Fear in the headlights

Good morning, homepeople. How's everyone doing on this (insert adjective that correctly refers to the weather in your part of the world) Friday? Yes, it's rather (insert same adjective with the knowledge that it is either accurate or sarcastic) here in Los Angeles, too. We do what we can. As I type this, I have no idea what this post is going to be about, and that frightens me a little. But I shall face my fears, push on, and see what comes of this.

Actually, something just came of this. By writing, "face my fears," I recalled a brief story. Isn't it fantastic when that happens? (Answer: Yes!) I've written a little about our sweet and adorable dog Hallie in the past. I wrote about how she got her name, songs in which I frequently insert that name, and some silly things she does from time to time. I don't believe I've ever talked about how extremely timid she was when we first got her from the rescue organization.

During the first month or so of having our new family member, we learned more and more things that scared her on a daily basis. It made no sense, really. I'd be walking her, and the wind would move a leaf. I think that's fairly typical, but she'd cower and put her tail so far between her legs that it looked like she had a penis. A minute later, a car alarm could go off right next to us and she wouldn't bat an eye. "Really? You're ok with that though?" I'd ask her. She never answered.

The scariest thing in the world to her during that first little while was...ROLLING LUGGAGE! I was walking her, and a woman pulling a suitcase behind her turned the corner and was a few feet from us. Hallie leapt backwards in the air, curled into the smallest ball she could behind my legs, and started shaking. The luggage roller asked me why she was so afraid, and I said what ended up being a very common refrain for the first couple of years that we had her: "We got her from a shelter, so we don't really know."

I saw that she started to develop a bad habit. Namely, when walking through the parking lot sections of our large apartment complex, Hallie started to fear...PARKED CARS! Yes, I know, they're very scary. I would try taking us between two cars, and she'd stop dead in her tracks and pull backward or turn and try going a different direction. After I changed course a couple of times, I took a new tact. "Hallie, it's time to face your fears," I said to her. Trying my best to be the confident and assertive pack leader she needed, I pulled her through two cars parked close together. My thought was that if she saw that she could go through without whatever mortal peril she expected to happen, then it would be easier the next time. And you know what? I was actually right. The next time we got to parked cars, I said again, "Face your fears, Hallie dog." With minimal pulling, we walked through. The time after that was no problem at all. I made her face her fears and she came out the other end smiling. (She really does look like she's smiling at times. See?)

After being a part of our family for four years now, she hardly resembles the little scaredy-dog we brought back to that apartment in Sacramento. She's still more timid than the average dog, but she's come way out of her shell. Parked cars, rolling luggage, and even dreaded leaves don't have the same effect on her anymore. I'd like to think that transformation started right then when I had the heartfelt Father-Dogter pep talk. I'd also like to think that she'll magically start walking better on a leash without us really working on it, but I'll take what I can get.

That story got me thinking (uh oh) about whether I practice what I preached (proach?) to my pup. Do I push myself enough in uncomfortable moments? Do I have fears that I can actively try to minimize? I actually think the answer is yes, albeit on a couple of small scales that come to mind. If there's an ugly bug in the house, I would love to be able to cast a spell from two rooms away to make it disappear. Instead, since I'm the designated bug-killer of the house, I've forced myself to persevere in those situations. Oh sure, there may be some girlish screaming involved and, if it was unfortunately messy for any reason, slight waves of nausea, but I get the job done. And I suppose it has gotten easier of the years. Maybe this "face your fears" stuff really works.

The other example that readily came to mind involves talking to strangers. Oh sure, it's easy on a computer monitor, but I'm talking about a different forum: the phone. There are times at work that I have to call someone with whom I'm not yet acquainted. Often that call is to ask for something (set up a meeting, pitch him/her on a service that might not be needed, complain about how a matter was handled, etc.), so I don't think that they'll excitedly say, "Oh hi; great to hear from you!" after I introduce myself. Therefore, I find it a little difficult to pick up the phone and start that process. I don't know if it's actually fear that makes me hesitate and not want to do it, but it's definitely in the fear family. (Coming soon to Fox - Fear Family! What happens when a normal suburban family is haunted by ghosts as they attempt to eat pig rectums and walk a plank over genetically-modified barracudas? Find out Fridays at 10/9 Central!) So what do I do? I make myself start. It's very similar to how I would talk to girls in junior high school. I told myself that if I began the sentence, it would be too late to turn back and I'd be forced to run with it. That's what I do now on the occasional call of this type. Knowing full well that I don't want to, I pick up the phone and start dialing as quickly as possible. Once it rings, it's out of my hands and I just have to power through the call and make it happen. And everything ends up being just fine. That makes the next time and the one after that a little bit easier, and I'm pleased to know that I'm headed in the right direction. Peter Klein: Fear Facer.

Bees and wasps though? Nah, fuck that, I'm not facing that fear. I’m 31 years old, and I still freeze like a broken computer anytime a bee is buzzing around me.

Ok everyone, let's move our sharp and lethal stinger-asses on over to the Car Watch.
First off, my lovely wife and I went wine tasting over this past weekend. In the parking lot of one of the wineries, she saw this license plate frame: "Wine drinkers make grape lovers." Nicely done. Speaking of that trip, we went to one place called Wiens that we really liked. While sitting there, I pointed out that "Wiens" is an anagram of "sinew." "Or 'wines,'" my lovely wife added, which was way more appropriate. "What's wrong with me?" I asked. She didn't answer, so I took that to mean, "Nothing, honey, nothing is wrong with you."

Next up, my homey Rockabye sent me this Car Watch item that made me laugh: "Bring back professional football in Detroit." You see, they do have a pro team, but since their hometown Lions went 0-16 last year (a record in futility), the car's owner doesn't think that they should count as "professional." I like sarcasm, so I liked this. It's a simple equation really.

And lastly, my friend Dusty sent me a funny bumper sticker: "If size doesn't matter, how come I'm so popular?" I've wondered the same thing for years, my friend.

Ok, that's it for today. But have no fear (tee hee), I'll be back next Friday with more stuff and...stuff. In the meantime, here are some happies: Today is my favorite niece's 5/6 birthday, so wish her well as she nears becoming a whole number. Happy 91st birthday tomorrow to my lovely wife's grandfather, which is quite impressive. Happy half-birthday to longtime and loyal reader Sue on Wednesday, and happy full birthday to my co-worker Rob on Thursday. As always, you can reach me at ptklein@gmail.com. Take care, everyone, and shaloha.

Geeking havoc

Good morning, one and all. I hope everyone's feeling chipper out there. Not like a wood chipper, mind you; I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of my original intention. So welcome. Ya know, for all the time I spend at the end of these posts wishing people happy full and half-birthdays, you'd think that I wouldn't gloss over key dates like the Ides of March and St. Patrick's Day. You'd be wrong though. In any case, I hope you survived the former and enjoyed the latter.

Back in December, I purchased something from an amazing website called ThinkGeek. Some of the stuff on there is way too technical for me to even know what they're spoofing, but I found something on there that I thought my boss might like. It's a mini drum kit that you play with your fingers (http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/cubegoodies/922f/), and I found it cool at least. However, I had no idea at the time that that gift would only yield about 1/1000th of the pleasure that I got from the "free gift with purchase." By spending a certain amount of money, I got a free device called The Annoy-a-tron. Here are the key parts of the item's description:

The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but very annoying, hence the name) beep every few minutes. Your unsuspecting target will have a hard time 'timing' the location of the sound because the beeps will vary in intervals ranging from 2 to 8 minutes.

