Some random assertions

Good morning, mis amigos interneticos. I don't know if that's the Spanish adjective form of that word, but I'm just gonna go with it. Today is a glorious one, being the birthday of not only Ross Perot, Helen Keller, Tobey Maguire, and Captain Kangaroo, but also of your friendly neighborhood Peter Klein. I'm not being facetious when I say that I'm quite pleased to be sharing it with you all. "Facetious" does have all of the vowels in alphabetical order though, so at least we'll always have that.

Last week, I said I had a bunch of random thoughts through which I was going to plow, but then I ended up kind of sticking to one topic. Today you will have no such luck, homepeople. For today I shall leap from topic to topic like a spider monkey escaping a predator through the trees (or a ninja stealthily disappearing after completing a mission undetected). Consider yourselves warned.

We're all familiar with the phrase, "The die has been cast," right? Well, I guess I hadn't written it ever before in my life until recently, because when I did, I wrote it as "the dye" instead. I was corrected, and it was a shock to my very core. I understand that once dice leave someone's hand, the rest is up to chance (or fate, if you're so inclined) and therefore out of one's control. My problem is not that I was always saying a homophone, but how very detailed my mental image of the incorrect idiom was. Every time I said or heard that phrase, I had a very clear image of a glass pitcher filled with water and a drop of red or dark blue food coloring hitting the surface and quickly diffusing throughout the container. With that interpretation, I thought that once the drop of dye hit the water, there was no undoing its effect on the entire contents. The dye had been cast. I'd love to find a way to argue that my way is right too, but a quick search says that roughly 43,000 more websites agree with the "die" version. That's not hyperbole folks; that's Google for ya.

Speaking of...well, nothing even remotely related, I'd like to spend a paragraph on my lovely wife. As I've documented in this space countless times, she's a wonderful woman who understands me so well that it often frightens her. That said, there's one skill that I have that she somehow hasn't managed to grasp quite yet: my uncanny ability to deduce the unheard side of a phone conversation just from the contextual clues from the heard side. Here's an actual recent scene from our household.

Interior: The Klein household. The telephone rings, and Amber, a beautiful woman who appears not to have aged since 20, strolls gracefully over to the base unit and picks up the receiver.

Amber: Hello? This is she. Fine, thank you.

Her husband Peter, a focused and intense man who could easily pass for either a young senator or star quarterback, knows this tone of voice. It means "telemarketer." Amber remains silent for a few seconds, listening to the pitch.

Amber: Oh, no thank you. Yeah, our cable's fine, but we already have our internet taken care of and don't want cable telephone. Thank you. No. Yes. Ok, thank you, goodbye."

She pushes a button on the receiver and then places it back on the pace. She sits down at the kitchen table next to Peter (the strapping young man from before) and looks up.

Amber: That was the cable company. They wanted to know if we wanted to use them for internet and phone also. I told them we were all set with those and didn't want to change.

Sometimes I guess she feels like she needs to say something after a phone call to acknowledge that it just happened, and I can understand that. I have been known to state the obvious on enough occasions that my friends have coined a phrase for it. "I'm going to the bathroom," I'll say after I've stood up and walked to within a yard of the bathroom. "Pete's asserting again," they'll say. Yes, I assert, and so I completely understand my lovely wife's desire to fill the post-phone-call silence with words, even obvious ones. I'm ending this paragraph now.

I went to the drugstore a couple of weeks ago and paid with a credit card. The man behind the counter handed me my receipt, and then asked, "What do you do with all the money?" "Excuse me?" I asked, wondering where the hell that question came from. "Your last name," he stated plainly, as if I should've known where he was going from the get-go. "Oh," I responded, before pretend-laughing at his pretend-humor. Yes, Calvin Klein and Anne Klein are famous people. I get that. But isn't Klein common enough at this point that I shouldn't still be getting those comments from time to time? It's not like my last name is Versace or Obama or Theron or Stalin or any other last name unique enough to automatically cause a correlation. I've vowed this before, but next time I'm really tempted to say, "Oh, yeah, Uncle Cal's pretty famous. He's a nice guy. Very generous too; keeps offering me his private jet, but with fuel costs these days I'm better off just sticking to first class, knowwhatImsayin?"

