Who needs firewood?

For those of you who stood in the shadow of the massive dead hickory tree in my front yard, you might be glad to know it's now only a memory.

A tree guy took down the monster yesterday, but he wouldn't remove the wood (for the price I was willing to pay him). So great big huge thanks to friend Greg for coming over before I even got off work to help clean up the mountains of debris. Amazingly, we got most of the yard cleared, although the city of Hoover will have a fun pile to pick up from the street.

I'll try to snag a photo of the dead-tree carnage and slap it up here before it (hopefully) gets hauled away.

So yeah, if you need firewood, now's the time to ask. We're going to have a few years' worth (although we put a lot of the good stuff by the curb, since we don't have much space to store it).

Not many other updates. I've finished a radio ad that should start airing soon on "youth" stations...probably The X in Birmingham and a few others.

I'm still plagued by poison ivy and will probably go in for a second steroid shot today. I feel like my arms are covered in ants. All day. It's great.

OK, back to being productive.

I should have picked "Swords."

Me: OK, Alex, I'm going to take "Things Griner hates" for $200.

Alex: "It hides in the bushes, waiting to hinder Griner's productivity for a week or two and make him second-guess the plant genocide he's committing on his back yard."

Alex: Griner.

Me: What is poison ivy?

Alex: Correct.

Me: "Things Griner hates" for $300.

Alex: This is ironic, but probably not in the literary sense.

Me: What is the fact that the new Macinstosh commercials always crash my Mac?

Alex: Correct.

Me: Whew. $400.

Alex: You put water in this.

Maybe it's just history the way Bush remembers it.

Can't remember if I've mentioned it here, but I've been loving Slate's graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Report. The artists have walked a fine line of showing multiple sides of a complicated issue while still interjecting occasional humor, blame and drama.

But I don't get one panel from today's installment:



The text makes perfect sense. But the picture...what year is it again? In 1997, U.S. officials are worried about Bin Ladin's growing power...in Iraq? And they're worried about him hitting U.S. interests...in Iraq? And what are all those U.S. and British flags doing in Iraq? I thought for a second they represented the No-Fly Zone, but there's a U.S. flag right in the middle of the country. The guy looking at the map also is talking about Bin Ladin seeking nuclear weapons...in Iraq? We all know there's slim pickins on nukes there.

I'm probably just misreading this, or it's a bizarre error. Anybody have a theory? Or am I just crazy?

Civil war averted.

We can all jitter with contentment here at the agency today. After asking us to vote between gourmet coffee and free doughnuts/meat muffins, the execs announced today that there was an even split.

Thus, in the Solomonic spirit I previously mentioned, they have agreed to let us have BOTH. Aw yeah. Sure, our clients are going through mega-huge mergers that may inexorably alter the future of our agency, but at least we have the important issue settled.

And yes, I realize that the true Solomonic answer would have been to give us half a cup of coffee and a doughnut hole, but that's not the point.

Here's....some stuff.

A few fun happenings from the past 24 hours:

1. I trained in the bookstore and music department at Barnes and Noble, where I've always just worked in the cafe. The managers are apparently planning to make me some kind of global fill-in monkey. It was surprisingly fun.

2. I learned that people can get quite angry when you tell them they can't buy the new Outkast album until 9 a.m. the next morning. (But don't worry, folks, Idlewild's out today! You don't have to resort to violence!)

3. A major client bought a radio ad I wrote, and it'll be likely be running on rock and pop radio stations in the next few weeks. I'll keep you posted. For now, it includes a blatant sex reference, but we'll see how long that'll survive.

4. My American Idol billboard continues to get strange amounts of attention, today being mentioned on People magazine's Web site. If any of you actually watch the show, be sure to let me know if they include the billboard in the talent-hunting montage.

5. My dreams of gourmet coffee in the workplace likely will be dashed on the rocks soon. The execs asked employees to vote on whether they'd rather have the good coffee or keep getting weekly doughnuts and meat muffins. I boycotted the vote, saying it pits coffee drinkers against eaters. Most coffee drinkers I know also eat. I'll let you know how that gets resolved.

6. I pussed out of volunteering for the Stoke the Fire BBQ festival at Sloss Furnaces this weekend. I feel slightly conflicted, but here's the deal: I agreed months ago to work the beer tent for four hours on Saturday. They apparently forgot about me until I contacted them the other day. So they assigned me to "security." When I asked what I would be doing, the coordinator said (and I quote) "Just walking around." I said I would have to pass. Am I a bad person? You don't even get a free plate of food. Oh well. I really do want to volunteer and help folks out, but I just can't see that being a justifiable use of my day.

Don't drive like my cardboard cutout.

My agency's new TV commercial for Little Debbie is available online over here. It's pretty funny, even if I didn't write it. I did write the stuff that comes up on the site if you enter the contest.

Not much else to say, so here's a shocking revelation from the Little Debbie FAQ, followed by Cafe Asteria's first interactive opportunity.

Question: What are the top selling products?
Answer: Our top selling items are:
1. Swiss Cake Rolls
2. Nutty Bars® Wafer Bars
3. Oatmeal Creme Pies
4. Fudge Brownies
5. Honey Buns
6. Zebra Cakes
7. Devil Squares®
8. Fudge Rounds
9. Star Crunch® Cosmic Snacks
10. Chocolate Cupcakes

If you had to enter a Little Debbie snack-eating contest, what would be your weapon of choice?
	Swiss Cake Rolls
	Nutty Bars
	Oatmeal Creme Pies
	Fudge Brownies
	Honey Buns
	Zebra Cakes
	Devil Squares
	Fudge Rounds
	Star Crunch
	Chocolate Cupcakes
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Bloggers: Sharing their great big love with the world.

This is completely random and unconnected to my life, but it made me laugh, so I thought I'd share.

Glamour magazine's Web site has started a blog where a 29-year-old writes about her dating life and lets visitors vote on what she should do (surprisingly, they don't seem to be doing her any favors...the voters seem to be both puritanical and cruel).

Anyway, the gossipy, snarky uber-blog Gawker has been writing about her like crazy (thus I know about her), and she wrote a post saying that Gawker really hurt her feelings by writing about her ex-fiance. Personally, I agree with the theory that if you're going to put your sex life in the hands of Internet trolls, you might as well just assume you've lost any chance at privacy. But I digress...

What made me laugh was this comment on Gawker's post about the blogger's post about Gawker's posts...or something. As always, click on the pic to see the text bigger.

I might draw the line at primal screaming.

Not to linger on work with two posts in a row, but...

Sometimes it bugs me that I'm in a cubicle, when every other writer (even the part-time guy who's only here once a week or less) has a window office. But today I was reminded how lucky I actually am. I visited a fella who's clustered among a bunch of cubicles, and he was getting chided by a nieghbor for tapping his fingers on the desk.

Cut to me, off in my own cubicle away from civilization, tapping my feet loudly for about five minutes while I hum the old Ghosts and Goblins theme song (thanks to my brother-in-law, who's randomly decided to master it on guitar). I watch obscure commercials in the name of work, I read my radio scripts out loud (and brilliantly in character), and I often kick the metal wall of my cube just because it makes a cool bass-drum sound.

So yes, my situation could definitely be worse. How's your work space?

A challenge worthy of Solomon.

I love my job and my bosses, and I'm not just saying that in case they ever find this blog. I really do. They treat me great, they've hired lots of awesome people, and they seem to take a sincere interest in making us all happy.

While I heartily applaud their most recent morale booster, it also seems to have painted them into an interesting corner, and I'm curious to see how they get out.

The situation: The other day, the president invited us into the "diner" area to try out some gourmet coffee samples. They came from the amazing little one-cup coffee maker shown here. It's not life-changing brew, but it sure as hell beats the Yuban or whatever we had before.

The problem: Well, they haven't said whether we're keeping the coffee maker, but dozens of caffeine addicts have made their opinions clear and are shielding the machine like it's the dauphin in The Scarlet Pimpernel. (Too obscure? Maybe, but how often do I get to reference The Scarlet Pimpernel?)

The only comments I've squeezed out of an upper manager are: "We haven't decided yet" and "It's quite expensive."

Now, to be brutally honest, I could live without the thing. I'm sure most of us could. But man, it's nice having it around. It's the most popular addition to the office since Emily (as someone noted on the chalk board...not sure who...), so how does an exec pull it out of the diner now? Why let people try something great (our trial period is going on a week now), that you might yank from under them later?

Oh well. It's times like these I'm glad to be a grunt who doesn't have to risk a single-cup-fueled mutiny. As long as they keep the meat muffins coming every Friday, I'll stick around.

To Drink AC Zero

I'm back in the smock, as of tonight. It's my first shift at the cafe since starting at the ad agency four months ago or so. To celebrate, the Web comic Toothpaste for Dinner posted this coincidental entry: (Click on it if you need to read it bigger.)



Thanks to Em for brightening my already great day by sending this to me this afternoon. And thanks to my lovely wife for sneaking out to show up for my birthday lunch at New York Pizza! Huzzah!

Man, it takes me forever to turn 29.

Had a nice, big, overly fed weekend at my parents' lakehouse to celebrate my birthday (which is actually today, but who can celebrate anything on Mondays?). Big thanks to whoever had Samuel L. Jackson call my cell phone to invite me to Snakes on a Plane. I liked the personalized touches, like him telling me to skip work at my "stupid ad agency" and "stop waxing your big bald head" long enough to go see the movie. I'm promptly sending on my own version to my boss' phone.

Discovered this weekend that Jonas cannot leave a kayak unattended in the lake. That's good news for us when we're looking to exhaust him. You simply hop in friend Dawn's kayak and paddle around lazily, while he huffs behind you for the full length of your trip. Strangely, he's been asleep since we got home from the lake. But he's woken up a few times to throw up random things he ate during his lake travels. Yay!

Got some great swag from my friends, but the biggy was an MP3 player for my car, from my parents and wife. I can't tell you how nice it is to step out of 1983 and leave behind my (rarely functional) tapedeck.

Thanks to everybody who made it a great birthday! Hope to see you all soon, if I didn't spend the weekend with you.

Let's all step into my bathroom, shall we?

A visual account of our recent bathroom painting session....


The problem: A pink and black bathroom. You might think that's charmingly authentic. You would be wrong.



We started with a special primer called "Gripper" that supposedly helps paint stick to tile. We just hope it will buy us a few years until we can remodel the whole thing.



Man down!



Good friend Emily got in on the action and was a huge help.



Karen came dangerously close to losing all hope.



But magically, it all got done. Tile is now white, walls are a reddish brown. My dad bought and installed the new light fixture. Also not pictured is Karen's mom, who did a ton of the actual painting work once the primer was done.



So there you go. Personally, I can't wait for the yard work "before and after" shots...or at least the "after."

Random updates for you and you alone.

I felt like you guys deserved a blog update, even though I don't have much new stuff to say. I've actually been working crazy hard the past few days, and it doesn't look like it's going to slow down any time soon.

This weekend, I'll be celebrating my birthday a few days early with a crab boil. We tried it a few years back at a beach house and were more than happy with the results.

Work on the house continues at a steady pace. We actually have the inside looking like a real, lived-in home. The overgrown yard continues to be my Two Towers, but it's been surprisingly rewarding to rip out weed trees by the dozen. The real work begins this fall, when we prune back the trees and shrubs we want, rip out every piece of plant life in front of the house, plant all new stuff and repaint the exterior. I get tired just thinking about it.

We'll also be installing a wooden fence sometime soon, or at least as soon as we save up enough to buy one. Chances are we'll have that done around the time it's actually cool enough outside to leave Jonas in the yard all day without us being plagued by guilt.

Hope all is well with you all! And just as a bonus random note, this is my 199th post since opening Cafe Asteria. Woohoo! Let's hear it for artificial benchmarks!

Oh. My. God. I feel like a tweener at a boy-band festival.

From MTV, strangely enough:

It's been known for some time that Modest Mouse were working on their new album with former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, but what's news to us is the fact that Marr is now apparently a full-fledged member of the band. A spokesperson for the band's label, Epic Records, confirmed that Marr had joined Modest Mouse and will tour with them in support of their upcoming album, tentatively titled We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. The band (including Marr) recorded the new album at Sweet Tea studios in Mississippi, the same place the group recorded its breakout 2004 album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News. The new Modest Mouse LP is tentatively due this fall.

I almost forgive MTV for referring to "Good News" as a "breakout album." Almost.

OK, I admit I sound like a big weenie, but how cool is this?

The governor of New Jersey loves my work.

So the American Idol billboard I wrote has apparently been getting some attention.


After the story got picked up by the AP, it circulated quickly through the Interwebs:


The funniest story, though, is that the governor of New Jersey apparently saw a piece about the billboard on the national news and called the governor of Alabama to mention it. Crazy.

Just a few billion more people to check up on...

I'll quit picking on MSNBC when they quit deserving it.

Hrm...that looks strangely familiar.

