April 2008 Archives

Someone asked me last week, "Why in the heck would you choose to take a road trip to Des Moines for your 30th birthday? For what you're paying for the King Suite, you could go to any number of better, warmer places."

See, but I don't need all that. People are more important to me than venue. And if I had my birthday road trip in Des Moines, my brother could join us -- something he couldn't do if we went elsewhere. So while there are certainly better places, at least on the surface, there is no better place in the entire world to be than at the bar with Cliff Glypha, Continental Frutiger, Dick Herculaneum and my Brother. Name your "better" cosmopolitan city, or your "warmer" climate, but unless its got that group together at a table, I'll pass.

You bet.

Editor's Note: From time to time, Max Univers' friend Tomas stops by to share his thoughts. These are some of those thoughts.

I recently read a fun article by Al Batt, (No relation to Baseball Batt, I assume?). A friend of mine wrote that he was a good writer and that he liked him. He is and I do too. Except my friend can never end a sentence with a preposition so I'll rephrase that. Also do I and he is. There, that reads soooo much better.

I'm cooking sirloin roast even as we speak. I bought a really heavy cast iron pot at costco and am using it for the first time. I have it filled with good stuff and lots of seasonings and gravies and onion soup mix. I just close my eyes and dump. I even rubbed the roast with my own special concoction. Which included cinnamon. I've never tried that before. There's so much other stuff in with it that you won't even be able to taste it.

Its a tradition at the company I work for to decorate offices on milestone birthdays. 30, 40, 50, 60 etc. Some of the better ones (and I know these are hard to believe, but trust me, they're all real):

When the CFO turned 40, we filled his office with packaging air bags. If you've ever bought something from Amazon, you know the bags -- those clear plastic bags that cushion your purchase. We procured a machine that produces those bags, and proceeded to fill the office with hundreds of bags. So many, in fact, that it was impossible to navigate through the office on foot when we finished. We also wrapped everything we could in newsprint -- every framed picture on his walls, his computer monitor, his keyboard, even individual pens and pencils. It was like Christmas in there, if air bags were snow and things he already owned were gifts.

Another time, someone in HR turned 50 and we took the Rolling Stones advice and Paint(ed) it Black. Using disposable plastic black tablecloths, we covered his walls to make them appear to have black wallpaper on them. Ditto for his desk. Add in dozens of black balloons, confetti and streamers that had various "Old Man" insults on them, and you get the picture. The office blow-up doll, Bob, also made an appearance in this scene -- wearing an "Over the Hill" T-shirt.

On Tuesday, the last day of my 20s, I walked into the office just before 8 o'clock. Groggy-eyed as I walked into the mailroom, I saw a photo of a toothy three-year old in cowboy boots and a sweet sequin vest. I thought it was someone's grandson, and I kept on walking. A few feet later, I saw another photo and did a double-take.

"Hey, wait a minute...that's me!"

As I kept walking, it got better. Or worse, depending on your point of view. There were ten, twenty, fifty, maybe a hundred photos of me, EVERYWHERE. In every cubicle, every office, on the pop machine, on the cabinets, even in the men's bathroom (don't ask). A cornucopia of me. The Museum of Max, as it were.

Hilarious.

When last we joined our hero, Max Univers, he had surrendered to the Tyrannical Eyeglass Regime. On Day Four, he had taken off the glasses in protest, but then put them back on, and headed out to the Pizza Shoppe. "Eyeglasses can take away all of my natural eyesight abilities," he said. "It cannot touch my PBR, it cannot touch my pizza, and it cannot touch my after dinner mints. Those three things are going to carry on forever. I thank you and God bless you all. You bet."

While I was in the recording studio last Monday night with Cliff Glypha and Dick Herculanum, Target Optical called to tell me that my glasses were in, and that I could come pick them up anytime. I tell you what, between listening to the Twins bullpen blow a lead to the Tigers and listening to my voicemail tell me my days of eyes free from the tyranny of glasses, I wished for a brief moment that I was deaf.

This was like Paul Revere announcing the Revolutionary War by yelling "The British are coming!". Or like Paul Revere rapping that he did it like this, he did it like that, he did it with a whiffle bat sooooo...Or like some dude at Target leaving a voicemail saying that the Tyrannical Rule of the Eyeglass Regime was about to attempt a hostile coup of The Kingdom of My Eyes.

Not wanting to give in at the vaguest hint of war, I put off going in to get my glasses until Tuesday at lunch, because my eyes have been good to me for 29 years and they deserved a few more hours of sweet freedom. But on Tuesday, at 12:07 PM, at the Super Target on 168th and Maple, my eyes succumbed to the tyranny of glasses.

The Power Hour is not a religious show featuring an evangelical preacher, nor is it a low-budget game show featuring a host in a bag toupee. No, The Power Hour is an hour-long drinking game popular on college campuses. Its not for the faint of heart or the light of weight.

