Geography Class

My sister in Texas sent this to me: a place the state game. It is harder than you'd think. At least when you do the first ten states.

I did the intermediate level. The website gave me a score of 94. My average error was ten miles. And it took me 428 seconds.

Word.

Random Thought

Whenever I go for a walk, be it with my dog or to the bus stop, I am careful not to step on a crack out of respect to my mom's back. Lines are also avoided for fear of breaking my dad's spine. Sad but true, all these years later, I still find myself following the golden childhood rules of walking on a sidewalk.

But when I go running, I don't follow the rule; Scoliosis of the Parents be damned. And now that there will be a matted inch of snow on everyone's sidewalk between now and March, walking just got a lot easier. The lines and cracks are nowhere to be seen.

As a sign of some maturity, I did give up knocking on wood not too long ago.

I also stopped holding my breath when I passed a graveyard. However, I was holding my breath more out of a personal "Can I Do It?" challenge than a fear of being buried in a specific cemetary. But I really let go of that superstition a few years ago, when Emily and I used to live by a cemetary. We drove by it at least twice-weekly. It became tiresome to hold my breath each time, especially since we drove along one side of it, took a turn and drove along another side of it.

Well now that I think of it, I first broke that superstition in a college cross country meet that had us running through a graveyard. Running close to oxygen debt makes it tough to hold your breath; so I breathed, DEEPLY, through that random cemetary that was somewhere in Wisconsin, Iowa, or Illinois. Does that mean I'll be buried in that cemetary, wherever it was? Was it Missouri?

Actually, I've always had trouble embracing this superstition. My understanding was if you couldn't hold your breath all the way past the cemetary, you'd be buried there. This has always troubled me, as you had little to worry about if you simply breathed in front of multiple cemetaries (unless, of course being drawn and quartered was in your near future).

This has become a grim post. Maybe it's because my annual employee review is tomorrow in less than 12 hours. I have little to worry about as I have done my job well this year, as I do every year, but still. Ugh. Do I really need to be blogging about being drawn and quartered at this time?

Question I Have While Emily Talks On the Phone With Her Mom

Emily is talking to her mom on the phone about Lord knows what. I assume the topics are what Emily wants for her birthday dinner that her mom is cooking her tomorrow night and what each of them has been up to the last 72 hours.

Meanwhile I wait for her to finish her conversation so we can eat our homemade pizzas and watch more of Arrested Development Season 2 on DVD.

While I wait, I surf the web. I read Emily's blog about some cookies she made and leave a comment about how I much I enjoyed said cookies. I sign my name as "Cookie Monster."

Then I am left to ponder the following:

Who has less pride, Cookie Monster and his slobby, greedy eating habits, or Winnie the Pooh, and his shirt but no pants attire.

Those of you who know me, know that I should hardly be the one to cast the first stone in this question. I have a sweet tooth bigger than Dallas, half of my food ends up on my face at mealtime, and my personal attire can be, shall we say, lacking at times. But I'm talking about fictitious charachters.

I will have to give Pooh credit. He is a bit more complicated and layered than Cookie Monster. But Cookie Monster's issues may be neurological. I wonder if somewhere in his file is a diagnosis of Aspergers Syndrome. Look at the signs: Issues with hyposensitivity, obsessive behavior, poor eye contact, pedantic speech centered on his interests, and an inability to monitor his peers' needs relative to his own (i.e. eating everyone else's cookies and/or not sharing).

Even so, I still think he has more pride than Pooh bear. Next time your getting dressed put your shirt on first, and nothing else. Check yourself out in the mirror. Then tell me how much pride you have.

Plus there's that one Pooh story where he ate so much fucking honey and got so damn fat he got stuck in Rabbit's hole. And his name is Pooh.

Seriously. Have some pride.

The Great Minnesota Get Togethers

Tonight for the first time in the nine-plus years I've lived in Minneapolis I went to the Mall of America (MOA) for the sole purpose of shopping. I've been there to meet Emily, gone to movies there, and used to go to some of the restaurants on the third floor before they all closed down.

But never have I gone since to be a shopper. But it just so happens MOA is the closest mall to our house. So unlike the tour buses that ship people up here from Iowa, I went there to buy my wife a birthday present because it was the most convenient.

But I went after 8 p.m. and it was not very crowded. On the way in, I walked through Sears and they had hastily-made signs that said "MERRY CHRISTMAS" taped to the door. The writing was ALL CAPS, Times new Roman, 24 point bold. Black font on white paper. Take that Christmas hatas!

But as per usual, I digress. And I found the MOA to be phenomenal. I'm sure the novelty will wear off, but the MOA is basically a more expensive year-round Minnesota State Fair (MSF).

The MSF has the midway; the MOA has Camp Snoopy.

MSF has a lot of fried tasty food that you feel guilty eating, and so does the MOA.

MSF has the farm animals and Miracle of Birth animal center; the MOA has Underwaterworld, an aqaurium.

MSF has tons and tons of vendors selling lots of weird, useless shit. So does the MOA.

The MOA has hayseeds visiting from Iowa; the MSF has farmers from outstate Minnesota showing their animals.

And this leads to my final point. The MOA has all walks of life, just like the MSF. Tonight while I was walking in the mall, a middle-aged couple was passed by a cocky 20 something yapping on his cell phone and a girl in front of me was wearing black pants so very tight you could see the crease of her butt crack. One cheek had the letters LO and the had VE. Yeah, nothing says love like an ass crack.

Only at these two places can you see these walks of life within 20 feet of each other. Great get togethers indeed.

¿Donde Esta El Cuarto De Baño?

Spanish was the cinematic language of choice in our house this weekend.

This weekend I watched Maria Full of Grace and Amores Perros. Holy crap was Amores Perros brutal. But it was as good as it was gritty. I was watching it with my dog Pancho. He was very intrigued by all the dogs barking. But when they started fighting, I had to shield his eyes, much like an over-protective parent shielding his son's eyes from the blue cinema.

I eventually sent him up stairs to be with Emily, safe from the influences of doggie rated R movies.

Regardless, Amores Perros is a great movie, even if I did have to watch a few dog fights and worse in fast-motion. Oddly enough, I tolerated people being shot in regular motion.

Maria Full of Grace is a lot less gritty, which is saying something since it had several scenes of girls swallowing heroin. It was not nearly as layered as Amores Perros, but certainly a lot more fun to watch and just as excellent as Amores Perros.

I Need A Life--Part II

Yet another post about Caribou Coffee's trvia. I have four unrelated areas to cover.

1. I am curious what question Rachel W answered at the airport when she was the only to get it right.

2. An engineer living in the western suburbs of the Twin Cities metro area, who likes to protect his anonymity, has brought it to my attention that George Washington is on the quarter and the dollar bill, meaning there are THREE Presidents on two types of US currency, not just one ( click here to see for yourself), making the question from my previous post the worst question of all time. And that is saying something, as about a week ago, the question was "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

3. Caribou does need to raise the discount for getting the question right. The discount is based based on 1996 dimes, not 2006. I used to pass on answering the question because it was only a dime. But then I figured over the course of a year, I passed on 20 to 30 questions that I knew the answer to. If there was a three dollar bill (I think Roosevelt is on the three dollar bill--shit that makes FOUR Presidents...) laying on the ground you'd pick it up right and away. So go ahead and answer each and every trivia question. It will eventually add up.

4. And now for my primary point of blogging today. Wednesday morning the question was "Which planet has the most moons?" In tribute to my childhood geekdom, I knew right away the answer was Saturn. Fair enough.

Thursday morning the question was "Cape Horn borders which African country?" Well I had no idea how to answer this one since I always thought Cape Horn was in South America and bordered either Chile or Argentina (which one, I had no idea), but clearly I was wrong. So I figured it had to be South Africa or Somalia, assuming that big notch sticking out of the eastern end of Somalia could be called a cape, despite its large size. And it looks like a shoe horn. So Somalia seemed like the guess to make. Plus I was pretty sure the southern cape of Africa was called the Cape of Good Hope.



So I guessed Somalia and was told that I was wrong. I was too embarassed to ask for the right answer and asssumed it was South Africa. My coffee cost ten extra cents that day.

As I walked to work from Caribou, the irony was not lost on me that I knew the geography of the solar system better than my own planet. I even had a title for a future blog about this experience,

Think Interplanterily, Act Locally

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But the need for such a title vanished when I got into my office and looked at the world map on my wall. Well of course Somalia was the wrong answer. Cape Horn isn't even in Africa. It is in South America, just where I had placed it. So I guess to make up for the question earlier in the week that had three correct answers (you just had to guess which of the three they wanted you to say), they chose a question that had NO correct answers.

The Caribou I frequent happens to be by Sibley Plaza. Sibley Plaza deserves a blog post all to its own. Emily and I drove past it this morning, in fact, and she called it "the strip mall that time forgot."

What is relevant to this post, however, is that Sibley Plaza and most of lower Highland Park (a neighborhood in St. Paul where I work) is heavily populated by Ethiopians and Somalis. They are known to enjoy a cup or two from Caribou like the rest of us. So I was wondering, the rest of the day, if someone with more confidence than I about Africa's geography went in there and set the record straight. I was going to stop in at the end of the day to see if they ammended the question, but I didn't have time if I wanted to catch my bus.

Cripes. Who does the fact-checking for this particular Caribou branch? Jayson Blair? Is this the best job he can find since the New York Times fiasco?

To help me through my angst, I need to harken back to my college days, and the wise words often spoken by a young man we called "Donkey Balls" for reasons I won't go into. But to put your mind at ease, it has nothing to literally to do with his testicles, donkeys, or a donkey's testicles for that matter. Although when we did call him Doneky Balls we were implying that he was, indeed, the testicles of a donkey.

But, as per usual, I digress.

Back to Donkey Ball's words of wisdom. Like most college kids, we always had a hard time squaring completely up after a night at the bar or the Pizza Hut (we were in Grinnell, Iowa, what kind of nightlife were you expecting?) because at least one of us would inevitably be absurdly short on cash. Each time this happened, Donkey Balls could always magically end our squabbling over who owed whom what amount of money and we'd move on to the next activity, which usually involved copious amounts of Busch Lite in cans and some form of public urination (again, we were in Grinnell, IA, pop. 8200, what more can you expect for a nightlife?).

But none of this post-Pizza Hut awesomeness would have happened if Donkey Balls, wise beyond his 18 to 22 years of age, hadn't said "It all comes out in the wash." Hell, to this day, we'd still be arguing about whether or not Strawman and Nitro were square now that the Klassmaster was paying for Donkey Balls' share of the bill, because that would make up for the seven bucks Nitro owes Klassmaster from Wednesday night and the three dollars and change Donkey Balls still owes Strawman from last week's sortie to Pizza Hut. "Seriously. Let's not worry about it. It all comes out in the wash," Donkey Balls would say, as if he were Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. A gong would softly sound in the background. End of conversation.

I need to remember such sage thinking. For every bullshit, unanswerable question this Caribou has offered me, I have also easily answered the following:

Why did the chicken cross the road? (I know I already said this, but I want to make it clear that this was a real trivia question)
How many days away is Thanksgiving?
What is the distance of a marathon?
What Aldous Huxley novel featured alphas, betas, gammas, deltas, and epsilons?
The first Caribou is in what city?
What are the five great lakes (Hint: the first letter of each one makes up the word HOMES)?
And a lot of either/or questions giving you a 50/50 chance, worse-case scenerio of getting the question right.

So I agree with Rachel W. I love Caribou. The snob in me, that turns his nose up at chains, and mocks poorly written trivia, does indeed love everything about the Caribou experience, corporate chain mentality, drive-thru service, suspect and cheaply discounted trivia, and all.

For Want of a Dime...

If a chain of events leads to my ultimate loss of house, job, family, and friends, we can trace it down to today, this historic day.

Anyone who lives in Minnesota and drinks coffee has inevitably spent some money at Caribou Coffee and probably tried to answer the daily trivia question. For those of you who haven't, there is a trivia question that changes each day and is unique to each location. If you get the question right, you get ten cents off your order.

When I ride the bus to work it drops me off right in front of a Caribou Coffee and part of my morning routine is to get my cup of coffee there and try and save a dime.

Because I am a nerd, I get excited about the trivia question and try to set personal records for how many consecutive days I can save a dime. My record is nine days, and my hitting streak came to an end when I was stumped by the question "How much dirt does a human consume, on average, in a year?" That's a bullshit question, because anything over say, half a centigram will be alarming and disgusting and we all know that the answer will be much higher than that.

So the question might as well have been "Pick a random number between .5 centigrams and 12988347 kilos and if you are right, you get ten cents off your order." I refused to answer that question out of protest, thus breaking my streak. I sure showed them with my silent protest!

But in the interest of full disclosure, at the Caribou I go to, the questions are usually quite easy for anyone with a high school diploma and a functioning long-term memory. Typical questions are "What is the capital of New York?" or "What story is attributed to Homer besides The Oddessy?" and things like that.

So my most recent streak is up to four days and today's question was "Who is the only United States President whose face is on two separate types of US currency?"





I thought it over for a few seconds, made my coffee order and said the answer was Thomas Jefferson.





The guy at the counter said, "Sorry. Good guess" Then held up a penny and five dollar bill from the cash register to show me the correct answer was Lincoln. Very dramatic.

I am the horse's asshole when it comes to all forms of competition, and I was about to prove this. I said, "Do you happen to have a two dollar bill and a nickel in there?"






I was half-joking, and was going to leave it at that. But he went ahead and told me that Thomas Jefferson's presence on the two dollar bill doesn't count because it's not in circulation anymore. I was satisfied with that answer even though I had no idea if that was true or not. But then his co-worker said, "Actually the two dollar bill is back in circulation but the book was written before that happened."





Now I have no idea what The Book is. I assume it's either The Bible (which I'm pretty sure was written before the two dollar bill was re-circulated by the US Treasury) or Caribou publishes a book of possible trivia questions for employees to use.

Either way, I'm back in this conversation, trying to get my dime back. "So Thomas Jefferson is also correct!" I say.

"Well we have to go with what the answer in The Book says," she answered, pointing vaguely to some object under the cash register, which I assume is either Gideon's Bible or Caribou Coffee Inc. Official Daily Trivia Manual. And the conviction with which she said this made me think maybe it was The Bible afterall. She clearly was not going to go against the authority of the answer in The Book, no matter how illogical it was.

Either way I got screwed. Open letter to Caribou Coffee: I want my freaking dime back.






So back to my origninal point, for want of a dime, the bus fare was lost, for want of a bus fare... Well you can connect these dots all the way to me losing wife, dog, house, job, and friends if you please.

In working with adults and teens who stutter I have found that those who feel they are victims and were let down by God have the absolute worse prognosis. I would say the degree to which a person plays The Victim is the number one factor in how much he can improve his or her own life. This is true in all realms of life. Not just stuttering.

However, I am here to say, that if my life goes to the shitter over the next, oh, 50 years, I blame Caribou.