The List of Lists

One day, while completely befuddled by the high number of lists I maintain, a friend of mine asked if I have a list of my lists. I laughed and said that I do not. So, here, for fun, I’m going to correct that. But first, here’s a list of things I’m not including on the list: 1) Phone lists (even though I am the head of the department phone list at my job 2) Work-related items involving projects and/or trade secrets (they’re boring lists anyways) and 3) Temporary lists (such as: Things to buy at the grocery store).
I’ve added a brief explanation for lists with non-obvious titles. Anytime I use the word “we” it should be understood to mean “Jennifer and I”.

1. List of meals the company has paid for
2. List of free things I’ve gotten from the company
3. Wage history
4. Books I have read (this is probably the oldest list here)
5. Number of books I’ve read per year
6. Subjects of the books I’ve read
7. An alphabetical list of the books I’ve read
8. Mistakes I’ve found in books I’ve read (this list is 27 pages long)
9. List of Edgar Allen Poe works
10. List of Sherlock Holmes stories
11. List of books authored by Theodore Geisel
12. Short stories I own
13. The ultimate calendar (a listing of every event in my life for which the exact date is known)
14. Timeline of my life (a list showing when and for how long I lived in certain places, held certain jobs, attended certain schools and how they overlapped)
15. Residences I have lived in
16. Cities I have live in
17. People I have lived with (there are 12 people on this list…)
18. Vacations I have been on
19. US states I have been to
20. Countries I have been to
21. Times I have been on an airplane
22. What we did for our anniversaries
23. Days since we married that we haven’t seen each other
24. Jobs I’ve had
25. Schools I’ve attended
26. Concerts I’ve attended
27. Professional baseball games I’ve attended
28. Plays I’ve attended
29. What we did on our cruise each day
30. Cars we have owned
31. Lego pieces I own
32. Board/card games we own
33. My 50 All-time favorite motion pictures
34. My 20 favorite TV shows
35. My 10 favorite albums
36. My 50 favorite songs
37. My 10 favorite non-fiction books
38. My 10 favorite fiction books
39. Motion pictures I have seen (there are 1,189 movies listed)
40. Number of motion pictures seen from each year
41. Motion pictures I have seen at the theater
42. Read the book…and seen the movie (I pick which I prefer)
43. Billboard #1 albums (1956-present)
44. Billboard #1 songs (1940-present)
45. Things that annoy me
46. Our ten year anniversary trivia quiz
47. Bart Simpson’s chalkboard writings
48. Best songs by people I know
49. Customer service (list of grievances filed with companies and what sort of recompense we received)
50. Deep Thoughts (from the SNL spot)
51. Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 greatest rock songs of all time
52. Non-work money (list of money I have made outside of work, such as at garage sales)
53. Favorite quotes from 1984
54. Favorite quotes
55. Quotes from famous losers
56. Addams Family episodes
57. Battlestar Galactica episodes
58. Little House on the Prairie episodes
59. Northern Exposure episodes
60. Quantum Leap episodes
61. View Master reels I own
62. Mistakes we found watching “Voyager”
63. Wal-mart facts (notes I took while reading “How Wal-mart is Destroying America”)
64. Website traffic (I track the number of new visitors to my website each week)
65. Words to learn
66. Bible verses mentioning dogs
67. Partakers at JW memorial, 1980 – present
68. US religious census statistics
69. Money spent by the Watchtower Society each year on Circuit Overseers, 1980-present
70. JWs publisher increases/decreases, 1930-present
71. JWs versus world population, 1950-present
72. Survey results (I sent out a survey asking ex-JWs if they thought they were going to die at Armageddon)
73. Chemicals in the atmosphere
74. Nations of the world
75. National parks
76. Places I want to visit in Minnesota
77. Vacations I want to go on
78. Word of the year (I pick a new word every year that I had never known about before)
79. Self-created filmlets
80. Other videography projects (weddings, baptisms, etc, that we have filmed)
81. Filmlet commentary
82. Every email address
83. Goals for 2008
84. Passwords
85. Palindromes
86. Autonyms
88. Homophones
89. My book – chapters, pages and words
90. Wonderfalls episodes
91. Arrested Development episodes
92. Freaks and Geeks episode
93. Awful Truth episodes
94. Star Trek: TNG episodes
95. Star Trek: TOS episodes
96. Star Trek: Voyager episodes
97. Firefly episodes
98. Best Picture Oscar winners
99. Best selling motion picture from each year
100. This list

There.
I actually have less lists now than when I was a kid, thanks in part to the internet. For example, I used to have a list of where the Olympics were held each olympiad, but that seems pointless now as I could just look it up. You may have noticed that some lists aren’t very personal (such as “Sherlock Holmes stories”), but the reason why I have such lists is to check them off as I watch/read the items on the list.

