The march toward the Turquoise Star commences. (Buy my books, yo.) 51-60

51. Fish, especially oily, fishy fish, are delicious. Mackeral sushi is heaven.


52. I'm probably going to get kicked out of New England for saying this, but I do not now understand nor have I ever understood the fuss over cod, or its needlessly more specific junior partner, scrod, which sounds to me like it should be the past participle of the verb "screw," as in "I just got scrod." Boring white fish.


53. My theory is that cod-scrod are popular because lots of people don't really like fish but they like saying that they like fish. Kinda like me with Satan.


54. I once knocked a picture off the wall pretending to be a dinosaur. This was before we had kids.


55. Favorite individual singers: Bryan Ferry, Annie Lennox, Peter Gabriel, Jane Siberry.


56. Favorite bands: B-52's, They Might Be Giants, The Police, Talking Heads, The Clash, U2.


57. My first LP record: Elton John's Greatest Hits.


58. As a kid, my favorite books were The Hobbit, Dune, A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Earthsea Trilogy.


59. My folks had The Worldbook Encyclopedia in our living room. I read all 20-whatever volumes.


60. Unfortunately, the encyclopedia was a little out of date. Well into the 70s I thought diabetes was a quick-killing terminal illness, lasers were a brand new technology, and some day we might put a man on the moon.

Not for the bandwidth impaired: If you have to be a cat, you may as well be a Viking cat who rocks. S: Uno, dos, tres, taco, cinco...
C: Cuatro.
S: Uno, dos, tres, taco...
C: Cuatro.
S: Taco.
C: Cuatro
S: Tatro.
C: Cuatro.
S: Cuatro.
C: Shazam!
S: Uno, dos, tres, taco, cinco, seis. 41-50

41. "Satan" is an anagram of "Santa." Happy Hellidays!


42. I occasionally emulate the laugh of Muttley, sidekick of Dick Dastardly and generally evil dog on Wacky Races.


43. It will shock you to learn that She Who Must Be Obeyed isn't wild about the Muttley Laugh.


44. Mint Milanos are excellent. Mystic Mints aren't bad, either. Girl Scouts' Thin Mints are OK, in a holy-crap-I-can't-stop-eating-these-mint-chocolate-potato-chips kind of way.


45. I generally avoid chardonnay. Most chardonnays taste too much like hamster-cage. I have enjoyed a few chardonnays, but not enough to make it worth buying or ordering one I don't know unless someone I trust gives a particular wine the "No Hamster Cage" thumbs-up. The popularity of chardonnay mystifies me. Perhaps we are descended from hamsters.


46. Other whites are fine: Sauvignon Blanc, Fume Blanc, Riesling, Pinot Grigio, Gavi, and Gewurtztraminer are typically enjoyable, except when they taste too much like grass clippings or photo chemicals and not enough like fruit.


47. I like big bomber red wines like zinfandels and shirazes. This essentially means that I like alcoholic Koolaid and don't appreciate the subtleties of vintage bordeaux or cabernets. I'm OK with that.


48. A world where you can buy tequila without a haz/mat license seems unnecessarily dangerous.


49. I suck at these four things: patience, gentleness, quietness, and tidiness. So be it.


50. Cambozola is an excellent cheese. Just ask your cardiologist.

Ill Mitch is in the house, everyone, and he is now free to do his three favorite things. 31-40

31. I will wear any jewelry my kids make for me.


32. I worked in software for ten years, despite thinking that most software is boring. Yes, that makes me a big dumbass.


33. Now I'm Mr. Mom.


34. One of my favorite matchups in sports is in volleyball, when a hitter faces two blockers who haven't been fooled by the set. Everyone knows where the ball is, and it's up to all of them to outsmart or overpower the other guy.


35. Don't tell anyone in my volleyball league, but when I'm hitting, my shot preference in decreasing order of goodness, is: hard down the line, hard at a sharp angle, dink to the close corner, blast at the seam between the blockers' pinkies, dink to the middle-short, roll shot to the far corner. I'm a little embarrassed to include the dinks and roll shots, but the immutable relationship between how strong my legs are and how fat my ass has become means that I've gotta be a little crafty to score points when the set isn't optimal and/or the block is good. I usually try not to look where I'm hitting, except when I do.


