Comments on two movie previews I’ve seen recently:

I’ve never understood the whole “Angelina Jolie is so hot” thing. Frankly, I’ve always found her to be a little freaky and think she builds every performance around her poor abused lips. But after seeing a preview for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I think I get it. She looks, well, hot in it. And the movie looks good too. Crap-bad, but fun-good.

And Angelina’s ex, Billy Bob Thornton, is in the new remake of The Bad News Bears. I can’t make a call on how the movie will be, but Billy Bob is perfect as Buttermaker. I can’t wait to see this one.

Two celeb-type observations:

1. Jennifer Lopez vs Ben Affleck in Gigli
• When Jennifer Lopez is the better actor, you’ve got problems.
2. Newly anorexic Lindsay Lohan vs perpetually anorexic Paris Hilton in paparazzi photos
• When Paris is the fat one, you’ve got serious problems.

Improv Everywhere stages a U2 roof-top concert in New York.

This is a “hose bibb”. We now have a new one.

Everyone knows that when you’re doing plumbing work, the first thing you do is shut off the main water supply, right? But what if, after you turn off the water main, the water is still on?

It’s a puzzlement.

Some people would think better of it and stop right there until they could either call in a professional or figure out how to turn off the water that won’t turn off. Other people…

Well, I’m here to tell you that you can in fact remove an old and leaking hose bibb and install a new one with the water flowing at full pressure — but it ain’t easy. And you’re going to get wet. Very wet. And your back yard will resemble a wading pool before you’re finished. But as long as you can keep your cool and continue fighting water spraying everywhere under incredibly powerful pressure until you somehow miraculously get the threads on the hose bibb and the pipe to line up in spite of the spraying water pushing the hose bibb out of position as soon as you get anywhere close to being in position and you can then impossibly keep them lined up as you rotate the hose bibb 360 degrees several times to screw it in while fighting the water pressure pushing it out of position, well, you’ll be just fine. And wet. Very wet.

Headline from today’s news: Viagra Users Report Blindness: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. health regulators on Friday said they have received more than 40 reports of a type of blindness in men taking impotence drugs, mostly involving Pfizer Inc.’s Viagra.

So I guess it’s true, you really will go blind if you play with that thing.

My office here at home is a little on the dark side. I have one light on the ceiling but that’s it. It’s a normal light and provides as much, uh, light as a normal, uh, light does, but since it’s overhead and a little bit behind me when I’m sitting at my desk, it creates a Chuck-shaped shadow on whatever I happen be working on. So everything is well-lit (if not clean) except what I most need to be well-lit.

Fortunately, I also have a lamp on the desk. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Hasn’t worked for more than a year, at least. I look at it frequently, there in the shadow of my biggianthead, and I think of how much more light I would have if only it had a new bulb in it. But it’s a halogen lamp, and those things are a pain in the ass.

Because, first off, I can’t just get a halogen bulb at the grocery store, no, I’d have to make a special trip another five minutes or so to go to Office Depot to find one. And the times I find myself driving past Office Depot — or maybe even inside Office Depot — I can’t remember what size halogen bulb it takes, and I’m not going to buy one on faith because then I’d have to make another trip back to exchange it if I got the wrong size and of course I’d get the wrong size and I had enough damn trouble getting here in the first damned place so I know I’d just never come back to make the exchange so screw it already. And then even if I did have all my ducks in a row and I knew I was going to be at Office Depot and knew what size bulb I needed, those damned halogen bulbs are expensive enough to offend my inner cheapskate and I’d spend half an hour comparing them and debating and hemming and hawing and then I’d probably leave without buying it anyway. So the punchline from the old joke “How many Jewish grandmothers does it take to change a lightbulb?” applies: “Never mind, I’ll just sit in the dark.”

So I frequently sit here in the dark and gaze longingly at my desk lamp and dream of what could be. And then I shake my head and get back to working by touch. Because never mind.

Well, today I was looking at the lamp in the dim of the afternoon and a thought occurred: Are you sure the bulb is burned out? Have you actually, you know, tried it lately? Ever? Do you remember trying it? Ever? And I had to answer “No” to all. So I took a chance, I flicked the switch to turn it on.

Well.

This is the part where you’re all expecting me to say that, whoa, the light worked! It wasn’t burned out at all! Right? Well, you’re wrong. I flipped that switch and nothing happened. Noth. Thing. Zip. Darkness continued. Etcetera.

Not so smart now, are you? So settle down there with your holier-than-though attitudes about how stupid you thought I was, all right? Because, no, it did not work when I turned it on.

But it did when I plugged it in.

Zoe turned up with a sore throat and fever last night, so we kept her home from school today and she got to do her favorite thing: lay up in my bed and watch TV. (She also got to sleep in my bed with Beth last night, too, while I slept in her kid-sized daybed. That was, uh, “fun”.)

