The Intelligence Estimate

I showed up for work at 10 this morning only to realize that I wasn't supposed to be there until 1. I had time to kill. Someone suggested going to a movie. I love movies, so I decided to give it a go. Well, the only thing playing at that time of day was some Tom Hanks movie about the moon landings. It was playing a short walk from my work and it fit my schedule.

Well, it was in IMAX format and it was in 3-D. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but because it was a Friday morning there were a hoard of school groups there. YOUNG kids. And I don't know if you've ever seen a 3-D movie in the theater (I hadn't) but apparently the idea is to have SOMETHING, ANYTHING, fly out of the frame at the audience. Preferably every 30 seconds.

Have you ever heard 300 seven-year-olds scream in unison? I thought a pterodactyl was ripping the roof off the theater. My ears have JUST NOW stopped bleeding.

I went to the bank today. The bank in Uptown, which is deceptively located to the south of me. And on my way back to the train I saw a Borders Bookstore I'd passed a million times on my way downtown...the REAL downtown, not the fake downtown that's really Uptown but located south of here. Well, since I had the day off, and I always meant to go to the store anyway, I decided to go to the store...anyway.

I found a new non-fiction book called "Fortissimo" that mentions a friend of mine, Stacey Tappan, by name. The book is about The Lyric Opera's Young Artist Program. Stacey is a soprano and a graduate of the program. (Class of 2003, GO RHINEMAIDENS!) So I sat down and skimmed the book looking for her. I found a paragraph where someone is using her as an example of a performer who is now a much more comfortable and commanding acting presence than she was when she entered the program.

I'm not sure that's the compliment you want in opera. "For a singer, you're not a bad actor." But what about my SINGING? "You're great actor...I gotta go!"

I'll never forget what Pavoratti said to her when he met her, "I thought you were taller!"

Well, no matter what a published author and the world's most famous tenor think, she a terrific singer. Check her out. http://staceytappan.com/audio.html

I also noticed that they had the "Sci-Fi/Fantasy" section of the bookstore right next to the "Romance" section. That's just cruel. Why would you put the two most socailly awkward type of readers TOGETHER in the same aisle. It's like some cruel science experiment. It's like spiking the punch at the chess club mixer! Just wrong!

Ok, first the good news. I got a call back from that interview I went on yesterday. They want me to come in and shadow the full timer for a show. That is the next step to getting hired. However, my cynical side (which is not so much a side anymore...it's more of a vast majority) says they're not going to pay me for the shadowing and then not give me the job that way they get me to work for FREE! Well, I'll show them, I'll show up and do a really half-assed job! It's a foolproof plan.

Now, the bad news: killer dolphins on the loose! That's right, it's finally happened. The second smartest mammels on earth have armed themselves. Or, to be more accurate, the SMARTEST mammel on earth has armed the second smartest mammel on earth. Which makes you wonder who deserves the title more!

A story from the The Observer (http://urbanlegends.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1577753,00.html) noted that the US Navy has been arming dolphins with POISON DARTS for years. The "logic" behind that was to have them patrol around ships in harbor and ships anchored at sea to keep them safe from underwater spies. Apparently the spies would either be incapacitated by the darts or annoyed into submission by the dolphins incessant chattering. A third, somewhat less likely, attack scenario involves jumping through hoops for fish as a means of disarming an incoming torpedo.

Anyway, all the recent hurricane activity in the Gulf Coast has wrecked the holding pens of the dolphins and they have escaped into open water. In a related story tuna fishermen around the world are scared shitless.

Imagine the fishermen hauling in their tuna nets and, in addition to the two or three ordinary dolphins who get caught in their nets, they find Delta Force Flipper lying in wait for them. He gets off the first shot, but the wiley fisherman ain't going down like that. He uses his peg leg to deflect the dart as he whirls around for the harpoon. It's now a battle of wills. A tense stand off. The fisherman glares at Flipper's beady black eyes. A cold breeze blows a misplaced tumbleweed between the pair of gunfighters. Trigger fingers flinch. Otherwise, there is no movement whatsoever. But the dolphin has back up. His friends make a glorious "Free Willie" style jump over the boat, catching the fisherman off guard just long enough. Flipper knows this is his moment and he moves in for the kill! The fisherman is sent whirling with one well placed smack from the dolphin's flipper. And as the fisherman stares down the barrel of Flipper's gun, one thought races through his mind, "I wish I'd studied more for the SATs!" Flipper dispatches with the fisherman with the panache and calculated coolness of the action hero he's fast becoming. As he pulls the trigger he says, " I guess I'm the one who got away!"

Three days later the boat washes ashore and the other fishermen are amazed and horrified to find their colleague fileted, lying on a plate covered with tartar sauce.

Ok, there clearly needs to be some ground rules placed on this before it gets out of hand. Now, to the uninitiated it looks like I've already gone back on my pledge to update this journal daily. Well, well, well, let me just refute that in the strongest possible terms: Nuh-uh! (Refute THAT if you possess the erudition!)

Anyway, I'm still up so I still consider it the 27th...no matter WHAT reality says!

Ok, enough about you, let's talk about ME! I had a job interview today. It was for a part-time theater position. I don't want to say too much about it because I don't want to jinx it. But let me just say this, they are very cool and it would be great to work there. They just care about the right things and they put out a quality product. The people were VERY laid back and their dress code appears to be non-existant. Which is a departure for me. My last job had a schizophrenic and somewhat arbitrary dress code. Por examplo, you couldn't wear stripes. What? I thought that was just a "nice" way of telling us we were fat and need to stick to solid colors. The thing that bothered me the most about it was that it didn't apply to managers at all. So the people ENFORCING the dress code could come to work in a bed sheet, pasties and monocle and tell me to go home because my dress shirt had a pattern on it. It was like be stuck in one big Dilbert cartoon...except funny.

The other thing that was cool about the place that I interviewed today is that their offices have a very clubhouse sort of feel to them. It was like we were hanging out at the cool kids dorm rooms. Or, at least, that's how I imagine it would have felt like. I had a lot of engineering and computer science majors as friends in college. All I picked up by hanging out in their dorm rooms was an intimate knowledge of every person who has every been a member of King Crimson. But I digress.

These new people should be contacting me by the end of the week one and letting me know one way or the other. I'll keep you posted.

Ok, the ads above search through my posts and generate ads that are pertinent to this blog. But what if this blog is nothing more than a series of random words? Like:

Monkey nuggets
Wax roulette
Reticulated adrenaline
Hooker fire
Insurance manatee
Ninja baby lawnmowers

Look at me, day one of the blog-o-rama and already I've resorted to cheap tricks. Be sure to tune in tomorrow when Ill be exclusively featuring the wedding of J-Lo and Tiny Tim's corpse.

Geez.

Dear All Y'all-

As my astute readers have no doubt already noticed, there are now ads on The Intelligence Estimate. That's right, I've sold out. And I'll tell you why...because a job in theater don't pay squat. But it does supply you with a pretty solid supply of moderately entertaining stories. So here is my promise to you, the consumer: I will update my blog daily with at least one moderately interesting story (as judged by ME and ME ALONE!) You, hopefully, will return here daily to find out my latest triumphs and travails. And when you return you will see some rockin' ads and I will make some money so I can afford to do luxurious things like eat and pay rent.

Deal? Who's in?

Sincerely,
Some Huckster

I don't get weekends at this job. Well, that's not entirely true...I just don't get them on actual weekends. I get like a Wednesday-Thursday off and we CALL it a weekend. The cool thing about that (if there is one) is that I get to do things when no one else is there. Like yesterday I went to a matinee of the new Robert Redford film. Well, you know who goes to weekday matinees? Old people. Old, rich, ill-mannered jerks to be more precise. They talk through the movie, they complain about the food, they're constantly adjusting their hearing aids so all I hear is a constant squeeling.

I'm gonna shift gears here for a minute, follow me. I'm going somewhere with this. You ever notice how often a thermometer in a theater gets checked? A lot. Every ten minutes it seems like someone is coming in with a flashlight to check the temperature. It's like a science experiment for those ushers.

"Our research has determined that Jerry Breuckheimer movies are best served at a temperature oh 14 degrees fehrenheit...that way the audience is too distracted by frostbite to notice the gaping wholes in the plot!"

So I didn't notice at first when some lady was messing with the thermostat. I only noticed when she started pressing buttons and the thing started beeping. I thought, "clearly this usher is new on the job." Then the woman walks right past me and takes her seat. She didn't work at the theater, she was just a patron. An old, rich patron who thought that the theater was too cold and that everyone deserved to be at HER temperature.

