Your Long Drives Quizo Update

I have mentioned in the past that I listen to NPR. That fact is a little weird even to me, but then again a lot of things are weird to me that the rest of the human race finds perfectly normal.

My being an NPR listener is more an accident of geography than politics. I’ve heard it said that the target audience for NPR is over-educated liberals, to which I would respond that if you are someone who believes that a person can be “over-educated” please identify yourself so that I can beat you to death with a Louisville Slugger and then hang your jellied corpse from a telephone pole with a sign that says “this is what we do to people who disdain knowledge.” Seriously, motherfucker, I am the child of schoolteachers and I will kill you with a bat.

Anyway, where was I? Ah, right, NPR. So, yes, the reason I listen to NPR is neither because I am a liberal (my politics are, most of the time, in a scary place well past liberal) nor because I am approximately 140,000 times smarter than the rest of the population. It is also not a consequence of my deep, abiding humility.

No, honestly, I listen to NPR because years ago I had a job that required me to commute every day from Northeast Philadelphia to a small town called Livingston, NJ. Livingston is about 20 miles west of Newark and as near as I could figure the only things in the whole town were a Borders, a Best Buy (where I bought, oh God, Star Wars Galaxies) and my office. Back in the pre-iPod era I drove up there every day for four months, and between Exit 6 and Exit 10 the radio landscape is a vast wasteland. The only thing I could pick up on my car radio at the time was an NPR station out of somewhere in North Jersey. It was on that commute that I got hooked on the BBC specifically; the World Service’s unique blend of information and condescension is the closest thing to me being on the radio since… well, since I was on the radio in college. So ever since then I’ve tended to listen to NPR in the car and, interestingly, almost nowhere else. It’s more than just a habit/compulsion anymore. There are things on there I legitimately enjoy – the wicked, black humor of the Marketplace Morning Report is a personal favorite – but I’m not going to lie to you, there are a couple things about NPR that absolutely annoy the hell out of me.

First and foremost, as I have mentioned in the past, is the traffic report. The traffic report on NPR isn’t useless. It transcends useless. Compared to the traffic report on NPR, useless is something so incredibly useful you can’t possibly live without it. The sheer paucity of useful information in the traffic report used to make me wonder why they even bothered until one day, as I sat in a gigantic traffic jam on I-95 that went completely unmentioned by NPR, I became convinced that the NPR traffic report exists solely so, like, one guy who lives in a rotating series of homes in the hinterland suburbs can get to and from work at WHYY.

This morning, on the way to work, the 7:30 traffic report, I swear to God and the man Jesus presented here verbatim and in its entirety, was: “there is an accident at the intersection of County Line Road and Cherry Lane. Everything else is fine.”

You’ve gotta be fucking KIDDING me.

Now, thanks to another very long drive I used to make regularly – from Northeast Philadelphia to Lehigh University for the year and a half I went there – I know that the intersection of County Line and Cherry Lane is in FUCKING SOUDERTON. If you don’t know where that is – and for reasons I will detail in a few seconds it is perfectly understandable if you don’t – Souderton, in addition to being the hometown of Jamie Moyer, is thirty-eight miles from the Dark Horse. THIRTY-EIGHT MILES! To give you some perspective, you know what else is 40 miles from the Dark Horse? The dead-smack-middle of the Pine Barrens. Do you care about the traffic out there? Can you even name a ROAD out there? I can, but once again that’s an area I’ve driven through about 9000 times in my life to and from the shore. No normal person listening to a Philadelphia radio station cares about traffic 40 miles away, at least not to the exclusion of all other traffic in an area of approximately FOUR THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX SQUARE MILES.

Worse yet, when you add the cheeky little tag of “everything else is fine” – so painfully obvious a lie that George W. Bush himself could not sell it successfully – those 18 words evolve beyond uselessness into a mind-shattering horror of Lovecraftian proportions. It is not so much a traffic report as it is Cthulhu himself snaking one of his slimy tentacles through the airwaves and rending your brain into jabbering insanity.

It has been my direct experience that the traffic report is the only portion of NPR that relays blatant factual inaccuracies at every opportunity. The actual informational content of the reportage gets no complaint from me. After all, where else am I going to get a seven-minute shame-spiral on just WHY my health care is so much more expensive than, you know, every other major industrialized nation on every planet within 500 light years of here? No, I have no issue with the fascinating and depressing things I learn from NPR every day.

I DO have an issue, however, with the fact that NPR stories do not appear to be edited by anyone with any kind of remotely advanced training in English composition. I know this person does not exist because if they did, the rough draft of 9 out of 10 NPR news stories would be sent back to the reporters and producers with “WORD CHOICE, FOR GOD’S SAKE WORD CHOICE” scrawled across them in the editor’s blood.

I freely admit this is something I am obsessive about beyond a useful or even rational point, but it nonetheless still drives me up a wall. This morning, at one point, when I heard the NPR news anchor refer to the Gettysburg Address as one of the “most iconic speeches in American history” I literally shouted at my empty car “YOU CANNOT USE THE WORD ‘ICONIC’ THERE!” I know what he meant, of course. But that’s not what he SAID. “Iconic” is the 100%, absotively-posilutely ass-wrong word to use there. It is a visual descriptor. It is an adjective that describes how things LOOK. A speech cannot be iconic for the same reason that Starry Night cannot be ear-splitting. The English language DOES NOT FUCKING WELL WORK THAT WAY.

A little later one reporter was talking about “the rhythm of the evening meal” and I wanted to stab something, not because the word doesn’t mean that but because it’s just WRONG. It is an excessively-prosaic choice when you are talking about, as they were at the time, an epidemic of childhood obesity. Yeah, when I’m trying to convey the importance of a public health issue I want to talk about the “rhythm of the evening meal.” Christ. I’m not sure who should be shot first, whoever wrote that line or whoever thought it was okay to go to air. Stop writing. Seriously, just fucking stop. You’re going to hurt yourself.

This sort of thing happens on NPR all the time, probably because their rubric falls just slightly outside the strict boundaries of just-the-facts-maam Columbia-style journalism. And I’m fine with something a little more colloquial, but come ON, people. The Doctor was right: words are powerful. They’re magic. If you won’t or can’t use them properly, please, put them down and leave them to those of us who can.

Because, frankly, I think we can all agree that the less pissed I get the better off we all are.

JLK

Your Growing Malaise Quizo Update

You ever have one of those stretches where everything lands in that grey, squishy space between right and wrong? Where things aren’t “oh my god this is awesome!” but they aren’t “oh my god this is terrible!” either, they’re just sort of “oh my… uh… yeah… so, that happened.” I’m sure we’ve all been there a time or two, had periods where everything is just comfortably mediocre, where our life events are like buying a new shirt and then getting home and realizing it’s half a size too big and taking the tags off and wearing it anyway. On the great sine wave of life we’ve all had times like these, those times between the highs and lows where things just hover around zero for a while. And for the most part we shrug these things off because, hey, that’s life. You take the good, you take the bad.

That is, if you’re most people.

You ever have one of those stretches where everything is mediocrity and squishy greyness and you overreact to it so outrageously, so vehemently, that you actually cause dangerous spikes in OTHER people’s blood pressure?

Let’s take a look back at this past weekend, shall we?

Friday – “this is a criminal waste of valuable resources.”

I normally play poker on Friday nights. This is a good thing. I legitimately enjoy the company of the people I play poker with, and it forces me to interact socially with other humans, which, I’m not going to lie to you, is something that given the choice I would probably opt out of in general. This past Friday I did not play poker for two reasons. The first was that it was raining.

Now, before we get carried away here, let me invoke the words of the great John Sullivan concerning rain: “it’s just rain, I’m not gonna melt.” No, my mortal fear of driving at night in the rain comes from long, long ago, back in the ancient mists of forgotten time when I, for a fleeting moment, was a student at Lehigh University. For some reason I was at a book signing at a Borders on Lancaster Pike and I had to drive back to Bethlehem in my old car – dubbed The Millenium Falcon by my friends not just because we were giant nerds but because as my then-roommate put it, “it’s big, it’s fast, and it breaks down at the worst possible times” - in the middle of the night on an unlit highway in a furious rainstorm and the only tape in the car was a collection of JG Thirlwell remixes of “The Downward Spiral.”