Light Reading

Owen and I read books together nearly every night before bed. After a long period in which he would only allow me to read a handful of non-fiction books (with the exception of Where’s Spot?), he’s finally allowing me to branch out into his entire reading library.

Here are some things I’ve noticed, and some other things I’m wondering…

One book Owen owns is a thick book of nursery rhymes. I don’t often bring this one out for fear he’ll insist I read every rhyme in the book (and the book does put forth an ambitious effort to include every nursery rhyme ever conceived), but reading these bizarre, often scary poems as an adult now has me asking:
What’s with the three men in a tub? I mean, let’s set aside the strange amalgam of blue-collar professionals sharing such tight quarters, what I find weird is that, in any illustrative depiction of the poem, the men are invariably in a barrel floating in a body of water. What gives? Should the poem be three men in a boat? Did “tub” used to mean “a thing you float in”?
And while we’re on the subject of nursery rhymes, why is Humpty always portrayed as an egg? Nothing in the poem seems to indicate this. What’s more, Humpty is shown to be a MALE egg. Again, nothing in the poem itself tells us what gender Humpty is, and I think you’d be pretty hard pressed to find something in the refrigerator that screams FEMALE! more than an egg.

Speaking of gender, one of our favorite books to read together is Wacky Wednesday. For the life of me, I can’t figure out the gender of the main character, despite the fact that he/she is shown on every single page – including one page in which he/she is naked but for a pair of socks. We never learn the protagonist’s name, and no one talks to him/her in any way that requires a telling pronoun. The boy/girl dons a pink shirt with jeans and sports hair going down just over his/her ears. Very cryptic.

Another Dr. Seuss book we read is Green Eggs and Ham. Here’s the funniest thing about that book: the pages are numbered. Yes, that’s right, despite the fact that there’s no table of contents or index, and despite the fact that the book can be read cover to cover in under five minutes, someone, somewhere along the way, felt it necessary to include page numbers. I guess, that way, when Owen comes to me with a confused look on his face asking: “Hey, where in this book does Sam-I-Am ask if his friend would be willing to eat green eggs and ham in a box or with a fox?” I can say, with precision, “Oh, that’s on page 22.”

You may not have heard of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, but in that book, a boy concedes to giving a mouse the above-mentioned dessert, only to have it escalate. The fun part is turning each page to see how it’s escalating. For instance, after eating the cookie, the mouse says he’s thirsty, so…(turn the page)…now he wants a glass of milk. Anyway, at one point, the mouse has drawn a picture and decides he wants to hang it on the fridge, so he needs…(drum roll)…Scotch Tape. You read that correctly: Scotch Tape. The first time I turn to this page, I felt cheated. Who hangs stuff on their fridge with Scotch Tape? Isn’t that why magnets were invented? It didn’t say he wanted a glass of Dean Milk, or a Nestle Toll House cookie. I searched the small print inside the front cover expecting to find something like “This book made possible by a grant from 3M”. No such luck. I hate when an otherwise good book does something stupid like pointless product placement.

In the book Where the Wild Things Are, we are told that Max is anointed “King of All Wild Things”. But I think a better title would be “King of All Run-on Sentences”. Here’s a doozy:

That very night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.

…Yep, that’s right: 62 words spread out over 5 pages, and that’s not even the longest sentence in the book. I am certain this book has more pages than sentences. I keep looking at the cover, expecting it to say “written by Thomas Jefferson”.

In the matter of funky sentence structure, I was going to mention Corduroy, with it’s predilection for passive statements (e.g. try to sound natural when reading things like “Over it fell with a crash.”), but, instead, allow me to point out one of the book’s reviews, which is reprinted on the inside front cover. The first sentence begins:

A winning, completely childlike picture book in which a stuffed bear waiting hopefully in a toy department finds a home with a little black girl…

…Yes, you read that correctly: Corduroy goes home to live with a black girl. Unlike, say, the Sneetches, ethnicity has absolutely nothing to do with the story, so I’m not sure why the reviewer was compelled to tell us Corduroy’s ultimate friend is black, nor why the publisher deemed this the best review to print in this edition.

My white son and I look forward to reading more books tonight.

Tea Time

I happened upon a how-to website the other day (and I’d put the link here, but this blog-publishing site isn’t very user friendly, even to a computer genius like me), and while looking up info on beer brewing, I noticed a link titled “How to Make Sun Tea”.

“Hmm…sun tea,” thought I, “That brings back happy memories of when my Grandma used to set a pitcher of water out on her back porch and I’d periodically check on it to see when it was ready.” So, since I like my Grandma, tea, and using the word “periodically”, I figured I couldn’t go wrong in trying my hand at brewing some sun tea of my own.

Thanks to reading the book The Tea Companion, by Jane Pettigrew and our recent forays to The Tea Source and Teavanna, I’ve become somewhat of a tea snob. I know, I know, I was already a snob in the first place, but I think “snob” is a term requiring subcatergories: am I a car snob? No. Am I a beer snob? Computer snob? Film snob? Telescope snob? Yes, yes, yes and yes. In fact, my wife even points out (correctly) that I am a Map Snob (I’m thinking of starting a Yahoo Group for other map snobs).

My first task was to find a large container appropriate to the task. I wanted it to be made of glass (see? -snob), and to have a spigot on the bottom. We serendipitously found a very stylish number at a store in Highland Park (more snobbiness). The store was going out of business, so everything was 40% off the original price. So we purchased this very classy looking container; it’s a far snazzier thing than the barrel-shaped/plastic-handle number I recall from my youth.

Anyway, with Owen’s ‘help’, I filled it with water, added some tea bags and set it out on the deck table. We checked on it (periodically, of course). Here’s what it looked like four hours later…


At any rate, the tea turned out find. Some alarmists warn that you shouldn’t make sun tea because strands of rope-looking bacteria grow in the heat of the sun, and this can make you very sick. But I did more research and found out you can avoid this by A) periodically ensuring the container is clean, B) using filtered/bottled water only, C) not leaving the tea out in the sun for more than six hours and D) discarding any tea that does have “ropes” hanging from the surface of the water.

The container is rather large and unweildy, so don’t ask me to bring some to your house (should I be invited). Instead, feel free to periodically come on over and try some straight from our snobby kitchen!

Cheers!

Recent Pop Culture Experiences

-There are no shortage of fans when it comes to actors, authors, singers, painters, directors, dancers and athletes. But have you ever heard of anyone becoming a fan of…a narrator? Well, now you have, because I am hereby declaring myself as a fan of Jim Dale.
Let me bring you up to speed on Mr. Dale. As I’ve mentioned here before, I recently listened to the entire Harry Potter series on audio cassette while driving to and from work. About mid-way through the first book, I thought to myself: “Yeah, the story is decent, but you know what’s really awesome? The guy doing the reading”. I mean, he was spectacular. He had a different voice for every character of varying ages and nationalities – even managing to sound like pre-teen girls without resorting to a falsetto. Hargrid (the giant) sounded large and gruff and Snape sounded cold and foreboding. I don’t know how he managed to keep it all straight, but I would often know who was speaking just by the voice. For example, when he read: “’I don’t like this,’ said Ron”, I knew it was Ron even before he got to the ‘said Ron’ part.
I looked on the back of the box and discovered that Dale subsequently won an Emmy award for his reading (well deserved, sir!). He also narrates the TV show Pushing Daisies, which I had noted to my wife more than once that “this show has a great narrator”.
Anyway, after finishing up the Harry Potter books, I went to the library and looked for another audio book narrated by Dale. I found one: Around the World in 80 Days. At the end of that book, Dale says: “We hope you enjoyed this unabridged recording of ‘Around the World in 80 Days’, by Jules Verne”, and for a split second, I thought “Hey, wait, this book was by Jim Dale, not Jules Verne”. But then I thought: “Silly James, Dale was merely the narrator, not the author”.

-While browsing the virtual shelves at Amazon.com the other day, I fortuitously stumbled upon Paddle to the Sea, a short film from the 1960s that I had last seen in Kindergarten. In fact, I totally forgot the film even existed until I saw the ad for it. I immediately went over to Netflix to add it to my queue, but to my consternation, they did not have it (marking the first time Netflix ever failed to have a DVD I was searching for). Alas, the local library did have it. We watched it that very night as a family, and Owen was completely enthralled by it, asking to watch it again on each subsequent night that week. He calls it “Paddle the Boat”, an endearing moniker that’s no less of a misnomer than the title (as there is not a single stroke of paddling in the entire film).
At any rate, after rewatching this film for the first time in nearly three decades, I have added it to its rightful place in my pantheon of Best Short Films Ever. Go rent it, you’ll like it, and so will that special toddler in your life.

-The wife and I recently viewed the documentary The Fog of War. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary back on 2003, and it’s directed by Errol Morris, which equated to a sure bet (in my opinion). The film is, essentially, an interview with Robert McNamara, who, in case you don’t remember, was Secretary of Defense under both Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara, who doesn’t succeed in proving his case despite being given an hour an a half to do so, comes across as a man who has lived long enough to see how historians have painted him (he’s 92 years old).

He does a good job of splitting the blame between his underlings and subordinates. Like a manager, when it’s convenient, he blames the President and, when it’s convenient, he blames his employees. McNamara seemed to have no trouble recalling the absurd atrocities Johnson (in his all-too-relevant Cowboy politics) committed during his tenure as Commander-in-Chief, yet can’t seem to remember details about his own life, like if he authorized Agent Orange or not.

McNamara implied that Kennedy’s assassination was a tragedy for another reason: had Kennedy lived, the American involvement in Vietnam would have ended far sooner than it did under the two buffoons who succeeded him. It’s an interesting thought, but ultimately pointless – maybe Kennedy would have ended Vietnam…maybe Buddy Holly would have become more famous than Elvis…maybe Jesus would’ve become CEO of a bread company. Who knows?

The documentary is filled with reflective comments from McNamara, wondering why it took so long to learn the lessons we learned in Vietnam, wondering if the acts of aggression we committed are crimes against humanity, wondering if the evil we performed in Vietnam was justified by the good that came of it. I kept wondering: what’s with this WE crap, Bob? When millions of Americans were protesting on the streets – including a man who lit himself on fire right outside your office, how dare you ask why it took us so long to learn. It didn’t take us a long time to learn Vietnam was immoral…it only took you a long time.

Near the end of the film, Morris asks McNamara if he feels guilty, and McNamara (who, earlier, said he always held a policy of answering, not the question that was asked to you, but the question you wish was asked of you) simply says he’s dammed no matter how he responds. So he says nothing. Nice try, Bob, but your attempt to win sympathizers is too little, too late.

Harry Potter: B
Jim Dale’s narration: A
Paddle to the Sea: A
The Fog of War: B
Robert McNamara’s career: F

Save $5,000 a Month!

Apparently, when there’s nothing note-worthy to report on (like the latest Hollywood fashion or a 2.0 earthquake), the news gravitates towards money-saving tips. These “tips”, more prevalent in today’s Bush-whacked economy, get my vote for most pointless news items in existence. I mean, at least a report on Hollywood fashion gives us some eye candy, and a report on an earthquake that shook a leaf off a tree might be a harbinger to something we’ll really need to know.

These money-saving tips must work for only two people: People who, up until this moment, have never bothered to attempt to save money, but are now looking to do so and people who are too stupid to think of any way to save money by themselves. I’m talking really stupid, as in: “It sure would be nice if we had more spending money,” said Jack as he rolled up the fifty dollar bill, stuck it between his lips and lit it on fire.

Take this article, for example: http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/105450/Cut-Your-Spending-by-%24500-Per-Month

Here’s one tip they give: Lower your car insurance payments. Okay, who doesn’t know to do that? That’s like saying, “if you want more food in your refrigerator, take less food out of it”. And, anyway, there are good reasons to not go with the cheapest car insurance company. Other so-obvious-they’re-painful tips include: pay off your credit card, don’t go over on your cell phone’s minutes, stop paying bank fees and put more in your 401K (oh yeah, that’s sure to help with the day-to-day making ends meet problem).

Another gem is here: http://green.yahoo.com/blog/greenpicks/191/saving-gas-isn-t-just-for-tree-huggers-anymore.html

To save gas, this article recommends not driving your car to work. It also mentions not idling your car and not going through the drive-through.

I’d like to, just once, see a “money-saving tips” article in which the tips are not 1) simply restating the title of the article; 2) so obvious that everyone already does them anyways (or at least knows they should) or 3) things that you can’t just do even if you want to (such as moving to a cheaper city).

Following the astute insight such writers have in saving us consumers money, therefore, I humbly submit my list of money-saving tips:

1. Don’t spend your money.
If there’s something you want to buy, like food or clothing, don’t. It’s as simple as that. Multi-millionaires don’t want you to know this secret, but now you do.

2. Try to find an item of equal quality but of lower cost.
Why spend $5,000 on a used car when you can spend $500 on a used car? Why spend $10 on lunch when you can spend $1?

3. Accumulate more money.
Stop volunteering! Demand your employer give you monetary reimbursement for the services you provide for the company. Also, if you have something of value, trade it for cash. Or at least for a receipt you can then use when you itemize your deductions.

4. Stop consuming gas and electricity.
Why drive 20 miles to work when you can walk? Why turn on the lights at night when you can sit in the dark? Unplug your refrigerator and your alarm clock. Use your computer as a paper weight.

5. Only do free things.
Don’t invite people to your house, where they’ll consume your electricity, water, toilet paper and put wear and tear on your furniture and silverware. If a friend invites you to go somewhere, decline. If you get invited to someone’s home, don’t offer to bring anything. Ask them to pick you up.