Ladies and gentlemen, the Safe is burning

Oh, dudes. Doods! Look what I missed, at last night's "Turn Back the Clock" Mariners' game:




Yes, that is THE Erik Estrada, looking not-too-much the worse for wear as he cruises past the dugout. Apparently, after roaring from the outfield tunnel in a great cloud of smoke, Officer Poncharello threw out the ceremonial first pitch. Oh my golly, he certainly was the coolest...back when I was in the second grade.

I do love the retro, "Mr.-Pibb-fonted" uniforms (a perfect turn of phrase I am stealing from Slate's Michael Schaffer), with the cornball trident "M" logo. I dimly remember my first game, in the late, not much lamented Kingdome; the kids' giveaway that night was an electric-blue plastic batting helmet with that screaming yellow trident on the front. I am sure we lost; I think Grandpa disconsolately took us home along about the fifth inning. Too bad that Kawasaki isn't a time machine, Ponch, because I would give most anything I own to either revisit that night or haul Grandpa back with me, to see what those hapless Mariners have become.

I have tickets tonight, actually--good ones; thanks, Steve-o!--but I don't expect that anything will quite live up to the above. Sigh.

Mulder, it's me

(Which is the one thing I have ever/will ever want to shout into a cell phone, whenever the spirit moves me.)

I have to confess that I have been something of an inadvertent Luddite when it comes to mobile phones. I kept meaning to get one--my interest spiking each time we lost Mom somewhere in the wilds of the baseball stadium, or a piece of my old car fell off onto the highway--but I continued to forget about it with great regularity. For, oh, ten years. I was finally inspired to act by my recent college reunion (which was two months ago), when my peers were frenetically logging each other's numbers and calling each other from seminars and dorm room to dorm room and across the picnic table. I couldn't remember which rooms we'd all been assigned to, and without a phone was reduced to standing in front of various doors stage-whispering "Emily? Margaret? Emily? Hello?"

So. Today I have succumbed to a cell-phone offer from the auto-club, and then conducted a whirlwind pop-cultural volley with Sis over the IM.

Kim says:
Just signed up for a cell phone. Now the Borg OWNS me.
Sis says:
eeek
Kim says:
yeah. but also I am a teensy bit excited.
Kim says:
do you remember when I called you from the AirPhone ™ once when I was flying back to college?
Sis says:
yes
Kim says:
it was something like $4 a minute, and the size of a brick. heh.
Kim says:
anyway, cheapo AAA deal, $20/month for 100 minutes.
Kim says:
I figure I will never come close to using that much, as it's only for 1. "Where the fuck ARE you?" 2. "I have been run off the road by a truck, help" and 3. "Hello, Snappy Dragon? I'm on 520, have the potstickers ready for me."
Sis says:
are you going to start voting on America's Got Talent now?
Kim says:
Oh. And that too, of course.
Sis says:
hee hee hee
Kim says:
10 votes for BoyShakira, coming up
Kim says:
Or I can play the Hell's Kitchen games: "Which chef will give Ramsay an embolism tonight?"
Sis says:
Christ, that man gives me high blood pressure
Kim says:
funny, he makes mine all just float away!
Sis says:
Fuckin' donut
Kim says:
DONKEY! DONKEY! DONKEY!
Sis says:
GET OUT
Kim says:
If I had it in me to behave like that as a boss, this week would have gone a lot different


(Mark Blankenship via both PopPolitics and Elastic Waist, today; potstickers via the wildly careening Dragon!Wagons, if you live in the delivery zone, you lucky duck.)

Cardio funk blast

This morning at the gym, I'd finished my workout and was stretching in the little carpeted area set aside for such purpose. It was fairly crowded, with other stretchers and with various folks and trainers prodding them through this or that activity. There was a man being made to do situps and bicycle-type (lying down) calisthenics by his trainer, and I am telling you, this guy ripped a series of explosive, sputtery, EXTREMELY LOUD farts. I mean, me and several other ladies were LOOKING AROUND in amazement. They were whoopie-cushion-esque; they sounded fake, like someone was making the noise to be funny, but no.

So then in the locker room changing we were all still marveling at it. We agreed that only a man would just blithely "push through the set!!" with indifference, whereas had I made such a racket I would be all "well, time to join a new gym!" I am sort of impressed with his perseverance, really, because at the very least, if I had unleashed such a veritable thunderclap of farting, I'd still be lying there paralyzed with laughter. Before crawling away to my car and never going back as long as I lived.

Gryffindorky

It's okay, there will be no spoilers in this entry.

I thought about going up to the Harry Potter bash at the local indie bookstore, Santoro's, last night...but by 11:30 I was drowsing on the couch. Getting too old for this shit, apparently.

But I stopped in just a few minutes ago, to lug my own final J. K. Rowling doorstop home. There were still red and yellow helium balloons, bobbing aganst the ceiling; the door to "the loo" was plastered with crayon renderings of Harry and his pals. The staff looked groggy and blissful. "I'll remember this for the rest of my life," my cashier commented. I was one of four adults in the space of two minutes, queueing up to get the book; also present was a dad with two little kids, the elder of whom was begging for a second copy.

"Are you fighting over it?" I asked, laughing.

"No...they're just so...wonderful. We need them!" the boy said. The dad pulled out 60-some dollars for the boxed, color-illustrated deluxe addition; the little sister was dragging the store's slightly battered, almost life-size Harry cardboard cutout around the display tables like a dance partner. "Come on...let's put Harry back and go home," Dad said, fanning the kids out the door before him.

When I got on the bandwagon, along about the fourth book, I remember feeling like I wanted deliberately to read them under the covers with a flashlight on late summer nights...despite the fact that I was a grown woman in her 30s and could read them when and however I damn well pleased. I saw a couple of FedEx drivers on the news, describing the experience of delivering the latest Potter to household after household on the due date. "This has been the best day of my life," one said with wonder. "Every house I go to, little kids run out and HUG me!"

Home, where I cracked the behemoth open to its dedication:

The dedication of this book is split seven ways: to Neil, to Jessica, to David,
to Kenzie, to Di, to Anne, and to you, if you have stuck with Harry until the
very end.

So, yeah. Pretty much already crying, and renderered virtually twelve years old. Thanks for that, J. K.

This is a dark ride

I got a twinge of puzzled nostalgia from this Seattle Times article on the late, lamented (?) Flight to Mars ride of the Seattle Center amusement park. I don't think I've been to ye olde Fun Forest in twenty years, but somehow I had not realized that the Flight to Mars was no more.

As haunted-house spook shows go, the best you could say of the Flight to Mars was that it was...eclectic. What was the deal, with the nodding mechanical alien-pirate-skull (with fedora!) that bobbed above the facade? I think I rode through in one of those little cars exactly once, on a trip with the Girl Scouts; I was completely petrified and spent most of the ride with my eyes screwed so tightly shut they nearly burst out the back of my head. I was a very timid child. Two gags have remained in my memory: a mechanical bat that swooped at your head, and a mineshaft-collapse faux timber that likewise veered at you from above. Neither of which would seem to have anything to do with intergalactic travel, unless I'm missing something. Maybe my eyes were closed for the Mars part.

I'm also bemused by Mike McCready's reminiscence of makeout dates in there. In the eighth grade?! Clearly I was both timid and somewhat backwards, because no such opportunities arose for me at 14.

Although actually I do have a very specific Grade 8 memory of the Fun Forest. My class was on an end-of-the-year trip to the Pacific Science Center; the teachers had basically turned us loose in there, and a dozen or so of us snuck out of the educational pavillions and down to the amusement park portion of the Center. We pooled our funds enough to buy a strip of tickets. Our ride of choice? The carousel. Yeah, that's right--we bad. But it was a beautiful day in May and I remember circling and laughing and shrieking, on a bejeweled painted pony while 80s pop blared overhead, and thinking I was the shit. It was probably the most subversive thing I'd ever done, at the time.

After the ride we ran to meet our buses; one teacher noted the non-scientific direction we were coming from and ticked off names on a clipboard as we sprinted past. Most of the kids were busted and had to do a week of lunchroom duty, slopping down trays and wiping tables...but I didn't get caught! Woohoo! Heh. It's a funny little slice of heaven now, an innocence so thorough I can hardly believe it.

Beezus !#*&@! Christ

Worked from home today, waiting for an exterminator to come and deal with the bumblebees that had taken up residence in the flower bed, directly against the foundation of my house. I felt a little bad about it: bumblebees are so fuzzy and dopey and fat, you know, konking into the windows, a little confused. Plus all of the END IS NIGH hypothesizing about the decline in honeybee population. Still, this was preferable to me going out there in a moon suit and giant netted hat, ineffectually waving around a smoke pot from a healthy distance of 40 feet.

Kim says:
eeek. so I'm typing, and the bee whisperer is right outside the window, and he just sort of jumped and banged the wall. stung, maybe? scared the shit out of me.

Sis says:
yi

Kim says:
I can hear a low mumblebuzz, dunno if it's his radio or, you know, ENRAGED BEES.

Kim says:
forming the shape of an angry pointing finger in the sky.

Sis says: christ...ask him thru the window

Kim says:
well, now he's yakking on his radio, so he seems unperturbed.

Kim says:
$195, btw. Better him than me!

Sis says:
don't you like owning a home?

Kim says:
oh yes. so fun.

Sis says:
what's he going to do to eliminate them?

Kim says:
I believe for this kind, they poison the hole and then seal it up. Most of the bees should be out and about, doing their bee jobs...so if they come back and find no hole, they move along. I think.

Sis says:
ugh

Kim says:
I am totally RADAR EARS right now, and convinced I can hear them, buzzing and plotting their revenge.

Sis says:
are they shaped in a giant finger yet? Pointing at your house?

Kim says:
an exclamation point of outrage.

Sis says:
uh oh...now they're forming the "at" sign....followed by a number sign, and asterisk

Sis says:
they're really pissed

How to secure a standing invitation

Talk at our adolescent-mortification-themed book club meeting (a whole 'nother story I'll fill in later) turns to John Hughes movies. One end of the couch is holding forth on both Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club, but I dismiss each as "too Messagey."

"Sixteen Candles, no question," I say. "It's the first one and the only one I can pretty much recite word-for-word."

At which point the newest book-club attendee, Kristin, turns to me and declares without preamble, "No, he's not retarded!"