Playing a night game

Bienvenidos, mis amiguitos. It's good to see you here again, and I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving. What an odd construction of a word. It's not like we call Christmas Presentsopening or wish people a Happy Eggshunting for Easter. I just wonder how someone settled on that. Oh sure, I could look it up, but it's much more fun to imagine it...

Pilgrim 1: What a kick-ass feast. Let's make this an annual thingamajig, ya dig?
Pilgrim 2: Totally with you, dawg. It's also frickin' sweet to be all thankful and shit for the cool things in our lives, like my new Blackberry Storm.

Pilgrim 1: Word, word. Maybe our descendants will even get this day off of work in the future. Then they'll get a brief respite from that shitty traffic on the 405.

Pilgrim 2: Yeah man, they're gonna love us for this. What should we call today? It's gotta have a name so it can be on their Outlook calendars.

Pilgrim 1: How about Thanking Day? That way it fits the mold of all of the other key holidays, like Independence Day, Presidents' Day, and Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.

Pilgrim 2: I like where you're going with this. But this one should be, like, specialer or something. Why conform to the societal pressures, man?

Pilgrim 1: Ite, ite. So what, something like Givingthanks Day instead?

Pilgrim 2: No, man, even more outside the box. Let's just take the plural noun, add a present progressive verb construction on the end, and chop off the "Day" part to really f with 'em.

Pilgrim 1: Wow, you're one hell of a holiday maker, Pilgrim 2. People are going to remember this conversation forever and write about it in their weekly blogs.

Pilgrim 2: (in Borat voice) High five!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it went down similar to that. Any online research would surely back me up, so there's no reason to even look.

So now we're headed into December this week. Get ready to hear "A Long December" by Counting Crows in heavy rotation on your adult contemporary radio stations. That's fine by me. I went from absolutely loving them to "Just eh" pretty quickly, but that's what happens when you take about six years to produce an album that sounds like you mailed it in. Sorry, I'm still a little bitter.

So, wanna hear how strange I am? Some of you might recall from an older post that half-asleep Peter inexplicably named the ten-minute window before his alarm goes off "The Shed." I still have no idea about that, but it's come in handy. I won't allow myself to get up before The Shed, which used to be a problem for me. In the past, I'd spend a lot of time trying to convince myself that I should go back to sleep, but then I'd eventually give up and get out of bed. Now, I either spend the last hour waking up every two minutes until The Shed hits or wide awake, staring at the clock for that amount of time. It gets a little boring, I'll have you know. So recently, I created three spur-of-the-moment games.

The first one is called The Internal Klein Clock. I wait for the digital clock to hit a new minute, and then I count to sixty in my head. The goal is to be so spot on that the number changes again right as I say "Sixty" to myself. I've gotten quite good at it, if I do say so myself. I'm usually around one to two seconds off, and I've hit it exactly a few times. The funny part (or least tragic part) is my inner monologue during the counting. It's something like this, "Ok, this is a good pace so far, I think I'm right on target. Uh oh, did I just do that one a little too quickly? Maybe I should slow the next one down a little to compensate. Hmm, that might not have been enough. I'll slow another one down a little too. Yeah, now get back into groove." I don't always err the same way. That is, I've had the clock change while I'm saying "59...." and I've done the whole, "And sixty...come on...there" thing. I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel really good to hit it right on the head.

The second one is related but probably not as strange. Well, I'll let you be the judge of that. I'll call this game The Thumb Detective. I look at the clock, and then depending on what number is farther to the right, I cover up part of it with my thumb. I don't actually reach out and touch the clock (because my dog would take that as a sign that I'm getting up), but rather hold my thumb somewhere between my face and the clock to block it out. The point of this is to see if I can tell when it turns to the next number. For example, the digital 2 and the digital 3 have some digital segments in common. In fact, the top three lines are the same on each. So if I cover the bottom, I have a guessing game between me and my thumb as to when that two became a three. Some don't have much overlap, but 7, 8, 9, and 0 all have the same top-right section in play, so the fun can go on for...well, four minutes I guess.

