this is drivel

I finished it! I finished all 439 pages of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq yesterday! It took me nearly two weeks of pretty much non-stop reading, and that was hard to do, given that every page told a story of yet another screw-up so colossally short-sighted that, by the end, I wanted to find out that everyone involved in starting the war indicted for being an idiot and deported to Mars.

Okay, yes, I’ve got an opinion about the war in Iraq. I know, I know, you’re aghast. Try to get a grip on yourself.

The book’s author, Thomas Ricks, didn’t write from an entirely objective point of view, either, which should be obvious from the title. Still, if you threw out every conclusion Ricks came to on his own and gave credence to only the soldiers he interviewed and the reports he quoted from the Army, the government and the gosh-darned White House itself, you might find yourself thinking that the damning title doesn’t seem so far off the mark. Recommended.

Unlike most people who want to live in a newer, more modern age, Tim’s pretty sure he was born a century too late.

At dinner tonight he outlined yet another of his ethically questionable, though not intentionally illegal, schemes to separate suckers from their money, his favorite hobby (thinking up schemes, not separating suckers from their money. None of his schemes have advanced far enough to execute them). He’s been telling us that he wants to be a pirate when he grows up, but tonight I saw, in a moment of clarity, the perfect career for him. Or, more precisely, what would’ve been the perfect career for him.

“You should be a robber baron,” I told him, remembering land-grant schemes, legislative scandals and bid-rigging scams that made men like Vanderbilt and Durant the tycoons they were. Tim would’ve made those guys look like slackers.

“That’s exactly what I’ve always thought!” he agreed, then added the part about being born a century too late.

It’s not necessarily too late. There are still a lot of robber barons in the world, maybe bigger than Vanderbilt. A lot of them lately get investigated and quite a few have gone to trial, which doesn’t do a lot to encourage an aspiring tycoon. And Tim hasn’t yet mastered the art of not getting caught, so maybe this isn’t the perfect career choice after all. Still, “my son, the railroad baron” has a ring to it that brings a tear to my eye.

This blog will now take a turn toward the grumpy.

The president wants to “surge” the number of soldiers in Iraq, adding at least 21,500 men and women (or 35,000, depending on who you ask), while Gen. Casey, on the other hand, says that only half that many are needed, and all this after years and years of experts and armchair quarterbacks arguing that we never put half as many soldiers in Iraq as we needed to crush the rebellion. Jesus Wept! Do these guys ever talk to one another? Are they ever going to?

As I read Fiasco these past two weeks, I recognized in one story after another the phenomenon immortalized in the office parable known as “The Plan” that goes something like this:

In the beginning was the plan,
And the plan was without form,
And darkness was upon the face of the workers,
And they spoke among themselves, saying:
“It’s a crock of shit and it stinks.”
And the foremen went unto the supervisors, saying:
“It’s a load of crap that smells so none may abide it.”
And the supervisors went unto the managers, saying:
“It’s a vessel of manure that smells strongly to all around it.”
And the managers went unto the director, saying:
“It’s a container of fertilizer so strong that all are overpowered by it.”
And the director spake unto the president, saying:
“The new plan contains much that is fertile and is full of power.”
And the president saw that the plan was good.

No matter how much the boss says he wants to hear the unvarnished truth, he never gets it. I’m surprised the parable didn’t appear in Fiasco, at least in the appendix. True, it’s more of a joke than a bibliographical reference, but it would go a long way to explain the boundless optimism of the goofballs who told us that we’d be greeted as liberators after our soldiers quickly toppled Saddam, whipped a little democracy on them and got the heck out of Dodge in six to eight weeks, tops.

Oh, crap, here I go again, after I promised not to mouth off about the war any more. I just finished reading Fiasco, though, and a two or three-paragraph review doesn’t adequately describe the bile I get whenever I read a book like that, or a news story about the next $245 billion (off the budget!) to keep the war going, or the latest National Intelligence Estimate that dryly explains the term “civil war” can’t encompass the enormity of what’s going on in Iraq, or I’m otherwise reminded that soldiers will be fighting and dying (For WMD? To topple Saddam? For democracy? To keep the oil coming? Tune in tomorrow) long enough to make sure that my sons will probably end up there. So I feel a need to mouth off, just a little bit, every so often.

Grumpiness ... fading. Blood pressure ... dropping. Vision ... returning.

Thank you for letting me vent.

Our president has declared that it’s irresponsible of anybody to criticize his handling of the war, and that they should keep their opinions to themselves unless they present alternatives.

Well said, sir. Couldn’t agree more. I’m far from expert in these matters, having served twenty-one years in the military as nothing more than a paper-pusher, but from the looks of things that doesn’t seem to be an impediment to conjuring up a new plan, so I humbly offer several suggestions, to follow forthwith:

Overwhelming, irresistable force — just give ‘em the works. Throw everything including the kitchen sink into Iraq (fingers crossed that nothing goes boom in another part of the world) and “get ‘er done!” Honestly, what could be bad about that idea? So what if it’s politically unpopular? The way it’s being handled now is politically unpopular! So what if it would cost a ton of money? We’ve already spent half a trillion dollars! (I remember when “trillion” was a made-up word like “gajillion,” meaning “a number with way more zeroes than you’d care to count.” Just thought I’d throw that in there for giggles.)

Swift, irrevocable withdrawal — Pros: We’re outta there, and the Iraqis are running the show themselves, which was the goal at one time, if memory serves. Cons: Gas costs ten dollars a gallon and we end up burning the furniture to keep warm. Good thing we paid off that mission sofa and recliner; all that hardwood might last until the spring thaws.

Hire a mercenary army — I just pulled that out of my butt so I’ve got nothing to back it up, but it sounds way cool, like if we hired pirates and gave them an aircraft carrier. Tell me it wouldn’t kick ass to see the USS Ronald Reagan flying a skull and crossbones! As a bonus, the Navy wouldn’t have to repaint their aircraft. (That’s not a photoshopped picture. Google “VF-17 Jolly Rogers” if you don’t believe me.)

Those are three really, really good ideas, if I may say so myself, and I offer them unconditionally for use by this and forthcoming executive administrations, with the understanding that, should they use one of my excellent suggestions, I will no longer criticize the way they’re pissing away the country’s resources.

Hope in one hand, spit in the other.

It was so cold yesterday evening that when Barb and I got into the car after walking maybe 150 yards from the door of West High School, she couldn’t stop hollering, “WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!” If I’d rolled down the windows, other drivers would’ve pulled over to the side of the road, thinking they were getting out of the way for an ambulance. Of course, if I’d rolled down the windows, Barb would have grabbed me by the neck and not let go until I rolled them back up again.

It was so cold that this was one of those rare occasions that the dashboard thermometer displayed negative numbers. “MINUS THREE!” Barb whooped, pointing at the readout. “WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!” She explained later that whooping helps her keep warm.

We were visiting West High School because that’s the venue where Habitat for Humanity serves up their annual “Souper” Bowl. Pay fifteen bucks, pick out a hand-thrown pottery bowl, sit down to a delicious bowl of hot soup and a droolingly good selection of breads, cookies and other baking, all donated by local restaurants, bakeries and other food services. To one side of the room you can watch high school students seated at pottery wheels cranking out bowls, some of them destined to be given away at next year’s Souper Bowl. On a stage at the front of the room, a local band played jazz to accompany the meal.

This is our second Souper Bowl since we came to Madison. Bizarrely, last year’s was on a bitterly cold Saturday night as well, and we had to park blocks away from West that time. I remember having some trouble moderating my speed between moving quickly enough to get in out of the cold, yet slowly enough that I wouldn’t slip and bust my butt on the icy pavement.

They served several kinds of soup, from chicken noodle to totally vegan. Barb had curried tomato, but got it exactly right when she said that tonight would be the perfect night for a bathtub-sized bowl of piping hot ramen. We’re never going to stop missing that stuff.

It was so cold today that the mantle clock on top of the book case in the hallway started ticking again. Don’t ask me how that makes a difference; I don’t know. It worked fine for a week or so after I bought it, then it stopped for no reason that I could determine and stayed stopped for several months. This morning its ticking was the first thing I notice when I stepped out of the bathroom and headed for the kitchen. The weather change is the only different thing I can think of, so I’m going to stick with that as the reason it started working again.

