Where peace is not a pie ...Rick's Cafe Americain

Originally written on August 24:

On Tuesday, when speaking to a VFW group, George Bush assured the assembled, and presumably memory-addled, veterans that we would not pull out of Iraq because millions suffered when we pulled out of Vietnam and he won’t repeat that mistake.

In other words, even though we have been chastised for years that we shouldn’t compare Iraq to Vietnam. Vietnam was a disaster. Vietnam was a quagmire. Vietnam was a unique mess, and to compare the war in Iraq to the Vietnam War is unfair and unpatriotic. Until today.

Today, we can compare the Iraq war to Vietnam, but not because (as most people have concluded) Iraq is, in fact a quagmire and a disaster, but because apparently WE NEEDED MORE VIETNAM.

As my officemate pointed out, this is probably not a conclusion he would have come to if he had actually had to serve in Vietnam. Then again, with a recent calculation showing that Bush spent over 1/4 of his presidency on vacation, he hasn’t exactly served in Iraq either.

Via Yahoo! News:

Craig begins campaign to save his seat

I’m starting a new (FREE!) show in Brooklyn on August 28 at 8PM. Please join me.

Pant-Hoot is a night of excellent stand-up comedy and chimpanzee information from Charles Star and Monkeywire. This is going to be a monthly Tuesday night show.

This month:

Pete Holmes (VH1’s Best Week Ever, Comedy Central’s Premium Blend)
Dan Allen (Comedy Central’s Premium Blend)
Amy Crossfield (Comedy Central’s Open Mic Fight)
Pat O’Shea
Claudia Cogan
Hosted by Charles Star with an educational interlude from Monkeywire.org.

Pant-Hoot at Magnetic Field
97 Atlantic Avenue (Hicks / Henry)
Brooklyn Heights

In an apparent effort to make everyone forget Ghandi, Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley will have a makeout scene in an upcoming movie with Mary-Kate Olsen. This news resulted in the best closing paragraphs you will read in an article this year:

Olsen, who rose to fame on TV’s “Full House,” was last seen on the big screen opposite her sister, Ashley, in 2004’s “New York Minute.”

Kingsley’s film credits also include “House of Sand and Fog” and “Schindler’s List."

Hat tip to Dawn.

It always feels strange when corporations try to communicate with me on a human level. When they put on human clothes and project human emotion and tell me that we have a personal relationship. Think about all of the post-9/11 commercials with images of smoky rubble and crying Americans over somber music and a maudlin slogan like “Our Country’s Strong” and tagged with a logo. ‘We are institutionally sorry,’ they say. “Thanks, American Express!,” we are supposed to respond, and then go spend our way back to emotional stability.

Alas, I reflexively think that it is in their interests to appear sorry, so I casually dehumanize the people who run the corporation and make the decision to project corporate sympathy. I don’t feel bad about that decision because they decided to exploit their own emotions for the benefit of the company. YOU WERE A JERK FIRST, Ken Chenault!

The latest silliness happened in my neighborhood. I happen to live pretty close to where Officer Timoshenko was shot and killed a couple of weeks ago. It was horrible, and the neighborhood was understandably upset by the whole ordeal. People collected cards and flowers to drop off at the precinct house and the local mailing list of gentrifiers was full of sympathetic messages. And the local McDonald’s flew its flag at half-mast.

It’s MCDONALD’S flag.

I hate to laugh at anything having to do with the death of Officer Timoshenko, but it looked like Mayor McCheese was assassinated.

Even though it was probably the defining feature of my teens and 20s, since meeting Carrie I have little to no fear of rejection. Last Friday saw a reversion to the awkward teenage years and it will take some time to recover: I was rejected by a dog.

I should start with the way-cool news that Carrie and I are going to get a dog (actual dog TBD). Carrie has been previewing dogs on Petfinder (lots of rescued dogs to choose from!) and we found one that we both really liked: Beansy. A mix of labrador and American staffordshire terrier (and probably something else) with sweet, soulful eyes (project much, Charles?).

I wasn’t in a great state of mind to meet a dog, which may have been part of the problem. I was reading Love is a Mixtape on the train on my way to the meeting. Love is a Mixtape is the memoir of a man who lost his 31-year-old wife to a pulmonary embolism, and I was reading about the dark year immediately after her horrible, shocking death. Needless to say, I couldn’t focus much. Since I lost my father, anything involving the death of a family member is hard for me to watch. Case in point: I cried on a plane during Love Actually. LOVE ACTUALLY! On A Plane! I am not proud.

