Welcome to Bay Shore!

Welcome to Bay Shore! You'll come for the Superfund cleanup site; you'll stay for the souvlaki! This photo is the closest I come to setting up a moblog. (Verizon conveniently charges 25c/picture to get your photos off your phone unless you bypass them with a data cable and some hacked-up software.)

We also had some excitement (the unwanted kind) yesterday when a guy in a pickup truck plowed into a crowd of union protestors, killing two of them. He then sped off to the Bay Shore Inn, which was the scene of many a post-prom party when I was in high school.

Except now that I think about it, I attended high school in Connecticut, not on Long Island. And my prom date turned out to be a man in disguise. Well, nothing that another quarter in the therapy jar won't fix.

Q-Tips

I just bought a brand-new 500-count box of Q-Tips. I don't know whether I'm imagining this, but they seem to have made the swab shafts bendier again. I can't get them past the opening of my ear canal without their doubling over in defeat like a vegetarian who's just discovered that the LichenStar Farms Chik'N-Nuggets they've just eaten were, in fact, made not out of chik'n but chicken.

I don't want a safety Q-Tip. I want a ramrod-straight Q-Tip. I want to be able to plunge it into my ear so far that I have to tie a string to the outer cotton bud. I want to twirl the Q-Tip around. In fact, I want an adapter so that I can put the Q-Tip into a cordless screwdriver. If necessary, it can bend like a sigmoidoscope, but I'd prefer that it stay straight and make my ear canal bend to fit. I want to get it in there so far that it touches my brain and my leg twitches. Because that's where my ear itches right now. My Flents ear plugs can work their way in that deep, so why not my cotton swab?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

In the looming shadow of an NHL work stoppage this fall, the revived WHA has announced six franchises, including one in Quebec. They also announced that they would be naming that franchise the Quebec Nordiks. Great idea, considering the NHL still owns the rights to the Quebec Nordiques. The WHA is confident that there will be no confusion because they spell the name differently. I don't know about you, but I'm really excited about some of the potential WHA rivalries. The battles between tri-state rival New Jersey Devels, New York Raingers, and New York Islandurrrrs will soon be legendary. The Toronto May Poleefs may be facing off against the Buffalo Say-Brrs at the very same time the Philadelphia Phlyurs will be traveling to meet the Los Angeles Kingzz. And really, the NHL will see no reason to file suit against any of this because the WHA founders are living on a small cloud community on a planet orbiting Arcturus.

Tim Horton's

After decades of waiting, I finally took the plunge today. I had my first Tim Horton's experience. They had this big sign in the window hawking their egg salad sandwiches, and it was breakfast time, so I made my way in. I ordered my egg salad, and I was given the combo offer. I could either get the egg salad sandwich, or I could get the egg salad sandwich with a donut. I did not know that if you ate all your breakfast, you'd be eligible for dessert. I love this country!

I also made my way over to World of Drugs World a bit further down Bloor Street. You know how people come to Canada to get prescription drugs cheap? Well, they also have great over-the-counter stuff. Go ask the pharmacist for acetaminophen with codeine - 200 caplets was about $10. Back hurting? Why not try some methocarbamol with ibuprofen? Sneezing? Allegra awaits.

Coffee Crisps aren't bad either. They're like a Kit-Kat, but if you close your eyes and concentrate, you can make out the faint wisp of mocha-like flavoring. For some reason, Eclipse gum is called Excel up here. And the winterfrost flavor is called winterfresh.That really knocked me for a loop.

My flight was scheduled for 7:30. I got to the airport at 5:35, and went through the same harsh questioning about my lack of a fifth form of ID. The ticket agent then said that there'd been some weather problems, so she'd put me on standby on the 5:40 flight. So I'm off the 7:30 flight in favor of another flight that leaves in five minutes on the other side of customs. Interesting concept - take away my guaranteed seat for a plane whose doors have probably already closed.

The line through customs was empty, so I made a quick detour through the duty free shop to buy maple candy. Unfortunately, they didn't have the big trays - the ones with the single super-sized maple leaf in the middle. I did a grab-and-run on the smaller boxes, shoved aside some dawdling tourists from Wisconsin, and was out of there in three minutes. My new flight was scheduled to leave in two minutes now. As I left the duty-free, an entire women's hockey team flooded the line in front of me. My choices were to go to the end of the line, or enter it at the point of the store exit. I'm an American - you take a guess.

