Ron's Big Life Update - October 2006

I just found out the word “strewn”, as in “there’s cat hair strewn all over the house”, comes from the verb infinitive “to strew”, which I’ve never heard in any usage other than “strewn”. I also found out from one of my clients that periods, commas, semi-colons and other punctuation marks always go inside the quotes, like “this,” but not “this”. Who knew? If my editor changes them, then so be it; until then, I’ll wrongly insist that punctuation goes outside the quotes.

Mid-July – Got a lot of great reactions to the news that Liz and I are engaged. The best was from Ron Thums (co-host of KFAI’s “Radio Rumpus Room”, which airs right before me). Upon hearing from Liz that she was engaged, he asked, “Does Ron know?” Awesome.

Late July – It was hot. The heat index got up to 106 degrees on July 15th. Bleh. My lawn was crunchy for most of the summer.

Early August – There’s one particular restaurant location very close to my house that seems to be doomed. Since I moved to town nine years ago, it’s been at least four different restaurants, all of them awful and all of them going out of business.

The most recent one was a pizza place that also sold Chinese food (???), and they did a miserable job of both. That closed and stayed vacant for about a year. One day a sign appeared saying that Howie D’s steakhouse would be in that location, but the sign disappeared after a few months. Guess Howie D saved himself the trouble and expense of actually opening the restaurant before going out of business. And that seemed like a dumb idea because it was literally two stores away from a “Steak & Ale”.

Now it’s the “Atlantic Buffet”, a pretty darn awful Chinese buffet. They do have a large selection of dishes, but I would prefer just one GOOD dish, instead of lots of bad ones. And like their business card says, they’re the “Best Buffet In Tow” [sic].

Early August – Liz and I drove down to Iowa to see her grandparents. On the drive down there, I flipped around the radio dial while Liz drove. Just to be a jerk, I stopped on a station that was playing Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day”. Liz immediately retaliated by digging her nails into my arm, breaking the skin, and causing my first ever song-related injury. (Liz felt bad afterwards, and it really didn’t hurt much, but it still makes a good story.) You’d think that 15 years of abuse dished out on “Crap From The Past” would have had a similar effect on some listener at some point, but I guess I’ve been lucky.

So thanks, Daniel Powter, for sinking to a low that had previously been unattainable by mere mortal songwriters. Your song actually drew blood; you must be very proud. May your second album spread pox, plague and pestilence coast to coast and around the world.

Mid-August – The upscale grocery store near my house set up a “Kosher Bakery” section! They rotate which products they carry, and over the past few weeks, I found black & whites and hamantaschen. (They weren’t great, but they were better than nothing.) Jewish food in Minnesota?!? What a disorienting experience! And even more disorienting is the logo on their packages, which has a Kosher for Passover logo superimposed on the state of Minnesota. What what what???

Late August – Decided not to go to my High School reunion, and was going to cancel the trip out east, but Liz convinced me that she needed to meet my 95-year-old grandmother and needed to do it soon. So we spent an extremely short weekend in New York seeing family and doing virtually nothing else. We zipped through Manhattan just long enough to experience some serious New York pizza, and then spent the world’s shortest weekend at my mom’s house in Nanuet. My apologies to virtually everyone in the New York area – we got to see essentially no one this trip.

After we landed in Newark, we took a shuttle to our rental car place. The shuttle driver was most likely crazy. He was blaring gospel music in the van, and driving approximately 350 MPH as he weaved in and out of traffic at the Newark airport. One would think that death metal would have been his music of choice, but nope – gospel. Well, if the gospel music was there to get God’s attention, then we passengers were thankful. We arrived intact, and we did indeed sing songs of praise and thanks once we were back on solid ground.

I would not recommend renting a car from Payless in Newark.

My brother Kenny and I have always had a strange fascination with baseball statistics. Not because we’re avid baseball fans, but because we like potentially meaningless statistics. I think a lot of it stems from a game we watched as kids, in which a batter fouled off at least 8 pitches. Kenny and I wondered who had the record for the most foul balls in a single at-bat. It turned out that there was no way to find out, because that particular statistic wasn’t kept at the time we saw the game. It might be kept now, though; baseball stats have since gotten way out of hand.

Case in point: Kenny found one particular statistic that may be the most convoluted and/or least meaningful statistic in all of recorded history – “LIPS”, or Late-Inning Pressure Situations, defined as “Any at-bat in the seventh inning or later with the Red Sox leading by one run, tied or having the tying run on base, at bat or on deck.” (USA Today, Thursday, August 17, Page 2C) Is this meaningful to anyone? What happened to good old AVG, HR, RBI?

Liz got to see the coolest thing in Rockland County, NY: the Rockland Bakery. Boy, do they make bread! The conveyor belt system is a sight to behold, and they let you in the back to pluck rolls right off the belts as they come out of the ovens. Plus, they make killer cakes and pastries, so I got Liz hooked on authentic New York black & whites. Now she understands why every trip out east is non-stop NY pizza and black & whites; they’re fantastic, and you just can’t get them in the Midwest.

During one stretch right before we left New York, I found myself with two hours to kill, so I drove into New Jersey to see if the last remaining record store that I knew out there is still open. To my amazement, it is! Except not on Sundays, so I got to look in the window and not much else.

So since I was in north Jersey with no record store to visit, I decided to visit one of my old summer jobs. To my dismay, Lehn & Fink, the company where I spent two summers in the maintenance department, was no longer there. Instead, there was brand new building on the property, which wasn’t quite finished yet.

Lehn & Fink made Lysol cleaning products, Bayer aspirin, Minwax sealants and stains, and a host of other cool products. At the time, the building was their corporate offices with a little bit of lab space, and I was the summer lackey who lugged stuff around, painted the equipment on the roof, and changed all the fluorescent light bulbs in the building as an after-hours overtime project. They’d send me all around town in the company van, picking up pizzas, delivering equipment, and filling up the tank. I had orders not to use a particular gas station on the corner that sells that “Mickey Mouse” gas; only the name-brand stuff for the company vans.

So they must have moved, or closed up shop. I was surprised at how sad this made me, considering I was only there for two summers and one Christmas break, all about 18 years ago. I thought about the guys in the print shop there, who printed off fake coupons for Park Pizza and then sent me out to pick up their order, without telling me the coupons were fake. Or the time they printed off a label for one of their aerosol cans for a wonderful new product that neutralized a particular annoying member of the maintenance department: “Fred-Be-Gone”. I thought about the time I strung up the garland around the top of the building during the holiday season, and then wrote “Ron” in fifty-foot high script letters in the snow on the roof. Or the time I had to disassemble, then reassemble, a set of office partitions because someone’s office size was too small by (literally) one inch. Or the time I nearly cut off a few toes moving some of those partitions – a piece of glass broke free and fell, cutting right through my leather boot, and actually broke the skin, but no blood. You can image the feeling of dread as I carefully took off my boot. Or the time when I knocked over and broke eight fluorescent light bulbs in the office of one of the VPs. Or the fantastic sound the fluorescent bulbs would make when you squash them in the trash compactor (environmental hazards? Ha!) Or the time I cleaned off the patio chairs with “Double Super Potent Cleaner”, an in-house product that was not for sale to the outside world. I cleaned the chairs on a Friday, and by Monday, most of the skin had peeled off my hands. That stuff was amazing!

In hindsight, it’s very clear why I was sad.

Now that I was depressed, I decided to drive all the way across Rockland County, going south to north on Route 45. I’d never done that before, and it seemed like a good way to see what else had changed and what hadn’t.

The baseball fields where I played my Little League games are still there. (Even the one where I started and ended my pitching career by throwing 32 low pitches in a row, all right across the plate, thereby walking the first 8 batters of the game. Never pitched again.)

