Sporadic

really quick hits:

Have you ever had a song that you didn’t know what it meant and then suddenly you knew. I thought a bunch of them on the way home tonight on BART. Here’s the starter list:

Delta Dawn: Delta Dawn is actually dead

Angel (of the morning): Juice Newton is a huge slut

I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus: (2 versions) Mommy is a huge slut

I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus: (2 versions) Oh crap! Santa is Daddy!

Excuse me while I kiss the sky: Jimmy hendrex is into some weird stuff

Excuse me while I kiss this guy: <Ibid>

The stroke: Billy Squire is *really* into swimming

On my way into work today I was wearing the same jeans I was wearing a few days ago. It’s not that I’m a dirty person but anyone who really understands jeans knows that most pairs have about 4 or 5 wearings in them before you need to wash them.* So reach into the pocket and find some change from a previous wearing. There’s two quarters and 4 pennys. Now quarters you have to keep- that’s 50 cents, you’re almost to a pack of gum. But the pennys, you may dispense with.

Years ago, when I was living on Valencia Street with Devyn our next door neighbors were a bunch of 20 somethings from Indiana. Great guys. We’d play basketball, there would be cross apartment parties, Devyn developed and then rejected crushes on most of them, it was a generally genial and social environment. So one day I’m walking back from who knows where with Chris and James and suddenly Chris throws a penny up and then kicks it “punt style” into the street.

“What Are you doing!?” says I, alarmed, because my depression era grandparents have hammered home the fact that you keep and roll all your change. They’re probably spinning in their mauselum at the thought of this.

“Penny kicking” says Chris, “I am going to show you a game that will provide you years of enjoyment.”

He was probably kidding, but he was right, once I got past my initial fear of throwing away money, I realized that this was big fun. Competitions can be held. Cars can be targeted. Squirrels can be marauded. All you do is drop kick you penny. It can be played anywhere. Although I do recommend a “standard shoe” like a doc martin or the like, Tennis shoes can be difficult because the penny can stick in the webbing.

Don’t get me wrong, I still keep and roll change, but only if I forget to kick the pennys first**.

However, over the years since then I have wholeheartedly enjoyed booting a penny across a parking lot.

MO Update:

Thanks to everyone who donated. Our team made $6,793.48, which Microsoft will double! I alone, thanks to many of you made $545! Awesome! Thank you!

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*unless you spent the day standing a small crap pond in your garage, but that’s another story.

**It can happen.

So I had this weird dream a couple nights ago and I wanted to make sure I could recount it. I’m not sure if it’s funny or if it’s signs of my larger sociopathic tendencies and fear of the republican party. I woke from the dream, not wanting to forget it, I scrawled out these notes on a beside pad:

Adverb

Obama

Subsidy

republican

pronoun

deregulate

From that, I have total recall of the dream, which goes…a little… like this (1..2..1..2..3..4 Hit it!):

To speak, everyone needed to buy each word as they said it. So if you wanted to say “Hi honey, how are the kids? Where’s tea?” you’d have to buy all those words from the various words markets. Just like there’s a meat market and a grocery, there were noun markets and verb markets, etc. So I was the guy who sells adverbs*. I was plying my trade as someone who sells adverbs would, when this world word recession hits and the adverb market tanks. Everyone in the word market is struck equally, except the guys who sell pronouns.

The pronoun industry, during the previous administration had be completely deregulated by the republican party who ran on the slogan “If you can’t say it with pronouns, then you’re probably gay”.  So suddenly it’s so expensive to buy words that aren’t pronouns that people are only using pronouns and then acting out the rest of the sentence. For some unknown reason that I can’t explain anymore than I can explain the rest of the premise the only verb anyone wants to use is “to hump” which is symbolized by a humping motion. So a collection of sample sentences might be:

SHE (points at a woman) (humping motion) IT (points at a couch). At which point the woman would then be required by the republican deregulation laws to hump the couch.

