March 2007 Archives

Thursday night, we headed out to Mr. C's Steakhouse for a tasty dinner after work. With the place set to close this fall, the opportunities to pay a visit to Karate Elvis are dwindling. Karate Elvis, for those of you who don't know, is perhaps the finest piece of porcelain artwork ever constructed. The statue stands just under 10 inches tall, and is just one of around 100 pieces of Elvis memorabilia in a glass display case in the hallway adjacent to the bathrooms. Dressed in a sequin-and-rhinestone-studded karate uniform, wearing his early-70's-trademark giant sunglasses, and rocking the Elvis Mullet as only Elvis could, this thing belongs in a museum based solely on its aesthetic value alone.

But one particular encounter with Karate Elvis took it from merely "great' to "legendary". Dick Herculanuum and Cliff Glypha were waiting for me to finish up in the bathroom, and were expressing their admiration for the Elvis memorabilia -- and in particular, the statue of Elvis in a karate pose. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a guy who sounded like Beverly-Hills-Cop-era Eddie Murphy came up behind them with a question.

"You know who taught Elvis karate?"

In a scene that could -- nay, should -- have been from any sitcom on TV, I drew disaffectionate stares as I sang to my five-month old niece to get her to go to sleep. Not funny, you say? Happens every day, you say?

True. But not like this, it doesn't. See, I don't know any nursery rhymes; there's 9078 songs on my iPod, and not one nursery rhyme. But as I was putting her down for the night, I recalled my brother telling me that she loves it if you sing to her -- it helps her relax and go to sleep, so I was trying. But like I said, I don't know any nursery rhymes.

I do know Seattle Grunge though. So I sang her "Polly", which when sang acapella in a nursery-rhyme tone, actually works surprisingly well. If you change the lyrics slightly so its not so patently, umm, you know.

"Polly wants a cracker..."

I get this question an awful lot, so with the 700th (!) post on this site, its high time to set the record straight. Seriously, 700 posts, what the hell took me so long?

October, 2001. I was five months out of college, weighed 900 pounds, or maybe it was 215, and I went to Nobbies (a local party-slash-costume store here in Omaha) to buy a Halloween costume. No longer strapped by college budget concerns but not yet ingenious enough to invent my own costume from scratch, I bought a pre-packaged Hippie costume. The guy in the photo on the package had a 1960's-style whiteboy afro, along with peace necklaces and other things the package made very clear were NOT INCLUDED.

"Dude," I said to myself. "I have to find a wig like that!"

The other day, I went to on my twice-monthly trip to the end of my block to check my mailbox, and discovered I had a letter from Donald Trump. Now, I've made no secret about the fact that I would love to go on The Apprentice to class up the inevitable one or two assignments that revolve around design. One of the reasons I do not watch the show anymore is because its too painful to watch future business leaders produce awful looking things in Power Point or Word.

The last straw for me was last year, when there was one contestant who kept insisting she had "extensive experience in marketing and was a very creative person" -- and would then prove otherwise by creating hideous looking brochures and materials week after week. The other contestants, and even the clients in one case (when they did work for Liberty Island) LOVED the work. Pissed me off. I want to do a brochure for Liberty Island, and I can't. But a business person who creates brochures in Word gets that job. The common denominator? Donald J. Trump. She knows Donald Trump, she gets to butcher that job. I don't know Donald Trump, I don't get to not butcher that job. I want to be on that show. Nay, I NEED to be. But I digress.

So anyway, I received a letter from Donald Trump.

Anytime you're at a party, and getting hit on by a 50-year old mom is only the 4th craziest story of the evening, you know its a good time. But that's exactly the kind of time it was on St. Patrick's Day at Gilby's, and I'd be remiss if I didn't document this stuff -- which is why, even six days later, I am doing so.

Now then, in reverse order, the Five Craziest Events of this epic party. I don't think its a coincidence that they also happen to be in chronological order -- parties tend to get better the later you get into the night:

As many of you know, I was off serving my civic duty by answering a summons to Jury Duty this week. Turns out it was a nasty murder trial, and I was dismissed from potentially serving on the jury because I possess both an independent mind and a knowledge of current events. But that's not the interesting story.

No, I'm sitting in the Jury room waiting to be called on, and the guy next to me is reading one of those glossy fan-boy books about...Nickelback? You can't make this stuff up.

I couldn't resist. I tried, I really tried, but I just couldn't. I had to say something. "Nickelback, huh?"

The guy didn't even look up from the book as he responded, "Yeah, I'm a huge fan." in a completely disinterested tone that, frankly, convinced me that he probably wasn't a huge fan.

"They really take their time in the studio, don't they?" I answered. "They've been working on that one song for years. I mean, you'd think they'd have written some more by now! Oh, wait."

This picture was taken at 6:39, not 5:39 as the display would lead you to believe. Also, the song playing was Nickelback, not Journey, as the display indicates. Of course, they're the same band, so whatever.

I realize this is a rather ridiculous thing to complain about, or even bring up, but the satellite-linked navigation system in my car sets its own clock. In October, after Daylight Savings Time ended, the clock reset itself automatically. This led to a pretty freaky phenomenon, where I was driving home from a night out and actually saw the clock repeat an hour. It was at 2:59, and then it turned back to 2:00. Nice.

Problem is, with the Energy Bill of 2005's provision of extending DST by three weeks taking effect this spring, my NAVX is not smart enough to know to change itself. So my clock is an hour behind, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it except wait for the 1987-2006 era DST date to arrive.

