Scabbing for Cookies

I have always believed that if you are one of the truly lucky ones, there will come a time in your life where you discover that which you were meant to do, that which you do so much better than all others. There occasionally comes that sublimely rare moment when a Tiger Woods picks up a golf club, a Michael Jordan picks up a basketball, or a Brian Lamb picks up a Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. So you can imagine my happy excitement when I felt that I too had discovered that which I was meant to do.

As the lag between posts on this blog clearly proves, if there is any task that I feel that I can truly throw my back into, and do as well as almost anyone on this planet, it is the act of not writing. So when I first heard of a so called “writers strike” I honestly thought that my time had come. It suddenly occurred to me that there are few things for which I have so much innate flair for as I do for “not-writing.” And now I was being told that my secret talents could be put to the greater good. My not-writing would become a devastating tactical Strike upon our corporate overlords. I figured I would not-write my ass off, nonstop, day and night, until corporate America could no longer stand the weight of my boot upon its throat.

And there I was this week, quite satisfied with how aggressively I’ve been tea-bagging "The Man" these past few months, when Christi unfortunately broke the bad news to me. What she tells me is that I don’t actually belong to the WGA.

Hmmm. Apparently, as she explains it, there is actually a guild of some sort that writers join. For whatever reason, I imagine perhaps a screw-up with the postal service or a problem with my cell phone, I never actually got an invitation to this clique. Christi also goes on to point out that, in my case, a doubling of my DVD residuals will not actually come out to all that much. So much for “being of use.”

On the bright side, what that means is that I am free to write again and just in time since I’ve decided to try using this space for something I usually abhor, two way communications.

I read somewhere that one of the strategies for growing a blog’s readership is to actively court and respond to reader’s comments. Now, I realize that this might make sense for a less narcissistic writer. However, what originally attracted me to this whole idea of keeping a blog in the first place wasn’t the new media ability to have actual interaction with a readership. Rather it was just the idea of being able to blah, blah, blah about myself in a public forum, for free, and without necessarily having to be interesting.

Why then did I enable the anonymous comments feature on this blog? Well, in all honesty I actually enjoy reading and erasing spam comments. It’s been interesting to watch them evolve in sophistication. Just yesterday I got a spam comment that actually found the phrase “Take me to the river” from an earlier post of mine and cut out a Wikipedia entry on Al Green that had the same phrase, and then posted the entry into my comments section, with their web address at the bottom and a link to "sportsbook" thrown in randomly. I was so impressed I actually left it up for the time being if you want to see the latest in spam-tech.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am exaggerating somewhat. I do enjoy getting nonspam comments as well. I’m just not a big fan of interacting with other people when I can avoid it. Getting comments is kind of like getting phone messages and emails, in that people sometimes expect you to return the interaction. While this is by no means unreasonable, it is annoying nonetheless.

And also, more often than not, what happens when people make a comment is that for some reason it suddenly becomes about them. It’s all: “I think that you’re brilliant Mike” and “I can sense the powerful virility of your loins” the stuff that they think and that they feel. By no means did I start this blog so that other people could talk about themselves.

(Now obviously I know that you have interesting things to say and if it was just you, I would have plenty of time to respond to and consider anything you might have to say. But you and I know very well that not everyone has as many well thought out things to say as you do. Once again, as it has so often been the case in your life, other people are ruining it for you.)

Nonetheless, putting my aversion to social interaction aside for a moment, I am actually requesting help in the form of your comments and suggestions if you have any. I am hopeful that one of the more creative amongst the half dozens of people who read this blog might be able to help me come up with ideas for Christmas cookies.

For quite a few years Christi’s family in Dallas has invited Christi and I to share Christmas with them. Traditionally, Traci, Christi’s Uber-Mom sister in law, bakes up Christmas cookies that we all get to decorate. Naturally there are only so many times you can decorate a tiny fir tree or a rotund old guy in a red suit and still have it be interesting. So over the years we have tried to expand the design possibilities at least a tiny bit.

