Long Shrift

Dirty Jobs, Scouting, and other crap

We discovered a few months ago that the boy likes watching Dirty Jobs. In case you somehow missed it, the show's host, Mike Rowe travels around the country doing particularly dirty and disgusting jobs, so the show spends a fair amount of time in sewers, tanks and other reservoirs of the unspeakable. We've learned that we need to DVR the episodes so that we can fast-forward through them, since we're not sure that Quinn's ready to watch the segment on the guy who cleans up roadkill.

Rowe had an interesting career before he even got to the show, including getting fired from his job as a pitchman on QVC for doing something unseemly with a nun doll. Now he's become something akin to a career consultant (see his Seven Dirty Habits of Highly Effluent People). If nothing else, the show is just fun to watch. However, while the puns and occasional sexual innuendos go over our boy's head, Mike says "Crap!" an awful lot, and so the word has made it into Quinn's lexicon.

The TypePad control panel lists recently updated blogs, and Rowe's was listed there the other day. His posts (maybe I'm a little naive to assume they're actually his) are thoughtful and witty. I was struck by a post he wrote about becoming an Eagle Scout. I liked his response, but selfishly, I'm just happy to be in better company than just a bunch of conservative nutjobs.

yes, that blows

I have kept silent on this long enough. I was shoveling the foot of snow that got dumped on us last night, and I decided it was time. I'm speaking of course, about people who complain about their snowblowers.

My friend Scott lamented the onset of winter, and made mention of his anemic snowblower. I heard a similar story from my wife's cousin just as I was sitting down to put on my winter boots. It's such a pain to mix the oil and gas, she said. It's loud, it's heavy, and it gets clogged so easily.

What these people fail to realize is that they are complaining about a luxury that many of us do not have. I have - get this - a shovel. You might as well be saying "And of course, right after I sent the chauffeur home for the day, I remembered that the Escalade was being detailed, and I needed to pick up my personalized cufflinks at Tiffany's."

Our neighbor two doors down from us is always the last to shovel - if he even bothers to shovel at all. Granted, he lives on a corner, so that has to suck. But today, just as I made my way around to the front of the house, a truck pulls up. Two guys get snowblowers out of a trailer and proceed to clear his sidewalks. As I pause to rest my tired arms, I see the neighbor come out on his front steps. He watches the guys with the snowblowers, cup of coffee in hand. He catches my eye and gives me a jovial "Hi!" and flashes a thumbs-up. I resolve to go back and pee on his garage.

Yes, this is a case of sour grapes. I'm sure the Germans have a word for it, even if the Inuit don't.

the summer of our discontent

Quinn seems to get by OK at day care, but when he comes home, he can be tired and testy. As my wife puts it, he's spent the whole day keeping his stuff together, and then he comes home and has to work through everything that happened during the day.

Today was one of those days. We were in the car, about 45 seconds from home, when he said he wanted to listen to a CD. I said no, and Quinn quickly began to cycle through all the stages of grief - except, of course, acceptance. He shifted to Jekyll and Hyde mode soon after, and we tried different things to distract and calm him. But he was off kilter for much of the evening.

He was getting ready for a bath, and insisted he needed help getting undressed. My wife cajoled him: "When did you turn into such a helpless little boy?"

Quinn regarded her carefully. "July."

making light of a grave situation

Officials in a suburb of Barcelona overcame controversy and installed solar panels in a cemetery. Some had questioned whether this could be done tastefully and respectfully; the locals apparently did not voice an opinion.

The installation cost 720,000 euros (£608,000) but will keep about 62 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year, said Esteve Serret, a director of Conste-Live Energy, the company that runs the cemetery and also works in renewable energy.

"The best tribute we can pay to our ancestors, whatever your religion may be, is to generate clean energy for new generations," he said.

The article doesn't mention what other tributes may have been considered, such as composting or other less conventional uses.

08 is enough

age of discovery, revisited

I'll admit, the first thing I do after logging into my TypePad account is to check the stats page. Maybe that's a little vain, but... ok, I don't have a good response to that. Happy now?

I have noticed of late that one post in particular gets more hits than all my other posts combined. Usually I see a huge spike (I have seen my readership double to four) when I write a post about something topical. I wouldn't have expected that a certain post - about a fake Discover card that was included in a credit card offer - would garner so much attention.

The reason? It's a honey pot for idiots. Every hit on that page is the result of a Google image search on "credit card" or "back of credit card" or something similar, and I suspect that this is the result of morons who are trying to create fake credit cards. Call me a snob (which goes with being vain, after all), but if you have to turn to Google to see what the back of a credit card looks like, then maybe you should be going to Monster.com instead.

But I suspect that a few people see that grainy image - I took the picture with a relatively cheap digital camera, in poor lighting - and wonder what the heck it is. It would appear that these people are not so intrigued with my post that they decide to read further. So I'm torn: do I take the image down, or perhaps the entire post, and suffer the precipitous fall in readership?

Of course I leave it there. I can't assume that these readers are all wannabe criminals or something... I should give them more credit.

there actually is some accounting for taste

We've been pretty happy with AT&T's U-verse cable TV service. We subscribe to one of the lower levels of service, and pay extra to get a few movie channels. Over the holiday weekend, AT&T ran a special promotion where we had access to all the big movie channels. We surfed madly through the channel guide, hunting down movies that we wanted to see, and added ten or so to the DVR. (At the rate we see movies, this should last us until spring.)

We finally had a chance to see Juno. I should mention that one of my mothers-in-law (yes, I have more than one) loved it, and had insisted that we see it. We don't get out much, and if we line up a babysitter, we probably wouldn't spend the time sitting in a theater. My mother-in-law even went so far as to offer to babysit expressly so that we could see the movie. We never got around to it. Well, now that we've finally seen it, I can say that we enjoyed it, although I spent much of the time wondering why my mother-in-law was so enamored by the movie. Was it the young men in running shorts? Shuddering ensues.

I mentioned this at work, where most of my co-workers expressed their appreciation for the movie as well. Except for one, who liked the movie... at first. Then he was bothered by the shallowness of the storyline, and the fact that the boy responsible for Juno's condition is largely absent from the movie. The list went on, and all of his complaints were well thought out. I hadn't put a lot of thought into the movie, but I thought it was good for a light-hearted study of the main character, even if she seemed a little too poised and precious to be taken seriously. The movie doesn't have a lot of depth, and maybe it's formulaic in its quirky shallowness.

It's tough to know how you might react to a movie, which might explain Netflix's million-dollar challenge to improve its movie recommendation system. Considering the challenges they face - trying to understand individual tastes, factoring in TV shows that may have good and bad seasons, and understanding polarizing movies like Napoleon Dynamite (BTW: hated it). I used to subscribe to Netflix, but let the subscription lapse when I realized how few movies I actually got around to watching. (And there was the guilt of having Hotel Rwanda sit idly for two months.) But one of the things I valued most was the recommendation system, which turned me on to movies I might never have known existed. As I recall, popular movies would often appear as recommendations just because of the volume of people who had seen them, but even this could be tweaked. Something that Amazon could learn from, or attempt to patent.

In college, I took a few literary criticism classes, which essentially teach people how to talk about literature. It's difficult to pull off without sounding like a complete wanker. It can be entertaining if used to irritate people, like if you're talking about leitmotif in Rambo IV. For me, the only lingering effects of those classes is that I question both the value of my opinions on movies, books or music, and if anyone is rolling their eyes as I voice them.

Still, if my mother-in-law wants to talk about Juno, I'm game. But if she mentions "pork swords," I'd likely faint in horror.