's rather classy - papa's got a brand new blog.

and i'll wrap with this video, reminiscent of my anecdote; here, a father imparts wisdom to his son in monty python & the holy grail. ive always loved it (the applicable scene starts about a minute into the clip).

im taking a few days off from posting.

scoreboard: the beginning of the end.

earlier this week, the 'president' signed the new terror suspect prosecution law.

as you may already know, the legislation allows for, among other measures - and i'll just copy the verbiage used in the times article i linked to above:

- authorizing Mr. Bush to issue an executive order clarifying the rules for questioning high-level detainees
- stripping the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear petitions from noncitizens for writs of habeas corpus, effectively preventing detainees from going to court to challenge their confinement
(More than 500 habeas suits are pending in federal court, and Justice Department officials said Tuesday that they would move swiftly to dismiss them under the new law.)
- a system of military commissions for trying terrorism suspects that would allow evidence to be withheld from defendants in certain instances.

ladies and gentlemen, america has left the building.

now, forget about the fact that this bill is little more than a brazen and blatant attempt by the repugnantcans to distract voters from the fact that the country is going down the tubes under their watch, by playing on fears of terrorism (“It is a rare occasion when a president can sign a bill he knows will save American lives,” Mr. Bush said at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House; The president said he was signing the measure “in memory of the victims of September the 11th.”).

(btw, a good drinking game would be to drink every time a republidon says '9.11,' and by good, i mean that it would get you blackout drunk within minutes.)

the fact that these bastards are fond of taking people's rights away (gay marriage, anyone?) just when people start to realize the full majesty of their collective incompetence is one thing. but right now i want to focus on the law itself, specifically juxtaposed with another statement bush made, that i read in the post:

"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of america. He didn't get his wish," the prez said.

oh really? he didnt get his wish? let's review.

america- as i understand it, and pls. tell me if im crazy - was founded by men who were fed up with being ruled by a goverment that placed inordinate power in the hands of one man - king george 3.0 - right? the founding papas wanted to correct that problem in their new nation, right?

they also wanted to make sure that the citizens of their new country would enjoy certain inalienable rights, like habeus corpus, right? and the right for a defendant to see, and therefore respond to, the evidence being used against him, right? the constitution and all?

do i have all this fairly correct?

cuz if i do, id say the terrorist indeed got his wish. i mean, this year christmas came early for that dude, no? as i see it, and tell me if im trippin something fierce here, BUSH JUST ESTABLISHED A LAW THAT DEFEATS SEVERAL KEY PRINCIPLES THAT 'AMERICA' WAS FOUNDED ON! id say 'the beginning of the end of america' just happened.

let's call the prez king george 7.0.

(dont even get me started on senator john mccain, a former POW himself, who, after some posturing to the contrary, tacitly went along with this new bill. i dont know if he's suffering from some kind of delayed stockholm syndrome, or what, but suffice it to say, the man is diced. then again, at least it's obvious he's aware he's diced:

from the times:

Leading Republican lawmakers, among them Senators John W. Warner of Virginia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who balked at the initial White House version of the bill and forced a much-publicized compromise, were also on hand [at the signing]. But the third leader of that Republican rebellion, Senator John McCain of Arizona, was noticeably absent.

Mr. McCain, a likely presidential contender in 2008, skipped the ceremony to go to Wisconsin to campaign for a Republican House candidate, John Gard, and was later headed to Sioux Falls, S.D., to address the Chamber of Commerce. A spokeswoman said the senator’s absence was “purely an issue of scheduling.”

i hope, for mccain's own sake as a human being with a heart, that it was more "purely an issue of suspecting he might be the saddest hypocrite on the planet, selling his soul to his '08 presidential ambitions." i mean, if mccain is anyone's answer for '08, they need to change the question.)

