Excavation

I've hinted at it in several other entries, but I feel like I need to open myself up and be perfectly honest here: I watch Friends. I don't just watch it a little, I watch it all the time. I used to watch it when I was a kid because my Mom liked it. I began watching the reruns due to my wife's obsession with sitcoms, but I realized something in that process: I really like it. Sweet Zombie Jesus that feels good to say! I am liberated!

I think the mark of a good sitcom is the abilities of the writers and actors to create characters so versatile and complex that any viewer watching could see themselves in any number of them.

Side note: A sitcom that accomplishes this task brilliantly is Modern Family. Amazing show and one I will very likely reference again.

Okay, back to Friends. For me, I've been compared to Rachel for my occasional airheadedness and the fact that my nipples often poke through my shirts, to Monica for my reaction to stress and because that one time I had a bit too much to drink and hooked up with my best friend who I ended up marrying, to Phoebe for my creativity (seriously reaching there, but stick with me, I’m going somewhere…I think), to Joey for my prowess with the ladies (pause for several minutes for my friends to collectively laugh at me and catch their breath), to Chandler for my actual prowess with the ladies…and the fact that I married someone WAY out of my league, and Ross for his compulsive need to be right and his love of all things science.

Ross, for those who have been living under centuries of sedimentary rock, is a Palentologist. He has been known to collect dinosaur figurines and have crazy debates about evolution. I’ve already done my evolution debate on here, need I remind you of the cactus?

http://morepointlessstories.blogspot.com/2010/02/never-on-sunday.html

But I thought I would share a little about me today. Like Ross, I too love dinosaurs…but for me, it’s a particular dinosaur…and no, I’m not going to post a picture of someone doing something inappropriate with the dinosaur statues out by Palm Springs…but I’ll keep that in mind for later.

No, THIS is my dinosaur.




I’m kind of into photography. I took a class or two in high school but followed a different path once I hit college. I have now been back into photography for a few years now and my dinosaur helped facilitate that hobby. This is a Gateway Inc. DC-M50. As far as digital cameras go, this isn’t a very good one. It’s big, it’s heavy, has a small screen (and an inexplicably redundant old-school view finder), a mediocre zoom, and a blah lens. It’s bad in low-light situations, it uses power very inefficiently from 4 AAA batteries…even when I spent the extra $ on those fancy lithium ones. Rechargeable batteries are a joke, by the way. Not the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries you find in your cell phones or in better cameras than this one.








Batteries aside as well as camera quality and my strange need for my gadgets to be the best of the best…this camera has been VERY good to me. How can I fault anything that gave me such a fun hobby? I really can’t.

Though the recent acquisition of new post-processing photo software (that and some actual, real-life time) has led me to do some cool stuff with my old photos, my Zen-like and truly mindful moment comes in the click of the camera…be it the fake sound that emanates from point-and-shoot cameras like Dino or from the actual click of the shutter in my fancier (read: but still on the cheap) digital single lens reflex camera. Finding that image in my viewfinder that is at that exact instant perfect and hearing and feeling the click is where you can find my happy place.









And while the Beeper King might tell you that technology is cyclical, we all know that it only keeps getting better. The camera that I used to take these photos is old relative to the DSLRs that are available today. If you look closely at some of these pictures you can see a bit of grain or “noise” in a couple of them…that happens with my current camera at high ISO speeds. I would never have discovered what the heck ISO noise was if it weren’t for my dinosaur.

If it weren’t for my dinosaur, I wouldn’t have taken shots like this.



It was foggy and on pretty much raining when I took this shot. My friends had all walked away as I laid down on the ground and aimed my camera just so to get this. I eventually caught up with them and this picture is framed and hanging in my house. Lots of people take shots like this when they visit Paris, but this one is mine and I’m really proud of it.



This is my friend Colin. This was taken the day he graduated from college. His dad brought cigars and Colin delivered the valedictory address at his graduation ceremony. We heckled him from the stands, but we meant well and were really proud of him.



You can’t take a bad picture in Venice. You look around and there are beautifully composed pictures just waiting for you to snap, you just have to point – and – shoot (see what I did there?)



With that, dear friends, I must be signing off. Microsoft Word has now stretched this out onto a 3rd page and I’m beginning to feel like this pointless story is dragging out a bit too long.




And just so that I can stick with my unofficial rule to always share something silly from my world with you, here is evidence that my habit goes WAY back…also, I took this picture with Dino.





PS

Woodbridge High School Football Sucks

Kids are awful.

Well that’s a little strong…but I had to get your attention somehow.

This is going to come off a little back-in-my-dayish, but the circles I’m going to talk you in and the tangents we’re going to take together are well worth it.

Allow me to start you off with a little appetizer of what I’m getting at here:



Funny story about the above picture. I uploaded this to facebook and as a joke, I tagged my friend Scott in the photo. He promptly removed the tag from this picture. I sure showed him, didn’t I?

I was late to join the facebook craze. I had a myspace page like everyone and as facebook became more and more popular I was hesitant to join. I thought to myself, “I don’t get it.” It took my wife sitting me down in front of the screen to finally join.

