My parents tell this story about me when I was probably four or five. One day, John the Hippie who lived next door was out in his backyard trying to repair a blown bicycle tube on his 10-speed. I went over there to “help” as I enjoyed talking to John the Hippie and he seemed to enjoy chatting with me. After I watched him struggling with trying to cram the tube under the tire, I suggested that maybe he take the tire off, put the tube inside, then put the whole thing on the wheel. This seemingly obvious solution hadn’t occurred to John the Hippie, so he beamed about the whole thing to my parents and the story lives on in family lore.

The other day, I was putting up new wall sconces in our living room (check them out) and Ray was helping. I had removed the old ones and was starting to screw the new brackets to the wiring box, but the new screws were too big for the 75-year-old non-standard wiring box holes. I let out a small grunt of frustration and thought: “Great. Now I have to replace the wiring boxes.” Images of former home “improvement” projects I have attempted flashed before my eyes. I envisioned that, before I was done with this, there would be a four foot hole to the outside above our fireplace and we’d just have to move.

Ray heard my grunt and asked: “Daddy, why ‘Ugh!’?” So I explained the predicament.

Ray just shrugged and said: “I guess we’ll just have to use the old screws.”

You know, the ones that I had just removed two minutes earlier? Those screws? The ones that fit?

I climbed down and gave Ray a big hug and thanked him for his suggestion. The sconces were up within minutes, and I didn’t even electrocute myself.

I am well pleased with my son, but, of course, this all means that his dad is no smarter than a hippie.

After I finished college, I stood at a veritable crossroads. The path I took led to graduate school in film studies at the University of Iowa; the other — the path not traveled — to the Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Oregon.

Last night, from a stool at the bar of the Earth & Ocean restaurant, I watched the kitchen crew moving about in a seemingly well-orchestrated dance of pans, cutlery, and platters, deftly piling scallops atop mounds of kohlrabi and artfully drizzling caramel sauce over butternut squash tarts. I recalled my brief interest in the life of the taste-bud, and experienced a strange yearning to revisit the idea.

Continue reading "Chef Jim" »

Throughout my life I have striven to avoid becoming a cliché. I haven’t always been successful (black-haired, eye-linered, pierced-ear goth phase, anyone?) but I am always mindful of the forces in my life that seek to pull me into categories that allow a simplistic definition or label. I’d rather be misunderstood than summed up in a word.

So, despite having spent the last twelve years of my life working in IT, I have steadfastly avoided reading science fiction or fantasy, drinking Mountain Dew, or getting into MMORPG’s, Star Trek, or comic books. I can’t deny there is a part of me that’s just a bit drawn to those things (well, except for Mountain Dew … nasty shit), but just as a bartender needs to watch how much he drinks, I need to moderate my exposure to and consumption of geekery.

The one chink in my armor is my unadulterated and unwavering love for the movie Blade Runner, and I am all aquiver with nerdiness over the news that the 5-disk “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” of the film will be released in December.

Continue reading "I’ve Seen Things You People Wouldn’t Believe" »

Like many good atheists, I was raised Catholic. But my family was by no means devout. We attended mass irregularly, I never said prayers before meals or at bedtime, and I lived more in fear of what Santa Claus would do to me if I was bad than God. Nevertheless, I had never knowingly met an atheist and it wasn’t until I was in my teens that the option of simply not believing there’s a God even occurred to me.

In my latter years of high school I first developed a friendship with an outspoken nonbeliever. My own ambivalence to religion and theism tipped toward atheism at that point, but I still considered myself an agnostic at best.

In my first year of college, I took an introductory anthropology course to satisfy a science requirement. I was an English major at the time (the first of many such “majors”) and had only a passing interest in the topic. I think my girlfriend at the time pushed me to take it.

During that class, I first learned the story of the peppered moth — the classic tale, derived from research done in the 1950’s by Bernard Kettlewell, by which the process of natural selection in a species can be easily explained through observable phenomena. It sort of changed my life.

