floorpie

The thing about places oter than California, you see, is that places other than California are cold this time of year. Granted, there are parts of California that get a little chilly, Mammoth for example; but that was by design. Ancient Californians piled the earth in great mounds with the thought that modern man would one day want to ski down it.

Same with the whole beach scene, incidentally. The Old Ones, when sad, would sprint to their created coast, so that there salted tears may fall into the sea, unwasted on dry land. And now I surf there, which is pretty cool.

But I digress. Virginia is cold, and it’s a weird thing. I didn’t have a white Christmas, but almost might as well have been.

I would, if possible, give my cab driver from this morning a permanent high-paying position as my personal drvier. It’s the day before Christmas, and LAX is completely snarled, the line of cars extending far oout into civilian space, like I’ve never seen. People are getting anxious, people are getting mad, people are gettng out and walking. Glancing over his shoulder the cabbie says in accented English, “Mind if I try something?” “Go for it,” I reply.

In a few quick maneuvers, we’ve somehow squeezed teh yellow cab through a dozen of the ubiquitous SUV’s and are in clear road again. The car heads down a side street that appears to go to the airport mechanics’s parking lot, but instead ends up right in front of the checkpoint in under 5 turns. “Nice!” I exclaim. “Much faster, yes?” is his answer.

Excited now, conspiratory, brotherly, he suggests taking me down to Arrivals instead. Glancing at the endless sea of brake lights snaking into Arrivals, I quickly agree. There are red curves everywhere in Arrivals, and security guards waving all cars off of the inner curbs. The driver looks at me in the rearview mirror and bites his lip in a concerned expression. “Go for it,” I say to his look, and he quickly stops the car and pops the trunk from the inside. Throwing him the fare and a huge tip, I’m thinking, “Merry Christmas, brother, friend, saviour, compatriot”

And that’s the story of getting to the airport in 15 minutes instead of 60.

When’s the last time you went ice-skating? Really? Because I went yesterday, and there is something I learned about myself: I am not a good ice-skater. I had fun, a lot of fun, actually. Winter-wonderland type fun with ADG. Neither one of us fell, either, and we made it around the rink passingly-well; but I’m… I’m just not greaceful on ice-skates.

This is one of those things that bothers me to no end, but no one else cares about or notices.

ADG, by the way, looks great on skates. You can take that any way you want, they’re all true.

To continue, I am not graceful on ice-skates. I’m clearly on that trying-to-look-confident-while-falling-continuously plane, and this bothers me completely as I like to think of myself as being able to project a little grace into everything I do (read that carefully, “I like to think of myself as…”. Whether I actually am that way is a whole other story). There is no fancy foot-work, no flourish, no thrilling hockey-stop complete with shaved ice, no quiet grace as a lazily turn around and skate backwards as if this was the way I was born to do it. No, instead there is very deliberate left-righting as if I’m counting as I go. “Left turn coming, two, three, four, and straight, straight, straight. Dodge the 4 year-old crying with her hat on her foot with a left and right and left…” It’s completely ridiculous.

You know what else is ridiculous? This:

Being a secret agent, you run into the strangest people. Yesterday I happened upon Saddam in an Undisclosed Location. He was in leg-irons with a Special Forces jamming an M-16 into the back of his head. No particular reason for it, just wanted to make him sweat, he said. They’d taken Saddam to a local McDonald’s and were force-feeding him good ol’ fashioned American capitalism. He looked like he was about to cry.

That, and all the local kids were shoving still-crisping french fries into his forehead like they were putting out cigarettes. Saddy’s always good for a laugh:

So they caught you like a rat, huh?

COBRA!

What?

COBRA!

Ah yes, YO JOE!

Can you believe American pig-dogs are making action figures of Saddam? I twice as muscular as capitalist swine show me.

Can you believe you were hiding in a hole like a little bitch? And seriously, why they hell weren’t you in Aruba by now? What did you think was going to happen?

