WORLD TRAVEL I

WORLD TRAVEL

We recently returned from Amsterdam, which I feel compelled to tell you, is a wonderful city. You might guess from looking at commercials for Amstel and Heineken, that everyone in the city is always drunk. This is absolutely false. The truth is that they are always stoned. If you look around, you can see entire families bicycling into Dam Plaza together. Then they get that look on their face that says, “Shit- I forgot what we came in here for.” They are completely stoned. Even the little children are stoned from secondhand smoke, which I think is a great thing for those who can’t afford to buy it new. Here they call it “Certified Pre-Owned.” Unfortunately, an hour after the cafes open there is a run on Fritos in all supermarkets, and many people are trampled each day. If I was a brilliant entrepreneur I would market a package deal of a gram of hash and a pint of Häagen-Dazs Heavenly Hash together for 20 euros.

Dam Plaza is kind of a congregating point in the middle of town, where tourists can go if they want to look lost and not feel so out of place. The problem is that you are steering your rented bike with one hand, holding the map with the other, and you finally find your destination, which is on Luijkeliedseprinsensplaat. You look up at the sign, and by some miracle, you are on that road! Then a huge trolley car slams into you and knocks you to kingdom come. And when you recover, the street sign now says Luijkeliedseprinsenstrasse. So you are back to square one. If you eventually do get onto the right road, in two blocks it changes to Kaiserspleidenrijkelgracht and you’re lost again. If you are stupid enough to ask for directions, they will tell you, “it is over by the canal.” Every street has a canal next to it in Amsterdam. There are displaced people over here, but I don’t think they are homeless. They just have no idea exactly where they are.

Whenever I am at Dam Plaza I always stick my finger in a dyke, and yes, I have been slapped for it plenty hard.

While we were here, we visited plenty of museums. One we did not get a chance to visit was the Anne Frank house. Which has to piss off the owners, because it wasn’t her house, they were just nice enough to let her stay there. The whole story is a little depressing, since she dies, but I guess if you wait around long enough every story has that same ending. The room is supposedly exactly as it was when she was living there, which made me wonder what would happen if I was Anne Frank, and MY room had to be preserved for many generations exactly as it was when I was living there. That is a LOT of pressure on a teenager to clean up your frigging room. Millions of visitors a year filing past my room behind a velvet rope going, “Gross! Is that a ginormous pile of underwear over there? When was he planning to launder it? I doubt the Nazis will occupy THAT! And what is that tacky blacklight poster of Farrah Fawcett doing there? Her nipples are practically poking my eye out.”

I never even read Anne Frank’s diary, because it seems nosy. What if there is stuff about her and her boyfriend getting to third base or something? She should have locked it with that little key if she didn’t want idiots like us reading it.

On a lighter note, there is plenty to do here. If you go to Max Euweplein square you can play chess on a giant board. The good news is that I was able to castle using an actual castle. The bad news is that on my opening move I think I killed a squirrel.

The van Gogh museum was great. Van Gogh is what I like to call a lasting impressionist. He himself was very impressionable, and soaked up techniques from other painters, such as Renoir, Gauguin and Japanese influences. The onset of mental illness caused him to do strange things, and eventually committed himself to an asylum. Whereupon hearing a voice in his head, he started removing his buttocks with a razor blade. The voice quickly corrected him: “I said cut off your EAR, not your REAR! Are you NUTS?” His fame grew even after his death, which is when he did some of his best work.

We went to the Concertgebouw and saw a kick-ass symphony concert. We were seated actually behind the instruments, facing the conductor. It was interesting to watch him work. With one hand, he was alternately keeping the time and cueing different sections of the orchestra. With the other hand he was texting somebody. Every once in awhile he made a motion towards the woodwind section, gave the finger, and mouthed the words, “F the bassoon player,” so I don’t know what that was about. At the end of the concert a page came out and gave a bouquet of flowers to the first violinist, and he yanked them out of her hand and gave them to the flute player, so I think he is banging her. One thing noticed is that the tympani player is grossly overpaid. He sat reading the paper for most of the program, clicking his tongue at the financial section, and every once in awhile he would turn the page of the music just for show.


