I'm Hungary

Best anti-war song I've ever heard. End of story.

I'm a bad person

Know what I’m not going to miss? Watching Charlie Weis eat his boogers on national TV every weekend of October through November. Good riddance. I stuck by that bastard for way too long. Now that I’m finally jumping his sunken ship, it feels good to be able to say some of the things I’ve held back for so long. I wanted to see you succeed, Charlie. So badly. You’re an ornery guy from New Jersey, you went to ND, and never played a down of college football there. It had all the makings of an incredible story. Just one problem: You’re not a head coach.

All this Charlie Weis talk reminds me:

Last week I took my dog out for a walk. She’s a 12 lb dachshund. In front of my building there was a minivan double parked and two vehicles headed in opposite directions. A big fat man in his mid to late 50’s driving a Lincoln Continental yielded to the vehicle traveling in the opposite direction. Once the other car had passed, he continued to sit there, presumably perspiring and breathing heavily from the exertion of applying pressure to the brake. I assumed he was yielding to me and Ruby as well, like a nice fat man. As we stepped briskly into the street and began to cross, he raised his hands in the air, an angry gesture that was likely accompanied by a few choice expletives that I couldn’t hear because he hadn’t yet rolled the window down. When I raised my hands, mocking him for his failure to either proceed in a timely fashion or for his lack of patience, he quickly rolled his window down.

“Oh! Big man!!! And his little fuckin’ dog!!!” he screamed.

I stopped beside his car, looked down at my little fuckin’ dog and smiled at her as she gazed back at me in wonder.

“Big man! Big man and his little fuckin’ dog!!! You pussy. Why don’t you get a bigger dog, you pussy!”

Completely fed up, I stooped to his level. Not something I’m proud of, especially because fat old men driving Lincolns sometimes have ties to organized crime. “What are you? 300, 400 lbs? How long did it take you to get into that car and get your seatbelt on? 15, 20 minutes? Seriously? How long? You fat fuck. Where are you going anyway? To have a heart attack?”

At this point his volume reached new heights. “Look at that little dog. I’ll kick that little dog. You fucking pussy!”

My volume increased evermore, “Are you kidding me? You couldn’t kick this dog if I put her on a tee, you fat fuck. Fat guys like you don’t kick things; you walk around taking baby steps and breathing heavily.”

From the park behind me a man chimed in, “Come on guys! Calm down! Sir, just drive. Just drive!”

I turned to look. It was a man and his wife walking their two dogs in the park. By the time I turned my head back around the object of my ire was driving away. I was both furious and embarrassed. In a huff, I walked my dog into the park, deliberately by the couple. The wife wouldn’t look at me. She was probably afraid of and disgusted with me. I earnestly offered to the man, “I’m really sorry about that. I’m not proud of myself.”

He turned to me and said, “That’s ok. It happens to the best of us. I just didn’t want to see it escalate.”

“Regardless, I’m sorry about that. No one should have to see that.”

Funny little hate crime

Brockman's into some interesting shit. Since graduating from college he's done stints in Costa Rica, The Congo, and Argentina researching primates. At present he's in Wisconsin at his parents' house working on his graduate school applications, a full-time job unto itself. Needless to say, he doesn't get out much these days.

A couple months ago he seized an opportunity to eat and drink like a Roman at a cocktail party thrown by his parents in the house he grew up in. As one might expect, the guests and his parents had all deserted him by 11:00. A good buzz like this one too rare to be wasted on sleep, he sat outside staring off into the Wisconsin darkness, yearning for inspiration.

He heard revelry's call from somewhere off in the distance. In ominous darkness loomed boundless possibility. His wasn't the only party in the neighborhood on this night, just the tamest. Like minded citizens of the world perhaps? His heart raced. Having never before met his neighbors across the street, insulated all his life by rows upon rows of dense evergreen trees, he was determined to right this wrong there and then.

Naturally, before embarking on this trip into the unknown, he scurried back inside to retrieve his trusty head lamp. Naturally.

Some two hundred fifty yards later, two smokers standing alongside the neighbors' house noticed a light emerging from the darkness, shortly followed by a skinny, bearded man in his early to mid-twenties who was wearing..... a head lamp?

He introduced himself as "Isaac Brockman, from across the street." As the smokers brought him around back and introduced him to the rest of the party, everyone assumed Brockman was gay (after they were done staring at the head lamp in wonder, of course). As one of them astutely whispered to the other, "That's how fags shake hands... And that's how fags talk." Familiar with the notion that he might give off a gay vibe during introductions, Isaac has become well versed at sniffing out homophobia. And when he senses this sort of high school locker room vibe, he becomes deliberately gayer.

Having been handed a beer by his seemingly gracious hosts, he flitted about the room like Liberace at a Nascar race. "This will have to do," he thought to himself.

Suddenly, however, he was pulled down to the ground from behind. Instinctualy curling up into the fetal position and covering his face, faceless attackers punched and kicked him. "Fucking faggot!" they hissed.

Moments later his assailants were pulled off him by other party-goers. He was lifted to his feet by a man and a woman, presumably his progressive hosts. They apologized profusely, wiping the dirt and wet grass off his shirt and pants: "Oh my god, we're soooooo sorry that just happened!" Even under the influence as he was, their apologies seemed borne out of fear of legal repercussion than of shame that people they'd invited into their home were of the deplorable sort.

Isaac assured them, "Everything's fine! Happens all the time. Don't worry about it." This had never happened before.

They replaced the beer that had gone to waste during the attack.... He drank it, and then another, resolutely staring around the room at the people who were staring back at him while they spoke in hushed tones to each other.

He cracked a third beer before flipping the switch on his head lamp and venturing back out into the Wisconsin darkness towards the home he grew up in.

What's the password?

As a rule of thumb, people assume no one will ever know their password. As far as I can tell, at least four of them are incumbent upon modern American life: voicemail, email, fantasy football, and online banking. If you have a job in a cubicle, you might have between fifteen to twenty more. These can be difficult to track. That's a lot of passwords. Repetition can be critical, especially when 15 to 20 passwords expire every 90 days or so and require that you change them to new passwords that haven't been used before.

When I am having computer difficulty from within the friendly confines of my cubicle, I have to call our outsourced IT team in India. Last week, I was cursed with an error message for a password protected software. When I picked up the phone, as with past calls I've placed to my counterparts across the pond and sand, I anticipated a run-of-the-mill, painfully cumbersome, misguided but ultimately successful interaction. I was only part right.

Once remotely logged into my computer, he innocently asked in a thick Indian accent, "Ok, what's your username, sir?"

I deliberately but politely spelled it out. It wasn't until I muttered the last character, the number '0', that I realized the question that was sure to follow.

"And your password, sir?"

My head whirled around on its axis Exorcist style, only nervous and paranoid instead of a symptom of being possessed by the devil. Assistant to my right, co-worker to my left, boundless potential for passersby behind, I tried to stabilize the volume and cadence of my voice. I needed to get this done in one take. No repeats.

"D--I--C--K--C--H--E--E--S--E--2...."

"Excuse me sir, did you just spell 'dickcheese 2' Is your password 'dickcheese'?"

I can only assume by the incredulity in his voice that he was not only surprised that someone would use such a password in a professional environment, but that this same person had presumably already used 'dickcheese 1'.

Phenom

This guy drops a lot of F bombs. You've been warned.