Phutatorius

Any momentum I had going to work today was dissipated when a gigantic minivan and a police car — with flashers on — blocked my passage out of the parking lot. I arrived during that stage in the ticketing process when the policeman goes back in his car to nap for several hours with the impugned driver's license and registration in his pocket.

As there was no apparent transaction in progress between the drivers of the two cars in my way, each of whom seemed to be in his own world, I had no idea what was going on and how long it would take before my path would clear. So I decided to take charge. I pulled the car out and crept up toward the curb until my front bumper was almost flush against the police car. The hope here was to make eye contact with the cop and thereby clue him in to my predicament. No dice. The only eye contact he was making was with the inside of his lids.

I thought about honking for his attention — with no one behind him, he was in a position to back up the cruiser and facilitate my escape — but ultimately decided against it. I am, after all, a Midwesterner, and it is my policy not to honk my horn unless (1) I am having a stroke, or (2) the Indians have just won the World Series (here's hoping (2) happens first, by the way). So instead I went up and rapped politely at his side window, rousing him from deep mid-morning slumber.

I would give a physical description of this policeman for you, except that his looks weren't memorable. So just assume he looked like a young Brian Dennehy.

Cop, rubbing his eyes: "Where am I . . . hey! What do you want?"

Phutatorius, gesturing: "I'm stuck in the lot."

Phasing completely into tough-guy character, the cop shot back, "Yeah? Well you can wait a minute." I went back to my car, and the policeman slumped back down into sleep. A meter maid wandered into the lot and gave me a cross-eyed look. Unable to associate my trapped car with any of the expired meters, she shrugged and left, disappointed.

Days, weeks passed. The bulbs in the flashers on top of the cruiser burned out twice, and police administrators came over and changed them. A glacier advanced to within fourteen feet of Bishop Allen and Prospect, then receded. The Indians advanced to the seventh game of the 2008 World Series and lost in the ninth, just as I was bringing a joyful hand to my car horn.

Then, finally, the cop kicked out of the squad car and delivered a written-out ticket to the decomposed body in the driver's seat of the minivan, which was now, inexplicably, covered in barnacles. From there, he mosied/ambled/strode back to his cruiser, lazily pulled into the road, and drove over to his retirement luncheon to collect his gold watch.

And now I'm here at work, with all my personal days exhausted, wondering to myself: where are all those hippies at Amnesty International when you really need 'em?

FREE PHUTATORIUS.

I write today from the Radnor Hotel in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, site this weekend of the National Steering Committee for "Project Kaleidoscope," to which the Wife and I, despite our charter membership in the Brewster Society, could not wangle invitations. But this snubbing will be the subject of another complaint.

Today's complaint concerns Auntie Anne's (which, incidentally, the Wife chooses to pronounce "AHN-tie Anne" — as is the practice in her bed---led state of origin — and as many times as she articulates the name, I am moved to declare, "AHA! But if 'Auntie' were intended to be so pronounced, the company's play on words would fail." To which in turn the Wife replies, "Exactly," leaving me without recourse except in defense of that unconscionably obvious play on words.) —

and specifically, the tendency of the Auntie Anne's airline-terminal franchises to be invariably out of pretzels. This is not in itself damning — as many, if not most, retail outlets are equally deficient in pretzels — but one must also consider that Auntie Anne's takes great pains to put itself forth to the community as a specialty vendor of pretzels, going so far, in fact, as to install an unmistakable pretzel graphic in its very corporate logo.

I have ascertained from the counter clerk that the Auntie Anne's airport m.o. is to prepare the pretzels at some centralized location off-site, then transport them to the several satellite outposts located strategically in the various concourses.

"The failure, it seems to me then, is in the delivery of these pretzels to these outposts."

"But take heart, kind sir," says the vendor, gesturing at two transparent plastic vats of churning liquid — one bright red, and the other wearing a distinctly lemonade-ish off-white hue — "we have plenty of beverage offerings." As I watch the liquids in these aquaria continue to bubble, agitated by some hidden motor capable of a great many applications short of making pretzels, I wonder what undesirable fate would attend these beverages if they were left to settle.

It does not seem intuitive that the sight of a corporate logo fraught with pretzels would trigger a craving for, say, fruit punch. That said, I can't imagine how a graphic designer might render a reel-in image of fruit punch per se — perhaps a rectangle, its bottom half red, to signify the half-full aquarium, with the characteristic stubby double-lines drawn around it to indicate the churning movement. Certainly uninspiring, and given these facts, I can draw one of two conclusions as to what Auntie Anne's means to achieve with its pretense to marketing pretzels in airports:

(1) Auntie Anne's is in fact marketing the fruit punch, and the pretzels are in place as a sly ruse, a siren song to draw in the unwary who would buy pretzels. Once at the counter, the trap springs — no pretzels! — and the clerk peddles the fruit punch that was the intended object of sale from the get-go. This strategy would comport with business sense, if, for example, one could demonstrate that the demand for pretzels correlated substantially with demand for fruit punch but that the cost of making the pretzels is substantially greater. Close observation of the commodities markets — which finds the price of pretzel dough at its five-year peak in late Februrary of this year — seems to bear out some part of this hypothesis.

