Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

At Del's memorial service on Sunday guests were once again invited to share a memory of him. It's a custom in Jewish mourning. Unlike a few days earlier at the house when everyone, all 8 of us, spoke, at the service only a few of us rose to speak. Maybe people felt intimidated by the audience of 30, maybe the fact that our sharing was the last thing standing in the way of dinner had people just wanting to get past it. 😅 Here's the story I shared:

Back in March or April of 2021 I was with Del and D at a custom suit shop in San Francisco. This was a few months before their wedding, their second wedding, with a big Jewish ceremony in New York. They were getting their suits refitted as they'd both lost weight. D had been successful with diet and exercise. Del's weight loss happened for a different reason— cancer. The cancer he beat, at the time. Del was fretting about how well-wishers at the wedding would congratulate him on losing weight and ask how he did it.

"You've got to get ahead of it," I suggested. "Own the topic. Tell them it was cancer and losing weight was, like, the one good thing that came out of it."

"Well, I tried a lot of of methods unsuccessfully," Del vamped with comedic delivery. "None of them worked. But then I got cancer and the pounds just melted away!"

I share this moment not to make light of a dark subject but to recall how, even at times of darkness, Del found and shared the bit of light within it.

Hawk startled me awake when I had just fallen asleep a few nights ago. "Come look at the sheep!" she exclaimed.

I grumbled. I didn't want to get out of bed. But she insisted.

I went out to landing at the top of the stairs where Hawk was shining a UV light on three of our stuffed animals. She bought the UV light a few months ago. It's an interesting tool/toy for examining the many semi-precious stones she collects. Certain minerals glow or reflect different colors in the UV light. That night she shined it on a bunch of our stuffed animals, and...



"Oh, great," I said. "The sheep are evil."

Their eyes all glow in UV light. One has a red mouth. Another has glowing red horns. Evil!

It's a few days late, but since I'm such a science fiction fan I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon of wishing everyone a happy May 4th.



( Confused? )

I was an attendee on a webinar today when someone, one of the moderators I believe, used the toilet with an open mic.

At first it sounded like someone was running water, kind of like filling a coffee maker, in the background. It wasn't either of the active speakers because they were on camera. Though it could have been someone next to them, off camera. I posted a comment in the chat, "Mmm, I can smell the coffee! Or are you pouring water?"

The water-pouring sound continued, followed by what was evidently a toilet flush. "Sounds like someone took a mic in the toilet," I commented. There were LOLs.

Then came a loud fart. O-M-G. "Is this seriously your first videoconference ever?!" I wrote.

There were more LOLs. And at least one other person was thinking what I was thinking— that a movie warned us about this problem 35 years ago!


Link: The Sound of Relief, The Naked Gun (1988)

There were a few other jokes about the open mic in the bathroom, and which movie it was in decades ago. I went to screen-shot them to include in this blog, but minutes later the host had deleted most of the comments about what happened.

BTW, I noted above that this was a webinar. It was configured so that only the host and the two invited speakers could share audio. This wasn't one of those, "Oh, crazy stuff happens when there's 200 people on a Zoom" situations. It was a professionally staged presentation with a (supposedly) experienced host moderator and two speakers representing their companies— one of which is a household name in the US.

Oops.

Yesterday was the Superbowl, the biggest sports and TV event of the year in the US. I feel almost guilty I didn't watch (I went hiking instead) because apparently it was a nail-biter and— most importantly— the USA won for an unbelievable 57th straight year!

U-S-A! U-S-A!



Of course, it helps that this "world" championship sportsball game is only open to USA teams. 🤷

"Dry January" has become a meme. It's not even new this year. A quick web search reveals that it started 10 years ago with just a few thousand people. Now it's all over social media. Didn't we just do this a few months ago with Sober October?

Not that I'm trying or anything, but as the clock wound past 10pm this evening I thought to myself, "Hmm, I haven't alcohol today... and I don't need a drink now." Then I thought for a moment, "Hmm, how close am I to Dry January?" In a moment I remembered this is probably only the second day so far (out of 9) this month I haven't consumed beer, wine, or liquor. 🤣

See, my notion of Dry January is more like this:



I don't mean to take anything away from people who've struggled with alcoholism and have gone totally dry. There are a few in my family and several among my friends. I also don't mean to take anything away from people for whom Dry January is an opportunity to recognize they have a problem and take strong steps to correct it. I roll my eyes, though, at the people spraining their shoulders to pat themselves on the back on social media for taking a brief break from drinking— before returning to their old habits, including bragging about drunken antics on social media.

A few weeks ago we watched "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story". It's available streaming for free on the Roku channel. How was it? Well, it was... just too weird. I hated it.

I know that's a strong statement. You might think, "Well, you just don't 'get' parody." (BTW, if you think that you have no clue about me.) Let me contextualize it.

I loved Weird Al's music since 1984, when "Eat It", his parody of Michael Jackson's hit "Beat It", came out. I heard it on the radio, and it was like a revelation to me. Music could be funny! And not just slapstick or bathroom humor funny, but poke-fun-at-things-that-people-hold-sacred funny. I.e., satire.