This morning the radio DJ read a list of school closings that went on and on for a full minute. 49 school districts across southern Wisconsin were closed. Why? It was sixteen degrees below zero.

Tim said that they cancel classes at his school when the temp drops below zero because most of Monona Grove’s students live in Cottage Grove, a boom town about five miles outside Monona, so nearly everybody gets to school by bus, and they don’t want all those kids waiting outside in the cold. That, and the buses are pretty hard to start when it gets so cold.

(Last year, a couple students unplugged the engine heaters on the school busses to get a day off. The busses are parked on an open lot next to the school, easy to get to, and the night was cold enough to transform the fuel and lubricants in those diesel engines to glue. The kids got their day off, but weren’t smart enough not to get caught, so it’d be pretty hard to argue the game was worth the candle.)

When his mother told Tim he could stay in bed because school was canceled, he was so happy he reached out to her using the same grateful gesture shipwrecked men used to reach out to their rescuers. “Hug me!” he begged her, and she did.

Barb, though, was pretty bummed. “Why doesn’t the DOT close when it’s cold?” she whined.

“Because they can’t afford to, dearest,” I reminded her. “You know that.” No one branch of the state government will shut down unless they all shut down. Or, to put it another way, you can’t stay home from work unless the Governor says you can. If he does, it’s a paid day off. Them’s the rules, and since it would cost a gajillion dollars, he doesn’t do that, ever.

Sometimes I wonder how many people have avoided reading William Langewiesche’s books or stories because they were faced with having to make an attempt to pronounce his name. Now that you can punch his name into a computer terminal it’s not such a big deal; the only challenge is in remembering how to spell his family name, almost as daunting as trying to say it. I’ve tried just once, and ended up mumbling something like LANG weesh, a verbal mangling that would probably make the author either grimace or smirk. If I were to try again, I’d rhyme his name with sandwiches. Smirk.

I’ve read two other books by Langewiesche before this: Cutting For Sign, about illegal immigration, and American Ground, a grittily detailed description of the clean-up and rescue efforts in the area of Manhattan now known as Ground Zero in the weeks following the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The night before last I picked up The Outlaw Sea and I’ve put it down only to sleep, eat, go to work and, occasionally, pee. Langewiesche’s style is to examine an issue from all sides, compiling a mountain range of information, then distil it to a stream of prose that is not only easy to understand, but fun to read. Setting the book aside was an effort.

The first third of the book is about piracy. We have the book because Tim has outlined his plans to become a pirate some day. His mother gave him the book for Christmas so his expectations of this career wouldn’t be entirely based on Johnny Depp movies.

The middle, and longest, section of the book examines the sinking of an Estonian ferry on the Baltic Sea. I found it fascinating, if a bit dryly clinical and perhaps fifty pages too long. The last third, the shortest part, takes an almost lyrical look at the industry of scrapping ships, which these days is done almost entirely by the poorest people of Bangladesh and India.

For my bed time reading last night I blasted through Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and I have to say that, after waiting in the library’s virtual queue for six weeks to read it, I was a bit disappointed. I’d read in newspaper and magazine articles that Harris has insisted, almost ferociously, that American society should engage in a rigorous discussion of the pathological nature of religion, a notion that intrigued me given the present state of ideological conflict in the world. I picked up Letter to a Christian Nation expecting to find a logically air-tight demolition of religious ideals, and maybe it is for him and for a few others, but it didn’t work for me.

I frankly admit that maybe I was expecting too much. I wouldn’t have the first idea how to logically demolish anybody’s faith in anything, and I’m not sure it can be done, seeing as how it usually encompasses ideas that can’t be logically proven in the first place. Although honestly, I’d like to see somebody give it a more effective try than this. Harris began the book by handily pointing out a few of the logical contradictions in the Bible, a rather worn-out argument but I was willing to give him that to build on. Once he got that out of the way, though, the rest of the book felt like little more than a collection of anecdotes, and by the time I got to the end of the book I felt as though I’d just spent an hour (it’s a very slim volume) in a cosmological day room discussion with a bunch of tripped-out college freshmen.

I’ve read about sleep cycles, but nothing drives a point home like experience. I cycle in and out of deep sleep like a Formula One racer through a pit stop, and my laps through light sleep seem to get longer as the clock ticks on toward morning. When the alarm bleeps at five-thirty I’m usually awake anyway.

Except for today. This morning, I was in the pit stop. My alarm clock bleeped for quite a while before I was even aware that alarm clocks existed in my universe. I hate it when that happens, because I wake up feeling about as ready to face the world as a cold, limp French fry. Not even a hot shower or a strong cup of coffee will put things right; nothing less than a hard slap in the face by the cold hand of reality will do the trick. Fortunately, there’s lots of that stuff around.

When somebody holds the elevator for me, I try to show my gratitude in every little way I can. Today, it was by looking at the floor the other rider had chosen and deciding it wouldn’t kill me to walk down to four from five. If she saw me head straight for the stairs as I left the elevator she might not realize that I was trying to do her a favor and simply think I was a weirdo instead, but I was willing to take that chance. Funny thing is, she followed me into the stairwell herself and walked up to six. Now, just what in hell was that all about?

Tim bought an X-Box today, and I helped him do it.

Stylistically, this is when I would want to say something like, “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” but it didn’t, not when he proposed it to me, not when I did it, not ever. He blew almost five hundred bucks on a glorified Game Boy in order to play a game called Gears Of War. Okay, granted, it’s a really cool-sounding name. Makes no sense, but sounds cool.

He wanted to order it on-line, and I’ve got a credit card. That’s how I figured into his little deal. For four-hundred fifty-nine dollars and ninety-seven cents he became the owner of enough computer power to launch a coordinated, multipronged, two-hemisphere attack of intercontinental ballistic missiles, except that the awesome hulking power of his console has been harnessed exclusively to play games. In fact, he bought it to play just one game. He bought it expressly to play Gears Of War. After scrimping to save a few hundred more dollars he might buy and play another game, but for the nonce he’s a happy camper. He’s ga-ga for that game.

Codger Vision: I remember the olden days when we played “board games,” so-called because they were printed on a piece of cardboard instead of flashing across a television screen or computer monitor. To move the army men across the board we pushed them with our fingers; there was no mouse, no arrow key pad and in order to find out who got shot and who didn’t, we rolled dice. Biggest difference: A game lasted an hour, maybe two. None of us ever looked up from a board game and shouted, “Whoa! How’d it get to be four o’clock in the morning already?” Well, not until we learned how to play Risk, anyway.

Speaking of war games like Risk, I have to admit that I know where Tim’s coming from when he wants to blow several paychecks on a gaming computer to play what is basically a game of “Bang! You’re Dead!” I still own a copy of the Avalon Hill board game Starship Troopers, for which I paid eighty bucks, what would have been a princely sum measured against my nineteen seventy-seven wages. Unlike plug-and-play computer games, we had to read a twenty-page rule book, then pop out the little die-cut cardboard counters before we could ever hope to make the first move. A single move (maneuvering, attacking and defending) could take a half-hour when all the counters were in play, and we had to keep track of each character’s strength, hit points and weaponry with a pencil!

We thought that game was the cat’s ass. Looks like cave paintings now.

I had to go get my hair cut today because it’s been something like forty-two weeks since I’ve been to the barber and I was starting to look like a schnauzer at the end of a long winter, flyaway salt and pepper hair all over. Whenever that happens I give George at the Concourse Hotel a call and he usually gets me in right away. George does a great job for me, cuts it so it looks neat, but not like he had to cut and bale a bumper crop, even though there’s usually at least a bushel or two of freshly-cut hair in my lap when he’s done. I don’t know how he does that, but so long as he keeps doing it, I’ll keep going back.

During the winter months, though, when I can’t turn my head without generating enough static to light up the Aurora Borealis, he uses some kind of styling spray to make my hair stay put while he’s working. I won’t say anything because I like the results; he’s the professional, after all, so I defer to his education and experience. Unfortunately, the spray not only keeps my hair from standing straight up, it also makes me smell like a San Antonio cathouse for the rest of the day. The way I imagine a San Antonio cathouse smells, I mean. It’s a wild-ass guess. Although I’ve been to San Antonio, I’ve never visited a cathouse there. If you’ve been to a San Antonio cathouse, I invite you to come sniff my hair and tell me if I guessed right.