The strange thing about the customs booths were that they were American agents on Canadian soil, and it displayed a "Welcome to the United States" sign. I was still in Canada. In fact, the "Friday's American Bar" near the gate was more than happy to take Canadian money. There aren't "Welcome to Belize" signs anywhere in American airports, are there?

I got to the early flight gate about 5 minutes after the scheduled departure, and they weren't close to boarding. Everyone who'd arrived for the later flight was being sent over to this one without a seat. They finally let us on about 45 minutes late, but held the plane at the gate until they got every seat filled. Then they pushed back and announced that we didn't have a gate opening for almost two hours at LaGuardia, so we'd be hanging out on the runway until we were an hour away. The last seat - the one next to me - was filled by a kindly gentleman named John Boozehound, who needed to order four mini-bottles for the one-hour flight.

Gordon Lightfoot

Okay, I know I'm in Canada. When I turn the TV on, do the first two words that come out have to be "Gordon Lightfoot?" I mention this to a couple of Canadian friends, and their reaction is "Oh yes, I saw that. He's not looking well." Well, how would YOU look if your last thirty years had consisted of playing concerts and people shouting "EDMOOOOOOND FITZGEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRALD!!" the entire night, exhorting you to play your Top Of The Pops sea shanty about an obscure maritime incident? You've got other things to do, like playing that new ditty you've just penned about a horrific snowmobile accident near Whistler back in 1953. You've got a new album to sell to pay off your crippling Indian casino bills, dammit.

I have to admit that I like the money up here. The $5 bill is especially fetching. It was designed so that you'd always have something to do. When you get bored of Canada after 3 minutes, you can just turn the money over and watch a hockey game on it!

First day in Toronto

I flew up to Toronto today. I know, hundreds of millions of people do this every day, but my passport was expired. It turns out that an expired passport no longer identifies me as the person displayed on that passport, because maybe someone else sprung up looking exactly like me but with a fake name in the past ten years.

The other problem was that while I did have my driver's license and birth certificate, I was born in England so my papers left the ticket agent dangerously confused. When you're an American citizen born in England, you get a second sheet, which is the US embassy's record of an American being born abroad. I triumphantly displayed four forms of ID to the clerk: expired passport, birth certificate, American certificate, and driver's license. She took a good, long stare at the papers, then looked back up at me and let me know that the easiest way would be if I just kept my passport current. A quick $20 under the table and I was able to avoid the American Airlines detention facility for people who only have four forms of ID on an international flight.

The flight itself is only an hour long, not counting the time waiting on the runway and the bus to the terminal at Lester Pearson airport. I discovered that when people are trying to get off a plane, they don't appreciate it when you're walking down the steps to get off the plane and start waving and blowing kisses like you're The Beatles. Their loss.

I grabbed a cab from the airport to town, a route that encompassed both the best and worst of Canada. I discovered that you can make anything Canadian by sticking a tiny maple leaf next to the logo. So Sears becomes . Subtle! Now I feel good about spending my hard-earned loonies at this retail establishment! This is much better than that Wal-Mart down the road. No local cultural sensitivity at all when they adorned their logo for the Canadian market:



I snapped back to attention as we drove past one of the saddest things I'd ever seen: a giant inflatable green monster sitting atop an industrial storefront. The temporary sign on the store read "Bailiff Seizure Baby Furniture!" Now I started thinking about an episode of Cops, where the sherriff's men smash their way into a two-room house, throw the baby on the floor, and repossess the crib. And now you can purchase that crib at low, low prices!

Herb's Market

We've had several great weekends in Montauk in a row now. The weather had been beautiful: sunny, not terrible humidity, not too breezy. However, not all is well in this paradise-by-the-sea. In particular, I reference the sign behind the deli counter at Herb's Market.

Herb's sign presents, for the benefit of its staff, a fried chicken price chart. It starts innocuously enough: "4 pieces, $4.00." The next price point is "8 pieces, $8.00." Okay, I think, there's probably some sort of discount that kicks in when you buy fried chicken in bulk. But the chart continues unabated in multiples of four pieces: "12 pieces, $12.00," "16 pieces, $16.00," all the way up to "96 pieces, $96.00." Why? Someone explain to me the utility of this sign. Hey, I think I have the hang of this now. How about: "Chicken: $1/piece, 4 piece multiples please!" Or did they have seasonal help scrambling with a calculator to work out how much a 36-piece order would cost someone at $1/piece?

