Last night was the Big Dance down at Not Bad President Elementary School.
They do this a couple of times a year.
On one side of the hall, in the corner of the gym, there is a DJ surrounded by twirling lights, pulsing speakers, and enough CDs to provide a coaster for every beer served during Mardi Gras. There are a hundred or so kids bouncing merrily around, for the DJ is actually pretty good at what he does and he knows how to get them moving. Or, rather, he knows how to get them moving the way he wants them to move, since kids that age never really stop moving unless the air temperature approaches absolute zero. The secret is to play songs that routinely appear on the Disney Channel, and to play only the highlights of those songs. This also appeals to the parents lining the walls, who have all heard these songs SO MANY TIMES that it would take a direct high-pressure firehose with one end in their mouths and another end in the entire whiskey output of Kentucky to erase these songs from our memories. Highlights are just fine, thank you.
On the other side of the hall, in what is referred to as "the multi-purpose room" (as if there are rooms in an elementary school that do not fit that description), there are tables, benches, and pizza.
I spent most of the evening in that room, handing out pizza to anyone with a blue ticket. No ticket, no pizza, order up, don't just stand there sonny, what'll ya have?
This arrangement worked pretty well for the girls, who have reached the age where they are happy to have us nearby but not too nearby anymore. Kim drifted in late from her office as Associate Grand Poobah of Home Campus, and we purchased our share of blue tickets to trade for dinner. After that the girls disappeared back into the gym with their friends, leaving us to finish up.
They did come get us a couple of times, though.
They came for Kim when "The Twist" was played. They came for me when it was a Daddy/Daughter dance, even though Lauren skipped merrily away once we got into the room and Tabitha cut me off about halfway through the song - not that my dance moves didn't deserve it, I suppose. And they came for both of us when the DJ decided to play 80s music. "I was there the first time," I told them. "That was plenty."
The highlight of the evening for me came after my pizza shift was over and I was one of the parents lining the walls. Lauren rushed over, gave me a big hug, gazed adoringly into my eyes, and said, "Daddy, you're not cool."
No, dear. Daddy is not cool. But he'll take the hug anyway.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Talk to the Animals
“He learned to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries.” (Douglas Adams)It is always dangerous to send me out shopping, because you never know what I’m going to come home with. This weekend it was a DVD of Up, the latest Pixar film. I make no apologies for this, as it was an excellent film – as, indeed, all of Pixar’s films are. I know this may cause the revocation of my Man Card, but you can keep your military-techno-big-things-go-boom movies. You can also keep the chick flicks, as they are no better. I’ll stick with Pixar. Two of the best movies I’ve seen are Monsters, Inc. and The Incredibles, and Up is right up there.
The montage at the beginning, as the main character and his wife get older, is just heartbreaking. You don’t find stuff like that in most movies aimed at kids, and it’s good to have it there. We are way too fixated on being happy HAPPY HAPPY all the freaking time in this country, not that it seems to actually make us happy, and we need to remind ourselves that sometimes the lasting moments – even the ones we later treasure – are often bittersweet.
Plus, how can you not love the dogs?
For all the technical wizardry that went into that movie and all the story lines that it contained, the thing that made me laugh was the idea of a dog collar that would translate whatever the dog was thinking so that we could hear it and understand it.
It turns out that dogs are about as bright as we’d thought.
SQUIRREL!
This only reinforces the lesson of the criminally underrated movie, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, that Lauren and I went to see down at Not Bad President Elementary last month. As with Up, one of the things that the movie invents is a collar that allows an animal – in this case a monkey named Steve – to broadcast his thoughts. These thoughts, in their entirety, consist of “STEEEEEEVE!” and “Hungry!” in random order.
There is a reason why they didn't try this with cats. If you could read a cat's mind, you'd get one of two things - either endless static or frighteningly specific plans for world conquest - and neither of those is really something you want to hear. Never ask a question that you really don't want to know the answer to.
The thing I most loved about the communication collars in those movies, though, is the fact that they work but they don't really do what their inventors wanted them to do. The mere fact of achievement doesn't necessarily mean that you've achieved anything, and this is a lesson we forget. The world does not have to conform to our desires. You can't find it if it isn't there. Reality trumps ideology. And beware of what you wish for, because you just might get it.
STEEEEEEEVE!
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Reading on the Right
I started a new book last night.
Normally this is not news. I start new books all the time - it's one of the things I do instead of climbing mountains, running for office, hitting home runs or adding value to society in readily definable terms. Not that those things would accomplish that either, so I like to think I'm in pretty good company that way.