THEY (point to a group of dogs) (humping motion) HIM (points at a guy). The dogs hump the guy

This happened in the dream for longer than I feel comfortable telling you.

So the Obama administration, hoping to bolster the other word industries** subsidized the other words so that we can bring down prices and allow for “more effective communication”. This is roundly dismissed as word socialism by the right wing pundits, however, since they are right wing pundits they refuse to use the subsidized words so they can only use pronouns and the humping motion. They have to resort to images to indicate their nouns which eliminates all radio talk shows. Fox news eliminates the crawl because they can’t use the words “humping motion” and substitutes a constantly changing roll of small pictures of cars and girls in bikinis. However, above for the main content all of the TV pundits take their turn doing the same sentence over and over again which goes like this:

HE (points to crudely drawn crayon picture of Obama) (humping motion***) IT (points to American Flag)

This content runs 24 x 7.

Meanwhile, the rest of the nation, with it subsidized word industry quietly goes about its business. Eventually the word industry recovers and the democratically controlled congress, using the payback and interest of the word subsidy, repeals the pronoun deregulation. French Prime Minister Sarkozy send a giant gilded “O” to America in thanks for allowing the entire world to begin using full sentences again. It’s placed in Long Beach Harbor.

At the same time a team of radical right wing lumberjacks carve a giant “W” visible from space into the Canadian north woods.

At this point I start laughing, for real, not in the dream and wake myself up.

There you have it. Do with that what you will.****

—

*From Schoolhouse rock

** And cut down on chafing

*** BTW, if you’ve never had a dream where Glen Beck repeatedly does a humping motion I *highly* recommend it, even now, remembering it, I’m chuckling to myself

**** I’m pretty sure I can commit any crime at this point and then use this dream to prove out my insanity plea.

I haven’t posted in a while and so I thought I’d do one of those clearing house posts that I used to do when this was an email. There’s a lot of small stuff to get to, but no connected topic.

To start: I’m spending the month of November growing a mustache to raise money for men’s health. It’s part of a big push to raise money for prostate and testicular cancers under the name “Mo-vember”. It’s a really silly way to raise money for a really not silly topic. You can donate/ watch my progress here:

Mustache Face

And speaking of mustaches, in the past year or so every time I walk to Bart there’s a guy who lives in the second floor apartment on 24th street facing the Bart station, who has a bunch of lovely painted portraits of local retired newscaster Dennis Richmond. I have no idea why. I have no understanding if it’s ironic or a tribute. The commitment, however, is real. Every morning, this guy has trotted out one or more portraits of Dennis Richmond and put them on his balcony. It’s one of the many reasons why San Francisco is a wonderful place, people are willing to do insane stuff and no one even blinks. Like put up giant pictures of people in thier windows.

For years, I used to play this game which I called “Plane Nun” which draws its name from a story I think I remember my uncle telling when I was a kid. The story goes like this:

He would travel frequently and got bored telling the same stories from flight to flight and so he decided to just make something up. He starts to tell some guy he’s sitting next to he’s a brain surgeon* but soon realizes that he’s sitting next to an actual brain surgeon so he confesses the ruse. The brain surgeon loves the game and so they start fresh with new personalities and play the whole flight.

The brain surgeon was a minor league short stop and my uncle was a nun. Purportedly, when they exited the plane the flight attendant says to my uncle “Take care, sister”

I have played this game on and off for a while. My favorite instance was when I told a pipe-fitter from Akron that I was the  guitar player from 90’s band “Filter” .  At the end of the flight he asked me for my autograph for his daughter. My ruse was believable enough for several reasons, Filter was from Cleveland, so it makes sense that I would be flying to Pittsburgh especially around the holidays, Filter wasn’t famous enough to be recognized and he was a 50 something pipe-fitter. My guess is that since Filter fell off the earth right after that and his daughter was 14 that the autograph was probably a prized possession. I was even enough of a band dork to know the right name to sign (Richard Patrick) I mean, how would she check that? So she had a theoretical autograph from a semi-famous guy and Filter probably got an  album sale that they wouldn’t have.

