"Eye brake for..."

Inner workings of a state of the art laser weapon or brake light? You decide.

Buzz Lightyear had it wrong...it's not "To infinity and beyond!" - it's "An Infinity from behind...

...is really, really, really annoying!"

Seriously...can someone say "severe retinal damage"?

While my new saying might not be as catchy as the original, I am going to go out on a limb here and say the only man-made objects you can see from space other than "The Great Wall of China" are Infinity brake lights.

If you are behind someone, especially at night, and you feel the membrane peeling off your eye as easily as the skin on a grape, chances are that car in front of you is an Infinity.

If you've ever been patiently waiting behind the guy with 17 items in the "15 items or less" aisle in the store and caught a glimpse of that red multi-light scanner doohickey and it gave you flashbacks to the "Sandman scene in Logan's Run with Farrah Fawcett vivaciously aiding the laser-happy plastic surgeon"...you'll have a tiny understanding of what I'm trying to get across here.

If you've ever had the inclination (with or without having a buzz) to look down the working barrel of a laser pointer and then, like a total idiot, turn it on...well...I think you get the message by now.

Why these lights have to be twice the brightness of anything an arc welder deals with is beyond me.

Have the designers who okayed the 20,000,000 foot-candle luminosity of the light system ever driven BEHIND one of their cars? As with other automotive manufacturers, they might stand behind their cars...but I'm inclined to believe they do so only in the daytime.

I was driving home from Birmingham the other night when what should pull out before me during rush-hour traffic, but a car with tail lights doing more damage to my cornea than any solar eclipse ever could. Between stops I managed to glimpse the type of car: Infinity.

I tried in vain to let someone else get in front of me. I nearly came to a dead stop and signaled to the merging drivers to "go ahead of me". Certainly any car between me and the Infinity would be a welcome change. Any car that is, but another friggen Infinity!

I kid you not...there must be about 170,092 of them in Birmingham and each of them was damned determined to get in front of me on the way home that night. Each time I figured I'd get a reprieve...a traffic light...a guy weaving in and out of traffic like a bat out of hell...you got it -- another Infinity.

My eyes felt like they were bleeding razor blades by the time a late model truck with a missing taillight and a smelly exhaust got in front of me. I thanked God and prayed he was heading the same direction I was.

He wasn't. And yes...another Infinity took his place as soon as he turned off.

I'm just hoping there's some level of Hell they toss the people into who invented this "shield your eyes as if it were Medusa" brake light system. And I hope that level of Hell forces them to have their eyes yanked open wide with a "can't blink" contraption like "Alex" was strapped up to in A Clockwork Orange...combined with being subjected to a never-ending slit-lamp ophthalmologic exam...until infinity...

...and beyond.

(31 Jan 11: I hate when I make typos or other such stupidities which I find days later. This time it was a big technical one -- I meant to say "laser pointer" and had typed "laser printer"...which makes absolutely NO sense whatsoever in the context of what I was trying to get across. I have fixed it and now it reads better - but it's too late for most of you...all three people who read this blog. I had my chance and blew it. I'm going to have to read these things out loud to my kids next time...a fact I know they will JUST LOVE as they nearly feign death to get out of reading them as it is now.)

Things Are Going From Bad to Worst...

Well, it's been a very bad couple weeks in the entertainment industry...Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and now Billy Mays. Very sad indeed.

So, I thought a little levity might be in order. But, be forewarned...these are really bad. In fact, they are amongst the worst out there...and therein lies the rub: they are SUPPOSED to be.

Imagine sitting at your desk in school when you were young...and the teacher just told you to write a story about summer vacation. If you were like me...it was an exercise in futility, imagination, and worst of all...getting it all started. The dreaded opening sentence. It all hinged on that. Once you got your story started...it usually came easier after. But...oh...that "starting off" point.

There's a myriad of ways to start off any story. Now, granted, first grade English class compositions probably weren't exactly going to garner you any movie deals. The number of screenwriters who struck it big at seven...well, you can probably count them on any cartoon character's hand (bear in mind...cartoon characters typically only have four fingers...or, three fingers and a thumb, if you prefer). In other words...there probably aren't many. But even at the tender age of seven...you came to realize just how detrimental the wording of that opening line is...and how hard it is to just...well...start...period.

And the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest capitalizes on just that. Period. Yes, up until that dreaded period...you can string words together any way you like...all forms of time-honoured punctuation is accepted...except the period. Once you place that dot at the end. That's it. That's all folks...that's all you get...that's all she (or he) wrote.

So, Professor of English, Scott Rice, started this contest way back in 1982 - as a lesson of sorts I figure...highlighting the pros and cons of opening sentence structure. It goes something like this:

Good: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." -- Opening line to A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

Bad: "Me and Mommy and Daddy went to Disneyworld and we rode the rides and then we got popcorn and then my brother, Timmy, threw up, and the lady had to clean it, and then we went back to our room." -- Opening line reminiscent of countless children's' essays (around the world) the first day of school.

Worst: "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness." -- Opening line by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford.

Do you see where this is headed?

Well, perhaps Professor Rice didn't either...but from a small beginning with, I believe, three whole entries...from his English class the first year...to what it has become: A literary legend. To win this prize is [almost] akin to the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer AND the Oscar...rolled into one. It has ballooned into the juggernaut that it is now.

And how do I know this?

I won it back in 2003...but you can read all about that in a blog I wrote back in 2006.