It's starting out to be a good book. It's a dark, grim story set in a city suspended from chains over an infinite abyss, out of which the moans of the dead create winds strong enough to blow out candles. One of the main characters is an insane and bloodthirsty angel, and the main function of the city seems to be the final stop in a pilgrimage that always ends in death.
The fact that I started this book as a sanity break from another book on the modern conservative movement in America says something, I suppose.
One of my ongoing projects for the last several years has been studying the history of the extremists whose social views have taken over the Republican Party and turned it into a vehicle for the most radically authoritarian, treasonously anti-Constitutional, close-mindedly theocratic and arrogantly self-serving elements of American society. I want to know where these cockroaches came from, what they did to a party that - 45 years ago - I might have had a home within, and what they plan to do to the rest of us.
It's not fun reading.
I started out this project, as any historian would, by going back to the sources of the conservative movement. I read Edmund Burke. I examined the careers of Klemens von Metternich, Benjamin Disraeli and others along those lines. I even read Barry Goldwater's book, and let me tell you was that a chore.
And then I stopped doing that, because it became clear that modern American "conservatives" are not actually conservative in any meaningful way. They are not trying to "conserve" anything - if anything, they are radicals trying to destroy the traditional institutions of American society and replace them with a fringe-element new vision (utopian or dystopian, depending on whether you are in or out) of an America force fed their narrow view of what ought to be. Neither are they a governing movement in any meaningful way, since they value ideological purity and the vanquishing of supposed enemies over such things as responsible rule, planning for the future, or the sorts of compromises with reality that the Founding Fathers understood was the essence of grown-up politics. The Republican Party today advocates as part of its basic platform positions that were considered part of the lunatic fringe by Barry Goldwater, and the radicals who have taken over that party continue to push even further into the fringes with every passing day.
They are children having temper tantrums while wielding power, and that is a bad combination.
The hardest part of reading the history of this movement - and there are a great many hard parts, ranging from the damage they have inflicted on this country already to the damage they plan to inflict in the future - is the sheer viciousness of its leaders. It is astonishing to read how venal, corrupt, dictatorial, and abusive they are, in a way that puts leaders in other areas of American politics (even more traditional right-wingers) to shame. Left-wingers may think they play hardball and can be dirty when necessary but they are way out of their depth facing this crowd, and it shows in how this country has been governed over the last 40 years.
It is depressing to see how much support these radical conservative leaders receive even when their characters and machinations are well known and documented. It is even more depressing to see how much support they receive from their followers who know very well what those leaders have done and who insist that this only makes them better leaders. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
I can get through about 30 pages of this before I have to put down whatever I'm reading and take a break.
Bring on the moaning dead.
Normally this is not news. I start new books all the time - it's one of the things I do instead of climbing mountains, running for office, hitting home runs or adding value to society in readily definable terms. Not that those things would accomplish that either, so I like to think I'm in pretty good company that way.
It's starting out to be a good book. It's a dark, grim story set in a city suspended from chains over an infinite abyss, out of which the moans of the dead create winds strong enough to blow out candles. One of the main characters is an insane and bloodthirsty angel, and the main function of the city seems to be the final stop in a pilgrimage that always ends in death.
The fact that I started this book as a sanity break from another book on the modern conservative movement in America says something, I suppose.
One of my ongoing projects for the last several years has been studying the history of the extremists whose social views have taken over the Republican Party and turned it into a vehicle for the most radically authoritarian, treasonously anti-Constitutional, close-mindedly theocratic and arrogantly self-serving elements of American society. I want to know where these cockroaches came from, what they did to a party that - 45 years ago - I might have had a home within, and what they plan to do to the rest of us.
It's not fun reading.
I started out this project, as any historian would, by going back to the sources of the conservative movement. I read Edmund Burke. I examined the careers of Klemens von Metternich, Benjamin Disraeli and others along those lines. I even read Barry Goldwater's book, and let me tell you was that a chore.
And then I stopped doing that, because it became clear that modern American "conservatives" are not actually conservative in any meaningful way. They are not trying to "conserve" anything - if anything, they are radicals trying to destroy the traditional institutions of American society and replace them with a fringe-element new vision (utopian or dystopian, depending on whether you are in or out) of an America force fed their narrow view of what ought to be. Neither are they a governing movement in any meaningful way, since they value ideological purity and the vanquishing of supposed enemies over such things as responsible rule, planning for the future, or the sorts of compromises with reality that the Founding Fathers understood was the essence of grown-up politics. The Republican Party today advocates as part of its basic platform positions that were considered part of the lunatic fringe by Barry Goldwater, and the radicals who have taken over that party continue to push even further into the fringes with every passing day.
They are children having temper tantrums while wielding power, and that is a bad combination.
The hardest part of reading the history of this movement - and there are a great many hard parts, ranging from the damage they have inflicted on this country already to the damage they plan to inflict in the future - is the sheer viciousness of its leaders. It is astonishing to read how venal, corrupt, dictatorial, and abusive they are, in a way that puts leaders in other areas of American politics (even more traditional right-wingers) to shame. Left-wingers may think they play hardball and can be dirty when necessary but they are way out of their depth facing this crowd, and it shows in how this country has been governed over the last 40 years.
It is depressing to see how much support these radical conservative leaders receive even when their characters and machinations are well known and documented. It is even more depressing to see how much support they receive from their followers who know very well what those leaders have done and who insist that this only makes them better leaders. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
I can get through about 30 pages of this before I have to put down whatever I'm reading and take a break.
Bring on the moaning dead.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Much To-Do
Every so often I sit down with a piece of paper and try to list all of the things on my to-do list, because otherwise they fall out of the back of my head and leave splotchy stains on the carpet. You have to fix those suckers down somehow.
This is invariably a depressing task.
Or it might be a confidence builder, since there is no way that the whole list will ever get accomplished in one lifetime and thus I am owed extra innings here on Earth. Either way.
I try to organize this list by job. The online classes get one chunk of the paper. The face-to-face class gets another. The performing arts gig gets a third. Miscellaneous Home-Campus-related items that don't fit under any of the above categories go next. The course I'm theoretically designing (again) gets its own space, forlornly white since at this point I have no idea what I'm going to put in there and am starting to doubt that I ever will.
And then there is a whole section labeled "Other." Because at some point all the classifications schemes in the world are simply insufficient to encompass the grand mess that is life in progress.
Right now the Other category has such gems as:
1. Fix violin.
I was trying to tune Tabitha's violin the other day and discovered why it is that I should not be trying to tune Tabitha's violin. It has a little wooden sliver called a bridge that is intricately carved to provide maximum structural weakness and over which all of the strings must pass on their way to being played. So when you break it, you are pretty much sunk. And apparently these are not standardized, so you can't just go to your local Music-O-Rama and get yourself a bridge, either. You have to special order the one that fits YOUR violin.
Wanna buy a bridge?
2. Call for Valentine's Party
I believe that this refers to Tabitha's class, as I am the room parent for that group and it is my job to scrounge up the sweets for their various celebrations. I certainly hope so, because otherwise there will be some disappointed partygoers somewhere else.
3. Email friends.
Yes, I still email people, because I am HOPELESSLY OLD-FASHIONED, that's why. I write these emails in ink, longhand, with a quill pen, before typing them into the computer. I do this by lantern light. This is why it takes me up to three months to respond to people. I am not sure what to make of a world where email is considered old-fashioned.
4. Call sheriff.
Wisconsin has some fairly strict laws about how old/tall/heavy you have to be to sit in the front seat of the car, at least as a child, and I want to see if Tabitha is okay for that, and avoid getting a ticket if she is not. I find it odd to think that some of my relatives who lived well into their 90s probably never would have qualified under those laws and would have had to sit in the back seat their entire lives, shouting suggestions at whoever was driving, particularly on bridges.
Yes, there's a family story behind that.
5. "Do Apple things as emailed."
I have no idea what this means, and I keep transferring it from to-do list to to-do list in the hope that the light will come on at some point and I can get it done and cross it off.
6. Order checks.
Because I live in the midwest, where cash is a sign of weakness, and we go through a lot of checks.
There's more, but even though going to sleep is not technically on the list, the fact that it is now after midnight on a school night suggests that perhaps I should consider it as such anyway.
This is invariably a depressing task.
Or it might be a confidence builder, since there is no way that the whole list will ever get accomplished in one lifetime and thus I am owed extra innings here on Earth. Either way.
I try to organize this list by job. The online classes get one chunk of the paper. The face-to-face class gets another. The performing arts gig gets a third. Miscellaneous Home-Campus-related items that don't fit under any of the above categories go next. The course I'm theoretically designing (again) gets its own space, forlornly white since at this point I have no idea what I'm going to put in there and am starting to doubt that I ever will.