The Cat

First off, we had a bit of controversy around the magazine last month. Joel Spolsky separated Microsoft into two camps, with us leading one of them. Anyway, I've spun off an essay on the subject here.

After John Kerry named John Edwards his VP candidate yesterday, the Bush campaign launched an ad campaign calling Edwards the "second choice." And who knows more about being a second choice than, oh, GEORGE BUSH - the second choice of the American people in 2000!

I've been walking to the train station lately. It's eight to ten minutes, depending upon which side of the platform I want to end up on. It's something I feel I should do now that gas is up around $2.20/gallon. That one mile a day I walk instead of driving might not seem like much, but you multiply that by 20 days a month, and figure that my car gets 20 MPG, and I can save $2.20 a month if I walk every day. That's MY $2.20, not the evil oil companies'! I can buy myself something special with it, like half an Entenmann's crumb cake, and eat the entire thing on the way home, thereby negating the healthful effects of a month's walking.

One downside of the walk is The Cat. Two weeks ago, a dead cat appeared on the grassy area between street and sidewalk along the shortest route to the station. Someone had put a washcloth on top of it. I figured it would be moved pretty quickly - no one wants a dead cat in front of their house.

Days went by. The cat wasn't moved. Someone mowed around it, so the grassy strip was now well-tended except in this little dead cat jungle. It wasn't being eaten or anything, it just sat there. I finally drove past it again yesterday, and it was still there, lying there twisted with a death meow on its face, looking like it had just spent some time on a feline Catherine wheel.

Another good thing about walking is that I don't have to deal with Escalades. I was on the highway yesterday, minding my own business but wondering just what crap the white Escalade in the far left lane would pull. They always do; their drivers tend to be atrocious because of their false feelings of womb-like safety. So I properly apply my turn signal to indicate my imminent exit, when Womb Boy comes barreling out of the far left lane because, well, too busy on the phone to move into position for the exit without going perpendicular. The driver, who I must say never appeared to break conversation, flashed the universal signal of Escalade triumph: a rocking motion that made the semi-semi look like it was about to go up on two wheels as he tried to reestablish a straight-line trajectory. No offense, but Escalade drivers are dicks, and their trucks are leaky condoms that provide the illusion of safety without actually coming through.

And speaking of commuting! The train I take home is always hit-or-miss when it comes to peaceful coexistence, since it stops at all the connector stations for Fire Island ferries. A couple of days ago, I found a nice quiet seat. A young woman sat two seats ahead of me and curled up with a book.

Then the train got to Jamaica. A group of three young gentlemen boarded. You could instantly see that they were looking for trouble - they were carrying three fishing rods and a bongo. THey were wearing stupid straw hats and were trying to grow vague beards. I could immediately tell that there was the potential for some explosive anger on my part. The three young men sat two behind the woman, and one next to her.

Things started slowly, just some generalized inane chatter. One of the lads was reading "Fight Club", and when he got to a passage about "tits", he chose to read it aloud to the others without the benefit of removing his headphones so that he could modulate his voice in any way.

We passed Hicksville, and Lad 2 announced in his best outdoor voice, "Dude, that sign just said HICKSVILLE!!!" The three lads collapsed in laughter. Then they got into a deep discussion about the proposed cross-sound tunnel.

"You mean they're going to dig under the ocean? They could never do it by hand. You'd need some really fast water robot."
"A waterbot."
"heheheheh"

The explosive anger kicked in. I'm sure that one of them could hear the anger forming behind them, because he hooked his ear buds to his hat so that we could all share his nice someone-else's-walkman effect.

Finally, we were approaching my stop. The discussion turned to another young lady that Lad 3 knew. For unknown reasons, the young woman trapped by them didn't claw her way out of the side of the train at this point. Maybe she was deaf.

"She's like the devil. She like doesn't care that people can go to jail for having sex with her. If she were like a morally like good person like, she would say this is like fine but you're going to go to jail and i don't want you to go to jail, man. I'd rather be ignorant than a whore."
"Her having sex with two people does NOT make her a whore."
"No, the fact that they were over 18 makes her a whore. That's sick."

Yes, Hicksville indeed.

Reagan sold weapons to terrorists in Iran

After a long, tedious week of reminiscence, Reagan will actually be buried today. It is important to take a step back and remember what the man actually did for our country, and honor his legacy now and in the future. To summarize:

Reagan sold weapons to terrorists in Iran, then gave the money to terrorists in Nicaragua.

In other news, I feel that an important social contract with me has been broken today. When you open the cap of the Sierra Mist bottle just a little bit, it foams up and then subsides. The social contract then says that you should be able to twist it all the way off without having the damn bottle EXPLODE all over your laptop and phone. What the hell?

Drop Reagan into the sea

You know what would be a fitting tribute to Reagan? Maybe the plane carrying him to Washington today can open up in the back and dump him into the sea, like happened to so many victims of the Central American death squads he supported.

I read a really interesting book online today, discussing the psychological trends behind the Reagan presidency and the American people. Basically, Reagan carried with him from childhood a deep-seated fear of castration and amputation, and it was a common theme that drew through much of his action as a leader.

As expected, the wave of "pretend Reagan was America's last hero" pressure has continued since the weekend. Here's a typical conversation, completely made up by me (like so many of Reagan's homespun bullshitty stories):

Person: Reagan was our best president ever.
Me: How can you say that? He was evil - EVIL! Here's a list of 243 things he did wrong. (Start with Iran-contra, work backwards through dead Americans in Beirut and capitulating to terrorists by removing troops, Bitburg, deficits, ketchup, etc. etc.)
Person: Typical liberal, all you have is "Reagan was evil" but no substance. He was so much better than Clinton, who was sleazy and crooked and everyone hated.
Me: Actually, if you look it up you'll find that Clinton's popularity over eight years was identical to Reagan's. And he was more popular than Reagan at the time they each left office.
Person: Well, but Reagan was decent and honest and Clinton was a
lying scumbag.
Me: Strangely enough, Reagan's administration was so crooked that it ended up with 30 convictions for crimes committed while in office. And that doesn't even include the big ones, Iran-contra, which Bush pardoned! Clinton's administration had exactly one.
Person: But Reagan was the Great Communicator!
Me: Weren't you the one who told me last week that you liked Bush because he didn't communicate well and that showed he was sincere? It sounds like you just like these people because they're willing to water down school milk to give you a fake tax cut and you're just backfilling their qualities to suit.
Person: Reagan was our best president ever, and you're an un-American asshole.

Win one for the Gipper!

Today was the first Fire Island Monday of the commuting season. Honestly, what a bunch of tards. You can tell them immediately - they're sitting around the Bay Shore station, sprawled out in groups of three and four, blocking the platform with their backpacks and oversized suitcases and shitty little yap dogs, and they're all desperately sipping coffee to get back to reality. Then on the train they wheel on their backpacks and oversized suitcases and shitty little yap dogs and leave them in the aisle. Jerks.

We're in Day Two of the Reagan Post-Mortem, where we're all supposed to pretend that Reagan was the greatest, most beloved American in history. We're supposed to bump Hamilton off the $10 bill in favor of Ronnie. We're supposed to sandblast his face onto Mount Rushmore. We're supposed to name a monument after him in every county in the United States. Well, guess what? He was atrocious. It's bad enough that the newest Bush strategy is to pretend that the War in Iraq is comparable to World War II in some way, now we're going to have to deal with "Win One Last One For The Gipper."

He was the president though, and he should be shown the proper respect. If you are flying a flag, make sure to keep it at half-mast for a month. A lot of places (Stamford Post Office, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s house) didn't do this when Nixon died. That's just simple respect for the office and the country. If you can't handle this, do what I did - just take the flag down for a month.

Then we have people on hockey chat lists saying stuff like:

> As our passed former President used to say:
> WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER
>
> As a longtime season ticket holder, I hope we make him proud in his
> grave tonight.

Yeah, that's what Reagan's doing tonight. He's sitting there dead, rooting for a team he never knew existed. Yeesh.

Crazy Jose

For reasons unknown, I never noticed this before, but near the Jamaica station there is a store called Crazy Jose’s Electronics. Curiosity compels me to ask: what on earth would compel someone to patronize a store named after an al-Qaida suspect? Okay, I see the upside. Maybe Jose is so crazy that you walk in and he gives you a new Marantz component system for free. But what about the downside? You walk in, and Crazy Jose thinks you look like the dog who orders him to do his bidding. Before you know it, you’re felled in a hail of broken Sansui tape decks. It really doesn’t seem to be worth the risk.

