Todd Stadler's blog

Unlucky pot

My friends Beeman and Kirsten hosted a potluck last Sunday, where we watched the previously recorded demise of Arrested Development and enjoyed the luck o' the pot, as the Lutherans call it. Well, the Irish Lutherans do. Actually, I made that up.

Anyhow, on Tuesday, I woke up feeling rather ill — the kind of sick I don't normally experience. To summarize and yet give "too much information" at the same time, my body was prepared to get rid of that virus in any way possible. Any way. Ahem.

Normally when I'm sick, it's a fairly genial affair. I sit on the couch with a blanket over me, a box of tissues at my side, and large quantities of orange juice and chocolate chip cookies within reach.

(As a side note, for whatever reason, I always get sick when we have run out of these items at our house, necessitating a truly pitiful trip to the grocery store in which the state of my hair and shopping cart send the distinctive signal of "Warning! This man is sick! Warning!")

But this was not to be a day of sniffling, sneezing, and surfing the Web. No, this was a day of long stretches of moaning and self-pitying, punctuated by the aforementioned virus-expurgations (ahem), which while painful were at least a break in the monotony. A day spent wondering why I could think of nothing else than the fact that I could think of nothing else, in which the smallest phrase or song snippet would get caught on infinite loop in my brain (pondering the word "ache" led inevitably to that accursed Billy Ray Cyrus song, and I'd like to have a word with him about that).

In short, I was miserable, and I had plenty of time to think about how I would have liked Julia to take care of me had she been home.

Interestingly enough, Julia called me later that afternoon, interrupting a stretch of bed-occupying in which I'd actually spent more time sleeping than wondering why I wasn't sleeping, and said that she apparently was sick with the same thing I had.

It instantly occurred to me that God had me get sick first so that, having experienced misery, I would be a far better sympathizer to Julia's illness than I normally would have been.

As I mentioned before, I don't usually get that sick. The usual phlegm-flam once or twice a year, but that's all. As such, when Julia feels bad, my responses to her aren't always as tender as they could be:

Julia: Honey, I think I have a cold.

Me: Walk it off!

Or perhaps:

Julia: Dear, I think I have the flu.

Me: Walk it off!

And, as if you didn't see this coming:

Julia: Todd, I lost both my legs at work today.

Name2: Walk it off!

As you can see, I'm practicing to be a coach of a youth sports league.

But with several hours of miserable sickness under my belt, I knew very well what it was that Julia needed. So rather than let her take the bus home from work (or, optimally, walk her illness off over the several miles between her work and home), I picked her up, in a car stocked with water, pain medicine, tissues, and, most importantly, a plastic bucket.

So that was that. A just-the-two-of-us retreat to Vomitville, written up in such detail that it actually took you longer to read it than it did to take place.

But wait! What about that dangling narrative modifier up there in the first paragraph? What's that all about? Well spotted, dear reader! Well spotted.

You see that overly-hyphenated phrase in that paragraph just a bit back? It was a lie. A lie!

Because on Wednesday, Beeman (to refresh your memory: potluck host) e-mailed all the potluck attendees and asked how many of us had come down with the stomach flu. It turned out a grand total of eight of us had, making for a grand percentage of 66%!

This prompted me to write Beeman an e-mail:

Hmm, that's strange. I distinctly remember avoiding the dish with the stomach flu in it, since it didn't look very tasty.

So what are we thinking it was? Terrorism? Democrats? Personally, I'm going to guess it was the Crème Anglaise, because in spite of translating to "English Cream", I still can't ignore that the name is French, dadgummit! French!

Oh well. I'm probably going back to work tomorrow. Hope you all have recovered well enough by now.

Todd

P.S. I bet you pulled this stunt just so you won't have to host any more potlucks. Fat chance! And next time we have one at your house — which we will — I'm not pussyfooting around. I'm bringing the freaking Pasta à la Anthrax!

P.P.S. This e-mail is so getting wiretapped for having the words "terrorism", "anthrax", "Democrats", and "French" in it.

So there you go. It was the potluck's fault. To put a very fine point on it, I will henceforth refer to said event as The Potunluck. Yes, very fine.

And now: a clam

I was looking at a technical document today that made parenthetical reference to all sorts of punctuation marks, and I had to laugh at one series of characters, because it looked like a small, shy clam.

(:)

Or maybe not. The important thing is that we've all learned an important lesson about love.

Clever Bumper Sticker Theater

On my walk to work this morning, I passed by a car with several bumper stickers. One of them read, "God protect me from your followers!"

Well, a clever bumper sticker deserves a clever reply, my mom always said, so I walked up to the bumper stickler's house and knocked on the door.

After a few seconds, a man came to the door dressed in a robe. "Um, yeah?" he said.

"The jig is up! It didn't work!" I stated, matter-of-factly.

The man stared at me for a second. "What the ... ?"

"Your bumper sticker," I said. "It has failed. I am one of God's followers, and clearly, He has not protected you from me, because here I am. To destroy you. Or at least bother you very, very much.

"Wait," he said. "Are you talking about the whole 'God protect me ...'?"

"Yes, the same," I said, and I took my Bible out of my satchel. "Now please step outside."

"Wait, what? What are you doing?"

"This," I said, "is my Bible. I am going to thump you with it. Multiple times. On the head. That is why we are called Bible-thumpers. I thought that was obvious."

And then I stopped walking and noticed that I was now several blocks down the street from the car with the bumper stickers. It had all been a dream!

Notes for clods: this is not the right-wing religious-nut revenge fantasy you think it is. My reasons for writing this include the following:

• I detest Clever Bumper Stickers of all sorts, and this is a way of sublimating my rage.
• I chuckled to myself when I thought of referring to the one who applies a bumper sticker as a "bumper stickler".
• I was similarly amused at the (false) etymology of the term "Bible thumper", a term for which, frankly, I have never understood the true derivation.

I promise to never assault anyone whose car bears such a sticker. However, I may annoy you very, very much. Eye for an eye and all that.

Musings on internet search and happiness

I bet that for people who work at Google, with the power of that, um, powerful search engine literally at their command, they don't send e-mails to their coworkers anymore.

They just leave notes on random Web pages, like some old, abandoned Geocities.com site, saying, "Hey Ralph, do you want to go to Quizno's for lunch?"

And given Google's power, Ralph just somehow knows that his coworker has left that message on that site, because he can just, you know, find it.

And then they go out to lunch, but later Ralph gets angry because he also found all those not-so-nice things that his coworker left on some older, abandoneder Angelfire.com site. That's the problem with working at Google — you know what everyone is saying about you.

I think that's why President Bush is so irritable these days. He was happy when he lived in his bubble and everyone told him he was, like, the greatest president since Calvin Coolidge and he dreamed of one day actually punching Fidel Castro in the face with his bare hands.

But then he started listening in on everyone's phone conversations, and while most of what he heard was really, really inane — I mean, you wouldn't believe how much people, including known Al-Qaeda terrorists go on and on about how annoying the people at their workplaces are! — a lot of what he heard hurt his feelings. Like this one guy who said he thought he could probably beat up Bush pretty easy. And another guy who said Bush probably wasn't in his list of the top twenty-three presidents of the 20th century.

That's the problem with being able to hear everyone talking — you hear people talking bad about you. And it's not like you can tell those people to shut up, because you only have the ability to listen in on everyone talking. You can't interrupt everyone's conversation. That's the problem with limited power. So I understand why Bush needs more power.

Anyhow, my point is, since the fourth amendment is now, officially, like, gay, I was just wondering if whatever NSA agent happens to be reading this could maybe just let some of my friends know what's up in my life these days. I mean, I haven't been very good about keeping in touch, and I don't know if anyone reads this blog anymore, given how infrequently I post. And since my taxes pay your salary and all, the least you could do is just drop my friends a note — you know who they are — and let them know I'm okay. And that I'm going to write that thank-you note real soon now. Thanks.

Blog backlog #3: chicken Maryland

(Part of a continuing series of writings that I've left unposted until such time as I'm completely uninspired to write anything new ... like now. This one is also Gerrytollian.)

Over a mildly disappointing lunch, Gerry Toll and I turned our discussion to that most common of themes in our conversations: weird foods. He told me of his trip to Malaysia, where he discovered to his surprise that there is a common dish there called "chicken Maryland".

Apparently, chicken Maryland is composed of separately fried items, among them chicken, onion (rings), french fries, and bananas. Maybe like a frito mixto from a parallel universe, but it's actually just from Malaysia.

Anyhow, nobody over there seems to think the name is strange. I'm not even sure they know that Maryland is one of these United States. Heck, I'm fairly certain some Americans don't know that.

Still, why Maryland? I could imagine someone in Malaysia cooking up a dish they called "Texas chicken", which would be spicy or perhaps served in a ten-gallon hat. But Maryland ... I have no preconceived notions of Maryland to which I could attach recipe suggestions. Perhaps the chicken is small and irregularly shaped?

And then, while pondering this mystery, it hit me. I asked Gerry if the chicken Maryland he had eaten ever had any apples in it. No, he said.

"Well, there you go, then," I said. "It's an-apple-less dish."

(For the aforementioned Americans who are ignorant about geography in general and Maryland in particular, Annapolis is the capitol of Maryland, and it is pronounced pretty much the same way as the admittedly-strained-for-humor phrase "an-apple-less". That said, I am not attempting to make a joke about strained apples in this parenthetical remark.)

Well! With a pun like that rolling effortlessly off my tongue, I felt like I was living in the pre-scripted world of some third-rate comic strip. However, when I said "an-apple-less", Gerry's hat did not fly off his head, nor was he forcibly tipped back in his chair. Oh well.