fine whine

How quickly the quarters pass. Why, it seems like just three months ago our head honchos gathered us together at work and told us how "strikingly mediocre" the business was doing. A lots of words were said this time around, and most of them positive. I've never gotten quite the hang of business words, I guess, because to me "execute" means "kill", not just "do", and "architect" and "hindsight" are nouns, not verbs.

But I'm not a business man by trade, just by chance, and maybe I missed out on some grammar reeducation somewhere along the way.

On my way home from work I dropped in on a focus group to try out some new sausage, or something. When I got there, though, it became aware that I wasn't needed. Since I showed up, though, they paid me the same compensation as if I'd participated. Now that's what I call business.

And the vanity license plate du jour? GUTN TOG, spotted on the back of a VW Passat.

Seeing as my little forays into what goes on between the ears of fellow drivers (or at least between their headlights) seem to spur such interaction that I'm dredging the topic up again. I need somebody to figure out what WXY MNX means. I saw it just after being amused (and somewhat surprised) to have seen a PT cruiser emblazoned with DJ RUSH or something similar that didn't call mention PTs or Cruising in any way.

Waxy Minx? (t)Wicksy Mannix? Something about those tailless cats? I don't get it. I think a dude was driving the car, too.

So the other day I'm driving to work and I see 4SBWTHU on somebody's plate. I'm not so quick in the mornings and it took me a good three stoplights of following the lady (or long-haired dude) to decipher it. Fortunately he/she was going the same way I was.

Then, as though to portray another end of an entirely different spectrum, I saw a BMW station wagon (I'd known such existed but never really seen one) bearing plates of MOMSTER. I could "read" that one right away but am stymied to this day as to what it means. Is it to be a clever combination of "Mom" and "monster" or "mobster? Or rather more in the vein of the SNL Rob Schneider nickname guy ("The momster. The mom-o-rama. The mom-inator" et al. ad nauseam)? Inquiring minds must know.

Inquiring minds are also tired. I'm going to try and get twelve hours of sleep tonight, just for the hell of it.

License plate spotted today: EA75HT. My brain turns that seven into a T and the five into an S. You figure out the rest. This was on a fairly recent Mustang, and just after another one (probably the Cobra variant) had peeled out in front of me into a convenience store parking lot.

Once again I could not fall asleep easily last night. I cannot be sure if it was thinking that kept me awake or being awake that kept me thinking, but I think I had a neat idea for a book. It's a mystery novel, quite possibly in the first person/bankrupt financially and morally/rooftop confrontation/etc. mold. The crime is a string of murders over almost a decade that get stumbled upon and ultimately halted. I'm considering doing it in third person and opening it up to the killer's POV as well (a la John Sandford) but probably won't; I've always had reservations about that style of writing though Sandford pulls it off with a certain finesse I can't hope to achieve. Anyway, the quirk about the book is that everybody in it is named Edgar, to a man (or woman). Naturally I'd provide other details and mannerisms to differentiate the Edgars, but if I can pull it off I don't even want to give them last names. So the killer's Edgar, all of the victims are Edgars as well as any potential suspects. As a bit of absurdity, I'd have the detective wonder "But who is the killer? What is his name?" or something like that that can only be idiotic in light of everybody being named Edgar. I'd picked that name previously for a quick ditty slash character study when an idea occurred to me that had no obvious use—so I made a page for it. It was only after an extra sleepless half hour that I remembered that the award given for particularly good mystery fiction is the Edgar, and to use that name so many times in a given novel could be considered name dropping or fishing. But I don't care. Silly books don't often win serious awards, after all.

In other news, I've targeted my GeoURL information as closely as possible. I believe the coordinates now pinpoint my fridge.

Two observations from the drive home today:

• A van in front of me with a small B&W TV on the dashboard, playing what looked like the news, though I didn't get too close.; Drivers like that scare me and he was obviously the one watching it—the other six seats were empty.
• A personalized license plate TSTGOD: what could this be?
  • Trust God?
  • Taste God?
  • Test God?
  • Toast God?
  • ...Gourd?
  • ...Garamond?
• I'm still stumped. Why did the guy keep the Ohio clipart instead of getting an extra letter for clarity? We may never know.

The previous two entries were a lot shorter than many I wrote lately, and I won't elaborate on them too much now either. I was in the thumb area of Michigan, an hour's drive from Canada, at my in-laws' place. It's a small house in a small town and I can't help but feel considerable distance from everybody and everything there. I don't think it's snobbery or some superiority complex (at least I'd hope not) but I don't feel any kinship with anybody there, her parents especially, particularly when they take us across the border for a day's worth of shopping and a hockey game they expected to be lackluster and then described as worse than boring. Their characterization and opinion of the hockey game would fit my perception of the shopping spree, and I cannot help but wonder if I somehow offended them by not buying anything. I'm not anti-consumer, I just don't want to buy anything right now.

I'm still having trouble getting into the whole spirit of the season thing. In the next weeks I will have to make or break family appointments for holiday time, and that prospect only aggravates me. I came up with a concise statement that conveys exactly what I mean: "Nobody gets what they want for Christmas" which is admittedly an oversimplification but it works for me and is somewhat catchy. I can see it serving as the tagline for a black comedy at Christmastime. It may fit Bad Santa, I don't know for sure but I can watch it to find out; I'd like to see it anyway.

I was reminded of an early topic I'd mentioned once, the Toyota Sequoia. They're still huge monstrosities and I still dislike them, but one gave me a laugh on the highway today. Its license plate was BLIGH and it was all I could do to keep myself from hopping out of the car and adding the missing T with a Sharpie. Well, the fact that he was doing 85 mph to my 75 was another good reason. And incidentally this is only the second (of over eighty) post to use a capital letter, and the first to mention "I" (though there are a couple "me"s here and there). You're welcome for that; I'm just trying to make things easier for the scholars of the future.