I’ve been meaning to post since Sunday. Where does the time go? To be fair, after last week I needed some serious recovery time: a dear friend was in town defending his dissertation, which meant much anxiety (and attendant consumption) beforehand. After he passed (excellent on written, excellent on verbal), there was of course much rejoicing (and attendant consumption). All of which more or less means not so much with the sleeping, and come Friday (when he went home) I was fast approaching delusional for lack of rest. As a result, this past weekend was largely dead to me. I did, however, manage to rouse myself for Saturday evening’s Girls’ Night activities, organized by the inimitable Jin: trapeze lessons.

Yeah, you heard me right. Trapeze lessons. In the park, with a view of the lake, boys in sequined tights and all. Cue the circus music.

Trapezing is kind of daunting. Not because I’m afraid of heights (after you’ve done something really crazy, other things just don’t seem as tall somehow), particularly, but because they make it all look so damned easy that you just know it’s well-nigh impossible. Mostly I was worried about the fact that I felt really ill and partly out-of-body and was just going to wind up making an ass of myself. Oh well, I figured. Wouldn’t be the first time. So away we went.

The first thing they teach you is how to hang. One would think this would be the easy part, but keeping your upper body relaxed while your lower body moves – and keeping your whole body straight while you’re swinging – isn’t as easy as one might think (see?). Plus, the bar is kind of textured to give you a better grip (it looks like it’s wrapped in tape and plaster of some sort), which if you’ve got no calluses on your hands is really pretty painful. Finally, and a little mortifyingly, the practice rig they used to teach us this wasn’t really high up enough for me. When they pulled the lift pad out from under me, my toes grazed the mat. So, lesson learned. Next time, use the taller rig.

The next exercise: the knee hang. Again, it looks pretty simple when they demonstrate. You swing back and forth once or twice, then kick your legs up in front of you, lean back and tuck your knees through your arms and over the bar. Then you let go your hands and swing once from your knees, arch your back and reach (you can guess what this is preparation for), then reverse the process and you’re done. With my stomachache this presented a bit more of a challenge than the first exercise, and in fact I wasn’t quite able to manage it. “Don’t worry,” they said. “You can try it later on the Big Rig. It’s easier up there.” I looked at the Big Rig, where at that moment a 13-year-old girl was swinging 15 feet above the net. Easier up there. Uh-huh. Whatever you say. And did I mention about the bar and the hands and the ow? I’m just sayin’.

Moving on. Lesson 3: the swing and drop. One of the most important things in trapeze is timing – otherwise the catches and flying about wouldn’t be possible. So there’s a series of calls used by someone on the ground to let the people swinging know what to do. The simplest of these is the one-two, which corresponds to movements that keep your swing going. Sarah, who’s 16, gets up on the practice rig platform to demonstrate what we’re going to do. She takes hold of the bar and jumps off. One-two! Swing forward. One-two! Swing forward. And then…. wait for it… Drop! And Sarah lets go of the bar, crosses her arms over her chest, and drops ten feet onto deep padding as if into a comfortable bed. We look at each other, a little alarmed. “Don’t worry,” our instructor tells us. “You don’t have to get up on the platform. We’ll just push you.”

Actually, this turned out to be the most exhilarating moment of the whole evening for me. The instructors push you to get you going, and once you’ve got some momentum built up (i.e. a full swing), they begin the count. One-two. Swing forward. One-two. Swing forward. “OK,” I hear, “You’re going to drop on my call, this time.” Swing forward. At the apex of my swing, “DROP.” Let go, cross my arms over my chest, and land deep in the padding. (I wasn’t quite prepared for the effort of will it took to actually let go, but I did it.) Lying there, my heart racing, I think I could feel every single inch of every organ in my body cavity, and they were all throbbing. It wasn’t that far off from the bungy experience, actually, except perhaps in terms of magnitude. Anyway, when I caught my breath and stood up it was with an enormous goofy grin on my face. And then, off to the trampoline.