Anyway, so I have just figured out that the game was played on me.

Here’s the ruse:

I’m on a chairlift at Homewood last season and I’m riding with an older guy who has a sort of Aussie accent. We do the standard “what do you do” conversation and he tells me he’s a voice actor. I say “Wow, that’s neat! Would I have heard you?”

He spins a yarn about how he’s the Gieco Gecko. Tells me a whole story about how they fly him down to L.A. once or twice a month to record new spots. He lives in Tahoe year round on the retainer they pay him. It’s believable and just like the guitar player for Filter, it’s just unfamous enough that why would I check on that?

I have been telling folks for the past year about how I met the Gecko and blah blah blah.

Yesterday I’m trying to find out whether I can get the series “Red Dwarf”** from Greencine and I’m following around some links on the web and I find a link to “Jake Wood, British Soap Actor and Voice of the Gieco Gecko”. So I check into his info on Wikipedia and IMDB. First of all, the unassuming middle aged aussie fellow is not a mid-thirties British soap actor and second of all he doesn’t live in London with his wife and two children.

I guess that’s fair. I mean, I’ve been duping people for years, why wouldn’t somebody have duped me? It actually makes me happy that there’s someone else out there playing the game. Sort of gives the universe more certainty.

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* Uncle Jay worked for Westinghouse, I think he did some kinda project management before he retired a few years ago, so…not a brain surgeon.

**Late 80’s British sci-fi sit com in the vein of Doctor Who***

***Yes I know, I’m a big dork. Shut up. Go ask Jody about which Star Wars is the worst and why or ask Ivy why light sabers are certain colors for certain characters.

I know it’s been ages. I forgot my password and then I forgot that I forgot my password and then I forgot to forget that there was something to remember. Basically I slacked out for about 3 months.

However, I got an email from our old friend Sarah and she asked what had become of the bucket list and I realized that I had better get to it.

Fortunately, there’s something that I’ve been wondering about and so it lends itself to a instant topic.

In most major metropolitan areas* there are these folks who have what’s called a fixed gear bicycle or “fixie”. These are bikes that have, as you might imagine, only one gear that they are in all the time. Not unlike that huffy you had when you were 7. The difference, dear reader, between these bikes and your huffy is of course that the people that ride these are not 7… oh and most times these bikes don’t have brakes.

The other day I was explaining to Jen what a fixie was and I tried to explain why there weren’t brakes on the bikes and I couldn’t. According to some of the more popular fixie websites, it has something to do with being really connected to the road, bro.

Fixie culture seems to indicate that if you want to be …um… “super connected to the road” you must also be the kind of hipster that claims “I don’t even care what you think man, I’m just gonna be myself”**

As far as I can tell, fixies are like skateboards with more moving parts. You are required to outfit your fixie in all sorts of expensive ways like turning over and then sawing off the handle bars *** or sticking one of those idiotic center bar pads on it or making your wheels not match, or painting it some kind of spacey lime green or sticking one of those goofy mag wheels on it**** 

According to The fixed gear gallery: “In general, these bikes tend be more light weight and simple, requiring less maintenance than other bicycles. The lighter weight and continuous feedback through the transmission can translate to increased performance in some conditions, such as a better sense of control on slippery surface.” What they don’t tell you is that since you’re clearly too cool for brakes, it’ll also make you a menace if some objects gets in your way quickly.*****

I’m sure that were any of the fixie enthusiasts to actually come to my website (they won’t), they might call me a “hater”******. I’m okay with that. Anyone that tells me they love the simplicity of something and then spends hours and hours fixing something up needs to hear about their double standard. It’s like my friend in high school who told us her didn’t care about what people thought and then spent like 6 months perfectly adjusting the # of safety pins in his very carefully etched leather jacket with “The Exploited” painted on it. I even remember the day he told us it was finally just right.

I guess I should be glad they’re not driving cars….

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*and especially here in SF

**And then working very, very, very hard to look like he doesn’t care, while still wearing all the right deisel fashons and bike messanger gear.

***Known as the “flop and chop”

**** but only on one of the wheels  (see rule 3)

*****Like a dog or a child or a swiftly moving 2 x 4 being swung at you from a conscientious resident of the sidewalk you insist on riding on (hey buddy, isn’t that a bike lane over there? Yes, right over there? Oh, you didn’t realize that you could use the bike lane for your ….uh…bike?)

******that’s youth speak for someone who doesn’t like the thing that you like used in a sentence like this “why do you haters got to hate on my super cool neon bike with no brakes”

When my mom moved out of the house in Pittsburgh there were a lot of odds and ends that ended up in boxes that are now in my Basement/ Garage/ Rock and or Roll train wreck. One of those items was a daily diary that my grandfather kept. It’s not like a diary in the aspect that he listed his hopes and dreams or boys he had crushes on. It was more of an appointment book with notes. There are about 4 lines per day and some days there’s an entry and some days he skips it altogether.  At the beginning of the year this year I dug in and found the notebook from 1949*.

Every day when I start work I open up the notebook and check on that day, 60 years ago. Here’s a selection:

Today, Aug 3, (Wednesday) 1949: “G. Witherspoon-Thomas, Caltex Producing Dept. Lunch with Ken Gold and Jack Detwhiler + Caltex Engrs. A. Rutan & wife”

As far as I can tell**, Caltex was the “California Texas Oil Company” formed in 1936, as a joint venture between The Texas Company (later Texaco) and The Standard Oil Company of California (later Chevron) which according to wikipedia was formed to market the oil that had recently been discovered in Saudi Arabia.

Grandpa was working for Westinghouse at the time, so for sport I search for a variety of combinations of “caltex”, “westinghouse” and “1949”

I find the following:

• Repeated mention of Caltex v. USA, a semi-historical case researched at length by folks such as Harry Truman, which was designed to break some of the monopolies of the day.
• In 1949 partners Caltex, Westinghouse and Bechtel began work on the Atomic Energy Commission’s Van de Graaff nuclear accelerator at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
• Emperor Yumiyoro of Japan claims in the late 40’s that Japan was not defeated by General Eisenhower, but in fact by General Electric, sighting many deals with companies such as Caltex and Westinghouse “robbing the Japanese people by charging unsuitable royalties”

Interestingly, this is the area where the most information is. Apparently both Westinghouse and Caltex had extensive interests in post war Japan. Again and again the two names are associated with business deals that are designed to profit from the depressed post-war Japanese economy. 

Also interestingly, my Grandfather did extensive business with Japan in those days. I mean, I wasn’t there or anything, but there’s a bunch of Japanese stuff that we got from Grandpa and a whole stack of pictures of him and Japanese businessmen.

Even more interesting, in a report declassified in the 80’s, Westinghouse and specifically the division that my grandfather worked for, were the main team that built the fuses for the first atomic bombs.

It’s wonderful. It’s one tiny little page of a appointment diary, and yet… in my imagination, it uncovers a sinister conspiracy of a major US company with middle eastern holdings to at once end a  world war and then profit massively from it.***

However, I might be making all this up and maybe I just can’t read his handwriting.

—

*He starts in 1946 and runs solidly into the 80’s

**and this is just me and the internet who are talking, a with a healthy amount of props to Wikipedia

*** If this is the case…where’s my post war trust-fund and huge Swiss bank account?

This one is not funny.

However, there will be funny things in here.

Billy passed away last Tuesday after a 5 year battle with Cancer.  Just typing that make me tear up.

I traveled to Jersey this past week for the services and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I took the red-eye out of SF on Wednesday night and proceeded to spend like $40 between the airport and the plane on booze. It worked and I slept most of the way. I landed and Betsy was nice enough to loan me her pull-out for the next few days.

