Archive for May, 2006
New Content on SafeT’unes!
Posted on May 21, 2006
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Click HERE to listen to the new SafeT’une, 2 Down and I Feel 0.
Closure Part 16
Posted on May 18, 2006
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Driving carefully and steadily in the right lane, exactly five miles per hour over the speed limit, I fought the shake and quiver of the aged Pinata’s rusted out front-end as it did its usual best to dash us against the concrete barriers lining I75. Meanwhile, I tried to look uninteresting to the occasionally predatory police patroler parked periodically along the ribbon of cracked and patched concrete making up this section of the Detroit landscape.
I lived in the city of Warren, a 36 square mile expanse of suburban America with residents ranging from the poverty-stricken white trash in the South to opulent gated communities of fat, lumbering men and skinny, jogging women in the North. My small bungalow squatted somewhere in the middle of that, close to the 11-Mile Road area; that was my destination. I had no where else to take poor Chuck and I wanted a safe place to sit and think, so we were heading home.
I kept looking at my rear-view mirror; not toward the traffic behind me, which was pretty light this time of day, but toward the back of the car and my strange cargo. I tried to calm my nerves and assure myself that the Chuck bits and the coffee urn were secure and well hidden beneath the silvery layer of emergency blanket I’d draped across them, but I just couldn’t see over the back-seat and I grew more nervous.
I checked the needle on my speedometer again. 70 miles per hour. 80 was fast enough to draw the attention of law enforcement while anyone driving 65, which was the actual posted speed limit, would be automatically considered a drunk driver. Recent laws enacted in Michigan banned the discriminatory practice of field sobriety or breathalyser tests and replaced them with a set of mandatory hygiene courses. Courses which were supposed to culminate in a training certificate and a small tin of laundry detergent. The lobbyists most instrumental in the new legislation, dubbed “Lets Clean Up Drunk Driving,” were heavily tied to the Johnson and Johnson corporation, which stood to make a killing on government mandated sales of their heretofore slow-moving line of portable personal hygiene kits. I had no interest in going to jail with or without hygiene supplies, and really didn’t want the inconvenience of having to explain the gruesomely dismembered body in the back of my car.
So it was with great care that I drove Northward on the I75 expressway, quickly approaching 8-Mile Road*, a large East-West surface street which acted as a defacto moat separating Detroit proper from inner suburbs like the City of Warren. Around about 7 Mile Road I began to hear Latin music wafting from my glove box; my cell phone was ringing.
Workers at Furd aren’t allowed to bring cell phones into the factory, so I usually kept mine in the car. No one ever called me on it, really, especially at this early hour. Yet now it rang. Originally, I’d intended it to ring a beepy version of Beethoven’s Fur Elise, but through incompetence, frustration and bad luck I’d somehow ended up with an equally beepy but infinitely more annoying rendition of the 90’s Latin dance phenomenon, “The Macarena”. 
I repositioned my left hand to better control the wheel solo and then leaned halfway onto the passenger seat, fumbling at the glove compartment with my freed right while quietly providing the chorus, “Hey, Macarena!” under my breath. The catch to the glove box was fiddly, and resisted my attempts to free the desperate tuneful telephone from its cell–pun intended. I intensified my efforts, and in my preoccupied state the Pinata swerved halfway into the next lane. I hurriedly righted my course, biting my tongue in the process, and the compartment finally popped open. I tugged the phone out and into my waiting hand.
Pressing the “send” button with my sticky red fingers, I held the little Nokia up to my ear, cleared my throat, and spoke.
“Hello?”
There was a moment of silence followed by a click, then a woman’s pleasant voice spoke,
”Please hold while we connect your call to… BANANAS.“
The last word was spoken in a completely different and incredibly gravelly voice; so rough that I felt, perhaps, that I heard it wrong. You can’t talk to bananas, they are food. I’m almost 100% certain of this. There was music then, a bland saxophoney easy-listening sort of thing, and from sheer curiosity I continued to listen to it while I drove. A few seconds rolled by as did I, and with a sudden start I realized that a large car, a Throne Eliza with police markings, was directly behind me and was steadily drawing near. How long had he been there? My heart beat quickened, and I was about to put the phone down when a loud click came from the receiver and the rough, gravely voice from the earlier announcement spoke.
“Good time of day, sir. I am Bananas with, uh, Franklin Mint activation tech support. How are you today?” What a voice! Whoever this fellow was–and was his name really Bananas?–he sounded like James Earl Jones with a tracheotomy. No matter, it was obviously a mistake. I looked in my rear-view mirror at the police cruiser still behind me and wrenched one-handedly at the steering wheel as my Pinata, under the influence of ruined ball joints, continued attempting to veer sharply to the right.
“I’m ok,” I answered, squinting and trying to make out the face of the policeman behind me, “but I’m pretty sure you have the wrong number. I’ve never bought anything from the Franklin Mint.”
