Friday Five: Five Things I Use My Phone For WAY MORE Than Just "Calling Someone On The Phone"

Go read Toothpaste For Dinner.

Last week Thursday I dropped my phone of 18 months, and that was the final straw: the glass screen shattered in about four places, and I had to get a new phone. (Turns out repairing a phone is almost exactly the same price as a new phone. VIVA AMERICA!)  That required that I spend several days without a phone, which for me was exactly the same as spending several days without one of the more important senses or limbs.  Actually worse: if you took away my hearing, or my legs, for a few days I'd probably be just fine. They close-caption Hulu.

That caused me to reflect on the important things in life, namely, all the stuff I wasn't able to do because I didn't have a phone.  Here are five of them:

1. Take Pictures.  I can remember when pictures were expensive, and rare.  When I was a kid, I got for Xmas one year a "Kodak Disc" camera that was going to revolutionize taking pictures: Easy to load film! No 'advancing' the film manually like a sucker! Only costs $132,000,000 (adjusted for inflation) to develop those 12 pictures!  I went to Washington DC and Morocco back in 1994, and I took about 100 pictures of the entire set of trips. That's 8 months!, some of it spend in a foreign country I will almost certainly never go back to again! That number of pictures probably cost me $300-400, total, by the time it was all done.

By contrast, I have taken over 2,000 pictures... since May. May 2015. I am one of those people everyone complains about, whipping out my camera at every possible opportunity, taking pictures of everything.  (If you complain about that or want to make snarky comments, shut up. Let people enjoy a moment they way they want to, not the way you want to. I'm not bothering anyone.)

I experiment with my camera, taking close-ups of things and trying to get imaginative shots. I take snapshots to remember things. I take photos of funny signs to send to people I know because I think they will be funny to those people, too. I have seriously thought about getting one of those mountable cameras so I could just wear it everywhere and stop the hassle of taking out my phone and opening up the camera, etc.  Who has that kind of time?

2. Find My Way Around.  The other day, I had to go to an office near my own Milwaukee office for a meeting. I used my GPS to get there. I have lived in or around Madison for twenty years and I still use GPS to go almost everywhere.  I take the boys for rides and just head out into the countryside, turning left and then right and then left and then right until we are lost, and then I pull out my phone and GPS us and head home.  (Unless we are out of cellphone range, as we were one Saturday morning, and I had to use dead reckoning the way sailors used to: Head east I kept thinking, literally piloting by the sun's position in the sky.  Too bad my car doesn't have a sextant.)

I have long joked about outsourcing my brain's functions, only it's not a joke.  With calculators I don't need to know how to do logarithms. With online dictionaries, I don't need to remember what a logarithm is. With Google, I don't need to remember hardly anything.  And now, with GPS, I don't need to remember where I live or where the grocery store is.  I can let my brain do important things, like yesterday when I had to go to a doctor's appointment on the other side of town.  I've been there lots, but I always forget exactly which exit I'm supposed to take off the highway, mostly because I have never made even the slightest effort to remember which exit I'm supposed to take. I just put the address into GPS, start my audiobook, and drive along with the friendly GPS lady ("Eisenhower") telling me when and where to turn.

3. Remember Stuff.  I have (had!) these two functions on my phone that would keep lists and notes, and give me reminders. It was an intricate system that would help me keep track of when and how much I exercise, various deadlines and dates for things that we were going to do, all sorts of things.  I have a million different things to keep track of: days when I'm in Milwaukee or Madison, which session of yoga I'm on (I do yoga now!), how much my last weight was, when the library is doing the "read to puppies" day.  I could do grocery lists and have them pop up on my phone on the way home from work so I'd remember to go to the grocery store.  It was wonderful.  Now, I have to recreate them all.

4. BOOKS.  I drive all over the place.  Not only do I drive to Milwaukee about 2x a week (four hours, round trip) but I go to court all over Wisconsin -- sometimes 2, 3 hours away.  I used to, in the Dark Ages, have to listen to the radio, or to CDs, but those are unsatisfactory because they're never talking about what I want to hear about, and I go crazy if I just listen to music for four hours straight.

With my phone, I can download audiobooks and podcasts and have a ready selection of things to listen to at any time. I've listened to more books than I've read this year, plus there are about 10 really awesome podcasts that are way better than anything on the radio.  With a phone, I don't even have to plan ahead.  When I had my big iPod -- it died and they can't be fixed, either, although Apple was going to give me FIVE WHOLE DOLLARS store credit for it. You know what five bucks gets you at an Apple store? Diddly/squat, as Berke Breathed would say.

PLUS, when my old phone went down I was only about 1% into Authority by Jeff VanderMeer, and now by having to wait nearly a week to restart it I've lost precious time trying to figure out (in a very very good way) just what the heck is going on in those books.

5. Playing Plants vs. Zombies, 2:  This is about the only video game that holds my attention anymore and yet isn't too hard to play. Videogames on consoles have a billion different controls, and I don't want to take the time to learn how to play a game like that.  The last time I played one of them was about 70 years ago, when The Boy beat me 70-3 on Madden NFL.  He could duck and twist and stiff-arm and control his passes.  I could move in SEVERAL DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, sometimes the actual direction I wanted to go in.

Plants vs Zombies, or 'Zoms,' as Sweetie has nicknamed it, doesn't require a ton of hand-eye coordination, but it's still an action game.  I had only just gotten to the point where I was ready to take on the newest level when my phone died. I redownloaded the game, and have to start all over, which is fine, but I don't all the great plants like the banana and the coconut cannon, I have to replay the stupid Western level, and I had 93 diamonds, which doesn't mean anything to people who don't play but if you do play you're all Whoa man that sucks.  (Diamonds let you get the cool plants without paying. I don't pay for videogames.)

Friday Five: Five Books I'm In Line To Get From The Library So HURRY UP PEOPLE.

I'm almost back. For about two weeks now my asthma's been really acting up, leaving me mostly exhausted at night and too tired to think about blogging or writing or anything except listlessly paging through the Internet. I know a lot of gossip about people I barely recognize.

