I may have inadvertantly solicited something I did not mean to solicit

I have flown through the Minneapolis airport many times.

I have used a restroom at MSP many times.

I do the following every time I use an aiport restroom: place my roller bag directly in front of the stall door, because I have been in far too many stalls where the lock does not work, and I'd like my privacy while I take care of business.

So, I was quite surprised when I read this passage in a story on Idaho Sen. Larry Craig by The Associated Press:

After a man in the adjacent stall left, Craig entered it and put his roller bag against the front of the stall door, "which Sgt. Karsnia's experience has indicated is used to attempt to conceal sexual conduct by blocking the view from the front of the stall," said the complaint.

The complaint said Craig then tapped his right foot several times and moved it closer to Karsnia's stall and then moved it to where it touched Karsnia's foot. Karsnia recognized that "as a signal often used by persons communicating a desire to engage in sexual conduct," the complaint said.

Ergo, I will remember to never, ever tap my foot in a public restroom.

Random update

August in Washington is slow enough that when I called the VW dealership recently to make a service appointment, they asked me if I could come in as soon as possible. (They wound up keeping my car for two days and extracted an obscene amount of money from my wallet, but that's another story.)

Anyway, the politicians and their staff, lobbyists, hookers, etc. are out of town for the time being, and we're even getting some sorely needed rain. I would have appreciated it a bit more if I hadn't had to drive home the other night in one of the biggest downpours I've ever seen.

Plus, I had one of those everything-starts-to-move-in-slo-mo moments when some d-bag, who had been stopped at a red light, decided he couldn't wait a second longer and began to pull into the intersection at the exact moment I was cruising through at about 35 mph. After taking evasive action -- and avoiding, in hindsight, what would have been a pretty gnarly collision -- I was dumbfounded enough that I just kept driving.

On the other hand, I've been looking for an excuse to get a different car. On the other other hand, I could probably do without the lengthy hospital stay.

More toilet humor

The manufacturer of those high-tech toilets I was so enamored of earlier this year has a marketing campaign aimed at U.S. consumers.

If you can make it past the flash intro -- in which the implied, though probably unintentional, message is, "Hey, these people are talking out of their asses!" -- the site is oddly engaging, considering it's all about toilets.

And I know that's two posts in a row referencing the toilets. Sorry, but that's the most interesting thing going on in my life at the moment.

RIP

I have been a little -- how shall I say it? -- lax about cooking for the past month or so, so I discovered just yesterday that my poor rice cooker got all smashed in during my latest move.

It was a model I had owned for quite some time -- the only rice cooker I've owned, actually, and my mom ordered it from Taiwan for my first summer away from home, I believe, after my junior year of college.

It's the only brand I ever saw in my parents' house, and pretty much everybody in Taiwan has a rice cooker made by Tatung, which is one of those Asian conglomerates that manufactures a wide, seemingly haphazard line of products. Their massive headquarters is not far from one of my cousins' houses, so I saw the building quite a bit when I was in Taipei earlier this year.

Anyway, when I went online to look for a replacement rice cooker, I found several models, but the one I wanted seemed to be available only -- oddly enough -- through a site that sells primarily computer equipment. And they were out of stock. So, since I still had some credit at Amazon, I went there and, after some very thoughtful research (read: looked at a couple of pictures and read one oh-so-helpful user review), I settled on a Panasonic, a decision my mother would certainly Not Approve Of if she was here. And if buying a Japanese rice cooker was not bad enough, she would Doubly Not Approve Of my selection of an electronic model.

But if I'm going to break from tradition, I might as well go all the way, right?

I just hope my experience with this thing is better than the one I had with those high-tech toilets.

They're media professionals

Whenever you move to a new city, you kinda hope the local TV news will be better than it was where you moved from. But it's not. In fact, it's pretty much the same everywhere. The graphics are just prettier and the wardrobes fancier.

But the local NBC affiliate came up with a gem the other night (via Break)


News Anchor Cant Stop Laughing At Model - Watch more free videos

What be this demon contraption?

It has been 20 years since I've worn glasses, so I was a bit lost when I went to the mall yesterday to finally fill the prescription the eye doctor gave me last month. I had been planning to wait until September, when my vision benefits at my new job kick in, but I decided I wanted to be able to see instead.

Anyhow, it seems there have been some vast improvements in glasses technology since the last time I was bespectacled. For one, these things don't weigh anything. Especially not compared to the paperweights I remember wearing, or even the sunglasses I currently have. Also, it seems like high-end designers have taken over the manufacturing of eyewear. Or at least they've all licensed their names to whoever actually makes glasses.

I generally don't shop at stores where everything has Prada, Burberry, and Ferragamo labels, but that's where I found myself yesterday. (Maybe I went to the wrong place? It was LensCrafters, which I always figured was your generic mall eyewear store. I'm so confused by this new world.)

My sister recently told me that when my brother-in-law started wearing glasses several years back, his first observation was that Philadelphia was an extremely dirty city. My revelation wasn't quite at that level, but I did find out that, hey, the type on the news scrolls at the bottom of your TV screen is actually pretty sharp. Who knew?

Not quick enough on the draw

Twice in the past two days I have cursed myself for keeping my cell phone in my pants pocket while I'm driving.

Yesterday, there was a perfect opportunity to illustrate the point that if you're a business, you have to be a teeny bit careful of who you decide to blow off as a customer. There used to be a saying about picking a fight with someone who ran a newspaper, because you didn't want to get into it with someone who bought ink by the barrel.

I guess the updated version of that is: Don't go toe-to-toe with someone who owns one of those instant-sign franchises. I was driving down the main drag in a suburb just outside D.C. when a bright green sign in a storefront caught my eye. "[Name of humongous national bank here] is a ripoff," it read. "Close your account now!"

I'm not sure that people make their banking decisions based on large signs in storefronts, but dude certainly gets the message across that way.

Then, today, I was behind your standard redneck pickup, appropriately festooned with American flag, NRA, country music, NASCAR, etc. stickers. However, it also had prominently displayed one of those 01.20.09 bumperstickers. Which leads one to wonder: Just who's in that 29%, anyway?

My new business: Food at Local Restaurant

My hometown has one big indoor shopping mall. Actually, it has zero since the mall was built outside city limits. This loss of tax revenue has been a sore spot with some in the community for decades, and methinks it's part of the reason the city relented a few years back and let the likes of Wal-Mart and Lowes build stores in town after years of resisting that type of development. They've also allowed some lovely strip malls -- the kind anchored by a Barnes & Noble with a Chili's on a pad in the middle of the parking lot -- to appear.

It's progress, I guess, and makes life a tad more convenient for folks, but it's sad to see that my town is becoming indistinguishable from your garden-variety suburb.

Anyway, the Pyramid Mall -- so named because the name of the parent company was Pyramid, and not because it was some Vegas-type theme shopping center -- was sold a few years back, so it's no surprise new management has finally gotten around to changing the name of the place.

From The Ithaca Journal (Here's the full story, in which the reporter writing about retail does not know how to spell J.C. Penney. And, yes, of course I blame the writer and not his editors.):

New signs going up in coming weeks will read “Shops at Ithaca Mall” as the management team at the mall attempts to build a stronger attitude of community.

It could be worse, I suppose. They could have gone with "Shoppes at Ithaca Mall." Come to think of it, that would be better, as it would read more like the name of a shopping center and less like a Jeopardy! clue: ANSWER: What a bored Ithaca teenager does on a Saturday afternoon. QUESTION: What is "Shops at Ithaca Mall?"

Now *that's* customer service

Because people I know continue to insist on reproducing, I've been spending a fair amount of time in toy stores and baby clothing shops. Today, I discovered a wonderful toy store in Georgetown while out with a friend.

It was so wonderful, in fact, that we kept the poor clerk there a half-hour past closing time. He was too polite to say anything until we headed for the exit, at which time we also realized the woman in the store who had been offering suggestions probably was his wife/girlfriend/whatever who was trying to move things along, and not just a chatty fellow shopper.

Anyway, the store was filled with those awesome, high-quality toys from Germany and France, and let me tell you, they're not afraid to include that quality in the price tag. There was a toy car that had an actual working hydrogen cell in it, and the box proudly proclaimed it to be the world's smallest hydrogen-powered car. The clerk noted that most people who bought that particular item were middle-aged men, and it wasn't likely those cars were going to any kids.

I did find a couple of interesting items from one toy company, though. Well, not exactly the toys themselves, but the packaging.



As far as I could tell, this is made by a Thai company. I just found the description "Ethnic Family" amusing.


This one, however, caused me to do a double-take EVERY SINGLE TIME I saw the box. Maybe it's just me. But at a quick glance, what does it look like is going on to you? No? OK, it's just me.

Carry on.

Life in a warehouse

Some of my things were delivered to my condo yesterday. I say "some" because there was no way to wedge all of my belongings into this place. So now I get to pay to store a bunch of stuff that, in reality, I don't really want anyway.

The lesson: Get rid of your big, bulky stuff before you move. I should have done that before I moved down here, but I decided to go on vacation to the West Coast instead. Oh well. At least these movers didn't box and ship actual garbage to me, as the movers who hauled my stuff from Portland to Connecticut did.

In any event, I'll be spending the next several days getting my life unboxed. And rather than make small piles of boxes throughout the two rooms of my condo, the movers apparently decided it would be better (or funnier) to make a few really tall stacks of boxes in one room. So if you don't hear from in the next, say, six or seven days, please look into it, as I'm probably dead under a heap of my own assorted crap.