Pathetic? Perhaps
OddComment #2 is done and uploaded and set to go. I think.
Patrick Labyorteaux, Stuart Fratkin and I sat and watched the flick (for the first time in a lonnnnng time) and reminisced about the actual good old days of going to Canada with sort of a script.
http://www.oddcomment.com/2008/07/05/ski-school/ should be working and available for your downloading enjoyment.
It is hot off the audio presses here at the OddComment command center. If you enjoyed Ski Stool, you’ll enjoy this.
A friend of mine, David Lawrence, suggested that I offer to create outgoing messages for veritable strangers who might be unable to leave their own or want the voice of the guy from that movie on their voice mail.
Check the OGM link. I made it fairly price prohibitive, so one really must want one.
I’m a great salesman. Gee.
Hello Dere!
Marty Allen y Betty Ford Center out of their minds on blow. I think that’s Harvey Korman over Marty Allen’s shoulder. It’s as if Korman is saying “hello dere”.
I was having dinner by myself at the Old World restaurant in Beverly Hills back before you were born and Marty Allen was at the table next to me.
The bride and I saw him perform with his new wife doing all of the Rossi bits 7 or 8 years ago. It was truly awesome and I don’t mean that in the ironic sense. He was funny and cool and knew what was up. Really cool.
I think I might be the next Marty Allen. That bums me out, but I think that’s my slot.
Hello dere!
Mrs. Postman
Holy crap. Wow.
I have a p.o. box because of two extremely scary incidents back when I was in a position to have scary incidents. I’ve relaxed a lot about that stuff, but it’s still there in the back of my mind. I rarely get mail delivered to my home and when I do, I use my initials.
I compulsively bought a pen/spycam for $25 on some gadget site and decided to have it delivered to the house as it fits in with my approaching winter massive depression plan of never leaving the house ever again. I used DC as the name on the order.
There was a slip in the mailbox explaining that I had to go to the laurel canyon post office to pick up the package.
But first, let’s travel back in time a few years.
We’re at the post office near the burbank airport on Lankershim Blvd. I went to mail a bunch of postcards for spamscam and there was a very horrific lady behind the counter who literally yelled at me because the metered postage was for the previous day. “YOU BUY NEW POSTAGE NOW OR I THROW AWAY!!! YOU BUY NOW!!!! I THROW AWAY!!!!” She was trying to grab the cards out of my hand. I escaped with my life and the cards. (one simply needs to re-stamp with the meter set at $0.
Because I’m becoming that kind of guy, I wrote a snail mail letter to the postmaster and lo and behold, a week later, the postmaster CALLED ME ON THE PHONE and APOLOGIZED. He was telling me that woman was nothing but trouble and he wanted to fire her but couldn’t because it was the post office and it’s really difficult to fire people. It was so cool.
Back to the matter at hand…
I walk in to the post office and I hand the slip to the woman who akses’ss’s to see my ID. The slip says “DC” on it and my license has my full name Dean Cameron Eikleberry. There’s a bit of a back and forth about the initials. I have a credit card with Dean Cameron on it. She starts giving me a hard time. I try to ‘splain (as ricky ricardo would say) how I use my initials for home deliveries. She grabs my drivers license and heads back to the bowels of the post office. I gently call after her “If it’s a problem, give me license back and I’ll leave. it’s not a big deal.” To which she replies “You gonna cry ’bout it?” After a pause I reply “No, are you?”
Then she disappears. When I say five minutes, I mean five minutes. I hear her talking to someone in the back. The tone doesn’t sound like “where is this package” but “how was lunch… where are you going for vacation…”.
She returns with the package and stands behind a half-door about 10 feet behind the main counter area where there is some sort of machinery used for processing packages, etc. Another employee shows up and they start talking about how a window is being replaced. I think. Something like that.
Another customer shows up with a slip and stands behind me. I give him a look implying that he is in for it. He holds up the same sort of slip I had. We have a bit of an exchange concluding that he should have brought a comfy chair. He says he’s been through this before. Hmm..
The woman says “You come here!” At this point I realize that this is the same woman from the Lankershim office who I complained about.
“You sign.”
I head back to her. She gestures to the little machine and holds out the package which has my drivers license on top. I begin signing the machine and grab the package, she pulls it back from me. “YOU SIGN FIRST!!!” Because, you know, she has to see my signature to verify it’s me or something before she releases control of the package. She’s concerned about security. We actually struggle for control of the package. I consider elbowing her in the throat and running but figure that I lose that way. She then pushes the package at me.
She’s really insanely pissed now (so am I, obviously) and says “PRINT! PRINT NAME! YOU PRINT NAME!!!” She bangs on the face of the machine “THERE. PRINT NAME! THERE!” I print my name and hit enter, which bugs her because she wasn’t able to tell me to hit enter. I know this because she says “ENTER! PRESS ENTER!!”
Then.
“NOW I KNOW YOU. I KNOW ADDRESS NOW. I WATCH OUT FOR YOU! I KNOW WHO YOU ARE NOW!”
I wonder to myself if it’s possible to actually kick someone in the ovaries. Instead, I say.
“I remember you. You used to work at Lankershim, didn’t you?”
You know in cartoons how cats look when they’re electrocuted? They go stiff and airborne and there’s that squiggly line around them? That’s how she looked.
“THAT NOT ME! THAT SOMEONE ELSE!”
I get wayyy calm and turn and leave.
“Oh yeah, I totally remember you. I complained about you. It is you.”
“THAT IS NOT ME!!! THAT IS NOT ME!!!”