Anyone who’s ever been on a real live full-sized trampoline knows that it’s one of the most fun activities in the history of ever. You’re weightless; you’re walking on the moon; you’re like Tigger and Neil Armstrong all at once. Only this time you’ve got a harness, because what you get to do is backflips, and backflips are fun times ten. Also nice and relaxing after a ten-foot drop that felt like a hundred because I had no harness on and for all I knew would go flying across the grass and into the treeline and break my neck. Trampoline time was over too quickly, and off to the Big Rig I went.

While I was waiting in line for the tramp, I watched several of the girls take their first turn swinging on the Big Rig. It looks just like the real thing, though not as high – the big thick net, the teeny little platform. I watched them go and it looked like fun. And since I’m really not that concerned with heights anymore (especially when wearing a harness), I just climbed right up onto the platform and got ready to go. There’s a moment that requires some pretty serious trust in your handler, though, which can be unnerving – you’re standing on the platform, you grab the bar, and you arch your body forward in preparation to jump. All your weight is forward, and the only thing that keeps you from hurtling off the platform before you’ve got a good hold is your handler, who is braced on the back edge of the platform holding the back of your harness until you’ve got a good grip. You just have to believe that a little wisp of a girl who seems about half your size can hold your entire body weight. Which, considering the harness, I was a little more willing to do than I might otherwise have been. She counted to three and I hopped off. Did I say the drop was the most exhilarating moment? Well, then this was the one I where I felt most swelled-up with pride. Hey, look at me! I’m flying on the trapeze! And then I realized that my hands really, really hurt. I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t be able to hold on any longer when the man calling (one-two, one-two) said, “OK, when I say ‘drop’, let go.” He said, I dropped, which was a little disappointing because he lowered me slowly down to the net instead of that fabulous drop on the practice rig, but still, I’d done it.

The rest of my runs on the Big Rig were pretty uneventful – I didn’t do as well as most of the others, which I attribute partly to my stomach ache, partly to my (raw and skinned) hands, and partly to the fact that I’m kind of a retard. But Jin and Rachel and MJ all managed the coup of the evening – the catch. This is what the knee hang is preparation for – and it happens so fast when you’re watching, but the girls said it felt like they were moving in slow motion. This is (secondhand) what it’s like:

One of the men (in tights) gets up on the other bar and prepares. When he’s ready, the caller cues you to jump. At the apex of the first swing: “Legs up!” At the apex of the backswing: “Hands off!” Now you arch your back as you swing forward again and look for your partner. You reach out to him for all you’re worth. It seems like he’s a mile away. And then suddenly, he grabs your arms, firmly, above the wrist. You grab him back. “Release,” he tells you. You release your knees and now you’re swinging back with him holding you, legs dangling above the net. “Drop,” he says, and you let go, and are lowered down to the net. It’s a gorgeous thing to watch, and I’m sure it’s several orders of magnitude better than that measly little drop I keep going on about, but I’m just going to have to live vicariously through their stories and the pictures. Until next time. Next time, I’ll do it too.

Although I am fairly certain that my words will not do justice to this man, I have been urged to post his description all the same. Last week, on my commute home, I found my hand fairly itching for my camera when I spotted the guy. Lurching haggardly down the aisle in my direction, he positioned himself roughly four feet away to wait for the doors to open at the next stop, so I got a good long look at him.

He must have been in his mid-50s – a tall black man with sort of a flattened version of Eddie Murphy’s hair from the “Buckwheat Sings!” sketch, clutching a Dominick’s bag in his left hand. He was wearing an enormously baggy green short sleeved Chicago t-shirt, denim shorts, black nylon knee socks pulled all the way up, and white-on-white adidas trainers. Too clean to be homeless, too grizzled to be sane, he was exactly the kind of character that, once I’ve spotted them, I normally find myself idly creating a biography for. But all I really wanted to know was what’s in the bag, bub?