To my surprise, I really liked facebooking. I put a facebook app on my blackberry (I’m very into gadgets, so this appealed to me greatly. Seriously, you’d be hard pressed to find me without a gadget of some kind in my hands…it’s why I’m able to get the pictures for this blog). On a quick side note for evidence, I was attempting to snap a picture today of a license plate. It wasn’t particularly funny or anything, but I thought my family would like it because it said “ZADIE.” It’s Yiddish for ‘grandfather’ and it’s what we called my dad’s dad. I was a little bummed I couldn’t snap the picture…but it reminded me of the following story about him.

When Zadie would send me birthday cards, he would do so on stationary that appeared have Hebrew writing on the top, with Moses holding two tablets beside it. When you looked a little closer, the stationary actually read “Hey Schmuck.” He would have liked this kid:



I can’t take credit for that picture. I grabbed it from a site I follow http://strikegently.com/.

A little while back, I mentioned http://www.lamebook.com/…something I learned about myself when I clicked through hundreds of pages (and, of course, added it to my reader, seriously, why don’t you have this yet??) Anyway the thing I leaned was how thankful that facebook wasn’t around when I was in junior high or high school. Information moved fast enough back then…could you imagine information moving any faster? I want to make an information superhighway reference here, but I can’t really think of one. Plus, it seems like you need to learn a whole new language…and when I was in high school, I was too busy scraping by in Spanish to learn another language.

One of the things you learn (both in high school and on lamebook), though, is that kids can be really cruel. Like REALLY cruel.

Can’t…stop…the…tangent…

I used to run cross country and track during my time in high school. At my school, these sports were the bottom of the social totem pole…even though our football team sucked out loud. Well one day during my freshman year I was warming up around the track and about 50 yards away was this dude that was friends with one of my friends. He had finished his football workout (he sucked out loud too, never made varsity…no, I’m not bitter). He looked at me with this shit eating grin as the distance between us closed. Then, without warning, he hit me and I fell to the track. Your boy PS was pretty embarrassed, a little dirty, and was bleeding because the cheap dirt track we had at my school contained many rocks…but to look at the positive in the situation…dude was laughing pretty hard…

Do you believe me yet about how mean kids can be? Here’s an example of how mean kids can be.




Back in my day we used to just throw taco sauce on people’s cars…and by “people’s” you should read “my” and by “we” you should read “they.”


With my positive self-image well-intact, I’ll sign off.

PS

MPS: There’s a story here in a picture I didn’t take. When I was making the left turn onto my street, a car with writing on the window caught my eye, but it wasn’t the one pictured above, but it was at the same house. That car window also had an “I ♥” on it…but it was followed, of course, with the classiest of classy statements: “UR MOM’S BOOBS.”

The Next Argument for Health Care Reform

HIS.

In other circumstances spelling that word with capitals might make you think that I was referring to the biblical “His.” In this case, however, I’m referring to Health Information Services. This is the department in any medical establishment which protects your confidential health information.

Notice how I changed the typeset on the word “confidential?” You think I would venture into changing things on the blog if I thought it was something you could just read without proper emphasis? That's how you know it's something important and worth giving extra attention.

What's got two thumbs and sucks at blogging? This guy!

Your health information is important to keep quiet. Do you really want people to know about that really embarrassing thing that you went and saw the doctor about? NO you don’t. That’s why the constitution doesn’t allow employers to base your employment on anything that health related. That stuff is gross and no one wants to know and you don’t want to tell them.

One place I definitely don’t want to see your health information is on my TIVO.


The last thing I need is your chronic lung condition interrupting my reruns of Friends. COPD refers to chronic bronchitis or emphysema…and according to the Wikipedia article I just accessed, COPD is usually caused by “noxious particles” causing an “inflammatory response.”

A quick message to TIVO: COPD is nothing worth giving a "Thumbs Up" to; maybe you want to consider modifying how you market drugs for conditions like that. What's next? IBS?

I also don’t want to know the various procedures you’ve undergone, well, not just me, everyone. We’ve all been talking about it behind your back and I’m the only one with the stones to tell you so. Again, this stuff is confidential. You don’t have to tell us that you’ve been weakened by some condition like COPD or a procedure like a…


Goodness! This is just insane. Well, not insane but come on. You don’t need to do this and we don’t want to know.

I mean…it’s like telling the world VERY personal information about you. Some of this information is sad, some of this information is awkward and some of this information is just Too Much Information (for the older readers out there, this is what the kids mean when they say TMI).

Do you really want people to know that stuff? Well, I guess this guy doesn’t care…

Confidentially yours,

PS

MPS (just came up with that as a way of adding a post-script without looking like I’m signing off, clever? Do we like it?): I like that in both of the license plates there are funny license plate frames that I wanted to be sure to not mention.

1st up, shout out to the Heart Stent Frame: "My dinosaur ate your Jesus Fish." Little harsh arguement, but probably true.

2nd: NINDICK. I’m thinking that license plate frame was bought by his wife.