Suffice it to say, folks, that this is what we in the theatre call “EXCEEDINGLY BAD.” I got back to my dorm quite literally shaking with fright and nerves, and ever since the idea of driving at night in the rain has caused a fear reaction in me similar to what gazelles must feel when they hear that first lion’s roar out on the savannah.

Now I HAVE driven under these conditions – just not happily – but the weather was only half of why I didn’t go out. The other half of why I didn’t play poker on Friday night was because the expansion pack for World of Warcraft had come out the night before and I, in a remarkable combination of self-aggrandizement and stupidity, decided that the confluence of release date and weather was God’s way of telling me to stay home and play WoW on Friday night. So I did. Until about midnight, when I suddenly stopped playing, looked at my monitor, and said, “what the fuck am I doing?” This began a brutal series of self-recrimination wherein I spent a solid ten minutes chastising myself with thoughts like, “what the hell is wrong with me, I should have gone to the poker game, this is dumb, I don’t even like this game that much anymore, I’m certainly not very GOOD at it, there are a billion other things I could be doing with my time, I hate the world,” etc etc. Eventually I calmed myself down by firing up FIFA 09 on my 360, dialing the difficulty all the way down to the easiest level, and pounding on some Korean team with Chelsea (final score 14-1). I’ve said many times that you can play World of Warcraft or you can play video games, and I think I may have finally chosen the latter.

Saturday – “I guess Tosca isn’t for everyone.”

After some comical shenanigans involving birthday parties, air fresheners, and his fluid concept of time, Nick and I made it up to see Quantum of Solace on Saturday night.

Yeah.

Let me just state in my typical hyperbolic fashion that the only thing worse than a bad movie is an okay movie that could have been great. And don’t misunderstand me – Quantum of Solace could have been great. It could have been really great. In fact, the way to have made it great is so simple I can hardly believe no one did it. All you needed to do was have someone walk up to Paul Haggis, who co-wrote the screenplay, and say, “look, Paul, we know you’re hot stuff now. You’ve got the Oscars and the money and whatnot and that’s great for you. It really is. We couldn’t be more proud. Fantastic. But, Paul, we’ve got to be honest with you, if you come anywhere near another James Bond script again we’re going to break every one of your fingers one by one with a ball peen hammer. I hate to put it that way but that’s really how we feel about it. Nothing personal, of course. We love your work. Love it. We’re big fans. Now if you could do us a huge favor and just fuck off and write another script about race relations or euthanasia or whatever social issue you just discovered this fucking week actually exists and leave the James Bond stuff to those of us who know what we’re doing, yeah, that would be just fantastic. Yes, fuck off, thanks. That’s a good lad.”

How do you go from such a tight, well-written, perfectly-constructed film like Casino Royale to the messy, spineless, occasional-flashes-of-brilliance-but-otherwise-incoherent Quantum of Solace? You hire Paul Haggis to do a rewrite. God, I hate that guy. I hate him so much. This isn’t a case like Die Another Day, which was just absolute garbage from beginning to end, this movie actually had a couple REALLY excellent bits in it. Daniel Craig and Judi Dench continue to be utterly fantastic – I would watch a 2-hour movie of just M and Bond talking about, like, life issues and stuff – and there are moments where the film transcends the typical Bond-movie glop that Haggis tries to drag it back into which keep it just barely in “real movie” territory. Because, let’s face it, even the best of the old Bond movies – and this is coming from someone RAISED on them – are really fucking stupid, and I’ll take an okay “real movie” with James Bond in it over a great “Bond movie” any day.

You know your movie has problems if Nick – who, though he is like a brother to me as much as anyone who I am not actually related to and who I would probably kill if offered enough money to do so and thus is really more like a half-brother or a distant cousin or something, has zero artistic or aesthetic sense whatsoever – asks after seeing it “why was that scene in the movie?” When people who have no knowledge of screenwriting WHATSOEVER can identify structural flaws in your screenplay that is when it is time to get a new writer.

Daniel Craig is still awesome, though.

Sunday – “Mike, this is a case of the terrible versus the pathetic.”

In a similar vein to the conclusion of my thoughts on Quantum of Solace, when my FATHER is summing up his thoughts on the Eagles game with an impression of the Comic Book Guy – “Worst. Football Game. EVER.” – your football team has SERIOUS FUCKING PROBLEMS. You can’t beat the Bengals in SEVENTY-FIVE MINUTES of football? Seriously? SERIOUSLY? THE FUCKING BENGALS?

As an unabashed Donovan McNabb fan I will be the first to admit that he had what was probably his worst game since his rookie year yesterday. But, hey, here’s a thought – if D-Mac is having a bad day maybe we could, I don’t know, what’s the word for it, oh yes, RUN THE FOOTBALL! YOU HAVE BRIAN WESTBROOK! GIVE HIM THE FUCKING BALL!

The Eagles ran the ball 18 times yesterday. They threw it 58 times. You cannot play football this way. I don’t care if you have the worst running back in the NFL let alone the best whose talent is being wasted by that pass-happy fuck with the headset, you CANNOT BE A SUCCESSFUL TEAM PLAYING FOOTBALL LIKE THIS.

Merrill said it best, I think, when he opined about halfway through overtime, “if there was ever a game which neither team deserved to win, this is it.” If you are the Eagles and not only can you not beat a bunch of meatsacks like the Bengals but you actually come a hairsbreadth from LOSING to them a couple times, things have to change. That is it. The Eagles should have blown this team out by 30 points. Instead they tie, and only because Shayne Graham was the first kicker to miss a field goal against the Eagles in something like 800 years. You almost lost to the BENGALS.

Andy Reid has to go.

Monday – “Is it safe?”

I got word from Oprah’s yesterday on their choice of speed round topic and I have deemed it perfectly acceptable. Actually I think it’s kinda neat. I look forward to what I can do with it. So make sure to put a stop to them tonight, because though they get to pick a speed round after winning three times in a row, if they pull back-to-back three-peats everyone will have to address Palestra Jon as “El Jefe.” And no one wants that.

JLK

Your Interesting Times Quizo Update

As we are all aware, my car went and blew itself up a couple weeks ago. This hasn't been as great a nuisance as you might think, since I have learned in the interim that without Chelsea playing every weekend, aside from work and school it seems I don't actually go anywhere. To get to our respective works and schools my father and I are sharing his car until a suitable, explosion-proof replacement for mine is located.

I was initially quite worried that without a car of my own my social life would take a huge hit and suffer greatly; the knowledge that my social life is apparently nonexistent is both sobering and relieving. Initially I thought a mistake had to have been made someplace, but when I went back and thought about it I realized that aside from the occasional excursion to the cinema or the casino (the latter of which is more like work anyway) I haven't left my house to go anyplace that wasn't the office, the Dark Horse, or Drexel in something like five months.

I was minorly distressed by this until I realized that I had chemistry homework to do, and the feeling passed.

The only trouble is that not having my own car means that on the weekends I have to ride back and forth to and from the shore with my dad. I'm certainly not complaining about this - I will never complain about being driven anywhere - but if you've never done it a car ride of any length with my father is something of an adventure. I thought about writing an amusing anecdote about what it's like, but I think instead I will just relate the conversations we have verbatim.

It is important to bear in mind three things: 1) I actually got a ride TO the shore on Friday night with a friend of mine, 2) I hurt my back pretty badly on Friday, and 3) all of these happened over a 90-minute ride last night and they are word-for-word transcriptions, I swear to God.

Oh, and ALL CAPS indicates shouting.

Seriously.

On geography -

Me: Kenny was asking on the way down here on Friday night how I survive this drive, what with it being dead straight and dead flat and pitch black and all.

Dad: Yes, well, New Jersey has THE MOST BORING SCENERY IN THE WORLD!

Me: What about Florida?

Dad: More boring than Florida.

Me: What about the desert?

Dad: No, the desert has a stark beauty that defies boredom.

Me: What?

Dad: A stark beauty.

Me: This isn't stark beauty?

Dad: No. This is verdant sameness.

On cuisine -

Dad: You know what the problem with being deaf is?

Me: Oh God.

Dad: If you're deaf you can't hear Sam Elliott's mustache.

Me: Er, yes.

Dad: You know, Sam Elliott? You can hear his mustache?

Me: (doing impersonation of Sam Elliott IBM commercial) "Peril masquerading as landscape!"

