Your Lengthening Lists Quizo Update

Since I am of an age where it is commonplace to get married – as evidenced by the fact that I have attended, by my count, 11 weddings in the last three years – I will occasionally be asked when I plan on joining the cult of wedded bliss.

“Well,” I usually reply. “How much time do we have?”

The usual response here is one of confusion and/or surprise, as even my psychiatrist’s question-answer is something of a jarring non sequitur.

I will continue, “because, you see, I have a list of 842 reasons why the answer is ‘never’ and I just wanted to know how many of them we’re going to be able to get through before you have to go home for the night.” There aren’t actually 842 reasons on the list, there are really only 6 or 7, but the number 842 SOUNDS very imposing and effectively conveys the severity of my feelings on the subject.

After spending a long day with two of my recently-married (to each other) friends, though, this weekend saw an unprecedented three – count them, THREE – additions to the list.

Reason #843: the price of wedding rings. I was as aware as anyone else on earth that engagement rings are freakishly expensive. The “two months’ salary” rule is a ridiculous fallacy, of course, but one expects to pay a hefty sum for an engagement ring. That’s just part and parcel of the deal, unless you’re one of the lucky ones like me who should the unlikely need arise plans to either a) hope your mother gives you the family engagement ring, or b) surreptitiously swipe it out of her casket at your mother’s wake after she wanders into a very dark place and is eaten by a grue. But up until Saturday I had never even thought of how much the wedding band costs. I mean, I figured it wasn’t nothing, but when I actually heard the price I would have spat out my milkshake were it not for the fact that I wouldn’t actually have the milkshake until about ten minutes later. Seriously, folks, we are talking about truly outrageous numbers here. I mean, you drop however many thousands of dollars on an engagement ring as a way of saying, “see, I love you so intensely I am willing to forgo so much money that I will subsist on nothing but tap water and Quaker instant oatmeal for the next few months.” Spending the kinds of money we’re talking about on wedding rings is a way of saying, “okay, now we’re BOTH completely broke. I hope you’re fucking happy. Pass the oatmeal.”

Reason #844: “filling the registry.” Given my well-known idiosyncrasies/psychoses about gift-giving in general I have always found the entire idea of the wedding registry a bit unseemly, but on a practical level I understand the need for it. However, much like the hidden/obscene cost of wedding rings, the registry also has a seedy underbelly, and you find yourself wading through it after the wedding when you go to get all the stuff on your registry that no one bothered to get for you. This was the specific part of the day that had been used to sucker me into the whole process since a long time ago, as part of a lifelong litany of things we think but do not say, I once unfortunately uttered aloud the words “I find furniture shopping to be vaguely masturbatory.” Word to the wise: the fact that you get quasi-sexual excitement out of buying a sofa is not something you want your friends knowing, since they can basically make you do whatever they want by saying that they will walk you through the Macy’s furniture department at some point along the way. And so I went along on the registry-filling trip on the strength of the promise that in the course of the filling we would go look at dining room sets (when the time came, in fact, we would not).

Now my love of shopping is well-known. I am a fan. It is one of my few reliable pleasures. Some people self-medicate with alcohol or needlepoint or golf. I am terrible at golf, lack the manual dexterity for needlepoint and suffice it to say tried the alcohol thing with fairly disastrous results, so now I find myself in a position where the one thing that is guaranteed to always lift my spirits is spending money in a retail setting (which frankly creates its own problems, just less so than Absolut). But registry-filling is to shopping what, ironically enough, weddings are to parties. It takes the basic idea and sucks all the fun and spontaneity out of it by having too many rules and regulations and shit you HAVE to do, as opposed to true shopping (and a good party) which is about unbridled self-gratification. Registry-filling is not shopping. It is the evil twin of shopping. It is the bastard nine-fingered half-brother of shopping. If you don’t think so, try sitting in a Macy’s at 9:30 on a Saturday night trying to track down a specific duvet cover while wondering if the nice bridal registry lady’s pen would go all the way into your brain or if it would just get stuck in the middle of your eyeball somewhere.

Reason #845: getting married turns you into a woman. And I don’t mean in that interesting, get to meet Jodie Foster sort of way. In the midst of all this quasi-shopping we split up to cover more ground and my friend and I, lets call him… say… “Nick of Oprah’s Book Club,” were searching for several (again very specific) towels. We’re looking around searching for “chocolate” and “midnight” towels, the words “brown” and “blue” being I suppose too blasé for Macy’s, when we come upon a display of towels that, to my trained eye are about 98% as good as the ones they’re looking for but cost half as much. Trust me, when you shower three times a day towels become quite a sub-specialty.

“Are you totally 100% set on the other set of colors?” I ask. If there is anything less important in the entirety of God’s creation than what COLOR your towels are I could not, and still cannot, think of what it could possibly be.

“I dunno,” Nick says. He puts his hands up on two stacks of folded towels that are just about at eye level. “I really like these white ones, but the sea green is such a nice shade too. Hmm.”

I stare at him.

“What?” he asks.

“So,” I say, “were you just never going to tell me about that vagina of yours, or what?”

While Nick was gamely laughing at himself I noted aloud, “of course, Reg is nowhere to be found and I’m helping fill YOUR wedding registry, so I don’t think I like what that makes me.”

We’re almost out of time, so let me just add that in addition to undergoing sexual reassignment in the last month, Nick and Oprah’s will be going for their third win in a row tonight, so let’s all show up and try to put the brakes on that.

Also - oh look.

Someone put a clock on my desk.

Perhaps I will manage it.

That would certainly be something we’ve never seen before.

JLK

Your "It Is An Honor I Dream Not Of" Quizo Update

A couple quick things before we get to the meat of today's missive.

- Attendance last week was excellent. Keep it up.

- Inasmuch as tonight is Game 4 of the NLCS, I'm not sure what the crowd situation is going to be like at the pub. If it gets stupid crowded with non-Quizo Phillies fans we can move to one of the other rooms, surely. My preference is for the Rigger Bar since I'm pretty sure that we will still want to watch the game as well and the TV coverage in there is much better than the restaurant.

- However, if vast numbers of teams are not coming tonight, PLEASE let me know so that plans can be made accordingly.

- On the good news front, it's been a very big couple days for Oprah's Book Club. Nick and Regina got married on Saturday (to each other, I mean, more on that in a bit) and today is Palestra Jon's (of the rule which bears his name) anniversary. To Oprah's from all of us at Dark Horse Quizo, congratulations, good luck, mazel tov, may the Force be with you, whatever benediction you prefer. I'm a fan of the Mandalorian "shoot straight and run fast," but that may not be quite the feeling we're after here. But, all in all, good on them.

Now, then, to our main attraction:

Since, as we all know, the motto here at Quizo Central is and has always been "Safety First," we're going to return today to our occasional series of seminars on drastic and dangerous life events.

This week's topic is "how to survive going to two weddings in one day."

- Firstly and most importantly - this really cannot be stressed enough - do not wait until the day you are attending two weddings to buy the shoes you are planning on wearing to two weddings. For while your brand-new shoes may be very impressive in their own right, and when combined with your brand-new suit and shirt and tie, all selected and coordinated specifically for the two-wedding day, make you resemble nothing so much as the reincarnation of Burt Lancaster himself, and we're talking like vintage 1955 "I just got finished sleeping with Ava Gardner AND Lana Turner and, my oh my, what's your name, sweetheart?" Burt Lancaster, wearing brand-new shoes to two weddings in one day is a CATASTROPHICALLY BAD IDEA. Doing so will cause your resemblance to Burt Lancaster to rapidly erode, as it is a known fact that Burt Lancaster was in possession of both his feet, and after a couple hours of wearing brand-new wingtips the only thought in your entire head - overriding your base, lizard-brain lusting after food, sex, lower taxes and oxygen - will be a burning desire to chop off your own feet with a rusty axe.

