Big, Big Things

Like when Jupiter turned into a star on 2010 – big, big things are happening.

To properly do what I need to do to prepare, posts will be suspended for 2-3 weeks. Then there will be a big flurry of them. Then, probably cake.

In the meantime, please enjoy perusing through any of the four hundred posts already sitting up here, or of course, there is the rest of the Internet to enjoy. I think you’ll be okay, blogosphere, but don’t think I won’t miss you.

And yes, all proper Curse-related documentation has been filed at the Courthouse, everything’s cool. (Not really, some stuff right now is really, really not cool.) But the blog-related stuff is, which is all you need to worry about.

 

 

 

Just Like Seein’ Bigfoot

You know how whenever anyone sees Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or Ogopogo, they’re so freaked out that they can’t snap a decent picture of what’s obviously, definitely, not horseshit and is instead really right in front of them? So what you get is something that looks like a large, blurry man in a Bigfoot suit:

Or a snorkeler with a Monster-Shaped Sock Puppet:

Or I guess sometimes yes, they do get a decent picture of Ogopogo. Watch out, kids!

Well that’s how I feel when I see a Women For Romney bumper sticker. Let me tell you something – they are OUT there. You just have to keep your eyes open. My friend Spang and I call each other when we see them – ohmygod, ohmygod, OHMYGOD! TOM! I SAW ONE!

Then we get cosmos. Other than that, we’re pretty manly.

But not the bumper sticker. I’ve never been able to get a clear picture of one, but here’s an artist’s rendition straight from my own personal Google Image files:

See? It’s pink – that means chicks dig it. And some of the letters are all fancy, like a girl wrote it on her notebook, a girl who doesn’t just “like” Romney, but who “‘like’ likes” him. Sometimes they don’t even get bumper stickers, they just spray paint their whole Romney-ending name all over their car, as if they’ve already married him and his First Wife. Stephanie Meredith Romney! In a big heart, you know.

But anyway, today I saw this cryptozoological wonder cross my path:

Holy shit! Christians For Obama!

At first, I didn’t even comprehend it. Why would Christians ever vote for a guy who is not only a Muslim, but also a Satanist AND an Atheist? FROM KENYA?

I don’t know, but this guy not only did it, but he’s permanently bragging about it on his car! Who’s driving it, Mothman??

I’ll tell you, it was a spiritual experience, like looking the Abominable Snowman right in the eye across a card table, thinking, “He’s got the jack. He doesn’t have the jack. HE’S GOT THE JACK!”

Surely you can relate. Anyway, someone needs to fly me to Loch Ness or to Bigfoot Town (Canada? Seattle? I don’t know where Bigfoot lives) cause do you see how I calmly stopped texting while I was driving, and snapped a picture of the Sasquatchmobile? I’m like motherscratching Steve McQueen, baby.

Cool, now I have to go run this by some network execs, make some scratch. Don’t show anybody, blogosphere, because it’s not worth any money that way.

Now, I know a lot of you are like, Tom, that could just be a Jesus Fish Eating A Darwin Fish bumper sticker wearing a Christians For Obama bumper sticker suit. Like when those knuckleheads said they had Bigfoot in a freezer and instantly, pre-Tom-On-Facebook, someone came to my desk to show me their Facebook page and asked me what I thought of it.

I said, “Well, shit, I’d say that’s either Bigfoot in a freezer, or it’s a Bigfoot Suit in a freezer. And since we already know there are Bigfoot suits, and since we don’t know if there’s Bigfoot, etc., etc. etc.”

Well – we’ll just have to let Science decide, and Science can tell History, and someone from Television can give me a check, is how I think this works. I’m going to get a new suit and a steak dinner, you guys stay here in case my studio check shows up.

 

A Word About My Name

Daily Prompt again – Say My Name, in which we are supposed to tell a story about our names.

Cool. I was named directly after my father’s brother, and not because of any pride of lineage or anything like that. Apparently, Mad Men-style, they had a little trouble locating my dad at my birth. He was on a bit of a bender.

It was 1971, so the dads didn’t do anything but smoke cigars and pace around anyway, so it’s not like I’m asking for a violinist. That’s just the fact. It always seemed sort of lazy, just picking the nearest guy and slapping his name on my head. But no, it was more a function of irritation I think.

For this reason, I often refer to my uncle as the Experimental, Government-Funded Prototype. Usually good for a laugh.

