Ron's Big Life Update - July 1998

"Summer blondes, revealing tan lines/I'll make more moves than Allied Van Lines." - Blotto, from "I Wanna Be A Lifeguard", 1980

Hope you had a good July 4th - beer and pyrotechnics all around.

Not much exciting is going on out here. We're having a large tree removed from our backyard. This is the tree that dropped a branch on our garage in May, and it's a very large, dead tree. I don't know the exact dimension, but I most definitely can't put my arms all the way around it. Maybe half-way around it, if I'm lucky. Margaret got to watch the guys in the cherry-picker, which they drove onto our backyard. (Part of it is paved in concrete, put there by a former owner who presumably wanted a nice place to park his Winnebago. Very Minnesotan.) I haven't seen so much dead wood since I left Kodak. (Badda-BING thank you very much...) It will be nice to have a sunny backyard now.

Insurance companies paid out $848 million to Twin Cities homeowners in the first half of 1998 - more than the last 31 years combined. I guess the storms really were a fluke. We'll be having our roof replaced and the side of the house re-sided in the fall, when the demand dies down and hopefully, the quality of the repairs goes back up.

You might have noticed that everyone's favorite supermodel, Cindy Crawford, married some guy named R. Gerber. Needless to say, this makes me very proud to be an R. Gerber.

In one of the more surreal occurrences in my life, my friend Mia-from-Tucson showed up at our house a few Wednesdays ago. Ding-dong... HI! I was just in the neighborhood and thought I'd stop by! (!!!) Most surprising, since it's something like an 1800-mile drive to Tucson. She was driving across the country, and thought she'd say HI before she drove off to Chicago. She took pictures, had some lemonade, watched South Park with us, and drove off toward Chicago. Very very surreal.

Margaret and I spent the last few days in NY with mom. Grandma was coming in from Florida, so my brother and I had orders to come home to see Grandma. We ate lots of black-and-whites (the same cookies once featured on Seinfeld) and NY pizza, replaced the faucets in mom's bathroom, and saw Grandma. We also made into Chinatown one night, and Margaret bought a $10 watch from some guy who sells watches on Mulberry Street. What a hoot! And despite the fact that my mom's car hit 77,777 miles at precisely 4:44 PM on 7/28 (no joke!), I did not win $290 million in the PowerBall lottery.

We recently spent a day at ValleyFair - the local amusement park. Seagate picked up the tab - it's their annual "Appease The Masses" day. Most excellent, if you go on a weekday. The numbers from "The Wild Thing", their new rolley-coaster are as follows. Maximum velocity: 74 MPH. First drop > 200 feet. Altitude: Highest thing around for quite a few towns. Color: Green, the scariest of all colors. Margaret and I had a very good time, even though she punched me when I kidded her about the "you must be THIS tall" thingy. She's 5 foot 4, and she'll hurt you pretty good.

Rented "The Sweet Hereafter" and "When We Were Kings" - both excellent. Saw "Lost In Space" in the cheapie theater - stinky. There is a cheapie theather within walking distance to our house that's undergone some renovations recently, so it's now the "Cinema Grill". You sit at tables, just like at TGIFriday's, and you order food that's just like at TGIFriday's for prices comparable to TGIFriday's. I don't know if this food-at-film will start a national craze, but it's an interesting experiment. It's good as long as it's not a super-serious movie. ("Shindler's List" with potato chips? I think not.)

I have a friend working in radio in Boston who recently commissioned me to put together some CDs with the worst possible music I could find. I mean jaw-dropping, nausea-inducing, bad music. It's part of a Chinese water torture-type contest for his morning show. No problem! I've sent off 2 CDs already, and I can't even imagine the bodily harm that would come from (a) listening to the discs straight through, or (b) the retribution that one would take from being made to listen to the discs straight through. "Pac Man Fever", Milli Vanilli, the two guys from Milli Vanilli actually singing, "Rock Me Jerry Lewis" (sorry Mike, he asked for it by name), The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" massacred by Barry White, the Shaggs, and many many more. Plus a whole CD devoted to horrible medleys like "Stars on 45" and "Hooked On Classics"! I am beaming with pride that these atrocities are getting airplay, and I am very proud to be the unofficial Godfather of Crap. (Tune in to WFNX Boston to hear the Pain firsthand, and tune in to "Crap From The Past" at www.kfai.org to hear my own show. It hurts real bad.)

