Friday Fives

Friday Fives

1. What was your first Halloween costume?
I believe I was an Army guy. A soldier. Little GI joe. Either that or a hobo. I have memories of both but can’t remember which was earliest.

2. What was your best costume and why?
I went to a party a few years back dressed as Barney the Dinosaur in a violent hunting accident. I had a Barney mask and dyed a pair of long underwear purple. I sewed on a tail. Then I put a fake bloody arrow wound in my chest with the tip of the arrow hanging out. It was a big hit. I also went as a Jesus as an Elvis Impersonator. A Jesus wig and and a too tight jumpsuit and voila! The King of Kings was the King of rock and roll.

3. Did you ever play a trick on someone who didn’t give you a treat?
No. But I have gone trick or treating for drinks on Halloween. Trapsing from door to door with a cocktail glass asking for a cocktail. Quite fun and definitely not for the weak stomached or tee- totaller.

4. Do you have any Halloween traditions? (ie: Family pumpkin carving, special dinner before trick or treating, etc.)
Not really. I don’t generally go out on Halloween. It is an amateur night. I tend to not be at home either, as I hate answering the door for trick or treaters. So I guess the only real tradition is to not stay home and not go out.

5. Share your favorite scary story…real or legend!
Hmmmm. I don’t scare too easy. But I was always very frightened any time my Uncle Ray was in the room. He was a real drunk and tended be just a bit unkept and when he came in the room I trembled. Scary stuff.

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Out On The Street . . .The Early Years

I didn’t mean to ruin as many shirts and pants as I did as a youth. I generally respected my parents and the hard work they put in to dress me and pay for clothes and nice things. I appreciated the new school clothes and hot kicks for the feet that they diligently helped me purchase.
But you see, I am a pretty clumsy guy. (I think that most people except for a small minority of gifted mutants are clumsy – I am brave enough to say it out loud. That is why sports, and especially extreme sports like hockey and car driving and winter sports are so popular – they delight us clumsy folks who have no chance of tackling the boards, hitting the ice, clearing the hairpin curve at top speeds. But I digress)
I like to think that as a kid I was cool.
Devious. Living a double life between Eagle Scout/church going angel and street hoodlum. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. Well, that is not exactly true. Half of that is exactly the truth. And the other half, the street hoodlum, couldn’t be farther from the truth. But it is the life I think I wanted as a kid growing up in a small town of 7,000 people. In a town the size of Craig, Colorado in the 1970s and the 1980s, there was really no opportunity to be a street thug. If I were to roam the streets past dark, past the standard time to be home, also known as “when the street lights come on,” well, I just would have been rounded up by a friendly police patrol, or deputy sheriff and politely and in a pure neighborly fashion, dropped at home.
That didn’t stop me, however. I was born to run! I was born to rock. I was born to be out on the street. The problem, at least on the those hot summer nights of my high school years, was how to get out of the house.
And this is how I ended up ruining so many clothes.
You see, part of being cool and running the streets was to get out of the house. And I had this window in my bedroom. My bedroom was located in the back of the house, a good ways away from my parents and I thought it was the bastion of absolute secrecy. Take, for example, a hot July evening. A plan had been formulated earlier in the day and I was to join the crowd down at my friend’s parent’s laundromat. From there, we would hit the road in the Camero. Buy some beer, perhaps even some whiskey to mix in a Slurpee.
I approach the window and begin my escape.
Now let’s take a moment and look at this window. For some reason, all the windows in the house are high up off the ground, about four and half or five feet. To get to the window, a chair had to be placed. Then the screen removed. It is a narrow window and no real room to just jump out. Don’t think of this bedroom window as something that you would see in the movies, where someone like John Travolta would just slide open and enter to find a waiting Olivia Newton John.
No, this window, on the outside, is about seven or eight feet from the ground. The plunge to the ground can be quite a shock. There was an old apple tree outside the window that a particularly spry person could grab and help brace the fall, but often as not, the tree limb would get caught on a pants pocket or a shirt sleeve and rip . . . there goes the wardrobe.
One could also grab the utility conduit next to window, however there were two troubles with this plan as well: 1. Aluminum conduit can be quite bendy and may or may not be the cause of some electrical or other utility outages. (This is just a theory, I have no idea if hanging off a service conduit of a 1960s-era home can cause the sparking and the power outage – and I deny to this day any knowledge of such actions.) 2. It is also important to mention the propensity for the good old-fashioned finger squeeze that can happen if I were to shimmy up the conduit and get my hand caught between the pole and wall. That gray harmless motherfucker can really hurt and generally be counted on to rip a shoe, shirt or trouser leg.
Well, regardless. Every exit seemed to result in a bruise, a sprain or torn clothing.
But it was so important! Must I remind you that I was born to run! I was born to rock. I was born to be out on the street!
So the July months passed. Summers went by. I rocked the night streets.
Scrambling home, taking the same exit, now in reverse. Shimmying up a tree, traversing a conduit. Piling up lawn chairs and lawn ornaments to scramble upon. Kicking the walls. Bumping the window. Falling to the floor of my bedroom. I had returned and I had rocked. And no one was the wiser.

