Prediction addiction

Good day, folks. I hope you're all doing well as I welcome you yet again to UOPTA. No, that doesn't stand for, "Ukuleles Offer Pleasant, Tuneful Amusement," but man is that an apt description or what? The famous "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" version by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole is certainly both pleasant and tuneful, and since that's the only ukulele song I can immediately think of, I'll assume my sweeping generalization is accurate. (And yes, I had to look up the exact spelling of his name. I always forget that it's A before E in Israel.) Instead, this UOPTA is where I write my thoughts and stories and wait for my mom to comment.

I was a junior in high school when Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain killed himself. (Oops - spoiler alert.) It was obviously big news, but (in my opinion) not the generation-shaping news that my history teacher thought it was. He, with a keen sense of the moment, spent our whole class period telling us that we'll always remember where we were when we heard this news, going as far as likening it to JFK's assassination. He asked us what this meant to us as teenagers and how we would carry this with us going forward. To me, it was sad and I liked their music quite a bit, but I clearly remember sitting there and thinking, "You might be taking this one too far, buddy." I also remember a conversation I had with a couple of friends later that day. "Mark my word," I said, "Kurt Cobain's almost two year-old kid is going to be a hit singer or big movie star by age 21." I knew the kid's name was Frances Bean Cobain, but I didn't know if it was a son or daughter. I just looked into the future and thought there was no way I was wrong with my prediction.

Well friends, Frances is a she, and she's now 17 years old. The fact that I had to tell you that means that my prediction has not yet come true. But what if she were a big star? I doubt anyone would remember me "calling it" way back in the day, and it wouldn't seem super impressive for me to say that I knew this would happen. Therefore, I've had to keep reminding people of my prediction every couple of years so that I'll be recognized for my prescience if/when it actually happens.

With that in mind, I had an idea for what I think would be a kick-ass website: Heard Here First. I'll explain my vision and then you tell me if it's as brilliant as I think it is. Everyone signs up and creates a user profile, a la MySpace or Facebook, but with fewer apps and modifications. Basically, you have a profile picture, a name, hometown, likes/dislikes, and friends. What else? Your list of predictions.

There would be some pre-populated categories from which to choose (as well as create-your-own ones). Each prediction would have to have an end date, so there would be a definite right-or-wrong aspect to it. Once you predict something, it would be time-stamped and put on your profile along with the time remaining until it will be decided. Emails would be sent to you as completion dates near (or as often as you want them). Once they're done, there would be a section that listed all of your previous predictions, the status of each one, etc. We might see, "Correct but outside of the predicted timeframe," "Marginally correct," "Way off," etc.

Why is this fun? Here's the way I look at it: I can tell you that the Lakers will win the 2010 championship after beating the Cavaliers 4-1 in the Finals. But anyone can say that, and many people already have I'm sure in their NBA previews. But let's think bigger. Will Jack Black be nominated for an Academy Award by 2020? If I memorialize that call in 2009, how amazing would it be if I were right? How about saying that some little-known senator or governor will be Vice President in 2016? What about a prediction that life on another planet will be discovered within the next five years? The bigger the gamble, the cooler the predictor is who prognosticated correctly.

Smaller ones would be cool too, especially for family and friends; they can even be used as motivational tools. "I will go to Australia by the time I'm 40," "I'm going to get straight As next semester," "I'll finish my novel by this time next year," "I'm going to run the L.A. Marathon in a personal-best time," etc. Big or small, putting predictions out there tells others about the way you think about things and your sense of the world around you. Who knows, maybe there would even be some minor celebrities made out of correctly predicting a few big things. They would be heralded for their amazing foresight. "Hell, it's practically 5sight," I'd say. And there would be much laughter and applause.