With its thin design and embedded magnet for easy hiding, the Annoy-a-tron can be placed in a variety of locations.

Assuming you have done your part in selecting a suitable hiding location for the Annoy-a-tron, it will do its part to drive your co-workers slowly mad with its short and seemingly random beeps. And when someone does locate the Annoy-a-tron, they're really not going to know what it is - which is almost as much fun as watching them search for it. Muahaha.

So once we got back to work during the first week of January, I thought about what would be the most suitable hiding place. I didn't want to subject my boss to this, mainly because I'm not a moron. My co-worker Jamie didn't deserve the torture, and Rob wouldn't have found it funny at all. In fact, I could see him getting very upset, yelling at the facilities managers, and unintentionally taking all of the joy out of the prank. But my co-worker named Scott...now that's a different story. Scott's a prankster in his own right (including the occasional hiring of a singing telegram in a full gorilla costume for someone's birthday), so I knew he'd eventually appreciate it. Also, there was a little sense of payback for the amount of stress he's caused me by consistently running five minutes late to conference calls and meetings. As a hyperpunctual person, that doesn't fly with me whatsoever. And he toys with me, often lying about when he'll be somewhere just to make me a bit more nervous.

So Scott won the honorable distinction of having me hide The Annoy-a-tron in his office. I found the perfect spot: the inside metal lip of a small table in the far corner of his office. I told almost everyone else in the office about the gag, turned it on, and waited to see what would happen. In all honesty, I expected Scott to complain about a beeping sound, find the device within a day or two, accuse us of planting it there, and then we'd all share a laugh as he called me names. Well my friends, my assumption was a little bit off.

A week went by, and I hadn't heard a peep out of Scott about any hearing any noises. I made sure to turn it off at the end of each day and then back on in the mornings in an effort to save the battery. Every time I turned it on, it beeped, so I knew it must have been working. The next week, I sat in Scott's office when I heard a beep from the corner. He didn't bat an eye and kept talking. Was he going deaf? If so, then this was a horrible idea. A few minutes later, it beeped again. I couldn't hold it in any longer. "Did you hear something?" I asked. "YES!" he yelled, with an exasperated look on his face. "I've been hearing that beeping for a week now. I think something's battery is dying but I can't figure out where it's coming from." Being fairly quick on my feet, I turned the exact opposite direction of where I planted The Annoy-a-tron and said, "It sounded like it came from over there."

A couple more weeks went by, with the same scene playing out over and over again. "I gotta find out what that is. It has to be either something losing its power or some kind of bug." "You think someone's bugging you?" I asked, trying my best to seem genuinely concerned. "It's possible, I guess." To maximize the fun factor, I'd occasionally leave The Annoy-a-tron off for a few days at a time before turning it back on. "Still hearing that beeping?" I asked. "Ya know, I didn't for a few days, but I just heard it a minute ago!" "Still coming from over here?" I asked, pointing in the wrong direction. "There are two beeps," he said. "One is coming from the that corner, and the other I think is coming from over there, but maybe up in the ceiling." That led to the three-week period in which he thought it was a smoke detector with a dying battery.

Two months into the journey, Scott seemed to be coming a little unhinged. Determined to find the source of the on-again/off-again beeping, he began unplugging various electronic devices around his office. The phone and plant that lived on the small table (under which the device was hiding) were temporarily moved into the lobby area. The television, cable box, and shredder were unplugged and scrutinized for any visible problems. Nothing seemed to work though, so he gave up and just tried to accept the fact that something was going to beep every few minutes on some days of the week.

That might make it seem like it lost its fun, but that's not the case. In fact, that's when the other office mates got involved to make Scott really start to question his sanity. "Did you hear that?" we'd ask, when there hadn't been any sound whatsoever. When it would beep, we'd keep a straight face and pretend not to have heard it. Then my boss and I "heard" the sound of a monkey going, "Hoo hoo" every so often. Scott just threw his hands up in the air and said, "I don't even know anymore. I don't think I'm going crazy, so something weird is definitely going on."

I was thinking of turning it off for a good week or two just to make him think the problem had resolved itself. I thought the payoff would be great when it reared its beeping head once more. I didn't get there though, because something happened. "Scott just found a bug in his office," a co-worker who wasn't in on the gag told me on Tuesday of this week. "What?" I asked, careful not to give myself away yet. "Yeah, something beeped, and his friend got on the ground and found a little electronic thing hidden under a table." I got up and went in there. Here's a synopsis of how the next half an hour played out:

Me: So it's a bug?

Scott's Friend: Yes. It definitely is. I've seen bugs before, and this is transmitting somewhere.

Me: (to Scott) Why would someone bug you?

Scott: I don't know, but this is fucked up.

Scott's Friend: Based on the size and battery, this thing can't be more than six months old. It has to be transmitting to somewhere close by. (He catches Jamie smiling.) Maybe these guys had something to do with it.

Me: Oh yeah, 'cause I want to hear everything Scott's saying.

Scott: No, and that looks like it's expensive.

Scott's Friend: I know a guy who I can bring this to. He can tell us if it's FBI, CIA, military, or something else.

Scott: Oh crap. Oh crap.

Me: If anyone's listening in there, my name is Peter Klein, and I've done nothing illegal.

Scott: Oh crap. Oh crap.

I then texted my boss (who was out of town) to tell him what was going on. I grabbed The Annoy-a-tron's box from my office, and I was about to present it to Scott and come clean with the whole thing, but I waited until he finished leaving a slightly-panicked message on our boss's voicemail. He hung up and said, "I think I need to go bring this somewhere and find out what it is. It'll cost me $500 if I go to the one place I know, but that's worth it." That was enough for me. I printed out The Annoy-a-tron's page from the ThinkGeek site and put it on Scott's desk. "Hey Scott, it kinda looks like this, don't you think?" "That's it!" he said excitedly. "And it looks like it would come in a box like this, right?" I asked, as I put it next to the printout. He looked up at me, and confusion turned to disbelief, which morphed into a mix of smiling relief and dissipating anger. "You fucker!" he said. "I knew it was them," his friend chimed in. "Was that before or after you told us the approximate transmitting distance?" Rob asked.

For the next hour, Scott said many things about not believing that "mild-mannered Peter" played this trick on him. I pointed out that the device said "ANNOY" on it, but he said it was too small to read and looked like "ALLOY." He asked if we were snickering behind his back every time he unplugged something or moved the plant, and we said it was much more often than that. I told him that I knew he could take it, and I wouldn't have done that to anyone else in the office. That didn't make it any better though, and he vowed to get revenge on me for making him think that he was either crazy or under surveillance by the government. He had two final thoughts on the subject: "Payback is a bitch," and, "Payback is a motherfucker." I'll let you all know how that turns out. This free gift ended up causing an exponentially higher amount of entertainment than I ever could've guessed, so I regret nothing...yet.

And now, let's magnetically affix ourselves onto the Car Watch.

My homey Rockabye sent me this license plate: "KANSKID." I have to believe it's one of three things, each with a flaw. If it's "Kansas Kid," then the missing extra S makes it more confusing than it should be. If it's "Kan's Kid," what kind of name is Kan? Is it short for some funky spelling of Candice? Is it going the Courtney route (which has about 30 spellings now), leading to Khandyss and Kanndhis? I hope not. And if the plate is supposed to be, "Can Skid," then the driver needs better tires right away.

