During the February Spatula In The Wilderness budget meeting, the chimps cracked open our office swear jar full of pennies and found enough change to buy a six-pack of Old Style, an autographed photo of Catherine Zeta Jones and a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. So, it is with great excitement (and quite a bit of anxiety) that the we’re “moving the island” over to http://spatulainthewilderness.net New home, same level of unparalleled ignorance you’ve come to expect from this particular blog.
In all seriousness, there are a lot of reasons to leave the blessed safety of the WordPress.com blog home. This has been, after all, a blog dealing with the life and loves of a 36-year-old hamburger flipping miscreant. While still a miscreant, my hamburger career is at its conclusion. I’m hoping to one day in the future join the ranks of middle management. Skinny tie, lightly starched shirt, desk with autographed photo of CZJ-all the trappings of modern ambition. New life calls for new blog. If you ask me why I’m not changing the name, I’ll give you the whole (long, boring) story. As life moves forward, the blog needs to keep up, too. The new Spatch will have room for more photographs and less appropriated/copy protected images. The theme is completely different, as well (although, I would recommend this page’s theme-Vigilance by Jestro-to anyone seeking a clean, widget friendly .com or .org theme).
Now for the good part. I’d like to thank all of the people who read and supported the 10 month run of this page. A big, warm THANK YOU! to the people who’ve supported Spatula (and its miscreant author, assorted walruses, monkey’s, inflatable editors and spectral interns). Thank you Lori for being the first (and early on, only) reader. Thank you to Clark, Scott, and Roger at the Wakefield Doctrine (http://wakefielddoctrine.com) for being the first to blogroll me, for the constant intelligent commentary and for championing the little hamburger blog. Thanks to my old friend Kathy, as well as Pat and Lori for re-posting and supporting the blog. A big Thanks to all of my Facebook acquaintances who’ve put up with my blog being jammed into their feed for the last year-thanks for humoring me and reading this weird little thing. Last, but certainly not least, Thank You! to everyone who has stopped by here. I am constantly reminded
that we don’t blog for ourselves, but write as part of a community and the world at large. See you around the (still very buggy) new blog!
Letting The Kids Push Tin.
This morning I was incapable of muttering anything intelligible. This is a normal predawn occurrence for me. Actually, it’s happening now. Around the house I went like Sputnik, just “dint dint dinting” for several minutes before the coffee kicked in. My seven-year old daughter Anna happened to be just waking up and her mother and I started to talk to her about the day ahead. Anna made a crack about wanting to go back to sleep and for us to leave her be, and I made the usual joke to the end “Watch it, or I’ll take you to work with me and let you cook for people.” For some reason this morning, she thought about the remark and asked if the hospital actually did offer a take-your-kid-to-work-day and said that it might be nice to go sometime. I assured her that we recently did start one and that it’s very well-organized and supervised. The kids learn about hygiene and do medical career related art projects. They also get a snack, which is a shame, because I certainly don’t. We don’t let them anywhere near the drugs and no budding Doogie Howser, M.D. has ever performed a procedure. There are certain places in life just not designed for kids. Like on dad’s lap, radioing instructions to pilots.
There was an Associated Press story today about an air-traffic controller directing flights out of JFK New York who has been pulled from duty (along with his supervisor) for letting his son radio simple messages to outbound pilots. The child was on winter break from school and on the evening of February 16, his dad brought him to the desk and let the child participate in verbal directions to waiting flights. Nothing terribly serious and most commands were telegraphed verbatim from father to son and similarly to the pilots. If you look up the story under Yahoo’s AP headlines for the day, check out the comments. 588 responses and for the most part they all echo the thought: no harm, no foul. I’m going to go out on a limb here, however, and say that “no harm” thinking is complete horseshit. This wasn’t Podunk airport, but international flights leaving New York. God forbid that hundreds perish while some grade-schooler is squealing “adios amigo!” to pilots. Everybody had a laugh, the controller will probably get his seat back. All’s well that just goes away. This is no harm America. As long as nobody gets hurt, everything’s cool. The famous Heene kid went up in a balloon, after all, and scrambled up the system. His parents were liable for the damage. How is this any different?
Say Timmy, Ever Seen A Grown Man Land One Of These Things?
