Guest Column by NeilChair

Hello, thelabcoatguy here.

As we casually approach the reality of fauxpop.tv, and I mean CASUALLY, we find ourselves bringing in some new writers.

And by writers, I mean writer. Singular.

Neilchair, our esteemed guest, is a young man and therefore fiery tempered and filled with vigor and passion. Or perhaps he is just a miserable prick. It’s hard to say at this point.

What is easy to say is that he will be popping into The Fizz now and again to interrupt my regularly scheduled self-diddlery with his own carping on about this and/or that.

I hope you enjoy it as much as his mother does.

Enter Neilchair:

…Read some troubling news today that modern DrumKing (which, now that I say it out loud doesn’t sound nearly as complimentary as I hoped), Travis Barker, was seriously burned in a jet crash on Friday (Sept. 19, ‘08).

Like many 80s babies (yea… I know… I’m already like this. Imagine what I’ll be like when I’m 40) I came of musical age in the mid-90s and was not immune to the shiny allure of the big SoCal second-coming of punk. In fact, I loved it. Bad Religion, Green Day, Rancid, the Offspring, Blink 182… everything from thundering songs denouncing the economic strangleholds placed on the poor by the greedy, right-wing, fascist government of the day to luscious saccharine 3-chord ballads about boobies… it was all good. And despite the broadening of my horizons, I still hold a great affection for those bands which is why I was disturbed to read of Mr. Barker’s accident. As a side note, he probably won’t die. See? God really does prefer the rich.

That being said, two things struck me as I read the article and a few of the ten million comments after it.

Point 1
First, a few items to keep in mind:
1. Pilots–and especially commercial pilots–have to train and practice and learn to be awesome for a REALLY LONG FRIGGIN’ TIME. A weekend with Flight Simulator X is not going to be enough to make you a licensed commercial pilot, trust me, I know… those guards were not impressed.

2. Next to overdoses, plane crashes are a pretty common and trendy way for the rich & famous to check out, see: Aaliyah, John Denver, Buddy Holly, another-popular-one, so we can’t call this a total surprise; the Big F’s, Failures (of the engine), Fires, Faulty wiring, Foggy mountains leaping out from behind the hedge, do happen. But one observation about this specific case…

They weren’t off the goddamn ground yet.

This has happened a few times in the last couple years, and no, I didn’t bother to look the specific incidents up but I know it has. (I will back him on that, although I too haven’t looked anything up. Ed.) For starters, there was one in France. I think. Or Montreal. Same thing. Anyway, the point is that it happens. But how? How, in Lucifer’s burning hell do you crash a plane that hasn’t taken off yet? I’ll be one of the first to admit (not the first, I’m still holding out hope) that I’m in no way qualified to fly a real airplane, but even in my limited experience of Sunday afternoon computer-simulated flying I know that the easiest, simplest, basic-est, do-blind-folded-in-a-coma-deep-trance act of aviation is Taking Off. Even Ted Striker could probably manage it so how, tell me how, Virginia, does a professionally trained pro like the pilot probably was, manage to drive the thing straight off the end of the runway, across a highway and into an embankment?

Possibly reaching to turn up that new Rihanna–and, in fairness, it is bumpin’.

Point 2
The comments-section.

Almost everyone hates the comment section (wink, wink) and I am no exception (nudge, nudge), excepting the exception of on here… I won’t read them anyway so knock yourself out. “Fisrt!!!!!11!!1″, “faagg”, “visit my sexy hot site with hot male where sexy barley-legell naked women can hook up with other naked mansex” are fine up to a point, but after you realize that although you aren’t the only one who’s naked, you are certainly the only one who’s sexy, the fun tends to fade out. Such was the case under the article.

After I waded through all the, “ohmigod, Travis is so sexy, even if he is a scarred and charred shell of a man”, and “wtf, liek who cares, Neil Peart’s like wayyy better at drumming” I came across the inevitable, “No one even would care about him if he wasn’t a celebrity.” And they’re right. No one would care. That’s the point and, in a nod to my 90s roots… duh.

Now, I’m not a celebrity watcher. I don’t know exactly what Nicole Ritchie looks like or why she’s important and the only thing I know for sure about Paris Hilton is that she shocked the world by displaying her possession of short-term memory in a video over at funnyordie.com (check out the vid, but look at our ads, not theirs). At least Travis Barker is an expert at an extremely complicated instrument and has displayed a high level of skill at playing it in a wide range of styles, but the commenter was right, we only care because we “know” him.