In the last two weeks, my organization chart at work has changed twice. We now have a new CEO, and I don't know what effect this will have on my day to day routines. If I have to eat lunch at a time other than 11:30, I'm gonna get mad.

Hope all is well in your far-away places. Stay warm...

Ron "There's a lot of crap on the radio, but there's only one Crap From The Past" G

Ron's Big Life Update - June 1998

Hi, all. First, and most importantly, Crap From The Past now has its own webpage as well as on-line audio (RealAudio for you propellerheads.) Go to www.kfai.org and find the Crap From The Past stuff. I have old playlists, too. Boy, am I keeping up with technology or what?

Well, Mother Nature has been totally wacked out for the last few weeks. I'll explain.

Friday, May 15th: Around 4 PM it got dark enough outside so that the lights in the parking lot went on, which is not a good sign because it's usually light until 9 PM this time of year. I heard rumors that a storm was moving in, so I just drove home. And it's a good thing I did, because Minneapolis got hit with a serious hailstorm. (Margaret confirms the seriousness of it, and she grew up in hailstorm country in eastern Colorado.) The skies got kinda greenish, then pitch black dark, then the winds started to blow pretty hard, then for about sixty seconds, the Twin Cities got pummelled with hailstones the size of melon-balls. (If you have a melon-baller, they looked like translucent pieces of canteloupe.) This may not sound like much, but it was enough to dent nearly all the cars that were parked outside (think ball-peen hammer dent every few inches on every car in town). Not mine, though, because I was a chicken and went home. It also dented the heck out of our aluminum siding on the south side of the house, and broke one window. The insurance appraisial: New roof, new siding on one side of house, new window, four new screens. (Woo-hoo! I would've needed a new roof in a few years anyway!) I saved a few of the hailstones in my freezer.

Two weeks later...

Saturday, May 30: It started to rain in the evening. Margaret and I were over at some friends' house. We got some serious lightning, and decided we better check in with the Weather Channel. (Cliff Claven's favorite!) We managed to see severe thunderstorm warnings all over the state briefly before cable went out. We decided that it was time go home before it got any worse, but nature had other plans for us, as evidenced by the wall of rain, the severe bendage of large tree on our friends' lawn, and the emergency sirens that went off. We spent a few minutes in their basement with a radio on, and carefully drove home about a half hour later during rain that was merely torrential. During the drive home, we heard that there were some large trees down and some power outages, but we had no idea what we were in for when we got home. We found a large branch about 10 inches in diameter resting on our garage, and an even larger branch about 12-15 inches in diameter resting between our house and the neighbor's garage. (It actually squashed a bunch of plants on her driveway, but I'll get to that in a minute.) It turned out that there were straight-line wind gusts over 80 MPH that took down lots and lots of big trees around the city, including the oldest tree in the state, which was something like 122 feet high. My house was without power from Saturday to Thursday, so we ate out a lot and I dropeed the leftovers at the fridge at work. The insurance appraisal: New roof on the garage. (More woo-hoo! That needed a new roof, too!) Needless to say, we lost the hailstones from the last storm.

So what about the neighbor's plants? Well, our neighbor is nuts. Literally crazy, we think. If nothing else, she's an idiot. She's in her 50's and she sells plants in an illegal garage sale from her driveway all summer. We wouldn't mind much if we liked her, but she's an idiot. (Too many instances to describe here. I'm sure Margaret could go on and on for hours, but suffice it to say that she's an idiot and Margaret and I wish nothing but evil on her and her stupid plants.) Well, when the huge branch fell off our tree, it missed everything structural and landed squarely on her plants. We think that God must be pushing the "smite" button.

