beautiful, funny, sad & true

This morning, I had a very strange and funny dream.

* * * * *

I leave my apartment and as soon as I walk outside my door, I see that my neighbors are all having a collective yard sale.  Other people in the neighborhood are contributing to this sale as well, so it’s really a huge collection of things.  I see two accordions, one on the ground and one on top of a display shelf, so I grab the one off the shelf and put it on.  I see the price tag and notice that it says ‘$1,000.00’ on it.  The accordion itself is made of cloth, and is covered with jewels.  I’ve never seen one like it before, so I try to play it, but it’s extremely difficult and, I decide, not worth the extravagant price.  I take it off and continue to walk through the sale.

As I do, I find that the sale is taking place inside a large, open room that is connected to a bookstore.  There is a coffee shop in one side, and people are sittting at little tables, reading newspapers and watching the plasma-screen television that’s on the wall.  My childhood friend Jason is there, and he tells me to “Look at this!”, and shoves a newspaper in my face.  There’s a story about global warming, and a new phenomenon called flaming glaciers down in Antarctica.  There’s a chart that reads:

GLACIERS:                                                        PERCENT:

• affected by global warming:                                 33
• mildly affected:                                                   22
• completely unaffected:                                        44
• other (flaming, etc.):                                           ??

I don’t know what to make of this ridiculous chart, so I hand the paper back to Jason, who points to the TV, where they’re showing footage of a glacier, belching smoke and steam into the air like a volcano.  I walk away and decide to go home.

[At this point in the dream, there is another scene which I can’t remember well enough to recount, in which I’m sitting on a gigantic green sofa in my living room.  A young woman walks up behind the sofa and says to me, “You know James?” She has an accent, possibly Russian or eastern European.

“From work, you mean?  Yes.”

She starts to cry.  “He said that you’re one of his great friends, and that you should call him right away.”  She walks away, sobbing.  I turn back around to where my housemate in the next room.  He looks over at me and I give him an I-don’t-know-what-the-heck-that-was-about-either kind of shrug. ]

I turn on the TV to watch a movie with my friend StudioJim, who is sitting on the other end of the sofa.  I’m on the left end and he’s on the right.  The movie starts.  “Man, it’s really cold in here,” he says.

“It’s fine on this end.  We should totally switch.”  We don’t move, but continue to stare at the screen.  I start to nod off.

“Hey,” he says again.  “You really want to switch ends?”

“Oh. . .yeah. . .sorry, must’ve dozed off a little.  Yeah, let’s switch.”  We still don’t move.

Finally I get up and go to my room.  I go to bed, and just as I’m about to turn off the light, Housemate does something that my brother used to do when we were little (and which I’d completely forgotten about).  He walks right next to the bed and falls over sideways onto me.  Full weight.  Suddenly I see a huge transparent moth flying around the light in the kitchen, so I point at it and say to Housemate, “Uhh. . .sir. . .there’s a huge moth over there.”

He immediately jumps up, runs into the kitchen, grabs the moth, brings it back into my room and stuffs it under the covers, laughing.  I sit up and freak out, yelling, “Gah. . .what’d you do that for, you penis hole?!”

* * * * *
‘Penis hole’.  Where in the world did THAT come from?  I woke myself up laughing.

In real life, those are words that I don’t think I’ve ever heard in conjunction before, and it would have never occurred to me to put them together, but it totally makes sense somehow, and you’d better believe that I’m going to find opportunities to use that description every chance I get.  Feel free to use it too, but if you do, all I ask is that you give credit where credit is due.

Thanks.

Naturally, all of this Mac nostalgia made me think of the comic strip Bloom County, in which the character Oliver Wendell Jones got a computer for Christmas which had a hilarious mind of its own, and which was obviously inspired by the first Macintosh.  It was called the Banana Junior 6000.

You can click on all of these to make them large and legible, by the way.  Here are two strips, from when Oliver first got the computer. . .

