My Life is an Open MacBook

Actual conversation from today:

An oldster comes up to me before a county airport-related meeting in the Bluffton Library, and points to my MacBook:
Oldster: Boy, that's a beautiful machine. That's just really nice. Look at that, it's beautiful.
Me (slightly overwhelmed): Oh this? Yeah, it's ... nice. Works pretty good too.
Oldster: Jeez, I mean, look at that thing. It's just gorgeous. It's a beautiful piece of machinery.
Me (now trying to cover up the palm-stained mousepad and crumbs dribbling out of the keyboard): It's a little old, I think. Actually, it's not mine, it's the Packet's. But I get to use it for meetings like this.
Oldster (not paying attention, still in awe): Isn't that something.
Me: How far we've come, right?
Oldster: Have you seen one of these iPhones?
Me: Um, yeah ... (Or, maybe I should have gone with the Pete Early response: "What do I look like, a f----- homeless person?")
Oldster: Man, are they neat. Hey, do you think that's the direction everything's going in? Do you think everything will be more like this (points to laptop) or more like the iPhone? I've got this old phone, and it's nothing like that.
Me: Umm ... I don't really know the answer to that, I guess. Maybe somewhere in between?
Oldster: Boy oh boy, isn't that something.

Siggnificant Other

Tap water and I have always had a pretty strong relationship. Perhaps this was foolish, as I grew up in the Toms River area where, during the mid-90s, more and more children started developing the cancer, something quickly linked to the water supply. This gave birth to the term "cancer clusters," referring to the parts of town where cancer-inducing chemicals had leeched into the water supply (not to be confused with Clusters of Cancer, the worst selling cereal of all time).

Yet all throughout high school, even as my Bio class got extra credit for going to speak at the hearings about the water supply, I continued to drink tap water. Perhaps subconsciously I assumed that if the water hadn't already killed me, it might imbue me with some form of superpowered toxin fighting powers, a sort of Adamantium esophagus that could handle even the dirtiest the Jersey water supply had to offer.

Until I left for college, I was unaware that many people considered tap water a foul liquid unworthy of crossing their lips. To them, drinking from the tap was the equivalent of asking the entire homeless population of DC to piss into their open mouths, chased by a big swig from the storm drain under Larry Craig's K Street condo.

This is how I learned about this phenomenon known as the Brita filter. If you didn't have this product in your fridge, your guests would stop looking for other amenities because they had made the conclusion you also ate dinner with sharp sticks and did your bathroom business in an empty dresser drawer. This is probably why I had such trouble making friends at GW, and why my closet always had a bad stink to it.

The Brita seems to make a lot more sense than bottled water, however, considering the multiple reports (and the growing opposition movement) that have come out over the past year or so saying bottled water is little more than glorified, expensive tap water.

I was always tempted to buy one of those Nalgene bottles, though I was never a fan of the plastic that gave the water all the lovely taste of 10-year-old Play-Doh. I also didn't want to buy 13 Grateful Dead stickers to put on the bottle. Plus, there's the news that Nalgene bottles leech BPA chemicals into the water. More cancer.

So finally, I broke down last weekend and bought a Sigg metal water bottle that has the sleekness of an Apple product yet the authority of a piece of World War I artillery. The metal doesn't affect the taste of the water and keeps it cold, not to mention this thing looks like it could knock a few teeth out in a fight with some bottled water pansy. It calls itself "indestructible."

Then I put the bottle in the freezer the other night and it cracked right open. Oops, not quite indestructible, I suppose. I took it back to the store and got another one.

I went home to Jersey a few years ago to find that my parents had installed a small water cooler on a kitchen counter, like the kind that serves as a gathering spot to talk about last night's Dancing With the Stars in your office. We just couldn't take the water here any more, my Mom said, pointing to the same faucet she had fed us from for years.

For me, I'm still happy filling this new water bottle from the tap. Until they discover in a few years that the metal in Sigg gives you nine types of cancer and two forms of whooping cough, that is.

'We hit the ball, Timmy hit a home run'

ah, the wonders you find when you put a Google alert out on your name. Also a candidate for the most unlikely combination of words to follow my name:

The heavy hitting (My Name) drove home Szanca in the next at-bat with a towering homer to right-center.

