Overheard in the grocery line yesterday as two women talked…
“So if we leave the Mexicans out, who will pick the fruits and vegetibles?”
“Machines.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. They can make machines for everything.”
“You understand things better than I do.”
I’ve been doing a quick job to get rid of drafts. I have one left that I am probably going to just delete because it sucks. Well, not so much as that as I think since the time I wrote it originally, I wrote it better and I already posted the gist of it.
So that is why so many posts in one day.
So I was out today running errands and getting lunch, and some VERY normal looking guy was getting condiments next to a VERY pregnant woman. They were across the sneeze/cough guard-thingy from me while we were piling on crap on our asssorted food.
“Do you let people touch your belly?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Can I just see it?”
“Of course not.”
“Just a peek?”
Now, at this point, I voiced up and was inserting myself in the conversation. Are you kidding me? That was just creepy. I walked her out to her car, made sure she was on her way, and the guy just kind of disappeared…so be it. I finished slathering my hot dog with almost enough vegetibles that I can safely justify the sodium intake.
But the guy was inately creepy enough I drove a weird route home. I don’t think he was up to anything nefarious; I think he was just…weird…in the friendly weird way.
Which is what got me thinking…there are still nice weirdos out there if you just don’t act scared about every weirdo. I honestly don’t think this guy meant harm or any ill will…I just think he was creepy. I thought about it all day, and I still can’t describe why I thought that or anything specific about it. That’s the strangest thing about the whole matter…well, that and the fact the guy kind of disappeared after I went back to top my dog off with onions.
I mean, you can’t have enough vegetibles, right?
I am so envious of anyone who can walk to a bagel shop and order a fresh bagel, onion flavored, with lox, cream cheese, tomato, and capers…I’d kiss your feet and paint your toenails if you wanted it.
I went on a little scouting mission yesterday, and it was zilch, zero, nada. None of the bakeries I went to could do it.
And all of them I went to said the same thing in some form…it’s too expensive to have lox on the wait for a New Yorker that might come along every month.
Excuse me?
I am no New Yorker. (Not that it would be horrible.) But every place made the argument that no one around here wanted New York-style because they don’t want it (almost exactly their argument). One guy said that if he cared how to do a bagel right, he’d also have to sell pickles…I have no idea, no idea, what that means, but I agreed.
I can’t argue with that. I accept the fact that getting a good deli bagel is not possible within 30 miles. Although…there is always pickled eggs with fresh white bread…
How long will it take that I trust something the federal government tells me again?
Thank about how striking that is. I don’t know if I should believe anything from taxes, borrowing, war policy to the fact my daughter is playing with safe toys.
Wow.
I was actually listening to the Bush speech yesterday and thinking, “It takes 45 days to undo something you declared in a speech and I am suppose to believe you suddenly understand North Korea?”
I am very cynical at this point. To the point it worries me. I have turned into a curmudgeon. I’m just the cranky guy that is just, well, cranky.
Enough said.
BTW…I was watching that first episode of SNL and it had Janis Ian doing “At Seventeen.” This is one of the greatest story songs ever. There is no chorus, per se. She just sings it as a narrative. I love that song! I knew she was on the first show, but it was only after watching it again I realized how simple it all was when she did it…but as a completely failed songwriter and a Harry Chapin fan, my hat is off to her. But mostly, read the words, because the poem is really cool. It’s pretty much a reflection of your parents Walt Whitman-type stuff. Is that too strong?
Someday I want a show on VH-1 or something that just takes simple narratives and points them out as stories.
I’m such an old fart I scare me.
Did anyone else catch SNL replaying it’s very first episode as a George Carlin trubute?
I have watched it twice. Pretty awesome stuff. But I like the fact they just played it it in all of its glory and didn’t mushy mush mouth around the fact that this was a tribute. I mean, who didn’t know he hosted the first show, and why do another tribute…they just showed the danged show.