Incidentally, Rembrandt van Rijn, who was in his painting heyday at about the time that New Amsterdam was discovering its New World identity, is purported to have painted over 300 works. Included among them are about 40 self-portraits, although in some of them he portrayed himself as looking remarkably like Brad Pitt.

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EARTH DAY

EARTH DAY

Today is Earth Day- did you get a gift? I must admit, I did not get anything. I have no idea what to get- I will probably just get a plant or something. I think I read somewhere that this Earth day the Earth is 40 YEARS OLD. And I must say it looks pretty good (although I think it has had some work done). Yes there are some cracks and crevices- Haiti looks a little wrinkly, and some of the tectonic plates definitely need to be replaced.

That’s why we all have to do our part. I am thinking of getting a Hybrid car- it’s a cross between a Yugo and a poodle- it’s called a Poogo. But I can’t even trust a battery to run a flashlight let alone my car.

Which reminds me: every time I buy a new package of batteries I go through the same stages of grief. First, Denial. I firmly believe that this will be the first package of batteries ever manufactured that I will be able to open with just my hands. I look for the little tab that says, “OPEN HERE.” I look all over for it. “PULL HERE, STUPID!” I can’t see anything. “NOT THERE, OVER HERE- ARE YOU A FUCKING MORON OR WHAT? YOU GRADUATED FROM SYRACUSE? FIGURES….” There is no tab. Next, Anger. I want to meet the person that designed this package. I want to butter him up with a little small talk, how’s the wife, the kids, etc. and make him feel at ease and light-hearted as we walk in the park, admiring nature. Then I shove him into a 10-foot pit that I have dug and covered with leaves. At first stunned, he regains his senses and pleads with me to throw down an i-phone so he can call for help, or at least pass the time surfing for internet porn. I say nothing for two hours, then throw in the i-phone, wrapped in hard seamless plastic. I watch and laugh diabolically as he ruins his incisors trying to gnaw the package open.

Then, Bargaining. I plead with the batteries to just come on out of the package willingly. Just this once. They decline. Then, Depression, where I just don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning, knowing that I can’t get those goddamn batteries out of the package. Finally, Acceptance, where I realize I will have to spring for another 20 bucks for the AC adaptor.

Anyway, alternative power is becoming a much higher priority. They are considering building a wind farm off the coast of Nantucket. Indian tribes are against that particular location, since some Indians were buried on the planet Earth, where they are thinking of building the wind farm. Congress has provided for tax credits for the proliferation of alternative energy, but what they should do is put the turbines right there in the Senate chamber where the wind is. Growing up on a wind farm is much less work than a regular farm- no milking cows, planting things, picking things. You just water those big wind things every once in awhile and they’re good to go- it’s a breeze. I have seen a giant hi-tech wind generator on top of our neighbor’s barn. It has a rooster on top and the letters, N, S, E, and W, which probably stand for something to do with the output or amperage.

Clean coal is another option that’s getting a lot of airtime these days. But clean coal is very expensive to produce, since it comes out of that mine so darn dirty. If you toss it in the washer (NOT with the delicates) using a little Tide you should be fine.

Hydro-electric power uses current to provide current. For instance, the two generating stations on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls provide 2,700 kilowatts of power, enough to supply one quarter of the electricity in New York State, as long as they don’t use their hair dryers all at the same time.

So if you live next to a coal mine, with a raging river on your property, with no trees to block the sun and constant 60- 65 mile-per-hour winds, chances are you will never have to pay one cent to run your appliances. But I have to tell you that sounds like an awful piece of property, especially in this real-estate market. Plus, one day you are going to wake up and say, “I have ZERO energy today,” and no one is going to feel sorry for you. You sound like a bit of a whiner to me.


Incidentally, Solar energy is produced in photovoltaic cells. The sun excites the electrons in these cells, possibly by telling them that they are going to Disneyworld. The cell produces DC power, which is then transformed via inverter to AC voltage. This AC/DC conversion is similar to taking kilowatts that enjoy Liza Minnelli concerts and changing them into ones that like working with power tools.