The first year was really primitive. Maybe an occasionally angry snowman or some peapods (Christi loves English peas).

The second year was still sloppy but at least I tried to work more within a theme, counterfeiting holiday money.

Two years ago at the height of bird flu mania I figured the best thing I could get for Christi’s nephews and niece would be some fine Tamiflu antiviral cookies.

And then last year I decided to honor various members of the Bush administration who are no longer with us. (Due to my almost photo realistic craftsmanship, who the cookies represent should be obvious. Nonetheless, I’ll label them at the end of this post just in case you have trouble figuring out who is who.)

And then this year I figured I’d try something different. I decided I would open up the floor to see if anyone out there had any thoughts. So, if you’ve always had a remarkable concept for a holiday cookie that you desperately want someone else to steal and pass off as their own, now’s your chance.

Of course, there are a number of things that I’m looking for in a design. Naturally we’re looking for topical originality. But I also need simplicity in execution. If you have a brilliant idea but it would involve me having to recreate Picasso’s Guernica, in icing, on a dozen cookies, that is probably going to be more annoying than it’s worth.

While it doesn’t have to be directly holiday related, at the very least it has to be age appropriate. If appreciation of your idea is going to involve me having to try and explain to a nine year old what exactly balloon fetishes are, or Picasso’s Guernica for that matter, I’m going to have to pass.

And finally, you will get bonus points if you can work within the confines of standard cookie cutter shapes, triangular trees, stars, reindeer and whatnot. This is not a prerequisite, but if it saves me the trouble of carving custom shapes in the dough and therefore plays to my laziness it will be appreciated.

So far, I think the Tamiflu cookies were the best received. It was a simple design that didn’t take much explaining and seemed like fun to eat. (I understand that the color of the capsule is wrong but I had supply problems. I think Camille hogged up all the yellow to make stars or something like that. Through the pain of experience I’ve learned that sometimes fighting an 8 year old over frosting is more trouble than it’s worth.)

The Bush cabinet cookies were not shunned, but they weren't gobbled up with the same enthusiasm as the Tamiflu cookies. As it turned out no one seemed quite as excited to eat an almond iced John Bolton cookie as I had hoped, except for Bella of course, their angelic if somewhat slobbery 900 pound Mastiff, who jumped up on the table and ate the entire administration when no one was looking.

And now, this year, I'm putting it in your hands. So if anyone has any topical and easily reproduced design ideas, I would love to hear them. Of course, if your design is chosen you will not be mailed any finished cookies, and in fact you won’t really get much of anything out of it except the satisfaction that I feel when my life is made easier. However, if the dog doesn’t get to them first I’ll post a picture up here and the kids will of course thank you. And by thanking you I actually mean me, since they don’t really know you very well.

(In case you needed help with the Bush cabinet cookies, moving counter clockwise from the upper right hand corner you quite obviously have cookies to commemorate ex-US Representative to the U.N. John Bolton, ex-White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, ex-Secretary of Defense Donald “Rummy” Rumsfield, ex-director of FEMA Michael “Brownie” Brown, and of course ex –Secretary of State Colin "The Colon" Powell.)

Timely Valentines Day Post

So I run into Dollie, of Jane and Dollie fame, and she tells me that she has been reading my blog. My particular type of narcism being driven by insecurity, I ask her what she thought of it.

Dollie- "Oh, I loved it!"
Me- "Oh yeah."
Dollie- "Yep. No it was good. I mean, you know, I liked it. I mean I didn’t read the whole thing."
Me- "No?"
Dollie- "No. It was just kind of like, you know, it was kind of like a lot of... long."
Me- "Oh"
Dollie- "Yeah, I mean I guess it makes sense. You’re always, you know with the stories, and they kind of...you know they kind of... Oh yeah, I liked it. It was just... you know, a lot."