That evening was the visitation at a funeral home over in North Bergan, not that far from where Billy grew up. I never made it in to the room for the viewing- I know what Billy looks like and that’s the memory I want to keep, him laughing at some stupid thingI said, him makingfun of Troy, him sitting out on the deck in North Carolina with a beer. One thing that was for sure,  the turn out was as much a tribute to Billy as it was to his choice in friends. The room was the largest that the home had, and it was filled to over flowing. There were relatives, friends from scouts , from grade school, from high school, from college and beyond.

For the most part, from my encampment just outside of the door to the room, I talked to a wide circle of folks and we shared funny stories and the things that brought us to him.

Billy’s Dad told a story about how as a camp counselor, Billy forbade his campers from even touching his jeep. This didn’t stop them. They threw the jeep in neutraland wheeled it down to the lake, and then covered it witha tarp*. Billy came back from whatever he was doing, realizes his jeep is gone and seeks out the troublemakers, who deny involvement. Then he mounts a search party that finally uncovers the jeep almost a mile away**. Then he goes back to these “troublemakers” and orders them to push it back and then of course respond with the sit com ultimate “But you told us not to touch it”.

For my part, I told the story about the time that Billy was the most angry with me, which was when he came out for my 30th birthday party which was at a club across town. We of course get really loaded and I end up being poured into a car to go back to the afterparty at my house. Billy is left at the party. Not on purpose, as I mentioned I was drunk. These were the days before cell phones, so he has to find people who he thinks know me and then convince them to give hima  ride back to my house. He gets there and I’m in the kitchen talking to some chick and he comes up and says “Excuse me sweetheart” and then hits me in the forehead. The to me he says “Where do I live?” and I say “Uh, Jersey?” and he says “Yes, Jersey, so how do I know where you live?” and hits me in the forehead again before walking off to the fridge and grabbing a beer. The anger bled away and it became a funny story to add to the lexicon.

The next day was the funeral which was a big Roman Catholic deal at a church around the corner from his dad’s house. I was asked to be a pall bearer and it gave me a vantage point both personally and  philosophically. As I entered the church, everyone was already seated and I got a chance to see the looks for people as I came in. They felt the same thing I was feeling “why in the world am I carrying my friend, who was my age? What god thinks this is just? How is this even happening?”  Then the bag pipes started. Jesus, bagpipes? Was this a scene from a horrible Mark Walberg movie about crooked cops and revenge? No, sadly, it wasn’t.

I spent the whole service trying to concentrate on things that would draw my attention away from the gravity of the matter at hand. Mostly because I knew that once I fell apart there would be no putting me back together. I rewrote every hymn we sang in my head to be a Bob Marley song. I read every single station of the cross (boy, you Roman Catholics are creepy). I tried to hear funny things that the eastern Europeanpriest’s accent caused***. I wondered about the tile image on the back wall of the church****. All the while the priest at the front with the beard intoned things about how we can never know god’s way, and that these things are part of his greater plan. Then after he finished his excuses, the bagpipes start again and the slow procession out of the church. It was the worst. Here was the end of something, the slow walk off and instead of a slow pull back shot from the crane and then the credit roll, our lives were going to continue. Without Billy.

Then we proceeded to the cemetery. On the way I saw what happens when you are an EMT and your sister is a cop. There was definitelysome pull with the police and ambulance world. A Ambulance, lights on full, leads us out… trailing the procession of 40+ cars were at least 4 motorcycle cops and two regular squad cars. I was in the end of the procession so I got to see the results of all that flash, people were out on their lawns, stopped on street corners, looking. “Who was this head of state? This great leader?” I know Billy was, in whatever your preferred idiom of afterlife, laughing. He screwed up traffic in two boroughsand on one major inlet to the GWB, they stopped traffic on the Palisades parkway! Screw you, people trying to get away early for the shore! 