Two more quick things before our Car Watch section: First off, who the hell keeps greenlighting movies for Eddie Murphy? Seriously, how many bombs can this guy have without it officially killing his career? I know he voices Donkey in the Shrek movies (including the upcoming fourth one, according to IMDB), but look at some of the movies he's "starred" in over the past several years: two "Nutty Professor" movies, two "Dr. Dolittle" movies, "The Adventures of Pluto Nash," "Showtime," "I Spy," "Daddy Day Care," "The Haunted Mansion," "Norbit," and now "Meet Dave," which looks like it could possibly be the worst of the bunch from the trailers. And trust me when I say that that would be a feat. Eddie, please stop crapping all over your legacy of being funny back in the day and fade away gracefully. Movie execs, stop it stop it stop it. I'm serious.

And lastly, I heard a commercial on the radio yesterday for the new Slurpee flavor at 7-11. "Radiation Rush." I don't care if it's tied into the Incredible Hulk movie, that's just one of the worst names I've ever heard. Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to market something ingestible with the word "radiation" in it? I'd love to hear them argue that people identify with the Hulk and he got that way from a radiation accident. Yeah, so let's all try to be like the guy who can't control his anger, destroys shit everywhere he goes, and alienates himself from all his friends and loved ones. Yummy! 7-11, you're on notice; you don't want to join Carl's Jr. on the banned list, do you?

Ok, enough vitriol for now. Let's watch cars in the accurately named section called Car Watch.

My homey Rockabye sent me a plate a while back of which I totally approve. It read, "HI O MOM," and it was a silver station wagon. Nicely done, fellow Angelino.

I was behind a car that pissed me off. Its license plate told me, "URA WIMP." Well fuck you too. Are they daring people to tailgate or cut them off? "Come on, you don't have the guts!" And there was no way for me to really respond. I mean, I guess I could've pulled up next to the driver and said, "No I'm not! You are!" Maybe I would've done that, but I was too busy thinking, "How did they know? Is it something I'm putting out there?"

Last but not least, since today is all about me, I'll add a more personal touch to this Car Watch item. I was rear-ended on the freeway a couple of weeks ago, and my car is now in the shop getting fixed up. I'm fine, thanks for asking. I have a rental for this entire week, and while it's far from a vehicle I'd ever purchase, it's getting the job done. My license plate frame on the rental bothers me though. "My other car is an Enterprise rent-a-car," it says. That's just factually inaccurate. My other is...is MY car! This, in essence, is my other car, and they have no right to stake claim to both of my vehicles. "This is my temporary other car," or "My other car is indisposed at the moment. Enterprise!" would be fine with me, but I feel like I'm lying to everyone out there. Even more distressing, how could any rental be "mine"? Those two concepts clash on the most basic level, and yet I'm out there telling the world that my real car is a rental that I own. I hate that shit.

Ok, I guess I wasn't quite done with the vitriol when I said I was. I am now. My friends, you have a kick-ass weekend and week. Happy half-birthday to my dad tomorrow, and happy 5th birthday to little Katy up in Sac-town on Sunday. As always folks, feel free to write me at ptklein@gmail.com with anything at all so I can keep churning out my random thoughts and stories. See you again next Friday, everyone.

Connecting invisible dots

Good morning and welcome, my homepeople from across the land. I've had a bunch of random crap clogged up in the pipes of my mind lately, and I'd like to flush a lot of it out. Damn, that's one beautiful metaphor.

Speaking of metaphors and well-placed transition clauses, I often look way too much into the significance of things and attempt to make connections where they might not exist. I realize that, and I can only blame so much of it on my training as an English major. Sure, my classes taught me to really read into things and make arguments that might actually not have any bearing, but I'm pretty sure I did that stuff before college too. Maybe that's why I selected that major, thereby making it almost a chicken/egg conundrum thingy.

Let me give you some examples. In a recent song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, there's a line in the chorus that says, "Running through the field/where all my tracks will be concealed." It might sound fairly straight-forward, but I hear that and make a connection that might not really be there. Who hides their tracks? On one level, it's criminals or just people who don't want to be successfully followed. On a completely different level, it's heroin users, hiding the tracks on their arms that would give away their habit. Do the Chili Peppers intend to have that double-meaning in there? I have no idea and may just be giving them too much credit, but that's how my mind works.

(Of course, my next thought is usually something along the lines of, "Well, if that's not what they meant, it's a pretty powerful juxtaposition there that maybe I should include in some writing. Hmmm, something about hiding my tracks with sleeves and...leaves! Yeah, that's it. I could use both meaning of 'tracks' in one sentence and make a rhyme somewhere in there too. That would kick ass. Wait, am I writing anything in which someone will be using heroin? Am I writing anything at all besides my blog? Hmmm, let's store this one away for possible use later.")