Continue reading "Ye Olde Peppered Moths" »

OK, let’s get something out of the way first.

In high school, I was a big fan of the TV show “Night Court.” I especially liked the character of Judge Harry (Harry Anderson), who wasn’t so much a “character” as he was a direct port of the actor/magician’s own persona. I was so taken by Judge Harry, in fact, that I bought a 30’s-era fedora and raided local vintage clothing stores for old ties and fancy duds. That I then wore. To school. I even learned magic and would produce silk scarves or “vanish” sponge balls at a moment’s notice. It’s a wonder I wasn’t beaten up every day.

Anyway, during the first season, the public defender (Billie Young) was played by a pretty, slighty-punkish actress named Ellen Foley. I had a mad crush on her, as did the character of the judge — the questionable ethics of which didn’t concern me at the time.

Later on, Young/Foley was unceremoniously replaced by the inferior, more conservative Markie Post, who provided the requisite sexual tension for the remainder of the show’s remarkable (and, in retrospect, complete undeserved) run of nine years. I never recovered from this recasting.

Flash forward to a couple days ago. The Clash’s “Hitsville UK” song comes up on iTunes. “Hitsville” is distinctly different from other Clash songs in that it’s (1) melodic, and (2) sung by a female. It never occurred to me to wonder who this guest vocalist was, but it was a slow day so I hopped over to Wikipedia, where I learned that the tune was sung by Clash guitarist Mick Jones and his then-girlfriend … Ellen Foley.

The same Ellen Foley who stirred such warm feelings in my adolescent body!

It turns out, Ms. Foley had been a recording artist prior to her acting career, released three solo albums, and worked with such rock luminaries as Meat Loaf and Joe Jackson in addition to various derivatives of the Clash. She’s currently a noted Broadway actress.

And now the damn song is stuck in my head.

I look up a lot of things. At the dawn of the Information Age (which I place at August 15th, 1994), I decided that my personal information management strategy would be to flush my brain of the clutter of “facts” and rely on being able to look things up when I needed to. At the time, that strategy was difficult to maintain given the fixity of computers and the non-existence of decent search engines. However, thirteen years hence, the technology has finally caught up to my ideal. And I am happy to report that my brain is mostly empty most of the time!

In that earlier, quaint, more-analog era, I sought to pack my ubiquitous student book bag with as many small reference guides as possible. If I was, say, at a hardware store and needed to know how to convert between US and metric measurements, I could just whip out my pocket reference manual and do some quick math. If I was a bar and got to arguing with someone about whether Ty Cobb had 4,191 or 4,189 career hits, I’d agree to a wager, pull out my pocket baseball almanac, and collect some fast cash. It was a perfect plan, with actual money-making potential.

Though I was able to find an extremely useful general purpose pocket reference book, I found there is no such thing as a pocket baseball reference guide, and no one ever tried to argue with me about Ty Cobb’s hit count so it didn’t really matter anyway.

As my life and the world became more digitized, I loaded my Palm PDA with every reference guide I could find. This became quite handy in doing crossword puzzles. 13 Down is a 4-letter word for “Zeus’ mother”? Let me consult my PDA’s Greek mythology eBook. Ah, that’d be “Rhea.” The Palm weighed considerably less than a corresponding set of books, and there was a baseball reference guide available. Still, Ty Cobb’s hit count never came up in casual conversation.

I have since ditched the offline Palm in favor of a laptop and my Windows SmartPhone. I no longer need to plan ahead and try to guess which reference materials I will need; I can just use Google anytime, anywhere.

Over the last weekend, it occurred to me that I could easily catalog all the things I look up in the course of a given time period and publish the list periodically on this blog so that … well, so that I can demonstrate that I can do it. What more justification do I need? Hell, you, Loyal Reader, might actually learn something!

Without further ado, here’s my first “Look-Up” list from this past weekend.

