(The title of this post is an extra-credit sixteenth quote. And correctly identified as being from The Great Muppet Caper, sung by the entire cast (with “is there any way to stop it?” plaintively intoned by Sweetums))

Well, since the comic strip quotes game seemed to be well-received, let’s play a little At The Movies with Meaningless Musings. Just like before, name where (which movie) the quote came from and who said it (actor or character or both). Also like before, these are all quoted from memory so they might be a word or two off, which on the upside might make them harder to Google. And speaking of Google, if you get the answer from a search engine I commend your resourcefulness but that’s cheating so please refrain from posting those answers (there will, of course, be exactly no repercussions or investigations – those sorts of things solidly KFI at 1). Also also like before, feel free to post your answers as comments or e-mail ‘em to me, as you prefer.

**Edit 5/20/05 – for the last four un-guessed quotes I’ve added a second quote from the same movie. Happy guessing!

**Edit 5/23/05 – #11 is apparently a bit too obscure (that or everyone’s Googled the answer already). The quotes were from The Secret of My Success, one of my personal favorites back in high school but hardly a runaway blockbuster hit. There’s a new #11 from a different movie for your guessing enjoyment.

And away we go –

1. Just fly casual. – Correctly identified as being said by Han Solo in Return of the Jedi. I love that line. “Keep your distance, Chewie… but don’t look like you’re keeping your distance.”

2. There he goes to write the hit song, “Alone in My Principles.” – Correctly identified as being said by Lenny Haise in That Thing You Do, perhaps the best movie no one’s ever heard of. If you haven’t seen it, make a point of doing so ASAP; classic stuff. I could easily have just used 15 quotes from this movie alone.

3. Well, I say it with a great deal of charm. OR There are 200 pairs of eyes on you and they’re all wondering two things – who’s that girl and why is she dancing with the President? – Correctly identified as being from An American President. The first quote’s said by Lewis Rothschild (Micheal J. Fox) by way of explaining how he gets away with his system for dating – all plans are soft until confirmed 20 minutes beforehand. The second quote’s said by Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening) as she’s dancing with the President.

4. And X never, ever marks the spot. – Correctly identified as being said by Indiana Jones (apparently Harrison Ford quotes are generally known) in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy’s face when X does indeed mark the spot later in the movie is absolutely priceless.

5. Is that a lot? – Correctly identified as being said by James Tiberius Kirk in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The crew, having traveled back in time to nineteen eighty-something to find a humpback whale and thereby save the world (a plot device which somehow works very nicely) needs money, so Kirk goes to a pawn shop to sell a pair of glasses given to him by McCoy. The shopkeeper offers him $100, and Kirk – not knowing anything about money and certainly nothing about 20th century exchange rates – offers this bon mot.

6. He’s a very clean man. – Correctly identified as being said by Paul McCartney (and many other people (primarily the manager guy whose name I can’t remember – the Brian Epstein of the film (the one Lennon keeps calling a swine))) in A Hard Day’s Night, which was the first movie to ever be released for sale in digital form.

7. Seize the fat one! – Correctly identified as being said by Prince John (Peter Ustinov) in Disney’s Robin Hood. For my money, the funniest scene in all of cinematic history – when “On Wisconsin” kicks in and Lady Cluck charges across the field I can never keep from laughing hysterically.

8. Then him… then me. OR It will turn out well. (How will it?) I don’t know. It’s a mystery. – Correctly identified as being from Shakespeare in Love, perhaps my favorite movie ever. Certainly the film I’ve spent the most on theater tickets for. The first quote is said by Mr. Fennyman (Hugh was his first name, I think) over and over as he rehearses his role as the Apothecary in Romeo ‘n’ Juliet. “‘Such mortal drugs have I, but Mantua’s law is death to any he that utters them.’ Then him, then me,” if memory serves. The second quote is said several times by Philip Henslowe and once by Lady Viola.

9. If you were waiting for the opportune moment – that was it. – Correctly identified as being said by Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.

10. You know the hot tip I told you about? Nobody told the horse. OR When the circulation bell starts ringing, will we hear it? – Correctly identified as being from Newsies. The first quote’s said by Racetrack, one of the Newsie gang (played by the actor who played the sidekick on Doogie Howser, M.D.). The second quote’s part of a musical number sung by Jack (aka Cowboy), played by Christian Bale (who’ll soon be donning the Batman cape in theaters everywhere). And, I should note in case Emily reads this blog and decides to catch me on a technicality, later said by the chirpy little kid whose name I can’t remember – Davy and Sarah’s little brother.

** Edit – Ah, heck, this is fun. Five more -

11. I would offer up the proudest prayer a boy could think of: Lord, make me a great composer. – Correctly identified as being said by Antonio Salieri in Amadeus, one of the most intensely well-done movies I’ve ever seen. I’ve learned that I need to consciously and intentionally limit my viewing of this movie, even though I love the soundtrack and the storyline and the writing and acting are simply spectacular. The theme of looking up from a Purgatory of mediocrity, just close enough to truly know how far away you are, strikes just a little too close to home for me. Which is, of course, a different post for another day. Congratulations, and thanks for playing!

12. You’re a Sikh Catholic Muslim, with Jewish in-laws? – Correctly identified as being said by Edward Norton (playing Father Brian Finn) in Keeping the Faith.

13. You will refer to me as “Idiot,” not “You Captain!” – Correctly identified as being said by Lone Starr (two r’s? Really? I didn’t know that) in Spaceballs. I’d heard rumors once upon a time that Mel Brooks planned to get the new Spaceballs movie into theaters before Revenge of the Sith came out, but he’s certainly running out of time.

14. Nonsense. I have not yet begun to defile myself. – Correctly identified as being said by Doc Holliday in Tombstone, after it’s suggested to him that perhaps 30 consecutive hours of drinking and playing poker is a bit excessive.

15. Thank you for the cookies. I can’t wait to toss them! – Correctly (if belatedly and, we assume, with Internet assistance) identified as being said by Julius (Governor Schwarzenegger) in Twins.

Before I go on with the actual post-y content of this post, let me first offer you this link for your surfing enjoyment. The store just went online yesterday; I can’t decide whether I think it’s absurd or wonderful. Most likely a healthy dose of both. Remember, though, nothing says, “I love you” on Memorial Day like a coffee mug!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled musing already in progress…

Four years ago, when I first started working at a hospital, I was excited to learn all sorts of fancy new medical terms and concepts. I did, but more than that I learned that true medical-speak involves never actually saying any of those fancy terms. I’ve never been part of a more abbreviation-intensive subculture; almost never are actual medical terms actually said. The medical world would like you to believe that’s because we so often deal with situations where those extra fractions of seconds can be life-or-death, but that’s nonsense. I’ll bet even Chicago emergency rooms aren’t nearly as excitement-packed as ER portrays – certainly 99% of the routine in a hospital is, well, pretty routine. My theory is that the abbreviations serve two purposes. They’re much faster to write than the full words are – doctors and nurses do a tremendous amount of writing in charts and on flowsheets and on their hands and their scrubs and whatever other surfaces are handy; the sort of time savings one gets by replacing, say, “electroencephalograph” with “EEG” adds up quickly. They’re also, unto themselves, meaningless. “Electroencephalograph” has all the sub-word-pieces in it you’d need to figure out more or less what it means – some sort of picture of electrical stuff in the head (or maybe Electric Head Picture, which would be, I think, an outstanding name for a band). “EEG” means nothing unless you already know what it is; if you’re not in the know already it offers you no clues. Sometimes they make it harder yet by using abbreviations that use letters not in the original word – “EKG” for “electrocardiogram”, for instance (the German word has a k (and probably a lot of ch’s and some phlegm) in it; it’s not completely random).