Memorial Day 2004

Julian’s class was marching in the Bay Shore Memorial Day parade today. We’re getting ready to head over to the staging point at 9 AM when Cordelia suddenly pipes up that her class is marching too and she had to go. Okay, fine. I’ll load the two kids into the car, drop them at the parade, grab a couple of slammers at 7-11, and head over to the finish line to collect them at the end of the parade.

It was not to be. We get to the staging area and start looking around. Julian’s class is off to one side – they’re all wearing laminated cardboard signs with magic markered names of American troops who’ve died in Iraq. Leading this charge is the Sir Learns-A-Lot banner that some grade school alumnus donated for parades.

Cordelia’s class is out in a side street. They’re handing out the Uncle Sam hats they made out of white paper bags. Cordelia gets a small American flag, but gets upset because she wants a big American flag. Of course, she works her way to the front so that she can hold the school banner: “Don’t Go Extinct, Read A Book!” I ask a teacher where I should meet them, and I’m told that I have to walk with her. I’ve just been press ganged into the Memorial Day parade.

Of course, you know what happens in these scenarios. The kids walk for a few feet, then get tired. For much of the mile and a half, I am forcibly marched through the streets of Bay Shore holding a “Don’t Go Extinct, Read A Book!” sign, enduring the derision of the angry crowd. Main Street is littered with roadkill, thanks to the Town of Islip’s crack Dead Animal Removal division. At one point, we stepped over something with a nametag on it. $ir Win$ton, of $ir Win$ton Realty, made sure that his “God Bless America / $ir Win$ton Realty” balloons got into everyone’s hands. So now I’m marching while holding a “Don’t Go Extinct, Read A Book!” sign in one hand and a $ir Win$ton balloon in the other. Some Dr. Seussian “Proud To Be An American” song is on a continual tape loop in front of us. I don’t have my sunglasses, and it changes from overcast to that uniquely glaring sun thing that you only get when you leave your sunglasses in the car on a cloudy day.

God, sometimes I just hate America.

Granny Smith pears

I do like Diet Sierra Mist. However, I don’t like buying a 12-pack and realizing that every single can has frigging SHREK staring back at me. I honestly would not have bought it had I known in advance I’d be looking at these hideous ogres of consumerism. I just wanted a frosty lemon-lime one-calorie beverage, dammit!

Clerk of the day: I’m standing there at King Kullen, trying to bag my groceries before the Sierra Mist rolls its way down the belt and pops the top off the mac salad, when the supply line is suddenly broken. I look back up and see the checkout girl staring quizzically at a bag of Granny Smith apples. She rolls one of them around, looking for a sticker. Finally, in desperation, she turns to me and asks “What kind of pears are these?”

Last Day of TechEd 04

Okay, last night I was up until 3:30. It would’ve been an earlier night, but we were waiting for our ham and jack sandwich to arrive. Today is the first day where my conference sleep patterns are really getting to me, and it’s also the day I get to go home. So that worked out okay.

Steve and I packed up the car and made the arduous three minute trek to the Lindbergh Field. There was a little confusion at the airport as he temporarily booked the seat next to mine, but it was all cleared up when I explained the joys of an empty middle seat in coach.

I got on the plane and made myself comfortable, looking forward to that middle seat. A few minutes later, a woman walked on and started pointing to me, asking me something in Spanish. I didn’t know what was going on, but it seemed to involve the middle seat next to me. She asked about my ticket, and when I showed it to her she said “Oh, you are in Group 5.” She then squeezed into the middle seat and started talking to HER sister, in the middle seat one row back.

Annoyed as hell, I sat there until takeoff in a grumpy fog. And to make things worse, across the aisle there seemed to be an empty middle AND aisle seat. Then just as we started taxiing, I looked at my ticket again. I was so exhausted that I’d taken the wrong seat! It turns out I was the big idiot, not the woman. Naturally, it was below me to apologize.

We got to JFK just before midnight. I had checked two bags – my big-ass, overweight suitcase and a TechEd conference bag full of magazine samples. The big-ass, overweight suitcase rolled off just fine, but an early trickle of TechEd bags soon became a cascade. I had cleverly put my business card into the NetIQ luggage tag so that I could identify my bag, but none of the bags had the ID on them. The belt kept going around and around. Most of the people claimed their stuff and left. There was nothing left but about five TechEd bags. I started rifling through them one by one until I found the publication-laden sack – with no nametag. It turns out that I was so exhausted, I put the card UNDERNEATH the generic “write your name here” tag that came with the bag. Good thing I’m not paid for thinking or anything.