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RELIGIOUS HOLIDAYS

RELIGIOUS HOLIDAYS

I have finally finished my Easter candy. At least I think I have; my wife hid all of my chocolate eggs so that I could hunt for them. Which I found mean and vindictive. Can you imagine if the Red Cross went into a relief area and hid the food JUST FOR FUN? I took my Winchester 94 with me. That way, if I failed to find any eggs I could just shoot at the ground and hope to find oil, like Jed Clampett. Wife sat there smugly as I struggled to find food. I said hey I don’t see you going down to the reservoir and hiding the swan’s eggs. Try that on for size.

I am still finding a chocolate egg here and there- there were several in my car which I did not discover until the weather returned from its high of 91 degrees.

As a kid we used to color our hard-boiled eggs the night before Easter with Paas Easter Egg Dye. You dissolve the different color dyes in bowls of water. After holding the egg patiently in the mixture for about an hour-and-a-half, the white egg would magically re-appear the vibrant color of ecru. You could hardly recognize it. They were hardly Faberge masterpieces, but they kept us out of trouble for however long an hour-and-a-half times one dozen is.

My mother used to hide the eggs that night so we could find them the next day. Unfortunately, we all well knew that the hours between Easter Eve and Easter Morning were more than adequate for her to completely forget where she hid them. I fantasize that the people who eventually bought our house every once in awhile scratch their head and go, “There it is again- what the hell is that smell?” Sometimes someone in North Dakota will find what they insist is a petrified dinosaur egg, but us six kids know better.

Then we would get hauled off to the Country Club (I love saying that, but I’m sure you know that if you call yourself a “Country Club,” it only means that you are hoping with desperation that you could be that which you are not), where they had a lovely Easter day planned, with an Easter egg hunt and a magician. I remember hating it, which proves I was cool even back then. The other kids were way faster and smarter at finding the plastic eggs with the prizes in them. Which proves I was unathletic, even back then. The magician did the same lame tricks every time, including the old “milk-in-the-newspaper-cone” trick.

Which I just had to try at home. Not only would there be a huge puddle of milk on the floor, but Dad would have no idea what happened in the world that day. Prior to getting yelled at and possibly misdemeanor assaulted, I would say, “Well, there’s no use crying over THAT is there?” and run like hell.

Easter is the most cannibalistic-seeming holiday. The torturous glee with which you slowly devour a whole animal, without skinning it or cooking it, starting with its ears. With no ability to hear, and sometimes with its tail suddenly consumed, hence its balance compromised, it still wears an fatuous and gruesome smile. I finally get to the flesh-eater’s prize, the beautiful blue eyes. I chew them slowly and savor them. Should the chocolate bunny lay chocolate eggs, I will swallow their unborn children whole.

I start to see things from Hannibal Lechter’s side. Which reminds me: every time I see a baby with one of those sucker things in its mouth I think of Hannibal Lechter. Is that baby a dangerous criminal? A psychotic killer? It is laughing at inappropriate times, a clear sign. It has a dazed, drooly look. Could it jump across that high chair, club me, remove my skin and eat me? It does not look particularly agile, but neither do NFL offensive linemen. Then the sucker thing falls out of its mouth and I feel stupid for even thinking it. But I steer well clear of it anyway.

I never pay much attention to the religious side of it; that people believe in such things seems vaguely embarrassing to me. But I would NEVER say so out loud. If there really is a Judgement Day I picture everyone sitting around a big table holding up signs with “7.5” or “6.0” on them. It will be a lot like the Easter Egg hunt, where I never made such a great showing.


Incidentally, the name “Easter” is possibly derived from “Eostre,” a month of the Germanic calendar akin to April, in which feasts were held. The holiday corresponds with the Jewish holiday of Passover, and the gambling holiday of Passover/under. The New Testament of the Bible teaches that Easter follows the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. And if you look closely at da Vinci’s The Last Supper, you can plainly see that Judas is reaching for a chocolate Easter bunny.