So why am I just telling you all about this idea instead of doing it? Well, I did buy www.heardherefirst.com, which currently forwards people right to this page. That's all I've done though. You see, we're talking about a shitload of work here and an equal amount of technical expertise that I certainly don't have. Think about the bandwidth a site like this would require to have profiles for everyone who wanted to sign up and upload a picture. Also, I'd be afraid that people would start using the site for predictions with which I'm not quite comfortable. "So-and-so is going to die," for example. I don't like that. I also wouldn't want to see mean things written about/to fellow high school students, like, "Brian Danning is going to get his ass kicked after school next Wednesday." (Hey look, that came true!) So would I need to only allow people to predict things in pre-populated categories? That's not fun, and it's impossible to think up every good one. Another problem is that no one can really verify the smaller predictions. If I say that I got all As that semester, who's going to say I didn't? People in a comments section under each prediction? Maybe each self-regulated prediction would require another user to verify it. That just opens the door for personal relationships to get in the way of the predictor's accuracy.

As you can see, I haven't fully thought this through except for the fact that I believe it's a good idea. I think it would have to be a free service for people, which means any money I'd make would have to be from advertisers (who wouldn't come a-knockin' until the site already had a crazy amount of daily pageloads). Who agrees with me that this idea makes sense? My feelings won't be hurt if you don't. (I'm often out on an island with things I think are good ideas. I'm the guy who thinks a Citizen Kane-like black and white close-up of a guy's mouth saying "Roast beef" instead of "Rosebud" would be a good commercial for Arby's, by the way.) I turn to you for your thoughts, homepeople.

And with that, let's waft like the delicious aroma of a Beef N' Cheddar on over to the Car Watch.

I was behind a plate on the freeway earlier this week that read, "HITSMKR." I assume that the owner is trying to say "hits maker," but I first read it as "hit smoker." That mis-reading could have two separate meanings. First, someone who smokes things in hits (versus deep drags I suppose), and second, someone who physically hit a smoker (either with a fist or with the Hit Smoker car itself). By the time I finally got around to what was likely the intended meaning, the car was nowhere in sight. Too bad, because maybe I would've seen some puffs of smoke coming out of the window or pieces of a smoker lodged in the grill. I'm just sayin'.

My loving mother-in-law saw what might be the most depressing license plate ever to grace my little slice of the internets: "NO HOPE." Unless that's an anti-Obama slogan that I somehow missed, I feel pretty bad for that person. Much like Jell-O, there should always be room for a little hope.

And lastly, my homey Rockabye sent me a plate that falls into the "I see what you were trying to do but it just didn't work" category of automobile expression. It read, "BON TCHR." I first read it as "bone teacher," as in the probably-illegal command. My homey Rockabye made me smile with his reading of, "Be on teacher," which is thematically very similar to mine (but more specific in the positioning). If I had to guess though, I'd say that this is probably a French teacher who thinks s/he is good at that job, and "good" is "bon" in that language. I've never thought of bon as "bone" before, but now that I have, I think I just made up a joke: What did the below-average French speaker call his honeymoon? A "bone voyage." You see what I did there? Hey-o!

That, my friends, is it for me today. Fret not, for I'll be back next Friday. In the meantime: Monday is my wife's half-sister Sara's full birthday. Thursday is Thanksgiving and our friends Sarah and Keith's anniversary. Speaking of Thanksgiving, I have an awful lot of thanks to give. I'm going to hold off until next week though, in a very special edition of UOPTA. In fact, it will be the final post I make here on this site. After three years, I'm kinda hanging it up. I'll explain more in my mammoth post next Friday, but just know that I'm very thankful for all of you. Enjoy the holiday, the weekend, and the majority of next week.

Whole lotta shakin'

Welcome, and what a glorious Friday it is over here at UOPTA central. Today is my one and only mother's birthday, and since she recently won the completely made-up Commenter of the Year award, her birthday totally deserves first paragraph status. Happy Birthday, Mom. I won't tell the readers what number you turned today, but let's just say it rhymes with "meally meally mold."