All right, all right. In an attempt to keep the Blah, Blah, Jibber-Jabber down a little I’ve decided to run this year’s Valentines’ Photos with only minimal commentary. Instead of going to a swanky restaurant this year, we went to a fancy pants hotel for Valentines Day. A special thanks to Jor for getting us a decent rate at the Standard in downtown Los Angeles. I told Nick Dileo we were staying at the Standard and he told me how much he despised it. It’s one of the new breed of "hip" hotels and I can imagine it being a love-it-or-hate-it kind of place. I don’t remember whether Nicky hated it because it was too pretentious or because it was too silly. But the more I think about it, that’s probably exactly why Christi and I liked it. Somehow it was able to be both pretentious and silly at the same time, which isn’t so easy. Anyway, with far less commentary than the Japanese photos, here are a couple shots from Valentines day at the Standard.

Scenic rooftop pool:

The cabanas were these funky molded red plastic things that for some reason all had actual waterbeds in them:
From here we could wave at Jor across the street in his oversized window office:

Luckily since this is minimal commentary I will not have to explain why there might be a giant black foam foot in our bathroom:

And of course, in case there was any confusion, this is the paper you use when you take a poo:

Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 1 (The Why)

A while back American Airlines ran this incredible promotion. In hopes of building loyalty and combating JetBlue on a couple of their most popular routes AA offered a free ticket to anyone who made two trips from New York to California or Florida within one year. Between the number of decent LA tournaments I could go to and the fact that both my parents and Christi lived in Florida it was the perfect promotion for me. I easily completed the two required trips and was mailed my free ticket. Now the thing that made this offer so impressive was that the ticket was good for anywhere in the world that American Airlines flew to. I looked up the world map on the AA website and found that every continent short of Antarctica was positively littered with tiny red dots representing cities you could get to using AA. All I had to do was take two flights to places I was going to anyway and I would get a free ticket to anywhere in the world, it seemed too good to be true.

Now, as it so happens I’m not all that well traveled. I’ve seen a fair cross section of the large and lushly diverse country that I call home. I’ve lived in Michigan, Florida, Massachusetts, and New York. I’ve taken various road trips out west, along the Eastern seaboard, from Florida to Chicago, and so on. If it’s a state with a major legal casino I’ve probably made a business trip to it. However, I’m not so much a world traveler. I've never even made it over to Europe. I did spend about a month in Ethiopia in ‘99 but beyond that I'm not so much a member of the international community.

Luckily I’ve a fair number of friends who are far better traveled than I am and I spent almost a year interviewing them on what I should do if I had the chance to fly anywhere in the world for free. I received a decent range of suggestions but with the parameters I set one country came up more than most of the others, Thailand. So I called up American and told them "I’m going to Bangkok!" to which they replied "No you’re not."

What I quickly discovered was that American Airlines defines "anywhere in the world" fairly differently than I do. While the world map on the AA website was littered with tiny red dots that represented AA cities, the subtle difference between a Codeshare City, a Oneworld City, and an AA/Codeshare had eluded me. While you could get to Bangkok through AA it was not the specific Bozo type of city required for my ticket.

Well, I had backup and I told AA that I’d go to New Zealand instead. Now, the woman on the phone didn’t actually laugh out loud at me but there was a moment as she tried to figure out the best way to convey not only that I was not going to New Zealand but that it was a pretty dumb question in the first place and to convey all of that without insulting me too much. She got the first two ideas across but failed slightly with the third.

From there the conversation went: Australia? No. China? No. Singapore? No. And eventually I just gave up and asked "what’s the farthest point I can get to with this ticket?" She thought a second or two and said "Tokyo. I guess," to which I replied "Lock it up!"

And that more or less is the short explanation of why I ended up in Tokyo. Now just in case the idea of me trying to wade through Tokyo alone not knowing a single person or a word of Japanese wasn't silly enough I actually convinced Christi to put aside her debilitating fears of earthquakes, Asian bird flues, and having the only person she knows on an entire continent be me, and I dragged her to Japan as well. This all resulted in the following photos: Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 2 (The Photos)

Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 2 (The Photos)

Part 1 (The Why): here

This was the Japanese Inn we stayed at our first night.

