The Intelligence Estimate

I was waiting to cross the street by my house the other day when I saw a black bungee cord in the middle of the street. I didn't think much of it at first, but the light didn't change for a long time so I had a moment to think about it. The longer the light stayed red, the more I thought, "That could do some damage if someone hits those prongs just right. I should pick that up."

I looked across the street and saw a bunch of other people waiting to cross to my side. Behind them was a sign for the Creative Problem Solving Institute 2006. This is a week-long symposium hosted by some advertising guru who knows more than you do. I know he knows more than you do because he has an institute. Do YOU have an institute? Do you even know where you can get an institute? What do you have? Well, if you pay up to $1125.00 you can have a handy little document suitable for framing that says how creative you are...but it's not an institute is it?

That's the real creativity here: getting people to fork over money for something that, in reality, you can't give them. Creativity cannot be taught anymore than you can teach comedy, you either get it or you don't. In the end you if you cannot tell a joke and have no charisma (Do you hear me Carrot Top?), no amount of teaching is going to make you any better. It will only leave you poorer. Same for creativity. You are either creative or you're not. You can learn some nifty little tricks and buzzwords that will annoy your friends and co-workers, but if it comes pre-packaged with a Powerpoint presentation and a neat little packet of worksheets it's not really creativity. It's marketing. Marketing fooled me once already with NEW Coke and I'm not gonna sign on for that pain again.

So as I stood at the intersection and looked at those smug morons being fleeced, I thought: "You know what? I'd like to see how these "problem solvers" go about those little conundrum. Let one of them pick it up."

The bungee cord is still there.

I'm starting my own institute.

"No," I answer. "I was there the other day. They were giving away free drinks...why?"

"Becasue I saw a listing on Craigslist that reminded me of one of your blog posts."

Ok, because I know that my mom reads this, I will take a brief moment to explain Craigslist. Craigslist is an on-line community with many different functions. On of the more common ones is buy and selling things. Another function is personal ads that ask for the most explicitly disturbing sexual acts like they are ordering a side of bacon. And if you are too shy to just come out and ask for bacon...I mean sex, they have a section called Missed Connections. This is where lonely and/or painfully shy people post notes about people they either missed the opportunity to talk to or were too socially awkward to approach in the first place.

So I go home and look at the Chicago section of Missed Connections and find this:

Drew Carey lookalike--Caribou Regular - m4m

Reply to: XXXXXXXXXXXXX
Date: 2006-06-21, 10:26PM

You know who you are. You have an admirer in me.
*****

Now, for the uninitiated (mom, I'm looking at you), m4m means male for male. In other words (do I really need to spell this out mom?) it is a man who is looking for another man. Or, in a word: GAY.

Now, I'm just narcissistic enough to want everyone to love me. I want single women and gay men to swoon over my every move. I want straight men and lesbians to reconsider their sexual orientation based on the cut of my jeans. I want people to want me or want to be me. I suspect it's because I wasn't hugged enough as a child. (That's not about you at all mom. I'm talking about dad...because he doesn't have a computer. He'll never read this.)

Anyway, I was flattered. I still am. When I showed it to Jen she said, "Awesome, I have a trophy husband!"

Now every time I walk past that coffee shop I stare in the windows and wonder, "Is it you middle aged realtor? Is it you unemployed screenwriter? Is it you overweight, swarthy sci-fi enthusiast? You sit there sipping your coffee, sweating through your Star Fleet uniform and rifling awkwardly through your comic books, but I know it's only because I am nearby. You are unsettled by my beauty. But in the privacy of your own bedroom (most likely in your mother's basement) you are at the helm of your own galaxy-class cruiser. Millions of lives depend on your every move. Lead on rocket man! Through worm holes and asteroid belts I fear no evil as you are my captain. I'd follow you into hell you magnificent bastard!"

I'd love to type more, but Caribou opens in six and a half hours and this tuxedo ain't gonna press itself!

I was at the Chicago Gay Pride Parade on Sunday and by far the most disturbing thing I saw was two women who had 40 oz. bottles of beer duct taped to their hands. DUCT TAPED to their hands! That is a commitment to alcoholism that is not seen in most people. A lot of people would assume that if you're too drunk to hold a beer, you're too drunk to drink it. Not these ladies. They're not letting go for ANYONE!

