Brady’s Blog

today marks the man-made, contrived division of arbitrary portions of time known as the end of a year..

that means tomorrow will be the start of a new year..

i’d like to take this opportunity to wish each of you a happy new year and a few other things..

so..

happy new year..

and..

may you find prosperity and happiness in the new year..

and if you found prosperity and happiness last year, may you find more of the same..

or either one for that matter..

and may you not lose any of it that you found last year..

and if you found prosperity or happiness and then lost one or both of them, then may you find both of them again..

or at least one of them..

and may you pay a little more attention to where you keep those things next time..

i mean.. seriously..

i might as well not even go to all the trouble of wishing you stuff if you’re not going to take care of it..

so..

so far that’s a happy new year..

and then prosperity and/or happiness..

also, one more thing i’d like to wish you..

may you avoid having any association at all with the word “autopsy” in the new year..

in fact, i’m going to go ahead and extend that particular wish on out to march of 2009..

just this once..

you’re welcome..

today i ate:

breakfast - large slice of homemade pecan pie, diet dr pepper, 8 mints and 2 pieces of gum during church

lunch - 5 piece buffalo chicken platter with extra blue cheese plus a couple extra strips the kids didn’t eat, diet coke

dinner - 10 bang bang shrimp, 1/2 order of ahi sashimi, 6 oz filet with gorgonzola butter, 1/2 of mrs cracker’s macadamia mahi mahi, 1/2 of another friends mahi mahi, couple more bites of sashimi, a little bit of another friends chicken pasta, 3 small sammy winters, quad espresso from starbucks..

and one small little bite of mrs. cracker’s cinnamon scone..

because i didn’t want to be a pig..

i’m not a huge fan of the roller coaster..

i like the idea of experiencing certain sensations produced by certain rides..

like weightlessness.. heaviness.. incontinence..

these are all great..

but the bottom line is i’m a scaredy-cat..

any kind of circular motion gets me pretty pukey pretty quick..

and i’m scared of heights..

so.. ya know..

we went to an amusement park last night..

i was finally talked into riding a couple of kiddie rides..

one of them was the pirate ships..

this was a ride that was basically a bunch of cars going around in circles..

not real exciting but fast enough to stir me up..

stew was pretty worried about me..

he was in the car in front of claire and me - i could hear him the whole time saying “daddy!! are you ok?!”

“i’m ok!”

“are you sure!?”

“yes stew.. i’m fine!”

sometimes i wish i was just too short to ride..

i hadn’t been at my new job too long..

i was working at a facility of ours where i have no office..

so i was in a patient admission room kicked back in a leather recliner with my laptop..

working..

another guy was in there talking to me..

he was also lounging a bit as i recall.. maybe had a chair leaned back on two legs or something.. i’m not sure..

a nurse came through and must have thought we weren’t working hard enough..

so she very sarcastically asked “well gee guys.. can i getcha anything?!”

without hesitation, and without any acknowledgment of her tone being anything but sincere, i answered “oh.. yes please.. i’d love a water.. thanks..”

the other guy said “oh.. hey.. yeah.. me too..”

she just stood and stared at us dumbly..

then she realized she either had to admit to being rather ugly to us or bring us waters..

she brought us waters..

a few weeks later i was sitting in the exact same place when the same nurse came through and started to comment the same way.. just out of habit i’m sure..

“well gee cracker.. can i–”

and nothing..

didn’t even finish the sentence..

just turned and walked out..

pretty funny..

unless you are fortunate enough to have been living in a cave for the last few years, you know what heelys are..

actually, you may not know what they are..

or know that they’re called heelys anyway..

but if you’ve seen a kid cruising by you on the street or in the library, seemingly floating along at skateboard speed but without the skateboard, you’ve seen heelys..

they are shoes with wheels in the heels..

pretty clever..

i’m one of the many parents who won’t let my kids have them but secretly recognizes the fact that had these things been available to me as a child i would have pulled out all the stops to get my grubby feet in a pair..

most schools are banning them as soon as they are discovered there..

which is fine i guess..

i don’t necessarily see the great harm..

but.. you know..

whatever..

i can certainly see why school officials wouldn’t want to have one more thing to deal with..

i can also see school officials are a bunch of old goobers..

i’ll say this though..

whatever one thinks of heelys, they do not belong on a twenty-something small town punk leaning on his girlfriend and smoking a cigarette while wheely-heelying into the wal-mart in alma, arkansas..

i think that is safe to say..

i was wishing i was wearing some bladerunners when i saw this guy..

those are the shoes with a switchblade in the sole that you use to throw at the feet of people who are wearing heelys and smoking cigarettes at the same time..

i wear a size eleven serrated if anyone wants to get me a late christmas present..

here’s my review of the feature film “dan in real life”

i would compare this movie to another romantic comedy “sweet home alabama”

and in that comparison, i would find “dan” be a lot worse than “alabama”

and then i would compare “sweet home alabama” to a really good movie..

and it would not be as good as that movie..

and that’s the most accurate review of “dan in real life” you are likely to read..

mostly because not many people are going to bother to review it..

here’s something you may not know..