Dad: Yeah, that. Also, what's it called, "beef: it's what's for dinner." I guess that's better than "beef: it's slaughtered cow."

Me: Sam Elliott was also in Road House, the best worst movie ever.

Dad: Doesn't he kick Patrick Swayze's ass in that?

Me: No, they're friends.

Dad: They should get Sam Elliott to do that pork commercial too. You know, "pork, the other white meat." How the hell do you call pork white meat anyway?

Me: It's white... ish.

Dad: After you cook it!

Me: Well what the hell's the difference between red and white meat anyway?

Dad: It's some chemical... tannins! That's what it is! Red meat has more tannins.

Me: What?

Dad: Tannins.

Me: That's... that's the difference between red and white WINE, you idiot. Red WINE has tannins.

Dad: Just like... uh... red meat!

Me: You're making that up! Why can't you just admit you don't know something instead of making stupid shit up?

Dad: It could be tannins! You don't know!

(Ed. Note: it is not; the distinction between red and white meat is entirely arbitrary.)

ME: I KNOW IT'S NOT TANNINS!

Dad: YOU DON'T KNOW FOR SURE!

(pause)

Dad: They should get Sam Elliott to advertise other foods. (imitating Sam Elliott) "Rocky Mountain Oysters: it's not what you think."

Me: (laughing) OW! OW! It hurts when I laugh. Stop that. (laughing) OW!

Dad: "Headcheese: you don't want to know."

Me: (laughing) OW! STOP!

Dad: Oh, fine.

Me: (laughter abating) Ow that really hurts.

Dad: Like tannins?

Me: I hate you.

On urban planning -

Me: How come when we drive past this landfill it doesn't smell horribly bad?

Dad: They treat it with chemicals.

Me: Do you actually know that, or are you just making that up?

Dad: No, this one's true, they treat it with chemicals.

Me: What, do they just spray Lysol on it?

Dad: No, no, no. (pause) It's baking soda.

Me: Shut the fuck up.

Dad: They have guys who walk around with big boxes of Arm and Hammer -

Me: WHY CAN'T YOU JUST ADMIT YOU DON'T KNOW SOMETHING?

Dad: It's true!

Me: THEY DON'T USE GIANT BOXES OF ARM AND HAMMER!

Dad: THEY USE CHEMICALS!

Me: What, like tannins?

Dad: They put chemicals on the trash so it doesn't -

Me: EVERYTHING IS CHEMICALS WITH YOU!

Dad: They use them to -

Me: I can't stand this! When you don't know something you make up some weird shit about chemicals!

Dad: CHEMICALS ARE EVERYWHERE!

(we drive over a large bump in the road)

Me: Ow.

Dad: Would you like something for your back? Possibly a pharmaceutical chemical? "Cause we are liiiiiving in a pharmaceuuuutical world." Madonna should have sung that. It's catchy. That would have been a hit.

Me: I fucking hate you.

(BUMP)

Me: OW!

JLK

Your "Everything Has Its Price" Quizo Update

I spend an inordinate amount of time in New Jersey, probably because I currently live there. The entire state gets a bad rap from a very small part of it - which that part admittedly deserves - but most of it that I've seen is actually quite nice. The spot I'm in especially.

This is not to say, however, that everything is always smiles and sunshine.

I managed to get myself a kick-ass laptop at a ridiculous price last week, which is how our story begins. I was at the Best Buy in Moorestown attempting to buy the Twin Peaks Gold Box, which despite the tag on the shelf reading "Twin Peaks Gold Box DVD" the salesman had apparently never heard of, and after failing to do so I wandered over to Computers. I browsed a bit until I came across a laptop that was a floor model listed as an "open box" sale. I perused the specs and came to the conclusion that the price on offer was several hundred dollars below what such a computer would normally retail for and jumped at the chance to finally get back into the mobile computing world after the implosion of the company I once worked for required me to return their laptop (they needed gas money, I guess).

The salesman in computers came over and pulled out the unit and said, "you're getting a hell of a deal on this thing, man."

"Oh, I know," I said.

"Let me just check it out, make sure everything works," he said. He plugged it in and powered it up. "Huh, that's weird."

I looked at the laptop and the screen said "Operating System Not Found."

The salesman said, "sorry about that, man."

Now I knew from my days at the Death Star I knew three things:

1) When a floor model computer was going to go out for actual sale the techs would reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows, and in this case had probably just neglected to do the latter.

2) The odds of the store still having the install disks that came with the computer were so miniscule as to be laughable.

3) Best Buy is not supposed to sell computers without an operating system.

Finally, a situation where I could game the system to my advantage. Not only was I about to get myself a laptop at a TRULY ridiculous price, but I would be able to put XP on it and not have to use the horror (and computer-resource-sucking-vampire) that is Vista.

"Tell you what," I said. "You whack another 75 bucks off the price and I'll take it anyway."

The salesman agreed in about 1/10th of a second; he was happy to unload a unit he would otherwise be completely unable to sell. So I ended up getting my kick-ass laptop for about half the retail price. However, once I got it home and working I realized I needed some other things for it - most pressing, I needed blank CDs so as to install my perfectly-legal copy of Windows XP on it. And I still wanted the Twin Peaks Gold Box. This necessitated a trip to another Best Buy the next morning, this time in Brick.

Getting into and out of Brick, NJ is a bit of an adventure under the best circumstances. There are two exits off the Parkway that essentially go to the same place, one on the northbound side and one on the southbound side, with different numbers. Similarly, getting back on the Parkway from Brick is confusing to the extent that I've never entirely figured out exactly how to do it, basically just relying on the knowledge that from whatever point I'm at if I keep heading west I will get to the Parkway eventually.

That said, never underestimate the state of New Jersey's ability to make your driving experience a screaming nightmare.

Because of a stretch of roadwork - which is something of a recreational sport in New Jersey - the four lanes that normally comprise Route 70 had been compressed to roughly one and a half, and the sign that actually reads "Parkway South ------>" had been taken down at the appropriate turnoff, which led to a situation where heading towards the Parkway were tons of signs that said "Parkway South [arrow pointing ahead]" which then are mysteriously replaced with signs reading "Lakehurst 8 [miles]" and drivers shouting "WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK" to their otherwise empty cars over excessively-loud Kylie Minogue music.

When I finally got home about an hour later - about three times longer than it should have taken - I realized I STILL didn't have the goddamn Twin Peaks DVDs.

Welcome to New Jersey.

JLK

Your Misbegotten Adventures Quizo Update

Firstly, an important safety tip: if you burn the roof of your mouth - say, on a piece of pizza at dinner some August Tuesday - do not repeat not use mouthwash when you brush your teeth that night. I cannot stress this enough. If given a choice between using mouthwash after burning the roof of my mouth or having blind 8-year-olds whack me about the head and heck with baseball bats, I would have to seriously consider the question of just HOW blind the 8-year-olds are and whether the bats are wood or metal. It is the worst pain ever. Avoid it if you possibly can.

Secondly, an important travel tip: if you are traveling to or from Atlantic City and you need gas, do not get off the AC Expressway at the Hammonton exit. There isn't any gas there. There is not, in fact, gas anywhere NEAR there. Exit 28 is, as near as I can figure, the only exit on the entirety of the Atlantic City Expressway that does not have a gas station within, say, 40 miles of the exit ramp. Driving (my father's car, as mine is still busted and he is on vacation) down yesterday, the "Check Gauge" light came on at about exit 31and for some reason I determined that I would not make it all the way to Farley to fill up and - in what was surprisingly NOT my biggest mistake of the day - decided to get off the Expressway at the Hammonton exit.

Understand that my sphere of geographic knowledge - within which I am basically infallible when it comes to finding/knowing the location of/getting to places - does not extend south of the White Horse Pike until you get fairly fair east, basically until you get to the Parkway, though it does have a sort of peninsula connecting the Hamilton Mall to Somers Point (me and my crew down there like to go to the Borders in Mays Landing, so I need to know how to get to and from it and people's houses). So I was essentially flying blind once I hit the bottom of the exit ramp, and the only thing I had to guide me to a filling station was my keen intellect and an educated guess. Now, at the bottom of the ramp there was a sign saying that I should turn right to go to Vineland and left to go to Hammonton.

