Nature or Nurture
The Rock-O-Nauts
Plaid Warriors
Muckraker and the Carpetbaggers
Moses and the Four Commandments
The Virgin Daquiris
Warning Explicit Lyrics
E Pluribus Unum
Legislation!
Yet Another Flock of Seagulls

Jerk-a-lator by Shari Elf is likely to be a CD mix mainstay for some time to come.

When a girl delightedly shows you a brand-new diamond ring on her finger, she’s not actually offering you the diamond ring to keep.  Apparently, it signifies some sort of major life event.  I forget exactly what.

Endings are everything.  However, I regretfully report that the first 2/3 of the new Harry Potter book suggests that it is to its predecessors what Phantom Menace is to the Star Wars trilogy.

A focus group of five guys drinking Sierra Nevada reveals that 100% of men prefer Mary Ann to Ginger.  Mary Ann gives you girl-next-door appeal, but her undefined and somewhat twisted relationship with the Professor indicates that she’s also a wildcat.  Ergo: you get it all.

If gamma rays ever transform you into a rampaging monster, be sure to wear purple pants.  They appear to miraculously change and grow with you, allowing you to share your bestial rage with the world while still covering up your green tackle.

Here’s where a lot of you stop liking me.  I’m going to tell you the lengths to which I’ll go for personal gain.  If at the end of this you decide to stop reading my blog, I’ll understand.  I can even recommend some other blogs to you—like the guy in Iraq, or the funny girl with the Doris Day song, or that geek from Star Trek.  (I’m not going to provide links.  You think I’m going to make it that easy?)

Anyway, earlier this week I sent out a routine press release about a technology upgrade my company had completed.  It was standard stuff, but it happened to overlap slightly with a current, red-hot business story.  Before I knew it, a camera crew from CNBC was in our office interviewing our Chief Information Officer.

None of this is bad.  In fact, free publicity to a PR/marketing guy like me is like mass quantities of crack, heroin, and LSD.  People said to me, “Hey check out the cameras,” and I was all “Shut up, I’m sitting here watching the trails.  Hey! The walls moved.”

But then the camera crew wanted to shoot more footage of our office.  In particular, they wanted to film one of our employees using our Internet portal, pretending to be a customer using our product.  One of our VPs went to go set it up; I stayed and watched the interview with our CIO.  The interview finished, and the VP came back and said, “Great, Ted’s all ready for you.”

Ted? 

Ted was going to be the pretend customer?

See, here’s the thing.  The camera crew was there for hours, but the segment would be a matter of seconds.  We didn’t know what they would show.  We didn’t even know if we would come out looking well.  It was crucial that every second of footage counted, that we looked our best.

And Ted?  How shall I put it.

Ted has a great face for radio.

So I ran out of the room and barged into Cindy’s cube.  Cindy is...well, I need to be clear about this.  She is not a dumb blonde.  She’s funny and smart.  But she is blonde.  She has striking blue eyes.  She’s…

She’s pretty much a hottie.

I said, “Cindy, how’d you like to pretend to be a customer using our web site while a camera’s stuck in your face?”

She said, “Okay, but isn’t Ted doing that?”

“No no, we’re just using Ted’s workstation.  You’ll be the pretend customer.”

“Oh.  Okay.”

And then I charged over to Ted’s area, and I said “We’re going to have Cindy be the pretend customer.  But we definitely want your workstation because your monitor is huge.”

“Oh cool,” said Ted, and amiably stood off to the side.

And Cindy sat at the desk, facing the computer that demonstrated our customer portal.  Since we didn’t want to show any real customer’s information, the screen displayed a fake name: “Doris Johnson.” And several VPs stood off to the side with me and Ted while the camera crew prepared the shot.

And one of the VPs said, “Ted, this seems strange.  Why are we filming your workstation, but with Cindy sitting in your chair?”

And I froze.

Because I didn’t want to explain.

I didn’t want to say that this was a cable TV segment, which is national, and CNBC is a business channel, which means it’s a bunch of guys watching, and they’re more likely to pay attention to the segment if they suddenly see a pretty girl.  To make matters worse, I like Ted; he is so not the kind of office guy you want to kick in the head repeatedly.  But he’s never been asked to model Revlon products.  He’s never been asked to be on the cover of Vogue.  He’s never been asked to be Cameron Diaz’s butt double.

I mean, Cindy’s never asked to be any of those things either, but she’d be higher on the list than Ted.

I prepared myself to lay out my entire evil plan, the way that all the bad guys do—"Your fleet has lost. And your friends on the Endor moon will not survive. There is no escape, young Skywalker. The Alliance will die...as will your friends.”

But as my face curled into a dark scowl, Ted furrowed his own brow.  He shifted from foot to foot.  He hesitated.  And then he said: “Well, you couldn’t have me sitting there.”

Everyone blinked at him.

“Because...the fake name on the screen is Doris Johnson. I’m a guy, so that wouldn’t work.  It has to be Cindy.”

And everyone nodded.  They seemed to be a little bit confused.  After all, the name on the screen was tiny; it never be picked up by the camera.

But no one pursued the matter.

And I breathed a sigh of relief.  I had got away scott free.  I suddenly knew how Keyser Soze felt.  And Hannibal Lector. And O.J. Simpson.

Tomorrow, I will be a liberal again.  I will rail against media images and stereotypes; I will rant and rave at the shallowness of the Hollywood body types; I will shout the names of Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolff, and Kathy Bates. But today it was my company and my story.  Today, I am Ted Turner, Rupert Murdock, and Al Bundy all rolled up into one.

Now, please excuse me.  I have this powerful yearning to go practice some supply side economics.

The strangest thing in my apartment, aside from an otherwordly fuzz growing near the bottom of the refrigerator, is the revival of one of the plants on the balcony.  It was dead, done, toast, history, finito--and yet, months later, raw green shoots are poking out of the soil and demanding to be watered.  Why the miraculous recovery?  My botanical touch is certainly deft.  I sing to my plants, alternating between arias from Carmen and selected Magnetic Fields tunes.

Regardless of the reason, it’s alive.  I am convinced that I am Lazarus, and I have the power to return things from the Dead.  I’m in the process of deciding whom to bring back first:

Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha.  “Do you see what’s going on out there?  You can’t even tell me that this is what you people had in mind.  You’ve got to go out there and stop them before--BUDDHA!  Put the damn nachos down.”

Charles Dickens.  “My old English professor said that my interpretation of your work was bunk, so I want you to write her a handwritten letter and tell her off.  Just mention that your characters represent the complex relationship between gender and class in the late 19th century, and--hey, don’t give me that horrified look, Chuck.  I brought you back and I can take you out.”

River Phoenix.  “Seriously man--aren’t you ashamed of yourself?  You couldn’t hack it and meanwhile both Coreys are alive and making crappy direct-to-video movies.  Get your lazy, dead ass back to work.”

My pet snake Bart.  He died too soon.  You have a favorite pet from your childhood?  A fuzzy, cute animal that you remember fondly?  Whatever.  Bart could totally eat it.

I was also going to resurrect Katharine Hepburn, but can you believe that she’s still alive?

Someone just called me “dawg” for the very first time!

Of course, the circumstances were that I was struggling under the weight of a third repetition of a bench press that I should never have attempted, and so he came over and spotted me and I thanked him because I would likely have been squashed like a pancake and he said “No problem dawg,” which is like saying “You are so white and stupid that the least I can do is regale you with slang because you’re the gym equivalent of a charity case.”

But that’s splitting hairs. The point is, I was called “dawg.” I think it’s safe to say that I exude badassedness.

My job doesn’t have a ton of perks, but every now and then a bone gets thrown my way. This afternoon, in order to make nice with a Gartner analyst who might decide to write up my company, we all went to see the Braves trounce the As at the Oakland Colosseum.

Some of you who know me are now thinking: Greg at a sports event? He must have had about as much fun as Martha Stewart in front of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Yeah, but everything’s fun when you’re there in the flesh. I can go see a polka show and afterwards I’ll be all “Dude, did you see the way he played that accordian? As though it was an extension of his very soul?”

Anyway, I was highly disturbed at a promotion for an upcoming game. Apparently, the first few hundred visitors will receive—and I am not making this up—Russian nesting dolls.

I admit that it’s been a while since I took myself out to the ol’ ball game. But in my day, we got hats. We got pennants. We got jars filled with the home team’s tobacco spit. Much less frequently: promotions that simultaneously threatened my gender and challenged my economic system of choice.

I don’t want to alarm anyone unnecessarily. I’m not saying it’s time to stock the basement with tins of spam. I’m not saying it’s time to rent Red Dawn and take copious notes.

But if the Colosseum starts handing out Ukranian hair curlers, it might be time to start voting Republican.

It’s June, and I’d like to make a mid-year’s resolution: 72 dpi.

I’ve always wanted to be a heavy drug abuser, but I’m a cheapskate and drugs are expensive. I’ve often combed through those coupon booklets that come in the mail but they never offer anything for first-time buyers. Everything’s return address labels and hedge trimming and carpet cleaning—not a damn thing about mescaline.

The Supermarket isn’t any help either. The clerk always says “Did you find everything you needed?” And I say “I’m still missing a pound of opium, and believe me I was all over the so-called ‘exotic spices’ section on Aisle 9.”

Ideally I’d like to be what’s called a “functional drug abuser.” This means that you can abuse drugs heavily but still go to work and collect a paycheck. And around lunch time when you’re convinced spiders are swarming all over you and you run screaming into the street and a bus hits you, you feel absolutely no pain whatsoever.

I’d also like to experience rehab, but only if I can attend a cool celebrity clinic like Betty Ford. Some of you may question my qualifications for this, but I’ll have you know that I appeared in Who’s Who in American High Schools. Such status symbols help ensure that you get to room with someone from Friends rather than someone from The Facts of Life.

Here’s how I found out that there’s no such thing as a fraternity of Howards.

Once upon a time I was alone in Los Angeles for a week. I had a screenplay that no one had bought, a manager with third-tier industry contacts, and a huge stack of Yahoo maps.

Why? Because although the script hadn’t sold, a bunch of production companies thought it was funny and wanted to meet with me to see what else I was writing. (This gives you a hint of the hotbed of lunacy that is Los Angeles. People reject you and then interview you, instead of the other way around.)

I had 30 meetings that week, about six a day. From morning until evening I studied my stack of maps and kept my appointments, driving around from studio to production house to studio. And I wasn’t meeting with Steven Spielberg, either. It would be an assistant at Fox Searchlight or an intern at Meg Ryan’s production house. The highest person on the food chain was a producer who worked on Lethal Weapon and Free Willy, but she was just looking for someone to write her pet project, a remake of All About Eve, without being paid. I passed.

About midway through the week I was tired of the whole thing. I was sick of talking about my screenplay, and my ideas for future screenplays, and my background. I was sick of inane conversations with Los Angeles industry types, who are all very nice but cloned from the exact same DNA. I was sick of no one writing me a fat check.

I decided to keep myself occupied with a new game:

Find a celebrity.

After all, I wasn’t just in Los Angeles; I was in the studio backlots—not where the tourists go but the heart of the beast. After a meeting I’d be left alone to find my way out, so I’d wander around Paramount and Fox and Warner Brothers and just look at everything. I saw actors auditioning, special effects people working, and executives chattering on cell phones.

But no celebrities.

Then, near the end of the week, I was walking through Universal Studios on my way to another meeting. This was when Universal’s big project was the live-action remake of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and you could see signs of it everywhere. Go-carts with the Grinch logo. Santa Claus and Who costumes hanging in half-opened closets. A giantic, outdoor set of Whoville, complete with sloping domes and swooping arches the color of cotton candy.

And then, coming toward me, I saw a man with a baseball cap that half-concealed a few tufts of orange hair. It was the Grinch’s director—Ron Howard.

I had found my celebrity!

And not just any celebrity. He was a Howard.

And surely, he’d look at me and see my aura, and he would immediately recognize that I was also a Howard. He’d say, “You look tired of having meaningless conversations with industry lamers. Why don’t you come with me and we’ll have a fun chat, Howard-to-Howard?”

And we’d talk about great things!

I’d ask him: “When you did the show where Fonzie jumped the shark, did you know you’d create a catchphrase called ‘Jump the Shark’?”

And: “Do you ever whistle the Andy Griffith theme when you’re by yourself?”

And: “You directed Night Shift and Gung Ho. Did you actually think those movies were funny?

It would be grand!

But then my brother came closer. And closer. And we locked eyes. And he gave me a look.

I believe it was a look that he has given many, many times over the course of his life. It was a look that was instantly, immediately readable. There was no ambiguity to it whatsoever.

The look said: “Don’t you goddamn dare call me ‘Opie.’”

And we passed each other. I had, at least, succeeded in my quest for a celebrity. But as I proceeded to my appointment—a meeting with an executive whose sole credit was “associate producer” on the Patrick Swayze bomb Black Dog—I couldn’t help think that a fraternity of Howards would be a nice thing to have.

To all appearances, this Associated Press picture shows Attorney General John Ashcroft testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee.  He seems to be holding a translated copy of a plan written by the International Islamic Front for Jihad, while impassionately booming: “Documents like these prove that the fight against terror continues.  To protect America we must expand the provisions of the Patriot Act, even if they result in minor restrictions of liberty for individual citizens.”

However, “Geese Aplenty” has learned that if you play Ashcroft’s speech backwards, you hear this instead:

“My name is Axnor Five, from the planet of the Lobster Men.  We are here to devour you, your children, and your children’s children.  You think this is a translated copy of a plan written by the International Islamic Front for Jihad?  Pathetic earthlings.  It’s a cookbook...a cookbook!”

I used to think it would be cool if they made a movie about my life. But I recently saw the trailer for Rowan Atkinson’s new spy spoof, and under the rating it gave an explanation: “Brief violence. Strong language. Comic nudity.”

So now I don’t want a movie about my life, because I’m almost positive that the rating will be given due to “comic nudity.”

I think it’s funny that we scratch out the price on books and other items when we give them to people as gifts. It’s a gesture that says, “In theory my feelings for you have no price--but if you really want a numerical value, just do a search on Amazon.”

I always wonder whether to cross out the Canadian price as well. My instinct is to leave it alone. That way, your gift says “My feelings for you are so big that they’re Canadian feelings, which at the current rate of exchange is several dollars more than American feelings.”