Where the Heck did Hank Come From?

I got the idea for A Trip to the Redbox when I was standing in line at my local redbox. I was standing there watching the guy in front of me (who, as far as I can remember, was not a jerk at all) get his movie and I started thinking about how funny it would be if I grabbed his movie before he did and chucked it as far as I could and then took off running. The sheer absurdity of that idea made me chuckle inside.


That's what I imagined Hank doing when I started writing his story. But the more I wrote about Hank and the closer I got to the part where he watched the muscle-bound guy in front of him get his movie, the more I realized how untrue that ending would be. So instead of letting Hank have the Napoleon Dynamite ending that I initially imagined I gave him the true ending and that felt a lot better to me.

***

Oh yeah. In case you haven't noticed, I can't seem to decide whether or not to capitalize the name redbox. The official company logo is uncapitalized. Nevertheless, it's a proper noun, so seventh grade grammar demands that when I include it in what I'm writing about I capitalize it. Now I know why my wife gets so upset everytime she sees a proper noun that isn't capitalized.

A Trip to the Redbox

The sun went down fifteen minutes before Hank drove into the Macey’s parking lot. It was about half full, just like usual. When it came to finding a parking space, Hank was always optimistic. He followed his optimism all the way down one aisle of cars, all the way back up another and down a third. Each time he reached the end of an aisle closest to the grocery store his hopes of finding an awesome parking spot lifted, then got smashed, by the empty “senior citizen” and “expectant mothers” stalls.

The handicapped stalls never gave him that kind of trouble. He could always spot them from a good 20 feet off ‘cause of their blue lines. But those dang fake out stalls were always such a let down.

He hadn’t ever heard of anyone actually getting a ticket for parking in one, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. Isn’t that the way things usually worked out?- no one else ever ended up getting caught doing somthin’ stupid like that, but it’d be just his luck to have some self-righteous Clearfield police officer stop at the Macey’s on his coffee break while Hank was gettin’ himself a video from the RedBox, his car parked in a space with a sign if front that said “This Stall Reserved for Expectant Mothers”.

He imagined exactly how it would happen. He’d get back to his car while the policeman was still writing him a ticket. The policeman would make some joke about Hank not looking like he was “very far along” right when someone he knew came walking by- somebody from work or church or something. Then he’d never live it down. They’d be making jokes about Hank being pregnant for the next three years. And of course there’d be the fine to pay.

No, it wasn’t worth it. Better to park down at the far end of the aisle, where there were a bunch of empty spaces without signs on them.

When he walked up to the Red Box there were six other people standing there. Some dude and his girlfriend were at the front of the line. She was standing so close to him it looked like they’d been stuck together with Krazy Glue- her arm was wrapped around his waist; his left hand was stuffed down her back pocket and his right hand was pressing buttons on the screen. Hank thought it’d be kinda nice to have a girl like that stand that close to him.

There were two guys behind them. It was obvious that they were going to each rent their own movie- they weren’t standing next to each other, they were standing one behind the other. Plus, what kind of guys would stand together in line at the RedBox? Not any guys that Hank new.

Last was a mom with a kid. Or at least, sometimes it was a mom with a kid, and sometimes it was just a mom. The kid kept running over to the automatic doors that went into the store. He would stand in front of them just to make them open. Then somebody would come walking out of the store, pushing a cart full of groceries and his mom would yell at him to “get back over here Freddy!”

Six people, but they were only going to make four purchases. If each one took as long as the dude and his girlfriend were taking he’d have to wait in line a long stinkin’ time before it was his turn. But they might not take that long. Hank didn’t usually take that long, so why should they? And besides, some of these people might just be returning movies instead of renting them, right? That usually didn’t take very long at all. Unless the person doing the returning didn’t know how to do it.