Here's my thinking at this point:

1) I remembered from my short time working at the Death Star that there was a Best Buy in Vineland.

2) I figured a Best Buy was a reasonable barometer of civilization so there would probably be a gas station near one.

3) I knew that Hammonton was about 2 miles north of my position (aka "left").

4) I knew that Hammonton did not, in fact, have a gas station once I got to it, and for some distance thereafter, at least not on the White Horse Pike.

From this knowledge I concluded:

5) If I turn right here, I will hit a gas station in Vineland after about 2 miles.

It turns out that from that spot it is, in fact, twenty-one miles to Vineland. Putting a sign at the bottom of that exit ramp saying "Vineland ----->>" is the equivalent - quite literally - of putting a sign out in front of the Dark Horse reading "King of Prussia Mall ----->> ."

That is one deceptive goddamn sign.

(That comparison, believe it or not, is actually accurate to about 900 feet.)

So I turned right at the bottom of the ramp. After five or six minutes of passing vast swaths of farmland, farmhouses, and other farm-related geography I realized that not only was I probably not getting gas any time soon I had no fucking clue where I was. I flipped a quick u-turn and started burning rubber northbound, remembering my old football coach's advice of "when you're lost, drive fast, because that way you aren't lost as long." (Note: actual advice. I am not making this up.) I passed back under the Expressway and started to see the rudiments of civilization - pizza places, a shopping center, and something called "El Rodeo Musical," but no gas station for several agonizing minutes.

Finally, as I start to feel the car shudder and buck at the pedal and realize that for the first time in my life I am going to run out of gas on the road and shit I don't know where I am there's nothing here but farms where the hell am I OH MY GOD I KNEW I WAS GOING TO DIE IN NEW JERSEY I see glowing red letters ahead on my right. A Citgo. Salvation!

All the dashboard lights flared on and the car finally sputtered it's last and shut itself off as I was pulling into the station. I literally coasted the last 30 feet up to the pump. Once I was there the attendant walked up to my window and actually smiled at me and laughed a little.

"Cut that one pretty close, didn't you?" he said.

I just said, "brother, you got no idea."

As I said, though, that was not even my biggest mistake of the day.

That would come later at the casino where the Little League World Series was showing on the TV over my table. At the moment in question I was fairly pissy - actually I was exceptionally pissy, as angry as I can remember being for quite some time - about something that had happened the hand before. One of the other players pointed at the screen and said "hey, at least we tied it up," to which I replied, fairly spitting venom, "yeah, you know, you'd think the Japanese would know not to fuck with us by now."

This is already the most offensive thing I have ever said. However, I continued, and at this point I turn around and start pointing at the screen. "Yeah, you oughta fucking know better! God dammit! You wanna mess with us? Fucking dumbasses! Remember what happened the last time? Huh? Huh?" I cap off this stream of invective with the unfortunate coup de grace of a muttered "BOOM!" while making a mushroom-cloud-motion with my hands.

This is when I turn back around to find that an elderly Japanese gentlemen is being seated at the table.

I have never wanted to crawl into a hole and die more than I did in that moment, and thus was my humiliation complete.

You have to admit, folks, I don't do anything small.

Thirdly, an important shopping tip: if you are of the comic book persuasion and you are in the Olde City/Penns Landing/Liberties/down that way area, the guys who run the store I shop at out in Willow Grove have opened up a new location on 2nd Street across from the Arden (45 N. 2nd Street, to be exact). It's quite nice. The folks who run it are good friends of mine and are outstanding people who run a hell of a store. If you go and tell Rob you heard about the place from me he'll probably laugh at you, but you never know. The importance of the comic store I shop at opening a location a scant five blocks from the pub cannot be overstated. The ability to make one trip on Saturday mornings to both watch Chelsea and get comics not only saves me the weekly jaunt out to Willow Grove but also gives me another conveniently-located place to waste time at and insures that I will basically never be productive on a Saturday again in any remote way.

Finally, on a personal, more positive note, today, August 27, marks eight years to the day since I stopped drinking, and I can't think of a better bunch of people to spend such a milestone with. The irony of spending such a milestone in a bar is of course not lost on me, but no one ever said my life didn't labor under an excess of irony.

JLK

Your Wildly Vacillating Quizo Update

I have railed against the weather numerous times in this space - previous instances of summer cold or winter heat or snow in April or whatever - and despite the fact that it is dark, cold, and raining in mid-August, the weather specifically is not what I'm shaking my fist at today. No, the problem is that for the last weekend life in general has taken this strange sort of erratic turn and, well, I tend to think my life was interesting enough beforehand.

One of the underlying causes of all of this is that the constant stress of obsessing about the horror show that my job has become is beginning to cause noticeable cracks in my psyche. This wouldn't be so bad were it not for the fact that it was pretty well cracked to begin with.

Things started well enough on Thursday night when I went to a book signing by William Gibson at the library. This was quite the big deal for me, bringing to 40% my completion rate for Meeting My Top Five Literary Idols - which is close to as impressive as it's going to get when one considers that meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald or William Shakespeare would require, respectively, some serious necromancy and some really, REALLY serious necromancy, and the fact David Mamet scares the shit out of me. (For the record, the other 20% that I successfully met was Neil Gaiman.)

The reading/signing thing was cool - he has aged an awful lot recently, but he's still sharp and funny, and when he signed my books he commented happily on how well-traveled my copy of Neuromancer was.

Then on the way home from the signing my car blew up.

This is only slightly an exaggeration. My car overheated fairly dramatically - the temperature gauge swinging back and forth over the redline, steam occasionally, but not constantly, billowing out from under the hood - and the next morning when I went to open the hood (it being too dark to see the engine at the time being, you know, night and all) there was coolant fluid pretty much everywhere, so it's a safe bet that SOMETHING with coolant in it, a hose of some sort I'm guessing, failed rather catastrophically while I was driving to the comic shop from the signing. I figure I was lucky to limp the car home. After consulting my finances and my personal feelings on the matter I determined that I am sick and fucking tired of spending money keeping this goddamn 16-year-old whoring sonofabitch car running. So, after my show is over I will be out and about on the market for a car.

Show, you say? Why yes! A show. Perhaps you've heard I produce shows. It's called Dealer's Choice. It is by Patrick Marber and it will be playing in the Restaurant at the pub opening on September 18. Originally we were going to be part of the Philly Fringe, but that is a gigantic pain in the ass to say the least, so we're not. Someone in my ridiculously talented cast - and here I do not exaggerate even the slightest little bit, this bunch is the most talented single group of actors I think I've ever seen in a show in this city, I don't know how in the HELL they're working for me - came up with the idea of calling our show the headliner of the "Philadelphia Binge Festival," and I liked it so much I decided to steal it. Tickets for the show are a scant $10, and if you get there early enough you also get to have dinner. So it's like going out for dinner and a show, only you're going to one place. Ask me for details. Website is up and ticket sales begin shortly.

Everyone remember the Medea references? Oh, that was nothing. Prepare to be besieged.

Anyway, a rental car later, me and some of my boys (and their moms and sisters, which was a little odd) were on our way to the Meadowlands on Saturday night to see the Los Angeles David Beckhams (nee Galaxy) play the New York Red Bulls. I wasn't sure what to expect from the experience necessarily, but two tailgates (totalling some 7 hours, both before and after the game), being pressganged into cooking for more than a hundred people at said tailgates, 66,000 fans in the stadium, spending the game next to several hundred Red Bulls supporters who can be charitably described as "completely insane" and NINE FUCKING GOALS! was certainly not it.

Sunday morning saw a big-time shock in the Manchester derby, and then something less of a shock as Chelsea and Liverpool played another spiteful, mean-spirited game that ended, mercifully, in a 1-1 draw, though I'm still convinced Chelsea left 2 points on the table there and could have won. The combination of the beginnings of cold and rain, the knowledge that I'd have to go to work 18 hours after, and the fact that we didn't beat the filthy Scouse put me in quite the pissy mood. Until I got home, at least, where after weeks of prodding I finally convinced my father to watch Hot Fuzz which - as I predicted - he loved, thus once again proving the age-old axiom "I am always right."

Then, just before bed, I pulled out my new William Gibson book to read before sleeping, and I noticed that one of my Top Five Literary Idols apparently inscribed all of my books "To Joan."