“Does your wife like your beard?” George asks me, every time I go in to get my hair cut. I tell him she says yes whenever I’ve asked her, and he says that’s what most women tell their husbands, but he’s also pretty sure that most women don’t like beards. “If you were trying to get dates, I’d advise you to shave off your beard,” he tells me. “Bearded men don’t get as many dates as clean-shaven men.” And that’s why I always try to tip George well. He not only gives me a great haircut, he’s looking out for me, too.

I had one heck of a time getting to the barber shop because it’s one floor down from the lobby and I haven’t found the stairs down yet, so I’ve always taken the elevator, but all three elevators were busy for several minutes, and when they finally stopped at the lobby I found out why. “The hotel’s full of Shriners!” I said to George as I settled into a seat.

“Yeah, and not one of them wants a hair cut,” he observed sadly.

After a hot cuppa joe to get the gears turning this morning, My Darling B and I hit the shower (one after the other; we’ve been married seventeen years so there’s not a lot of co-ed showering going on these days) (probably more than you wanted to know, but you comes to this page, you takes your chances; now, where were we?) and we headed into town where she wanted to get breakfast and do a little shopping at the Dane County Farmer’s Market. They were serving crepes for breakfast today, big ones with little cupcake-like cheese cakes. I wasn’t feeling hungry for a crepe, and a good thing, too, because it was loaded with plenty of cheese, not the right way for me to start the day. I got myself a trail cookie and washed it down with more coffee.

Although the sun’s out and the sky’s clear today, it’s still only ten degrees. Once the air’s cold enough to feel like a slap in the face, warming it up ten degrees doesn’t make much of a difference. It’s still colder than a well digger’s ass. Make that a transvestite well digger wearing a brass bra, and maybe sitting on a brass monkey, too. (What is it about brass seem so cold?) The short walk from the car to the Farmer’s Market, right next door, made Barb start whooping again, and when we walked the hundred yards to the book store she whooped even more. Whooping cold: Even colder than freaking cold.

Because it was even colder than freaking cold, we stayed inside nearly all day long. There’s not a lot of incentive to go out when breathing in feels like sucking a pack of dimestore needles up your nose. Luckily, we stopped at Bongo Video on the way home Friday night, so we had a few movies to watch. I got Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels for Tim, who hadn’t seen it until this weekend. He gave it high marks, as I thought he would. Barb brought home the documentary Beauty Academy of Kabul, about a group calling themselves “Beauticians Without Borders,” who teach Afghani women how “to heal Afghanistan one hair cut at a time.” You think I’m making that up, but I’m not.

Barb had peanut soup with her dinner last night. Ever heard of peanut soup before? Neither have I. More than that, I would never in a million years have thought of making soup out of peanuts. And it didn’t look much like soup, either; it looked like creamy peanut butter somebody had added about a teaspoon of water to and nuked for about a minute in a microwave. Barb ate about half of it before she decided she didn’t like it. I could tell I didn’t like it from across the table.

I had the breakfast combo: scrambled eggs, fried potato slices and three thick strips of bacon (What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?) from the kitchen of Monty’s Blue Plate Diner, which had to be the busiest restaurant on Atwood Avenue last night. People stood waiting in line at the door the whole time we were there, and, having stood in line for fifteen minutes ourselves, we weren’t in any hurry to rush through our dinner. It had been a long week, and we were going to enjoy treating ourselves.

Whenever I find myself stuck head-first in the cramped spaces under the countertop, reaching around the pipes to beat a nail into the woodwork, I find myself wondering, David Byrne-like, “How did I get here?” I keep playing around with these fix-it projects as if I know what I’m doing but, truth be told, it’s all guesswork. I’m as amazed as anybody else when it works.

My task today was to close off the space under the sink, where all the odors from the garbage pail and bottles of noxious cleaning agents were free to mingle with the pots and pans in the cupboard next door. Whoever built the cabinet space under the kitchen counter fifty years ago did a fabulous job. For one thing, he knew how to cut mortises and tenons that fit together as snugly as sweethearts holding hands, and he probably did it in an afternoon. I’d sell my kids to slavers if I thought they could teach me that, but I’ve never been able to pick it up from anybody or any book.

But as good as he was at joining wood, whoever that guy was didn’t bother to close off the cupboards from the smelly open center section under the sink. I cut out the cupboards on the left to make room for the dish washer, but the cupboards on the right were still there, and still open, and when My Darling B batted her eyes at me and said she’d like it if there was a wall separating her clean dishes from the garbage pail, I was helpless to ignore her.

Not that it was hard. All I needed was a piece of quarter-inch plywood cut so that it wasn’t square any longer (nothing’s square in a fifty-year-old stick-built house) and somehow, inexplicably, I cut it right on the first try. Usually takes at least two, sometimes three attempts. Never four. After I get it wrong three times, I resort to beating it into place with the carpenter’s friend, a BFH: Big Freaking Hammer. Didn’t have to this time, though. The piece fit perfectly straight off the work bench, which made my heart flip-flop like the very first time I fell for a girl. You’d have to experience the frustration of a carpentry project gone horribly wrong to understand why.

After I had it cut to fit, and I nailed a rail in to hold the bottom edge, the rest was simple: All I had to do was lay on my side on the kitchen floor, stick my head in under the sink, reach around the drain pipes and hammer a few more nails around the edge of the plywood to fix it in place. Piece of cake, if you’ve got the flexibility and upper-body strength of an acrobat in the Cirque du Soliel. Since I didn’t, I flailed away with the hammer until I hit something. It was a good sign when I hit my fingers, because they were holding the nail I was aiming at, and I didn’t break any bones or bruise myself, so I think, all things considered, it went well.

Steve Canyon has been running for three weeks now on the web site Humorous Maximus, long enough for me to piece together a summary for you, in case you read it but forgot, or weren’t old enough to read back in 1948. No, no, don’t thank me; it’s what I love to do.

I used to read Steve Canyon every day, but that was in the 70’s, long after Wall Street tycoon and Joan Crawford look-alike Copper Calhoon all but disappeared from the strip. Her number-one henchman, the outrageously fey Mister Dayzee, saunters into the strip’s opening sequence and through the front doors of Canyon’s overseas shipping company, “Horizons Unlimited,” where he’s sassed by Canyon’s secretary in pretty much the same way Humphrey Bogart sassed Peter Lorre when they meet in The Maltese Falcon, probably for the same reasons.

Dayzee has been tasked by Copper Calhoon (the main characters of the comic strip hardly ever miss an opportunity to use her full name, even when addressing her directly) to hire Canyon for a round-the-world adventure. Calhoon owns “holdings” scattered all around the globe and wants to re-establish connections with them, lost during the war. Calhoon convinces Canyon to take the job by buying the mortgage on his plane, then inviting him around to her place and having two or three of her thuggish bodyguards try beat the crap out of him when he gets there. I can’t see how that would work, but I don’t know much about business. Canyon wipes up the floor with all of them, natch.

The installments of the past last three weeks have conclusively proved that Canyon’s the perfect pick for the job. How? First, because he’s an ex-Army pilot, making him stalwart, true, and red-blooded as they come. Second, because he’s ruggedly, devastatingly handsome. Calhoon takes one look at his 8 x 10 color glossy photo and commands Dayzee, “Hire him!” Lastly, he can beat up three guys even when they’ve got the drop on him.

To summarize the story up to today’s Sunday strip: Dayzee took a few lumps stepping in to break up the fight. Then, as Calhoon fussed over Canyon’s cuts and bruises, Dayzee revealed himself to be an alarmingly jealous sociopath, conspiring with Kroon, one of the bodyguards, to knock off Canyon while they’re on the upcoming round-the-world trip. Meanwhile, Calhoon cozied up to Canyon by using the old “have a look at this map” con to move in close, and he was mezmerized by her Crawfordian eyebrows, arched higher than McDonald’s. Now, Canyon has to figure out how to tell the rest of his crew that they’re owned lock, stock and barrel by Calhoon.

I hate missing a day. I meant to get downstairs and spend a good, long time rapping out an endless piece of drivel tonight, but I got caught flat-footed by the television schedule. I completely, utterly forgot tonight was Monday night, the night Heroes goes back-to-back with Studio 60. I was sitting there in my easy chair, reading science fiction shorts out of a book so thick you could use it as a sofa leg, when Barb said something like, “Half-hour to go.”