Here's another example (that might make me seem less crazy): Recently, someone told me that baby rattlesnakes are born with all of their venom and that it dissipates as they age. I didn't bother to look it up and see if that was true or not or even ask how the person came about that knowledge. Instead, I thought, "Wow, that would be a very powerful metaphor if I could find the right thing to pair it with." I wondered if storytelling could apply, and whether stories about real events are most potent shortly after they take place and slowly lose their force after time. But no, that didn't make enough sense. Maybe anger is like a baby rattlesnake. Ooh, I think I found it: wheatgrass is like a baby rattlesnake. If it really loses 50% of its healthfulness just a few minutes after being processed, then I might be onto something.

Completely ignoring the whole thing about seeming less crazy, another similar metaphor just came to me that fits in nicely with this conversation: Phlegm. Yes, check this out: Having a good story to tell is a lot like having phlegm in your mouth. The longer you hold onto it, the more watered down it becomes. Eventually, it's mostly just water sitting there in your mouth waiting for you to find an opportune time to spit it out, and you might end up just swallowing it again and waiting for the next time it arises. Damn, it's hard being this profound sometimes.

Instead of waxing even more poetically on phlegm and its one-vowelness, I wanted to tell a story about storytelling. (Wow, I've never written that sentence before.) In high school, I spent my first three years taking Honors English classes that taught me how to do everything properly. We learned to diagram sentences, construct sound thesis statements, and actually support our theses with correctly-cited references. My senior year though, I switched out of my Advanced Placement English course and joined something called Expository Composition. (The teacher often referred to it as "Suppository Composition," which I think was particularly inspired.) It was basically a class for people who needed something from the English family of courses but didn't want to do much...work. I loved it.

Our teacher didn't care about thesis sentences or the structure of a paper. He just wanted us to write, and I had no problem translating thoughts to words on a page when not bound by the rules that I'd been force-fed for years. One day, he had us do an exercise that I'll always remember. We formed two circles with our desks, the inner circle facing outward so everyone was paired up. He told us to tell our partner the story of the greatest meal we'd ever eaten. I told my partner a rambling tale about being stuck on a bus for four hours more than I should've been while on a class trip and our eventual stopping point at In N Out Burger. I order two Double-Doubles and wolfed them down with the gusto of a lion snacking on a wounded gazelle. (They eat gazelles, right?) He then had everyone in the outer circle move one seat to their right and tell the new partners the same story. Then a third time with a new partner. After that, he asked us what we noticed about the evolution of our stories from the first time we told it to the third and final one. I thought about it and realized how much tighter and...better my story got. I took out all of the superfluous details, learned to build to the climax of the tale better, and had a clear beginning, middle, and end. It was amazing, and easily the most memorable lesson I had in four years of English classes (that didn't involve a teacher yelling "Bananas!" and throwing a stack of papers into the air). Now if I could only tie that lesson in with heroin, rattlesnakes, and phlegm...

And now, for the penultimate time in June 2008, it's time for Car Watch.

My Aunt Lynn saw a car with a license plate reading, "LILGASY." She wondered if that car only needs a little fuel to motor about the city, or if it's in reference to the minor occurrence of its driver's flatulence. Unless it's a big Emeril fan who doesn't know how to spell his last name, I've gotta go with the flatulence. That said, who in their right mind puts that on his or her plate? Almost more importantly to me, if the person is truly just a little gassy, why does that warrant a message on his or her car? Surely the person has to have some other distinguishing characteristic, right?

My homey Rockabye saw a bumper sticker that is quite timely: "Beer: Now cheaper than gasoline. So drink...not drive." What a unique perspective on the insanely high gas prices. Sure, it's a very random comparison, but that makes it all the more fun. Let's try one: "Pizza: Always costs less than a tank of gas. So eat up, and while you're at it, try carpooling every once in a while or maybe taking an alternate form of transportation. If you're close enough to walk, it's a great way to get some exercise without being too strenuous. Do you have a good public transportation system in your city? You might want to look into that and see if it's a viable option. Even once a week would make a big difference for the roads...and your wallet." While that may be a smidge too long for a normal car, at least it's a little more socially responsible than the other one.