I saw a license plate frame, and between reading the top and bottom of it, I was able to slip in a thought and an entire memory. Pretty special, eh? So the top said, "All Eyez on Me." "Wait a minute, that sounds familiar," I thought. Then I remembered why. Years ago, I sent my friend Dusty a text message about a license plate frame I saw that confused me. "All Eyes on Me" was on top, and "Fijian Pride" on the bottom. Was the driver just vain and proud of her heritage? "Is it some kind of pun with the three dotted letters in a row?" Dusty wondered. We never came to a consensus, but I went back to that in my mind before looking at the bottom of the frame in front of me. What did it say? "2Hard's Mom." Well that's different. And it was a guy driving. I drove away more confused than ever.

Lastly, I was behind a car with this plate: "1TRU QT." I wanted to see how accurate the driver was in his or her self-assessment. So when the opportunity presented itself, I passed the car on the right and saw the woman driving. Um, gee, how can I put this politely? I think Borat said it best with, "You, eh, not so much." I don't normally go around judging people by their outer beauty, but when you tell everyone on the road that you're cute, you kinda have to be cute. Sorry, lady.

Ok, I've taken up way more of your time than I originally anticipated, so I'll make this part brief. Happy half-birthday today to our friend Paul, and happy 5th anniversary tomorrow to my lovely and increasingly wonderful wife. Have a great week everyone, and if you have a March Madness bracket, may your hunches prove to be accurate. As always, you can reach me at ptklein@gmail.com. Take care.

Spain management

Hello again, UOPTA readers, and thanks for coming back here for more of whatever it is I do here. I'm a little confused that it's Friday the 13th again after we just had one last month too. Aren't they usually more rare than that? And if the calendar on my phone is correct (and why wouldn't it be?), we have another one of them in November. That's weird, right? I don't keep track of such things, but three of them in one calendar year seems awfully high to me. Crap, now I have to look it up. Sure enough, 2008 only had one Friday the 13th (in June), so this year's total of three is a huge increase. And 2010 has but one as well (in August). I love it when my random hunches get proven to be accurate.

A couple of days ago, I was reminded of a story from my past. I started to send myself an email to write about it in this space, but I stopped partway through because I was certain that I'd already done that. The next day, I spent a good ten minutes searching on my blog for that story by typing in different words that would be essential to the story, but I came up blank. I still think it's in here somewhere, but what the hell, here goes:

During my senior year of high school, I went on a class trip to Spain with my fellow AP Spanish students and a few other people who my teacher just liked and allowed to join us. This was really the height of my extroverted behavior, fresh off a good role in a school play and 1.5 years of improv comedy under my belt. That said, I was clearly still learning that glorious secret to comedy: timing.

After a week of gallivanting around the country, seeing beautiful museums and landmarks, and learning the wonderful effect that alcohol had on my teenage body (it was legal there, Mom), the group headed to airport for our long trip back home. Since we were a larger group, we had an customs official assigned to us to get all of our paperwork perused and approved. The man assigned seemed nice enough, and he unknowingly started his questioning with the meekest and generally most uncomfortable student in our group. This was a shy underclassman named Brett, and I was standing right next to him. Here's how it went down:

Airport Agent: Passport please.
Brett: Oh, ok, um, here you go.
Airport Agent: Do you have any contacts here in Spain?
Brett: Excuse me?
Airport Agent: (a little more sternly) Do you have any contacts here in Spain?
Brett turns to Peter, the street-smart and wily veteran next to him. Brett's face shows a combination of confusion and sheer panic. Peter doesn't pick up on this and instead goes for the funny.
Peter: No, he wears glasses.
Peter looks around for approval and maybe a high-five, but his search is interrupted by the agent.
Airport Agent: Please let him answer the questions himself. (to Brett) Do you have contacts here?
Brett looks back at Peter, in full panic mode now.
Peter: (trying to save the day) No, you don't. (to the agent) No, he doesn't.
Airport Agent: Sir, please stop answering for him. (to Brett) Is there anyone in Spain who you were meeting?
Brett: Oh. No sir.
Airport Agent: Did you pack your bags yourself?
Brett: Yes.
Airport Agent: Do you have any firearms or explosives in your possession?
Peter: (half to himself) No, he left them at the hotel.
Airport Agent: (very sternly and seriously) Look, I know you're kidding, but if someone else were to hear you, you'd be in serious - SERIOUS - trouble, do you understand me?
Peter: (thankful for his ability to avoid shitting in his pants) Yes sir. Sorry.

I stepped away from their conversation, and when it was my turn, the agent and I went through the process quickly, mechanically, and uber professionally.

Here's the thing that gets me about that story: I was a fairly bright kid, so I should know what everyone on the frickin' planet knows about when not to make jokes. Airports/planes and banks are off limits, and rightfully so. Yet here I was, a snotty teen who had recently been praised for off the cuff comedic retorts, unable to stop myself from pointing out the ambiguity of the phrase, "in your possession." I'm glad the agent knew that a stern glare was enough to scare me straight, because an airport holding cell would've been excessive in my opinion.

I certainly learned my lesson. If anything, I get weird looks from airport personnel now for being super friendly and polite. It's a sad state of affairs when manners cause suspicion, but that's the way it works sometimes. "Why's this guy smiling at me and asking me how I'm doing this morning? What is he hiding?"

Ok, I have room for a couple unrelated stories. By unrelated, I mean both to the previous story and to each other, in case you were curious. First, I was watching with great adoration recently as my favorite niece was falling asleep. I found myself thinking, "Ah, there's nothing like a kid nap. Wait. Kid nap. Kidnap?" Naturally, I couldn't stop thinking about that word for while. Wouldn't kidnab make a hell of a lot more sense? Someone nabbed a kid, and there most likely wasn't much napping involved. Who do I petition to have that changed?

While I'm at it, I think "kidnapper" makes more sense than "babysitter" for that position. Maybe I should start handing out cards that say, "Peter Klein, Kidnapper. All ages. Reasonable rates. References available upon request." Seriously though, if you didn't speak English well at all, is there any way you would hire a "babysitter" over a "kidnapper"? One sounds much crueler than the other, and if you're willing to put everything you know aside, I have to believe that you'll agree with me. Just like Diarrhea being a pretty name for a girl (but spelled Diaria, of course).

And my other unrelated story involves my favorite nephew. Well, he's related to me and to my favorite niece, so I guess there's something related going on here. Anyway, I was reading one of the Shawny Man's books to him, and something caught my eye. On one of the pages, Cookie Monster was eating a piece of watermelon. "He's eating something other than cookies?" I asked my dad, who was on the couch with us. "That's bullshit," he said (or something similar). I thought about it and realized that no one ever said that the Cookie Monster only ate cookies, it's just that he loves them with every ounce of his being. If he's hungry and there are no cookies around, then sure, he can eat something else. One page later though, and Cookie Monster was eating cupcakes...and there were cookies right in front of him! What the hell, man? Did he go to cookie rehab or something when I wasn't paying attention? I don't ask for too much from my puppets, but consistency is key. Seeing Cookie Monster eating other foods is like seeing Oscar the Grouch living part-time in a condo in Manhattan. It just ain't right.

With that, let's take the subway (specifically the C line) on over to the Car Watch.

First off, my homey Rockabye knows how I feel about Prius license plates. It seems like I've come across every combination of plate that touts their MPG capacities. So when he sent me a different type of Prius plate, I appreciated the variety. It read, "GSGZLRR." Yes folks, we've branched out into the sarcastic Prius owner realm. I welcome it with open arms.