Then there’s my last name – Chalfant. It’s actually my father’s stepdad’s last name. Mr. Chalfant adopted my father and the Experimental Government-Funded Prototype when they were about 2 and 4, and then promptly skipped town. It was the forties, and I guess the guy was a rolling stone. That’s how it goes.

Here’s something odd. My mother first married my father – Dave. He had a brother named Tom. So she had two sons, Tom and Dave. Meanwhile, my uncle had a son named Thomas Scott, who goes by Scott for obvious reasons.

So then my mom divorced my dad, and married a guy named Dave. He had a son named David Shawn. That guy went by Shawn, but he’s not the Shawn you see hanging around here.

Then she divorced Dave and married a guy named Tom. Keepin’ it simple.

Guess what my last name would have been if the Mr. Chalfant hadn’t adopted my dad? BUTY!

Buty!

Close call, I agree.

All right then. Good thing it was a short prompt, cause I got to go.

 

Switch Places With Another Blogger?

Today the Daily Prompt is Switcharoo, and I’m supposed to tell them which blogger I’d like to switch places with for a week, and I hate to constantly be the wise ass, but this one is easy, too.

First of all, I don’t know that many bloggers. I vowed several weeks ago to read and post about other bloggers twice a week, and then I cheerfully forgot about it. That’s because I’m selfish and lazy, and it turned out that I was too busy to always go around reading everybody else’s blogs. I have to write and work and drink beer and watch television shows and read paperbacks. Also my bartenders need me – some of them have children.

Which blogger would I switch place with? The only one I can think of right off the top of my head is robaker, the guy with all the airplane-flying stories, and that’s mainly because he’s THE ONLY ONE WHO LIKED MY PARKER POST YESTERDAY YOU BUNCH OF SQUARES. But you have to remember, if I’m robaker, then he’s me, and it gets pretty quickly weird. I’m sure we’re both fine without switching places.

The whole idea is creepy. What if I pick a female blogger? Is your husband going to know there’s a dude Freaky Friday-ed into his wife? I certainly hope he would know.

What if I switch with Arianna Huffington Herself? Which one of us would get the accent?

To me it’s like this – Imagine that you decided to communicate using only a squeaky horn and a kazoo. Or imagine that you purchased a large, pink bunny suit and then became addicted to wearing it no matter how many problems it caused. That’s pretty much blogging, right there.

If I could switch places with someone, let me tell you – it would be anyone but a blogger. I’d use it as a loophole around the Curse, because again, I am a deeply, deeply lazy man. I just – I just can’t stress that enough.

I guess a better answer would be, I’d switch places with just about any blogger, and then that person would be taking the week off blogging, while he or she blogged for me.

Do you have a blog, whoever you are reading this? Then you. I’d switch places with you, and then I’d be quitting your job and going camping for a week without your phone.

 

Let’s Hang Out With Parker This Weekend

You might know Parker as Jason Statham, from the new movie Parker, which I haven’t seen yet. It’s based on Flashfire, the 19th Parker novel. I can tell you from the preview that it looks a bit like the book, but that it looks nothing like Parker. It’s had some sort of protagonist transplant.

Which is fine – you shouldn’t go around making movies out of Parker novels, because Parker’s too dark to appeal to a wide enough audience. Parker does not, for instance, live by any dumbass “code” like the preview for Parker says he does. Apparently this incarnation of Parker never hurts innocent people and never steals from the poor, which might make you like him more, might make it more likely that you’ll buy some movie tickets, but it isn’t Parker.

Parker’s assessment of whether or not he should kill you or steal your money is entirely risk-reward based. He is a sociopath. In the first novel, he breaks into a beauty salon right around closing time, ties up the woman who runs the place, and uses the window to watch some mob guys he’s interested in. Later he goes back to check on her and she’s dead. Parker doesn’t care.

I’m not saying – “Go Parker!” But I am saying, if you’re wanting to pretend you’re a criminal, you can do it Ocean’s Eleven-style, where they’re not actually bad people, just hot, lovable scamps. Or you can be grittily realistic. There’s no correct way, now, settle down – literary morality is not a race.

I AM saying that’s the character, he’s completely amoral, and that’s who he is. Very quickly in the series, author Donald Westlake softens the character up, but if that entails knocking off the accidental murder of innocent hairdressers and getting him a steady girlfriend later on, well- you’re really overreaching when you claim he’s Robin Hood.

