The Green Machine

  • by Drew

Hey, a recent license plate sighting of note – I was behind a metallic green SUV the other day with a couple interesting markings. The license plate was amusing enough, being SOURPCKLS. But the little white oval sticker (you know those things that are, like, pseudo-European and usually tout the Outerbanks?) read PKLFEST. This cracked me up. Picklefest.

And here’s the funny part. Despite the somewhat feminine nature of the SUV, it was driven by a guy. A thirty-something, shaved head, chambray-shirt-wearing guy. I was wondering if this was somebody with a real sense of humor, or just some dude who thinks he’s got the package from heaven.

Of course, chances are, it’s just some guy into project management software and Battlestar Galactica, but isn’t it more fun to imagine some super 70s guy who’s all “come on down ladies, pickle fest is happening in the way back of my Honda…stat!”

It’s not a boat, it’s a ship

  • by Drew

Yeah, you’d have to be kind of a fool to believe the hcg diet could help you lose a pound of fat a day, but I recently learned that rookie Navy boys in World War Two came close. At least some of them did. This past weekend we had a Cub Scouts outing, what we affectionately refer to as “camping on the boat.”

In fact, a crusty old WW2 sailor explained that our floating hotel was actually a ship, and he took the distinction between boat and ship very seriously. Since he lived and worked on the ship for its 4 plus years of active service back in the 40s, I really want to show the proper respect. So, forgive me when I slip and say we slept on the boat. I’m only human.

The ship in question was the U.S.S. Massachusetts, nicknamed “Big Mamie.” Decommissioned more than 50 years ago and slated for the scarp heap at some point in the 60s, Big Mamie’s crew was able to save her and get her a permanent dock in Fall River, MA. Now, gazillions of people, many of them scouting groups, visit the ship annually. Some of them even end up spending the night. Who would’ve thunk?

The place is called Battleship Cove, and in addition to Big Mamie, there are some other vessels and exhibits. We checked out a destroyer, a couple PT boats, a submarine, and a Russian vessel comparable to a destroyer. And in the gift shop they make bitchin’ cool custom dog tags.

Speaking of the DMV

  • by Drew

My recent trip to the DMV in Millbrook has reminded me of a number of past experiences. One of my favorites was when I was in line with my Mom, when I was in High School. It was in Peekskill in the 80’s, when impatient douche bags on line would scream “Next! Next! Next!” as soon as a window opened to apparently shave a half second off the time it would take for the next person to move up. It was a hot bed of tension and nastiness and I witness ed a number of verbal battles.

On another occasion, I was actually present when a guy displayed a knife, apparently to cut to the front of the line, and one of the duty cops drew his gun to subdue the imbecile and take him into custody. Fantastic.

This particular occasion, I was behind a real Westchester douche pony with his son. He had a pink tennis Izod shirt with the collar turned up (yes, it was the 80’s)and he was about as condescending as a condescending prick can be. Think of any condescending pick in a John Hughes movie and multiply it by 2.74 and you will be halfway to how obnoxiously condescending this prick was. This guy would totally have benefited from a rapid detox and/or a three course coffee enema.

Anyway, the point of the whole story is that the guy had to take an eye test. I had to do the same the other day, and considering I could read everything down to line 15, the last line, without a problem, and I was only expected to read line 7, the eye test is no big deal. Nevertheless, Super Prick had his teenage son write down the entire eye chart while they waited on the 45 minute line (and yes, 45 minutes on line at the Peekskill DMV in the mid 80’s was nothing).

Then, when he got to a window and the clerk told him what line to read, he waited for her to look down at her form and then read it from his crib sheet. Yes, this middle aged genital wart could not read the eye chart and went so far as to enlist the aid of his teenage son to cheat on the test. I learned a real lesson about road safety from that near-sighted clown that day.

Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of…

blood staining the pavement?

The Big Sigh

  • by Drew

I had to go to the DMV to renew my license today. I’m hoping my new photo will be slightly less thuggy than 3 of my last 4. I did have one for a while when my hair was down to my butt and I had a good 90’s indie rock smile, but otherwise I always look like a thick-necked and bouncer.

I actually could have renewed by mail, but an eye test was required because I am a corrective lens person. This amused the hell out of me because there were half a dozen senior citizens with canes and blue blockers and a renewal form like mine, but none of them had to take the eye test. Seriously, WTF? One of those seniors almost backed into me in the parking lot a few minutes later, so, again, WTF?

The line was interesting. Understand that I have waited in some of the best NY state DMV lines for myself or with friends including Westchester and Manhattan offices. I have seen fist fights, I’ve seen people ejected, I’ve seen cops in the office draw their guns to “keep the peace,” I’ve seen lot. So, Millbrook…really didn’t make much of an impression. It was a 10 minute visit, from back of the line to completed transaction.

The thing that blew my mind, considering my vast experience with the excruciating NY state DMV experience, was the anger of the 15 or so people on line. I saw everything from equestrian apparelto ghetto hoodies with bling sunglasses to Members Only-style jackets, but universally, these peeps were miserable.

The prime sign of misery on line? The massive, dramatic sigh. The sigh that says, “I should be performing open heart surgery on the prime minister of England right now but you little people won’t hustle me through the line.

I’m back to my earlier sentiment. WTF people. WTF. From overheard bitchings I learned that at least half were retired (and didn’t really need to be there in the first place), two were unemployed with nothing else to do and one woman was a stay at home Mom who “runs errands when her kids are in school.” I guess this didn’t count as an errand. There was also a kid just discharged from the Marines. There was actually only one person on line I can say for sure was taking a half hour off from work. That was me.

Peeps, is it really that bad? 10 minutes in line is really that bad? Come on. I waited longer to buy a $5 basketball at Walmart a couple weeks ago, behind a family of trailer folk with a hell of a lot of canned spaghetti and meatballs than I did at the Millbrook DMV.

Lube Job

  • by Drew

This is a simple complaint. Or, well, an observation and a complaint. We’ve had a number of contractors/service people here in the last year, and there is a disturbing trend. Whether it’s a guy in a pickup truck, a fuel oil delivery, the septic pumper, Fed Ex, the sealcoater, or the meter reader, they always leave me with something.

An oil stain on the driveway.

Seriously. It’s getting on my nerves. I have this driveway we spent a mint paving two years ago, and then a couple hundred to get it sealcoated in the Summer. And now I’ve got oil spots all over it. Do you think I should read some accutane reviews and see if I can make a recommendation to these folks?

OK, that’s kind of silly, but I have to wonder why all these guys have leaky trucks. Maybe I could invent some sort of truck diaper. ..Yeah, that works.

Green Thumb on the Down Low

  • by Drew

I just saw an interesting truck. It was a big green behemoth with a dump bed on the back. On the door was the name of the business: Covert Landscaping. This made me chuckle. I mean, isn’t the point of landscaping that people actually notice it?

Then again, I thought, maybe it’s not the finished product, per se, that “covert” refers to. Maybe it’s the methods of the landscapers. I know how big yard projects can go on and on. Maybe their sales pitch is doing the work under cover, or after hours. Your neighbors never see the wheel barrows upturned on your lawn, the day laborers munching their lunches out of paper bags, the shovels and pickaxes and coffee cups…

No, these guys come in after dark. Their hoses operate silently, their pickaxes have plush covered handles. They wheel the new shrubs and trees across your lawn in baby strollers and if they don’t finish in one night, they cover the whole yard with astro-turf drop cloths.

It’s the wave of the suburban future. What’s next? Mowers that use lasers to trim your lawn? Self washing hybrids? The future’s so bright…

Spayed

  • by Drew

I saw an interesting license plate the other day. On a rather small Honda hybrid car, a 2 door with the back wheels covered by the body, was this plate. NEUTRD. This was a fairly small vehicle, like something you’d not be surprised to see a dozen clowns exit.

After laughing a bit, I had to imagine the driver. In my mind it was one of two types. On the one hand, it could be a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches wearing veterinarian with a salt and pepper beard, neatly trimmed micro ‘fro white guy who’s running into the mall for an Orange Julius and maybe some patio furniture.

The other possibility, as I imagined it, would be a burly, tattooed dude with a sleeveless flannel shirt and possibly a starter mullet. He traded in his Charger, or maybe restored Cougar because he fell in love with a hippie chick in a crunchy sun dress.

Spring is in the air and with it comes thoughts of attracted opposites, Romeo and Juliet/Hatfield and McCoy type romances. I’m such a sucker for melodrama – even when it’s just in my head.

The New Math

  • by Drew

I was working on homework with my second grader and puzzling through some addition problems. See, they add big numbers differently then when I was a kid. No more carrying the one and such. Now they add the hundreds, add the tens, add the ones. Put them together, then you’re done. Or something like that.

Actually, I kind of like the system, it’s just a little foreign after thirty odd years of doing it another way. The thing is, at a class meeting with the teacher earlier this year, she explained the whole thing to the parents. It was a sort of warning of what to expect. I thought it was interesting. A funny Mom sitting next to me commented that she’d struggled with it when her older daughter went through second grade – FINALLY it made sense. We chuckled.

Then the bus driver Mom chimed in. She’s grizzled and weird and very trailer-y. You know what I mean, don’t even pretend you don’t. I know she is a bus driver because she tells me and everyone else at every opportunity. And there’s nothing wrong with that, until she goes into her rant about how her company is good and the drivers are well trained (she drives for a school district about 35 minutes south of us) while the company our district uses employs untrained idiots.

