Rotating Pineapple

In 1979, the publisher of Mad Magazine, the late William M. Gaines, authorized a board game that would be inspired by his famous magazine. Game play was loosely inspired by Monopoly, only the goal was to lose all your money. The Mad game didn't have Chance of Community Chest cards, but it did have cards that you had to take if you landed on a certain square. One of the cards said this: THIS CARD CAN ONLY BE PLAYED ON FRIDAYS. No other instructions were given. It was a useless card. What would you do if it was Friday? The same thing you'd do if it was any other day. Here is a commercial for the Mad Magazine game: That is one goofy looking dad. I wonder if the director told the actor to grow that silly mustache. Seriously, he looks like a prototype for Ned Flanders. Then again, this is pretty common for commercials, where actors are told to behave like the world is a magical place simply because of the existence of the product they are shilling: I mean, does anyone really have th

 I guess this is a universal thing. No matter how hard we try, we just can't keep our socks together. Probably the only way to stop this is to be extremely anal about it. To wit: 1. Have a dedicated sock drawer where all socks are kept together and paired off. 2. In your laundry room, have a mesh bag that is dedicated only to socks. 3. Whenever you take off a pair of socks, put them in the mesh bag. 4. When the mesh bag is full, put the mesh bag (full of socks) in washing machine. 5. Wash socks. 6. Remove wet sock bag from washing machine. 7. Put bag in dryer. 8. Dry socks. Voila!!! - I used to be a member of Food Cardigan, which is a company that sends you a different pair of funky socks every month. I am wearing a pair of those socks right now. They are purple socks and they have a bubble motif. The socks are about seven years old. The fabric where my toes go has worn thin. I will likely throw the socks away soon.  Foot Cardigan has sent me socks with the following motifs: - Acco

 Dear Mr. Man You know, I don't hate you. If I saw you on the street, I wouldn't yell at you or cuss you out, but I don't think I'd shake your hand. But I do pity you, man. You don't know what you gave up. She's going to be a funeral director, did you know that? Yeah, she's going to be a mover and shaker, hitting the big time. She'll have a good job and she'll never be out of work because she's in an industry that will never die (you should pardon the pun.)  Sure, she had her challenges growing up, but what girl doesn't. Things made her cry. Sometimes, I'm sad to say, I was one of those things. But all I can say is the good times outweigh the bad. I hope she agrees with that. You see, Mr. Man, I have a whole lot of great memories with her. This one time, I tried to take her down to Cleveland so we could see a Major League Baseball game live. But we couldn't get into the States so instead, we went to Niagara Falls and we had a grand ol

My son has picked up the awful habit of banishing his mother from his bedroom when it's time to go to sleep. He will allow us both in to change him into his pajamas and the nightly prayers, but after that he wants some alone time with me. His mom says it doesn't hurt her feelings, but I kind of think it does. - She should not be offended. My son merely picked up my genes. When I was a kid, I didn't want both my parents in my bedroom at the same time. They had to say goodnight to be individually. I guess kiddo and I both have a little OCD. - As luck would have it, Ash and I just finished watching a movie called TRAP. The premise of it is that a serial killer and his daughter are attending a pop concert. The police know he's there so they set up a trap, ensuring that every male adult is interviewed by police before they're dismissed. In the end, we discover that the man's wife suspected him and so she tipped the police about it.  Mom of the year, I tell you. "

Serendipity is described as " an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident ." I prefer to describe it as "stumbling into happiness." - This makes me think of fudge. Apparently, fudge was created by accident. According to legend, an American confectioner accidentally dropped some chocolate into a pot where he was making French caramels on Valentine's Day of 1886. The result: fudge. - I like fudge. My waistline does not.  - We spent much of today in Cornwall. Kiddo has therapy there on Wednesdays but today was also his first swimming lesson at the Cornwall pool. I was nervous at first, afraid kiddo wouldn't be able to follow along, but he did and even learned to float on his back. I'm not sure if that qualifies as serendipity. - Here is something that qualifies as serendipity. I have told this story before. I will tell it again. In 1993 or 1994, I was looking for a job, so I went to the local Hire a Student office to see what they had. There wa

 The address of Sara's Pyrohy Hut will forever be etched in my mind. It was located at 1216 Centre Street Northeast, Calgary, and was one of my family's favourite restaurants. I always ordered the same thing - a plate of beef perogies with a side of dill pickles. The Pyrohy Hut is no longer with us, its former proprietor, Fred, lost in the sands of the past. I know that the restaurant was named for a dog, Sara, but I don't know who Sara belonged to. Sara is dead now. So it goes. - I've never had perogies as good as the ones at Sara's. I know I never will. The emotional part of my mind won't allow that. My heart will always insist that the best Ukranian restaurant exists only in the 1980s and 1990s. Readers of this blog should not be surprised by that. If the Rotating Pineapple has a constant theme, it is that I messed things up in the past and would love to go back and rectify my mistakes. - Google tells me that a TD Canada Trust branch now exists at 1216 Centre

 In retrospect, it probably wasn't a smart idea to buy a straight razor at a second hand store. I had wanted one for several years but when I priced them out at barber shops, they wound up being more than I could rightly afford. So when an old one appeared in the second hand store window, I bought it quickly for $25. But I never used it. The blade was too dull and I never figured out how to sharpen it. "Use a leather belt," the barber told me, but I never did it. Too long. I didn't have the patience. I wanted a machine. I wanted to press a button, see a bunch of sparks fly, and then take my sharpened straight razor home. At least the straight razor had some use. It was adopted as a prop for a play sometime in the late 90s, after which is relegated to a plastic bucket in my room and (I think) ultimately discarded. - There is nothing wrong with buying clothes from Value Village. As I type this, I am wearing a sweater that I bought there. While wearing it, no one has eve

