Friday, June 16, 2000

Tony sent me this. What a great commerical! It's a Nike soccer ad called... The Mission.

"But... It's a ball." "No! It's rounder."
posted by LT2 2:51 PM ET | discuss | link

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Despite not being able to find any web-based evidence of these commericals to link to, I'm going to blog this nevertheless. There is an extremely funny series of commercials running on the Discovery Channel right now. The ads feature these three guys, acting very badly, dressed up as things you might see on the Discovery Channel. The three I've seen so far feature the guys as asteroids burning up in Earth's atmosphere, mosquitos on a fisherman's arm, and partially digested fish in a shark's stomach. They are very cheesy and very funny. Check 'em out.
posted by LT2 2:42 PM ET | discuss | link

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Thursday, June 15, 2000

Well, after a little procrastination, here's The Angry Pen with this week's vituperation!
posted by MES 6:18 PM ET | discuss | link

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The Pen has been a little bit lazy of late, but hey, it's summer time, give 'im a break!!! Rest assured, this week's missive has been turned in to the Angry Editor of The Pen and will be making an appearance shortly. Do stay tuned. I, for one, will pass those anxious moments until The Pen's arrival, by heading over to see what's going on with my favorite pair of 34DD's.
posted by LT2 5:27 PM ET | discuss | link

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Just received independent confirmation from Chavez that The Garbage Toss was definitely Adam's idea.
posted by LT2 4:18 PM ET | discuss | link

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Gotta brag a little about last night. At the last minute, a manager friend of mine invited me out to a dinner show at a place called The Largo here in LA. Show was great! It turned out to be this band/comedy act called The Naked Trucker. I can't even begin to explain what happened during this show, but the closest I can come is to describe it as a Tenacious D kind of a thing, but with a redneck/drunkard bent to it. Very funny.

But the really cool part was that Cheri Oteri was at our table. I've never had dinner with a celebrity before. Wish I watched her show more often... or ever. I might have had more to say. A young director named Sandy Bookstaver was with us as well. He's a client of our company and quite talented. His short film Scriptfellas is hysterical. Remember the name, he's going to be major, I predict.

"Who wants to touch me?"... "I said who wants to fuckin' touch me!?!?!?"
posted by LT2 12:08 PM ET | discuss | link

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Adam dropped me an e-mail last night to tell me how much he enjoyed my rendition of the Stanley episode. As part of his compliment, he mentioned that he's almost positive that it was he who invented the garbage toss and, after hearing his evidence, I have to agree with him. The bit of evidence that sold me? In his words: "It was definitely me- besides, I'm the obvious choice- I was the laziest bastard in the house." So, from all of Tri-Llama's fans to you Adam: Fine work!
posted by LT2 12:02 PM ET | discuss | link

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Wednesday, June 14, 2000

Correction:

Fisher Stevens is still a celebrity. Information was wrong in Friday's Blog.
posted by LT2 5:47 PM ET | discuss | link

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How an ordinary kitchen sponge became a pet named Stanley

As odd as the concept of the rock-toss game may seem, let me tell you a story about my college friends Mark, Mike, and Sean, who took the art of passing time to a whole new, and utterly bizarre, level.

I met Mike, Mark, and Sean at the same time I met all of my best college friends… through the miracle of the Freshman dorm-living lottery. By the luck of the draw, I was thrown together with Adam, with whom I would live for the next four years (and who I see/talk to even now, on an almost daily basis). Also on my freshman floor that year were Chavez, Vinnie, Tobbe and, of course, Mark, Mike, and Sean (these are characters you will come to know quite well as you tune into this blog).

All these guys represent, for me, the kind of intense friendship that only comes from eating, sleeping, studying, getting arrested, and shitting together in the same room for an entire year. I don’t see these guys very often, but I think about them a lot, and I have a feeling that even if I were to run into them for five minutes on the street in an unfamiliar city, it would be like we’d just moved away from each other the day before. There have been few occasions in my life when I was as upset as the day I graduated and left all those guys behind.

During that fantastic junior year in the Ackerman House (blog 6/8), Mark, Mike, and Sean lived up the block in a dark green house on the same side of the street. While Adam, Chavez, Tobbe, and my interests tended to lean more towards the conventionally destructive (i.e., The Rock-Toss Game), Mark, Mike, and Sean’s interests, quite often, strayed into the downright disgusting. And goddamn if we didn’t love ‘em for it.

An average night for the boys at 907 Ackerman involved activities like The Garbage Toss. The Garbage Toss came into being one cold winter night as the four of us sat around watching Monday Night Football in our underwear. Now, no one in their right mind goes out after dark in a Syracuse winter, unless a warm bar and a couple of tequila shots are included in your ultimate destination. And no college student puts their clothes back on once they’re down to their jammies. However, since garbage was picked up early on Tuesday mornings, we faced a dilemma on this particular Monday night. At halftime, somewhere around ten at night, we realized that we had a kitchen full of garbage bags that stunk to high heaven, and somehow, we had to get them out to the curb before morning.