My Bratty Kid Sister sent me a license plate, and even if I didn't like it, I'd still put it here because I believe in rewarding those who reach out to me by writing to ptklein@gmail.com (hint hint). As luck would have it, this plate would've made the cut even if it had come from my homey Rockabye and his infinite supply of Car Watch items. This one read, "QDITCH*." If you can't tell, that's "Quidditch star." If that still means nothing to you, I'll shed some light on the subject by explaining that Quidditch is the make-believe sport that the make-believe characters play in the make-believe world of Harry Potter and his friends. Not only does the driver of this car want us to believe that s/he plays this sport (which involves flying on broomsticks), but that s/he is very good at it too. I hope - and I mean really, really hope - that "Quidditch star" made it on the driver's resume at some point. That would just make my day.

And lastly, I saw this plate on a car while driving home earlier this week: "DROOLY." I looked, and the driver was neither a Bassett Hound nor a Newfoundland, so my guesses were way off. (By the way, here's a good little joke to use at anyone's expense you see fit. I'll choose our former President as a target to illustrate my point: "Did you hear what George W. Bush got on his SATs? Drool." It's best when you bring it up contextually, like when someone mentions W's Yale education, for example. Maybe I've officially learned my lesson on comedic timing. In any case, please let me know if you get a chance to use this joke and how it's received. It's served me well in the past, especially when I ask it in a very serious tone like I'm about to impart some cool trivia. I'm gonna close this parenthetical side note at some point, right?)

That's it, homepeeps. I hope your Friday the 13th is neither freaky nor filled with homicidal maniacs wearing hockey masks. Aren't I sweet? I'll be back here next Friday with more stuff, so hopefully you can wait that long. Before that, Thursday is our good friend Danielle's half-birthday, so send her some half-happy thoughts, ok? Take care, everyone, and be happy and healthy. That's an order.

More than I can chew

Hello and shaloha, my homepeople. It's a pleasure to have you on this website today, especially since there are at least 20 or 30 others to choose from. I hope you're all doing well. Personally, I could be doing a little better. You see, I have a problem, and I want to get it all off my chest here and now...in story form, of course.

In college, I took four creative writing courses and absolutely loved them. The first of those classes allowed us to write whatever we liked, and after dabbling in short stories for a week, I switched over to writing poetry and never really looked back. More specifically, I almost exclusively wrote in specific forms and meters instead of free verse (which I referenced in last week's post). There was something about trying to be creative within a defined (and often rigid) structure that gave me a much, much greater sense of satisfaction and accomplishment than the free verse variety. In fact, I had trouble writing not in meter. I tried once, and my professor happily pointed out that I slipped into a rhythm a few times in my lines. Why did I like it writing in meter so much? I believe it all boils down to the degree of difficulty.

Allow me to back up a little before I move forward. It's not that I don't enjoy well-written free verse. I do, and I even just read an entire book written in free verse that was fascinating. It's called Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow, it's about modern day werewolf creatures, and it's like nothing you've ever read. That format worked surprisingly well with the subject matter, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I personally don't like writing in free verse though, and here's where I'll sound a little snobby: I feel like anyone can write crappy free verse, but it still takes skill and planning to write crappy meter. In fact, really crappy meter turns into crappy free verse, if that makes sense. Which brings us back to the degree of difficulty thing: it wasn't enough for me to think of a topic and want to write a poem; I needed the extra level of fitting it into specific metric feet to get my full sense of accomplishment.

And that's a problem I see in my life at times when it comes to creative projects. The higher I set the degree of difficulty, the lower my chance of success will be. Some of you longtime readers might recall the humble beginnings of this blog. I wrote one day, then another, and then another. From that point, I decided that I had to do it every single workday (including holidays) or it didn't count for some reason. It took me a year to finally switch to once a week, and that came with some hefty internal struggling - even though I was almost completely out of topics.

One might reasonably think that I'd learn my lesson, but I keep coming back to this problem. The most recent example is what led me to this post. Back in a late '08 post called "Twinkle Twinkle," I casually mentioned that maybe I should write down something new that I learned every day of 2009. That, in and of itself, is a fine idea I think. After I told myself that I was going to go for it, I just couldn't leave well enough alone. "Maybe I could write the thing I learned in a rhyming couplet," I thought. "That way, at the end of the year, I'd essentially have a 730-line poem!" I thought about it more and ditched that idea, realizing that I would often have more content than would fit in what would amount to twenty syllables. So I went the other way: I chose to make a book out of this. Each day, I would learn something, but I wouldn't just write it down like a list of new facts. Instead, I would start by telling a story, which would cause me to question something, which I would then look up and find out the answer. If each day ended up being about a page in length, I'd end up with a (hopefully) interesting book of over 300 pages that I could then shop to publishers. How cool would that be?

So I began. To show you the full range of my lunacy, here is what I wrote for January 3rd, 2009:

I'm reading a book by Nick Hornby right now in which he talks about the various books he's purchased and read on a monthly basis. It's taken from a series of articles he wrote for The Believer, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. In May of 2008, he started and stopped a few books, but "nothing took." "At least I have some fun facts at my disposal," he wrote. "Did you know that if you wrote out the human genome one letter per millimeter, the text would be as long as the river Danube?" He doesn't specifically say which book that was from, but of course I was not aware of that. Still, I didn't feel comfortable saying that the thing he learned that day would be the thing I learned on this day.

What struck me most about that fact was that it posed two more questions for me.
First, the human genome is written in letters? I'd never pictured it or tried to, but I doubt I would've pictured letters. And second, I guess the Danube is long, but I have zero idea whether it's five or five hundred miles (or kilometers, I suppose).

So I looked stuff up. According to Wikipedia, the human genome "occupies a total of just over 3 billion DNA base pairs." That sounds like a lot. A sample base pair looks like this:

ATCGAT
TAGCTA

I'm now remembering Adenine, Guanine, and other -ines from science classes back in high school, thereby making sense of this whole thing. "One letter at a time" for each base pair with over 3 billion base pairs...I'm guessing that's a damn long river. Let's check.

Sticking with Wikipedia for ease, it tells me that the Danube is "the longest river in the European Union and Europe's second longest river after the Volga." How long is that? 1,771 miles or 2,850 kilometers. Wow, that's a long river. How does that compare with the Nile? Well that one is 4,132 miles or 6,650 kilometers, aka "long ass long." So what did I learn today?

You would need to write out the human genome letter by letter about 2.33 times to make it the length of the Nile.

And to doubly prove my point (and ensure that this is the longest UOPTA post of all time), here is January 5th:

I was standing in my boss's office with another co-worker today when my boss turned on his computer. His desktop is a pretty picture of bright stars and what I'm assuming are galaxies. Out of nowhere, my co-worker said, "Ah, the Peacock Galaxy." "What?" my boss asked, and the co-worker pointed out a bright part on the screen that looked a little like a peacock if you squint and/or are extremely high. "Is there really a Peacock Galaxy?" I asked. "Eh, I'm just making stuff up. But I think that's it," he replied. "Hold on," I said, "either you made it up or it really exists." "It exists in my mind," he said, rendering himself completely useless.

I went to Wikipedia and found zero entries for "Peacock Galaxy." When I just tried "Peacock," it took me to a page for a star called Alpha Pavonis in the constellation Pavo. "Alpha Pavonis was named Peacock, for obvious reasons," it told me. Uh, not obvious to me. So I dug around some more online and found another site the spelled out that "pavo" means "peacock" in Latin. "Wait a gosh darn second," I said to myself, "Pavo just means 'turkey' in Spanish."