The final game came to me out of nowhere. I looked at the clock and for reasons beyond me thought, "I wonder how many NBA players' names I could spell upside down on a calculator." Really, that's the best explanation I've got. So I thought about the numbers and corresponding letters and concluded that I'm working with I, E, H, S, L, B, O, and maybe G (the 9 is suspect). Immediately, I got Bosh from the Toronto Raptors. That led me to wondering if he ever uses 4508 as a PIN for anything. Then I thought of Bell, as in Raja Bell on the Phoenix Suns. For my third one, I wanted to find one not starting with a B to add diversity to my list. I came up with a former player (Mario Ellie), but that wasn't going to cut it. Monta Ellis came next, which worked just fine. With more deliberation, I came up with Grant Hill and David Lee. Here's where I go from quirky to possible crazy. Monta Ellis can play point guard, Raja Bell plays shooting guard, Grant Hill's a small forward, David Lee plays the power forward position, and Chris Bosh plays center. My first five guys would actually be a very good starting five, with scorers and role-players complementing each other nicely. In fact, Bell and Hill are teammates - do you think that's a coincidence? Or did the owner specifically seek out players whose surnames could be represented upside down on calculators? We may never know.

(When I confessed to my lovely wife that I'd been playing that last game, she said, "Like Bosh?" Man I love that woman.)

Ok, one final thing before the Car Watch. If you recall, I spent some time last week writing about words that show up way more often in song lyrics than in our everyday speech out of laziness. I cited both "romance" and "strife" in my argument, and I have one more to add to the pile. "Shelf." What do I mean? Countless songs out there end a line in "myself," and then force a line about either putting a book back on or taking one off a shelf. I think that's lazy, and I think that those three words should be stricken from the songwriting record, Your Honor.

And if you're not still full from yesterday's feast, here's some Car Watch for you to chew on.

I saw a license plate during this past week that confused me, and I'm hoping there's a simple explanation that you'll reveal to me and remove this extra and unnecessary confusion from my already confuse-infused brain. The plate read, "FLAISLA." My first attempt at making sense of this was, "Florida is Los Angeles." Since I know firsthand that it's not, I tossed that theory out. The next guess was, "Florida Island...in Spanish." Yeah, that doesn't make much sense either. I know Florida has a bunch of little islands, but that makes it sound like the whole state is an island. Or maybe it's a mis-spelled take on humankind having original sin: "Flaw is Law." I honestly don't know what's up there, so fill me in if you're picking up what that driver's putting down.

Next up, my homey Rockabye saw this bumper sticker and sent it to ptklein@gmail.com: "Where's DeButts Terrace?" I think I know what they're trying to do here, and I refuse to play along. They want me to find out exactly where DeButts Terrace is by searching for it online, thereby expanding its popularity. Nay, I say. I shall not play your game.

Crap, I just played their game. I'd like to say it's not all my fault, but I'd be lying. Here's the thing: It was bothering me not knowing whether there was supposed to be an apostrophe in DeButts in not. Of course I expected that my homey Rockabye sent it in to me correctly, but I wanted to make sure. So I did a Google search, and the brief descriptions alone told me the entire story. Debutts Terrace is not a restaurant or any other kind of establishment that I may have been picturing. Instead, it was a street in Malibu. The residents were tired of being laughed at, so they formally changed it to Murphy Way two years ago. (If I were in that city council meeting, I totally would've said something like, "Yes, it's been embarrassing and a hardship for us all. So we propose an overdue name change to either DeButts Road or DeButts Circle. Enough is enough.") So, if you had some people's old address and were trying to find them, you very well may be wondering where the hell DeButts Terrace is.

Lastly, I saw a bumper sticker that proudly proclaimed, "I love airplane noise." Somehow, that seems more like a fetish to me, but I was certainly intrigued. Why would someone love airplane noise so much that s/he got a bumper sticker stating it? Is it a former pilot or air traffic controller who misses the job and looks up wistfully every time a plane soars overhead? Is it someone who used to live right under the LAX flight path but recently moved and now finds it hard to fall asleep without the intermittent roars of jet engines? Is it sarcastic? Oh life is such a mystery sometimes.

Alrighty folks, that's enough musings for now. You have yourselves (and your shelves) a great weekend and week, and I'll be back on the first Friday of December. During that time, Monday is my friend and former boss Kim's half-birthday, and Tuesday is my France-dwelling friend Devon's half-birthday. If you want to say hi or send me any thoughts, questions, stories, jokes, recipes, diatribes, or directions to a buried treasure, my inbox is there for you. Shaloha, and see you next time.