Whatever the reason, though, the use of abbreviations is absolutely ubiquitous and becoming comfortable with them is almost like learning a foreign language. Tonight at work, for instance, I wrote this on my clipboard about a particular patient: “CABG pod4 c ioCVA, JP, MT-s. RSW, Uc2, NPO – NGF.” Another fellow was, “CADx4, MM, ¯INR, UAL, GD-NAS, GM ac&hs.” In fact, looking over my whole clipboard – notes on 16 patients – I see only one word written out. Apparently I don’t know the abbreviation for “pneumonia”. Whatever I may think about the practice of expressing oneself without using any complete words, I certainly seem to have embraced it, which leads me to thinking about other abbreviations I’ve used in the past. I can think of three that I think you, Gentle Reader, might be able to productively incorporate into your vocabulary, and in the spirit of e-helpfulness I’ll go ahead and tell you about them.

First up is “RSS”. This has its own meaning now in the Internet world, but I have no idea what that meaning is (I’m quite sure at least two of you readers could enlighten me, if you were so inclined…). It seems to have something to do with tracing how someone found a particular website, or perhaps with tracking electronic paths back to someone’s computer so their credit card information can be easily stolen. Fancier blogs all seem to have RSS feeds, so apparently an RSS is something you feed. It probably even stands for something cool, too, but again I’ve no idea.

I came up with my own “RSS” acronym back when I was a columnist for the Wartburg College student newspaper. I wanted to conclude my columns with some sort of actual worthwhile information and I thought doing a weekly poll might be fun, but I quickly learned that actually polling people is quite tedious. Plus you generally get a more or less 50-50 split unless your question is designed to create decisive results (“Is it okay to eat live kittens?” for instance). So I decided that instead of doing a regular poll every week I’d develop a whole new style of polling. Thus was born the Rod Simplified Survey, or RSS.

To conduct an RSS, find someone and ask them a question (or, in absence of anyone else, just ask yourself). Then project their response out to a demographic represented by your polling sample. For instance, if a professor expressed his opinion that the Wartburg tradition of Outfly was silly that could be reported as, “This week’s RSS reveals that 100% of professors are in favor of doing away with Outfly.” That’s boring, though – better a result like, “100% of men ages 31-74 are firmly opposed to college students ever having days off,” or “All people who live now or have ever lived in the state of Iowa…” or whatever Whatever the result, the key is that the results are 100% conclusive. The RSS allows polls to take a definite stand on something, and they’re not, in the strictest sense of the word, inaccurate.

I know I didn’t actually make up this system of polling, whatever I may have let myself believe. Professional polling companies have been making the data fit the results for years. It became a popular part of the column, though – people would occasionally stop me on campus and ask if they could be my polling sample for that week. I often think it would be sort of funny to have a little “RSS” link (like those fancy blogs do) on my website, but instead of having it link to whatever technical stuff a real “RSS” link links to, it would instead open up a page full of RSS results. That is to say, polls indicate that 100% of people who’ve ever used a computer think it would be funny.

Later, in my immediate-post-graduate years, I developed (in conjuction with some friends) the RTI and KFI, both scales for determining how desirable a particular action or event is. The RTI is the “Rod Tastiness Index,” a 1-10 scale to determine how tasty (“tasty” in the holistic sense, not just basic food-and-drink yumminess) something is. A 10 would be the Cubs winning the World Series or holding your newborn child for the first time or Airwolf finally coming out on DVD – something of that sort. A 1 would be listening to the lead singer from Rascal Flatts singing opera or having to amputate your own leg or realizing that while you’ve spent an hour feeling around for the watch you dropped into an outhouse it was in fact just on your other wrist. The usage is to treat it as a verb – things RTI at some number, which can be any real number between 1 and 10. “How was your day at work?” “RTI’d at about a 5.4.” Or you can just cite the number: “Didja check out this website?” “Yeah. Maybe a 3.2.” Or, to revisit my earlier example, being able to buy CST stuff online RTI’s at 8.6, at least.

The KFI is the “Kammerer Far Index,” a boolean scale (expressed as either a 0 or a 1) to determine whether or not something’s far. Again, this isn’t “far” in the strict sense of distance but rather whether it’s just too much work to contemplate. Things are either far or almost far, and since there isn’t the range of possibilities that there are with an RTI, expressing something’s KFI is usually just a matter of saying, “far,” (or, in rare cases, “that’s far,” although the “that’s” is generally considered too much extra work) or simply, “eh,” (That’s a short-e “eh” like in “then” or “den”, not the Canadian long-a “eh”) if something’s KFI is 1 (if it’s 0, then you just agree to do whatever task you’ve just rated). For instance – “Hey, can you help me move all my furniture into my new fourth-floor apartment?” “Sorry – far.” Or, “Should we sit down and spend the evening talking about our feelings?” “Eh.” Things that are ones on both the RTI and KFI scales are, obviously, about as undesirable as can be.

Movie trivia’s coming soon; thanks to everyone who played the comic strip quote game. Now it’s time to sleep the day away, which will be at least a 7.9.

Okay, boys and girls, let’s play a game of “Name That Quote.” I have assembled for you a list of 10 of my favorite comic strip quotes of all time – quotes that forced me to stop reading because I was laughing so hard. Your challenge is to identify the strip in which the quote was said and the character who said it. There are, therefore, 20 points possible.

You’re welcome and encouraged to post your answers as comments in a spirit of convivial work-together-ness, or if you’d rather e-mail your answers to me that’s certainly fine too.

These are all quotes from regular in-the-paper comic strips (nothing tricky), although five of the strips quoted are no longer being made. Also, all these quotes were entered from memory – I’m 99% sure they’re accurate, but there might a slight wording difference.

Good luck!

1. Yes, Santa Claus, there is a Virginia. – Correctly identified as being said by Howland Owl in Pogo. It’s the punch line conclusion to a huge stretch of strips where the Okefenokee gang notices there’s a Georgia in the USSR and freak out that somehow the Soviets have stolen it. With Christmas coming, they fret, what if Santa Claus goes to Georgia’s new location and ends up getting lost and assuming that the rest of the Southeast is just gone? Pogo compilations are hard to find, but absolutely worth the effort and money, especially if you’ve never read the strip before; in my opinion the best comic strip ever in the paper.

2. Who the dickens is Dan Fogerburp?!? – Correctly identified as being said by Opus in Bloom County, a proud product of Iowa City. Opus is freaking out because his fiancee Lola tells him she has a tattoo of Dan Fogelberg.