But, like any dream, it interferes with your relationships and peace of mind. How do they shake hands? How did they open doors? How did they go to the bathroom? The world may never know. But they don't have to really. Because most of the world has something that makes the duct tape completely irrelevant. Two things really: self-restraint and opposable thumbs.

God love the Onion for printing what we're all thinking. I used to ride the bus everyday with a large woman with three kids who we called The Whirling Dervish of Hate. She disciplined her kids just like the woman in this article. Enjoy!

Is Anyone On This Bus Interested In Disciplining My Son?

By Maria Sturgess
June 21, 2006 | Issue 42•25

I can tell by your disapproving stares, hushed whispers, and looks of genuine concern that just about everyone on this crosstown bus thinks that they could do a better job raising my 4-year-old son—whom you will identify as the child leaning over the back of your seat throwing soggy Cheerios at you—and I completely agree. Someone needs to put an end to his unacceptable behavior, and I can assure you that person will not be me.

So please, if you want my son to sit still and shut up, consider this an open invitation to any or all of you to knock some sense into him.

I realize this proposition may seem irresponsible, but you must understand that I am a terrible parent whose interest in raising an obedient, well-behaved child has long since vanished, and the only way my son will ever be introduced to the basic concepts of rules, restrictions, and repercussions is through the teachings of one of the random strangers on this bus.

So, if you so desire, feel free to yank him by his shirt collar while he's running up and down the aisle, bend him over your knee, and do your worst. While I might not thank you directly, I will show my silent appreciation for your invaluable assistance by putting my tabloid down for a moment and staring blankly out the window.

I've tried to control my son in the past, but I clearly lack the most basic parenting skills and have perhaps done more damage than good throughout his young life, but I can tell you what definitely does not work: half-heartedly scolding him from across the bus, letting him run around and swing on the silver poles to get it out of his system, taking away his toys and immediately returning them on the condition that he behave, telling him to go talk to the bus driver, and, finally, completely ignoring him—my preferred method to this day.

Please don't feel you should be restricted to corporal punishment. I may be a disgracefully bad mother, but I am still open to any interpretation of child discipline, as long as it doesn't involve me taking any action whatsoever. You are more than welcome to try reasoning with him, strapping him to the seat next to yours and forbidding him to move, calmly explaining how to properly behave on a bus, or exiting the bus with me at our stop and dragging him by the ear all the way home to show that there are negative consequences of inappropriate behavior.

It's up to one of you to establish a set of boundaries for him.

Over the years, I've grown used to his incessant squirming and shouting, so if everyone else would like a calm, quiet ride the rest of the way, then I suggest one of you get up and do something about it.

I should also add that this offer is not restricted solely to other parents. If you have never interacted with a child in your adult life and are not sure whether you possess the instincts or ability to relate to a child, I assure you, you are still vastly more qualified than I am to dole out some tough love.

Not to overstep my bounds, but may I suggest one of you take away his Superball? I don't know if that is the way to handle it, and I certainly don't care to find out for myself, so just leave me out of it, because the first and last time I did that, he cried.

And, by all means, take your time to craft the perfect approach to handling this situation and instilling a sense of enduring responsibility in my son. Who knows, a brief encounter with just the right complete stranger could help undo my years of neglectful and incompetent parenting.

After all, he and I will both be on this very same bus with all of you tomorrow, the next day, and every day after that, and trust me, it will only get worse until one of you intervenes.

I got on the train today and my eye was drawn immediately to two women in the corner. They were large (read: FAT) women dressed in long black dresses sitting with their faces inches apart from one another. They had their hands about the others face in a gesture that looked a lot like monkeys grooming each other.

One was almost cute with her close cropped hair in a spritely pixie-do! The other one looked like Rosie O'Donnell ate Dom Delouise. I called her the Sasquatch. In addition to her standard-issue black dress, Sasquatch was wearing red leg warmers. I'm not sure why she was keeping her legs in such pristine condition. I could tell the last time she ran was when the ice cream truck broke down a few blocks away.

As I sat down I realized why they were so close to each other: they were painting each other green. They were on their way down to the the one year anniversary of the sit down production of Wicked at the Oriental Theater in Chicago. They were giving away pairs of tickets to the first 365 witches to show up at the festivities.

What better way to say thank you to the fans than by making the faithful come out into the light of day to be mocked and ridiculed by the public? Bravo!

