Happy New Year!

For those of you wondering why I’m prolifically blogging today instead of being on a 26-hour hell ride back to Vietnam, I changed my flight around a little bit.  I had originally booked my flight back as a round trip returning to the U.S. on June 1, 2008.  But after thinking about it, I decided that coming back in another six months would be too soon, and if I did that and then also came back at Christmas next year, it would be too expensive.  So I decided to change my flight to return on October 1, 2008 instead.

And while I was going ahead and paying the $100 change fee, I decided to delay my return to Vietnam for a few days, so I’m now leaving Atlanta this Thursday, January 3rd.  That gives me a few more days to chill out and take care of all of the things I need to do while I’m home that I haven’t done while I’ve been driving all around the Southeast – like trying to sell my car, etc.  It also enables me to drive to Athens tomorrow to watch some of the New Year’s Day bowl games with my buddy Will – especially UGA vs. Hawaii in the Sugar Bowl tomorrow night!

I’m definitely ready to get back to Vietnam, but I don’t mind pushing it off another three days.  Frankly, my vacation kind of wore me out.  I put over 2,500 miles on my Jeep over the last two weeks, driving all around Georgia and all the way from Mississippi to North Carolina, etc. Click here for a Google Map that I made to show my Vietnamese friends where all I went in the U.S.

So it’s nice to have a few days with nothing on the agenda and thus time to chill!

I hope everyone has a great 2008!  Come see me in Vietnam!  (I just found out that my friends Glenda and Jun from Austin, Texas are coming to Vietnam at the end of January and I’m very excited!  And then my dad comes a couple of weeks later in February!)

While I’m posting YouTube clips, I feel compelled to post this one that McGehee’s son, Hugh, showed me. I can’t decide if it’s funny and disturbing or just disturbing, but I’ve watched it about five times. The song that begins at 5:47 is what brings it all together, but it’s better if you watch the whole thing first because it’s really just weirdness compounded by more weirdness:

Do you love me?
Are you playin’ your love games with me,
I just want to know what to do, cause I need your love alot, oh come on now
Do you love me?
Are you playin’ your love games with me,
I just want to know what to do, cause I need your love alot, oh come on now
Movin’ too fast, this isn’t a race.
Baby, back off, and lower the pace now.
Slow it down, give me some space,
Movin’ too fast, this isn’t a race.
Do you love me?
Are you playin’ those love games with me,
I just want to know what to do, cause I need your love alot, oh come on now
Movin’ too fast, this isn’t a race.
Baby, back off, and lower the pace now.
Slow it down, give me some space,
Movin’ too fast, this isn’t a race.
I’m Old Gregg
I know, I think you saaaaid.
Come on, don’t make me beg now..
cause I’m not your regular guy!
Don’t be shy!
Do you love me?

I’ve never seen the HBO show “Flight of the Conchords,” but this YouTube clip Travis showed me is funny as hell:

If you want me to
I could hang ’round with you
If I only knew
That’s what you’re into.
You and him
Him and you
If that’s what
You’re into
Him hanging ’round
Around you
You’re hanging ’round
Yeah, you’re there too.
And if you want me to
I will take off all my clothes for you
I will take off all my clothes for you
If that’s what you’re into
How ’bout him
In the nude?
If that’s what
You’re into.
In the nude in front of you
Is that what you’d wanna view?
If it’s cool with you
I’ll let you get naked too
It could be a dream come true
Providing that’s what you are into
Is that what
You’re into?
Him and you
In the nude?
That’s what he’s prepared to do
Is that the kind of thing you think you might be into?
And then maybe later
We get hot by the refrigerator
In the kitchen next to the pantry
You think that might be what you fancy?
In the buff
Being rude
Doing stuff
With the food
Getting lewd
With his food
We heard that’s what you are into
Then on our next date
Well, you could bring your roommate
I don’t know if Stu is keen to
But if you want we could double-team you
How about you
And two dudes?
Him, you and Stu
In the nude
Being lewd with two dudes with food
Well, that’s if Stu’s into it, too
All the things I’d do
The things I’d do for you
If I only knew
That’s what you’re into

This is the invitation for the garden and tool wedding shower we had for Dave C. and Jamie when they got married back in 2003:

And, for good measure, here’s one more of Dave C. bonding with Sasquatch:

Jamie, me, David at Whistler, B.C., 2004:

One more from India, 1996.  I have no recollection of this so, like you, I can only wonder “What the hell?”  As far as I know, this marks the only time in  my life that I have ever carried an Indian man around on my shoulders, but unfortunately I can’t even be 100% sure about that:

A photo of my mom and Santa when she (my mom, not Santa) was a little girl:

In 1996, a credit card account I had was sold from my local bank in Tacoma, Washington, to a bank in Columbus, Georgia.  Once the account was sold, I had a bunch of problems with the bank in Georgia charging me late fees when I had not been late on my payment, etc., so I decided to just pay the card off and cancel the account. 

In early 1997, I sent the above cancellation letter to the bank in Georgia along with my final check and cut up credit card.  I lived in Seattle at the time, and the bank had no way of knowing that I was also from the south, so I used the opportunity of sending my cancellation letter to also call the bankers a bunch of inbred rednecks.  I am sure that even today a copy of that letter is on at least one bulletin board somewhere in that bank in Columbus, Georgia. 

Click on the above for a larger PDF version.

In 1996, some of my law school friends and I played a prank on a few of our fellow students.  Lewis & Clark is known primarily for its environmental law program, and as a result a lot of environmentalist activist types attended the law school.  My friends and I found many of them to be a little too shrill and humorless for our taste, so we were always messing with them.

We picked up some Lewis & Clark letterhead off of a secretary’s desk and typed up the above memorandum.  (Click on the above first page to see the entire memorandum.)

Basically, everything in the memorandum was designed to either convince the activist students we were targeting that the document was valid or to piss them off.  For example, Edmund O. Belsheim was a recently-retired professor they were honoring that year, so it made sense that they’d dedicate the CLE center to him.    The Boley Law Library was always very short on storage, so it made sense that they’d be also increasing its storage as part of this plan.  The 25% tuition increase and predicted resultant drop in mean LSAT scores would obviously upset the activists, as would the fact that the new center would completely block the views of Tryon Creek State Park from the library and the amphitheater – to be replaced by a two-story, windowless concrete wall!

The accompanying Parking Lot Expansion Plan further pissed off the activists, as it would result in 8.2 acres of “mature Douglas fir and western hemlock” being cut down and sold off to the hated timber company Weyerheuser “at prevailing market rates,” the elimination of most on-campus parking, etc.

After we finished the memorandum, we typed up an accompanying cover memorandum from “An Anonymous Faculty Member” who felt that the school was “abandoning its environmental orientation to cater to certain interests in the local business community”, etc.  (A copy of that cover memorandum is included in the PDF that will come up if you click on the above page.)

We then made copies of everything and placed them in the mailboxes of the students we were targeting.  The next day, one of my friends who was in on the prank saw several of the students in the dean’s office having a heated conversation with the dean and waving copies of the memorandum at him.  My friend saw the dean throw up his hands and say “I don’t know anything about this,” to which the students responded “Well the memorandum itself says that if anyone finds out about this, you will vehemently deny everything!” (Which I thought was a nice touch on our part to add that to the memorandum.)

I don’t think anything really ever came out of it, but it was at least fun to rile up those students for a few days.

In 1997, I sent this mock Firm Bio out as my Christmas card.  I was working for the law firm Gordon, Thomas, Honeywell, Malanca, Peterson & Daheim in Seattle, Washington at the time. 

It’s pretty much self-explanatory.  If you click on either of the individual pages below, you should be taken to a larger PDF version of the document where the text is more legible. 

By the way, the Frigaliment case mentioned in the text really is a case we studied in law school – and in that case the court really was considering the issue of what constituted chicken parts as opposed to chicken pieces, in German.  It was about that time that I started wondering if I had made the right career choice!

My friend Caroline and I have always laughed about how some people abuse quotation marks and all-caps, so when I stopped at a Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits in Alabama on the way back from Mississippi last week and saw this, I had to snap a quick photo with my iPhone.

I am very confused.  Is the restaurant really a “Popeyes”, or is it really something else – a Zaxby’s maybe – masquerading as a Popeye’s?  Why did they go to the trouble of placing two quotation marks around the word “Popeyes”, but left out the one punctuation mark that was really necessary – the apostrophe?

Does the restaurant really “OPEN” daily, or is it only kind of quasi-open as the sign implies?  And even if it is “OPEN” daily, when does it actually open?  “10 AM” seems to imply that it opens somewhere in the neighborhood of 10:00 a.m., but when exactly?

The same goes for “CLOSE”, plus, what really closes and when?  If it’s not really the “Dining Room” that closes at “9 PM”, what is it?  If it’s not really the “Drive Thru” that closes at “10 PM”, what is it?

Also, why are the words Sunday-thru-Thursday not placed in quotation marks, while “Friday & Saturday” are?  Is it the word “thru” that somehow exempts Sunday-thru-Thursday from being placed in quotation marks, or is it the “&” sign that, in their mind, required that “Friday & Saturday” be placed in quotation marks?

I would like to sit down with the person who typed this sign up to find out what their real understanding is regarding how quotation marks are to be used.  Maybe they place words in quotation marks if they’ve heard someone say those words before?  If so, I would like to point out that most words comprising the English language have likely been spoken by one person or another at some point in time – that’s why they’re called “words” – and the fact that they might have been spoken does not require that they be placed in quotation marks.

I don’t claim to be a grammarian, and I am certainly not a grammar snob, but this sign sets a new standard for quotation mark abuse.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_quote.html

Quotation Marks for Words

Use quotation marks to indicate words used ironically, with reservations, or
in some unusual way.

The great march of “progress” has left millions impoverished and hungry.

Unnecessary Quotation Marks

• Do not put quotation marks around the titles of your essays.
• Do not use quotation marks for common nicknames, bits of humor, technical
  terms that readers are likely to know, and trite or well-known expressions.

I’m about to take off from Asheville. Above are Travis, Suwannee, Indio, and Katie. Here they are crazy stylee:

Mr. Hanky, Indio, and Suwannee: