Month: January 2002

The most obvious long-term impact 9/11 had on my place of work is that employees now have to enter through a different door than we always had. The new entry has security cameras, a keycard ID system, and a narrow, fast-closing door so a rogue Al-Qaeda member would have a tougher time skating in behind someone legitimate.
The only problem is that this new employees-only door was once a loading area on the back dock, so there’s a big industrial-size scale embedded in the floor. It’s covered with a scrap of carpet and usually put in some sort of locked position so it doesn’t register weight. But every once in a while, someone unlocks it, and every employee walking into work gets weighed. It’s like we’re walking into a heavyweight fight or something.
Even worse, the scale is way off, so people appear to be 30 to 50 pounds heavier than they really are. (At least I hope so — if not, that bagel I eat on the drive over has many more calories than I thought it did.) It’s great fun to watch people walk in, catch the soaring needle out of the corner of an eye, then depressingly watch it settle at some Shallow-Hal-in-reverse version of reality. Really gets people in the right frame of mind for a productive workday.

Observations from the weekend:
– When you get on your bike for the first time in months and ride it 18 miles, your hindquarters grow numb quickly. Tomorrow, they will no longer be numb, but numbness will sound like a more pleasant alternative than soreness.
– Short story writing contests that (a) limit you to 1,000 words, (b) require your story to start with the phrase “These were perilous times,” and (c) require it to end with “So, you see it all worked out” are (a) dumb, (b) dumb, and (c) dumb.
– My favorite discs of 2001:
The Magnificent Seven: Spoon, Girls Can Tell and Clem Snide, The Ghost of Fashion (TIE for crabwalk.com Album of the Year); The Dismemberment Plan, Change; Death Cab for Cutie, The Photo Album; The Strokes, Is This It; The Flashing Lights, Sweet Release; Pernice Brothers, The World Won’t End.
Honorable Mention, in alphabetical order: Mark Eitzel, The Invisible Man; The Faint, Danse Macabre; Luna, Live; Stephen Malkmus, Stephen Malkmus; Owls, Owls; Radiohead, Amnesiac; Red House Painters, Old Ramon; Sloan, Pretty Together; White Stripes, White Blood Cells.
Disappointments (none of them bad albums, but less than they should have been; alternately, discs I liked at first that quickly grew stale): Travis, The Invisible Band; Weezer, Weezer; Tindersticks, Can Our Love; R.E.M., Reveal; Champale, Simple Days; Ryan Adams, Gold.

A personal side note: as of today, my old cell phone number no longer works. If you want or need the new one — like, say, if you’re one of the hundreds of people I deal crack cocaine to (oops!) — email me.
This new cell phone is too small. I fear I might wonder where it is one day and realize I’ve accidentally swallowed it.

Burger brouhaha: An irate customer at a Burger King restaurant in Perkins Township threw a Whopper at a restaurant manager Monday, police said yesterday. The customer

Interesting things you learn from referrer logs: http://i.am.a.notalentassclown.org/ points to Metafilter. At first, I thought this was some sort of anti-Matt Haughey snub, but then I checked the domain registry:
Registrant:
   Matthew Haughey
   [address withheld]
   San Francisco, CA 94117
   US
The man has a sense of humor. Reminded me of the Harvard jokesters who registered www.safetyschool.org.

Holy hit count! I’ve somehow been Metafiltered (thanks, Matt!), which means that there are, um, a lot more of you here than there normally are. Welcome to the neighborhood. And again, my sincere thanks if you are participating in the Mazie Project 2002.
Unrelated: News of Eric Clapton’s sudden marriage to a 25-year-old woman inspired this link to groupiecentral.com.

Make a grandma happy: Mazie Project 2002!
And make a mix while you’re at it.

We’re all gonna die, thanks to “mysterious dark energy.”
“Distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another. In effect, it would be like living in the middle of a black hole that kept getting emptier and colder.” I’ve had relationships like that.

A brilliant new all-haiku blog from my coworker Katie. Among the gems:
New Year’s tradition
Cheetos and Benjamin Bratt
God bless A&E
Inconsolable
“Why this mortal toil?” I cry
Dawson’s a repeat
Now that I have blogged her site, perhaps Katie will screw up the courage to comment here. (And her blog-reading friends, whom she has heretofore banned from leaving comments on crabwalk.com, are hereby invited to do the same.)
In other news, it’s snowing in downtown Dallas. w00t!

I need your help! My dear, sainted grandmother turns 70 on Jan. 26 and I’m trying to think of ways to mark the occasion. You can help two ways: (1) giving me any great ideas you have, and (2) participating in the Mazie Project 2002.
Mazie (that’s her name, Mazie) Project 2002 is an attempt to get as many people as possible to send her birthday cards. She sometimes gets a little lonely down in Louisiana, and while I drive down there as often as I can, it’d be great for her to know that lots of people are thinking about her. (Even if they don’t know her.)
So, if you woke up this morning thinking, “I am a good person! How can I show this to the world and improve my karma?”, here’s your chance. Her address is Mazie Benton, 803 W. Branche St., Rayne, LA 70578. And if you want to feel extra good about yourself, ask someone else to send a card, too. Why should you do this? Well, Mazie’s really, really cool. There’s your reason.