But back to the winner at hand, David McKenzie, of Federal Way, Washington, who won with this flowing refuse of writing:

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

Bravo, David. Bravo, everyone else who won sub-categories and got mentioned...but most of all, bravo, Professor Scott Rice...for your monumental contribution to [would-be] writers everywhere.

Oh, the things you will learn...

Things I've learned since posting my last blogumn:

When you use a 1980s "one hit wonder" group's name as the title of your last hat blog and then proceed to show your online friend their video on YouTube which you used to sing en route to nightclubs with your wacky friend when you were much, much, much younger...that song will stay with you the entire weekend. Don't believe me? I triple dog dare you to go here and defy the power of a jump-happy tune: "The Safety Dance". Don't blame me if you also do the ballerina/picture frame move with your arms whilst you pseudo-dance around singing it. Some things I refuse to be held responsible for creating.

When you make Chicken Vindaloo...you will walk around and be mesmerized by just how fun saying one word over and over can be. That one word which kept pouring out of my mouth with the resonant conviction of Citizen Kane's "rosebud", Marlon Brando's "Stella", Rocky's "Adrian", and Al Pacino's "Attica"...was my "vindaloo". Vindaloo, it seems, is pleasing to both the tongue and the ear at the same time, thereby racing to the top of my cerebral cortex to get its justly position in my brain's "word bank". I feel confident that Vindaloo, with all it's pleasantries, pushed a few of the other words out of my brain's "file folder". Vindaloo there and then became the current cuckoo bird of my wordbank memory and proceeded to toss a few less used verbiage right smack into the firing line of prions...my neurons never had a chance...there was nothing I could do. Then the coups de grâce...my friend on the phone who jestily asks "Oh, Vindaloo, huh?...like Little Cindy Vindaloo Who, who was no more than two?

It was then that I realized I could not readily smack or otherwise hurt or maim him...or at the very least stomp up and down on both their home and cellphone as they live in Texas...and I'm all the way over here. But that thought, in between "You can dance" stanzas, kept looking more and more like a good idea with each passing chorus.

Enter vindication: This same Texas friend who was responsible for me saying "Little Vindaloo Who/Little Cindy Vindaloo Who" and all permutations thereof, about 82,120 of them, proceeded to then bring to my attention that my previous blog comment "everything is on YouTube except my birth and that Joe Namath/Farrah Fawcett Noxzema commercial" was in effect, incorrect. "But, ha! What of the date?" I say in complete defiance of his accusation (because I like to be right). YouTube Date Input: 4 months ago...my blog's date: "I Just Don't Get It" - it is official, I am vindicated. Not only am I vindicated, the YouTube people undoubtedly read my blog, were incensed that clip wasn't there and that someone found out...and then promptly added it to TRY to cover their ineptitudinal tracks.

Ah...life is good once more...in fact...if we really so desired, we could, well..."We can dance if we want to..."

I Just Don't Get "It"

My mother used to say "every generation seems to think that they were the first to have sex"...which she might have a point about, as it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same...well, except for more daring displays of sex as these generations go on. The Romans had their orgies, the Victorian times had their "gadgets" (oh, don't let them fool you...they did have sex back then, contrary to what Queen Victoria's history would have you believe), the 20's had Flappers, the 50's had Monroe, the 60's had the pill, Masters and Johnson (I think there's a couple puns there somewhere) and Woodstock, the 80's had big hair, and we have the Internet.

And splattered all over the Internet now are 237 reasons why people have sex and according to this article people are coming up with even more they left out, and AOL's main page the other day had a survey asking what was our worst reason we've rationalized to "get any"...then to top it off they gave us their choices to vote on.

Now there's no denying that sex sells...we've been using sex to sell everything...literally from head to toe. From Herbal Essence Shampoo's apparent orgasmic properties (yes, yes, YES!) to 60's Noxzema shaving cream commercials with a sexy blonde Swede compelling men to "take it off, take it all off" to Joe Namath having Farrah Fawcett slather lather on his face whilst crooning "Let Noxzema cream your face...so the razor won't" (then afterwards telling her "you've got a great pair of hands"), to Joe Namath, yet again, in Beautymist pantyhose. You know, it seems old 'Broadway Joe' scored more passes off the field than on if these 1970's commercials of his were any indication of his sex life.

And then there was that "All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all" men's cologne commercial when I was young. Come to think of it, when I was a kid there were a lot of sexy ads on television...but then again we had to, we didn't have the Internet to get our info. If you were a kid and wanted to look at naughty photos, you did what everyone else did: got out the Sears catalogue and turned to the underwear section.

Ah, yes, the bygone days of my youth...and most people look back on theirs with genuine fondness. How many times do you think back of how things were so great when you were a kid? Or the stories your parents told you when they were young...or your grandparents lingering on tales of what they did when they were children. Well, I've come to the conclusion that while every generation needs to have sex to get to the next generation, life was indeed better without sex. This is also why people want to live vicariously through their own kids when they have them...oh think about it...those glory days of youth. Where would innocent Ralphie, of "A Christmas Story" fame, be if he wasn't mesmerized by that "soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window"? If he truly KNEW about sex, that leg lamp just wouldn't have had the same intrigue...face it.

So, while a lot of us are indeed curious and read online articles about who does "it" and where and what they say to get "it" and wonder why they do "it"...stop complaining about not getting enough of "it" and just remember how uncomplicated and fun life was before you did. Then go and tell your kid a "When I was your age we didn't have...." story and be sure to smirk a lot...they'll really wonder what you are up to. And only you'll know "not much".