The room was small but we liked the room service.

The view rocked as well.

This is Christi riding the subway. As you can tell all she had to do was throw on a black coat and she was indistinguishable from everyone else on the train.

This is Christi so hopped up on unfiltered Sake that she pretended to be a painted fiberglass bear...

...and then a sumo, where she yelled "FIGHT ME!!" and challenged the confused locals. Luckily, after about 20 minutes she eventually got bored.

This is Christi either at a Buddhist temple or in 1940's Germany.

Here's Christi at Shinjuku Train Station which made Grand Central look like an Amish buggy junction.

I didn't get any decent pictures of the neon of Shibuya so here's a stock picture of Time Square that's blurry enough that you can pretend it's Tokyo.

Here's me in front of a building with a giant bug crawling up the front of it. I'm still not entirely sure why there was a giant Japanese cockroach on the terrace but somehow in Tokyo it didn't seem too out of place.

As it turns out the whole city is pretty much laid out like the West Village, which makes it great for cruising around and randomly exploring little neighborhoods but not so good for actually finding anything specific. The fact that they choose to not even name most of their streets, much less list them in English, doesn't help either.

This impressed me though. It's not enough that you can buy a can of sake in any 7-Eleven. Their cans of sake actually have a button on the bottom of them that you can push and within a minute you have steaming hot sake no matter where you are. Those little bastards are crafty!

And speaking of crafty bastards, I stepped out of the shower and I couldn't understand why the area over the sink hadn't fogged up. Then I touched it and realized, heated mirrors. These fricking guys and their high tech mirrors. As you can clearly tell though, we westerners still have them soundly dominated on the hirsute front.

Completely by accident, we ended up in Japan at pretty much the exactly perfect time for all the touristy spring time activities. The weather was perfect for seeing cherry blossoms...

...and shrines...
...and gardens...

...and of course giant radioactive spiders.

This was where we ate the first morning.

And this was what we ate (after putting some wasabi on it). The restaurant was about 50 feet from the fish market that supplies all of Japan. It seemed pretty fresh.

This was one of our favorite restaurants.

It was almost like being in the Japanese pavilion at Epcot Center but it felt even more real.

Here's another of our favorite restaurants. All pampkin, all the time. We tried the pamkin pizza and pamkin curry. Actually very good.

This is a gratuitous shot of me on our picnic in order to show off my new haircut.

I'm not sure why, but for some reason I thought pachinko would be somewhat less dumb than slot machines. I was wrong.

This was of course great for my allergies.

I still have no idea what this thing is but the picture fits very well into the "Things Growing Out of Our Heads" series of shots, which also includes...

this...

...and this.

And speaking of things sticking out of heads, the only thing cuter than a giant robot shaped like a panda is of course a giant panda shaped robot with a little panda pilot sitting in it's head. These people do love their cute.
For Culture we hit the Kubuki theater. As you can tell, the Gaijin seats were pretty far back. Those little tiny colors in the distance are a bunch of Samurai's and Geishas and crap like that. We had headphones that were supposed to translate the play into English. However, what happened was that someone on stage would go into a 15 minute Shakespearean monologue and then at the end, through the headphones, all we would hear was "Let's go boss!" I imagine some of the nuance fell to the wayside.
This was an instillation piece at the Mori Museum. What was great was that the white things on the floor were hundreds of plastic cups arranged aesthetically. Two different times during the 20 minutes I was there I actually heard a shattering crash as some older Japanese lady would accidentally barrel through the cups. A very crafty people, the Japanese, but perhaps not so coordinated.

And finally, this was the view as we sadly journeyed back to our empirically inferior Caucasian country.

Here's Christi miserable to be back wallowing among the muddied, miscegenated, masses of New York.