So we got fed up with the idiot-neighbor's illegal garage sale and we called the IRS on her. (We figured that the Man would be more responsive than the police.) And sure enough, we watched with giddy kid-excitement as a Richfield public safety car drove up, the officer got out, the officer began asking idiot-lady some questions, and idiot-lady went ballistic yelling at the officer. Good plan! I'm sure the yelling part will look good in the police report. Well, that was two weeks ago, and we decided that since the officer's visit had no effect on her plant business (signs still up, etc.), that we'd call again. And sure enough, the Richfield public safety car drove up, the officer got out, the officer began asking idiot-lady some questions, and idiot-lady went ballistic again. Ooh - this is so much fun!!! The plan is to call a third time this Sunday when idiot-lady is in full swing, because this time they can cite her for a bunch of violations like not obeying the first two warnings, not paying taxes on her illegal business, and all sorts of good stuff! We hope she goes to jail. Stupid neighbor...

I have to say that the weather and the idiot-lady next door have totally dominated our lives for the last few weeks. I have seen two excellent movies and I will give them quick reviews here:

• "The Truman Show". I read a review that called it an 80 million dollar art film with Jim Carrey. I thought it was excellent, and unlike anything I'd ever seen before. I'd compare it to "Forrest Gump", but I thought Gump wasn't all that great. Two thumbs way up, and I hope it wins some Oscars next year.
• "In The Company Of Men" (on video). An indie film from last year about two scumbag business guys who try to both seduce and then dump a girl. That's pretty much the whole plot, but it doesn't convey just how scummy these two guys are. I don't think I have ever seen such despicable characters on the big screen (and I saw "They Saved Hitler's Brain"...) An excellent, thoroughly original, and deeply disturbing film. I loved it.

What if there was a stuffed animal store? Literally, a store where you could buy animals, stuffed.

We have riding lawn mowers. So why not a riding vacuum cleaner? Could you think of anything more fun than driving around the house on your riding vacuum cleaner?

I had a dream not too long ago in which I was at some garage sale and was looking through some kids' toys and found one of those old Fisher-Price "record" players, which has the mechanism for a music box in the little "tone arm" and plays those fake plastic records, each with a different "song" on them. I was looking through the records (as I have been known to do in real life) and looking at the titles, and I remember seeing some mundane songs like "Edelweiss" right next to a record by Parliament. PARLIAMENT?!?!? I imaged "Make my funk the P-Funk/I wants to get funked up" played in tinkly music box sounds, and I woke up laughing.

I just remembered my brother telling me about a body-builder friend of his who occasionally refers to people as "Quadzilla", "Tyrannosaurus Pects", and "Rippopotamus". I don't know why such things creep into my mind...

So be sure to tune into CFTP if you have a sound card and an internet connection on your computer. The website has statistics to tell me how many people are listening, and frankly the numbers are pretty puny right now. www.kfai.org

And be sure to wish evil on the idiot-lady next door,

Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber

Ron's Big Life Update - April 1998 (II)

So I want to find out if I can get my teeth cleaned by a particular dentist whose office is one block away from my house. So I check the big list of eligible dentists, which says to call this particular toll-free number to find out if he's still participating in the health plan. So I try the number and it's busy. So I try sporadically over the next hour, and it's still busy. Miraculously, I get through, but right around quitting time for me. So I've been on hold for at least twenty minutes, and I figure that this is as good a time as any to write an e-letter.

Well, things are settling down after our stay with mom in NY. We were in NY for about two weeks, and now we've been home for almost two weeks. The outpouring of support for mom has been remarkable; she's gotten over a hundred sympathy cards, and friends are still calling and stopping by all the time. Since we spent two weeks with family, we naturally accumulated a whole lot of family stories, some of which I will share with you now.

I have known for years that my stepsister Debbie has a great sense of humor. I found out during this trip that when she was in college, she used to celebrate her friends' birthdays by hitting them in the face with a pie. Just like in the cartoons. Apparently, she very quickly became notorious for this, and sometimes had to go to great lengths to make sure that the person got hit in the face with a pie, like hiding in a dorm room, etc. While reminiscing fondly about one particular encounter, she remarked, "They had to take up the carpet." I laughed.

I found out that my grandfather used to breed pugs. (For those of you that are as inorganic as I am, Margaret tells me that pugs are dogs. Ugly little smelly dogs.) I hate dogs. Up until recently, I thought I was following very closely in my grandfather's footsteps. Well, apparently not any more.

I got a bunch of great stories about my brother Kenny, most of which are directly from Kenny himself. I distinctly remember him yelling "Somebody get me out of this stupid crib!" at a very early age, and I think I taught him that.