I don't even smoke anymore, but there aren't enough cigarettes in the goddamn world for this.

JLK

Your Sonic Death Monkey Quizo Update

For someone who does not meet the clinical definition of a "sadist" necessarily, I do take an awful lot of joy in tormenting my friends. My one buddy, let's call him... say... "Ken Turner of Linwood, NJ," we had this conversation in his car on the way to dinner on Saturday night.

Ken: What are you doing?

Me: I'm plugging my iPod into your radio.

Ken: What? No! No! Don't.... oh, no.

Me: (searching for a song to play) What? What's the problem?

Ken: Oh, god, this is going to be horrible.

[music begins]

Ken: This isn't too bad...

[a few seconds pass]

Me: (singing) SHE'S ONLY SEVENTEEEEEEEEEEN!

Ken: Oh, god.

Me: (singing) DADDY SAYS SHE'S TOOOOOO YOUUUUNG BUT SHE'S OLD ENOUGH FOR MEEEEEEEE!

Ken: This is the most awful thing I've ever heard.

Me: Fine, I'll put something else on.

Ken: Why do you even have these songs on your iPod?

Me: (searching) I ask myself that all the time... ah, here we go.

Me: (singing) You've got style that's what all the GIIIIIIIIRLS SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

Ken: Why are you doing this to me? Please, god, stop!

Me: (singing) All your suits are custom made in LOOOOOOOOOONNNNDOOOOOOOOON!

Ken: You're killing me. I can feel my brain dying.

Me: (searching iPod) Fine, fine...

Ken: Don't you have any music I won't hate?

Me: Probably not... ah! Found it.

[music plays]

Me : (singing): I NEVER MEANT TO BEEEE SO BAAAAAAD TO YOUUUUUUUU!

Ken: God you're annoying.

Me: (searching iPod) I'm not annoying, I'm charming.

Ken: Uh, yeah, here's the thing about that -

Me: LIDO MISSED THE BOAT THAT DAAAAAY HE LEFT THE SHACK!

Ken: Just... please, stop.

Me: (searching iPod) You love Coldplay, right?

Ken: AAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!

[bangs head on steering wheel]

Who needs to go out on a Saturday night when you can have that much fun just driving to dinner?

JLK

Your Monumental Quizo Update

As we all should know by now, tonight marks the 100th Dark Horse Quizo, an event commemorated by the phrase (as coined by Alias Pseudonym Undercover):

"It's Going To Be Great; Don't Tell Your Friends."

Let me tell you, I went back and forth for a long time on whether to use a comma or a semicolon there. I'm a big fan of the semicolon. When used properly it allows for the sorts of long, hideously complex sentences that we all know I am a large fan of. But in a Quizo slogan? There was a fierce internal debate about this one, but I eventually decided that strict grammatical accuracy had to win out over aesthetics.

What's on tap for tonight, then?

Well, in a new effort on my part to achieve if not 100% honesty than at least 80 or 85%, I have to say that I'm not entirely sure what just yet. The one thing I am sure of is that tonight's money round will be at the Special Quizo Rate of $10 a team, if for no other reason than to give the winning team a little more money. Also, after the fiasco last week of Das Boot and Sunshine Happy Face -

Side note, seriously, RC and crew, show up with that name again and MONDO BAD SHIT is gonna happen that will make the William McKinley thing look like a walk in the park -

After the money round fiasco last week of those two teams betting each other 20 bucks that they would win and then getting trounced by a team led by a friend of mine who was a Quizo first-timer and who I am not entirely certain has more than a sixth-grade education (he's from Florida), I'm tempted to put forth... not so much a "rule," necessarily, as a "strong suggestion" that "if you don't follow your team will almost certainly lose" that if you're going to make side bets on the money round you have to toss that money into the pot to make it interesting for everyone. Surely, if you think you're good enough to bet Team X that you're going to win you must think you're good enough to put that money up for grabs for everyone.

It is just as sure that by now everyone realizes that Quizo is not so much a trivia game as it is a chance for me to teach certain people a little humility. And by "a little" I mean "any." And by "certain people" I mean "Das Boot." And by "Das Boot" I mean "Fletcher."

So, yes, tonight will feature a $10 money round and some as-yet-undetermined other prize offerings. I don't know if tonight will be as well-attended as the Two-Year Anniversary Quizo, but then again the anniversary Quizo wasn't as well-attended as the game two weeks ago when we had 18 freaking teams, so who can guess at these things anymore? I would still recommend an early arrival, though.

Also be aware, for those of us who are Quizo beginners, that the Quizo website - http://quizo.blogspot.com - has the full text of this e-mail every week, along with a few links that, if carefully perused, are usually guaranteed to give you anywhere from one to four answers in a given week. So there's that.

Final note: driving home from the shore last night I stopped at a 7-11 (a non-Kwik-E-Mart 7-11, since apparently small towns in Central New Jersey don't rate this kind of promotion) for a drink, and after I paid for it the guy behind the counter handed me my change and said - I am not making this up - "have a day."

I thought, "how existential of him," then proceeded to spend most of the drive home trying very hard not to hit the VAST HORDES OF DEER that infest Routes 530 and 70. Cause that's, you know, fun.

JLK

Your Good for Business Quizo Update

Aaaaaaaaand... we're back.

You know, once I quit smoking I figured that I would experience a cold like a normal person; instead of every little head cold being a two-week ordeal I'd be stuffy for three days and then get over it. (If you weren't aware, smoking while you have a cold makes your cold last a looooooong time.) This, however, does not appear to be the case, as I was sick for the better part of a week straight, though in fairness somewhat less so than was normal in the past. My cold, thankfully, never made it to the "hacking cough" phase, and for that I'm sure we're all eternally grateful.

After my recovery I made it down to Somers Point to hang out with my crew down there and for the first time in my life I went to a Japanese restaurant. Japanese restaurants can be somewhat difficult if, like me, you for the most part do not eat seafood. (For the record, I don't eat seafood unless I or someone I know and trust caught and cleaned it. You know how many things there are in a fish that can kill you?) So we're at the restaurant and I appear to have found the one thing on the menu that breathed gaseous oxygen before it decided to be food - Hibachi steak. I figure that even with all the other things that will be piled around the steak - rice, vegetables, etc - steak is, at its heart, pretty hard to screw up. It's steak, for god's sake.

Of our large group I'm the last one to order, and everyone else, being suicidal nutcases, is ordering vast quantities of exotic-sounding Mercury and Other Fish-Based Toxin Delivery Systems. They and the waitress/geisha are tossing back and forth all these Japanese (or at least Japanese-sounding) words, and after I order the waitress/geisha looks at me and very clearly says, "and how would you like that cooked?" like I'm at Nick's Roast Beef and the moment was totally ruined.

The food was great though, and my friends? The ones who ate sushi and eel and that water-dwelling shit? All dead. Ha ha, suckers!

Also, I am now totally down with the whole eating in a restaurant without shoes thing.

Driving back at 2:30 in the morning I was listening to the BBC World Service on NPR - I get twitchy if I don't hear an English accent at least once every 24 hours or so - the big story was that the UK is now entirely smoke-free in all public places (except the main terminal of Glasgow International, ba-dump-bump!) and how no one in England really gives a shit.

Except, of course, Joe Jackson.

You may or may not recall Joe Jackson. If you don't, that's okay, because he sucks. Imagine if, instead of being Elvis Costello, i.e. a vastly talented songwriter and performer who is, to put it charitably, not exactly the best-looking guy in the universe, you were an incredibly, horrifyingly untalented songwriter and performer and were, in fact, so hideously, mind-blowingly ugly that the subatomic structure of the very universe itself would recoil in horror at your approach and that all matter in your path would shunt itself into a parallel dimension when you were near to avoid your Medusa-like countenance. That's Joe Jackson. He's like Elvis Costello, only he sucks and is uglier. He had one semi-major hit in the US, "Is She Really Going Out With Him." He blows.

Anyway, this dickrag was so incensed at the smoking ban in New York in 2003 that he actually fled the city and the country and moved to England (where, it should be noted, he is fucking well from in the first place). He in fact wrote a song about the great injustice of having to go outside to smoke. No one, by any reputable accounting of the incident, cared. Now that a smoking ban has been enacted in England, he is so incensed that he is fleeing THAT country and moving to Germany.