Makes me nostalgic for the days of Buick Skyhawks with analog clocks and AM/FM dial radios. I eventually ripped out the dial radio and replaced it with a sweet $39 Audiovox tape deck from K-Mart. You could say a lot of nasty things about that tape deck, but the one thing you could never say is that the clock was an hour off.

You bet.

My buddy Dick Herculanum recently purchased some rather heavy machinery to produce notebooks for his business. However, to test out the notebook-making process, he had the brilliant idea of making notebooks out of record album sleeves.

Last year, <a href="http://www.vintagevantage.com/">one of my favorite T-shirt sites</a> introduced a limited number of one-of-a-kind notebooks made from album sleeves. I emailed the link to both Dick and Continental, knowing they would share my amazement at the sheer Awesomeness of Kenny Rogers, Neil Diamond and Sergio Mendes with Brasil '68! notebooks.

Continental responded back with his trademark one-sentence quippery. "If anyone is still looking for Christmas gifts for me, you can totally buy me that sweet Lionel Richie notebook."

The Fightin' Lew Alcindors will defeat the Prancin' Pat Ewings 70-65 in the National Championship Game. You heard it here first.

Plus, the Jays will beat both Nevada and Memphis before losing to the school Tony Barone bolted for, Texas A&M, giving Jays' fans another reason to hate Te-has.

Oh, and Albany will upset Virginia in the first round. Because Gilby is from Albany, and that's the kind of guy I am.

You bet.

You know, I despise getting Spam just as much as everybody else (although it is pretty funny when you get "naughty" spam and just leave it up on your screen -- hey, oh! Why...is that...no...Ow! Dude... -- its not your fault, its Spam!) but I do rather enjoy some of the subject titles that are generated by their random algorithms. Here's a sample just from the past couple of days:

Some time last summer, I managed to make my way onto a small team of volunteers charged with concepting and creating Jumbotron videos for Creighton athletics. Now, I'm the first to admit that I know jack squat about Final Cut Pro, and I've never run a professional video camera a day in my life. But that didn't stop me. I had a lot to offer in terms of creative ideas, concepts and passion for Creighton sports, so I figured I would be a semi-valuable asset to the team. 

Besides, I love trying new things, and tend to pick up on how stuff works fairly quickly, so how difficult could the technology be?

Pretty damn difficult, as it turns out. Good thing others on the team knew their way around the software, that's for sure.

The video we produced for the basketball team's walk from the tunnel out of the locker room right before the starting lineups was a great example of people with more talent than me taking ideas and making them work. The video prominently uses blue EQ bars that, believe it or not, were video-captured from an iTunes plugin and then transposed into Final Cut over the video clip. The same EQ bars played in synch with the video on the ribbon boards that surround the arena, as well as on the color boards at courtside. When the lights were out, it was pretty damn cool -- the crowd was visually immersed in blue EQ bars moving in synch to a techno remix of Rob Zombie.

Being Awesome runs in the family, apparently. Monday morning's edition of the Fort Dodge Messenger has a lengthy feature story on my mom and the government-funded senior programs she heads up. There's even a mention of yours truly towards the bottom, which is certain to mean my email box will soon be flooded by people from back home.

Good times.

I know this is going to come off as a back-handed compliment, but this is actually a well-researched and well-written piece, especially for The Messenger, which has had daily grammar and proofreading errors for as long as I can remember. It really is a nice daily paper for a town of 25,000, though, all things considered. Poorly designed, but most newspapers are. You would think they'd never heard of H&J's, but I digress.

To be fair, its not like the Omaha World-Herald is any less of a joke -- it is, just on a much grander scale.

The Messenger, and to a grander extent, the World-Herald, are proof that Dick Herculanuum's theory on restaurant/bar service is not exclusive to that industry. His theory goes: Its not about quality of service, its about consistency. If a place has consistently bad service, you know that going in, you don't expect it to be good, and nobody complains. If a place usually has great service, and one time they don't, you're pissed. Likewise, if a newspaper is consistently crummy, you know that before you read it, so you don't really complain.

As my boy Denny Green would say, it is what we thought it was! They are who we though they were!

Yeah, don't talk smack to Mutha Nature. I wrote a boisterous, obnoxious and generally odious post mocking the "storm" on Thursday, bragging about how it didn't keep me from the bar that night, and how it wasn't all that and a bag of potato chips.

Turnabout is fairplay, and after the events of Friday night, I just want to formally apologize to Mother Nature to mocking the badness of The Storm. I respect its ferocity, I bow before its power, and stand in awe of its superior wrestling moves. That half-nelson/bodyslam combo move was rough, dog.

You bet.

After Thursday's blizzard, we have now received almost TWICE our normal annual snowfall; We were plus-1-1/2 inches before yesterday's foot of snow. When I woke up and looked out my bedroom window, I could not see the houses across the street. Sweet. Not long after, I got a call from the office saying I didn't have to come in if I didn't want to. Now, that sounded like a challenge to me -- and I was curious just how bad it really was outside. So I went in to work anyway.

This had nothing to do with responsibility or other virtuous traits -- just an adventurous spirit and a stubborn insistance not to allow weather to stop me from living my life. I got out on the roads, and yeah, they weren't great, but I didn't think they were really bad either. I took some alternate routes to avoid going uphill as much as possible, and made it in with almost no headaches -- and in decent time, to boot.

I was not impressed by this "storm". I put that in quotes because I don't know that you can classify it as a storm if it doesn't keep me from getting out of my driveway. Let me know when we get a "storm" with enough power to barricade my garage door shut with 6 feet of drifted snow, keeping me under house-arrest and then I'll take out the condescending quotes and call it a storm. I might even capitalize it Storm. Might.