If the guy filling your gas tank has a sniffle, do you suggest he take the rest of the day off? Do you go buy him some herbal tea and spice it up with some honey and a couple drops of lemon extract? Do you offer to put the snarky teenager down the street through college so she can study Art History and design armcovers with safety pins in them? Probably not. But what if the guy at the gas station was your brother. What if the snarky pop-art tart was your own darling Clementine. Totally different story. So what’s the difference? The difference is that you don’t know the other guy and can’t stand the stylistically perfect goth and because you don’t and can’t… you don’t give a shit.

You probably don’t know Travis either but because he’s been out there, pounding the skins, for 15+ years, you form a connection to what he’s done and how it makes you feel, which makes you feel like they’re important, which is why you care when they survive a plane crash that almost every other passenger died in. Common folk like to say that the famous are just like us but the truth is that most of the time, they’re not. Most of the time, they’re Better Than Us. For most famous people (I’ll arbitrarily say 85%) they are famous because they were better than everyone else around at the time.

Unless you’re Robert DeNiro reading this (in which case, do I ever have The Script for you, buddy), Robert DeNiro is a better actor than you are. Unless you’re George Carlin online from the grave (you laugh, it’ll happen), George Carlin is a better comedian than you are. And unless you’re Travis Barker (or, allegedly, Neil Peart… thanks rushfreakfromhell667), Travis is a better drummer than you are.

So the next time that someone famous does or almost does or doesn’t-but-could-have or wasn’t-there-but-could-have-if-they-weren’t-somewhere-else, die in the latest fashionable way, keep the “no one would care” line in the bag. Unless your are the greatest actor, or funniest dude, or craziest drummer… Neil Peart.

Sorry Barker, us Neil’s gotta stick together.

- Neilchair

The Inevitable Rise of Our Robot Overlords

Availing myself of the news this morning, I, like many of you, was terrified to read a story that we have all been expecting for some time.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080227111811.y9syyq8p&show_article=1

In case you haven’t the wherewithal to examine the contents of this website for yourself, I am fully capable of providing you with the headline from this story on Breitbart:

“Automated killer robots ‘threat to humanity’: expert”

I have been reading science fiction for years, not the least of which was an amazing novel from the 50s entitled It Was The Day Of The Robot! and my first thought upon reading this article was, how do you get to be an expert on automated killer robots?

The expert in question is University of Sheffield’s Noel Sharkey.

Noel Sharkey? Really?

Wasn’t Noel Sharkey the original bass player for Herman and the Hermits?

Exactly what kind of course does Professor Noel Sharkey teach at the University of Sheffield that would make him an expert in the field of automated killer robots? And more importantly, what are the prereqs?

Growing up, I would have had a much easier time concentrating on Math if I had been told there was a chance I could take such a course and become an expert in the field.

We live in a time of constant and terrifying news, and have lived there since It Was The Day Of The Robot! first hit the newsstand. Just before I read the article about the robots, I read an article outlining how we are well into the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history. Yesterday I read about the brutal recession into which we are sliding. The day before that I read about peak oil and the coming global holocaust underway thanks to the climate crisis brought on by global warming.

Sitting here reading about the chilling certainty of the rise of an army of bloodthirsty robots mad me realize that I have never known a single moment without the certainty that we were all just a few Doomsday Clock ticks away from some earth shattering cataclysmic horror of devastation. Even when I was a child.

I remember driving home from the beach with my parents, and seeing a huge, anvil shaped thunderhead to the east, over Clinton. I was only ten or so, but my first thought was that I was seeing a mushroom cloud.

That’s it, I figured. Oh well, at least I had a good day at the beach.

Nobody should have to deal with that kind of thinking, at any age. It’s poisonous, and I am half-tempted to call out forty-odd years of one grim realization and acceptance after another as the primary reason I am such a callous and heartless monster.

Movie historians talk about the hysteria of the 50s as exhibited in the films of the day. We laugh at the thinly veiled, or completely unveiled, depictions of treacherous Commies, scheming Russkies, the Yellow Peril, death ray shooting aliens, Tokyo crushing giant monsters and all the other low budget special effects flicks of that decade. Well, those of us who actually watch documentaries about 50s movies laugh at those things. The rest of us aren’t laughing because those are the ones of us who are watching CNN and then running out to buy rolls of duct tape and canned food to ward of the End Times.

I don’t know about you, but I am sick of it. All of it.

Here’s a news flash to give us all a little perspective:

We’re all going to die.

Maybe not tonight, and maybe not next week and maybe not because of global arming or Osama bin Laden, but eventually, inexorably, every single person you know and all the ones you don’t, will die. All of them.

The real issue is how we do it.

And in a world with so much cancer, starvation, Ebola, drunk driving, IEDs, precision bombing, pesticide spraying and everything else, I doubt I am alone when I say I would welcome an army of automated killer robots.

Let them step up and take a turn running this place.

They couldn’t do any worse than we have.

What is Wrong with the Academy Awards?

Many people come to me and they say, “What is wrong with the Academy Awards?”

My response to those people is to say this:

Pure envy.

But then after that, I say, no wait! I have another, much more compelling reason.

The Academy is not really an Academy. It is a sham. And so are the awards themselves.

You may remember that the Oscars were first given out in 1929, although the Academy was created in 1927. Unlike many other academies, which would likely be schools, prestigiously fustian enclaves of intellectual pursuit, and secret gatherings of scheming lizardmen bent on world conquest, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was created by a group of cigar-smoking tycoons and moguls raking in obscene profits each year by making and exhibiting movies on a weekly basis for throngs of entertainment-starved commonfolk. And in doing so these wealthy gentlemen and their employees were not above resorting to the most depraved lowest common denominators to lure people in. Like the upper slopes of a woman’s chestal area or perhaps filmed depictions of brazenly exposed ankles and/or wrists.

It is only natural that Hollywood of the 20s would reflect what was going on in the most high flying pockets of American society. This was the Jazz Age, after all. Never was there a more salacious, lustful, thirsty, good times hungry cavalcade of generally naughty goings on available to the wicked and there was more than enough money available to indulge in all of it. Especially in the Greater Los Angeles area.

Fatty Arbuckle’s suspected involvement in the hideous death of a young woman who had attended one of his frequent “liquor parties”, director William Desmond Taylor’s mysterious murder, the parade of famous drug addicts, boozers, hopheads, pedophiles, rapists and maniacs of all sorts; these were all shocking and disturbing, but the very content of movies themselves had changed for the worse. Ecstasy, starring Hedy Lamar had naked boobies, for God’s sake! In the water! Soaking wet and bobbing around like overfed carp!

As is predictable, forces for Temperance, Goodness and Proper Christian Values begin to line up against all those boobies, and as a key player in the Creation and Distribution of Good Times of All Sorts, Hollywood looked like an excellent place to begin some kind of culture war to turn back the Satanic effects of Cinematically Exhibited Debauchery.

The studio bosses weren’t stupid, and rather than wait around for angry villagers to carry their torches and pitchforks all the way up to a government that would be forced to take action, they began a P.R. campaign of their own to show that Hollywood wasn’t Sodom and Gomorrah.

Part of that P.R. campaign was the Academy.

What better way to show the best face of Hollywood than to literally show the best faces of Hollywood all dressed up like European royalty, parading down a red carpet, gathering with dignity under august circumstances to politely celebrate those deemed the best of the best with regard to the creation of their Arts. And Sciences.

It’s as if a group of unruly Grade Seven students got together and decided to dress up in their parents’ clothes and pat themselves on the back in a public forum. This isn’t news. This has nothing to do with what movies are good, bad or indifferent. These awards really don’t mean anything, not unless everybody else agrees to perceive the value therein. You have to buy in, to invest that value yourself. If I tell you that I am this year’s recipient of the “I Think I’m Great and Clearly Take Myself Very Seriously, So Shouldn’t You” Award, you wouldn’t give me a three and a half hour slot on prime time to crow about it, would you?

I didn’t think so.

Gee, Britney’s Not So Funny Anymore…

Hey, remember back when Britney Spears’ biggest problem was that she was too stoned to remember she wasn’t wearing underwear?

Ah, the good old days.

I remember the first time I heard about Britney Spears like it was only a few years ago.

I saw a clip of her first video.

Much in the way of a sake swilling Japanese salariman, I was both taken aback and impressed with the rampantly cynical filthiness on display in hardselling the music of a barely girl by sliding her into a Catholic schoolgirl skirt and having her act out the female half of seventeen different sexual positions for the viewing pleasure of MTV’s hormone crazed demographic and the grim faced middle-aged men tuning in when nobody might catch them.

It was an inspiring, but not particularly original mass media moment. I was neither surprised, nor offended.