And I said something stunningly perceptive, like, “Huh?” I caught on eventually, didn’t have enough time to finish the story I was reading but got within a couple pages of the end during the commercials — there are enough commercials in an hour-long television program to read the first four volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica if you skim.

I was supremely disappointed in this week’s installment of Heroes, mostly because they very strongly hinted — no, I’m pretty sure they came right out and said that one of the heroes was going to die, and I got the idea it was going to be the mind-reading cop, probably because they showed the homicidal bimbo throwing him out a window. She really did throw him out a window, but he didn’t die. Nobody died.

Wait, one guy did die, a guy who can turn a toaster into a puddle with his brain. Now there’s a useful super power. He was introduced about five minutes before Syler walked into the room, cut his head open and ate his brains. Too bad for him.

Meanwhile, the writers of Studio 60 were trying to prop up their flagging show by exploring the dark side of Matt, who, it turns out, is a full-blown pill-popper. A visiting musician spotted his blown pupils before you could say one-Mississippi, but Matt’s best friend Danny, who is a recovering cocaine user, somehow doesn’t suspect. Weird. And the episode wasn’t all that funny, except for the previews of next week’s show when the baby’s eyes popped out and jangled around on bed springs, which wasn’t technically part of the episode, but I’m going to give them that anyway.

Then I went down to my basement lair, which is a lot more habitable now that the temperature down there isn’t cold enough to turn me to an Omansicle, and banged out this meaningless ramble, while simultaneously banging my knees on the underside of the desk again and again. I’ve written at that desk since 1990 and I’ve never worked out a way to cross my legs while sitting at it. It’ll always be painful no matter what I do.

The story I was reading was a 1993 story by Nancy Kress called Beggars in Spain, about people who are genetically engineered to not sleep. Seemed like a good story, too. If I could skip sleeping, I could’ve finished it tonight.

I’m no good at matching socks, not when I’m wide awake, and certainly not first thing in the morning when I’m trying to get dressed in a hurry.

Trouble is, first thing in the morning is when the job gets done because I put it off when I’m wide awake. Who wants to waste precious nap time sorting socks, right? So they get rolled up into a great big wad and stuffed into the sock drawer.

Actually, to be more frank with you (and I’ve been frank, right? Possibly a lot more frank than you’ve wanted, much of the time), they usually get left behind by whoever folds the laundry and migrate to a single basket. Most mornings at about quarter to seven you’ll find all the O-Folk fishing through that basket trying to match a pair of socks. Being lazy is a curse when it comes to things like this. Well, strictly speaking, being lazy is a curse, period, full stop.

Sometimes I think socks are part of our maze. You know how scientists study the behavior of rats by training them to run through a maze to get the cheese? Some higher power is studying how we deal with life by making us wash our clothes. I think socks somehow record the results. That’s why they go missing one at a time. The researchers don’t realize we can tell the difference between a singly and a pair; they figured we’d never catch on. That’s what I think, anyway.

Blue potatoes. Our dinner last night (and tonight; there was enough for leftovers) included blue potatoes. Tasted just like regular white potatoes, but they were blue, and not just near-blue, like purple-but-we’re-gonna-call-it-blue — blue. The next time somebody makes the dumb remark, “Did you ever notice there’s no blue food?” you can tell them from me that there is.

Here’s the thought that ran through my head as I walked back up the stairs from the break room, spilling coffee on my hand: What the heck is “religiosity,” anyway? I should have been thinking, Crap, that coffee’s hot! But I’d just read a story about Barack Obama and the word “religiosity” got stuck in my noggin, repeating itself on a seemingly uninterruptible loop. Was it even a real word? It sounded made up. I know, they all are if you go back far enough, but I mean recently. Last week, say.

When I tried to think of words that sounded like it, to figure out what it meant, words like “curiosity,” “monstrosity” and “perspicacity” popped into my head. That last one went for a few laps around my phonological loop before sideswiping “religiosity” and exploding into a Nascar-esque ball of flames and smoke. Too bad. I liked the sound of that one.

Backtracking a bit, I found myself pondering: If the noun form of “curious” is “curiosity,” and “monstrous” morphs into “monstrosity,” (and “perspicacious” turns higgledy-piggledy into “perspicacity” — that’s just too much fun to say), then I guess it only makes sense that the noun form of “religious” ought to be “religiosity.” But I thought it was “religion.” Weird.

What is it about the combination of chocolate and cherries that makes people gag?

Like everybody else in the office, I keep a candy jar on my desk. That way I have something to lure passing Germanic children within arm’s reach when I need filling for meat pies. (Do parents even give their kids nightmares by reading them Grimm’s fairy tales any more? And why did they think it was a good idea back when I was growing up?)

For the past two days my candy jar’s been filled with Valentine’s Day Hershey’s kisses, specially made with a creamy cherry filling. Not an actual cherry, like a cordial, but cherry-flavored high-fructose corn syrup ... and I mean high fructose. This is sugar refined to a concentration so intense it can strip the enamel off all thirty-two teeth if you take too long chewing it. But it’s unmistakably cherry-flavored, which is apparently a problem with most of the people who would ordinarily pry the top off my candy jar with an urgently clawed hand and snorfle up all the sweeties with the puckered lips of a sow rooting for truffles. Ze fungal Frrronch kind, not the chocolates, although I’d bet the sow would go for the chocolates, if she only knew.

Chris was the first to check out the new candies. (I was going to change his name to protect the innocent, but he’s not what you’d call bashful about visiting the candy jars in the office, so there’s not a lot of innocence to protect there, if you ask me.) He popped the lid off the jar, spied the red foil wrappers and guessed, “These are cherry-flavored, aren’t they?”

“You betcha,” I answered with a big grin, fully expecting him to scoop up a handful. I was absolutely gobsmacked when he bunged the jar and walked away empty-handed. Two more visitors didn’t even bother to pop the top open, and my dear Auntie Sue wrinkled her nose at them and declared it was fundamentally wrong to taint chocolate with anything other than more chocolate. The jar was still half-full at the close of business today, two day after Penny filled it. Under normal conditions, with any other kind of candy, I’ve seen it empty within thirty-six hours after filling.

I may be the only person who’s eaten any candy from it, come to think of it. Practically speaking, it’s mine ... ALL MINE! BWA! HA! HA! HA! I could give myself a mind-bending sugar rush from now until next Wednesday if I still had the copper plumbing I used to have when I was a kid and could gobble candy by the bag full. Nowadays, the plumbing’s more like poorly-soldered tin. (I think that’s a good way to put it, anyway. It’s leakier, anyway.)

I learned long ago that, even if I got to the Whitman’s sampler long after everybody else did, I could have all the cherry cordials I wanted, and so, by dint of Darwinian adaptation, I grew a sweet tooth especially for them. But I still think it’s odd. I don’t like cherries by themselves. My Darling B, on the other hand, will wolf down a heaping bowl of them, and she adores all kinds of chocolates, but she doesn’t care for cordials, and she’s just one of dozens who’ve said that to me. Why? They’re just as sugary, sloppy and chocolaty as, say, a crème-filled bon-bon.

Not that I’m complaining. As I said, I get all I want.

Happy Saint Valentine’s Day.

Item: A polling service somehow got 1,840 video game players (“gamers,” if you’re hip to the lingo) to stop playing shoot-em-up long enough to take a survey that revealed, among other things:

Seventy-eight percent of all guys aged twelve to seventeen play video games at least once a week.

Sixty-two percent played two, but not more than three times a week, except right after they bought a new game; then, they couldn’t stop playing until they passed out for lack of eating.

Fifty-five percent said they played less than once every day, by their count. Way more than once a day by their mother’s.

Forty-eight percent played twice a day for at least two hours, or until they had to pee, but twenty-seven percent of this group said they didn’t have a problem with peeing their pants.

Thirty-three percent couldn’t stop playing long enough to finish the survey.

I made up every single bit of that, except for the very first line, the part when the gamers said they planed “once a week.” Right. That’s a pretty brassy lie those droolers are telling, unless they count “once a week” as “five-thirty Friday night to four o’clock Monday morning.” Or maybe it’s the “at least” part they’re stretching like a pair of dime store pantyhose.