When I got to the coffee joint on 1st Avenue, I was a mental mess. And after shaking hands with the owner, Beansy lunged at me and started barking like a guard dog. I nearly lost it. The combination of lost-wife-memoir and dog-who-hates-me was a little too much. It threw me into a noticeably deep funk. By the time Carrie arrived, my eyes were drooping and I wasn’t saying much. After Carrie arrived (Beansy loved Carrie), the dog decided it still didn’t like me and went for a second round of lunging and barking. I honestly don’t think there was any chance of biting, but it was a little harrowing nonetheless.

The whole thing is bothering me because I went into the experience really, really wanting to take this dog home. Beansy is adorable. He is probably sweeter than my first impression. And now, I am in effect rejecting him - even though by the end of our visit, Beansy was sitting with his head on my lap and letting me pet him calmly. I am choosing not to take in this dog, which very badly needs a home. I am shrugging my shoulders and saying “someone will take him” - though that is by no means certain. I can’t help but feel that I am shirking a responsibility by not working through whatever ‘issues’ we had.

Dogs aren’t children, of course, and so I don’t want to take the analogy too far, but I can’t stop thinking about parenthood. If we have a kid, that child is ours, no questions asked. I almost wish that anyone who wants a dog be issued a dog by the Dog Council so that I don’t have the luxury of saying no. At the same time, it felt strange that I had to prove my worth to a puppy.

All that said, though Beansy isn’t the dog for me (and there were other smaller reasons that he wasn’t right for us), he isn’t a bad pup. I hope someone else takes a look and considers taking him in. Check him out.

There has never, in the history of news, been a story that started with this phrase and ended well:

A 16-year-old Florida mother...

...and two of her relatives made the girl’s ten-month-old baby drink from a cup containing gin and videotaped the incident, said police who arrested the group this week.

The latest in a series of “features” that I think I will run on the blog and then lose interest in, Virtual Notepad is where I’ll write the ideas for jokes that haven’t coalesced into something complete yet. Hopefully what is funny about them will still shine through.

1) Right now my workload isn’t too intense. The few projects I’m on occupy less than an hour of my day. Still, when my officemate turns around to talk to me about the case that we are working on I still can’t help thinking “Jesus, didn’t he see that I was reading?"

2) Today’s NYT had an Op-Ed by Nina and Tim Zagat that threw their two cents into the immigration debate:

Twenty years ago, American perceptions of Asian food could be summed up in one word: “Chinese.” Since then, we have developed appetites for Korean, Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese fare. Yet while the quality of the restaurants that serve these cuisines ... has soared in America, Chinese restaurants have stalled. ... China and the United States should work together on a culinary visa program that makes it easier for Chinese chefs to come here. With more chefs who are schooled in China’s dynamic new restaurant scene, we would see a transformation of the way Chinese food is served in this country.

Today was a minor milestone in my career and a bit of a silly one: I picked up my first set of headshots. It is neat because now I actually have a headshot. It is a tangible thing on heavy-duty 8x10 paper. My mother can hang it on her office door. And she will. It will, in some way, feel like I am making progress to her, just in the same way it feels like making progress to me. This is despite the fact that both of us know that with a digital image and $100, anyone can get a headshot done.

And so the definition of progress is internal: I felt that I was ready to get a headshot. Worthy. In need. Able to take advantage of their presence. The headshot, then, is the manifestation of my own sense of progress. With that, Silly Thing becomes Good Thing.

Of course it isn’t exactly me. A little touching up was necessary because I am flawed and even a good photograph has some unavoidable imperfections. The shine on my nose and cheeks and two stray hairs: gone. The refraction from my glasses: corrected. The bump on the end of my nose: erased. It is still me, but a ‘better’ me. It is still far enough from perfect that it looks like no work may have been done at all. A touch dishonest, but a far cry from the photoshop crimes and out-of-date pictures that decorate the profiles of match.com.

Don’t worry, Mom. It’s me in the picture. You remember the flaws, right?

18 months after being labelled “endearingly chubby” by a reporter at the NY Observer, I was contacted by a reporter at the NY Post to see how, as a funny schlub I felt about the romantic prospects of fellow schlubs in the wake of Seth Rogen’s star turn in Knocked Up. I have to admit that I prefer the term “endearingly chubby” to “schlub,” though I’d take “strapping” over either, if only it weren’t so obviously false.

That article came out yesterday, and I am quoted near the end: Schlub You the Right Way.

If we combine the news that Paris got a cavity search on arrival at prison and that she was released early for medical reasons, I think we can conclude that a follow-up biopsy revealed that her brains actually were up her ass.

This concludes Easy Joke Thursday at rickblaine.com. Look for more smarter jokes about more important targets later today at Stay Free! Daily.

And the Ramble project is complete and future Rambles will be cross-posted here. I hope at least a couple of people read this, Dawn.

