The further adventures of an earthbound alien

The old Joke goes; "Los Angeles has a great China town but do you know who has a really big one? Hong Kong. It’s huge!"
As we walked through the shopping stalls of Los Angeles China town during Chinese New Year one thought kept going through my head: Why are we doing this? I mean, we pretty much wore out this whole bit in Singapore.
But the answer is actually: Cooking supplies. You want chopsticks? They got them! You want plastic bowls? They got them! You want high quality things that have a lasting value that you’d be proud to hand down to future generations? …Yeah, well… But, Hey! They had, like twenty-seven guys in a dragon costume. All dancing to the exotic, pie pan, beat of “Bzew bezw bezw, bezw, bezw.
Lately, I’ve bowed to Jens will. She has this idea that Sunday mornings aren’t for putting on jogging shoes and taking off for two hours. She prefers to make a pot of coffee and look through the paper. Here’s what happens to me when I try to sit and enjoy a cup of coffee.
What to do with the weekend? One of the things that I haven’t had in a long time is a weekend. When you freelance, the middle of your workweek is the weekend. If you take time off to go do something you have to make it up later, usually Sunday night until about 2am. My new 9-7 job allows me to come home Friday night and not have any plans until Monday morning. I'm sure a lot of you out there don't think this is a big deal, but it is! Sure a when I was a freelancer I could take time anytime I wanted, but I'd usually blow it on impuls stuff during the week.
My mom noticed that we have been doing stuff on the weekends, every weekend, and I couldn’t explain why. I guess the answer would be, I have them now.

For the record, the best way to watch any award show is with TIVO. That way you can skip the commercials and all the interstitial bull shit. At our house the Grammies lasted about six minutes, but only because I kept repeating the extended stripper show that Shakira calls her “act”. Also, for the Grammies, you will also need a mute button. (Which I also used while watching Shakira’s “act”.

Just a few Grammy thoughts:
Was it really good to see the police again? I mean, were they gone? Why couldn’t they have just gotten together at the pub like other old guys. And if they had to do an old song why did they do the one that is so burned into my memory that I didn’t even hear it? Why couldn’t they have done the one where the guy was in love with his inflatable doll? There’s one I’d like to hear again.

And the Dixie Chicks; why did they really need to sweep the awards? It couldn’t be because of their music. Is it just because they said Bush was a piece of shit? If that’s the case I think about 70% of this country should get a Grammy.

Finally, the Doors get the lifetime achievement award! Bout time! They haven’t won anything since 71 when they got the Death-time achievement award. Isn’t it ironic that people win the lifetime achievement award when they look like death?

Was it just me, or did anyone else try to sneak a peek up Corinne Bailey Rae’s dress?

John Mayer, dude! It’s OK. You can afford a new guitar. Don’t worry, we’ll still think you’re cool.

Shakira, babe, nice abs. Those six million daily sit-ups are doing the trick. Now, let’s get to work on that “music” thing.

On to other, non music related thoughts:
Anna Nichole Smith and Marilyn Monroe. The only thing they have in common with each other is the one thing they both have in common with every other dead person.
…they’re dead.
There, I can go to bed now.

Talk about specialty shops!
I know this is going to be a bit of a rant but, now that I’m pretty sure no one really reads this blog, I think I’ll just let ‘er rip.
This all started with a television commercial that really grinds my gears. Every time I see it I feel obligated to point out how stupid it is. And, quite honestly, it’s beginning to wear on the people around me. So one last time in mind numbing detail:

The commercial involves two guys having a comical squabble about the words of a song. One guy is clearly wrong and the other guy basically tells him he’s an idiot. Not a bad start. The problem is that they picked the title of a song to screw up. No one screws up titles. Especially a title that is repeated in the chorus of the song at least fifteen times.
The reason this bugs me is because I know how stuff like this gets decided. And I know the second you start to analyze a joke is when you start to lose the joke. Joke sharpening is a serious business and shouldn’t be attempted by amateurs. If you don’t know what you are doing you could kill the joke. Would you want a thing like that on your hands?
Or in more basic terms:
One guy comes up with, what they think is a clever idea, then everyone along the line shits on it until it has no personality.

To use our example, our clever ad guy gets the bright idea to exploit a mediocre gag that he once saw in a movie. He remembered a song that he used to sing along with when he was nine. In this case the song was “Brand New Me” by The Partridge Family. The line that confused him wasn’t particularly funny to anyone but him. He thought the song said, “How did he know that you were sure to love me today, baby.” But the real words turned out to be, “How did he know that you would show up to love each day, baby.”
Oh, how he must have chuckled when he discovered that he had it wrong.
The guys at the agency tell him that you can’t have two guys go around arguing about Partridge Family lyrics. After all who gives a shit about that demographic?
So they tell him to make it hipper. And to these poor schlubs, hip is still The Clash. So he decides to use one of their songs. He goes to the web and finds out which of their songs is most popular. After all, who knows any of the words to White Riot?
Upon examining the lyrics to the Clash’s most popular song he decides that all the lyrics would be a mystery to most people. So he goes for the hook. In the case of “Rock the Casbah” the hook is the line “Rock the Casbah”.
The next problem is, how are they going to get to the point of arguing over the lyrics? No one plays music out loud unless they are working on their computers or they’re in their car. But they have to have this argument outside (one of the ad guys say) OK so let’s have them listening to the same MP3, somehow. OK so put a little speaker on it. So now these two guys are sharing a small speaker MP3 player going somewhere on foot mistaking the words to the only part of a twenty-something-year-old song that everyone knows the words to.
My point?
What the hell were they selling?
Would the commercial have been more effective if they had stuck with “Brand New Me”?
Where were these two freaks going with their tiny speakered MP3 player?
This is rhetorical stuff, in case you were wondering. There’s no need for an answer. (By the way, congratulations for getting this far in my pointless rant.)