Lastly, I was behind a truck yesterday. At first, I just saw the words, "WITHIN SOFT" on the back. "Hmm," I thought, "Maybe that's a moving van for fragile items." Then I noticed that it said, "NO SMOKING" above "WITHIN SOFT." That left me more confused for a brief moment until I saw, "Flammable liquids" on the other side of the large rear doors. "Yeah, that's probably supposed to be 50 ft.," I said aloud to myself. That makes much more sense.

Ok I have a large signing-off paragraph here, so let's get right into it. So long, Lakers, and thank you for a wonderful season and post-season. I would've loved two more wins, but I see this team being a force in the West for years to come, so this will just be a blip on their radar when we look back through the annals. Next, so long to living in L.A. to my Bratty Kid Sister, who got a new job and is moving up north. I congratulated her but told her that she was abandoning me. "Yeah it's too bad all you have down here is your family, your wife and your friends," she replied. Touche, BKS. Happy half-birthday today to my favorite brother and my buddy Jon. Happy half-birthday tomorrow to my homey Rockabye , and later this week, to Jesus. Happy full birthday to my friend Jason next Thursday. And before my eyes fully close, I'm outa here. Have a great weekend and week, and please remember to write to ptklein@gmail.com with anything at all. Shaloha, friends.

The old block

Howdy folks, and welcome to another word-filled installment of UOPTA. "Fun-filled" just sets the expectations too high, but you can't really argue with "word-filled," can you? I'm all about accuracy.

My parents were out of the country on vacation a couple of weeks ago, and I started writing a post that nicely poked fun at my dad during that time. I figured it was the right time to do it so that I wouldn't see an email a few minutes after I published calling me a "no good little shit" or something similarly flattering. After getting most of the way through it though, I realized that it would make a little more sense to save it for the Friday right before Fathers' Day. Yeah, I put the apostrophe after the S even though my calendar seems to think the day is only special for one father. So, without further ado (since I've already adone enough), here's what I wrote plus a good deal more. Enjoy.

My father, the wonderful man that he is, falls asleep rather easily. My brother and I spoke about this at a roast in my father's honor last December, but I'll rehash a little of it in this medium as well. Growing up, our family of four would all be sitting close to the tv as the Lakers tried holding onto a one point lead in the playoffs with fifteen seconds left to play. I'd look over at my dad, and sure enough, his eyes would be closed. These were some of the tensest moments of my youth, and he'd be blissfully unaware. I'd nudge my brother or mom and nod in my dad's direction, and they'd give me the, "He's at it again" smile and headshake.

The very best example of his spontaneous sleep happened while playing Tetris on our home gaming system. I'm sorry, let me be a little clearer: it happened while he was playing Tetris on our home gaming system. The other three of us were behind him, watching him play (at a sub-par level to yours truly, naturally). A piece started to fall slowly down the center of the screen. Instead of rotating and moving left or right, the piece continued dropping at its slowest pace right down the center until it landed on some other pieces waiting at the bottom. It wasn't at all where the piece should've gone, so either Kevin or I said, "Dad?" He sat up a little straighter and said, "Oh! Oh!" in a clearly surprised tone. "Did you fall asleep?" we asked superincredulously. He confirmed that he had indeed, and so grew the legend of Paul's slips into unconsciousness.

We made fun of this and other incidents for years and years, imitating the "Oh! Oh!" whenever possible - even if it didn't fit with our topics of conversations; it was just fun. Here's where the real hypocrisy lies: I'm just as bad as my father. For years and years, my friends have poked fun at what they affectionately refer to as "Pete's narcolepsy." (Fortunately, there's no T and only one E in 'narcolepsy,' so 'Peter' is nowhere to be found in that word.)

The first example of this that comes to mind was during a class trip to Spain when I was in high school. We were on a little dinner cruise watching some flamenco dancing show to soak up some of the local flavor. It was the loudest music and stomping I'd ever experienced in my life, and I dealt with it by falling asleep. My friend Dusty couldn't believe what he was seeing, because it seemed literally impossible to him that the cacophony of the dancers and various percussion items wouldn't keep even the most sleep-deprived individual awake. What can I say, I was tired.