The woman's hair was the most impossible shade of red. I kept looking at it as she talked to me at the New Year's Eve Party, which was taking place in the living room of a magician friend of mine in northwest Calgary. The woman was telling me how adorable I was, how she was positive the girls in my Grade 10 class found me irresistible. She was wrong. The girls in my Grade 10 class thought I was a loser. "Well, what do they know at that age?" she asked, dismissing the thought with a wave of her hand. She leaned in and planted a heavy kiss on my cheek. Her breath smelled of too much red wine. "You'll be fine," she promised. Later, her son, only a year or so younger than I, apologized, saying his mom got a little over affectionate when she drank. "That's okay," I said. I was ashamed to admit that I was flattered by the attention. I could still feel the kiss on my cheek and later that evening, when I was putting on my coat, I felt the woman beh

  Unlike most people, the 90s sitcom, Friends, is not the first thing that springs to my mind when I think about Courtney Cox. Nor do I think of Family Ties, Ace Ventura, Scream, or Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark music video, where he pulls her from the audience to dance with him onstage. The first thing I think about is an early 80s sitcom called Misfits of Science, where she played a telekinetic teenager. I remember very little about that show. I couldn’t tell you the plot of any episode; I am left with only dream images. There was a character who could shrink himself. There was another character who could fire lightning bolts out of his fists. And there was Courtney who could move things with her mind, though I think doing so left her mentally exhausted. The show was relatively short-lived; it certainly did not have the decade-long run that was enjoyed by Friends. This tells me that sitting around a coffee shop is more interesting than shooting lightning out of vari

 I have it on good authority that guinea pigs think their owners are gigantic cuddly teddy bears. Here is a picture of my friend's guinea pig: Our friends at PETA - easily the world's most joyful organization - warn us that guinea pigs do not make good starter pets and that it is cruel to use them to teach kids responsibility. Here is how PETA answers the question Are Guinea Pigs easy to care for? "The short answer is no. It requires a lot of time, energy, and money to keep guinea pigs healthy, clean, and happy." However, my friend's guinea pigs seem to be happy and this is evidenced by all the pictures she posts of the guinea pigs eating vegetables and watching movies and reading books about Sarah Palin.  Guinea pigs are rodents. So are rabbits, which I like, and rats, which I do not like. Here is a picture of me with a rabbit: Here is likely what rabbits think of their owners: - Why is this dude putting me in a hat? I hate being in hats. Why are all those people

The circumstances surrounding my first and only viewing of The Lion King were not happy. It was February of 1995 and I had just embarrassed myself by writing, producing, directing, and starring in the worst one-act-play known to man. When my unfortunate cast and I took our final bow that terrible evening, there wasn't even polite applause. The audience was stunned that they had sat through one hour of misogynistic garbage. I did not go home. I did not want to debrief with my family - to be told that "next year would be better" or that "it might be best if you refrained from this sort of thing again." Instead, I ran away. I slept in my car one night (nearly froze to death), stayed at friends' apartments some other nights, and saw a lot of movies. The reason why I saw a lot of movies was that on my birthday, I had received a $100 gift certificate for the movie theatre. This I exhausted during that terrible three-day stretch in the mid winter of the Year of Our

 My niece, Sasha, was born on her parents fifth anniversary. I can't tell you for sure but I wonder if - when she was younger - she felt guilty that her arrival on planet Earth negated another celebration.  A friend of mine was born on Christmas Day. He used to insist his birthday be celebrated on Boxing Day; he didn't feel worthy to share the same birthday as the Lord.* I have no idea what happened to that old friend of mine and - now that I think about it - I have no idea how my niece and her parents made those two anniversaries co-exist. My niece is 20 now, old enough to know that you don't actually have to celebrate something on the actual day. By the time you've reached the two-century mark, you've celebrated enough holidays early and late to fill up an entire month. - Like my brother and my late best friend and my daughter, I was born in early January. This meant that early winter was a stressful time in our household. No sooner had my parents dealt with the h

In one of my old notes of the day, I wrote that I still believed the same things I believed when I was a teenager. A colleague upbraided me for this, calling it irresponsible and stifling. Yes, and even the great Dale Carnegie confessed that he was constantly re-evaluating what he believed to be true. In How to Win Friends and Influence People , he says that about the only thing he still believes from his childhood are the multiplication tables. (He joked that he even wasn’t sure of that.) - I counted myself a Christian when I was a teenager and I count myself one today. Back then, I would have signed my name to the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed and I doubt a second has passed in the ensuing time when I would have revoked that signature. We recited the Apostles’ Creed every week at church and I remember my first Mass as an altar boy (I was eight) saying those words out loud with the rest of the congregation at St. Gerard’s. At the time, I also believed the following:

The difference between a hardboiled egg and a softboiled egg is about one minute. Cooking websites tell me that if I want a softboiled egg, I should boil it for eight minutes (no more, no less.) Hardboiled eggs can stay in the water for a minute longer. Hardboiled eggs are also known as eggs that are inedible. No one should eat hardboiled eggs except for Lieutenant Columbo. - The adjective ‘hardboiled’ can only modify two nouns. One of them is “eggs.” The other is “detective fiction.” Nothing else can be hardboiled. You can’t have hardboiled playing cards, dining room suites, ear wax, Bangles CDs, or mummified remains. It just doesn’t work. - Here is a book of hardboiled private eye stories that I bought from my friend, Charles Prepolec, back in the early 90s.     When I bought the book from him, I complained that there were no Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer stories in there. Mr. Prepolec told me that I should expand my horizons and read P.I. stories from the real masters