I also noticed that Pixie-Do had a wiccan necklace, so I guessed she was just going to the party simply to meet with the producers and deliver a list of corrections so that their show would more accurately portray the way witches live their lives. I assume one of the changes was going to be more public humiliation.

I got a copy of Art World the other day (for reasons I don't feel like defending right now) and I was reading about a historic house in Moscow that is perfectly cylindrical. It was built by an architect by the name of Konstantin Melnikov.

It is now in the beginning stages of being converted into a museum. The problem they are facing is that they cannot determine who the owner is. When the original owner passed away he willed the house in equal shares to two family members. Each of them in turn sold off their shares to others who sold their shares to other and so on and so forth and the ownership got to be very suspicious and murky.

The part of the story that interested me was when one of the residents, while living there, went blind. Not completely blind, just legally blind. But blind all the same.

Now, at the risk of offending everyone who ever loved The Miracle Worker, how did a blind man live in a cylindrical house? My guess would be: not well. I'm pretty sure that he didn't live there because he wanted to at that point. He just lived there because he couldn't find his way out.

The other day at work we were made to go to diversity training at a nice Italian restaurant near work. A few days later, my boss puzzled at why no one (myself, Ryan or Kevin) had written a blog mocking diversity training. I told her that it was because diversity is a valuable part of any work place. A person who would mock that cornerstone of teamwork clearly has just confused his ego function with his role function. Anyone who would do that needs, not your scorn, but your understanding. They need someone to play angel's advocate with their opinions to truly understand what their mocking is all about. Or something. I don't know. Whatever.

That being said, here's a list of priceless information I learned from Diversity Dave:

1) Rebecca hates being called Becky...therefore from today onward she will be called ONLY Becky. (Her real mistake is letting us know where her buttons are. That just makes them easier to push!)

2) SUCK IT UP!

3) It is sometimes very hard to distinguish between the scents of certain markers. Who knew watermelon smelled so much like strawberry?

Today was a big day. I saw 4 movies today, which brings my total count for the year to 99. The real question is now, what should be 100? I feel like it should be something monumentous...like Citizen Kane. Any suggestions?

Here's the current list to get your motor running:

January (15 Movies This Month)
Gunner Palace
Vernon, Florida
Le Samourai
Munich
Match Point
Transformers: The Movie
Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Be Here To Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
Fight Club
Pride and Prejudice
Saw
Mrs. Henderson Presnts
Memoirs of a Geisha
Cache

February (17 Movies This Month, 32 Total)
How's Your News?
How To Draw a Bunny
The Three Burials of Mequiades Estrada
Casablanca
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Frailty
Why We Fight
The Matador
Amadeus
Once Upon a Matress
Rick
Tales of Hoffman
No Way Back
Battle of Algeirs
That Touch of Mink
16 Candles
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

March (20 Movies This Month, 52 Total)
Dark Prince, The True Story of Dracula
Transamerica
Legend of Boggy Creek
Frankenfish
Metropolis
Serenity
Unknown White Male
MirrorMask
Curious George
The Hills Have Eyes
Beyond The Rocks
Forest For The Trees
Hero
V For Vendetta
Cinemania
7 Up
7+7
X-Men
Bringing Up Baby
Adam And Steve

April (18 Movies This Month, 70 Total)
Lonesome Jim
Inside Man
21 Up
Say Anything
X2
Thank You For Smoking
Sorority House Massacre 2
Waking Life
Brick
28 Up
Cowboy Del Amor
Hellboy
Reservoir Dogs
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
Santa Claus Conquers The Martians
Ultimate Avengers
35 UP
GO

May (17 Movies This Month, 87 Total)
Hard Candy
M:I III
42 Up
Koyaanisqatsi
Heathers
Off The Charts, The Song-Poem Story
A Touch of Evil
Judgement at Nuremburg
Solyaris (Russian Version)
Disco Dolls in 3-D
The DaVinci Code
Powaqqatsi
High Noon
The Proposition
Art School Confidential
X3
Over The Hedge

June...so far (12 This Month, 99 Total)
7 Samurai
Sin City
An Inconvenient Truth
Team America World Police
CLUE
Horse Feathers
Me and Isaac Newton
A Night in Casablanca
Room Service
Red vs Blue, Season 4
The Man With The Movie Camera
Monkey Business


Oops, nevermind. I forgot to add this one in: Naqoyqatsi. I guess I'm at 100 already. And I made it in on a great Marx Brothers film. Good enough for me. I'll still accept suggestions though.