3. You stupid darkness!! – Correctly identified as being said by Lucy in Peanuts. “I have heard it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,” says Linus to Charlie Brown. “That’s true,” replies Charlie Brown, “although there will always be those who will disagree with you.” The third panel is Lucy standing out in the night yelling.

4. I just like to say “smock.” Smock smock smock smock smock! – Correctly identified as being said by Hobbes in Calvin & Hobbes.

5. I am the master of all window treatments! – Correctly identified as being said by Bucky Katt in Get Fuzzy (while on a catnip binge).

6. If Jon’s socks are in this drink… where is the ice? – Correctly identified as being said by Garfield in Garfield, which spent many years being only somewhat funny but has massively rebounded of late and is often the funniest strip in the paper on a given day these days. “My feet are cold.” Classic stuff!

7. Clearly, J.R.R. Tolkien never played D&D. – Correctly identified as being said by Jason Fox in FoxTrot.

8. What if the Hokey-Pokey really is what it’s all about? – Successfully evaded identification. Said by Jeremy Duncan in Zits. Jeremy’s sitting around his room with his chum Hector and apparently thinking deep life thoughts.

9. They can make me do it, but they can’t make me do it with dignity. – Correctly identified as being said by Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes. Calvin pitches an enormous fit about bathtime and then in the final panel grins merrily at the reader and says this line.

10. Car! – Correctly identified as being said by a random cow in The Far Side (no website for this one – here’s why). I’ll bet many of you have seen this one – a bunch of cows are standing around all bipedal-ish in a field and one of them yells, “Car!” In the next panel (sort of – The Far Side didn’t really use panels) they’re all standing around on all fours like regular cows. Then in the last panel they’re standing upright again.

Time for me to make use of that time-honored and generally-accepted blogger’s technique of discoursing aimlessly about an assortment of things-on-my mind and arranging them as a list. To muse meaninglessly about various whatnot and suchforth, as it were.

• Yesterday evening, I found (through a link on Greg’s blog) a flash version of the old Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game. Ah, the many hours I spent on the old Commodore 128 trying to figure out the puzzles contained therein – not the least of which was just trying to figure out what it was you were expected to figure out. The new game seems to be exactly the old one, only with some nifty illustrations and without the frequent 45-second pauses while the disk drive chugs away. So far I’m on the Heart of Gold and zapping myself around to various out-of-body experiences that have, I’ve no doubt, some sort of significance but which I can’t solve the connected puzzles for. Basically, in other words, exactly where I was 15 years ago. There’s a link to the game in the links section off to the right – if you used to play the game, I think you’ll greatly enjoy taking another crack at it (the site lets you save your game (just type “save” at the command prompt (you know, like you used to))). If you’ve never played, you should definitely check it out. The site also has the new radio re-recording of HHGG, which I haven’t yet spent any time at all persuing, so excited was I to find the interactive, but which is, I’m sure, very nifty as well.

• There are a few new links (and a few renamed ones – I went ahead and changed all the blog titles to the actual names of the blogs instead of the bloggers’ names) over in linkyland to the right. Aside from the HHGG interactive game there’s Greg Nichols’s blog “heckuva far” which I was pointed to a couple of weeks ago by “Air” Jesse Klosterboer and which I’ve quickly become quite attached to. If you haven’t checked it out yet, click the link and spend some time reading through Greg’s archives – he’s extremely good at this blogging thing. Also, my name is in bold capital letters in the first post right now and I think that’s cool. There’s also been a cycling in the “send an e-mail to…” link. Pat McAlpine’s given way to Jason Martin-Hiner (née Hiner)’s stepped in. And so goes the inexorable force of progress, coupled with my restless-little-kid need to keep tweaking the template.
• Stepping into ranting mode for a moment, I’ve been astounded (naívely, probably, but astounded nonetheless) over the last few months at the amount of TV time the Michael Jackson trial’s been getting. I work night shift at a hospital so I generally get a pretty good sampling of nighttime TV going from room to room and if I didn’t know better I’d think that the trial had somehow become actual news because the defendent is extremely famous and extremely weird (I’m not sure which is more important). Please don’t misunderstand me – if he’s guilty he did a horrible thing and I hope he’s force-fed his own toes; there is no excuse for that sort of crime. My bewilderment comes from the fact that it’s more interesting when a person who’s famous does something (and he hasn’t been convicted of anything) wrong. I remember being in American History back in 10th grade and listening to Mr. Harms proudly talk about how America has never had a monarchy. I think he was wrong – Hollywood’s our royal family. We afford them a silly and extravagant life but by heck we get to watch them live it.
• Continuing in ranting mode, but on a completely different tangent – I’m so very tired of seeing the word “alright.” There is no such word. None. It’s a lazy misspelling of “all right” (or perhaps the last name “Albright”) that’s become commonplace because we’re a society that’s lost sight of the fact that “wrong” can simply mean incorrect so we hesitate to call anything wrong. I know it’s in the dictionary, but I find myself unimpressed with that argument -conversationalisms have very much established themselves as dictionary-worthy (Exhibit A and B).

  I’ve no problem with new words or new usages of old words (obviously), but is just an accepted misspelling. “All ready” and “already” mean different things, “all most” and “almost” mean different things, “all bum” and “album” mean vastly different things. As soon at “alright” thinks of its own thing to mean I’ll cheerfully accept it. Until then it gets filed away with kat and occashun.

• I found an upside to the Cubs’ penchant for disappointing tonight. I had the lovely and alas-none-too-rare joy of working with a patient who was determined that I would be as miserable as he felt. I try very hard to keep in mind that people in the hospital are generally at their worst overall and therefore not to be judged harshly – but this guy was a jerk. He was actively rude all night to me and the nurses; comments like, “Boy, they don’t work very hard at teaching you how to do your job, do they?” and, “So you lost your way getting here?” A real winner all around. I was in his room at about 3:45 in the morning checking his blood pressure (which, I was told, I did incorrectly in a variety of ways) and noticed he was watching a replay of yesterday’s Cubs/Brewers game.

  “Watching the game?” I asked.

  “Trying to!” he sneered at me (I kid you not, the man was like a parody “Man Who Is Mean” from a sitcom). “Can you finish what you’re doing and get out – it’s tied in the bottom of the ninth!” Then he turned back to the TV, “Come on, guys! It’s the [colorful adjective] Brewers! You can win this, you [colorful... plural pronoun, I guess]!”

  “Didn’t you see this game when it was on earlier? Novoa’s going to walk in the losing run in about ten minutes.”

  Ah, those good old reliable Cubbies.

• A couple of days ago I did some mixing/editing on the working draft of Matt’s new song “Simple Life,” and since then it’s been running through my head quite a bit. I’m pretty sure both of you readers have heard it (I can post an mp3 if there’s interest); it’s a song about leaving the pace of life behind and creating a simpler one, told with the unforced rhymes and invitingly simple tune that Matt excels at (someday that man’s going to be famous, and I intend to be clinging to his coattails for dear life). Particularly, I’m intrigued by the bridge: “This life that I’m living’s all taking, no giving/And I feel like I’m driven by money and greed/I’ll pack up these horses and make my divorces/From unhealthy courses and go plant some seed.” All taking, no giving. The standard complaint about the hectic pace of life is that it’s give, give, give with no time left for oneself, but I think Matt’s right – it’s generally the opposite. We don’t have time to give of ourselves because there are so many other things to get done, so we end up taking. We count on friendships to stay on course without direct maintenance, we treat people as if they were just their jobs because we don’t have time to do more. There’s not room, not time for giving in this me-centric culture.

