You know...

At this rate, it's going to take me longer to write about this damn roadtrip than it actually took to make it.

Dee Nee Nee Nee, Dee Nee Nee Nee

Note: For those who can't read music, that's the Twilight Zone theme

Back to the road trip for a post or two.

I had decided to stop by Roswell, New Mexico, since I was already out in that general direction. As a souvenir shop owner I spoke to later that day put it, "Anyone going through Albuquerque with even a remote interest in Roswell tends to come take the detour."

Roswell is remarkable for its utter unremarkability for 99% of its area. The town is a hell of a lot bigger than I thought, said souvenir store guy estimating about 50,000 people lived there, and from the size of the place, I don't doubt him.

I had always kind of thought that Roswell was a backwater hole-in-the-wall, but no. As the town's sign, posted at the entrances to the town (and which says nothing about aliens) proclaims, it is the Dairy Capital of the Southwest.

In fact, if you don't notice the little alien head symbol on the Roswell Wal-Mart, nothing seems out of the ordinary at all for a medium-sized southwestern town about Roswell...until you get down towards the Alien District.

I stopped at the Roswell Chamber of Commerce to try and figure out where all the weird alien shit was, since I hadn't seen any of it, although I felt a bit embarrassed about my task. I stated roundaboutly that I was simply from out of town seeking more information about Roswell.

"Aliens, huh?" said the Chamber of Commerce employee.

"Bingo," said I.

I was directed about five blocks further down the street to the International UFO Museum And Research Center, and the other alien-related areas of Roswell, which for some reason are all concerntrated in about a four block radius of weirdness.

You don't initially notice anything weird, until you look at the streetlamps. They are the same, bulbous style as the ones in the rest of Roswell, except the ones in this stretch have the Alien Eyes painted on them, so the lamps look like Alien Heads. Very odd.

Before my pilgrammage the Museum, I ended up eating lunch at a place called the Crashdown Diner, complete with flying saucer sticking out of the side of the restaurant, and entrees named after various aspects of the conspiracy theory.

Surprisingly, their food was probably the best (diner food division) I had during my entire roadtrip. Their motto is "Out Of This World Food Made Right Here On Earth." I would have gone with "Best Cheeseburgers In The Universe," but I think theirs is probably better.

Anyway, I then made my trip to the UFO Museum and Research Center, which was pretty entertaining. There's all kinds of stuff about what happened, and they actually offer a relatively balanced view of what happened.

While they do feature "Artist's Renderings" of the supposed crash, they also talk about a certain type of (at the time) classified military target vehicle that bears a strong resemblence to what people claim they found in Roswell.

They also spend a lot of time participating in one of my favorite activities, making fun of the Government.

The U.S. Military released a stunningly dumb (even for them) report in 1997 (the 50th anniversary of the "crash") which claimed that people had actually seen test dummies instead of alien bodies, but had actually seen them in 1957, not 1947.

The only problem with this explanation is that there are newspaper archives from all over the country reporting on the incident as taking place in 1947, including follow-up stories about it turning out to supposedly be a weather balloon.

Personally, I think the most rational explanation is that the Army accidentally had a targeting vehicle go down and tried to cover it up, and the locals blew it way out of proportion because of an ongoing scare over "flying saucers" taking place in '47.

I am far more willing to belive that the U.S. Government panicked and did a piss-poor job trying to cover up the accidental crash of a top-secret test vehicle than that Aliens landed and nobody said a goddamn thing about it to the press.

Bush can't even keep his goddamn economic plan secret, and people think there's a massive conspiracy about aliens. Please. Does anyone honestly belive:

a) If Aliens crash-landed here, their friends wouldn't come back looking for them and cause way more of a stink?
b) If this really happened, after 50 years, the press could come up with something more substantial than hearsay?

There are a bunch of sworn affadavits at the Roswell museum, but most of them are attesting to the fact that either the guy who's supposed to have seen the aliens told these people he saw them, or that the material that was supposedly the spacecraft was later replaced by the "weather baloon."

Anyway, it was kind of interesting to learn more about the whole thing, especially the crazy people who believe we are actually under siege by the aliens.

Like the folks who run the "Alien Resistance Headquarters," across the street from the IUFOMRC. I didn't even go in, because the sign scared me so much. I'm going to try and post my pictures of Roswell when I eventually get them developed, and you'll see why I fled this place.

I wound up souvenir shopping (and ended up in a music store and came perilously close to buying a really good acoustic bass for dirt cheap, but I couldn't even afford dirt cheap), and struck up a converstation with the guy I eventually bought a glow-in-the-dark shot glass for Adam, my roommate.

He seemed like a fairly normal guy, so I asked him how long he had been doing this. Turned out he had been a cop, as I recall somewhere around L.A., though not in L.A. He retired to Roswell, and made an alien refrigerator magnet as a joke five or six years ago.

Within a year, he had sold 10,000. He ended up opening the store I was at shortly thereafter, since he figured out he could make a fuckload of money sitting around selling schmucks like me glow-in-the-dark shot glasses and other assorted tchotchkes, though that wasn't the way he worded it.

I asked him how many people came through for all the alien shit every year, and he told me they get 20,000-30,000 people every year for their UFO Festival the first couple of weeks in July, and 50,000-100,000 overall.

His numbers could have been off, though he purported to have gotten them from the Chamber of Commerce. This is a smart town. Even the people who think the UFO nuts are loony know better than to say so, since it's turned the town into a cash cow.

'Tis a cardinal sin to look a gift alien in the mouth, you know.

Anyway, for more information on all this shit, you can check out the Albuquerque Journal's entertaining Roswell Site, which has news stories related to various Roswell and UFO type-stuff.

If you've got an extra day to waste, it's an entertaining way to waste it, although I wouldn't recommend planning your trip around it. Just if you find yourself running ahead of schedule, drop by and get a good laugh and a good Alien Burger.

Hurrah!

On a much happier note, my heat has been, (at least temporarily) fixed! The thermometer in my room is slooooooooooooooowly creeping back up towards the seventy degree mark, up from the ridiculous 56 degree mark it hit this afternoon.

If it stays fixed for more than a week, I'll probably die of shock.

A Little Too Close To Home...

I think I would have gotten a much bigger laugh out of the Free Condom Harsh Reminder of Sexless Existence story in The Onion if it didn't remind me so much of the guys with the nudie cards in Vegas reminding me of my sexless existence.

But then I got wasted and made out with a dentist, so all is well. Or, more accuately, not...

Best paragraph:

"When I sort of frowned at the condom in my hand, they pulled me over to pick any that I liked better from their cornucopia of condoms," Tudor said. "Lubricated, non-lubricated, for-her-pleasure, for-his, mint-flavored. They even had ones wrapped in foil that looked like candy coins. Which, I hate to admit, caught my eye for a second. Chocolate, I would've had some use for."

Privacy Notice

I've had a couple of requests for misspellings of names and removal of last names from people who I link to in order to protect anonymity/non-Googleability. Anyone else who would like this consideration, please let me know.

Anyone who links to me, I don't care. I'm not in a position with any sort of responsibility, and anyone anal enough to Google me to find out what sort of person I am is probably not my type anyway (and that goes for both employers and potential romances).

And it's also not like they couldn't figure out who I am from the URL...

B-b-bollocks t-t-to t-t-this...

Ok, it's so cold in my apartment that it took me an hour and a half to thaw my feet last night, so I think I'm going to bed early tonight so I don't die tomorrow at bartending school.

Fucking Conrad. The heating guy is supposedly going to fix this for good tomorrow, though that's about the seventh time he's supposed to have fixed it for good. I should see what I need to legally form an angry mob to stone my cheap, dumbass landlord to death...

More details of the road trip and the joy of bartending to come.

Hee

They have this thing on VH1 called "Most Outrageous Game Show Moments," which is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Years and years of wrong answers, slip ups, etc., packed into one hilarious hour.

I just about fell off the couch at this exchange, between the host of the British version of Family Feud and the guy in the lightning round:

Host: Name something you bring to the beach.
Man: Turkey.
Host (trying not to laugh): The first thing you buy at the grocery store.
Man: Turkey.
Host (laughing his ass off): Something you stuff.
Man: Turkey!