Has there ever been a time when freshly pubescent females untouched by the ravages of cellulite and gravity weren’t used in such a way? I think not, and I have seen the paintings in the Louvre to prove it.

It is, of course, completely unsurprising that a number of our modern day sex fantasy celebrities were shipped into dirty circulation fresh from the Mickey Mouse Club. Unsurprising, but still icky. But I am not here to point the finger at Disney. You can do that for yourself. I can’t wait to read what you come up with.

I am here to state what has become obvious to even the most casual media observer:

Britney Spears is not funny.

We’ve all grown accustomed to famous crackheads, drunks, sniffers, shooters, tweakers, boozehounds and pill-poppers. That’s nothing new, and far be it from me to suggest that late night talk show hosts should refrain from taking cheap shots at the pop culture millionaires rolling in and out of high-end rehab centers all over the world.

Kicking heroin with Bhuddist vomit therapy in Thailand is funny stuff.

But Britney isn’t taking that easy road.

Not anymore.

She’s in the big leagues now.

It would be fair to say that the Britney story started out with a fairly common psychological stew of mismanagement, manipulation and fiendish misappropriation at every level, involving what would appear to be pretty much every adult she’s had the misfortune to work with since she overfilled her training bra with high end silicone.

That part of her story is no different from any one of a thousand similar child star stories. Michael Jackson wasn’t built overnight. It takes years to make a monster.

What is different with Britney’s story is how it brings some new aspects to this milieu.

These are what I would like to examine, if I may.

1. Britney is a feral child.

Clearly, this woefully undereducated girl has grown up in a total moral and intellectual vacuum, without logical checks and balances, without the mental stimulation that even a homeless kid would find scraping the streets for spare change, without a successful model for adulthood for which to strive. She is the 21^st century new media equivalent of a feral child, only instead of being raised by wolves in the Indian jungle, she was raised by Armani wolves in the media entertainment corporate jungle. And by raised, I don’t mean to indicate anything to do with actually raising a child.

To all outward appearances, she is in many ways similar to those hideously abused children who locked away in cages for years, are never taught to speak, never touched, never given unconditional love and a sense of her own intrinsic, independent value.

She is like a typical, mentally healthy human being in that she can (nearly) communicate with others through written and spoken language, but through even a small amount of time spent listening to and reading what she has to say, it becomes apparent that there is something profoundly broken in there.

Britney has no ability to forecast or discern possible outcomes of her actions. She would appear to be incapable of making rational judgments from an informed perspective. She seems to lack reflective capability, existing in a permanent now, without any frame of reference to the past and without any understanding as how her actions have causal link to the future.

What happens when you have sex without birth control?

What happens when you take whatever pill you’re handed without question? Or handfuls of pills? Or glasses or bottles or syringes or powders?

What happens when you thoughtlessly spend all the money you get on things you don’t need and couldn’t possibly use?

What happens when you aren’t sixteen anymore and grim physical reality shows up with gravity and cellulite and stretchmarks and everything else?

What happens when you don’t know how to actually do anything?

And that brings me to –

2. Britney is Us and We are Britney.

What happened to Britney Spears is a microcosm for what is happening to young people all over North America. She is the canary in the coal mine. What’s happening to her is what is happening all over.

I knew that the U.S. economy was doomed for the dumper as soon as she started her descent into insanity.

When I read that she’d shaved her head I knew that I should get out of the stock market and throw into bonds.

When I saw her drooling cappuccino/vodka spew all over herself in the front seat of a plush European sedan, I said to myself, lock in that mortgage, because the party is finally over.

It would be nice to simply blame her parents, but it’s not all their fault. We made Britney Spears what she is, we built her up and invested in her all of our hopes and dreams for the future. She is what we wanted to have, what we wanted to be and now we are seeing her, and thus ourselves for what we really are.

And it’s anything but funny.

Prince Charles’ Hypnotic Technique For Picking Up

I recently discovered an amazing photo that shows, for the first time, Prince Charles using the same hypnosis techniques for picking up that he must have used on Diana Spencer.

Look out, Scarlett, you’re next…

(AFP Photo from news.com.au)

What the heck?

I can’t blame anyone but myself.

Normally people would be clicking in to the blog here and reading hilarious yet tragically sad and emotionally resonant stories about my family’s year living in Germany, many of which revolve around the foibles of that wacky nation of zany Teutons, but lately people have been clicking in to the blog and reading the same story over and over again, wondering why I have forsaken them.

This is the part that is my fault.