anyway, back to the pt of the post. i know i make a lot of noise about the terrorists winning, but i really do feel that they had a good week - at least scoring a pt, if not a victory - and i hereby acknowledge as much, with a new blasilica feature, the terrorism scoreboard. i will update it on an as-needed basis. hopefully i wont need to update it too often, and hopefully we'll score some pts eventually. but after this week, it's clear we are gonna be playing catch-up:

we need a better team; vote democratic in november.

juliet, when we made this video you used to cry.

at the behest of this don, this post is dedicated to pomelo head cat.

everyone has an opinion about what is the worst music video ever. but i have found the singular champion.

for me, a video being bad in its own right is not bad enough. it must be as bad as the song it reps is good, such that this disparity is a chasm so deep and wide that one must consciously, actively keep one's esteem for said song from falling into this canyon.

apropos of this, while researching baci di romeo for bene, i stumbled upon the video for dire straits's romeo and juliet. after two frames of it, i knew i had made a discovery akin to penicillin.

you see, i think romeo and juliet is an amazing song. catchy but elegant melody, eloquent-yet-edgy lyrics, an overall timeless sound; i mean, any work of art that manages to be a direct homage to both romeo and juliet and west side story without coming off clichéd or hackneyed is pretty classy in my eyes and ears. i consider it to be the definition of a five-itunes-stars track. (i just spent a good chunk of time trying to find a stream of the song to link to, but it was fruitless. but you can hear the song along with the video itself, whose link will follow.)

accepting that this video was made in the 80's, during the infancy of the music video-making industry - at least, i hope that's when it was made - it's still nothing short of atrocious. its level of tackiness, cheesiness, and literal interpretation flies directly in the face of the absence of these qualities in the song. in fact, it craps on said face like a canadian goose that was fed all-bran and raisins for breakfast. i mean, this might be the first thing i've ever known was diced from the appearance of actual dice! it hasn't tainted my affection for the song, but it will surely be hard for me to hear the song without having these horrible images in my mind, for a long time.

without further ado: the worst video ever made by men with cameras.

the loathsome new yorker cartoon caption contest.

so, every week, as it has for some time now, the new yorker holds a cartoon caption contest.

i have entered it dozens of times, and never been selected as one of the three finalists.

sometimes, the finalist captions are insightful and funny. most of the time, though, they're kinda lame.

more galling then its mundane picks for the winning captions, however, is the patronizing emails the new yorker sends the entrants once in a while, which are, of course, thinly veiled attempts to sell some garbage.

tonite, i got such an email. i think my response to it was right on the money. it will take a few moments to read the whole transcript, but i think it's worth it:

From: The New Yorker Store (thenewyorkerstore@thenewyorkerstore.com):

Dear Colby,

It's a caption-eat-caption world out there. But as a contestant in The New Yorker's Caption Contest, you already know that. And as a contributing cartoonist myself, and one who has yet to have a cartoon featured in the contest, I feel your pain.

I'd like to help by suggesting a technique I use to keep my own captions coming submission after submission, week after week.

Since I never "caption" a drawing, I can resubmit old drawings with new captions. So at the end of the month, around 39 unsold, uncaptioned drawings are added to the heap of my creative flotsam (sketches for ideas, ideas for sketches, old pastrami sandwiches, etc.).

Then, usually very early in the morning or late at night, I return to that stack of cartoons and just react to them. You'd be amazed how many different captions will bubble up, or how a flaccid line suddenly sharpens up.

So the original caption—"I'm sorry I'm such an apologist."

Might evolve into—"You're not even sorry about being an apologist."

In other words, from failure comes fertilizer! Probably 34% of my submissions, and about 25% of my sales, are generated in this manner.

Try it yourself. Next contest, create a few captions, allow them to simmer overnight, and then revisit and react. And keep all those extras—you never know when an old caption might be perfect for a new cartoon.

Hope to see you in The New Yorker, soon.

Michael Shaw
Cartoonist

P. S. I'm happy to announce a new training tool that's also a box full of fun—The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Game. Playing it is the perfect way to keep your gag reflexes sharp. And at $34.95, it's only about twenty cents per captionless cartoon. What a deal.

