“You know how the two of us are escorting the grandmothers up the aisle?”

“Yea, what of it? We just practiced that. Don’t tell me you forget how to walk in a simple line already.”

“Was your lady angry? ‘Cuz the one that I was assigned to was muttering something under her breath in Spanish the entire time.”

“Maybe that’s because she doesn’t speak a lick of English. Ever think of that?”

“All I know is that if she says tonto to me one more time she’s going to regret it.”

…

“Tonto means ‘idiot’ in Spanish, Brian.”

“Oh. Yea, then that’s justification for a broken hip.”

Looking back on high school, I have a deep sense of regret, mostly for how the collective student body treated the teachers. In particular, my sophomore chemistry professor (a lovable, brilliant, seemingly senile Jesuit) was taken advantage of far too often. There were times when students would abuse his lack of eyesight by eating right on their desks because they were far enough past his depth of focus. There were instances where all thirty of us moved out desks (noisily so, I might add) to the top tier of the classroom during a lights-out movie. Our sixteen year old hijinks knew no boundaries of decency for these individuals who sacrificed to teach our bratty little selves day in and day out.

1. The alternative version of the “You Can’t Tell Us Nothin’” video - I would be surprised if there is anyone with an internet connection that hasn’t seen this yet. Hilarious music video for a (kind of) new Kanye West single directed by and staring Zach Galifianakis. Apparently they met through a mutual friend, Kanye asked if he wanted to do a video and Zach decided to shoot it that weekend on his farm. Good song too.
2. Gigantic cupcake-cake mold - I have yet to find someone that doesn’t like cupcakes. I think they hold a special place in most people’s hearts because of their connection to childhood. This cake mold allows you to make a full cake that looks, duh, like a giganto cupcake.
3. Behind the scenes of Sprint’s new “Dreams” commercial - It’s odd how something so analogue can seem so high tech. The skill and artistry of the lighting artists is fantastic. While I have yet to see it on TV, it looks like an incredibly fresh idea.
4. “Version” by Mark Ronson - This guy is getting a lot of press these days. High-profile producer/DJ/histper/wunderboy Ronson released this album recently. I was skeptical at best because of his celebrity status, but after hearing it I think it’s genius. Full of horns and solid drums, it’s a fun, funky album of remakes that churns (largely) British pop songs through a Motownish grinder. A fun summer album whether you’re in the club or knocking out designs on a sunny day.
5. Comprehensive table comparison of the presidential candidates’ positions - Even though the election is still a year away and the field is jam-packed with robot overlords candidates, this is a highly informative way to start of the research. Sure there are a few key topics that I wish were listed, but a great resource nonetheless. [via]

And while I feel as if I should write apology letters to most of them now, from my not-so-wise age of 27, I can’t help but chuckle. I hope even they themselves got a kick out a few of our pranks. Lord knows that over a decade later my friends still laugh uncontrollably when retelling the “Fr. Sweeny’s pants caught on fire and he neither knew nor cared” story. The older I get, the more fantastic my early years seem to me.

Last night The Wife™ and I headed out to a “restaurant” to meet up with a bunch of friends. I say restaurant loosely because yes, technically they serve food, but really it’s more of a year-round fish fry where everything is deep fried, fourteen times the size of a normal portion and served on aluminum trays and consumed on picnic tables. God bless Kentucky.

Anyway, it was a wonderfully cool evening, and eventually one of our side conversations turned to freshman year in college where a good handful of friends present all lived on the same floor of the same dorm. As we unspun memories long forgotten over the nine years that have passed, we tried to recall the names of everyone who lived on the sixth floor, which lead to a rather frustratingly disastrous game of recall.

Eventually we had to part ways, finishing our beers and heading home to our respective beds. And as The Wife™ and soon settled down to sleep, we began tossing back and forth descriptions of people in hopes of remembering names. If you’ve ever tried to unstick forgotten names from the dusty corners of your brain, you know how aggravating this can be. Or maybe it’s just me, because I’m obsessive, and once my brain starts churning through letter combinations in search of a first or last name, I can’t stop. For an hour and a half I laid there trying to recall everyone that I could from 1998’s sixth floor of Kuhlman Hall. It was rather nice to call up memories from when I was 18 years old, glances from faces that I never really saw again after that year permanently etched into my brain along with one or two letters from their names.