The kid was standing by the doors again. But this time the door wouldn’t open for him. Dumb kid was standing too close. The heat sensor at the top, or whatever it was, couldn’t see him. So he walked over in front of the other door. His mom wasn’t watching him. She was talking to somebody on her cell phone saying something about “what time were you going to be home and no she wasn’t going to get Transformers because it was a stupid action movie and they watched a stupid action movie last time and this time she was getting something with some romance in it…”

The kid finally got the door to open. No, somebody inside the store with a cart full of groceries got it to open which meant that it was an exit door which meant that… when it opened it smacked the kid and knocked him over. How dumb do you have to be to stand there and let a door that slow smack you in the face? Now he was crying and rubbing his forehead where the door hit it and sitting right in front of the person with the cart full of groceries making it so she couldn’t get past. His mom was still talking on the phone saying something about how “he really is a nice dad he’s just tired when he comes home from work and that makes him a little cranky and he probably would be nicer to the kids if they would just do what they were told once in a while…”
Wasn’t she going to go over there and get her kid out of the way?

“Hey, your kid…” Hank started to say. She just kept blabbing on her phone. She didn’t hear what Hank said. That seemed to happen to Hank a lot.

“Hey, your kid just got smacked in the head.”

He said it a little louder this time, but there was a Honda with a loud exhaust pipe driving past which meant that she still didn’t notice that he was talking to her.

The person with the cart full of groceries was telling the person behind her that if he would just back up so that she could back up she could help that poor little boy out of the way and then they could both get through the door. But the guy behind her was being a real dork and instead of just taking her word for it he had to see for himself whether there was really a kid sitting on the ground in front of her cart which meant he had to leave his cart where it was and stand right behind her cart while he leaned forward as far as he could…

So Hank walked over and picked the kid up himself. As soon as he lifted the kid up the kid stopped crying and just looked at Hank. He wasn’t sure exactly what the best way was to hold a kid, so he kinda just held on to the kid under his arms with his own arms kinda stretched out while the kid stared at him. He still wasn’t crying when Hank put him down next to his mom. She looked at Hank sorta funny, like she wasn’t sure if she should say “what the hell are doing with my kid?” or “thanks.”

“He got smacked by the door.” Hank said.
“Oh.”

She didn’t say anything else. She just grabbed hold of the kid’s hand and turned back around so she was facing the RedBox.

It didn’t seem like there was really anything else to do or say. So he decided to just get back in line behind the mom where he had been before. Except right then some guy with arms that were a little too big for their sleeves walked up and stood behind her.
He looked right at Hank with a face that Hank had seen before. Well, Hank hadn’t actually seen this guy’s face before. But he had seen the look on that face before. He had seen it on girls faces at the dances back in high school. He had seen it on the faces of people driving next to him during rush hour. He had seen it when he was thirteen and the kids at the house next to his would let him play basketball because they thought that because he was five inches taller than any of them he might actually be good. And it didn’t always say exactly the same thing, but the different things it said weren’t really that different from one another. This time it said, “Yeah, I know you were standing in line here, but now I am, so what are you going to do about it, dork?”

And it was right. There wasn’t anything that he would do about it. He would just get in line behind the guy and that would be it. He sure as heck wasn’t going to try and fight this guy, or anyone else for that matter. Wasn’t worth it. Getting his nose busted up and looking like a fool, what good would that do? Better to let this guy go around thinking he’s real tough, than to make something of it and get his teeth knocked in. Besides, he’d only have to wait a few extra minutes, so it really didn’t matter.

At least that’s what Hank tried to tell himself. But as the minutes passed and he inched his way closer to the RedBox, the fact that this jerk in front of him had stolen his place in line- like some fifth grader at the drinking fountain on his way in from recess- worked it’s way under his skin. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why did people like this guy think it was ok to act like such jerks? And why did he let people act that way- to him especially- without letting them know that they were jerks?

While the jerk-with-muscles was swiping his credit card a scenario began playing itself out in Hank’s mind. It was sort of like when Napoleon Dynamite asked his own personal jerk, Don, for a Summer-Wheatley-for-President button and then as soon as the guy gave it to him, he chucked it down the hall just to show him what he thought of the guy. Only instead of a high school election pin, Hank imagined himself grabbing the guy’s movie as soon as it slid out of the slot and chucking it as far as could. He imagined it bouncing off the pavement and doing little cartwheels before the case split open and the disc popped out and slid along the asphalt and got all scratched up. He imagined the jerk staring at him, not quite believing what had just happened. He imagined himself running away just like Napoleon had, running across the parking lot as fast as he could, then jumping like Michael J. Fox into the bed of some lucky truck as it pulled out of the parking lot, with the jerk dude slowing to a stop behind him, waving away a cloud of smoke that the truck had left behind.

It would be hilarious! The disc was sliding out of the slot and the guy hadn’t even noticed yet- he was checking out some teenage girl as she walked into the store. The opportunity was there. It would be so awesome. It would be so…

Stupid.

That guy would probably catch him before he took five steps, if he didn’t just lay him flat the moment he grabbed at his movie. Besides, how would acting like a jerk do anything to get another jerk to stop acting like a jerk?

The jerk was walking away now. Hank could see which movie he had rented. It was the same one he was going to rent. Hank stepped up to the Redbox and made his selection. The RedBox told him that that selection was temporarily unavailable- it had been rented out.

Exfoliate Byzantine

I read somewhere about a little game you can play with Google. I forgot what it's called, but the rules are pretty easy to remember. Think of two words. Enter them both into Google at the same time. If the search brings back exactly one result, you win!

Like I said, the rules are simple, but the game is pretty stinkin' hard. I came came up with a winning combination a few months back, but I don't remember what it was. I think one of the words may have been redhead, or one of its variations.

I came up with another one today- edwardian plastocine. This one actually didn't take me all that long. I suppose the game might be easier for someone who's familiar with many obscure words or technical terms that really have no use outside of their technical context.

I don't play it all that much. After all, it's not very exciting. But the challenge definately maintains its appeal for at least a few minutes. For me anyway. And it can be interesting to discover just how many sites contain two words that you otherwise would have been certain had nothing to do with eachother. Not to mention finding out what the heck those sites actually contain.

Give it a try. See what you can come up with. But don't blame me if you end up asking yourself, "Why did I just spend the last half hour typing byzantine and exfoliate into Google?"

My Daughter's Pictures

I came home the other day and saw a stack of pictures sitting in the kitchen that my 4 year old daughter had drawn. At the risk of sounding like a gloating parent, I have to say that I was quite impressed with what she had drawn. Have a look.

I asked her about them. She said, "This grandma (right) wants a grandma (left)."

When I asked about this one she said, "He's frowning because his friends don't want to play with him."

These two didn't have hair when I first saw them. But after I started writing her comments on the pages she wanted to get into the action. She said they needed hair. What could I say? So now they have hair (and beards too, I guess). And eyebrows.

Her comments for this one were brief. "His name is Smiley Happyface" she said.

The Nature of Sparkly Dresses
My 4 year old daughter was watching the Disney Cinderalla movie. I asked her why Cinderella's dress sparkled. She told me, "It's because the fairy gottamer bipetty-bopittied her with her wand and made her dress sparkle."


Smashed Bird
I was standing in the median of 300 West, waiting to cross the south-bound side before entering the building where I work. Traffic was busier than normal. While I was waiting I saw a bird fall into the street three or four feet from where I was standing. It's a strange thing to see a bird fall. It was in my peripheral vision, so I thought it was a falling leaf- it was spinning and falling slower than denser things might.

I'm not sure why I didn't just assume it was a leaf and ingore it. But when it hit the ground I looked at it. It was in the lane nearest me, sitting pretty much right where it needed to be to get run over by the driver's side wheels of the oncoming traffic. It wasn't laying on the ground like a dead bird. It was standing, or maybe crouching. But it wasn't moving, so I wasn't sure if it was alive. After all, why would a living bird fall into a busy street?

The outer edge of the tires of the first car that passed missed the bird by what seemed like less than an inch. That's when I knew it was alive because after the car had passed it hopped away from where the tires had been. That's also when I decided that it wasn't flying away because it was probably too young to know how to fly well. At least, that's the best guess I could come up with. Another car passed, again just missing the bird. The next car was closer to the median. When it drove by the bird was in bewteen it's wheels. The bird took a hop or two closer to the median, then sat still.

It occurred to me that I could pick the bird up and move it out of harm's way. I felt some pitty for it, given the imminent distaster presented by the situation. Unfortunately for the bird, its well-being held little sway when I weighed it against my own. To be able to pick the bird up I would have to step out into busy traffic. True, there were breaks in the traffic that would have given me enough time to do it. But only just barely. If I were to misplace my grip, or if the bird were to hop out of my reach, I probably woudln't have enough time to try again before having to jump back out of the way of the traffic.