I consulted an online English to Spanish (and vice versa) dictionary to get more information. As I knew but confirmed, "duck" is the similar "pato" and "turkey" comes out as "pavo." What does "peacock" tell me in Spanish? "Pavo real." Yeah, enough of those fake turkeys already. I'm talking to you, vegans.

I went to find out more about peacocks to see how close they were as a species to turkeys. I guess they look alike, come to think of it, once you get past the showy colors. As it turns out, a turkey is in a different genus than the peacock, but that's not my learned item of the day. Nope; it's this:

While a male is called a peacock, a female is technically a peahen. Together, their group is amusingly called peafowl.

I think you may see my dilemma. I was having fun and truly learning interesting things, but I set my sights way too high. I'd get to the end of the day and think, "Oh crap, did I learn anything today?" Then I'd try reliving conversations I had, and on the off chance that something stood out, I'd have to go back and find a story to tell to lead to that fact. On several occasions, I had to start scouring the internet to find something to learn before the day was up. The task was becoming far too arduous, especially since I decided at some point that none of that information should overlap with what I was writing in my weekly blog. Brilliant, Peter, simply brilliant.

At the end of January, I began questioning if I should abandon this task. I hated to even think of doing that, but I looked at the calendar and thought that was probably the way to go. Before throwing in the towel though, I was going to press on. I got through February 10th successfully, and then my lovely wife and I went away for the weekend. I sent myself text messages during that time of things that I should write about upon my return. The messages said, "Find origin of 'shoe-in,'" "something about steroids - start with A-Rod," and "Who was Ft. Lauderdale named after?" Well folks, those text messages remained just that, and I never got back on the horse. My desire to up the proverbial ante outweighed my actual ability to complete the task. Part of me was mad and disappointed in myself for being my own creative project's downfall. The other part of me felt great about abandoning the idea, because it was taking a lot of time and stressing me out when I had to search for new information.

So what's next for me and my high bar-setting? I don't know. I'm going to try to regulate myself for a while, and if I get an idea that makes my eyes twinkle, I'll try to keep it on the simpler side. I can always go back and rework it to be a Spanish palindrome in iambic pentameter, or whatever ridiculous thing I decide to attempt.

With that, my friends, let's take a palindromic race car over to the Car Watch.

For once, I have clear-cut examples to illustrate the point I've been trying to make about license plates all along: if it doesn't quite work, just abandon the idea instead of forcing it. Longtime and devoted reader Sue sent me this plate: "IAMUNEC." I can only assume that the driver meant to say that s/he is "unique," but there is a major flaw with that attempt. Just like a plate from a while back that read "D UNIK1," botched attempts at spelling "unique" make it instead look like "eunuch." Therefore, "IAMUNEC" is proudly telling the world, "I have no balls." On the extreme flipside of this example is a license plate that my loving mother-in-law sent me. It read, "8YPICAL." I like it; I like it a lot. Way to use all of the weapons at your disposal, Mr. or Ms. Car Owner.

My homey Rockabye sent me a plate that was immediately received by the 14 year-old who resides in me. It read, "LUV DKC." Oh sure, go ahead and argue that someone's initials are probably DKC, but you're not changing my stance on this one.

Lastly (and possibly conversely), my friend Dusty sent me this license plate: "IH8PORK." Wow, this person must feel very strongly to put that on the license plate. Hate? Geez, I bet Orthodox Jews don't even hate pork. Did pork kill the driver's family or something? Is the driver an ostrich farmer who was about to trademark, "The other white meat" as a slogan but got usurped? Look, I hate mustard and tell people that fairly often, but even I think that this great dislike of a foodstuff is over the top.

Ok, I'm done. I've written enough for this week (even if two large sections were simply cut and pasted). I'll be back with more stuff next Friday, and I still have about 38 "what I learned" entries to supplement any shorter post. In the meantime, Sunday is our little buddy Noah's 0.5 birthday, and Tuesday is my cousin Carrie's birthday. Think happy things for them. Take care, everyone, and feel free to write me at ptklein@gmail.com with anything that crosses your mind.

Tensing up

Hello and welcome once more to another installment of UOPTA. I hope my electronic words find you well on this penultimate day of February. (I really like using "penultimate" every chance I get, because it's just cool to me that the word exists. Is there a word for the thing before the thing before the last? If so, I'd use that too. Let's make one up in case it doesn't yet exist. How about "tripenultimate?" Or would "prepenultimate" get the job done by itself? I may never know.) Ready for some additional random stuff? Excellent.

I had a strange dream during the week, and I recounted it in the office the next day. I went up to my boss and said, "In my dream last night, you handed me some dog treats. I think you should explain yourself." Without missing a beat, he asked, "Were they cookies?" "No, they were jerky treats. And I knew somehow that they were for me and not for my dog." "Is your subconscious telling you that I treat you like a dog?" he asked. "Maybe it's telling me that you respect my fierce loyalty to you and the company, best personified by a dog," I said. "Yeah, that's totally what I meant," he replied.

While that story and interaction didn't come up again for the rest of the week, typing it brought up a few questions I have. First, I understand that "dreamed" and "dreamt" are both acceptable past tenses of "to dream," but I don't know which one I use. I think I need to be caught next time I say it by someone who can then report back to me about me. I'm pretty sure it's "dreamed," but if I were writing a poem, I'd totally opt for "dreamt." Doesn't it sound more poetic? What about "leaped" and "leapt" then? I think I use "leapt" more often, which means I'm wildly inconsistent in my past-tense choosings.

A bigger problem (to me at least) is that I'm now questioning whether other words have two acceptable past tenses or not. Can I say that someone "creeped around the corner" or is "crept" the only right way? I can hear myself saying that I "kneeled down" somewhere instead of "knelt," (which looks like a completely made-up word to me right now), so I think that fits the pattern. You know what clearly doesn't though? The past tense of "to sleep." If someone said, "I sleeped for nine hours last night," s/he would get more than a few weird looks. I believe the same is true with "to mean." "I meaned to get there in time for the opening band" just doesn't get the job done. Interestingly enough, thinking about this past tense stuff is getting me tense, so I'll stop for now.

Time for a little more word stuff. My friend Dusty sent me a link to comedian Demetri Martin's 224-word palindrome poem. It's quite impressive: http://www.neatorama.com/2009/02/18/a-224-word-palindrome/. Two things struck me upon reading it. First, it's amazing how little syntax and flow matter in free-verse poetry. Second, I never knew that "deified" was a palindrome by itself. I like that a lot. I'm amazed by Mr. Martin's piece of work here because as much as I fancy words and thoroughly enjoy playing with them, palindromes seem incredibly difficult to create. I never know where to start and always end up with something that completely misses the point like, "Racecar and Hannah kayak. Kayak, Hannah DNA! Racecar." That said, I did come up with a brief (only three-word) palindrome two days ago after looking at a word backwards for the first time. The word was "golfer," which is "reflog" backwards. You know, as in "to flog again." Therefore, "Reflog a golfer" becomes the same frontwards and backwards. Now if I could just get my spellchecker to acknowledge "reflog" as a word, we'd be in business.

One more little word thing for now: on the radio earlier this week, the announcer said, "Our bonus word is 'fun dip.' 'Fun dip.' That's f-u-n, space, d-i-p. Once again, our bonus word is 'fun dip.'" I was already making my "You've got to be kidding me!" face after the first time he said that the bonus WORD was actually two words. I tried giving him the benefit of the doubt by wondering to myself if the Fun Dip candy was one or two words, but then he ruined it by spelling it with the frickin' space in the middle of the "word." Then he went back and reminded us again that those two words were the bonus word, and I pulled out my phone to text myself about that error.