Continue reading "Looking It Up" »

The news that a certain Ballard eyesore (the Denny’s on 15th and Market) will be bulldozed in early 2008 reminded me of my extra-special delicious post-nightclub snack back in the late nights of my goth-inspired youth.

Continue reading "French Fries and Ice Cream" »

I just got done reading two books that involved doppelgängers — The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim and The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk. In the former, the doubles are separated for the whole novel except for the first chapter; in the latter, they are engaged in a master/slave relationship throughout the work.

As a narrative trope, the doppelgänger is a great way to represent personal or internal conflict, or to represent contradictions inherent in a social strata. Think of The Prince and the Pauper, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, and any number of other tales involving identity swapping and confusion. I thoroughly enjoyed The Great Impersonation. It is a rare novel that keeps the reader engaged even though the denouement is projected well ahead of time. The doppelgänger conceit is played out fairly straightforwardly and mostly to benefit the story, not an overarching theme. I can’t say that I liked The White Castle, however. I really liked Pamuk’s My Name is Red, but this novel was just … well, slow. Almost completely still, in fact. It felt flat and was surprisingly repetitive. The master/slave dichotomy has been done much better.

I’ve only ever had two possible “celebrity doppelgängers” identified for me — famous people that others seem to think look like me. This revelation requires an extreme suppression of my ego, but here are the actors who — others have claimed — could play my “double” in the film version of my life:

Continue reading "Doppelgängers" »

The recent reports of the Virginia Tech shooter’s disturbing creative writing efforts reminded me of my tenure as the editor of the my high school’s literary magazine, The Quill. The experience exposed me and my editorial staff to an array of alarming material, not to mention simply dreadful adolescent prose and poetry. Everyone, it seemed, was seriously misunderstood and underappreciated by their parents, teachers, or boy/girlfriends. Except, that is, those lucky few who believed in — and wrote incessantly about — unicorns. All in all, I’m sure it was fairly common teenage stuff.

About ten per cent of materials submitted to us ended up in the magazine; the remainder wound up in a large portfolio we termed “The ‘No’ File.” The most prolific contributer to our reject pile was a fellow I’ll call JT.

Continue reading "The “No” File" »

During a casual glance at a map today my eyes fell upon Luzon, the main island of the Philippines. When I was growing up in Detroit, my grandmother’s telephone was often given as “LUzon-5-1864” (or whatever the digits were; I’m sure my mom remembers). I never knew what it referred to. I also recall that “LOgan” was another common alphabetic prefix (and, admittedly, I might be mixing this up — grandma’s phone number may have been LOgan-something, but LUzon was definitely popular, too).

I got to thinking: what was up with the alphabetical prefixes? I assumed it had something to do with mnemonics, but was it a formal program supported by the phone company or was it just a popular practice amongst its customers?

Continue reading "Calling KLondike 5-5555" »

Amy and I were discussing our first album purchases the other night. I was reminded of how behind the curve I was when it came to music, and even life in general.

I often feel as if I’ve lived my life one step out-of-phase of everyone else. By “phase,” in this instance, I mean a major segment of life, like “high school” or “college.”

I look back and realize that my high school years were largely spent figuring out the things that most of my peers had nailed down in junior high school — e.g. girls, pop culture, fashion, interpersonal relationships, etc. Until my senior year, I was largely an outcast, developmentally behind and socially immature compared to my classmates.

The first couple years of college were in many ways an extension of high school. I lived at home, dated significantly younger women (i.e. high school students), and wandered aimlessly about my curriculum. Of my first ten college courses, I dropped 6 of them; I changed my major four times and my minor twice. It wasn’t until my third year that I started making sense of everything, and by my fourth year I had finally figured out what I wanted to do only to run smack into graduation before being able to fully realize my goals.

The soundtrack of my life reflects this out-of-phaseness, too.

Continue reading "Sitting on the Doorstep of the House I Can’t Afford" »

You might not know it by reading my blog, but one of the reasons I have this thing is to improve my writing skills. Every now and then, when I have time away from bitching about shitty customer service and offending 90% of the population by implying they can’t think rationally, I puruse writing self-help sites and try to glean some wisdom from the gurus of the blogosphere.