Despite my misgivings, I still believe in involving children in the world of their parents careers. When I was in my twenties, there were several bring-your-offspring days a year at the Postal facility I worked for. Now that was scary. Bring your kid to see the Vietnam-era drug addicts and government employment abusers in action. Those kids probably all became Postal employees after seeing people do nothing but smoke all day. That said, I love the idea of my child taking pride in what her grubby old dad does every day. Let her talk to departing pilots? No sir. Onward and Upward (without the ground chatter).http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100303/ap_on_bi_ge/us_child_air_traffic
Onward (and all that stuff).
I took a few days off from the usual fervent pace of publishing Spatula blogs and started working toward some goals for the first half of 2010. That, and I had a headache which was (remarkably) cured by watching the curling semi-finals. Who knew that watching grown men slide around with a tea-kettle would aide any physical malady? One of the goals for this year is to establish a tricked ou
t, self-hosted blog. A long, involved process, but I have faith that the whole thing will be rewarding.
The women in my life won’t stop revealing details I don’t need to know. There was no astrological warning in any of the recent horoscopes. No voice from above shouted “The women you know will start spilling their guts and you’ll have a renewed sensation of nausea!” The trend started with my mother talking about getting booted from work one day for wearing a low-cut blouse. She works at Industries For The Blind, so I’m wondering who told. Today wasn’t much better. One of my co-workers started talking about what happens behind her closed doors and the dirty old pervert who lived in her neighborhood as a child. She’s sort of our Milton in what is fast becoming Office Space. So, strangely enough, thank God for Kathy Ireland.
CBS Sunday Morning featured Ireland this past week in a profile of amazingly successful entrepreneurs. She was featured shortly after the guy who invented whipped cream style pancake batter. I was astonished by much of the short piece about Ireland. Not so much because she runs a $4 billion dollar a year global sales business, marketing over 15,000 products. Granted, this was Sunday Morning, so after Kathy Ireland, there was a montage of ducks circling a pond followed by two minutes of the sun setting into Galveston Bay. While I was seriously impressed by the way Ireland turned her name and drive into major success, it was Ireland herself that most impressed me.
When I was a lad and the thought of sitting through an hour of Sunday Morning would have made me gouge out my eyes with a Bic pen, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue was a pretty big annual event in my life. The 25th anniversary issue was memorable for me and featured Kathy Ireland on the cover. I always assumed that I was the only guy who looked past Elle MacPherson for the Ireland layouts, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. One guy I befriended who was a class below Ireland at her high school described to me once the vision of her running the opposite way past him on a cinder track during P.E. Apparently, there were a few of us fans out there. What I appreciate now is something I must have seen as a teenager. As I watched the CBS interview, I couldn’t help but notice some very un-celebrity traits about her. At 46, Kathy Ireland looks like…well, Kathy Ireland. No Botox, just age that wears well on her. That was kind of refreshing and something that would be nice if all women (former models, or not) could embrace. Onward and Upward.
2010 Playmobil Census.
This a slightly weird, tangential topic of mine, but 
some days are more weird and tangent filled than others. Tonight’s family project was to take an accounting of all of my daughter’s Playmobil figures and use the bulk of them for a school project. If you aren’t familiar with Playmobil toys, they’re people, animals, structures and vehicles made by the German company Geobra Brandstatter. Oftentimes, shoppers can find Playmobil products along side Lego sets, but generally Playmobil concentrates on historical themes and slightly more realism (such as the current mini-set which pits two wayward pirates against a giant squid). Our family obsession with the tiny villagers started when my daughter was four and often required to spend long periods of time playing quietly after medical procedures. Now the villagers number over 125 and have pretty much taken over. It was time for us to conduct a census and figure out how the Playmobil townspeople were represented and if their life among us humans is adequate. Here’s the socio-political breakdown from our Playmobilers. Looking at it, you get a strange sense of how America might be represented in the upcoming 2010 Census. Sure, I’ll hold for a call from crazy.
→The Social BreakDown In Our Playmobil Town:
- The town is not represented by minorities. In fact, there is only person of color. The wise men who travelled from the Nativity set count as minorities in the sense that we can’t tell how far they’ve journeyed.
- Municipal Services are well spoken for. There are four town fire fighters (one female), two postal clerks (ditto), two police officers and one criminal. Four out the 125 residents operate the air rescue chopper. The town owns one police motorcycle and a hook-and-ladder fire unit “borrowed” from G.I.Joe.
- Health care seems to be the big issue concerning the Playmobilers. The town’s largest employer is a multiple bed hospital with its own ultrasound machine and defibrillator. There is also a late-model ambulance, which (due to poor design) is often on its side. There is also the aforementioned rescue chopper which comes in handy because of…
- …decapitation. Partial scalp loss and total head removal plague the small population. Fortunately, a custom wig shop in the town square offers hair replacement. The lone female fire fighter suffers frequent bouts of cranium loss.