There was a part of me that continued considering whether or not to try to save the bird. But that part of me was quickly shouted down by another, more practical part that asked me to consider what would happen to the bird after I moved it out of the road. "That bird doesn't even have the sense to move out of the way when faced with imminent doom" it said. "Even if you were to get it into the median without getting yourself killed, what then? It can't fly and it's survival instinct seems to be malfunctioning. It won't last two days after you leave. If it doesn't get smashed or eaten by a cat it will die of starvation or dehydration. You'll have risked your life to extend this miserable creature's life by a few extra hours or days."

As this argument was meandering through my brain cars continued driving by, each time missing the bird by just a few inches. The traffic thinned a little. Then I saw the vehicle that would kill it. It was a dump truck. The kind with those tires that are 12 inches wide. From a hundred feet away I could tell that those tires were going to roll right over top of the bird. They did.

If this were a novel maybe I would describe the sound the bird's body made when it was smashed as 'sickening' or something to like that. But it wasn't sickening. It made one quick snapping noise. If I had heard it out of context I might have thought it was the sound of a single packing bubble getting popped. Then, instead of being a normal greyish-brown bird shape, it was a flat, indistinguishable greyish-brown and pink shape. A gap in the traffic big enough for me to run across the street opened up, so I ran.

Definition Correction
Am I the only one who thinks it would be a little bit foolish to correct a highly renowned professional author on the proper use of a particular word? I mean, wouldn't that sort of be like walking into a mechanic's shop while he's rebuilding a carbeurator and telling him he's using the wrong tool for the job? Who am to tell an auto-mechanic how to do his job? But what if the mechanic were using a dentist's sickle probe to scrape carbon off the carbeurator? And what if I were a dentist? Maybe then it wouldn't be so foolish for me to tell him that he wasn't really using the tool the way it was meant to be used.

I've pretty much given up on tyring to make people think I'm not a fool, and I don't think I'll be returning to the practice any time soon. I'm a pretty regular reader of Orson Scott Card's blogs. In the May 27 edition of Uncle Orson Reviews Everything he discusses the challenges of producing audiobooks. He says that when the market for a particular title isn't very big, the costs of recording the audiobook have to be "amortized over only a few hundred or a few thousand sets of tapes." Now, given his status as a highly renowned professional author, and my status as not-an-author-at-all, I normally wouldn't even consider correcting him on the use of a word. But I am an accountant, so I do know that when it is used in an accounting context, the word amortize has a very specific meaning. It's not the word he should have used. He should have used allocate. Or he could have said spread over.

He's talking about a manufacturing scenario that accounting students are introduced to in their fist year of study. He's refering to the fact that when someone produces a tangible product (e.g.- audiobooks) there are certain 'up front' costs (actually, the term is fixed costs) that do not fluctuate as the rate of production changes. In this particular scenario the cost of recording the audio book is a fixed cost. It doesn't matter how many copies of the audiobook the producer decides to make; the cost of recording remains the same. To make a profit the producer has to pass those costs on to the customer. The amount of the cost borne by the customer is inversely related to the number of units produced and sold to the customer. In other words, the more audiobooks you sell, the less each customer has to pay for the cost of recording the audiobook because that cost is allocated to the individual audiobooks in an increasingly smaller (how's that for poor word choice) amount as the number of audiobooks increases. It's like spreading a fixed amount of butter over slices of bread. If you have one stick of butter and one slice of bread, you'll have a whole lot of butter on your bread. But if you're trying to spread that stick over ten loaves worth of sliced bread, the butter will be spread so thin you might not even notice it's there.

Amortization is what happens when a company purchases an intangible asset (as opposed to incurring production costs) such as a patent, or a copyright. The cost of the purchase doesn't hit the bottom line all at once. Instead, accountants try to match that cost to the benefits the asset provides during the entire time it's used by the company. So we recognize a little bit of the cost in each time period (month, quarter, year, etc.) that the asset is used by the company. This process is called amortization.

