Archives for October 2004

This morning I received an email that had a list of 50 or so line items that said:

“You know you are from LA when” blah, blah, blah. Sometimes they can be fun, but like all lists they do require a mix of truth and hyperbole. Here is a sample of some of the lines that I found most interesting/correct or funny.

You Know You’re From LA When…



You begin to “lie” to your friends about where you are (i.e. “Yeah I’m like 20 minutes away”) – when you know that it’ll take you at least an hour to get there).



You eat a different ethnic food for every meal.



You look around at the nice cars around you during traffic, thinking it’ll be your favorite Laker or WB star.



You know it’s best not to be on the 405 at 4:05 pm.



Getting anywhere from point A to point B, no matter what the distance, takes about “twenty minutes”.



In the “winter”, you can go to the beach and ski at Big Bear on the same day.



You’ve bumped into a celebrity at El Pollo Loco.



You know what “sigalert”, “PCH”, and “the five” mean.



If your destination is more than 5 minutes away on foot, you’re definitely driving.



You’ve partied in Tijuana at least once.



You’ve ever bought oranges, flowers, cherries or peanuts on a freeway off-ramp.



You drive next to a Rolls Royce and don’t notice.



You’ve started crossing a street and returned to the curb when the DON’T WALK sign started flashing.



You have a favorite Thai restaurant.



You think you are better than the people who live “Over the Hill”. It don’t matter which side of the hill you are currently residing, you are just better than them, for whatever reason.



Walking out of Jamba Juice, you see that a movie is being shot on-location across the street. You are not happy, or even slightly excited that there may be a movie star there. You just say, ” They f*cking better not be blocking my parking space.”



A nurse can look at you in all seriousness and ask, “you don’t drink or smoke, right?”

I am just disappointed. All of the things that I have read regarding both candidates reminds me that I still do not like either.

There is something wrong with feeling like you have to vote for the lesser of two evils. It is like being set up on a date by a friend. She/he tells you nothing but good things about the person you are going out with. They show you a picture and between the description and the picture you are truly excited to meet them.

And then they show up and you find out that the picture is before they ate their way through Vegas/underwent a bad hair transplant/got hit by a bus, you get the picture. Of if you are like me you look at the hot girl in the picture and think that G-d is really smiling down upon you as you are about to go out with a supermodel who has brains and really likes you.

And then you find out that the supermodel is not your date, it is the woman standing behind her. Disappointment.

Enough of the silly descriptions. The point is that we deserve better than this and we can do better than we have. I demand it and so should you. It is time to rethink and re-evaluate how things work.

No need to reinvent the wheel, but we can improve how it functions. More on this later.

This is not funny. When a columnist says something as asinine as:

John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr – where are you now that we need you?



This merits a formal reprimand.

I haven’t seen this in years Rikki-Tikki-Tavi but I remember loving it as a child.

I may have to buy this to share with my children.

Of course it should be noted that when I tried to watch the Wizard of Oz with my son he got bored and asked me to turn it off.

If I surfed, this would be worth the rush. Ok, maybe not, but what a thought. Wow.

Not unlike the other lemmings I have a TV/VCR/DVD/SAT/DVR with surround sound. And I have many remotes, so many remotes that I have often wondered what would happen if I took them into the street and just started punching buttons.

Could I wreak havoc? Would the lady watching Dr. Phil be left wondering if the drug addict dad ever recovered because I managed to change her television channel. Would the teenager next door get busted because I turned on his porno while his mom was home.

Should I wait and try it on a Sunday morning and see how many men I could roust from their easy chairs and football games. I wonder.

In the search for ways to ease my life and drive my MIL crazy I purchased a universal remote today. It is supposed to handle all of the technology in the house, ok it can’t blog for me, won’t pinch hit for the timer on my sprinklers and doesn’t turn on the washer, but it might one day. And it could be just a matter of my reading the whole manual so that I am familiar with all of the functions.

But I won’t do that because that would take some of the fun of being male away. I don’t take or ask directions, refuse to go to the doctor, wear my underware until there is just one big hole for both of my legs, let fly bodily functions with reckless abandon and celebrate being 230 pounds of uncontrolled 5-year-old.

Shakespeare discussed unleashing the dogs of war and I say unleash the testosterone. Jack has a new toy and he is not afraid to take it out and wag it around. Yippee.

I love the name “Universal Remote” because it holds so many different possibilities. With this remote I can bring peace to the Middle East, Far East, South East, South West and if there were still a Wicked Witch of the West I could nail her too. Figuratively speaking of course.

With a couple flicks of the wrist I am truly the master of my domain. Of course, I still haven’t figured out how to make it work yet, but I will.

In the interim I have been considering how to make use of my old remotes and have stumbled upon an idea. While waltzing through the store (you should have scene the looks I received. Try waltzing by yourself in public and you can share this experience. Better yet, go and Lambada, it is fun.) I saw part of an old Kung-Fu Movie Master of the Flying Guillotine and it gave me an idea.

I could become a superhero fighting for justice. With my trusty bag of remotes I could roam the dark and dangerous alleys of Los Angeles righting wrongs and fighting injustice. When I spotted a criminal I’d whip out my remote and send it flying through the air and listen for the thunk it would create when it smacked the bad guy in the head.

Now there are a couple of potential problems with this idea. First, I need to gather a huge supply of remotes because I’ll probably lose a few while practicing my aim. Not to mention some of these fights might require that I use a couple of them. And while I am thinking about it, how many will I need to carry to be effective. It would be awfully embarrassing to ask the bad guy to hang on while I run to the car to get another remote.

But if I carry a really large supply, it would make for an ungainly and unwieldy appearance. It is hard to be intimidating when you are struggling to carry a huge bag/box of remotes.

Maybe I need to modify the remote so that it becomes a Taser. It could be more effective, but it wouldn’t have the same effect as the remote, and I’d lose the connection to the Master of the Flying Guillotine movie.

I shall have to ponder about what to do.