Miracle of Technology, the Robot Vacuum

 

Last week I was perusing the many black Friday deals that we are bombarded with during the season of giving when I came across an advertisement for a robot vacuum cleaner at the bargain basement price of four hundred dollars. According to the ad, I would be saving $150 which as far as I can tell is better than I could get at Walmart, the big box superstore which follows the business model of decimating all the mom and pop shops on Main Street of every town in the country.

We could collectively shun Walmart and put them out of business for paying their workers peanuts while offering a benefits package that consists of directions on how to file for food stamps if it wasn't for the everyday fantastic deals we all enjoy from shopping there. I rarely go to Walmart because I hate the layout of the store. I think they randomize the placement of merchandise to promote impulse buying. The last time I went into a Walmart, I wandered about among the bounty looking for men's underwear which I eventually found next to some motor oil.

My wife, Christine, has been complaining about the dust in our house. For two years, we had a cleaning person who did a fantastic job. Christine recently let them go because as she put it,

"They keep breaking stuff."

Being a little too rough on our trinkets and baubles was not a good idea. The worst part was that they never told us when they broke something. They would just leave the newly freed up piece next to the thing they just ruined. The last straw was when Christine discovered the ear to a limited edition, Kaiser porcelain horse statue lying next to the wooden base. We bought the statue in a small town in England on our honeymoon so it was kind of special to both of us. The good news is it's free of dust. The bad news is that our limited edition Kaiser porcelain horse statue now qualifies for a black Friday mega deal.

My wife and I both try very hard to keep up with the housework, but I'm not nearly as good with that kind of thing as I am with fixing stuff. While I will gladly glue the ear back on the horse, I loath vacuum cleaning. So that got me thinking that technology should be able to remedy this problem in the form of a robot. After all, that's what robots are for, you know, to do all the things no one else wants to do. Best I can tell, a robot vacuum can't do the steps nor the lampshades, but everything else is covered.

Now, I watched a lot of movies and shows that feature robots, and what I learned is they'll be able to clean my house better than a human. When I was a kid I watched Westworld in 1973. Sure things went amiss with the robots going haywire and bumping off a bunch of peeps, but that was then. Technology has come a long way. More recently the AMC series, Humans, featured robots that were consciously connected via a centralized server, but for some reason they had to plug in and charge every night. In the future, wireless communication is going to link up millions of entities, but the state of batteries will pretty much remain at the level of today's smart phones. In 1975, I watched the movie, The Stepford Wives, which feature a town in Connecticut replacing women with homely dressed, obedient robots. I also saw Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine in reruns. The movie starred Vincent Price as a mad scientist who made sexy women robots that committed bank robberies. 

Gemma Chan

What all these shows have in common is that men eventually boff the robots. In Humans, Anita played by Gemma Chan is purchased as a domestic servant. By the fourth episode of the first season, Joe, whose idea it was to purchase a robot in the first place, discovers in the owner's manual that Anita has an adult option that can be activated by scratching off a code in the manual then reciting it while being in contact with her. Now, mind you, this is not why I want a robot vacuum. It's more to combat my allergies. Besides, I would never pick an attractive female robot if I were to get one. Just look at all the Hollywood power couples broken up by babysitters. I can see how that happens with all these celebrities except for Arnold Schwarzenegger and his maid.

 

I have a friend who has a robot vacuum. He posts pictures of his cat riding it all the time. I think this is great because it allows his cat to shed in places it normally wouldn't go. He told me that his robot vacuum occasionally breaks down or gets stuck in odd places. Once it got jammed up on a hairball which is a euphemism for cat puke.

"Yeah, but does it work?" I asked.

"When it runs, it works fine," he said.

He's not fooling me for a minute. I know what's going on here. I've heard of this before. Those things were not designed for that. You should never let your cat ride the vacuum cleaning robot.

