The Occasional Cacographer

Greetings from an internet kiosk in Narita Airport in Tokyo, Japan.  I have four hours to kill before my connecting flight to Manila, so why not fall back into the old kiosk habit?  This one’s no Shibby but it’ll do.

The flight here from LAX took 11 hours.  It actually wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be.  Don’t get me wrong, it sucked, any length of time on a commercial airliner sucks, but it was manageable.  You kind of drift into an alternate reality when you’re on a long flight, where the universe shrinks down to the limits of your seat’s armrests and the back of the seat in front of you, and time just sort of becomes unreal.  The hands on the clock don’t really have anything to do with how time is passing. 

I watched three movies on the flight: The Wrestler, Taken, and The Changeling.  Those were good for about six hours; the other five sort of just … vanished.  I didn’t nap, so I was awake for the whole flight, but I have on idea how I spent the five non-movie hours.  Like I said, time becomes unreal. 

I know I spent at least 20 minutes of that time being completely disgusted by the guy across the row from me, who was hocking up loogies the whole time, spitting them into napkins that he had carefully pre-folded before we took off, and then collecting it all in an airsick back.  I could have done without that…

Narita Airport is frustrating me a bit.  My “international” cell phone doesn’t work here, so I had to use a pay phone to call home to check in with Beth and Zoe.  It took me about 20 minutes to figure out how to use it and then another 20 to input all the friggin’ numbers it took to call home — the network code, the credit card number, the expiration date, the billing zip code, the 3 digit security code, the country code and area code and phone number…  And of course I screwed something up each time, so I had to go through the process at least five times.  And at the end of all that, I woke them up so they could tell me they sent me a text saying they were going to bed — which I couldn’t get because my cell phone doesn’t work here.  Argh.

And now?  Now I think I’ll go wander around Japan for awhile.  At least this terminal’s part of Japan…

I’ve been at a new job for the last five weeks, and now they’re sending me to the Philippines.  I’m boarding a flight at LAX in about 12 hours, connecting through Tokyo, and then on to Manila.  I’ll be there for three weeks, in an area called Muntinlupa City.

I keep remembering my interview, where I told them I’ve done the road warrior thing and I’m done with it, that I don’t want to travel for work anymore, that about a week on the road is my limit.  And here I am, off for three weeks.  Great.

On the bright side,  stand by for the return of The View From Here and other nostalgic wonderfulness…

Apropos of nothing, I was thinking about the Elton John song Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me. That song has always bugged me because of the line “Don’t discard me just because you think I mean you harm.”

I mean, come on! Is there a better reason to discard someone? And what’s with “just because”? Way to minimize a threat to life and limb…

I say dump him in the dark!

There are records that reflect the glory and beauty of human achievement, and then there are records that never should have been set.  This is the latter — this guy holds the Guinness World record for the (I really hope you haven’t eaten yet) longest ear hair in the world:

I don’t know why I’m sharing this.  I guess my brain just couldn’t hold all the disgusting and I had to spread it around.

My wife Beth is a huge LOLcats fan; she sends me links to “funny” ones all the time. The problem is that the lols are made by your average internets user — and even worse, your average lolcats internets user. This means that they’re usually mildly amusing at best and only occasionally genuinely funny — at least to me, and I’ll admit right here to having a slightly warped sense of humor, so I’m not one to judge.

But…

To me, worse than the unfunny lols are the really unfunny recaptions for the lols. Their system is set up so that when you go and check out a lolcat that someone else has posted, you have the option of reposting it with a new caption. This leads to people trying to one-up each other and post better or funnier captions, and I believe that this increases the lameosity index by an astronomical scale.

Here’s an example:

As it stands, this is a pretty clever lol. The cat looks vaguely Groucho Marx-esque, and the caption makes a clever nod to that by using a classic Groucho quote. This is one of the better lols I’ve seen.

But then the peanut gallery goes to work recaptioning it, thus ably demonstrating their utter lack of understanding of A) just how good the original caption was, B) the comedic genius the cat resembles, and C) the context of the quote that was the original caption.  Not to mention their complete lack of wit, humor, cleverness, or originality.

These were some of the alternate captions offered for this picture:

• the oscar goes to Martin scorsece
• wen ai izent in mah rite mind, mah left mind gitz pretty full
• Put teh eyebrow pensill down slolee …
• Marxism Ur Doin it wrong
• least iz no uni-brow
• fluffie no longeh aloud to play wif magik marker

…and so on.  There were 178 of these disastrous recaptionings after the first one, in lolspeak, “wuz doin it rite.”  It hurts my head, it really does.  The average person has no business trying to be funny, especially on the internets.  They just ruin it for the rest of us.

Funny.  Ur doin it rong.

Something I like about living in Southern California:

• Picking an orange off the tree in my back yard in February and eating it right there.

I learned a valuable lesson on a film set catering truck the other day. I was looking for salsa to put on my quesedilla and the cook pointed two bowls out to me, red and green. I asked him which one was hotter, because I wanted hot. He pointed me to the green, then held up a tupperware container filled with a pink liquid and said, “If you want hot, this is hot.”

I held my plate out to him and said, “Yeah, give me some of that.”

He hesitated for a moment, looking confused about how to serve it and I said, “Just go ahead and pour some right on it.”

“Right on it?” he asked, his expression doubtful, his eyes saying Are you crazy?

“Yeah, right on it.”

So he poured it right on it.

Oh.  My.  God.  That was the hottest hot sauce I’ve ever had in my life.  It was nuclear.  It was lava.  It was so hot  I couldn’t even taste it, my tongue was just a lump of burning, quivering, paralyzed hot in my mouth.  I must have rubbed my eye while eating it, because later on my eyelid — not my eyeball, just the outside part of my eyelid — started burning too, and the burning slowly spread until the entire eyelid felt like it was on fire.  It was so hot that mere contact with flesh caused pain and suffering.  That hot sauce was awesome.

But I learned from it.  If ever again a Hispanic cook looks at me like I’m crazy for wanting to use his hot sauce, I’ll be sure to ask him what kind of hot sauce it is.  I didn’t do that with this guy and now I don’t know what it is or where to find it to get more of it for home.

I’m still ironing out the bugs in this here new blog. The biggest problem I’m having (until I solve it and discover a new one) is that comments are broken. Sort of.

You can post comments, you just can’t post them on whatever happens to be the most current entry. The magical elves behind the pixels lose their minds when you do that and start babbling about unacceptable and inappropriate and how they can’t find stuff, and then they won’t save your words. But if you want to post on an older entry, well then they’re all for that!

So this is my advice to you until I get everything squared away: If you have something to say here, say it yesterday.

I just dropped my daughter off at a nearby private Catholic school to take their entrance exam, and I’m feeling an echo from 32 years ago from when I took the entrance exam for this school’s biggest rival.

I think back to the kid I was back then and I look at my daughter today and I’m just so proud of her — and of me too, I guess. I was a mess back then, a timid kid just going where ever I was pointed, unsure of myself in every way, uncomfortable in my own skin, with a fractured home life that didn’t do a thing to help my situation at all. In contrast, my daughter is a smart, confident, driven young lady who knows what she wants and does the work to get there, and she is supported by a stable home with two committed parents who tell her — and show her — that they love her every day.

Watching her walk up the steps to enter the school, I flashed back to doing it myself 32 years ago and marveled at how sure of herself she is. She’s a great kid. She’s going to do great.