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11/26/05: The Week in Reverse

You don't have to tell me -- I know the e-logging's been lighter than Jm J. Bullock's Ballys lately. A lot of days, no posts. There have been ample chances to type up some bullshit and publish it, but here at verbungle.com we feel the same way about our content as Orson Welles feels about Paul Masson wine.

But now it feels right, so let's go. We will give you a brief recap of the last four days, in reverse order. It'll be just as if we shared these days together!

Friday:

The day after Thanksgiving may be the most underrated day of the year. In fact, I am going to go ahead and call it my favorite holiday. It doesn't get nearly the respect it deserves, maybe because it doesn't have a cool name. Forget "Black Friday" and any other consumerism-based nicknames. That's not what this day is really about. The Friday after Thanksgiving is one of the only truly free days of the year. There's no pressure to hang with relatives. There's no driving through ice storms or spending all day in the kitchen. No obligation to buy anyone a gift. There's no work the day before, and there's no work for TWO DAYS afterward. It's a rare chance to spend a day completely lost in yourself, doing whatever the hell you want without a thought or care for anything or anyone else. Me Day. That's what I'm gonna call it from now on. Or maybe Free Day.

So the wife and I spent our Me Day walking around with the baby. It was nice. No anxiety whatsoever, just fun and smiles and a nice long lunch. Since we are Americans by birth, we did manage to squeeze in a little shopping.  After weeks of subtle cajoling and desperate whining, I actually got the wife to enter the Apple Store with me. It was a geek frenzy. Total chaos. I bet there were 500 people in the place.

I wanted to look at the 15" PowerBook. I thought that maybe after the wife ran her fingers across its sleek abdominal muscles, she'd fall in love with this slender thoroughbred the same way I have.  After waiting for about five minutes while douches right and left used the floor models for all sorts of annoying personal business -- booking trips, checking sports scores, emailing old friends -- a computer opened up and I dragged the wife over as quickly as we could get there. She looked at it for a couple of minutes and didn't really seem to form an opinion one way or the other. I had a few questions, so I hauled over the first available Genius I could find.

Unfortunately, this Genius had even less knowledge than I did, pretty much across the board. Software? I knew more. Deals and discounts? I knew more. Compatibility? Maybe he knew more, but he answered my questions with such profound uncertainty that I mentally dismissed everything he said. The one question he did answer was:

If I want to upgrade from the 80GB, 5400 rpm factory standard hard drive to the 100 GB, 7200 rpm dealie, can you do that here in the store? The answer was no. For that you had to buy online. In the store, they could install extra memory, but even that would take a couple of hours, and on a day as busy as today I took that to mean three weeks. He suggested that instead we could buy it online, right then and there on their internet connection. It seemed like a lame idea, but the wife was so dizzy from the masses of bodies banging into one another that she almost agreed. In the end, we decided to think about it, and if we wanted to we could order it online at home.

When we thought about it, however, we came to realize that we are in no position to be dropping $3000 -- and that's how much it would cost after all was said and done, $3000! -- on a toy. So I quickly shifted my sights to the 14" iBook, which was marked down $100 today, but even with the discount it'll run a couple of grand after a few simple upgrades. Still way too much for us to be spending right now. We got a mouth to feed.

So no computer for me. We will continue to share this one. Married readers out there, how many of you share a computer with your wife or husband?

I should have listened to BJL and bought the HP Laptop that Walmart was offering for $398. Whatever.

It was also a day of sightings:

PBdotC, either I saw you Friday around 4pm on Houston and Broadway or you have a NYC twin. I hollered out to you like three times but I didn't really scream as loud as I could because I wasn't sure it was you. Do you have New Balance sneakers with some maroon on 'em? And do you have a soul patch?!?! If so, I saw your ass, baby. Happy Me Day.

I also stopped at Lombardi's for a disappointing pizza pie. They didn't give it their usual love and care. The place was mobbed, and on the way in I could have sworn I saw Hardy Fischer, a high school classmate and a true original. Here's a verbungle.com flashback to refresh your memory on Hardy:

If you were a kid who cut class all the time, you managed to locate other kids who did the same thing. If you were cool, you went to the park and smoked pot. If you were me, you either a) went into Stuytown to play basketball with the 35 year-old still-live-at-home dudes, or b) decided for some reason to hang out in the school library. They had some magazines in there -- I remember reading the Ebony magazine where they went to Magic Johnson's house and he had an "Isiah Room." Lord knows they probably had some fun in that room. There were also a lot of responsible kids who would go to the library to study for exams and work on papers and stuff during a free period, kids who had plans for productive lives. I remember sitting in there with another screw-up, a towering delinquent named Hardy Fischer, and we'd play a game which consisted of whispering a chosen word back and forth across the table at increasing levels of volume until we were shushed by the librarian. The two words I distinctly remember using were "zany" and "smegma" (this was when the term "smegma" was brand-new to us). Once we were reprimanded, we would return to our Sports Illustrated or Ebony and give the librarian a gesture of contrition, like "Pardon us, what were we thinking?" Within a minute, we were at it again. And it got pretty damn loud. Inevitably, the game would end with me shouting the word "zany" or whatever the specified word was, and the librarian kicking us the hell out. I think Hardy always respected me for really committing to the game. When we received the boot, we never argued at all, just packed up our things and shook our heads as we walked out amidst the stares. Two men ahead of their time.