And then there is a whole section labeled "Other." Because at some point all the classifications schemes in the world are simply insufficient to encompass the grand mess that is life in progress.
Right now the Other category has such gems as:
1. Fix violin.
I was trying to tune Tabitha's violin the other day and discovered why it is that I should not be trying to tune Tabitha's violin. It has a little wooden sliver called a bridge that is intricately carved to provide maximum structural weakness and over which all of the strings must pass on their way to being played. So when you break it, you are pretty much sunk. And apparently these are not standardized, so you can't just go to your local Music-O-Rama and get yourself a bridge, either. You have to special order the one that fits YOUR violin.
Wanna buy a bridge?
2. Call for Valentine's Party
I believe that this refers to Tabitha's class, as I am the room parent for that group and it is my job to scrounge up the sweets for their various celebrations. I certainly hope so, because otherwise there will be some disappointed partygoers somewhere else.
3. Email friends.
Yes, I still email people, because I am HOPELESSLY OLD-FASHIONED, that's why. I write these emails in ink, longhand, with a quill pen, before typing them into the computer. I do this by lantern light. This is why it takes me up to three months to respond to people. I am not sure what to make of a world where email is considered old-fashioned.
4. Call sheriff.
Wisconsin has some fairly strict laws about how old/tall/heavy you have to be to sit in the front seat of the car, at least as a child, and I want to see if Tabitha is okay for that, and avoid getting a ticket if she is not. I find it odd to think that some of my relatives who lived well into their 90s probably never would have qualified under those laws and would have had to sit in the back seat their entire lives, shouting suggestions at whoever was driving, particularly on bridges.
Yes, there's a family story behind that.
5. "Do Apple things as emailed."
I have no idea what this means, and I keep transferring it from to-do list to to-do list in the hope that the light will come on at some point and I can get it done and cross it off.
6. Order checks.
Because I live in the midwest, where cash is a sign of weakness, and we go through a lot of checks.
There's more, but even though going to sleep is not technically on the list, the fact that it is now after midnight on a school night suggests that perhaps I should consider it as such anyway.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Housing Codes
We are slumlords.
This is a fairly busy household. Kim has taken on additional administrative duties down at Home Campus and is generally swamped. I'm actually teaching full time this semester, in addition to a separate part-time job. The girls are in school and have reached that age when they have piles of homework, and their social lives are becoming more jam-packed than mine, which, admittedly, isn't saying much. But they are busy. And there's the cats, who may only be one evolutionary rung above sofa pillows but that entire rung consists of evolving newer and more effective ways of making their wants and needs known.
So things fall through the cracks is what I'm saying.
Two of those things are the hamsters. Hammy and Vee (or Vee and Hammy - I still can't tell) are rather quiet little things, tucked away in their art-deco pink plastic cage safely bungeed to the crafts storage area in the corner of the dining room. They sleep a lot, and sometimes they run around on their little wheel, and neither of those things is designed to attract attention. Call it a legacy of being at the bottom of the meadow food chain, but they're very good at not bringing themselves up in your mind.
So sometime this past week it occurred to us that we haven't changed their bedding or cleaned out their cage in a while. Like since before Christmas.
Not that they minded, really. It was snug, warm, and approximately 30% stored food. Anywhere they wanted to rest, they were within easy reach of a snack. I should have my house set up so well.
Unfortunately, it was also about 30% hamster poop.
Hey, the food has to go somewhere. And it certainly wasn't going in the designated receptacle that we went out and got for them. It was basically, well, wherever they were at the time the need struck.
Eew.
And what wasn't wherever was concentrated in the tube up to their nest. They have a little nest at the top of the cage, which is accessible through a plastic tube that they climb up. Apparently to hamsters this tube looks a lot like a garderobe - the little hole that extended out over the side of a medieval castle and dropped straight down to the moat or thereabouts, which aided its functionality thereby - and let us just say that passage up that tube was getting rather constricted.
I'm sure that if we had waited a bit longer there would have been a tiny little knock on our door and a very officious looking rodent with a white hat and a clipboard would have written out a ten-foot ticket and stuffed it into a pickle and taken the pickle with the ticket and shoved it down our throats.
I don't want a pickle.
So now the hamsters are surrounded by fresh bedding, clean walls, and sparkly toys, and now we don't have to listen (hard) for that little knock for at least another month or two.
