I give a man five minutes of my time and spend the next 40 minutes regretting it...

Last Saturday, I mowed the lawn, took a shower, and came back outside to finish putting things away before I had to get ready for lunch and then leave with my family.

I see some guys getting stuff out of an SUV in the middle of the street. I probably should have headed inside then, but I didn't know what was coming.

A guy comes running up to me and asks me a question: "If you could pick between these two fragrances, which would it be?"

I shrug, but play along. Both are well-known brands and both are some sort of fruit scent. I spray and sniff both and tell him, "Neither, because I don't like fruity smells."

The guy chuckles a little and says, "Well, we'll get you a different scent. It's our little gift to you for a few minutes of your time."

He tells me he's part of a marketing group that spreads the word about a particular product. "If someone knew of a great product, wouldn't you want someone to tell you about it?"

"I guess," I shrug.

"Well, we want to give you a quick demonstration that should only take five minutes of your time."

He then asks me if I've ever heard of a brand of vacuum, let's just call it The Vacuum Company.

I tell them I had, but added, "Let me stop you right there. I've just bought a brand new Dyson vacuum. I'm not interested in getting a new vacuum."

The guys eyes pop wide and he goes, "That's just perfect!" and proceeds to call another guy over to give me a demonstration. He assures me again that it's not going to take a long time, so I reluctantly let the guy in my house.

Within the first few minutes, I start to realize that this isn't going to take five minutes.

The other guy that just came in, let me just refer to him as Guy, drags along two boxes with him and when I say "drags", I'm being literal. He has a heavy limp like he's suffered with a hip malfunction for most of his life.

I guess I'm just good-hearted because I start feeling a little sorry for the guy, so I sit there patiently as he pulls out of a box, a vacuum head, some hoses, a big bag and an attachment that I've never seen before. After five grueling minutes, Guy gets the vacuum all snapped and pieced together. Guy then goes into a pitch about how The Vacuum Company doesn't do any advertising. They apparently rely on people like me to buy their vacuums door-to-door.

He plugs in the vacuum and snaps some circular filter pieces into his side attachment and starts to vacuum away. He unsnaps the circle filter and says, "Look at that." It indeed is filled with dirt fibers.

Guy goes into his pitch about how The Vacuum Company is one of the only companies whose vacuums are listed as actual "vacuum cleaners". Whereas my new Dyson, is a "vacuum sweeper."

He asks me to get my vacuum out. Vacuums a little with it (I had to show him how to turn it on) and then vacuums over the same carpet space with his vacuum. He shows me the result: more dirt. He does a demonstration in which he vacuums over the same space 52 times to simulate a years worth of vacuuming. Guy then vacuums over that same space again with his vacuum and shows me the result: more dirt.

It's at this point that I'm starting to get a little impatient. It's taking way longer than 5 minutes. The demonstration seems to have no end and it's starting to cut into lunch time for my daughter. My wife starts to make Julia her lunch while I'm stuck there, starving myself, waiting for this non-ending demonstration to end.

I then also start realizing that there seems to be a never-ending stream of dirt coming from my carpet. I think he could have gone over the same spots all day long and still managed to pull up bits of dirt. Also, he has a side attachment that is not even the bag, it's a place to put his filters, but it's also a way to increase the suction. I can only imagine what it would do with the actual bag intact.

It was during this period of helplessness that I started to realize that Guy sounded and talked just like Uncle Rico, the scheming uncle from Napoleon Dynamite who tries selling everything from breast enhancements to cheap tupperware.



Guy then says in an Uncle Rico way, "What I asked you, 'where would you say your dirtiest part of you house is?' What would you say?"

I started to try and think, but then I just said, "I would say... I don't know. Could you just tell me?"

Guy asks to go to the nearest bedroom. In the guess bedroom, he pulls up the sheets and starts vacuuming on the mattress. He shows me the result: lots of dirt and very fine dust. Apparently, dust mites feed on us and dispose of 5 times their body weight on our mattresses. Thanks Guy, I'm now paranoid that I might actually need this vacuum, but I resist the urge.