Hey, guess what happened in this past week. The earth kind of moved a little for us. Or to coin a phrase that I hope not to use very often: it quoke. Being a native Californian, this was not my first experience with the entire world around me jolting. Oh no, friends, there have been several by now, and I've developed my own internal sense of magnitude, comparative duration, etc. I guess you could say I have...quadar. (I'm coining phrases left and right this morning!) This particular quake was different for me for one particular reason: Comedy! Here's what transpired:

I was sitting in my boss's office chatting with him, when I cocked my head like our dog does when she thinks we said "walk" or "treat." For me, it meant, "Is that the earth moving?" Our office tends to creak and shake a bit if someone runs down the hall or if there's a particularly large truck outside, so usually that head motion of mine is for no good reason. After a second though, a co-worker said, "Do you guys feel that?" "Yeah," we replied, and we sat there for another two seconds or so while it kept shaking. During that time, I was thinking, "Should I stand up and move to the doorway? My boss isn't moving at all, so would that make me look like a wimp? It's still going, so maybe I should. Yeah, I guess I will." I then stood up and took the four or five steps over to the door of his office. I looked down the hallway and saw the big potted plant in the lobby swaying back and forth. "Huh, this one's pretty strong," I thought, quickly comparing it to my previous experiences. My boss then spoke up, saying, "Wow, this is long." "That's what she said," I responded. He laughed. As the shaking finally subsided, I said, "Let the record show that I just made a 'That's what she said' joke during an earthquake." He smiled, and I'm just going to assume that meant that he was impressed.

My boss turned on the news, and after hearing a few reports about fun words like "magnitude" and "epicenter," we went back to work. I emailed my lovely wife to make sure everything was fine over at her work, and that was that. Life in L.A., ladies and gentlemen. I awoke, it quoke, we spoke, and you must acquit. Wait, that last part didn't work.

I just remembered another brief earthquake story that involved a little humor as well. Let's keep the theme alive! I was working at UCSB, and as I'm likely to do a couple of times a day, I went to the restroom. I stood at the urinal for a little bit, and upon completing my task, I flushed and turned around to walk toward the sink. As I took that first step, I felt like I suddenly got very dizzy. My first thought was, "Did I stand up too quickly? No, I was standing the whole time." As I was washing my hands, I wondered if I peed so much that it made my blood pressure drop or something like that. Before I could fully grasp the absurdity of that hypothesis, I heard lots of voices out in the hall. I stepped out, and sure enough, they were all discussing the quick jolt of an earthquake we'd all just experienced. "Ah, that makes much more sense," I thought to myself. Much like that time I thought a cat was speaking to me, I probably should've gathered a little more information before leaping to nonsensical conclusions. (The Nonsensical Conclusions could be a band name, eh? They sound like they'd be either from Berkeley or Scotland to me, but that might just be an illogical association. And yes, the Illogical Associations are from Philly.)

That leads us to the granddaddy of them all (to date...knock on wood): The Northridge Quake. And come to think of it, there ended up being comedy related to this one as well. That's interesting. Anyway, I was 16 years old back in January of '94, and I spent the night at my friend Dusty's house. Our friend Jon slept there that night as well, and the thing we all remember when going to bed was Jon making some strange pun relating the word "derriere" to a cow's "dairy area." Oh how we laughed. We fell asleep, and everything was going just dandy until a television landed about a foot from Jon's head. Yeah, Earth did that. Jon and Dusty sprung to their feet and ran to the doorway. Being a rule follower, I was busy lying on the ground, with one arm on my forehead and the other covering the back of my neck. This is precisely what we were instructed to do if unable to get under a desk. "Peter, get up!" they yelled. "I'm making a head sandwich!" I yelled back. They reached down and pulled me to my feet, and I joined them in one of the nearby doorways.