Kenny loves to eat (even more than I do), and nearly all of his stories involve (1) food or (2) his car, a 1983 Chevy Celebrity, which is known for breaking down in the worst possible places and for being nearly filled with old food. I could recall the incident in which the mice living off the old food in his car escaped through the garage and infested the house, but I'll do that some other time.

A few summers ago, Kenny and some friends were driving to New Orleans, and had stopped at Taco Bell somewhere in Mississippi. Somehow, there were some leftover tacos and the guys just left them in the car. After they had ripened in the car in the hot summer sun for two full days, Kenny decided to eat them. As he put it, he got a little case of "The Botch", and was plenty sick.

Then there was the time that he and five or six other guys decided to go to Taco Bell and order one of everything on the menu. Kenny wanted to be the one to actually place the order at the drive-thru, naturally using his car. The guys pulled up to the drive-thru at about the same time as another car. Kenny waved the other car ahead of them, knowing that they were about to place a fairly substantial order. The other car insisted that Kenny go first. Well, OK. Kenny pulled up to the little speaker and began to go down the menu item by item. "I'd like one taco." "Soft or hard shell?" "One of each. I'd like one chicken burrito." "Regular or deluxe?" "One of each." The woman at the other end of the speaker figured out pretty quickly what they were doing and naturally got very upset. Kenny reassured her that this was all legitimate, and that they did indeed want all this food. They held up handfuls of money for the little camera to see. Well, Kenny worked his way down the entire menu, including cinnamon twists, hot chocolate, and one of every soft drink. The bill came to about $51, and it was a fairly large effort to get all the food from the little window into the car. The woman gave Kenny an entire box of hot sauce packets. It took quite a few hours for the six or seven of them to eat all the food, but they did it. The worst was the sour cream that was on some of the items; apparently sour cream isn't too good after it's been at room temperature for a few hours. Kenny tells the story with a twinkle in his eye, especially when he recalls how when the car behind him pulled up to the window, the woman told them that they were closed for the next fifteen minutes. Those guys were pissed.

I think the best story was from Phil's days in the navy. He was in the navy in the early '50s, and only told us one story about his navy days during the entire time we knew him. He was brand new to the navy, on a ship at sea somewhere, and was in charge of being the timekeeper guy. (I'm sure there's a better term for that job, but I forget what it is.) Every hour on the hour, Phil was supposed to ring a bell to let the crew know what time it is. He'd ring it once, then twice the next hour, three times the hour after that, and so on. What Phil didn't know is that when you get to eight bells, the next hour resets to one bell. Well, Phil was a picture of enthusiasm. He rang his one bell, then his two bells, then three. He was proud of his job, and he rang the bells loudly and clearly. Then six, then seven, then eight. Then, on the ninth bell, he "wound up and gave it such a ZETZ!" (a wonderful Yiddish word meaning OY! I hit it so HARD!) The captain looked up, then walked over to Phil. "Sailor, how long have you been in the navy?" "Six months, sir." "Well, I have been in the navy twenty-five years, and in all my years as captain, I have NEVER heard NINE BELLS!" I still laugh when I think of nine bells...

Ron "thank you for holding" G

P.S. I got taken off hold halfway through the Taco Bell Menu story.

Ron's Big Life Update - April 1998 (I)

More bad news from the Gerber household: After battling leukemia for a few months, my stepfather Phil passed away this morning. Most of you had met Phil at some point, and you know that he was my "dad", even if not by blood relation; we were very close. The funeral will be on Thursday , and we'll be sitting shiva (sp?) until Sunday. Margaret and my brother are already in NY with my mom, and I'll be flying out this evening. We'll certainly miss him.

If you need to get in touch with me between now and Sunday, I'll be at my mom's house.

Hope all is well in your neck of the woods. Say a little prayer for my mom...

Ron

Ron's Big Life Update - March 1998

"Dit produkt is met de meeste zorg vervaardigd. Er kan echter geen enkele aansprakelijkheid worden aanvaard voor eventuele fouten en/of onvolkomenheden." - from Hertz roadmap of Holland. I don't know what it means, but my spell-checker says that all the words except four are spelled wrong.

