A matter of perspective

So I sent my dad and stepmom an article about a nudist convention just outside of Atlanta as a joke, since they were whitewater rafting in Idaho at the time, and it was such a terrible tragedy that they couldn't make it.

I got the following responses:

Dad- "Really cute. They missed something by not having us there."

Ray Ann, about 12 hours later- "No way would I exhibit this fat body!"

I think this says a lot about differences between the sexes...

You know you're fucked when...

Gary Condit is the only person willing to vouch for your character.

James Traficant Expelled From House Of Representatives By 420-1 Vote.

Goodbye, Rep. Traficant. I hope you get the crap beaten out of you in prison for that hideous haircut.

Just hopeless

I'm such a hopeless fucking romantic. You'd never know it to read most of the bizzaro shit I post here, but underneath my caustic exterior beats a heart of pudding.

I try to hide it. I'm not terribly proud of the fact that I get all mushy at romantic comedies. Not all of them, mind you. I'm happy to say that dreck like You've Got Mail bounces off the stiff wall of sarcasm I've spent many years lovingly constructing.

But a good movie? I just turn into a smiling, giggling idiot.

I was blissfully reintroduced to this phenomenon tonight when I rented Amelie, an excellent movie that comes from France. It is in French, but the subtitles are large enough that you can actually read them, and is actually good as opposed to existentialist and pretentious, like French movies have a tendency to be.

I'm not sure what it was about the movie that made me love it so much. Maybe it was the elaborate lengths that Amelie goes to in order to work up the courage to speak to her true love. Maybe it was the hilariously paranoid excuses she came up with for someone being late. Maybe it was the scene where her love walks out, and she quite literally melts.

I think movies affect you most when you see a little bit of yourself in the characters. The trick to making a great movie is to make one that hits on some common chord of humanity, and this movie really nailed it in my book.

Sometimes however, you're just in the mood to believe true love exists again, and you watch something like this, and it makes you smile. I've been grinning like an idiot for an hour now, and I really forgot how good that can be.

Though I did get a funny look from the clerk at "_blank">White Hen when I went to buy milk.

I promise I will return to my regularly scheduled snideness tomorrow.

And you can quote him

"It doesn't just suck dick. It sucks uber-dick."

-Mark, on having to report from downtown next quarter.

Da train! Da train!

I take the El to and from work every day, and mostly, I like it.

I can read, I can be half-asleep, and I don't generally end up getting too psychotic towards my fellow commuters.

The only problem is that when I leave work anytime between about 4:46pm and 5:30pm, the trains that come are so crowded that I would have done better to stay at the office for another half hour.

I don't get as mad about this as I would about sitting on the Dan Ryan for 20 minutes and moving about three inches, as I would if I drove, but it still kind of pisses me off to see train after train after train, packed with people by the doors.

The middle is sometimes packed too, but occasionally, there's just an impenetrable blob by the doors while the middle of the car remains relatively open. This violates many tenets of commuting courtesy, but whatever.

I think we just need the people from Tokyo's subway system that literally shove as many commuters onto the train as they can get before the doors close. Chicagoans, I think, might be a bit more agitated towards this idea, but at least it'd get people on the damn train.

This plan might hit a snag in the high likleihood of Chicago residents shoving back and having someone end up on the tracks. But if you've ever seen While You Were Sleeping, you know if you fall onto El tracks, you won't get immediately electrocuted, and will instead be rescued by a gallant Sandra Bullock.

Which might actually be an incentive for some. No one that's seen Hope Floats, but for the many legions of people that are blissfully unaware of that atrocity, the prospect of being rescued by Sandra Bullock might be cool.

And then I could actually get on the damn train and get home before the 6pm Simpsons.

City slicker's first tractor pull

"Oh, hey, my school's tractor pulling team is pulling today. You wanna go down and watch?"

This question came from Ray, my friend Elisa's fiancee, who I was going down to Champagin, Illinois to meet up with, and check on for Elisa to make sure that their new place (they're getting married in 3 weeks) wasn't a total mess. It was cleaner than my place, so it passed the (not very difficult) test.

He asked me the above question before I began my drive down, and an answer I never thought would come out of my mouth did: "Yeah, sure!"

Until yesterday, I was unaware that there were colleges with tractor-pulling teams. Further proof that the older I get, the more I realize I don't know.

A tractor pull is a mercifully simple event to explain (anyone who's ever tried explaining baseball to a bunch of Brazilians and Italians knows what I'm talking about).

You've got a 300 foot strip of dirt. You hook up your tractor, which weighs anywhere from 4 to 6 tons, to a sled with about 30 tons of weights on it, and you see how far you can pull it. Whoever pulls it the farthest, wins. If you pull it all 300 yards, it's called a "full pull." If more than one person does that, they have a pull-off. The end.

Now I don't know a spark plug from a cam shaft, so I was a bit confused about a lot of the lingo getting tossed back and forth. However, I was saved by the fact that Ray won permission to marry Elisa by fixing her dad's car for under 50 bucks when mechanics had quoted him minimums of $1200.

So I got to ask some fairly stupid questions, like "So why is fire shooting out of the exhaust pipe?" without feeling like a total moron. Answer: The smoke is unburned fuel, and sometimes it gets superheated and reignites. Thus, fire shoots out of the tractor.

Like every sport, there is a great deal of strategy involved in tractor pulling: Where to hang the weights that make the tractor heavier (and thus provide more traction), what side of the track is running the best, what engine parts will give you the best performance.

And of course, how to get the thickest, blackest smoke you can get coming out of that fucker.

The best example of this was in the Truck Pull, when people get in their souped-up pickups and try to pull the same sled that the tractors have been pulling. The trucks are just about two or three tons lighter.

One guy drove all the way in from Terre Haute, Indiana in his seriously modified Dodge (instead of an exhaust pipe, this fucking thing had a smokestack coming out of the hood) to give an exhibition.

So he hooks up to the sled, throws his truck into neutral and revs the engine until the smoke is nice and black, and then takes off at about 40 miles an hour down the strip.

Problem was, he dropped his driveshaft about 200 feet down the track, which, from what I understand, basically is what takes the mechanical power from the motor and transmits it to the axles (which turn the wheels), letting you, you know, drive.

This huge truck came to a dead stop, and the weights just slammed forward into the front of the sled, putting it out of commission for a good 20 minutes. It didn't damage the truck all that much, and the guy was able to get his truck limping off the track.

But he must have had a nice long walk back to Terre Haute this morning.

A tractor/truck pull is a surprisingly zen experience, at least until the Mosquitoes of Death come out and attack every millimeter of exposed skin, as mosquitoes tend to do. The rumbling from all the tractors made me feel oddly calm, though I knew if any of the parking brakes slipped out, I'd be flattened into the cornfield next to the strip.

Some days however, it's nice just to be outside and sit in the sun, have a couple of sno-cones, and watch guys try and prove they have more horsepower (and thus, testosterone) than the guy down the street. Or rural route, as the case may be.

Though I think I gave myself away as a city slicker by wearing a Bob Dylan shirt...

Anything For A Vote

Janet Reno's Dance Party becomes a reality.