5/25/07

The hits keep on coming. After “The Bicycle Incident” I figured that I was clear of further injury for a while. This is known in the psychology biz as “delusional optimism.” In fact, I find myself with enough cuts and scrapes all over my body that I could be confused with someone (at first glance only, of course) who actually works with his hands.

This could not be further from the truth. I still have the baby soft skin that can only come from work avoidance so aggressive and complete that, if the energy were better channeled, would result in “accomplishing something.” As if.

Anyway, the injuries started when we offered to catsit for my sister-in-law to be’s cat, Fluff. Fluff is an amiable, if skittish, cat and we hoped that bringing her by might help us with a mouse issue that we no longer have. We quickly realized that we would not solve our mouse problems with Fluff. As awesome as she is, she is large and not all that into moving, much less chasing mice. The best way to describe Fluff is as “a pile of cat.” This did not stop Fluff from making a quick dash for the border and stepping on my wrist when I tried to pet her, resulting in a deep gash. Probably due to cat allergies, I will apparently bear the Mark of Fluff for all of my days, as it has not and probably will not heal completely.

Then the bicycle thing.

This past weekend, Carrie decided that we should make our house less garrison-like and remove the security bars from the second floor. We are the only house on the street that has them and, besides the impact on light on our house, it virtually screamed “terrified white folks.” The plan was simple. With Carrie’s help, a strongman would lower the wrought-iron grate down to me, and I would guide it to the ground. Like I said, simple. To help us get the bars down to street level, we asked a neighbor and friend to help. He was on his way to the airport, though, so he could only help with one window. For the second window, we had to ask a stranger. Rather than handle the weight of the grate himself, and let Carrie slowly let out the slack on the twine we used as a backup restraint, he used the twine as the SOLE restraint on the grate.

I mentioned that I was to guide the grate from below, yes?

Needless to say, the twine wasn’t strong enough to hold the grate. I realized this when the grate wasn’t being slowly lowered to me but was instead tipping and hurtling toward me, just behind the screams of Carrie and her assistant. Good thing sound travels faster than gravity - and light faster than sound. That fortunate quirk of physics allowed me to move quickly out of the way (or as quickly as I move) enough for the grate to merely clip my arm and then bounce into my leg, rather than crash directly onto my head, turning me into a drooling moron. Carrie has gotten used to living with a moron, but I think the drooling would have been even more than she could bear.

So, no drooling but a hell of a contusion on my left arm and scrapes and bruises on both legs. I remained stoic and didn’t cry because I know that is the least that I could do to continue the charade that I am a man.

To sum up, since Carrie was on “upstairs” duty, I consider us even for crashing her side of the car into a tree on our honeymoon.

5/9/07

I have a bad cut on my knee. I hurt it riding my bike over the weekend. I have a bad history with bicycles, so this is par for the course. It all falls under the theme of “Did the person who used the expression “it’s like riding a bicycle” to describe how easy it is to restart an old activity ever ACTUALLY take a long hiatus from riding a bicycle?”

I rode my bike a lot when I was a kid. Of course I did. I was a kid. (If you didn’t ride a bicycle as a child, your childhood was probably unbearably sad.) Then I kind of stopped riding. I went to school on a bus and anything else I did was pretty much close enough to walk or far enough to drive.

After a few years of not riding, I got jealous of all of the people in college who zipped back and forth to class while I found myself slowly trudging everywhere, so I pulled my bike out of the garage and brought it up to Ithaca. During my first week of riding, as I was struggling up a hill, I was passed by a woman pushing a stroller.

The bicycle went back into the garage.

14 years later I met Carrie, who rides or walks everywhere. One night, when I had to go home because I didn’t have work clothes at Carrie’s apartment, Carrie volunteered her bike to me. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that a trip from a neighborhood called “Park SLOPE” to one named “Prospect HEIGHTS” was not the ideal maiden voyage. It was a mile and a half, uphill, over the streets of Brooklyn - which are roughly like downtown Fallujah. It the intervening 14 years I had completely forgotten how one cushions ones balls from the shock and by the time I arrived home, I was sweating like I just came in from a thunderstorm, heaving like I was having a
heart attack and walking like I just rode a bicycle for a mile and a half without any shock absorption.

The next time I needed to go home for a change of clothes, I walked.

3 years later, Carrie finally convinced me to get a bike so we can ride together. I like it. It is red and shiny and maybe I’ll get a bell for it, just to recapture my youth. This past weekend, however, I was using it to ride to the softball fields in Prospect Park. As I was riding in the park, I saw that I was going to have to make a left turn into a steep incline up. So I leaned forward, pressed hard to make the charge and fell over.

I repeat, I fell off of my bicycle. I didn’t hit anything or anyone. I wasn’t avoiding a dangerous object. I FELL. OFF. MY. BICYCLE.

I have been limping since Sunday and have not been on the bike since.