The Twisted Rantings of the Dantelope

Sometimes you win, and sometimes this happens...

1. Woke up late. Mental note: replace lazy rooster with real alarm clock.
   
   
2. Didn't work out as planned. Again. Now where did I put those fat pants?
   
   
3. Bunch of folks announced departure at work. Expecting resulting workload to fall squarely on someone named "me". Unless I get laid off first. Not sure which would be better for someone named "me".
   
   
4. Left later than desired from work and ran into unusually aggressive and slow traffic. Nothing quite as exciting as a 90 year old in a Cadillac STS driving weaving in and out of traffic like a drunk 9 year old. Except giving said 90 year old the "old man's middle finger". And maybe getting an unknown sign back from him which I will certainly need to research.
   
   
5. Nothing in fridge, had to scrounge and make dinner for TSO and the Two Evil Genius Midgets. Daddy resorts to old high school cafeteria trick: mix mystery meat with mystery sauce and play up the "mystery" part as A Good Thing.
   
   
6. Princess Diva broke space bar on laptop. Okay, Firstborn actually broke it but it didn't truly pop off and play dead until Diva decided it made a good drum.
   
   
7. Yours truly cannot fix said space bar on laptop and feels like a complete idiot. Which only really sucks because I am a complete idiot but like to pretend otherwise.
   
   
8. VOIP phone service goes down like a side-street ho on a Japanese businessman. TSO flaming pissed like Hillary after finding The Stain.
   
   
9. Tech support for said phone service is.... busy signal; can't receive or make calls. I think if you own a telephone company and your telephones are busy, you probably have your money going in the wrong spot. Who's with me?
   
   
10. Broke diet and finished DQ ice cream cake; now feel like a bloated pig in sweats. Sometimes you just gotta go for the gold.... icing.
    
    
11. TSO in a funk not seen since Vanilla Ice when he realized he never really had a career. Upset about a dozen different things and not sure who she wants to kill first. Betting folks will want to wager on me as first to be buried six feet under.

---- Dantelope @ wish-i'd-stayed-in-bed-today

There were so many great memories from when I was in high school... and these are not some of them:

1. Mystery meat. That fantastic concoction of all things Monday thru Thursday rebaked into a most intriguing smelter of sizzling unknown. What is it? Is it chicken? turkey? hamburger? Sausage? Oh no, it most certainly is not. It's chikurkyburgausage.
   
   
2. Championship paper football. Never has an ophthalmologist been more aghast than when kids begin to fire triangular paper missiles at each other in an effort to score a touchdown between fingers that are spaced in a very exact "eh, about this much" kind of way. I am personally responsible for several folks in the Detroit metro area looking like pirates.
   
   
3. eXtreme gossip. I'm not sure how it didn't make it into the Olympics this time around, but you have never met athletes like schoolgirls. I once saw a girl's head spontaneously combust when the heat from her rapidly moving jawbone ignited her hairspray. Opa!
   
   
4. Gum in impossible places. Nothing fascinated me more than seeing the unusual -- and seemingly implausible -- places where gum would end up. Sure, everyone's seen it under the chair and desk... in the toilet... and even on the walls. But I've seen gum on the ceiling. And inside the light fixtures. And on the bottom of the pool! I mean, this kind of creativity just shouldn't be overlooked by academia!
   
   
5. Rich kids and their cars. While I drove around in a rusting blue Malibu station wagon with 5 out of 6 cylinders firing and fine blue upholstery interior, I always enjoyed watching the wealthier kids displaying their opulence. Like the time Scott drove his brand new blue Mustang GT convertible into the parking lot retaining wall. And then got a brand new blue Corvette convertible to replace it.... and, naturally, drove that into the wall, too. And then was seen riding around in his grandfather's Ferarri 328GTS. Yes, because this is the kind of driver I want to entrust a six digit figure to. If I were grandpa I would have at least covered the car with 15" of rubber first.
   

Share with the class, now.


---- Dantelope @ i-used-to-taper-my-jeans-with-safety-pins

... the first of which isn't starting a land war in Asia, but rather having a twin who is equally annoying.

Doug Hall, annoying inventor-turned-judge on American Inventor.
Wallace Shawn, annoying-but-funny-actor-whose-work-I-love.

One in the same or evil Yin and Yang? You decide.




---- Dantelope @ bring-me-your-classic-lines

After a long and exhausting read the first installment of my childhood dream, I'm sure you're all wondering, "hey, I really need to protect my money but I can't afford a real safe and I need something that will blend in."

Folks, I never disappoint. Here's something so disgustingly funny, it's hard to believe it's a real product.

I give you... BriefSafe, a safe you can drop in plain sight in the middle of your room and will hold your most prized belongings -- without worrying that your thief of a sister will steal your green....



Why does mother nature feel the need to produce inventors like this? I really do need a therapist now...

---- Dantelope @ that'll-make-your-brown-eyes-blue

I'm prepared to share with you some of the craziest, most vivid and memorable dreams I had as a child. I'm sure you won't laugh like hyenas.... much. Here's the first installment.

The Water Tower
A dream by Dantelope, circa age 7 or so.

I am crouching behind a dark, wooden cupboard in my friend Alexa's kitchen. It's a summer afternoon and the sun is angling through the living room window, producing funny slanted shadows along her shiny wood floors. I'm staring intently at the elegant, green cloth couch in the living room from my hiding place and thinking I must get out. I feel Alexa tugging at my shirt behind me. She, too, is scared.

Unknown bad people have stormed the house and are rounding up our friends, probably preparing them for some terrible torture. We can hear their horrified screams and shouts again and again. Alexa and I somehow managed to escape to the kitchen before they arrived and we are now nervously plotting a haphazard escape the best way two smart children know how.

They're coming, Alexa. We need to go now. We run for it, taking quick short steps and then dive behind the couch. Voices coming. Did they hear us? No... we're safe... for now. Voices talking in the living room... they're very close. Can't make out what they're saying. Don't really care, either. We've got to make a run for it... to the front door only a few short steps from the couch.

We bolt -- fast. They see us and give chase.

As we're running, the dream shifts to a birdseye view of a tree-laden hillside, rotating around like some kind of epic movie, hanging for only seconds but seeming like an eternity. The landscape is broad and Alexa's house is an island unto itself within the sea of dark evergreens surrounding it.

Now we're in the plains, running for our lives on a dusty dirt road, with farmland all around us. The bad people are driving an old, rusty red pickup truck and barreling down on us fast. We're not going to make it... they're gaining... run, Alexa, run!

When they catch us, they laugh out loud and congratulate themselves on a job well done. And as they prepare to put us in the back of the truck, I notice that the lining of the truck's bed is pegboard. With big holes. I'm perplexed at the obvious ridiculousness of such a prison. While I'm pondering this, I am thrown hard onto the back of the truck, butt first, with my legs dangling off the end of the place where a liftgate should have been. Alexa is placed in a similar fashion next to me. As we look nervously at each other, large wooden pegs, like giant chess pieces, are used to fasten our shirts to the pegholes in the truck. The bad people laugh again, jump into the truck, and begin driving us to what must be certain doom.

As the wheels begin to spin and the dust kicks up, I turn to Alexa and explain how plainly dumb this entire contraption is and show her how we can simply turn around and extract the pegs from their holes and escape. I feel almost superior to the bad guys and my confidence gives me the energy I need to take action. We wait for a moment when there is a lot of dust so they will have trouble seeing us.... and escape... again.

Despite our smokescreen plans, the bad guys immediately know we have bailed out. The truck stops quickly, kicking rocks and dust into the air. They turn it around hard, like you'd expect them to do in the movies, and they begin to chase us a second time. We are quickly caught... again. Apparently unfazed by our intelligent escape, we are once more pegged to the back. But as the truck drives off this time, we feel resigned that there is no escape because we are not fast enough to outrun them even though we are not technically bound by the simple pegs. The fact the bad guys may have known this all along sinks my confidence and makes me feel that perhaps, just maybe, I wasn't as smart as I thought I was.

The truck ambles along the dirt road until we come to a giant, abandoned water tower. The tower is the tallest structure for as far as the eye can see and its peak seems as if it touches the clouds. The bad guys bring the truck to a gentle stop. Car doors slam shut and we are being taken off the pegboard and placed into large potato sacks like the kind we used to race down the slide at Belle Isle with. I feel myself being hoisted onto the shoulders of a bad guy and he begins to climb the thin metal ladder to the top of the tower. And he climbs. And climbs. And climbs.

We're now inside the water tower, and the sack is opened. I step out. It's cold and damp and dark. The metallic interior echoes with the sounds of the second bad guy coming up the ladder and the sounds of the first bad guy disposing of the sack he has just removed me from. Alexa is extracted next. We look nervously at each other: we do not know what is going to happen to us and neither of us knows how to stop it.

The bad guys tell us we are to jump out of a small square opening cut into the bottom edge of the water tower -- sort of a strange twisted version of the pirates' walk-the-plank scheme. I cautiously creep to the edge of the opening and peer over to see what's below. To my dismay, I see a small, bright blue lake with enormous rocks protruding from the water's surface... and the bodies of people who have come before me laying there, apparently dead. I struggle to escape but cannot and, before I know it, I am thrown... and falling... falling... falling.. my eyes strain in the wind to see below me, to watch my impending death.

But as I near the end, I am shocked. The huge rocks are actually hippopotamusses. The bodies strewn about are actually my friends and family playing in the water! I bounce precariously but excitedly off the hippo beneath me and swan dive into the lake. Alexa does a double somersault and lands with a fantastic splash that covers me and several of my family members. We are laughing, splashing, having fun. The fear is gone, and I am safe.

And as I look up at the water tower I wonder... were they really bad people?

---- Dantelope @ i-dream-in-technicolor

Back when I was growing up, my mom and dad used to take me to work with them once in a while. I distinctly remember, with crisp and fond recollection, trips to the General Motors building with dad and sitting in the library at a Detroit public school with my mom. Some of my best memories were from weekends when my dad would need to drop by the office to take care of something.

We'd arrive at the security desk and my dad would greet the guard, sign in, chit chat (something painful for him), and then we'd walk up to where he worked. He'd let me access the mainframe to play Adventure, or Star Trek, or Wumpus. I'd sit there for what seemed like an hour or two and just enjoy the atmosphere. The large marble walls with columns that seemed to stretch out of sight. The shiny glass plates that tiled the ceiling, letting the afternoon light bounce off the rows of indoor trees. The fantastic open architectures of the visitors desk and the large, bold letters of the company's name riveted overhead. Echoes of footsteps as we walked along the halls, twisting and turning, occasionally passing by coworkers and enduring the pride (and childish embarrassment) of introductions.

Times have changed, for sure. Today I tried to repeat this loving memory with my son. I drove him down to Dearborn to see where dad was spending the last four years of his life and to give him a sense of awe about that place that I disappear to every weekday and occasional weekend. He was quite excited about it, too. I imagined what must be going through his mind.

But then we both learned a cold, stark lesson about the country and times we live in. Whereas in the 1970s, it was implicitly obvious that if a father took his son to work, the father was 100% responsible for the welfare and safety of his own flesh and blood, it is apparently not so obvious in litigious 2006 for corporate america to allow such assumptions to be made.

No, instead of chit chat, this irritating and clearly child-averse guard and I had to discuss how corporate policy prohibits unauthorized entry of a guest without prior approval from a manager. Indeed, he lamented how my son could be hurt on the property and it would be -- brace yourself -- his responsibility. Huh? Not mine? I was struck instantly by a grievous sense of loss for both innocence and simplicity.

Has it really come to this? Somehow in the last 30 years, the care and well-being of our own family has been transferred to the property-owner and its guardians? A magical shift of responsibility from those who should care deeply to those who don't.

So the manager -- who has never met my son -- can take responsibility... the security guard -- who knows neither me nor my son -- can take responsibility... but I, who would gladly jump into the jaws of death to save my son from danger, cannot.

I don't fully blame the company for its policy. Rather, it's the legions of folks who sought legal action against companies when an injury took place on their property and caused this country to fall into an impersonal, uncaring, rut of legal cover-your-arse. We've tipped the balance in this country from favoring personal responsibility to blaming everyone else -- and now it's coming back to haunt us in the most ridiculous ways.

I suppose, in the real sense of "justice", it serves us right.

---- Dantelope @ don't-touch-me-or-i'll-sue