Friday, August 31, 2007

Thoughts while boiling an egg

Something terrible happened to me last week. Something life altering. Something that dramatically impacted my ability to do something as simple as feeding myself.
My microwave broke.
As food-related disasters go, this was miles worse than the great hot plate meltdown of ’04 or that spinach recall from a few months ago. If I had to make a comparison, I'd put it right up there with the Potato Famine.
Maybe you think I'm being melodramatic, but this was a major blow to my cooking routine. Gone from my home-cooked meal rotation are staples like frozen burritos and Hot Pockets and, for the love of Emeril Lagasse, Easy Mac. I can't go back to regular mac now. Boil water? On the stove? Are you crazy? I'm a busy guy. I've got things to do. I've got television shows to watch and video games to play.
I've tried to cope the best I can, but a man can only live on frozen pizza and Chipotle burritos for so long.
I've had to resort to drastic measures recently. I even fired up the grill. I cooked pork tenderloins. I had meals with actual vegetables. My digestive system is still recovering.
Anyway, all this waiting I have to do as I explore non-irradiating cooking methods has left me with a some time to think. And that's always a dangerous thing. Here are a few of the thoughts that have crossed my mind as I waited for the toast to pop up.
• I'm going to start a list of people I'd like to punch in the face. Up first, the guy quoted in the current issue of Newsweek who says he bought a hybrid Honda Civic but traded it in for a Toyota Prius because the Honda looked too much like a regular car and he wasn't getting enough credit from strangers on the street for being sensitive to the environment.
Second on the list is Michael Vick, but only if he's strapped into one of those Hannibal Lecter-style restraint systems.
• The NFL season starts soon, which means football fans nationwide have spent countless hours in recent weeks combing through magazines and web sites and police reports in an attempt to put together the best possible Fantasy Football team. If we devoted this much effort to saving the environment we could solve global warming and Al Gore wouldn't have anything to talk about at parties.
• I've never actually played Fantasy Football, but I see the appeal. It gives the average fan a chance to experience all the the glamour and excitement and prestige of managing a professional sports franchise, but in a way that nobody other than you actually cares about.
With the possible exception of the weather, Fantasy Football might be world's leading cause of incredibly boring conversations. If someone tries to tell me what receiver they drafted in the third round or how many yards their backup quarterback threw for I might actually try to punt him.
• Seriously, there has to be a Fantasy Football league somewhere that uses team arrests as a statistic, doesn't there?
• Fine, two words of advice for anyone out there with a high Fantasy Football draft pick and no idea how to use it: Tarvaris Jackson. But you didn't hear it from me.
• On the bright side, I continue to dominate my one-man Fantasy MLS Soccer league.
• In other super-geeky news that somehow seems acceptable because it's vaguely sports-related: The latest version of the Madden football video game allows players who win their virtual Super Bowl to design and order their own championship ring. And yet somehow people think I'm weird when I wear the "King of Pac Man" cape I made with a shower curtain and a Bedazzler.
• I bought a pack of plain white t-shirts the other day. They came in a resealable package. Why in the world is this necessary? Are my new undershirts likely to go bad? Should I keep them in the refrigerator rather than in my dresser drawer?
If you're ever standing near me and notice an odd smell, I guess now you'll know why.
Whoops, gotta go. My water is boiling.

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Now playing: Radiohead - Pyramid Song
via FoxyTunes

Friday, August 24, 2007

Who wants to live forever?

A researcher at Cambridge University who runs something called the Methuselah Mouse prize for lengthening the age of mice (Motto: Because the world needs more crotchety old mice.) told the BBC recently he believes the first human to live to 1,000 might already be 60 years old. I imagine this will come as wonderful news to people who hold out hope of seeing Michael Vick play another professional football game.
Geneticist Aubrey de Grey, who appears to be shortening his own life expectancy by devoting considerable energy to maintaining a beard massive enough to hide an Olsen Twin, told the BBC he believes lifespans will increase dramatically in the years to come as new technologies evolve to fight the effects of aging. I don't claim to have a strong science background, but as I understand them the reasons for de Gray's beliefs boil down essentially to, because. Come on, though. If we can't trust science geeks with crazy-ass beards, who can we trust?
De Gray argues the technology to combat aging already exists in preliminary form, which sounds a little like arguing scientists are on the verge of building a working time travel machine because Doc Brown slipped on the toilet and invented the flux capacitor.
Still, de Gray is confident. He believes the technologies in question will be in use in mice within 10 years — finally bringing life to the dream of nigh-immortal super rats whose only natural enemies will be super-old cats — and in humans within a decade after that. Once that happens, we can kiss good-bye the frailty that currently comes with old age. Science, de Gray says, will correct all the wrongs that nature and millions of years of evolution have decided are a good idea. After that? Forget dying of old age and start watching out for passing trucks.
Seriously, getting hit by a truck appears to be de Gray's choice for leading cause of death in the anti-aging future. He mentions it at least twice. I see things a little differently. I see the number of deaths attributed to fights started over stupid little things that happened three centuries earlier skyrocketing. Alternately, I figure we'll all slowly starve to death as the population of undying humans and super-mice slowly grows too large for our natural resources to support.
Mostly, though, it's going to be the stupid fights between two 964-year-olds about whether the Timberwolves were stupid to trade Kevin Garnett or who got a raw deal in a fantasy football trade back in 2142.
Face it, if we're going to live to 1,000 we're going to have a lot of free time on our hands. And a lot of time to hold stupid grudges.
De Gray seems to think this eternal life deal is a good thing. I'm not so sure. I know plenty of people I wouldn't want to have around for 10 minutes, much less 10 centuries. I don't think I want to live in a world where I have to spend the next 967 years getting news reports of a centuries-old Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan beamed directly into my brain by the soon-to-be-invented neural-news networks. You think it's hard to get away from stupid reality shows now? Wait until everyone on the planet is all connected at the brain.
Hasn’t de Gray seen the movie Highlander? That was one unhappy immortal Scotsman.
Living for 1,000 years without a significant decline in mental or physical ability would presumably mean 1,000 years of getting up for work every day. These days people are worried about putting away enough during their working years to live comfortably from 65 until their death, which with current, non-made-up science, is likely to occur sometime in the 35 or so years that follow (runaway trucks notwithstanding). You think your 401k contributions are going to be enough to last you more than nine centuries?
And, ultimately, there's the whole natural resource thing. If global warming is a problem now, what's going to happen when we can legitimately count body heat from the undying hordes as a contributing factor?
Actually, I might have a solution for that last problem. By de Gray's beard-influenced logic it may already exist in preliminary stages. It's called Soylent Green, and I hear it's delicious.