Donnelly's second home run of the season not only landed with a thud against the aluminum siding of a house across the street from the field, it essentially ended the contest - making the final score 9-5.

"We hit the ball, Timmy hit a home run," Szanca said.

Not only can I not definitively say what sport this is (could be baseball, but also cricket is a strong possibility), I've been scouring the web site to find where this newspaper is located, all to no avail. Best I can find is it's in McKeesport, Pa., where the sky is always blue and the Donnellys always swing way.

The Best Lede You'll Never Rede

Checking crime reports yesterday, there's this one about a Hilton Head Island man caught shoving a package of ribs and a bottle of barbecue sauce down his pants at the Piggly Wiggly. When the cashier confronted him, his explanation was that he was hungry, and didn't have any money (or, to put it in the stilted newspeak of the Sheriff's Office police reporting: "a clerk did observe a white male place packaged ribs and a bottle of BBQ sauce down his pants in an attempt to conceal and deprive the store of the value of the items." Oh criminals — when will you stop trying to deprive our society of the value of our important items?)
If you're going to shoplift, you might as well get something that's going to stick to your bones, I suppose.

Here's the lede I wanted to write, but didn't.
There's a barbecue in one Hilton Head Island man's pants, and the police were invited.

Here's the full report, as it ran in today's paper:

A man shoplifting from a Hilton Head Island Piggly Wiggly apparently was throwing a barbecue — in his pants, police said.

On July 23, a cashier at the Coligny Plaza store observed a man put a package of ribs in his pants, then move on to another aisle and add a bottle of barbecue sauce, which he also put down his pants. When the cashier confronted him as he tried to purchase two Cup of Noodle soups at the register, the man pulled out the items.

He said he was hungry and didn’t have any money, according to a report from the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office. He was arrested and is being held on $1,092 bond at the Beaufort County Detention Center.

The total cost of the ribs and sauce was $13.18.

Trivia team names for the week

You're Next, Bea Arthur*
When Batman Hits His Mom, Does it Say 'POW!"?*
The Overzealous Deputy
Omni-Bubba
One Knol of Jigga
A Stable Career in the IMAX Repair Industry
Matt Griffin's Batman: The Ride Revenge
Questlove's Poorly Wrapped Chipotle Burrito
Closed Exits and the Free Gallon of Gas Scheme
The Atlanta Rooftop Racists Association
The Layman's Deadbolt Shopper's Guide (Trailer Edition)


*Actually used in competition

Firefoxy Lady

Firefox 3, I think I love you. If I could marry you and have many, Google-ready babies, I would. It would be so simple to take care of these babies, because they would be easily locatable. "Hey, where's Moz Jr. run off to?" Then I'd hit ctrl F, and BAM, he'd be located before I even finished typing.
Who are these people still using Internet Explorer? Do they also ride trains to the grocery store and wash their clothes on a scrub board down by the creek? Maybe they even work at newspapers (self-zing!).

Foxy 3, your tabbed browsing and improved bookmarking have done wonders for my ADD. I can hardly write a story these days without simultaneously flipping through my Facebook, Gmail, RSS feed and Digg pages at least several times an hour. I just did it three times during that sentence. And once again while I edited that sentence. There were no new e-mails or responses to read, of course. But there might have been, and Google forbid I miss one a second after it arrives. I just can't take that chance in this day and age. ("Jonathan Cribbs has also commented on my photo?!? That son of a bitch...")

Digg is particularly structred for the attention-deficit, tabbed-browsing age. Digg seduces me into opening upwards of 10 tabs at a time to look at the latest geek art or some top ten list of Most Awesomely Awesome Dark Knight Related Topics We Haven't Written About Yet.

So does this mean my attention span is parsed so thin it can barely read a Panera menu without wanting to Google exactly what "artisan breads" means? (a search you can do in Firefox with a right click into a new tab, fyi). Probably. The Atlantic seems to think so.

I did, at least, read all of that article in one sitting. In print form, nonetheless. Now, where did I park my train?

