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A Brighter Spotlight On Mr Blog's Tepid Ride

Today we present another in our ongoing series of posts highlighting the talented work of BMJ2k, of Mr Blog’s Tepid Ride, as he faces off against his nemesis Home Depot.
Mr Blog's Tepid Ride

For those of you who were smart enough not to read “Knobs for Noobs,” and frankly, good for you, a quick recap: After a fruitless yet epic search for a replacement air conditioner knob, which took me such exotic locales as Boro Park, where a man ate dinner from a dusty hot plate, to New Jersey, where I bought a “shhnurgenshtein” in the Swedish heaven called IKEA.. I was finally forced to order a knob at a stupidly inflated price from GE. That blog featured an extended description of my lifelong frustration with Home Depot. An excerpt follows:

Despite owning the reputation of having everything anyone could possibly need to put in a tub, sod a lawn, or furnish a castle, I had trouble there a few years back finding some hex screws. On another occasion I could not buy their advertised drill because, as explained by an associate, “it doesn’t exist.”

For those of you who have never been to a Home Depot, congratulations! Home Depot is one of those huge mega-warehouse hardware stores that is supposed to be your one-stop shop for anything in your home, be it paint, planks, or pliers. It has power saws and sanders. It has garden soil and planters. It has primer and stain. You could go into any Home Depot store and leave with anything for your home except an actual house, but if you want to live in a tool shed, they can supply your home too. Or so they say. I have found Home Depot to be lacking in pretty much whatever I have needed. And I’m talking about simple stuff, like nails or toilet seats. (Not to mention air conditioner knobs. But that was another story.)

Well, as this episode begins, I found myself in the strange predicament of being locked inside my apartment the other night. I’d been locked out before, but this was new. I was inside with no way to get out. I have a very expensive and secure lock on my front door. It has a very unusually-shaped key and is guaranteed to be impossible to open except by that key. In fact, the keys are uncopyable and have to be registered with the locksmith. So if my home is ever burgled, I am going straight to the police with the name of my locksmith, since he must be the one who broke in. The lock is great, but the doorknob was original equipment with the door and had been going bad for a few weeks. It would spin on the axle and not catch until I tightened the little screws on the side, and they were starting to strip. I put off replacing it because, well, that’s usually what I do. (Other than writing blogs where I review movies. Have you read my Ratatouille review? Neither did I. I heard it was good.)

On this night, as I was on my way out to an exciting and amazing destination (Waldbaum’s to buy some fruit) the door knob just came off in my hand. The door stayed shut, I had the knob and a stupid look on my face. “Uh.” Thanks to my special lock, if I were on the other side of the door, I could easily have gotten in to the apartment with the key, no knob required. Getting out, however, needed the knob. See why the lock is so special?

I got a long-handled screwdriver and used all of the skills I picked up in my years as a carjacker to jimmy open the catch through the little space between the door and jamb (and no, this doesn’t render the lock useless, this can only be done from the inside) and popped the door open. I cancelled my vital plans to buy oranges and knew that I had to replace the knob or once I came back I might never get out again. It was nine at night and only one place was open, Hells’ Depot. I mean Home Depot, again in search of a knob.

A little bit of back story here. I had just slightly twisted my right ankle for the 12th or 13th time in my life and it was a little sore. High on my left hip I had a small insect bite which had become infected and painful to a degree that I wouldn’t inflict on Jolanta Rohloff or Rick Mangone.  Consequently, walking was uncomfortable for me. Not bad, not painful, but uncomfortable since any pressure on either leg was a problem. And if there is one thing you do in Home Depot, it is walk, because the place is as big as a TWA aircraft hanger, but with worse customer assistance.

I approached the store the way you I imagine soldiers in Viet Nam approached a stretch of dark woods. Cautiously, not knowing what it held, I slowly neared the store. Steely eyed and resolute, I nodded when the greeter did his thing. (And why does Home Depot need a greeter anyway? If I want a guy in filthy overalls to say “hi” to me I’ll go to the dump.) This was to be the last intelligent human contact I had inside the store. I would have a load of non-intelligent contact soon enough.

Home Depot (HD from now on because I’m lazy) at nine on a Friday night is not a happening place. On Saturday night, date night, the aisles are filled with young lovers, but on Friday the place had a few moms and toddlers looking for mops, some guys buying sheets of plywood, a few people pushing carts filled with power tools (and Homeland Security should really see who is buying power drills and big bags of fertilizer) and me, on my mission.