I hadn’t driven the roads in 20 years, but I knew all the curves from sitting on the summer camp buses for years on end. Once I hit the north end of Route 45, I decided to see if those camps were still there, since I still had an hour to kill. I drove past the studios of what used to be one of the local Rockland County radio station (AM 91/WRKL), which is now an all-Polish language station.

Miraculously, the car seemed to know where to go, winding through the maze of ribbon-like two-lane roads at the north end of Rockland County. Not sure where I was actually going, but confident that those roads led somewhere interesting. As I drove past a parking lot and a field on my left, it clicked – I just drove past Deer Mountain Day Camp, which I attended in the summers of 1979 and 1980 (as a 10- and 11-year-old!)

I turned around and pulled into the empty parking lot. At first, I was spooked because there was no one around, but then I realized it was Sunday and day camps are completely deserted on Sundays. Not knowing if there was any security guard around, I wandered slowly through the grounds, which I hadn’t seen since I was 11. (Bear in mind that I don’t have any close friends that go as far back as 1979 – I met my close childhood friends later on in junior high.)

Incredibly, everything was just like I remembered it, and in really good condition. The little lunch counter that made the best hamburgers ever, the little wooden bunks where we’d change in and out of icky wet bathing suits (a task I hate to this day), the volleyball courts where I discovered that I could jump higher than a nerdy kid could be expected to jump, the tiny lake (“Lake Inferior” I used to call it) with a few canoes and kayaks. I couldn’t believe it. I was absolutely astonished that something from so long ago could be so immaculately preserved! Fresh coats of paint on everything. Spiffy nets on the tennis and volleyball courts. Just like when I was 11!

And as I strolled to the far end of the campground, I remembered why I had such an attachment to Deer Mountain Day Camp. Back then, they had a tiny, carrier-current AM radio station (“WDMC”), which you could hear all over the grounds. And one of the scheduled activities was Radio, right along with Arts & Crafts, kickball, and lunch. I got my start in radio right there, under the watchful eye of a senior counselor who called me Radio Ronald on the air (ugh!), and a junior counselor who introduced me to the drama of the chart positions on the Billboard Hot 100.

Back then, their little radio bunk had two turntables, a Numark DJ mixer that had a “talk” switch that abruptly knocked down the level of the music so you could talk over it, a mike in a mike stand, and a handful of rock record albums. As you might imagine, I spent the majority of the summer playing with the equipment as much as I was allowed. I even had my stepfather Phil paint a little “WDMC” sign on a block of wood, so the mike stand would look all official, like the ones you see at press conferences.

This is where I got my start in radio. 27 years ago. And it was still here!

As if my eyes weren’t tearing up enough, I noticed on one of the bunks at the far end of the grounds a little sign on the outside that read, “Radio”. Like Omigod! I looked in the window, and saw one CD player, a cheap mixer, and a microphone in a mike stand. Not much of a radio station, and it looked like it hadn’t been used in a while, but it still existed!

I was amazed. I wondered how many other little impressionable 11-year-olds had caught the radio bug from this place in the last 27 years. Or, for that matter, an Arts & Crafts bug that turned into a hobby in quilting. Or any other of the activities on that weekly schedule, which one day a week would always read, “Bowling, bowling, bowling, bowling, lunch.”

I drove home in shock. Of all the little morsels of my childhood that have evaporated over the years, I still couldn’t believe this one was still here. When I got home, I tried to describe it to mom and to Liz, but it just didn’t have the same impact in mere words. I’m just sorry I couldn’t find any other people on the grounds; I’m pretty sure someone there would enjoy hearing a thank-you from a former camper who was very grateful for one of their summer camp activities from a mere 27 years ago.
Late August – Liz and I played hooky and went to ValleyFair, a local amusement park. Over the course of about ten hours, we rode 29 rides. That’s 29 funs, in our unit of currency.

Late August – More hooky and went to the State Fair, where we ate 11 food items, most of which were on a stick. 11 funs – same as last year.

Late August – Went to a midnight showing of “Plan 9 From Outer Space”, the best worst movie ever.

How bad?

• Bela Lugosi died three days into the shooting, so rather than scrap the handful of shots he was in, director Ed Wood replaced him with a guy about six inches taller who kept a cape in front of his face for the remainder of the movie. I think the new guy was the director’s wife’s chiropractor or something like that.
• The woodenest of wooden dialogue. “You know, it’s a funny thing when you consider, the earth people who can think are so frightened of those who cannot.”
• Absurdly cheap sets. You can see headstones in the graveyard wobbling when people walk by. The shots of the spaceship are hubcaps on a string. You can actually see the string. The same desk turns up in a government office, a spaceship, and an airplane cockpit.

In short, very, very bad. And certainly the most entertaining bad movie I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t believe Liz hadn’t seen it before. This makes my 50th-or-so viewing, and the second up on the big screen.

Mid-September – The rep who handles our work bank accounts decided to show her appreciation for us by dropping off three whole pies at the office. And on a day when a bunch of us were out of town – there were four people and three pies that day. That glorious, wonderful day. The pies lasted about a week, with a little help from all of us.

Mid-September – Spent a day in Atlanta for business. My tiny law firm in Minneapolis is partnering with a huge firm in Atlanta, so we flew out to check the place out and meet people.

This was my first time outside the Atlanta airport, and I kinda liked it. The train system (“Marta”) took us to midtown, and we walked about a block to our hotel. The law office was just across the street from the hotel, so we certainly didn’t need a car.

I got to wander around for an hour after we flew in, and I strolled through the Botanical Gardens and Piedmont Park, which has everything you could ever want in a park – tennis courts, bike and running trails, water fountains, big huge green field for soccer and football games, plenty of people throwing around frisbees, and a guy playing the bagpipes. (Is that the “Chariots Of Fire” theme I hear?)

We even found a great place for dinner. If you’re ever in midtown Atlanta, I can wholeheartedly recommend “ONE. midtown kitchen” (that’s how it’s spelled, with odd capitalization and punctuation). Very good food, cool atmosphere, and excellent staff. I had a dessert with some blueberry ice cream, which had the most vivid blueberry flavor I’ve ever tasted. Apparently, there’s a “TWO” and “THREE” elsewhere in town, owned by the same people. I don’t know how often I’ll be getting out to Atlanta, but I now have a short (and numbered) list of restaurants to try.

Late September – We put Liz’s condo on the market, and moved everything except the furniture into my house. Including the cats. Keep in mind, my cat is a 13-year-old girl cat, and her cats are 1- and 2-year-old boys. It’s like the skate punks moved in with Grandma.

We kept her cats in my TV room, which has French doors with big windows, so her cats could see out and my cat could see in. I was pretty sure that my old cat would have just hid in the basement indefinitely and not interacted at all with the new cats, so I put her food and water bowls right by the windows in the TV room. After a month or so of that, we opened up the doors, and now they can wander around without killing each other.

Combining households is fun, in that you get to pick the best stuff from two complete sets of everything. We’ve made many a trip to Goodwill with clothes, old pots and pans, towels, the giant plastic serving spoons that never really fit in the drawer anyway, a set of drinking glasses, virtually unused exercise equipment, and so on and so on and so on… It always feels good to get rid of stuff – that must be why people buy stuff to begin with. Liz’s furniture will move in once her condo sells, which may be a while.

Late September – There’s a restaurant delivery service that we routinely use at work. They don’t cook anything themselves, but they pick up and deliver from lots of local restaurants, and they’ll set up the food for meetings and whatnot. Once a year, they throw a Restaurant Expo, which is an exhibit of food. Just food, plain and simple. Exhibitors have booths, and they’ll give you plastic forks and little Styrofoam plates full of pasta, sandwiches, pizza, desserts, and whatever else they’ve got. A co-worker and I went to this year’s Restaurant Expo, and it was like the entire State Fair crammed into 45 minutes, with better food and all for free. I ate items from 14 restaurants in a mad sprint through the exhibit, and unlike the State Fair, I was very glad that there were no roller coasters there. This may very well be the Greatest Event Ever, and I’m already looking forward to next year!

Late September – “Crap From The Past” picked up a new affiliate in Liverpool, England! Home of the Beatles! That raises the total to four countries: US, New Zealand, Germany and now the UK! As always, I still can’t get arrested in Minneapolis, but apparently the show is a big hit overseas.

Coming early next year – We settled on wedding plans. We’ll be doing a destination wedding in Hawaii with parents and siblings, and no one else. Small, intimate, and most certainly memorable. Liz and I have never been out there, and this is the perfect excuse to go sightseeing. We’ll be spending a little less than two weeks on two islands there, and I’m sure there will be plenty to write about in the Big Life Update in February. (I’ll try and get one more out before the year ends.)

In early February, we’ll throw a much smaller party here in town for the locals.

We’re not registered yet. We joked about registering with SkyMall, the in-flight shopping magazine! Who WOULDN’T want a voice-activated R2-D2, a pop-up hot dog cooker, or a 9-foot by 13-foot dry erase wall map mural? That’s the life for ME!

Stay warm and cat-hair-free!
Ron and Liz

Ron's Little Life Update - July 2006

A little Big Life Update this time out.

Why so soon?

Liz and I are engaged! Woo-hoo indeed!

We just passed our 2-year anniversary, and I still thought Liz was the greatest thing since CDs, so I thought it was time to ask her, you know, the Big Question. How to do it, though?

I still hadn't decided how to do it when I got an unprompted email from Liz's best friend, Beth. Beth was bugging her persistently about getting engaged, and told Liz that she'd need to know what kind of ring she'd want. So Liz played along, and one day at work, the two of them looked online at the Tiffany's website to do some fantasy-ring shopping. Afterwards, and unbeknownst to Liz, she wrote to me that Liz especially liked a particular model of ring, just so I know. Nice of her to pass that on - something I can use!

So I now knew what to get, but how to do it was still perplexing. Should I get her a ring at Tiffany's in New York when we visit later this summer? No, she'll be expecting that. Should I take her to a fancy restaurant and hide the ring in her dessert? No way - what a cliche!

Instead, I went with the most direct, and least obvious, plan I could think of. I bought the ring at the Tiffany's in Edina, MN (about a mile from my house), had them wrap it up in the awesome little blue box, and brought it over to Liz's. She got off work at 8 PM that night, and I was waiting for her at home. So far, no big deal - I meet her at her place after work all the time. After a little while, I told her that I got her a birthday present a little early (two weeks, to be precise), and would she want it now? Of course, the answer would be Sure! (Neither she nor I have any self control, so I knew she'd want to open it now.)

So I handed her the little blue box, and told her I'd gotten her a little something. She unwrapped it very carefully (they don't use tape when they wrap these things, so removing the wrapping doesn't ruin the box), and then her eyes got really big for about a second. She asked "Are you serious?" once or twice, then started crying. A lot. Really, an unbelievable amount of crying.

I told her that I should probably do this properly, and got down on one knee (in her kitchen, mind you), and asked her if she'd marry me. She nodded yes, because she couldn't say anything, what with the crying and all that. Oh yeah... I did good.

Liz told me later that she was completely, 100% surprised. She confessed that she expected me to do something in New York, but she never suspected that I'd ask her out of the blue two weeks before her birthday.

And to further throw off the scent so she wouldn't suspect, I bought the ring and asked her on the very day that I got my new driveway. (It looks really fabulous! The driveway, that is.) So one diamond ring + one asphalt driveway = the most expensive day ever: Thursday, July 6, 2006.

The next day, Liz was off on Friday, and she met me at work for lunch, where we went out with a bunch of my co-workers for Indian food. It's a good thing she was off on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, because she was giggly the whole weekend. She's still not quite right, and it's really funny to watch her staring at her left hand while waiting at red lights. Ooh - sparkly! I did real good.

We haven't worked out the logistics of what comes next. The obvious question that everyone asks is if we picked a date, but I was lucky just to get this far, let alone plan anything else. So no, no date picked yet. We're pretty sure we don't want a traditional caterer/florist/photographer/DJ/band-type wedding - I think a little ceremony on a beach somewhere is more our style. (Hawaii? Italy? How does one plan such a thing?) Details to follow - I have much to investigate.

So there you go. Gonna be hard to top THIS one...

Ron and Liz

Ron's Big Life Update - June 2006

You’d think that in the five months since the last Big Life Update, a great deal would have happened to me. Lots of major occurrences in far-flung corners of the world, with exotic foreign customs and exciting foods. In reality, not much big has happened. A few little things, though, but I’m probably not going to be able to top the Disney World experience from January.

Late February – The order arrived at work for the Girl Scout cookies I bought from a co-worker. I ate an entire box of the darn things at work; they never even made it home.

Mid-March – Liz and I drove up to visit her parents in Ada, MN, a small farming town northeast of Fargo. The reason for the trip was that Liz needed to get her hair done, and Brian, “the guy”, is in Moorhead. Now while I don’t claim to understand women, hair, or women’s hair, I can safely say that once a woman finds “the guy” to do her hair, the loyalty he inspires is comparable to nothing else on earth. I’d even venture that the loyalty to “the guy” is comparable to the planet itself; Earth wouldn’t run off and orbit some other star in the galaxy, would it? Her hair looked pretty darn nice after the trip, so I can’t complain.

An integral part of every visit to Ada is a pilgrimage to the TJ Maxx in Fargo, which is probably the finest TJ Maxx anywhere, according to Liz. She goes with her mom, and they spend hours there. At least it feels like hours. So I went with them, being the kind and benevolent guy that I am. And I attempted to be the voice of reason as they shopped by talking Liz out of a bunch of unnecessary stuff. Unnecessary to me, anyway.

I did find three kitchen knives on clearance for her (I forget if they were Wusthof or Henckels, but they were German and marked way down.) Liz had been using a horrendous Chicago Cutlery set, and had not yet known the joy of cooking with good knives, so I offered to buy them for her. Apparently, I had made such a nuisance of myself talking up these knives and trying to dissuade her from buying anything else that karma caught up with me: immediately after I had checked out, I read on the back of the knives, “German quality. Made in China.”

Late March – My 1996 Corolla got its 120,000 mile maintenance done. Belts, fluids, all that good stuff. The mechanic called and said that the next time I bring it in, I might want to have my brakes checked. They looked fine for now, but he thought that in another 5,000 miles, the brake pads could use a checking. I told him that was pretty funny, since they’ve told me the same thing for the last 30,000 miles. I also told him that the car still has its original brake pads – 10 years and 120,000 miles! – and the guys in the shop probably wouldn’t believe me unless they looked for themselves. Which they did. And they reported back to me that they’d never seen a pair of still-functioning brake pads that were so old! And people wonder why I’m such a rabid Toyota fan! Or, it might just be that when I’m driving, I never feel the urge to slow down…

Late March – Invented the Hambrella. Still don’t know what it does, but it’s got a great name. Also invented the Wineosaurus, but it’s not nearly as catchy as the Hambrella.

Early April – As you know, my hair has been fairly short for a few years now. Specifically, it’s been about a 1/16th of an inch at its shortest, which I let grow out to about an 1/8th of an inch at its longest. Every two weeks, it got mowed down with a pair of clippers, which was a major ordeal that involved vacuuming up the hair fuzzies. A gigantic hassle, to say the least.