The shaking eventually stopped, and we spent the next little while sitting in doorways, chatting with Dusty's dad and his now-wife, and commenting on the noticeable aftershocks. At one point, one of us ventured downstairs to assess the damage and get some cans of Sprite. A glass broke, but that was about it. A little bit later, figuring that the drama was over, we went back to sleep. Shortly thereafter, the house phone rang, and it was my parents. They were shocked and a little upset that I hadn't called them, but more prominent was their wonder at the fact that we went back to sleep. What I hadn't realized until that point was that Dusty's dad's house was cushioned by the hills on which it was built. My parents' house (and the house my lovely wife grew up in, I later learned) didn't have that luxury and the damage was extensive. When I got home later that morning, I understood why they thought I should've called. Everything that had been in a cupboard was now broken and on the floor, there were cracks in walls, and all sorts of damage. "A glass broke at Dusty's," I said, but no one found that juxtaposition of havoc as interesting as I did.

Here's where the comedy comes into this story (unless you found the "head sandwich" part humorous): later that year, Dusty, Jon, and I acted out that entire scene during a practice session for our improvisational comedy team. We were playing a game in which people are doing a scene, a fellow teammate watching the scene yells, "Freeze!" and then takes the place of one of the actors. He or she is to take the exact position of the person who was released, and then change the scene to something else. I don't remember if it was Jon or Dusty, but one of them tagged in, and then said, "Oh my god, it's an earthquake!" We spent the next half-hour acting out everything that happened that early-morning, and a whole bunch of stuff that never happened. The rest of the teammates were enjoying it so much that no one yelled "Freeze!" to interrupt us or stop the scene. They just let us keep going, and so we did for a long, long time. Ah, isn't it great when natural disasters can yield laughter? (Hint: The answer is yes.)

Ok, this is getting long (that's what she said), so I'm going to jump right into this week's fantabulous edition of...Car Watch!

I saw a license plate frame on the freeway this week that said, "After 40...Life is Good." Does that mean that life totally sucked for that woman for the first 39 years? Or was life excellent before and now it's just...good? If this were a word problem in a math class, I'd look for the "Not enough information" answer. You know what I'm talking about, right? They'd always throw something in there like, "Bobby is taller than Billy. Sheila is taller than Sally. Billy is taller than Sally. Who is the tallest one of the group?" The answers would be Bobby, Billy, Sheila, Sally, and Not Enough Information. If Billy were taller than Sheila, then we'd know for sure, but nothing tells us how Bobby and Sheila compare to each other. It would help if they said it was in sixth grade, because then I'd choose Sheila every time.

Not to veer too far off course, but sometimes those types of questions would be laughable. Something as obvious as: "If Ricardo can make ten free throws in thirty seconds, how long does it take him to eat a roast beef sandwich?" And you just know some kids read that and think, "Well, let's see...ten free throws in thirty seconds...roast beef...probably about 90 seconds." I like those kids; they made my percentiles higher.

My homey Rockabye saw this plate and sent it over to me: "SML 4ME." Granted, it's probably a photographer or maybe a dentist. However, there's nothing there that makes "smile" any more represented by those letters than "smell" would be. If I were driving past that person, I'd either sniff around like a drug- or bomb-detecting pooch or I'd raise one arm, sniff my armpit, and give the dude a thumbs-up. "I did it for you man!" I'd manage to convey.

Last but certainly not least, I was a couple of cars away from a truck that had a peculiar license plate frame. On the bottom, it said "Paris Hilton." And on the top...I don't know. I couldn't catch up to it and it turned before I could see the beginning of the thought. Naturally, it was killing me. What could that have said? "I want to be?" "God hates?" "Honk if you're?" "My other ride is?" Any thoughts on this, friends? If so, fire away in comments section and let your voice be heard (or more appropriately, let your words be seen).

Ok people, that's it for me. Since I know a lot of you are current or former Angelinos, feel free to share any earthquake stories you have in the comments section - preferably ones with some sort of humor. (I'm looking at you, my favorite brother Kevin.) Or if anything else comes to mind about any subject whatsoever, ptklein@gmail.com is there for you to sound off. I want to once again wish my mom a very happy birthday today. I've also got some other happies going out to our friend Scott M's birthday tomorrow, our friend Kareem's half-birthday tomorrow as well, and my old colleague and friend Leslie's birthday on Monday. Have a happy and healthy weekend and week, friends, and I'll see you here next Friday.