Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: asides
Overheard at the gym
Is it a full moon? It must be a full moon.
Two white-haired guys in the locker room: one in his 70s, buck naked, drying himself off from the shower, the other in his sixties, neatly dressed, trying to make his escape.
Naked guy: The politics in this country, I just don’t know.
Escapee: It’s always been crazy.
Naked guy: No, you don’t understand. It’s just this century* people got greedy. Time past — what, for 19,000 years? — all people cared about was getting enough to eat. Now they care about cars.
Escapee: Well, no, it’s just the same. They’d fight about getting two hunks of meat instead of one, that’s all. People are the same.
Naked guy: It’s all different now.
And to emphasize his point, I shit you not, he grabbed his package and gestured with it. Whereupon the escapee made good on his escape.
At the treadmills, two women, friends I guess (but you should have heard the one bitch out the other for being late to the gym), no descriptions tendered because when people are living caricatures, accurate description would seem cartoonish. Call them woman one and woman two.
One: Do you know what my Message from God** was today?
Two: Your huh?
One: My Message from God. Check out my MySpace. My Message from God was, “Change comes [and here she paused for dramatic effect. Or maybe to catch her breath] whether you want it or not.” I tell ya, it’s amazing. Almost every day, my Message from God speaks to me. It’s where I’m at nearly every time.
Two: Well why shouldn’t God use MySpace to talk to you? God can use anything.
(Personally, I would opt for the burning bush or wrestler-angel. Much less ambiguity than a social networking app, don’t you think?)
One: Sometimes He uses people to talk to me.
Two: Oh, yeah! All the time!
People these days, I just don’t know. In my day we read horoscopes. (I grab my crotch for emphasis.)
D.
*He seemed oblivious to the fact that our century is a scant ten years old.
** She really did talk in hyperlinks. You could have knocked me over.
Either they love him or they hate him
We were TP’d last night. Not a bad job, but hardly professional. No toilet paper on the roof . . . no mostly dried-up egg yolk on the driveway or windows. The tree is well festooned, as are some of our bulb plants, but that seems to be the limit of our TP’ers creativity.
What follows is pure guesswork and supposition. For all I know, my partner and his wife had a few too many and decided to flashback to their youth. But given that most TP attacks are directed at the school-age child of the household, I wondered who would target my son.
I didn’t have to wonder long, since only a few of his classmates know where he lives. Specifically, his co-stars in this creation. The better question is this: should we take this as sign of affection, or act of revenge?
See, they didn’t get a great grade on the project. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe. They made a video, for the love of all things unholy. But the terms of the assignment specified that certain information regarding drug use had to be in the song’s lyrics, and my son and his fellow filmmakers included the info in a number of captions. The teacher judged this sinful enough to warrant a B rather than an A.
Why blame Jake? Because he insisted that if they make him (and me) do the bulk of the filming and editing, they would need to do the writing. And when he didn’t answer his text-message on the day they wanted his help with the writing (because, tech savvy though he may be, he’s never mastered the art of IM), perhaps they figured he was being good to his word.
In other words (as Karen put it this morning), your basic fight between the writer and the cinematographer.
Or, on the other hand, perhaps one of ’em has a mean crush on my boy.
D.
Jon Stewart on racial profiling.
Okay, so I was wrong.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Explosive and the City 2 | ||||
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D.
Big cat
The best dreams take place in the hour before waking. Or perhaps it only seems that way, since those are the dreams I remember.
I’m walking a trail when a big cat steps out and blocks my path. The cat is large like a tiger, fully capable of taking me out, so there’s really no point in running. She’s midnight black, sleek, glossy.
She paces forward. Without much caution I reach out, stroke her neck. She plops down onto her haunches and I get down on my knees to keep stroking her. She purrs like an Italian sports car. (Yes, I know the big cats don’t purr.) I lie down beside her and rest my head on her neck or shoulder, close enough to hear the purring, and we doze like that for what seems like a long time.
Then we both get up and she licks my hands, arms, face with that great sandpapery tongue. Tiring of that, she stalks off, leaving me to my trail.
Regarding the Times Square bombing attempt, mark my words, this will turn out to be a white supremacist or some other addled person from the Caucasian right. Supposedly the Pakistani Taliban are taking credit, but I doubt the veracity of that claim (particularly since they have a history of making false claims). The attempt had an unusual degree of amateurishness — for example, the perp had removed the VIN from the dash, but not from other parts of the vehicle, and descriptions of the explosive suggest a kluge job.
Law enforcement officials offered a more detailed description of the makeup of the failed car bomb found in Times Square on Saturday night, and said they were reviewing surveillance footage that showed a white man who appeared to be in his 40s walking away from the area as he looked over his shoulder and removed a layer of clothing.
Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, said on Sunday that the materials found in the Nissan Pathfinder — gasoline, propane, firecrackers and simple alarm clocks — also included eight bags of a granular substance, later determined to be nonexplosive grade of fertilizer, inside a 55-inch-tall metal gun locker.
I’m not the first person to think that here at home, we’re more at risk from domestic terrorism than we are from the made-in-the-Near East variety. Don’t make me quote Pogo at you.
D.
Like I should hold a grudge?
Tweet #2 for the day:
National Public Radio reports on CatholicTV going 3D.
The funny part comes at the end, when interviewer Art Silverman asks ShalomTV’s Rabbi Mark Golub if he minds being one-upped by CatholicTV.
Says Rebbe Golub, “The Catholics have always beat the Jews.”
I’ll bet he has a pet rat named Torquemada.
D.
The cough
I can honestly say I am sick of dark chocolate.
What I wouldn’t do for a decent night’s sleep . . .
D.
What’s next with my movie-making career?
I must admit, it was fun relearning the Pinnacle Studio video editing software. Close to two years old, my magnum opus, while still up on YouTube, sadly lacks a soundtrack. I was unwise enough to give credits for the various sound clips I used, and that led to YouTube trashing my whole audio file. The video is still up but WTF? Like any of the jokes work without audio?
Which reminds me . . . if any of my Crescent City friends have the CD I made them and can send me a copy, let me know. I’d be grateful. I can’t seem to reconstruct the video from Pinnacle.
But what should I do next? I haven’t tried grabbing scenes of movie DVDs; if I can do that, then I can create my very own mash-ups. Having just suffered through Drag Me To Hell (we fast-forwarded through most of it, but our suffering was quite real nevertheless), I’m of a mind to create a movie trailer that makes Sam Raimi’s flick look like an unlikely gay rom-com featuring the relationship between the protagonist and the old gypsy lady. Yes, I know, it’s kinda been done before, but 32,447 Brokeback send-offs demonstrate that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing over and over again.
I’ve thought about filming “The Sights of Bakersfield”: Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace, the Fox building, the big “BAKERSFIELD” banner, and then cut after cut of drive-through burger joints, for which the town rivals Modesto. But as a fresh immigrant to Bako, I have to wonder . . . is it too soon to ridicule my new home?
D.
Brilliance
I’m still feeling pretty sick, so this is all I got for ya.
But it’s a good one, don’t you think?
D.