When you enter HD, you are facing the cleaning supplies. To your left is the garden center, to the right is the bulk of the beast. I turned right.

All the aisles are cleverly labeled with such helpful signs as “tools” and “nuts,” so I at least got a good chuckle there.

So I walked and walked and walked to the other end, past appliances, through paint and wallpaper, to the lumber section, in which it is possible to purchase bags of sawdust. That’s the stuff that gets swept up and thrown out at the end of a job. I assume it is there so that someone could spread it all over their floor and pretend top have been working really hard building that patio deck when they’ve actually been drinking beer and looking at their Jessica Alba calendars. (And yes, I do know why they sell sawdust. I’m no fool. They sell it to spread on the floors of Western steakhouses.) You may have noticed that I have just walked end to end without finding the doorknobs.

The first thing to do was find someone to ask. This is easier said than done because, in a store the size of a city block, there are maybe three employees. The guy at the door, someone in a red vest who always seems to be at the opposite end of the store no matter where you might be, and the guy I asked. In my defense, he looked like he knew what he was doing. He had a price gun and was carrying a ruler. But of course, the answer I got was “back there, I think.”

My first instinct was to hit him with something solid. My second instinct was to just walk away. I briefly thought about asking “back there where?” but my better judgment kicked in. I said “Phhhpt” and walked, now a little more uncomfortably, to where I believed, logically, they should be. I studied the flow of the store. I noted where the plumbing section led to the appliances and then led to the tools. After a few seconds of inspection, I said to myself “aisle twenty,” and that’s where they were. (And before you ask, no, the signage did not help at all.)

Now don’t think it was that easy. Although I was in the right aisle, I still had to hunt through all the stuff I didn’t want to find what I did. And then it was still harder because they had only four sets of knobs. Four in this whole city-sized place. And they were all dented.

Dented! Every single one of them, in every set of two, was dented. I held them all up to the light. Some were small dings, some were big holes. I picked the least dinged of them on the theory that A- I really need this to get out of my house, B- I could replace them later, and C- if I could manage to find a manager, I could complain. Now I knew that C was impossible and B wouldn’t happen because I’m lazy, but A was very compelling so I set out to find a cashier.

They actually had a cashier working, and I have to admit that this cashier was working hard. Good thing too, because she was the ONLY cashier and the line was anywhere from 8 to 45 people deep. I couldn’t really tell how many there were because they weren’t in a line, they were clustered around the cashier and complaining about how she was the only cashier and why didn’t she open another line and why didn’t she work faster and where was the manager and why was there only one cashier and where were the lawnmowers and on and on and on. Plus everyone had either a wagon filled with stuff or a flatbed filled with lumber.

I had doorknobs. So I went to the self-checkout.

Self-checkout is a scam. Part of what you pay for anything goes to pay the salary of the employees who ring you up. If I am going to ring up myself, and the store doesn’t need to pay someone to do it for me, I want a rebate. After all, the store is getting to save money by making me do the work. The same goes for when you bag yourself at the supermarket, but I make an exception there so my groceries will be bagged competently. Fast food places do the same thing when they give you the cup and you fill your own soda, but you can get over by getting refills. (But since soda is the biggest moneymaker in all of food service, this really is a hollow victory. McDonald’s, for example, pays less than ½ cent for the soda for which you paid $1.49. Soda is nearly all profit in food retail.) In general, there is a trend in retail to get the customer to do more of the work, thereby saving the company money. These savings are never passed on to you, and they are designed to make you think you are getting faster checkout, or convenience, or whatever, but in the end you still pay for services you don’t get.

But if I wanted to get out of HD before I died, or before I killed someone with a Dremel roto-tiller, I needed to leave. Self-checkout had a line slightly smaller than the regular checkout, but slightly slower, so it was a wash.

When I finally got out of HD, sometime early Saturday afternoon, I went home and put the knob on the door.

Fit like a glove.

I would like to say that I will never go to Home Depot again. I’d like to tell you that I have managed to get it out of my life. But history shows that I am doomed to forever go back again, and again. Home Depot still beckons me, like some Lovecraftian phantom, lurking on the threshold of my sanity. I pray that I have the strength to resist.

 

Good News & Bad News

The good news is that friend of the site, Ray, has posted up the first in his series of Walker Journals!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh2REBwxuvY]

Click through, subscribe, and give the man encouragement for his hard work.