Well, no one, except my sister. In the morning after a particularly drunken teenage storming of my window and my room, my sister the next morning just smirked at me. Hung over, clutching a cup of coffee and definitely worse for the wear, she just remarked to me that instead of waking her up every night when I leave through my window that I should just go out the front door.
That is what she does.
You see, as I was trying to live this movie-inspired lifestyle and take to the night, my sister was also out all hours. However she and her friend the Reverend Ed would simply just go in and out the front door.

The shame.

And next, I suppose, I should also own up to my dad asking me if I was ever going to repair the screen in my room – his way of letting me know that he also knew of my evening conquests and nighttime debauchery and just let it go on -it entertained him and was indeed harmless in a town of 7,000 people and a town where invariably word of an real wrongdoing would be sent back to him.

I still think, however, that my way was much richer and full of a life that rocked.

The front door? The horror. The horror.

Friday Fives

Friday Fives

1. How often do you do laundry?
Usually a couple of times a week, meaning I do a load a day over the course of about two or three days. However, having said that, I am a bit behind so will be doing all the laundry this weekend. I must get cracking.

2. What’s in a typical wash load?
Well, I don’t sort the clothes. I have no elaborate system. In fact I despise laundry. So generally a load is a handful of clothes from the hampter tossed into the wash. I am a pretty cheap clothes shopper, so I have very few items that need to be treated with any kind of special care.

3. Front or top loader? Powder or liquid detergent?
Top loading washer, front loading dryer. The pair are full size stackables that you don’t see too often. I bought them from a lady who placed an add in the newspaper. I got a fairly new washer and dryer for a $100.00. And except for a few scratches and dents from some unfortunate moves, they work great, although the dryer is starting to be a bit slow.

4. Do you use fabric softener in the rinse cycle?
I use a fabric softner ball that goes in at the beginning. And then I use fabric softner sheets. I double soften. My clothes smell nice.

5. Dryer or clothesline?
Dryer. I don’t trust the clothesline – the weather in Colorado can turn in a second! And how many movies have you seen where someone like Ferris Bueller goes running through your yard and upsets your clothes. Who wants that. With a clothes dryer, it is set it, and forget it.

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It Ain’t No Monkey Bar

But this joint looks kind of fun. We really should dedicate more of our life to the double-wide lifestyle. I grew uup in a small coal mining town amid the boom and bust of Colorado’s wild oil and gas years. Craig swole and shrivelled many times in the 1970s and 1980s as the area dealt with building a coal-fired power plant and the connected deritrus of open-pit coal mines and support industries that come with such a less-then-clean industry.
As a result, the town sported some trailer parks. Mobile home villages. A few were even referred to as communities. Without a map or any resources, and removed from memory by many, many years, I can still count at least 8 trailer parks in a town of 9,000 people. That is nearly one trailer park for every thousand people. That, folks, is densely placed temporary housing. I still marvel at the entire concept. Simple, shack-like accomodations. Placed on wheels for moving from job to job, from town to town. Fake pine or cedar wall panelling. Dark carpets, usually shag. Low ceilings. And clever uses of many floor plans. Bathrooms up front, bathroom in back. Put the kitchen in the middle, put the kitchen in the front. Build a porch on the side, or a deck on the back. Or build an entire house around the trailer. I know a few folks who owned some very expensive 4X4 trucks – this before the SUV era. Their driveway would be littered with trucks, huge boats for taking to Lake Powell on trips, expensive campers and RVs – a entire fortune spent on toys and all stored “up at the house” – a $25,000 mobile home. It makes me smile.

Special bonus homage to the trailer park: The Great Trailer Parks of Mississippi.

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Who Else Sang That?

Driving down the road, you have the radio on and you hear a song, a song you have heard a thousand times before but perhaps this time it is being performed by someone else, someone you aren’t used to hearing. Or perhaps you just wonder, when you hear some Springsteen opus, if someone else has ever given the thing a try.
I had exactly these thoughts many times and a few months back, heck maybe even longer than that, I stumbled upon the The Covers Project. A music covers blog.
As a resource, this a great site. I haven’t taken the time to play the game, although Rock Guy can and probably will, as will Snowball and perhaps Beaker. The idea is to take a song and create a chain linking a song as many different ways by the bands and the folks who have covered it. Kind of a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing, or Clint Howard for the more adventurous.

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Notes On Nextel

What to say now.
New job and responsibilities.
In a familiar place surrounded by many familiar people.
It is old and new.
The first day I felt like a sophomore returning to campus after a summer off. It was as if I never left. Friends and former coworkers around every corner.
Lunch at the BBQ stand and a chat with the folks at Jabos.