She goes on about how she doesn’t like letting her son ride the bus to school because the drivers don’;t know what they are doing and are piloting “death traps.” Did I mention that I thought she was the kid’s grandmother until she mentioned that she was all alone. The boy’s father is “long gone” and Granny (presumably her own mother) is around, but she can’t be doin’ no driving.

This is the woman who got into a shouting match with the principal when the school requested her son be checked by a doctor for H1N1 when he’d been in and out (mostly out) of school for three weeks with flu-like symptoms. Okay, I know the H1N1 hysteria was irritating, but even I thought it was reasonable for the school to demand a note from the kid’s doctor that it had been considered. I mean, without such confirmation, how would they even know that bus Mom is taking him to the doctor. Seriously, the kid was sick for a month. I mean…what the hell?

Look, I’m not saying people with advanced degrees are better or something. Sure, a GED might help, but…okay, that was mean. Jobs in IT or banking or education or whatever do not make you any smarter or more well-rounded, or even more hygienically sound. I know that. Nevertheless, when the teacher is explaining how they now teach math to kids, a new system developed by educators to be more useful and sensible for youngsters, I don’t think you should argue with her.

And when she explains that she will be teaching this method in school, but if the child already knows another way and uses it to get correct answers, she will accept it, I don’t think this is either necessary or appropriate as a response:

“So if my kid does it the right way, not your way, you’re not going to give him an F?”

What evil lurks…

  • by Drew

My love of Old Time Radio began with The Shadow. Back in my college radio days I got on some mailing lists with catalogs of esoteric recordings. These were back of ‘zine catalogs, mouse type on a single photocopied page with handwritten corrections, send a SASE for a copy of the pricelist kind of things. Within a year or two of my dawning interest, all of this back page stuff pretty much disappeared along with the ‘zines, moving onto the Internet. Sure, it was the early days, but it wouldn’t be long before those types of classified ad pricelists by mail were a thing of the past.

Anyway, in one of these catalogs I found a couple of inexpensive cassettes that I bought for long drives, going to gigs or back and forth between Boston and New York. It was the beginning of an insane collection, but most things big have to start out small…or, at least less big.

One tape I got was War of the Worlds. The other had a couple episodes of the Shadow. Classic, early episodes after the Shadow show format changed from a Tale From the Crypt style show to the more recognizable Lamont Cranston, man about town, version. The first season of Lamont Cranston as the shadow starred Orson Welles. And it was magnificent. Truly, truly, like a couple of Ambersons.

It was dark and moody and less comic-booky than the later seasons. In ran up through the 50s, so there was plenty of time for evolution. In fact, some of the later seasons, long after Welles left the show, were among the most enjoyable to listen to. They were more polished and often better written, if a bit safer or tamer. Radio seemed to go tame and lose a lot of its edge after World War Two. The same goes for movies and even a lot of music, I think. The woo hoo 50s really did end up begging for the 60s.

But in the late 30s, the world was on the verge of massive conflict and the tense energy pervaded all media. Thus, when I first heard the Shadow some 14 years ago, hissing out of the cassette player in my car, it was truly extraordinary. Radio show sponsors in those days were coal and cigarette companies, shaving cream and hair tonic peddlers. Latter day phisoderm and little blue pill merchants, maybe, but who cares. And a couple years later, they’d start asking all good Americans to buy War Bonds and follow the rationing rules.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

The Shadow knows. Ha ha ha ha ha!

[brought to you by Pennsylvania’s finest anthracite, Blue Coal]

getting plowed

  • by Drew

On the relatively recent subject of plows and plow drivers – they’re nuts, right? I mean, as a generalization. They’re pretty much totally wacko. Yeah, I know there are a few normal ones out there, but the majority of guys who plow must be bat-poop insane.

This is excluding the guys who plow with back hoes and other heavy machines. They are often in a whole other class. And, of course, anybody who puts a plow on the front of a four wheeler atv. Half of those guys are cowboys, the other half are in the market for tweed sport coats and mac memory.

No, I’m talking about the standard winter sight of rusted out pickup trucks with even more rusted plows, flying out of driveways with no heed for oncoming traffic. They slide around and do donuts in the middle of the road. They bounce off trees, and in large parking lots, sometimes off each other.

I’ve know a few guys who’ve done heavy winter plowing and man, their attitude borders on a death wish. Seriously. I even knew this one guy who wouldn’t plow with any less than a half pint of vodka in him. Often more. He said it kept him loose when there were impacts.

“Impacts?” I asked. “You mean when you hit a pile of snow?”

He just laughed at that, shaking his head at my naivete.

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