OK, not really. I did, however, have a sort of rare reality-check opportunity this morning. You know all those 80s-inspired, kinda cute, quasi-ironic clothing options we’ve got at our disposal now? The kind that are so frequently abused? Well, it may be all well and good for a hot 20something to throw on a Members Only jacket with his otherwise inoffensive ensemble, but lest we forget, once upon a time people were serious about that shit. And, as I was reminded just this morning, some people still are.

Walking across one of the three parking lots on my daily route between the train and my now-infamous office, I spotted a man exiting the building I was about to walk into. Even from a distance, he seemed different. Remarkable. As he drew nearer, the first thing I really registered was the hair: traditional kickstand mullet. Then the facial hair: traditional redneck/NASCAR moustache. Good lord. Remember Jeff Foxworthy? Like that, only worse. I looked closer: clearly, this was no hipster. Though he didn’t look to be much over 35, he was undoubtely serious. The hair, the moustache, the skinny jeans and – yes, folks – the brown leather tab-collar Members Only jacket: he is the reality of the decade from which so much recent fashion inspiration has been drawn. Let this be a lesson to hipsters everywhere: before you put on those creeper shoes, think carefully: there is fun, and then there is reality. The reality is that the 80s were a decade of really horrifying fashion. Pieces here and there are all well and good and clever and fun, and i would be lying if i pretended never to succumb to my disco diva urges, but beware the draw of The Ensemble, lest you wind up at the club in orange parachute pants and Chuck Taylors. Go back and look at photos of real live people back in 1982. There but for the grace of Barney’s go you.

My paranoia reflexes seem to have gone all funny. More and more, I notice people around me getting agitated about things that don’t have any effect on me at all. I attribute this largely to my time spent travelling – there’s nothing quite like realizing you’re going to be putting yourself in harm’s way more or less daily for several weeks at a time to force you to deal with your instinctive agitation. To wit:

Riding in an ancient bus through the mountains in northern Laos. The roads are hairpins worthy of the Swiss Autobahn, only not nearly as well kept. They’re maybe wide enough for two subcompact cars to pass one another safely, but this bus takes up what looks to be 2/3 of it, from where I’m sitting. I haven’t been able to charge my iPod for days (no power), so I’m reading whatever book I’ve picked up at the last guest house, alternating with long bouts of staring out the window. The scenery is breathtaking. In the distance I can see a huge limestone formation with no roads climbing it. I wonder what it’s called.

Drivers in Laos communicate largely through the honking of horns, punctuated by occasional hurling of epithets, so honking isn’t normally something to worry about. You get used to it – it gets so you don’t even hear it anymore. But when it accelerates in pace as it’s doing now, something in the back of my brain begins to register it again. I ignore it for a minute or so, then look over the seat in front of me, craning my neck to see out the front windshield ten rows away. I can’t really make out what’s happening, but it looks like there’s an army truck headed toward us. I look back out of my window and see, about fifty yards down the fifty degree drop-off, another bus. There’s no railing between the road and the drop. The bus is identical to the one I’m riding in, and it’s clear that it flipped and rolled its way down there. It’s rusted; it’s been there a while. There are no seat belts. The truck is coming toward us. This is about the fifth time I’ve been in a situation where the odds were against my survival since I came to the country two weeks ago, and I just can’t bring myself to worry about it anymore. I tune out the honking horn and go back to looking at the limestone cliffs. Somehow the army truck makes it past us. I guess the road is wider than I thought. I fall asleep.

So when I was in New York over the 4th – actually, this happened on the 4th – there was a fire at our hotel. We woke up around 10:30, after a long long day of shopping at Prada and a late night of martinis at Pravda (couldn’t resist, sorry), to the sound of sirens. It’s a city, we’re pretty used to sirens, so we don’t think much of it at first. But after about 20 minutes of sustained wailing that sounds like it’s getting closer and then not farther away again, it occurs to me (even through my sleepy vodka haze) that hey, this might be something I should pay a little attention to. The view out our window affords us no insight. As we’re trying to work out what we should do, the sirens in the hallway start up and a voice comes over the PA system:

Attention, attention, we are having a smoke situation in the sub-basement. You are not in any danger. All guests above the third floor, please stay in your rooms. I repeat, if you are above the third floor, please stay in your rooms. Do not evacuate.

