Damn. First those pesky Iranians, now Canada has the audacity to pursue nuclear energy.  Fire up the F-18’s boys, we’re going canuck huntin.

When a dude you don’t know suddenly has his hand on your inner thigh – you’ve done something horribly wrong.

Let me back up. We’re having a lovely evening at the Crown and Anchor, home of beers, burgers and as the summer comes to an end, an overabundance of undergrads from the campus across the street. It’s getting late, the place is thinning out a bit when this guy yells to his friends who are leaving/fleeing, “I totally win gaychicken.”
I look up at this guy who already way up in my pre-designated personal sphere, and asked him what the hell is gay-chicken. In hindsight bad plan. If I’d stopped, thought about the etymological structure of the phrase, taken into account the spiky-beached haircut and also had about two less beers, I would’ve left well enough alone.

“Gay chicken is where two guys try to make each other uncomfortable by acting gay. I’m awesome at it. The first one to flinch loses…” Or it was something like that, because at this point I’m having my inner thigh felt-up by this guy and fight or flight instincts have shut down the hearing. Finally, just before we get to the turn-your-head-and-cough-point, my brain restarts and sees the exit strategy, “Dude you win. Really, you win.”

I found myself thoroughly bemused by news-bit this week of the would-be car-jacker that was thwarted by a standard transmission. Personally, I think the automatic transmission makes is just a forerunner to the rise-of-the-machines style takeover by our technology. One minute you let your car shift for you, the next thing you know the governator is traveling back in time to kick your ass. That and it makes for less attentive drivers who slam on their brakes all the time, which is number six in my list of the world’s most annoying habits.

I’m one of those weird people who learned to drive a standard early. In my middle school to early high school years, my dad would give me a lift on his way to the plant, allowing me to avoid the undignified practice of the riding the big yellow dog. The Rice Rocket was an ’83 Honda civic wagon with no radio, no AC, failing ball joints, intermittently functioning windshield wipers (for a while we had a pull chain on them, but that only got you one pass, then you had to stop and push them back down manually), a sizeable library of mechanical engineering texts in the trunk for light reading and of course a standard transmission. We also never had to change the oil, the theory being that enough leaked on the driveway, you could just add a quart every time you filled up and it’d be fine. Also, in my senior year when I could finally park at school the exhaust plume was singlehandedly responsible for canceling a few band practices (Al Gore was twitching somewhere).

But I digress. On the way in to school, my dad would steer with his left hand and hold his coffee with his right. He never went for the travel mugs – he was hard core and just rolled with your standard mug, smoothly compensating for the dips and turns on in the road, calling out gears for me to put the car into. It was a pretty smooth operation. No wrecks, no coffee spilled. Switching from shifting with my left hand to right was a little weird when I took the wheel, but I got over it.

So each morning when I pull my Dukes of Hazard exit off Mopac to turn on to Bee Caves (yes, the Subaru horn does play Dixie) and downshift across four lanes of traffic, I think of my dad in the Rice rocket and our decidedly superior driving skills, while I try not to spill any coffee.

I’m a master at the “stern but sweet, don’t mess with me, sounds like it’s your fault though its probably mine” voice…

With that voice, my sister was able to get me a daily subscription to the New York Times for the cost of the weekend version. Wow.

Regarding a very hip, mutual acquaintance

Me: man he is sooooooooooooo….
hippster ?
emo?
emoippster ?

K: hippo?

Regarding an influx of technical terms such as scalability, encapsulation, object oriented programming and whatnot.

Me: love being in the bullshit business

FC: dude
I sell bullshit to cows
or…something like that…