(2) The Auntie Anne's franchises in airports are not in themselves franchises but cleverly devised three-dimensional billboards — close enough to the genuine article to muster up a real hankering for a soft cinnamon-sugar pretzel, but not real enough to satisfy that craving (it remains an open question whether the fruit punch, which no one has ever tried to buy, is real or fake). Thus does Auntie Anne's Corp., through a subtle but ingenious deployment of tantalization, exalt an otherwise mundane product offering, the soft pretzel, to the stuff of legend. "Leave 'em wanting more," you say? We'll go you one better and leave 'em wanting anything at all!

I could spend a week cataloging what was lousy about that last "Ides of March" post, but that would dwell on the negative. So instead, quick hits, in an upbeat "three cheers" format:

• Three cheers to the fourteen people at last night's Sting concert who did not yell SHUT THE F**K UP! at the shrieking spastic woman in the left-side orchestra. Your understanding of how silence works did not pass unnoticed in all the hubbub.

• Three cheers to Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Lyle Overbay, the first Pig Latin-American player to make the majors. And no, all those Josés don't count, because that's not the way Pig Latin works. All the names have to start with vowels.

• Two cheers to Columbus authorities for tracking down and bringing the highway sniper, Charles McCoy, Jr., into police custody. A cheer of her own goes to the alert profiler who realized that all the fired-on cars were registered to Hatfields.

• Three cheers to the Utah lawmakers who opposed the state's abolition of death by firing squad in defense of the age-old principle that all five of a convicted criminal's wives should get to play a role in his execution.

• And finally, three cheers to Diane Keaton for her stubborn commitment, against all odds, to bring back the leather beret. It was an abortion, Michael. It was a son. A son, and I had it killed because this must all end . . .

Well, another Ides of March has come and gone (knock on wood) without significant incident, no thanks to that rooftop sniper across the way, who waited all day for me to come outside before finally stepping out for a mocha at around 4:30 in the afternoon. This gentleman's stick-to-itiveness made for quite a nuisance, because I really wanted to go the gym — I thought he'd never leave. It also rendered the TV in the living room, which fronts on the street, all but inaccessible for most of the day, sticking me with a talk-radio NPR morning when I'd rather be watching Katie Couric's hard-hitting journalism.

The file cabinets that the Wife ordered last week were delivered today chock full of plastic explosives, resulting in a shipping weight discrepancy you'd think Fed Ex would have noticed when they loaded their trucks this morning. At any rate, the detonators had shaken loose and were hanging off the bombs by the time they found my doorstep. Certain people apparently can't be bothered to make those last, admittedly most difficult, quarter-turns of crucial screws. That's not my dumb luck: if my pursuers were at all competent, they'd be working for me and halfway up Easy Street by now. And all the plastique that doesn't blow is mine to keep, so HA!

Showering at the Boston Sports Club is always an adventure, and all the more so when the shampoo bottle in your preferred stall has been surreptitiously spiked with cyanide dilution. Still, on March 15 you take extra precautions, and when the contents of the bottle seem a lighter shade of purple than usual, you do the Denorex tingle test — left side of the head lathered with the BSC shampoo, right side with your own Selsun Blue. Just to see if you can feel the difference.

I may not recover sensation in my right side for another couple months, but the left still works like a charm. By my arithmetic, that leaves me one fist I can still pound into a table and cry, come and get me, you bastards. You've only got two hours left, and then it's "wait 'til next year" all over again.

So it turns out that my much-anticipated interview with Barbara Walters will likely never be aired. It seems the network execs reviewed the tape and decided that we "didn't click," which is — I presume — a polite way of saying that I didn't like her sad-sack lines of inquiry and she didn't like my honest and forthright answers. At any rate, I'm legally free and clear to transcribe the heart-to-heart for the Fan Club now. Here are some tidbits (the rest I'm holding in reserve for the premium subscribers):

BW: When it became clear that the Hank Williams, Jr. ransom enterprise was a failure, and you weren't going to get the gobs of money you had projected in your business plan, did you feel just a twinge of remorse for putting Mr. Williams through such a difficult experience?
P: I wouldn't call it a "failure," Barbara. That deal brought in close to 1500 bucks net. I bought a kick-ass stereo with that money.

BW: Not so long ago a man posted a cry for help on your website about being bricked inside a room. What ever happened with that? That wasn't Hank Williams, was it?
P: Nah. That was a contestant on a reality show concept I sold to Fox. The network scrapped the program in mid-production. I don't know if the guy ever got out; according to the contracts all liability flowed to the network, so it wasn't really my problem. I'm still waiting for the crew to return my Ace Frehley boots, which I recently saw Jason Bateman wearing on Arrested Development. So there might be a lawsuit in the coming weeks.

BW: What's the hardest thing about being Phutatorius?
P: The winters.
BW: The winters?
P: Yeah, they're really cold.
BW: Are you speaking metaphorically?
P: No, Barbara — I live in the Northeast, and the winters get pretty goddamned cold. Jesus, already. What did you want me to say?

BW: How are things with your Wife, really?
P: The Wife is unqualifiedly the light of my life. Everything that I do — the kidnappings, the Save the Children work, the tree surgeries, the dishes sometimes — it's all for her.

BW: Certain people in the entertainment industry have said that your celebrity is trumped-up, that you're a talentless publicity hound. How do you answer these criticisms?
P: That Jennifer Lopez is a bitter, underachieving bitch who should tend to her own fields first. If I had her body I'd be the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO by now.

BW: Underneath the bluster and posturing, the pomp and circumstance — the tough-guy image you project on your website — there's a different Phutatorius inside, isn't there? A wounded inner child, perhaps, desperate for acceptance?
P: Cut the crap, Barbara, before I have you killed.

BW: When this interview airs, you will be able to reach a broad-ranging demographic — people who probably are not familiar with your website. Is there something you would like to say to the viewers who don't know what you're about and are seeing you now for the first time?
P: So I bought this great Spanish cheese at the Whole Foods yesterday for $9.99 a pound. Real buttery stuff with an edible rind — Urgelia, Urgelita, I think it was called. Something like that. Anyway, the guy at the cheese counter says he expects it to go on special sometime in the next two weeks. So all of you people out in TV Land should totally try it.

I came up big in Music Trivia on the flight home from Florida yesterday. Yeah, that's right: of the four rounds I played, I ran away with three, and in the fourth only a controversial photo finish gave temporary honors to "JOHN" up in 11E.

Song's flights are equipped with personal touch-screen monitors, embedded in the seat backs in front of you, just above the collapsible tray tables. The screens pick up satellite TV and offer the trivia game: the questions are multiple choice, you hit the touch screen for answers, and the faster you answer, the more points you win. Just to put the sheer dominance of yesterday morning's trivia play into perspective, I should tell you that I, unlike my strongest competitors, was seated in an exit row. I therefore had to reach considerably further to enter my answers, a handicap that I don't doubt lost me crucial points, as it took me longer to bring my finger to the touch screen, and my touches were not, on the whole, as accurate as they might have been in regular seating.

That I played from the championship tees might explain that single blemish on my record. Anyone who knows me would smell a rat: Phutatorius the Great would never have claimed that anyone other than the Pointer Sisters recorded "Jump (For My Love)." The screen, however, tried to tell me that I selected La Bouche. Are you kidding me? The win goes in the books as yours, JOHN in 11E, but you and I both know who was the better player in that round and in all others.

And to all you schlubs I trounced up in first class, you wouldn't know rock 'n' roll if it bit your disgusting classist butts and shouted, "ROCK 'N' ROLL!" So maybe when Song gets it together to ask "cultured" questions about violin concertos and Shostakovich, you might get a chance to vindicate your preferred seating. But in the meantime, keep drinking your free Bloody Marys and remember — we're sitting behind you, we're angry, and we're smarter than you.

In the men's room of Harvard Square's Border Café today, after lunch, I spotted a shiny quarter resting heads-up in the toilet basin. This presented me with a bit of a quandary, as I have been out of work for several months now. How committed could I really be to my indolence, if I could not be bothered to roll up my sleeves and dig out this quarter, which might well purchase me another hour or two of joblessness?

Assuming that I was an unwilling participant in some Harvard field study and that a well-placed camera (perhaps in the air freshener?) was webcasting my every movement to a panel of graduate students in a psych or public health department office, I elected, after a short period of reflection, not to retrieve the two bits from the bottom of the bowl.

Would your finnicky-fingered Phutatorius have responded differently if the quarter had been a twenty-dollar bill? You betcha — the Andrew Jackson I know would have been floating on the water's surface, and with my house and car keys poised as a makeshift pair of tweezers, I likely could have fished him out without dirtying my hands.

And with that I bring to a close my Toilet Trilogy (Airport-John, Cris Collinsworth, and now this last $.25), hoping against hope that the lion days of March will bring some other, more inspiring subjects to belabor.