Riiiight. Translation:

There is a fire in the basement. The fire department is here and they think they can contain the fire. If you all come stampeding down the stairs now, there will be major panic, besides which we risk you being injured by smoke inhalation since all the smoke’s down here and the stairwells will get all backed up. So please, for the love of god, raid your minibars and go back to sleep, people.

I listen to this message, do the mental math, and decide to see if I can in fact sleep through the hallway sirens. It’s been a long weekend already, and it’s not even half over yet. My companion spent the next half hour pacing. I started to get annoyed with him, then thought: is it me? I mean, is there some sort of survival instinct here that’s misfiring and eventually going to make me die a terrible tragic reckless death? We were all fine, everything was fine, and we were only a half hour late to lunch (this last largely because I’m an idiot and put us on the wrong train), but still – was this really a moment to be calm? Annoyed? Frightened? I have no idea.

Yesterday, riding on the El. We’re between stops, we’ve just come up above ground and are between stations, 25 feet or whatever above the street, when we stop. A prerecorded voice on the PA system informs us:

May I have your attention please. This train is experiencing technical difficulties. Your conductor is off the train. Please remain in your seats.

This one doesn’t really require a translation. Something’s up with the train, or the track, or both, and it’s bad enough that the driver had to get out and give it a look-see. At first, everyone’s just annoyed. I’m reading my magazine. I’ve forgotten (again) to charge my iPod, so I can hear the frustrated moans and sighs of exasparation popping all around me. Eventually, the train begins to move again. Ten feet later, it stops. Longer, this time. Now people are starting to get a little freaked out. What’s the matter with the train? Should we try to talk to the conductor? How are we going to exit if we have to? We’re nowhere near a platform. No more announcements were forthcoming. Minutes later, the train started again. Then stopped. Then lumbered on another few yards, then stopped again. It continued like this all the way into the next stop. I was half-expecting to hear an announcement telling us we all should exit and find alternate transportation, but there was nothing. A number of people got off the train anyway. I stayed, with my magazine. Over the next two stops, we came to a halt at least five times. The reactions of my fellow passengers, which I observed with interest, ranged from mild annoyance to borderline panic. Me, I was just happy I had a couple of extra minutes to finish my article.

So, what? Is it me?

Happy Bastille Day, everyone! I was trying to find something joyful (ok, I guess bloody would be more appropriate) and celebratory to pick out of the news, but was having a hard time finding anything that wasn’t just plain alarming, so I was suitably overjoyed when, having lost a previous draft of this entry, I returned to Google News and found this. And furthermore, I’ll exhort you to join in on Lance-watch 2004. It’s a joyful thing and a French thing (or at least happening in France), so all the more a propos.

Speaking of M. Armstrong, we finally got around to seeing Dodgeball last night. What, you didn’t realize he was in it? Well, you’d better get your ass to the cineplex pronto, bucko, before you miss it. I confess that I do have a soft spot for the exactly-over-the-top-enough comic stylings of Ben Stiller, but seriously: I haven’t laughed this hard at a movie since South Park.

Nor did the comedy end when the final credits had rolled. Exiting the theatre, Lindsay and I discussed popping into the Wine Bar across the street, and whether we needed to validate our parking (which we didn’t, as the exit gates were already up when we came in). We got on the down escalator. Halfway down, Lindsay piped up:

L: Hey, why are we going downstairs?
Me: Um, because that’s where the doors are?
L: But the car’s on the third floor [silent ‘comma, dumbass’]!
Me: Oh. Sorry. OK.

