I never liked the whole Starbucks “tall, venti, grande” thing but I let it pass because my first experience with Starbucks coffee was so memorable.  This was around the mid 90s and they were successful but not as insanely successful as they are now.  I lived in Massachusetts, and I visited a Starbucks in Boston and kicked back one their house coffees.  It was dark, strong, and powerful.  It wasn’t the best I ever had, but it definitely made me pay attention and I still remember it to this day.  I actually think Starbucks coffee tasted better back when the chain was still a little hungry; these days I can detect a faint, acrid aftertaste.

But I recently went into a Jamba Juice and I realize that this whole size thing has got to stop. Do you realize that their drinks come in “sixteen,” “original,” and “power”?

I’ll be drawn and quartered by a pack of rabid horses before I ever say to anyone, “I’d like to order a sixteen apple-peach matcha with a protein boost.” Why sixteen, anyway?  Why not just call it a jailbait?

Screw all these trendy chains with their made up sizes.  What next?  You walk into Cold Stone Creamery and order a C-Cup Scoop of Pecan and Cream Passion?

I usually talk about trivial matters on this site and eschew politics, but it’s time for all of us to make ourselves heard.  They’ll keep trying to screw with us as long as we let them.  We need to stand up and buck the system.  I want all of you to walk into Starbucks and order a Power Caramel Macchiato, and then go into Jamba Juice and order a Grande Acai Supercharger.  And if the “barristers” or “juice jockeys” or whatever the hell they call themselves try to correct you, you tell them “Look, shut the hell up and get me my drink in the exact size that I just ordered.  Otherwise I’ll call your manager and bust you so far down the franchise food chain that you’ll be slinging sausages and lemonade at Hot Dog on a Stick, which conveniently come in the sizes of Kidney, Schnauzer, and Ballpark.”

At my father’s suggestion, I’ve gotten in the habit of sending my grandmother an email every week.  The fact of the matter is, I am not very close to my grandmother so I haven’t been very admirable about corresponding with her.  But she is increasingly sick and has reached a point where she can’t even read or watch TV because her eyes are too weak.  So I email updates on my life to my aunt, who prints them out and reads them to her.

The one I sent her last night seemed to me like something I might post here, so I am, in fact, posting it here.

Dear Grandma,

Today I spent the afternoon with [my niece] Cameron.  It was fun.  [My brother’s wife] Deborah dropped us off at the park, but not before [my brother] Geoff gave me all the supplies I needed: spare diapers, crackers, and a water bottle.

“You also need one more thing,” Geoff warned me.  “You need to know what to say to all the nannies at the park.  When they say ‘Oh, you have a beautiful daughter,’ you need to say ‘Oh, she’s not my daughter. I just happen to love children.’ They will all melt.”

Sound advice. However, if any nannies were giving me the eye, I had no time to find out.  I was too busy following Cam around the park and preventing her from getting into trouble.  A park may seem like a very safe place, but in fact it’s full of danger.  In the brief time I was there, I catalogued the following deathtraps:

I recently installed TIVO and couldn’t believe it.  You can pause live TV!  I sat there watching shows then pausing them and hitting “play” again.  It was mind boggling.

The thing is, I only watch intelligent television with complex, highly sophisticated content, so it’s very helpful to be able to pause shows when I need to.  For example, the pizza man rang the doorbell, so I quickly paused Cartoon Network’s Krypto the Superdog and opened the door and waved the TIVO control and said “Isn’t this cool?”

He said, “Yeah, but you owe me--”

I accidentally hit the “pause” button while pointing it at the pizza guy.  He froze in place.

Horrified, I quickly hit “Play” again. 

“--$19.98 plus tip.”

I stared at the remote.  This technology was even more powerful than I suspected.

I went to work.  My manager called me into his office and said, “We’re interested in leveraging synergies with our new partners.  At the end of the day, one of our paramount goals will be to achieve organizational energies driven by bottom line revenue as well as top line--”

I pointed the TIVO remote at him and hit “Pause.” Then I called my friend.  We went to a few bars.  We had a good time.  Things got a little crazy.