So Mr. Card, if you ever read this, I hope this criticism is as constructive as I meant it to be, and I hope I don't seem as pretentious as I sound to myself.

Nostalgic Video Clip and Celebrity Encounters

Sometimes I get funny little surprises in my life. During my online wanderings recently I stumbled across this old video clip from the Muppet Show. I had never seen it before in my life. But I knew exactly what it was within five seconds of clicking on play. I recognized it because my wife was singing this song the first night I met her. “What’s so impressive about that?” you’re saying. “Songs are easy enough to recognize.” I’ll give you that. But this song doesn’t have any words. Well not real words. Anyway, If I had intentionally set out to find this clip I don’t know if I ever would have succeeded. But last night there it was, staring at me from my computer screen. I chuckled when I realized that I knew what it was. Then I went and showed it to my wife and she laughed too.

When it was over I clicked on one of the ‘similar clips’ that YouTube offered and found this hilarious muppet rendition of Danny Boy. If you haven’t already seen this, it will probably make you laugh too.

Celebrity Encounters

I recently found out about a new fantasy book that’s getting loads of enthusiastic reviews. I had a gift certificate to Amazon burning a hole in my pocket, so I bought it. This is a debut novel which means the author isn’t all that famous yet. So I really shouldn’t call this a celebrity encounter. Semi-celebrity encounter maybe? Sort-of-celebrity encounter? Anyway, I went to the website for the book and it had a “contact the author” page. So did. I sent him a message in which I… well, here’s the transcript:

Patrick,

I got your book in the mail last week along with The Children of Hurin. I haven't started on yours yet because I'm still working on the other one. But I did take a look at the map and I noticed something almost right away. That road is pretty much straight. So now I'm anxious to find out how such a road came to be.Of course that's in addition to all the anticipation I've built up after reading about a bazillion raving reviews. In fact, I have such high hopes for your book that I decided to read Children of Hurin first in hopes of being able to move on to something even better aftward- you know, save the best for last and all that.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to it.

Tim Young

To which he responded:

Tim,

Heh. I'm glad you noticed the oddily (sic) of the road. You're actually the first one to comment on it.I hope I do a good job of following up after Tolkien....

pat

I should have been content with that response. But instead I thought to myself, “Wow, a sort-of famous person just sent me an email. This is my big chance to become buddies with a sort-of famous person who might one day become a famous person. So I wrote him back:

I started your book last night. I loved the chapter where Chronicler gets robbed. Great stuff. Not that I enjoy reading about people getting robbed, of course. But I did enjoy watching how he dealt with it. I'm curious about the skraelings- eager to find out what the heck they are. (Animal, mineral or vegetable...? heh heh) No, I don't want you to tell me. Not here I mean.

I really appreciate the ways you introduce information about the world without it seeming like I'm getting spoon fed.

Can't wait to get home and read more.

Tim Young

That was two days ago. He hasn’t responded.

Ok, so I pretty much presented myself as one of those crazy gibbering fans you might see on a movie or the news or something. And I feel sort of sheepish about it. The real embarrassing thing though is that this isn’t the first time I’ve done something like this. (Which probably means I am one of those crazy gibbering fans.)

This will take some explaining. There’s a website called Snowdays where you can make your own snowflake and add a message. Other people can read your message and respond to it when they look at your snowflake. I found out about the site from Orson Scott Card’s blog. Immediately upon reading about it I went to the site and did a search for his name. Sure enough, there were about sixty little snowflakes with his name on them. So what did I do? I responded to one of his messages of course—what else? He had made one that looked like a naval contact mine. If you haven’t read his book Ender’s Game, some background information is in order. In the book the protagonists have a weapon that’s capable of destroying entire planets. It’s called a Molecular Disruption Device. Since the first two initials are MD they sometimes call it an M.D. Device, or the Dr. Device or the Little Doctor.

Anyway, here’s the link if you want to read the silly little conversation I had with him about his snowflake that looked like a mine. (If you decided to follow the link, be sure to wait until you see the flake that looks like a mine. It will have an arrow pointing to it that says "your friend's".)

If you like, you can also read the other conversation I had with him about swimming in cold water at scout camp.