We reached the bottom, turned around and got on the escalator going back up. Halfway:

Me: Wait, it’s because we’re going to the Wine Bar!
L: Oh. Sorry. OK. But we can get the parking validated upstairs!
Me: [long stare clearly implying ‘you are a dumbass’] The gate is up. We just had this conversation.

We reached the top, turned around and got back on the down escalator. The teenagers in the lobby were by this time shooting us some very odd looks, which was probably exacerbated by the fact that we couldn’t stop laughing. To the point, in fact, that I had to sit down on the escalator to keep from… well, having an accident. I’m not proud, people. But it was damned funny.

Gracious, how could I have left that melancholy garbage up at the top for so long? I was busy enjoying myself in New York, that’s how. Didn’t even check my email one single time in five whole days. And stop sniggering – that’s serious progress for a junkie.

New York, by the way, was fabulous, thanks. But more about that later – right now, it’s high time I updated you, gentle readers, on the joys of my workspace. A few weeks back, I told you a little bit about the office in which I spend my days and some of the characters who inhabit it. But there’s so much more wealth to share here that I can’t bear not to share it. First off, here’s one of my favorite conversations in recent history, from last week when I realized that the connection between our email server and the outside world was down:

Me: Hi, I’m having a little problem with my email.
Tech Support Chick: [stares at me expressionlessly]
Me: I think the connection between the server and the outside world might be down – I’m only able to receive email from people within the network.
TSC: Yes, that’s a known issue.
Me: Um… do you know when this might be resolved? I’m waiting for some files that I need to meet my deadline.
TSC: No.
Me: OK, great. Thanks.

I did say it’s a lot like Dilbert around here, didn’t I?

There are a few more office characters as well. Props to MBrooks for coming up with good names when I was too braindead to do so…

The Lead Hummingbird – Lead as in the metal, not as in first among many. This woman obviously subscribes to the theorem that if your goal is to look busy and important, your best course of action is to never ever walk anywhere at a normal, relaxed pace. What you should do is, whenever you need to go somewhere (to make copies, send a fax, talk to your boss, kill some time, visit the toilet), walk as quickly and – this is important now, so pay attention – as loudly as possible. Make sure you have a worried, furrowed-brow expression on your face and stomp for all you’re worth. This will not only make it look as though you have altogether too much to think about, but also show your deep and abiding concern for the well-being of your corporate mater. Periodically – but at least once every two days, and more frequently in the days immediately preceding or following any time off – you should actually sprint across the office to your destination. If you master these simple strategies, you won’t even need to carry the usual props (piece of paper, pad and pan) – the sheer velocity of your presence will prove conclusively that you are indispensible to the organization.

This woman, last week, emerged from her boss’ office (where she was presumably in a meeting about something or other) and ran full throttle past my desk around the corner. Two minutes later, she ran back in the opposite direction. In heels. She was carrying nothing either time. Phineas suggested she might have left her wastebasket on fire. A clever ruse – I never would have thought of that.

Los Dos Caballeros – These two manager-type guys have the market cornered on marketing-speak. They add value. They probe demographics. They create opportunities to communicate. They make meetings endlessly long, profoundly tedious and tearjerkingly annoying. It’s impossible to look at a single wireframe with these two jokers in the room without having someone ask whether there’s space provided for marketing, whether each and every possible cross-selling opportunity has been examined, debating not whether it’s worth interrupting the customer for the seventeenth time to ask them if they want to buy something they’ve already refused, but whether the interruption should come in red or in blue. As with all good manager-type guys, as far as we are able to tell they do nothing at all except attend meetings, host meetings, talk to their underlings and go out to lunch, but we appreciate them for their appalling lack of knowledge of simple Chicago geography. To wit, a conversation from a few weeks back:

Caballero #1: [referring to some as-yet-unspecified downtown location. downtown is 30 minutes away by train.] Yeah, I gotta be there by 7. I gotta leave at 5 then, right?
Underling: Where are you going?
Caballero #1: The United Center.
Caballero #2: I don’t know where that is.
Underling: What’s the United Center?