I should have called it quits long before, but it got out of hand. I suppose the game eventually ended when I screamed out “McKnight! and…and…Mulligan!! Hahah, I finally got them both!”

Mumbles from The Wife™ signaled that I had both won and lost at the same time. She had been asleep for quite some time, leaving me talking to myself in the dark.

This past Saturday The Wife™ and I had a few friends over to the house for dinner. Two of the couples that normally join us for dinner on Friday nights now have wee ones, and we’ve decided to shift our weekly get-togethers to Saturday as a matter of convenience for all.

The weather was perfect, the babies were adorable, the beer was plentiful and it was quite the enjoyable evening. As usual, I should have been wary that things were going too smoothly.

I had gotten things inside the house mostly under control, so I headed out to the back deck to check on the grill. The coals were looking hot and ready, so I flipped the chimney over and spread out the little nuggets of radiant warmth, added some wood chips and replaced the top rack. We were now primed and ready to rock. I hurried inside to grab the sheetpans of prepared burgers, deftly avoiding Jonas and his all-too inquisitive advances to get inside. As I returned to the back deck, everything was in order. Except that I had forgotten shoes. See, I hate wearing shoes. In fact it’s pretty much the one stereotype about The ‘Tucky that I’ll ascribe too. Besides, I’ve got to try and blend in with the yokles a tiny bit. We stick out too much as it is and I don’t have cinder blocks to put the cars on, so this time we were totally going the “no shoes” route.

The very unfortunate sequence of events that occurred next was much like The Bleach Incident of 2006. As I approached the grill, I lifted the lid with one hand, burgers on a tray in the other. I planted my right foot with full weight only to receive the most searing, excruciating pain shooting up my leg.

I hopped. I yelped. I danced in a circle, on one leg, with eight burgers on a tray in one hand and a hot grill lid in the other. It was a magnificent performance of Redneck Swan Lake. What’s most surprising is that I never dropped the burgers. Or at least not that anyone inside knew.

As it turns out, a rogue red-hot coal had escaped the grill and landed out of bounds on the deck. I was unaware of this, which is why I was so dismayed when I placed all of my bare-skinned weight on top of it. And in case anyone was curious, it even made a nice sizzle sound when it happened. I thought that was only in movies, but I can certifiably say now, from first hand experience, SIZZLE in fact is a real life onomatopoeia.

So now I have an awesome burn blister in the convenient location of the ball of my foot/between my toes. And really, if you’re going to get a nice burn, why not have it on a place where you can put any ointment or avoid touching it? Brilliant.

Maybe I need to try the cinder block thing instead…

Ugh. It’s that vacuous time of year, the middle of July, when time simultaneously moves at humid hyper speed and sticky slow-mo. I have no idea what I did this week. I do remember sweeping the kitchen floor with a broke-ass broom for what seemed like four hours yet I can’t remember much else. Oh! I do remember getting violently angry at the television when some show called “Rock of Love” came on. Shoot, I don’t even know how the television got tuned to VH1. Lord that’s embarrassing to admit.

1. I Listen To Bands That Don’t Even Exist Yet tshirt - I don’t care if quasi-ironic hipster tshirts are 5-years ago. This shirt rules. [via]
2. “Make the Logo Bigger!” - Anyone who has done design work for others has heard the god-awful phrase “could you just make the logo bigger?” about 10,000 times. A group of advertising guys do a metal tribute to the phenomenon. Hilarious enough that the designers here were rolling in laughter, and I’ve been walking around the house singing it (complete with falsetto) all week. And yes, I set up a hotkey so that with the push of a button it automatically starts playing whenever a client gets unruly the time is right.
3. Design By Humans - More shirt geekery. There are some truly beautiful shirts by the designers. I love this one in particular.
4. The Simpsons’ theme song by one dude with two guitars - It’s crap like this that the internet is made for. How much richer is my life after seeing this? Between this and the lolcats…
5. Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead - This is one of the books I read on vacation. The title is rather alarmist and overly dramatic. Nonetheless it is an enlightening book for someone like myself who previously had no knowledge of how today’s economy was shaped by my parents’ generation. At it’s worst, the book is statistically heavy. At it’s best, it’s incisive and thought-provoking. Not one for the beach, unless you’re weird as hell like I am.

And while I don’t know if I changed my boxers this morning, I am fully aware that our recent efforts to be more energy conscious have been entirely offset by the fact that we’re leaking natural gas. We got a letter saying so from the gas company. It basically said, “your gas meter is leaking. We left it on though. Fix it yourself.”

Guess I know what I’m doing this weekend.

While we were on vacation a few weeks ago, The Wife™ and I decided to splurge. No, we didn’t get crazy and buy a Wii or XBox 360, a large LCD television or even hit up the buffet at The Pizza Hut. No, instead we hit the milestone in every marriage when you know things have changed in your decision making: we forewent a birthday gift for me and bought Jonas a very large, unfortunately expensive bed.

It was not a rash purchase. It was something we debated for over a year. We finally took the dive because, well, we were tired of him pillaging everything in the house each night like Godzilla simply because he wouldn’t sit down. See, our first floor is all hard surfaces, which His Majesty™ doesn’t fancy, thus he doesn’t sit down. Even when we scream at him, “SIT THE HELL DOWN!” No dice. So in purchasing this bed, we were really making an investment in our future sanity. We were also crossing over into the realm of where “little monsters people and their happiness take precedence over big people.” It’s going to take awhile to get used to that.

Now that we’re home, the plan has mostly worked. The reason it was so expensive was 1) he’s the size of a fully-grown mule, so we needed the extra large bed and, 2) we had to get the Tough Chew version because there is nothing too tough for him to chew. The good thing about the Tough Chew is that with the Orvis satisfaction guarantee, you can return it and they’ll send you a new one. A new one! For more chewing! And you get two whole chances of doing this before they finally send you back all your hard-earned money with a note telling you to invest less in bedding, more in tranquillizers. Or doggie dentures.

All in all, Jonas is happy. Sure, within the first five minutes of laying on it he had already chewed a hole in the “Tough Chew” fabric. And true, he now takes running leaps onto it that send him slipping and sliding across the wood floor only to crash into the wall. So while I’m not sure if it’s more of a toy than a rest area for his big-ass frame, it seems to have worked. Most mornings before work and most evenings he spends his time rolling around on the bed, pushing his legs against the wall trying to send himself scooching across the room on it like a flying carpet. But he sits. Finally. After 14 months.

And before you go thinking that perhaps he is a different dog, a dog devoid of any abnormalities or ill-patterned behavior, stop yourself. Last night as I was in the basement, I watched him through the window run out the door, over to the fence and jump up to rip the entire top of the fencepost off with his jaws. Spastic congratulatory romping ensued with the fencepost hanging out of his jowls like a turkey leg to a Viking. Fenceposts are not made of Tough Chew, and do not come with a satisfaction guarantee.

It’s also the fourteenth fencepost that he’s eaten.

PS - I tried to get a picture of Ali Baba on his flying carpet but he has yet to sit still. More attempts forthwith.

I’m not a very good sick person. By that I don’t mean that I get whiny or needy, wanting only to sleep and lay in the fetal position in bed moaning to myself in woe. In fact, it’s rather the opposite. I’m a terrible sick person in that I refuse to accept that I’m sick at all, and feel useless if I actually have enough sense to stay home from work.

Friday I was sick. And as if being sick on a Friday isn’t sad enough, I was at home with nothing to do. Our internet connection was still busted, I was tired of reading the depressing economics books that I’ve been trying to finish since vacation and Judge Judy does nothing for me. I was awake just as early as I normally am with nothing to do except contemplate the existence of my navel. Awesome.

To make it all worse, this was the weekend that my parents were coming to visit, something that doesn’t happen all that often, and as it is that I quite enjoy my parents’ company, I was saddened that I was going to be feeling ill. Such is life, as my mother would say.

