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.