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NATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

NATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

Have you sent your Census Form back yet? I have not. But Person Number 1 has. After 30 some odd years (some would argue most odd) of signing on the dotted line below my dotted line, my wife has taken it upon herself to become “Person Number 1,” as directed by our Census form. I found this amazing! Of all the people in America to receive the survey, she was the FIRST!

So Person Number 1 was just about to start answering the questions, but then Person Number 1 had to clean up a cat number 2.

The questions seem fairly simple. They ask your name, which she got right. But that is not until question #5. There are other more important matters. First it asks, “How many people are living or staying at this house, apartment or mobile home?” Which implies that some of the people staying at your house might not necessarily be alive. This is potentially a trick question which you should answer carefully, and if need be, consult a deceased lawyer.

Question 2: “Are there any additional people staying here that you did not include in Question 1?” If you recently put an addition on your home, this is where they probably are living, so check that out. Or it might mean people who are good at math.

Then it asks: Are You Hot? If so, what is your telephone number???

It asks your sex, Male or Female. It instructs you to “Mark ONE box,” so it won’t do to hedge your bets.

You have to list your age. The form says it is okay to report a baby as age 0, but a baby age 0 seems like it may have been ill-conceived.

In addition to asking your race (I put the 5K), it separately asks whether you are of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin. If so, what is your batting average? I think they may be starting a softball team at the census bureau.

Question number 10: “Does Person 1 sometimes live or stay somewhere else?” By the way if you live in a trailer, you may be at home and also somewhere else, depending on where you are parked. The choices are: 1.) In college housing; 2.) In the military; 3.) At a second residence; 4.) For child custody; 5). In jail or prison; 6.) In a nursing home; 7.) For another reason, which I take to mean: Who-knows-where with Tiger Woods.

Speaking of Tiger, I was recently in the office of a noted sexual psychiatrist, who evaluated him. The doctor sat him down and said, “Mr. Woods, I will first ask you two important questions to make an analysis of your condition and determine whether you are a sex addict. First, are you a guy?” Tiger answered yes. The doctor said, “Okay, so you are a sex addict. Now the next question: do you know how to play whist? We have another 50 minutes to kill till ten minutes of two.”

The doctor then proceeded to win 17 hands of whist in a row, but then Tiger challenged him to arm wrestle, whereupon he won and bruised a bone in the doctor’s hand.

Tiger then showed me a text message he recently sent to a “links minx:”
“I C U from 16th T. U R a Q T! I like UR B hind. U have a nice boo T. luv TGRRR”

I can’t really picture Tiger as a ladies man since he seems so polite- the very name “Tiger” should be reserved for football players or boxers, not golfers. These guys are dressing in knickers and visors- you make your own judgement, and please mark only ONE box.

Question number 11 asks: “Didn’t I just see you at the hardware store?”

There are many scam questionnaires going around, so pay attention to the questions if they do not match the ones I have listed above. Does it ask for your Social Security number? Does it ask, “What is your cat’s name?” That plus the current year will get you into just about any account. Does it ask, “Where do you keep your spare key?” All red flags.

So fill out the census and be counted. And long live the NEW Person Number 1. She will enjoy her newfound status, higher self-esteem, and I’m guessing a jury duty notice sometime very soon.


Incidentally, if you do not send back your form, a government Census agent comes to you to harass, cajole and harangue you, not necessarily in that order. And your tax dollars are paying for it. The first thing they ask you is won’t you please come to your census. Then they push right in and check what’s in the fridge. If they don’t leave, you may have to list them in Question number two. Chances are they will eventually go; it’s off to the next field trip, where apparently NO ONE at Sin City Gentlemen’s Club has answered the census.

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SPORTS

SPORTS

I have not had a chance to write (lucky you) (and yes I understand you are not the plural you) because I’ve been working hard on the NCAA Tournament. My job is to assemble a whole bunch of information regarding how the network is broadcast into a zillion different regions, and make sure that the people who actually make the switches know what the heck they are doing.