Eventually, around 2 a.m., I stumbled back to work.  It was dark.  Everyone had gone home except for my manager. I went back into his office, sat down, pointed the TIVO, and hit “Play.”

“--productivity.  In addition.......say, did you always have underwear on your head?”

What bothers me about intelligent design isn’t that it’s the old Watchmaker theory dressed up in new clothes.  Sure, the Watchmaker argument has been so thoroughly discredited that it doesn’t make much sense to me to try to resuscitate it—but, y’know, whatever.  I thought it was dumb when Britney Spears covered Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” too, but I could just switch off the radio.  No big deal.

And it’s not that proponents of intelligent design are intent on aligning themselves with the scientific establishment.  Well, okay, that does bug me.  What’s wrong with science staying in the classroom and faith staying in the church?  It’s not like scientists go to religious leaders and say “Do you think we can just sort of jump in between the sermon and the hymns so we can show everyone the difference between meiosis and mitosis?”

It strikes me as weird that the faith folks are beating down everyone’s door to be part of the science crowd.  It’s as though they look over at the scientists and say “Hey, they’re having fun over there.  Let’s go be a part of that.” So they go over to the scientists:

- We want to do what you’re doing.

- Okay. Do you use hypothesis to predict the existence of phenomena, or predict qualitatively the results of new observations?

- No.

- Do you do perform experimental tests to verify predictions that are evaluated by several independent experimenters?

- No.

- Um, maybe you should go back over there.

- You guys are mean.  We’re calling the school board.

I don’t understand why this is such an issue.  Scientists, many of whom are religious, are not necessarily anti-faith.  Many of them advocate faith as a means to fill in the gaps in human knowledge with spiritual thought and belief in order to give people richer and more meaningful lives—as long as there’s no riding around on bikes and knocking on people’s doors. But faith can’t replace the scientific method.  (Conversely, the scientific method can’t replace faith, so see?  Everyone should be happy.) You can’t mix them up.  For example, I remember being in high school chemistry and trying to put together various chemicals in order to create a purple flame.  Do catholic priests train in labs so that they get transubstantiation just right?

- So, did it work this time?

- No, and I can’t figure it out.  I followed all the instructions, but the wine just turned into one of those little Jesus-in-a-manger snowflake globes.

- Sorry, that’s another C grade.  But you can make it up by doing extra credit in astronomy—for example, following that yonder star.

That doesn’t stop the faith advocates from attempting to discredit evolution with non-scientific arguments. I was reading a proponent of intelligent design in a mainstream newspaper recently, and he criticized evolution because it made all these suppositions about how history happened but “no one was there to see it so no one really knows for sure.” So all we need to do is trust our eyes?  I once saw Ronald McDonald doing somersaults into a mosh pit full of talking cucumbers, but that doesn’t mean it really happened.  Rather, it taught me to never eat anything that that’s sold in the parking lot before a Grateful Dead show.

None of those problems with intelligent design bothers me all that much.  What bothers me is the theory’s bottom-line implication, that the First Cause of a designed reality somehow equates to the Christian God.  Let’s say for the sake of argument that intelligent design is correct: reality is so complex and intricate that it somehow “proves” a creator.  Where does that lead us to the conclusion that said creator is capital G God? 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not being cynical about the state of life, the universe, and everything.  We have lot of very nice things here.  Rolling mist covering dew-kissed hills in the morning, love, sex, the miracle of birth, TIVO.  But what about the rest of it?  Does it truly reflect a perfect system that sprang from an omniscient being?

At the movies a while back, I saw two trailers.  One was called Red Eye, a white-knuckle thriller about a cute woman who ends up sitting next to a psychopath on an airplane.  The other was called Flightplan, a white-knuckle thriller bout a cute woman who ends up losing her daughter on an airplane.  Both movies look worthless, but maybe there’s a chance to bulk up the plot a bit by combining them.  Red Eye Flightplan, a white-knuckle thriller about a cute woman who loses her daughter while sitting next to a psychopath on an airplane.

“Stewardess, help me!  That man is crazy!  Also, have you seen my daughter?”

I still wouldn’t go see it, though.

---

At the sushi place near my place of work, they’re advertising two specials:

OH YES ROLL

YUMMY YUMMY ROLL

You have to respect a place that cuts the pretentious crap and tells it like it is.

---

I made a joke once.  Someone else has done it better.

I had a minor accident last week that covered my face with tiny red welts.  I went to a wedding Saturday, a birthday Sunday, and it’s now mid-week--which means you can believe that I now have a ready arsenal of answers to the question “Jesus. What--what happened to your face?”

- You know how some people get together on weekends and participate in a real Fight Club? I do that, but my club doesn’t follow any rules. Which is why I’m allowed to discuss this with you.

- Oh, I suppose you got through the chicken pox when you were a kid, Mr. Born-with-the-Silver-Spoon?

- Well, I’ll tell you what it’s not.  It’s definitely not battered husband syndrome.  My friends say it is, but it’s all my fault.  I made her mad, and I deserved it.

- This happens to every male in my family around this age. I’d rather not discuss it.

The problem is, the actual answer to the question is just as ridiculous: hot oil spattered my face when I was frying some burgers.  Listen, I fry burgers all the time.  I’d be highly willing to have burgers for breakfast.  I know how to maintain the delicate balance of flame to oil in order to achieve maximum effect without personal injury.  So what happened?  I was just tooling along and suddenly my frying pan went all Poltergeist on me.

The thing is, it didn’t even hurt; it just stung a bit.  I laughed and had dinner and went to bed and woke up the next morning and looked in the mirror and the picture of Dorian Gray was staring back at me.

My co-worker (pictured below) said I should go buy some vitamin E cream in order to prevent scarring.  It hadn’t even occurred to me that the bruises might scar, and I was about to take her recommendation when I realized that:

My friend and co-worker has been carefully monitoring my laser eye surgery recovery, because she’s scheduled to get the same procedure with the same doctor.

When she asked me what the worst thing about the procedure was, I wanted to make all the jokes about it that I’ve posted here, except, well, I couldn’t.  I couldn’t bring myself to scare her.

I mean, look at her. She’s practically a zygote. 

So I told her something like “When the angels come the next day to gently lift up your eyelids and show you a beautiful and dazzling new world, sometimes the pixie dust gets in your eyes.”

I don’t think she bought it.

There’s a number of intersections that I drive through on the way to work.  Several of them have a warning side that reads “State law requires drivers to yield right of way to any pedestrian within crosswalk.”

I’ve always taken that phrase literally.  Remember how you read fantasy books as a kid, and there was always some dangerous, mysterious land that you could only navigate through safely by staying on the enchanted path?  That’s how I interpreted the crosswalk sign.  A pedestrian was safe as long as he or she stayed within the narrow confines of the marking, but any deviation from the path and it was all Death Race 2000.

Yesterday a pedestrian ambled very, very slowly along the crosswalk.  I had a green light, but he didn’t care. He just kept moving slowly, passing in front of my car as though he was out to pick flowers.

I watched him very closely.  His foot came very close to stepping outside the crosswalk.

Finally, he stepped completely outside the crosswalk.  I decided to test my theory. I slammed on the gas.

The police arrived on the scene quickly, but eyewitnesses verified my story: the guy had stepped outside the crosswalk.  The cop crumpled up the citation and said “Too bad for the guy, but he knew the rules.”

I started to get back into my car, but the cop stopped me: “Off the record, sir, I’d like to give you my personal thanks.  That slow walking, red-light crossing guy had pissed off most of the town.”

Here’s another reason to avoid laser eye surgery: I was given eye shields which I have to wear for ten nights straight.  I have to tape them across each eye, and they look like miniature hockey masks.  Apparently, they will prevent me from crushing the still-healing issue like a grape if I happen to roll over in my sleep.