- Have backup. This is valuable in several respects. If, for instance, you tear the price tag off your brand-new tie a little too vigorously and rip out one of the moorings of the little tie-holder-label-thingy, while driving to the first wedding you can call your backup and say, "you got any safety pins? What do you mean you threw out all your safety pins? How the fuck can you throw away anything as fantastically useful as safety pins? (This exact sentence was actually spoken by me.) Fabric glue? Will that set in time? Okay, fine, bring that." Or, when partway through the first of two weddings in one day, you can say to your father, "if you don't get me a pair of golf shoes that look like wingtips I'm going to chop my feet off with a rusty axe." If your backup gets snippy, you can remind them that pain overrides family and that once you start chopping off body parts it can be very hard to stop.

- While buying nice new Burt Lancaster-izing clothing for two weddings in one day is endorsed, if you are buying your clothing at someplace you have never shopped before be sure that you actually look at the prices of the clothes you're buying, so you can avoid situations such as tearing the price tag off your brand-new tie a little too vigorously and, while wondering how you're going to fix the little tie-holder-label-thingy, glancing at the too-vigorously-removed price tag and realizing that you have paid more for a tie than you normally do for a shirt, and that you normally pay pretty handsomely for shirts to begin with. This realization is closely followed by a feeling of growing horror while you try to calculate how much you paid for the new shirt from this place, then wondering whether the guy at the gas station on the way to work on Monday morning will accept the change from your cup holders as payment.

- While the bucolic location for the first reception might make you think that everyone will be very relaxed and easygoing, always remember to be very, very careful when surrounded by large groups of Germans. This advice applies pretty much anywhere, really. And for god's sake, whatever you do, don't mention the war.

- Your desire to end the lives of certain guests at the reception is not something you should vocalize.

- At the first reception, if your father has been hopelessly addicted to the bride's grandmother's pastries for the last 40 years, telling your father that the dessert tray is a collection of pastries made by the bride's grandmother and that they are out and ready to be eaten is a surefire way to guarantee that you do not get to eat any of said pastries.

- Silk suspenders do not have the same kind of "give" in them as the cheaper, elastic suspenders you may have worn in the past. This means that things like going to the bathroom take exponentially longer as you will spend several minutes trying, Houdini-like, to extricate yourself from them, since after you realize that you could have made a car payment for what you inadvertently paid for said silk suspenders you will find breaking your own back preferable to doing any damage to the goddamn things.

- Wearing contact lenses for the first time in almost a year is recommended if the first reception is outside on a beautiful sunny day, as it makes the wearing of sunglasses possible. Trying to drive from one reception to another in the dusk of twilight while wearing contact lenses for the first time in almost a year is not recommended, as the combination of your eyes adjusting to your slightly-different vision and the tricky, shifting light of the immediate post-sunset period will make driving in under-lit suburbs much more exciting than it really needs to be.

- When arriving at your friend's parents' house for the second reception, do not trip over the SAME GODDAMN TRICK DOORSTEP THAT YOU HAVE TRIPPED OVER EVERY ONE OF THE HUNDREDS OF TIMES YOU'VE GONE INTO THAT HOUSE FOR THE LAST TWENTY FUCKING YEARS! Seriously, don't do that.

- No matter how much your new clothing makes you resemble Burt Lancaster, the sentence, "you look so much like my ex-girlfriend that I really thought you were her, but when you walked past and didn't punch me in the face I realized you weren't" is, despite how 100% true it may be, not the first thing you want to say to someone you've just met. Even at a nighttime, outdoor reception, where the darkness makes you resemble Burt Lancaster that much more, saying things like this clearly mark you as "not relationship material."

- Get your friend who lives out of town and is thus marrying a woman you haven't met yet to introduce you to his new wife BEFORE he is drunk.

- If you once watched one of your friends drink 26 beers in one night, offer him a ride home BEFORE people start playing beer pong if you want to leave the party any time soon.

- And, finally - whether your belief tends toward Jehovah, Vishnu or the Lords of Kobol, never let anyone think that you don't thank God every day that you have the friends you have.

JLK

Your "I'm Terrified Beyond the Capacity For Rational Thought" Quizo Update

It's been a sort of weekend where a whole bunch of things happened that I was certain would never occur. This is fairly surprising when one considers the staggering vastness of my intellect and my ability to consider the most outlandish possible outcomes of any given situation.