You see, I don’t live in Germany any more. Yes, I am still writing stories about living there, but the end is in sight. I have a number of stories left to tell, but the writing of these stories was interrupted by being forced once more back into an actual real life complete with a fully social existence. No more can I sit in the basement by myself writing all day and night. Now I find myself forced to do other stuff such as have a job, talk to people outside your family and go places.

I could also go into the further details as to how somebody in Toronto wanted me to write a feature based on his pitch (which I did), and then how that same person and his happy-go-lucky co-worker inveigled me into working on a pilot for a series idea (upon which I am working), or perhaps I could point out to you that I have had to write a play in three weeks or less, then cast and direct it at the school (I am currently on page 49), or I could note how I need to finish producing Boy In December’s debut cd release (try www.boyindecember.com for recent mixes), or how I have to work out and enhance my physical beauty to keep my wife from finding a younger, more attractive husband, try to be a reasonably good dad to keep my children from finding a younger, more attractive dad, finish my law/organic chemistry combined honours degree, mop up under the urinals in the boys’ bathroom on the second floor, get the rest of my hair plugs planted, learn how to arc weld and get my black belt in Ninjitsu.

For which I apologize.

Clearly, I have to smarten up. Too many fans have written emails or accosted me in the street, demanding that I rebegin the tales. I would like to take some time now to print some excerpts from some of these emails and accostments:

“When are you going to update your blog? I have nothing left to look forward to, especially now that your abs are tighter than Britney’s. Which isn’t saying much.”

“Please, please, please get back to the stories. Your life is way more interesting than mine.”

“Blog it up, chubs!”

“Post another story within one week or I’ll eat this kitten.”

You can see the pressure that I have been under.

To that end, let me reassure you all that I am still here, still writing, and still planning to update soon.

Maybe even now.

Marcel

How many people have spit in your mouth?

I can only think of one person who spat in mine.

I was in the back seat of his car when he did it.

It was Good Friday, 1983 and we were driving out towards Brucefield to check out a new bush.

He was in the process of telling us that there was always a freak change in the weather marking the exact time that Jesus rose from the tomb or something like that.

Being a faithless skeptic, I laughed at this. I laughed long and loud.

“Give me a break! You don’t really believe that.”

“Go ahead and laugh” he said. “You’ll see.”

Then he horked out the window.

It wasn’t a statement against me, it was just one of those juicy early spring horks. Maybe a little bit of punctuation to his certainty.

His hork was heavy on that day, and it struggled to get out the window, where physics took over and stopped it dead in the slipstream blowing past the car as we flew down the sideroad.

Then, amazingly, in a kind of slow motion, it turned ninety degrees as the wind caught it and threw it directly into the back seat of the car where it splattered onto my front teeth as I laughed.

Truly, the Lord works in mysterious ways.

I probably should have puked, but I don’t do that. All I could do was laugh and try to keep my mouth open and my lips curled as far away from my teeth as possible.

Of course I also horked his hork back out the window where it belonged.

Sadly, thanks to the slipstream, it blew back onto the window beside me, where I could watch it slide around on the glass.

It was horrible of course, but I couldn’t stop laughing.

“There aren’t too many people I’d let hork in mouth,” I said. “Looks like you’re number one on the list.”

He couldn’t answer because he was laughing so hard he had to pull over.

His name was Marcel Laporte and yesterday he died.

When I was a kid people used to say when somebody had a heart attack that he died of old age, and that made sense to me. Nobody lives forever, I would think, and maybe those same people would say about the dead man, “He had a good inning.”

But Marcel was 42 and I don’t think that was enough.

However, as we all know, that doesn’t matter.

Most of us don’t choose when we go and all anybody has to do is pick up the closest newspaper to find out about all kinds of people who never got a chance to make it to 42. I guess we should be grateful every day when we wake up and find out we made it as far as we have.

It’s a strange thing, but when I think of the good friends I grew up with, my old days friends, I see them the way they were. It’s like they still have their high school face, and their adult face is an overlay, more transparent than not.

No matter how rarely I see those people, and no matter how deeply life has carved the years into them, I don’t see the effects of those years. They can get fat, get thin, go bald, get glasses, lose an ear in a knife fight, whatever.

Living here, I can’t go to Marcel’s funeral, but a part of me is relieved.

I wouldn’t want to test it, to challenge that way I see my old friends by looking down at one of the best of them lying in a coffin.