She slams the little half door behind me and I leave the other customer there. Poor fella.
I wonder what she’s going to do to our mail now.
Intelligent Design?
This occurred to me this morning. This may have been pointed out before, but I’m slow like that…
Hey, Intelligent Designers… Let me get this straight. You have a difficult time believing something that has been documented over and over and over and over and over, examined with the scientific method over and over and over and over, studied worldwide by literally millions of people, modified, debated and peer reviewed. At least one of these has occurred every day by someone somewhere for almost 100 years. You have a hard time believing that…
But…
You have no problem believing a nearly 2000 year old book filled with conflicting accounts written in obscure languages by different people and then translated by others over a few hundred years that has stories about magic; some of them almost exactly like OTHER really, really old magic story books written by lots of people in obscure languages.
Okay. Okay… Just wanted to make sure I had it right.
Thanks, Occam.
Cancer is more organic than a banana
I miss regular religion.
It was so simple then. There is a magical, all knowing entity with a magical offspring who does magical things and if you believe the story to be real (wink, wink) there is no doubt what happens to you when you die.
If someone was religious, you automatically knew quite a bit about them. You knew that, if you only used it a couple of hours, you could “borrow” their car Sunday mornings.
The good part of people figuring out that belief in a fairy tale is silly is, well, fewer people living as if a fairy tale is real.
The bad part is that there is stuff taking its place that is more difficult to define as religion.
I give you: political extremism, homeopathy, acupuncture, environmentalism, vegetarianism, veganism, animal rights and…
With fatherhood looming (no, but we’re trying), knowing other people with kids, being a part of the “skeptic movement” and being a fan of the Skeptics Guide To The Universe podcast, I’ve become all too aware of the new anti-vaccination religion.
As Michael Goudeau says, “Everybody gots their gris-gris”, and I certainly have my share of it (hi, global warming climate change doubts!) but the anti-vaccine position is one of those complete and utterly ignorant positions that is embraced by people who think they are being smart.
Last night the bride and I were talking about the possible psychology of what may drive the show-biz anti-vaccine movement and this is what we came up with. It is very broad stroke generalization (hey, that’s redundant redundancy!) but maybe it will make sense.
We’re all guilty of wanting to be special. I don’t know that guilty is a pejorative… wanting to be special is good. Special people do special things that sometimes help other people. (Special people even have their own olympics!) But, because of the desire to be special, we are susceptible to one of the ways people sell stuff: flattery… appeal to the ego. “Oh, you’re much too discerning for a regular t.v., you need this special Gizmotron 9000!”
I give you the following monologue:
“We have beaten the odds: It is impossible to succeed in showbiz and yet, here we are… we are special. We are different. Because of this, we have access to special, inside information. We have a very exclusive doctor. He costs more. It’s difficult to get in and see him. Other doctors hate him. People told us that we were crazy to try to be in movies and t.v. But who’s crazy now? We have special diets. We know that our organic, natural, gluten-free, prius driving lifestyle makes us better. We buy only “organic” foods. Only the best for us. We are different from everyone else.
Since we have all of this exclusivity, pure food and information, it follows that our child must be exclusive and special as well. There is no way that something that comes from our special purity could manifest disease naturally. On the contrary, if we do the things that everyone else does; if we use the things that everyone else uses, it will actually contaminate our child. Doesn’t it make sense that if we only have pure things that the thing we make will be pure?”
The answer to the final straw man question is, obviously, no. Nature wants us dead. I don’t mean “wants” as if there is a design or nature has a soul. Death and disease are nature. Cancer is more organic than a banana from the health food store. Even the special health food stores no one knows about. Disease, tumors, predators, violence… Never get out of the boat. If you or someone you know has ever been to the hospital, it’s quite probable that 100 years ago, they would be dead.
The ironic thing about the anti-vaccine people being “rebels” is the same thing I find funny about rebellious teenagers (I used to be one, so I know)… they’re all listening to the same music, wearing the same clothes and reading the same stuff. There was a review of a Rage Against The Machine concert where the critic mentioned how the entire crowd at the Forum was being led by the singer to chant “FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TOLD ME!!!”
There’s a similarity with the Creationists. They both throw science out with the bathwater. There’s one thing that doesn’t add up, so it all must be false. And yet, I find the pseudo-science crowd to be more dangerous than creationists. Pseudo-science cuts across party and economic lines more easily and faster than creationism. Generally, there must be some other specific stuff prior to embracing creationism like christianity. Creationists are following a small group of people who are getting rich off of them. But, celebrities and sports heroes go to chiropractors and acupuncturists. They talk about homeopathy on talk shows. Jim Carrey and Milfy McCarthy aren’t speaking at creationist rallies, y’know? Mainly, Big Pharma is a much sexier villian than Big Science.
And yeah, since I’m a SAG member and don’t know science so much, my only real ability is to question the thought process and motivation.
What I do know is this: Measles rates have gone up. It correlates with fewer measles vaccinations. It seems like a very solid correlation.
We hope to have a little munchkin next year (I want to name it “Tourette”.) We’ll vaccinate. I don’t like being part of the crowd, though. I’d rather know some special thing that makes little Tourette stand out (besides the screaming obscenities, of course).
Yes, I understand that the skeptics can be thought of as a religion (man, that’s funny) except…
Religion doesn’t change with new information. Science does. I’m happy to change my mind when presented with new and better information. It’s fun but annoying. It means I was wrong… which I hate because I’m perfect. But yeah, it’s fun.
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