Incidentally, Hardy was also the master of returning to a class he had not attended in weeks, bearing only a self-penned, Juan Epstein-style note from his "parents" explaining his absence. My two favorites:

"Please excuse my son Hardy Fischer for the dates February 13th through April 9th. He has been undergoing intensive psychotherapy.
P.S. Please do not question him about this, as he is very sensitive."

and

"Please excuse my son Hardy Fischer from class from October 12th through December 18th. He has been battling stomach cancer."

I wonder what ol' Hardy is up to now. I hope he's screaming in somebody's library.

Or eating delicious pizza.

Thursday:

Had a great Thanksgiving, hope you did too. Got to see my mom, pop, sis and bro-in-law, along with the bro-in-law's family and their kids. Lots of kids, running around and screaming. Ate good food. Mashed potatoes, yams with marshmallows, creamed onions, collard greens, pumpkin pie, etc. Good stuff. No turkey, though. Too many turkeys have to die each year. I won't be a part of it anymore.

Didn't spend enough time thinking of things to be thankful for. I guess I will just have to reiterate my thankses from the last two years, and add one major thank for the arrival, good health, and easygoing demeanor of our beautiful baby Bungle. She's been an absolute treat and I can't get enough of her.  She's even better than that 15" PowerBook. The one I won't get tomorrow.

Wednesday:

Wednesday started off with a painful root canal (or, actually, the first half of one, more to come) and it didn't get much better after that. Kids, take care of your teeth when you're young or you'll end up a crusty old yuckmouth like me.

As shitty as Wednesday was, it was way better than...

Tuesday:

...when I made a real ass out of myself in front of the higher-ups again. It's official. I need to keep my mouth shut at all times. The things I say are incredibly stupid and inappropriate.  Here's an example:

On Tuesday, we went to Philly so we could do some focus group testing. The way it works is, they bring in about 60 women and they play them a tape of the show we're trying out.  We watch the women through a one way mirror, or two way mirror if you prefer, whatever the thing is where you can see them but they can't see you. The women all get little electronic dials (sort of like Atari 2600 paddles), and as they watch the tape, they turn the dial to the right when they like what they're seeing and to the left if they don't like it. In our room, we have a monitor that displays each woman's response as the show plays. After the show is over, the women fill out some questionnaires to be reviewed later. While they are filling them out, we take a few minutes to make a cursory analysis of the paddle results (Band Name!).

Simple enough. We had one group of women at 11am, and another at 1pm. After both groups were done, the computer dude graphed their results against each other. They were strikingly similar -- at the same points in the show where the first group had dialed right to indicate a favorable response, the second group had done the same thing. The same for the negative responses -- they were almost exactly in sync between the two groups. It was pretty neat, and it constituted helpful feedback. 

There was just one point in the show, like 19 minutes in, where the 11am group had a favorable response and the 1pm group had a negative response.  Here we are, in this room, me, a few co-workers, some higher-ups, and some representatives from the focus group tech crew. Everyone's trying to figure out why the 11am group liked this one part of the show and the 1pm didn't.  I started thinking perhaps it was an external factor.

"Maybe somebody in the 1pm group broke wind at the 19 minute mark," I offered. Out of the ten people in the room who heard this crack, three laughed. The higher-ups were silent. My boss glared at me in a way that indicated he'd most definitely be kicking my ass if we were alone on the street at that moment.

I wanted to kill myself.

Kids, another message from Uncle Hans: as much as you may enjoy fart jokes, you need to slowly wean yourself from them.  If you wait too long, you'll end up like me, a prisoner of your own immaturity.

Although inside I still think it's sorta funny: a bunch of Philly housewives, staring intently at the screen, all dialing left at the same moment, without even realizing what it is that's giving them a negative response.  The answer: somebody farted!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

***

Okee dokee, BC MI brilliantly answered the last Whiteydat challenge, with his answer of Rick from Illinois (#46). Ten points total at the discounted Withey Alumnus Rate.

Quick Rick Notes:

Decent guy, although he could get pretty emotional when he was drunk. Like he would all of a sudden start yelling and acting like he was the protector of all that was righteous. That got boring pretty quick.

Rick was another bodybuilder type. By not lifting weights, I was definitely in the minority in my dorm. We had some serious lumber.

I do remember that when junior year rolled around Rick arrived on campus in a fairly new 280 or 300 ZX. He thought he was the man for a few weeks there, until he fell asleep on the interstate and totaled it. He escaped unhurt.

He did a cool crazy neck vein lizard man imitation.

He was a lefty.

Enough about Rick, on to the next Whiteydat question. I was thinking maybe these challenges are lame for the folks who weren't a part of the Whiteness of Withey, but Kissel assures me they're fun for one and all. Incidentally, I am in the picture (#24) sporting a ridiculously skinny head. I wish I had that metabolism today. There is also a bust of Mr. T. in the picture, if you can tell me where it is you get 1 point (Withey alumni and Kissel not eligible). Here's today's question:

For ten points each, give me the number of the person who stole my Xavier McDaniel Spot-bilt sneakers, and the number of the person who stole my Brucecomp (TM) Bruce Springsteen compilation tape. Both items were eventually returned. One guess to a person, and onetime Withey residents may weigh in immediately on this one.