Earlier this week, my co-worker Rob was trying to get a female co-worker to sign up for online dating. "Peter will write your profile for you, and he and I will screen all of the guys so you only see the good ones," he offered. She eventually acquiesced, created a login with a couple of pictures on a free-trial account, and motioned for me to plop down and write. The prompt was something like, "Describe yourself and what you look for in your perfect match," and there was a minimum of 200 characters. (I'm guessing the minimum is there so people don't just write, "Cool. Sex.") "First off, what are you actually looking for?" I asked. "Just...keep it simple and don't make me sound desperate," she said. I thought for a minute, and then I wrote the following:

My co-worker thinks I should say that my perfect match is "three inches tall, highly combustible, with a phosphorous tip, and can light my way during my darkest hours." I think he's a moron. Fortunately, it's much simpler than that: I'm fun and down to earth, and I'm looking for the same in my match. See how easy that was?

She loved it (even though I made it all about me) and clicked to submit it. Within literally five minutes, she had three emails and one person trying to IM her. I took pride in this at first, thinking that they must have really liked what I wrote. Then I realized that they probably preferred her keywords of, "18-25," "blonde," and "Los Angeles" to anything I could've written. The onslaught of attention and apparent low quality of her potential suitors confirmed her earlier suspicions that this just wasn't for her (at least for now), and she deleted the profile later that night. Well, I had fun at least.

Those who know me well at all know that I love burritos. They're just wonderful. There's a Chipotle near my work, and two relatively close to my home, so when I can cajole someone else into going there for lunch or dinner with me, I'm a happy Klein. Last week, I went by myself to bring home a burrito for dinner, and the line was especially long. I had no problem waiting though, because I knew the payoff would be an exceptional one. It was only about thirty seconds of waiting before I pulled out my phone and began emailing myself about the interactions of the people in line ahead of me. Here are the highlights:

1. An employee was making a burrito for a woman who asked for sour cream. She didn't say, "Just a little" or any other qualifying phrase, just, "Sour cream." The next thing she said was, "No, no, no! Too much, too much, too much!" She then made the Chipotle worker scrape off what she deemed to be extra sour cream. I felt bad for the employee, but he took it in stride and didn't make any of the faces I would have in that same situation.

2. Another woman walked up to the counter and said very seriously, "This is not a joke. I want guacamole on the side and mild salsa on the side." It honestly sounded like a stick-up instead of a burrito order. More importantly, why would someone think that was a joke? Has she been laughed at and completely disregarded when making that same request before? I don't know, but I'd like something to explain her order's bizarre preface.

3. A woman two people in front of me in line asked her young son where his nose was, and he got it right. "Where are your cheeks?" she asked next, and the kid quickly reached out and grabbed the mom's breasts. Well played, kid.

4. I considered using my Blackberry to order online and then step into the empty "Pick Up" line, but eventually abandoned that idea. (Yes, that was a highlight. Leave me alone.)

5. The man in front of the breast-grabbing kid said to the mom, "Look at his red hair!" "It's strawberry blond," she replied defensively. Sore subject?

6. It eventually got to my turn, and the result was as glorious as I'd anticipated.

With that, let's wrap our tortillas on over to the Car Watch. That sounded way dirtier than I meaned.

My homey Rockabye sent me this plate that he spied: "HWYENDS." Yes, I'm sure every one does, eventually. I wonder if this has ever freaked somebody out. Some dude's from a small town and in L.A. on business. He's already a little on edge driving on our big and crowded streets, but the freeway is scaring the crap out of him. He misses his exit and starts to panic, wondering how in the world he's going to get where he needs to be. Then, in front of him, a car warns him of impending doom: Highway Ends, it says. "Ends? But how?" Convinced that he's about to drive into the ocean, he pulls over and breathes shallow breaths into a paper bag he kept in his suit's jacket pocket just in case something like this happened.

That same homey Rockabye saw this plate: "NINJA (Heart)R." It must be very difficult to be in a relationship with a ninja. One minute you're alone and getting ready for an evening out, and then - POOF! - he's right behind you. On the plus side, I bet they're masters of leaving quietly in the morning after a one-night stand. I've always wondered how they can remain so silent with all of those metal ninja stars bouncing around somewhere in their pockets or secret ninja pouches. (By the way, The Secret Ninja Pouches is immediately in the running for my next band's name.)

Lastly, I saw a license plate frame on my way home from work a little while back. It read, "Without a Doubt...World's Greatest Mom." I believe that's what statisticians call "an insignificant sample size," because I have to think that this unscientific poll questioned somewhere between one and three people. No offense to that lady, but I doubt that she holds that title, so I alone invalidate the poll's conclusion. I'm just sayin'.

Ok, I'm not making any more sense, even to myself. That is a clear indication that it's time to stop typing. But first, let me address a plight that affects millions of Americans - most of them completely unaware. It's a silent attacker, much like hypertension. Or a ninja. My friend Ceil's birthday is August 30th. Therefore, her half-birthday should be February 30th, but we all know that she's never going to get the chance to celebrate that. Oh sure, once every four years she gets within one day of her half-birthday, but that's hardly a consolation prize. Every other year, the closest she gets is the tripenultimate day, which is already the saddest time I've ever used that word. I mentioned this last late April when I noticed that our dog (whose birthday is Halloween) shares in this same plight, but it never gets any easier. Today is my two-thirds birthday, and my joy is dampened by a hefty dollop of half-birthday guilt. Be brave for me, friends, and please join me in wishing Ceil the closest thing she can experience to a half-birthday. I'll be back next Friday, as we boldly march into...whatever that next month is. As always, please feel free to write me at ptklein@gmail.com, and have a happy and healthy weekend and week. Shaloha.

Zinging in the rain

Bienvenidos, mi gente de la casa. I hope each and every one of you is doing well. It rained here in Los Angeles during this past week, so naturally we all freaked out and refused to go about our daily business without first consulting the Live Mega Doppler 7000 HD. In the end, it turns out that rain is really just some water falling from the sky, so naturally we all survived.

I want to spend a little time today writing about teasing. Not a strip tease, mind you, but the poking fun variety. My group of friends has no problem whatsoever when it comes to needling one another. As time passed and we got to know each other better and better, that just led to more focused fun-poking. Those are the ones I appreciate the most - even at my expense - because they show a deep knowledge and understanding of our dislikes and shortcomings (as opposed to our likes and longcomings).

A perfect example of this happened recently when hanging out with some of my friends. We were starting a board game called "Time's Up," in which each card has the name of someone famous on it. You're allowed to discard two of the cards that were dealt to you. (The rest of the game details are inconsequential for right now.) Our dear friend Twilight tossed a card into the discard pile and said, "Who the hell is Tenzing Norgay?" When no one spoke up, I said, "He's the sherpa that helped Sir Edmund Hillary be the first to climb Mount Everest." It was silent for a second, before my sweet, adoring, and lovely wife asked, "Are you fucking kidding me?" Everyone laughed, and I surmised that what I said wasn't exactly common knowledge. My friend Dave then chimed in with the absolutely perfect zinger: "Yeah, but ask him where the windshield washer fluid goes in his car." He totally got me, and it was great because it demonstrated how well he knew me (and my competing areas of expertise and cluelessness).