A Hero for Our Times

Meet Matt Griffin. He's the hero we need, not the hero we deserve:


Matt Griffin is an on-the-ground serviceman for Media Merge, a Chelsea, Ala.-based high-tech service company. And he's a certified IMAX repair technician.

We located Matt Griffin on The Internet Saturday afternoon in a fit of blinding desperation after hearing that the IMAX projector at the Mall of Georgia was continually overheating and cutting showings of The Dark Knight short or cancelling them all together, ruining the experience for hundreds of moviegoers who (like us) had been frothing at the mouth for weeks at the potential of seeing an 8-story tall Ennis Del Mar.

As Josh Thompson, who drove from Augusta only to have his 3:40 show scrubbed, told the AJC that day: "I'm beyond bummed. I'm really [angry]!" (Sources assume that [angry]! actually meant "pissed!").

The situation was dire. Our 10:20 p.m. show was fast approaching. Either we could sit on the floor of Pouya's Atlanta apartment and lament our woes while taking out aggression by firing a machine gun at the heart of the Statue of Liberty, or we could take action.

Like Batman, we sought justice. Justice through the utility belt of our age: Google. A search for IMAX repair companies brought only one real result in the form of Media Merge.

We called. The voice mail picked up. "For emergency service, please press 1 now." Well hell, if this isn't an emergency in the world of gigantic projector screens, nothing is.

Pouya and I made the plea. Hello, we're calling to leave a message for Matt Griffin. Matt, we need help. The IMAX in Atlanta is down and we've got people who drove from South Carolina just to attend it. This is supposed to be the big coming out weekend for IMAX, and it's in trouble.
We know you can do this. We see that you began your career in the mid-1980s as a systems integration manager. In the 1990s, you honed your professional and technical skills before becoming IMAX certified. This is some serious shit, Matt Griffin. You may hear us laughing in the background, but we're deadly serious. This is the 9/11 for the IMAX industry, and you need to be the hero. You're two hours away, you can be here in time. We will purchase you one large diet Coke and a package of Jujubees if we see you in the theater. Matt, please, get here, you're the only one with the skills to repair our broken dreams. This is it, this is the time to shine, to make your industry, your parents and yourself proud and fix our IMAX.

Help us Matt Griffin. You're our only hope.

And then we hung up. There was a sudden flash of hope in the small loft apartment as we all had a collective vision that somewhere, in an office park in Chelsea, Alabama, a goateed man in a button-down shirt had just hit a big red "GO" button on his desk and slid down a chute hundreds of feet below ground, landing in the seat of a rocket-propelled Honda Civic with a "PWNED" sticker on the back, zooming eastward to the rescue.

The rest of our day was nervousness and terror. What if Matt Griffin had already been called out to another job in another city? Did he have the superhero endurance to make it to Atlanta on time? Sure, he's IMAX certified, but the human body can only be pushed so far.

Shows were still being cancelled in Atlanta and we were unsure if we should even make the trip to the mall theater that night. When we arrived two hours before the show, the staff was still unsure if the overheated projector had been repaired.

In line under the hot lamps of the IMAX waiting room, we kept hoping to see a bearded fat man storming into the projector room with a sense of heroic purpose, a box of IMAX repair tools jangling noisily by his side. When we told the theater suits we had contacted the repair company in Chelsea, they nodded politely and said "that's nice," the way you'd turn away a child who told you they had collected 30 pennies to help save your house from foreclosure.

What if Matt Griffin truly wasn't the hero we had hoped all along?

After pushing the movie start time back half an hour, the fever broke and we were allowed in to the IMAX theater to claim our seats for The Dark Knight. The show went off without a hitch, except for the guys sitting next to me who kept talking about how balls awesome it would be to watch pornography in IMAX vision.

We stood up to leave, brains reeling from Christopher Nolan's stunning cinematic achievement. Surely Matt Griffin had come this night; why hadn't he sought us to claim his Diet Coke and revel in his triumph?

That's when we realized: a real hero doesn't need your reward or accolades. He can be the outcast.

Back in Chelsea, we hope Matt Griffin realizes the symbol of hope he is for us as he lies in wait, a bag of Cheetos at his side, listening for the call of citizens who need their hero again.

Matt Griffin, seen here refusing to pay for valet parking at the Mall of Georgia.