So I decided to take the short hair to its logical extreme, by shaving it down to the scalp. It went quite smoothly, and I don’t think it really looks much different from before. Now I shave my head with a blade every three days or so, instead of every two weeks with the clippers. I did learn a few things, though, that most haired people don’t know:

1. The grain of your hair is radially outward from the bald spot on the top of your head. Specifically, the grain on the top of your head is toward your face, the grain above your ears is downward, and the grain at the back of your head is also downward. This piece of knowledge is completely useless to most people, but is extremely important to those of us that need to shave with the grain, not against it.
2. It’s a really bad idea to try and shave your head at the sink, unless you enjoy mopping up your bathroom floor regularly. Better to shave your head in the shower, with the water pressure turned way down so you don’t waste water. There are shower heads that come with an intensity button on them, so you can shut off or turn down the water pressure without changing the temperature.
3. It is quite difficult to shave the back of your own head. It’s completely impossible to see what you’re doing, unless you’ve got a complicated series of mirrors in your shower stall. You will almost certainly miss one spot, and the trick is to be able to find that spot and fix it with the electric razor before you leave the house.

Now you know.

Mid-May; Mother’s Day Sunday, actually – After having brunch with friends at Key’s, an awe-inspiring greasy-spoon breakfast place in St. Paul, then meeting friends on short notice at El Meson, an awe-inspiring Spanish/Caribbean restaurant a few blocks from Liz’s house in Minneapolis, Liz and I ate dinner at Cosetta’s, an awe-inspiring Italian place in St. Paul. Any one of these restaurants will render a mere mortal completely immobile from overeating, because they’re THAT GOOD. And Liz and I hit all three in ONE DAY, leading to exclamations of disbelief from friends. In my little world, where I’ve defined myself based on how much I can eat, it’s nice to know I still got it…

Late May – I heard that Thomas Dolby was coming through town on a tour! That’s the guy who had a novelty hit with “She Blinded Me With Science” in 1983, and he’s been a pioneer in the field of electronic music ever since. So when I found out that Minneapolis was one of the stops on his brief one-man show tour, I was elated!

And since I am a radio guy, and a big Thomas Dolby fan since I was 15, I rang up his press agent and asked if I could do a radio interview with Thomas. He would be playing in town on a Sunday night, and my weekly “Crap From The Past” show would fall on the Friday night right before that. I told him I would devote the whole 90 minutes to Thomas Dolby and his music.

Well, it’s hard to turn down publicity like that, and they agreed. I got a half-hour on the phone from Thomas on a Monday afternoon, which I edited into segments and padded out with songs to fill the entire 90-minute show on Friday. A ridiculous amount of work from my end, but it sounded terrific.

His live show was pretty good. It was just him onstage with his array of keyboards and sequencers, next to a gigantic video screen. He had a camera mounted on his head that was originally developed for the military, and at certain times he projected on the screen what he was watching, so we got to follow his hands on the keyboards as he played and twiddled knobs and buttons. Fascinating stuff. Plus, afterwards, he signed autographs, shook hands and posed for pictures. He even held up the three things I brought in for the other members of his tour – I had The Nerdiest loot, and I was never prouder of my geekitude.

You can hear the full 90-minute interview on the May 19, 2006 show. Truly a high point for “Crap From The Past”!

This is a picture taken during the show. You can clearly see me in the audience, with Liz in front of me to my left (facing away from the camera, unfortunately), my friend Carla in front of me to my right, and my friend Graham just behind me. Fun!

Mid-June – We had our annual camping trip to the Peshtigo River in Wisconsin. That’s about six hours due east from Minneapolis into the middle of Wisconsin, almost to Michigan. There were 19 of us this year, up from about 10 last year. This is the third trip I’ve been on, and since I met Liz on that first trip, this year’s trip marks a 2-year anniversary for us. Awwwww…

The weather cooperated quite a bit more than the past two years. It was dry the whole time we were there – amazing! – so we got to throw around a Frisbee and bat around a volleyball in addition to the non-stop eating. A little chilly at night, though; it got down to 38 degrees on Friday night and 46 on Saturday night. That’s a little too cold for my tastes, but it sure beats getting rained on.

And the non-stop eating was exactly what it sounded like. We went down the river on Saturday morning, and from noonish on Saturday until the wee hours, we cooked and ate and cooked and ate and slept and ate… I made the mistake of buying bacon at Sam’s Club, which came in a 3-1/2 pound brick. It was pretty decent bacon, but it was WAY too much even for 18 people, and I won’t be repeating that next year. In keeping with the tradition of unintentionally destroying some of Kelly’s camping gear (I threw a set of her plastic utensils on the fire last year), I ruined her frying pan this year. I’ll be replacing it, of course, but it’s still bad policy to keep ruining a friend’s equipment.

The big hit this year was pie-irons. You put two pieces of bread and filling in the pie iron, then cook them on the fire. The filling can be pie filling, or pizza sauce and cheese, or nutella, or bacon, or whatever else you can think of to put in a sammich. Crazy tasty! I bought one of my own for the trip, and now it’s part of my extremely limited camping gear, along with a tent, an inflaty-mattress, and two old sleeping bags. We also found out that the pie irons themselves melt if the fire gets hot enough, so we’ll be a little more careful next year.

We also brought a 7-pound can of chocolate pudding, as demanded by tradition. Finished it, too!

Late June – I went with Liz to her all-school reunion in Ada. It was kinda fun, and although the specifics were far different than what I had for my own high school reunion (in a large public New York school), the fun parts were the same. She got to hang out with some of the high school friends she still keeps in touch with, and reconnect with some that she hadn’t seen for years. A lot were engaged or freshly married, some had kid(s), some were expecting. I was just along for the ride, and was more than happy to be “arm candy” for Liz for the weekend. Trophy boyfriend? I can do that.

One of the planned events was a parade through town of all the alumni. The floats threw candy at the crowd as they drove by, and the kids in the crowd stayed pretty busy scooping it all up for later. Sort of a weird cross between Mardi Gras and Halloween. Liz’s class had a major flood during their senior year that caused an immense amount of damage in the whole town, so their float had sandbags around the outside. Very nice! We threw candy at Liz’s float as they drove by.

Late June – “Crap From The Past” picked up an affiliate in Germany! One more country to add to the list (US, New Zealand, UK, and now Germany!) It’s amazing that the foreign stations like the show so much, since I still can’t get arrested in Minneapolis.

Late June – I needed a new driveway, since my old one was 30+ years old and had pretty much crumbled to dust in places. That’s actually being started as I write this, and should be done in a week or so. Driveways are expensive, if you didn’t know. I went with asphalt. Concrete driveways are ultra-expensive, and actually are less desirable than asphalt out here because of their light color. The dark color of blacktop helps melt off some of the snow and ice in winter. If you’re having your driveway done, I’d recommend getting lots of bids – probably more than you’d get for your average contracting jobs, because the amounts they quoted me varied by as much as factor of 2. I’d also recommend going with a small operation, like a guy who does just blacktop for a living. In this case, small is good, and you want a guy who uses his kids for help, and doesn’t contract it out or use help from a big firm. I’ll let you know how it goes in the next Big Life Update.

Liz’s cats, Poohead and Noodge, are doing just fine. (My cat, Stinky, is fine as well.) The last time I wrote, you heard about Noodge, the hyperactive kitten. So hyper, in fact, that we could get him to run around and play until he panted like a dog. Sticking his little pink tongue out, gasping for air, short of breath, looking like he was gonna die. We’d cast the little toy fish down the hall and reel it back, he’d chase it and chase it and chase it, without the good sense to stop when he was exhausted. We were a tiny bit worried that his little heart would explode, but it was just too funny to stop. I’d do this about once a week, just for laughs.