The cemetery had a nice view, which I think is the ultimate irony: great view so we’ll stick you in the ground, we’ll see the valley, you check out all this dirt.

Slow to anger, quick to laugh, he was a guy that everybody liked. Yes, he came off as a big scary Jersey guy until you talked to him…but as soon as you talked to him you found a giant teddy bear who was a fluent in Vonnegut as he was in football. He was the renaissance man of the 20th century. No, he couldn’t play the lute, but who plays a f*&%ing lute these days?

It also made me realize how seldom we as modern day folks tell each other how important the relationships that we have are.

I spent Saturday in the park with Halle, Jillian, Betsy and Scott. We didn’t do anything. We threw a Frisbee, we drank some beers, we shot the breeze. However, it’s little moments like these that make up our lives and make them worthwhile. If there’s a lesson we can learn from this whole thing, it’s that the relationship that we have are the most important things about our lives. So take a moment and tell the people who are important to you that they are.

His family has asked that those who would like to pay tribute to him please give money to the American Cancer Society. If you want info about how to do that, feel free to drop me an email and I’ll send over the details.

Cancer sucks and we should figure out how to stop it from taking more great people from us.

—

*Camouflage!!??

** Seriously!? How do you decide to push a jeep a mile?

*** “Everyone”, as he lifted his hands up,”raise up your pants!”

**** Images: 1 Jesus, crucified, 2 penitent clergy people (1 male 1 female), 1 monk looking dude and strangely: a guy in business suit (who to my mind was clearly a time traveler from 1973)

This last weekend there was a baseball inspired roadtrip to lovely Stockton.

Stockton, for those not in the know, is a industrial central valley town just east of San Francisco. It’s a little like Bakersfield*. Stockton has to its credit a Single A baseball team called “The Ports”** which are part of the Oakland A’s minor league system. Scott, Barbara, The Joffes and Cowey and I all headed over to Stockton for a game between the Ports and the San Jose Giants.

Since this was a baseball themed roadtrip, we started our adventure at the Appleby’s in Livermore where we basked in the 5 x 6 foot ego wall for the Giant’s storied new left hander, Randy Johnson. Randy hails from Livermore***, and therefore is celebrated by the local restaurants****, in absence of actual local restaurants…Appleby’s.  On the wall in the Appleby’s were a glove which had been screwed into place, a couple articles about when he was with the Mariners (1989-1998) and a shirt from the local high school baseball team, which presumably was worn by him.  We ordered the appetizer sampler***** and some burgers, which was later roundly regretted by all.

Undaunted by rumbly guts, we proceeded to the Residence Inn in Stockton, a Joffe recommendation, which was a delight. We had a sweet suite with two bedrooms and a pull out couch for only $180. The hotel was pretty nice as hotels go and served as a great home base for our trip to the game.

When we left to come to Stockton, I think all of us expected standard central valley weather, i.e. 95 degrees with -30% humidity. What we got instead was a day at ATT&T Park junior with high 50’s low 60’s and a nasty wind in from the west. Tammy was betting any takers that the fog would make it to Stockton that night.

However, despite chilly conditions we had a lovely time. There’s a certain magic to single A ball, where the game is only marginally interesting so the stadium does something wacky in between each inning which is hosted by Ryan Seacreast wanna be “Zack”. The things I remember brought to us by “The Zack Attack”:  Asparagus race, Ports Trivia to children,  some type of Bungee event that involved a lot of falling down, Fat guys Dancing******,  small children running in a giant uniforms, strike out/ home run food or beer benefits, and of course all of this was punctuated by the magic of single A baseball. Single A: where the play you think is a lock is only a slim chance i.e. four guys converge on a ball and it drops between them, second base throwing to third on a fielder’s choice between 1st and home, and so much more.

Oh it was delight and sometime later this summer if I get my way, we’ll repeat in the heat…although Scott wants to go to Modesto.

