Category: Short Subjects

For years I had wanted to meet Kurt Vonnegut. Then, about 10 years ago, I saw him on some sort of show. I forget the exact nature of it. Vonnegut must have talking about **Hocus Pocus** or maybe even **Timequake**. But the point here is that he was old, an old old man.
And there he was only 74.
I’ve never really made peace with *the old man*, in any form. And to see Vonnegut as an old man really bugged me. What time does to us. It’s cruel and pointless and vicious. But that’s my hang up.
Anyway, my point is that from that time on, I figured that I would never get to meet Vonnegut. Who knew I’d have 10 years to throw away not meeting him? Still, in that time, I grew to accept that idols only exist in our perception of them. The Kurt Vonnegut that I wanted to meet was already in his books. It’s a trite philosophy, for sure, and one that allows me to rationalize my situation where I will meet *nobody* whom I idolize. But it is true. I may never be friends with someone like Vonnegut, but all my friends are partially friends with him, because of the huge influence he’s had on me.

Excerpt from **Breakfast of Champions**, 1973:
> Trout accepted the invitation after all. Two days before the Festival was to begin, he delivered Bill into the care of his landlady upstairs, and he hitchhiked to New York City—with five hundred dollars pinned to the inside of his underpants. The rest of the money he had put in a bank.
> He went to New York first—because he hoped to find some of his books in pornography stores there. He had no copies at home. He despised them, but now he wanted to read out loud from them in Midland City—as a demonstration of a tragedy which was ludicrous as well.
> He planned to tell people out there what he hoped to have in the way of a tombstone.
> This was it:
>
More excerpts and memorials:
[Jonathan Schwartz at **This Modern World**][1]
[Tom Tomorrow at **This Modern World**][2]
[Atrios at **Eschaton**][3]
[John Gruber at **Daring Fireball**][4]
[Skatje at **Lacrimae Rerum**][5]
[PZ Myers at **Pharyngula**][6]
[poputonian at **Hullaballo**][7]
[1]: http://thismodernworld.com/3673
[2]: http://thismodernworld.com/3675
[3]: http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_04_08_atrios_archive.html#117634956734591420
[4]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/april#wed-11-vonnegut
[5]: http://skatje.com/?p=295#comments
[6]: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/04/so_it_goes.php
[7]: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/good-uncle-bad-uncle-by-poputonian.html

It was long overdue. And from working in the vegetarian kitchen, where much of my day is spent standing over a huge pot of steaming onions, my hair stinks. Now that 4/5th of it is gone, I hope to have shampoo-smelling hair in a day or two.

Last night, I tried *Hershey’s* “Heath Milk Chocolate Layered Cookies.” These are square-shaped sandwich cookies, with a toffee flavored filling. And they’re not good.
The first thing that I noticed was the strong buttery scent upon opening the package. It was so strong that it reminded me of margarine, which smells like a parody of butter. But when I tasted it, the scent and flavor mingled into butter cream, super sweet butter cream.
Now, I like toffee. It’s not necessarily on my list of favorite flavors, but I do like it. When it is done right it has a butterscotch subtlety–a long, mellow flavor that lingers after it’s consumed. The cookie, on the other hand, tasted like a wedding cake dipped in granulated sugar. It was too sweet. I had just finished a *Starbucks* Mocha Frappachino, too, so my palate was already desensitized to sweetness. Nothing should be that sugary, with the exception of eating a quarter-cup of plain sugar crystals.
The filling has a crunchiness to it, which I assume is meant to imply little toffee flakes, but, instead, it just reinforces the sugariness, as if the cream is so filled with sugar, some it didn’t dissolve.
The selling point behind these cookies is that they are made with real milk chocolate; a counterpoint, one presumes, against *Nabisco* Oreos and their dark chocolate wafers, which apparently the American consumer has been loathing for over 100 years. The problem with *Hershey’s* solution, though, is that I couldn’t taste the cookie. My taste buds were burnt out from the super sweetness, so that the wafer could have tasted like dry cardboard, and I could not appreciate the fine quality of the milk chocolate that they bake into every cookie.
There were two other flavors of these cookies on the shelves. One was a vanilla cream filling, and the other was peanut butter. I doubt I will be trying either one of them.

Once, several years ago, I punched a hole in my head while working on my piece-of-crap car. I don’t remember if it was the car that leaked transmission fluid, or the one that leaked oil from the faulty head gasket, or if it was the one that needed daily transfusions of coolant. In fact, that may have been a single piece-of-crap car. Time, and a good smack to my head, have mushed many memories together.

In any case, while working on this particular car, I punched a hole into my forehead on the latch that hung down about two inches from the roof of the hood. It hurt like hell. For a second, I didn’t even realize what I did. I went to look at something in the engine block, ducking my head under the hood, thinking I had inches of clearance. I mean, I wailed my head into this thing. It dazed me.

I was out in front of my friends house, and I remember staggering in the doorway. His family was gathered around the kitchen table, and they all looked at me as I held my hand to my head and giggled weakly. I laughed as soon as I realized what I did, looking at the hook that gouged me in my car. I couldn’t believe that I hit it; I just didn’t expect there. So I was still laughing when I walked into my friends kitchen, all ashen and dizzy. The hook left a perfect tiny circle in my forehead, right below the hairline, perfectly in the center of my head. The wound lasted for days.

Good times.

I often laugh when I smack my head into something. It’s funny, after all. If someone saw me do it, hearing the clunk of my big fat head cracking into a corner or hanging lamp, he’d laugh, too. Just because I don’t get to observe it doesn’t mean it’s not funny.

A couple of weeks ago, I cracked my head into the top of a doorway, walking down a low set of stairs into somebody’s basement. Actually, I thought I had cleared that, too, but there was a staple halfway stapled into the [lintel][1]. Maybe it was sticking out about 2 millimeters. I thought I just wailed my head into the doorway and that was that, until about 15 minutes later, my friend says, “Your head is bleeding!”

I got a good chuckle out of that one, too, along with a scab that my fiancée thought was a pimple, but instead was another hole in my head.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lintel “A horizontal beam above a door that supports the wall above it. Yeah, I had to look that up, too.”

Previously, my favorite dialog box warning was a [blank box with a single button saying “OK.”][1] But then I read about an [even better one][2]:

> [Word][3] cannot edit the Unknown.

This is pure bliss for me. I’ve written it down and recite it as a mantra while I ponder the universe. Even the powerful Microsoft Word cannot edit the Unknown. Who among us can edit the Unknown? Verily, I say no mortal can. It is humbling and empowering all at once.

And just a little funny.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/2005/05/has_to_be_ok
[2]: http://www.thedragnet.org/blog/musings/theunknown.html
[3]: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=244170

I am SO much better at spelling than I used to be. When I was in high school, my spelling was atrocious. Word processing, contrary to common wisdom, actually helped my spelling, because I got tired of the spell check flagging the same words over and over again. But homonyms still get me. Especially when I’m typing quickly.
*Break* and *brake* are constant thorns in my side. I use *brake* quite a bit, because I typeset quite a few labels for automotive accessories. But almost instinctually, I’ll type the word *break*, instead. I did the opposite in a poem once, though, spelling it *braking* when I meant *breaking*. It colored the poem in an entirely different way.
I’m especially bad with *it’s* and *its* and *your* and *you’re*. Most people would assume that I default to *its* and *your*, but most people would be wrong. I like apostrophes, so I tend to always use *it’s* and *you’re* when it makes no sense at all to use the contraction. Again, it’s typing quickly that gets me. Plus, I have a sincere aversion to double-checking my writing until AFTER I publish it or send in that proof.
I’m not sure why.
But spell checkers, and also the half-assed grammar checkers, can’t beat double- and triple-checking my typing. I almost always see the mistake a day later, when I re-read it. I’ve gotten to the point where spell checkers don’t really give me any assistance. I hardly use them anymore, because the mistakes I make are beyond their programming.
However, it still pays to run a spell check once in a while. Today, I found out that I’ve been spelling *squeak* incorrectly, for years. *Squeek!* It just seems right to me with the two *E*s. Who decided that an onomatopoetic word should conform to some loose rule of English vowel coupling? I know *ea* can sound like “eeeeeeeeee!” in words like *leak* and *creak*, but *ee* works just as well in *leek* and *creek*. Damned homophones. *Squeek* apparently is very unacceptable, even though it appears in [roughly half-a-million web pages][1]. Still, Google helpfully wonders if I meant to search for *squeak*. How nice.
[1]: http://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=squeek&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

I was going to go on a tear about **International Delight** coffee creamers, because they have palm oil in them. Comparing this to **Nestlés Coffee-Mate** creamers, which have soybean and cottonseed oil, I thought it was clear which one to buy. Of course, non-dairy creamers are bad shit to begin with, but if you’re going to use them anyway, you might as well use the one that will kill you the slowest. So the one with palm oil was surely the worst of the worst.
Because I know how bad palm oil is. Doesn’t everybody?
Hmmm… let me [check up][1] on that before I post how bad it is. Huh. It’s not that bad. In fact, it’s [better][2] than [partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil][3], because all partially hydrogenated oils have [trans fats][4]. Those are the things that make butter healthier than margarine. Can you imagine that? Butter better for you than anything else?
So, palm oil, because it is so high in saturated fats (sounds bad) doesn’t need to be hydrogenated (really bad) to stay oily in food products. And palm oil, if it isn’t handled too much, may decrease cholesterol (get outta here!) and is rich in anti-oxidents. Damn.
Now, palm *kernel* oil… [that’s still bad][5].
[1]: http://www.wholefoods.com/healthinfo/palmoil.html
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_kernel_oil#Health
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottonseed_oil
[4]: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424721.900
[5]: http://www.drweil.com/u/QA/QA118473/

[Impeach the MFer, Already][1]. Sounds like a good plan to me.
[1]: http://impeachthemotherfuckeralready.com/

Verbatim:
>**Subject: Former President Bill Klinton uses Voagra!**
>
>Everybody knows the great sexual scandal known as “Klinton-Levinsky”. After the relations like this Klintons popularity raised a lot! It is a natural phenomenon, because Bill as a real man in order not to
shame himself when he was with Monica regularly used Voagra. What happened you see. His political figure became more bright and more attractive.
>It is very important for a man to be respected as a man!