Larry Bird's best player

Any of you who knew me in junior high and high school knows how much I loved the Boston Celtics. Larry Bird was the number one player in my book, but I adored his team mates as well. The Chief, McHale, Danny Ainge, Gerald Henderson, Quinn Buckner and more. Except Walton, never really liked him that much.

Sadly, one of my faves, Dennis Johnson died today of an apparent heart attack. He was only 52 years old. Dennis was around in the days of tiny shorts and when passing the ball was an intregal part of the game. He made the famous lay up after the famous Bird steal. I know I was jumping up and down like a freak after that play. I used to drive my dad nuts. Larry called him the best player he'd ever played with which is high praise indeed.

On a happier note, Duke won again tonight!!!! We're gonna be on a roll come tourney time. I hope.

Discovered the power of positive thinking may not be the complete sham I think it is. It's been a rather crappy week. The birthday was uneventful and while work wasn't horrid, I was out a person for 2 1/2 days which just makes the loads feel heavier, etc. Anyway, I've been in a poo of a mood most of the week. I came in today still feeling crouchy. At lunch I was behind an older woman with a walker. She was pretty slow, but the place wasn't busy so it was no big deal. I placed my order and went to wait for my sandwich. Her order came up, but there was no way she could carry her tray and move with the walker. So, I decided to have a little "pay it forward" moment (and by the way, that movie completely sucked). I offered to carry her tray for her. I walked with her to her table. Her friend was getting coffee and hadn't noticed she needed some help. She thanked me and I said, no problem, and there was my little nice moment number one.

I get back to work and at some point end up in the music department dropping off some signage. A woman is getting her items rung up and her 2 yr. old-ish child is getting cranky. She's talking to him, but it's not really working. So, I crouch down and start talking to him. I stick my finger in my mouth and make the popping sound that is my "thing" with the kids. He starts to smile and then giggle and eventually I get him to try to do what I'm doing. He's happy and mom's happy and he says bye to me when they leave. Nice moment number two.

I guess my karmic pay off is I run into this regular customer that I occasionally scope out...okay, perhaps stalk would be a better word. He recognizes me since we had a conversation about Green Day one time. He says hi and smiles and I notice that he's still not wearing a ring. Sweet. Nothing else happens, but hell, I'll take what I can get at this point.

Weird work bit:

One of our information desk people told me she took a phone call from a guy asking if we had a Kama Sutra book. She explains we have several versions of said book. He asks her to check it to see if the book explains how to do it "doggie" style. She said the book covered a decent number of animal themed activities and perhaps he should come in and check out the section himself. Apparently this guy doesn't get out much.

Oprah helped Bill O'Reilly attempt to cover his tracks. Check out www.mediamatters.org/items/200702220011.

If you want to see something really freaky go to nin.com and click on year zero. Then click on the high or low res (depending on how you want to download it). Make sure your volume is turned down. Trent is a freakin' genius.

harming the youth of America...with bunnies

No, this is not a bunny. I'll get to that in a second. Just felt like putting Mr. Reznor up here and mentioning if you'd like to hear two songs off the new album you can check out the NIN myspace page. If you do some searching, you can find a place to download My Violent Heart. I usually listen to it a couple of times a day.

The new album is part of a grander concept that includes several webpages (anotherversionofthetruth.com is just one...click and drag over it for a really cool and disturbing reveal), clues on tour t-shirts, flash drives left in bathrooms, and a huge story line involving a giant government conspiracy. Right up my alley.

Back to the bunnies, last night I was at a friend's house with her family hanging out. I usually bring over a DVD to watch, but my kid friendly selection is rather limited; we've watched Ghostbusters many, many times. Cherrill mentioned she'd heard myself and her brother Jim talking about Monty Python and the Holy Grail a few times and she'd never seen it. I skimmed through it and there wasn't any nudity and only a couple of bad words so I figured we were good. I knew the boys would like the knights and stuff. I also knew a lot of the humor would be over their heads, but they would get the sillier moments.

Here's what happened. They loved the bit where the King hacks the arms and legs off the knight and yet he still lives. They loved Sir Lancelot's over the top carnage. The one bit that made the youngest kids upset was my favorite part. Killer rabbit attack!!!! It's okay for the knight to hack up an entire wedding party, but a bunny (and a fake puppet bunny at that) flies around going after the necks of knights and we get tears and stomping out of the room. Kids are nuts.

At our managers' meeting this past week, we got our yearly self evaluations handed out. I freaking hate these things. My job does not change from year to year. Open the box, take out the books, put them away. Reverse that for the returns process. I never have "personal goals" to write down. Although, I have been tempted to mark down goals like "not hitting management with my car" or "setting fire to fixtures for which we have no room."

Our store manager and community relations gal were the only two that admitted they love doing these eval's. Fearless leader got all Masterpiece Theater on us when he said he liked to take an hour or two each month and go up to his loft/library and reflect on how he had done over the last thirty days. Sort of his own little eval. I told Laura that I immediately had two thoughts when he said this...one, these personal eval's aren't working very well and two, self evaluation...is that what the kids are calling it these days.

As usual, I will wait till the day or two before it is due to write mine out. Anyone have some useable business catch phrases I could write down? I think I'll have an Office DVD marathon to get me inspired.

WATCH IT:

Amazing Race starts tonight!!!! I hope the exceeded our fame couple of Rob and Amber (is that right, I never watched Survivor) go out early.

LISTEN TO IT:

Nine Inch Nails--My Violent Heart

READ IT:

I'm waiting till I finish the book till I tell you. But, I will say it is pretty darn snarky.

GO DUKE!!!

CBS is showing Ohio St./MN today in this part of the country so I'll have to wait till half time to see how the Blue Devils are doing. OH--the final appearance (atleast for now) of Chief Illiniwek (sp?) will be this Wed. if I remember correctly.

Opening The Box

No picture today--just boring text.

A couple of weeks ago, "W" came to town. He ended up going to a locally owned restaurant for breakfast. Actually, it was just dry toast and coffee; he'd probably had waffles on Air Force One. His visit was not that far from the store so traffic was blocked off for miles which caused many employees to be late to work. I lucked out and took a different exit and got in on time. Most of our delivery drivers were not so lucky. One of them got stuck for almost 45 min. and the other was immobile for 90 min. Thanks George!

A friend of mine works at a local hospital with a woman whose son is part of the morning show of a local radio station. According to the woman, her son told her the Secret Service came to the station and told them they were not allowed to say anything bad about the President while he was in town. The morning folk stated talking about W and the S.S. intervened and told them they couldn't talk about the prez AT ALL!!! Guess we shouldn't be surprised that the guy who wants to take away as many free speech liberties as possible sends the S.S. in to make sure everything is under control. That's what you do when you take over a country, take out their communications...learned that in history class.

Speaking of communication, our CEO started his own blog about a month ago. This blog is a part of our intranet at work. He writes a column once a week and we can submit a comment if we'd like. The man had no idea what he was in for. The comments on the first two blogs had nothing to do with the blog topic. He was bombarded with questions about everything that is wrong with the company. People were looking for answers. Answers that they were obviously not getting from store managers or district managers (or even higher up the chain). I really believe he thought he was stepping down off the mountain to pass along words a wisdom to his followers, as though we'd be waiting for him in a subjugated position.

He's trying to bond, I suppose, but when he spent one blog running down what he did in the course of a day, he name checked so many people, I felt like I was listening to someone who hasn't pumped his own gas for a few years.

By the third blog, he'd had enough. In a rather pissy tone, he told us we should stick to the blog topic or offer up "big picture" questions. His responses to most comments are condescending and often have several spelling and grammatical errors. Seriously, he's not some teenager textmessaging a friend during study hall to find out where this week's beer party is located. He's a freakin' CEO--invest in spell check buddy...or better yet, keep a flipping dictionary at your desk. I know where you can pick one up cheap.

Here are a couple of random things:

Stephen Colbert is apparently getting his own flavor of Ben & Jerry's.

Duke fell out of the Top 25 rankings for the first time in 11 years. They missed the number 25 slot by just 8 votes. They had the second longest streak at 220 consecutive weeks in the rankings. One more week and they would have tied UCLA, which went 221 a couple of decades ago. Still love them though.

Several people in Boston are idiots. Essentially, a series of lite brites were up for about 2 weeks before someone noticed and confused a cartoon character with a terrorist threat. Maybe it's because Boston is close to NYC that they are hyper freaky about this sort of thing, but come on people.

The new Nine Inch Nails cd comes out April 17 and it's called Year Zero. I'm excited. I'm sure the rest of you probably don't care that much, but that's okay.

One last bit, another sign the world is coming to an end...today we got in a Grey's Anatomy magazine. ARRRGHHHHH!!!!!!!

That's that. Hope the crazy font action made up for the lack of photography this time around.

A Tough Year Continues

Tonight was rough. We had them. Had them till there was 5:15 left in the game. Tyler who? was the cry pretty much up until that point. Then those freakin' free throws were missed. We didn't have a solid go-to guy at the end. It's been a struggle, but my Dukies have been improving over the season. There have now been 3 heartbreaking losses (and with 5 of the next 7 games on the road there's a chance there will be a few more). Still, I will not abandon hope. Rematch is set for March 4. Josh is gonna come through I just know it.

Okay, to move on from basketball. Went and saw yet another film at the end of last week. Notes On A Scandal is really good. Judi Dench plays a supremely creepy woman very, very well. Damn, I'm tired. I'm blanking on whether or not Judy or Judi is correct, yet I'm too lazy to get up and check. Oh well.

Couple of happy notes:

R.E.M. made it into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. Or, they will when the induction ceremony happens on March 12. Patti Smith also made it which will make Michael Stipe very happy.

One of our most evil employees has quit!!!! (Bells are ringing and a choir of angels is singing) While he came in at #3 on the most evil list, it is still satifying to know he's gone. Apparently while in the breakroom, he was looking over the posted schedule and told the manager on duty--"I think tonight is my last night." Classy. Found out he was a philosophy major which explains why he was a complete prick.

Strange question from our driver today. We were talking about the guy who was recently charged with 69 different counts in the cases involving the kidnapping of two boys. Our driver asked me if sodomy was oral or anal as he wasn't up on this sort of info. It felt really weird to answer that question. I actually forgot that technically both qualify, but thanks to repressive culture I had it stuck in my head that it was anal (tell me that isn't a weird sentence). All I could think about was in the movie Omen 3 (?)--it's the one with Sam Neill and he's running for Congress or something--and he sodomizes some chick and it's supposed to be the "evil" sex position because he's the son of Satan. My head is full of strange, strange things. I don't think I'll be correcting myself with the driver any time soon.

As I am tired and have a headache, I think I will save for another time my discussion of the "blog" the CEO of the company I work for has started. I'm sure you will all be waiting anxiously.