There are many more examples from college. I took Astronomy 1 during the second quarter of my first year, and it was rough. First of all, I ended up majoring in English and minoring in Spanish, so it's safe to say that this course in the Physics department wasn't anywhere near my wheelhouse. However, I learned one very important thing from the class: 2:00-2:50pm isn't my prime operating time. I had five friends in the class and we all thought the teacher was hilarious, yet neither of those things kept me from falling asleep in roughly 80% of those lectures. It just happened, and usually within two minutes of me rubbing my eyes. (Much like people have triggers with migraines, rubbing my eyes is my faux-narcolepsy trigger.) Needless to say, my grade could've been a little higher in that class.

I'm more of a morning person than any of my friends, and while I tried using my early waking hour as justification for these sleep fits, that really wasn't it. Like my father, when I'm tired, I can easily fall asleep. I don't need to be terribly comfortable either. In fact, for Dusty's 21st birthday, a bunch of friends stayed in a cabin in Lake Tahoe. It was late and I was tired, so even though everyone around me was chatting and laughing, I fell asleep. Oh yeah, I was lying on a flight of stairs. Rather than wake me by any conventional means, my friends thought it made more sense to try balancing water bottles on my sleeping head. They got one on with no problem, but adding another to it (and making a kind of human Jenga game out of me) didn't work as well.

Messing with me while sleeping ended up becoming something of a hobby for these friends. They banged pots and pans in my face, and in a stroke of evil genius, banded together to pick up and move my old Toyota Corolla.

A year or so after graduation, I was living with Dusty and Jon in downtown Santa Barbara. One night, after several drinks and countless stupid stories, Dusty and I played a basketball video game on our Sega Dreamcast console. We played it fairly often, mainly because we'd created our own characters that actually looked like us (but were 6'8 and amazingly gifted). "I'm tired," I told him early on, letting him know that I was going to stop playing possibly before the end of the game. Somewhere in the second quarter, he yelled at me. "Dawg! Dawg! Wake up Dawg!" I opened my eyes, and there, standing by himself at half court and dribbling the ball was my electronic counterpart. "Sorry," I said, and I passed the ball. The same thing happened in the third quarter, but in an even more embarrassing fashion. I was dribbling down the court from left to right, and even though my eyes closed and I began nodding off, my fingers held their position and my character kept on running right until he was out of bounds. "Dawg!" Dusty yelled. "Sorry," I said again. I paused the game, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and finished the game. The whole time, I was thinking to myself, "Oh my god, I'm turning into my dad." Not in a "I don't want to be like him" sense, but more of a "Now I can't make fun of him" way instead.

In recent years, I've been a little better. Although, I seem to remember missing key moments of Alias episodes when it was on. I'd be fighting the whole show to stay awake, and then I'd hear my lovely wife say, "Well that was interesting." "Yeah," I'd say, completely unaware of what she was talking about. Five seconds later, I'd fess up: "What exactly was interesting?" "Did you fall asleep?" she'd ask. "Yeah, I guess so." We'd discuss what I remembered from the show, and usually that amounted to only the first ten minutes of the hour-long spy drama.

And then, within the past week, my flash-sleeping stuck again. This one was bad, and I'm ashamed to say that I may have taken the reigns from my dad in this category. We've all fallen asleep while reading many times, right? The eyelids get heavy, and then the book starts to slip or it even falls completely on your chest. Well, I fell asleep while reading...aloud. Yep, Peter Klein, ladies and gentlemen! I was reading a funny short story out loud in bed to my lovely wife, as I do from time to time. I noticed that I was getting pretty tired, but didn't make much of it and kept going. Then, Amber asked me a strange question: "What happened?" "Hmm?" I asked. "You just stopped reading," she said. I was about to tell her that I had just been thinking about something, but I realized that the "thinking" was actually more along the lines of what we call "dreaming." Before I could own up to it, she asked, "Did you fall asleep?" I could hear the smile in her voice, and it was completely deserved. I admitted what had happened, and the smile turned into a full-on laugh.

So Dad, as a strange sort of Fathers' Day gift, please accept my apologies for making so much fun of you for falling asleep all those times. I may not look much like you, enjoy all of the same foods that you do, or have your gift of balance, but I got your rapid sleeping ability in spades.

Now let's slide on over to the Car Watch section.