There was a pause then. I heard heavy breathing broken by quiet grunts. In the background a keyboard tapped away.
Finally, Bananas said, “that is slightly possible. I’m very sorry for any confusion. Are you Joseph H. Minnetola?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Alright,” he said, “Of 6505 Beechcraft, Warren Michigan?”
Whoever this was, he clearly had the right man. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“Are you at home now, Mr. Minnetola?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I’m driving,” I answered somewhat impatiently, “frankly, there’s a cop behind me and I think I better hang up the phone and concentrate on driving. Bye, Bananas.” I moved the phone away from my head, thinking to hang it up when the voice suddenly yelled out of the phone loud enough to be heard over the formidable road noise penetrating my rusty chariot,
“WAIT, MISTER MINNETOLA!” I hesitated, holding the phone a foot away from my head, almost in my lap. Still looking at the policeman through my rear view mirror, I put the phone back up to my ear against my better judgement.
“Ok. I’m listening.”
Of course the policeman chose this moment to turn on his lights and sound his siren.
* 8-Mile Road is so named not because of its length, which is substantially longer than eight miles, but because of its distance from a theoritical 0-Mile Road deep in downtown Detroit. Every mile Northward in the Detroit area comes with another mile road. SafeTinspector lives in a city known as Utica, which lies near and around 21 Mile Road. Most mile roads are not major thoroughfares, with the exceptions of 8 Mile, 16 Mile and 20 Mile. There is no corresponding system for roads running North and South.
Wife 30 Daughter 5 Basement Wet Dad Widower
Posted on May 16, 2006
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| Say HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Heather turned thirty on Monday! Sam will soon be five. I will turn 34 the day after that. My basement is partially flooded. And my father is now a widower. Isn’t time a strange substance. I was wading through it, now I’m being carried downstream. |
 On the subject of Heather’s age, I have no observations to make. Thirty was almost four years ago for me, and I don’t feel any older yet. Oh, ok, I look old when the allergies take me, but I’ve shaved my head in order to compensate. Actually, my wife shaved my head. Well, she didn’t quite shave my head, she more or less trimmed it down to about a quarter of an inch.
She did this on Mother’s day, and there is some evidence in the form of her constant sepulchral chuckling during the act that she took unnatural pleasure. I suppose it was a follicular version of ‘marking’ her territory. |
 As for my daughter, she is the single most adorable little girl I’ve ever met. She is also the most active, and at times the most exasperating. In this she is normal. Visit Sam’s blog for more information on your future benevolent dictator. |
 Oh, yeah, flooded basement. I have seepage. Water, in its eternal war with civilisation, encrouches upon my subterranean basecamp. I beat back its inexorable advance with my plastic wand of suckage (shown in the displayed photgraph). The Italian man came and said he can fix it, but not until next Monday. |
 My father, Ed Whited, suffered a terrible loss this last weekend. His wife, Margaret, passed away in their home of an embolism. They were changing clothes to go out when she simply dropped dead in front of him. She went quite suddenly and quite unexpectedly.
I only met her a few times, but she seemed very nice and they looked happy together. Not knowing my father very well, as he’s lived out of state all my life and contacts/visits very infrequently, I don’t really know how to reach out and offer him sypathy. Dad, if you’re reading this, then I’ll say again what I’ve said already. I’m very sorry, and may the pain dull as quickly as it can. |
Closure Part 16 will be up tomorrow for those who care.
A New Religion – Hear me Out!
Posted on May 13, 2006
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Are you looking for Closure? I posted part 15, in which we learn to beat a pinata, a few days ago. Part 16 should be up before Monday’s sun sets in Detroit.
No new podcasts because allergies have me even more nasal than usual. If I clear up I’ll do another one.
First, let me state the following: Purpose is intrinsically linked to efficient function. Take a gun, for instance. Its purpose is immediately apparent to the dispassionate observer based on its form and function.
- The Primary Purpose of a Gun: Emptying Jars.
- The entire workings of the gun are clearly dedicated to the task of emptying jars.
- It elegantly induces rapid combustion of the materials inside a tiny jar, causing them to explode, emptying the jar.
- It then quickly discards the jar lid out the end of a narrow waste chute and ejects the emptied jar from the chamber to make way for another lamentably full one.
- The entire workings of the gun are clearly dedicated to the task of emptying jars.
There are ancillary purposes to be sure, and I’ve heard some fools claim that the purpose of a gun is to kill, or possibly to poke holes in targets. While I don’t deny that someone holding a gun can, if they hold it with the waste chute directed toward a target, produce that effect, I believe it is clearly a perversion of the original purpose. Those fools claim that because a gun can be used to shoot targets or to kill, then shooting and killing make up its whole reason for being!
If you were to use that logic to determine ultimate purpose, you would inevitably come to the conclusion that the purpose of a thermos full of vegetable shortening is to act as a proxy vagina in a public restroom setting. That logic is faulty.