Naturally, he got zero points for the first two and something like 21 for the last, since apparently in Britain they stuff chicken more often than turkey.

It airs again at 10pm central tonight, and I'd do it if you need a laugh. Hell of a lot better than watching the news.

Hooray For Bored Film Majors

This is what FinalCut Pro was invented for. Wish to hell I knew who did it, the editing is brilliant.

Thanks to, oddly enough, Weigel, for sending me this. I'm sure the rest of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy will eventually get him for this.

Mmm...Crater

The words "meteor crater" do not generally bring excitement to people in my 18-25 age group, unless a) they're geologists or b) they're space nuts.

For some reason, over the last couple of years, I have turned into the latter, although more about the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era than now, since then, there was this marvelous sense of purpose, and recently, it's begun to feel we're just kind of putting things up there.

So I knew that there was an extremely large meteor crater out in Arizona, where many of the astronauts who had walked on the moon had trained in field geology, so that they wouldn't get up on the moon, look at a moon rock, and say, "Wow, ain't that a purdy one?"

What I did not know was that it's only a few miles off of I-40, about 50 miles east of Flagstaff. I had given up on getting farther than Albuquerque that day, so when I saw signs for it on the Interstate, I figured what the hell, I'll go take a look.

What it turned out I also did not know was that a really shitty visitors center had been erected and the crater had been fenced off, so you couldn't get a real great look at it, and you also had to fork over 12 bucks to see it and the craptacular museum now built into the side.

The museum actually wasn't that bad, with a "create your own meteor" computer simulator that let numerous small children obliterate the earth with monstrous space junk, much to their delight.

There was a lot of stuff there for people who were attracted by the idea of something, anything! between Flagstaff and Albuquerque besides breathtakingly beautiful scenery. Beautiful scenery is apparently not educational enough for some folks.

The crater is kind of weird, because it actually sticks up quite a bit from the surrounding desert. It looks kind of like a mesa, but you can't tell that it's anything but a mesa until you go up and look down and, oh, it's a giant goddamn crater.

The crater, according to the Museum, was formed by a meteor 150 feet across, weighing 300,000 tons, and traveling at about 40,000 miles an hour. Things like this (like my experience at the Hoover Dam) tend to be irrationally obsessed with measurements.

Like the statement on the website and repeated in the museum, that "The force generated by its impact was equal to the explosion of 20 million tons of TNT." That's wonderful to know, in case I should ever run into 20,000,000 tons of TNT, with the fuse going.

At least I'll be able to react better than Wile E. Coyote (who'd just sit there and blink, or possibly open a weensy umbrella), and say, "Hey, this is about to blow a crater the size of..." before getting blown to smithereens.

To be fair, it's also not a museum designed for people who know a lot about the space program in the 1960's, which I freely admit, I know an inordinate amount about, especially for someone not even born until the 1980's.

The fact that you can't go down into the crater also kind of bites, but is understandable because you don't want someone tracking your geological evidence around and screwing it all up, and/or spitting gum in your geological evidence.

Anyway, if you're into geology or space-type junk, or if you really like holes (best Simpsons line so far this season: "Did you know the natural enemy of the hole is the pile?"), I'd recommend stopping by if you're in that neck of the woods.

Otherwise, save your 12 bucks and fly past it at 85 miles an hour, like most of the sensible people do.

Spam Spam Spam Spam

Gene Weingarten writes in his column about the Washington Post's vaunted internal anti-spam blocker not exactly doing its job:

"The Post, for example, had to eliminate certain words from its spam filter when it discovered that completely innocuous e-mails were being filtered out.

Like what? I ask Diane.

'Like résumés with the expression "cum laude." ' "

Grand Chasm

On my way back from Vegas, I decided to take the southern route along I-40, taking me through the balmy 60 degree temperatures of Flagstaff and Albuquerque, instead of the ice-slicked roads along I-70 and I-80.