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*If Bakersfield had a year round river (it does not). Actually Bakersfield’s lack of year round river means that for 8 months out of the year there’s a sandy stretch of ground that has bridges over it and on the bridges are posted signs which say “No swimming or diving”, as if one might dive into the sand.

**Because Stockton has a year round river (the San Joaquin) which flows into the San Francisco bay, it’s actually possible to navigate all the way from the Pacific Ocean to Sacramento via a complete marine route. Thusly, “The Port City of Stockton”, despite the fact that it basically looks like every high desert town in the central valley. 

***Livermore: smaller Bakersfield, no river.

**** So storied and celebrated is Randy, a 300+ game and multiple Cy Young award winner that when we told our server why we had come she exalted Mr. Johnson to his worthy status by saying “Who?”. To which we responded by pointing to the wall at the restaurant where she worked

*****boneless buffalo wings (?), fried cheese, some kind of spinach goo, fried cheese sticks and a bacon(?) quesadilla

****** Actually just one fat guy, the fat guy closet to us pussed out and was replaced by Alex the drunken 20 year old whose abilities were outshone by his enthusiasm and possibly drunkeness.

Sean and Anneke are getting married tomorrow (holy crap!)*

Anneke sent out a invite to the Apres-vow and she used a Q & A style that amused me, so I will use the same style to explain the following nothing:

Q. Why does the bathroom at your office smell like onion rings and popcorn?

A. Good question. I know it’s totally gross, because not on does the bathroom smell like, well, a bathroom, it also smells like food. It’s very confusing to a number of deep evolutionary concepts from within our lizard brain. So as near as I can tell, the reason is that the bathrooms share the same exhaust/ ventilation system with the food court on the first floor. I can only hope that the ventilation only goes 1 way.

Q. What’s wrong with the Penguins?

A. There are a lot of differing opinions on this one. The most commonly held belief is that Marc Andre Fluery needs to make some key saves and basically bring his game to a better place. Hopefully this will happen as the series moves back to Pittsburgh, since as we’re continually reminded, only 1 team in the past 32 games has ever gotten out of a 2 game hole.

Q. What’s the matter with Kemp?

A. He’s a bum

Q. What’s with all the sports stuff?

A. You know, I haven’t the faintest. I guess I’m just feeling particularly sporty today with Hockey finals on and such.

Q. Mayo or Miracle whip?

A. I’d say they both have their place. I like Miracle Whip on egg and tuna salad but for a turkey sandwich mayo with a touch of Dijon is the way to go.

Q. What’s the deal with the free bacon?

A. Apparently there was some kind of special Microsoft Advertising function on the 7th floor and we were not informed. By the time anyone let us know, there wasn’t anything left but a few mangy croissants and a huge pile of bacon. Not being one to look a gift pig in the mouth, I grabbed a bunch of Bacon. It’s nice, it means that my sandwich which I brought for lunch went from being a standard turkey sandwich to a club.

Q. How can  croissant be ‘mangy’?

A. You kinda have to see these croissants. They were sitting out, cut in half, since like 7:30 AM by the time I caught wind of their existence  around 11:30, by that time they had seen far better days.

Q. Why less footnotes?

Well, basically the Q & A format means that you don’t need as many simply by design of the idiom. Since all the responses are quick, there’s not really much need for an aside**

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*Which I think means that we are all adults now, thinking back on my longest running friends in the city that I still speak with which as far as I can tell is just really comedy related we have now 4 marriages, 1 real divorce, 1 fake divorce, 1 kid and 2 property ownerships. Crazy huh? I’ve been to like 50 40th birthday parties in the last year. We’re old. Nirvana and Mudhoney are now ‘Classic rock’. (Pearl Jam always was classic rock – even when it was new)

** Which is the whole reason why the foot notes came into existence. I just didn’t like including huge parenthetical statements in the center of the main narrative. I thought the public was better served by having the parenthetical stuff thrown in at the bottom and it sometimes work well for comic effect.