So with her laid up in the bedroom and me in my office on the other end of the house and her with a sore throat, long-distance communication was an issue. Zoe asked if we had a bell she could ring when she needed me (because it’s a TV cliche and yes she watches far too much TV and of course I let her spend her sick day watching TV) but we don’t have one, so I offered her the 21st Century version of the Sick Bell: my cell phone. I had her call the house line if she needed me and I answered in my office and that way we could talk without taxing her voice.

And oh-my-God did she work the hell out of that phone. No lie, it was ringing every five to ten minutes:

• Daddy, can you take my temperature?
• Daddy, can you make me a cup of tea?
• Daddy, can you make me some tomato soup and tuna fish?
• Daddy, can you put more mayo in the tuna?
• Daddy, can you take my temperature again?
• And etc…

Now, the phone ringing annoys me on the best of days, and today she was ringing it off the hook. But because it was Zoe I couldn’t ignore it and let it go to voicemail. So not only was it annoying me by ringing, it was also annoying me by requiring me to answer it. And not only was it annoying me by requiring me to answer it, it was also annoying me by being for me. And not only was it annoying me by being for me, it was also annoying me by being a call that required me to get up and do something. I’m not the most patient of people to start with, and all this ringing and being interrupted and running to do whatever didn’t do much for my sunny disposition. So I don’t think staying home sick was quite as much fun for Zoe as she might have imagined.

She seemed to be staging a comeback by the afternoon (which time has proven to be just the Motrin kicking in), so I got her dressed and out of bed and took her to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Because I’m all about being a responsible parent. But, hey, that was two hours when we were entertained together and the phone wasn’t ringing. This part of the day probably was as fun as Zoe had imagined — she thought it was cool going to a movie midweek because “It’s not crowded because the only people here are retired people and people who don’t have jobs.”

And now we’re home again, and more importantly now Beth is home again, and I’ve tagged up and turned over responsibility of sick kid requests to her.

And I took my cell phone back.

I’m quickly developing a love/hate relationship with Access. My little scuba inventory form is coming along nicely and I think it’ll be a thing of beauty when I’m finished with it. In the meantime I’m teaching myself a lot of cool stuff about Access — but I’m also forgetting stuff as I learn newer stuff.

One thing that I loved when I learned it — and now I can’t remember how the fuck it worked — is how to make checking a checkbox in a form trigger a date in another field in the same form.

I know it can be done because I did it about five hours ago and thought I was all spiffy for figuring it out. Then I deleted the form to rebuild it with a few refinements and when it came time to make the checkbox put the date in the other field — well, I drew a complete blank. And I’ve been drawing a blank ever since. And it’s really fucking pissing me the fuck off. A fucking lot.

So if any of you fine peoples out there can tell me how to do this, I’d sure appreciate it.

Fuck.

I think perhaps I wasn’t clear enough with the meme I proposed yesterday:

Go to Google. Paste whatever’s on your clipboard right now into the search box and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Report your result — IN YOUR OWN BLOG.

I think it’s cool that you’re all dutifully reporting back to me what results you got and why, but this meme will not propagate — and I will not thus become world famous and enjoy staggering amounts of traffic here and thus become even more famous and enjoy even more traffic and etc and etc — if you don’t help me get it out there by posting it in your blogs.

Thanks for understanding.

Love,
The Ingrate

I had a real “duh” moment in a Word class I was teaching the other day.

I was going over tabs: how to set them, use them, different types, etc. And then I went off on one of my patented tangents and started talking about how a quick way to indent an entire paragraph was to drag the “Left Indent” box on the ruler. Not really tab related, but sort of in the same genre — if I’m training it. Then one of the students interrupted me to ask how to indent just the first line of a paragraph.

Easy answer, right? Uh, no. Not for me, not on that day.

I was right in the middle of tangenting off into formatting paragraphs in a manner only vaguely related to tabs, so I had paragraphs, not tabs, on the brain. And my mind immediately jumped to Format/ Paragraph/ Indentation/ Special and the various options there, and seized on “hanging indent.” Which a split second later I realized does the exact opposite so it wasn’t really an answer. And then I quickly mentally inventoried the other options there and realized none did this weird “indent just the first line” thing this student was asking about. This all took place over the course of about 2 seconds. And I was, for just a moment, stumped.

Then another student offered, “Couldn’t you just hit the Tab key?”

Hey, I’m honest, I ‘fessed up: “Um. Yeah, that’ll do it. Sure. If you want the easy way.”

It was a good reminder to KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid. Knowing all the advanced features doesn’t mean you have to use them for everything. Sometimes all you need is one simple key that does exactly what it says it does — they have names on them for a reason. And it took a beginning level student to remind me of that.

That was probably my biggest training Duuuuuuh moment ever. I felt like an idiot. And of course I’m sharing it with the world (or at least the eleventeen people who read me). I must be an idiot.