These people work for United Airlines, for crying out loud.

It probably bears mentioning that one of Los Dos Caballeros is the Lead Hummingbird’s manager. Coincidental or causal? You be the judge.

I’ve been writing this post for what feels like a week (but is really only an hour or so) and it’s still a sappy piece of shit, so fuck it, I’m starting over.

I’ve been thinking about distance (in the geographic sense) and closeness (in the intangible/emotional sense) and how different my feelings about these things are now as opposed to a few years ago. A friend of mine left this morning (well, was planning to leave in any case – after yestereve’s beer-fueled impromptu backgammon tournament he might still be around) for New York, and walking the last block back to my place after we said our goodbyes last night I realized that when I said, “I’ll see you,” that was exactly what I meant. No big gravity or air of finality, just a “see ya later” kind of a thing. It was not always so. I used to think somehow that when a person moved halfway across the country (or, heaven forfend, even further away), this great gulf would open between us and the friendship would wither and die for lack of contact. I suppose there are people with whom I’ve actually lost touch after they moved to one of the coasts, and I’m not just talking about the ones who went to LA and then insane, in quick succession. Self-fulfilling prophecy, I suppose: thinking distance was an obstacle made it so. It’s extra-odd that I would think this way, seeing’s how more than half of my family’s friends at any given point in my formative years were several thousand miles away.

Maybe it was my recent bout of prolonged wandering that jogged something loose, or into place. Before I left, alongside the freaking out about going alone to a place where I couldn’t even read, let alone speak the language, whether or not I could live without 50 pairs of shoes and other attendant worries, I thought about the possibility that I’d be forgotten when I came back. There is an appeal to the nomadic lifestyle that’s borne out in the fact that you can be a stranger when you want to. I have more or less a love/hate relationship with that concept, and while I love going away and being totally anonymous, I also love coming home and being welcomed into the arms of my friends. And of course I didn’t come back a stranger. One never really does, particularly when returning to such an established place. In the end, distance is really a very minor thing, and time in retrospect always seems shorter. I still find it difficult to believe that I was gone for the better part of a year, and yet when I came back it was as though I’d never left. Except that I totally missed the winter.

Which brings me to a point of sorts – at least, probably the closest thing you’ll find to a point in this rambling mess: Dictionary.com defines distance as “the extent of space between two objects or places; an intervening space.” I posit that the space between two people who are in the same room, inches apart, can be greater than the span of any ocean I’ve crossed. Friendship, love, the connections between people – none of these things are about geography. There are people I know that live right around the corner from me and I haven’t seen them in years. By contrast, there are people I know on the other side of the Atlantic that I talk to almost every day. Who’s at a greater distance?

So do me this favor: if you’re a friend of mine, and you decide to move to another city or go be a hermit in the mountains for a few years or try out the Amish lifestyle [brief aside: the Amish have a web site?!?] and see if it suits you or meditate at Plum Village or something, unless you really intend to shoot me if I get within 100 feet of the porch, don’t give me the grand old “be well,” ok? It’s got a finality to it that just doesn’t fit our bill.

The scene: this morning, 8:20, at the coffee place. I was standing there waiting for my coffee (they don’t move so fast) when i saw the bus outside, stopped at the red light. Of course it pulled away while the barista was pouring the milk, and I said “damn,” just under my breath. The guy behind me in line, perhaps thinking I’d dropped something or sprained an ankle or somesuch (but in hindsight, probably just waiting for any kind of opening) says, “What’s wrong?” Say i: “Nothing, just missed my bus.” “Well, they come along pretty regularly,” says he and I agree and start to walk away. No such luck.

Please bear in mind that at this point I have not had much coffee and am therefore ill-equipped to deal with any kind of situation.