  It may well be that Matt just needed the end of the first line to rhyme with “driven” and so flipped the words from their standard usage. I prefer to think it was intentional because the line is absolute genius as written and I enjoy thinking of myself as a bandmate of a fellow who writes lyrics like that. Whatever the origin of the line, though, I think it’s something that bears some thinking about. Is my life all taking, no giving?

  This was probably a bad thought to follow up my work story with. Hmm…

And thus concludeth my thoughts (I’m impressed with myself for having even this many). Thanks, as ever, for stopping by.

If you’ll pardon my unleashing my (never all that well-contained) inner geek for a post, it’s time for At The Movies With Charlie. On Friday I saw The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and immortalizing my thoughts on the experience seems like as good a way as any to continue plodding towards my post-a-week goal for 2005.

A disclaimer – this review contains a spoiler or two, so if you’re planning to see the movie and hope to see it without pre-expectations, best to put off reading this post. Once you have seen it, though, I’d very much love to know what you thought.

I was first introduced to the Douglas Adams novels the movie is (sort of) based on back in junior high. My brother had a copy of the first one, I think, and I read the other three (at the time there were only four books in the trilogy (or at least I only knew of four)) courtesy of the Northwest Junior High library. I was (and still am) entranced by the way Adams played with language, his way of putting bits of sentences into other sentences, his absolutely wonderful gift for dialogue. I spent hours and hours and hours in junior high writing my own Douglas Adams-ish (I wish I could call them Douglas Adams-esque, but I don’t think I can justify that) fiction, typing fiercely away on FREDwriter as my friend John typed away alongside me. Between the two of us we must have turned out hundreds of pages, much of it admittedly dreck but still a tribute to how influential the man was. John somehow taught himself to write well through those hours and hours of developing a voice and practicing transforming thought into text; I missed that part, but I think I got more of my dreck written than he did (quantity was key. Every day we’d check in as we were leaving the lab to see how many pages had been tacked on to our works). Someday I hope to find those old Apple II disks and figure out a way to transfer the text thereon to a word processor; that would be a delightful look back at who I was lo those many years ago.

All of which is quite off-topic; this is At The Movies, not In The Junior High Computer Lab. Last Friday I went with John, Mark, Carrie, and Jason to opening night. The reviews I’d read ranged from lukewarm to scalding, so I was a little nervous. The previews that ran before the movie included the new Herbie the Love Bug film and Chicken Little, which should have tipped me off to what sort of audience they’d made the film for, but I completely missed that red flag. The film itself… well, the film was “almost”. Allow me to elucidate -

The film almost got Adams’s universe. Hitchhiker’s is set in a universe that doesn’t share the standard science fiction assumption that for sentient life to reach the stars they must have solved the problems that humanity’s struggling with. It’s not completely ubiquitous but certainly present enough to acheive cliche status – the star-faring worlds have done away with racism, dictatorships, petty wars (what wars there are are usually either against some other society that’s achieved star travel through oppression and despotism and allowing homosexual marriage and other obviously-society-destroying things or against an insurgent group inside the society that’s led by a brilliant and charismatic but warped and evil madman), and often with the idea of money. The bit in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home where Kirk has dinner with Hot Cetologist Lady (Gillian? Help me out here, Star Trek faithful; it’s been a long time) and then can’t pay because they don’t have money when he comes from is a classic example. In Adams’s world society has just expanded out into a larger setting but kept all of its basic weirdness. The universe is a parody of the real world – sometimes literally. The filmmakers didn’t quite get that; rather than put us into basically a weirder Mos Eisley setting they hustled us around between basically exotic locales and settled for having the Vogons (the major bad guys in the movie, but not the book) be a running joke about bureaucracies.

They almost got the Adamsian style of dialogue. Douglas Adams is one of the greatest writers of funny dialogue (indeed, I can’t think of a legitimate challenger) in the history of the English language. The wordplay back and forth betweeen his characters is wonderful, and a major part of his novels. I’m completely at a loss as to why a filmmaker would say to himself, “Well, we’re making a movie based on this book with outstanding dialogue; we’d better be sure to change a bunch of it!” But change it they did. Not completely rewrite it, not always – usually just change it. For instance (and forgive me if I miss a word or two here, I’m doing this completely from memory):

From the Book:
Arthur: “Where are we?”
Ford: “We’re safe.”
Arthur: “Oh, good.”
Ford: “We’re on a [I forget the exact wording. "Vogon Ship" but more descriptive].”
Arthur: “Ah. This is obviously some new usage of the word ‘safe’ that I wasn’t aware of.”

From the Movie:
Arthur: “Where are we?”
Ford: “We’re safe.”
Arthur: “Oh, good.”
Ford: “We’re on a [again, I forget exactly].”
Arthur: “FOOOORRRRD!!!”

Apologies for the inexact quoting, but you get the idea. They would almost use an exchange straight from the book but then change the punch line into something lame-o. It was weird, and very puzzling to me. The only thing I can think of is that they were aiming the film at a younger audience and thought that Adams’s humor might be inappropriate in a movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (read that sentence again if you missed the sarcasm).

They almost picked a target audience. I expected the film to either be aimed at the hard-core fans – sort of like the newer Star Wars movies or the second and third Lord of the Rings films: if you don’t understand the world you’re watching the film certainly isn’t going to bother to explain it to you – or at people basically unfamiliar with the . Instead it was a very weird combination of the worst of both. There were jokes aimed at the in crowd that were probably just confusing and annoying to those who haven’t read the book – simple ones to fix, too. Explain why they’re carrying towels! There was also a staggering disregard of the book’s plot that indicated to me that the filmmakers themselves might not have read the book – certainly not aimed at HHGG devotees. I’ve never seen a movie adaptation that changed the plot more than this one – the characters’ goals, the routes they took to reach those goals, and the exciting conclusion were all very different. Plus they of course had to add a love story.

They almost got the characters right. Arthur I liked quite well, Trillian was fine, Ford was okay. Zaphod was a disaster – they took an interesting character and made him an annoying idiot. I’ve heard that he was supposed to be a parody of Dubya, which is all well and good (certainly it defends some of the characterization choices), but certainly doesn’t help make the film timeless. Marvin drove me nuts; they played him as the funniest part of the books, and while he was certainly entertaining the movie shouldn’t have been about him any more than the books were.

The special effects were breathtaking (although, strangely, they opted to avoid dealing with Zaphod’s extra head and arm by having his heads arranged vertically and his arm always under a cloak (until they’re just taken away)), but they seemed to be the focus of the movie. I have trouble understanding why moviemakers these days are willing to spend millions and millions on special effects but not to spend money on a top-notch scriptwriter. The film was partially Adams’s work (I’m not sure to exactly what degree) but somewhere along the line it lost his vision. Worth seeing for the sake of watching a HHGG movie, but really only almost worth the ticket price even then.

* Endnote – I found the frequent necessity of using the possessive of “Douglas Adams” bothersome. Strunk & White tell me, though, that when a non-plural word ends with an s the “‘s” ending is correct, and far be it from me to argue with the Charlotte’s Web dude himself.

‘Twas an interesting weekend. Matt and I played our first concert in quite a while on Friday night (which was a post-worthily interesting event unto itself; I’ll either post separately about that sometime soon or put it off until it seems like there’s no point and never get around to it (ah, the blogger’s dilemma)) and I got to see my first cantate worship service on Sunday morning. This post, though, is about the sandbox game.

“The sandbox game” is a classic Sesame Street sketch. Bert and Ernie are hanging out in their possibly-legal-in-Massachusetts-but-obviously-not-set-in-Texas apartment and Ernie tells Bert about a great new game he’s invented. “I’ll say ‘I one the sandbox,’ Bert, and you say, ‘I two the sandbox’ and so on,” he says. Bert eventually says “I eight the sandbox” and hilarity ensues. It’s classic Bert and Ernie; Jim Henson and Frank Oz at the top of their game. I’ve always loved that sketch, but unfortunately I’ve never gotten anyone to fall for it (my brother Joel obligingly claims to have eaten the sandbox every so often, but I’m pretty sure he’s not actually fooled).

Which brings me back to last weekend. On Saturday several of us headed down from Waverly to Waterloo to enjoy a tasty steak dinner, and my little buddy Connor decided he wanted to ride with me (which I thought was interesting, because back when I still had my Cavalier he refused to ride in it. Apparently even at 5 1/2 he had a keener sense of what constitutes automotively uncool than I did. Or maybe he just didn’t like purple). Connor’s the closest thing I’ve got to a nephew – we’re not related, but I’ve been around for his entire life, and I feel a certain affectionate protectiveness towards him that I imagine is somewhat uncle-ish. He’s a couple weeks shy of six years old and has that age’s characteristic conversational hyperactivity in full measure – for the first ten minutes of the trip I got a running monologue on what he thought about Sunday School and how long he expected his current pair of shoes to last and what he would name a particular field if it was given to him to christen (“Connor’s Field”) and some embarrassing slip of the tongue his dad had made that morning (alas, I didn’t catch it exactly and Connor has no rewind button) and a recount of the path he’d taken chasing his aunt’s dog around her apartment while a piano was being moved in. I responded with the occasional “oh, really?” and “wow – awesome!” and whatnot of that sort, but honestly I was only half paying attention. Then he mentioned that he’d recently taken a counting test at kindergarten and won some sort of acclamation for his grasp of ordinal sets in the low three digits and an idea suddenly occurred to me.

“Counting, huh? You’re pretty good at counting?”

“What? Yeah. The teacher was talking about how we needed to learn to count backwards, too, and I was all ‘whatever’. Then my friend said we should go play with the kickball and I…”

“Okay, but let’s not actually leave counting just yet. Do you want to play a game, buddy?”

“What? Okay, whatever.”

“Hooray! Here’s the game – I’ll say ‘I one the sandbox’ and you say ‘I two the sandbox’ and so on until we… run out of numbers, I guess.”

There was a part of me that was trying very hard to point out to the rest of me that the sandbox game actually comes to sort of an unkind culmination – “Ha ha! You ate the sandbox!” might not be a Dr. Phil-approved thing to say to a 5 year old. I couldn’t help it, though; the prospect of actually seeing the game work was too much to pass up. To his credit, Connor really was very good at the game, and ’twas only a few moments before I turned to him with a (friendly, I like to think) grin and said, “You ate the sandbox? Really?”

I was torn. The moment was all I’d hoped it would be (those who find that lame are welcome to start their own blog and only write about things that are actually cool. I’ll be happy to link to it from mine), but Connor clearly wasn’t impressed. He looked confused for a minute – sat with his mouth open, still ready to claim he’d tenned the sandbox and unsure what exactly had happened – and then sat back in his chair and was quiet. He didn’t look sad, really, but he was certainly very subdued, which is a red-flag Something’s Wrong signal with him. I was trying to figure out what to say to him and trying to decide how uncomfortable my chair in Hell was likely to be when he turned to me and said, “I’ve got a game now.”

“Okay. How does your game wor…”

“I say ‘I one the sand’ and you say you two the sand and then we count up.”

“But… that’s just my game without the word ‘box’, buddy. You’ve got to change more than three letters. That’s the rule.”

“What? Oh.” There was a long pause as he sat with his chin on his fist like a tiny little Thinker in denim. “Okay – here’s my new game. I say ‘I one the horse’ and you say ‘I two the horse’ and we count up.”

I was still unconvinced that the horse game was a sufficiently large departure from the sandbox game to merit it being called a new game, but I felt like I wasn’t in any position to refuse. Connor took a second to count through to himself and make sure that starting on one would ensure that I was the one who’d actually eat the horse and then started things off. I hope that all of you have a chance to make someone as happy as I made him when I said “I ate the horse”. I thought he was going to give himself a tiny little aneurysm; he had a victory dance and everything. And watching him dance I realized that I’d been owned by a five year old. Owned at my own game, no less. Sort of made checking “Fool someone into saying they’d eaten a sandbox” off my life accomplishment list seem a little less significant.

We had about 15 minutes of driving left at this point, and in that 15 minutes I think I was reminded that I’d eaten a horse about seventeen million times. Jim Henson’s genius lives on, I guess. When we got to the restaurant, Connor ran up to his dad and said, “Okay, Dad – here’s the game. You ate a sandbox and then… wait – how does it go?”

I can only hope that I’ve at least planted the seed and that someday Connor, too, will appreciate the sandbox game sketch for the genius that it is. Until then – hey, Joel! I one the sandbox…

That was the theme for the 2005 Northern Plains regional conference of the National Association for Campus Activities last weekend (catchy, although I got a little tired of humming the Three’s Company theme song to myself. Next year’s is something along the lines of “Swing your partner to and fro, off to NACA we will go,” since it’ll be in Cedar Rapids and Iowa is of course the center of the square dance universe). 1300 students and staff advisors from campus activities boards in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, and Wyoming came to the Mayo Civic Center in Rochester, Minnesota to spend a four-day weekend being courted by performers. And had you been one of those students walking around the marketplace you might have happened past a booth for Central Standard Time, nestled in between booths for a company that provided clowns and clown gear and another that did booking for hypnotists and magicians – and maybe three, four booths down from Peppermint Records where you could book Storyhill. Imagining for a moment that you stopped to see what exactly “Central Standard Time” could do for you as a campus activities person, you would have gotten to talk to Matt and I, who would have struggled with trying to define how we sound (Simon and Garfunkel-ish was the comparison we used most often, although that’s certainly not dead on (and more than a little presumptuous). Anyone with good ideas about how to describe the Central Standard Time sound to someone who’s never heard us, please send ‘em my way), asked you about the role acoustic music plays on your campus, offered you a promo CD, talked about how cool it is that said CD is dual-media, asked you to sign our mailing list, and wished you a pleasant weekend. Hopefully you’d have then immediately gone to find the other campus activities people from your school and told them they needed to – indeed, they must – book CST and do so quickly, although if that happened we never found out about it.