Here's the filler (both of) my readers missed! 

I am not sure I'll ever buy a book again. The last book I bought (other than real books I buy for nostalgic purposes) was on sale for $2.99 on Amazon. It was To Rise Again At A Decent Hour and I'm about 1/8 of the way through it. I never really feel like going to read it. I think part of it is that I bought it for only $2.99.  Part of my brain thinks how good can it be if it was only $2.99? Did you ever find a really good book in the remainder bin?

Instead, I get my books from the library.  Right now, I'm reading The Bone Clocks which is superawesome and I'm only like 3 pages into it. I've also got Authority from Jeff VanderMeer as my audiobook. And I can go check out an infinite number of books (well 10 at a time) online right now! FOR FREE. #govtworksforme. (PS I STARTED THAT HASHTAG back in 2012 and IT CAUGHT ON and I was briefly a Twitter celebrity.  WOO HOO.)

The thing is though, the library is limited in how many digital loans it can give out, so you have to get in line for books, and that makes it a gamble.  It's like Xmas crossed with a scratch-off lottery ticket: go to the library website, put a book on hold, go about your life and then one day out of the blue you get an email saying your book is here! and you know you'll be readin' good that night.

Here's five books I currently am awaiting.

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander.  I'm next in line for this. So any day now, I will get that email! I'm on the edge of my seat.

This is another book I'm going to re-read out of nostalgia. I wanted to say that I first read this book in 8th grade, but clearly I didn't because it was published in 1984, when I was in 9th and 10th grade. It's about an assistant pig-keeper who fights a Welsh Darth Vader.  I hadn't thought of it in years, but when we go to the actual physical library here in town (having ended my feud with them on account of Mr Bunches likes the library), Mr F likes to sit in the 'teen' area, where they have comfy chairs. There are racks of books there, and one of the books in this series was on one of them.

The Color Of Magic, Terry Pratchett.  (Currently 18th in line). I've never read a Terry Pratchett book. Or at least I don't think I have? I think maybe he did one as a collaboration that I read.  I never thought much of him either way, until he died. Even then I wasn't going to read one of his books, but then I read this discussion of the controversy over whether his books are worth reading (and the post it links to which talks about what books will live on forever and why), and decided I'd give it a shot. I believe this is the first Discworld book ever, so I picked it out and put a hold on it. Apparently 17 people read that post before I did.

Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix. (Currently 3d in line). This is sort of an example of why physical bookstores (or libraries) maybe ought to live on in some form even after everyone finally goes mostly digital, the way music has: I was not going to ever buy/wishlist/borrow this book because when I read about it I thought oh man way too gimmicky. The setup is supposed to be that the story is somehow told in the form of an Ikea-like catalog. I despise gimmicks despite the fact that they're an obvious way to get critics to turn your book into a bestseller. Imagine how awesome(ly stupid) it would have been if my book Codes had come with two copies everytime you ordered one. You know, because clones? ANYWAY another day when we were at the library it was Mr F's turn to decide where we go (he and I are a team at the library; Mr Bunches goes his own way mostly as long as he stays in sight). So we went to get a drink of water, and passed by the new books. Horrorstor was there on the display so while Mr F quenched his thirst I glanced through it and decided to give it a try.

BY THE WAY: A SPECIAL NOTE ON LIBRARIES AND EBOOKS:  Ebooks only make up about 8% of library borrows as of the most recent figures.  Publishers are still trying to figure out how to charge for these.  Some ebooks are borrowed just like physical books: the library can loan out a copy to one user at a time, so they would have to buy multiple copies to let multiple people get it. Others are a cost-per-borrow basis, and some publishers require the library to re-buy a book after so much time or so many borrows.  For Harper Collins, that number was 26; for MacMillan, it was 52.  THAT IS A COLOSSAL GAIN FOR AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS. Ebooks are far less costly to publish, and re-selling the book to libraries every so often is just gravy for the people who get the money. (Those were 2013 numbers.)  Since ebooks are overpriced anyway by a factor of about 100, I do not mind borrowing them from libraries, especially since that lets me try more books than I would otherwise, and cuts my cost on books that suck. Subscription services like Amazon Prime and such are too expensive for me: I read maybe a book a month, so for $80 a year, I would lose money on Amazon Prime.

Aftermath, by Chuck Wendig. (Currently 57th in line.) If we didn't put ourselves on a budget, I'd have probably bought this book, or maybe not. It's the newest Star Wars book and helps tie Return of the Jedi to Episode VII, so of course I'm going to read it at some point. But what if it's awful? My threshhold for spending money on books is so high that I basically cannot commit to buying a book anymore.  Other than that $2.99 impulse purchase all my purchased books have been directly purchased for me as a gift.  I had an Amazon gift card last year, and I waited five months before using it. The day I was going to buy a book I dithered so much about it that I finally decided not to buy anything and ultimately I let Sweetie use it to buy something for the boys. I just cannot bear to spend money on a bad book. Maybe when I am rich I will do that, just buy a book with impunity and hope it turns out for the best. But I'm not rich and so many books are so bad.

So I put this one on hold and hopefully 56 people will read it all in like a half-day because that movie's coming out in December and I would really like to know what's going on. (PS I also have Heir To The Empire on hold. I'm third in line for that. I know it's not canon anymore but I was feeling Star Warsy and wanted to read it again because I remember liking it.)

Armada, Ernest Cline. (Twelfth in line.) Ernest Cline's Ready Player One was one of the most pleasantly surprising books I read last year. I didn't expect much when I checked it out; it was just filler while I tried to decide what to read next. Ho hum a guy basically goes into a massive online game trying to win a jillion dollars is what I thought. But the book was really good, and really engaging, and to this day scenes from the book pop into my head.  So when I saw he had a new book out, I put it on hold.

Friday Five: Five Specific Comic Strips I Remember From Long Ago, For Some Reason

About the only thing I miss from newspapers is the comics page. I know there are comics on the Internet but it's not really the same.  