So he says, “Do I detect a slight accent or is it my imagination?” The smart response would have been, “It’s your imagination. You’re crazy. Please go away.” But because of the aforementioned insufficient caffeination level, I defaulted to polite mode. “Probably not your imagination,” I said. This led to him somehow getting out in two sentences that he’s an expert in spotting dialects and speaks five languages and blah blah and do I parle francais? And again, reflex taking over, even though I’ve begun to suspect this is a trap, I mumble en francais that yes of course i do. This opens the floodgates. I find myself sort of inching away backwards, sunglasses on, while this guy close-talks at me (and well over the decibel level required for such a conversation) in French about how he spent a summer there when he was in school and lived in the 18th and do I know Paris and he’s buying a hotel in Montmartre and the Americans in Paris are all idiots (with the implication that he’s the exception, bien sur) and he’s got an Irish passport and wow, I’m thinking, how the hell do I get out of this now? I’m just waiting for a break in the stream to make a polite exit (did I mention how loud this guy was?) and there isn’t one and then he says, “So, you live around here?” Aha, I think. Here’s my chance. “No, my boyfriend lives around the corner. I live across town.” At this point, the guy who’s sitting drinking coffee and reading the paper at the table right next to us, who’s clearly been listening, chokes and almost spits coffee onto his paper, trying not to laugh out loud. I silently curse him for being amused at my pain and not having rescued me with some quip about the Financial Times. Fortunately the gambit worked and Obnoxious Guy made a quick exit, but not before I noticed another bus speeding through the intersection. Jerk.

Moral of the story: if you must venture out in public before you’re sufficiently caffeinated: headphones. Headphones are de rigeur.

It’s one of those high-annoyance-factor days here in fluorescent heaven, what with the burgeoning sore throat and the never-ending trickle of niggling little changes and the blah blah whinge whinge, and I find myself needing to make a conscious effort to keep the cranky at bay. Fortunately, there’s a fantastic presentation being made in the conference room five feet from my desk, and as usual they’ve rudely left the door open. I looked up just in time to catch the title page of the PowerPoint. It read:

idiom

Turning Content Management into
GLOBAL CONTENT MANAGEMENT

At first, for some reason, I just found this terribly amusing. I mean, how long of a presentation can one build around the introduction of an adjective? But after spending a few minutes (ok, seconds) perusing their web site, I began to get sort of a Dr. Evil vibe off them: Globalization Management Services? Sounds like something involving an ultimatum and one billion dollars, or perhaps just a giant and glorified version of babelfish. Maybe it’s just me. Oh well.

While I’m on the subject of questionable marketing, I’d like to reopen the topic of utterly bewildering billboards. Two more that I just can’t get my head around:

1. At the corner of Armitage and Ashland, there’s an enormous full color billboard for the local classic rock radio station. It reads, “Now, MORE PETTY!” Lest we mistake this to mean they’ve hired a bunch of passive-aggressive DJs who now bicker on the air, this is printed in one of those retro-psychedelic looking typefaces across a twenty foot tall photo of Tom Petty. So, in this case, it’s not so much that I don’t know what they mean as that I can’t fathom how this is a prime selling point.

2. Somewhere along the Kennedy, on my way out to the office, there’s a Hooters billboard. About two thirds of it is occupied by their logo and the requisite morsel-in-tight-t-shirt, but then next to her there’s this enormous bowl of salad. It’s roughly the same size as her torso. The top of the billboard reads something like, “see inside for details.” This one just has me mystified.

Why do people insist on buying canary yellow sportscars? Seriously, try as I might, I can’t come up with a single line of reasoning to back this up. It’s completely inexplicable. Why, if you’re going to spend $50,000 on a brand spanking new Corvette, would you want it to look like a motherfucking taxi? Why? The president of one of the companies I worked for back in the late 90s had a yellow Dodge Viper. It was hideous, but visible. Maybe that’s the point, but if so, it’s a dumb one – sure, people are more likely to notice you if your low-slung souped-up super-coupe is fluorescent in color, but then again, people are also a lot more likely to notice that you’re a complete fucking retard.