Travels: Boise, Idaho (The Trip Out)

On April 7, 2009, RJP4 and I flew out to Boise, Idaho to visit our friend (and former occasional guest DJ), Stone. RJP4 is moving out here, and I am thinking about doing the same if my all my shit goes pear-shaped. Which, you know, is what is happening. Anyway, I decided to detail our exploits on this here web log for your singing and dancing pleasure. I will try to withhold anything that might result in either RJP4 or myself being arrested and killed by stoning. Which is what they do here.

On Tuesday the seventh we left the Wilkes Barre/Scranton airport at 6:09 pm on the smallest jet possible. "This feels like a bus," I said to RJP4. "No," he said. "Buses are larger." This is why I hate flying out of the local airport. The closest thing we have to an actual commercial airliner is a World War I era biplane flown by an old man in scarf and goggles. It is unsettling to be able to look out the window of a plane and be eye to eye with a man standing on the runway. Once they cleared away the goats from the runway by means of blowing the great horn we were able to take off. It was roughly an hour and a half out to Chicago, and RJP4 and I were seated behind a baby who screamed as if in a meat grinder.

Chicago's O'Hare airport is the size of a small city and is a surreal place to say the least. We had to go to concourse C from concourse F--and you can take a shuttle, but RJP4 has feelings about such things. We decided to take the long walk through the strange--passing on our way the skeleton of a brachiosaurus, and riding one of those movable walkways in a tunnel with blinking neon tubes on the ceiling. "O'Hare is a massive robot," I said, "and we are riding though it's horrible brain." RJP4 was unfazed by our surroundings, quite like the semi-sinister Willy Wonka in the tunnel of terror--I was almost expecting to turn to me and start jabbering disturbing poetry about being lost in the belly of a great phosphorescent whale. This is the airport in Chicago.

Our plane out of Chicago was a proper one, thankfully. But our seats were taken by a family with several screaming children. They were largely unapologetic, so RJP4 and I scrounged seats behind them against the wall of the bathroom. During the flight the children were yelling and walking around while the flight attendants were trying to tell the parents "UH YOU CANNOT HAVE THE CHILDREN ROAM AS FREE AS CHICKENS" and "UH YOUR SON AND/OR DAUGHTER HAS CLIMBED OUT ON THE WING PLEASE RETRIEVE." I assume the family was Mormon for the following reasons: first, they were as blond and blue-eyed as the American Jesus. Second, at one point the father told a bedtime story to his daughter about space aliens with large families who don't like black people. Either way, like many observational comedians, we consistently sat behind ill-behaved, screamy children. And, in one case, creepy Mormon children.

Once we landed at Boise we were picked up by Stone and his friend Veronica. On the way we picked up another of Stone's friends and went to a bar in downtown Boise called Mulligan's. It was odd to be downtown at night. I grew up in a place where those who trespass upon the night were practically gauranteed to be, at the very least, raped. We sat at tables outside, and the worst thing that happened was that a drunk woman came by and asked for a drink of Stone's beer. He obliged and she thanked him and continued on her way. No one was raped.

But that is not to say that Mulligan's is the best place to take someone on their first Boise experience. While the bartenders and bouncers are nearly suspiciously nice, the clientelle is composed of a strange demographic which I have termed "metal hipsters." They look like hipsters but with more tattoos and worse taste in music. They have long hair and scraggly beards and look like they will stab you to take the pins from your backpack. RJP4 and I played pool until about 2 AM. I am very bad at the game, and RJP4 was drunk, so it turned into an hour or so of flailing and cursing and shame being brought upon our families.

After last call we got a ride home to Stone's house. I went to bed assuming that Boise was composed entirely of vaguely threatening ponytailed twenty-somethings that view skateboarding as a legitimate and age-appropriate mode of transportation.

Next time on SQR: Day One of Boise, wherein our hero discovers that Mulligan's is a dive that caters to what passes for assholes in Boise--and that the city itself is actually quite nice indeed.

Stay tuned!

Nasa is full of shit

It has been awhile since I ventured into the blogosphere, but I've returned and well equipped to deal with fat acne scared folk who haunt this realm looking for innocent and helpless people to "pwn." Don't fret, I have not returned solely to fight the tyrannical uber nerds, but to also deliver you a good heaping pile of funnies from the fourth grade.

This past week my class took a test on the solar system. This was a basic test asking for information on all eight planets, and Pluto who is now treated like an unwelcome step child at dinner after making a comment about the "zoo noises" mommy was making last night. The students were given a study guide that was filled in over the course of the week with a final review by the classroom teacher where they were all given the correct answers. All the students had ample time to study, but a few students went the extra mile and did some historic and scientific re-visioning for us. Here is a list of the new facts I learned today:

1. All the inner planets are not in fact made of rock, but made of Ice and dust. (I knew global warming was a conspiracy made up by the liberals.)

2. The outer planets are giant snowballs, not gas. (God does love giant snow cones...)

3. Saturn's rings are not made of ice, rocks and dust. What are they made up of then? The truth, fire.

4. The first person to walk on the moon was actually Arnold Schwarzenegger, not that phony Neil Armstrong.

According to the logic used to to arrive at the last fact I can only assume it will soon be revealed that it was Will Smith who first flew across the Atlantic. And when he landed in Paris he promptly punched the mayor in the face, stood over him and said, "Welcome to Earth."

More reasons I hate my job.

1) Thanks to this here recession we got goin' on my hours have been cut to the point of having one day of work a week. Sometimes I have a full 8 hour shift, sometimes not. One week I was only scheduled to work four hours. Somehow this hasn't stopped me from hemorrhaging money like I have the Dollars-Tuberculosis. I cough demurely into a white handkerchief and look anxiously as dimes fall from it.

2) At my one day of work this week I heard two teenage girls discussing me.
Girl 1: Doesn't he look like [inaudible]?
Girl 2: Yeah. Maybe the hobbit version.
[Assorted giggles.]
I briefly imagined myself flagging them down and saying, "Hey, I don't come to where you work and tell you that you are too fat and pock-marked to work the pole while holding back tears of shame and thinking about your step-dad." But I would never do that. Bible says that would be wrong.

3) I had to alert the general manager to a teenage boy walking around the store with a gigantic inflatable cartoon penis.

4) That same night the store was visited by a living, breathing, cautionary tale against drinking while pregnant. This was the clearest and most obvious case of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome the world has ever seen. Eyes spread about seven meters apart, the classic "elfin" features, and, of course, the full house of behavioral problems. He yelled, he screamed, he demanded people help him find horror books even when we were engaged with other customers. When someone finally did free up to help him he was incomprehensible. His sister-mother had the same features and yelling issues. Clearly we were dealing with a multi-generational illness. In the end, she bought him the uncut version of the original Friday the 13th. I should receive a promotion for not immediately demanding to know why the mother hated the world so much as to use her genitals as a weapon against us all.
After they had left the store I went to the horror fiction section to see the damage left in their wake. The child had somehow knocked down a bookshelf. That took me a while to fix. I then went to the horror film section--only to find more of a mess and several empty DVD cases.
"Why didn't your fat ass get an abortion?" Imaginary Jackson asks.
"Because Bible says that would be wrong," says hillbilly woman, as she and her mongoloid son steal DVDs and cut in line in the public sphere. Wrong indeed, you horrible inbred deep-woods nightmare--now stop your walking talking miscarraige from biting me.

And with that my hate catharsis is complete. I will now resume rubbing my cat's belly and telling him what a handsome fellow he is.

Handsome devil.

A Christmas Message from your Uncle Jackson

Merry Christmas, you little scamps! May you and yours have a lovely time worshiping, ignoring, or denying the existence of the deity or deities of your choice. Personally, my family and I spend the holidays remembering that thousands of years ago a child was born who would grow up to be tortured to death to save us all from some kind of especially nasty metaphysical pigwidget. We do this by giving each other scarves and eating cookies, and occasionally going to a movie none of us really want to see. This is called Catholicism, and it is weird. No one really gets it the first go-round, but fortunately we have an eternity of either damnation or stagnation to think about it after the fact. I subscribe to a service called agnosticism, which means I rightly don't give a shit about the large-bearded-man-in-the-sky and would rather watch disturbing and violent pornography anyway.

As most of you are aware, our friend and colleague Tyler hiked up his grumpy pants recently and clattered out a special Christmas tirade railing against nearly everyone. I would like to take this moment here to let our readers know that Sports Quiz Radio covers all kinds of political ideas--and while Tyler more often represents the Center-With-Mild-Right-Flavorings, I want to assure you that I am here to represent the far left with positions such as mandatory man-marriages and beating unwanted babies to death with socks full of nickel rolls. And, while we're outing our habits, I voted for Barack Obama, may peace be upon him. And I also must agree with Tyler that my fellow supporters of Obama tended to be more annoying. But that's mostly because I hate hipsters in general and that Venn diagram had a hell of a lot of overlap. Just like "McCain Supporters" and "People Who Cannot Read."

But this post is not about politics. It is about Christmas--which is a completely a-political time of year. This year my scattered immediate family collected in Scranton and drove down to my grandmother's house in New Jersey. Somehow my father had procured an audio copy of the only mystery ever written by Abraham Lincoln, and we listened to it on the way there. It was disturbingly awful. It was based on a case in which Lincoln was the defense attorney, and it shows that Lincoln was actually quite bad at his job. His clients managed to get off mostly on sheer luck, and he was never able to offer an explanation of whatever happened--even for the fictionalized story. Most mysteries have some kind of ending, perhaps in which the strangeness of the whole story (the "mystery") gets unraveled and explained (the "solution"). But Lincoln ended his story with what was basically "Well that was all quite a strange occurrence, wasn't it? Too bad we never figured out what the hell happened there. Might have made a good story." Perhaps one day he took off his lawyer-ing hat and put down his mystery writer-ing pen and said to his beastly wife, "Mary, I can't write worth a shit and I'm the worst lawyer in the world, so I might as well give up now and become the President of the United States and free an entire race of people from centuries of institutionalized inhumanity." It is unsettling to see an amazing specimen of human capacity fail spectacularly at something. It was like watching Thomas Jefferson inadvertently fly a hot air balloon directly into the waiting jaws of a crocodile, all the while screaming incoherently and helplessly. Or like watching To Kill a Mockingbird with all the reverent children and black people edited out. Or it's like neither of those things, because they are silly.

Remember, kids, on this most holiest of days, that even a middle-aged Jew with good prospects can fuck it all up.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Scranton Stories

I have a shameful confession to make: I was born, raised, and currently live in Scranton, Pennsylvania. That's correct. That strange, nearly mythical, dying city in the Northeast is my home. Much has been made of Scranton recently, what with the popularity of The Office and Joe Biden's status as the Vice President elect--but even before this, Scranton was consistently in the national dialogue.

Granted. this city's mention is usually as the butt of a joke (e.g. Home Alone, My Father the Hero, and numerous Saturday Night Live appearances), but it is still strange that such an unimportant and largely inoffensive place should warrant such repeated reference. It's almost as if there is some strange fascination with Scranton--even though most Americans have never (nor will ever) grace our exceedingly humble shores.

I feel it is warranted, then, to not only jump on the Scranton bandwagon but to add a little clarity about this place. I will admit that, at times, Scranton can be used as proof that if God were to vomit on a mountain it would roll downhill and sprout semi-habitable buildings--but there are other times when Scranton can actually be a very nice place.

But, for the most part, the stories I will tell will be embarrassing and indicative of a serious corruption of the local gene pool. Fortunately, my parents are from Jersey.

Stay tuned.

P.S. Disregard the entire image of God vomiting, etc. The architecture here (the old architecture, at least) is actually one of the plusses.

P.P.S. Disregard the previous. The new buildings more than destroy any advantage the old buildings would have given us. The "new" high school alone--which resembles the hideous result of Dr. Seuss having violent sex with a federal prison--is enough to turn our architectural heritage into some kind of half-assed post-post-modern nightmare.