1. I'm A Reasonable Man, Doonesbury.

So I was kind of a weird kid. I used to check out Doonesbury collections from the library, and one of the first was one from the 1970s in which Duke went and became the governor of American Samoa, with Zonker as his lieutenant governor. I had no idea what many of the strips were about, but they helped me piece together, slowly, lots of things that were going on around me in the world.

I don't know why this strip is the one that stuck with me, though. It just has.  I think of it everytime it snows, for one thing. It will start to snow and I will think I'm a reasonable man, so I know this isn't snow, and chuckle, and I never explain (before now) what I'm thinking.

2. I didn't even do it yet, Calvin & Hobbes:

This strip is twenty-eight years old. I think of it about once a week. What do you suppose Calvin would've grown up to be? I sometimes listen to Mr Bunches talk about his plans.  He was playing with his planetarium the other day and he told me that he's going to be an astronaut and go to Saturn, and also he would be a policeman. He watches science experiments on Youtube and then has us recreate them.  Mr F, meanwhile, tears through the house and neighborhood laughing hysterically, have us chase and wrestle him, swinging acrobatically. They both play games they make up on the fly.

I used to think, when I read and re-read and re-re-read Calvin & Hobbes that it would be kind of awesome to have a kid like Calvin. I think I got two of them.

3. Could You Go To Your Window, The Far Side.

I mean I get why this is funny but I have nightmares about it.


4. Beethoven, Peanuts.

When I was a kid I read a lot, and I did not talk to people a lot. I read a lot of comics especially. I also took piano lessons. I was shocked when my piano teacher taught me Fuur Elise, and said it was by "Bate-Hoven."

I'd always pronounced Beeth in a way that rhymed with teeth, oven, like the stove.



5. Made Or Just Happened, Bloom County.

Made first, then set loose to see what happens.

Friday Five: Five Poems I Read Wednesday Night (Poem 4)

I didn't forget about these:

Because I cannot remember my first kiss

Roger Bonair-Agard

but I remember sitting alone on the brown
couch in my grandmother’s living room,
couch whose cushion covers were of velvet
and the color of dark rust, or dried blood
—and sewn by the tailor from up the block,
the same one who made me my first light blue
suit two years earlier 
             And I sat there running my hands back 
             and forth
over the short smooth hairs of the fabric
and understanding what touch meant
for the first time—not touch, the word,
as in don’t touch the hot stove or don’t
touch your grandfather’s hats but touch
like Tom Jones was singing it right then
on the television, with a magic that began
in his hips, swiveled the word and pushed
it out through his throat into some concert
hall somewhere as a two-syllabled sprite,
so that women moaned syllables back in return.

And I knew I wanted to touch
like that  because
Tom Jones stooped down at the edge
of the stage and a woman from the audience
in a leopard-print jumpsuit unfurled
from her front row seat, walked like
a promise of what I couldn’t quite 
discern up to him and pushed her mouth
soft and fast up against his mouth
and they both cooed into his microphone
mouths still move-moaning together
like that for an eternity.  And then 
Tom Jones unlocks his mouth from hers
while my breath is still caught
in my throat, and moves to the other
end of the stage, and squats there, 
and kisses another woman from the audience
in a black jumpsuit, while the first
woman looks on, swaying so slightly
I almost can’t tell—to the band
which is still vamping the chorus line—
mesmerized and taut with expectation as I 
am, palms down on the velvet-haired 
cushions        and Tom pauses, sensing
the first woman’s impatient almost-mewling
and says Easy Tiger while he moves his mouth
against this woman’s, his cheeks working 
like tiny bellows, before returning to the first
one and then the bridge or the chorus
or whatever—at that point the song 
is an afterthought, and I knew there was
a mission to be fulfilled—Tom Jones
pointed to the women and said touch
and the new color TV made everything
shimmer with promise so my eight year old
body preened and stretched itself against
the ecstatic couch and dreamed of what
tomorrow could be like if I could make
touch mean so many things, if I could
make a building or a body coo like this.

_________________________________________________________________

Memory is very much on my mind, nearly every day. We are the sum total of our memories; or perhaps we are the sum total of all the things we can no longer remember.

Friday Five: Five Poems I Read Wednesday Night (Poem 3)

Escape

When foxes eat the last gold grape,

And the last white antelope is killed,

I shall stop fighting and escape

Into a little house I'll build.

But first I'll shrink to fairy size,

With a whisper no one understands,

Making blind moons of all your eyes,

And muddy roads of all your hands.

And you may grope for me in vain

In hollows under the mangrove root,

Or where, in apple-scented rain,

The silver wasp-nests hang like fruit.

Elinor Wylie

__________________________________________________

  For me, the hollows under the mangrove root are a beach house, somewhere south of here. Far south of here.

Friday Five: Five Poems I Read Wednesday Night (poem 2)

I think what I like best about this one is how very unpoemlike it is, and also how it perfectly captures the terror of being a parent -- both the good and the bad of it.