36. Yellowstone National Park is one of my favorite places.


37. I like bears.


38. One of the best vacations She Who Must Be Obeyed and I ever took included a week at geology camp. Beep!


39. I am fueled by Satan.


40. OK, I don't really believe in Satan, but I like talking about him. She Who Must Be Obeyed wishes I would lay off the Satan-talk, especially around the girlies.

A mellow Friday Five:

1. What are your favorite ways to relax and unwind?

Wrestling with my daughters, having a quiet dinner out with She Who Must Be Obeyed, bullshitting with my friends over a cocktail, playing cards.

2. What do you do the moment you get home from work/school/errands?

Take off my shoes, change into shorts, kiss whichever girls are handy (except She Who Keeps Us All Sane...no kisses for her).

3. What are your favorite aromatherapeutic smells?

What the fuck? I'm not even exactly sure what that means. I'm guessing John Tesh might be involved. Be that as it may, my favorite smells are the ozony thunderstorm smell, girls just out of the bath, and my wife's bouilliabaise cooking on the stove.

4. Do you feel more relaxed with a group of friends or hanging out by yourself?

I like both, but I especially like the feeling of sitting around the table at a dinner party with a bunch of friends after a few drinks. That is just about as loose as I get.

5. What is something that you feel is relaxing but most people don't?

I'm not sure "relaxing" is exactly the right word, but I like speaking in front of groups. Got Brains? 21-30

21. I think freedom of religion is a beautiful thing, including the freedom not to have one.
22. Someday soon, my wife is going to start taking both kids to church every Sunday morning. I will stay home and worship in my own special way, at my fluffy down-filled altar.


23. I like to fish. Some people think fishing is cruel. I don't care.


24. I hate zealotry in regard to just about anything. It seems like an excuse to stop thinking. I am zealous in my opposition to zealotry. ERROR! ERROR! STERILIZE! (Yes, that was the second reference on this site to the original Star Trek episode, "The Changeling." Beep.)


25. She Who Must Be Obeyed and I were married September 11, 1993. One of the reasons we picked that day was that I thought I'd never forget my anniversary. Guess I got that right.


26. I think Personal Finance should be a required class in high school. Taxes, mortgages, credit cards, insurance, budgeting, saving, investing, retirement, and banking are all things that every single student will have to understand within a few years of graduation. I hereby decree that knowledge of personal finance is 1,000 times more important than knowledge of just about anything else you learn in high school.


27. I believe that the world is significantly more complicated than any of the American political parties would like us to believe.


28. Having said that, I'm pretty sure the government is WAY too big.


29. When I find myself spending a lot of time obsessing about what (car, gadget, etc.) to buy next, I know there's some other non-consumer issue I need to deal with.


30. I recently had a dream where I visited the Sopranos for dinner. After the meal we all did a project where we put iron-on transfers onto green T-shirts and then baked them into puff pastry.

11-20

11. Everyone in my public high school was supposed to take a standardized test called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Uniformed military types came into our school to administer it. I refused to take it, but I was not entirely unconflicted. I kinda like standardized tests. Later on, I took a career/personality matching test. The results suggested I should be a comedian, airline steward, or member of the clergy. Maybe the ASVAB would have made me the chaplain on a USO transport plane.


12. I refrained from registering for the Selective Service right up until the day they threatened to arrest me. On that day I realized I wasn't a pacifist, I was a wuss.


13. I like sports with nets: volleyball, tennis, ping-pong. I haven't played much badminton, but I'd probably like it.


14. I won't intentionally eat eggplant, beets, okra, beef liver, or lima beans. Most other things are fair game.


15. Given a good pan, I make a good omelet. With a bad pan, I can only make interesting scrambled eggs.


16. I went to college during the transition from typewriters to computers. At one point, I coveted an IBM Selectric.


17. In restaurants, I like to sit facing the door, with my back to a wall. I picked this up from a guy I did a road trip with when I was 16. He'd taken too much mescaline and his blind spot would come around to the front and start chasing him. When we'd go to restaurants, he'd sit with his back to the wall, and when I'd sit down across from him, he'd nervously say "You really feel comfortable sitting there?" Yes, there IS such a thing as too much mescaline.


18. I play cards: poker, bridge, and cribbage are my favorites, but a good game of Go Fish or Concentration will do in a pinch...


19. ...unless the cards are dirty. If the cards are dirty, deal me out, and get yer goddamn priorities straight.


20. I think drugs, prostitution and gambling should be de-criminalized. Not that I'm much of a participant in any of these activities, but I don't think the government has any business telling someone they can't smoke a joint in their own home, lose all their money to their bookie, or pay for a blowjob. Government efforts to stop this stuff are a waste of time and money. Plus, only a pro can give you a truly premium BJ. (Note to the wise and merciful She Who Must Be Obeyed: That was a joke. Just trying to lighten things up again.)

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

I have just spent the morning as "school helper" at my daughter's cooperative nursery school, where apparently almost all the families come from the Planet of Strange Names (ours included). The class: Schuyler, Tiger, Garrett, Camilla, Pieter, Nikoline, Julian, and...Jeffrey. I started my day at my older daughter's bus stop, where your name has to end with "a" or you can't get on the bus. The crew: Natalia, Tatiana, Alexandra, Samantha, (and her little sisters Emma and Alana), Olivia, and Sophia. I wonder exactly how many miles I'd have to travel to find a nursery school class or bus stop where David, John, Robert, and Michael are chilling out with Mary, Anne, Susan, and Linda.

If you're still awake, this is kinda fun. 1-10

1. I hate the smell of balloons. The latex kind, not the mylar kind, which smell fine.


2. I have two children. They make me happier than I have ever been before.


3. I suspect that having children causes a hormone to be released that makes you think you're happier than you've ever been before.


4. I've heard it wears off after a few years.


5. I really like Smarties. Whenever my kids are involved in the piñata mosh-pit that occurs at most young childrens' birthday parties, you can often hear me screaming "Get the Smarties, girls! Get the Smarties for Daddy!"


6. I have some teeth that other people don't have. My special teeth have five cusps. They're perfect for eating Smarties.


7. I just don't get body piercing. If there's any merit at all to acupuncture, getting one's navel (eyebrow, nasal septum, lip, tongue, nipple, philtrum, naughty bits) perforated seems like an invitation for ailment.


8. My first computer was an IBM PC jr. In retrospect, it was a piece of shit. Actually, at the time I bought it, it was a piece of shit.


9. I was just enough of a rock star in college that I don't need to be a rock star anymore.


10. I am claustrophobic. I found this out about 25 yards into a spelunking trip in a 2-foot high tunnel with 30 kids behind me. I couldn't turn around, so I freaked out for a while and then I kept going. The nature of the freakout involved doing math in my head to estimate how many tons of dirt were on top of me.

Sophie: Come look at this, Daddy. What does this spell?
Me: That spells "prefooa," Sophie.
Sophie: What does that mean?
Me: It doesn't mean anything. It's not a word.
Sophie: What sound does the "A" make?
Me: "Uh."
[Sophie crosses out the "A."]
Sophie: What does it spell now, Daddy?
Me: "Prefoo."
Sophie: What does "prefoo" mean?
Me: It's what happens right before the foo.
Sophie: Are you sure, Daddy? On a long car ride this weekend, Sophie and I were playing a modified version of "Botticelli" where one person tries to guess which cartoon character the other person is pretending to be. The only question you can't ask is "Who are you?" We went around a few times...I was Benny the Bull, Sophie was Madeline, I was Hacker from Cyberchase, etc., etc. Then Schuyler (age 3) announced that it was her turn. Sophie and I told her to go ahead.

"I have brown hair! I'm Dora the Explorer!"

Needless to say, we were stumped for questions after this pre-emptive strike. Now that 10 other people have given me good feedback, eBay has awarded me a star. It has been quite some time since I've received a star. I've gotta say, I like it. Now I just need to find 90 more things to buy or sell so I can get a nifty upgraded turquoise star. Mmmm....turquoise star. I fell asleep several times putting together this Friday Five:

1. Would you say that you're good at keeping in touch with people?

No.

2. Which communication method do you usually prefer/use: e-mail, telephone, snail mail, blog comments, or meeting in person? Why?

E-mail is wonderful, but there is nothing like getting a good snail-mail letter...a rare occurrence, these days.

3. Do you have an instant messenger program? How many? Why/why not? How often do you use it?

I'm on both AOL and Yahoo IMs. They're pretty convenient, but I shut them down if I've got something that has to get done. I'm usually on AIM, but YM's client is too buggy, so I only open it up once or twice a day.

4. Do most of your close friends live nearby or far away?

Lots in Boston and NYC, the rest in Chicago, LA, SF.

5. Are you an "out of sight, out of mind" person, or do you believe that "distance makes the heart grow fonder"?

Isn't it "absence makes the heart grow fonder?" Never mind. Depends who we're talking about. With the various She Whos, I start to freak out if I don't see them. Just when you thought nothing groovy would happen today: Dooce is back. ijustneedsomemoremoney.com

Inspired by Karyn and now Penny, I've decided to ask all my good friends on the Internet to help me with my current financial crisis. See, I really want to build a sizeable addition to my house, but it's going to cost a heck of a lot of money. Too much! I would rather not use any of the traditional ways of funding a project like this. I don't like saving or borrowing money very much, and I sure don't want to get a job. That's what wives are for! I just want to sit at home playing Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped! and eat bon-bons, while watching non-union laborers diligently expanding the Transglobal Epicenter. I've still got some room on my home equity line, but I was thinking we might want to go to the islands this winter. See, I told you it was a crisis.

You might be asking "How did you get into this mess?" Well, I'll tell you. Remember "The Internet Bubble?" Well, I forgot to sell all my stocks right at the top of it. Silly! But it was an honest mistake, and now I really wish you'd send me some money to make up for all the money I don't have from that wackass WebVan IPO I got my nuts caught in. I don't really need all that much. If every visitor to this site just sent me $10,000, I'd be there in no time. See how good a guy I am? I'm not even asking for more than the IRS's annual gift tax exemption!

You might ask "Why should I send Chris money?" Well, I'm not saying you should send me money, but I'd sure appreciate it if you did send me some! You might be asking why I don't take some money out of savings for the addition. OK, that's a pretty good question, and here's my totally specious rationalization: I'd have to liquidate stock or bond positions, and that would put downward pressure on the markets! I'd be hurting other investors! So rather than hurt other innocent investors, why don't you send me some money? Huh?

Maybe you're curious about what the proposed addition might look like. First off, it's going to have a big open space with a high ceiling so I can install a really good ping-pong table and pursue my lifetime dream of playing for the US Olympic Ping Pong Team. Sure they always get their butts kicked, so you never see any Olympic ping-pong on TV, but I'm going to change all that! And I love exclamation points!!! The addition will also have a lot of space for dancing. In our current configuration, dancing is a little cramped. That's really all the thinking I've done about the new addition, but I haven't got your money yet, so that would be putting the cart before the horse anyway. See? I'm practical!

Convinced? If you're ready to give some money right now, click here. For weeks I have struggled to internally articulate a focused statement of my discomfort with the prospect of a pre-emptive US attack against Iraq. The things that have been bugging me include:

• The fact that Bush, Cheney, and so many others in the administration are oil guys.


• My feeling that Saddam Hussein is a very bad guy, but not an insane or suicidal guy.


• Wondering if George W. Bush is out to finish family business regarding Saddam's assassination attempt on his Dad.


• Wondering if the September 11th attack by radical Muslims is a convenient basis for Bush to claim that Saddam, as the leader of a Muslim state, is insane/suicidal and will use nukes against us, despite the fact that Stalin, China, and North Korea all had/have nukes and didn't/haven't used them against us, and the fact that if Saddam either officially used a nuke against us or provided a nuke to terrorists who used it against us, Baghdad would cease to exist.


• Reports that Cheney and Company had been planning to establish a greater US beachhead in the Gulf well before September 11.


• The fact that Israel doesn't seem as interested in a pre-emptive strike against Iraq as the US is.


• The question of what, exactly, deposing Saddam accomplishes besides making Iran that much stronger.


• The tremendous cost in terms of relations with our traditional allies, who swung wildly in America's direction immediately following September 11 and who seem to have swung back away from us much farther as a reaction to US unilateralism.


• The possibility that Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric serves only to unite and motivate bad actors who would otherwise not be as inclined to cooperate.

Now I find that Pat Buchanan, of all people, nailed it in a piece he wrote two weeks ago. While away a few minutes of your precious leisure time with Jack Dickovitch at Seattle's KJR-FM.

(Actually, a bunch of Seattle microstations got together to bust on KJR for constantly playing 80s music while calling itself "nothing but hits from the 60s and 70s." You can listen to all of the clips here.) Rant Control

Of all the ill-conceived things that governments do to and for the people they represent, few make me crazier than rent control. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the basic formula is this: a city or town government, usually in response to the efforts of affordable housing advocates, decides that rents have risen (and/or are rising) too fast and too much. People are being forced to leave their homes because they cannot afford to stay. So the government enacts an extremely simple solution: they cap rents, and limit rent increases. Property by property, a commission or board of some sort considers each rental unit, and decides what will be a "fair" rent. In doing so, they also cap how much income the owner of the property can receive, often without much consideration of what the property cost to buy or costs to maintain. In markets for other goods and services, this is called price fixing.

If you think about it, a government enacting rent control is also effectively fixing real estate prices, because real estate buyers who plan to rent their properties need to charge enough rent relative to their investment and carrying costs to achieve a return commensurate with the level of risk they take on by buying and owning property. When the maximum rent is artificially lowered, it therefore automatically lowers the value of the property. For the real estate investor, it is as if they owned shares of stock and the government came along and said, "You are receiving too much dividend income. From now on you'll get half, and we'll give the other half to someone else to help pay his rent." And of course the market price of those shares would fall precipitously. You might imagine that a real estate investor who had been charging X for rent and who can now charge only a smaller fraction of X might be put out.

You also might imagine that an affordable housing advocate would say that residential real estate is fundamentally different from stock, because people don't live in shares of stock. They're right, and I want to state clearly that I am not suggesting that a government that wants to help people whose means have not kept up with the costs of living in their community should not do so. BUT the government should not do so at the sole expense of the rental property owners in the town. That is my main problem here. With rent control, the government is effectively saying "The market is setting rents that are too high and people with limited means are being hurt. We are becoming less diverse. We have to do something about it, but we don't want to spend our taxpayers' money on it. Let's make the owners pay for it." That is fundamentally unfair. Setting aside the issues of meddling with people's investments and livelihoods, the disincentive to maintain and invest in properties, the question of how many rent-controlled properties end up occupied by people who don't need the help, and the disregard for free-market principles rent control represents, it is just simply wrong to put the burden of paying for a social good on a narrow subset of the community. We'd like more trees in the parks. Let's make all the Sagittariuses pay for them.

If a community wants to help people who can't pay market rents there are better things the government can do. They can subsidize rents for people who pass a means test. They can buy or develop property and charge whatever rents they like. They can provide incentives to landlords who voluntarily charge rents that are deemed affordable. When they do any of these things, they pay for them out of taxes collected from all the folks in the local tax base, not just those who rent out their properties. That's more fair.

Why do I care? In 1993, we moved out of our condo in Cambridge, which had rent control at the time. The condo did not sell quickly, and for more than a year we had to rent the unit out for less than we paid in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. We didn't even want to be landlords. The city had decided that any condo in a building with more than X units was covered, so we hemorrhaged money for a while until the thing sold. Out of our pocket and into theirs. I take little solace in the fact that our sacrifice enabled a needy MBA student to live cheaper in our city. Arrgh.

Why even talk about this issue now? Because Boston's affordable housing advocates, with the encouragement and support from the Mayor, are gearing up to float a home-rule petition that would make Boston the first city in the country to re-impose rent control after abolishing it previously. Wanna see the Boston real estate market collapse? Wait till the day after that thing becomes law. And if you can find a good Boston residential REIT, you might want to consider shorting it. Back to school with the Friday Five:

1. What was/is your favorite subject in school? Why?

Later on I loved many classes, but Geometry was the first time I started to suspect that someone with a brain was involved in designing the curriculum. Axioms...mmmmm. A template for thinking about everything. After Geometry, everything else - English, History, Science, Music, Art - was just Applied Math. Of course, that's why I majored in English. Doh! I didn't really change the way I thought about things until I took Art History my Senior year in college. If I'd taken Art History earlier, I would have majored in it.

2. Who was your favorite teacher? Why?

Four come to mind. Mr. Urban, 7th (?) grade English. The first really funny teacher I had. Whatever knowledge of proper sentence structure I now have, I owe to him. He would hate that sentence. Andy Crichton, highschool Senior English. The first teacher I had who wouldn't let me get away with doing just enough to beat the curve. He was my baseball coach and senior advisor, too. He'd ask a question standing at the front of the class in a batter's stance. I'd offer some wise-ass answer, and he'd croak "Low and outside, Crunchy!" A music teacher I won't name, because he may still be teaching. Funny guy, and let me off the hook one time when he had me 100% dead-to-rights "in possession" as it were. It REALLY wasn't my stuff, but that's another story. Arnie Barnett, grad school statistics. The funniest person to ever teach anything to anyone (not to mention the preeminent dude on the statistics of airline safety.) "Imagine, if you will, an urn filled with 1,000 accountants..."

3. What is your favorite memory of school?

The best thing I did was probably Skip Doo Wop and the Humtones' Tour of Northern Aggression my senior year in college. The best thing I witnessed was in an accounting class in grad school, when my classmate Hanno, a towering German lad, punctuated our prof's dismissal of an irritating classmate's pointless comment with a thundering "Jah, you suck!" bellowed from the back row.

4. What was your favorite recess game?

Ball tag. Sounds kinda kinky, but there you go.

5. What did you hate most about school?

Until I switched schools in 11th grade, most of it. I couldn't believe that they were taking up so much time teaching so little. I still remember lying awake as a 5- or 6-year-old, thinking that if school didn't get more interesting and I had to do it for 16 more years, I didn't know if I was gonna make it. If you'd told me then that I'd voluntarily go to even more than 16 years of school, and that I'd think school was the greatest thing since sippy cups... They Rolled

Forget, for a minute, about ideology, politics, religion, nationality. Imagine you're on a plane. You got up early. You're tired. Maybe you're not wild about flying. Suddenly, bad people take control of the plane. The cockpit crew and some members of the cabin crew are dead. Maybe you saw them die, probably by having their throats slit. Grisly, brutal deaths. You pray that this is a garden variety hijacking. They'll fly you somewhere, and then it will be all over. Then the news about NYC and the Pentagon reaches the plane via cellphones. You're going to die today.

You have minutes to come to grips with all of this. Your own mortality. The loss of your future. The people you'll never see again. The things you planned to say and do but didn't. If you're lucky, you get a call out to a loved one. Someone in the real world, where it's safe, where this isn't happening. You don't have time to choose your words carefully. I love you. Thank you. Take care of the kids. Tell them I love them. Be happy. Goodbye. How do you hang up? Someone else wants to use the phone. How can you not let them?

You're more afraid than you have ever been. Physical, nauseating, primal terror. You're shaking. You're sweating. You're barely in control of yourself. You're at the edge of human experience, in a place many people never find themselves. And yet there's still one last thing to do. Not for yourself, not for your family, not for anyone you know, individually. It's a favor to everyone, and your last chance to do something that counts. And so you make yourself move. Quickly, a plan is made. And then it's time to finish it.

I don't know what I'd do in that situation. I'd like to believe that I'd do what the passengers on Flight 93 did a year ago today. The truth is, I don't know if I could. I'm not a soldier. But neither were they. We don't know what happened next. We know the passengers planned to break into the cockpit, and that the plane went down in a field in western Pennsylvania. Maybe the hijackers flew the plane erratically, trying to knock the passengers down, and crashed the plane in the process. Some people think the plane was shot down. I choose to believe that at the moment the plane hit, the passengers were at the throats of the hijackers, who had enough time to know they'd failed, and that they'd been defeated by better people.

Today is our 9th wedding anniversary. Last week, I put my older daughter on the bus to kindergarten for the first time. Yesterday, her little sister started nursery school. I don't know if the schools can teach kids to be people of substance. I'm not even sure it's the schools' job. But in the coming years, when my kids ask about what happened the day of our 8th anniversary, I know a story I'll tell them. Great Googily Moogily

This is not the way things typically work in my life. In my life, I would typically buy a backup device, in this case a CDRW drive, install it, and have the very best intentions of backing up my files. Then, my PC would suffer a stroke and I would lose all my stuff. I would then bitch and moan that I HAD all the stuff to do a backup, but I just never got around to doing it. And I would be sad.

But that's not what happened. What actually happened was that I bought the CDRW drive, and had the very best intentions of doing a backup, but didn't, for months. Then, yesterday morning, for some reason that I don't fully understand yet, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to do a backup. I didn't do everything, but I got all the important stuff, and everything else that fit on one 600MB CDRW. My PC was dead as a doornail by suppertime. Seized up while She Who Apparently Must Be Obeyed Now Too was surfing pbskids.org or something. I am not a religious or otherwise superstitious person, but I am moderately freaked out by this. The PC is at least temporarily dead, but I've got a CD with the critical stuff on it: the financial stuff, the digital pictures of my kids I never had printed and can never replace, the Mister Crunchy stuff, all the half-finished writing projects. The last time I did a full backup of all the data files on this PC was, uh, never. "Lucky" doesn't quite seem to capture the magnitude of this coincidence.

She Who Must Be Obeyed is not quite as impressed. Her theory is that I was aware that the PC had been making grumpy noises for a while, and that my subconscious was monitoring the increased frequency and volume of noises and escalated the issue to my conscious mind, luckily on the day that the PC happened to go kaput. Could be. In the meantime, I just might build a small shrine to Saint Nirmal, patron saint of data storage. Schuyler is convinced that she 'killed the pyooter,' but I have assured her that she didn't. That little bastard Caillou did.

Now, I should point out that not all is relaxed and groovy just yet. When I took the aforementioned backup CD to the stunt computer and tried to open up the backup, I experienced no joy whatsoever. Apparently, Microsoft, in its infinitely limited asymptotically-approaching-zero wisdom, made the Windows 2000 restore utility totally incompatible with the Windows 98 backup utility. Makes perfect sense, right, I mean why would you ever want to restore files from one computer running their old operating system onto a different PC running their less-old operating system? That's crazy talk, that's what that is. Sheesh. I mean, the only reason you'd want to do that is if your old PC just up and died. And PCs never die. Everyone knows that. Silly. GODDAMN YOUR BLACK SOUL TO HELL, MICROSOFT BACKUP MARKETING MANAGER. OK, maybe I am a little religious. You know, the number of times that the gazillionaires in Redmond cause me pain each month seems to be going up. I'm sure their explanation would be that I'm a recalcitrant numbskull for not staying on the upgrade path, mailing them $100 bucks every 11 months or so to upgrade to Windows ZZ version 4.02b, codename: "Tailpipe," double-secret codename: "MSDOS with even MORE crap on top." All I can say about that is that those "Switch" testimonials on the Apple site are looking more and more persuasive each day. The Friday Five, a weekly habit:

1. What is your biggest pet peeve? Why?

In general, rudeness ticks me off no end. People who go through life selfishly inconveniencing others should be given their own island somewhere so that the rest of us don't have to put up with them. Either that or push them off a cliff in a sack.

I oppose the word "learnings." We have a perfectly good word, "lessons," that fits nicely just about anywhere someone might feel the need to say "learnings." I can't stand the word "impact" when used as a verb, unless the sentence involves one thing smacking into another, or a tooth. Don't even ask about "impactful." That makes me want to scream. Nominative use of the reflexive pronoun "myself" is another one.

"Bob and myself attended a conference where we acheived a number of impactful learnings."

Shudder.

2. What irritating habits do you have?

Biting my nails, rolling my eyes, potty mouth, laughing too loud and/or at inappropriate times.

3. Have you tried to change the irritating habits or just let them be?

Mostly I let them be. With two little kids, the potty mouth is a challenge. My three-year-old dropped the F-bomb the other day. Not good.

4. What grosses you out more than anything else? Why?

Spoiled food. Bad B.O. Being in a small enclosed space with someone smoking or who smells of cigarette smoke. Tongue piercings. If "Why" isn't obvious, there's no point in explaining.