Run Bob, Run

 

I've lived long enough now to have had many a conversation concerning UFOs, big foot, ghosts, abortion, flag burning, and if light is a particle or a wave. I wasn't always insufferably stubborn. Youth lends itself to an open mindedness that diminishes over the years, not necessarily due to intolerance, but from deja vu. I've already talked it out plenty of times, and I just don't want to do it again with the next generation who is just going to say,



"Ok, boomer"

to me anyway. Besides, I'm not interested in arguing with peeps that as a challenge eat Tide Pods.

I've also found that unlike in my youth when I could run like the wind, today I run like a middle aged accountant in sandals, trying to get away from a wild animal tempted by my soft underbelly. Briefly, I had to stop running because people kept coming up to me to ask,

 

"What's the matter?"

The only logical reason why someone would run so pathetically is to escape from terrorists. Truthfully, I was never a good runner. I know that when I run, it's not pretty. My wife, Christine, is one of those silent, gliding type runners who looks like a graceful prancing gazelle as she runs. I clop along like a Clydesdale pulling one of those sleds full of concrete blocks you see at fairgrounds in the summer. People always talk about the runner's high. I've never experienced it. Truth is I've never been high so I wouldn't know a runner's high if it ran right over me.

 

I read Jim Fixx's book, The Complete Book of Running, in the 80's because I thought I was doing something wrong. My technique must be off. I hadn't the right shoes. My wristbands were the wrong color. Something, anything to release my inner Jesse Owens. The red cover of the book had a picture of Fixx's muscular leg, sockless in an expensive world class running shoe. His red shorts where impossibly short in a Steve Irwin kind of way, but let me tell you, back then Jim Fixx had it going on.

Fixx was a heavy smoker and an equally heavy human. He started running at 35, lost 60 pounds, wrote his seminal running book, and helped start the fitness craze in the country. Shortly after I finished the book which I can say was a little one-dimensional with a flat story arc, Jim Fixx died of a heart attack while on his morning run. Talk about a plot twist.

The doctors claimed he was predisposition to heart failure and would have died much younger if he hadn't started running. This news didn't make me feel or run any better. I already felt terrible while running and the thought of giving it up would lead to an early death wasn't exactly the runner's high I was striving for. My father was a Jim Fixx fan. In the early 70's, he started running over lunch with a few of his work buddies because the neighbors called the cops on him and his coworkers for tossing a football in the street. He said the cops showed up and told them not to play in the street so they took up running. He and his factory worker buddies started running in their work boots and jeans until the cops stopped them yet again, convinced they had just committed a crime. An officer asked,

"What are you guys doing?"

"We're running," my father answered.

"Running from what?" the cop inquired.

My mother bought running shoes for my father from the Sears catalog. They arrived three months later and were two sizes too small. Back then, the only thing longer than waiting for merchandise from Sears to arrive in the mail was returning something to Sears that you got from the catalog. Often the item disappeared in the system, and you had to make a toll call to Minnesota to argue with some disinterested Sears worker to get your money back. So my father figured he would wear the sneakers only when riding his bicycle until the day he got a flat tire and discovered he hadn't a patch kit or spare tube. While pushing his bike home, some snot nose, smirking kid saw him and asked in a mocking tone,

"Got a flat, Mister?"

"Yeah, flat like your head," my father answered.

"At least I'm not pushing my head home," the kid said.

By the time he got his bike home, his new sneakers where stained red with blood. Once I was biking with my father, and we pulled up to a restaurant after his shoelace broke on one of the too small, blood soaked sneakers. As he tied the pieces of lace together, a kid on a big wheel rolled up and said,

"Hey stupid! This is my dad's restaurant."

My father said without missing a beat, "Yeah, tell him the food sucks!"

 

In the early 80's, my father and I eagerly watched the movie, Chariots of Fire, which as the name implies is not about burning roman vehicles, but instead, running. It won Oscars for Best Picture, Original Music Score, Screenplay and Costume Design. The movie was about two kids of different religious backgrounds training for the 1924 Paris Olympics. What I learned from this movie is back in the roaring twenties, everyone ran in their underwear.

I soldiered on with my running, now relying exclusively on treadmills to soften the impact. My footsteps are so loud that once a patron wearing headphones complained to management. Medical studies show that runners knees are actually in very good shape compared to non-runners. You would think that all that relentless pounding would mess things up over time, but not so. 

 

Today, I completed yet another miserable run, indoors on a treadmill while listening to the Fine Young Cannibals on my phone. For a brief moment, I felt kind of good. I thought maybe after all these years I finally might be getting a glimpse of the runner's high. I was certain, this was it. I felt like those kids in the lost tribe on Mad Max who thought Flight Captain Walker was going to get the wreckage of that airplane back into the air granting them passage to "tomorrow-morrow land" as I was on the cusp of actually tolerating, maybe, dare I say, enjoying a run.

I think that was, in fact, a runner's high, but I'm not sure. I've run for years without ever enjoying any of it. I've experienced many a runner's low, but never a high. Now that I think of it, the only time I've ever felt good running is when I stopped.

Maybe next time.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on September 29, 2016.

Blog Theory

 

I'm new to blogging. A lot of people are advising me as to what content will result in the right metrics which will propel my blog into the stratosphere. Everyone but me seems to know exactly what's funny. To expand my experience, I've been reading a lot of popular blogs lately. Some include so many ads you can't find the actual text. Others consist of a lot of original poetry written in "free verse." I was hoping that someone could explain something to me.


Why are all the blogs on the internet so boring?

Medical Blogs

If you Google the most popular blogs, one that shows up is a woman who writes about her digestive disorders. She wrote a compelling post about constipation, topped only by her recent one on hemorrhoids. Her blog has an army of dedicated followers because she's the only one in the world chronicling her digestive malady. Intestinal issues have a universal appeal. Every culture, every civilization in history has had problems taking a dump.

I, for one, don't really believe in constipation. What is really going on is that your stomach is messed up, causing you not to eat. If you don't eat, you don't crap, and you erroneously think you're constipated. Whenever my stomach bothers me, I eat more. Sure that sounds counterintuitive, but I think of the body like a Play-Doh fun factory. Stuff goes in, stuff comes out. I find that this practice may not always work. Sometimes stuff comes out the same way it went in. Now, I'm not a doctor, but technically I do write on the internet so that qualifies me to dispense medical advice. So instead of a comedy blog, of which there are thousands, I should write about a common ailment plaguing the human race. Best I can come up with is a blog about gingivitis.

Mommy Blogs

There are many mommy blogs to choose from, all chronicling every milestone achieved by someone's firstborn. In my day, we tolerated a few pictures of some bald kid with a ball, bald kid sitting up, bald kid with a stuffed animal, bald kid with a bowl of spaghetti on his head. You get the picture. Back in the day when photos were processed, the largest roll of film was no more than 36 pictures. When a new parent handed you a stack of photos, you always knew that at most this would take a few minutes to feign interest in the Adventures of Bald Kid.

Today, digital photography and social media stretches this activity into a two hour evolution which involves a good amount of reading. The woman who cuts my hair once told me that her friend constantly asks her if she read her mommy blog which she's often compelled to "pity like." If you're writing a mommy blog now, here's some advice for you. You should try to entertain your readers. They're not here to entertain you. The only thing worse than a mommy blog is a pet blog.

Pet Blogs

 

At least I understand mommy blogs. When you have a kid, you naturally want to share the experience with the world. However boring mommy blogs are, pet blogs are downright insane. The pictures alone of animals in different outfits are enough to give you a cavity. I read a pet blog the other day with over two hundred thousand page views that went on about a Yorkshire terrier named, "Tootsie," who his owners claimed could understand more words than a four year old. Comparisons of animals to children always strikes me as bit mental, like the bumper stickers that say,

I bet bumper stickers like this are not big sellers in countries that academically outshine the United States, especially those that eat dogs. When it comes to intelligence, my money is on the human. When I see a bumper sticker comparing the intellect of pets to children, I think of putting one next to it that reads,

A lot of pet blogs are endless drivel about the exploits of Dinkles the Dog, how he chewed the arm of your favorite chair, how he pulled the toilet paper roll all over the house, the Tootsie roll he left on the rug. Makes the blog about the woman who can't shit seem fascinating.