The Very Nervous Family

Sabrina Orah Mark

Mr. Horowitz clutches a bag of dried apricots to his chest. Although the sun is shining, there will probably be a storm. Electricity will be lost. Possibly forever. When this happens the very nervous family will be the last to starve. Because of the apricots. “Unless," says Mrs. Horowitz, “the authorities confiscate the apricots.” Mr. Horowitz clutches the bag of dried apricots tighter. He should’ve bought two bags. One for the authorities and one for his very nervous family. Mrs. Horowitz would dead bolt the front door to keep the authorities out, but it is already bolted. Already dead. She doesn’t like that phrase. Dead bolt. It reminds her of getting shot before you even have a chance to run. “Everyone should have at least a chance to run," says Mrs. Horowitz. “Don’t you agree, Mr. Horowitz?” Mrs. Horowitz always refers to her husband as Mr. Horowitz should they ever one day become strangers to each other. Mr. Horowitz agrees. When the authorities come they should give the Horowitzs a chance to run before they shoot them for the apricots. Eli Horowitz, their very nervous son, rushes in with his knitting. “Do not rush," says Mr. Horowitz, “you will fall and you will die.” Eli wanted ice skates for his birthday. “We are not a family who ice skates!” shouts Mrs. Horowitz. She is not angry. She is a mother who simply does not wish to outlive her only son. Mrs. Horowitz gathers her very nervous son up in her arms, and gently explains that families who ice skate become the ice they slip on. The cracks they fall through. The frost that bites them. “We have survived this long to become our own demise?” asks Mrs. Horowitz. “No," whispers Eli, “we have not.” Mr. Horowitz removes one dried apricot from the bag and nervously begins to pet it when Mrs. Horowitz suddenly gasps. She thinks she may have forgotten to buy milk. Without milk they will choke on the apricots. Eli rushes to the freezer with his knitting. There is milk. The whole freezer is stuffed with milk. Eli removes a frozen half pint and glides it across the kitchen table. It is like the milk is skating. He wishes he were milk. Brave milk. He throws the half pint on the floor and stomps on it. Now the milk is crushed. Now the milk is dead. Now the Horowitzs are that much closer to choking. Mr. and Mrs. Horowitz are dumbfounded. Their very nervous son might be a maniac. He is eight. God is punishing them for being survivors. God has given them a maniac for a son. All they ask is that they not starve, and now their only son is killing milk. Who will marry their maniac? No one. Who will mother their grandchildren? There will be no grandchildren. All they ask is that there is something left of them when they are shot for the apricots, but now their only son is a maniac who will give them no grandchildren. Mr. Horowitz considers leaving Eli behind when he and Mrs. Horowitz run for their lives.

Friday Five: Five Poems I Read Wednesday Night (Poem 1)

I was reading an article and it linked to a poem and I went to read the poem and then I read a bunch more. Probably about 20. Here's five I liked. It's one per post; I'll put them up throughout the day or weekend or whatever.

Poem 1:

"Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies"

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1937)

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age

The child is grown, and puts away childish things.

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course

Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,

And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripéd bag, or a

jack-knife,

And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.

And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,

And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion

With fleas that one never knew were there,

Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,

Trekking off into the living world.

You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small, because she won't

curl up now:

So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.

But you do not wake up a month from then, two months

A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night

And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God!

Oh, God!

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,

—mothers and fathers don't die.

And if you have said, "For heaven's sake, must you always be

kissing a person?"

Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window with

your thimble!"

Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having

fun,

Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother."

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,

who neither listen nor speak;

Who do not drink their tea, though they always said

Tea was such a comfort.

Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;

they are not tempted.

Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly

That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;

They are not taken in.

Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,

Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake

them and yell at them;

They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide

back into their chairs.

Your tea is cold now.

You drink it standing up,

And leave the house.

_____________________________________________________________

Friday Five: My Five Favorite TV Sitcoms (Right Now)

Television shows doesn't seem quite right, does it? Just like books don't seem to be books anymore, is it right to talk about them as television shows? I watch 98% of my shows/movies on my laptop, or my phone.  We have TVs in our house but the boys are always using them. (One, in their room, is permanently playing Chicken Little and we cannot turn it off or Mr Bunches gets terrified.  The other one, in our living room, generally shows Ice Age or The Incredibles these days.) But even televisions are televisions anymore. They're just screens.

Anyway, here's my Five Favorite Shows (Right Now), in no particular order (other than the order I put them in):

1. Brooklyn 99: This is my and Sweetie's lunch show. I started watching this and around episode 2 Sweetie got into it and we've worked our way through most of the two seasons available online, watching it while we eat lunch.  While you're obviously supposed to love Andy Samberg's Jake Peralta (and he is funny) I think Andre Braugher's stoic, desperately unhip police captain makes the show:



I loved Andre Braugher on Homicide years ago (and Homicide still has the single best episode of a tv show I've ever seen, the one where Vincent D'Onofrio gets pushed in front of a subway), and he's essentially the same character only in  a wacky precinct. It's awesome.

2. BoJack Horseman: The Boy got me into this show, and while I'm suspect of many of his pop culture choices (21 Jump Street is the funniest movie ever? SERIOUSLY?) he was dead on here.  This is too weird a show to be as touching as it is: BoJack Horseman is a former star of an 80s sitcom just drifting through his days aimlessly, drunk and hoping to get some fame or recognition or respect.  Season 1 followed him as a ghost writer wrote "his" autobiography, and Season 2 shows what happens after the book, which tells all the bad stuff about him, comes out.  There are hilarious comedy bits but this season was also really touching. I didn't think a show about a drunken horse buying a yacht in New Mexico could bring a lump to my throat, but it did.

One of my favorite characters is "Vincent Adultman," who only BoJack Horseman knows the truth about.  See if you can figure out Vincent's secret:




3. The Mindy Project: I love commercials. If it wasn't for commercials, how would a guy like me -- who generally distrusts people and/or society -- find out about stuff? I started watching The Mindy Project because it was advertised all the time on Hulu after it got canceled and then put on Hulu.  I liked Mindy Kaling on The Office so one night when Mr F couldn't sleep I figured what've I got to lose and gave it a shot.  It's surprisingly funny.  The concept is that Mindy, a successful (?) doctor, is semi-obsessed with making her life as much like a romantic comedy as she can, with of course funny if not hilarious results.  The show almost tries too hard to be cute at times, but is rescued by Mindy Kaling, who's funny, and even more so by her foil/love interest, Danny, who's exactly the kind of lunky loveable character that populates rom-coms.




4. Archer: Archer shows how more or less how I have abandoned broadcast TV, as well as being the funniest, smartest, adventure-iest show around.  I am a season behind Archer right now because when I tried to DVR it and watch the latest season, I couldn't really keep up with it. Some didn't tape, and I didn't like having to watch it on the TV in our bedroom (which was where I DVRd it because we can't watch the living room TV, but we never just hang out in our bedroom until the boys have gone to bed, which is almost never -- it's 8:46 on Thursday night right now and I'm sitting in the boys' room waiting for Mr F to fall asleep. He won't fall asleep unless one of us is in the room, so we alternate nights sitting in here.)