The only reason – the ONLY reason – Parker isn’t killing you right now, is that it’s a pain in the ass and there is no compelling reason to do it. He doesn’t care who you are or what you did or whether or not you’re nice.

Here’s another modern incarnation of Parker:

In Payback, Parker’s name was Porter, and they softened him up in hilarious ways, like they made him goof around with a big, silly puppy dog and made him a former driver for a Super Hot Prostitute named Rosie, whom he was apparently in love with, because that makes sense, driving a prostitute from John to John and thinking, if only me and her could skip through the park together eating ice cream.

That movie was based on The Hunter, the first of the Parker novels, and so yes, that’s the one where he killed the hairdresser. Did you see Porter kill any hair dressers? Me neither, and Parker is to be clear, MUCH larger than Mel Gibson.

Rosie, who is Mel’s love interest in the movie and runs off with him at the end, is in the book for approximately seven pages, as a chubby, drug-addled prostitute who Parker knocks around a little bit until he gets some information out of her. I think she tells him she hates him when he stomps away with the name he needed, and we never see her again in twenty-three novels.

I actually like Payback. They kept it pretty dark, and it’s all retro-technology, since the original book was written in 1962, and this was before Mel Gibson parked a fertilizer truck in front of the Crazy Town Courthouse and started threatening the Queen and getting his Anti-Semite Groove going. Before that, he was very mainstream and the ladies dug him. Going dark was playing against type, and it worked for him.

It was as close to actual Parker as I think we’re likely to get on screen, but again – that’s okay. The books were practically designed to be read with a six pack of beer. They’re short, and they’re lean, and they come in two categories.

Either Parker is planning a job, and at the end they’ll execute it and we’ll see how it goes, or we join him in mid-job, and something goes horribly wrong, and we’ll watch him get clear.

That’s it. We’re just sociopathic criminals for a few hours, without hurting anybody and without going to jail. We don’t have to watch him fall in love with a beautiful and brilliant safecracker, or a beautiful and brilliant stunt driver, or a brilliant and beautiful police detective or anything like that. There’s no mute kid who says something at the end, making it really meaningful and softening the grizzled heister’s cold heart.

No. You’re going to pull off a heist, and you get to leave your conscience at home, and if you don’t like it you get out of the car.

So here’s why we’re going to hang out with Parker this weekend. Of the twenty-three Parker novels, I’ve read twenty-two of them, missing the tenth simple due to being unable to find it. There are more coming out, from what I hear, but Donald Westlake is dead. The last Parker novel, Ask The Parrot, was very clearly the result of a stooge being handed the beginning of a first draft which Westlake left behind, and being told to write a Parker novel out of it. I guess it isn’t terrible, but I know when Westlake’s writing and when he’s not. That wasn’t him.

In fact, it was him, for the first sixty pages. Then suddenly all the characters decide, let’s think of a whole new plan, these last sixty pages aren’t doing it for me, then Parker does something else, acting nothing like Parker at all.

Parker why do you suddenly sound like a thirty year-old English major with a second glass of whiskey in your hand? Sigh.

So anyway, the one Parker novel I haven’t read is The Green Eagle Score. It comes right after The Rare Coin Score, in which Parker meets Claire and she becomes the greatest criminal girlfriend ever, asking zero questions about what Parker does, putting zero requirements on when he should and shouldn’t be away, and being able to use her brain if the shit hits the fan and the cops show up. You know what Claire knows, officer?

Nothing. Beat it.

Suddenly, back in my world, it was 2013, and I realized that instead of combing local used bookstores for the remaining Parker novel, I could use Amazon Technology and have it in my hands overnight. Fair enough – that’s what I’ve done. Now I’m off to sit on my ass, drink a few beers, and read it. There’s a good chance you’ll get to hear all about it tomorrow, because what else am I going to write about if that’s all I’ve been doing all day?

And if you are wondering about Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, I’m still going to finish it, but Parker doesn’t like to wait in line, so he gets to go first. You can take it up with Parker if you don’t like it.

That’s the best thing about Parker novels – you don’t have to wait for stuff to happen. Westlake – who writes the novels as Richard Stark – drops you right into the shit from the very first sentence. In fact, my favorite opening line ever is from Firebreak, a 2001 Parker novel:

“When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.”

I’ll tell you the first line to this one tomorrow, once I’ve finished it. Until then, blogosphere.

 

The Next Big Thing – Emailing Your Stuff

Today the WordPress daily prompt is, What will the next technological innovation be? Since they use the phrase, “The Next Big Thing” I am assuming they mean something that’s going to be new and then omnipresent, like wheels and soap and smartphones.