Saturday afternoon, after going to the pub to watch the Manchester United - Arsenal match, which ended somewhat badly for the Gunners, I somehow ended up watching Brokeback Mountain.

Now Brokeback, understand, is a movie where I've never quite understood why I have it on DVD. The first recorded instance of this phenomenon was a couple years ago when, at the Best Buy in Moorestown, I bought the Special Edition DVD of Schindler's List with a bunch of other DVDs. I remember walking back to my car and stopping in my tracks in the middle of the parking lot. I pulled the movie out of the bag, looked at it, and said, "why did I BUY this?" I couldn't conceive of a situation where I would ever actually WANT to watch Schindler's List. Despite the aforementioned vast intelligence and imaginatory ability I couldn't see myself ever sitting around on a Saturday afternoon, bored, and saying to myself, "you know what, I feel like watching Schindler's List." Despite the movie's obvious quality it does not exactly top the list of weekend pick-me-up movies. Brokeback Mountain is the same kind of movie - great, to be sure, but not really something you'd ever look forward to watching.

I did end up watching my DVD of Schindler's List a couple years later, though to be fair I believe it was on a Tuesday night, and I was working at Best Buy at the time. This is a general life situation in which watching Schindler's List will actually improve one's overall mood.

I originally watched Brokeback on my computer when it came out - to this date one of only two films I have ever downloaded off the internet* - and I vaguely remember thinking when I bought it, "why am I spending 17 bucks on a DVD I'm never going to watch?" Saturday, though, I was going through one of the many piles of assorted media littered throughout my space, small mountains of books, DVDs, and video games it would take the National Geographic society to accurately map, when instead of the video game I was looking for** I came across my still-unopened copy of Brokeback Mountain.

For some reason I was possessed by a desire to watch it, possibly caused by the fact that it was still in two-year old shrink wrap. It is of course as good as I remember, but watching it didn't exactly put me in the best mood. I decided to go with my timeworn method of making myself feel better: spending money (aka adding altitude to said mountains of books and stuff).

On the way to the store I was stopped at a light across the street from a funeral home. Sitting there I noticed something outside the funeral home, on the patio.

"That can't be right," I said.

I looked closer.

"No, there's no way that's what I think it is."

I tried to squint a little to get a better look, but I was still seeing something that could not possibly be there.

"There's no fucking way," I said.

The light changed and as I drove past I got a close look at what was outside the funeral home. It was, in fact, the impossible thing I suspected from across the street.

A wedding party.

The whole bunch. Groom, bride - in what I assume was a Valentine's Day-themed dress of white with red highlights - groomsmen, bridesmaids, the whole whack. Standing around outside a funeral parlor and - this is the absolute kicker, the thing that drives it totally over the top and me insane - DRINKING CHAMPAGNE.

I can't live in this world.

JLK



* 1408
** Final Fantasy XII

Your Cause for Celebration Quizo Update

Today's e-mail is going out a little late because I am operating at slightly less than 100% due to catching the plague this weekend. The illness itself isn't really terribly serious, but my overreaction to it certainly is. Massive alternating doses of orange juice and NyQuil (unfortunately the green kind, don't know how I got that) leaves one a little woozy.

I caught the plague at a wedding on Saturday, the last of this year's silly season. This year was certainly nowhere near as bad as last year - three weddings in four months doesn't even hold a candle to five in ten weeks - and the event itself was fun enough, I suppose. I had a nice little moment when I was talking separately to friends of mine who have been going out a long time. Let's call them... say... "Rich and Colleen of Huntingdon Valley, PA." At about the halfway point of the reception I was talking to Colleen.

"So when's your wedding?" I asked her.

Colleen looked at me blankly.

"I mean, maybe you don't have a date set yet, but like an idea on when maybe? Next summer, next fall, what're we talking? I'm a busy man, you know."

Colleen continued to stare at me as though I had suddenly sprouted a second head. I began to grow confused.

"What? Richie proposed a while ago now, didn't he?"

Stare.