You are capitalist dog, but you speak the truth. Aruba was totally booked, and I wasn’t doing Jamaica again. Too hectic.

I hear you. So you know you’re going to die, right? Most likely fairly slowly.

Yeah, that totally sucks. I never even got to see the last Matrix.

The butler did it. Any comment about the whole killing thousands of your own people thing?

Eh, what can I say? That Conan O’Brien thing where he puts me on a TV screen with someone else making me talk pissed me off. What else could I have done?

Invested in a punching bag?

… shit.

See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya…

I created my 1,341,456th internet password today. This time it was for a frequent flyer program. Luckily though, it asked me to think of a password question, that’s easy to remember, only I would know, and is unlikely to change over time. As an example, they provided “What’s my favorite movie?”

They’re right, that’s not likley to change every movie season or anything. My favorite movie is, and always will be, The Neverending Story. When that freaky dog-dragon starts flying around, I just… just… *sniff*

Action Items From Most Recent All-Hands Meeting, A Summary:

.: Proactively leverage synergies
.: Address geographical distribution factor
.: Be well-matrixed

Also, from the VP of Engineering

I’m responsible for everyone’s execution in this room.

Ah, corporate goodness.

Ariel has some very convoluted vacation plans coming up, which I can’t rival in complexity… but possibly can in pain-in-the-assedness.

.: flying to Washington D.C. to visit with the parents for a week over Christmas.
.: upon return, driving up to Tahoe the same day for skiing over New Years
.: upon returning, flight out to Taiwan for an indeterminate time, somewhere between 1-2 weeks

It doesn’t sound like much to see it written, but it represents an uninterrupted stream of basically a month in which I won’t have slept in my own bed, with my own girlfriend, which is a bit depressing. I will, however, be racking up the flight miles. Tahiti for free, here I come…

There’s a McDonald’s radio commercial that I’ve been hearing lately that, more or less, says something along the lines of:

Now McDonald’s McNuggets are even better with even more white meat!

Obviously, just another attempt by The Man to keep a brotha’ down; but, besides that: more white meat than what? More white meat, say, than a large canned ham? More white meat than a non-white meat making machine’s non-white meat meat? More white meat than fractions? Inquiring minds want to know.

Also, who thought Chicken McNuggets were made from actual meat in the first place? I’d pretty much reconciled myself to the fact that those babies were made from recycled Third World phonebooks.

Unless, of course, someone can show me what part of the chicken the “nuggets” come from.

Of Engrish

We make about 300 different kinds of probes for customers. No matter probes of U.S. standard , JIS standard , or European standard , all can be easily offered by us. Therefore if you need any kind of probes ,please contact us without hesitate. Best quality , reasonable prices , superior service and quicker punctual delivery will be guaranteed.

Am I a bad person for finding that funny? I could really rake in the dough by simply correcting the English on some of the Asian vendors’ websites I come across in my work.

Of course, my Chinese is nothing to be proud of, either.

My hits have been steadily dropping, lately; most likely due to my steadily decreasing frequency of posting and always lackluster content.

And so it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut did this thing in one of his books. Most likely it’s one of the ones with Kilgore Trout in it, as there are a few. Incidentally, Kurt Vonnegut would have never put together a sentence with “one of the ones” in it. Which is why he is famous author, and I am but an infamous… product designer. And so it goes.

“And so it goes” being the thing he did in his book.

It was another beautiful day here in Southern California, which is not unlike saying that my heart beat, pretty consistently, from the moment I woke up until this exact moment. And this one. And this one. And this one. That is to say, until someone tells me otherwise, my heart will always beat, and it will always be beautiful in the storied land of SoCal.

Unfortunately, this kind of consistency lends to taking advantage of your good fortune (whereby “taking advantage” I mean “forgetting about it completely, assuming it will always be there, and generally ignoring it”). Which is why I spent more time inside today than I really should have, considering the vagaries of Nature. And so it goes.

All things considered, though, I’m glad I’m not in Boston.