Now understand, I do not say this as some kind of ex-smoker zealot, crusading against the evils of public smoking. If you want to smoke, go ahead. If you want to smoke near me, go ahead. I don't care. And when I did smoke I always tried to accommodate people I was with or near who did not appreciate it. I never once (I don't think) refused a polite request to please take my cigarette outside or flaunted someone's "no smoking in the house" rule. I don't especially care if people smoke or where they do it, nor do I care whether it is banned in public places (and similarly did not care when I did smoke). I care more about the fact that Joe Jackson is an obnoxious asshole whose songs suck and is so ugly that, if you are not properly shielded, his face could actually permanently sterilize you if you walked past him on the street.

Joe Jackson claims that a smoking ban is the first step towards a nanny or fascist state. Here's a hint, Joe: you are in England. You ALREADY live in a fascist state. The difference between our Colobus monkey of a president's attempt at secretly creating a fascist state and your government's long-since-successful implementation of one is that the English are much more pleasant and upbeat about it than we are. Here the government tries to curtail your rights and install a fascist architecture in secret and then acts like nothing happened (or, alternatively, like you're a terrorist for asking questions) when they get found out. In England, the situation is more like a nice gentleman in a top hat who says, "yes, well, here's a very short list of the rights you do have, here's a rather long list of the rights you DON'T have, and the tube will be here in precisely 94 seconds. Cheerio!"

And you know, Joe, a word of advice: if you're worried about living in a fascist state, Germany may not be the country for you.

JLK

Your Misinterpreted Symbolism Quizo Update

This morning we have a few random snippets from the last few days around the horn in an effort to bring some vague semblance of meaning to a random, chaotic universe.

- At work on Thursday in one of the many useless, interminable meetings I am forced to sit through I actually had to utter, totally seriously, the phrase, "I'm sorry, but I don't see our choice of software platform as a moral issue." This is the kind of crap I have to deal with during the day. And you wonder why I get crabby.

- Standing in the rear lobby of the Borgata (which is kind of like the Endor Shield Generator Back Door of the casino) at 4AM on Saturday a dealer friend of mine uttered, totally seriously, the phrase, "Frankie the Hat just cashed at the fifteen hundred stud, made thirty-six hundred, he woulda done better but that fuckface Darden outboated him on 7th Street," and not only am I vaguely horrified that I'm having this conversation at such an ungodly hour, but I briefly wonder where my life went wrong that at said hour I'm talking about SOMEONE I KNOW who is actually called "Frankie the Hat."

- I was still at the Borgata at 4AM on Saturday because, simultaneously, the bridge on the White Horse Pike was stuck in the "up" position, there was a gigantic accident at the Atlantic City toll plaza on the expressway, and there was - I am not making this up - a tattoo convention totally gridlocking traffic throughout the city, all of which combined to make it essentially impossible to leave Atlantic City before that ungodly hour. On another note, I have come to the conclusion that island living is probably not for me.

- I do not have any specific comments on the final episode of the Sopranos, but I did get a fairly complete recap of it from a friend of mine who did watch it and based on what I was told I agree with him that it does not sound exactly riveting.

- I did successfully vacation at the shore this weekend, and in between Jeeves and Wooster DVDs - FUNNIEST. SHIT. EVER. - managed to catch the back-to-back basic-cable airings of The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal which, shall we say, lose something in their edited versions. (For the record, I think Hannibal is a fascinating movie.)

- On the way home from the shore last night, I was stopped at a light in Pemberton when a car pulled up next to mine. Well, next to and just slightly forward of. While I was fiddling the radio between the Philadelphia and North Jersey NPR stations I heard some music coming from this car that made my head jerk up very quickly. Coming from this car was a song by a ridiculously obscure Swedish band called The Sounds that, to this date, I have never met a single other person who has heard of them. They're so obscure that I'm not even mentioning them as a clue to a question tonight as that would be unfair. To hear this band coming from another car in the middle of nowhere in Central New Jersey at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night is completely unreasonable. I looked to see who the other person in New Jersey to find - gasp! - a beautiful woman. Well, I assume she was beautiful. The combination of darkness and my viewing angle meant that all I could see was that she had blond hair and wore glasses. Suffice it to say that from the shoulders-up rear-three-quarter view she was quite attractive. And she had Pennsylvania plates! She was on her way home from the shore, just like me!

I was certain at this point that I had finally found the girl of my dreams.

This feeling lasted approximately 0.85 seconds until I realized that a) I still knew absolutely nothing about this woman other than the fact that she liked a band I liked and had her car registered in the same state as me, b) the last couple women I thought were the girl of my dreams turned out to be closer to Hannibal Lecter than Helen of Troy, and c) I refused to meet the girl of my dreams in a car in New Jersey, and especially not on the Pemberton end of 38.

Still, I was vaguely wistful when she peeled out of the light at about 400 miles an hour with "Queen of Apology" blaring out of the car windows.

- During a Rite Aid trip over my shore weekend I saw an endcap display for an actual item called "ear lobe tape." Now, the fact that "ear lobe tape" exists is frightening enough. The truly scary thing is that THERE WAS ONLY ONE LEFT. In a weekend full of frightening adventures, the fact that multiple people are walking around Ocean Gate, NJ with their earlobes taped to their skulls is the most frightening thing of all.

JLK

Your More Than Likely Quizo Update

I remembered this weekend something I read once about quantum mechanics, how when the first scientists started studying it and they tried to get exact values of things all their equations pumped out garbage (the one guy who kept getting 1=100 I found particularly amusing). They learned that at a quantum level everything operates on probability, that you can only determine the ODDS that something will or won't happen.

The structure of the universe is based on a probability distribution. That doesn't give me a whole lot of hope for, you know, anything, since as the theme song to Casino Royale (which I've watched approximately 14 times in the last week) teaches us: "the odds will betray you."

Take for instance, the following situation from Saturday morning, once again guest-starring my father:

After waking up two hours before I planned to (highly unlikely) and spending the better part of an hour trying to dig my car out of several inches of solid ice and then still being unable to go anyplace (also unlikely) my dad comes out and along with two neighbors (me interacting with my neighbors in any way: incredibly unlikely) push me out of my parking space so I can get to the bar and watch Chelsea thump Sheffield United 3-0 (very likely) all by myself (unlikely).

I go around the block to find my father standing next to his car. He can't get out of his space, doesn't have time to dig out, and needs me to drive him to work. No problem. I still have time what with me getting up so freakishly early on a Saturday.

So after dropping him off I'm taking the Boulevard to the pub instead of 95. As I'm on the Route 1 bridge making the merge onto the Schuylkill a truck turns off onto 76 westbound. As this happens, a piece of ice about the size of a bread plate flies off the top of the truck towards my car.

Now at the exact moment this is happening I am using the handy windshield-spray-thing - again, my knowledge of cars does not extend to the actual name of this device - to clear some gunk of the windshield.

The ice flies in an arc towards my car and strikes EXACTLY ON THE JOINT of my windshield wiper arm where the blade connects to the arm as it is in mid-wipe and my driver's side windshield wiper blade splits in half lengthwise and flies off of the front of my car in two different directions.

My response to this event was to say:

"JESUS FUCKING CHRIST AAAGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!"

As at that precise instant I was certain I was more than likely about to die, since with no visibilty and my car apparently under attack from ice artillery I could quite easily have driven myself off the bridge.

Let's line up all the pieces here (the "probability cloud" as the physicists say): me - truck - my location - truck's location - my velocity - truck's velocity - position of windshield wiper - velocity of windshield wiper - original resting location of ice - escape velocity of ice from top of truck - windspeed, gravity, and air resistance affecting trajectory of ice towards car.

For those things to all come together at once to destroy one of my windshield wipers - and incidentally, mean I had to travel the length of 76 from Route 1 to 676 leaning over to look out the passenger side of the window since, with the plowed snow, there was no place to pull over - well suffice it to say that the odds against that are mathematically disharmonious.

Afterwards my dad said "you're lucky you're not dead," and I'm like "yeah, being lucky, that's my problem."

