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Gaah. I could only provide the 2173 words I promised yesterday if I wrote another episode of DirecTV joy, and I’ll save that for later. Bottom line: they no longer support TiVo, so if they swap out my unit for theirs, I must give up the TiVo remote. My beloved, perfect, remote. Windex And so on. Plus, it exudes a strange static charge that actually collects dog hair, so the bottom fifth of the unit always wears a coat of cast-off Jasper follicles. Apparently the previous owners failed to request ScrachGuard™, since the act of looking the finish etches fine lines in the façade. And a façade it is; the metal front consists of some panels held in place by the black plastic perimeter. You can jiggle them up and down if you wish, but that means touching it, and the Smudg-4-Sur finish ensures that your handprints will remain indefinitely. It’s the first fridge ever designed by forensic investigators. The automatic ice maker? It makes ice. When it feels like it. But it hates ice; it feels that ice is somehow a sin, and when you push the automatic ice button it grinds the cubes into powder and spits them into your glass with such force that half the drink ends up on the floor. Then again, the floor’s already wet, because the freezer compartment has a drain hole that can be plugged by one (1) hull of corn, and once it’s plugged the fridge urinates all over the floor. This fridge is dead to me. I went downtown for a Business Lunch today. Always nice to leave the house and get out amongst my fellow bipeds. I met my editor from Mpls/St. Paul magazine - I do a monthly historical postcard feature for the mag – and we met at Morton’s. The desk clerk took my jacket, and I considered taking my cellphone out of the pocket – but really. Please. I’m not one of those people who puts the phone on the table as a totem of My Importance. I may be called at any moment! Quail in the face of my indispensability! The only person who’d call would be Gnat’s school, because she’d gotten another bloody nose. I ordered a small filet, medium. It looked like a bloody nose. Perhaps I am unschooled in the ways of meat, but to my crude ways Medium means pink inside with a general absence of rawness. Yet the steak’s innermost recesses were cool and raw. I asked for a bit more heat, and oh: lord. First you get the passive-aggressive explanation: that’s what we consider medium, but of course sir if you wish Chef to incinerate this fine piece of meat so it resemble a lump of coal pulled from hobo-camp trashcan fire, your wish is our command. Then you get the Monty Python dirty-fork routine, with a procession of tall guys in good suits swanning over to apologize and check and recheck and make sure it’s all okay. I’m at the point in my life where I have no problem sending something back. I have not yet reached the point where I feel comfortable sending it back again. Because then you’re just trouble. Then nothing can make you happy. You’re one of those. They don’t even try to comp your dessert. It came back with a lurid raw center, which I still believe, all Morton-supplied evidence to the contrary, is not medium. I should have asked for medium-well medium, I suppose. In the end I ate around the raw part, and left the raw bits as an unspoken rebuke. I could have complained, but I didn’t. Understand that, and you understand Minnesotans. Afterwards I walked back to the office, freezing, and did office things. Got home, checked the answering machine: the school nurse. Checked the cell phone: they’d called. Of course the phone hadn’t beeped a Missed Call alert, because the sound on a RAZR can be disabled merely by touching it. (To sum up so far: TiVo hosed, Fridge broken, RAZR inadvertently silenced due to poor user interface. The modern world in all its glories.) Uh oh. Gnat had taken a fall on the ice. Why? Because they went outside to play for recess. Why? Because the temperatures were above Zero. The temps were two, to be exact, so out you go me hearties. Someone tripped her by accident; she flipped back and cracked her head on the ice. Spend an hour in the infirmary, then went back to class. I was advised to look for signs of concussion, such as sleepiness and vomiting. The nurse said she was fine, and I’m sure this happens a lot; the form sent home was a preprinted sheet that said “So Your Child Has Suffered a Head Injury!” or words to that effect. Did the Hewitt show; the topic was a professor of ethnomusicology who’d appeared on the show earlier, discussing the use of music in “torture” interrogations. He was against it. He was also against referring to women as “gals,” which got his dander up more than any other issue in the conversation. If playing the Barney theme loudly in an endless loop has the same definition as hooking up someone’s nads to an Evready, then we lost sight of the thing the word purports to describe. Then I worked on the book, half-heartedly. It’s not going well. But I never think it’s going well. It’ll snap together next week when I look over everything and decide: hey, it’s going well. I have nineteen days. That’ll do.
Let’s see. What else. Well. Watched half of “Broadway Danny Rose” last night; everyone always raved about Mia Farrow’s performance, but I think a supporting actress award should have gone to her sunglasses. Woody is so full of ticks that the film’s editor probably did her job with a tweezer and a lit match, but he’s better than usual, and the film has its charms. Because it’s in black and white, for starters. That softens the heart, for some reason. I was going to write last night about something said about Your Host on a local conservative site: A certain local media celebrity recently made it known that he is not a "Social conservative" by proudly pointing to the fact (among other things) that his daughter attends a public screwl. I have to wonder how long an otherwise rational and common-sense person can maintain this position of social-liberal-with-a-daughter-in-the-PS when the state mandates HPV vaccines for all 12-year-old girls in the system? Minnesota is one of the states toying with this wacked-out idea that Texas has already implented. It must be one of the benefits of being known as a social liberal that you are not troubled by such developments. The author had previously posted remarks about my confession, with the same tone. I didn’t know we were on bad terms. (The other post had more snark, and challenged Hewitt to confront me on abortion during one of our weekly chats. Since that’s what America really, really wants to know about.) The venue where I “made it known” was a local message board I no longer read. During a discussion of a new editor to the metro’s free weekly, my name came up, and I was gently & briskly batted about for being a GOP Tool, etc. On the same site my opinions had been called “odious” by another regular poster on another thread. I thought I would clarify things with a few explanations: true, I am generally on the right side in economics and foreign policy, but I am not a social conservative. Because some people think everyone on the Rethug side is cut from the same iron bolt. I said I wasn’t a social conservative not to curry favor with the Hipsters, who will probably have six dozen other reasons to dismiss me, but because it’s the truth. I think I’m a social moderate. Ooh gasp, the dreaded M word. Everyone hates the moderates. Me too! Moderately so. I don’t like the word, because it’s often mealy and evasive and a code-word for either having no firm beliefs, or believing things that are actually “liberal.” (The terms lose their meaning when discussing social matters, but they’re all we have for the moment.) Besides, people like to think they’re moderate. It’s flattering. I listen to all sides, and synthesize comepeting truths into a new, rich Truth Smoothie! And who passes up the chance to flatter themselves? Social liberal: believes Howard Stern should be able to say the F word not just on satellite radio, but broadcast as well. Social moderate-liberal: same as above, but wishes Howard wouldn’t say it so much. Social moderate: believes Howard Stern should not say the F word on broadcast radio, but has no desire to control the content of satellite channels to which people freely subscribe. Social moderate-conservative: Howard should definitely not say it on broadcast radio, and while he probably has the right to say it on satellite, Senate hearings into decency on cable and satellite stations isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Social conservative: doesn’t believe Howard Stern should say the word, and if you subscribe to satellite radio, you’re supporting Howard Stern, and have no right to call yourself a social conservative. You can apply that template to a variety of subjects. The HPV virus vaccination question is interesting. As for the issue itself, Jane Galt’s site has a good discussion in comments about the merits and pitfalls. Since I know someone who got HPV and then got the associated cancer, I’m in favor of the vaccine’s availability. (Strike one?) Since I respect parents’ rights to control their child’s medicine intake in regards to a disease which cannot be communicated like Diptheria or TB, I support the opt-out option. I would oppose, with a small residual amount of reluctance, parental notification laws that forbade minors from getting the vaccination. (Strike two.) But here are the interesting details, at least to me: the Texas law was mandated by the governor. It appears to apply to all schoolgirls regardless of whether they’re in public or private school. The governor is a Republican. AP describes him as a “conservative Christian who opposes abortion and stem-cell research.” Which would seem to make him a social conservative, at least as the term’s understood in regards to those two issues. So even a social conservative turns out not to be a social conservative, when held up to exacting standards of the Lawgivers. Jeez: even Landru understood the need for Festival. Why did I “proudly” point out that my daughter attends a public “screwl”? Because she does. It’s a great school. So far. All of her friends in the neighborhood go there, too, and this lends a cohesion to her world that echoes the Norman Rockwell upbringing I had in Fargo. The school is close to church and the community center and the park, and it all combines to provide a sense of place you can’t always get when you’re driving to and fro. Not to say the private experience is worse; I’m sure it has its advantages - and isn’t that just the sort of bland wobbly pudding you expect from a social moderate. We’ll see what happens down the line. For now, though, we’re satisfied – and as long as I’m paying for it, I’ll ride it as long as it works. Would I like to see alternatives to gummint schools? Damn straight. Show me a politician who puts the welfare of the kids above the institutions that have evolved to form parallel, and often competing, agendas, and he or she will have my support. But enough of all this. New Quirk; new GIGANTIC Diner (smaller-sized version here; big fat MP3 version here. Please hit the small one if you can.)
Well, what do you know:
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I explained to the manager that this was a deal-breaker: as much as I have enjoyed DirecTV over the years, the TiVo remote is the end-all / be-all. So it’s going to be Comcast, it seems. I know this means my inbox will be filled tomorrow with Comcast horror stories. But you know what? I have bigger problems. The fridge is sick. The fridge is making sounds it shouldn’t make. The motor sounds like it has a fever, and there’s a strange sound coming from the back – like a giant insect with steel feelers, grooming itself. If this means the end of the fridge I will not be overly distressed; I’ve hated it for years. GE came up with a unique metal finish called Smudg-4-Sur. It’s always full of handprints, and cannot be cleaned by conventional means. And by “conventional” I mean:
