Thursday, November 30, 2006

...you know who you remind me of?

I was walking into a local watering hole, when I saw coming up the other way on the street what looked to be a young woman I used to work with and occasionally chat with but hadn't seen in about a year.

I smiled and waved, and she got the same look on her face everyone on Earth gets when someone's being very friendly and you have no clue who they are.

"Jackie, it's me, Bradley! How's it going"

"Oh! I'm not Jackie... I'm her identical twin sister, Cristy."

My next statement was one of those things that... even AS the words floated past the teeth and the lips and out into general consumption, I wanted to smack myself and go find a hole to crawl into...


"Oh, really? You look just like her!" Doh!


Yeah, umm, that's kinda the idea behind the whole "identical twin" thing, ya see... to her credit she did not say "Ya dumb prick", though she certainly would have been entitled to.

What I meant was that not only was this girl her twin, she had the same exact build, same haircut and length, same wardrobe, many of the same mannerisms, etc... I did not mean "derrr you look like your twin, yuh-hup."

Monday, November 27, 2006

Penalty on...errr... sumthin' and either an 8 or a 3

Something you'll eventually see if you watch enough football... (though I have friends who would argue that there's no such thing as enough football)...

A referee sternly comes out and calls a penalty on number 67 for holding.

The commentator shuffles his notes for a second, then says something like "Well, there IS no 67 on the Cardinals, he probably meant 57." Or "I doubt that call was on Johnson, since he's on the sideline and in dress pants today."

Simple mistake, they're only human, blah blah blah, right?

Here's the question ---

We're supposed to trust these guys to determine whether a player at the bottom of 9 other players crossed an imaginary plane of existence with a ball and if he had control before hitting the ground but not after.... when they can't read a 2 1/2 foot tall number off the back of a guy standing in front of them?

Saturday, November 25, 2006

go west, young woman

Most of you who know me may already have heard this story, but it warrants repeating. And if you don't know me, honestly what the hell are you doing here anyway?

This is possibly the only post I'll do in "Gator orange", because it's in honor of a girl that at one time (and, at last report) lived in Gainesville, FL. I dubbed her Sleeping Beauty, for reasons that made sense at the time but aren't really worth the time to explain.

Anyway, freshman year at Florida State, so October 1997. One of my friends (and someone I had a borderline obsessive crush on) decided she was going to drive down from Tallahassee to Orlando for Halloween Horror Nights. For some reason that has been lost to history, I couldn't go along, but I chatted with her pretty soon after her return.

Seems this gal had headed off in the wrong direction. Just a skosh. On her way from Tallahassee to Orlando, she ended up in ALABAMA.



Now, I should provide a visual aid for those of you not intimately familiar with the layout of the Viagra-wantin' dangler that is FL. Suffice it to say, for someone from Gainesville, heading from Tallahassee to Orlando (southeast) and ending up in Alabama (due west) is a neat trick.



courtesy of yahoo maps http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-577612-map_of_florida-i

What makes this story great though, I think, is that it wasn't even that she saw the giant sign that said "Welcome to Alabama" and said 'oh crap I'd better turn around!'... uhh no, this collegian got pulled over by an Alabama State Trooper... she was SPEEDING in the wrong direction!

Offhand I'm guessing that guy had a good story to tell when he got back to the station. Knowing her she probably turned on the waterworks and that got her out of any ticket.

Asbestos I can figure, she meant to get on I-10 East and instead got on I-10 West... and stayed on it for about 200 miles... passed signs for Destin, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Pensacola, over several rivers... into another time zone... passed the Welcome to Alabama sign... my first question to her was "Uhhh, hon... didn't you notice the SUN was on the wrong side?" No, apparently it had already gotten dark while she was driving.

There was something about this girl though... there were things I wanted to do with her, and most of them did NOT involve chatting over capuccino about contrasting the systemic perpetuations the electoral college system makes necessary to maintain a sense of political efficacy permeated on a nationwide scale for sufficient adoption and participation, while still including inherent safeguards to both placate smaller regions and protect against the same mass endorsements the system itself requires. No, when it came to this particular filly, my search was more of Van Halen's 9th album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

And yet, while the tale of going just a weeeeee bit off course will forever live on in infamy (and now for what I believe to tbe the first time is committed to "print")... at the same time, I still check MySpace and Google every few months to see if she's on the grid anywhere. And I haven't seen hide nor hair (both of which were quite nice) in, what, 7 years now.

So, as Obi Wan said to Han, "Who's the more foolish, the fool --- or the fool who follows her?"


Thursday, November 23, 2006

first step is admitting you have a problem....

I was watching the other day a clip of Richard Pryor being interviewed by Barbara Walters. This was not a particularly recent conversation, as you might imagine. Richard Pryor was talking about his crack habit --- saying he would try and convince himself to put the crackpipe down... he'd tell himself that he'd just have to make it five minutes... he couldn't put it down for ONE minute. He felt incapable of breaking free.


On a completely unrelated and in no way connected report, the most amount of time I've spent not in front of a computer screen since 8 am this morning was probably the 20 minutes it took me to drive to work --- and if there was a way to play PC games in the car while driving, I'd probably do it.

Hell, I already do cellphone games at some stoplights (yeah, you're welcome.)

Now it's after midnight and I'm sitting with a laptop, having just shut down my desktop that I've been using so much the screen is starting to flicker.

Twitch.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

"Who are three people who have never been in my kitchen?"

That was Cliff Clavin's response on Final Jeopardy. While technically true, it wasn't the common bond snooty Alex the Canuck was was looking for.

If pressed to come up with what all these posts will have in common, the only answer I can think of would be they're all stuff that I wanted to put on my blog. Honestly that's probably the only common thread I can come up with at present.

I've always toyed in the back of my mind with having one of these... actually up until a couple of years ago I mainly wanted a radio show, and realized I didn't have enough to actually say... I thought that was true for regular blogging too... but now, with any luck, I'll be able to regurgitate enough random rants about life, the universe, and everything (42) to keep this at least a little amusing.

I realized too late I should have started this when I began my trip to DC... more on that over the days, including the story of the day someone broke into my place and cleaned it up, and what I have in common with Stradivarius (who has never been in my kitchen).

I definitely want responses... or at least signs of life.

If you're looking for Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Whatever DVD Easter Eggs, wander the hell off somewhere else. If you're looking for freaky Mexican donkey porn... ummm... we can chat later.

BTW, as far as Cheers goes, the "answer" was Archibald Leach, Bernard Schwartz, and Lucille LeSueur. The correct response is "What were the real names of Cary Grant, Tony Curtis and Joan Crawford?" It's probably a bad sign that I might have known the correct response and deliberately given Cliff's anyway.
I started a blog,
which started the whole world laughing
oh if I'd only see
that the joke was on me