The classiest hooker in San Diego

The days are becoming a blur now. All I know is that I leave tomorrow afternoon. Oh, and I’m pretty sure that Brian Randell and Rocky Lhotka didn’t leave with that hooker at the party last night.

I looked outside the bar and saw Brian, Rocky, and a “friend” who was talking to them like she knew them. They were both trying to ignore her. I walked over to do my mingle thing. After a few seconds, she announced – and I may be paraphrasing a bit here – that she bemoaned the lack of men in this town who enjoyed anal. Well, okay! I told her that I thought there were a couple in the bar, so she went back inside to look for them.

TechEd party!

When you get to bed at 2:30, getting up at 7:30 really isn’t an optimal situation. Plus, I had to get packed to move rooms. For some reason, the Westgate decided that I needed to change rooms. Something about changing rates so they had to give me a nicer suite. It was the same damn room, but with one king bed instead of two twins. Oh, and a pair of hospital-grade slippers under the sink.

Much of the rest of the day was a wonderful blur. I saw my friend Theresa for the first time in 16 years as she sought me out at the CMP booth. (If you need consulting services, make sure to give AVI Consulting a ring.) I met a list of people too long to recount here – including people who are interested in writing for TechNet Magazine, people who want to advertise in TechNet Magazine, and people who want to subscribe to TechNet Magazine. Guess what’s been on my mind this week?

Our annual MSDN Magazine party kicked off at 9:30 PM. Every year it gets more buzz around it, and this year saw people lined up outside to get in. And that includes people who weren’t actually invited – next year we have to figure out some armband system or something. It got to be a bit messy.

Being the center of attention at a party of 150 people in a bar is an odd experience. A lot of people wanted to talk about submitting content, and about how to get involved with TechNet Magazine. The one hard part about these shows is that I really, really like a lot of people on a personal level, but I also have to find the time to talk to dozens of folks in just three hours. It’s something I’ve worked on year after year – being graceful and perhaps moving to the next person even though you still want to hear from the person you’re with. Since I’m not naturally a party guy, I do have to put on my TechEd face before doing this – it’s good to learn how to be more social in any event.

One thing I’ve spoken with Sara Williams about in the past is strategies we can adopt to improve the gender representation in our author pool. I know that there are good female authors out there, but it’s not easy to find them! I really feel that if we can sign more qualified female authors, we can help lead perceptions that we don’t have to be a male-dominated industry. Sara has done her part by introducing all the women authors she knows. I don’t have a written goal for it, but I know that we’re not there yet.

Anyway, things broke up at about 2:30 AM again. Two more days of TechEd fun.

TechEd 04, Day 1

Not only is today the first day of TechEd, it’s also the day we announce our most ambitious project to date: TechNet Magazine. I walked from the Westgate to the convention center, my rapidly fading synapses managing to recognize some of the same sites I last encountered in 1997. Or, to be exact, I walked past the Ralph’s supermarket in the middle of town.

I needed a Snapple. Ralph’s had the promise of Snapple, but they appeared to have nothing but Mango Madness and some other crap. I walked through the store, desparately searching for their Snapple repository, but found only the one cooler in the front, next to the walk-up latte stand. Using classic Eastern ingenuity, I scanned the back row and saw one Snapple cap unlike the others. YES! It was the only regular iced tea in the place.

After our morning meeting with CMP, we repaired to the exhibit floor, where a stack of TechNet Magazine cards was waiting for us. Since you asked, TechNet Magazine is a new publication we’re launching for the IT professional.


We’ve got one issue planned right now, discussing security from the IT perspective. It’s going to be great, you’re going to have to sign up for it, and you’re going to tell your friends about it. It’s going to be the best thing you read all year. (Fiction and non-fiction not included.)

This was an unusually long day, punctuated by the exhibit floor reception in the evening. They had THREE KINDS of chicken wings! It was just fabulous. It turned out that the punctuation was just a semicolon, however, because from there I headed over to Ruth’s Chris for one of those 9:30 PM plus time zone steak dinner opportunities that only come along a few times in your life before your heart explodes. I managed to escape with just a salad before heading over to the W Hotel for what turned out to be a four-hour nightcap. It started with the media reception, then ended up huddled up in a cabana with a slowly dwindling crowd from exotic locales like Toronto and Maryland. We learned, among other things, that the Quality Inn has smoking rooms that actually smoke, and that you can upgrade to a menthol suite for just $29/night. Who says business travel isn't glamorous?