The point of this (pointless) rant is; this is a lazy bit. The idea might have worked, but was molded by people who exploited the lowest common denominator in order to appeal to the largest group of people to make their comedy decision. This isn’t an uncommon practice. If you need an example of lazy bits, just turn on the TV or go to the movies. You won’t have to wait long.

But, success in the funny business is the exact opposite of that type of thinking. And don’t think that going the other way and picking the craziest shit is going to work either. (Unless you’re one of the boys from Monty Python and this is 1971) The test of a good gag is this: did anyone laugh?
Also, people should know that there is a big difference between funny and clever.
You should also know that funny has a shorter shelf life.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure this commercial appeals to a lot of people. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this commercial probably appeals to a majority of people. Good work there, boys. You’ve earned the tons of money you make for doing this sort of thing.
But seriously, what the hell were you guys selling?

I first met Jimbo Picscorz years ago when I was living in Florida in a little dumpy town known as Deerfield Beach. Deerfield had two claims to fame and neither had anything to do with fields or deer. I think the town was named a long time ago when people used to let utter morons name their towns.
Deerfield’s first claim to fame was the pier. It wasn’t particularly long or clean or any of those things you’d think piers should be. It’s just that it was the only one in Deerfield. Pompano beach, just to the south, had a Pier. And I think there was one to the north all the way up in Lake Worth but hey, those weren’t in Deerfield.
Deerfield’s other claim to fame was Jimbo Piescorz. Personally, I think Jimbo should be considered Deerfield’s biggest claim to fame. You couldn’t walk out to the end of Jimbo and cast your line into the ocean. Nor could you ride a bike on him, but that’s not saying much, you couldn’t ride your bike on the pier either. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that if you go to Deerfield don’t bother taking a bike. No, that’s not right. The point I’m trying to make is that Jimbo was a heck of a guy. The pier was never a heck of a guy.
The thing that made Jimbo special was that he liked people and he loved to fish. It could be that he hated fish and by contrast gave the illusion that he liked people… anyway, he was nice to me. He also had the rare honor of being stone deaf.
Jimbo was almost always featured in the Sunday paper for having caught a particularly large fish. I remember the picture one Sunday featured Jimbo next to a seven foot Pompano; suspended by the tail. How Jimbo got suspended by his tail I’ll never know, but it was an impressive fish.
Pompano, or Jacks as the Deerfieldians call them, are usually caught in the breaking waves a couple feet off shore using sand dabs on a small hook. They rarely ever get to be any more than 3 pounds. This is exactly the reason Jimbo was so famous in Deerfield. Here was a guy who could snag a seven foot freak fish just a couple feet from shore on a single #7 hook, wrestle it to shore and still manage to get caught up in a fish hanging device.
The following Monday I tried to congratulate him for his fine catch and equally fine escape from the fish hanging device but it fell on… uha… he didn’t understand me. So the better part of the rest of the day involved me mouthing the words “I said, nice fish” while he yelled back at me “Ob. But did ooo ball be?”
The weird thing is that I never saw Jimbo with any fishing equipment. He never had rod or reel in his car. He was never sun burned. He never even wore hats advertising fishing tackle. Yet every Sunday, there he was with another freakishly huge fish.
Jimbo was a very generous guy and everyone around him profited by his fishing. He’d roll up to you with a cooler full of white marlin or record flounder, unload a couple pounds in your arms then roll on down the road. That’s probably why people liked him better than the pier. All you ever got from the pier was splinters.
Needless to say I ate a lot of fish in Florida. I ate fish that I never knew existed. I had Black Drum for breakfast, Atlantic Croaker for lunch and for dinner it was record breaking White grunt. I midnight snacked of grouper, brushed my teeth with Rock Bass and dreamed about Amberjack in my bed made entirely out of King Mackerel. Man, was I sick of fish.
Every Sunday, there he was next to another leviathan hung up in the fish hanging device. And every Monday morning, there he was with some new fish. “Ear Ob. oor ooo.”
“Thanks, Jimbo.”
“But?”
“I said Thanks, Jimbo.”
“But”
“Hanks, Bim bo”
“Ooor belcome”
A couple months later I left Jimbo and Deerfield to go live with a certified psychopath in an even smaller and crummier town, the details of which I’ll save for another pointless story. And I never heard from Jimbo Piescorz again.
Do I ever think of Jimbo, you ask. No I don’t, partly because I made him up, but mostly because I hate fish.
Will I ever visit Deerfield Beach again and look him up? What’s with all the questions?
Today Deerfield Beach is a much different place. The Pier is still there but is overshadowed by huge hotels and timeshare condos. The local color has all but been squeezed out. Still, I’d like to think that Jimbo is still down there, decimating the fish population and burdening the locals with his catch of the day. So if you find yourself down that way and someone rolls up to you with a cooler and lays a fish on you tell him that, “Ob” says “I”.