With just three days on the books I am enjoying the new challenges. It is a different part of the business then I was exposed to before and that makes it interesting. And I am genuinely helping people.
One of the Buddha’s rules and all that. It makes it worthwhile.
I work in the Fraud Operations Department and I spend my days investigating claims of fraudulent cell phone account activations and then I either turn off the phones/accounts or route the issue to the correct department for handling. It sounds a bit boring but there is some small bit of joy to be had. I get to help fraud victims by protecting their credit and I get to assist Nextel in protecting about $120 million in losses. And I get to a bit rude and downright mean to fraudsters who have used someone elses credit information or social security number to establish an account.

It is perhaps sad that the world has come to this. That there is now a department in most medium to large companies solely dedicated to stopping fraud.
Groups of office-phone-talking-computer-screen-scouring worker bees analyzing and micoscopically inspecting potential customer discrepencies for flagged details. It is humbling, really.
As the country grows, as the technology that makes us free also traps us in the security of knowledge that seems to be compiled in some central repository, it appears also, that those same technologies which make us free are also technologies molding us into victims. Trapped against the desire to own the technology and the need to steal to obtain it. Trapped in the need to surround ourselves in technologies to protect and to then fight off hackers and felons trying to topple the digital walls we create. Just as days past, we fight battles to protect our villages. Months before I began this job I was talking to Renee who used to work in this office. And she said that her exposure to corporate fraud and identity theft rings has made her wary. She is now keenly aware of where and how her identifying data is used and even decided to call her insurance company to ask to have a different number used as her account number, rather than her social security number. She said she now shreds all her receipts and is vigilant about credit card receipts not being left at a restaurant or a car seat. Now if you were to know Renee, you would know she is hardly a person to be paranoid. The fact that these are the steps this mellow and calm, confident woman has taken is a telling sign. The fact that Nextel is confident it can protect itself by stopping $120 million in fraud loss and waste is shocking.

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DOJ And Greenpeace Go To Court

The Department of Justice will go to trial later this month to prosecute the radical environmental organization Greenpeace. Using an odd and arcane maritime law that forbids persons from boarding a ship unlawfully, the Justice Department is now breaking new ground by prosecuting the entire organization for an act committed by four Greenpeace members. Very little seems to be written about this case but it bares watching. In April 2002, two Greenpeace members illegally boarded a ship from Brazil that, according to Greenpeace, was illegally importing mahogany wood from South America into the United States. Using a tried and true method of civil disobidience, the enviro activists boarded the ship and attempted to hang a banner off of it reading “President Bush, Stop Illegal Logging.” Theywere later arrested and eventually pled to misdemeanor infractions. Then months later the Justice Department decided that was not enough and has invoked an old, arcane law. A law so obscure that constitutional and other legal scholars can not find a citing for its last use. Acording to Greenpeace, ” the 18th-century law is designed to prevent unscrupulous boarding house proprietors from luring arriving sailors to their establishments.”
Using this law, the Justice Department has pressed charges against Greenpeace Inc. The organization faces a statutory maximum penalty of five years’ probation and a fine of $10,000 as well as the potential loss of its tax exempt status and thus its ultimate demise. If convicted, it would have to report its activities to the government and get approval for all of its actions – a scary thought if it comes to pass.
I don’t get most of the Greenpeace agenda and have always questioned the effectiveness of chaining yourself to a tree or using a tiny rowboat to stop merchant vessels carrying oil or other cargo while traveling in shipping lanes.
But the government’s whole-hearted attempt to shut up one of the current administration’s loudest dissenters is chilling.
And yes, the law, as arcane and untried as it may be, is the law and perhaps has clearly been broken. But in this case, so what. Until now, that particular law has been ignored for over a hundred years.
And I can only imagine that any other groups who attempt, through acts of civil disobedience, to defy the government will be facing a similar ominous fate. But is it really a just Justice Department that attacks the use of free speech by destroying the organizations and people who dare defy them?
Scary stuff.

(Not wholey unrelated: no charges to date have been filed against The Enron corporation. )

Friday Fives

Friday Fives

1. Name five things in your refrigerator.
Mustard, half gallon of Super Food juice by Odwalla, left over Thai curry beef, Budweiser six pack remnants, tortillas.

2. Name five things in your freezer.
Hatch green chilis, orange juice concentrate, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, loaf of bread, Bomb Pops.

3. Name five things under your kitchen sink.
Vinegar, orange glow, trash can, rubber gloves, soft scrub.

4. Name five things around your computer.
CD coasters, checkbook, pencil sharpener, fingernail clipper, remote control to the tv.

5. Name five things in your medicine cabinet.
BandAids, Prylosec, Claritin, Tylenol, multivitamins.

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