He also tries to sell me out of my Dyson by explaining that his vacuum has HEPA filter bags. I counter that not only does my Dyson have HEPA, but they are lifetime filters. He doesn't seem fazed and counters with how the HEPA rating is displayed on his vacuum but not on others. I look and can't find it (but I'm sure it's somewhere in my manual). He tells me how the vacuum will also clear the air. I counter with the fact that a British allergy association recommends my vacuum for allergy sufferers. He counters with someone else. I counter that the Dyson produces air 1.5 times cleaner than the air outside the vacuum. He counters with something else. I realize this is never going to end.

I ask if we can wrap this up, so he gives me the lowdown. $2000 for the vacuum!!!

I tell him rather bluntly, "Look, I told the first guy that I had just bought this Dyson and I'm NOT going to just throw it away to buy yours."

Guy/Uncle Rico says, "Okay, but I need to call my boss and let him know that I tried, but you're not interested."

He pulls out of his pocket the oldest, most beaten-up looking Nokia cell phone that I've seen since 1999, dials and starts to talk, in what can only be described as the biggest sack of horse crap that anyone's tried to feed me.

Guy asks, "What's your name?"

I tell him. He nods.

"I'm hear with Mr. At Large. I showed him the vacuum and he's very impressed with it (gives me a nod), but he says that he can't afford to buy another one because he's just bought a new Dyson. Can we do anything for him on the price?"

He nods and starts jotting down numbers. Now it doesn't sound so horrible while I'm typing this, but it sounded like he had just pretended to dial and was talking to no one. I was very tempted to ask Guy for the phone, but refrained.

He then knocked off $800 on the price and told me I could have it for 50 bucks a month. I again reiterated that I made it perfectly clear up front that I had a new vacuum and wasn't interested in buying a new one.

Guy nodded, thanked me for my time and then proceeded to take five minutes picking up all of his equipment and putting it back in the bags and then into the boxes.

I muttered, "Boy. You think they would give you a nice carrying case to haul those vacuums around."

Guy finally leaves and Laura goes, "How do you get yourself sucked into these things?"

I guess I got sucked in by the assurance that it would be only a short demonstration. I'll know better next time someone like that comes along. I then realized not only did I lose 40 minutes of my life that I'll never get back, I also didn't even get my spray fragrance.

Other music I'm listening to lately...

Futureheads - News and Tributes

The Futureheads are a band in the vein of punk rock in that they're not really punk. I guess you'd call them post-punk. My brother, Bill, said they remind him of the Clash, which they sound nothing like. I liked their first self-titled album a lot. The problem with a punkish-like band is that their first record is usually wall-to-wall uptempo number, which leads to disappointments on subsequent releases. The new album has uptempo numbers but a lot of them start out slow and end fast. Some are just slow the whole way through. I like it, but it's not wowing me. C+


Slayer - Christ Illusion

Slayer is a band that I grew up with when I was a metal head. They're a dark metal band that sings about such sunshiny topics like Satan, God, religion, war, demons, blood, etc. Did I mention they love to sing about dark stuff? Fast, pounding and full of fury, this album does not disappoint. I haven't listened to them in years, but it's a nice change of pace. I'd give it a B

These are just two I've been listening to this week. More to come...

We see the trailer for the Grudge 2 and Laura almost loses it...

My wife has several fears in life.

She's afraid of birds, kids that are possessed or ghosts and Billy Gilman.

For some reason, she's creeped out by Billy Gilman. Not the surely-20-years-old-by-now Billy Gilman, but the 12-year-old Billy Gilman. Gilman was one of those kid country proteges that got some airplay back in the late 90s. He put the albums out that old people would buy because he was young, cute and had a decent voice.

Laura was creeped out by him and still mentions it to this day.

Oh my God! It's Billy Gilman!!!

But this story isn't about Billy Gilman.