Emailing your stuff. That’s clearly what’s next. You don’t drag your suitcase to the airport anymore, you pack it, scan it in, and then you use a 3-D printer somewhere at your destination to make a you a copy of that.

3-D printers aren’t quite there yet, I know – but this guy has one that prints clothing. And this guy can print you a gun. And this guy is building a house with them.

But 3-D printers are just technology, and technology always improves until it looks like magic. I’m sure the Wright Brothers would be shocked at the flying hotels we buzz around in now. Charlie Chaplin, meet James Cameron. It’s inevitable, like pushing a boulder a few inches and then wondering if you could push it to Cleveland.

Of course you can. It’s just a bunch of inches.

The price will go down, and the quality will go up. Radio waves, vacuum tubes, VHS players, CDs, BluRay – 3D Printers will be no different until pretty soon, we’ll all have a decent one, and that’s where we’ll keep a lot of our stuff.

It’ll be cool, too. Want to go on a trip? Pull up your laptop, click the bathroom file, and copies of all of your typical bathroom accessories are uploaded to your Virtual Suitcase. Click on some outfits, a bathing suit, maybe your freaking bicycle. Enter your destination, click send and then you’re off to the airport, step on the plane with no luggage.

Once you get to your hotel, all of your stuff has been 3D printed from the Virtual Suitcase you sent along with your reservation and payment method, and it’s sitting there in your room waiting for you. If you spill anything on your favorite dress – no problem. They can print you one downstairs, and you just hand the old one back in and it gets recycled into the Printer Substance Buffer.

Like everything, at first it will be very expensive and a sort of novelty – you’ll have to put up with imperfections, like people will start to notice that their hair dryers stop working a few months after they’ve been printed. Maybe you’ll print a whole suitcase, and six months later the handle falls off. It won’t matter though, you just print yourself a new hair dryer and a new suitcase. A mere nuisance til you get back to the house.

It will be irritating magic, that’s all – like everything around us. Argh – why is this microwave taking so long?

What’s the matter, Sam? Oh, nothing Bill. I just had my jacket teleported here and it smells like cheese for no reason. They’re printing me a new one, but I’m going to be ten minutes later to dinner now!

In the end, I’m not talking about the Next Big Thing so much as the Last Big Thing. The Next Big Thing will be the end of Things as we know them – the complete, free access to whatever Things we want, whenever we want them.

 

The Elevator Trap

Today the Daily Prompt is “Elevator.” They actually have a more specific approach to elevators in mind, but they’re not the boss of me. One time I got caught in an elevator trap, and possibly a psychological experiment, parallel dimension, or both. You be the judge:

The reason we were driving to Cincinnati was that Rob’s sister was down there with a couple of friends of hers. At eighteen years of age or so, they were a couple years younger than us, and Rob got it into his head that we should drive down there and make sure they didn’t have any dudes in there with them, because that was obviously some of our business. Did it occur to us that once we got down there, they’d have some dudes with them? I don’t know, but we got a case of beer, and piled into DJ’s car.

In a very nice nod to responsibility, DJ drank zero beers on the way down there, while Rob and I pretended his car was our own personal cocktail lounge. His sister was down there for some kind of mind-bogglingly elaborate shopping trip, which okay, they were girls. Shopping was an acceptable motivation for pretty much anything. We drove straight into downtown Cincinnati using only information from Rob’s brain to arrive at the proper hotel, then we stumbled into the front door thinking, man, sure could use a bathroom about now.

Well, let’s get up to the room, use that one. Our experiences as knucklehead twenty year-olds had taught us that people in hotels – or nice places in general – had not much patience for us, usually identifying us as knuckleheads with a single glance.

It was a big hotel, with a lot of polished marble and high ceilings and plush carpets. This notion of driving two hours away to pay what must have been a chunk of change for an overnight room, all so one could go shopping at different stores – this was baffling to us. Nonetheless, Big Brother Protocol was in effect; we kept moving.

Rob had the room number written down but I don’t remember it. But it was on the 14th floor. I remember that because we found a long, quiet hallway and followed it to an elevator, and once we boarded the elevator, and the doors closed, I said, “Isn’t the 14th floor really the 13th floor? For triskadekaphobic reasons?”

Yes. We checked, and the numbers went straight from 12 to 14. Good lord – awfully superstitious for 1992, which seemed at the time of course, very modern.