I was going out tonight to see a friend's improv troupe. They performed at IO at 12:30 a.m. in a show called The Cagematch where two teams compete head to head and then one gets eliminated. My team lost. Eh, whatever. I just wish those bookies took plastic.

Anyway, I say that to say this, I was leaving my house last night much later than I would normally. As I approached the train platform I started hearing people screaming. Not in pain, just like belligerant drunks. And the reason? Because they were belligerant drunks...are you paying attention? I live in Roger's Park, right across the street from Loyola University so there is never a shortage of college kids running hither and yon. Actually they don't run yon so much as they used to. I think it's because Yon pressed charges. But there's plenty of running hither...and possibly dither. Yeah, dither's cool. Hither and dither, together again and it feels so sweet! They never run helter skelter though, which is good because I didn't care for that movie.

Back to the drunks on the platform.

They are stretched out over the whole platform, so I try to get as far to the end as I could to get away from them. But they follow. More accurately, TWO follow. One skinny little girl and one chubby, one might say cherubic, girl. And Chubby's crying. Something about guy troubles. And she is just sobbing. "Blah, blah, blah, you don't know how it feels. This has been a horrible year. I'll never have anyone."

Now, chubby wasn't good looking to begin with, but she looked like she had been on a five day crying bender. Her eyes were puffy and red. It looked like every capillary in her head was staging a protest.

Geez, I thought, I don't know why you'd have any trouble finding a man. Maybe there's a stunning conversationalist under there somewhere, but it's currently drowning in it's own disgust. Gawd, pull yourself together...or at least get home so I don't have to watch it!

Finally the train shows up and I get on hoping to be done with the water works from the platform...but they get on the same car as I did. And to add insult to injury the train is loaded with college kids who, coincidentally, are also loaded. Each one on them looked like an add for drunken irresponsibility and sexual adventure. And now add our crying girl into the mix and I'm back in high school. The cool kids and their overt sexuality are trying each other on for size while the people sentient enough to have feelings are in the corner bawling their eyes out.

I was torn. I didn't care for the cherub crying her eyes out because she reminded me of me and my college days. Days when EVERYTHING was soooooooooooooooooooooo important and no one could possibly understand the existential strife of day to day living that was raging within me. But I also hated the "cool kids" who just drank their problems away while trading partners like baseball cards. They reminded me of all the things I never did in college, and all the people I detested due to their ignorance of the aforementiond strife. People who have always had everything and will continue to get whatever they want just because they're pretty.

So I did the only thing I could. I got off the train hating EVERYONE! It's the only fair thing to do.

Now I'm gonna go over to Yon's and get good and drunk. And if Hither and Dither drop by I will not be responsible for whatever hedonistic revelries ensue!

The "you" that heading refers to is not, in fact, me. Or you for that matter...unless you're my former boss Phil. And you're probably not. Very few people are. In fact MOST people aren't Phil. Seriously, look around. You see Phil? Didn't think so. And neither do we now.

Phil became former yesterday. It was a sneak attack. He didn't see it coming...which is a redundant way of say it was a sneak attack. We were all taken by surprise. Which is a repetitious way of saying he was taken by surprise.

I loved working for Phil. He was a lot of fun. More like a big brother than a boss. Very cool.

So besides the shock of being Phil-less, I have the added problem of having been his assistant. Which means that his job is, for the meantime, my job. The problem is Phil was such a fantastic bullshit umbrella that we had no idea how much he did on a regular basis and how musch non-sense he shielded us from. Well, we had a much better idea than the boobs that fired him. But, until he left, we didn't realize how much crap was heaped on his shoulders and how much he did routinely that was not a part of his job.

And he didn't know he was going to be fired! Which is a redundant way of saying he didn't see it coming and a repetitious way of saying we were all taken by surprise.

I miss Phil already. But I finally got my perscriptions filled...so the only thing i'm gonna be missing in a few hours is reality! Whoo-hoo! It's at times like this I think I should take up a hobby. Like competitive drinking. Or bowling for crack.

I have a confession to make. I am on an anti-depressant for general anxiety disorder. There. Take that Tom Cruise! Now, I say that to say this: if I ever have to talk to another insurance company or pharmacy I may very well need the services of an amazing criminal lawyer. (Isn't that an odd phrase, criminal lawyer? I mean, I know they're crooks but....)