- Stray animals are an issue and the two local police officers are ill-equipped to handle them. The recent arrival of monkeys, an elephant and several ponies has only worsened the problem.
- The town has seen growth in number of homes added to the community. There are now three. In addition to a single family cottage, there is now a manse fit for several families and one town house that has been on fire for several years. Most of the 125 residents live on the streets, in the hospital or in the cardboard Nativity scene.
- The child population is highly uneven for the number of residents, suggesting that the local hospital may be offering fertility programs, or that the folks are taking turns using the three houses.
To Save Millions or Save Thousands? Huh.
Several years ago, I remember pausing a beat after hearing the news story that Toyota had overtaken every other auto manufacturer to become the world’s best-selling car maker. There wasn’t a lot of surprise, just the feeling that our cars were about as inferior as everything else we produce in the country. Part of me asked “Why Toyota?” I could stand to see the world go bouncing along in Honda’s or Volkswagens. Toyota? I’d been a passenger (or rented) enough of their vehicles to know that they were the TV dinner of automotive engineering. I know families that have sworn by them since the mid ’70′s, but I never got it. Soulless, plastic smelling vehicles. They transport people from point A to point wherever. That’s it. My crappy Fords were the equivalent of driving folding chairs on wheels, but they had a bit of personality. untrustworthy, slacker personalities. They were college Freshman to the reliable, urbane working cars of Toyota. That said, most people have more fun slacking in college than with uptight workers. I should be in American muscle car heaven with the continuing news about Toyota’s problems with accelerators, computer systems and now power steering. Actually, no.
If you’ve never heard the July 6th 911 call from San Diego by an off-duty C.H.P. officer chronicling the moments before he (and family) were killed by their runaway Toyota vehicle, it’s one of the most harrowing, disturbing recordings one can ever sit through. What this and other deaths in over-accelerating Toyota models managed to do was bring to light a problem years in the making. During the last few days evidence has come to light that Toyota knew there were safety issues on the horizon and worked with the U.S. Government to save millions of dollars, along with thousands of man hours, by seeking a reduction in necessary oversight regulations. Toyota managed to save $135 million dollars by only implementing those safety items absolutely necessary and reducing the scope of faulty floor mat recalls and delaying side curtain air-bag placement and door lock upgrades. Read more…
This was a week full of stories that just made me wonder about my place in the sphere of human relationships. Alright, that’s too much. The stories were stories and many made me hope that the week would end soon and that we could start over. Here are some of the items that I read crossing the wires/digits this past week:
→Beppe Bigazzi. You may not have heard of the Italian chef and food writer, but he’s got a lot of people upset. This week our fearless chef made one of his regular appearance on the midday Italian Public Television La Prova del Cuoco and presented the audience with recipes using house cats. Bigazzi referred to cats as succulent and informed viewers about soaking the “meat” in spring water for three days before cooking. Hostess Elisa Isoardi worked to persuade Bigazzi to apologize, but he refused. Part of his reasoning was that during the 1930′s in the provinces people ate cats regularly. The 77 year old chef’s been fired for obvious reasons. Italian animal protection authorities stress that the killing of cats for food is illegal. The cooking professional part of me wonders if this wasn’t the recollections of an elderly man for his lost childhood in the countryside. Not that I condone any of his behavior, because 77 or 770, animal cruelty is just vile. When I was a kid, growing up in rural mid-Michigan, I knew a cat and dog eating family. This was the late 1970′s and the family were the emeritus poor-in poverty long before the depression. They actually would ask people which pet they preferred. Beppe is reliving what many folks live around the world. People eat to survive, despite the disturbing nature of what they’re doing. Maybe he’ll go to a sunny nursing home and dream of chasing cats over the fields as a boy.
→I kid you not, but General Larry Platt’s Pants On The Ground debuted this week on the Billboard Hot 100 at #46. Granted, this isn’t the silly little bit he did at the Atlanta AI auditions, but a slick hip-hop version (i.e., overproduced, busy, more insipid than the original if possible). So, now along with hearing Taylor Swift and that stupid “Heaven” song (from four years ago) every hour on commercial radio, listeners will be subjected to six more weeks of idol audition music. American Idol has proven over the course of a decade that you don’t need talent to make it big in music. The judges and producers may not have put Platt, William Hung, Jumping Dave, or Renaldo LaPuz through over the years, but they sure as heck have over-promoted them. Idol makes its money the old-fashioned way, by huckstering the hacks onto the viewing public. Don’t believe me? Try and view Renaldo’s “We’re Brothers Forever” video (or any of the others) on YouTube and you’ll see a nice note that Fremantle Media (AI’s distribution company) owns the rights to all of the historically great losing auditions. So, congratulations to Larry Platt on becoming an American Idol after all. He’ll have a longer career than Taylor Hicks, either way. Onward and Upward.