Cooking Blogs

 

Cooking blogs are at least useful because they typically explain a technique to prepare some kind of food. I read an article the other day on how to make French toast and another on how to prepare a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Sadly, both of these items are available pre-made in the supermarket. My wife feels that if you can't make either of these then "you don't deserve to eat them." She can be tough that way. There's a whole generation out there that can't cook. If you ever bought frozen French toast or "Lunchables," then cooking blogs are for you.

There is actually no secret to making a good peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You pretty much just put jam on one slice and peanut butter on the other. The only thing easier to prepare than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is water.

Subscriptions, Likes and Comments

 

Anyone who writes a blog wants positive feedback, placation over honesty. I never thought I would become a person shamelessly begging for subscriptions, but this too has come true. I understand your reluctance to subscribe if you are reading my blog at work while on the clock when you should be doing the thing that someone pays you to do, but think of it this way. If your company pays people while they stand outside and smoke cigarettes, then you can take your mental smoke break from the hustle and bustle of your busy day to read my blog. You deserve it.

I understand why people don't want to subscribe to a blog with their work email. I do write a lot about puking and flatulence and drop an occasional f-bomb, but I promise I will never announce affiliation with the Neo-nazi party. Even so it's not a good idea to subscribe to blogs with a work email no matter how many people tempt cancer outside the front door of your office.

My generation also doesn't like to subscribe because they think if they do they'll get emails indicating their best friend was injured in Tunisia, and needs them to wire money so they can get home. First, off, the subscription service for my blog, Feedburner, is affiliated with Google, God's search engine. They will never spam you. Second, if you ever get an email asking for money, don't give them any. Your friend is not injured in a foreign land. They're home watching Naked and Afraid.

If you subscribe, the blog posts are sent directly to your email. Each email indicates at the bottom how to unsubscribe, just in case your boss catches on and is a smoker himself. The good news is that he'll likely check out in a few short years from the big C, and you'll be in line for his job. In the meantime, just hold off until that day comes.

Metrics

Google sets up all sorts of metrics concerning one's blog that I regularly peruse like session duration and bounce rate which indicate how long readers stay on your blog and where they go next. A short session time of, say, twenty seconds mean readers took a quick look then navigated to something more interesting. Bouncing rate is also a measure of how many readers left your blog. My favorite is the "Page views by Countries." In 2016, mine looked like this,

 

I was on fire in Slovakia. I know some of this was probably bots, software surfing the internet for some targeted data, but I preferred to believe that I had an international audience both entertained and enthralled by literature dealing with American celebrity bashing, family and vomit.

 

The other interesting metric is a pie chart of the devices being used to read my blog. I noticed that "Desktop" goes up to nearly 40% on Friday afternoons and as low as 5% at night. This is because readers who use desktops are screwing off at work and reading my blog before the weekend, but at night they curl up with their smart phones. There's something very satisfying in knowing I'm helping people usher in their weekend. It's also nice to know that, together, we are sticking it to the man.

Me, Myself and Me Again

There are many blogs to choose from out in Internet land, all unedited journals largely written by narcissistic want to be writers who feel that any day now they'll be discovered for their Mark Twain wit, and offered piles of cash for their "unscripted musing." I'm more realistic than that. I check my mailbox everyday, but I never find any money in there. But enough about me. What do you think about me? As a blogger, you can't help but think you have a bigger audience just hanging on every word you pen than you actually do. Most bloggers inflate their readership by 100%, even though that info is oaten publically available. Truth is blogs are mostly ramblings about nothing.

Back when I first posted this piece I was a third the way through my Year of the Blog when I wrote every Tuesday and Thursday. My plan was to forge ahead, stopping only if I ran out of ideas. I've picked up a lot over the years I wrote this blog. I learned that people laugh at a lot of different things, certain food allergies can trigger hemorrhoids, great deals can be had for kid's clothing, and adults sometimes dress dogs in costumes for no apparent reason.

Oh yeah, one other thing. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are best when grilled.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on December 6, 2016.