My homey Rockabye saw a plate the confused him a bit, and he knew just where to send it. (Answer: ptklein@gmail.com) It read, "(Heart) LUV 22." He pointed out that with the heart and "luv" that the driver really, really felt fondly about the number 22. I see it similarly but a little differently. What he have here folks is a clear case of Visual Stuttering. This person just wanted to say, "Love to!" as in the response to an intriguing invitation. However, because of his/her oral stuttering problem, the DMV employee heard "Love Love Two Two" and incorrectly guessed how the driver wished to have that phrase represented. Therefore, Visual Stuttering. My heart goes out to all VS victims.

Lastly, I saw a big truck with "BLT 4FN" as its license plate. At first glance, it may appear that this person and/or his car were "built for fun." Being a Car Watch expert though, I can see through the obvious choice and find out what's really going on here. His home conversations go a little like this:

Woman: Honey, is everything ok?
Man: I guess, I'm just...bored and it's bringing me down.
Woman: Well I think I know just the thing to turn that frown upside down.
Man: You do?
Woman: Oh yeah. Hey, what's that in my hand? It couldn't be...a tomato, could it?
Man: (sitting up eagerly) Is it? Is it?
Woman: Uh huh. But what goes with this tomato? Surely not this...bacon over here.
Man: Yes it does! Yes it does!
Woman: But those two aren't enough for a sandwich.
Man: (bouncing up and down on the couch cushions) No they're not! No they're not!
Woman: I wonder if there's anything in this drawer here to add to our current ingredients.
Man: (whispering to himself) Please be lettuce, please be lettuce, please be lettuce.
Woman: (raising her arm triumphantly) Lettuce!
Man: LETTUCE!!! (He leaps up off the couch and begins circling it while making whooping noises and riding an imaginary horse.) B-L-T! B-L-T! B-L-T!

And...scene.

That's it for now, but before signing off, I've got a bunch of Happies to dish out. Happy Friday the 13th to everyone and Happy Half-Birthday to my loving mother-in-law. Happy Flag Day tomorrow, and please flag responsibly. And on Sunday, I want to wish a Happy Fathers' Day to all the dads out there, but especially my own, my grandpa, and my favorite brother. Last but certainly not least by any stretch of the imagination, Happy 39th Anniversary this Sunday to my parents. Have a great weekend and week, friends.

Hung up to dry

Ah, 'tis June, and what a glorious time of year. It's a chance for people to get together, have fun in the great outdoors, and use "dads and grads" roughly a bajillion times. Can't beat it! I have some thoughts and stories for you folks, so lean back in your desk chairs and settle in.

Last weekend, my lovely wife and I went to our friends' couples baby shower. It was very nice, and the parents-to-be were clearly happy and excited for that next chapter of their lives to start. Now I'm no savvy veteran of the baby shower, so I wasn't sure what to expect in the way of games. I'm a born game-player though, so I wanted to win whatever we'd be doing. I won at our friend Lisa's shower when they had a word search and at our friend Kim's with some fill-in-the-blank nursery rhyme thing. I bring my A game. So when one of the future grandparents put a clothespin on each of us and told us we couldn't say "baby," I nodded like a boxer being asked if he's ready to touch gloves and come out swinging. Immediately, I turned to one friend, and in hushed tones asked, "Wait, what word aren't we allowed to say?" "Baby," she said, and her clothespin was snapped off her shirt and onto mine before she finished the word. Yeah, I'm that guy.

I'm also a moron though. It was about two minutes later that I, for no reason whatsoever, described a picture of a little flower with a face as "a baby flower." My sweet and benevolent wife yanked my clothespins off and smiled gleefully. Over the course of the next hour, I worked my way up to (ready for this?) nine clothespins. I was masterful, starting conversations and molding them as I slowly led people to the sentences I wanted to say. Our friend Scott wasn't even sure how it came up, but I got him to say "babysitting." I got Candice to mention "...when we have babies down the road." It was all working perfectly. (I admit that I wasn't super smooth though. One friend refused to talk to me at all, because he knew that I was only starting conversations with him in order to steal his lone clothespin.)

Every time someone pointed out to me how many pins I had, I told them in no uncertain terms that I wasn't going to win the game. I just knew that I would slip up at some point, even if it was something as ridiculous as singing a song out loud to myself that happened to have the word "baby" in it. Naturally, that almost happened a few times, but I was able to close my mouth before the offending word escaped.