Also speaking of odds, if you watched Galactica last night - and shame on you if you didn't - it is clear that some of the people we know and love are going to be revealed as Cylons next week, which is something I'm not sure how I feel about. For what it's worth, my take is:

More than likely a robot (5-3 odds): Sam, Torii

Less than more than likely a robot (6-1): Gaeta, Dualla, Starbuck [choke][sob]

Not remotely more than likely a robot, aka almost certainly not a robot (12-1): Helo

If he's a robot there'd better be a damn good explanation for it (20-1): Saul MF Tigh

I will be taking bets tonight. Get in on the Cylon Pool while the action is hot.

Then, this morning, on the way to work traffic on Cottman Avenue was backed up (and I mean way the hell backed up) in this one spot where it never is. I finally get there and learn that the cause of the problem - I am not making this up - is these two old people just standing in the middle of the street. A man and a woman, easily 80-something if they're a day, standing square in the right lane on Cottman Avenue.

What are the odds against THAT?

JLK

Your Disturbingly Detailed Flashback Quizo Update

Apologies for length. This one got away from me a little bit, but it was worth it.

On my way to work every morning there is a light - at Ryan Avenue and the Boulevard, for those inexplicably keeping track of my route to work - that I have actually successfully driven through without stopping I believe four times in my entire life. It's one of those weird things. It's an intersection I end up at approximately 800 times a week, since you have to go through it to go essentially anywhere that isn't Center City. And I always get stuck at it. It's one of those things you get used to.

This morning, for whatever reason - Monday is usually the lightest traffic day of the week - the wait at the light was much, much longer than usual, stretching back a solid three blocks. While I was sitting there, for some reason, I had a flashback to another time I was sitting in traffic, although that one was much more weird and scary.

Many years ago me and a friend of mine, let's call him... say... "Patrick" decided to go to Boston for a long weekend to visit a friend of ours who had recently moved there. For some reason - this part is hazy, it may have possibly been because I didn't have a car at the time - Patrick was going to drive us up there on a Friday afternoon. This was a spectacularly bad idea for any number of reasons, the foremost among which is that Patrick was (and to an extent still is) completely incapable of successfully driving anywhere without laser-guided telemetry to get him there. The first time he tried to go to my house when we were in college he ended up at a bowling alley 21 miles past my house. TWENTY ONE MILES.

Boston, if you've never driven it, is roughly a six hour drive from here. Patrick picked me up at noon. We arrived at our friend's apartment on Beacon Hill at 10:30PM.

Here's how you make it take ten and a half hours to get to Boston:

First, you have someone drive you who, I am fairly certain, cannot always discern their right from their left. Then you have this person make only a cursory glance at a road atlas and think that this road here, yeah, 95, sure, that can take us the whole way, right?

So, instead of taking (if I'm remembering correctly) the New Jersey Turnpike up PAST New York City to... the Merritt Parkway? I honestly forget... you take the Turnpike INTO New York City and try to cross the GW and hack your way through the Bronx and suburban Connecticut on 95. Now years before we had them here they had those giant LCD signs on 95 in Connecticut, and once we get across the GW (elapsed bridge time: 45 minutes) and finally get moving, the sign says "HEAVY TRAFFIC APPROACHING DARIEN, CT"

When we see that sign Patrick begins rummaging in the space behind the seats with his right hand. Eventually he pulls out a map and says words that, to this day, echo in my nightmares:

"Find us a better way."

I find what I think is a way for us to get to the Merritt Parkway without undue distress. This, of course, does not happen. After taking the first exit we can, Patrick first turns west, i.e. AWAY from Boston, and after much screaming we finally make it onto this OTHER highway which is, of course, at a dead stop.

"This is all your fault," Patrick says.

"How is this MY fault?" I am neglecting to mention that while the actual ROUTE is entirely my fault, the idea to take it and the execution is all him.

"We were MOVING on 95," Patrick says.

"Fucking turkeys," I say.

"I, ah... I've never heard traffic described that way." Patrick sounds confused.

"No," I say, pointing at a flock of wild turkeys on the highway embankment. "Turkeys. Over there." Like 20 turkeys just sitting around watching the traffic. This is my first ever exposure to the state of Connecticut and between turkeys and traffic I am unthrilled to say the least.

"That's something you don't see every day."

"I don't get stuck on a random highway in the middle of Connecticut every day either."

"Shut up."

At this point we've been in the car for maybe three hours. Eventually we get to a point where what we're on is moving and it is determined -rightly or wrongly - that we need to get back onto 95. There is some kind of highway spur that goes to 95 through New Haven, which at that point I understood to be a slightly dingier place than Hell.

Traffic has been moving for a while and we're on this spur back to 95 when Patrick turns to me and says - I swear to God these were his exact words because they will be burned into my brain until the day I die - "I don't want to alarm anyone, but we don't have any brakes."

Despite Patrick's attempts to the contrary I am considerably alarmed.

We manage to limp off the highway and into a Pep Boys that was INCREDIBLY conveniently located right off the exit. It is now 5:30 in the afternoon on a Friday (5 and a half hours to New Haven, BTW). The mechanics have all gone home. The people working at the Pep Boys are telling us that we can leave the Jeep there and someone could possibly look at it Saturday morning, but that it's also possible the sun could explode on Saturday morning and the two things are about AS possible, and more than likely it will be Monday before someone looks at the brakes.

My vacation weekend in Boston is rapidly turning into my weekend sitting in a motel across the street from a Pep Boys in New Haven (which, until I would go to Los Angeles a few months later, was at that point the Worst Place On Earth I Had Ever Seen). Patrick is talking to the people at the service desk - god knows what he's talking about - and they're firmly saying no sir, we can't call in one of our mechanics, but there's a lovely Motel 6 just down the block when I notice a guy leaving the store with like 4 bags of auto parts.

I run outside and stop him in the parking lot. "Are you a mechanic?" I ask, desperate. He is. I ask him if he would PLEASE PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE OH GOD HELP US I'M GOING TO DIE IN NEW HAVEN just look under the hood of Patrick's jeep and let us know if there's something immediate we can do. This is how much I know about cars. I think the brakes are under the hood.

The guy actually agrees, opens the hood , and after approximately four and a half seconds says "you're out of brake fluid."

"That's it?" I ask.

"That's it. Cost you five bucks and you're back on the road."

"Wow. Thanks."

The mechanic - aka The Nicest Man I Have Ever Met - walks away smiling. I go back into the Pep Boys to find Patrick now with approximately half of his upper body leaning across the counter, his feet now barely touching the floor, pleading with the person at the service counter. I consider letting him debase himself a little further before I remember that he is actually my friend and could, were he so inclined, leave me in New Haven.

"Come on," I say, grabbing his arm and pulling him away from the service desk. "I took care of it. We need brake fluid."

"You TOOK CARE OF IT? What does that MEAN?" he asks.

"Just find a couple bottles of brake fluid and let's get the fuck out of here."

"What does TOOK CARE OF IT mean? What did you DO?"

Knowing him and knowing me I imagine Patrick assumes I, Jack Bauer-like, tortured a perfect stranger into diagnosing the car. I tell him what actually did happen.

"Brake fluid? That's it?" he asks.

"That's it."

He pauses, then says, "we're really fucking stupid."

"No," I say, "we're smart, we just don't know anything about cars. There is no shame in that." I resist the urge to tell the story of the first time I tried to put motor oil in my car and put it in the transmission fluid.

"We know what BRAKE FLUID is, for god's sake. I mean, we've HEARD of it."

This argument essentially went on for the remaining five hours it took to get from New Haven to our friends apartment, 90 minutes of it spent actually IN Boston looking for it. Because calling someone from the Virgin Islands to help you navigate around a city he's lived in for like 3 months and never actually driven a car in - that, my friends, is intelligent behavior at its best.

As for what happened in Boston, well, that's another story, innit?

And, finally - highlight the next bit unless you don't want a major spoiler from Galactica last night - STARBUCK NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Cried like a little girl at that, I did.

JLK

Your Back To Earth Quizo Update

It's a good-news-bad-news kind of day.

The good news is that my back doesn't hurt anymore and hasn't for a couple days. The bad news is that this means I don't really have an excuse to consume dangerous quantities of painkillers any more and thus have to live on this lousy planet with everyone else. I couldn't even pull a Brett Favre and get hooked on them and claim that's why I throw so many interceptions. I do kinda miss the purple clouds, though.

The good news is that Chelsea won the Carling Cup yesterday, defeating Arsenal 2-1 and winning us our first silverware of the season. The bad news is that Chelsea and England captain John Terry got kicked in the face and was knocked out for a little while, but he seems to be okay.