I was home a few weeks ago and found myself alone in a mall with time to kill. I had seen all the stores, bought the thing I had come for and even some things I hadn't. I was so bored that I even spent 15 minutes in the massage chairs, not because I needed it but because it would pass the time. I eventually made my way to the arcade where I believe I fought zombies in every way imaginable. But I only wasted time with zombies because I was resisting the lure of SILENT SCOPE!

For the uninitiated, Silent Scope is your basic first person shooter game except you are a sniper. So as you look at the screen with your naked eye (by the way, put some glasses on or something. All the nudity is scaring the kids!) you see your basic cityscape, but if you look through the scope of the sniper rifle you see a close up of the terrain replete with little bitty terrorists who are taking hostages and wreaking havoc and generally making poor life choices.

So you get to play the part of vengeful guidance counselor. A rogue faculty member, you administer your tough-love lead salad to those wisenheimer who laughed when you told them that they should consider a career in the heating and cooling trade. But the principal didn't agree with your unorthodox methods, so he's suspended your teaching certificate. That, and having your frequent advances on the lunch lady thrown aside like so much cafeteria cole slaw, freed up your time to search out these ne'er do wells and deliver the ultimate demerit!

At least that's the story I concocted while I was at the mall. I had a lot of free time on my hands.

The thing that scares me about the game is that it is incredibly lifelike. The weight of the gun, the workings of the sight, it all seems very real.

As I was playing it I thought, "I've seen this before." And I had. It was a movie called The Last Starfighter that came out in when I was 9. It's about this lonely kid that grows up in a trailer park where his only friend is a video game called Starfighter. In the video game he slays the alien armada time and time again. What he doesn't realize is that the video game was placed on earth by aliens to train pilots. So one day an alien shows up and takes the kid off to space to play the game for real...blah, blah, blah learns lesson about life.

Recruitment! That's it! The Army has had a hard time meeting their recruitment numbers as of late. (Or, perhaps there's been a serious shortage of guidance counselors that I don't know about. ) Either way, I just slowly backed out of the arcade without making any eye contact.

"This is not my fight," I said.

I worked at two different newspapers so I know how boring a job news gathering can be. That is why I was not surprised to learn from our editor that one of the "fun" things that people do when laying out pages is to put ironic things next to one another to create "theme pages." The example he gave was a headline about a Chinese restaurant being closed down right next to an ad for the local dog pound. Or a story about an arrested pedophile next to an ad for the local preschool. Something like that.

Here is the information age equivalent:















The lead story (arrow #1) is a about a Palestinian protest on a Gaza beach. The Palestinians are protesting an attack on the beach launched by the Israelis from a navy gunboat. (full story)
















The ad in the right-hand column (arrow #2) is for a DVD on "How To Get Started Boating."

About a month ago I finished watching perhaps the most pretentious films known to man: Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy. They consist of images repeated ad nasuem at different speeds over a very repetitive Phillip Glass score. There is no story, just a "theme" that is "explored" by the "poetry" of repeated images. If you've never seen them, don't. Watch this movie instead. It condenses all the movies into a bite-sized minute and twenty-five seconds. Which, if you have seen the films you know, is all the longer they are actually watchable.

It finally happened. Jen got a job. A good job. Hell, as far as I'm concerned, a GREAT job. She'll be working on a new cardiac transplant floor at Northwestern Hospital in downtown Chicago. I guess the hospital is world renown. I seem to remember hearing something about it being the number 2 transplant hospital on the planet...or something. Whatever, all I heard were celebratory cash registers ringing in the era of eating bon bons and watching my stories on the sun porch while being fanned by palm fronds.

Whoop-dee-doop-dee-deedly-doo!















Newly Employed Sweety, Jennifer K.D. Hughes!


And who do I have to thank for my rekindled dedication to sloth? Satan. Beelzebub. The Dark Lord. No, not Jay Leno. I mean the ACTUAL devil. (Although I think those two are somehow in league with one another. I mean, how else could a man with no discernible talent, humor or charisma hold on to a talk show for so long?) We got word of Jen's new job on June 6, 2006. Or, in layman's terms: 6/6/06. Or,put even more simply, 666 the mark of the beast. The beast being Satan of course...not Leno!