Dave's not alone in this fun-poking activity. In fact, I can think of a few more recent examples right off the top of my head. First, my friend Greg was coming over to our house one day. It was about ten minutes before he was supposed to arrive when I got a text message: "Are you standing and looking out your window yet?" Sure enough, I was. Knowing me and how silly I am with time issues, he took a pretty safe gamble with that text, and it paid off beautifully.

Just a couple of weeks ago, our friend The Mills had a 30th birthday party. I saw a good friend's ex-girlfriend whom I hadn't seen in years. We exchanged pleasantries (what's one step up from 'pleasantries?' It was nicer than that.) and then half-smiling, she said, "I see you haven't branched out in your color schemes." I smiled the smile of one who has just been zinged. You see, years and years ago, her ex-boyfriend used to say that I only wore the colors blue and gray. While that was an exaggeration, those colors did make up a good deal of my wardrobe. So here, about eight years later, I'm standing before her wearing a light blue shirt, blue-gray jeans, and a gray hat. Her comment was perfect, and though it caused those around me to point and laugh, I still appreciated the zinger.

The last recent example that comes to mind happened this past December. I went to the holiday cocktail party of a company with which I often work. There were a bunch of people from other companies there, and I mixed and mingled to the best of my ability. Later in the evening, my co-worker Jamie came up to me laughing hysterically. "What's so funny?" I asked, but even as I asked it, I had a feeling that her tears of laughter were at my expense. Through her remaining chuckles, she told me the story. Apparently, she and our co-worker Rob ran into a very nice guy with whom I've joked around for a couple of years named John. They said hi to him, and he said hi back before adding, "Where's Peter? Oh wait, let me guess - he's probably off telling people what they can spell with his name." I'm not sure Jamie's stopped laughing yet, and it's been over two months now since well-placed tease.

There are countless smaller versions of these teases that happen almost daily. It might be someone mocking my lack of sense of direction, my hyperpunctuality, or my dislikes (i.e. mustard, Carl's Jr. commercials, etc.). All it boils down to one main thing though: familiarity. And I love it. They couldn't make those pointed comments without really knowing how I tick, and I relish in it. A relish without any mustard in it, naturally.

Like most humans, I enjoy feeling comfortable in my surroundings. What I like even more is the rare occasion in which I can pinpoint the inception of that comfort. Allow me to explain via example: During the winter quarter of my freshman year of college, I took a large lecture course on human anatomy. My lovely wife (nee girlfriend) was in the class with me, along with about a dozen people on my floor of the residence hall. For the final, all of us from the floor went into the lounge, spread out our books and notes, and went through what we expected to be on the test. A couple of hours into the study session, I was getting pretty fried mentally. I rose from my seat on the floor, leapt onto a little side table next to one of the couches, and half-sang/half-mumbled a few lines from a song while accompanying myself with the air guitar. (The song was "Possum Kingdom" by Toadies, by the way, and I'd had it in my head the entire day until that boiling over moment.) When I was done with my music, I stepped off the table and went back to my books on the floor. Here's the thing: no one even batted an eye. "Wow," I thought, "these people really know me!" It was one of my favorite memories from the entire freshman year, and believe me, that's saying a whole hell of a lot.

While I can't pinpoint the exact moment, I've felt more and more accepted and truly known at my work recently. This is evident by how freely I'm now sharing my strange and bad ideas with them. Last week, I stopped my boss in the hall on his way out of the office. "Wait, I came up with a kick-ass ad campaign for a gym." (Here's the part where I should point out that our company doesn't do stuff like that, so this was truly out of nowhere.) "Ok, let's hear it," he said. "Be Here or Be a Sphere!" I said. "What?" "You know, like 'be there or be square.'" "But why a sphere?" he asked. Jamie chimed in: "You mean, like, fat?" "Yep," I said. "Yeah, I don't think so," my boss said. I started to plead my case a little but then gave up, realizing that even I didn't like it that much. It was the extra syllable with "a sphere" instead of just "sphere" that bothered me. By the time I came to that conclusion, my boss was out the door and my other co-workers were back doing whatever they were doing. If I had pulled that same move two years ago, they would've been staring at me and shaking their heads, but since we've reached the necessary comfort level, it was just a momentary blip on the radar that hardly registered at all. While one might argue that it's more of a desensitization than an acceptance, I'm just happy to feel like I belong in the places I spend most of my days.

Now let's ride our imaginary elliptical machines on over to the Car Watch.

I saw a license plate frame and I didn't quite know what to make of it. On the top, it read, "This is where the." In the split second I had before reading the bottom, I contemplated the possibilities. "Party starts?" "Ladies flock?" "Trunk resides?" I didn't come up with a good answer, and so I read the bottom of the frame: "HEARTBEAT STOPS!" Well I clearly wasn't expecting that. So basically, the driver is saying that this car kills people, right? I don't think I'm reading too much into that at all. But how? Does it kill them by hitting them with the car, or do they die within the car (from fear or more likely, embarrassment)? Maybe s/he needed another license plate frame to clear up what this first frame meant.

My homey Rockabye saw this license plate on a Lexus SUV hybrid: "HRDTOGT." What is - the driver or the car itself? I've seen a number of those vehicles around, so I'm assuming it's the driver asserting his or her hard-to-get-ness. Doesn't that take some of the fun out of it? It's been a long time since I was in the dating scene, but isn't a major point of playing hard to get...not telling the seeker what you're doing? It seems like it would lose much of its efficacy if the gameplan was common knowledge.

The same homey Rockabye saw this bumper sticker: "My other transport is the Millennium Falcon." He didn't tell me what kind of car it was, but I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit on that. First of all, unless it was Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, or even Lando Calrissian driving, then the person is either a liar or they bought the Falcon second-hand from some intergalactic used spaceship lot. Let's assume for the moment that the latter is true. There's one huge problem with this still (I know, probably more than one): the Star Wars double-trilogy happened "a long time ago," not to mention "in a galaxy far, far away." For the sake of argument, let's say that the closest that something "far, far away" can be is...the next closest galaxy. According to Yahoo! Answers, that would be between 25,000 and 42,000 light years away. So even moving at light speed (with the Millennium Falcon certainly can do), it would've needed to leave that galaxy tens of thousands of years ago to reach that used spaceship lot. And that's without stopping for bathroom breaks, mind you. Let this be a lesson to all of you: nobody makes outlandish and obviously-false claims without facing the wrath of Peter the Debunker. You have been warned.

Ok, that's enough bullshit for now. You all have lovely weekends and weeks, and feel free to drop me a line at ptklein@gmail.com with anything at all. As for the small crop of happies during that time: Happy half-birthday to my father-in-law tomorrow, and happy half-anniversary to my favorite brother and sister-in-law next Tuesday. Take care, folks, and I'll see you next Friday. (By the way, you can't spell "strip tease" without Peter.)

Bored games

Shaloha, people and other highly-advanced animals that somehow learned to read English. I hope you're all doing well. I have nothing in particular to talk about this week, so I'm just going to jump into some random stuff and hope it forms itself into a post.

We had a strange day at work earlier this week. Being an early bird, I'm always the first person into the office. In fact, I usually have at least an hour to myself before anyone else gets here, which is a nice way for me to ease into the day and get some good stuff done before having to actually speak to people in person. My routine is a fairly simple one: I come in and as I make my way to my office, I turn on every light along the way. On Tuesday, I hit the first group of three switches and noticed that only about half of the lights turned on. "That's weird," I thought, but pressed on. The next switch in the routine is the one in the little kitchen. I hit that one, and the light came on...but it was about twice as bright as it normally is. "Well that's really weird," I said (probably aloud). As I went through the office, the individual lights either turned on, stayed off, or turned a blinding hyper-on. There was no rhyme or reason either; all three outcomes could happen within the same office.