When I started my job here I was supposed to have insurance after 3 months. Then, on my first day, I get told that they've ammended that to be ONE YEAR from my start date. Well, after copious amounts of bitching and whining and all around poor-sportsmanship, they've relented and given me insurance. The insurance should have been effective on August 1st..90 days after I started. But the geniuses in the home office made it effective SEPTEMBER 1. So I get screwed out of one month of coverage.

Now then, because I didn't have the insurance yet, I waited to get my anti-depressants refilled. On September 2 I took in the perscription only to find out that because I was now with a new healthcare provider I need to get a pre-authorization before the perscription could be filled. The pharmacist assured me that he would call the doctor's office (which is in ANOTHER STATE mind you) and get the authorization so he could fill the perscription and I wouldn't have to pay through the nose for it.

Now I've been going back and forth with the pharmacy for a week and every day it's a different story. "We need to call the insurance company." "We haven't heard back from the doctor's office." "Nobody sees the wizard, not nobody, not nohow!" So for a week I've been coming down off my anti-depressants. In other words, been getting depressed, anxious, angry and all around miserable.

Well, today I call in and the pharmacist get mad at me. "You need to call the doctor or the insurance company. Because the pre-authorization is stuck somewhere and I don't know where it is. YOU need to call." I NEED to call? For a week now I've been hearing, We'll call, we'll call, we'll call. Now, all of a sudden, I'M THE ONE WHO NEEDS TO CALL?

So I call the insurance company. I get into an automated listing asking me for my account number and member ID. Well, because my imnsurance is so new I don't have an ID number. This holds up the line for a couple of minutes. Then the space age voice on the other end says, "I'm going to transfer you to an attendant now...please have your ID number ready." Then I talk to this guy (who very politely looks up my account using my name and birthdate) and he tells me that he has no idea if there's been a preauthorization because that's a different department. Call this number.

I hang up and start again. I start out on hold...forever! Every now and again there is the voice that tells you that the call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance pruposes. I'm half hoping it will be so there will be a document of how screwed I've been. Then Christina comes on and ASKS ME FOR MY ID NUMBER! I tell her my situation as politely as I can after being on the phone for 25 minutes. She looks up my account and gets some information from me. She then puts me on hold while she PERSONALLY calls my doctor. She even comes back every now and then to tell me that she's sorry I have to be on hold for so long. When hse finally comes back for good she said, "Well, the office wants to get this done today because you've been without meds for a week, so call back this afternoon and we'll try to get this done before the weekend."From now on if I need to get anything done I'm going straight to Christine!

So, for those scoring at home, here's the current enemies list:
1) Drury Lane Water Tower Theater, my employer for screwing me on coverage.
2) Walgreens Pharmacy
3) United Healthcare of Illinois
4) Tom Cruise

by Eric Blair

Televangelist Pat Robertson was issued a subpoena today asking him to appear before a hastily assembled grand jury on the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

Rehnquist, 80, passed away Saturday from complications of thyroid cancer. Most would call those natural, albeit regrettable, causes. However, Robertson's recent on-air request to have his followers pray for supreme court vacancies has some thinking he may have overstepped his bounds.

One such naysayer is attorney and activist Keith Christenson president of "Assassination Watch America" (AWA.) He maintains that, in his fervor to get judges to retire, Robertson may have gone a step further and asked for God to take Rehnquist's life.

"No one is saying that Robertson killed Rehnquist," Christenson said. "Just that he had him 'taken out.' Just like he wanted (Venezualan President Hugo) Chavez 'taken out.' "

Robertson has since apologized for his comments about Chavez noting that he never said he wanted Chavez assassinated, merely, "taken out." Robertson noted that "taken out" could mean many things that do not involve death, including kidnapping.

"Well clearly God doesn't kidnap people," Christenson said. "So what did Robertson mean if he wasn't asking for God to kill?" Robertson's legal representatives declined to comment on the subpoena. Robertson himself would only say, " I pray for the Rehnquist family and for the speedy appointment of a new justice."

President Bush, fresh off a 5 week vacation, praised Justice Rehnquist for his dedication to the job even noting how he still showed up after being diagnosed with cancer. Bush promised a new appointment before October.

"Our prayers are with the Rehnquist family tonight," Bush added.

Christenson, for one, is uneasy with all the prayers. "Haven't these people done enough to this family already?"