‘Twas certainly an interesting weekend. Matt’s and my expectations were ever so high going into it – we wouldn’t have been surprised at all to leave Rochester with a dozen shows booked and confirmed. Indeed, we spent some time discussing what sort of limit we would set for too many shows so we wouldn’t overextend ourselves. Pitiful, yes, but to our credit it only took us about half an hour to figure out how naive we’d been. Then we went through a period of despondence as we thought about the $1000 we’d spent to come to Rochester and not gain anything substantial from the trip, but we got over that pretty quickly, too, as we talked to campus activities people who seemed interested in us (particularly because we were there instead of an agent – there weren’t many performers in the room) and took promo CDs and left contact information. So far we don’t have a single show on the books, but we have over a dozen strong maybes, and we certainly don’t need all of those to turn into shows – not even close – to make our money back. And next year people will remember us from this year and be more inclined to take us seriously.

And if nothing else, it was really neat to do such a “we’re really a band” thing. Central Standard Time will never be a full-time job for Matt or me; neither of us are in a position to pull up stakes and tour nationally. Every time we do something band-ish, though, it’s a little piece of my childhood dream of being a professional band-in-be-er (specifically, being John Lennon (no reason to aim low, after all)) coming true. I still remember when we recorded our first CD – no studio or processing or effects or anything fancy like that, just two mikes and two guitars run through a mixer into a DAT. I can barely stand to listen to it now, but it hardly ever stopped playing back in May Term ’96. A couple of years later we played a concert on campus for 100 people. Horrible sound system, still quite an unpolished stage presence, but we were playing our songs and people were listening and clapping for us – it was one of the biggest rushes I’ve ever gotten. Last weekend we went to Rochester and met with campus activities people and networked with other performers and handed ‘em CD’s and referred them to our Electronic Press Kit and discussed fees and stayed in a really crappy hotel with a bed that almost took off one of Matt’s fingers. It was a step towards a next step, and even if nothing comes it that’s exciting unto itself.

As you’ve probably already noticed (if you’re one of the three regular readers of this site), we’ve changed the look here at Meaningless Musings again. I may not be a regular poster, but by heck I get bored with layouts quickly. Mostly I like how little wasted space there is with this format – once you’re past the top part of the page with the links the whole screen gets used for text. Obviously, a strong argument can be made that said text just turns around and wastes the space again, but at least I’m not wasting your valuable monitor resources to just create blank space.

There are also a few new links over on the right-hand side of the screen, and for your Thursday reading enjoyment I thought I’d go through ‘em and give you a few details on why they’re there and why you might be interested. Gripping stuff it certainly isn’t, but my understanding of blogosphere etiquette is that quantity always trumps quality. So away we go, starting with the blogs -

• Untested Ideas – My little brother Joel’s blog. Joel’s a computer programmer in Madison, Wisconsin and his blog has the distinctive flavor of computer competence – lots of little sub-links and a clean, polished format. He assures me that’s nothing to be impressed about; that he just used some bloginating software that anyone could figure out, but I remain stubbornly impressed. So there.

  Joel’s perfected the art of writing interesting blog entries that aren’t long-winded; little snippets, often no more than a sentence, that make some thought-provoking point. A remarkable feat and certainly one I’ve no delusions regarding my ability to duplicate. It’s also certainly worth perusing the rest of his site for some of his other writings – one of which was published in the Wartburg Trumpet lo these many years ago.

• The Three-Ring Circus of E. Rod – Not that I’m in any place to criticize those who don’t post regularly on their blogs, but I think it’s a shame that my sister Emily seems to have moved on from a short-lived interest in the hobby. She’s quite a good writer (which only makes sense – after all, both of our parents are quite good writers; she no doubt inherited it) and I, for one, quite enjoyed the window into her thoughts. Love, luck, and lollipops indeed!
• In the Hands – This site is a treasure. An absolute gold mine. If Paul’s not getting a million hits a day then I’m disappointed in us as an Internet community.

  Paul Cantrell was a college chum of Joel’s at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The two of them and their roommate Nick (at least I’m 90% sure his name was Nick…) were the aces of the computer science department – Joel tells me that when they were all three walking together other computer science majors were required to genuflect as they passed by – and, as with Joel’s, there’s a very professional polish to the look of the site. The content, though, is what should draw you there.

  Paul’s a pianist and a bit of a music philosopher and last September he started a music blog to make his work accessible to the cyberworld at large. Every Tuesday and Saturday he posts an mp3 of a piece that he’s recorded – sometimes things he’s written himself, sometimes a work by another composer (often Romantic-era, although there’s the occasional Bach. No Mozart yet, though – sigh), sometimes just an improv that he recorded whilst creating. The recording quality is very good – here’s an explanation of his approach to home recording (worth reading if you’ve any interest in the art) – and the music itself is breathtaking. Paul reminds me of Vladimir Horowitz, the Russian-born piano virtuoso. He doesn’t quite have Horowitz’s chops (or if he does he modestly declines to showcase them), but there’s an understanding of the music that brings to mind Horowitz’s Encores (a recording everyone, whatever their taste in music, should own at least one copy of). Paul isn’t interested in just playing the notes – he’s playing the music around the notes. Corny? Possibly – but take some time to listen to his stuff, and especially to the pieces he’s written himself; you’ll hear a level of expression and depth of interpretation you rarely hear from a piano. Paul also offers philosophical musings on the nature of music and there’s a link to the music blog he writes for MPR.

  Every recording on his site is available for free download – pieces recorded specifically for In the Hands and live concert recordings. I’ve never found anything like it online. It’s – I’ll say it again – a gold mine, a treasure with a URL. It’s apparently not paying the bills, though (recording music and offering it free to anyone interested in enjoying it must not be as lucrative as it sounds), so In the Hands recently became a user-supported project. Click the link, listen to his stuff, and give serious thought to Paypalling a buck or ten Paul’s way. And if you have a website with a links section, add a link to Paul’s site – even if his music isn’t your cup of tea, the work he’s doing deserves as much recognition as we the Internet-at-large can muster.

• What, You Too? – In the spirit of international Internet relations, I invite and encourage you to check out this blog from Germany. Jess started her blog (or “blog” auf Deutsch) as a way to regain a sense of connection to her friends and family back on this side of the Atlantic and she’s taken to blogging like a fish to water (or something less cliche – I’m a little sleepy right now). What, You Too? is updated frequently – often more than once a day – and stories range from tales of her angst over a job that, shall we say, isn’t ideally suited to her temperment to stories about a rice cooker that apparently doesn’t make hamburgers; it’s a “here’s what’s on my mind today” sort of blog and a very well-done one.

  Jess also has dived into the “find other interesting people who blog” aspect of the blogging life, and she’s compiled a set of links to other interesting places the blog-reading-ly inclined might wish to visit.