5. What one thing can you never see yourself doing that other people do?

Getting a tattoo. Three reasons: a) There is no image or sentiment I want emblazoned on myself 24/7 for the rest of my life. b) Ever take a good look at a 50-year-old tattoo on an old guy? Not pretty. That cute little dragon or Mickey Mouse or whatever will, over time, mutate into an unsightly blob. c) Needles. Heinous Notion

Dangerous Liaisons. Fatal Attraction. Cruel Intentions. Indecent Proposal. Disturbing Behavior. These popular films all fit my "Heinous Notion" model of movie naming, which pairs an unfavorable adjective with an intangible noun. "Basic Instinct" does not fit the model because "Basic" isn't bad enough, and "Rancid Notebook" doesn't fit because "Notebook" is tangible. Get it?

Now, as a service to aspiring moviemakers and all mankind, I hereby offer you Mister Crunchy's Random Heinous Notion Movie Name Generator. It pretty much does what you'd expect. Feel free to make movies with the titles generated. Also, if you're really, really strapped for something to do, see how many times you have to click before the adjective comes up "French." Liking these provides more proof that I am a bad person:

Get Your War On
My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable
My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable

Not suitable for kiddies. If you're a kiddie, go here. Guilty Pleasures

I'm looking through my music just now and it occurs to me that there is a lot of stuff here that I just shouldn't like. No one should. But I do. Embarrassing stuff. So, of course, my first impulse is to tell the whole world about it. Here are some of the most embarrassing songs that I not only admit to liking, but possess in one form or another.

Song	"Artist"	Lame Excuse
The Look	Roxette	The rhythm guitar sound is cool. Really, it is. And the lady singer is attractive, so liking this doesn't call my sexual orientation into question, right? Right?
Got To Get	Leila K.	OK, so this is Rap Lite, but it's pretty damn catchy. I think.
Mamma Mia	The A-Teens	I know, I know...it's not even the ABBA version. But these A-Teens are quite photogenic, and they ARE from Sweden, and that should count for something.
The Sign	Ace of Base	Clearly, I have a soft spot for Swedish pop. This song makes me huppy. Very huppy.
Lorelei	Styx	There's a pretty chunky guitar sound mixed in there with all the bubbly synthesizers. And some of the Styx dudes had wikkid mullets.
Believe	Cher	That vocoder effect is cool. It makes her voice all freaky.
Barbie Girl	Aqua	C'mon Barbie, let's go party!
Millenium	Robbie Williams	Hey, it's got a James Bond sample, and James Bond is really tough and cool. Much tougher and cooler than this song.
When Smokey Sings	ABC	This one is probably indefensible.
Genetic Engineering	Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark	This is just a synth-pop placeholder. I could list dozens more by OMD, DEVO, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, and their ilk. Beep.

The more I look the more I see. I'm not going to pretend this is a Top 10 or anything. It's just the first 10 I happened to find. There's lots more where this came from. Rush. Yngwie Malmsteen. Heavy D and the Boyz. Night Ranger. The Scorpions. Vanity 6. Information Society. Digital Underground. Wilson Phillips. OK, that's a lie. I don't own Wilson Phillips. But I could.

Ease my pain. What are yours? Last Mover Advantage

I'll never forget my first taste of Zima: frantically ransacking the cooler at a party to find something, anything, else to drink, then, finding nothing else, resigning myself to the notion that I was actually going to try it, the "pffft" of the bottle, the vaguely fizzy pour - so reminiscent of Fresca. Then, the certainty that I'd just ingested slightly alcoholic, flat Sprite with just a touch of dishwater. I never figured out the appeal of Zima, and I was even more perplexed by the recent proliferation of "malternatives:" Smirnoff Ice, Skyy Blue, Captain Morgan Gold, etc. Then, an article in Boston Magazine clued me in: these things are all about advertising the hard liquor brand name on TV. I wonder if they even taste test these things or if they just ink the deal with the "brewer" and let them put anything they want in the bottles, as long as their name is spelled right. I'm embarrassed that this didn't occur to me sooner. The article panned all of them. Have you tried any of these things?

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