I don’t remember whose idea it was, but it probably went down something like this. In order to get to the stairs that led down to our first-floor front door, you had to pass the door that led out to our second floor balcony. This door had a glass window in it and, probably, one of us noticed that you could see the spot where the garbage had to be laid to rest, out through that window. “Hey guys”, one of us likely said, “It’s cold as shit out there, why don’t we just toss this crap to the curb from the balcony.”

The first time was likely done out of sheer functionality... it was damn cold, and none of us was wearing the appropriate clothing. But by week three of the NFL season, The Garbage Toss had become a full-fledged athletic event, and something we looked forward to each week. I remember talking "trash" for seven days… “I’m gonna kick yer ass in the Toss this week!” I just couldn’t wait until halftime of Monday Night Football.

The rules were simple. Using whatever form you had developed over the weeks, you had to throw your bag of garbage off the balcony, get it across the 20-foot front lawn and across the sidewalk, to the curb (a total distance of about thirty feet, from a height of at least that). He whose bag landed closest to the telephone pole out front, won (bonus points if your bag did not explode). My only regret is that we never kept stats. I’d love to know who had the most wins when the year was over.

Many of our neighbors got strange notes from the garbage men complaining about exploded bags of garbage. Some of them desperately tried to discover who was responsible for the wisps of soiled whatever that they would often find blowing around the street in the bitter morning wind. No one ever thought to wonder if it could’ve been those four idiots in that second floor apartment at 907, throwing large bags of garbage thirty feet through the air. I mean really, who would suspect anyone of that kind of stupidity? For no reason?

We were never caught.

But, while Adam, Tobbe, Chavez and I were perfecting the “Garbage Toss”, Mark was in the process of creating his own piece of “garbage art” that would eventually put us to shame. While ours was a performance piece, Mark’s art was done primarily for his own enjoyment. I was not present for Stanley’s genesis, but Mark told me the story. It’s been almost ten years, but I’ll try my best to relate it now.

After dinner one night, Mark unwrapped a brand new blue sponge and cleaned the table with it. No one can say for sure what malevolent entity put the idea for what happened next into Mark’s head, but at some point in his clean-up, he decided to put the sponge in a gallon-sized Zip-Loc bag with the evening’s last piece of pizza. The sponge safely ensconced in the bag with the pizza, he put the entire experiment under the sink where prying eyes and sunlight would have no effect.

The next morning, Mark woke up and wandered into the kitchen to make breakfast. The coffee was brewing when he remembered, “Oh yeah! The sponge.” He opened the cabinets, pulled out the bag, and saw… a single blue sponge. The pizza… was gone!

The sponge had eaten the pizza. But even stranger, the sponge seemed not to have been changed by the experience. It still looked like a brand new, if slightly soiled, blue sponge.

Mark named the sponge Stanley and began feeding it every night.

Word of Mark’s new pet began to spread far and wide and soon it was not unusual for a crowd to develop at feeding time. We tried everything, ice cream, cake, pie, pasta, even chicken bones. Whatever we fed Stanley that night, would be gone by nine a.m. the next morning, leaving nothing but a smiling blue sponge where leftovers had been only eight hours before. It really was an amazing phenomenon.

Of course, every great idea has a downside, and Stanley’s rather substantial con, was discovered pretty early in his life… and that would be the smell. The bag had to be opened at feeding time and, while I never caught a whiff of Stanley myself (feedings had become an outdoor affair by the time I became aware of Stanley’s existence), I hear tales of the first time the odor was ever experienced indoors. Apparently, Mark, Mike, and Sean wound up at the bars, in whatever clothes they’d been wearing when the bag was opened. Unable to even take the time to change, they just had to get out. And they claimed the smell hung around for several days afterwards.

Stanley gave us a lot of joy over that year, but eventually, the time came for us to graduate. Mark, Mike, and Sean wound up staying in that house for two years. On Graduation day, Stanley was no longer blue, and didn’t really look much like a sponge anymore. He was still in his original bag, but that bag had been inserted inside a succession of other bags to guard against accidental leakage. Mark had a party on our last night in town. It was the kind of bash where we all wound up throwing our underwear into the trees around his house. Typical “we’re outta here forever” kind o’ shit.

As things wound down that night, I asked Mark what he planned to do with Stanley. Now, every house in Syracuse came furnished with the exact same furniture. A chair, sofa, and love seat made out of cheap fabric, with right angle arm and back rests that were anything but comfortable. Chavez used to joke that all the landlords in the area bought from the same store, “Landlords R Us.” We all hated that furniture. Mark thought about it for a minute and the said.