Election Hero

Since today is Election Day, I'm reposting an article I wrote about the 2016 Presidential Election. The DNC funded smear dossier, compiled by the Queen’s former counter intelligence specialist Christopher Steele, which described how Trump, a germaphobe, watched two Russian prostitutes urinate on the bed the Obama's used on their official visit to Russia, hadn't yet surfaced. Hunter Biden had already been booted out of the Naval Reserve for testing positive for more drugs than Cheech and Chong combined, leaving him plenty of time to work on the board of a Ukrainian energy conglomerate. A Yale alumnus as well as the privileged son of a vice president, Hunter prepared for his recent no holds barred exclusive ABC News interview with Amy Robach by looking up where Ukraine is on the map and taking a sponge bath. Trump would eventually get ensnared in impeachment proceedings for asking the newly elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, if he could compile his own dossier on Joe Biden that included some tidbits like how much the Vice President tipped in restaurants and for lap dances. So let's go back to that simpler time.

_________________________

Trump and Hillary

The way this election is turning out this season, Kanye West in 2020 is looking pretty good. Our choices are the first women candidate who is a scheming, opportunistic career politician or a reality TV celebrity, billionaire businessman who's on his third wife. There are other party candidates which have as much chance of success as a Hall and Oats come back tour. Our system to elect a president has been so over analyzed and is wrought with so much scrutiny that the only people who would want to do something like that for so little scratch must be narcissistic nutjobs.

The late, John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, the fifth human in space, winner of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and Presidential Medal of Freedom, Marine colonel, four term Senator from Ohio, never ran for president because he was widely regarded as a poor public speaker and his eyes were too small. The oldest man to travel in space can't lead the country? Colin Powell, a four star general, Vietnam veteran, National Security Advisor to President Reagan, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Bush and Clinton, Secretary of State, awardee of two Presidential Medals of Freedom, didn't run for President because the process would have put too much scrutiny on his wife who suffers from mental illness. When we set up a system that excludes highly qualified individuals based on irrelevant information, we get the junk candidates which we have today. By the way, Colin Powell was so popular he would have defeated Clinton in 1996 even with a first name that is a homophone for large intestines.

Hillary Clinton is a smart lawyer who gets in trouble when she talks unscripted. She said she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary even though he was an obscure climber who hadn't yet summited Mount Everest at the time of her birth. She claimed she had to run from sniper fire in Bosnia even though the video clearly shows her calmly greeting people as she walks with her daughter, Chelsea. Former NBC Nightly News Anchor, Brian Williams, took a beating for lesser misstatements. She claimed that the reason she had a private email server was so she could have one device for personal and private emails when in reality it was to maintain control over the content.

Recently, she said that she discussed it with Colin Powell who gave her the idea. Powell denied the conversation took place. I guess Hillary figured as long as George Bush could blame the weapons of mass destruction debacle on Powell, she might as well toss her little email screw up his way too. She suggested that Trump was unfit to run the economy when past elected officials have put the country $21 trillion in the hole. Her husband's "I Met a Girl Speech" at the DNC left out most of Bill's more Hollywood moments. It's hard to believe she might serve in the same office where that dress got stained. Bill followed with a tweet musing the first time Hillary heard him speak, he was saying how beautiful Arkansas melons were. She thought he was talking about fruit while Bill was speaking more in a mammary sense.

Donald Trump is a smart businessman who talks unscripted all the time, but gets into trouble when he speaks unfiltered. He took umbrage with the line of questioning from Fox reporter, Megyn Kelley, during the republican debates implying she was menstruating. He claimed a Mexican judge would be unfair in regards to his legal troubles. He responded to Marco Rubio when Rubio obliquely suggested Trump had a diminutive tool with a comeback more suited to a middle schooler than the Leader of the Free World. His simplified solution to undocumented immigration is to deport everyone who is here illegally to the other side of a big wall which he's somehow going to get Mexico to pay for. He mimicked a physically challenged reporter and criticized Carly Fiorina's face. I was waiting for him to say,

"She was good in Shrek."