The good news is that the Oscars were last night and Martin Scorcese finally came up big. The bad news is that I was supposed to go to an Oscar party down the shore last night and the FUCKING SNOW prevented me from doing so.

Remember that bit a couple weeks ago, from that one psychotic e-mail that went out because Dr. Chill complained that I hate everything, where I talk about how wonderful snow is? Yeah, that was a lie. I hate it. I HATE IT. I hate it more than anything. MORE THAN ANYTHING, do you hear me? It drives me insane. Then last night I'm trying to get ready for this thing - which was black tie, further pissing me off, because goddamn I look good in formal wear, as those of us who were here on Barrymore night are aware - trying to divine from the weather forecasts whether it's safe to drive to Somers Point. Or, more accurately, whether it's safe to drive BACK from Somers Point at 1AM.

All the websites and TV stations were being relatively noncommittal and I was about to take the plunge when the thing on weather.com changed from "light snow, with a possibility of sleet and a secondary possibility of some icing" to "DON'T DRIVE TONIGHT IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE ZOMG WEATHER DEEEEAAAAAAAAATH!!!!!!shift1"

So much for that idea.

Did anyone catch that one commercial during the show last night, where Diane Sawyer is doing an interview with Bob Woodruff? He's that reporter who got bombed in Iraq and needed massive brain surgery and whatnot. I certainly have nothing against him, but during the commercial they quote this one bit where Sawyer asks him incredulously - Diane Sawyer, curse her black soul, is always incredulous about something - says "so you have no fear of death anymore?"

At this point I said out loud to the TV, "you know what, if I took a fucking RPG to the dome and lived to tell about it I probably wouldn't be scared of a whole hell of a lot anymore either. I'd be like, skydiving? You got it. What? No. Parachutes are for pansies."

Then I peeked outside and saw that the entire world had been encased in snow and ice and STILL wished I'd gone to the Oscar party. Goddamn snow.

The good news, though, is that my recent back injury, while comparatively healed, gives me total immunity from shoveling, since that's how I did myself last time. The bad news...

Well, I guess there isn't any bad news on that one.

JLK

Your Connect the Dots Quizo Update

I have developed this distressing habit lately where my mind will simply fail to make any connection between two important and related events. I will be able to recognize that, yes, Item A is very important, and Item B is as well, but whatever sort of strange mental linkage that happens and makes you think "oh my God those two things have something to do with each other" just never happens. Perhaps I have early-early-early-early-early-early-onset Alzheimer's. I knew I should have eaten those shark brains when I had the chance.

The whole thing with the election and what was to be my next show was the first example, but this weekend proved to be even more personal than that.

There was a plan to go to the Dark Horse to celebrate my 29th birthday - which none of you even bothered to notice, shame on you - on Saturday night. Beforehand, I was sitting at home watching the Army-Navy game, and my thought process at some point in the second half went something like this:

"Okay, Navy's winning, so... the game should be over by about 6, maybe 6:30, I'll hop in the shower, get some dinner, then head downtown to the bar." [pause] "Yeah, that sounds good. Can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong there."

I first drove past the pub at about 8:45. I did not get out of my car, in the Ritz parking lot at 2nd and Walnut until almost 9:15. Why did I park at a movie theatre 4 blocks away from the pub, you ask?

The parking lot on Front Street was full. The parking lot behind Cosi was full. The parking lot across the street from that was full. The parking lot at 3rd and Bainbridge was full. The parking lot on 3rd between South and Lombard (which I have a sneaking suspicion is actually the same lot as the one across from Cosi) was full.

It was full-blown screaming insanity. The streets were crawling with midshipmen. The roads were packed with people who clearly had never driven in a civilized country before, let alone Old City (which, in some car-related instances, barely qualifies as civilized either). Everyone in the entire world apparently had forgotten how to get anywhere without completely ruining the lives of everyone else they came in contact with.

Then, after parking four blocks away and seven stories up from the Pub, I hiked down to the Dark Horse...

Which was, of course, mobbed. Although this year, thankfully, it was full of Navy people (and the one lonely, depressed guy in an Army hat) and not Norwegian shipbuilders (the bane of my last birthday party). Around 10 my friend Kevin showed up, and after saying hello he took a quick look around the packed bar. This was easy since we were crammed into the corner near the back door (about 15 of us at Gym Shorts No Underwear's usual table) and all he could move was his head.

"Forgot today was Army-Navy, huh?" he said.

"Er... yes," I replied.

He paused a moment, then said, "for a smart guy you're really fucking stupid sometimes."

I did not argue.

Remember that we start at 7 tonight, that's SEVEN IN THE PM, due to the Eagles "game" at 8:30. Speed quizo, everyone's favorite.

JLK

Your Journey Into Mystery Quizo Update

This week's update is coming a day early since I'll be comms-down all day tomorrow. Consider it more time than usual to get yourself prepped and ready. It's not going to be a regular thing, so don't get your hopes up. Apologies for length as well, this one turned out to be something of a tome.

I was at the pub on Saturday morning to watch Chelsea's 2-1 win over Charlton when I mentioned to the assembled throng that I would be watching the Eagles game at friends of mine's new house, which was in someplace called "Royersford." I asked if anyone knew where this place was and I got multiple answers, none of which were remotely similar.

"It's out 202 someplace, I think. Down near Westchester."

"No, no, it's out near Reading."

"I think it's in Montgomery County... or Chester County... or near Norristown... or maybe not."

Royersford is, in actuality, none of those places. People who know me well will grudgingly admit that one of my few useful skills is my ability to pretty much find the best way to get anyplace within my sphere of geographical knowledge (producing plays is not really a "useful" skill). The western limit of said sphere, however, is right around the King of Prussia mall, so of course I got directions that had me going way the hell out 76 (to KoP, aka "my limit") and then way the hell out something called 422. When you get in the car and realize that the directions to a place you've never heard of include a ROAD you've never heard of, that is not a sign that things are going to go well for you.

I had to meet my producing partner at the mall to pick up the scripts for our next show on the way. If you've never been to King of Prussia Mall, suffice it to say that getting into the parking lot is quite easy. Getting OUT of the lot and onto a specific road going someplace you actually want to get to is another matter entirely. As we were talking I asked if he knew how to get onto this mysterious 422.

He said, and I am quoting here, "I dunno. But we can ask the car."

He was driving his father's new Benz which apparently has some sort of navigation system whereby you put in an address and it tells you how to get there. Like, vocally. As you're driving it will say "turn right here, then look for a right soon thereafter." We put in my destination address and got elaborate directions, even how to get out of the parking lot we were in. It's quite well-spoken and pleasant; I would have expected a German car to be a little more condescending.

On the way out there I kept seeing signs for places I had only ever heard of in fevered whispers and never really believed existed, like "Trappe" and "Oaks" and "Valley Forge." Heading out 422 I saw a very large, very dark cloud bank hanging over the landscape. After a few miles I realized this cloud bank was not, in fact, clouds, but was something emanating from a pair of cooling towers, and it occurred to me that driving TOWARDS the nuclear power plant may not have been the best move long-term health-wise.

I finally arrived at the house, which one actually gets to by parking in the lot of the high school behind their conehead development and cutting through the baseball fields, and when I got out of my car I just stood there, looked around, and said to myself:

"Where the FUCK am I?"

This is what happens when you step outside your limits.

At the very least, the Eagles put up a very convincing win over the hapless Houston Texans, even in the face of what the TV commentators (who we had to listen to because Merrill Reese was 6 seconds ahead of the TV feed) called the best drive in Texans history. The afternoon was only sweetened watching the Cowboys game, when someone said "anyone remember the Bounty Bowl?" and we all had a good laugh. Buddy Ryan, man, those were the days. The freaking Bounty Bowl. Good times.

Bear in mind that we now have a semi-functional website again, this time at

http://quizo.blogspot.com

The new site will have, at the very least, reposts of the weekly e-mail and the recaps I used to do at the old site, for which (if you can believe it) I've actually gotten requests. Perhaps some other stuff as well, as I think of it. So there you have it.

Finally, also bear in mind that the subject line of this week's e-mail is also one of my patented obtuse clues to a question this week.

See you all Monday night.

JLK