/dev/zero

A while back my brother posted about a recent Luann comic strip.
Today I was working in the photo lab at school on an portrait assignment. Another student, in another photo 1 class, glanced at my latest attempt at a print as it slid out of the print drier and exclaimed “Oh, that’s a good one! Is that your daughter?”
<sigh>

Christy, the lovely young lady in the photo, is one of my fellow photo 1 students. You can probably imagine how the rest of that conversation went.
That’s the second time in less than a month I’ve been accused of being the father of a college age woman.

I walked into another room of the photo lab and asked Laura, the head lab tech “Hey Laura, how old would you guess I am?”
“Hmmm. About the same age as me.”
I raised an eyebrow. It’s one thing to ask a lady how old she thinks you are. I wasn’t about to ask her how old she was.
“Thirty-eight.” she clarified.
That’s it. I officially give up on ever having any chance of dating any of my fellow students.

While visiting Martin in Ft. Lauderdale over spring break, I happened to be sitting in a Johnny Rockets with some of Martin’s friends having dinner. I was explaining something about Martin to my dinner companions, in which the term “poly amory” was used.
While leaving the restaurant, a man who had been sitting in the next booth approached me and asked if he could speak to me for a minute. He said something about “(my) daughter” and “pro-am dance”. Thinking I had misheard and I was about to be proselytized to by some ultra-conservative Christian on the subject of poly-amory, I became guarded and asked him to repeat himself. (I think my actual words were “Huh?” Short and to the point. Yeah, that’s me.) He tried again “You said your daughter is a pro-am dance teacher, didn’t you?”
(confused) “My daughter?”
(Pointing to one of my dinner companions as they waited a polite distance away) “Your daughter. Isn’t she your daughter?”
“Uh, no. Sorry.” And I moved on.
Danielle, 5 months pregnant, had just gotten married the previous Saturday. Her husband was standing right next to her. At that point I had known these people for perhaps 45 minutes.
For the record: I’m 32. A little young to be a grandfather yet.

Does anyone else find the use of a voice over of children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in a TV commercial for “Tom Clancy’s ‘Splinter Cell’” video game a little distasteful?

We see some sort of covert ops type sneaking around an implied “terrorist” compound, scaling walls, looking through a sniper scope at a “target”, tossing grenades through an open window, sneaking up behind a “bad guy” and performing all sorts of other violent acts… to the soundtrack of children declaring their patriotic allegiance to the good ol’ U. S. of A.

That we are a nation of jingoistic GITS!
I predicted this as soon as I saw US flags angling out of every pickup truck window at a 45 degree angle after 9/11. If there’s something stupid on which someone can slap the phrases “9/11″, “We will never forget”, “God bless America!” or “United we stand” and get some other idiot to give them money for it, they will. I give you: the “We Will Never Forget September 11, 2001″ Memorial Display Knife with Plaque.

I can’t believe the crap people will market as “memorabilia” to make a buck off a tragedy.
It was bad enough with everyone and their brother rushing to release as many “FDNY” and “NYPD” “patriotic” toys, capitalizing on the tragic losses suffered by those departments in the aftermath of the WTC attacks. Many of them even claimed a portion of the proceeds from their sales would go to the families of those firemen and police officers who died. I wonder how much actually made it to the families? (And just how much money did they really need? I don’t mean to make light of their tragedy, but with so many organizations jumping on the “let’s raise money for the poor wives and children of the brave, heroic, patriotic firemen and police men who died in NY” band wagon, with multiple television specials for just that purpose, how many times over did each kid get sent to college?)

Pre-dyed Easter eggs.

I stopped at Tom Thumb on my way home from class tonight to pick up some milk, and soda for Mom. As I was walking through the dairy section, a colorful bit of something caught my eye in the egg case: pre-dyed Easter eggs in a clear plastic egg crate.
Come on. Isn’t the point of dyeing Easter eggs dyeing them yourself?
Next they’ll be selling pre-stuffed stockings for Christmas. Oh, wait…

“Weldon Grisham” needs to hire a new script writer, videographer and makeup artist.
I realize attorneys don’t make the best actors, but he could at least sound like he didn’t gulp down a handful of downers after a 3 day amphetamine bender.

I just got off the phone with Martin. He called to let me know he had just spent a week in the hospital with neumonia. While he was down with neumonia, he had a fever of 105F. He has no memory of my visiting during spring break. He said “Yeah, I have a photo of a bunch of Segways…” We found a business down on the beach in Ft. Lauderdale where you can rent a Segway for half an hour, and he took a photo of the lot of them parked out front, along with their brochure.
He doesn’t remember buying a laptop with an AMD Athlon 64 processor. He doesn’t remember that I had bought a laptop a month before coming out to visit. When I told him about that, he got all excited and made me tell him all about it all over again.
He doesn’t remember hanging a new front door. He said when he got home from the hospital, he was confronted with a door he didn’t remember. He doesn’t remember Dave arriving to take a job at the same company as him. He remembers trying to get Dave hired, but not that he got the job and had flown in while I was visiting and was now living with him and DL in the guest bedroom.
He mentioned that “apparently we tried to play a game because I have 1/2 an install of Neverwinter Nights on my laptop.” Dave, Martin and I had tried to install NWN on our laptops so we could play against eachother, but gave up when it came time to leave to go see a movie. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. Ironic, since it’s a movie about memory loss…

I’m just glad my best bud survived neumonia. This has not been a good year for him, health-wise.