From: Me (me.bean@gmail.com):

go fuck yourself. how's that caption?

holy effing sh*t.

after my office got wind of the upper east side plane crash today, i was admonishing my coworkers for being up in arms about it ('it's not terrorism; it's just a small plane; what's the big deal' etc). i was going on so much about how people shouldnt go on about it, that i eventually admonished myself for admonishing everyone else so much, saying that if there was a god, a plane would crash into our office, killing only moi.

well, it was short of that, but i did get my comeuppance. damn. poor cory lidle.

and to think, if the yankees had bested the tigers last weekend, this prolly wouldnt have happened. very paul auster, as one of my colleagues pointed out.

meanwhile, wikipedia updated lidle's entry with his death def. within two hours of the tragedy, possibly within one. that site is wik-ed.

im going to look myself up on wikipedia to see what's in store for me.

generally speaking, i wont possibly be able to do this event as much justice as slack lalane, so im going cede coverage to him.

tiger wooo, tiger wooo.

this morning, on my walk back home from running the small loop in prospect park for the first time without stopping or getting lost (shut it), i passed jeffrey wright on vanderbilt ave. - more or less in front of the veterinary hospital where i bring brady, actually. i couldnt tell what he was doing, but it could well have been some mundane task like dropping an envelope off somewhere, or picking one up - as he does live in brooklyn.

anyway, i had my headphones on and i didn't stop, but i did point at him and say 'you're the best actor!' - which he said a slightly surprised but hearty 'thank you!' to. then, as i was overcome with the double rush of feeling good after a run and seeing one of my favorite actors in the flesh, i yelled 'i love you!' as i finished walking by. i did not swivel my head back to see his reaction, which i hope was flattered.

i havent even seen that many of his films, but from what i have seen - basquiat, angels in america, and shaft - a crap movie, in which he manages to shine brightly - it's clear he's a major, major league talent. and he's one of those presences who's simply a joy to watch onscreen. and he deserves to hear as such from passersby.

im not sure if i chickened out of trying to shake his hand - my preferred way to starfuck, as physical contact seems more significant, or if i just didnt feel like it, but id like to think this non-attempt stemmed from a deeper allegiance a code revolving around nyc-based stars.

see, i once read of some star saying that he/she had moved to nyc because it was so much easier to remain anonymous here: to live normally. and i buy that, in no small part because it implies that as new yorkers, we are above falling all over celebrities (we as a whole, the royal we, not nec. me).

so anyway, i like to abide that code, to rep my city with classiness. (of course id have to defenestrate the code when it comes to certain luminaries, as i once did with bruce.) my feeling is that a celeb in la-la land is fair game, because people go there, effectively, to get noticed. but here? you come here to be a new yorker; and we dont even say hi sometimes.

ps - apparently wright's gonna be in casino royale, which would mean this is the first ever bond movie i'll remotely think about considering being excited to see. i have to admit, the trailer looks good. then again, the trailer for little children looked great, and that movie's clownier than a documentary about the circus.

jiminy jillikers!

in addition to happy times, i spent some of the weekend watching the yankees get diced to the teeth.

man were they diced!

as were my predictions, needless to say.

a quick note on (inefficient) language.

this is the last mel c post; it's been a good week. i like how everyone anted up with their own idiosyncratic eating habits for the last post. good show!

speaking of idiosyncratic, i think i just came to an understanding of a particular aspect of language; namely, why so many properties of a given lexicon are gratuitous and/or inefficient.

i was g-chatting with a friend, and i used the ol' smiley face emoticon (shut up, we all use it). i noticed that g-chat so cleverly switches the sideways :) to a right-side up smile once you type it in. that got me to thinking about how people have been using said emoticon for years now, but no one's making keyboards that have a smiley key. we just continue to use the tool we've had all this time, fitting our new language (the emoticons) to the keyboard, rather than the other way around.

im no chomsky, but i figure that languages in general surely develop/ed like this: largely using old words and grammar structures in artful ways to convey evolving thoughts and systems, rather than creating new words and structures - thereby accumulating inefficiencies and idiosyncracies.

i mean, we all intuitively know this, but nothing had ever crystallized it for me before. thanks smiley!

truman powder.

