Suffice it to say that he's a slacker. No, that's not the word for it. He's more of a schmoozer, someone who has that gift of brains and street smarts that lets him get the most out of life with the minimum of input. Take, for example, his driving (or lack thereof). He is old enough to have a learner's permit, but refuses to drive. Reasoning: why spend your hard earned money on gas and insurance when you have parents and friends willing to take you places? Besides, if he works rides out for the year, he can simply walk in and get a regular license without spending the money on a learner's permit. Fine for him, but things came to a head with his parents about it. The idea: give him some clue that he needs to get off his Play Station beating butt and get a car and a license. But how to get it through a teen’s skull? Drills? Some Clockwork Orange style programming session? No, something much simpler.

The solution: key chains. Lots of them. All wrapped as Christmas gifts.

And the best part of all of this? He’s vowing revenge on me for the prank! We’ll see what Slacker Boy can pull off, if he does pull off anything at all.

Despite this, I have this nagging feeling that something is coming soon. Something bad. Shortly after 9-11, I made a point of carrying around a small flashlight with me wherever I went. Not that I think Al Quaida has plans on taking out a nondescript office building in central New Jersey, but then again no one really thought they had plans for ramming jets into skyscrapers just to get our attention. That flashlight just gave me a feeling of security, which is something neither the federal government nor their Panic Color of the Day chart does. They know something might happen, but there are way too many questions of when, where, what, how, and even if. After a while, I kind of resigned myself to my fate: I’m just another cog in the wheels, a statistic while I’m alive and a different statistic if I should die in an attack. Today, though, I put the trusty Mag-Lite back into my pocket, complete with fresh batteries. I’ve usually done well trusting my hunches and I’m not about to stop now.

That’s about all I have for now. I’m desperately trying to locate an ocean plunge for New Year’s Day in the area. Unlike the well organized and well publicized one in February, I usually only hear about the New Year’s ones a day late and in the paper. If anyone is willing to do a Google search for one, I’d be eternally grateful. Until next year…

As for gifts, mine were heavenly laden with DVDs. Before the 25^th, I owned the following discs:

Also had a wedding to attend last night, of which the Missus was a bridesmaid for. Marie, a mutual friend of ours from college days, finally got married. I say "finally" because she’s the type of person that makes you wonder why she didn’t get married sooner. Funny, intelligent, financially secure, easy on the eyes, yet it took a dating service to get her hitched. Fantastic wedding, it felt like one of those "spare no expense" types you rarely get invited to. Fabulous weather, especially for December, although the ladies were none too fond of getting pictures taken outside wrapped only in whisper thin shawls. Oh, did I mention the shots were taken on the beach? Nothing like trekking though a hundred feet of sand in dress shoes and heels. Although the setting sun made for some spectacular shots, everyone was chilled and gritty by the time we made it to the reception. A few scotch and sodas fixed that, plus it steeled my resolve to sit next to the in-laws (though not originally invited, they were included later to cover the previously approved guest list). I scored brownie points by dancing with my mother-in-law later in the evening (the Old Man is something of a music snob and will only dance if there’s a live band playing). He later did eventually dance, DJ or no. After he sat down, I started feeling around on the floor behind his chair. Someone asked what I was looking for and I told them, "Ice. I figure Hell had frozen over." I’m thinking I should take up drinking professionally so I can snap out witty rejoinders more often.

Not much else to report. The cold is making the standard progression from head to throat to chest cold. We’re currently in sore throat stage, my personal favorite. I can sound like Brando in the Godfather without trying and it gives me an excuse to gargle with the single malt scotch of my choosing.

We still have skatey-eight billion things to do before the holiday arrives. We’re having the in-laws over again this year. A welcome change from the road race between families, but the trade off is having to make the house look immaculate and do most of the cooking and baking. So far we have enough cookies to fuel a truckload of kindergartners for weeks. We also do the Meal of Seven Fishes (anyone else out there knows of this tradition?). Her mother is bringing crab cakes and we’re making the rest. Plenty of frying and broiling going on. By week’s end, we both look slightly sunburnt from stoking the fires under pots and checking items in the oven. Her grandmother, who was the one who got the ball rolling on bringing Christmas to our house last year and this, is balking about coming due to a fight with Mr. Wonderful (my father-in-law, who could warrant an entirely new blog or a book series, I can’t decide). My sister-in-law was supposed to drive Grandmom in place of the in-laws, but somehow her ex-boyfriend cajoled her into driving him up from Baltimore. It wouldn’t be the holidays without high levels of stress, anxiety, drama, and blood alcohol content.

And now, my blogging New Year’s resolutions, in no particular order:

• An improved blog! Well, just as soon as I learn HTML or get a bootleg version of Front Page.
• Photos! I finally wrangled some web site space and will be posting pics soon.
• Less chat about my personal hygiene and well being! Misery may love company, but not a 300 word essay on a root canal.
• A second blog! It will have nothing to do with the first, look nothing like this one and will be open only to members of my soon-to-be-incorporated super secret club!
• More unsubstantiated right wing beliefs!
• More mentions of Miles Davis! Because chicks dig Miles…
• More, more, more… man, you people are so needy.

If I can get the first four down, I’d be ecstatic. I’ll gladly settle for two of the four (photos is nearing a definite thing).

And while all of this was going on, our dear friend turned enemy Saddam was being wrested from his latest hidey hole. As an American citizen who is opposed to the war, I’m not sure how I should feel about this. On the one hand it’s nice to see that, despite all of his paranoia and wealth, we captured him in a little hole in the dirt. Yet since the start of the war, I can’t see why we turned all of our attention on him in the first place. True, he was a tyrant of his own people, but we have played nice with tyrants in the past (at least until the rest of the world said something about it).

But didn’t the war start because of 9-11? Did we ever find hard proof that Saddam did anything more than verbally approve of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center? Money transfers, taped conversations with Osama, anything? As far as I can see it, the wonderful game of "Where’s Waldo bin Laden?" got old and we switched to a new target: Saddam. And why not? To the American people, it was a sore spot that we never ran roughshod over Baghdad when we had the chance in 1991. To Bush, it’s old fashioned Texas justice: to right the wrongs your father never could. To voters, it makes you want to believe in America again, to put some bones back in our collective spines. Screw all this namby-pamby diplomacy, we demand action!

And unless we capture our original quarry or find out that he’s now a rust colored stain in an empty cave in Afghanistan, that shoe will most likely be a sandal dropping on our heads again.

The tooth is still bothering me. Actually, it feels more painful than it did before the dental work, but I’m not saying much of anything. My teeth are sensitive enough that even a professional cleaning can leave them aching for a day or two. Chances are it may be the swelling or the second operation will take care of it. Until then, I just about scream anytime anything two degrees hotter or colder than room temperature makes contact with the tooth. Lukewarm coffee anyone?

Anyhow, now she’s working on a degree at forensics in New York. I’m waiting for the Christmas photo cards that will show her gleefully smiling over an open chest cavity, wishing us peace on earth while she pulls lead slugs from a Mafia stoolie.

Oh, the reason she called? She got to work early and was locked out of her office. In Brooklyn. I take particular delight in getting calls from out of the blue like this.

The second is storage. No longer will you need to lug a backpack of CDs around (only if you want to, you masochist you). MP3 players like the iPod can store in excess of 4,000 songs on a single device. I’d have trouble coming up with 400 songs I’d like to hear right now, let alone 4,000. And these songs can be heard anywhere. Listen at home through the computer or piped through your stereo. Listen to it while driving. Listen while on the Stairmaster, working off that second helping of sausage stuffing. I’m sure they’ll eventually make a waterproof version for those who need to hear the Rolling Stones while scuba diving.

And the device can play in any order. Go ahead, put Pavarotti next to DMX. Eminem and Wayne Newton can peacefully coexist. Compare covers of Morrisey’s "How Soon Is Now" with the original. It’s your ears, listen how you want to. CD’s, even burned mixes, limit you to the order they’re in, save the occasional hit on the Shuffle button. I made the mistake of putting the White Stripes "Seven Nation Army" on a bunch of mixes, only to find it on the radio about every seven minutes. I’ve had enough of hearing Mr. White whine about going to Wichita. Fine, go to Topeka. Or Boise. Just get out of my speakers.

The crux of the problem with this new music buying format is the format itself. The entire music industry is based on record sales. Musicians are paid by the amount of records they sell. Reviews, both good and bad, are based on the entire album, not a few key songs. A band’s popularity and newsworthiness stems from how many people know them through a combination of media hype and record sales. A local band member who assaults a fan would barely get mention in the town police blotter. Someone sues Marilyn Manson for sneezing on them and suddenly Peter Jennings is weighing in on the situation.

When the RIAA started going after file swapping services, they were primarily concerned with getting the musicians their fair share of the profits. A good idea at first, but it’s kind of like getting rid of a swarm of bees by hitting the hive with a stick. Illegal file sharing has been around almost since ENIAC and it’s not going to go away. Stem the tide if you like, but you can always expect some attrition. By allowing legal music downloads, I think the music industry only made it worse for themselves. How do you judge record sales when everyone only buys a pittance of the songs on that record? Does Rolling Stone start discussing Ms. Aguilera’s new single instead of the whole album? And what happens to the brick-and-mortar stores? Will they be reduced to a select few for those who prefer holding shiny expensive plastic in their hands? Or will they morph into audio ATMs, just slip in your credit card and download directly to your player? (Hey, that’s a good idea…)

All I know is that, outside of a few high quality recordings of jazz and blues music, I’d rather have my music in electronic format on an iPod or something similar. Are you reading this, Santa?

And people seem to buy into this tripe every time. They get one of the field reporters into a store to report on rock salt and shovel sales. They get a cameraman do a long angled sweep of the supermarket bread aisle, the shelves empty but for a broken bag of raisin bread. A similar shot for the dairy cases, interviews with a few late-comers debating on using soy milk in their coffee tomorrow. Jump back to the newsroom to give some late breaking details on the weather: the storm is moving. Fall to your knees and pray for salvation, the storm has moved! Now on to another field reporter, showing how traffic is crawling along the local highways, probably more so because there’s a camera crew than the roads being bad. Run the standard footage of some jackass who rolled his SUV while doing 80 in an ice storm and chatting on his cell phone (damn Republicans!). I have only one question for the dairy and bread shoppers and the speedball drivers: what was it that made you so easily forget last winter? Make that two questions: what do you do with all that bread? Make French toast?

Personally I think it’s some sort of kickback scheme between the local dairy board, the baked goods conglomerates and the news stations. The reporters drum up the storm, there’s a surge on milk and bread sales, and the newsrooms get a nice "donation" from the bakers and moo juicers. And who’s going to report on this scam, you, you tired blog hack? You’ll get nothing and like it.

Sure, sometimes we get belted with a good storm and you’re stuck in the house for a couple of days. More often the Storm of the Century fizzles out for one reason or another (a good sneeze from someone in Boise might alter the storm’s course for all I know). We get a few inches of the white stuff, we dig out where we need to and get on with life. Need anything from the store? No, we still have three gallons of milk left in the fridge.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m running on very little sleep and way too much caffeine. Spent most of the night trying to help Kate rebuild her kitchen. She got a donated countertop, dishwasher and sink and we attempted to install them using the existing cabinets. A lot of work with little equipment and even fewer screws to result in...nothing. The structural support we had to put in to make the cabinets solid enough to hold the sink was the exact location the sink needed to be in. I know that two objects can’t occupy the same place at the same time, but we did our damnedest to try and break that rule. In the end, the most we got done was getting power to the dishwasher. Despite staying late and making Kate feel guilty about it enough to think she was Catholic, I enjoyed it. It’s always good to put the tools back on and roughen up those too smooth calluses once again. I just have to remember to stick to electrical work and not carpentry. You’d think I’d learn by now.

Someone at work asked me if anyone knew me. A confusing question. The comment was probably based on my hermit-like existence in the office. I walk through the front doors in the morning and don’t see those doors (or much of the building)again until most everyone else has gone home. Not the way I’d prefer to have it, but they usually pay better for work than for three-hour steak and martini lunches (there was a time for long lunches and trips to bars, but that managerial dynasty has gone the way of the Ming). Rather go into a long existential discussion on whether or not anyone really does know someone else, I’ll give you the things I do know about myself and let you the reader (possibly readers?) decide.

• I’m a 30 year old Caucasian male, roughly 6 foot 1 inch tall, a tad overweight, with a wife and a dog and a small Cape Cod style home in New Jersey.
• I have no kids. At least not yet.
• I grew up in a part of the New Jersey that most visitors (and even some natives) don’t believe ever existed. We had more corn fields than subdivisions around us. The local dairy farmer was a friend of the family. I even remember going with my dad to buy 12 dozen eggs from the local farmers co-op and splitting them up among neighbors. And yes, this was in the Garden State, not Pennsylvania. The trees were planted by nature, not the Parks Department.
• I’ve always liked blues music. Don’t ask me why a white bread kid from suburbia should like or even know about the blues, but I do and that’s that.
• I like jazz, too. I pretty much like all music, but I find my ears reaching for Miles instead of Metallica these days.
• I’m also a huge fan of animation. First off, to know that people are willing to spend countless hours with pen and ink to get something that isn’t real to become real will always fascinate me. Second, cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Charlie Brown usually capture the feelings and ideas of the era in which they were created. Few other forms of historical media can do that and manage to make you laugh at the same time.
• I have done some acting, but not nearly enough. It’s the one thing in the world that lets you slip into another person’s skin and be them. Equally fun, scary and a huge adrenaline rush.
• I know enough about electrical work to be skilled, but not adept at it. Had I the talent for it, I probably would have kept my dad’s business up and running. The rest of my home improvement skills are dangerously novice. It’s fun, but in a burn-the-house-down sort of way.
• I’m cantankerous and ornery, more so because I like the sound of those words than because they fit my description.
• I am a bit of a crank (thus the name for this blog). Sarcasm is my coffee in the morning, my midday meal and my apéritif at supper. If I’m not sarcastic, I’m obviously asleep.
• I like the color blue. Navy if you’ve got it. Certain greens have their appeal (the twenty, the less familiar fifty), but I look and feel best in blue.
• I believe that humor is one of the best ways to see the world (other than a cruise ship). Sure I can be pretty moody and sarcastic, but it tends to make people laugh instead of getting upset with me.
• I write this blog and hope to keep writing it so that people will know me and respond to what I have to say. Maybe what I have to say isn’t anything on an Alan Greenspan sort of level, but it’s at least important to me.

Keep reading this blog and you may see a different person. Maybe you’ll like what I write, offer me a book deal, possible movie scripts, cereal branding, animation rights. Maybe you’ll hate me, spam my e-mail, crash mo’time, flame the comments page for every word I post. As long as you keep reading, I’ll keep posting.

Ah, the home movies. This was a touch of strange. These were from my fraunt’s house in VA after we helped clean up her house from Hurricane Isabel. The projector and four reels of film quietly made it into the car after she told us to throw them out. The projector ended up dying on us, but a $30 rented one from the local camera store (who knew?) got us up and running again. Two films were spliced sets of family home movies, alternating between various vacation shots and some religious ceremonies (May Crowning, Confirmation, Easter, etc.). The problem was that these were people from my fruncle’s side of the family. He’s been dead several years now and no one has had much contact if any with his relatives since then. So the shots were neat to look at (the old cars and outfits being the popular points of discussion) but kind of had a peeping tom quality to it. For all we knew about the people in the shots, we could have fished them out of the trash from anywhere in America.

The third reel was cut from a much longer one. Obviously geared towards getting kids hooked on smoking, "Tobaccoland USA" was the story of the Whitehead family from Virginia and how they produced tobacco for Chesterfield cigarettes (an old cancer stick made by Liggett and Myers). It went through various types of tobacco, what states grew it (although the states were referred to as Tobaccoland USA so often you’d think they seceded), how it was grown and dried and everything about smokes except how to roll your own. The reel cuts out with Mrs. Whitehead and her African-American maid using the modern Kenmore stove to blanche fresh vegetables and then freeze them in their modern freezer. Better living through emphysema. No idea on a date it was made, but it had that 1950’s high school biology class feel to it. After the lights went up, I half expected a quiz on it.

Better acting than this flick can be found in any second grade play. Still, it was worth watching and left everyone laughing almost as much as the Jolly Fat Man (or at least the skinny nerd they had playing him).

Because I’m a Hatfield who married a McCoy, we rarely manage to get the two families under one roof for any sort of occasion. So we put our youth to good use and drive all across the Tollbooth Capital of the World. We’re seasoned road warriors (most of our honeymoon was spent seeing Nova Scotia through the windows of a rented Chevy Cavalier) but Turkey Day really saps us. The standard MO is to drive to her parents early in the day, have dinner, race up to my parents and have dessert. After five years, it’s down to a science. We arrive at the in-laws at the appointed time and are told the bird should be another hour. Fine, we’ll relax and chat it up until then.

I should preface the following with a brief discussion on my father-in-law. My father-in-law rarely tries the same recipe twice for anything. He tried deep fried Cajun birds for a couple of years (which no one would eat because they looked like charcoal and tasted like fire and oil), but he’s usually content to tinker with the seasonings in the stuffing or a new spin on Polish bread (called babka). This year he went CSI on the bird. Flip the bird over, remove the entire ribcage, clean the cavity out nine different ways, pack it with stuffing, use some butcher twine to keep the bird intact while leaving the stuffing exposed and pop it in the oven.

Upon opening the oven door an hour later, it looked like a holiday autopsy post-mortem, complete with the bone white skin and open chest cavity of the deceased staring at us in the face. The bird took three hours longer than expected and ruined any chance of meeting up with my kinfolk. The kicker was having the in-laws look surprised when we told them we were supposed to be going to my folks for dessert. Dessert? Actually, I didn’t even get to see my parents, who were both asleep by the time we made it to their house. I smell sabotage.

Then, in an equally brilliant move, I told my one sister I would join her for shopping on Friday. Black Friday to be exact. Get up at 4:30 and be ready to be picked up at 5. Make it to the store by 6, just as the doors open. Attack Target with military precision (hint: all Target stores are laid out the same, so if you know one you know them all). My brother-in-law acted as a storage depot, protecting our wares inside of the plastic confines of the cart and running down the occasional enemy shopper. My sister and I would run sorties through the throngs of people and return with our cache of goods to the Mother Ship (or Brother-In-Law Ship, in this case). I have poor hearing to start with, but I swear I had Superman’s ears that day. Three aisles away in the toy department, surrounded by fifteen jabbering women looking for various things, I heard a woman ask for what I was looking for (a Shrinky Dinks oven). I also managed to hear the clerk say, "They’re on the top shelf. I’ll go get a ladder." This from a man who has trouble hearing a running truck from thirty feet off.

We met up with my other sister, the shopper’s equivalent of Gary Kasparov. By the time we made it out of Target, she had already covered Target, Michael’s Craft Store and Circuit City (and got one of only four Palm Pilots the store had on sale for Friday). She’s a master tactician and the head of what my family calls the Network, a web of people she knows who can find the best buy on anything anywhere. Need a toy that no place seems to have? The Network can get it. A one day sale that starts at six in the morning? Network members have been waiting at the doors since five. Much of their knowledge and membership base remains a mystery, but I can tell you tha***** FILE DELETION ***** UNAUTHORIZED USE OF NETWORK INFORMATION *****

More of the weekend for tomorrow. Trust me I’ll try to make it worth your while. I’m up to the gills in work, too, but I don’t take a month off like Mr. Lileks.