The bad news is that FlashCast 02 is being delayed due to holiday-related commitments. Hopefully we’ll be able to record it after tomorrow’s Flash Pulp, but, if not, it may have to wait till Tuesday.

Flash Pulp 105 – The Murder Of Eustace Norton, and his wife, Matilda: A Mother Gran Story, Part 1 of 1

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode one hundred and five.

Flash Pulp

Tonight we present The Murder Of Eustace Norton, and his wife, Matilda: A Mother Gran Story, Part 1 of 1
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp105.mp3]Download MP3
(RSS / iTunes)

 

This week’s episodes are brought to you by Flash Pulp on iTunes.

It’s where the leprechauns store their pots of gold.

Find a link it here.

 

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight we discover the truth of a murder in the small town of Hearse.

 

Flash Pulp 105 – The Murder Of Eustace Norton, and his wife, Matilda: A Mother Gran Story, Part 1 of 1

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

 

On a damp Saturday morning, the majority of the population of Bigelow county found itself at the gravesides of Eustace and Matilda Norton.

“It’s a shame to see such an upstanding man come to such an untimely end. A murderer in our midst? It seems unthinkable,” whispered Mrs. Tupper to Mrs. Wills, hoping, as always, that some tantalizing nugget of information might drop from the Constable’s wife’s lips.

“Mayhaps it was Matilda herself who killed him?” was the best reply Mrs. Wills could make.

“Slip him a poisoned drink then turned his musket on her own person? It seems improbable. Why wouldn’t she have simply saved some of the elixir for herself? More plausible is that she discovered his body and, overwhelmed with her grief, she did herself in,” interjected Mrs. Pilfer.

“Who knows what a mental defective might do? It is well known she was a bedlamite. I certainly do not believe it beyond her to have done exactly that. Likely she poisoned the man in a fit of passion, then, realizing there was no other who might take the blame, brought her crazed hand to his weapon and ended her life.” As often happened when defending her gossip-strung theories, Buppy Tupper’s voice had crept into a volume unsuitable for a solemn event, such as a funeral.

Father Burke stifled the conversation with a targeted gaze, his practiced lips never stumbling on the conjoined eulogy.

At the furthest edge of the crowd, from beneath the rough blanket she held aloft to guard against the drizzle, Mother Gran made her single statement of the service, heard only by her grandchild, Ella.

“I cannot abide a murderer.”

* * *

Mother GranGran had been summoned to an emergency at the Norton homestead on more than one occasion, and, at times, Matilda had made her own way to the large spread of land that three generations of Gran’s family worked and shared, so it was not without familiarity of subject that Ella eavesdropped upon the conversation of the chatterers who’d gathered on The Loyalist’s veranda the following Monday.

“The Lord has no love for a suicide,” continued Buppy, the solemnity of the burial having worn away. “That woman was never right. Do you recall the afternoon, perhaps three months ago, in which she stumbled through town weeping and screeching? Covered in mud and screaming – she was a madwoman, like as not.”

The prattler nodded as Ella motioned the tea-spout towards her emptied cup.

“- and her poor husband, attempting to make what he could of her. It’s only luck that she never bore children,” replied Mrs. Madison, eager as always to support her friend’s position. “It’s a surprise he was not driven to turn the weapon on himself.”

“Oh, come now,” replied Mrs. Pilfer, “I understand it does not reflect well to speak ill of the righteous dead, but you’ll have sainted that booze-hound before long. It seems to me you were not so enthused at his character little more than two-weeks ago, when he saw fit to lay his foot to your little Putser.”

Putser, the Tupper’s beloved terrier, had had the misfortune to stray within range of Eustace’s boots as the man was exiting Hearse’s general store. He’d let out three sharp yaps, then a whining squeal.

“Every man has his moments,” said Mrs. Madison.

Buppy was quick to find a new topic upon which to expound.

* * *

Later, as her duties at the Loyalist ended and she walked home with her brother Alvin, also returning from his position of apprentice to the town’s cobbler, Mr. Tupper, Ella began to carry with her a nagging concern. She made her best effort to remain merry, and even as they supped some hours later, she took pains to hold her smile.

