Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

How To Waste Half a Day

By Bob Wire, 10-02-08

	Photo courtesy of Murph the Surf, Australia

I polished off a James W. Hall mystery last night, and this morning I wondered what new titles Shakespeare & Co. might have to offer. I logged onto my Mac and clicked over to their website, and today’s blog entry was Garth’s brief statement about the upcoming Vice-Presidential candidates’ debate: “C’mon Joe, don’t mess this up.” Short and to the point, a five-word entry. That’s one of the things I love about Garth—he’s not one to waste words, and his candor is frequently hilarious. The guy pays attention.

It contained a link, so I followed it to a Slate.com article by a Dahlia Lithwick, a self-professed ex-debater, on how Joe Biden can lose this debate only if he is seen as a sexist bully. It was funny and entertaining, and the fact that it was written by a woman gave it extra heft. The woman pays attention.

One of the things she suggested was that Biden needs to avoid coming off as unctuous. I’ve never really had a good handle on that word, so I decided to look it up with my computer’s dictionary. I clicked the dictionary icon in the dock and it bounced once and then nothing happened. Oh yeah, I remembered, the son of a bitch doesn’t work. I discovered this the last time I used it. I must have been reading an Andy Smetanka movie review.

So I went back into Firefox and navigated to the Apple website, to see if I could maybe download the app from their site. In the forum discussions, I found that I could download a widget from Merriam Webster that contained a dictionary/thesaurus. [Which reminds me: does anyone know another word for ‘thesaurus?’] Anyway, I went to that site and downloaded the widget and figured out how to install it. I’d never used widgets before, and was fascinated by this little mini-collection of apps living right there in the lower left corner of my screen. With an unctuous smile, I began browsing for more widgets.

I found one that has a customizable NFL schedule, so I downloaded it and set it to show just the AFC East. With Brady out for the season, and the Dolphins handing the Pats a sound beating ten days ago, I’m looking for my Florida fish to, well, maybe not suck quite as bad as everyone thinks they will. In fact, their tandem running back set of Ricky Williams and Ronnie Brown is reestablishing the traditional running game (Larry Csonka/Jim Kiick, anyone?) that has been long missing from this once-elite program.

I clicked over to Wikipedia and (after downloading their widget), and looked up Larry Csonka to see how his stats compared with those of the modern-day backs. There was a great Sports Illustrated cover photo of the two running backs. Kiick was leaning casually on a goalpost, and Csonka was sitting on a helmet. Oddly, Mercury Morris was still wearing it.

The article said that Csonka was Hungarian, and that reminded me that I used to make a pretty mean Hungarian goulash. Perhaps that’s a dish I could still whip up, even one-handed, I thought. I clicked over to Allrecipes.com, and there was a big bold close-up of the finished dish, and it looked like a horrible motorcycle accident. Good god. I decided to stick with spaghetti.

But the thought of a horrible motorcycle accident brought up Evel Knievel, of course, Butte’s most famous resident. I’m in the process of writing and recording a song about Butte, so I thought I’d do a little research as long as I was online. So I typed in “Butte whore population 1890” into the Google bar, and was directed to a vile bunch of porn sites, that featured the most heinous sex acts imaginable.

I checked the Google bar and discovered I’d left the ‘E’ off the end of Butte. I won’t make that mistake again. (Although I did find a couple of handy widgets.) I went to Evelknievel.com, and remembered that I had once gotten Robbie Knievel’s autograph on an 8x10 glossy in Denver. I’d been waiting tables at a restaurant in Cinderalla City, a mall on the brink of collapse. They’d scheduled the place for demolition after I left (pure coincidence), and I wondered if there was any YouTube video of the actual implosion.

Three hours later, I peeled myself out of my office chair to go to the bathroom. The kids had already come home from school and were doing their homework. The dog was surly because I hadn’t taken him for a walk, like I promised, and Barb would be home soon and I hadn’t started dinner. But I did watch a lot of cool videos of high school kids punching each other in the face, drunk gang-bangers ghost-riding their Hondas, a bulldog riding a skateboard, an anti-gravity helicopter with motionless rotors, Evel Knievel’s Caesar’s Palace jump, and several videos of Sarah Palin showing what a potato head she is.

I swore off the computer for a couple of days, kicking myself for allowing my attention to be pulled into this huge time-suck. I need to spend some time in meat space, get caught up with my kids, and take care of some things around the house. Then, rather than surf the ‘net for entertainment, I’ll tuck into a good book.

Hmm. I wonder what’s new on Garth’s shelves down at Shakespeare & Co.

[Go to the Community Blogs page. Okay. Click the RSS feed subscription. Cool. Who knows, maybe I’ll have a widget for you next time.]

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