Ron's Big Life Update - December 1997

Howdy, all.

It's dark outside, my boss is in Japan for a week, no one else is around, and this is a good time to get some work done uninterrupted by other people. Or I could just write a letter...

It's winter in Minnesota, and this is clearly the place to be at this time of year. My graphite snow shovel has held up magnificently, and my driveway is snow-free. It hasn't gotten too cold yet, but every year around Christmas it stays below zero for about two weeks. Add the wind chill on top of that, and Oy it's cold. We former-Arizonians would say It's a dry cold...

I can slowly feel myself becoming Minnesotan. I just put $400 worth of snowtires on my car (that's four good tires, not eight cheap ones), I got Minnesota plates for the car, and in the ultimate act of becoming Minnesotan, I got a Minnesota driver's license. I read the little book, and took a computerized multiple-choice test, and wouldn't you know, I passed. (Just so you know, the test-taking room had about 30 of these little computer stations, each about the size of a computer slot machine. The questions were all done on a touch-sensitive screen, so no #2 pencils or anything like that.) I did get dinged on one or two nit-picky questions, though. If you're driving at night, and some other car is approaching you from the other direction, how far away should the other car be when you turn off your hi-beams? 200 feet, 500 feet, 1000, or 1500 feet? Well, "How the heck should I know" was not one of the choices, so I got it wrong. When I first got my NY license, the ID # was 19 digits long. A few years back, NY changed their licenses so that the ID # was 10 digits long. Now, MN uses 13 digits. 19, 10, 13: is this progress?

Aside from the computer I bought a few months ago and my head-blastin' new snowtires, I haven't bought anything of importance lately. We still occasionally shop at Sam's Club because we like the huge quantities of stuff they have. If you buy one package of chopped onion at Sam's Club, you'll see that it contains 3487 servings. That's one serving of chopped onion every day for almost ten years!

I got a piece of junk mail to end all junk mail: a solicitation for me to buy "The New World Book of Gerbers", which is precisely what you think it is - a book listing of all the people in the whole world whose last name is Gerber. What a stupid thing! In fact, I think you should tell the author that his book is a stupid thing (not to mention the most boring piece of literature since the book of the first million digits of pi). He's Eugene E. Gerber, and the solicitation provides an address and phone number. So I thought, Should I buy this? Am I really this desperate to see my name in print? The only person who I thought would like to own this is my brother, Ken, who IS this desperate to see my name in print. (Ken - I was going to actually get this for you for Hanukah. But I didn't, because it cost money.) I can only pray that whoever put this book together sorely overestimated the number of interested Gerbers in the world, and that there are a million copies of it stashed in a warehouse somewhere.

Are there books of other last names? Is there a "New World Book of Osmonds"?

I've been getting to do a tiny bit of traveling for work. I briefly visited San Jose (hi, Jill), where we ate a lot and I lost $9 at poker to my coworkers. I'm not too worried about the $9 because one of our dinners was rather expensive: 7 people + 1 excellent Italian restaurant = $350 dinner bill, which our manager Dave signed for. Expense reports rule, especially when someone else picks up the tab.

Saw a couple of movies recently:

• Gattaca - a sci-fi flick about genetic engineering and what-not. I thought it stunk, but Margaret liked it. Critics didn't think it was as bad as I did, but it's still bad.
• Eve's Bayou - a neat movie about a family growing up in Louisiana in the '50s, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Quite good, and I expect to see a few of the cast members' names on the Oscar ballots.
• Lone Star - a neat movie set in Texas on the Mexican border. It played in theaters last year, and we rented it. Excellent offbeat film.
• The General - A Buster Keaton comedy from 1926, with a lot of trains. Made even more amazing when you realize that all that running around on top of the trains and jumping off the tracks and everything is real; special effects were pretty minimal in 1926. Excellent flick.
• Sullivan's Travels - sort of like It's A Wonderful Life, but a comedy from 1941, starring Veronica Lake. Two thumbs up.
• Overdrawn at the Memory Bank - it was slaughtered on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and was most excellent. It starred Raul Julia (!) and was taped (not filmed, taped) in the early '80s. It was supposed to be all high-tech sci-fi in the future, where if you misbehaved your personality was temporarily transferred to a wild animal for "reconditioning" or something. The special effects made Dr. Who look like Jurassic Park, and the acting was pretty much non-existent. And it was sponsored by a grant from WNET, the PBS affiliate in New York City. Astonishingly bad on every level.

Crap From The Past is progressing slowly. I had been doing some production work at a community station, much like the one I was on in Tucson. The goal was to wait until someone at the station died, then replace his show with Crap From The Past in the schedule. A perfect plan, except for the really slow attrition rate at the station. Nobody died. So I decided to pitch my show to every other station in town, and even to some radio networks to try and get CFTP syndicated. The responses that I've gotten back so far were pretty much what I expected: no room on the schedule for another specialty show, but the program directors all liked Crap From The Past. One PD liked it enough to recommend it to one of the syndicated show guys at a radio network, which is pretty cool. My most promising leads still haven't gotten the demo tapes yet (they're still in the mail), so I should know before the year ends whether or not I'll be rich and famous. If I'm not a household name by this time next year, you'll know the outcome.

If you have Microsoft Word Version 7, type "zzzz" and let the spell checker fix it. I don't know why, either.

A potentially great idea: a radio station with a format of "Books on Tape". That's it, just Books on Tape, played 24 hours a day over the airwaves.

If Margaret were here at work, say would say Hi, I'm sure. (Holy jeez! I forgot to go home.)

On that note, enjoy the longest night of the year (December 22nd - my anniversary!) Out here in Minneapolis, the sun will rise at 7:48 and set at 4:34.

See ya,
Ron "Altoids saved my marriage" G

It's 1000 feet.