You can say what you want about the NCAA Tournament, mostly because it is your first amendment right. By the way, why is the right to free speech an amendment? How did they forget to put that into the Constitution in the first place? Remember that War for Independence we just fought so that we could speak freely? Didn’t anyone proofread the thing? “Dude we left some stuff out- it might be pretty important…”

Incidentally I have a great idea to reduce the deficit: you know the Bill of Rights? Go ahead and submit a bill. Charge people for the rights they actually use. For instance, I need free speech so I can annoy people. But I don’t need to bear arms. I have arms, but I don’t need to bear them. Charge people extra for brandishing arms, and even more if they menace. I don’t need free religion- I am not religious. I don’t need to do anything unto others- I can’t remember if that is the Bill of Rights or the Ten Commandments? I always get those and Benjamin Franklin confused. “A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned-“ was that Jesus or Ben Franklin? I heard Jesus was kind of a cheapskate.

Anyway, when the NCAA tournament rolls around everyone has to “pick their brackets.” Don’t worry that you know ABSOLUTELY nothing about the teams, just pick them. The early rounds of your bracket are awash with red ink. If you got most of them right that means you are an idiot savant, like a horse who can paint with his tail, and it comes out looking better than some stuff you have seen at the MOMA, or when your cat walks across the piano, and it sounds a little like Liszt. Or when George Clooney is in a movie and for some odd reason it isn’t that bad.

Obama picked some ridiculous school for an upset and was crowing about it for two days. My mother LOVED the NCAA Tournament, because she loved to root for the underdog.
“I love Michigan- they are cute! A little school like that against a big powerhouse and they WON!”
“Mom, Michigan was favored by 25 points- their stadium fits 100,000 people.”

This year these dopey mid-major schools have been beating up on the big guns, and the execs at CBS are getting nervous. A final featuring Murray State versus St. Marys (Cal) was a distinct and distasteful possibility for far too long. Any school that has to list what state it’s from in parentheses because there is another BETTER school somewhere else with the same name does NOT belong this deep in the tournament.

They are thinking of expanding the tournament to 96 teams. This is not good. I went to Syracuse, which is a fine learning institution with a damned good basketball team. I don’t want to see some bogus little college come along and knock my ass out in the second round.

It would actually be 97 teams, because they have that play-in game. Can someone please explain why that play-in game is in my life? Didn’t they play the whole season so that they could either be selected or not selected by the tournament committee like everyone else? The winner (loser, because the winner wins an embarrassing smack-down in the first round by the number one seed of the tournament) this year was Arkansas-Pine Bluff. Does a team with the word “bluff” in it sound like it’s going very far? This year they skipped the game and Duke just took them into a back alley and shot them- it was more humane.

Some dopey schools in the past: I.U.P.U.I. I’m not sure what it stands for but it will keep you from getting pregnant I think. Also: Austin Peay (pronounced Austin Pee), which got a lot of chuckles from dads and eye-rolls from moms with kids named Austin.

And the lower the seed, the weirder the school nickname is. Cornell is known as the Big Red. The Big Red WHAT? I think I know the answer, but I am too much of a lady to say. Speaking of ladies, that’s another thing. After Title IX passed, all the major schools had to fund female basketball programs, but they didn’t give any thought to what they would call them. So they just put the word “lady” in front of the existing nickname. The “Lady Trojans” of USC is a perfect example of inappropriate. Now the nickname for Brigham Young University is the “Cougars,” so I’m not sure what to make of that.


Incidentally, the lowest seed to become the national champion was Villanova in 1985. They did qualify as a “Cinderella” team, because they arrived at the tournament in a large pumpkin, and believe me the inside of it was the pits.

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WINTER OLYMPICS

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VACATION DESTINATIONS II

VACATION DESTINATIONS II

We finally went to Disney World, and I started to write about it, and wasted my whole blog on ONE stupid ride. After “Mission: Hurl” we literally took a slow boat to China. Across a really tiny Pacific Ocean lies an entire world out there. If you’ve always wanted to see the continents, but don’t have the money to travel to Vegas, this is the place for you.