• Jaunty Thoughts – Here is that rare gem – a blog written by someone who can really really write. John was my best friend through high school; together we coasted through to mediocre grades while reassuring each other that we were brilliant and spending most of our time writing and making up new silly voices (the whole story is far past the scope of this single paragraph). Now he’s a professional writer (ironically in the education field) and he’s been churning out prose for most of the last 30 or so years of his life. The blog is basically a “here’s what’s been going on recently” accounting updated about once a month and aimed mainly at John’s family and friends, but he has such a wonderful knack for turns of phrase and the storytelling voice that it’s a delightful read anyway. He started his blog when he put together a website to feature pictures of his (at the time unborn) son, and over the last year the blog’s become less of the focus and the pictures more. They’re awfully cute pictures, though – if pictures of infants are your thing be sure and stop by. Little Thomas’ll be one next Friday, and there’s a place on the website to send messages (birthday greetings, perhaps) to the little guy. Who will, if the movies on the website are any indication, likely reply, “boom!”

  My secret hope (or, more accurately, my secret-until-I-posted-it-on-the-Internet-for-anyone-to-read hope) is that now that John finds himself with less free time for blogging he’ll start uploading some of his other writings (and maybe even writing new ones – ah, to read once again of Nicholas St. Paul). Until then, there’s poetry, pictures, and movies in addition to the blog. *Exciting update – apparently, John actually reads this blog, for there are indeed old writings to read. Check out The Vault!

• The Daily Aneurysm – I found Jim Bartlett’s site through a link on John’s. This is a political website, and an extremely well-done one; Jim must put hours into researching and reading before he posts (which he does almost every day). Even if you don’t agree with Jim’s politics (which are strongly liberal), you should check it out – the writing is very good, the points generally well-defended and fairly presented, and there’s a lot to be learned. Plus he has a pile of links (including one to me!) for those interested in finding other, similar blogs.
• heckuva far (greg’s online ramblings) – Greg Nichols is one of my friend Jesse’s roommates, although it seems like I should have met him long ago – he’s a fellow EWALU-an (proof of how quickly camp moves on, I guess). Wonderful fellow – I generally find that entering new social territory ranks somewhere between being bitten by a puma and having teeth extracted on the things-that-are-fun spectrum, but Greg, Jesse, and their other roommate Matt have created a space that even I don’t feel awkward or unwelcome in (they keep telling me to stop knocking and just come in, though. Yeah, right). I’d happily include a link to his blog just for that, but this is a really excellent blog. Greg’s a very good writer and he has a tremendous gift for having his stories come to a point, so that the reader gets an equal dose of interesting story and thought-provoking point. Plus he’s another computer person (studying for his PhD at Iowa in, I believe, Federation Starship Mainframes) so his site has that slick professional look that I so envy. No way to comment that I can see, though, which is a shame.

  I suspect that his URL is an allusion to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but that’s just a suspicion.

Thus concludeth the list of blogs. Now on to the other links!

• Central Standard Time – Central Standard Time is me and Matt Hibbard, playing tuneful tunes on our guitars. This is the official group website, where one can find lyrics, ordering instructions, contact information, some pictures, a performance list, and the CST Trivia Challenge. There’s also a hidden link to various other interesting content, which so far (as far as we know) no one has been able to find.

• My website – a project mostly stalled out partway through, this is my online HTML workbook. I had some online space since I get Internet access through Earthlink so I set out to put together a webpage and teach myself HTML along the way. It was partially successful – I learned a lot of HTML – but mostly all I worked on was my old blog, which I stopped adding to when I signed up on blogspot. There are a few interesting bits in the CST section (my lyrics page offers some comments and musings about some of the songs, for instance, and there’s a video of Matt and I playing), but mostly it’s still a work in progress that I rarely work on. Also – sort of along the same lines as my comments about Joel’s and Paul’s blogs – you can absolutely tell by the layout that I’m no kind of computer expert.
• VITP discussion on Consimworld – This link is mostly there for my benefit. I often visit the Victory in the Pacific (a military simulation board game about the naval battle between the US and Japan in WWII) discussion board on Consimworld (a website dedicated to various things military simulation board game-y). The URL for the VITP thingy is impossible to remember and scrolling through menus to get there is far, so when I’m at another computer and away from my bookmarks I can just type in my site’s URL (much easier) and click that link.

  On the subject of VITP, though, there’s a weekend-long tournament coming up in a couple of weeks which I’ll be attending and no doubt blogging about – I always write up a report on the happenings; might as well post it here.

• Send Jason Martin-Hiner an e-mail! – My li’l Cubs fan buddy Jason Martin-Hiner enjoys getting e-mail, and here’s a helpful link with which to fire some his way. As before, eventually this link will be changed so you can e-mail someone new! Exciting stuff, these Meaningless Musings.
• Andre LaFosse – Andre was a high school friend of mine who lives in L.A. now and makes his living as a guitarist. He was a phenomenal player in high school, and since then he’s earned a performance degree from CalArts and spent another 12 years practicing. His chops have chops that have chops that are better at guitar than I’ll ever be. It’s incredible to listen to. His interest is in new ways for the electric guitar to express itself, too, and he’s done some very interesting work with looping over the last several years. There are downloadable samples on his website and if you’re intrigued ordering instructions, too, as well as a very interesting and well-written blog about his merry adventures in L.A. and some nifty pictures.
• The Chicago Cubs – What can I say? It’s gotta be this year. Or maybe next year. Certainly not more than several years from now.
• Storyhill – These guys are my favorite band ever. Theirs was the music of my college and camp experience, the music many of my friends were married to, the music that inspired Matt and I to make music of our own. Their songs are full of evocative imagery and beautiful harmony and clever lyrics and some of the most singable tunes I’ve ever heard. Outstanding stuff, wonderful stuff. If they’re ever in your area make sure you go see them (this site is often more up-to-date with tour schedules). Listen to some of their stuff here and then buy yourself some CDs!
• The WFWCCB – Ah, fond memories of tours and concerts and recitals and whatnot. I hope your life has included some experiences of feeling like you were part of a group that really did something well and that wanted you to be there like I had with the Wartburg band.
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy interactive text game – It’s difficult to express how excited I was to find this online (thanks to Greg for providing the link. I spent many an hour playing this game on the old family Commodore 128, and never did mange to figure it out. It’s a little creepy that it runs so much more smoothly now over the Internet with graphics added than it used to, but I’m not complaining.

And there you have it. My little road map to some interesting byways off of the information superhighway. Turned into a longer post than I originally intended, but that’s probably good; it’ll help my guilt over how long it will probably take me to post again.

To steal a sign-off from my sister – love, luck, and lollipops!