Well, I have nothing of substance to report on, so I've accumulated here a small batch of unrelated thoughts, as I have been known to do.

We got a new TV. Well, not NEW new, but new to us. Margaret got in for FREE from her dad's old apartment in Denver, and it was made in 1981 by Sony and has a remote control! This is a big step up for us; our old TV was made in 1975, had no remote, and had difficulty getting any channels except Channel 3 (we used to do the tuning on the VCR). I got the '75 model for free in Tucson (thanks, Tim), and I feel obligated to pass it on for free. We'll be donating it to Goodwill when spring cleaning rolls around.

So we decided to break in the new TV by renting a pair of excellent movies: Apocalypse Now (1979) and Hearts Of Darkness (1993?), which is a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. A.N. was outstanding, if incomprehensible. H.O.D. gave us a minor setback, because the opening credits immediately showed starring roles for Tim Roth and John Malkovich. We realized that we mistakenly rented "Heart Of Darkness", a 1994? remake of the William Conrad novel, not "Hearts Of Darkness", the documentary. Oops - one more trip to Discount Video, who was very understanding. Apparently, we were not the first people to screw that up.

And did anyone else notice the bizarre psychic connection between the character "Chef" in Apocalypse Now and the character "Chef" on South Park? I still laugh every time I see the words "Isaac Hayes as Chef" on the screen.

We also rented "Waiting For Guffman", which is a fake documentary of a community theater group in Blaine, Missouri. It's directed by Christopher Guest, and is very much in the Spinal Tap vein. It's a riot. A 10.

Margaret also had some other interesting stuff besides the TV in the car when she drove back from Denver. She had a certificate from the Swiss Army thanking her Great Aunt Frida for her service during the war. (Part of Margaret's family is from Switzerland.) We can't really read it because it's in German, but I joked that the word "sharpenshooten" should be included somewhere.

The new Ben Folds Five album is terrific. (Thanks, Charles.) I'm hooked.

It looks like spring is coming early out here. It hit 70 degrees in the Twin Cities yesterday! This is not at all typical for March, which is usually the snowiest month in Minnesota. My coworkers and I celebrated by going to Old Country Buffet for lunch, also known around the office as "The Trough." I have to laugh at the large number of elderly people at Old Country Buffet - they even have prunes at the salad bar. (no joke) That explains the "Old" in Old Countrry Buffet...

As Seagate celebrated the manufacturing milestone of its one-billionth magnetic recording head, they handed out calcuators to the employees with the inscription, "one billion heads and counting". I thought it was entertaining that we can't do the head-counting on the calculators themselves, which only have eight digits.

Kudos to Entertainment Weekly for pointing out the similarities between the orange-in-all-directions hairdos of Janet Jackson and the Simpsons' Sideshow Bob.

I think I just heard Thomas Dolby's new wave classic "One Of Our Submarines" played in a string arrangement on Muzak. I think I'm gonna be sick.

I think I need to take the ratings in my Leonard Maltin movie book with a grain of salt. On the same page, I found the following two reviews:

• Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - 2-1/2 stars
• Willow - 3 stars

This is just plain wrong.

More disturbing news. I noticed that our department got a new dictionary, so I took it for a test drive. And I'm very disappointed in my findings. From the Riverside Webster's II New College Dictionary (1995):

• proactive or pro-active (pro-ak' tiv) adj. Acting in advance to deal with an expected difficulty: anticipatory. -proaction, n. -proactively, adv.

This, too, is just plain wrong. "Proactive" is a nonsense word used by managers who don't know what they're talking about. The word has been mocked by The Simpsons and Dilbert, and (at Kodak) I routinely ignored anything said by the one guy who liked to use the word in daily conversation. And now, IT'S IN THE DICTIONARY?!?!? Then again, "orientate" is also in this dictionary, so maybe the book itself is flawed. (I don't want to think that it's the whole English language.)

The "Crap From The Past" pursuits are slowly gathering steam. I was allowed to do a half hour of CFTP on the morning show of my station (community-run KFAI), and I filled in a midnight-2AM slot a few nights ago. I don't think I'm cut out for morning shows, though. While we were reading the weather, and talking about temperatures in the teens, I advised people to "throw some more cats on the fire, it's gonna be cold". In spite of my weather advice, people are starting to learn who I am, and I feel like I'm slowly making progress with a show of my own. After all, TV's "Solid Gold" wasn't built in a day...