. . .and here are two from some time later, when Oliver and the Banana started to feel the effects of Moore’s Law:

This was the 1980’s, after all, so there was plenty of heavy metal music in the culture at large.  Some people listened to it, some people ridiculed it, some of us even got guitars and learned how to play it.  I told you that story so I could tell you that Kiss was one of the biggest bands in the world back then (you could argue that they still are), and one of their claims to fame was definitely Gene Simmons’s tongue.  The creator of Bloom County designed a hilarious mock-advertisement for the Banana, using Gene as the negative model for what will become of your child if he or she doesn’t grow up with the necessary skills and tools to survive in this cruel and unforgiving world.  Like any good, intrepid Kiss fan, I instantly recognized it as a classic, cut it out of the newspaper, and tacked it to the wall in my bedroom.

Still rings true today, eh?

I love the name of the program ‘Bananamanager.’  That’s just pure genius.  Somehow, I suspect that’s where he got the idea for the whole Banana thing in the first place.

Incidentally, I need to give special thanks to this blog and this blog, from which I scrounged up these strips.  Without them, I would have been trying to take pictures of my old Bloom County books, which would have been a huge pain, and wouldn’t have looked nearly as good either.  My hat’s definitely off to both of them.

Star Wars geek-out beginniiiiiiiiing. . . . . . . . . . . now.

Ackbar! The Star Wars Talk Show

Today I nonchalantly sent what may have been the best text message ever.

“What do you mean?  I mean, I KNOW what you mean, but what do you MEAN?”

I was tempted to explain the context, and the conversation we were having, but I actually think it’s much more effective if I just leave it hanging there, undefined, on its own merit.

That might be the weirdest title I’ve ever written for a blog entry, but all I ask is that you bear with me on this one.

I got a text message from a friend yesterday that said, “Turn on NPR right now.”  I did, and heard a story about a bunch of bizarre medical conditions that afflict musicians, like that badge-of-honor rash that violinists get on the left side of their necks from rubbing a violin across it for years or decades.

I didn’t hear anything that would have caused my friend to write with such urgency, though, so after the story was over, I wrote back and said, “Caught a bit of it. . .musicians’ ailments.  What’d I miss?”

“Cello scrotum.  You need to hear the whole story.”

“Holy crap!”  I had to find out more.

As it turns out,  an English medical journal back in the 1970’s reported about a condition called ‘guitarist’s nipple’ that is (supposedly) an irritation caused by a guitar rubbing across your chest.  I suppose that’s assuming that you’re not wearing a shirt.  I’ve played guitar for many years, and my nipples are fine and dandy, thank you very much.  (TMI?  NEI?)  My ribs do go in a little bit on one side, where the top of the body of the guitar rests against your chest while you’re sitting down with it.  Oh yeah, and the calluses on my fingers are thick enough that I can touch a hot pan or something for a while and not feel it.  (“Mmmm, what’s that smell?  Smells like bacon.  Oh. . .it’s my finger.”)

So.  Anyway.

Around the time of said nipple affliction, this English doctor and her husband thought it would be funny if they one-upped that condition, so they dreamed up ‘cello scrotum’, which they said was chafing in the scrotal area.  This is, of course, impossible, because when you play the cello, you hold the instrument between your knees, which are spread far apart, which also means that your nether region is getting plenty of air, so there’s no opportunity for chafing.  Not to belabor the point, but. . .

. . .there, you see?  No chafing.  You DO get sore sometimes from sitting on the edge of a chair all the time, but that’s about it.  The cello is one of the most ergonomic instruments out there.

Apparently, though, the myth of scrotal chafing persisted for decades, until another journal mentioned the condition last December, which prompted the doctor to write to the journal and put the matter to rest once and for all.

The money quote of the article was this:   “Perhaps after 34 years, it’s time for us to confess that we invented cello scrotum.”

Here’s a link to the story.

I had a ball writing this entry, by the way, but ultimately I find this subject to be completely nuts.