Archer ought to need no introduction or explanation by now. Its's both a spy show and a parody of a spy show, full of action that is every bit as cool (and cartoonish) as Mission: Impossible but which also makes fun of spy movies.  And the wordplay and inside jokes; like my prior favorite, Arrested Development, Archer can be watched and rewatched without getting boring, because each time I get some new joke I didn't before.

Plus the show just goes off in these wild directions. For one whole season, the ISIS spy group was trying to work as cocaine dealers and ended up with its accountant being a third-world dictator.  It's that kind of stuff that makes the show extra fun.

The clips are somewhat NSFW:



5. Adventure Time: I'm not actually sure this counts as a sitcom, but I do love it so whatever.  Adventure Time I think is by the guy who also writes Dinosaur Comics, and I learned that Adventure Time is a thing when we were wandering through Toys "R" Us trying to find Star Wars X-Wing Legos for Mr Bunches like 2 years ago.  I saw some "Adventure Time" action figures and had no idea what they were, so I looked them up when I got home, and learned that the show is about some sort of post-apocalyptic world in which a 13-year-old boy and his shapeshifting dog have adventures and fight various monsters to save various princesses.  It's weird and touching and interesting and sometimes funny, but not really laugh out loud funny.  I can only watch 1 or 2 episodes at a time, because they're sort of overwhelming in a way.  It's like a day at an amusement park just after your mom died.  That's the best I can sum it up.



If you like scifi or fantasy, you should definitely watch Adventure Time, especially if you like weird stuff. It looks like a kids' show but it's so definitely not.

Friday Five: Five "Foods" That Are In My House Right Now, And Stuff About Them.

In the summer, I take every other Friday off to spend time with the boys and do summer-y stuff.  This is one of those days.  We're waiting for Sweetie to get home from her extreme workout session before we leave, which is why I have time to kill taking pictures of the "food" in my house.  Also, we recorded a very informative video about the solar system that I will probably debut tomorrow.

Here's the "Food!":

1. Gummi Krabby Patties:

A gummi candy modeled after Sponge Bob's Krabby Patties.  True fact: Mr Bunches liked Spongebob for a while when he was younger and for about two years he thought hamburgers were actually called "krabby patties."  Another fun fact: these are surprisingly good.  I don't particularly like gummi candy, but whenever Mr Bunches won't eat a batch of these (he is picky about textures and if they're a little stale he won't come near them) I "have to" finish them.  I like 'em.  I took a bunch to my office and put them in my candy vase, and the other lawyers ate them up in about 4 hours.   

2. Bologna: 

Bologna is my second-favorite lunchmeat, right behind liverwurst, which we didn't have right now. We don't buy liverwurst every week because it's superexpensive, especially compare to bologna, which is about 99 cents a ton.  

When we were kids my mom used to make fried bologna from the ring, fried up in butter with onions.  I still make that sometimes even though I am the only one in my family who will eat it.  

3. Frosted Mini-Wheats:

On a not-completely-unrelated follow-up to that last part, remember back when I had my heart attack? I had to talk to a nutritionist because hospitals have this thing where they want you to NOT keep coming back for emergency surgery even though if we were all healthy they'd be out of business DID THEY EVER THINK OF THAT? 

Anyway, the nutritionist suggested that I substitute frosted mini-wheats for snack chips, and I have done that pretty successfully: right now in our house we have an entire case of Doritos (courtesy of a client of mine who WORKS FOR FRITO-LAY I HIT THE JACKPOT) plus a bag of "Funyuns" which would have made it into this post but I haven't opened them yet, even though they have been in our house for nearly 24 hours.  

I like the frosted mini-wheats enough that I don't even hold it against them that they were recalled in 2012 for possibly containing metal shavings in them.  Have you ever noticed that almost no junk food ever poses a direct health hazard? Nearly every vegetable has caused a salmonella or e. coli outbreak.  Fruits are made up of 100% spiders. Kale was perfected by Hitler. Etc.  But when's the last time you heard of someone dying of Cheetos? NEVER. Unless you count someone getting murdered over a dispute about Cheetos, which is not an argument against Cheetos, it's an argument against ever being around other people.  

4. Cap'n Crunch:

Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch is actually my favorite.  I like it not just because it tastes delicious, but because it exemplifies everything I think is awesome/lamentable about modern society: We take a peanut, and grind it up into tiny powder, and then mix it with chemicals and then put it through a series of industrial processes to shape it into a fake peanut.

HUMANITY: 1, NATURE: 0.  Probably the score is more lopsided than that.  

I don't have Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch right now, and technically the Cap'n Crunch shown here is not a regular one; it's one of the ones that comes mixed in with the box of Crunchberries.  Mr Bunches likes the berries in Crunch Berries, but not the crunches.  I'm not sure what he disliked about them.  He tried to eat one to earn a star so he could buy a toy [when he wants to buy toys he has to earn 9 stars, which he can do through various tasks/challenges] and he managed to get it into his mouth and chew it but then he gagged and had to spit it out and drink about a gallon of milk.  He got his star.

So he picks the berries out, leaving all the crunches.  So I take the leftover crunches and put them in a box and eat them for cereal.  It's the circle of life.  

"So just buy him that All-Berries cereal," you're probably saying.

PRO TIP: When someone deals with a situation regularly and spells out a problem to you, if you can think of a potential solution to that problem in 0.0000001 seconds, assume that the other person has also thought of it.  Whatever you came up with instantaneously has probably occurred to that other person in the years they have been dealing with the problem, don't you think?  Like the time we were at our in-laws with Mr F, and he wanted some cheese puffs, and I tried to get him to eat them out of the bag because he was suspicious of bowls back then, and he wouldn't, and he dumped them onto the couch.  As I pushed them onto a paper towel to try to have some semblance of clean, my sister-in-law said: "Have you thought about giving him a bowl?"