Friday Apology Predictions.
(A few weeks back, Spatula paid homage to the State of The Union Address by incorrectly predicting what might be said during the Presidential Speech. Following in those small footsteps of blogo-tabloid ineptitude, we offer predictions of the Tiger Woods “Press” Conference scheduled for later this morning)*
Q: Any Chance that you’ll be playing in the Masters Tournament this year?
A: Right now I’m just trying to put my life back together one day at a time. At this time I’m just working my way through the first half of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
Q: What was life like in rehab?
A: Thanks to the Gillette 5 blade shaving system I never have to worry about being less than smooth and always get an incredibly close shave.
Q: Do you believe that your marriage is reconcilable?
A: Elin holds the keys to the marriage. Really. I mean she’s giving me a ride home after this presser.
Q: Do you see similarities between your situation and that of Laker Kobe Bryant?
A: Not at all. My jump shot sucks. Oh, and he tips his caddies poorly.
Q: What do you say to all those who believe you’ve not only sullied the game of professional golf, but marriage, as well?
A: “Stanford promotes both excellence in academics and athletics. The department of athletics offers 34 varsity sports-18 for men, 15 for women and one co-ed.”
Q: What’s next for you after golf?
A: Nike Golf spikes offer comfort as well as control and I appreciate both.
*The Standford Athletics lines are plagiarized directly from the university information site (http://www.stanford.edu).
The Mad World Of Joe Stack.
Yesterday I was irrationally mad at the City of Saint Joseph. In the course of the municipal sidewalk clearing program, the man in his little bobcat managed to leave two four-foot tall piles of snow in my driveway and ripped clods of sod out of my lawn. After calming down somewhat, I took another look at the situation and realized I was partly to blame. The sod was chunked up because I hadn’t used reflective markers to delineate the sidewalk boundaries. The snow was chunked up into the driveway (mostly) because I’m lazy as sin and could have cleared the sidewalk myself. At no point in my disgust with everyone in charge of my sleepy little hamlet did I ever think “I should take x object and crash it into y location.” This is where the thinking man jumps off. Yes, bureaucrats have done things I don’t agree with. No, I have no desire for insane, kamikaze retribution. In my case, I just shoveled the snow and sod back onto the freshly plowed sidewalk. In Joseph Stack’s case, retribution meant death and destruction.
Joe Stack (1956-2010) crashed a small passenger plane into the Federal Building in Austin, Texas this afternoon. This was done after setting fire to his home, which fortunately his family escaped from. In a rambling online note, Mr. Stack described his desire for revenge on the 
Internal Revenue Service which he claims took ten years of his savings away and set his retirement fund back to zero. I can not begin to fathom the short circuits taking place within the depths of Stack’s mind. Life goes south, man needs a scapegoat. This is how all acts of vengeance start. The culprit may be ourselves, but it’s easier to put the government’s face on our own problems.
A friend asked me the question this afternoon that tends to come up each time an unimaginable, certainly inexplicable act of domestic terrorism takes place: “How do you bring children into a world like this?” I honestly don’t have an answer, even though I’m raising a 9/11 baby. When we were trying to start a family in the fall of 2001 the world seemed absolutely shattered and there didn’t seem to be a feasible reason to bring more children to the chaos. Despite those misgivings, our daughter was born 376 days after the attacks. You do the best that you can to raise responsible citizens of the world, prepared to deal with the trials of life, love and the I.R.S.
My nephew Austyn was born at 5:51 yesterday morning. He, mom and dad are doing great. I got to hang out with him for a minute tonight and was reminded of when I held Anna for the first time in the fall of 2002. Looking at them, you realize why we keep on raising families in such a mad world. They represent more intelligence, hope and opportunity than our generation could ever achieve. Not to dismiss the old Genesis song, but Phil Collins was wrong. Their generation will put it right. Onward and upward.
My Big Fat Tueday.