it is physically impossible to utilize a wall-mounted pencil sharpener without shaking your butt..

try it sometime..

if you can find one..

and a pencil..

when you rotate the crank of the sharpener, the motion is transfered to the rest of your body..

most of the young men of my generation became acutely aware of this fact at one point or another..

we were lucky enough to have these devices in every classroom in every school we ever attended..

i hated school..

but not everything about it was bad..

have hollywood filmmakers just worn us down to the point where we’re supposed to accept that every gun in every movie just has unlimited ammunition forever and ever amen?

i’ll admit i am a bit picky when it comes to movies.

if there are holes in the plot, or the dialog stinks, or there’s just a terrible individual acting job turned in, i’ll usually notice it..

but i am generally willing to suspend disbelief and jump in with both feet if that’s what a movie asks..

if you present me with aliens or zombies or vampires.. i’m in..

i can go for that..

i’m along for the ride..

but you have to keep your end of the bargain..

if you tell me the zombies can only be killed by being shot in the head.. well then.. you’re going to have to pony up some characters who are willing to scrounge up some ammo..

seriously..

don’t just give someone a handgun and let that person fire seventy rounds without ever reloading..

where is the tension and suspense in that?

i long to witness a jittery, bloody cowboy thumbing shells into his revolver..

with the sun and dust and sweat in his eyes, the dirt and blood making the bullets slippery, and the bad guys bearing down hard on him from over the nearest ridge..

tension.. suspense..

and a little consistency.. is that too much to ask for?

if a character fires the same machine gun for twenty five minutes and then suddenly when you need a tense moment for the plot he has to reload, i’m just not buying it..

set a ballpark number of rounds for that weapon and have him reload every time he gets there.. give or take a few of course.. not like you can really count that..

i know it’s silly..

and i hear this a lot when i bring it up — “it’s a MOOOOOVIE!”

yes.. i know..

i get it..

it’s a movie..

but if you want to use that logic, why bother with the guns?

why not just have everyone shoot bullets out the end of their fingers and be done with it..

in real life, you have just as much chance shooting a zombie with your finger as you do firing nine rounds out of an eight round clip..

and neither one of those scenarios is at all fair to the zombies..

like things aren’t rough enough for them already..

poor zombies..

mrs. cracker has a carpool arrangement with a couple of the moms in the neighborhood..

we’re in one of those areas where almost everyone drives their kids to school..

the arrangement this year is such that there’s usually too many kids for me to take them because i have a strictly four-seater jeep wrangler..

but there are times when mrs. cracker calls on me to fill in when the number of kids is down for whatever reason..

yesterday was one of those days..

it was just stewart, davis, and haley from down the street..

now i don’t know how it is when one of the ladies does the driving, but when i take the kids to school it’s always a mess trying to get everyone out of the jeep and headed into school without one of them falling or hitting his head or leaving behind his stuff..

or something..

and there’s kind of a lot of pressure with the long line of cars behind us and everyone in a hurry to jetison the kids and get on to work..

the dropoff procedure is like some sort of sophisticated covert military operation..

on the way in, i’m prepping the kids..

“ok.. we’re in the driveway.. everyone unbuckle and grab your stuff..”

as if i’m set to drop them into a hot LZ in the middle of vietnam..

“ok gang.. we are cleared for approach and we are a GO for elementary school!!”

they fumble out of the seatbelts and start scrambling for their gear..

“soldiers.. stand ready.. on my count! we are down in 3.. 2.. 1.. ALPHA TEAM GO! GO! GO!”

and out they scramble..

yesterday they all had not only backpacks and lunchboxes, but also huge carry bags full of presents for their classmates..

just like a platoon falling out with radios and bazookas and ammo bands all over them..

stew even reached up to pull down a cap that almost got scraped off by the door frame of the jeep..

just as if the chopper wash was trying to pull it off his head..

it was perfect..

i fully expected to see one of them start hand signaling to the others, pointing at his own eyes with two fingers and circling a hand palm down to say “stay low!”

and then..

once they were all cleared out..

davis, being the last one, turned as if to make one final check..

and then closed the door to the jeep..

then he looked at me..

and actually knocked on the closed door..

as if to say “clear!”

just like in the movies..

i couldn’t help but salute..

a couple of months ago i mentioned i used to smoke clove cigarettes..

not long after that post, i serendipitously found an empty pack of cloves on the ground outside the found theatre in los angeles california..

here’s a picture of that pack..

this is the same brand i used to smoke..

when i first wrote about this i said i thought the brand was darjum..

so.. not too far off from djarum..

oh and the pack i found is djarum lights..

so that’s kind of odd to me..

when i was smoking cloves, the whole idea of smoking cloves was to show the world how unbelievably edgy, crazy, dangerous, and cool you were..

so the light clove cigarette would have been counterproductive..

unlike regular tobacco light cigarettes which totally make sense..

at the cancer center where i work we have tons of patients who are diagnosed with “light” cancer..

some are lucky enough to only get “ultra light”..

also, they get cancer of the menthol gland, cancer of the 100s and 120s, and we’re seeing more and more “full flavor king” cancer cases..

so the lights..

yeah..

definitely a good choice..