I will leave you with an item that was forwarded to me (thanks, Seth). An item that I shared with my family, and I have never heard Grandma laugh so hard... (oy, I'm gonna plotz...)

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The 8 Worst Convenience Foods

By PENMART10@aol.com

8. Meeter's Kraut Juice (Stokely USA): Yes, that's sauerkraut juice, which is even worse than it sounds. The taste and smell can be a bit, well, harsh, but KJ is reputed by its fans to have certain medicinal benefits (as a source of vitamin C, cure for intestinal bugs, etc.), which adds up to a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease.

7. Guycan Corned Mutton with Juices Added (Bedessee Imports): The best thing about this Uruguayan canned good is the very pouty-looking sheep on the package label -- he seems to be saying, "Go on, eat me already." The second-best thing is the presence of both "cooked mutton" and "mutton" in the ingredients listing, which would seem to have all the mutton bases covered.

6. Armour Pork Brains in Milk Gravy (Dial Corp.): If you're really looking to clog up those arteries in a hurry, you'll be pleased to learn that a single serving of pork brains has 1,170 percent of our recommended daily cholesterol intake. All the more ingenious, then, that the label on this product helpfully features a recipe for brains and scrambled eggs.

5. Sweet Sue Canned Whole Chicken (Sweet Sue Kitchens, Inc.): From its size (think growth-impaired Cornish hen) to its overall appearance (it's stewed in a quivering mass of aspic goop), this product may change forever your idea of what constitutes a chicken. Gives new meaning to the old line about meat "falling off the bone."

4. Musk Life Savers (Nestle Confectionery): You may think musk is a scent, but over in Australia, they think it's a candy flavor. A candy flavor that tastes disturbingly like raw meat, to be precise. But what did you expect from a country where everyone happily consumes Vegemite?

3. Blind Robins Smoked Ocean Herring (recently discontinued by Bar Food Products): Possibly the world's most bizarre prepackaged tavern snack. Interestingly, the product's titular robin isn't actually blind, he's blindfolded -- the better, presumably, to avoid looking at these heavily salted herring strips, which look like giant slugs.

2. Kylmaenen Reindeer Pate` (Kylmaenen Oy): This Finnish canned good may not be particulary tasty, but at least it answers the age-old question of why Rudolph was so eager for that safe, steady job on Santa's sleigh team -- he didn't want to end up a cracker spread.

1. Tengu Clam Jerky (Tengu Co.): Nothing you've ever consumed can prepare you for the horror that is clam jerky. Still, this product does score a sort of conceptual coup: If you're the sort who's always found raw clams too slimy and gelatinous for your taste, these dried, shriveled mollusks will help you dislike clams on a whole new level.

[Note - originally appeared in rec.food.cooking. Reprinted with permission of PENMART10@aol.com. All are reportedly real products - ed.]

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The pork brains won me over, and Margaret made me call Grandma and ask if she knows any traditional Jewish recipes that involve brains. There are. Oy, Jewish food...

Stay warm and proactive...

Ron and Margaret G

Ron's Big Life Update - February 1998

Well, it's been a difficult week in the Gerber household. Margaret's father passed away last week, and we spent a few days in Yuma with the rest of the family. I had the chance to meet some distant members of Margaret's family, many of whom I'd never heard of. Nice people, on the whole, and some could tell a story that could make you laugh until your insides hurt. It's difficult to retell some of the stories, but two stand out in my mind, both of which were childhood games that Margaret played with her brother and sister:

• Granny. Granny is a two-player game. One player is "it", and gets to ride his (or her) bicycle in circles on the driveway. The other player is the "granny", who has to walk slowly across a diameter of the driveway without changing his (or her) speed at all. When the "granny" eventually gets run over (!), then he (she) gets to be "it" and "it" becomes the "granny". Margaret said that you'd cry only until you realized that you were now "it" and got to run over your sibling. Good lord! It's a wonder that Margaret survived childhood at all!
• Bucket-head. Also a two-player game. One person sits up in a tree with a five-gallon gas can attached to a pulley. (I think it was a bucket in the original version of the game.) The other person has to run out from the base of the tree while the tree-dweller tries to drop the gas can on him (her), then they switch. Margaret's brother can clearly recall one time when he got hit squarely on the head. In his words, "I got all dizzy and had tunnel vision, but I wouldn't let anyone tell mom because she'd make us stop playing."