"What the hell, he bought the ring, I know he did, it's not like..."

As Colleen's stare moved from blank uncomprehension to seething anger I realized that if any of the things I have just mentioned are actually true, which I was starting to seriously worry may not have been - i.e . proposing, buying a ring, etc - she knows nothing about any of them.

Oh dear.

I fled outside for a cigarette and when I came back in I motioned for Rich to come over and join me.

"So I just talked to Colleen," I said.

"Colleen's nice," Rich said, clearly on his way to being very drunk.

"Yeah, I, uh, I may have intimated some things that, uh, you might not have done yet. See I THOUGHT you had done them, so I was asking, and, uh..."

I've never seen someone sober up as quickly in my entire life than at that moment.

"What did you SAY?" he asked.

"I may have, uh, mentioned something about, uh, you buying a ring and, uh, proposing and, uh..." I struggled to find a way to wrap this up. "I think you may be engaged now."

Rich stared at me.

"Congratulations?" I said.

He punched me twice in the back of the head. I deserved it.

Part of the reason I am overreacting so strongly to getting sick is because I will be turning 30 on Friday and I need to be well for the gigantic birthday celebration at the Dark Horse Friday night. I figure you only turn 30 once so there might as well be a gigantic blowout bash. If you're reading this you're invited - we start at 9, get there early if you want a seat. It's going to get... er... crowded. However, if I am not operating at full capacity, not only will I not be able to fully enjoy the festivities, but I will succeed in getting everyone I know sick. While in a sort of academic sense that sounds interesting (if not fun outright) I don't want an army of plague-bearers bearing down on me this weekend while I'm trying to watch the new Futurama movie (comes out tomorrow!).

JLK

Your "Has Anyone Seen My Lighter?" Quizo Update

No, seriously, I just sat down to write the e-mail and it's nowhere to be found. What the deuce.

So how was everyone's weekend? Aside from temperatures 20+ degrees above normal - global warming, bah, what's that - I hope everyone had a good time.

I was at a wedding on Friday which was primarily notable for the actual wedding itself - I am not making this up - lasting less than three minutes. I'm serious. It was at one of those riverside mansion places up in Bensalem. We're sitting in folding chairs out on the lawn (like you do), there's the whole little collapsible-arch-thingy for the ceremony, a guy is off to the side playing vaguely classical-type music off a Powerbook - you know, a wedding. The Pachelbel Canon starts playing and the bride/groom/assorted hangers-on start walking up the aisle.

This is where it gets weird.

The wedding party gets up to the arch-thingy, the priest guy says "dearly beloved..." and at this point a helicopter starts flying directly overhead. The mansion we're at is maybe 800 feet from the junction of 95 and Woodhaven Road, so I'm guessing it's a traffic copter. I can barely make out the proceedings - I catch an "I do" here and there - and almost before you can finish buttoning your jacket from standing up when the bride passes they're walking back down the aisle. Done! Married! It's taken you longer to read about it then it did for the actual wedding to occur.

I turned to the guy standing next to me and said, "you've gotta be fucking kidding me."

I wasn't timing it myself but I am informed by reliable sources that the entire ceremony, from dearly beloved to walking back down the aisle clocked in at about two minutes and forty five seconds. After I got past the initial shock I said, "this is the greatest wedding ever."

Of course, it did not go all super-nice, as at the after-party after the regular party I had to say to the groom, "yeah, before you go on your honeymoon, I need you to make sure that your Dad doesn't think I'm a giant drug addict." Now you have to understand that for many years now the groom's parents have, to put it charitably, scared the living shit out of me. They are very intense people; I am fairly certain that if his mother concentrated very hard her gaze could actually shatter plate glass. Before the ceremony I ran into his father at the men's room sinks and, trying my best to both be pleasant and seem brave (they can smell fear) I said, "so how we doing?"

He said, "eh, pretty good. Can't wait until I can get a drink, though."

"Well," I said, "some of us are luckier than others on that score."

For the first time I can remember in the last seven years he looked at me as though he did not want to eat my liver and said, "that's right, you don't - how long now?"