The same survey found that, by the time gamers grow into the 18-to-34 year old bracket, only forty-two percent are still playing at least once a week, and by the time they cross the line into 35-to-44 year old territory, their numbers shrink even further to just twenty-four percent. Analysts name a bunch of reasons for the obvious decline in a gamer’s need to shoot everything he sees (Can you believe college-educated analysts are getting paid to think about this?), such as:

Some games are so complicated they take hours to learn, and bring on headaches, cramps and other physical ailments. So it’s almost like a physical workout, in spite of critics who deride gamers as couch potatoes.

Gamers get bored with their games, hard as that may be to believe, particularly when they’re still in playing-round-the-clock-mode.

Gamers have other things to do. Or, put another way, they get a life.

By a twist of cosmic fate, I found this news bulletin on the same day that Tim took delivery of his brand-spanking-new X-Box, an overmuscled computer custom-built to do nothing but play video games — in this case, a shoot-em-up called Gears of War. When we came home from work yesterday, we found Tim parked in front of his shiny new console, trying to figure out how to push all the buttons on the game controller in the right combination to make bullets fly, grenades blow up, and commit various and sundry other acts of messy mayhem.

He gushed over his new toy like a school girl with a crush. He wasn’t exactly what you’d call articulate about it, though, keeping his remarks maddeningly vague, usually along the lines of, “This is so awesome!”

“What’s there about this game that makes it better than the other games like this you’ve played?” I asked him.

“It’s just ...” and here he would sputter and wave his hands in the air, unable to convey the waves of awesomeness he felt for this awesomely awesome toy. “... way better than any other game.” Seeing that he wasn’t clearly communicating the totality of his feelings about the experience, he added, “It just is.”

Well. All right, then.

Jingle, jingle, jingle went the loose spare change in my shirt pocket as I hurried up Carroll Street into a headwind so bitterly cold it felt as violent as a backhand slap. When you top the hill at Main Street, the wind coming off the lake has a clear shot at you, thanks to Hamilton Street. Bundle up as tightly as you can, zip your down coat all the way up to your chin, wrap a scarf around your face and wear your warmest earmuffs — you might as well be wearing a layer of cheese cloth, for all the good it’ll do you.

Jingle, jingle, jingle, went the change again, and I thought, That’s funny, I don’t remember putting any change in my shirt pocket. Even funnier than that, though, was when the loose change fell out of my shirt pocket and got stuck between my undershirt and my belt line.

When I was finally save inside the stairwell at work, the first place warm enough that I felt I could take off my gloves without losing feeling, I groped around under my jacket. My probing fingers could find just two coins under the fabric of my shirt, and that’s when I figured it out: I’d frozen my nipples off.

That’s how cold it was here today, kiddies.

“For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with Iran,” said secretary of defense Robert Gates just the other day, trying to quiet the press. “We are not planning a war with Iran.”

And just a few days before the November elections, President Bush tried to get the press to kill rumors that Donald Rumsfeld would resign from the post of secretary of defense, the job Gates holds now, by saying something like, Rumsfeld’s going to be my secretary of defense for as long as I’m president.

Yikes. So I guess we’ll be going to war with Iran after all.

“Well, look at you,” Barb congratulated me, as I turned on the garbage disposal without opening the cupboard and reaching deep into the nether regions beside the sink, where spider webs, centipedes and who knows what else might be lurking.

Actually, I know. I’ve had my head up there a few times in the last couple weeks. It wasn’t too bad, but I still got the creeps groping around in there. Until last night, though, we had to reach up there in order to run the disposal. It must’ve been a do-it-yourself project many moons ago. That’s the only reason I can think of for mounting the switch under the sink, behind the cupboard door.

We’ve been living with that for almost a year, but last night I got the home improvement itch, started measuring a spot where I could mount a switch on the front of the cupboard, and next thing I knew, I was leaning into a power drill. After boring four neat holes in the fascia in front of the sink, I was pretty much committed to the project.

There’s something about cutting up your house that’s intoxicating. I suppose it doesn’t have to be a house; I’d bet I’d feel pretty giddy if I started hacking away at anything for which I’d paid several hundred thousand dollars. Since I’ve only bought one thing that falls into that category, though, cutting up our house is the only experience I can speak from.

It took a little while to cut the hole I needed for the switch because the guy who built the cupboard under the kitchen counter (I’m pretty certain it was a guy, but if it wasn’t, apologies to Rosie) used inch-thick plywood when he made that little slotted facing you find under the sink on so many old-fashioned — excuse me, retro cupboards. Bullets bounce off inch-thick plywood. I made a lot of sawdust and worked up an impressive sweat cutting that little hole (by hand — An electric drill is about the only power tool I routinely use), and thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have to fiddle around with a rasp trying to grind away at the edges to make it any bigger. I somehow got the size right the first time.

The rest was an extremely basic two-wire connection to a designer switch, and voy-lah! Well, not so voy-lah right away. It was a switch meant to be a pair that controlled one light, so I had to swap the wires around to get it to work, but it worked on the second try! Voy-lah again! And the rest is history.

I’m used to searching for my car in a crowded parking lot by looking at the wheel covers. There are about a million six charcoal-gray Toyota Camrys in the Madison metro area, and the rest appear to be a ripoff of the Camry body style. We should’ve asked for a banana yellow Camry. That would’ve stuck out.

But for some reason the wheel covers on our car are very nearly one of a kind — I’ve seen them on just one other Toyota, and it wasn’t a charcoal gray Camry but a blue Corolla. I’m thinking our dealer busted the original wheel covers on our car and swapped them out with a Corolla’s, or one of the covers popped off while they were driving it across town to deliver it, or something equally bland. It might have been ham-fisted of them, but I’m damned glad it happened that way because it gives me just about the only clue to finding my car again after I step out of Menard’s and am faced with a couple hundred gray Camry look-alikes.

I’ve gotten so used to looking at the wheel covers that I hardly look at the car any more, so when I came out of Menard’s this afternoon and went straight for the car I thought was mine I was startled back into reality when I reached for the door handle and saw a car that didn’t look like mine at all. Crap! I thought, stepping away a little bit and reaching for my key fob. But when I fobbed the LOCK button to make my car answer up, the car right in front of me bleeped and the lights flashed.

What the hell?

I peered inside. It was my car! And that’s when I realized that Barb must’ve had it washed when she went out hunting for Asian food stores this afternoon. Until she came home, our car was a dingy ashen color from collecting layer after layer of road salt for weeks on end. All the gas station car washes were closed during the cold snap, and we hadn’t had the time to go out of our way to see if Octopus was open, so our car slowly turned the color of dirty snow, and I got used to seeing it that way. Looks pretty odd as a charcoal-gray car once again.

If there’s anything with more potential for fun than a convention center packed bellybuttons-to-buttcheeks with train geeks and their toys, I can’t think of it right now. Not that you can do in public, anyway.

I spent the better part of yesterday wandering the aisles between about a gajillion vendor’s booths and model train layouts at the local convention center. It wasn’t something you’d want to do if you weren’t a train geek. In fact, when I finally took a break to eat the sandwich I’d packed for lunch, I took a seat at a table where a woman was happily listening to whatever her ear buds were plugged into, which turned out to be the Badger’s game. “My husband’s into trains, not me,” she explained. “I’m just along for the ride.” I didn’t ask why her husband didn’t drop her off at the Badger’s game, or why she didn’t listen to the game in the comfort of her own home instead of sitting in an uncomfortable plastic stacking chair parked dead in the middle of a convention center filled with thousands of people radiating non-sport-related geekiness.

As for myself, I had a great time, although to be honest I wish there’s be a few more bargains on the vendor’s tables, and at shows I’ve been to previously I’ve seen a lot more modeling demonstrations and seminars, but there was almost nothing of that sort on offer yesterday. On the very positive side, I met a guy who deals in train memorabilia and invited me over to have a look at his collection, which apparently fills most of his house. Sounds like something I’d have to set aside an entire afternoon for, if I wanted to do it right.

There’s more to this, if you can stand it, on a separate web page, so I won’t go into it in any more detail here. I won’t be offended if you breathe a sigh of relief.

I had the song Alabama Get-Away stuck in my head all morning long. It’s bad enough to have an inane pop song playing in an endless loop in your head for hours; it’s so much worse when the only words you know to the song are “Alabama get-away, get-away, Alabama get-away, get-away ...” Might as well just hit yourself over the head with a hammer until you can’t feel it any more.