We went to see the new Will Ferrell movie, Talladega Nights - The Ballad of Ricky Bobby last Friday night. Right before the movie, they had the new trailer for the movie, Grudge 2. See the trailer here... link

Now I'm sure no one remembers my review of the original Grudge, but you can read it here.

I thought the original movie a little scary, but it had some major plot points that I felt were too big to make up for. The movie centers around a cursed house in which a man killed his wife and kid. Because they died in a violent way, the house curses anyone that goes into it and they die by the hands of the freaky-ass ghost of the wife and the creepy kid ghost.

The movie picks up right after the first movie ends. Sarah Michelle Gellar has survived the first movie and is back to watch everyone around her die.

The trailer shows flashes of everyone under the sun dying at the hands of the ghost wife, but they show a few flashes of the ghost kid lunging at people and screaming in his cat-like voice. It's at this point that Laura screams and winces.

I look over at her during the trailer and she has her head turned toward the side a little. She tries to look away, but is compelled to look just in time to see something like this:


She yelps, "Oh God!" and turns away. I laugh because I know her fears.

There's a quick shot of the freaky kid yowling a scream and people jump. My wife covers her face.

In another part of the trailer, a lady sees the freaky ghost kid and runs and hides under a table (Good thinking!). Her cell phone on the table above her starts ringing. Frantically, she reaches up to grab the phone when... she grabs the kids foot!

People jump and my wife yells, "Jesus Christ!"

Several more scares abound in the trailer (they don't seem to care that they're showing you everything I guess). My wife turns to me and mutters, "I'll not be seeing THAT movie thank you very much!"

I chuckle because I think back to the original fears. I think the perfect horror movie for my wife would be a possessed ghost kid that sings like Billy Gilman and has a flock of attack birds following him, not that I get her to see it.

A slight new look with more spell checks!

I noticed this template on a site. Someone modified the original design and added an extra column. I also was prompted to run the spell check on a few of the current stories. Apparently, it looks sloppi to hav a few mispelled words hear and their...

New music I'm liking...

There's a mash-up type band called Girl Talk that has a new cd out called "Night Ripper." It's what I like to call a mix tape for someone with a very short attention span. It mixes beats and sound segments from hundreds of popular songs into short segments to result in a long mix. Songs change direction several times before they're done. Recommended if you don't mind the anarchy going on in your head while listening.


Girl Talk - Night Ripper

A hella cool pop in the city...

In California, one of the biggest culture shocks I had to endure did not involve anything involving a landmark or a saying, although those certainly could cause confusion to anybody visiting or a newbie Californian like myself.

I mentioned before that I worked in San Francisco as a video game tester. While I worked there nearly every day and visited San Francisco off and on with my wife when I wasn't working, it wasn't until after I left the state that I found out that people referred to San Francisco as "The City". My wife told me that you couldn't refer to it as "San Fran" or "Frisco" or anything close to it without people glaring at you. It was just "The City". Eddie Izzard, a British comedian known for dressing in drag onstage, taped his "Dressed to Kill" HBO special in San Francisco and noted that it sounded like snakes were in the audience from the people hissing when he didn't refer to San Francisco as "The City".

Looking on this now, it strikes me as odd that San Francisco got this designation. New York City is "The Big Apple", New Orleans is "The Big Easy", Los Angeles is "LA", but I never understood why San Francisco is so special that it out of any city in the country is "The City". It's still strange to me.

California is also the home for the term "Hella". I first heard the term on a South Park episode where Cartman, the fat kid, annoyed everyone in one episode by declaring everything "hella stupid", "hella lame" or "hella crazy". I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a joke on the California use of the term "Hella". If you look it up online, you'll see that "hella" is actually a slang term mainly used in the Northern California area. Some think it's a derived from the term "hell of a" meaning "very" or "a lot".

A lot of culture comes from California. For example, the Valley Girls with their own Valley Speak that once swept the nation. For some reason, Hella just has never caught on with the rest of the country. Not that they don't try.