In a rather catastrophic example of totally blowing the coverage, I said, "eight years since I stopped drinking. But, you know, I still do massive amounts of cocaine to keep myself limber."

The liver-eating look came back, and I thought "FUCK!" very loudly.

Saturday night, of course, was the Springsteen show, and I don't think anything needs to be said about that.

...

...

...

Oh, come ON, you didn't really think THAT was going to happen, did you?

Going to a Bruce Springsteen concert is something of an odd experience if you aren't used to it. It's a bit like being in the chorus of a musical. Everybody knows every song in its entirety, but you only have to sing certain parts at certain times. You have choreography to remember, which is slightly different than what the leads are doing. Everybody knows who the real star of the show is, but damn if you don't still feel like you're an important part of it. And he played Thundercrack! FUCKING THUNDERCRACK! OH MY GOD HE PLAYED FUCKING THUNDERCRACK!

I am going to restrain myself at this point because if I don't I could go on for literally thousands of words about the amazing transcendent awesomeness that is a Springsteen concert. If you are not an especially religious person - and "not especially religious" is a pretty accurate way of describing how I roll with such things - a live Springsteen show is as close are you will ever get to pure, unadulterated joy. It is, truly, awesome. As they said on the Office, if you don't realize that it's awesome, well, you just need awesome lessons.

For a taste, most of the concert can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=cgb77&p=r

And, finally, I am publicly calling out Cum From Behind and The Darg Whores, both of whom have been notably absent the last few weeks.

JLK

Your Extra Primo Good Quizo Update

A couple things from around the horn this week:

- Though I have never actually sat through, from beginning to end, an unedited version of it, Trading Places is by a country mile my favorite Philadelphia movie and is probably one of my top-five favorite comedies of all time. I watched it again yesterday for about the 90th time and sweet zombie Jesus it still cracks me the hell up, even when I'm on the tail end of a 17-hour, three-city wedding celebration extravaganza that saw me go something like 34 straight hours without sleep. I especially love the fact that there is an entire website - http://dangerouslogic.com/trading_places.html - dedicated to explaining just what happens at the end of the movie, which I cheerfully admit I STILL don't completely understand. But hey, cheer up, Coleman, in a couple hours you gonna be richest butler who ever lived.

- From a purely personal-health-related standpoint, I cannot in good conscience recommend embarking on a 17-hour, three-city wedding celebration extravaganza, unless you are a) suicidal, b) a goddamned idiot, or c) both. Seriously, kids, do not do as I do. I spent most of last evening flipping between Trading Places and the PGA Championship, alternatively counting the minutes until I could go to sleep without waking up at 4 in the morning and wishing God would smite me with a lightning bolt and end my interminable misery. Sleep is not for the weak. You will not sleep when you're dead (well, you will, but that's not really the point). Punch me in the face the next time I say those things.

- Obviously, don't punch me in the face. That would be, shall we say, an "exceedingly bad choice" on your part.

- I used to know a cocktail waitress at the Borgata who said that all the serious gamblers she knew were Bob Seger fans. I wouldn't call myself a "serious gambler" necessarily, but I am a long-time admirer of Seger and I have to put this out there: can anyone tell me what the FUCK the song "Ship of Fools" is actually about? I've been listening to it for more than ten years and the fact that I can't get my mind around it drives me absolutely bonkers.

- The Premiership season started this weekend, and yay! The soul-bludgeoning nightmare of seven whole weeks without soccer is finally over. Man these odd-numbered summers (i.e. without a World Cup or European Championship) are tough to take. Clearly, I (and others of my ilk) deserve some kind of commendation for enduring it.

JLK

Your More Wedded Bliss Quizo Update

My wedding marathon is finally over, after hitting two in the span of 24 hours this weekend. Fun was had, but I am seriously getting too old to carouse this much.

I am stone dead tired, so let me just say that your obtuse clue this week is weddings. Hopefully I will remember that when I actually make up the quiz tomorrow.

Remember, we are starting at 7 o'clock this week to accomodate the Eagles on Monday Night Football.

I am going to pass out now, if it's all the same.

JLK