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Now playing: Atmosphere - Cats Van Bags
via FoxyTunes

Friday, August 17, 2007

Two of a kind

Dear Tiger Woods,
Hey, Tiger. Congratulations on your win last weekend at the PGA Championship. And congratulations on collecting your 13th major tournament title faster than any golfer in history. That's pretty sweet. I bet you're pretty excited.
I played a little golf last weekend too, Tiger. Around the time you were tying a major championship record by shooting a 63 in front of a crowd of thousands of cheering spectators, I was teaming up with Independent sports guy Pat Rupp to whup former Independent general manager Chad Richardson and the sports guy at our company's paper in Hastings. I realize our round didn't get quite as much news coverage as yours. But we won by 14 strokes. What'd you win by? That's right: two. Don't feel bad, though. Some people just perform better than others in the heat of competition.
Was that out of line, Tiger? Sorry about that. I'm not trying to make you mad. Actually, I think we're a lot alike, you and I.
Consider this: You play golf for a living. You spend countless hours refining your game and you make millions of dollars every year in tournament winnings and endorsements, including one for Buick where you talk about breaking the window of your car. My round Friday was the first I've played this year. When I got to the course I had to shake glass out of my shoes, because they haven't left my trunk since last summer and they were in there when someone threw a rock through my window a few weeks ago.
I know. Spooky, right?
You are known for your powerful golf swing. I often swing really, really hard. You can hit your pitching wedge something like 200 yards. I can hit my driver that far. On a good day. With the wind at my back.
Need more? How about this: You're married to a superhot Swedish model who recently gave birth to your first child. I'm single at the moment, but I've been to Sweden. Also, we just got a dog in the house where I live. I realize a dog and a baby aren't the same thing, but a lot of the same issues come up. You know: feeding, walking, flea baths.
It's like looking in a mirror, right? And that's not all.
You have your name on a video game. I play video games (not yours, though; I'm not a big fan of golf games). You have clubs made to your specifications with the latest golf technology. My dad made most of my clubs something like 15 years ago. Millions of people read about you in newspaper stories. Literally fives of people read this column every week.
Life's not easy for guys like you and me, Tiger. You've set such high expectations by performing so well at such a young age. Likewise, now that I've helped power my two-man team to a score of 84 people expect more from me. Like that I continue to hit the ball without causing it to slice viciously into the parking lot and maim innocent bystanders. Or that I actually play golf again at some point. We've got the weight of the world on our shoulders. There's you, there's me and there's Atlas, Tiger.
I guess what I'm saying, Tiger, is that we should hang out sometime. Drop me an e-mail. We can go bowling or something.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