We started another game in which we had to prove how well we knew the future mom and dad. As that went on, we were also supposed to pass baby food jars around and guess what flavors they were just by looking at them. I chose to abstain from that game. Not because I'm better than it or anything like that; I just wanted to minimize the chances of me accidentally saying "baby." We got through the trivia game and were going through the answers (I did horribly), and I heard a young lady and her mother to my left debating what flavor was in one of the tiny jars. It was a slightly-unnatural looking orangish-red color, and I joked that "it must be chicken tikka masala flavored." I know that's not the highest of high comedy, but I expected some laughs from that comment. One friend chuckled and said, "That's funny." With that approval, I wanted to share the joke with others. "Hey hon," I said, "Don't you think that babyfoo-" "OHHHHH!" was the shout that interrupted my joke. Before I could even fully hang my head in shame, our friend Stefanie was yanking the nine clothespins off my shirt.

In hindsight, it was almost a classic Shakespearean tragedy. A small-time player works his way up the ladder by scheming and tricking those who thought his intentions were pure. Then, when the endgame is almost in reach, his own inflated pride clouds his judgment and everything he's worked for topples in front of him. And Stefanie gets the Starbucks gift card.

I have a few disjointed thoughts that I'd like to share. First off, an online dictionary told me that "couple" can mean "an indefinite small number: few." I can't even begin to explain how much that pisses me off. Sure, that's the fourth definition and all three preceding ones talk specifically about the undeniable twoness of "couple," but there's no excuse for that. When someone is holding three...anythings in his hand, he should not be allowed to say, "I got a couple of these here anythings." According to the pros at m-w.com, I could use Definition 1 to point to two people and say, "Look at that couple." But by Definition 4's criteria, I could point to three or four people and say, "A couple of people are over there" without being incorrect. "An indefinite small number?" Oh it's definite alright, and the number is 2.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that this is more the fault of everyday people than the dictionary's. Linguists' chief concern is usage, and if people have been using "a couple" as other small numbers besides two, then they eventually have to reflect that. Hold on, 1 is a small number. Are they saying that a couple could be one by that definition? I think my head might explode if I don't start a new paragraph immediately.

Let's talk about breakfast cereal instead. Ah, much better. My lovely wife and I were eating Special K (the Red Berries sequel), and I looked at the ingredients. I've grown accustomed to the fact that I may ingest something with the word "germ" in it, but I still think wheat germ is a horrible name of something edible. So what did I see on the box? "Defatted wheat germ." Yep, that makes it totally better. Mmm.

And lastly before the Car Watch section, I went to the dentist this week. I want to go on record and say that I think it's a bad idea to make the tooth polish blood-colored. The momentary panic I felt when I rinsed and saw what appeared to be a bloody, pulpy mess could've easily been avoided. And then you would've been spared that description too. Ya see, we'd all win.

Ok, now it's time for the segment that's vacuuming the nation (sweeping is so 20th century), Car Watch!

First off, I saw a license plate that read, "(Heart) DOGKDZ." To me, that means one of three things. It could be someone who loves their dog and their kids in that order, which is an odd sense of priorities. Other than that, I see it as someone who loves his dogs who are treated like kids, or less fortunately, loves his kids who are treated like dogs. Only one of those makes the person not a creep, so I'm holding out for that one.

My loving mother-in-law saw both "IM L8" and "HAFHRL8," and wrote that since I'm such a hyperpunctual person, I'd never have those plates. Instead, she said, I could have either "NVR L8" or "2EARLY." While she's 100% correct, I feel like getting a plate like that would be taunting the traffic gods to consistently throw the plate's message in my face. "Oh yeah," they'd say, "if you're never late, then what do you call going 0 mph for 45 minutes? Sucka!"

Lastly, my homey Rockabye saw this bumper sticker: "If it ain't Dutch, it ain't much." I can understand that sentiment making sense in the following situations: Discussing paintings as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, discussing what type of boy would make the best name for a brand of paint, and discussing which jump rope techniques are superior. What's next? "If it ain't Korean, it ain't for seein'?" "If it ain't Persian, it's a lesser version?" "If it ain't Tunisian, there's no cohesion?" "If it ain't Chilean...you know what I'm sayin'?" These are fun! Chime in, gentle readers.

Alrighty then, I'm out of here. If you think of anything that you'd like to share with me for future posts (or just for shits and/or giggles), ptklein@gmail.com is there for you. Have a fantastic weekend and week, mis amiguitos, and know that your friendly neighborhood Peter will be out there fighting the good fight for you. And by "good fight," I mean "not using 'a couple' for one, three, or other numbers besides two." Damn that irks me. Shaloha.