Now that it has all passed and my parents have returned home, I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to recover from an illness one does not need fancy prescription drugs or cocktails to soothe the throat. All one needs to do is the following:

1. spend an entire day blowing insulation into your attic (must be during summer)
2. fail to own gloves/be too cheap to use them when handling the insulation
3. accidentally fall feet-first through the ceiling of your garage during the very last part of the job, effectively creating another job

Who would have thunk it? As I hung from the ceiling joists in the attic, legs dangling freely through the newly created skylight err… escape hatch hole in the garage ceiling, I had some time to contemplate. Maybe sweating out a cold is the best option. A little hard work (or a lot) might help push the illness through your system, no? At the time it seemed plausible. Or maybe it’s that I was high on adrenaline from the rush of almost pancaking myself on the concrete slab below. I’m not totally sure.

Nonetheless, I’m back and operational and wholeheartedly sorry that an issue of “5 Things I Love for Friday” failed to go to press. You can call Insight Broadband if you wish and voice your complaints. Be forewarned, though, that if you’re like me then you will likely be greeted with a customer service agent so highly skilled in the arts of indifference and apathy that you’ll hang up before making any difference.

Now it’s time to look into finally installing that fireman’s pole, seeing as how I have a place to put it and all…

Returning home from vacation this past weekend, I was happy to see the latest issue of Rolling Stone in the mailbox. I was having a bit of a literary hangover, and welcomed some mindless entertainment. As I flipped through the pages the first evening in bed, I was saddened to find out that this issue was (for the third time this year) a retrospective look at the anniversary of the magazine and the late Sixties era that birthed it. I groaned, anticipating another full issue dedicated to the unparalleled brilliance of The Beatles and Bob Dylan.

What has pleasantly surprised me since beginning to read the entire issue is just how wrong I was initially. Instead of the tired, bitter political recriminations and tabloid tidbits that usually comprise the bulk of the magazine, it was filled cover-to-cover with quality writing. Insightful. Engaging. Entertaining, even. What struck me most while reading the personal accounts of the summer of 1967 was just how seemingly magical that time was, filled with an air of opportunity and desire for change that blew not just in the US, but elsewhere as well. Or perhaps it’s merely a testament to persuasive editorial. As I pour over these articles, one thought continually tries to break my concentration and rhythm: “There is no way this could happen in the world we live in today.”

Iggy Pop recounts the coexistence of racial tensions and musical brotherhood in Detroit with a fondness. He speaks about how, despite the fear of increased police presence in black neighborhoods, it was still an electrifying time to live through, unrestricted and seemingly limitless in it’s potential. The in-depth article about the making of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band reveals much the same: everyone the world over could almost palpably feel things shifting and changing, and how artists during those days felt partnership in helping to steer it onward. Sure, the mind-expanding drugs helped, but even in the non-hippie sector where The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol’s Factory existed, the stories still share the same theme.

Will 2007 ever be just as fondly delineated, waxed nostalgic or celebrated by future generations? I just cannot see how. The lack of boundaries that seem to have existed in 1967 are no where to be seen today. Bob Dylan and the members of The Band would not simply run into each other in a rural mountain town in the Catskills and spend a summer chopping wood and recording in basements. High-spirited, enthusiastic individuals simply looking to create the ultimate music festival would never get off the ground today, let alone be able to arrange the roster of 32 legendary artists (playing for free) as was done for the Monterey Pop festival. It’s no secret, the world is just not the same.

“As I pour over these articles, one thought continually tries to break my concentration and rhythm: ‘There is no way this could happen in the world we live in today.’”

The national and global climate today is just as troubled, bruised by war and injustice, political scandal and abuses of power. People young and old are seemingly just as disaffected and frustrated as their counterparts 40 years ago were. So why is there no magical air of potential blowing through the plains of this country, no growing tremors of hope to be felt? Have we run out of resolve? Where are the musical and visual artists trying to spark the fires of change?

Maybe I’m simply jaded and callous. Perhaps the world has not reached a critical mass where the potential for such a radical change is impossible. For all I know the artistic communities around the world might very well be engaged in creating ground-breaking creative works that will help promote and define these times for decades to come. But from the humble position where I sit today, at 27, I just don’t feel it.

Ten days, 24 hours of driving, some credit card fraud and a flat tire later, I’m finally back from vacation. It feels as if I’ve been gone for a month and not just a few days, so while I dust things off around the office and begrudgingly move back into routines, things will pick up again here. Photos shortly.

Sadly, the view from my office chair is not quite as relaxing as the one from my beach chair was: