Right now I am on the front steps, playing hookey from a family gathering, trying to get a start on the week’s work – the boulders of duty (I’d capitalize that, in the usual mock-heroic style, but I had a dream last night in which the Dark Chef from the old Diner radio show castigated me for irritating capitalization, and noted that both he and his wife had taken me out of their Favorites list for that very reason. He seemed quite irritated) start rolling downhill around 6 PM on Sunday night. But there’s stuff to do every night now, and last night I got caught up in a longish post for buzz that ended up being posted around 2 AM or so. I was watching a movie while I wrote, so it wasn’t as if I wasn’t enjoying myself. The movie? Why, glad you asked! Something I’d been saving for the right moment, and the right moment never came, so what the hell. It was “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” the one Bond film I’d never seen. It’s the famous Lazenby Experiment, and I’d heard wildly conflicting things about it. Short verdict: I am wildly conflicted. Long version, with screen grabs, tomorrow.

Saturday I did two hours of shock-jockery @ 1280 with Captain Ed, and it was a joy. Being a co-host is always better than being a guest. I confess to tuning out during the Scooter Libby section, since I’ve never had great passion for that matter. The other day I was stuck behind a car smothered in angry bumperstickers, most of which seemed mad at me for not being as mad as the driver, and the occupant of the vehicle was so incensed over Scooter Libby she had written a protest in crayon on the back of the minivan window. Certainly made me rethink my position, such as it is. Everyone has their hobby horses, and I deploy that obvious banality only to transition back to something I heard Friday on the Medved show concerning the Roswell Crash. Medved had been dismissive of the story, but he had a friend who called in with additional information. The friend was Dwight Schultz, aka twitchy phobic future-dork Reg Barclay from Star Trek (TNG, Voyager.) I kept waiting for him to get to the point about the recent death-bed recantation of the fellow who first pushed the weather balloon story, but in one of those life-imitates-the-artist moments, Schultz went full Barkley on us: too much detail, not enough narrative drive, obvious intelligence but no sense of the audience, and I felt like Picard tapping my foot saying GET TO THE POINT, LIEUTENANT. Heh. Still love the guy, and the man knows his Roswell.

Saturday afternoon I shopped, and had my camera with me to record the room tone of the Rainbow coolers. It turns out I was wrong, more or less; it didn’t sound too much like the Eno song. It sounded like a cooler. I paused at the display of cut-price fireworks: the sign said 50% off, and that’s good. I took a box marked $19.99 up to the cash register and asked the clerk what it was priced.

“Nineteen ninety-nine,” he said.

“Well, it says 50 percent off.”

“Really?” We walked over to the display. It said 50 percent off.

“I think that means it’s fifty percent off what you would pay,” he said.

“Some theoretical price that was never charged,” I said.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“So were these forty bucks before the fourth?

“Never, nah.”

We had a discussion about air conditioners while he scanned my goods. He’d put one in for his mother, and he said every page had a warning: do not let it fall out of the window.

“Good advice,” I said.

“I guess.” Beep, beep, beep, beep. “But who doesn’t know you shouldn’t let it fall out the window?”

“Everybody knows that,” I said.

“Exactly. It’s just like those warning labels on everything they have to put because someone did something stupid and they have to tell you not to do it.”

“People sue over everything,” I said.

He noted that it was a pretty heavy unit, but it was cheap, and that was good, but they made things cheap because they’d break and you’d have to buy another, that’s what they wanted. I noted that I’d never had an air conditioner quit on me. When you think about it, a lot of the stuff we get for lower prices works pretty well. He said that was true enough, true enough. I said you could get a DVD player for one-tenth of what the cost ten years ago, and they did more, too. True enough, true enough.

He bagged my groceries and handed me the bags and I went out to my car. Halfway across the lot the handle ripped on the heaviest bag and the milk fell out and rolled away. No one had warned me!

Sunday I got the last load of cedar chips. En route I spied this:

Good luck to anyone who wants to turn it into condos, and sends out eviction notices.

The weather was ominous, but I figured I’d get the load spread before the rain came. Stopped at Target for some goods; when I got to the cash register the sky outside was night-dark. A gale had set in. Well. I ran for my car, which was a mistake – soaked to the pith in six seconds. The lot was shin-deep with water. Driving home was an exercise in caution and horror; there’s always someone from the Hydroplaning Enthusiast Society who wants to pass you at 15 MPH over the posted limit. This was the view from the driver’s seat:

Seriously. Made it home, decided I should post to Buzz about the matter, and sat on the front porch on a chair from Gnat’s computer table, laptop on my knees, writing in the rain. Favorite moment of the day, now that I think about it. I’m easily amused.

At least I’m not easily depressed.  (Link goes to opinion piece about the author's disinclination to celebrate the fourth because of that whole "independence" thing, and desire for Darth Vader to speak truth to power at an Anti-Cheney rally that will use the power of Paris Hilton and rap stars to bring the nation together again. The author also wishes we would storm some sort of Bastille next week. I’ve noticed that most people who romanticize the French Revolution are a little unclear on the details, particularly how it turned out. They seem to think it resulted in two strokes of the guillotine – the king, who obviously deserved it, and Marie Antoinette, who kinda-sorta deserved it because she was disconnected from the people and said they should eat cake, tee hee. Bitch! (Unless you're holding her up as a victim of 18th century social norms imposed by the oligarchical phallocracy, in which case: Martyr!) The fact that it all dissolved into the worst sort of Utopian drivel, sectarian quarrles, nasty radical egalitarianism and the rise of ideologically-inspired state terror – well, yes, but they meant well. So did Vader, depending on your viewpoint. My favorite line:

Maybe we need Bono and Brad and Angelina there, to focus on the crisis in America and not the crisis in Africa, at least for a few months.

It's like a neutron star of inanity, that line; like a neutron star, it collapses into a dot so dense that the editor's pen is forever stuck on the event horizon, unable to move forward and cross it out.

Well, so much for My Private Opinions, held by Me. On to other matters now. A matchbook awaits (oh: my tireless researcher George G., whom old Diner listeners may recall as the Fun with Numbers fellow, has secured for this site an astonishing collection of old matches - and combined with the 65 pristine matchbooks from the 40s and 50s I just bought, well, we may have to take the matchbook feature daily.) (Yes, yes, be still beating hearts, etc. Same to you, pal.)

Anyway. Buzz.mn! Right about now.