Tapping into Dick Cheney's hunting experience, Trump said he could shoot someone in the middle of the street and not lose any votes. That's true only if he capped Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rife Association, who in a stroke of irony would fully support the shooting. His wife lifted a speech from Michelle Obama. If you're going plagiarize a speech by a First Lady, best pick one less popular (and less alive) like Nancy "Just Say No" Regan. Trump makes all sorts of bizarre faces and hand gestures which the news media often focuses on making him look more incontinent than competent. Trump proves that no amount of money or products can do anything for fundamentally bad hair. I doubt he'll ever learn that while it might be a great business trait to go for the jugular, it's not a good idea to do so on camera, at least in this country.

I have an idea. Let's forget about the election process all together and draft someone for president. We'll make it illegal to refuse. The first person we'll select will be Chesley Burnett Sullenberger III, the pilot who ditched a plane in the Hudson River, saving all 155 people onboard. He's a no nonsense national hero, Air Force veteran, author of books on leadership, an outstanding public speaker, and retired pilot. He's clearly good at thinking on his feet, unscripted with a judicious filter. His eyes aren't too small, and he's got a cool name not associated with digestion.

Sully

Sully is so truthful that while being interviewed by Katie Couric, she asked him if he took a moment to pray. Hillary would have said,

"I thought of Psalm 23:2, the one about green pastures and quiet waters. I recited it out aloud as I was delivering my life saving orders. I also sent an email on my private server to the Pope asking him to pray for us too."

Trump would have answered,

"Hey Katie, I'm flying a fucking plane here that I'm about to crash land in the Hudson two blocks from Trump Tower. I'm pretty much on my own. My copilot is low energy. Of course, I prayed. Are you menstruating or something?"

Sully answered, "I would imagine somebody in back was taking care of that for me while I was flying the airplane. My focus at that point was so intensely on the landing, I thought of nothing else."

Please Captain Sullenberger, save us all this time.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on August 30,2016.

Who Is the One?

 

I've been writing posts for this blog for almost four years now. With nearly 70,000 page views, I've tried to keep it lighthearted, staying clear of any topic that might get me banned from the planet. Today, it's important to agree with the mob otherwise the social media universe will call you out, and you'll be fired from your job. Lucky for me I don't have an actual job.

I've written a few screenplays. I read somewhere that the screenplay is the middle aged guy's mixtape. Everyone who writes a script is certain that it will be on fire once Hollywood gets ahold of their gem. Tinseltown needs me; after all movies like The Odd Life of Timothy Green get made all the time and those movies stink, and not just because Jennifer Garner got cast as the mom. To date, I've garnished fifteen placements in seven different screenplay contests with three different scripts.

One script was a top fifty semifinalist in the Academy Nicholls Fellowship in Screenwriting, arguable the most prestigious screenplay competition in the world. Last year, another script came in second place in the New York Metropolitan Screenwriting Competition. After becoming a finalist in the Big Apple Screenplay Contest this past summer, my wife, Christine, and I attended a public reading of excerpts from the winning scripts. While the contest placements have been exciting, and I've enjoyed sitting back on my laurels, I've always wanted to write a comedy.

Comedies are the hardest genres by far. Anyone can write a drama. Just dream up a few characters, one being a priest, another being an attractive women. Make some people good and others bad, then kill off a good one now and again. In the third act, set fire to a barn, and there you have it. You got a drama. It worked for Thorn Birds. Comedies are hard because while anyone can write a tragedy, very few of us can make people laugh. Even if you dream up a few zingers, you still have to do so for 90 pages. I hate it when you watch a comedy in which the five best gags are in the trailer. You think you already saw the film. My goal is to write a script so funny that the viewing audience will collectively piss themselves. While this means the film will go straight to DVD as no theatre will carry it primarily due to the mess, writing a comedy requires a skill set I knew at the time I didn't yet have.

Most people hate to write and are amazed that some people manage to make a living by doing so. I have a friend who is always going on about being a novelist. The reason she wants to be an author is so when she goes to the doctor's office and fills out the paperwork, she can write "novelist" for occupation. I always advise her to write it in script. Recently, I told her that she shouldn't let the worldwide ban on paper and pencils keep her from realizing her dream. I suspect that the hard part about being a novelist is the novel part. Everything else is probably pretty easy.

