Phutatorius

It has come to my attention that Webbers who type the query "axe-wielding & xanthan gum" into search engines will get no results. Well, consider that deficiency corrected!

Loyal readers — you need suffer with the Internet's inadequacies no longer. Forward to me your no-yield search engine queries, and I'll see that these loopholes are closed.

Phutatorius will bear this cross, because he so loves you all.

The wife and I are back home after another weekend trip to Northern Virginia. I know I promised to post the name of that choleric woman at the check-in counter, but — alas! — she was off-duty again. It is clear to me now that the counter lady is scared to death of this weblog and running. Because she has ready access to the database of ticketholders, she can make regular queries about the upcoming flight dates of one Phutatorius, and she calls in sick on those days. Well, shame on you, brown haired D.C. National Airport US Airways Shuttle Check-In Counter Woman. Shame on you, indeed — I had regarded you as a worthier adversary than this. I had never known you to run from a fight or shrink from a confrontation before now.

In other news, airport security held up my wife for twenty minutes after her Birkenstocks tested positive for explosives. She was asked, as the searchers commenced a second run-through of her carry-on bags, if she had "walked on grass lately." Apparently shoes can pick up trace amounts of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that the government recognizes — and appropriately so, after Oklahoma City — as bomb-making material. And indeed she had been gamboling playfully across her father's yard earlier that day — well, carrying luggage to the street, anyway — so there you have it. Case closed. Now if you'll just give us your name, address, phone number, occupation, and place of business for our files, we'll let you go. The wife did surrender that information and ultimately fared quite a bit better than the gentleman next to her, in whose possession Security had found two .22 slugs. Last we saw of him he was seated in a chair, trying to explain to the gathering swarm of TSA infantry, supervisors, and state police that he'd spent the afternoon at a shooting range.

Now I know I don't need to tell you to trash your unspent ammo before you get to the airport. But here's a word of parting advice from your Phutatorius:

If you have any future plans to board a commercial airliner, you would do well to keep your feet on good old fashioned all-American asphalt in the meantime. And if you work for Chem-Lawn, you can forget it.

So my verdict on the Sex Pistols (four days late) was that they were lousy. Not that I had any conceptual objections — I saw them in '96 and came away largely impressed — I think it was just a failure of execution. To be still more specific, I have no beef with Steve, Glenn, and Paul; they played competently and seemed to be enjoying themselves.

But Johnny, of course, has always been the face of this band (even as Sid was taking the beloved "troubled rocker" cliche to new depths), and it seems that with every passing day he lapses further into self-caricature. Last Wednesday he took the stage in a sleeveless T-shirt and Capri pants; I couldn't shake the impression that he was trying to look, act, sing, and dance like a surfer. The between-song banter seemed to have three components: (1) slagging off the Ramones, (2) saying the word "fuck" a lot, and (3) insisting that "we are the originals — the real thing" (see entry (1)). These gestures elicited considerable applause from the starstruck audience, quite a few of whom were adolescent punks who had dreamed of this day since they first mounted a skateboard. I recycled in my mind all the critical literature that endows this band with an almost mythical confrontational aesthetic, wondered if the legend was purely the construct of similarly undiscriminating fans.

Even the political rhetoric was largely ham-handed; "Is this BIG BUSH COUNTRY?" Johnny sneered. I'm going to have to believe, John, that Malcolm MacLaren was the creative force behind your band, if that's the best you can muster these days.

As for the music, "Sub-Mission" and "New York," surprisingly, were the prime cuts. Either because he was old and winded (probably the case) or because he just doesn't care (as he would like you to think), Johnny didn't sing more than 70% of the lyrics in the band's 70-minute set. "Holidays in the Sun" suffered in particular from these elisions — I like to think his frenetic and repetitive rant on the studio recording about going over the Berlin Wall best captured the band's live intensity, but I didn't hear any of it on Wednesday night. "Belsen Was a Gas" was an interesting inclusion: might have been more interesting if Johnny had sung more than the first verse of it. "I Wanna Be Me" and "(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone," while sorely missed, I can play at home on my stereo. All in all, it's an ironic condition to prefer your Sex Pistols recordings to "the real thing." But it is, after all, 2003.

Truer props go to the Dropkick Murphys, who are worth the price of admission, if you can stomach the idea that most of the money is buying Rotten's beach house in Ibiza. Of course, they are likely at the top of their game here in their hometown. They probably won't open shows with the rousing "For Boston" in other cities, and you won't hear anthems to the Bruins or covers of "Dirty Water." That said, you don't often see a man with a ten-inch mohawk playing a tin whistle. The front man seems to think he's Henry Rollins — he's forever got one foot on his monitor and bulging his neck muscles — but if you can get past that, you're in for a great show. All sorts of revolution and union solidarity songs with working class sentiment and Irish Republican themes: because I'm an idiot, I keep wearing orange to Murphys shows, and I did again on Wednesday. "Forever," "The Gauntlet," and "The Rocky Road to Dublin" stand out in my mind as highlights. The dude with the pompadour on guitar moves like he's in the Clash. This band has a great grassroots fan base and deserves to blow up nationally, so check 'em out.

I suppose this concert came at an opportune time, as my nine- and seven-year old Pistols T-shirts have all but dissolved on my body, and I needed to buy myself a replacement. But next time I'll probably just mail-order one. Anyone remember Burning Airlines?

Roy Moore, the gleefully embattled Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, is now faulting the federal court system for "threatening to drain huge amounts of public funds from the state of Alabama" in pursuing his case. Of course, he started the whole controversy in the first place (when he smuggled a monument to the Ten Commandments into the courthouse lobby in the dead of night, knowing full well that such gestures violate well-settled federal law concerning state entanglements with religion) and has dragged the case out with his own stubborn commitment to martyrdom (as he continues to flout federal and now state court orders to remove it).

There is talk now about building a partition around the Ten Commandments monument. That way Roy Moore can know it is there, but our Constitution will be unable to see it. No doubt this solution pays oblique homage to another of our Christian Constitution-wreckers, Attorney General John Ashcroft, who concerned himself so nonsequiturishly last year with covering the exposed nipples of DOJ statuary. But as Mr. Ashcroft well knows by now, you can cover something up, but it won't go away. I like to think the Nipple of the Spirit of Justice talks to him as he strides out to his podium now and again for press briefings:

I'm still here, John. You can't see me, and you cannot escape my watch. I am everywhere, and I am all-powerful.

Sex Pistols/Dropkick Murphys concert review is coming, as I labor salmonlike through a steady current of ridiculous news stories toward a spawning ground of irrelevant subjects. In the meantime, content yourself with this article about a Baghdad benefit concert. Whatever.

Someone should spell out the logic to Ann Coulter and her creepy fan base: young + blonde + attractive can, under certain conditions, make a person hateful. But young + blonde + hateful does not make a person attractive.

CNN reports that police are interviewing over 100 suspects in the Charleston area sniper killings. Given that all they have to go on is a "dark pickup truck" driven by a gun-toting madman in West Virginia, I have to ask:

Only 100 suspects?

Even money says Jay Leno makes that same joke in tonight's monologue (not that I'll be awake). Who's betting?

If you want to see what happened to all the alt-rock kids from high school after they turned thirty and got jobs, be sure to check out Liz Phair before she vanishes for another ten years. At her Boston show last night she revealed herself to be more of a songwriter than a performer — at times she looked scared to be out there — but the set list was rich with tracks from Exile in Guyville (the frat-boy in front of me raised his beer in the air and howled whenever she sang something dirty), and though she mixed in the new material in tiny, acceptable amounts, she steered clear of that fatal, exodus-inducing announcement so often given by the aging rocker on summer tour: "I'd like to play a few songs now off my new album."

The rumor around home (which has the support of the authoritative Allmusic.com) is that the glam-rocker guy with the pointy boots and eye liner from my high school hooked up with her and played on one of her albums. Unwilling to accept that the rock 'n' roll life was available to regular kids from Howland High, I waited anxiously until the end of the set for her to introduce the band, and I was relieved when she did not mention his name. Don't get me wrong — I don't wish ill on the guy. It's just that my four-minute career as a rock drummer began and ended in a law school dormitory with an extended cover of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" (simple and slow). The neighbors interrupted our third go-round to complain that they couldn't study.

I wish I could say there was a fight that day, that the police were called, that in the ensuing car chase I drove my car, Keith Moon-style, into the public pool on Magazine Beach. But none of this happened. Our band dissolved a week or two later. Three of us (the bass player, guitarist, and lead vocalist, who never did have a microphone) have since become lawyers. The fourth, of course, is your Phutatorius, who has tickets to see the Sex Pistols — recently released from their climate-controlled storage unit for the Queen's 50th Jubilee! — on Wednesday night.

I'm running scared these days from my new dentist, who, while a skilled professional and stand-up guy, seems to err too often on the side of drilling with his cavity designations. Upon first peering into the Phutatorian orifice last year he found ten: it took two subsequent appointments to fill them all, and my neck muscles still aren't strong enough to support the additional weight of the porcelain.

My ten-cavity case has since become the subject of cautionary tales to other patients. Several months ago the wife was in for a check-up; while on the Rack she confessed a predilection for Diet Coke to Dr. Deahl's hygienist, a masterful Inquisitor and ruthless identifier of bad habits. "You know," said the hygienist, moving in for the kill, "we had a patient in here recently who drinks a lot of Diet Coke, and we had to give him ten fillings." The wife then had to reveal that she shares a bed — and a refrigerator loaded with soft drinks — with this very same Patient of Legend. A short period of awkwardness ensued, after which the hygienist excused herself to review some x-rays. It's possible that some compensation is due for the stories told about me in my dentist's office. If ASCAP can make him pay for the mood music, I'm certainly entitled to a reasonable royalty. My lawyers will be in touch, Doctor.

That same hygienist assured me during my last visit that severe temporomandibular consequences would ensue if I continued to allow my jaw joint to crack as it does, with surprising violence, every time I open my mouth. She gave the warning as though there were something I could do about it. But alas! that bone-jarring jaw-crack — known to set off the motion-sensor lights in our back parking lot — is just one more signature quirk of that appointment-dodging physiological marvel, your loyal correspondent,

Phutatorius.

My sources report to me that the HMS Phutatorius has sprung its first link. An anonymous and irresponsible camerado has taken my cue to start his own blog.

He's a good man with many talents — he can heal you with his eyes, for one — and we blogging types need to stand tall and promote one another. The Bloomsbury and punk rock movements were born of similar alliances.

So go, determined reader, and seek out the footprints of Genius at "Web-Log." As our man has left no address to which you might write him encouragement, close your eyes and will him the time and ambition to keep posting.

The great and wise Ur-Blogger Pat Benatar has declared it: We are strong — No one can tell us we're wrong. Blog is a battlefield. So let's paint ourselves blue with Berserker paste and cry FREEDOM.

Well, it finally happened. A few weeks ago the wife and I caved and bought an air conditioner for the bedroom. Our holdout was noble — for years I had regarded this step as yet another fabric softener-esque concession to what Caesar would call "the effeminating powers of civilization" — but a second consecutive brutal Fourth of July weekend ensured that we would relent.

Lodged somewhere in my subconscious was, apparently, a need to earn my reprieve from the oppressive heat and humidity that so many of my ancestors weathered without the aid of a Kenmore 5,700 BTU window unit (though Caesar, the hypocrite, probably had a captured Gallic concubine to fan him). So I hacked myself to bits while installing ours. The streetward exhaust grill of this particular model is comprised of hundreds, possibly thousand of metal slats, vertically arranged and razor-sharp. At one point during installation, before we managed to screw it down into the window frame, the air conditioner teetered on the sill, threatening to heave itself out into the driveway. I threw my arm around the back of the unit to cradle it, slashed my fingers open on the grill, leaving twenty or more deep parallel lacerations down the index, third, and fourth fingertips of my left hand. Justice! my subconscious might have declared — a karmic down payment. As I tested the absorbency of Bounty paper towels on my blood-spigot fingers, my Yosemite Sam swears drowned these observations out.

Earlier that day I had been pontificating at work about new laws requiring convicted felons to surrender DNA samples to law enforcement. I thought it gave the authorities too much of an advantage in identifying criminals, with the result that true-crime book and film genres, with all their reliance on whodunit intrigue, would ultimately forfeit much of their appeal for lack of plausible suspense. A co-worker suggested that police have been taking fingerprints for years, and that practice had only enriched crime narratives. Ah! I declared, but determined criminals can burn off their fingerprints to escape future detection. I noted parenthetically that I was sure I had seen that at least once in a movie (was it Face Off?). For my part, I argued, I would burn off my own fingerprints that very day (and I don’t even have any extralegal aspirations) if I could be assured that it wouldn’t hurt.

Needless to say, eyebrows were raised in the workplace the next morning when I arrived with Band-Aids lashed around the ends of three fingers. Phutatorius had some 'splainin' to do that day — yes, indeedy. As I type these words tonight, the cuts have healed and the striations on my fingertips have all but disappeared, but I'm still searching the Internet for a class action settlement notice covering “all persons injured by an unreasonably dangerous Kenmore air conditioner exhaust grating.” Keep your eyes open, readers, and send me links if you find them.

Status report, August 13, 2003: Just as I feared, my wife and I now spend all our at-home hours locked in the bedroom, our 15- x 20-foot refuge from the chicken-soup atmosphere parked outside the door. Entering our enclave of conditioned air is like ingesting a York Peppermint Patty without taking on the calories. It’s glorious, a great leap forward for the apartment, but the technology is insidious and seductive: the TV, our second-newest appliance, sits alone and unattended in our sweltering living room. We haven’t watched it in weeks.

Nowhere in the painstakingly compiled government manuals on the subject have I seen it written that jackhammers operate best or most safely at the butt-crack of dawn. But the City of Cambridge appears committed to proceeding on that intuition, and the sounds of exploding street dug into my skull at exactly 7:15 a.m. today.

Down the road in Allston, Volkswagen mechanics would spend most of the morning plotting my demise (i.e., piecing together a labor-and-parts estimate to set right the car they "fixed" last week). Approximately fourteen seconds after I approved the work, they called back to report that the car is ready -- they are apparently growing ever defter at the "Arthur Fonzarelli" approach to car repair, which entails little more than a gentle but authoritative bump of the chassis with an elbow. That'll be $760, please.

Here at work I read about bomb threats to the building (delivered with the now de rigeur white-powder attention grabber) and try to process assurances on the internal website that

THE SYSTEM IS WORKING NORMALLY TODAY.

I guess I'll be taking my beginning-of-week issues to the Help Desk now.

Contained in this post are excerpts from a letter I was compelled to write recently in order to obtain a rebate for disposable contact lenses. For now I will spare you the letter's last two paragraphs and their abstract theorizing about modernity and customer service — I leave those observations instead for some twenty-second century archivist to edit for inclusion in the Epistulae Phutatorii — as I think the story is best told without commentary:


Mary ********
Gage Marketing Services
ACUVUE $30 Rebate Offer
P.O. Box 9900 Dept. 386-011
Maple Plain, MN 55592

Re: ACUVUE rebate.


Dear Ms. ********:

I am in receipt of your letter notifying me that I “did not include the correct proof(s) of purchase required for this promotion.” The materials and instructions I read asked that I provide four “box tops.”

In my experience, a “box top” is that portion of a box that one raises to open the box. Based on that experience I sent you the slim tabs clipped from four boxes of my contact lenses. Those tabs are raised to open the box. Perhaps I was mistaken in what “box tops” was supposed to mean, as it was not adequately explained. . . . I therefore now enclose the boxes in their entirety, on the presumption that some portion of each whole box must by definition be passable as a “box top.”

* * *

Please do not hesitate to alert me to future irregularities in my submission. I await as ever your watermarked reply.

Sincerely,

[Phutatorius]

It appears from my default-loading Apple/Netscape home page that teen riot grrrrl and controversy-in-her-own-mind Avril Lavigne has released a Net-only EP, defiantly entitled "Avril Live: Try To Shut Me Up."

Fine, Ms. Lavigne, if you insist . . . but would you mind having a parent or guardian sign this waiver form before we get started? Yes, yes, fine — run it by your lawyer, please do.

That's all I've got today. It's not the heat — it's the humidity.

This is recycled material from before I had a pretend audience, but I have an ongoing feud with a friend who thinks an economically-determined world is a right and just world. Here's an example of argument by induction as to why it isn't (and in support of the theory that all my thoughts are cued in transit):

It was New Year's Eve, and I was standing at a urinal in a Service Area on I-90 East — a routine bathroom break on the way home to Boston. Kicking around in my consciousness — amid visions of decomposing sugar plums — was a news report I had read, describing how the nation was woefully unprepared to detect the presence of rogue nuclear devices in urban areas. I stepped away from the urinal, and it flushed automatically.

At that very instant it occurred to me to question the distribution of intellectual resources in the American economy. Millions of us who live and work in cities do so labor under a significant and growing threat of immediate vaporization — or worse, long, slow death by radiation poisoning — and a not insignificant portion of the engineers whose combined acumen could save us are instead devoting their time, energies, and genius to ensuring that we don't have to touch any of the facilities in a public restroom.

I looked briefly on the Internet into the phenomenon of automatic flush valves ("AFVs"). AFVs are available in "exposed," "concealed," and "retro-fit" varieties. The valves average $280 a pop and offer only ho-hum features. Contrariwise, a company called Sensor touts a "revolutionary" "motor-driven" EZ-Flush Kit — you can change the batteries without turning off the water! Posted on a message board at Dr. Spock's website under the subject line "automatic-flush toilets scare my kids. but found a solution" is an enthusiastic endorsement of the "Flush Stopper" (available — where else? — at www.flush-stopper.com), a device parents can carry into public restrooms with their small children. Once affixed to the wall behind the toilet, the Flush Stopper covers the sensor while the child does his business; no more will the shadow of a premature flushing darken your child's road-potty training. Indeed, the site's web header reads "Stop Public Restroom Fear BEFORE It Begins."

Would it be too much to ask the government to conscript the innovative minds and skilled craftsmen who conceived, developed, and marketed EZ-Flush and Flush-Stopper to serve their nation on a Save Manhattan Project? There has to be some carryover technology we can use to defeat the terror threat.

Of course, I'm oversimplifying things — any economist or well-indoctrinated investment banker could explain to me (in probably fewer than 100,000 words) how the existing allocation of engineering resources reflects with mechanical precision the relationship between supply and demand. But all of that is lost on me. The renowned "invisible hand" that distributes scarce resources according to demand is flushing toilets for day travelers in Oneida, New York. And I want to know why.

Overheard while I was talking myself through an overnight delay at Reagan National Airport:
"An airport without irony isn't an airport. It's just a place where all the planes fly out on time." The wife doesn't appreciate my wit in such situations, so I'm looking elsewhere for validation.

The lady with the shoulder-length hair and caked-on makeup at the DCA US Airways Shuttle Check-In Counter could well be the surliest person ever to take up the mantle of "Customer Care Professional." I've gone to war with at least five employees at that counter over the past two years, but she almost came over the counter — unprovoked, I might add — at my even-keeled wife. Whew! I had the 'blog in mind and was hoping to get her name this morning so I could enrich this posting with proper nouns. But — alas! — she doesn't work Mondays (too much risk of combustion there, I suppose, with all of us who would "shoot the whole day down"), so I'll have to wait three more weeks before this semi-public shaming tribunal proceeds in full force through this first case on its docket. But hold me to it, blessed readers — or in my nerves and haste I'll forget to scrutinize her lapel tag.

Incidentally, the First Circuit Court of Appeals (that's MA, ME, NH, and PR) appears to be evenly divided on whether the government can force you to take off your clothes for no good reason. So next time you're in New England, moon a cop, and when he asks what you're up to, tell him you're just "assuming the position."