I had seen the South Park episode years before my move to California. Suddenly, I became surrounded by it. At the video game company, some guys would declare things "hella cool" or "hella crazy". I thought it was rather funny to suddenly hear it all around me. Funnier yet, the kids that weren't allowed to say "Hell" substituted "Heck" at created "Hecka" for "Hella". I almost lost it in a video store when I heard that the first time. I heard a kid declare to his Mom that the movie he wanted to rent looked "hecka cool". I thought it was just that one kid, but I heard it several times after that, usually in a video store, by kids that weren't teenagers yet declaring anything and everything "hecka cool".

One of the hardest words for me to avoid saying lest I be labeled an outsider in California was the word, "Pop."

When I was working at that Pizza Hut for a few short weeks, I'd take people's orders over the phone and I'd ask them near the end, "Do you want any pop to go with that order?"
This was usually followed by a confused sounding, "What?"

I thought that maybe people had a hard time understanding me since I have a habit of mumbling, so I'd repeat with, "Do you want any soft drinks like Coke, Diet Coke, etc."
One night, it became clear to me why people were confused. I asked the "Pop" question during an order and the lady answered with a drink order. She then asked, "Are you from the Midwest?" I answered that I was indeed from the Midwest, Nebraska to be exact. She said, "I'm from Ohio. I figured you were from around there because I haven't heard the word "Pop" used in a while."

It became clearer at the video game company. They would stock free pops into a large cooler for us to drink. People called it "soda".

Now at this point, you're probably wondering what took me so long. I just had never heard people refer to products like Coke as "soda". All my life, it was "Pop" so forgive me if it took me a long time to figure out what term people used for their "sodas". I think it was when I would see guys get up and go, “Dude, do you want a soda?” or “Hey, they just restocked the sodas?” that I put 2 and 2 together to get to the “soda” variable.

Soda was a hard term for me to adopt. It felt weird to call soft drinks “soda” because in my mind, “soda” is the clear, flavorless stuff that you add to hard liquor to dilute it, like with a vodka and soda.

So I would find myself saying to my tester friends, “They just restocked the pop… err… soda cooler!” To which guys would give me a strange look as I had stepped off the train in San Francisco wearing overalls with a banjo on my knee and a piece of straw hanging out of my mouth.

While I did my best to adopt the “soda” slang, I was stymied by my wife at home. She refused to call the soft drinks we used “soda”. We’d be at the store buying our groceries and I’d say that we’d need some “soda” to which she’d either glare at me or glare and ask, “Oh, you mean, pop?”
She was bound and determined to get me to stop saying it, so I would have to remember to call it “Pop” at home, but then revert to the California term by using “Soda” while I was working in San Francisco.

I think my California co-workers were confused by it. One day, they asked for an explanation when I again made the unkind mistake of referring to their “soda” as “pop”.
“What’s this “Pop” thing all about?” one of them asked. I tried to explain that this how I’d always referred to soft drinks at home, but again they looked at me like I was a yokel. Thankfully, a co-worker who was originally from Ohio came to my defense.

“Hey, I’ll back Bob up on this. That’s what they call it in the Midwest. You don’t understand. It’s not as is this is just a local thing. It’s everywhere! The store aisles literally say, “Pop”. You’ll see a store ad in the newspaper and people will say, ‘Hey! Pop’s on sale!"

I should point out that when I was in California that a lot of guys that I worked with seemed to have no concept that there are other states outside of California save for Oregon and Arizona. Most never seemed to have traveled outside of California. Why should they? They have almost every pastime that you could want to do in California. Like tall trees? Go to the Muir Woods. Like hiking? There are plenty of hills. Like to surf? Go to the beach. Like to ski? Go to Lake Tahoe.

Because of this, the guys I worked with seemed genuinely shocked when they'd walk by me and I'd be listening to some music that they'd actually listen to. They looked like they wanted to ask, "So did you mug some Californian and steal his walkman?"

It sounds very stupid now that I write about this, and it is, but the soda story actually sets up my next story: How to lose weight and then gain it all back and then some by sitting on your but all day.