America Is Not The World

Well, I’ve been off the blog thing lately, for reasons that will become clear at TechEd tomorrow. I’m on my way to San Diego as I type, on one of those flights that last exactly 75 minutes longer than your laptop battery. If you’re one of three people who read this before Monday, come visit us at the booth after noon tomorrow.

American has removed its “More room in coach” program except on its 767s, so try to get one when you fly cross-country. This seat isn’t that bad – 34” pitch – but I’ve set a new record in that my assbone is already in searing pain and we haven’t even closed the door and pulled back from the gate yet. I discovered SeatGuru – it lets you check the exact configuration of the plane you’re about to take domestically. I discovered that American puts underseat power in every third row and that JetBlue has smaller seats in front of the exit rows.

But back to this flight. The woman in 35H is now eating a can of Bush’s baked beans with a plastic spoon. And reading the first two chapters of a Dick Francis novel, ripped from the full paperback. I always wondered who they were addressing when they explained how to use a seatbelt, but I think I have my answer.

Dinner was chicken. Not just any chicken, mind you. That’s right! The old paradigm is gone. No more flabby chicken breast with some BBQ sauce slapped on top. Now you get little cubes of that flabby chicken breast with some BBQ sauce slapped on top, pushed right up against some burning hot red potato cubes with cheese sauce slapped on top, accompanied by some green bean cubes with, well, nothing slapped on top.

Dessert was a little cube of cake. Actually, that’s not fair – it was more of a rectangular prism of cake, except that it was opaque to light and flavor. It looked like pineapple upside-down cake, but the yellowish topping emitted more of a vague coconut burst upon entry into one’s cakehole. The roll was exquisite. In fact, airline rolls are always top-notch. They’re completely uniform in texture – not light, yet crumbly. They usually taste better dipped in the pepper ranch dressing than slathered with the fingernail-sized packet of “Now! More Buttery Taste!” spread provided for a $2 fee in coach.

Okay, here’s the next problem. I’ve got Morrissey’s new CD, “You Are The Quarry.” I turned it on, and within about 45 seconds I wanted to put a fist through his throat. He’s come up with the revelation that America is a dominant country and is driving it home through shocking lines like “America, your belly’s too big.” So not only is he repeating the bleeding obvious, fashionable opinion but he’s STEALING FROM CROWDED HOUSE.

That’s right. Morrissey, who used to write about topics that touched all of us – topics like headmaster abuse of fifth-form students and clergymen who dance ballet – has now decided to take on his least controversial topic to date – the concept that America exports gluttony. Well, duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuur.
. . .
But when the president is never black, female or gay
And until that day you’ve got nothing to say to me
To help me believe in America

Sorry, but which nation WERE you going to believe in then? The one where they filmed that Old Navy commercial with a black guy, a gay guy in a sweater, and Fran Drescher? Morrissey: his ideal nation is a TV commercial for cargo pants.

Beagle cysts

Well, the good thing is that Edina the Beagle is out of her five day "crapping on the bedroom rug" stage. However, she's entered a new stage. You might be thinking "what could be worse than a Beagle who craps, pisses, and pukes her way through life on various expensive carpets?" Well, you might want to skip ahead if you don't want to find out.

Edina has been blessed with several benign cysts just under her skin surface. They're anywhere from dime to quarter-sized. They've started to burst through her skin. THe first sign that a Beagle cyst has burst is that the cyst has flattened out, replaced with a hole that looks like a pitted Bing cherry. The second sign is the oozing cyst juice that mats her hair and drips off her.

Edina exchanged biz cards with the vet, and returned home with tubes of burst cyst ointment and pills that can only be hidden by deboning a chicken leg and inserting the caplet where the bone had gone. Fortunately, a Beagle can swallow a half chicken in one gulp (although for some reason it takes them five minutes to eat a single blueberry), so that's not that big a deal. The ointment however...

You think you're doing the right thing. You close your eyes, grit your teeth, and rub the ointment on the Beagle scab twice a day. But is it the right thing? No, of course not. After a few days, you're told by the vet that you're SUPPOSED to be lifting the Beagle scab and rubbing the ointment on the still-raw Beagle cyst hole. Oh, and don't let the Beagle see that you're distressed because it will hurt her self-esteem and body image.

I tried to trade her in yesterday, but her value has plummeted to the point where I can only get a lease on a Pekingese. Which seems all well and good until you see the balloon payments on one of those fuckers.