Now, having seen the DaVinci Code movie, I know a thing or two about numerology. (The DaVinci Code movie also taught me that acting is completely unnecessary as long as you have an ass-load of backstory. But that's another blog entirely.) You can connect any three events if you have some half-baked numeric link. First is the date: 666. Secondly, Northwestern Cardiac Floor has 18 letters in it. Eighteen is 6 + 6 + 6. 666. Thirdly, I am writing about this in my blog, which is short for online weblog. And whose online weblog is it? Mine. Chris's Online Weblog. Eighteen letters. 6+6+6. 666.

There you go! Three 666s?! How can you argue with that? It's irrefutable evidence, like the alien autopsy or the blurry photos of Big Foot or 9/11 Commission Report.

So thank you Satan, for the vote of confidence in my wife. And for making her so damned smart, and buying her that interview suit and sending her to a Jesuit College which she used God's name to damn quite a number of times. (See, Satan has a sense of humor too! Maybe he could take over The Tonight Show while we're all waiting for Conan to step in.)

Congratulations Jen!

I biked back from work today, an accomplishment I WAS very proud of up until a few minutes ago. That was after I finished my celebratory donuts and Gatorade I "earned" from the bike ride and decided to crunch the numbers on the actual calories burned.

According to Mapquest I biked 5.54 miles.
According to the Calories Burned Estimator I burned 554 calories during my trip.
According to the Dunkin Donuts website all the donuts I consumed added up to 720 calories.
According to the nutritional information on the side of the bottles of Gatorade I consumed 260 calories.

980 calories taken in, 554 calories burned, for a net gain of 426 calories.

I always knew math would be my downfall.

Lesson learned: can't win, don't try!

Look out bumper stickers, now there's something stupider!




















If I never see words on a tee-shirt again it will be too soon.

I saw a girl the other day (a girl who was barely 13 mind you) that had the words "These Are My All Access Pass" emblazoned across her "chest." I gotta assume that the girl has pretty much given up on any kind of education at that point. No use for geography when whoring is what's gonna put food on the table. Girl got to get PAID! She got bills, yo. Those ointments ain't gonna pay for themselves.

Ahhhhhh... ironic tee-shirts! They're all so damned witty. Beauties such as "OB/GYN Kenobi" (Welcome to 1977, will you be staying long?) and "This Shirt Deliberately Left Blank" (I get it, it's funny cuz it's NOT blank! Irony's a tricky bastard!) and "I'm Hungry For Turkey" with a map of the country of Turkey. (See Skankorella? That's where your geography comes in!)

It's like there is a frat party going on at Hanes or something. Enough already. Have some coffee! Sober up and get those 6 year old Indonesian girls back to making nice button down Oxfords like they used to do when they were young! What do we pay you four cents a week for?!

I got my hair cut yesterday at a little place about two blocks from our apartment. I've gone there before, but I've never been happy with the results. I don't know why I keep going back. Apparently I forget how horrible they are between visits. Maybe that's a survival instinct, because if I held on to that anger for the entire 5 weeks between haircuts the result would definitely be bodily harm if not arson.

The only selling point of this place is location. They never listen to what I want. No matter what haircut I ask for...




















...this is what I get.




















That's the only haircut they have apparently. The Chemotherapy special.

Now, you can't really tell it from this picture, but after the massacre was complete the "stylist" went back with the clippers and took a few random stabs at my hairline around the widows peak and the little patch between the peaks. I have yet to understand why anyone would want that. She's basically saying "You're not going bald fast enough, I can help."

The funny part is that the haircut in the first picture was from a lady at a different salon who frightened me much more than the stylist responsible for the travesty in the second. Stylist number one was an obese lady that only used one hand the entire time. This was especially alarming when she was doing flybys with the clippers. As she was vigorously shampooing my head (read: drowning me) I hoped that I would make it out alive. But it turned out to be one of the best cuts I've gotten in a long time. However the stylist responsible for the G.I Joke in the second photo was sweet as can be. That's how they get you. Don't be lured into candy houses for sugary sweet haircuts by kindly old ladies. They really wanna make a pie out of you.

A guy at work accidentally sliced open his hand (are there are some people who do that on purpose?) the other day and had to go to the emergency room. He's fine. He got some stitches, a splint and some great drugs. The problem is that the splint and stitches are on his dominant hand and he can't get his pill bottles open.