The truth is that you can not arbitrarily pick and choose from amongst the possible actions of an entity in order to determine its purpose. The behavior and/or propensity of an entity should be statistically tabulated and the most frequently encountered and most simplistically described function must be accepted as its purpose. Occam demands no less of us, and I demand no less of you.
At first, I was troubled by this method of ascribing meaning. It seemed, on the surface, that it would actually compell me to determine that the true purpose of the aforementioned gun is to remain in a nearly constant state of rest inside a locked cabinet or leather pouch. All one needed to do, however, to eliminate this boondoggle is to remove the element of time from the equation.
Time is not an event, it is a string upon which events are hung like so many hippie beads in a really groovy curtain. If you think that the purpose of an entity is determined by which of its beads remains on the string longest, then one will likely find that the purpose of the modern automobile is to cover a portion of a driveway or car-park. But if you instead take all those beads off the curtain and count them without worrying about their original placement on the string, you will discover the much more intuitive and believable truth; that the true purpose of the modern automobile is to protect pavement from being struck by bird poop. Therefore, it isn’t how much time an entity spends on any one activity, it is how often an entity engages in that activity.
How does this logic structure relate to my new religion? Not so fast! First, let me tell you that my flawless logic has finally provided a definitive answer to the age-old question:
SafeTinspector’s Answer
After careful consideration, I have determined that the purpose of humankind is, in order of importance, the following:
- Eat and Drink
- Especially if you count each bite as individual events, this is by far our most important function in the cosmos.
- Produce tears, spit and sweat
- Clearly our number two purpose on Earth–unless you weren’t counting each bite individually above.
- Urinate
- As a species, we seem uniquely capable of producing waste water.
- Defecate
- Packaging solids and delivering them out into the world is a holy part of our existance.
Before I continue, I will defend my choice of not including the act of breathing in the previous list. It may seem odd that I include gland secretions, but not breathing. This is completely explainable, however.
Anyway, now I am ready to tell you about my New Religion.
The tenets of my religion begin with the following points of faith:
- God designed the Universe like an amazing game of snooker. We are merely the result of a push stroke near the baulk-line.
- He made EACH of us for a specific purpose.
- That purpose is to eat, weep, spit, sweat, piss and shit.
- Any purpose assigned by God is, by His very will, a holy thing.
Once you have accepted God’s purpose into your heart, and realize that your bodily functions are your holy mission on Earth, then you can proceed toward acceptance of the following:
Definition of Goodliness: In order to please God and gain celestial reward, a human must
- Successfully eat at least one bite of food
- Weep one tear
- Spit (or swallow a mouthful of spit) once
- Sweat enough to dampen one or more body parts
- Urinate at least one time
- Poop as little as one nugget
If one follows these edicts, then one has fulfilled His divine will on Earth and is thereby assured a place in Heaven on His right hand. His left is reserved for dealing with His own cosmic bodily functions.
Definition of Badliness:
- Not eating, or trying to prevent oneself or others from eating, is a sin.
- Dry mouth without special papal dispensation is a mortal sin. Dry eyes likewise. God advises that you carry a canteen of water to swill and a bottle of eyedrops as being necessary to avoid eternal hellfire. Pack them in your God-pouch!
- Antiperspirant is strictly forbidden!
- Holding in your water for more than five minutes after feeling the urge to pee is a mortal sin. All adherants should have an egg timer in their God-pouch. If it dings, pee immediately, no exceptions.
- Laxatives are forbidden, and severe constipation is to be interpreted as God withdrawing His presence from your life. Suicide is the proscribed solution to constipation.
How to Cheer Up a Woman
Posted on May 11, 2006
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Taken from text messages sent to Heather Whited at work:
Joe: You sounded so sad and tired when I called.
Heather:Just stuff going on
Joe: I want you to be happy.
Heather:Don’t worry about it.
Joe:I drew a picture of you eating a hot dog!
Heather:Right.
Joe: I did!
Heather: Why?
Joe: To cheer you up.
Heather: !
Joe:I don’t like to think of you sad.
Joe:You love hotdogs.
Joe:I knew you would be happy if you were eating one.
Joe:So I drew you eating a hot dog.
Heather:I dont have hot dog.
Joe:I know
Joe:I wanted to see you happy.
Joe:If you were here and had a hot dog you would be happy
Joe:And I would be happy watching you be happy
Joe:Next best thing is to look at a picture of you being happy.
Heather: Why not draw me happy without hot dog?
Joe:It seems more real with a hot dog.
Heather: LOL
Joe: In my drawing you were so happy you fell to your knees
Heather:eating hot dog
Joe: Eating hot dog on your knees!
Heather:dork.
Joe: I figured you wouldn’t want a bun.
Joe: And there wasn’t enough room on page for whole hot dog.
Joe: It is coming in off the edge of the paper
Heather:dork.
Joe: You look so happy eating the hot dog.
Heather:thanks
Joe:Don’t mention it