It was serene in a way that George Carlin would have liked. It’s like a friend of mine once said on a trip where we were looking at the Badlands…I said it looks like a “postcard.” He quickly said, “No a postcard looks like this you dumb ass.”
After all the sloppy tributes and things, it was nice just seeing a simple “real-thing” version of the guy from the very first show of SNL.
The other thing that cracked me up is that it was rated PG-13…are there people who sit arount and look at shows more than thirty years old and decide this is a designation? It was on exactly the same time thirty years ago, on the same night, and now it’s got a PG-13 label on it.
There was show on TV today about how people can manipulate throwing dice with mechanics to beat the house at craps.
Which reminded me of a funny story…
I once rolled the dice so long at a low-price craps table, they not only changed the dice twice on me, they gave them all to me when it was done and took my picture.
It was very late at night and I was curious. Within a half hour, though, there were thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on the table, and none of it was mine because I was keeping my black jack money, not wasting it on a game of chance, thank you very much.
One pair of dice is lost because I gave it to Big A…the other two pairs though are a funny reminder of just how stupidly clueless I was to roll that long and, maybe, maybe, I won $50 while practically everyone in the entire craps area was winning thousands on my run. I had no technique, had no clue about anything other than not rolling a seven, I killed the house, but it was so obvious I was clueless, even the house thought it was funny. I was not faking the fact I didn’t really understand what to do, and finally the pit boss started telling me what to bet. I am not joking.
When it ended, I had a roll in the top-10 for at least that year, they all said, but I don’t remember. It just went on forever. The only thing I did was place the one and the six face up and see if I could get one or the other to flip just right to not be a seven.
It’s the only time before or since that I have ever played craps. I rolled huge with the two pictured here, or so everyone was trying to explain to me, numbers 607 (on the right) and 373 (on the left). I wasn’t even drunk, and it’s all still a blur about how many people seemed to appear out of no place.
I decided it was funny, but I’d stick to blackjack.
Then this show was on about the fact people actually can learn how to throw dice well enough to have an edge over the house. I’ll be damned. But it kind of caught my attention that I did do something very cool holding the dice for more time than even these “professionals” think they can hold them in their fantasies. You should roll a seven about every six and a half rolls — pure math. I went, and forgive me because I can’t remember the exact number, someplace in the hundreds. These guys were bragging about 40 rolls.
It’s still one of the stupidest (in the ironic sense) things I have ever experienced in my life.
Mostly what I got out of it was free beer, a lobster dinner, and a pretty good breakfast buffet…all on the house. It was probably about the most fun I’ve ever had at a Las Vegas casino and why it’s nice to, well, never played again at dice. For the decade since I have gone back to my boring blackjack.
Big A asked me today what would happen if two astronauts had a gun duel on the moon.
I felt better because I was mostly right if you look at this website. My answer had flaws, but we got into a discussion about gravity, mass, and acceleration, which was pretty close to all the answers I found on the internet and in books.
My gist was that guns on the moon would be as bad as on earth. The point is…it’s a great question we tried to figure out. What if two guys in moonsuits pulled an O.K. Coral moment? She wasn’t thinking about violence…but the pure sceience of it. It was a very smart question for an eight-year old, I think.
But I was also happy that i was almost right and I am not a scientist. But by the time I was wanting to explain where I was wrong, I got the “Daddy cold shoulder,” which means I had gotten to into her question. So when I was watching something else on TV, she came in late tonight, and said she liked the fact I helped her with answer.
So that got me fired up again…until she made it pretty clear that her speech was code word for drop it because you gave me too much information. Ummm…that lasted 10 seconds.
The point is that she asked something about something she read. Nothing to do with TV. It was a question because of a book she was reading. I wanted to do jumping jacks of joy, or something. Books. Books. BOOOKS! There is a place for them. But I get that these internet tuby thingys kind of have stuff, too…I’ll give you that.
It just made me feel better she was asking the question after reading a book.