Since then, Noodge has outgrown his kitty-dom and is now a huge, fat orange cat. He plays, but not until he pants anymore. He’s huge, and looks a lot like a fuzzy basketball, with legs. He’s even inspired me to write an award-winning song about him: “Who’s big and fat? Noodge!” Liz says it’s more of a chant than an actual song, but who says a song can’t be two seconds long? That’s right, award-winning.

His personality is still a well-meaning dingbat. We’ve affectionately dubbed him The Ruinator, since he’ll show up and ruin everything. For instance, if Poohead is sleeping and Noodge wants to play, Noodge will just attack him: pounce, MEOW, fur flying… Truly, The Ruinator. I think a good comparison for Noodge would be Chris Farley or John Belushi – big fat guy shows up and ruins everything. Or better yet – the Kool-Aid pitcher from those old commercials: “BLAM! Oh yeah!” Once, as I was typing on the laptop, Noodge walked across the keyboard and typed “nnnn”. Liz thinks he was trying to spell “Noodge”.

Liz is a big fan of the digital camera, and has taken hundreds of pictures of her cats, since the 0’s and 1’s don’t cost anything. I’m sure she’d show you pictures of the cats if you were here, so I’ll take care of that for her…

Here’s one of Liz and Poohead:
Poohead has a thing for sleeping on the couch in the sun, as you’ll see from these action shots:
How good it must be to be THAT blissed out.

Liz also had some work done on her bathroom and her kitchen, so they look pretty nice now. I’m certain she’d want to show you pictures of the construction, so here’s one of her new kitchen sink. There are about a dozen similar pictures of her bathtub, cats included. We’re all doing our best to keep Liz from becoming Crazy Cat Lady!

As for upcoming travel, my own high school reunion is coming up this summer. In principle, anyway. I found a website online that says the Clarkstown South Class of 1986 reunion should be on Saturday, August 19th, but I have yet to hear a peep about it from anybody. And I had to dig pretty deep to find the website itself. So, I may be coming out east for a week or so around August 19th. Liz loves Manhattan, and I’m sure we’ll be spending a few days staying in the city proper, in addition to the usual visits with family and friends. Details to follow.

Stay cool and dry,
Ron and Liz

Ron's Big Life Update - January 2006

A while back, we came up with a pretty snazzy medical procedure that would come in handy both for day-to-day issues, and also in the case of a zombie apocalypse. We call it “Protocol Z”, and it involves the severing of a patient’s head from his shoulders. The precise removal mechanism can be cutting, slicing, sawing, prying, perforating, or any combination thereof; there is tremendous flexibility in administering Protocol Z.

To demonstrate the wide-ranging applicability of Protocol Z, consider the following exchanges between medical professionals:

“Doctor, this patient appears to be a member of the undead, causing mayhem and feeding on the brains of the living.”
“Nurse, administer Protocol Z. That’ll clear that right up.”
“Right away, doctor.”

“Doctor, this patient appears to have a fever and the sniffles.”
“Nurse, administer Protocol Z. That’ll clear that right up.”
“Right away, doctor.”

“Doctor, this patient appears to be generally healthy, but says that his health insurance won’t cover this visit.”
“Nurse, administer Protocol Z. That’ll clear that right up.”
“Right away, doctor.”

In fact, we’d be hard-pressed to come up with a medical condition that can’t be snuffed out by Protocol Z. I’d even recommend using it at the office. Afraid that you won’t get that big raise? Protocol Z! Excessively chatty co-worker? Protocol Z! Afraid that someone else will nab the last donut? Protocol Z!

It’s cheaper than drugs, faster than exercise, and more beneficial to society than cosmetic surgery! Remember to ask for Protocol Z by name. At a theater near you.

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Hi, all. Things are going pretty well out here in the land of ice and snow. This January has been about 15 degrees above average, so I think I would come out in favor of all this global warming stuff.

As fall was winding down, I decided to get rid of the dozens of miscellaneous paint cans that I had in the basement and the garage. Margaret was a big fan of the “oops” paint that Home Depot would sell for a dollar, and there were cans everywhere. I filled up the trunk of my car (end to end and two deep throughout - there must have been 40 or 50 cans of paint!), and drove them to the local hazardous waste disposal site. I’m now a big fan of the hazardous waste disposal site. It’s set up like a Goodwill donation site, where they drop stuff into bins, and deal with the bins later, all at once. Only there’s a bit more security than Goodwill; they take down your name and address, and all that. Out of the dozens of cans of paint Margaret left, I kept only one, which is a blindingly bright green that’s used in my kitchen. Everything else is now recycled. I also kept one can of mineral spirits, which I use to clean off my barbeque tools. If you’ve never used mineral spirits to clean your barbeque tools, you’re missing out.

A few months back, I’d mentioned Liz’s cat, Poohead. Well, she got a second cat to keep Poohead company. It turned out to be a good idea, and Poohead’s temperament magically changed from bratty to sweet. The new cat is named “Noodge”, which is a Yiddish word meaning pest. (It’s not pronounced “Nooj”, like Ted Nugent, but is more like “book” or “look”.)

Noodge is best described as a well-meaning dingbat. He really is a pest, so the name fits him well. For instance, consider the following scenario. Liz was napping on the couch, and Poohead was sleeping in the crook of her neck. It was very cute, so I took a picture with the digital camera. Seconds later, Noodge jumped on Liz to see what all the fuss was about, oblivious to the fact that Liz was sleeping. I should mention that Noodge is a fairly dense kitty. Oof! That’s Noodge.

Late November – Thanksgiving at a friend’s house here in Minneapolis. Good friends, no family, and seven full dessert dishes for eight people. My favorite holiday, hands down. I also found out that I may be the only person on earth who likes spiced apple rings. They’re bright red, they taste vaguely like cinnamon, and they’re available in a jar. They also must have been present during my childhood, because there’s no other explanation why I am so fond of them. No one else likes them or had even heard of them.

Mid-December – I got to bring Liz to a professional hockey game. The Minnesota Wild played some other team, but I can’t remember which. (Can you tell how much I care about professional sports?) I really don’t care about the outcome, but I like being at the games. This one had everything – a fight, during which one player was knocked unconscious, a penalty shot, and a win in sudden death overtime. Good game! Liz’s favorite part was watching the medical procedures on the guy that was knocked out - a true nurse at heart!

Late December – My first Christmas with Liz’s extended family. They live in Ada, Minnesota, a tiny farm town about an hour northeast of Fargo, and about 4 or 5 hours from Minneapolis. There’s not much going on in Ada.

The holidays went very smoothly. Liz’s parents and her brother are all astoundingly good cooks, and the food was sensational. My cooking skills are limited at best, so I just helped clean up when I could. I also met most of Liz’s extended family, which also went quite well. I even got to visit Fargo, which was my first time ever in North Dakota. Whaddya know? It really does exist!

Mid-January – Originally, Liz and I had planned to wish my grandmother a happy 95th birthday in person. We bought tickets down to Florida, and everything looked fine, until Hurricane Wilma ruined my grandmother’s house a few months back. Grandma moved up to the DC area, and Liz and I decided to use our Florida tickets to go to Disney World instead.

That’s right. Three days and four nights in the Mouse House! After making a trip to the library to check out Birnbaum’s Walt Disney World Guide For People Without Kids, Liz and I were on our way.

We stayed in “All Star Movies”, one of the resorts on the grounds. Our room was decorated with a Herbie The Love Bug framed poster and Herbie wallpaper border, with hideous blue-green furniture and a wonderfully tacky comforter. The bathroom walls and shower curtain had blinding complementary dark blue and white star-shaped patterns. Tasteful? Not in the least. But spotlessly clean and very quiet. And who spends time in the rooms anyway?