WHAT? WHAT DEVILTRY ARE YOU SPEAKING OF WOMAN? What is this bowl you talk of? Some miraculous new contraption of science? I must learn more of this thing!

The reason we don't buy the All Berries is because that is not how Mr Bunches started eating Crunch Berries, and so he won't switch. We've tried. He won't touch them. It doesn't matter that they're the same berry.  And they probably don't taste the same: I'm of the opinion that the berries in Crunch Berries taste different because they are packaged with the crunches, and so the flavors mingle a bit, while the All Berries is more of a pure crunchberry flavor, suitable for purists.

5. Oreos.

We have Oreos in our house because Mr F likes the middles.  And also so that late at night I can feel a little hungry and open up the cupboard and see them and think "I'll have just one," and then eat 7 of them in a row before forcing myself to go upstairs and try to get to sleep, vowing that tomorrow for sure I'll start dieting or something.  It's an almost-nightly ritual.

We're working on Mr F at least depositing the Oreo shells on the table:

Did you know that Oreos were a knockoff product? It's true: They were the Mr Pibb to Hydrox cookies' Dr Pepper, so to speak.  The current design of the Oreo was done by William Turnier, in 1952.  Or at least he is who is generally given credit.  Nabisco won't officially say it was him.  That is the biggest miscarriage of justice since the guy who invented the Doritos Locos Taco got the shaft: Todd Mills came up with the idea and sent a letter to Frito-Lay in 2009. They rejected the plan, and then made it anyway.  Mills never got any money, and died on Thanksgiving 2013.  He was like a modern-day John Harrison. Of tacos. 

Friday Five: Five Bands I Loved When I Was Younger (That I Still Sorta Like I Think?)

I suppose YOU'VE never worn Darth Vader socks
as gloves? LA DI DA Mr High and Mighty.

Last week, Laws Of Gravity Liz threat-promised (it's a thing) not to inundate me with the bands she liked as a kid, apparently in retaliation for my talking about superheroes. Joke's on her: I have NO PROBLEM stealing people's ideas, hence this week's post, which is also inspired by my hearing the song Day By Day on the radio last week.  Or hearing about 15 seconds of the song before Mr Bunches turned the radio off.

"Why'd you do that?" I asked him.

"We don't sing along with songs," he said. "Only people on the radio sing." That is one of his many rules about singing, whistling, dancing, rhythmically tapping your thumbs on the steering wheel to the beat of Radar Love, etc etc.: These things are only done by professionals, on the radio or on stage. They ARE NOT DONE by Daddy.  It will dishonor him, something he learned by watching Mulan: when you do something he doesn't like, he says you have dishonored him, pronouncing the h in the word. Dis HAHN erd.

"Pronouncing The H" I think would make a good name for a band.  Anyway, here's the five:

1. The Hooters.  I have two distinct, and distinctly different, memories related to The Hooters.

One is listening to the song Satellite as I stood and waited for the bus outside my dorm room in November, 1987, my first semester in college.  It was very early, and I had to get to work at JCPenney, a job I wouldn't hold much longer after I dropped out the next semester.  But I remember that morning because the air was crisp and nobody was around and it seemed like Madison was entirely empty except for me. That semester was a tough one for me to adjust to, and the feeling of being entirely alone left me feeling peaceful.



The other memory is going to a Hooters concert a few years later, in the years during which I was a wastrel working nights at a gas station and generally hanging out doing almost nothing with my life.  We had gotten some tickets to the Hooters concert for free, I don't remember how, and I had gone with two of my friends, Mark and Rob, and also two girls.  One of the girls I really liked and had wanted to ask out.

When we were at the concert, we noted that the security seemed a little bit lax.  Rob said it would be 'totally easy' for someone to get on stage -- and we were in like the fifth row.  Then the girl said it would be totally cool if someone got on stage.

So I did it.  I edged my way up to the front row, and then to the side of the stage, and then got up on stage and walked towards the lead singer, who looked surprised but shook my hand before bouncers came out and led me off and then out the side door of the theater, leaving me to wait about a half-hour before my friends came out at the end of the concert.

I was feeling pretty cool, and I didn't (and don't) like concerts anyway, and I figured maybe I'd made some inroads with the girl.  She sat in back with me and Rob on the way home while Mark and the other girl were up front.  And about halfway home she started making out with Rob.

That's The Hooters for you.

2. Supertramp.  This was one of the first rock groups I ever liked, and I was only 10 when their album Breakfast In America came out.  I had that album on vinyl, and listened to it over and over as a kid, before moving on to their live double album Paris, which featured one of my all-time favorite songs, the Fool's Overture.



Nowadays I think they're only okay.  I don't know what the fascination was for me as a 10-year-old, but I listened to their music for hours.

I looked on Wikipedia and apparently most of the band is still together and touring. They don't seem to really have a pop culture presence, though.  I only ever had the two albums, but I remember liking It's Raining Again a lot, too.  Now that song's used (again per Wikipedia) during NASCAR rain delays.

3. The Cure. Another band that would almost be  an obsession, music-wise, and then almost entirely fade away was The Cure.  When I first heard In Between Days it was almost revelatory; there was something in the music's somehow wistful-yet-driving sound combined with the somewhat inscrutable lyrics that seemed to just grab me.  The Cure was music for kids who felt like they should be disconnected and surly but who couldn't really, because they were too comfortable and everyone around them was pretty nice.  What good is being a teen if you can't rebel against something? Teens need to rebel and if your life is a pretty okay one, your rebellions feel a little forced.

I was never a hardcore Cure fan; I got their greatest hits album , plus The Head On The Door, but that was about it. Still, I listened the beejeebers out of those songs.

My alltime favorite song by them: Close To Me:




4. Orchestral Manoeuvers In The Dark (OMD):  Sure, everyone (of my age or so) knows them because they sang If You Leave for the movie Pretty In Pink but I liked them before that: Junk Culture was the first album I'd gotten by them, and I bought the next two before drifting away from their music.  Last year out of the blue I suddenly thought of them again and began listening to a bunch of their older stuff on Youtube. I thought about maybe getting the album Junk Culture again but then I thought eh maybe not now and then I browsed around on Amazon for other stuff and then I went to bed so that was that.



I think my reluctance to buy the music is a combination of factors.  First, I'm cheap.  Second, I've been going through a nostalgic period lately, and I figure it's because the last 2+ years have been so challenging, getting extremely tough and stressful at times.  I probably have been feeling nostalgic not just for my teen years (which, while not terrible were not all that great either) but for any earlier times because the good times are fun to remember and the bad times help me remember that I've gone through rough patches before.  So while I like to listen to some of the music from earlier times (and re-read books, and re-watch movies with Sweetie) during times like this, I don't want to make the music a permanent part of my life now -- if only because it can serve as a relief valve now and in the future, by remaining linked to earlier times rather than soaking into tough times.

5. Men Without Hats This one sort of isn't quite the same as the others because really I don't care about the group at all, and know almost nothing about them, other than they made The Safety Dance which of course I loved because: the 80s, and also and more importantly I know about them that they made the album Pop Goes The World! which is one of the greatest albums ever made, hands down, an album so great as to make me listen to it enough that now, almost three decades after it came out, and a good 20 years since I owned the album (I have it on a cassette tape somewhere in the box in my garage), I can still remember nearly all the lyrics to all the songs in order.  And this is me! I'm the guy who can't remember if he ate breakfast this morning. (I checked: I did.)

So really I didn't care about the group and I still like the song, and it doesn't fit in with the title of this post at all but who cares? The rules is there ain't no rules. *snarls, gets into car ready to race for pinks*.

I first heard the song Pop Goes The World sitting in a hotel room in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1987.  My friend Fred, from high school, had enlisted in the Army right after graduation, and had gone into basic training.  The weekend we went to visit him was his first break from basic, so me and two other friends (Bob and Flan, short for Flanagan, his last name) got into Bob's Camaro-- Bob owned a Camaro! -- and drove to Kentucky to visit him.  I don't remember much about that weekend other than how tired I was.  At the end of the trip, it was my turn to drive and we were going through Illinois in the middle of the night and I began to hallucinate, as I'd been awake for about 48 hours.  I thought there was a giant rock in the road and swerved to avoid it, steering us onto the shoulder before coming to my senses.  I woke up Bob and had him drive while I slept in the car the rest of the way.

But I do remember being in the hotel room and eating pizza and watching TV; I don't remember if we could drink in Kentucky or why we hadn't gone out on the town (or maybe we did and I've forgotten?). We were watching MTV and the song Pop Goes The World came on and the next day, after I was back home and rested, I went out and bought it. It's probably my second favorite album of all time. The only reason I haven't gone to buy/download it now is I can listen to it for free anytime I want online.

I know you probably won't listen to it but here's the whole album anyway:



You should listen to it, though. It's awesome.

Friday Five: Five Superheroes I Loved (Who I Don't Think Were Very Popular)

Ant Man opens today and I'm sort of confused because I can't tell if (a) the movie is good and everyone thinks it's good (b) the movie is bad but everyone thinks it's good (c) the movie is good but everyone thinks it's bad, or (d) whether I should care at all.  In any event, since we rarely get to the theaters anymore, I'll have to wait until it comes on Netflix and I fall asleep watching it on Xmas Eve, which is how I experience pretty much 99% of the big, non-Avenger, movies nowadays.

I am disappointed that Marvel didn't steal my tagline that I once proposed if they ever  made a movie about The Atom.  I have a whole idea for a movie ad for someone like The Atom, or Ant Man, in which they show you, say, Iron Man, then Thor, then The Hulk, and finally Ant Man, while a voice over says This summer, small is the new big.  THAT WOULD BE AWESOME. And even though Orange Is The New Black and its misplaced sympathy for the author who TOTALLY DIDN'T WANT TO BE INVOLVED IN DRUG-DEALING GUYS -- let's not waste any time rewarding or feeling sorry for poor little rich girls who got involved with bad boys and paid a very minor price for their thrill-seeking and then were 1000% enriched by it.

Let me go off on tangent here.  Piper Kerman is a drug dealer, okay? That's who everybody is making rich/lionizing with this series.  A DRUG DEALER. She was a spoiled rich girl who grew up to have a relationship with a heroin dealer and not just have a relationship: Piper Kerman HELPED DEAL THAT HEROIN and laundered money to make it more possible for more people to deal heroin.

HEROIN.

And since then, Piper Kerman has become some kind of poster child for society, getting awards and being made rich by the sensationalizing of her own downplay-my-wrongdoing-and-shrug-it-off fake memoir.  (Fake memoirs of rich women are all the rage these days, and making up stuff or minimizing the poor behavior of rich women can make you a rich liar yourself, right Wednesday Martin?)

Piper Kerman writes it all off as "I fell in with a bad, hard-partying crowd," and everyone keeps making her rich(er!).  When she was indicted her rich family had an emergency meeting to decide how much of its wealth to devote to defending her. She plead guilty but was allowed to remain free for five years because the federal government wanted her to testify in street clothes, not prison uniforms, at the trial of her drug-lord kingpin boss.  In the end, she got 15 months in prison for her role in the scheme; the bust that led to her arrest involved someone bringing 14 pounds of heroin into the US.  That's about $6,000,000 worth of heroin, on one trip.  I wasn't able to find out how much Piper Kerman got paid for glamorizing and minimizing her major role in a drug ring, apparently because rich white drug dealers are better at hiding personal information about themselves from Google.

"Drug Dealing
Is the New Debutante Ball"

Having made myself good and mad, let's try to blow off some steam with some superheroes that I loved.  As I started out before getting distracted by a drug-dealing rich skank, Ant Man is either a good or bad movie that everyone has weird opinions about. What I was surprised about at first was that Ant Man was being made, at all.  In this brand-conscious era, it's increasingly risky to throw billions of dollars at something people don't know about already.  That's why there'll be another Hunger Games movie even though the (awful, I assume) book series was only three books and there's already four movies. That's why we keep getting Spider-Man and Superman and Batman and The Avengers as superhero movies, with only the rare Guardians Of The Galaxy thrown in for variety.

It's even harder to justify spending billions on a movie if the movie is likely to suck; as I was saying to Sweetie last night, and as I say so often, most things suck.  If you look at, say, a library with 10,000 books in it, consider that those books represent the cream of the crop: they are the books that survived all the levels of publishing scrutiny/gatekeeping to actually get put out.  And how many of them are good? Not all of them.  About 10%, I'd say.  The same goes with movies, photographs, restaurants, etc: about 1 in 10 things is good and worth keeping around, by my estimate.

So if I was asked to invest MY billions into a movie, I'd likely not want to take a risk on Ant Man, who is probably beloved by, like, three people. I'd want to try to make Superman or something, where 99% of the people wouldn't say Huh? when the name was mentioned.

So it's good that they're making Ant Man because maybe it means people are entering a phase where we can experiment a bit more and not everything has to cost/make a billion dollars.

There's my second diatribe of the day.  Now for superheroes I liked that I don't think were very popular. In no particular order!

1. Blue Devil. Blue Devil was, according to my memories, a stuntman who got magically trapped in his blue-devil suit and had some powers based on that suit; he had a weird mixture of scifi and demons in the comics back when I read them, and the stories themselves usually had a humorous slant to them.  The one I remember most was one where there were aliens named "Leni" and "Jorj" (get it? Nothing funnier than riffing on one of the saddest stories ever written... I didn't realize that when I first read the comic, though. I thought they were making fun of Bugs Bunny's frequent references to Lenny and George.  I wouldn't fully understand the reference until I actually read Of Mice And Men and now I don't find them funny anymore. I find them sad.)

Apparently, that humor went away after a while -- as it seems to have done with every comic, judging by the few I read in the last 5 years or so.  Green Lantern fighting zombies, crises everywhere, demons: everyone is dark and disturbed now. Here's a sample of where the comic adventures of Blue Devil led, from Wikipedia:

He spends the "missing year" trapped in Riverrock, Wyoming along with the rest of Shadowpact. It is a small city hidden by a blood shield by an assembly of evil magical beings, called the Pentacle. There he meets, or rather meets again, Jack of Fire, a red, muscular demon. The entity is hiding a disfigured, bony face under a black bandanna, claiming to have been turned into a demon by the actions of Daniel. He further explains that the very same moment the demonic Neron granted fame and powers to Cassidy as the Blue Devil, the dead parents and siblings of Patrick were dragged from Heaven to Hell.

 Fun!

2. Ambush Bug: The Ambush Bug was another funny comic, and wasn't always a hero.  He started out as a comic foil/bad guy I think for Superman, before somehow heading into the future to fight with the Legion of Superheroes? That's what I remember, anyway.  He also had his own miniseries in which he battled a sock who was a sort of parody of Dr. Doom.

Hey, I didn't say I had good taste.  Ambush Bug had all sorts of possibilities that sort of got swamped in silliness.  He appeared to understand that he was in a comic book, for one thing, and was supposed to be completely out of touch with reality.  That sometimes made for funny and yet interesting adventures, but more often towards the end was just overwhelmed by 'lunacy' that seemed to try too hard.

3. The Legion of Substitute Heroes: I read the Legion of Superheroes comics regularly, and sometimes they had guest-stars or appearances from the Legion of Substitute Heroes, a group of substandard heroes with odd powers, like Stone Boy, who could turn himself into a statue.  The group was led by Polar Boy, who could make things cold, and who eventually made it into the real Legion.

While I liked funny comics more than the dark ones, as a kid, looking back again I think maybe the boat was missed here.  One thing that a lot of very funny stories have is a sort of twist on something sad that lends the comic antics some zing, like salting caramel only in a literary sense.  Catch 22 is hilarious whenever it's not heartbreaking.  The Hitchhiker and Dirk Gently books involved murders and the destruction of entire planets, and yet were funny while dealing with serious themes of a sort.

Comics seem to go only in two lanes: Supersilly, or superdark.  I'm sure there's a marketing reason for that, but it led to my disinterest in things like the Substitute Heroes when they just went too silly.  There's probably a great story about people who want to be superheroes but aren't quite good enough to do so, waiting to be told.

4. 'Mazing Man: 'Mazing Man wasn't really a superhero at all; the book was about a midget-type guy who found a helmet with a letter M on it and decided to become a superhero; he mostly helped kids around the neighborhood and hanging out with his friend Denton (a 'dog-faced' apparently human guy who wrote a comic book.)

The stories were interesting and sort of nostalgically sweet ones that I remember and like to go back and re-read; the comic was canceled after just 12 issues.  I'd say it deserved more, but sometimes things have to end to keep them from going bad.  How much better would our memories of Arrested Development have been without the muddled fourth season?  Or Seinfeld without that terrible last episode?  Like George Costanza, people should learn to leave on a high note.

5. Firestorm.  Finally, a "SERIOUS" superhero.  I liked Firestorm because of how cool his powers were, and because of how weird a superhero he was.  Firestorm was the melding of an athlete's body and mind with the mind of a college professor, through some kind of nuclear accident.  When the two joined to become "Firestorm" they could do something like reconstruct things on an atomic level to change one thing into something else, like a nuclear reactor into 10,000 hamburgers or something.

I'm not really clear on how his power worked, actually: I only learned about Firestorm near the end of my heavy comic-reading days, and so only read a couple issues in which he was a hero.  That's how I remember it, anyway.  (I checked on Wikipedia and learned that he couldn't actually affect organic matter before he became an "elemental" and the storyline got much darker.  Also, there's a new Firestorm now but I don't know anything about that.