There will always be stories

I will always remember where I was when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up. I'll always remember where I was on 9/11. And now I suspect I'll always remember that I was in the Town Pages office, waiting to conduct a job interview, when I heard the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River had collapsed.
I'm not sure I'll remember quite so well how I felt at that moment, but the emotions are still clear now. There was confusion, of course. Surely they couldn't have meant an interstate highway had just fallen into the river. Clearly it was a bridge over the highway that had fallen.
Right?
There was amazement. An urge to to talk about the tragedy with anyone and everyone. "Did you see that?" I wanted to ask and be asked. "Can you believe it?"
Ultimately, as I drove home listening to reports of the collapse on the radio, there was a kind of intellectual adrenaline rush. A desire to be at the scene not so much to see the wreckage but to tell the stories. To dig around — literally, perhaps, but mostly figuratively — and find out what had happened. Why things had gone so wrong. Who had been affected and how.
Maybe it's a reporter thing, but as I pointed my car north on Cedar Avenue that's what was going through my head. On top of the confusion and the amazement and the sadness for the people who had lost their lives there was that desire to talk to people. To find out what they had experienced. And most important to put those stories into words. To share them with as many people as I could and to get it all done to meet a deadline that wasn't even mine to worry about.
There has been no shortage of stories in the weeks following the collapse. That much has been obvious to anyone who has opened a newspaper or turned on a television news broadcast since early last Wednesday evening. Even earlier this week Twin Cities daily newspapers are dedicating entire front pages to stories coming from the collapse. Some of those stories are based solely in fact. They're the stories that attempt to explain what went wrong. What could have been done to prevent such a catastrophic failure.
Many other stories are rooted more strongly in emotion. They're the stories of the people who were touched by the disaster. Those who made it off the bridge and those who didn't.
There are local stories, too. Some of them have happy endings. Farmington resident Jeremy Schutte was on the middle section of the bridge when it collapsed. He was on the phone with his wife at the time, on his way home from work. The last words he said before his cell phone lost contact were "Oh my God, I'm in the water. Help me."
Schutte's truck ended up in the water. He had to crawl out the window and swim to the bridge deck, but he made it. He was lucky.
Other stories lack that happy ending. Some, like Peter Hausmann’s story on the front page of this issue, don't have an ending at all. At least not yet. It is all but certain Rosemount resident Hausmann was also on the bridge. According to at least one report rescuers have found his car in the bridge's wreckage but not any sign of Hausmann, who last week was one of eight people officially listed as missing by the Minneapolis Police Department.
In the week since the collapse newspapers in Minnesota and around the country have dedicated thousands of pages to telling those stories and more.
It has been popular in recent years to predict the demise of newspapers. And there is evidence to support many of those claims. Clearly the newspaper business is changing, even in places as relatively small and out-of-the way as Rosemount. In recent years we have embraced new technology in our office. We've added web pages. We've bought video cameras. We've tried to find new ways to reach readers.
But here's the thing: In the end it all comes down to stories. And whether they are about a tragedy or a triumph, whether they're delivered online or in print, in words or in video, there will still be a need for stories. And for people who get excited at the opportunity to tell them.


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Now playing: Bright Eyes - Bright Eyes - The First Day Of My Life
via FoxyTunes

Friday, August 03, 2007

Wait for it ...

These days it seems like anything really worth having has to be worth waiting in unreasonably long lines to buy. No major product can launch, it seems, without news stories about all of the dedicated fans who have pitched tents outside stores so they can be the first person to get one.
Take Harry Potter. When the most recent movie in the series debuted last month fans around the country attended midnight screenings. When the final book in the popular series hit stores a few weeks later dedicated Potterphiles — many dressed in costume, at least two straight foregoing their own wedding reception, according to one news report — loitered for hours at book stores so they could be among the first to discover whether the titular wizard died, as he was rumored to do. Or whether he killed his arch enemy. Or whether he turned out to be not actually a wizard but a leprechaun who lived in constant fear of children stealing his overly sugary cereal.
I haven't read any of the books, but I wouldn't be surprised if that last option turned out to be true. Writers love to throw in twist endings.
Anyway, whatever you think about Harry Potter it's hard to argue this: nobody ever dressed up as an old fisherman to wait in line for Ernest Hemingway books.
People waited in line for the iPhone, though. According to news reports hundreds of people camped outside of Apple stores for the earliest possible chance to seem even more pretentious while using their cell phones.
Don't get me wrong. I think the iPhone's awesome. I'd probably buy one if I was in a position to spend $600 for a phone — plus whatever early termination fee my current cell carrier would charge me so I could move to a provider everyone I know hates. I just think if I were going to do it I'd happily be a day or two late to the party if it meant I didn't have to curl up in a sleeping bag outside a mall.
Every new video game system seems to launch with massive lines these days. When Sony launched its much anticipated Playstation 3 earlier this year the truest nerds camped outside electronics stores for days for the chance to drop several hundred dollars on a souped-up Atari.
Actually, many of the people who waited for the Playstation 3 were there in hopes of putting their newly acquired systems on ebay and turning a quick profit. Thing is, so many would-be free marketeers had that idea it was hard for many of them to turn a profit. Some reportedly lost money on the consoles they spent as much as a week of their life camping outside Best Buys for. When you think about it, that's pretty hilarious.
Even the less anticipated Nintendo Wii, which remains the video game console with the most obscene-sounding name, drew lines when it launched a few days after the PS 3. One person outside a Woodbury Best Buy waited in line dressed as popular Nintendo character Luigi.
It's not just geeks who camp out for new products, though. These days people will put their dignity on the line for something as simple as a canvas shopping bag, as long as it's from the right designer. People clamored earlier this year for designer Anya Hindmarch's "I'm not a plastic bag," which was basically a simple canvas shopping bag with the phrase "I am not a plastic bag" printed on the side. Honestly, why just feel superior to people for being more sensitive to the environment when it's possible to feel superior to them for having better fashion sense at the same time. As of Tuesday, the bags, which originally sold for around $10, were going for upward of $100 on ebay.
How's that for a twist?