Nasferatu

I give you Barry Glazer, a Baltimore-area lawyer who absolutely oozes class, refinement, and style.

The mystery of why so many children of the fifties and sixties ended up terrified of clowns....

So, what to do with a four-hour drive down to Philly on Christmas when Pookie has to follow behind in a separate car?

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to break out my big mix of Tom Waits, who's on Pookie's no-fucking-way-while-I'm-in-the-car list.









Mmmmmmmmmm....

Yes, I voted. Even got the sticker to prove it.

Got to the polls at 6:05 this morning and had to wait about 20 minutes.

Not too bad, especially with the reports of people having to wait two hours-plus in the rain.

I hope they at least got a visit from the Flying Pig.



Now, to sit back and watch the carnage on CNN.

....until Sarah Palin fades back into obscurity. Gotta squeeze in as many laughs at her expense as possible in the interim!

This morning got off to a rousing start. As I pulled into a parking spot in the garage at work, the woman who had been seated behind the wheel of the car in the next space over jumped out of her car and began very histrionically inspecting the side of her car--feet stomping, arms waving, the whole bit. I hadn't felt any contact, but it seemed like a safe bet that she had.

"I'm sorry, did I bump you there?"

She immediately started yelling. "Yeah, you hit me! You know you hit me! Why you even ask that? And it's a good thing I was here to catch you, too!"

"Ummm, I said I was sorry, so I think you can lose the attitude," I countered in a rare outburst of sauciness.

"I ain't got no attitude! You asked if you hit me and I said yeah! And I caught you, too, otherwise you'd've just run away! Wouldn't have left a note or nothing, would you? Uh-uh, no way." Still yelling, of course.

I looked at the "damage": there was a small scuff, about an inch square, on her front tire. Being the masterful auto-body mechanic that I am, I fixed it--completely, and without a trace--using the high-tech method of rubbing it with my thumb. Ditto for a similar scuff on my front bumper.

"You hit my car! Now, you wanna take this further?" ranted the insane woman, inexplicably waving her hands in my face.

Not knowing what the heck she was talking about, but thinking that sounded vaguely threatening, I declined to "take this further." Since I was running a bit late, and there was no damage to speak of, and I was growing weary of being ranted at by a lunatic, I walked away and went to work.

All morning, I was pissed off at myself for not having the type of personality that allows one to tell a person who desperately needs to go fuck themself to do so.

As it turns out, that wasn't the end of things. About 2 in the afternoon, I got a call at my workstation from a police officer wanting to talk to me about "the incident in the garage." It turns out that the harridan had filed a police report, claiming that I had badly damaged her tire, and demanding that I be charged with......I'm not sure what. "Hit and run" seems a bit extreme........"nudge and walk," perhaps?

Anyway. The cop and I went out to look at the cars, after he called the woman to tell her to meet us there. We found that there were indeed several deep scratches in the hubcap of the tire that I'd hit.....but they were of a type that would have been impossible to inflict with a glancing blow from a fiberglass bumper. Not only that, but the other three hubcaps looked exactly the same. The cop immediately saw that this woman was full of shit, that she'd obviously scraped up her own tires at some point by running against a kerb, and was looking to get me to buy her a new one.

When the woman arrived in the garage, she was still in high dudgeon. She claimed that I'd "run off" in the middle of our, er, conversation--not that she'd said anything to stop me. She claimed that I'd been talking on my cellphone when I pulled in, a complete fabrication that I immediately called her on, prompting her to say she "didn't like my attitude" and demanding that the cop get my insurance info for her. She was not happy at all when the cop explained to her that all of the damage to her car was obviously old, and that he couldn't see any damage that I could possibly have caused.

Oh well. The cop was cool.....after the shrieking harpie oozed away, he told me that he could tell her story was clearly bullshit, and even though he obviously couldn't say "this is bullshit" in his report, he'd phrase things in such a way that the insurance company would think, "Hey! Bullshit! No need to pay this woman anything!" We'll see how that turns out.

I suppose there are worse things. Still, it really pisses me off that some people feel the need to be such rollicking shitheads.

Hey, have I made fun of Sarah Palin recently? Here, look at some YouTube spoofs:

First off, congratulations to everyone who did well in Orlando. Is it just me, or does the final top-three headshots collection on the standings page (Nigel, Brian, David) look like a pretty good start for a Scrabble Mount Rushmore?

As for my own performance, I have considerably less enthusiasm. I certainly didn't enter Orlando with any ridiculous delusions that I'd be walking away with 25 large in my pocket at the end. But my hot streak heading in at least made me feel that something similar to my 8th place finish in Phoenix wasn't so outlandish. So, yes, 12-16, 80th place is pretty goddamned hard to stomach.

Saturday was fine. Won five of seven to put myself right in early contention.

Then, the losses came. Lots of them. A veritable menagerie of losses, from the hopelessly mundane to the indescribably exotic.

I lost a one-point game where, despite some questionable pre-endgame choices, I still had a 75% chance of winning depending on the single last tile in the bag. I lost by 200 in a game where my opponent got to play solo Scrabble for a few turns at the beginning, when the first 17 tiles I drew were consonants. I lost with a 509 in a game where my opponent bingoed 4 times in his first 5 turns, and where my mad comeback fell short only because of his 50-point Z play on his last turn. I lost with just barely 300 points in a game in which I drew all the esses and blanks. I lost games where I never sniffed a lead, and I lost games where I watched helplessly as my early 100-point leads disappeared. I lost fun, exciting, memorable games, and I lost games that were 50 minutes of pure torture.

Yes, I did a lot of losing. It was just one of those tourneys where it seemed like every guess I made was wrong, every post-bingo rack had three I's on it, and every opponent arrived at the table with their A game fully operational.

Really, though, I should have seen it coming. Every time I go on a hot streak, I manage to convince myself that this time, I didn't just get lucky. This time, I've really figured things out. This time, I'm not giving the ratings points right back. This time, I've put shitty tournaments behind me forever. And what happens next? Yes, a run of shitty tournaments to bring me back to reality. Orlando, really, was my own personal 28-act morality play about the perils of Scrabble hybris.

Now, in spite of all that, let it not be said that I didn't have a good time. Four bad days playing Scrabble are, of course, better than four good days working, and this was no exception. The rental house we shared (thanks to Pookie's excellent prep work!) was beautiful, and generous quantities of food and libations were enthusiastically consumed. And, hey, a couple of the games were even fun.

Unfortunately, Orlando does kick off what's going to be a bit of a Scrabble hiatus for me, as real life will be making an unpleasant nuisance of itself in the coming year. I've got my oral board exams coming up in June, and given that I've generally been a lazy fuck for the past three years residency-wise (Scrabble is a not insignificant factor here), I've got ten months to whip my ass into shape, and every iota of mental energy I've been devoting to the game needs to get redirected to radiology. I'm semi-committed to Ira's (non-big-money) October tourney, and I'll probably still go to that one, but that's probably it for me in terms of tournaments for the next year or so.

Damn, I never know how to end these things. Here, enjoy some TMBG: