Note: If you want to hear my thoughts on some possible upside to joining the military, you have to read the bio for this week's that guy.

Things that would be A) ok to ask if I were sober, B) not okay to ask if I were drunk, but C) only aware that it was not okay for me to ask to do if I were drunk if I were sober at the time includes asking Doug and Theda if I could smell their baby's head. Mmmm, paradox. Sorry Doug and Theda. And baby.

Can I just say it--Lucas made the hugest mistake last year (or was it 2 years ago?) when he picked Brooke over Peyton. Don't get me wrong, I think Brooke is hotter and I know that Maya hates Peyton, but I find Peyton really endearing. Way more earnest than Brooke (hmm, yet Brooke is my lady). I will never forget how, when he actually began his decision monologue, we didn't know which girl he was going to pick--even after he started his speech (the camera was showing a close-up of his face), and he said, "It's always been you." At that moment, I knew he picked Peyton. But he didn't, and that's bullshit. Peyton was the one that he first fell in love with while she was dating his half-brother and Lucas was still an "outsider." She even played a role in his joining the team. So how could you say, "It's always been you," but say it to the wrong girl? Argh. He goes through all this trife becuase of having picked Brooke too. Peyton is clearly the better fit and cares about him a lot more.

JC is so hardcore about her pajamas that she actually went out and bought a pair of big pimpin, Friday night pajamas that are this totally sweet print. They are green and white and stuff, and the best part about them is that when she sits on that one funky green and white couch in our living room, she camouflages into it. Which is cool.

Random nonsensical voice memo alert: The golden ticket, the golden rule, and the golden shower.

One of my students said that her head hurt. Being the Dr. House-esqe diagnostic genius that I am, I asked her if she had a headache. She said no. I asked her if she got whacked in the head. She said no, it was an ache in her head. I asked her if she was sure that it wasn’t a headache--since that is the most common symptom of a headache. She was sure. I'm baffled.

Stealing from these kids: I know what I am going to be next year for Halloween (yeah, right. Like I am gonna dress up). One of my kids told me that she wanted to get a bunch of those Smarties candies and glue them all over a pair of pants. Then she could go out dressed up as...Smartie Pants. I thought that was a good one. This is the same kid that wrote in her Lord of the Flies essay about the conch as a symbol for civility that what they did to Piggy was "unconchionable." How rad is that? Yeah, she got an A.

JC is a good influence on me: I went with her on Friday to go get flu shots at Costco. Of course the whole time I couldn’t help but fear that I was the one person out of however many that actually gets the flu from the vaccine (it is Monday night as I write this, and I still don’t know if I am out of the water yet). I did decide, on Friday evening as I was getting ready to go out, that I should try this pick up line: Hey baby, I just got my flu shot. If you have sex with me tonight, it will be like a partial vaccination for you. Alas, I didn’t use the line (or vaccinate any women).

The OC (bitch): 3 episodes in 2 weeks, and this is what I have to say: Summer, what's going on, girl? You don’t look too hot, and you are dating a dude with a cheesy maggot 5 dollar Venice beach rasta hat. I miss the sarcasm. The funny part about the first 3 episodes, of course, is that she is the only one out of all of them that has actually gone away to college (and Brown at that, of course). Taylor, on the other hand, is really growing on me. I'm not saying Summer has competition, cuz I know she will pull her shit together, but Taylor seems to be one of those jack-of-all-trades, like how it would be so rad to have Martha Stewart as your lady. She could just hook everything up so fat. I feel like Taylor is sort of like that, and she's spunky as all hell. Ryan and Volchek in the hotel room, having a heart to heart...giggle. Speaking of, how is it that Sandy wouldn’t be disbarred for bringing a client to a hotel room and then bringing someone that Sandy knew wanted to literally kill said client to said hotel room? And I still hate Missy, I Mean Mom, and can't believe that everybody always forgives her.

I'm kind of a critical guy, and I'm pretty critical when I am reading my kids' essays. And you know that I am the type of teacher that uses a red pen (yeah, I am the poster boy for that kind of guy). I was out with my Western Medicine teacher friend and I said that I wished I could mark up the people that I see on the street--for the faults that they have--with a red pen. A metaphorical red pen...

Oi, that chick is a fragment; that dude lacks parallel structure. And don’t even get me started on that shirt-pants subject-verb disagreement. I could go on all day...but I should stop.

See that gold digger at the bar? She's a dependent clause. See what I did there?

...I went the other way.

RR bought a $200 mattress, and when it arrived, it was rolled up in a tube. It was a foam mattress. Now I know about futons and stuff (which are weaksauce), but I didn’t know that you could buy an actual mattress that is made of foam. No springs. He figured that since he had a 2 inch memory foam pad that he lifted from ma's house, the cheap mattress would be fine. Was it? Of course it wasn’t. Clearly RR had painted himself into a corner. What does a Ross boy do when painted in a corner? Dig a hole, of course. He went online and bought a supplemental (to the supplemental) memory foam pad. Only this one was 4 inches thick and wasn’t free. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I will keep you posted.

I had a dream that there was this big surprise that was going to happen at halftime of The Lakers' season opener, and when it came, they pulled back these curtains all dramatic-like, and behind the curtains was Magic Johnson sporting an artificial stick leg. I cried.

It was actually only like 4 days later that the papers had stories about it being the 15 year anniversary of when Magic announced to the world that he had HIV and was retiring. I actually remember that day...being shocked...I cried when I heard that news...

I also dreamt that they finally had the technology to just beam stuff from phone to phone, but the only other person besides me that had the technology was one of my students, and I didn't really have that type of information to share with him (though I do like that student a lot).

Jenn's Mom is so nuts: Jenn never did actually know if her childhood family dryer worked. Her mom always said it didn’t, so they all had to hang dry their clothes. One or more of the 2 following justifications were at work: first, Jenn's mom is so cheap (how cheap is she?) that she would never have let the family waste money on drying their clothes with a dryer. They were a family of 4, all hang drying their clothes everywhere. I would have loved to come over and see all the clothes hanging everywhere. The ante is upped because they lived in Philadelphia, where it gets freezing-fucking-cold. What do you think are the odds that a woman who wouldn’t shell out for the electricity for a dryer would allow the family to turn on the heater in the house? Yeah, about zero. So in the winter the clothes would have to be dried indoors, and it would take a really long time at that since it would be hella cold inside. Could you imagine how tough it would be to be a high school kid who wanted to wear their favorite shirt on Friday night, so you would have to wash it a week and a half in advance to ensure that it dried in time? Weaksauce. The second possible factor goes back to the whole Jenn's-mom-stockpiles-canned-goods-that-are-on-sale-in-case-of-a-nuclear-holocaust. Yeah, Jenn's mom used the dryer as supplemental storage space for her at-home Costco (called Sam's on the east coast). She was also known to have stored stuff in the oven, but the worst (to me, the chronicler) is the sound of the family freezer. Jenn's mom took all the shelving out of the freezer so that it had maximum storage space--she would just stack the fuck out of all the shit that she put in the freezer, and it was just about impossible to access anything unless you really wanted it. Talk about motivation to skip that before-bed nosh... Jenn says that it was actually quite dangerous to open the freezer since it was so jam packed full of stuff (remember, no shelves) that either hella stuff would spill out when you opened it or everything would be sealed against its neighbor by that whole frost/freezer burn/whatever you call it that gets on stuff.

Wait, I almost forgot. The other reason why stacking was dangerous and freezer burn was such a factor is because of the storage method itself. Do you think the woman who probably had a pair of socks on display in the living room for 2 weeks, slowly drying in winter, would invest in some superfluous tupperwares for the leftover food that you just know she wasn’t going to throw away? Hell no. She just put everything in plastic bags. Ghet to. Last bit of danger to add to opening the freezer at Jenn's mom's house: going along with the theme of "waste nothing," Jenn's mom would pour leftover morning coffees into cups and jam them into the freezer as well, making frozen ice coffee. The danger was that when you went into the freezer for something, you never knew if the cup you needed to get past had liquid or solid in it. Highway to the danger zone...

He'll always be Nick Tortelli to me: this week's that guy is a double--not only is he a that guy, but he is also one of those guys that is most synonomous with a specific character that he played (more on this in a later column). Fun facts include that he has allegedly been doing 150 pushups a day since he was 6 and that although he usually plays Italian-Americans, he is actually a Sephardic Jew (goooo Jews!). Also, apparently people get him confused with Sam's helper-friend-guy (Al) from the TV show Quantum Leap (merit mentioning: the Quantum Leap character is a military man who holds the rank of "Rear Admiral," which is the first good reason I've ever heard for joining the military, although I would imagine that it takes a lot of rear-licking to climb to the rank of Rear Admiral. But then just think about it; if someone disrespected you at a party, you could just yell out, "DON'T MESS WITH ME--I'M A REAR-FUCKING-ADMIRAL!"

I found a website with a bunch of his quotes, and apparently he is also some kind of amateur philosophical horticulturist: "When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves." Sounds like I could hook him up with the Western Medicine teacher. Nick's credits include:

Robots
Swimfan (I always wanted to see that)
Mullholland Drive (one of those Bert-paradox movies)
Down (only because of the tagline: YOUR NEXT STOP... IS HELL)
Shaft (remake)
The Hurricane (wait for it...hate put me in prison--love's gonna bust me out)
Dick
A Civil Action
A Night at the Roxbury
Alien Resurrection (this one was surprisingly good)
A Life Less Ordinary
In & Out (oi, not to be confused with cheesepockets)
Daylight (Stallone--Tagline: Hold your breath)
Ransom (GIVE ME BACK MY WIFE)
The First Wives Club (only included because Jesse Spano was in it)
Freeway
Nixon
Clueless (sweet)
The Usual Suspects (the second time you see it, you can't help but think that the detective is an idiot, which I admit is unfair to the detective, but hey, them's my feelings)
Mr. Wonderful (tagline too cheesy to repost)
For Love or Money
Searching for Bobby Fischer
Rookie of the Year (just an incredible story of a young boy's dream coming true via a too tight ligament replacement surgery)
Benny and Joon (damn, now I wish I were watching this tonight)
Boiling Point
The Addams Family
Pacific Heights (sweet ass flick)
Joe Versus the Volcano
The Flamingo Kid (seriously, this is one of my top 10 cheesy 80s movies and quite possibly the best thing that Matt Dillon ever did)
Running Scared
Commando (matrix)
Blood Simple (totally fucking brilliant)
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (another childhood favorite--I almost came in my pants when I found this used, on videocassette, at Amoeba 2 years ago)
Oh my fucking god--I am too tired to also list all the stellar TV shows that he has been on, but you know that Cheers is on that motherfucking list.

by Justin
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