I realized that this route also lowered the number of States I Have Never Visited to four: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Oregon (the ones that were firsts this trip were Nebraska, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico). This is kind of an odd realization to make at the ripe old age of 21, but I digress.

Also, if I had taken I-70, I would have gone through Denver and Kansas City, necessitating visits to many steprelatives I have no desire to see. Especially my stepnieces. My stepsister is very nice, but her kids are total brats.

The but the main advantage of this route is that it meant I got to go see the Grand Canyon, something I had never done, but have always wanted to do. I knew the crowds would be lower because it was winter, but I also knew it might be a little cold.

I had tried to make it there in time to catch the sunset after I left Vegas, but my fiasco attempt at trying to go over the Hoover Dam to get out of Vegas on New Year's day (wasting 40 minutes waiting and then saying fuck it and taking about a 75 mile detour) precluded that.

I stayed in Williams, Arizona, which is where you get off I-40 to go to the Grand Canyon if you're coming from the west. I tried to get up real early so I could go see the Canyon in the first light of day, but that failed miserably and I ended up getting there around 10am.

The Grand Canyon is stunningly beautiful. I could go on and on about the millions of years it took to create this wonder blah blah blah but it all adds up to nothing until you actually see it, look down into it, and almost fall into it.

I took part in the latter recreational activity when I scrambled up around a railing onto some rocks to try and get a better picture of a really cool rock formation that I couldn't get from the railing-enclosed Designated Tourist Area.

I HATE heights, so I had to sit down to take the picture because I was afraid I would get vertigo and/or slip and fall into the Canyon, and that would not be a fun way to die.

As much as I laugh when they show the Simpsons episode where Homer tries to jump Springfield Gorge on Bart's skateboard and ends up tumbling down the Gorge over and over again, I didn't think it'd be too fun to try and re-enact as a reality show...just without the cameras.

The other great thing about the Grand Canyon is you can look waaaaaaaaaaay down and see how huge the rapids are on the Colorado river. As a whitewater enthusiast, I was salivating. I know it costs upwards of 3 grand, but someday, I swear, I'm gonna raft the Canyon.

I definitely was right about the crowds being lower. I barely saw any cars when I was driving up to the Canyon, and it was a fairly light day there. It did kind of suck that because I was the only person in my car, I had to pay the whole $20/car fee, but it was worth it.

I was also right about it being a touch nippy. One thing I didn't know about the Grand Canyon is that the elevation of the South Rim (where I was) is somewhere around 6,700 feet, and consequently, it's really fucking cold there.

When I left Willams, it cannot possibly have been warmer than about 10 degrees, and it didn't get much higher than 25 by the time I left at noon. This definitely helps keep the tourist hordes away, but it certainly shortened my visit a bit.

What lengthened my visit was accidentally getting lost. I turned down a road that eventually turned into a dirt road, thinking it would take me to the Canyon, when in fact it led me to Kabiab National Forest, and thus away from the Canyon.

I felt kind of bad, because some people followed me, apparently thinking I knew where I was going, which I definitely did not, and for a while, I thought they knew where they were going. I ended up apologizing to them for the wild goose chase when I ran into them at an actual overlook later.

The other funny thing was seeing about 50 Ohio State fans wandering about, since the Fiesta Bowl was in Tempe, and many of them had stopped on the drive in from Ohio. Some of them noticed my NU license plate holder and keychain and gave me a wee glare, which was amusing.

Anyway, I highly reccomend going out and seeing the Grand Canyon, although I'm sure in the summertime the heat and/or crowds can be extremely frustrating. There's really no way to describe its breathtaking beauty in words, you've just gotta see it to believe it.

I'll try and post some of my pictures once I get around to getting them developed, which at my regular rate of getting pictures developed, should be sometime in 2006.

Best Freudian Slip of 2002

When we were in Vegas, I made one of the more accurate Freudian slips I've ever made while I was talking to my friend Joanna on the phone:

"Yeah, we wanted to save money and since drinks in the clubs are like eight bucks each, we went out and bought a bunch of alcowhore...I mean alcohol..."

Those of you who have seen me drunk know this is a particularly accurate description of my own personal reaction to alcohol...