The other day, I came across a tidbit that advises to let your blog posts “marinate” a bit before posting them. I know that, often, to meet my self-imposed goal of at least one post per day, I hastily rattle something off only to regret it later. Perhaps I should let things stew a bit and then review them before clicking the “Publish” button.

This reminds me of a deal my former office mate, Paul, and I once had to protect each other’s jobs.

Continue reading "Let it Simmer, then Boil Over" »

Ray starts school in less than a month. He’s been such a mama’s boy for his three years, that Amy and I are concerned about how he’s going to adapt. She has carefully explained to him that (a) she’s not going to be there, and (b) he goes to school every day that daddy goes to work. He seems OK with it in theory; we’ll see what happens when we abandon him in a room with 24 other kids. To be honest, I think it’ll be harder on me and Amy. Even as I type this, I can’t imagine myself dropping him off and then leaving, even if he’s not screaming and struggling against restraints to get to me.

Amy’s talked to a few other parents of older kids about their experiences, and things seem to be all over the map. For one boy, there was a lot of crying and clinginess for a week; for another, that sort of thing lasted all year. Amy — quick to assume that any troublesome character traits in Ray originate from my genes — asked me if I remembered any stories about how I acted on my first day of school. I had to plead ignorance. I remember wailing hysterically before getting on the bus to first grade for the first time, but only because I thought my mom was going to come too. I don’t think I had a problem with going to preschool or kindergarten before that, but I don’t recall hearing anything one way or the other.

However, I did have a problem with graduate school.

Continue reading "School Days" »

After posting the other day about the box of letters and journals I threw out, I found a box of index cards on which I used to write snippets of conversations and brief thoughts. Most of them date from the early to mid-90’s when I lived in Iowa City. I haven’t read them in a decade.

Some involve me, others are conversations overheard or reported to be by friends. My hope was that by stripping away all character and context, something profound might emerge. I’m not sure it worked.

There are over 50 cards and scraps of notebook paper. Here are some that seemed worth sharing.

Continue reading "Lost Notes" »

I’m reading The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank, the author of A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing. I have a sneaking suspicion that the book is considered “Chick Lit,” so I’m hiding it behind a copy of Maxim magazine when I’m on the bus.

In today’s passage, a junior high school character is thumbing through a worn copy of her elementary school yearbook. The girl is described by the narrator as the leader of a gang of bully girls. Now, however, the other girls in her gang have turned their attentions to boys and being pretty, and their former leader is feeling left behind. The now-pathetic girl clings to the yearbook, and her out-of-style friendship bracelets, as a reminder of her former glory.

I rarely hold onto things purely out of nostalgia, though I do to wax about the past (especially on this blog). I’ve moved far too many times in my life, and usually into smaller places, and have learned to not shed too many tears on my way back from the Goodwill donation box.

But there are some things that I’ve carried around from place to place, and I wonder what they say about me.

Continue reading "The Way We Were" »

The bus I ride some mornings passes the ramshackle headquarters of a local catering business called “Secret Chef.” The building’s windows are covered in wooden furring-like material and no hours-of-operation or contact information is posted. I have to question the wisdom of associating secrecy with food preparation. I want to know what’s going in my mouth and who’s preparing it. What is that “secret sauce”? Which “eleven herbs and spices” are you talking about? I want to be able to tell the public health inspectors the name of my murderer as I lay dying of listeriosis.

Honestly, I can’t say if “Secret Chef” is truly a secretive organization — I picture its cooks in ninja gear operating in the dark — or if it’s just an attempt for a clever name. But I am familiar with a truly secret food operation — the mysterious “Secret Pizza” of Iowa City.

Continue reading "Culinary Secrets" »

We’re inside now, which is nice as it’s a bit chilly outdoors.