She could not help but notice, however, how silently Mother Gran maintained her position at the head of the table, un-joking even as little Rory was caught with his fingers amongst the biscuits for his fourth serving. It had never entered her mind to doubt her grandmother, or to ask after what business the old woman chose to engage in during the late hours, but her cryptic comment at the burial had left a rattling guilt in the girl’s mind.

As the time ticked away and the first round of good-nights were said, Ella slipped into the little backroom which her grandparents shared.

Gran sat upon the edge of her bed, and for the first time that evening, a smirk came to her face.

“You seemed too quiet at dinner,” she said.

“I was of a mind to say the same thing to you,” Ella replied. She repeated some of what she had heard earlier in the day, then, as she completed her recitation, she paused, eager for some explanation that might absolve her increasingly heavy conscience regarding the death of Mr. Norton.

Gran smiled once again, but there was no happiness in it.

“You stop short of asking the question I can hear silently echoing from your words, and I wish I could provide some answer which would lighten your heart, but, in truth, I suspect one day you may take up my role, and it is important you understand the balance of things.

“Matilda had come to me on a baker’s dozen of occasions, seven times to seek my council on birthing, and six times to seek my council on burying. I know not the number before the pair found themselves at the edges of our county, but it is telling that it was me to whom Matilda came, and not the physician, Boyle.

“On the third conception I asked her what might be occasioning her miscarriages, as if the bruising bout her torso did not make it clear enough. The monster’s hands seemed to double in fury at the sight of her rounding, she said, but nothing more. She worked hard when the sixth was imminent, strapping down her belly and servicing her drunken lout only in the dark. She overslept one morning and he saw the evidence pushing at her stomach. By the time she woke he’d drank through what gin remained in the house, and it was only my hard night’s labour with needle and herbs that kept her in our world. The babe, at a seven month count, was not so lucky. It’s departure was bloody work, and a pitiful interment.”

Gran, who Ella had never seen as anything less than stalwart, now seemed to grey and shrink with her age. She continued.

“On the seventh she ran crying when I confirmed her condition, and it nagged at me so that I felt compelled to visit her upon the following day. I knew that even Eustace would have found his way to his labour in the mine by noon, so I expected little trouble. I found the door ajar, a gin bottle open on the table, and the majority of her cranium spread along the back-wall.

“How many more lives would he end? If not Matilda, then some such as the Lindsay girl, who’ll bend for any kindly murmur. I spent the rest of the daylight picking what I needed from amongst the surrounding foliage.

“By the time of Eustace’s return, I’d laid out the tableau. The door was fully open, despite the chill, and a single of Matilda’s shoes was laid askance on the lip of the porch. Upon a rock, along, but some ways away from, his path to the door, I set the remainder of the gin, having topped it up with my own concoction. I myself awaited behind a tree near the spirits.

“If his concern had outweighed his thirst, he might still be alive.”

Ella nodded, and, after a moment, set herself down on the bed, wrapping her arms around the old woman.

 

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

Go Download Yourself

Deep Thought
The problem I have with the futurist idea of downloading your brain into a computer is the same problem Dr. McCoy had with using transporters on Star Trek.

His complaint was simple: despite the fact that a version of you pops out at the far end, the process dictates that the current you is destroyed, a blue print of your former body is sent to some distant point, then a new you is assembled.

Despite my great love for technology, and the possibilities it will be presenting us in the next hundred years, I do not believe the process of dumping your brain into a computer is ever going to catch on as anything more than a disturbingly precise last will and testament, or possibly as some sort of wisdom dispensing novelty that will drive Japanese ancestor worship into the stratosphere.
The Tron Laser
Imagine:

You’re sitting in a chair, an over-sized helmet held in place via a black chin strap, a tingling at your scalp. The process has taken three hours, but finally the technician who helped you into the rig comes back into the room and brightens the lighting.

“All done,” she says.

“That’s it?” you ask.

“That’s it,” she replies.

So you walk out, exiting the office with an awkward wave to the receptionist. Sure, there’s another you somewhere, a digital-you that may continue on for thousands of years with a little luck and a decent back up routine, but you’ve still got to get your left leg to stop being asleep after sitting so long in an awkward position, and there’s the drive home to consider.

You’ll never be that machine, and you’ll likely never think of it as anything more than an offshoot of yourself, a child that might have some sort of immortal superiority complex.Master Controller From Tron

An Odd Question

Dancers for Empire Of The Sun as photographed by B. MayerI was listening to a podcast the other day, and the host and his cohorts were discussing swimming with dolphins. The idea was presented that a lady pregnant with twins shouldn’t be allowed in the pool, as the animals will become confused by the dual-babies and attack the woman and her unborn.

Is this just an urban legend thats grown up around the insurance hazards of letting a pregnant person do something strenuous?

Google hasn’t provided an answer, and I’d be interested to hear if anyone has heard this before/might be able to shed some light on the situation.

Siberian Chicken Counting, Pre-Hatching

In July of 1580, the Russian Tsar, feeling his backyard wasn’t large enough, decided to conquer Siberia. At the time, the territory was largely populated by a number of loosely-connected tribes under the taxation of Küçüm Khan. To retaliate at the intrusion, the Khan decided to force Islamic rule upon his people, and raised armies of Tartars to beat back the invasion.
[From Wikipedia] Laminar armour from hardened leather enforced by wood and bones worn by native siberians and Eskimo
The problem, however, was a fellow named Yermak. Nominally an explorer, he was much of the Spanish school of discovery which required any freshly encountered people to be hit with something heavy or sharp. His journeys went well, for him, and his expeditionary force of Cossacks and slaves quickly subdued everyone they happened upon.

The Tsar was quite pleased, and sent more men to help put down anyone who wasn’t fond of the new map. Everyone but the Khan was sure that Yermak had sealed Siberia’s fate, and it was just a matter of time before the last bits of resistance were stamped out. To reward the “explorer”, the Russian leader also gifted him a fine set of chain mail armour, an item that would make Yermak practically invincible to the weapons of the remaining Tartars.
Yushman Amour
It may have been the ease of his success, and the knowledge of his relative invincibility, that lead Yermak to folly.

From the wikipedia:

Küçüm Khan retreated into the steppes and over the next few years regrouped his forces. He suddenly attacked Yermak on August 6, 1584 in the dead of night and killed most of his army.

Now, to be fair, the army referenced in this snippet was just a portion of the total force that Yermak had spread over the Siberian countryside, and if he’d managed to survive the confrontation, he would have likely been able to rebound.

Unfortunately, for him, he did not.

Again, from the wikipedia

[…] Yermak was wounded and tried to escape by swimming across the Wagay river […] but drowned under the weight of his own chainmail.

Flash Pulp 104 – Hero, Part 1 of 1

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode one hundred and four.

Flash Pulp

Tonight we present Hero, Part 1 of 1
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp104.mp3]Download MP3
(RSS / iTunes)

 

This week’s episodes are brought to you by Flash Pulp on iTunes.

– because we love you.

Find a link it here.

 

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight we encounter a woman with incredible power, a true hero of her age.

 

Flash Pulp 104 – Hero, Part 1 of 1

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

 

At 2:13 on a warm Thursday morning, her eyes full of fury and her lips smiling, Catherine “Cat” Finch was victorious. The breeze from the open window rustled her long coat.

She was a hero, but better yet, she had had her revenge.

At the age of thirteen she’d seemed destined for greatness in an Olympic-level career in gymnastics. It was at a competition in Guadalajara, Mexico when her father – her coach – got the call. The judging was still under way as, weeping, the pair had booked and boarded a return flight to Texas.

That day, as their jet broke through the clouds which had smothered their few moments of tourism, she swore she would one day slay her mother’s killer.

Her time at the gym did not wane, but thereafter the fire she’d shown for her routines came through in her schoolwork as well. If she wasn’t training, she was reading. Her father began to worry over her drive, but could little complain when she was accepted into university under an academic scholarship, and not for athletics as he’d expected.

She made two and only two friends while away for her schooling: a librarian, and a personal trainer.

Despite her eagerness to begin the hunt immediately, it was obvious once away from campus that she would need to begin with lesser efforts, to prepare herself for the confrontation that now defined her life.

She dreamed of the day of her triumph, both while sleeping and awake. Sometimes she was jubilant, sometimes the thought of the moment left her in tears.

It took decades; years in which her reputation became legend.

The final effort required a team of specialists brought in especially for the job, and no little investment in equipment.

Still, she stood alone in the end, abandoned by her fatigued comrades.

In the darkened room, now silent, she was glad to be able to enjoy the victory unaccompanied.

The vaccine wouldn’t save her Mom now, but it could have then – and it would save thousands of those still alive.

Her fist tightening on the results sheet till it crumpled, she laughed.

 

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.