This is a fairly busy household. Kim has taken on additional administrative duties down at Home Campus and is generally swamped. I'm actually teaching full time this semester, in addition to a separate part-time job. The girls are in school and have reached that age when they have piles of homework, and their social lives are becoming more jam-packed than mine, which, admittedly, isn't saying much. But they are busy. And there's the cats, who may only be one evolutionary rung above sofa pillows but that entire rung consists of evolving newer and more effective ways of making their wants and needs known.
So things fall through the cracks is what I'm saying.
Two of those things are the hamsters. Hammy and Vee (or Vee and Hammy - I still can't tell) are rather quiet little things, tucked away in their art-deco pink plastic cage safely bungeed to the crafts storage area in the corner of the dining room. They sleep a lot, and sometimes they run around on their little wheel, and neither of those things is designed to attract attention. Call it a legacy of being at the bottom of the meadow food chain, but they're very good at not bringing themselves up in your mind.
So sometime this past week it occurred to us that we haven't changed their bedding or cleaned out their cage in a while. Like since before Christmas.
Not that they minded, really. It was snug, warm, and approximately 30% stored food. Anywhere they wanted to rest, they were within easy reach of a snack. I should have my house set up so well.
Unfortunately, it was also about 30% hamster poop.
Hey, the food has to go somewhere. And it certainly wasn't going in the designated receptacle that we went out and got for them. It was basically, well, wherever they were at the time the need struck.
Eew.
And what wasn't wherever was concentrated in the tube up to their nest. They have a little nest at the top of the cage, which is accessible through a plastic tube that they climb up. Apparently to hamsters this tube looks a lot like a garderobe - the little hole that extended out over the side of a medieval castle and dropped straight down to the moat or thereabouts, which aided its functionality thereby - and let us just say that passage up that tube was getting rather constricted.
I'm sure that if we had waited a bit longer there would have been a tiny little knock on our door and a very officious looking rodent with a white hat and a clipboard would have written out a ten-foot ticket and stuffed it into a pickle and taken the pickle with the ticket and shoved it down our throats.
I don't want a pickle.
So now the hamsters are surrounded by fresh bedding, clean walls, and sparkly toys, and now we don't have to listen (hard) for that little knock for at least another month or two.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Magnum Trivium
Once again, people, say it with me: if you want trivia you need to go to the source.
Last night, for the second year in a row, the team from Home Campus went down to the local symphony orchestra's fundraising team trivia contest and walked away victorious. I wasn't the captain this year, which was a nice break, but in terms of personnel it was more or less the same group as last time. The Dean doesn't really care if we win, so long as we beat Local Tech and Nearby Private College. In theory we could place third to last and accomplish that goal, but in practice we have to win.
Academia is where the term "trivia" arose, and academics are its greatest practitioners. There were teams there from banks, corporations, libraries and charitable groups, but we are the Greatest of the Least, the Masters of all that is not really worth mastering, and you know what? It feels good.
Go, us!
Last night, for the second year in a row, the team from Home Campus went down to the local symphony orchestra's fundraising team trivia contest and walked away victorious. I wasn't the captain this year, which was a nice break, but in terms of personnel it was more or less the same group as last time. The Dean doesn't really care if we win, so long as we beat Local Tech and Nearby Private College. In theory we could place third to last and accomplish that goal, but in practice we have to win.
Academia is where the term "trivia" arose, and academics are its greatest practitioners. There were teams there from banks, corporations, libraries and charitable groups, but we are the Greatest of the Least, the Masters of all that is not really worth mastering, and you know what? It feels good.
Go, us!
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Cable Cutter
I can no longer watch television in my own house.
We cut back on our cable television package last year when the Great Recession hit and my uncertain status as the Extra Historian On Call at Home Campus seemed to recommend such cuts. And in truth, we really didn't miss the stuff we cut. We don't watch a whole lot of television anyway, and most of what we do watch is either cartoons (for the girls) or on Discover, the Food Channel, HGTV or one of the various ESPN networks, all of which can be found on the smallest package you can get and still get internet service, which Kim and I both need for our jobs so that was a Justifiable Expense and Well, Meet and Good.
And then Kim discovered Lost.
It took the better part of four months, but she went from never having seen an episode to being completely caught up and waiting impatiently for the start of the final season, which should take place in five days, seven hours and twenty-nine minutes or thereabouts, not that she's counting or anything. Or that the girls are counting, either, since they too are hooked on the show.
Thank whatever local deity you choose for Hulu, or there would have been much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth around here.