Today I was given the sacred duty of transporting the Paczkis around town to the outpatient surgery building. I 
consider the job a labor of love and took very seriously the delivery of oversized, high calorie treats to those who wait all year for the occasion. This morning saw a mix of wet, sloppy snow and heavy winds, but I made it across town with the paczkis. If you aren’t familiar with paczkis (poonch-keys), they’re a fried bread style donut (some look like two donuts stacked one on top of the other), usually filled with fruit (sic) filling or cream cheese custard. Back when my headaches could handle paczkis, I was particularly fond of the lemon filled variety. There is only one rule for paczki consumption: don’t ask how many calories are in one. Nobody knows and it’s too much information. The history of the dessert goes back to the Polish tradition of using up all the verboten foods in the house by the end of Fat Tuesday. This is the Tuesday on the calendar that Roman Catholics use to enjoy favorite foods before Ash Wednesday, in which sweets are often given up for the forty days of Lent (the season of reflection on the life and death of Jesus Christ, which this year ends at sundown on April 1st). I’m not Catholic, but I love the idea of taking a day to enjoy and then looking at the folly of one’s life and actions for several weeks. Many protestants use Lent for the same purpose and vow to “sacrifice” sinful indulgences for 40 days. I’m one of those. Thankfully, when people ask what I’m giving up for Lent I’ve stopped telling them “religion.”
I am thinking a lot about what to give up this year. Previously, I’ve vainly tried to give up coffee. There is a feeling I get that God wants my sacrifice, though, and not my anguished, twisted-limbed death from ditching coffee. There is no way to be a good servant of the kingdom if all I can do is scream like a banshee because my coffee is gone. There is a part of me that burns to go to my boss and ask if for Lent I can take 40 days off of work, so I can think about my sins. I mean, there are a lot of sins to account for. As my wife points out, one of last week’s blogs posts wiped out any trace of goodness in my puny heart (guess which one). Of course, 40 days off would mean I could visit Graceland and pay my respects to the patron saint of us migraineurs, Elvis Presley.
Truly, the thing to do is not worry about giving up anything. The whole idea is to give back and to consider how we can be better as people, as members of the human race. Sometimes you focus so much on what you can’t have that you end up losing site of the big picture. Cliche? Yup. I’ve got dozens. Maybe I’ll sacrifice them for Lent. Wow. 40 days without a cliché. Nah. Onward and Upward.
Silent Kevin Goes Off.
Film director (and actor) Kevin Smith was kicked off of a Southwest Airlines flight Saturday for being overweight. This may be the first time a celebrity has been booted off an airliner for an infraction that seemingly only happens to regular schlubs. Smith went off on a Twittering rant for the ages that eventually prompted 
some of the followers to tell him to cool it with the foul, vitriolic updates. Eventually, though, reps for Southwest did get in touch with Smith and offered him free diet 7-Up (“Tastes just like regular 7-Up”) and plastic jr. pilot’s wings.
There are some steps the airlines can take to accommodate the overweight. Here are some possible solutions to make everyone happy:
→Fly Greyhound buses. Seriously, slap some wings on the silver dogs. Sure, they’re just as crowded as planes and the smell is one-of-a-kind. I’ve had dates where I wasn’t as close to the person next to me as on an average Greyhound ride. Still, when have you ever seen anybody kicked off a bus for being fat? Buses and the overweight are like the marriage of white bread and mayonnaise. They just go together. Besides, you’re only having to lift the folks about six feet off the ground, so there isn’t any aerodynamic issue.
→Take the seats out altogether. Just put those little subway straps and have everybody stand. The airlines have probably already thought about this one. The overseas flights could be a problem and instead of complimentary peanuts and soft drinks they’d have to hand out deodorant sticks and Dr. Scholls. For heaven’s sake, though. Neil, Buzz and 10 other men landed on the moon doing just that-standing up for the ride down. Sure, they were in 1/6 gravity and water-cooled suits, but if it was good enough for the astronauts, it’s good enough for the overweight American flying public.
→Knock everybody out. The Dharma Initiative submarine captains on the TV show Lost touched on a good idea. Just sedate the passengers, check them in as baggage and fill the planes. In fact, the airlines could use C-130′s and just drop passengers over intended destinations via zip-line.
→Make airline travel so frustrating no person wants to do it. Oh wait… .
→Put Kevin Smith in charge of domestic airline seating policy. Just don’t ask him to land on a frozen river or push a plane down the tarmac if it gets stuck. Onward and upward. Whichever comes first.
>>Well, here we go! Spatula In The Wilderness carries onward and (slightly) upward at http://spatulainthewilderness.net Thanks for stopping by and see you around the new blog.