Ah well, 14 it is. We hit the button and did potty dances while the elevator rose silently, then the doors opened and the three of us strode confidently off the elevator, and then we all produced frowns as the doors slid shut behind us.

This wasn’t a hotel. We were in some kind of vestibule with four elevators in it, including the one behind us. To our right and to our left were offices – an architectural firm and a law firm – with heavy oak doors lined by vertical windows. Next to the elevator behind us, a metal ashtray was mounted to the wall, and along the architect’s doors sat a potted plant about the size and shape of R2D2, but it looked nothing like him.

We all put our hands on our hips and Rob, the tallest and shaggiest of the three of us said, “Huh.”

Then we spent ten minutes pressing the button to call the elevator, but the elevator would not respond. It was very, very quiet in the vestibule.

DJ was a skinny little guy like me, except he cared how he looked so he had some product in his hair and was wearing a non-hobo shirt and had shaved. He said, “I guess since it’s after business hours, maybe they lock the elevators, so you can’t call them?”

“They should maybe lock the number 14 button then,” I suggested. ”This is a problem.”

We all had beers in our pockets, so we popped them open and sat down for a minute. I looked at the potted plant and said, “I’m going to stand up in about two minutes and pee in that potted plant right there, if you guys want to think about what else to look at.”

We didn’t have phones to look at, so that was something to mull over.

“Huh.” Rob said again.

A half an hour later, all of us had peed in the plant, and I imagine there was an odor. Next to one of the elevators was an emergency panel which would only open if you broke the emergency glass. It was either hang around there all night - or possibly all weekend since it was Friday night - or break the glass, so we crushed our beer cans, stuffed them in the butt compartment of the wall-mounted ash tray, and then I broke the glass with my elbow and opened the panel.

Ah – an emergency phone inside. I picked it up and said, “I’m terribly sorry, but we’ve selected the wrong elevator and now we’re trapped on the 14th floor of the business side of your hotel. Can someone..”

But the line was dead. Of course the line was dead.

One more beer each apiece, and the rest was still out in the car. We sat on the floor like you see people doing at the airport when their flight’s delayed, killing our beers and alternating between frowning at each other and cracking up.

“You’d think if you break the emergency glass there’d be some kind of alarm somewhere,” DJ mused. ”You’d think that would do something, rather than just being glass.”

I said, “I would think you would turn off the elevator if it went to Weekend Business Limbo.”

Rob said, “Still, my sister is on this floor of this building, just waaaaaaaay around the other side.”

“Close,” I agreed. “We came very close.”

It all became surreal, like a Twilight Zone episode. Was this some kind of experiment? Were we being watched to see how we’d handle the situation? Were we really dolls in a Salvation Army barrel?

Suddenly I found myself staring at the door of the law office. We had been sitting in the vestibule for an hour and a half, and not long before, I’d realized that the hinges to the law office doors were on our side.

I said, “I vote we take one of those doors off its hinges.”

Getting up to look through the window next to them, I could clearly see an “”Exit” sign, above another door in there among the desks and cubicles, with the word “STAIRS” on it.

DJ had a pocket knife. We used it to pop the pins out of the hinges, and pulled the heavy door right out of the deadbolt locking mechanism, and leaned it against the wall. Aware that we were officially breaking into a law office, I hit the stairs running, down several flights of stairs before finding an unlocked door. I blasted through it to a short hallway, which led to another vestibule, same layout, similar plant, similar ash tray.

Tapping the call button made a pleasant chiming sound, and the elevator arrived in seconds. I jumped on it, hit 14, and the doors opened up to DJ and Rob standing there, blithely wondering if I was going to be me or a carload of cops. I said, “Hold the door.”

So DJ propped the door open while Rob and I fit the heavy law office door back onto its deadbolt, then into its hinges. We tapped the pins down easily, and I had to use my heel for the bottom one, then we bumbled back into the elevator, hit the button for the ground floor, and down we went the way we came. When the doors opened, we blarneyed past a guy in a black suit speaking into a radio, but he said nothing to us and we located the correct elevator, found his sister, confirmed there were no dudes there, just shopping bags, and got diagnosed as idiots by the three people we’d come here to check on.

They might have been right, and they might have been wrong – it sure felt like a psychological experiment to us, and it was a full day before we shook the surreal feeling – but we never heard a word about the elevator or the break-in, and if Rob’s sister had any unsavory dude-related plans, well, we took care of that.