Staying on the grounds allowed us to get free “Fastpasses”, which let us bypass most of the lines on the crowded rides. There were buses that shuttled us from the hotel to the theme parks and back, all for free. On our very first shuttle ride, the woman driver was very polite and pronounced her words very carefully over the loudspeaker, which only emphasized her unfortunate mispronunciations of ask (“ax”) and studio (bafflingly, “stoo-dee-ay”. As in MGM Stoo-dee-ayz.)

Day 1: Epcot. 22 years ago, the last time I was there, it was “Epcot Center”. Now, just “Epcot”.

From memories of my last trip to Epcot in 1983, they used to have a very primitive computer system that let you design and simulate roller coasters. It had some basic physics smarts built in, and it wouldn’t let you do impossible things, like putting a giant loop as the very first thing in the ride. They also used to have a very primitive speech simulator - you type a word or sentence and it says it. We made it say “Science!” over and over. (Big Thomas Dolby fans we were…)

Needless to say, that’s all gone and replaced with new whiz-bang stuff. There’s a giant robot with multiple arms that plays different types of drums (“Rockin’ Robots”), which was pretty cool. The rest of the hi-tech toys were less enthralling to me, possibly because a lot of them used computers to do stuff and I’ve seen plenty of computers doing stuff, and probably because I’m not 15 anymore.

There were a handful of purely informational rides, where you get in a little boat or car that takes you from educational thingy to educational thingy. Some had some gentle ups-and-downs to them, and some went through darkness or very elaborate sets with animatronics. Those were pleasant enough, but I was at Disney World and I really wasn’t all that into being educated.

Liz and I were more into the thrill-type rides. And unlike a typical amusement park, these thrill rides had some absurdly elaborate setups, which attempted to somehow rope you and your brain into the Disney Fantasy Experience. For instance, the coolest ride at Epcot was Mission: SPACE, which was built around a huge “rocket” in which people are strapped into chairs, all arranged in a big circle and facing the center of the circle. You are on a mission to Mars, and as you blast off, you get squashed back against the chair with a simulated G-force. It would be a cool ride if that’s all there was to it, but there was much more. First, you stand in a particular place in “teams” and watch a video of Gary Sinise (actor from the 2003 film “Mission: Space”, which I’ve never heard of) telling you that you’re about to undergo flight training for a Mars landing. Or something to that effect. Then, you walk down a hall to another particular place where Mr. Sinise gives you instructions to push a particular button on a control panel when you’re told to. Because the mission depends on YOU. Then you strap yourself into the chair. Finally, a video of rocket launch plays in sych with the movements of the chair, so that you’re weightless or very, very heavy at exactly the right cue points. Provided that you push the button when told, of course, because the mission depends on YOU. A nice effect, and you stumble out of the ride knowing that Disney put a boatload of effort into creating a fantasy experience for you. Which, if you think about it, is the whole point of Disney World.

And you exit the ride directly into the ride’s gift shop, where you can buy pictures of yourself on the thrill ride, and dozens of T-shirts, hats, and endless souvenirs of your ride fantasy experience. We noticed quickly that nearly every ride exits into a gift shop; clearly, merchandising is the other important point of Disney World…

We noticed that many of the rides had very prominent sponsors. Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, Nestle, Kodak, and so forth. To me, it felt like many of the movies were just giant ads for Kodak. The rest rooms even had signs with specific directions on how to wash your hands. Those signs were sponsored by Brawny and Sparkle, and clearly read as such. I shouldn’t have been surprised at all the crass commercialism, but I was anyway. Yay, commercialism!

For food, we split a giant chocolate chip muffin for breakfast, and split an ice cream sandwich for lunch. When dinner rolled around, we decided to have a proper sit-down meal in the Moroccan restaurant at the World Showcase, since neither one of us knew anything about Morocco. During dinner, there was a live belly dancer in the restaurant, who looked disconcertingly like Lisa Kudrow in a black wig. Plus, each course in the meal, including dessert, featured some sort of puff pastry. I don’t know why.

After dinner, we went to MGM Studios (that’s stoo-dee-ayz) for their “Extra Magic Hours” – a privilege for people staying at the resorts. Overall, MGM was horrible, but it did include the two coolest rides in all of Disney World.

We mistakenly started off in a ride called “Voyage of The Little Mermaid”, which turned out to be a puppet show set to music. Liz almost cried, and I had to comfort her and tell her that everything was going to be all right and the bad old puppet show was going to be over soon.

At this point the crowd was starting to thin out, since the mere mortals had to leave the park at 7, and we were allowed to stick around until 10. The lines got shorter and most of the little kids magically disappeared. We then discovered… “The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror”, a thoroughly thrilling throw-you-up-in-the-air-and-drop-you-repeatedly ride. The premise was that the elevator in a really old haunted hotel would take you to the Twilight Zone. Or something to that effect. Because much of the ride is spent waiting in line, they snake the line through a very convincing mock-up of an old hotel lobby and basement, complete with fake wires, pipes, and other miscellany that you’d find in an old hotel basement. As set design goes, it was excellent. And the ride itself, also excellent. I think that was my favorite ride in all of Disney World. We rode it three times.

The other scream-worthy ride was the “Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith”. The premise: you have to get to the upcoming Aerosmith concert VERY QUICKLY in a super-stretch convertible. It’s a very good roller coaster in the dark, with blaring Aerosmith music, and some flashing lights and street signs thrown in for good measure. We also rode that one three times, until the park closed. On our last ride, we heard one of the workers ask, “Are we done?”, just as we entered the ride. Yes! It’s as if we cheated death itself by squeezing in one more ride before we all went home.

Then we were herded onto the bus back to the hotel, where we bought a little pizza at the food court and a little heart-shaped frosted Rice Krispies bar at the gift shop. Tired? You bet. And not just because we’re wimpy (because we’re not) – Liz wore her pedometer all day, and we racked up 10.2 miles over the course of the day! She covered it in 23,986 steps and burned off 980 calories just in the day’s walking. (My numbers would be off a little because my stride is longer, but the 10.2 miles would apply to me as well.) No wonder little kids get tired at these parks!

Day 2: The Magic Kingdom

The weather in Day 2 only partially cooperated. Unlike the gorgeous weather on Days 1 and 3, the high temperature on Day 2 was only about 60 degrees. That’s cold. And it got down to 42 at night, which is quite cold. We spent the day bundled up in pretty much all the clothing we’d packed.

The first ride we went on was Liz’s favorite (from her last visit at age 13) in all of the Magic Kingdom: Splash Mountain. A fun boat ride through animatronic animal hijinx, and a giant splash at the end. Since we got soaked, we just went on it again right away. It was 60 degrees and windy, and no one else was dumb enough to go on a water ride except us. My butt was wet until the sun went down. Plus, I lost my hat, which Liz had gotten for me personally during a previous trip to Mexico. Woops. I bought a Goofy hat later in the day, which I’m sure I’ll lose on a future vacation.

We went on a few non-thrill rides, where you side in the car and it takes you through some animatronic hijinx or mayhem of some sort. Some were especially elaborate, like “The Haunted Mansion”. Boo. Some were taken directly from Disney movies, like “Peter Pan’s Flight”. Some even inspired Disney movies, like “Pirates of the Caribbean”.

One of my two favorite sit-gently-in-the-car rides was “Snow White’s Scary Adventures”, which condensed the entire story of Snow White to a three-minute ride. Virtually all of the animatronic scenes were especially dark and dour, with witches and sleeping for a thousand years and all that. The scenes themselves didn’t do very much, and the ride made up for that by running the cars especially fast and putting plenty of tight hairpin turns throughout. You got jerked from one dark scary scene to the next without absorbing anything, because you were moving too fast. Then, the very last scene was happy, with the Prince Charming and the birds chirping and all that, only to find yourself having to exit the car so the next people could get on. It felt like dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, HAPPY, done with the ride. The combination of the insane car speed and the Deus ex machina storytelling was especially jarring, and I enjoyed it immensely, even if for all the wrong reasons.