Japan and China are dangerously close to one another. I heard stories of Japan toilet-papering the pagoda, and China short-sheeting the kimonos. We saw three Japanese girls performing a very entertaining taiko drum routine. Then two Chinese girls came over and said, “ 汉字 / 漢字,” which means “shut up with that racket,” to which the Japanese replied “F you and the sampan you rode in on.”

Canada has a neat movie starring Martin Short. It’s very funny, and the basic theme is that Canada is not just a bunch of snow. It is also a country brimming with cold temperatures and some freezing rain. Also it has half of Niagra Falls. We then cruised by the German pavilion, where you can get a Nazi officer’s hat with mouse ears on it. At the Moroccan village, we bought a very young girl whom we plan to use as a slave, if we can teach her how to mow the lawn. At the French ville they made fun of us for not being able to speak English very well.

They have an American pavilion; someone must have seen all the weird buildings around and forgot that we already ARE in America. They have a movie that celebrates the history of our country in grand panoramic film, mixed with surround sound and of course the animatronics. There is an animatronic for everything, and after a while you start to question your own sanity. “That is an animatronic squirrel!” “No it’s not, but it has animatronic nuts!” I went to the bathroom to escape the insanity briefly, and it seemed to me that even some of my body parts had a life of their own.

While we were waiting for the show to start, this spooky glee-club looking octet of men & women in full period dress starts singing songs in perfect harmony. Not only is there not one stray note in the bunch, but they are smiling fatuously in unison. This is typical Disney at its finest- everything is happy there, but not normal-happy: Stepford Wives-happy. At the end of the trip I was so smiled-out I just wanted to run over a cat or something.

Anyway “The American Adventure” movie was grandly stirring, and I managed not to cry until they showed a picture of George W. Bush, who always makes me weep for the future of humanity for some reason.

Back across the pond, as we say, was Ellen’s Energy Adventure (everything in Disney is either an Adventure or a Journey). You sit in a seat in the theater, and the rows of seats start to move around, going back into time. Animatronic dinosaurs try to spit on you, and there is even an animatronic Ellen DeGeneres, who, if I had control over the robotics, I would make a much better dancer.

The Seas with Nemo & Friends was very cute- you ride around in a clamshell through a series of real fish tanks, with holograms of Nemo and his pals superimposed into the tanks. It is a lot like a snorkeling trip in the Caribbean, only not as well-behaved.

We tried out “Test Track,” which simulates the experience of a test car driver doing a series of quality control exercises, such as heat and cold response, traveling over hazardous road surfaces, blind curves and speed. It’s similar to taking a cab ride in Manhattan. They don’t call them crash test dummies for nothing.

We went to dinner at the Coral Reef Restaurant, a huge, beautiful faux-reef tank surrounded by tables. We were sitting right next to the tank itself, and all of a sudden a group of SCUBA divers swam by right in front of us. At first I thought they might be lost, and there was a large shark in the tank, which I pointed out to them. But one of them pointed at my dinner and made the international symbol for “I ordered that once and it wasn’t that great.” I asked the waiter if they could grab something fresh out of there.

Back at the hotel, we noticed these two Japanese girls. Since Japanese tourists dress so weird, it’s really hard to tell them from the Disney characters that over-populate the parks. They usually have either pink hair or a really long visor, and wear a lot of colorful clothes. A dull-witted-looking American guy was trying to make some time with them. Although women love a guy who can make them laugh, if they laugh while pointing at you it’s generally not a good sign. I’m pretty sure I now know the Japanese word for “beer belly.”


Incidentally, Walt Disney had planned for EPCOT to be the model for an integrated community. Laid out in a circle, the small city would consist of businesses in the center, schools and parks in the middle, surrounded by residences for 20,000 people and connected by monorails and people movers. Unfortunately, Walt Disney died before the EPCOT property started development, and the Disney Corporation wanted no part of it.

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