The last time I waited in line like this was for tickets to David Bowie’s 1991 Sound + Vision tour. My girlfriend, Katie, and I drove to the ticket outlet at 5 am. It was freezing out, and a dozen or so fans were there already, but they were still in their cars, thus violating a major rule governing queuing up for concert tickets: no matter the weather, you wait in a line outside.

We boldly strode to the doors and sat down. Slowly, the others emerged from their car and joined us. One guy engaged us in some pleasant conversation before awkwardly stuttering that he had been there since 2 a.m. and, surely, we would let him in first.

” Well,” I replied, “you weren’t at the door.”

For the next several hours, I think he and the others thought we were bluffing. The atmosphere was tense, and when the doors opened, Katie and I rushed in to the ticket window and placed our order.

No one had a chance to object, and we ended up scoring font-row center tickets.

At the concert, the 2 a.m. guy spotted us from his 8th row seat. He was, rather inappropriately, in full Ziggy Stardust regalia, and shouted angrily at us. We smiled and waved, and, later in the show, took great pleasure in watching the decidedly anti-glam Mr. Bowie recoil from his touch.

boingboing links to this story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about a cloud of mayflies in La Crosse, Wisconsin, so thick that it showed up on National Weather Service radar.

I drove through just such a cloud in La Crosse a few years ago around this time of the season. It was one of the freakiest things I’ve experienced.

The mayflies hatch along the banks of the Mississippi River, and Highway 14 runs right alongside it. The Journal reports that the flies “leave the water, and mate in a sudden burst of aerial theatrics before dying.”

At first, it was just a few amorous insects smacking the windshield. Pretty soon, the windshield was covered with mayfly goo. Then we hit the full swarm. Visibility was near zero and the crackling sound of the flies smacking the car was deafening. The windshield wipers were useless against the piling fly carcasses.

Just as I was about to give up and pull over, the swarm subsided. I directed the car into a service station and, along with a dozen other motorists, began the disgusting process of scraping the fly bodies off the windows and headlights. There was about a half-inch of build-up all over the car.

When we finally got to where we were going, I was advised to hose the car off as much as possible right then — at 11:00 pm — so that the fly paste wouldn’t bake onto the car in the sun the next day. The fly corpses were in every crevasse and cranny of the car, including under the hood. It took about an hour of spraying and scraping to get most of the rest off.

Musing yesterday about my nom de plume got me reminiscing about an occurrence when I lived in Iowa City.

Assume for the purposes of this tale that my name really is “Major Steel.”

I got home one Sunday afternoon and checked my voice mail. The only message was from a woman who did not identify herself and whose voice I didn’t recognize. She was crying, and after a few moments said only: “Major, I love you,” before hanging up.

This was in the dark days before Caller ID or *69, so I had no way of telling who this could be. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, though I was dating a couple different women. And some broken-hearted ex’s were still around someplace. I compiled a list of suspects in my head and decided to make some calls. Someone was upset and needed help!

Continue reading "“Major Steel, I Love You.”" »

Another July 4th recollection….

The fireworks display in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, was supposed to be remarkable. In my mind, nothing could beat the display from Hoover Days in West Branch, Iowa (seriously), but there was a lot of buzz about the LaCrosse festivities and the fact that the show would start with three skydivers shooting fireworks as they parachuted from a plane. That sounded cool.

We spread our blanket on the shores of the Mississippi and waited. Shortly after nightfall, someone near us pointed up in the sky and said “There they are!” After a few moments, my eyes located a small red light in the sky, and then another. I could just make out the shape of the parachutes in the light created by the fireworks the skydivers shot off as they descended to earth.

The crowd ooooooo’d and ahhhhh’d as the band struck up a tune. After a little while, I remarked: “Weren’t there supposed to be three skydivers?”

The next day, we learned what happened to the third one. It involved a failed chute and the roof of a hardware store on the other side of the river.

Ouch.