The other fantastic non-thrill ride was “It’s A Small World”, one of the original rides from when the park opened in 1971, and one which was originally built for the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York. It’s been preserved immaculately in its original form, with fresh coats of paint and all that, and it’s a very clear snapshot of 1971 in all its hippy freak-out glory. The color scheme and wacky geometries looked like the parodies you see in Old Navy commercials, or maybe on the sets of Laugh-In or the Lawrence Welk Show. Impossible to describe, even more difficult to photograph. I took about 25 pictures on the digital camera, but none conveyed the brightly lit, jaw-dropping insanity of hundreds of potentially racist dolls, all moving their mouths in time to the endlessly repeating chorus of “It’s a small world after all/It’s a small world after all/It’s a small world after all/It’s a small, small world.” The song has real verses with real words, but they weren’t in the ride. It was just the chorus, over and over. We just assumed that the workers who tended to this ride were completely deaf. I loved it.

We had lunch at a futuristic, space-age burger place called Cosmic Ray’s. I hope that Cosmic Ray’s was one of the original 1971 restaurants, because there’s no other possible explanation for the menu. Each category (burger, sandwiches, soups) had three or four food items, plus an explicitly labeled “Kosher Selection” underneath, like a corned beef sandwich. This must have been considered progressive or radical back when the place opened, because the words “Kosher Selection” were larger and more prominent than the food selections themselves. Weird. We were unfortunate enough to get trainees, who were “earning their ears”. Outside the window where we sat, there was a stupid old man feeding the seagulls. We wanted to beat him senseless, but we figured that we’d get kicked out of the park. So we didn’t. But we wanted to.

We then went to Animal Kingdom, one of the other theme parks. It was late in the day and cold (on its way down to 42 degrees), and I was still damp from the water ride earlier in the day, so I vetoed the “Kali River Rapids”.

We sat through “It’s Tough To Be A Bug”, one of several 3-D movies that all had a great deal in common. You picked up 3-D glasses, you sat down in the theater, the movie would play (ooh! 3-D!), things would bump under your seat at the proper time during the movie, you’d invariably get sprayed with water at the proper time during the movie, you gave back your glasses, and you left the theater. There was one of these 3-D movies in each of the theme parks, and they were all pretty much interchangeable. At least, we hope it was water.

Then went back to Epcot to see the big fancy fireworks/lights display. We had two hours to kill, and Liz suggested that we do the “World Showcase” Challenge: one menu item from every country in the “World Showcase”! Pure genius! (Isn’t Liz the greatest?) We couldn’t find any good food, so we just ate a LOT of bad food! We then ate the following, all in two hours:

Mexico - a combination platter, with refried beans, chicken taco, beef burrito, and a chicken quesadilla
Norway - a sweet, frosted pretzel with almonds, which was pleasant but tasted more like a danish than a pretzel
China - the worst fried rice in all of recorded history
Germany - a peanut butter fudge bar
Italy - two tiny strawberry truffle thingys
America - N/A; we had enough American crap food already
Japan - teriyaki chicken
Morocco - we passed, since we had a puff pastry at every course yesterday
France - a napoleon, which is a tasty, rectangular, layered pastry
United Kingdom - just chips, since we were too full for the fish
Canada - a maple lollipop in the shape of a moose head

Now, having just consumed 11 countries’ worth of food in less than two hours, and with only ten minutes to spare, I sprinted to Germany and bought Liz a souvenir glass slipper (a la Cinderella), and she sprinted to Japan and bought a few refrigerator magnets of the Cat Bus from “My Neighbor Totoro”, quite possibly the best animated kid film of all time. (From a random Totoro fan website: “Cat Bus is the transportation of choice for O Totoro. NekoBasu's got glowing eyes for headlights, rats for tail lights and furry seats that change size according to the passenger.” Miyazaki is awesome.)

Loot in hand and freezing our 42 degree butts off, we then watched the fireworks/light show. Just like the Magic Kingdom fireworks show that we’d later see on Day 3, the Epcot show had three songs in it – two pleasant instrumentals followed by a treacly dollop of schmaltz. It made my teeth hurt, but the visuals were cool.

Then back on the bus to the hotel (moo), and raided the hotel gift shop for other souvenirs. We found next year’s Halloween costume, amongst other stuff.

The total for Day 2: 11.85 miles, covered in 27,779 steps (for Liz; fewer steps for me).

Day 3: Started with the Animal Kingdom, since we got there too late yesterday to see most things.

The weather was much warmer than Day 2, so we went on the Kali River Rapids and got soaked. Twice.

Animal Kingdom had a few exhibits with what we believe to be actual animals, rather than fancy animatronics. There was the “Pangani Forest Exploration Trail” and the “Maharajah Jungle Trek”, where you stroll through the forest and see fish, birds, hippos, and tigers. Liz got some amazing pictures of the tigers. Even though they’re probably 100 yards away, the zoom on the camera makes it look like she’s right next to them. On one shot in particular, she was moving the camera, trying to follow the movement of the walking tiger, and it came out spectacularly.

We took a shortcut and walked through a show called “Tarzan Rocks!”. According to our map, “Join Tarzan and friends for this rockin’ live stage show filled with stunts performed by jungle gymnasts and in-line skaters.” Just for the record, Tarzan does not, in fact, rock.

We had a deep-friend lunch and then went back to the Magic Kingdom for the rest of the day.

I was especially enamored with the section of the park called “Tomorrowland”, which was what the future was supposed to look like when the park opened in 1971. They still have the Peoplemover, only now it’s called “Tomorrowland Transit Authority”.

“Space Mountain” was still there, thank goodness. There’s nothing quite like a roller coaster in the dark. What I didn’t realize the last time I was there is how much the interior of Space Mountain looks like the set of “2001: A Space Odyssey”. I’m sure that was no coincidence; the movie was a huge hit just three years before the park opened. I also didn’t realize how gentle the roller coaster was, compared to today’s monsters. I noticed that most of the movements on the ride were in circles; unlike today’s coasters with their giant ups and downs, the older rides emphasized the side-to-side movements, and would throw you from one side of your seat to the other.

The round and round aspect of the rides was even more apparent on “Astro Orbiter”, in which you’re put in a two-person car that’s suspended from above, then spun. (It’s the same idea as “Dumbo The Flying Elephant”, only in space.) You control how high or low your car is, but you’re still spun in a big circle. Even “It’s A Small World” goes around in a big circle. I don’t know the significance of all this - it’s just an observation.

All in all, the most endearing rides were the original ones from 1971, like “Space Mountain” and “It’s A Small World”. Sure, the newer roller coasters were cool, but they’re just like the roller coasters at other amusement parks. You can find those anywhere. But I’m certain that there’s nothing on earth quite like the psychedelic trippy greatness of “It’s A Small World”. I was very relieved to see that most of those original rides were well preserved, and still look like they did 35 years ago.

And 35 years ago, there was no better dizzymaker than the “Mad Tea Party”, known to me as the teacup ride. It’s still there, and is still most excellent. Liz and I got some great pictures of each other as we rode on the teacup ride, taken amidst fits of laughter. So dizzy, so wonderful. And again with the spinning in circles!

After the fireworks, on the way back to the hotel, we were surrounded by dozens of young teenage kids on a trip from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Actually, we must have seen four or five groups of Brazilian kids, all apparently on vacation. Must be a holiday down there. We ordered a whole pizza from the food court at the hotel, ate most of it in the room while watching some bad TV, and packed up most of our loot.

Totals for Day 3: 8.87 miles, covered in 20,804 steps and burning off 850 calories. Almost atoned for the pizza. Almost.

The next morning, we packed up our stuff, and I ate the remaining two pieces of pizza folded together as a sandwich as we walked the bags out to our car.

We then drove the hour from Orlando to Tampa (where our flights originated and departed), and went to my favoritest restaurant on the planet: a Cuban restaurant named “La Teresita”. We got there for a late lunch, and ordered a tremendous feast for about 12 bucks. I was so happy that Liz took my picture with the food. So much great food! And in such stark contrast to the three days of overpriced, bad food at Disney World! We ate until we felt ill.

To kill time in Tampa, we drove out to the beaches in St. Petersburg, and dangled our feet off a pier into the Gulf Of Mexico. Two days earlier, it was 42 degrees, and now it was in the mid-80s. Crazy! On the way back from St. Petersburg, I drove right past the other La Teresita! (I knew there were two, and I knew how to find one but not the other.) So we stopped, I ate some more, and took half my sandwich home on the plane. Soooooo good…

Our rental car was a Chevy Cobalt, the same little car that I’d rented in San Francisco. It’s tiny, and it looks like it’s supposed to compete with the Ford Focus even though I never see them on the road anywhere. At one point, Liz adjusted the visor to keep the sun out of her eyes. Moments later, the sun visor fell off and landed in her lap. Ah, Chevy. (Like I’ve said before, I can make fun of Chevrolet because I used to have a 1979 Chevy Caprice, an oil-burning gas hog with a bad two-tone paint job and a defective cooling system, which stranded me in more places than I can remember.)

After we passed through security in the airport, we had about 40 minutes until our plane boarded. So Liz put on her pedometer, and we walked back and forth across the largely empty terminal. From one wall all the way down to the other and back. About 7 times. We walked for 40 minutes, and put on about 4,000 steps. If people are supposed to walk at least 10,000 steps per day, then pacing in the airport seems to be the way to go.

So looking back on my trip to Disney World, I’m left with impressions:

(1) The Disney Corporation is one tightly run organization. From the cleanliness of the hotel rooms and bathrooms to the uniformity in the over 6,000 places to spend money at the parks (that includes all the food vendors and gift shops), I didn’t see anybody slacking off.

(2) The Disney Corporation prefers uniformity and sterility to genuine creativity. How can so many restaurants in the theme parks all have the same bland menu choices? The same way that all the Disney movies in the last 15 years have been the same formulaic crap. “Aladdin” was fun, but that was 1992, and there hasn’t been anything genuinely creative ever since. This doesn’t include the Pixar movies, naturally, which are head and shoulders above anything else in the animated world, or even the live action world, for that matter. Since Pixar just got bought by Disney, let’s hope that Disney doesn’t bleed the creativity out of them.

(3) The Disney Corporation is superb at marketing. Every single thing I saw at Disney World “reinforced the brand”. From the ghastly Chicken Little tie-ins down to the mouse ears printed on the napkins, the House of Mouse is really good at getting you to buy stuff. For those of you with little kids, do you own all the Disney movies? There you go.

(4) Mickey Mouse is a big slacker. I thought about it, and Mickey Mouse hasn’t been in a movie since Fantasia, which was in 1940. He’s been resting on his laurels for 66 years. What a slacker.

And that was our trip to Disney World. Two days later, I had a business trip to Orange County, California (south of LA), and saw an ad on the local news for Disneyland, which was celebrating its 50th birthday. I didn’t go. But in the Orange County airport, I did see a honeymooning couple wearing the characteristic mouse ear hats - his had a top hat, hers had a veil. Very nice.

Late January (January 25th, to be precise) – My friends, Jenny and Graham, invited me over to celebrate Burns Night, a fine Scottish tradition that I’d never heard of. Graham is from the UK, and is well aware of my fascination for odd food (Kaboom cereal, Totino’s Party Pizzas, Little Debbie Snack Cakes, nukey burritos...), and was kind enough to invite me over for a celebration that involves… haggis.

Robert Burns was a Scottish poet in the late 1700s, and Burns Night is his birthday. It’s usually marked by a ceremonial reading of one of his poems, “To A Haggis”, written in 1786 and timely as ever, and then the eating of a haggis. The poem is fairly hilarious, describing the “gushing entrails” of the haggis, and how the haggis will prepare ye well for cutting off the “legs an’ arms an’ hands” of your enemies. Spectacular. And exactly the qualities I desire from food.

We started with some spiced anchovy relish, spread on heavily buttered toast. I should point out that nearly everything in existence is edible if you add enough butter. This stuff is billed as “The Gentleman’s Relish”, and it’s nice to know that we now fit in with the upper crust in the relish world. I don’t think that the relish is part of the traditional celebration, but it fit nicely as an insanely salty appetizer. They smuggled it illegally into the country from England.

They also smuggled the haggis into the country in their luggage. They were describing their flight back from the UK, and how just ahead of them in the check-in line there were several huntsmen with a large array of guns, properly checking their firearms with their baggage. Watching all this, Jenny and Graham weren’t too worried about the sealed and frozen food items in their bags.

Now exactly what is haggis? It was considered peasant food in Scotland a few hundred years ago, so it was developed with economy in mind, and was a way of cooking some of the less desirable parts of a sheep. More specifically, it was some of the organ meats of a sheep, ground up with some oatmeal, then sealed inside the sheep’s stomach and baked until edible. I guess it makes sense: Why not put stuff inside a sheep’s stomach? That’s what the sheep does. The way I see it, you’re inverting the sheep, literally turning the sheep inside out, by putting the organs that are usually outside the stomach on the inside.

I should point out one very important misconception, which explains why people still eat haggis: They do not eat the sheep’s stomach itself, just the contents. Graham informs me that no one in his right mind would eat the sheep’s stomach; it would be akin to eating a nukey burrito without first taking it out of the plastic wrap. A-ha! This makes a little more sense now.

After the Gentleman’s Relish, Graham brought out the haggis, still piping hot from the oven, and read Burns’s poem. It was a little smaller than a softball, and would serve about four people. Upon reaching the line about the gushing entrails, Graham stabbed the haggis, and indeed its entrails gushed. Much rejoicing. Then, we dished out portions to eat.

The haggis portion that actually ends up on your plate looks and tastes a lot like a wild rice and ground beef hot dish. It’s customarily served with a side of mashed potatoes and a side of rutabaga, both of which resemble each other and provide a nice, starchy contrast to the haggis. Graham’s family adds a few strips of bacon as a side dish, which always helps. (Bacon makes it better.)

As a meal, I actually liked it. And not just because we were drinking twelve year old Scotch with it. I truly thought it was quite tasty, even after they showed me the list of ingredients, which detailed exactly which unfortunate parts of the sheep they used.

As you might imagine, discussion turned to the worst foods that all of us had ever had. My vote went to lutefisk, a horrendous Norwegian fish dish that requires the use of lye (yes, lye) in its preparation. You can only choke it down because it’s drowned in butter, but there’s not enough butter in the world to make it taste good. Jenny grew up in North Dakota, and was subjected to many a church lutefisk dinner growing up, and she contended that there was one thing even worse than lutefisk: sea urchin. Everything about it is offensive - the texture, the taste, the odor. You name it, it’s disgusting. They had it once at a sushi place, and they suspect that the sushi chef was having a little fun with them, just to see the reactions of the silly white people. Raw sea urchin is apparently worse than lutefisk, and I am not in a hurry to try it.

The Crap From The Past website got a rather severe facelift about a month ago. Instead of trying to have the most up-to-date-looking design, I decided to go for a look that would have been appropriate for when the show started in 1992. Do you want to know what a “quit” page does on a website? You’ll have to visit www.crapfromthepast.com. I am especially pleased with my own handiwork.

Hope all of you are well. Take care!

Ron (and Liz, too)