I told all my friends at school about it. At first nobody knew what it was. They all cracked up laughing when I repeated some of the lyrics, though. Soon more of us heard it on the radio— but not very often. I got bold and called a DJ to play it so my friends and family could all hear it.

I remained a fan of Weird Al's parodies for years. I bought a few of his albums. I eagerly watched the movie UHF (1989) as soon as I found out Yankovic wrote & starred in it. I think when I rented it on VHS I watched it 3 times in one weekend, then rented it again 9 months later.

Thus I was pretty primed to see "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story." Perhaps because of the title (which I took literally) I expected it to be a biography. A funny biography, to be sure; and likely parodying the biopic genre, as parody is at the heart of what Weird Al does. And that's where my dislike for the movie spawned.

You see, Weird is not a biography. It starts out as a sort of parody/biography, taking satirical liberties with the truth— which is exactly what I was expecting— but then gradually becomes completely unmoored from reality. Pretty soon it's a Weird Al self glorification fest on LSD, and it's not amusing.

Among the run-on jokes I found tedious:

• Al's parents hate him, like sadistically hate him, and treat him as a failure even when he's objectively successful


• Al insists repeatedly that he wrote Eat It as an original song, not a work of parody, and Michael Jackson wrote a little-known parody based on it


• Madonna threw herself at Al, made him an alcoholic, and tried to turn him into a murderous drug cartel leader.

Let me reiterate: these gags were funny at first, but like too many jokes Saturday Night Live runs into the ground in their many bad seasons, they were made unfunny by excessive repetition.

As I sat through to the end of the movie I was reminded of what a writing teacher said to one of my classmates years ago about his absurdist comedy story written in the fashion of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "John," he said— I think his name was John— "Your story is like a hot air balloon with no ropes. It rises and it's beautiful. But it's not moored to the ground of reality. It starts floating away, further and further away from reality, until the audience can't make sense of it anymore."

"Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" is that untethered balloon floating farther and farther away.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics today published the much anticipated consumer price index (CPI) for October. Economists' consensus was that it'd come in at 7.9%. That'd be a high rate, though less than June's 9.1%, a 40 year peak, or even last month's 8.2% level. Well, the figure came in slightly less bad than expected: only 7.7%. But Wall Street went wild.



Stocks went on a tear today. The S&P 500 index rose 5.5%. The tech-heavy NASDAQ rose more than 7.3%. Within the technology sector heavy hitter Apple was +7.3%, Amazon +12.2%, NVidia +14.3%.

While traders on Wall Street were living it up, I was out grocery shopping on Main Street. The price of the carton of milk I bought today was 13% higher than just one week ago.

It's not just milk that's getting more expensive. Across the past year I've seen prices on many grocery staples rise by 50% or more.

"Why isn't the inflation number higher, like 50%, then?" you might ask.

It's because the official inflation metric used excludes "volatile" things like food. Riiight, one of the core necessities of life, food, is excluded from the statistics.

Thursday was Day 2 for me at the trade show in Detroit. It wasn't as long as a day as marathon Day 1 on Wednesday when I was on my feet for 10½ hours. Today the booths were open only 7 hours. Despite the shorter day I still got home late after staying out a bit with colleagues I haven't seen f2f in years and didn't have time for my blog. So I'm catching up a day later as I sit at the airport waiting to go home.

A few things I saw at the show Thursday really amused me. First were a bunch of "No Guns" signs at all the entrances. When I see them I think of them like this:



One of the many things at the show is a merch market. The label on this t-shirt amused me a lot:



In case you're wondering what the joke is, it's a GLBTQ rainbow with a "STRAIGHT" sticker on it— which is supposed to refer to the shape of the t-shirt, straight vs. fitted. Alternatively it's a perfect shirt for "Straight but not narrow". 🤣

Last night I watched Game of Thrones Season 3 Episodes 2-3. This blog post isn't about those specific episodes as much as it's about what happened when I browsed The Game of Thrones Wiki today to understand a few scenes I was confused about. The pages that detail individual episodes are great. They provide lots of information about what's happening— including critical details that are sometimes really not obvious in the TV screenplay— without spoiling what happens later in the story. When you click a link to read more about an interesting character, though, watch out!



The "bios" on individual characters all have opening sentences like, "Person X did A and B until they were killed by C during D." I clicked on pages for 3 characters and all 3 of them had spoilers like that right at the top.

At first I was frustrated about this. The wiki writers could have done much better to not spoil the series for people who are just watching it for the first time! But then I considered what anybody who hasn't been living under a rock for the past 10 years already knows: In The Game of Thrones basically everybody dies.



I'm not even the first to think about that. Millions of fans have been frustrated about it.



I had fun looking up memes about how "Everybody Dies" in Game of Thrones. I've included in this blog post some of my favorites.







No, I won't tell you which three characters I clicked on and learned are goners. Unlike seemingly everyone else, I won't spoil the story for you! ...Except to remind you, of course, that basically everyone dies. 🤣