Our friendly local Mega-Cable Monopoly has been deluging us with promotional materials for some months now, eager to have our business back, or get us to provide them with more business, or just hand them more money on general principles - it's hard to tell - and finally I opened up one of the letters and read it. It had a Fantastic Offer, one that was so Fantastic that even MCM had a hard time understanding it when I called to take them up on it. Seriously - it took four phone calls and twice through the computer-generated audio fine print (where you have to say "yes" every time the voice pauses or your offer becomes Unfantastic very quickly) before they decided that I wasn't lying about how Fantastic this Offer was. But eventually it all got worked out, and the cable guy came over to install our new equipment and get us up and running.
The key point, as far as Kim was concerned, was that this new equipment included a DVR, which could be used to record episodes of Lost. Plus, since the Fantastic Offer also included unlimited long-distance telephone service, we could cancel our other long-distance provider and actually save money overall. Win.
On the down side, all this came with a new television remote.
This new remote could land the space shuttle. It could track Osama Bin Laden to within six inches, launch killer bees to make him miserable, and then put capsaicin in his benadryl to make him even more miserable. It could solve the energy crisis, make sense of British politics, cash in on the Nigerian email scam, and find intelligence in Sarah Palin. It could locate the Lost Tribes of Israel, pass health care reform, and make a margarita that will kick you to the curb and leave you wanting more.
But I still can't figure out how to get it to show me television.
Oh, sure, I could ask Tabitha or Lauren - they've already got it figured out and are happily enjoying the plethora of new cartoon channels that seems to have been part of the Fantastic Offer. Or I could randomly hit buttons and hope that somewhere, in between the killer bees and the Nigerian scam buttons there is a television button that I could use to change channels from whatever cartoon network the girls were last watching. Or I could learn to enjoy the cartoons.
Perhaps I'll read a book instead.
We cut back on our cable television package last year when the Great Recession hit and my uncertain status as the Extra Historian On Call at Home Campus seemed to recommend such cuts. And in truth, we really didn't miss the stuff we cut. We don't watch a whole lot of television anyway, and most of what we do watch is either cartoons (for the girls) or on Discover, the Food Channel, HGTV or one of the various ESPN networks, all of which can be found on the smallest package you can get and still get internet service, which Kim and I both need for our jobs so that was a Justifiable Expense and Well, Meet and Good.
And then Kim discovered Lost.
It took the better part of four months, but she went from never having seen an episode to being completely caught up and waiting impatiently for the start of the final season, which should take place in five days, seven hours and twenty-nine minutes or thereabouts, not that she's counting or anything. Or that the girls are counting, either, since they too are hooked on the show.
Thank whatever local deity you choose for Hulu, or there would have been much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth around here.
Our friendly local Mega-Cable Monopoly has been deluging us with promotional materials for some months now, eager to have our business back, or get us to provide them with more business, or just hand them more money on general principles - it's hard to tell - and finally I opened up one of the letters and read it. It had a Fantastic Offer, one that was so Fantastic that even MCM had a hard time understanding it when I called to take them up on it. Seriously - it took four phone calls and twice through the computer-generated audio fine print (where you have to say "yes" every time the voice pauses or your offer becomes Unfantastic very quickly) before they decided that I wasn't lying about how Fantastic this Offer was. But eventually it all got worked out, and the cable guy came over to install our new equipment and get us up and running.
The key point, as far as Kim was concerned, was that this new equipment included a DVR, which could be used to record episodes of Lost. Plus, since the Fantastic Offer also included unlimited long-distance telephone service, we could cancel our other long-distance provider and actually save money overall. Win.
On the down side, all this came with a new television remote.
This new remote could land the space shuttle. It could track Osama Bin Laden to within six inches, launch killer bees to make him miserable, and then put capsaicin in his benadryl to make him even more miserable. It could solve the energy crisis, make sense of British politics, cash in on the Nigerian email scam, and find intelligence in Sarah Palin. It could locate the Lost Tribes of Israel, pass health care reform, and make a margarita that will kick you to the curb and leave you wanting more.
But I still can't figure out how to get it to show me television.
Oh, sure, I could ask Tabitha or Lauren - they've already got it figured out and are happily enjoying the plethora of new cartoon channels that seems to have been part of the Fantastic Offer. Or I could randomly hit buttons and hope that somewhere, in between the killer bees and the Nigerian scam buttons there is a television button that I could use to change channels from whatever cartoon network the girls were last watching. Or I could learn to enjoy the cartoons.
Perhaps I'll read a book instead.
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