I called the building management, and an engineer came out. I told him the problem, and when I mentioned the ones that were brighter than normal, he very condescendingly said, "There's a dimmer on these switches, so maybe they're just all the way up this morning." I pointed to another one with the same problem. "Well unless someone switched out the bulbs between last night and this morning, this has nothing to do with it," he said. He then said he'd check something out and come back. When he returned a minute later, I said in my big-boy voice, "I know it sounds weird, but I turn these lights on every morning and a few of them are definitely brighter than normal." He nodded dismissively and went to check on more things.

When he came back ten or fifteen minutes later, he said in a serious tone, "This is going to be a while. Make sure all computers are off or unplugged, because something big happened." I started to ask what "a while" meant when he added this mumble: "And you were right about the brightness thing. That's really strange though." Hmmm, maybe the engineer should've listened to the guy who knows absolutely nothing about electricity or how anything works after all.

It was about 8:45am when my co-worker Jamie came in, and we had no idea what to do. The plan was to wait for our co-worker Rob to come in around 9:15 and devise a plan of action based on the estimated time we'd be without power. In the meantime, we were completely useless to the world. The phone system was completely down, we had no computers, and neither of us even gets good cell phone reception in the office. I was doing some work emails from my Blackberry, but my battery was getting low. I have a charger, but that requires electricity. I thought about going back down to my car and charging it in there, but that seemed a little pathetic.

"Let's play a game!" I said to Jamie, only half-serious. "Ok!" she said, surprising the hell out of me. She then told me about a game that she called, "Landmass." The instructions were simple: we take turns listing non-man-made types of objects until someone's stumped. Here's how it started:

Jamie: Mountain
Me: Peninsula
Jamie: Ocean
Me: Oh, so it doesn't have to be land?

We went on for about five minutes, which really is a long time if you think about it. I was very pleased with using "marsh," "tributary," "isthmus," "delta," and few more choice selections. We eventually got interrupted by Mr. Condescending Engineer and never made it back to the game. For something that sounds really boring, it ended up passing the time quite nicely for those five minutes. In the end, we were told that a transformer blew and that we'd be out of power all day. Our boss realized our complete uselessness without electricity and sent us home for the day.

The inappropriately-named "Landmass" game got me thinking (uh oh) about other diversions sprung out of boredom. One in particular came to mind that I played way back in...gosh, '92 I think. Wow. Am I really that old now? Anyway, when my friend Jon and I were both 15 years old, our social options were slightly limited by our lack of driving ability. (My nerdiness and awkward stage of adolescent development had nothing to do with it too, I swear.) So we often walked to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, which Google Maps tells me is 1.2 miles away from my parents' house.

As 15 year-olds, we were fairly adept at entertaining ourselves on those walks. We would talk about all sorts of deep topics, ranging from music and cute girls to music and not cute girls. Despite that never-ending supply of conversation topics, we occasionally fell into extended silences. During one walk back home, we encountered such a silence. Jon spoke up and suggested that we play a game that he and his friend Arash used to play. It was simple and it was great. While walking west, we'd watch the westbound cars that passed us. The third car that passed would be "his," and the third after that would be "mine." Then back to him, back to me, etc. I know that can't sound super exciting to you from that description, but it had four elements that maximized the fun factor:

1. Since the cars were coming up from behind us, it was always surprising to see what appeared.
2. The cars that were either number one or two in the sequence (and therefore neither of "ours") added a great element. If it went BMW...Porsche...we'd start getting excited right until a beat-up '78 Cutlass Supreme showed up.
3. Sometimes there would be a virtual tie as to which car was second and which was third. The argument couldn't last long though because we had to get back to counting the next three cars.
4. Sound. After car number two, we'd hear something coming and only have a second or two to determine whether it sounded like a fancy car or a clunker. We could never really tell (unless it was a city bus or cement truck), but it added a different level of anticipation. Maybe that old, smoke-emitting VW bus would be overtaken by a new Lamborghini at the last moment to secure the third spot. We never knew.

The reason the car game so easily came to mind is that I thought of it just a couple of weeks ago (for the first time in years). I went to pick someone up from LAX by myself, and I had a bunch of time on my hands. First of all, I'm hyperpunctual by nature, so I left a little too much time to get there. Second, there wasn't any traffic whatsoever, which simply doesn't make sense. And third, her flight was delayed a little. Needless to say, I sought some mental diversions. I plopped down in the perfect location: I could see both the board that showed the changing flight arrival times and the escalator that all arriving passengers were using to get to baggage claim. The people came in waves as flights landed, and I created a ridiculously immature version of Jon's car game to pass the time: To save the fate of mankind, Jon would have to "do it" with the third person who came down the escalator, and I would have the same duty with the third after that. Let me repeat - this act was not for pleasure but rather to save the entire human race. And it was hilarious. I played for twenty minutes, and I think I had only one woman (who was at least in her 60s) fall my way. The first three or four of mine were older Asian businessmen, and if any of them were looking my way as they came down the escalator, they may have wondered why I was giggling to myself. Not to sound too shallow, but there were only two mildly attractive women the entire time. One was in her 40s and in a business suit, and she narrowly missed saving the world with Jon. The other was in military fatigues, and she was sharing her escalator step with a male soldier, so it was hard to tell which one Jon ended up with. It was childish and occasionally a little mean-spirited, but it passed the time and made me laugh, so I feel comfortably sharing it all with you. In fact, I encourage you all to try that game at some point and see how undeniably funny it can be.

And with that, let's ride the electronic staircase on down to the Car Watch.

My loving mother-in-law sent me a license plate that took me a few minutes to get: "WERYNOS." I went through "weary nose," "weary Nos" (like I get when I ask my lovely wife if she's still awake), "we rhinos," and "wearin' Os" (like the Baltimore Orioles or Oregon Ducks). Then I realized that it was most likely saying, "We are winos." I hope that's not really the driver's family's most distinguishing characteristic. I understand that "WINE (Heart)RS" was probably taken, but "wino" yields a much different mental picture than "afficionado," ya know?

I saw a plate that read, "2PRIUS." Oh yeah, it was on a Toyota Highlander and not, as any reasonable person would assume, a Prius. What the hell, man? I'm trying to make sense of it all but coming up woefully short (like Danny Devito). Is the driver "too Prius for a Prius?" Is that "Prius 2: Bigger and Badder...at gas mileage?" I have no idea, but I do know that I don't like it.

Lastly, my homey Rockabye sent me an incomplete Car Watch item. It was a bumper sticker that said, "Register Librarian." "There was some other text but I couldn't read it," he said. Well that puts us in a bit of a pickle, now doesn't it? I like the pun of using "librarian" instead of "libertarian" quite a bit (if that's indeed what they're going for), so I want us to work together to find the best "other text" possible. How about, "Register Librarian: Vote for Dewey?" "Register Librarian: Let your whisper be heard." "Register Librarian: State your reference." Let's here it, people.

Ok, I'm out of here. I actually turned a blank mind into a post with a coherent theme, so I count that as a success. Have a Happy Valentines' Day tomorrow if you choose to celebrate that slightly commercialized holiday. Happy birthday next Thursday to my Bratty Kid Sister; she's the best fake sibling I've ever had. As for the rest of yous, have safe and healthy weekends and weeks. I'll see you next Friday unless you choose to grace my ptklein@gmail.com inbox with your presence before then. Peace out, homepeople.