The more I find out about childhood in Yuma, the less I believe in Darwinism.

I also found out about a family dog named "Dodger" that recently got run over.

Then I flew out of Denver to San Jose for a business meeting, and Margaret stayed behind to deal with family stuff. She'll be back here in about two weeks.

San Jose was rainy, to say the least. Windy and rainy still doesn't do justice. Mighty windy and mighty rainy comes close. We spent the first day and night in Santa Cruz, and stayed at this nice hotel on the beach that we like. Normally, the beach is nice and sandy, as one would expect from a beach. This time, we looked out our windows and saw driftwood - enough of it so that you could barely make out the sand underneath. Over the course of the next two days, it was windy enough so that by the time we left, the driftwood had blown inland and left the beach clean again. They estimated the winds at 50-75 MPH in the region, and the newspaper headline the day we flew out read "79,000 without power in Bay area". Oy! We had a little bit of time to kill before we were due at the airport, so we drove to a local flea market, which had unfortunately suffered lots and lots of wind damage. I felt bad for the vendors there who were fixing up their damaged booths; it's odd how I felt much more sympathy for these people than for the people whose houses were washed down the side of the cliffs. (Part of me says that if you're stupid enough to build a house on the side of a cliff, then don't kvetch when it falls down. But that's just me.)

So I got back into town over the weekend, and what should be waiting in my big pile of mail? Why, it's a invitation to purchase the bestest book in the world: "The Gerbers in America: From 1790 to 1998!" Joy joy!

"You'll go back in history and meet Gerbers like Francis, a farmer, who lived in Monroe County, Illinois in 1850." The author of the invitation, Eugene E. Gerber, "guarantees that once you've started this Gerber book, you won't want to put it down." Utterly spellbinding! "No direct genealogical connection to your family or to your ancestry is implied or intended;" I guess we're supposed to delight in the listing of our non-family namesakes. Well, at least "each heirloom quality Gerber book is handmade to order and elaborately illustrated," so that my $34.50 plus postage and handling would not be wasted if I actually cared about my namesakes. The publishers were nice enough to include a wholesome picture of three Gerber-looking people smiling at each other while flipping through a rather paltry-looking paperback book.

Compared to junk mail, I preferred the baby food jokes.

I, like a billion other people, enjoyed "Titanic". It told a nice story, and it LOOKED amazing. Unlike "Waterworld," I think the million dollars per minute was well spent.

I also saw "Fresh", a terrific movie about a 12-year-old inner city kid who's a runner for drug dealers. It came out in 1994 (or '92?), and it was excellent. It probably flew beneath the radar of Blockbuster Video, so I can't imagine anyone else has seen it.

I just found out that German pop singer Falco was killed in a car accident. 1998 stinks.

I recently picked up some good 45's, including "Right Between The Eyes" by Wax, an early recording of Nick Lowe's "Cruel To Be Kind" (later rerecorded for the hit version), an early recording of the Pretenders' "The Wait" (later rerecorded for their first album), Justine Bateman [Mallory from Family Ties] destroying "I Can't Get No Satisfaction", Barry White destroying "Louie Louie", and Laverne and Shirley singing "16 Reasons". My 45 collection wins the gold in the Special Olympics of Music.

I take a certain perverse pleasure in knowing that while El Nino beats the snot out the rest of the country, Minnesota has been dry with daytime highs in the 40's.

Finally, I recently had a dream that I'd like to share with you. I dreamt that I was back in school in Rochester, and that we were having one of the U of R's big party days. Only this one was especially sensitive to us Jews. It was "Yarmulka" day, and because it was cold outside, they were handing out free Yarmulkas With Ear Flaps. I woke up laughing.

I guess I should go home now. I'm not in a big hurry because the fridge is empty and Margaret's gone. I feel like a bachelor again, and it's no fun for a single guy to own a house.

Stay warm,
Ron "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the Stars On 45" G

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.