A Post of Pith

Some pithy observations:

:: I'm sorry, soccer-lovers of the world, but your sport just isn't for me. I can't imagine what you all love about it so. I get especially confused when soccer fans tell me that baseball is too slow-paced a game. Soccer makes me long for things that are a lot more exciting, like reading a textbook on accounting, sorting my silverware, shopping for towels at Target, or watching a nature documentary of octopuses copulating in slow motion. How on Earth soccer manages to inspire anyone to stay awake, much less to a massive riot (win or lose!), is utterly beyond me.

:: There's a relatively new video store near Casa Jaquandor that is now our default video store, since the closest three Blockbusters all closed. It's a nice enough store, but in some cases, their movies are full-screen versions. I find it impossible to take that store seriously now. Full-screen? Really?! Why not stock VHS while you're at it?

:: Friday night fun: turn down the lights, put some Pink Floyd on the stereo, and read a couple of Funky Winkerbean collections by candle-light. Make sure you have the suicide hotline on speed-dial, though.

:: So we're at a mini-golf place the other day, and Hole #18 is just a normal hole. That was really weird. At every mini-golf place I've ever been to, Hole #18 actually keeps your ball. This one doesn't. Weird.

:: I keep looking for recent (last 10 years or so) superhero comics that aren't mainly depressing tracts in which we delve into the existential issues of the hero of the title, and aside from the Joss Whedon run on X-Men, I'm not finding any. The latest? Spiderman: Reign. Decent enough story, but all through it I keep thinking that it's just The Dark Knight Spider Returns.

:: I didn't see a hard copy, so I don't know if it was an actual front-page story, but the other day, one of the top three stories on the Buffalo News website was an article on the pernicious menace of...goose poop. Seriously. Lots of Canadian Geese fly over us, either on the way to Canada or on the way out of it a few months from now, and it turns out that...geese poop. And that poop is a news story in the Buffalo paper. Hard to believe newspapers are in trouble these days.

:: I'm having a hell of a time finding ideal headphones for my cell phone. It uses a smaller headphone jack than normal headphones. I got a ten-buck adapter thing, but the adapter's not very robust, and it's already started that thing that headphone cords tend to do over time. I have a pair of earbuds that fit the phone, but the buds themselves don't seat reliably into my ear, or if they do, they un-seat themselves fairly quickly, robbing me of sound quality. This is an annoyance, since I put an 8GB card into my phone and want to use it as my main MP3 player.

:: Seen at The Store: mother pushing her shopping cart. It's one of those kid's carts where the front is shaped like a car or truck or something. Little boy reaches out and grabs the pursestring of a passing old lady, who grabs her purse back, sees that it's a little boy in a kid-cart, and starts laughing. Mother then comes forward, smacks the kid, and says -- I swear I am not making this up -- "I told you to stop doing that!" Never have I seen a child whose future was more certain.

:: Thing I'm tired of hearing about: "Man-caves".

:: A while back, The Wife had a flat tire on her way home from work, so she called me and I ventured out to help her. Of course she was stopped on the side of I-90 in Buffalo. Nice and busy. Of course the driver's side tire was the one. Of course the spare was rusted in place and I couldn't budge it. Long story short, we called a tow truck. Tow truck arrived. Driven by an enormous person who looked an awful lot like Robert from Hell's Kitchen, but with a very high-pitched voice. Long story short...we couldn't tell whether our tow-truck driver was a man or a woman. So the other night, we're driving to Kleinhans Music Hall, and there on the side of I-190 in downtown Buffalo is a tow truck, where the unfortunate vehicle is being trussed up by none other than our sexually-ambiguous friend from a few months ago.

:: If you're going to insist on talking on your cell phone while you're driving, might it not be a bit safer to hold it in the same hand as the ear you're holding the phone up to? As opposed to wrapping your right hand all the way around your head while you're trying to maintain 65MPH on an urban highway?

:: I find this defense of the phrase "I could care less" staggeringly unconvincing.

:: I swear, my interest in football drops a bit each year...and yet, every summer, I'm excited when all the "Pro Football Preview" magazines start coming out. I always buy three of 'em.

:: "Dad, my teacher says that if I want to bring in cupcakes, it has to be tomorrow." GAHHH!!!

:: Sign #785 that you may have jumped the shark as a person: you and a friend speculated on what a musical version of Schindler's List would be like, right down to the show-stopping dance number and the closing power ballad, "I Could Have Done More".

OK, that's probably enough pith for now. Don't worry, I won't be exorcizing my pith on a regular basis. I'd like to keep some of my readers!