 

 

Instead I will keep him forever seventeen, hunched over his steering wheel and crying with laughter as I wipe my teeth on his coat

Update: Marcel died, not from a heart attack, but as the result of a condition called “dilated cardiomyopathy”. It is a natural disease progression which causes a weakening of the heart muscle over time. My apologies for any confusion from prior information.

 

What Really Happened In Spain?

Okay, it’s time for me to fess up.

Why couldn’t I write more posts when I was in Spain?

What the heck was stopping me from spending more time crafting quality material for you to enjoy and reread many, many times per day.

Well, here it is.

I’m not proud of what I did, but when you’re on the Inside, a man will do what it takes to survive.

I just hope we can all learn from my experience. For example, did you know that window sashing makes an excellent shank?

Why No Recent Posting?

Hello.

You may remember me from such films as “I Am Your New Media Teacher” or “This Guy Writes Stories About Himself” or even my most recent movie “I Am Writing a Blog From Germany.”

Sadly, none of these films were summer blockbusters, and our special effects budgets were very low. As a result, I had to do all my own stunts, which explains my bad hips. Bad hips! Down!

You may have also wondered what the heck with regard to a recent slow down of blog-related entertainment. All I can do is tell you to relax, things will pick back up once the Easter holiday has come and gone.

You see, it turns out that I am on a mountaintop in the south of Spain, near the city of Malaga. If you want to check your Google map just to confirm, I am overlooking the Vinhuela reservoir from the west and slightly to the south. It is a very attractive azure at the moment, thanks to the sun blazing over the mountains. It’s not all that warm, so don’t go thinking I’m in some kind of tropical paradise. In fact, as of yesterday, Dusseldorf was warmer than here.

Why am I explaining this to you? Well, I don’t want you to think I have left the blogging business. I haven’t. I will be blogging it up with a vengeance when I get back to The Germ, and you will hopefully start checking back with thelabcoatguy for all your web-related entertainment needs that don’t include tasteless nude photos and hit-in-the-groin videos.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to roll over so that Juanita can apply coconut oil to my freshly shaven chest.

Update on Southern France

I have now been almost one full hour without food. Not sure how long I can keep this up…

Me, my brother and I have been enjoying the graciousness of some fine people out here, and they are spoiling us beyond your imagination. Go ahead and try to imagine how spoiled we are.

Pretty nice, huh?

(Those of you who imagined me biting freshly peeled grapes out from between the whipped creamed covered toes of a French supermodel will have to go back and imagine something else. Sorry.)

Our meals here are so good that they actually make me hungry while I’m eating.

Our hosts are great entertainers and there is another group of people here besides us. That kind of cross-guest contamination can create undue tension when you are entering new circumstances as a weekend guest in someone else’s home, and I suspect my brother wasn’t just trying to scare the people behind us when he was leaned out of the car window vomiting blood from nervousness on our way up the mountain. Yes, we are on a mountain.

But, it turns out that the other guests here are fantastic. I find myself in unfamiliar terrain.

Here I am, a known misanthrope, an asocial, solipsistic miscreant of questionable taste in humour, engaged in convivial social milieu with others, and I haven’t yet been forcibly ejected or made to publically apologize. It’s a new feeling, and one that isn’t as damaging as I might have imagined.

My brother is out skiing at the moment, as he did yesterday. He has an instructor with him, presumably holding on to the other end of the kiddie tethers that keep him from plummeting off the mountain. As a result, I have crept into his room and write this on his laptop, which is excruciating. Why don’t they make laptops with ergonomic, split keyboards for people like myself? Writing this is like doing microsurgery with your fingers duct taped together, which I have done and is no good for anyone, particularly for poor old Mr. Jenkins.

Yesterday while Rick was enjoying his first day of skiing, I went down into the nearest layer of town here and lent my keen eye for fashion to the one of the other guests here. She was looking for a dress for a cocktail party. Thank God for the crippling arthritis that ravages my hip bones and keeps me from the slopes, as she would have been lost without me to guide her choices. We chose the chocolate dress and it is fabulous.

I would continue in this vein, delighting you with the story of how Rick foolishly ordered up that heart and got us euchred, costing us last night’s game and casting into doubt our claims to be from Huron County. Or perhaps I would describe to you the exquisite torture of leaping from twenty-odd minutes in the steam room into the four degree Celsius water of the bain de holy crap that’s froid. But I cannot, for I have to stop typing on this ridiculous tiny keyboard and concentrate on the potentialities of our next meal.

labcoat out. 

  

  

   

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