Check it out. One of my headlines is featured on my favorite ad blog today. Woohoo! Can't wait to see all the comments about what a hackneyed hillbilly must have written it.

I hope these Legos illustrate how I might have lied to you in the past.

OK, I might owe an apology to some folks. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, I'm known to throw out some obscure trivia. Much more rarely, my factoid proves to be wrong.

I don't intentionally lie; I just sometimes remember things...differently.

Anyway, today saw another installment in the brilliant Blogging the Bible project over at Slate.com. The writer, who is writing blogs about his attempt to read the entire Bible, is now on Numbers.

When I was getting my highly practical Religious Studies minor at Missouri, I focused a lot on the Torah and the Tanakh (aka, Ye Olde Testament). But I can't say I've read Numbers, and there's an important piece of Biblical trivia hidden in there.

Some of you may know that Moses didn't make it to the Promised Land, despite his intense work to get the Israelites there. For some reason, I was convinced that he was prohibited by God because he had committed murder.

In case you don't remember that part of Exodus, here's a visual reminder from one of my favorite Biblical resources:



But no, killing a slaver wasn't the problem. It was a much, much more serious transgression.

Moses and Aaron were asked by God to speak to a stone so that it would release water for the thirsty Israelites. Instead, Moses just Ike Turners his way to the watery goodness:



That's it. His lack of faith and inability to follow God's specific orders earned him a lifetime of desert exile. Tough luck, Mo.

Here's a summary from another site:

Moses was not perfect. Like any man, he had his flaws and his moments of weakness, and the Bible faithfully records these shortcomings. In fact, Moses was not permitted to enter the Promised Land because of a transgression (Deut. 32:48-52). Moses was told to speak to a rock to get water from it, but instead he struck the rock repeatedly with a rod, showing improper anger and a lack of faith (Num. 20:7-13).

So there you have it. Sorry if I ever told you wrong. And I hope we all learned a valuable lesson today. Stoning, killing, committing genocide? The Old Testament God can let these things slide. Heck, he can require them.

But hitting a rock with a stick? Unforgivable.

Good news: Carjackings are rare, even in a deathtown like this.

In case you care, here's an update on the carjacking/shooting near my house the other day. (Well, to be specific, the carjacking was a ways away, but the woman was shot trying to flee near my house.)

Anyway, they arrested a man and a woman and say they're linked to a string of recent carjackings. The victim was alive but still critical.

Interesting but unclear note here from the Birmingham News story:

In Bessemer, Mountain Brook, Pelham, Hoover and Vestavia Hills, police officials said carjacking was so rare, statistics were unavailable. The sheriff's departments in Shelby and Jefferson counties didn't recall any recent carjackings.

It's not really clear whether that includes Birmingham proper. When I was a reporter working out of downtown, a carjacking would not have seemed that strange. Multiple homicides were virtually a daily occurance. That being said, I can't remember covering a carjacking. Oh well, at least we can all rest easy now, until that serial killer in my neighborhood decides to get crackin on his femur lamp collection.

I really should celebrate that...

Just a fun follow-up to my post about morning "news" shows. Saw this on MSNBC today...

Who knew Homewood and Hoover were so dangerous?

A cautionary tale that ended badly a few blocks from my new house last night. Story via Birmingham News.

Carjack victim shot as she tries to esape in Hoover
A 25-year-old woman was shot in the chest in Hoover about 4:40 p.m. today after being carjacked and kidnapped in Homewood, police said. The woman was abducted from the Lakeshore Landing Apartments off Old Columbiana Road in Homewood where she was visiting or picking up someone who lives there, Hoover police Capt. Gregg Rector said.

She was taken away in her own car, a Nissan Altima. The woman tried to escape from the front passenger seat of her car in the 1600 block of Shades Crest Road near Alford Avenue in Hoover and was shot by her kidnapper when she did, Rector said.

She suffered a single gunshot wound to the chest and was taken to UAB Hospital by the Hoover Fire Department. She was in surgery tonight, and her condition was unavailable. Police did not release her name.

Her car was found abandoned at the intersection of Shades Crest Road and Old Columbiana Road in Vestavia Hills. Police searched the area but believed the suspect likely was picked up by someone in another vehicle, Rector said.

Homewood police Sgt. Ben Sutton said police have some suspects in the case. Rector said it’s possible this carjacking and shooting is related to other recent carjackings in Homewood.

Jon Anderson