The problem is, this means I can only sleep on my back and my side.  This is not how I sleep.  I’m very restless. I turn over and around and back again.  Unconfirmed reports indicate that every night around 3:30 am, I sleepwalk out of bed and open the window and throw my blankets and pillow into the street while screaming “WE’RE AS MAD AS HELL AND WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE.” Then I stumble into the living room and collapse on the coffee table.  It is not possible to do this anymore; instead, I wake up several times a night dreaming that I’m being smothered by Wayne Gretsky.

Last night, I taped up the shields and put them over my eyes and stared at my reflection in the mirror and said “You look like a total idiot.” My Friday-the-13th-Jason style eyes whispered back, “killkillkillkillkillkill.”

I got even more upset after talking to my brother on the phone.  He had laser surgery a while back, and no one ever asked him to wear eye shields. This made me very paranoid: what if my doctor just likes to play jokes on his patients and has them wear ridiculous headgear?

“We’ll make this guy wear a pair of hockey masks.  And the next guy will wear a big purple nose warmer.  We’ll tell him that if he sneezes too hard, the warmer will catch the eye if it dislodges from the socket and shoots out the nostril.”

I rode a lot of roller coasters this weekend, and people asked me if the pressure would hurt my eyes or something,* but I read all the fine print and it said nothing about roller coasters.  But apparently sleeping is off limits. 

Well, it’s only four more nights. I think I’ll celebrate at the end of it by throwing a slumber party.

*My friend Adam told his girlfriend once that I never mention him on my site, so this is a good time to say hello to Adam, and thanks for getting us into Paramount’s Great America, and maybe we could go back this weekend and find my right eye? Because it popped out of my head during the Top Gun ride and rolled underneath one of the tracks.

I just found out about fantasy football and I’m very upset about it.

It turns out that fantasy football is a season-long competition played by football fans in which participants draft their own team and compete with teams built by others. Individual game winners are determined by points accumulated by players based on their real-life performance.

In essence, this people are watching tons of football on TV, reading about the rest of the games or catching the highlights on the news, and then playing their own games in their spare time.

I’ve been known to be called a geek from time to time--well, actually, every day--but nothing I do even comes close to this.

I mean, sure, people have tried to draw me into ridiculous discussions, such as whether the Hulk could beat Superman.  But I refuse to get sucked in, and after an hour of arguing I’m completely done with the topic.

As opposed to traditional geeks, these fantasy football people can completely blend in.  They don’t wear Starfleet insignias on their chest.  They could be bankers.  Executives.  Presidents.  Zionist conspiracy?  Give me a break.  It’s the fantasy football cabal that I worry about.  Zionists are kittens in comparison, even though I do suspect them of helping launch Ashlee Simpson’s career.

The real problem is, nobody has told fantasy footballers that what they’re doing is wrong.  Traditional geeks, at one point, faced William Shatner’s famous wakeup call--but Joe Montana never stood up in front of an audience of a thousand screaming fans and shouted “GET A LIFE.” Therefore, fantasy footballers just continue on their merry way, and society suffers as a result.

The world is just a bit darker for me today.

You know, one gets very tired of the condescending, sarcastic coverage of blogging found in the mainstream press.  Take this op ed piece in the New York Times: “Blogs are often just a way of making oneself appear on the Internet. It’s like a closed-circuit video camera that catches a glimpse of you walking by an electronics store window filled with televisions. There you are in all your glory, suddenly, if not forever, mediated.”

I happen to take blogging, and this site, very seriously.  It’s not just a narcissistic self-reflection.  It’s a conduit for profound thought and nuanced philosophy.

By the way, have you noticed that if you squint at my archives page in a certain way, it looks a bit like a pregnant rabbit?

I made up the below post.  I was too nervous to make jokes when I was getting laser surgery.  But some funny things happened.  There was a couple in front of me at the reception desk, and the nurse asked if the husband wanted to go to the “viewing area” and watch his wife undergo the procedure:

HUSBAND: Forget it.  No way.

WIFE: Honey, it’s not like I’ll be gushing blood.