4mc.

last night during the yankee romp (8-4) i took some häagen-dazs out of the freezer, then some nesquik powder out of the cabinet, to sprinkle on my bowl of ice cream. friends jph and ijd were aghast, while ddr explained that that's just something i do.

this was not the first time people have been shocked by this practice. but these reactions are always surprising to me, and im not saying that b/c i think putting chocolate powder on ice cream is not so different than the socially acceptable practice of putting chocolate syrup on ice cream - though i certainly do think that.

im always surprised b/c i forget that this is not what everyone does. growing up, my dad - a chocoholic and ice cream fiend - put quik powder on his ice cream all the time. so i've always done it myself, never thinking it strange. (rather, that it's delicious.) this reminds me of a great quote in the truman show, delivered by ed harris's christof: We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.

btw, for those of you who want to try this at home, i recommend häagen-dazs coffee ice cream. it's a perfect combo.

lastly, imdb informs me that today is charlton heston's birthday; he's 82. despite the fact that chuckie apparently used to be a classy liberal, the recent school shootings in this country and abroad stoke my belief that the world is not a better place for counting this gun-toting, anti-abortion old bastard among its members. (im not against guns per se - though i prolly am; im more against people against gun control.) go down, moses.

october test.

as always this week, this post is dedicated to melissa c. i hope she likes baseball.


notes:
al div. series.
•the tigers are young and good, but they're not that good. they jumped off to a ludicrous start then faded as the season wore on. for most of the season, detroit looked like it had the al central locked up; the fact that the tigers are the wild card is indicative of their fall (pardon the pun). it continues, as the veteran, preposterously talented yankee lineup sends the young, talented detroit pitching staff to the school of hard knocks. apparently the operative word in this paragraph is young, which is interesting, as the tigers cut dmitri young earlier this season. ironically, losing him made them even more young. i digress.

•oakland routinely stinks it up in the playoffs, while the twins are always frisky. but it will be close. i just have a feeling.

nl div. series.
•with or without pedro, the mets are the class of the nl. (they're now without, for those of you who are not american.) still, the dodgers are good for one game.

•sand diego and st. louis. who the hell cares; both these teams are crapola. but st. louis is prolly less crapola, despite recent struggles.

alcs. if the twins had a healthy liriano, instead of no liriano, this would be frightening (though not as frightening as a 5-game set). as it is, the twins are scary, but not as scary as that yankee lineup, which is a combination of talent on par with lennon/mccartney, watson/crick and ren/stimpy. yanks in six.

nlcs. the mets are good, the rest of the nl is crap. that's all you need to know. i give the cardinals a win b/c pujols will take one game singlehandedly.

ws. abiding the properties of algebraic division, we can eliminate the ny on both sides. we thusly strip away the fanfare of a subway series. we are left with a simple problem: yanks vs. mets. c'mon. yanks in six. cut that cigar.

win one for the kipper.

this week's posts are dedicated to melissa c, a generous and classy lady who gave me half her sandwich saturday night. and it wasnt one of those 'this sandwich is mediocre; i dont mind parting with half of it'-type deals. it was a great sandwich, replete with turkey and cheddar - not american - cheese, and im sure she wouldve enjoyed the whole thing. thank you again.

family legend has it that when my dad, who grew up in elmhurst, queens, was around seven years old, he came home from school one fall afternoon to report to his parents that a jewish boy in his class got to have the day off from school because it was 'kipper's day.'

this was apparently when my grandparents decided to inform young papa bear that:
1. the holiday to which he was referring was called yom kippur.
2. he too was jewish.