The object of Gears of War, like almost every other video game on the planet these days, is to shoot every ugly alien you see. Or, to be more specific (by paradoxically using more general terms): Kill every animate object you see. You can do that by shooting at them, and for much of the game that’s the most desirable method; you don’t want the ugly aliens to get too close to you. You can also blow them up with grenades, punch them out and stomp their heads to mush, and chain saw them to pieces. But you can do that only to the ugly aliens. You can’t shoot your own guys, a pretty handy loophole once you learn to exploit it. So if it moves, try to kill it.

That’s pretty much it. Everything else is eye candy, if you have a sweet tooth for the sight of bombed-out buildings, greasy, slug-like aliens that puke on you from overhead, flayed corpses swinging from meat hooks, and your own virtual blood spraying away when aliens armed with hand-held cannon blast away at you.

When that happens, duck behind one of the many huge chunks of rock scattered everywhere in the streets. In a few seconds you’ll be right as rain. The aliens can kill you only when you stand fully exposed to the unending storm of bullets they fire your way when you’re dumb enough to do that.

Or I should say, when I’m dumb enough to do something like that. I used to like video games and played them a lot, but that was back when they were no more than one or two generations more complicated than Pong. Gears of War has a controller with two joy sticks, two triggers, two toggles, four buttons and a fruggen kitchen sink. To shoot at something, you have to a) get behind some cover, b) rotate the right joy stick to get your target in about the middle of the screen, c) press the left trigger to zoom in while d) simultaneously rotating the right joy stick to center the bull’s eye on your target, then e) squeeze the right trigger to open fire on the bastard. In the mean time he’s started running, so you’ve got to f) rotate the right joy stick to keep the bull’s eye on him.

My biggest problem is that, when I want to move the bull’s eye down, I press the joy stick forward. This raises the bull’s eye. “It’s almost more fun to watch you,” Tim said, laughing, as I fired wildly into the air and the aliens rushed forward to bash my brains in. I tried to chain saw them but I could only get that to work once or twice.

That’s right, I said “chain saw.” The rifle doesn’t have a bayonet on the end, it has a chain saw that not only messily dismembers any ugly aliens in your personal space, it appears to spray a gory mess all over your television screen. Nice touch, eh?

I wanted to give it my best shot, just to see what all the fuss was about, but at this point, I’m thinking that the new Nintendo game console, the one with the controls you wave around in the air and has nothing more gory or violent than a tennis game, is more my speed. I could devote hours of my free time attempting to master control of a targeting system more complicated than a quadratic equation, or I could curl up with a nice history book. A sixteen-year-old would rather do the former; a forty-six-year-old the latter.

When I logged into the library’s web site to put in a request for John Scalzi’s book The Android’s Dream three or four months ago, the software told me I was number 3.25 million in line. It was such a long wait that, when I got an e-mail last Friday letting me know The Android’s Dream was in and I had three days to pick it up, I had almost entirely forgotten I’d asked for it.

I dropped what I was reading — Reading Lolita in Tehran — and wolfed down the Scalzi book over the weekend because it was a 14-day checkout and I knew Tim would want to read it, too. Scalzi’s witty space opera reminded me a bit of Douglas Adams’ book A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, especially the officious interplanetary bureaucrats and computers with people personalities. The ex-army guy who bodyguards the savior of the race across the galaxy, though, kept evoking an image of Bruce Willis in the film The Fifth Element, especially when they escaped Earth on the interplanetary cruise ship. I don’t mean to say Scalzi’s book was derivative, just that it seemed to be paying homage by the ton to other works, starting with the title on the cover: One of science fiction’s most notable works is Phillip K. Dicks novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The Android’s Dream was a lot more fun than Reading Lolita In Tehran, but I was glad to get back to it, a memoir of the Islamic Revolution in Iran by a professor of English Literature who was teaching, or trying to, even while her course of study was officially banned as decadently Western. Well, duh. If it’s Western, it must be decadent, by golly.

While I was in the library last Friday to pick up Scalzi’s book, though, I had to pass the “Too Good To Miss” table (gotta find a way to avoid that) and spied a copy of The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was a member of the Dutch parliament until death threats from radicals drove her into hiding, and then out of the Netherlands altogether. I’d just read good reviews of her memoir, Infidel, and because Reading Lolita in Tehran had piqued my interest in learning more about how women are treated under Islamic law, I not only ended up checking out Caged Virgin, I asked the library web site to hold Infidel for me, as well. It’s too ambitious by half, but that’s not the end of this week’s literary overkill.

When I came home today there was a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in the mailbox. Mom recommended it, and she’s never steered me wrong, so when I found a copy on Paperbackswap.com I put in a request but I didn’t expect it to arrive for weeks, dammit! I don’t have time to read all this!

Barb and I stayed in town after work tonight to see author Sarah Vowell give a reading at the Memorial Union. Apparently, so had everybody else in the Lake Street parking garage, because by the time we got back to our car and were ready to pull out, there was a long, unmoving line of cars backed up from the exit to the other end of the lot, around the corner and up the ramp to the next level. After waiting five minutes or so for an opening that never appeared, I shifted the car back into park and put my hands in my lap.

From around the corner, somebody started honking his horn.

So that’s how you get the line moving again! I wish I’d thought of that!

Funny thing, though: The line didn’t move. Nobody even looked around to see who was honking. Then, from just around the bend, Mister Honky-Horn popped out of his car, stepped around the front and glared at the line to see just what the heck could possibly be holding up his very important personage. All he could make out was about what you’d expect, a line of people too dim to use the pre-pay ticket machine, so we had to wait while one driver after another dredged the appropriate amount of change from his coat pockets. Nothing unusual there.

It’s kind of fun to listen to Sarah Vowell read her stuff because she sounds — can I say ordinary, without being mean? She sounds so ordinary, like somebody I would know, except that she’s written several books and I don’t know anybody like that.

First she read three or four of her pieces, then she had the stage hands turn the house lights up and took questions from the audience. I wish she had just kept reading, mostly because the audience didn’t ask questions I cared to hear the answers to. Truth be told, I thought most of the questions were pretty dumb, and if I’d been her I would’ve asked them to turn the house lights back down and pulled out another book. That’s just me. But we already know how warm and fuzzy I can be.

There was one question, though, from a woman behind me who asked Ms. Vowell if she’d consider writing a history book for fifth graders, which seemed to perplex her. She said she’d been asked that before and didn’t know why she would have to write specifically to kids, but I heard the question from the perspective of somebody who wishes he’d read her books many years ago. I would’ve taken a much greater interest in history if I’d read the kind of history books she likes to write, and maybe that’s what the questioner meant to ask about.

“Your anti-virus subscription will expire in 2 days,” my laptop informed me after I booted it up. “Do you want to renew?”

What I really wanted to do was check my mail real quick before supper, but I figured protection from viruses was sort of important, so I hit the “yes” button, figuring it would take, what, fifteen minutes, maybe a half hour?

An hour at the most?

I can be such an incredible weenie, can’t I?

Three hours, two downloads and at least a half-dozen restarts later, my laptop was at last finished re-installing the anti-virus software, updating the anti-virus keys and activating all the connections with the anti-virus home page. I could have hunted down and removed all the viruses on my computer with a spy glass and tweezers in half the time.

I finished Reading Lolita In Tehran this afternoon and, if I haven’t already recommended this memoir of the Islamic revolution in Iran, I’ll do it now, if you don’t mind. The author, Azar Nafisi, was a professor of English literature who was invited to take a post teaching at the University of Tehran at the beginning of the revolution and stayed in Iran for the next eleven years. She taught on and off as conditions permitted, and because they didn’t permit it much, she formed a small study group of her most dedicated students, invited them round to her house once a week, and taught the class from her living room over coffee and pastries. Her memoir used the literature of Fitzgerald, Austen and James to illustrate the weakness of a regime that perverted religious belief into political dogma. It’s an especially poignant book in these contentious times.

The cat loved it when we dangled a little feathered, beaded toy with bells over her head, but she usually got pretty excited about playing with it and her claws are kind of sharp, so I tied the toy to the end of a stick with some string. Worked like a charm. One of us could dangle the toy over her all day, she could get as crazy as she wanted, nobody got hurt.

