Words, words, words

Time for a word game! The other day Ann and I were playing Scrabble -- the game she always wins when we're playing alone, and I always win whenever there's a third person playing -- when she brought to the table not one, but two sexually themed words. We've all been there, right? You're just cruising along, playing a friendly round with your in-laws, and the next thing you know you're faced with a dilemma: lose the game or put down "boobs" on a triple word score in front of your father-in-law. Tough call.

In the interest of keeping it classy, I'll just give a couple of hints, and you can work out on your own what words that trollop used to beat my ass. (By 3 points. 3. Points.)


-One of the words, if you add "up" to it, describes what a student might have done regarding his subject matter the day before an exam.

-The other rhymes with the past tense of what you might do with a match if the power suddenly went out.


And just in case you were thinking it was one of these situations... yeah, no. (Trust me, I checked.)

The Scarlet Letter

Yesterday my wife went to the women's center for her monthly pregnancy checkup. The problem was that she forgot her engagement and wedding rings at home. (At the risk of sounding smug, if she'd just had them welded on like I suggested...) That in and of itself would not be a major issue, except that as she told me later, this visit she happened to get a doctor she'd never met before. At which point, given her lack of digital accoutrements of any kind, she started worrying that he would think she was an unwed mother or Satan or something.

As you can guess, she got back to the house without being stoned in the street, but it was a near thing. And I had to ask, given the circumstances, whether the doctor made her lay on the "hussy table" or not.

Goodbye, expertise

Well, the Olympics are over. I'm always sad to see the Olympics end, partially for the same reason most people are: the end for another four years of watching history being made and legends being born. The end of watching the greatest athletes in the world competing and imagining yourself in their shoes, if only stupid Mr. Crandall in 6th grade had given you just a bit more of a chance in track, I mean come on, you'd think the old bastard was paying for the cleats himself. And the end, of course, of Morgan Freeman voiceovers.

Those are all valid reasons for being sorry the Olympics are over, but my more personal disappointment is that it marks the end, for another four long years, of me being a sports expert. See, I'm not one of those guys who follows professional sports closely or memorizes statistics. Oh, I'm a pretty athletic person, and I'm always happy to go see a football or baseball game a couple of times a season. (They have beer there. Sudsy, watered down, $9 beer.) But I've never been the guy to closely follow trades, lineups, and win/loss records. Maybe I'm worried it will push other knowledge out of my brain, like the secret identities of Earth's five Green Lanterns (Alan Scott, Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner), because God knows I'm going to need that someday. But the fact is I'd just usually rather be playing sports than watching them. No one ever calls me to find out the outcome of the Phillies game last night, or whether the Eagles covered the spread. I'm happy when Michigan wins, I'm happier when OSU loses, and that's about as far as it goes.

But. The one exception to this phenomenon is swimming, because listen: I know my swimming. It's not that I follow the stats any closer than I do other sports, but I can answer most any question someone raises about the differences between strokes, why they're using the butterfly kick off the wall, whether that was a good start or not, etc. If it's within reason, I probably know it, and if I don't I'm at least knowledgeable enough to fake it. So for a glorious week and a half, I get to feel incredibly manly while my wife, who knows more about college football than I ever will, sits beside me and asks questions about how realistic it is that Phelps might conceivably win gold in all 8 events, and how on earth he managed to win the fly even though it really looked like Cavic touched him out. (A: who knows, but while those electronic touch pads are pretty sensitive, just brushing one lightly won't always set it off; you really have to push them. Phelps slammed into his, while Cavic was reaching at the end of his stroke, so Phelps' weight would have registered first even if they technically touched at the exact same time.) And that is just... awesome. If someone at work asks how in the world people don't go crazy during the 1500 free, I can answer them. (You sing songs in your head, preferably something from the AC/DC or Green Day catalogs.)

But now it's over. Back to another 4 years of listening to my friends talk about Detroit's chances this year while I sit there and vainly hope someone asks what happened to Captain America after World War II. So please, everyone- if you're ever out at a bar and you see a group of guys having a heated argument over their fantasy football teams, with one lone dude sitting there quietly nursing his beer... go over and ask him the Vegas odds on the X-Men beating Magneto next Wednesday. Trust me, he'll appreciate it.

Pop quiz, hotshot...

It's the day of your wife's baby shower, so while she's being fawned over by friends and relatives at her mother's house, her father and brother take you out to the movies. The three of you see Pineapple Express (decent, no Knocked Up), then afterward they take you to a bar for a drink, because none of you are particularly enthused about going back to the house and beginning the process of loading 8 thousand boxes of Baby Bjorn accessories into your car. As you sit down at the bar, you can't help but notice the two large screen TVs located straight across from you, directly in your line of sight. More specifically, the reason you can't help but notice them is because one is tuned to the Spanish Channel. As it turns out, the Spanish Channel is a bizarre network filled with shows wherein bikini-clad girls and Abercrombie douchebags spend an hour gyrating to music on a fake beach. Ten seconds of careful study reveals to you that the total cost of surgical enhancements among the women is approximately equal to the annual gross national product of Finland, and that none of them have apparently kept down a meal in the last five months. This is, as it turns out, the entire program: fifteen seconds of stripper trainees jiggling in the general direction of the camera, interspersed with two seconds of gelled-up 'roidheads scowling. Repeat as necessary. Being as your brother- and father-in-law are seated directly beside you, and the TV being located, as aforementioned, straight ahead, this presents an obvious dilemma. Do you:

A) Studiously ignore the TV, pretending you haven't even noticed it's there while suddenly finding the inside of your beer glass to be the most intensely fascinating thing you've ever seen;

B) Wait till the bartender is out of earshot, then make several calculated snide remarks about the choice of programming, and is there anything else to this show, I mean it's like spring break in Cancun meets a Budweiser commercial, for God's sake;

C) Go wait in the car, where the summer sun basting down on the nearby dumpster creates a pungent odor only too reminiscent of the soiled diapers you'll soon be encountering firsthand; or

D) Whoop and holler, chug your beer, then flag down a passing (skanky) (read: all of them) waitress and ask if she'd care to make an extra five bucks by trying to shake it like the chicas on TV.


If you know the correct answer, feel free to hop in your DeLorean, head on back to last Saturday and let me know. I'm still trying to figure it out.

It's harder to be elitist when you're drinking. And yet, also easier.

You know how you can tell I'm an English nerd? As if there was ever any doubt. The other day I'm out at a bar with my friend watching the Olympics, and a commercial comes on for that new Christian Slater show -- the one where he's a boring family man by day and some kind of bad-ass secret agent by night, I guess, but each identity is unaware the other exists. Anyway, the ad happens to mention the names of the two alter egos: Henry and Edward. At that point I turn to my friend and say (probably snidely... being pretentious is standard homework for English majors), "I suppose they think they're being sooo clever with those names. You know, what with the whole dual identity thing... like, Dr. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde?" My friend (an extremely smart guy, mind you) just looks back at me and replies, "Wow, uh, yeah. I never would have made that connection."

And doctor, that's when I knew I wasn't like all the other children.

That could be difficult...

Today at work we got an email stating that "due to a lack of participation, there will be no Bring Your Kids to Work Day this year."

I asked Ann if she thinks that means she's just not allowed to come in to the office. I mean, right?

Mucus Plug: great name for a band

One of my personal heroes, Dave Barry, began his career as a humorist by writing a column about his wife's pregnancy and the eventual birth of his son. Even though it's his first ever column, it still reads like vintage Barry- witty, self-deprecating, deceptively insightful. In one of the funnier segments he describes the childbirth class he and his wife attended, specifically the graphic videos of women actually giving birth that they were forced to watch. He hastens to add that he can't give many specific details about the videos, since during them he had to go out to the hall twenty or thirty times to get a drink of water.

Well, Ann and I attended our first childbirth class tonight. And yes, they showed videos of actual women actually giving birth to actual babies. (So much for starting slow and ramping up to that.) But I, unlike Mr. Barry, decided to remain strong and support my wife by watching the entire thing without getting up once. That's just the kind of guy I am. So I did.

You may notice that one of us is a famous, highly respected and almost universally beloved journalist and author whose work has spawned a television show and a movie, with more on the way; and that one of us is stuck in corporate America writing movie reviews and blog posts on the side to keep his brain from atrophying. I'll leave it to you as to who makes better choices.

It's not the years, honey...

One of my best friends turned 30 yesterday. In fact, he's the first of my really close friends to hit that milestone; I have other friends who reached that age long ago, of course, but none that I grew up with. And even though he's two years and some odd weeks older than me, it's still a rather sobering reminder that the big three decade mark is closer than I like to think. It's not even that big a deal... I mean, just an arbitrary number, right? I could have a heart attack tomorrow (but please, Lord, do me a solid and forget about all those bacon cheeseburgers, 'kay?), whereas there are 70-year-old grandparents out there who've never been sick a day in their lives. I think it's just the change in attitude that goes along with it, y'know? It brings the whole aging/maturity thing home in a way that going to your 10-year high school reunion or, oh, having a child somehow don't. Maybe it's the comforting mindset of "Sure, I've been out of college for 6 years and I have a job and I'm married, but I'm still young. I never would, but technically I could start over from scratch if I wanted to. Nobody calls me 'sir' yet." But once you hit 30 you're no longer a promising anything (statement void for doctors), you're not a youngster whose mistakes can be forgiven, nobody expects you to show up for work bleary-eyed because they just assume you were out drinking last night. Now you have to face the horrible, gut-wrenching realization that the interns you're giving instructions to don't remember where they were when Kurt Cobain died because it probably involved apple juice and Duck Duck Goose. Oh, and those Playboy centerfolds? Remember when their dates of birth were, like, in the '70s and that was pretty cool because they were older women? Well, now they would look at your younger siblings and say, "Ew, way too ancient for me. No thanks, LOL!" Enjoy.

It's still a couple years down the line, so I'll continue to enjoy my late 20s secure in the knowledge that no way, my hairline is definitely not receding, uh-uh. But I swear, the next time I don't get carded at the liquor store, I'm reaching over the counter and grabbing that smug punk who doesn't even know who He-Man is for God's sake, and giving him a piece of my mind. As long as I don't trip over my walker.