TEN JACK TEN

Foil car stereo thieves by making them think you’re already a victim:

Using an assembly of loose wires and broken plastic, Instructables discovered that a car stereo with a removable faceplate can be made to look as if it has already been ripped out of the dashboard when, in fact, it’s perfectly intact. Mount your “stolen stereo” faceplate before you exit the vehicle. Upon returning, simply remove the “stolen stereo” faceplate (pictured), snap on the real one, and you’re ready to go.

I’ve had one ripped out of my car and it made me paranoid until we got our own parking garage downtown. 

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A service that lets you avoid talking to someone and go straight to voice mail:

Dialing (267)SLY-DIAL followed by a person’s number will take you straight to his voice mail — none of that phone ringing nonsense. And then you can lay it on him: “This isn’t working out,” or, “I’m sorry I abandoned you when you were so young.” 

There’s one catch for being a coward, though: You have to listen to a short advertisement before Slydial will connect you to the voicemail — unless you pay 15 cents to skip it.

More personal than a text message, less confrontational than a conversation . . .

What some call cynicism, I call reality-based thinking.

Will Ferrell is on the verge of digging a comedy rut so deep he won’t be able to climb out of it.

The only thing a concert review in the newspaper tells me is:  “Ha ha, I got my employer to pay for me to go see a concert.”  It’s not like I could go see it if the review was good.

Good news tends to come in the mail, bad news tends to come in a phone call.

Kids lose things.  Handing them something of value is always a risk.

Spending some time at a public swimming pool is a great way to remind yourself that everyone is funny-looking in their own special way.

Two patties on the burger is the sweet spot.  Three or one don’t have the right meat-to-bun ratio.

Mushrooms are nature’s boogers.

There’s something in my brain that refuses to believe that I’ve given up on a book I’ve stopped reading.  I may have stopped reading it, set it aside for a year or so, forgotten what page I was on, started reading another book, or misplaced the book itself — but I’m still reading it.

Always install or play used software before the return period is over. 

Part of the Miss Universe pageant is a “national costume” presentation. Here’s Miss Venezuela’s:

She won anyway.

Nothing like the VH1 video countdown to show you just how out of ideas the music industry is.  All the bands sound the same, all the solo female artists sound the same, all the hiphoppers and rappers sound the same.  The only thing that seems to sound different is Death Cab For Cutie — and I don’t like them.  I’m having to look harder and harder to music that isn’t completely boring.

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So Madonna got Timbaland to produce a song and Justin Timberlake to do the video with her and make her relevant again, to the point where she seems like a guest star in “her own” song.  As far as I can tell, she’s got four minutes to save the world, but all she & Justin do is dance around in a bathroom, a supermarket, wherever.  

Until the creeping wall of negativity eats their faces off.  I don’t think I’d be in a hurry to put either of those two in charge of anything important.

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And then there’s another song that’s climbed the VH1 charts about how the chick “keeps bleeding in love.”  Keeps, keeps bleeding in love.

And all I can think is that she must be on her love period.  Ew.

One of the great things about being a parent is getting to mess with kid stuff again.  For years, I solemnly declared that buying fireworks was like blowing up money and I wasn’t going to do it.  And then the kids came along and I ate those words, remembering how much fun I had blowing stuff up when I was young and that somebody had to buy those fireworks.  Now it’s me that’s doing the buying.

This year, I went over the $100 mark for the first time.  I let the kids pick a few and bought a variety pack of smaller stuff for them to mess with.  But I couldn’t resist the “Goliath” pack of 36 artillery-tube-style sky blasters.  And at my uncle’s lake house near Tulsa, I shot off every last damn one of them as soon as it turned dark.  Colored sprays, showers of crackling sparks, multiple blasts, this pack had it all.  It felt like a smaller-scale version of the professional stuff.  I was not ripped off.

After we were done, we watched the city’s fireworks over the treeline.  It was hot, late, and the bugs were eating me alive, but none of that matters when you’re having a perfect moment.

They’re waiting in there, ready to mess with your day when you don’t expect it.  The Pants That Are Too Tight In The Groin, or PTTITG for short.

They rely on your unwillingness to toss out an otherwise perfectly good pair of pants, or maybe they serve as “emergency” pants.  The PTTITG lurk on the rack waiting for you to use every other pair of pants and be too lazy to take them to the cleaners.  Or they use the disguise of being colored like other, non groin-binding, pants. 

And then they strike.  Often, you won’t even realize it until you’re in the car on the way to work – they’re fine standing pants, it’s the sitting that gets you.  A few miles down the road, you get that feeling that things just aren’t sitting right.

You’re nailed.  Prepare to spend the rest of the day handling your junk like a Major Leaguer.

WARNING:  Spoilers Within. 