Another great feature of this new, improved toy is that you can jam one end of the stick into a laundry basket so the feathered toy continues to dangle long after the human at the other end has grown tired of playing cat games. One hitch to note, though: In this configuration, the high end of the stick is in juuuust the right place to reach the crotch of anybody who happens to be about six feet tall and might be stumbling through the living room on a dark morning. Oh, one more important detail: When the room is lit by nothing but the feeble light from the sodium streetlamp outside, the stick is so close to completely invisible as to make no difference. And the end of the stick seems to somehow become sharper in the dark. Have I covered everything? I think I have.

About six inches of snow fell last night, and the forecast called for even more through the weekend.

Whenever we get snow in a Big Dump like this, one question inevitably comes up in every circle of people standing around talking about it: “Have you got a snow blower?”

I don’t, but there are times I wish I had one. On a morning like this one, for instance, and particularly after I’ve gotten about halfway down the left side of the driveway. By that point I have to take a short break after every third or fourth shovel full and bend over backwards until I look like a question mark to work the stiffness out of my lower back.

I would have two big problems with owning a snow blower, though: First, we have no place to put one. There’s barely enough room in our 1950-era garage for a modern Toyota sedan. Most snow blowers big enough for me to take seriously are the size of easy chairs. I sometimes root around in our garage for a full afternoon trying to find enough room to hang an extra shovel or rake.

Second, if I had spent the five-hundred dollars for the snow blower that would be able to handle the six inches of heavy, wet snow that covered our driveway this morning, this would’ve been exactly the second time I’d have been able to use it this winter. Some day, maybe, my back won’t give me enough support to lift that shovel, but until then we’ve got a lot of other things I’d rather spend that much money on.

There’s just one other thing about owning a snow blower that I’m not keen on: By all indications they kill off brain cells. Or maybe they only somehow prevent your common sense from talking to the arm that turns the snow shooter thingy toward your yard instead of pointing it at the street. One way or another, I’m hoping there’s a sensible explanation, something to give me hope that modern medicine might someday find a cure to help these otherwise upstanding citizens.

If they’re doing it on purpose, though, I’m all for instituting martial law at the first sign of snowfall, and summary execution of anybody found throwing snow into the street.

My Darling B and I drove from Monona into downtown Madison this morning. We probably shouldn’t have, but the roads in Monona were so well-plowed that I figured they would be all over town. Not so. Madison seemed to have been caught with its blaze orange snow pants down around its ankles, but we didn’t realize that until we were in the Atwood-Schenk neighborhood, halfway into town. You go that far, you might as well press on. How much worse could it possibly be?

Not too much worse, but I’ll tell you what: It could’ve been a whole lot easier to drive along the roads if there was a city ordinance prohibiting the sale of snow blowers, and even snow shovels, to morons. I could’ve faced any direction and thrown a snowball — I would’ve hit somebody chucking snow into the street, guaranteed.

I’m sure there’s a really screwed-up line of reasoning that goes something like this: The plows will clear it off. That’s what we pay taxes for.

My reply to that, and it seems pretty reasonable to me, goes: They have cleared it off! You’re unplowing the road! And I sometimes throw the word “moron” in there somewhere, too.

The boy wanted a video game. He wanted it today. Trouble with that was, southern Wisconsin was under a winter storm warning, most of Madison was buried under about a foot of snow that the plows had only begun to clear away, and the video game he wanted was in a store at the East Towne Mall, far enough away that dozens, if not hundreds, of crazy drivers would have a chance to sideswipe, rear-end or t-bone us if we chanced a trip that long.

I told him no. He tried offering me money, an outright bribe, at first, but he doesn’t have anything like nearly enough money to bribe me for this job. After that, every favor I asked of him was met with a counter-offer. “Pass the salt” was immediately countered with, “I will if you take me to Best Buy.”

There was one thing I wanted to do, but couldn’t do alone, that I could ask him for. Our neighbor’s driveway was drifted over from the garage to the curb, and the city plows had sealed in the street end with a three-foot-high wall of slush that would freeze solid after the sun went down and the temps dropped. Sometimes she called to ask Tim to shovel it clear and offered him ten bucks for the favor, but today after the back-breaking work of helping me shovel our drive he flatly told his mother that he wouldn’t be doing any neighborly favors today.

“If you really wanted me to drive you all the way across town so you could buy that video,” I said, when I finally got around to asking him, “would you help me clear the neighbor’s driveway?” He said yes so quickly that I was pleasantly surprised. Didn’t have to haggle at all.

I knew shoveling the waterlogged snow at the end of the drive would be so heavy it would take both of us quite a while to move it, but the enormity of the job was much worse than I’d imagined. The bottom six inches of snow was muddy slush, and a shovel full of it weighed something like one point two million pounds, give or take. We hacked at it for about five minutes before Barbara, our neighbor, popped out of her kitchen door and thanked us, adding that she had already called her son-in-law, who would stop by shortly to clear the driveway with his plow. There are no words to describe the relief Tim and I felt to hear that.

A deal’s a deal, so I drove Tim to Best Buy where he picked up a copy of the shoot-em-up game he couldn’t wait another day to have. The main roads were clear but narrowed by the piles of snow heaped up along the curbs. Drivers turning onto the slushy side roads way to fast fishtailed widely, and drivers coming onto the main road from the side roads slid as their brakes locked up or the ABS stuttered, yet somehow I got all the way there and came all the way home without getting in an accident, or an almost-accident.

Please forget everything I said the other day about snow blowers. I want one. After shoveling a driveway covered in six inches of wet, not-very-fluffy-at-all snow, I want one bad. I want the biggest one they sell. No, I want one bigger than conventional snow blowers. I want something mounted on the front end of a truck, and not a puny Ford F-150 pickup truck — I want it mounted on a real truck, with a bed as big as a bungalow and at least three axles, ten tires, and a diesel engine that can pull a house off its foundation. I want the snow blower to shoot the snow backwards over the cab into the red-hot heart of an atomic reactor that instantly converted the snow to a deafening blast of steam shooting non-stop from a pair of exhaust pipes jutting at an angle from either side of the truck.

On a morning like this one I would fire that monster up, wheel it around the side of the garage from the back yard where I kept it chained up, and clear my driveway in one pass. Thirty seconds, I’m done.

Instead, I spent about a half-hour – or was it an hour? – clearing the driveway by hand, with the very able and enthusiastic help of the youngest O-man as rain showers spat down on us from clouds the color of dryer lint. That’s right, rain. What the hell’s up with that? Not only do we have to shovel six inches of snow, and not only is the snow packed tight and wet, but it rained on us while we shoveled. What an ugly way to start a morning.

It turned out there was an upside, though, as unlikely as it might’ve seemed to us at the time: We were greeted at the door by the smell of bacon as My Darling B fixed us brunch. Scrambled eggs and bacon is a special treat any time, but especially so after shoveling snow in a cold rain. I’m almost tempted to say it was worth the whole ugly effort.

My Darling B and I were browsing the shelves at the University Bookstore Friday night when the 1974 Tom T. Hall country music sensation “I Love” began to play on the overhead speakers. If you can’t recall the squoojy-woojy feel of this long-lost tune, I’m all too eager to refresh your memory:

I love little baby ducks
Old pickup trucks
Slow-moving trains
And rain
 
I love coffee in a cup
Little fuzzy pups
Wine in a glass
And grass

Got that stuck in your head now? Good. I want you to know I hated to do that to you, but misery loves company, and that song has been making me miserable for days. Isn’t that just about the most awful thing you’ve ever heard since your girlfriend read to you from Rod McCuen back in high school? I haven’t heard it since, well, probably 1974 or thereabouts, and was getting along just fine without it, thank you very much, and then the gooberhead in charge of background music at the University Bookstore decided to forgo the anonymous Muzak I would’ve hardly heard (and would’ve instantly forgotten), opting for the Tom T. Hall instead, so that now I hear those way-too-cute rhymes over and over until I want to slam my head in a door to make them stop.

Do you realize that, even now, there are people walking among us who adore that song? And if you happen to be one of them ... What the hell’s wrong with you, huh? I used to like writing on myself with a ball-point pen and eating glue, but I grew out of that. You’ve got to get past childish stuff like this or it’ll come back to haunt you again like Marley’s ghost, and this song is a perfect example. Let it go and move on!

I’m sorry, that was going too far. I’m a little twitchy from having that song in my head for three days.

Our radio was tuned to the local radio station this morning and I’m sure I saw Tim’s ears prick up every time he heard them mention “school closings,” but there was no joy in their words for him. A few rural schools were shut but here in the heart of our fair city the schools were apparently doing just fine. He couldn’t even get a two-hour delay, the booby prize of school closings.

