Martin Pease

I met a local celebrity last Saturday, at a Walgreens in the city of my birth. My family and I were in town because I had some business there, so we made it a reason to see my immediate family as well. The Walgreens used to be on the corner, across the street, but for some reason they moved and now that's an auto parts store. Weird. Anyways, this fellow is a journalist, author, pundit, entertainer and archiver of pop culture ephemera from decades gone by. I like his work quite a bit and read his blog pretty much daily. We had to stop to get baby formula. Walking in, I noticed this gentleman going inside. He drives a distinctive car, so I was pretty sure it was him, and there was some slight embarrassment as I hesitated and let him go in first, even though I should have entered first. Once inside, I introduced myself and we chatted about his work. He was very friendly, and didn't brush me off, and he was the same in person that he appears online- smart, friendly and gregario...

This post is an update to So Close . A sad update, with a twist ending! So about a week after the original post went up, I get another call from the dealership. The car is here! Come on down and begin your happy trails to motoring wonderment! I go, and there she sits, even better than I imagined. The color is shining in the clear, cold April air. I instruct my bank account to carry the bundle of sticks up the mountain. But. A dark premonition creeps in around the daylight of hope. There was one feature I absolutely required in this car, a specific configuration of seats to accommodate all my many clones. After 4 months, it would be disaster if the car was not equipped just so. To set my fear at ease, I go to the door for the back seats, open and- Of course it's wrong. It's the wrong seats. The fancy captain's chairs are there, instead of the less fancy but more useful bench. The flunky at the dealership who's job it is to input the order into the computer did it...

I have to stop eating frozen pizza. Every so often my mouth tells my brain that what it really wants is the salty, crispy, cheesy goodness of pizza, and my brain says, "No problemo, I prepared for such an occasion by whispering into The Idiot's subconscious while in the frozen food aisle that we're gonna need some pizza. Like he always does, he put one in the cart, and now it's in the freezer. Pizza hoy!" But this is my stupid brain, giving bad advice again. Frozen pizza is almost uniformly terrible. If the universe is truly just a simulation, then frozen pizza is undoubtedly a double-simulation, an Inception-level hologram of actual pizza. But gross. Frozen pizza is bad enough to give one strange thoughts, such as, "Maybe I'll vote Green Party next election, if it promises to shut down whatever monstrous system of injustice foists such awful pizza on the public. To the barricades, comrades!" My brain just can't help itself. I think there...

Here it is, what you've been waiting so long to see. The perfect tomato.

A refreshed Lincoln Continental might get suicide doors! The best Continental ever First we heard that the slow-selling Continental might get the ax after only a couple years on sale; but then this news comes out, indicating a completely new body structure to support rear-opening "suicide" doors. It's hard to believe both things are true; unless the Continental is leaving the US market and staying alive in China. That would really be a sorry state of affairs.

Jim looked out his front door, and waddling down the street came a fat man. This man was uncommonly fat, by Jim's reckoning the fattest man he had ever seen in person, of course there were real fatties on television sometimes in those shows meant to entertain you with grotesqueries.  Jim bent down to pick up the newspaper from the stoop, stood up and looked again at the man slowly shuffling his globular flesh along the sidewalk in front of Jim's house. What a whale, thought Jim. How is he even capable of motion? The fat man was looking at Jim now, watching him. He came to a stop in front of Jim's house, rotated slightly, facing Jim now head-on. This unnerved Jim. The eyes of the fat man, so surrounded by the puffiness of his face, beetled into Jim. "Good morning," the fat man said. "Uh, good morning to you," Jim replied. The fat man looked with his little eyes right into his own. "Is that today's paper?" asked the fat man. "W...

It's officially been 3 months since ordering the new car. We've got a VIN and an estimated delivery date in the second week of April, but it may arrive sooner than that. The salesman called me down to the dealership today to look at a model they just got in stock, to see if I wanted this one instead of waiting. While I didn't decide to take this one (wrong color, wrong seat configuration) I was pretty relieved that I still find the car very cool and now I'm even more excited. Hopefully I'll have a write up of the new vehicle soon!