Hollywood is flooded with terrible screenplays, so much that professional readers assume yours stinks before they even read the title. Tinseltown is full of people trying to make it big in whatever lane they've chosen. People spend all day managing clout, that is, convincing others that they are the go to person for the next big project. I once read an article written by a professional script reader who described the three piles of scripts he had to read. The first pile was the scripts his boss gave him. The second was made up of material from his friends and family. The last pile, the one he never gets to, was the contest winners. It's sobering that a nobody like me is beat out by the dude's second cousin. I once asked a friend of mine, who wrote for years in the film industry, why she thought screenplay competitions don't discover the best scripts. I never forgot her response. She said,

"Nothing of value is given away for free in Hollywood."

Writers have always been struggling for recognition in the movie industry. There are plenty of crummy jobs fixing the dialog in some equally crummy scripts. These so called "uncredited" writing tasks are partial payment of your dues to make it in Hollywood. I read a blog written by a writer who was hired by a big production company to work on a script about a Catholic priest who was a vampire forced to choose between the zombie he loved or his faith. He stated that a good writer can fix any story, even a stinker like that one. I imagine so, but why would you want to?

So like most lost writers, I found my marble coming to rest in a remote corner of the internet. I've was writing emails to my sister, Jeannine, for years. She would respond by telling me how she laughed, then always sign off with,

"You should blog that."


My Sister and Me

So I started sending her emails entitled "Blog of One." For several years, she had her own private blog in which she was the only reader. Having only one subscriber who's your sister gives you a lot of freedom as a writer. It's pretty hard to offend my sis. So I figured I would take her advice and write a humor blog for a year to hone my skills, then attempt to write a feature length comedy.

 

My promise was to posts every Tuesday and Thursday, no ads ever, and this was as indulgent as I would ever get. There also wouldn't be any frigging poetry either. I completed the Year of the Blog, then continued to post now and again, eventually settling on every Tuesday.

Whenever I think of my childhood, anything that was any good always involved my sister. After ever post, I would wait for her text letting me know how I did. Her affirmation is never guaranteed. It's earned. With her encouragement as well as that from Christine, my editor, I continue to write. Now that I'm working on another script, I've been reposting earlier pieces with an occasional new one. It will likely go that way for a while, but I still promise that there won't be any frigging poetry.

My sister and I are close in age. As little kids we were sometimes mistook for twins, mostly because my mother to save money gave us the same haircut. It worked out for me, but not so much for her. I often remind my sister that she spent the first year of her life alone in a playpen. Being younger than her, I always had someone in there with me which is why I'm normal, and she's just a little bit nuts.

She's the One.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on October 5, 2016.

Insurance for the Irresponsible

 

What's going on in the Marketing Department at the headquarters of Liberty Mutual insurance? Their commercials feature young people whining about having to pay a deductible or bellyaching that they're not cut any slack for a good driving record. Liberty Mutual might as well admit that they are targeting irresponsible drivers. One commercial has a black couple telling their story with the Statue of Liberty in the distance. The woman scolds the man for ruining his perfect driving record by side swiping a food truck. She adds,

"You would think your insurance company would cut you some slack, right?"

No, I wouldn't. I would think they would invoke my policy to the letter, trying to figure out any way to get out of paying. The man adds,

"Your perfect record doesn't get you anything."

Well, it does, just not anymore. Your perfect record got you lower rates before you smashed into the Mister Softee truck. When you crash your car, you become in insurance lingo, a "liability." Too many claims, and you become a "high risk." I know young people expect something for participation, but I think it will be easier for them to understand that insurance companies are for profit businesses, not extensions of their parents. The way that guy carried on about the injustice of his rates going up for crashing his car into a vending truck, I wouldn't be surprised if he expected the food guy to run some chow by his house for the next week to help him through the trauma of the accident. There is another commercial with a smartly dressed Asian woman, holding a cup of joe with the Statue of Liberty in the distance. She expresses her dissatisfaction with the insurance deductible by saying,

"You pay your premiums like clock work...then one night, you hydroplane into a ditch. Yeah. Surprise, your insurance company tells you to pay up again. Why pay for insurance if you have to pay even more for using it?"

She rolls her eyes then storms off screen leaving Lady Liberty stoically scanning the harbor for huddled masses. Maybe if you weren't driving excessively fast while trying to surf the internet for the address to the next bar your friends are meeting up at on your bald tires your dad keeps offering to replace, you wouldn't have ended up in that ditch. Surprise!

The insurance industry requires a deductible in order to limit your use of their services. Unlike your parents who hemorrhaged big for that useless college degree you insisted on getting, Liberty Mutual expects something in return for their coverage. It's the same for copays used by the medical insurance industry which dissuade you from going to the doctor for that boil on your ass. You see, the insurance companies don't actually produce anything although the industry refers to their policies as "products." They don't purchase raw materials, they don't have a manufacturing facility, they have no need for research and development. The insurance industry makes their money by selling you a policy, then dissuading you from using it. That's their business model.

I often wonder what meetings are like in insurance companies. They can't brainstorm about innovations that would make their products superior to their competitors because they don't have any products. I figure they all trickle into the conference room ten minutes late for a 3 o'clock, holding their fourth cup of coffee for the day, which they spill on the carpet, as well as a stale donut Ted brought in to celebrate his twentieth year. As they go around the table tossing out ideas about their next big business move, a common theme emerges.

Make the customer pay more for less coverage, and oh yeah, jack up the deductible again.

They all nod in agreement. Just another day in the exciting world of insurance sales. Another Liberty Mutual commercial has a young women telling a story in the second person of "Brad" your car that was with you through three crummy jobs and two douchebag boyfriends, none of which, I'm sure, your parents approved of. You totaled Brad in a less descriptive part of the story. I surmise that it probably involved too many distractions from drunk millennials all texting each other while sitting in Brad. She sounds very upset until Liberty Mutual calls, which causes you to "break into your happy dance." My generation never had a happy dance, nor did we name our cars. My guess is when the next years premiums are cut by Liberty Mutual, and they finish factoring in the demise of Brad, there isn't going to be any happy dances for a while.

Another commercial features an African American woman lamenting that after she wrecked her brand new ride, she discovered her crappy ass discount insurance only covers three quarters of her car. She asks,

"Do they expect me to drive three quarters of a car?"

No, they expected you to read more than three quarters of your policy. The wrong time to be questioning the extent of your coverage is when you need it.

Yet another commercial has a sheepish looking kid standing next to his helicopter mom as she explains that her son got a flat in the middle of the night. His mother states that Liberty Mutual's 24 hour roadside assistance helped her clueless son change the tire "so he can get home safely." The commercial cuts to a scene in which two other equally oblivious teens struggle to change a flat tire unassisted by Liberty Mutual's roving bozo brigade. The wimpier kid on the phone with his father exclaims with some measure of irritation,

"I know what a lug wrench is!"

He then turns to his friend, Chad, who probably picked a college based on the cafeteria food, and whispers,

"Is this a lug wrench?"

Chad, doped up on Ritalin and his last weed pen answers,

"Maybe."

The commercials ends with a narrator indicating that you can leave worry behind when Liberty stands with you. What you should worry about is raising a kid so stupid that he can't follow the three pictorial steps in a car's manual illustrating how to change a flat tire. Someday, life is going to throw your kid something tough like a cruise ship taking on water in rough seas, and he's going to have to make some quick decisions to save himself. There won't be any time for phone calls to dad for advice. He can be like one of those ass hats in the Liberty Mutual commercials, or a guy like me, that is, a survivor explaining to Katie Couric on Good Morning America how he used Chad's bloated corpse as a floatation device for three days.

"On day four, I fed Chad to the sharks."

Insurance is a necessary evil that you get just in case you experience an inordinate amount of bad luck. You can hedge your bets and go commando on insurance if you feel lucky, just don't complain afterwards. That's not how insurance works.

Oh yeah, one other thing. Brad ran like shit.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on December 29, 2016.