“I’m moving out tomorrow. I’m gonna turn this couch over, cut a hole in the bottom, punch a small hole in Stanley’s “cage”, and stuff him up inside the couch. It could be months before anyone figures out where the smell is coming from.”

As far as I know, Stanley lives there still… doing his best to provide hours of quality “entertainment” for a whole new generation of college students. Though he probably hasn’t eaten in a while. Poor guy.
posted by LT2 11:51 AM ET | discuss | link

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Tuesday, June 13, 2000

Be careful who you call stupid (even if it's yourself).
posted by MES 4:08 PM ET | discuss | link

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Crisis averted. Emergency reserves of half-and-half were just airlifted over the wall. All is well once again and no one's posterior had to meet the business end of my plunger handle.
posted by LT2 2:41 PM ET | discuss | link

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If your company gets you addicted to coffee by providing free Starbucks coffee and related condiments every day for five years and then one day runs out of half-and-half (without which coffee is largely undrinkeable), should you...

A) Do nothing. Sit still and allow the anger to build within you like some evil internal Mt. St. Helens until it erupts at a completely innappropriate time in a fit of rage aimed largely at innocent family members.
B) resign in protest.
C) take an enormous, Olestra fueled dump on your CEO's desk.
D) March from office to office with an Armalite AR-15 water-cooled automatic assault weapon calmly pumping round after round into co-workers you once called friend.

Take the next few minutes to vote, and I will act upon your answer.
posted by LT2 11:54 AM ET | discuss | link

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Monday, June 12, 2000

Also happened to catch the new Behind The Music on Bon Jovi. That too, is a great show. Always makes me nostalgic for the bands they cover. I've got the Bon Jovi Greatest Hits CD spinning in my computer right now. I used to walk home from high school the same way every day and for some reason I cannot explain, hearing Bad Medicine puts me at a very specific place on that walk home on a very specific sunny spring day (in front of an antique store in a curve on Monroe Street for those of you who know Herndon, VA). Nothing is happening in this particular memory, it's just an extremely specific snap-shot of a day. Wierd.

Anyway, a new episode premeires Sunday night at 9pm EST. This one on AC/DC. That is going to rock!!! One of my all-time favorite bands and I don't know shit about 'em.

One interesting thing about the Bon Jovi episode was this one 5 minute segment where they talked about the departure of the basist. He claimed in print that Jon Bon Jovi kept telling him his playing sucked, and they interviewed Richie Sambora who talked about how this basist dude would make mistakes on stage, and then Richie cringes and says "you feel embarrassed for the guy." Man, I wish they would've elaborated on that. I mean, he's the freakin' basis for godsake! how bad could he have screwed up. I've played live before and, honestly, our basist Adam could've been playing an entirely different song and I wouldn't have known the difference (no offense Adam). Or if I did, I certainly wouldn't have been audially offended enough to cringe and be embarrassed for Adam. And besides, this basist guy had played on five albums up to the point of his departure, how much more complicated could Bon Jovi's music have gotten that this guy was no longer able to keep up?
posted by LT2 10:03 AM ET | discuss | link

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I just knocked Star Wars off my personal Top Ten. Fight Club, after catching it several times on Pay-Per-View this weekend, has now taken an honored place on the ranks of Laaz's list. Goddamn that is a great freakin' movie.

- "The ability to let that which does not matter, truly slide."
- "I am Jack's complete lack of surprise."
- "As I get up to pass you, do I give you the ass, or the crotch?"
- "My job will be to never tell anyone these things that I know. I don't even need to come into the office anymore. I can do this job from home... and that is how Tyler and I got corporate sponsorship."
- "How's that workin' for ya... bein' clever?" "Pretty well." "Good... keep it up then."
- "This Conversation" "This Conversation" "Is over" "Is over"
- "We've all been brought up on television to believe that we would become millionaires and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly realizing that fact. And we're very pissed off."
posted by LT2 9:49 AM ET | discuss | link

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Sunday, June 11, 2000

Had a thought about Puddin' the Cat today. Roommate Tony usually gets up first and feeds her. But then when I get up, she follows me around meowing like she hasn't eaten in weeks. If Tony has left already and hasn't provided a sign that she's been fed, sometimes I will feed her twice by mistake (the fat little bastard!). Up to now, I assumed she was being sneaky and clever. But maybe the truth is that her Pavlovian reflex to my alarm clock is all that's at work here and she is incapable of learning from experience that she only gets fed once.

In other words, if...

A = Lars Wakes up, and
B = Puddin' begs, and
C = Puddin' gets fed, and
D = Tony has already fed Puddin'

Maybe Puddin's little brain is not capable of understanding that A + B = C, unless D.
posted by LT2 4:12 PM ET | discuss | link

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