HUSBAND: I don’t care.

NURSE: You don’t even have to look right at her.  The procedure is projected on a 42” TV set--

HUSBAND: I have one of those at home. And it’s got the Learning Channel.  And that’ll tell me all I need to know about what’s going on here.

Also, as I was waiting for the surgery to start, I saw a sign that said “PLEASE TURN OFF CELL PHONES.  THEY MAY INTERFERE WITH LASER.”

Why is everyone worried about chemical and biological warfare?  Clearly, the most dangerous weapons on the planet are cell phones.  They can bring down airplanes and interfere with lasers.  I bet the gang of Star Wars wishes they had a cell phone when the stormtroopers came at them on the Death Star:

HAN: We’re being pinned down, kid!

LUKE: Can’t you do something?

HAN: (whipping out a Sprint phone) Hi, I’d like to place an order for a pepperoni pizza.

(Stormtrooper weapons shoot around crazily, mowing each other down)

LEIA: Great!  Now we don’t have to go into the garbage chute.

I was disappointed with my performance under the laser; the doctor told me I kept trying to squint.  Well, sure. Your eyelids are clamped back and there’s a huge red light coming at you and even though you’re holding a stuffed moose (the nurse put this into my hands right before everything started) you start to sweat a bit.  All I could think of was Sure, they’re curing me of my ultra violence, but what if I can never listen to Beethoven’s ninth symphony again?

My friend took me home and I lay on my bed with my eyes closed.  I wasn’t allowed to watch TV or read or play on the computer, so I had queued up an audiobook of Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them, and I quickly realized I was about to fall asleep.  This worried me, because falling asleep to Al Franken is likely to bring dreams of being eaten alive by a giant, slavering Ann Coulter.  Fortunately this didn’t happen; I dreamed instead that I was helping Ray Charles find his way around and I accidentally led him into a lake.  I am not making this up.  I am blaming Jules for putting my brain into such a state of mind.  Oh, and if Ray happens to come back to life and you happen to be leading him around and you happen to accidentally lead him into a lake?  It turns out he’s a really good sport about it.

Are you considering getting laser surgery?  If you are, I’d like to warn you about a couple of side effects which don’t appear in the fine print.  And the fact that they don’t is astonishing.  You have to sign form after form, and the fine print goes on for pages and pages and talks about the strong possibility that your nose will explode and your genitals will fall off.  And yet, they miss two key points:

First, as a commenter mentioned in the below post, there is a highly disturbing smell associated with the procedure.  At first, you don’t realize what it is.  And then it occurs to you: YOU SMELL THE FLESH OF YOUR OWN BURNING EYEBALL.  Hello, I think that should have been in the warnings somewhere.  “Your eyeball will burn.  You will be traumatized.  You are welcome to bring a packet of soy sauce.”

The second side effect is even more terrifying.  For decades, I’ve been getting up every morning and showering and shaving and combing my hair and eventually putting in my contacts.  For all those years, I figured I was the most handsome, well built man alive--until such time as I put in my contacts and then everything snapped back to normal.  Why shouldn’t I think such a thing? All I could see was a blurry blob.  I filled in the blanks to suit my own needs.

But even though one’s vision is a little weak the next morning, there’s no question that I got up, went into the bathroom, and stopped in my tracks at the sight of an unshaven monstrosity with a huge bedhead.  This is what I actually look like?

So now I’ve got two urgent followup items.  First, write a letter to, I dunno, the laser surgeons of America or something and tell them to update their consent forms because they lack key details.  And two, I’m going to have to get to know this bedraggled Bigfoot who is apparently going to be hunching around my bathroom mirror every morning until, well, forever.

- Now, keep your eyes straight ahead.  You don’t want the laser to miss, right?

- Actually, Doc, I might.

- Why?

- Because it might trip a secret optic nerve and give me heat vision powers, like Superman.

- Maybe it’s best that you don’t talk for a bit.

- ‘You expect me to talk?’ ‘No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.’

- Nurse, are you sure you gave the patient a sedative?