My sister and I were never allowed to have firecrackers when we were kids. By the time I grew up and could drive myself to the scary-looking metal buildings just off the interstate and buy some, I didn’t have much interest in doing so. Consequently, to this day I have never lit a bottle rocket, ignited an M-80, or set off a three-inch mortar or whatever the hell those motherfuckers down the street were setting off until eleven-fucking-o’clock last night. Damn kids. And I wish they’d stay off my lawn.

We were, however, permitted to have sparklers. Now, there’s a great idea. “No, kids, you may not light off a contained small explosive device that’s designed to shoot off far away from you, but, here, hold these burning pieces of white-hot magnesium in your hands and run around in the dark waving them randomly as they shower you and your cousins with sparks. Have fun!” Yeah, that’s much safer than a Roman candle.

As youngsters, it didn’t take us long to grow somewhat dissatisfied with sparklers. Desperate for some greater holiday action one year, my eyes fell upon the warning label on the sparkler box.

“WARNING: Do not light more than one sparkler at a time.”

Continue reading "Sparklerfest" »

Yesterday, fellow blogger Oren expressed amusement that my mother comments on my blog. I suppose it does seem strange if you don’t know my mom.

My veil of pseudonymity doesn’t extend to members of my family; mom knows who I am. And my knowing she is out there checking this site daily, I do occasionally feel that I have to self-censor but honestly not that often. That’s mostly because I don’t do anything even approaching illicit behavior (anymore), but partly it’s because of the general coolness of my mother.

As a parent, my mom was always able to achieve that very delicate balance between being a Parent and being a Friend. It wasn’t like she was one of those pathetic hipster moms desperately trying to act 20 years younger, smoking pot with her kids and hitting on their friends, but she also wasn’t a total oldster constantly eliciting her children’s embarrassment over her terminal squareness.

I think a lot of it came from her being a high school teacher. When my sister and I were teenagers, my mom had a hundred others to deal with besides us and she saw just how truly bad kids can get. Nothing my sister or I did — nothing we pierced, dyed, wore, or listened to — was anything my mom hadn’t seen before.

I’ve already written about how she used to judge her students’ intelligence via Monty Python quotes. She also went to midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with them. It’s not like she dressed up as Frank-N-Furter or anything; she just went to have a good time, and, I’m sure, keep an eye on them.

In short, my mom knew how to relate to teenagers and young adults. She didn’t try to emulate our lingo, listen to our music, or live our lifestyle. But she kept an open mind about it, didn’t judge (well, not often), and kept us pointing in the right direction.

So, true to her form, she’s not out there blogging herself, but she’s keeping an eye on me. Just like a mom.

OK, so it look like NO ONE of the five (five!? I get 100+ visits a day. What’s up with you people?) quiz-takers got the right answer in the first Major Quiz on this blog.

The red herring was “The Hurons.” Neither Amy nor I attended a school that desecrated the memory of Native Americans by naming a football team after a tribe.

Amy’s junior high school mascot was the Trojans. When Amy was in sixth grade, her town’s two junior schools merged, and the incoming students were called upon to select a new mascot from among several choices. Amy voted for “The Scorpions.” Everybody else voted for “The Trojans” and giggled whilst doing so.

Amy’s college mascot at UC Santa Cruz was, indeed, the “fighting” Banana Slug. Santa Cruz is known for its iconoclasm and egalitarianism (for example, they don’t offer grades). According to the university’s web site, “the students’ adoption of such a lowly creature for a team mascot was their reaction to the fierce athletic competition fostered at most American universities.”

In high school, I had the misfortune of having to root for “The Tractors.” Wikipedia has a good write up on Fordson High School, which explains that Fordson was the “name of the tractor produced by a separate company operated by Henry Ford and his son Edsel, which later merged with Ford Motors.”

Then, in college, I had to endure my identity as a “Tartar” at Wayne State University. WSU changed mascots in 1999 and became “The Warriors.” Undoubtedly, now instead of taunts related to dental hygiene or fried fish sauce, they face calls to “Come out to playeeeyaaay!!!”

I want to see more activity next time. No more lurking. To read this blog, you need to commit!