This winter storm has somehow become THE BLIZZARD OF ‘07! Okay. I guess. Maybe. I mean, we had a lot of snow, and digging out our driveway was a pain, but when I think of blizzards I picture nightmare scenarios of houses buried up to the tops of their windows, teams of people digging holes as deep as granite quarries to rescue families trapped in their cars, and kids in baggy pants doing some really gnarly shredding across the ridges and chimneys of the neighborhood rooftops. That last one is more like an idle daydream of mine than a nightmare blizzard, but I thought I’d throw it in there anyway, for fun.

I admit the storm was pretty heavy — we did, in fact, get over a foot of snow, but it took all weekend to get there, the plows cleared it away toot sweet, nobody was stranded in killer snow drifts along the interstate, and this morning we all went back to work as if pretty much nothing happened. There were no power outages, nobody had to eat their dogs for sustenance or burn their furniture to keep warm. When morning broke outside our picture window this morning, the world was pretty. Vote “No” on The Blizzard of ‘07. There’s no reason for this mudslinging any longer.

My cubicle exploded! Or, more accurately, my cubicle has been exploded. A team of guys wielding power tools tramped into our office shortly after lunch today and started to break down all the cubicles until, about ninety minutes later, nothing was left but a jumble of fabric-covered panels and stacks of file drawers.

This was all in preparation for tomorrow when they’ll all come back and violently re-assemble the puzzle pieces until a new, improved office stands in place of the old one. I used to sit at an open cubicle at the center of an office suite. When they’re done sometime later tomorrow I’ll instead have a closed, office-like cubicle where I can close the door and take a nap after lunch. (Only kidding. Somebody would catch me. I snore.)

In the meantime I’ve been shunted to a temporary cubicle on the ground floor, sort of a foretaste of the cubicle I will eventually inhabit. The walls were preternaturally blank. I am considering decorating options. What do you think of this one? (click on the photo for a close-up)

I made the mistake last Friday of thumbing through the first few pages of my recently-acquired copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, just to see if I could get an idea, from the briefest of readings, mind you, what all the fuss was about. I intended to read no more than the opening paragraph, but you can’t tell much from only one paragraph, can you? Maybe from the first two. Three. No more than three.

Oh, hell. Once you’ve read three, you might as well give in and read to the end of the first chapter.

It was good. It was fun, too. I found myself making a little time here and there to read a chapter between household chores over the weekend, promising myself that at night I’d finish off The Caged Virgin, the book I’d put down to read Kavalier & Clay. I even left Virgin on my bedside table and even read two or three more essays from it, but finally, inevitably, I gave in. I’ve been wolfing down Kavalier & Clay whenever I know I’ll have fifteen or twenty minutes to spare.

After finishing my after-dinner chapter this evening I marked that I was halfway through the book, then just about blew a gasket when I checked the page number: 387! Reading three-hundred-plus pages in five days is pretty good mileage for me. On the other hand, I’m only half done. Double yikes.

I came this close (pinching together thumb and forefinger) to moving back into my remodeled cubicle this afternoon. The walls were up, the desk was in, but the power wasn’t on and there was no computer connection. I guess I could’ve moved in, but all I would’ve been able to do is sit there and imagine an office-like ambience.

The new cube is considerably larger than I thought it would be, certainly larger than the cubicle I used to have. This new one’s so big that the rest of the people in the office want to move a juke box in there and party. I’ve already been told that the office fridge and microwave are going to be in the corner by the door, where there’s plenty of room, not to mention a table and chairs where up to four people can sit and snarf down their Bird’s Eye Frozen Foods dinners while they discuss the latest plot points of this week’s episode of Gray’s Anatomy.

The electrician promised he’d be done hooking up the one-ten tomorrow, and I haven’t seen anybody from the I.T. department around lately but I know somebody who can hook me up. If nothing else, I should be able to move all my boxed-up crap back in before the close of business tomorrow. It could happen. I can dream.

The video game Tim wanted to buy the other day was not, by law, a video game that he’s allowed to have. How about that? That’s more than a little weird, isn’t it? It’s a video game. It looks like a cartoon. It’s made for kids. And somebody wrote a law prohibiting its sale to minors. If that’s not conclusive proof that too many legislators suffer from rectally-impacted cranial disorder, I don’t know what is.

The label on the cover of the game says it’s “Rated M for Mature audiences.” Really. I like that. In the game, you get to be an indestructible, superman-strong flying cop. Yeah, sounds pretty mature so far. The beat you walk is a city filled to busting with bad guys who are all more or less constantly shooting at you. You can shoot back with a wide selection of weapons you just happen to have on your person (of course), but the game has been designed to encourage you to find more imaginative ways of dealing with them. You could, for instance, pick up the first handy car you see, hoist it over your head and hurl it, bowling them over like pins on a hardwood alley. Again, I’m impressed by the level of maturity that’s evident in this game.

Myself, I don’t like the game. I think it’s vacuous crap, but so, in my opinion, are television shows like Deal or No Deal and American Idol, or public events like Nascar races, or anything that has to do with Rush Limbaugh, but I don’t think there should be a law against it. I’d really like it if there was a law against Rush Limbaugh, but if there was it would be a law at least as stupid as banning the sale of shoot-em-up games to minors.

Barb was pretty stunned to find we would have to pay federal income taxes this year, the first time we’ve ever had to pay the feds. (The state guys were another matter.) While we were in the military we always got our withholding refunded, one of the joys of being enlisted — in exchange for getting paid squat, they let you keep a lot of your money. Not all of it, but pretty much.

But that didn’t happen this year, our first full year working in the Land of Round Doorknobs. The single biggest mistake we made was that neither of us had taken the trouble to learn just how to figure out how much to withhold from our paycheck for taxes. An airman down at the military pay center used to just tell me how much to take out. We had to guess this time. Didn’t guess right. Rightly. Whatever.

So this is what I’ve got to say about the Bush tax cuts: Pppppttt! Thanks for nothing.

We finally returned our weekend rental movies ... yesterday morning. Sometimes I feel pretty stupid about picking out a movie to watch on Friday night, then not returning it until Tuesday morning, but I comfort myself with the rationalization that I’m supporting a local business. That almost makes the feeling of being stupid go away.

Supporting the hell out of business, really. It’s not much of a stretch to say Bongo might’ve been able to finance their move across town on the late fees they’ve collected from us. If there’s anybody else in the city of Monona who pays as much in late fees as we do, they’d have bring their overdue in a Wells-Fargo armored car.

One of last weekend’s movies was The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Through The Eighth Dimension, a delightful little piece of 80’s fluff featuring Peter Weller in the title role. He isn’t much remembered for it as he is for playing Robocop. If it means anything coming from me, I don’t think the movie tanked because of his performance, though. He and all the other actors in it tried their quirkiest to make a decent summer comedy. The writers and the director, unfortunately, seemed to be making up the story as they went along.

It has its moments, though. John Lithgow as the delightfully raving Doctor Emilio Lizardo, voguing through a series of Mussolini poses at the rail of a factory catwalk as he barks such memorable lines as, “Home is where you hang your hat!” in an outrageous Italian accent. Ellen Barkin vamping as the hard-bitten moll Penny Priddy, making her entrance in a beaded flapper dress. And Weller’s Buckaroo Banzai deadpanning, for the first time I ever heard it, “No matter where you go, there you are.” I can’t say it was worth paying two late fees in addition to the rental charge. That sort of took the gloss off finding the DVD in the first place. To be honest, though, I have to admit I liked seeing it again.

And we also watched The Science of Sleep, a love story, I think, about Stephane, whose mother says he has always had trouble separating dreams from reality, and Stephanie, his next-door neighbor. The movie begins in Stephane’s dreams, combines them with reality, as dreams often do, and continues in this way through the rest of the movie. I was never sure when the dreams ended and Stephane was entirely wakeful, if he ever was, which I’m sure was the point of making the movie. And like a dream, the movie ended rather abruptly, without a resolution. It could be a very frustrating experience for lots of watchers but I’d still recommend it, on the strength of its technique at capturing the feel of the dream world.

I still couldn’t say it was worth all the late fees, though. I have a hard time thinking of any movie that would be.

 
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Every gosh-darned word © 2007 Dave Okonski