(1)  Insultingly Preposterous Stunts 

It’s one thing to have close escapes and improbable occurrences in the context of an action serial.  But shutting yourself in a refrigerator (lead lined or not) to ride out a nuclear explosion is just bullshit.  Even if the fridge had the structural integrity to survive the on-screen blasting and bouncing, the contents would have been goo and a fedora.  Any time I say to myself, “this is bullshit,” I’m not being entertained, I’m being jarred out of the movie.  This occurred constantly throughout the film, with elaborate and unexplained vine-swinging and monkey-commanding techniques or riding boats off of huge waterfalls without any real consequenses.  Would it have been that hard to make the stunts more believable?

(2)  Insultingly Stupid Plot

There are evil agents after you.  They know who you are.  They just got done chasing you around the campus where you work.  What do you do?  If you’re Indiana Jones, you go home and calmly consult some reference materials.  Then there’s uniformed and armed members of the Soviet military running around unsupervised on foreign soil.  In the Western Hemisphere.  Unnoticed.  Meanwhile, the nuclear explosion had absolutely no relevance to the rest of the film, they apparently just thought it would be cool and show that we were beyond WWII.  It felt like there wasn’t a script as much as there were a bunch of 3×5″ cards on a bulletin board with cool ideas written on them that they had to try to connect somehow.

(3)  Insultingly Inconsistent Gimmicks

The Crystal Skull is intensely magnetic, drawing anything metal towards it.  Except when it’s not.  Sometimes this happens in the same scene.  I can almost visualize the places on the shooting script where they marked through random references to metal being attracted to the skull, with a handwritten “fuck it, the effects guys say they’re busy enough as it is.”  The Skull also has spooky mental powers that will permanently alter the mind of whoever stares at it long enough, except that it really doesn’t.

(4)  Insultingly Weak Acting

Someone needs to take Shia LeBouef aside and tell him that saying things louder does not actually convey “emotion.”  But the pits was Karen Allen, who was either liquored up or already spending her check in her mind throughout the film.  Or both.  The only woman who was a decent foil for Indiana Jones throughout the films was wasted on bickering and minor participation in the elaborate set pieces.  And then there’s Harrison Ford, who showed he was no longer a credible action star in Firewall a few years ago.  Instead of acknowledging the age of the character, we pretend he’s still got it.  Congratulations on failing to match the emotional depth of Die Hard 4.

(5)  Insulting Ending

Good lord, Speilberg — aliens?  Really?  Nobody could talk you out of that?  After Close Encounters, E.T., and War of the Worlds, you really thought you had something else to say about aliens?  And the ending is:  the aliens say “hey thanks for the skull” and they leave.  Actually, I’m kidding, they don’t say thanks.  They just vaporize the person they had to thank for the skull return (despite that they cared about humans so much they watched over the ancient Mayans and taught them all about agriculture and architecture), and they head home.  They don’t take the treasure that they meticulously gathered over the centuries.  Was there a point?  A lesson?  An allegory?  Nope, not unless you think “UFOs are cool” constitutes a point.

You don’t own the house, the house owns you.  So when you see that the water heater is leaking, it’s time to fix it before things get even uglier.  The house doesn’t care how much stuff you replaced last year. 

Somehow, it irks me to spend that much money and end up with exactly what I had before — a 50-gallon hot water heater.  It would have felt better to have “upgraded” in some way, but it cost plenty without considering the on-demand water heaters that are getting so much advertising lately.

And then the garage fridge dies.  I caught it in time to evacuate the frozen food to the kitchen fridge or take it to the office with me.  But once you get used to having more storage for drinks & frozen food, you don’t want to give it up.  So we went to Sears to see what they had to offer.

Sears gave me no reason to do business with them.  The salesmen wanted nothing to do with us once they realized we were looking for a small & cheap fridge, and then they told us they couldn’t deliver anything for a couple of weeks.  What finally killed any interest was a catch-22 with the delivery charge.  There was free (after rebate) delivery if the fridge was over $399.  But they were running a sale, and every fridge they had in the price range would be less than $399 after discount.  Which meant that you would have to pay the full delivery charge and come out worse than you would after the rebate.  Pay more and get bad service?  Pass.

Lowes had the same post-delivery rebate deal, but could sell us a new model that was within the rebate coverage and get it to us the next day, even with a 10% discount for the floor model.  But the doors opened from the opposite side I wanted them to.  No problem, says the salesman, we can reverse them for you.  I ask at the check out whether I need to specify in advance that I want the doors reversed.  No problem, says the checkout guy, just ask the deliverymen to take care of that when they show up.

“We don’t have the tools to do that,” say the deliverymen when they show up.  I reflected on their lies as I worked for an hour in the hot garage reversing the doors.

Then, a few days later, I realized that there was no evidence that the promised delivery-fee rebate would occur.  I went back to Lowes and was told by customer service that, woops, they must have forgotten to give me the form.  (Actually, I was told by the second person at customer service because the first one interrupted our conversation to answer the phone and provided customer service to them instead of me as I stared at her in disbelief.)  Yeah, in all the frantic confusion caused by my politely paying for my purchase, I can see how that detail could escape you.  I can only guess how many times Lowes has “forgotten” to give people the rebate form. 

Lowes should be thankful that I went to Sears first or I’d think they were the worst bunch of lying screw-ups I could have found.