A couple of Sundays ago I went up to Waverly to watch the service of consecration (or maybe Service of Consecration; I’m not sure if it’s a proper noun or not) for my friend Jess. What, you ask, is consecration? I’m not 100% sure myself (other than knowing that it’s not the same as circumcision – talk about your embarrassing malapropisms), but I’ll try to explain. The Service of Consecration (or maybe service of consecration) is the process by which one becomes a diaconal minister in the ELCA. “Diaconal minister,” if I understand correctly, is sort of a new designation. Obviously it’s closely tied to the word “deacon,” but I think that deacons are generally thought of as being basically Ernest Frye (the guy Sherman Hemsley (of Lois & Clark: the New Adventures of Superman fame) played in Amen): the guy who sets up chairs and makes sure the candle wicks are trimmed and generally takes care of the church building. Diaconal ministers have a much more interesting and exciting role. The idea (indeed, from what I’ve learned, the catchphrase) is that they serve where the church meets the world. While a pastor is ordained into the ministry of word and sacrament and generally serves a congregation in a role that’s theoretically primarily spiritual and theological, a diaconal minister is consecrated into the ministry of word and service and generally ends up working with an organization, dealing with social justice issues and bringing the work of the church outside of the sanctuary walls.

At least that’s my understanding of it – a lot of which is lifted directly from the sermon preached at Jess’s consecration. Here’s Jess’s explanation from her blog, and here’s an explanation from the ELCA web page, both of which are far more informative and lucid. It’s interesting stuff, I think, and I find it very exciting. To me, this is a formal statement by the ELCA that we understand that the church can’t stay inside church buildings and still do the work we’re called to do. A diaconal minister has to jump through basically every hoop an ordained pastor has to – these aren’t lay volunteers who are just using the church to find projects to work on, they’re men and women with the same level of theological training and formal church support the clergy has. I think that’s downright nifty, and I’m proud to be able to name a good friend of mine among their ranks.

It was a delightful weekend, too – several people I hadn’t seen for years were in town for the consecratin’, the sermon was based on Micah 6:8 which is the foundation verse for one of the finer campfire songs to ever grace the woods of southeast Clayton county (I’ve had the tune in my head pretty much ever since), and Dr. Kleinhans got a chance to make fun of me for how long I was a student at Wartburg, which always seems to make her happy. I find that almost any event which triggers Wartburg memories ends up being a lot of fun (it’s a shame admissions can’t sell that – that’s what you pay the extra $15,000 a year for).

On an unrelated note – I’m not sure I got the “Hey, Hi, Ho” in the title of this post in the right order. I was, alas, never a Mouseketeer. Anyone more familiar with the tune who wants to correct or affirm me feel free.

For the last several years, my toes and I have had, at best, a strained relationship. They don’t like me and I don’t particularly like them, but without them my sandals would fall off and without me they’d never get to see interesting new places so we put up with each other. A few months ago, though, they went too far.

The story goes back to the summer of 1998 when I accidentally dropped a lawnmower on my foot (I know, I know, everyone has a “dropped a lawnmower on my foot” story). I was working at summer camp, and I was supposed to take a bunch of little kids on a hayride but the camp tractor still had the lawnmowing attachment on the back (looked sort of like this). When I disconnected it, it fell onto my foot – caught me right on my left big toenail. I’m fairly sure that’s the most pain I’ve ever been in; I was completely incapacitated for a few minutes (and the close proximity of the camp pool made it impossible to let loose with any really cathartic language).

That toenail fell off a few days later, but apparently my toe was still mad at me because when it grew back it never really grew back connected to the toe and it fell off again about a year after that (meanwhile, I also lost my right big toenail after a kid from my youth group stepped on it during a heated game of “Try to Knock Mark DeVries Over with Sofa Cushions”. Youth ministry is dangerous stuff). The third time seemed to be the charm, though – the toenail looked a little weird but seemed to be functional. Until last May.

Last May the inside edge of the toenail started growing down into my toe. Apparently the toenail had gotten sick of dealing with me and had decided to just remove my toe so it and the toenail could go be happy on their own. I couldn’t help but admire its initiative, but I didn’t want to give up my toe. After a month, it had become painful to put on shoes (not often a problem for me since I’m a devoted sandal-wearer, but I have a shoe-requiring and walking-intensive job) and every so often I’d catch the toe on something and have an entrant in the running contest to beat having a lawnmower fall on my foot for “most painful experience ever”. Clearly, something needed to be done. I talked to some friends and co-workers and they all told me to go see a doctor, who would cut away the part of the toenail that was digging into my toe and leave me with an oddly-shaped but no longer painful toenail. Most of that sounded fine, but it seemed silly to me to pay someone else to cut part of my toenail off when I had plenty of cutting implements handily available to me. And so, Gentle Readers, I present for your personal edification Charlie Rod’s Handy Guide to Do-It-Yourself Toenail-In-The-Toe Amelioration. All you need is a Swiss Army knife and a pair of pliers. I personally vouch for its effectiveness.

• Step One – determine how much of the toenail you’ll actually need to remove. I chose to cut so that the toenail looked more or less symmetrical – one side goes a little ways into the toe and one doesn’t, but it doesn’t look all that odd. Take the awl extension on your Swiss Army knife and gently score a guide line into the nail.
• Step Two – cut the rest of the nail through along the guide line. This is the tricky bit (although still certainly not requiring four years of med school to figure out); it’s going to be impossible to cut through the nail at the same time along the length of your cut, so you’re likely going to have your knife slip down fairly often as you get past solid keratin and to parts that are already cut through and end up slamming the blade into the toe beneath (and the flesh beneath your toenails is extraordinarily wussy stuff, ridiculously oversupplied with pain receptors). My advice is to go very slowly and try to cut up from underneath the nail whenever you can. The trickiest bit here is the most proximal (closest to the foot) part of the nail. There will likely be quite a bit of blood and, if your toe is like mine was and has been ingrown for a while, probably some pus and interstitial fluid, too. If it helps, keep in mind that step three sucks far more than step two. Also, you can’t really stop once you’ve already cut most of your toenail loose.
• Step three – once you’ve cut through the nail along the guideline (or at least mostly cut through – if there’s a little left it’ll pull free on step four), lift the cut-off bit of nail up from the new edge you’ve just made (so that it sort of resembles a tiny drawbridge pulling away from the main nail) and cut underneath. There’s a bunch of connective tissue there that you need to detach from the nail before you pull it loose. This step is really quite horrid; it’s astoundingly painful to turn the new little nail-fragment in the flesh of your toe, and that sensation is magnified by the knowledge that the whole thing is being voluntarily, consciously done. Also, again, if you’re doing this in the first place your toe is probably already badly inflamed and sore from the ingrown toenail that you’re about to fix. Cutting the connective tissue, on the other hand, doesn’t hurt a bit, so at least there’s that.
• Step four – finally, once you’ve got the connective tissue cut loose, grab hold of the little toenail piece with a pair of pliers (it’ll be far too slick to grab with your fingers) and apply steady, firm pressure straight up (perpendicular to the line your toe makes) until the front of the nail clears your toe – it’ll look sort of like a tiny, white, bloody battleship. Then pull straight forward and out it’ll come. The sense of relief at finally being done with the whole remarkably unpleasant process will only be exceeded by wonder at how much better your toe suddenly feels.

And that’s today’s handy tip. If any of you ever have reason to try it, please let me know – I’ll be curious to see if your experience varies from mine. I’ll try to post again fairly soon so that this entry doesn’t stay at the top of the page for overly long.