I tell you this because on Saturday, I got coerced into just such an hour. While a CD with sixty songs edited down to one-minute each played on a boombox, a group of people sat around the kitchen table drinking a shot of beer every time the song changed. Lets do the math here, because I'm curious for my own knowledge.

60 songs x 1.5 fl. oz. = 90 fl. oz.
90 fl oz. / 12 fl. oz. = 7.5 beers

See now, 7.5 beers in an hour is a problem for most people who are not alcoholics or corpses. Even Max Univers has his limits, and 7.5 beers in an hour is well beyond Max's limits. I mean, 90 ounces of water in an hour would be ridiculous, but beer? No way. 3 beers in an hour is borderline excessive.

"So are you excited for your big speech at BU tonight?" I asked Continental Frutiger on Thursday.

"Indeed I am. Are you planning on attending?"

This is where he tried to talk me out of attending his speech. "I can assure you that most other activities will be more rewarding. Hell, watching reruns of 227 might be more rewarding."

Oooo, 227! "Wasn't that a spinoff of The Jeffersons? Didn't it star the inimitable Jack-ay?"

Continental was stumped. "I'm afraid I don't know the answer to any of those questions."

I told him not to worry, because he had almost nine hours to cram for Q&A -- wherein I would ask a series of completely asinine, loose-cannon-type questions that may or not pertain to 227, The Jeffersons, or Jack-ay.

I should have been wearing glasses a year ago. That's what the doc tells me, anyway. "How long have you been having headaches?"

I don't get headaches, I told him.

"Mm hmm. How long have you had eye strain?"

Nada, my eyesight is fine, I told him.

"Right, you can stop lying to me now, I can tell from the exam that you do suffer from these symptoms. So I'll ask you again: How long have you been having headaches and eye strain?"

The nerve of this guy, right? "Since last May, Doc."

"Last May? So you've been putting off coming in for an eye test for 11 months?"

I'm a pizza snob. I make no apologies for this. I was talking to Megan late last week, and the subject of pizza came up, specifically how a certain arena and convention center in Council Bluffs had charged us $25 a pie at a recent graphic design event.

At the time, I couldn't remember the exact amount. "I can't remember how much they ended up charging us for those pizzas, but I know that I haven't done math with numbers that big since like 11th grade!"

Even Old Chicago, which has the most expensive pizza in town, is cheaper than that. And if I do say so my damn self, The OC is around, on average, 153.5% tastier.

This was the line, nay the fact, that precipitated my being accused of being a pizza snob. She coined the term, accused me in jest of being it, and then watched with much laughter as I attempted to defend myself out of that box.

I was heading to a party, and I was running late. I'd left the office on time, because I'd promised someone that I would meet her at a party at 6:30. But you know how it goes: you're eating leftover cold fried chicken and sour cream and onion Pringles, you're watching SportsCenter, and before you know it, sonofapoppycock, its 6:15 and you haven't even showered yet, you haven't stopped to purchase beverages AND the party is 15 minutes away. Yeah, you know how it is.

Apartment parking lots can be labyrinthine in nature. When they are dissected by a body of water, they're even moreso. The Regency Apartments are one such place. I pulled in at 6:45, armed with a printed out map because, well, because I'm a huge, gigantic moron and didn't program the address, which I had written in scrawled-out ransom note style on that printed out map, into my computerized navigation system in my car. And I drove around the streets of the complex complex, running into dead end after dead end, without finding the right building. Shut it, tough guy-slash-grammar god. I meant to have the word complex appear twice in a row in the latter section of the previous sentance, because it was a complex, as in complicated, complex, as in apartment complex. Also, I meant to misspell sentence in the sentence explaining the sentence before that one just because I knew it would drive you absolutely insane. Did it drive you insane? Good, then lets move on.

In yet another stunning example of how Omaha is better than Des Moines, I present to you the case of Monday night. It was Opening Day in baseball, and the Twins were on ESPN2 in High-Definition against the Angels. I stopped by Little Caesars on the way home, picked up some 'za and some 'sticks, and retreated to my basement to watch the season unfold.

Just a couple minutes into the game, my phone rang. I looked at the screen and it said "BROTHER". Since this was the only acceptable call I would accept (more on that later), I picked up. "What channel is the game on again, Brother?"

Me: "Brother, its on ESPN2. In HD!"

Bro: "Yeah, its not on here. We're getting ESPNEWS, Brother. ESPNEWS!!"

ESPNEWS? Well, that could only mean one thing: the game was blacked out in Des Moines. Really? I know that they black out games in a team's home market, so as not to compete with the teams' local broadcast. But as far as I knew, the Twins home market only consisted of the state of Minnesota, and its only a minor inconvenience there, because the game is still available on another cable channel.