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Okay, I’ve got an idea for a new business. You ready?

High-School Yearbook Obscenity Consulting.

You know how every graduating high-school class has a couple of guys who like to give the finger in the swim team photo? Or how the art students will scratch tiny four-letter Hirschfeld statements into their senior page drawings? This service will vet high school yearbook pages for:

1. Obscene gestures
2. Drug and alcohol references
3. Gang signs and neo-nazi symbolism
4. Other prohibited freakyness

Core to this business model will be the assumption that obscenity and pranks are a relatively unchanging constant through the years (only the details change,) and that high school yearbook printers have seen it all. I have no doubt that you could get a seasoned seventy-year-old master printer, show him any yearbook from any graduating class in the world, and he’d start paging through it, saying:

“There, that kid is giving the finger. Him? He’s got no pants on. This drawing here says ‘Chess club blows goats’ when you hold it up to the mirror and close one eye. The entire volleyball team is displaying the shocker. That wall clock says ‘4:20’ for a reason. That’s not a flashlight she’s holding.”

“Okay, moving on to page two…”

We’ll get indemnity insurance for when the service misses the 10-pixel-high porno centerfold photoshopped onto the principal’s mirrored glasses, which will pay for yearbook reprints. We’ll develop a slideshow designed to shock and entertain PTA meetings, and advertise it like the sideshows of old: “In-formational purposes only, ladies and gentlemen! Do NOT attend if you’re easily offended! Por-no-graphic secrets will be revealed! Purely for edu-ca-tional purposes! You WILL be shocked!”

Man, we’ll pack ’em into the PTA hall, and we’ll have a big red light that goes on to signify when folks should hold their ears and close their eyes to the SMUT that’s about to be shown, which they’ll pretend to do. Once we get ’em convinced that their yearbook is destined to be a cross between The Necronomicon and Hustler: Campus Cuties, we’ll charge a reasonable hourly rate to protect them.

All we need is some venture capital, a snappy name, and a seventy-year-old veteran of the yearbook printing industry to actually do the work. Who wants in?

Dude, I’m huge in Columbus

I’m very slightly more Zaphod Beeblebrox-y today, as Columbus, OH-based rock and roll band DB3 has released a new album featuring my badass six-year-old bigwheel-riding self.

The good news: This helps me convey that crazy, madcap, laugh-in-the-face-of-death persona that keeps the Naderites at bay. Feet off the pedals! Badass at six years old! Hey, maybe the resolution on the cover art is low enough that you can’t see the expression of abject terror on my face.

The bad news: The hammy expression may be mine, but the photo is very much my mom’s, and I gave permission for DB3 to use it thinking it would be part of a big-wheel collage, and all of half-an-inch across. Not the band’s fault, I gave them the imprimatur as a knee-jerk response. My mom, who is a Real Photographer, won’t be amused. Mea culpa, chere maman!

The first time I got unintentional overexposure was at the Hill School Computer Camp, when I was just a couple of years older than in the bigwheel photo. My fashion sense ran to short khakhi shorts with many zippers and clip rings, excruciatingly tall “ringer” calf socks, and — get this — a Doctor Who hat with a pedometer clipped to the back. Channel Ten news came by to do a story on this crazy new “techie kid” phenomenon, and I really really really wanted to be on TV. So I walk up to local reporter Cheri Banks, and say, all casual like from under the bill of my “Doctor Who” hat:

“Say, we don’t get newspapers here. Can you tell me what’s happening in the Falkland Islands?”

Yeah, smooth, right? I’m sure my story would have been more convincing if there wasn’t a TV RIGHT BEHIND ME WITH THE NEWS ON. Anyhow, maybe it was the socks, but skip forward a week, and I’m sitting anxiously in front of the TV, watching the nightly news teaser: “Kids who know more about computers than adults do, ha ha! More after this break.” The longest commercial break in history, then:

“At first glance, John Young is a typical kid at a typical summer camp…” [shot of me in the pool, waving through the dive coach’s underwater viewing window at the camera GOOD GOD THIS WHOLE STORY IS ABOUT ME! OH DEAR LORD LOOK AT THOSE GOGGLES]



“But this is a special kind of summer camp… a computer camp!” [shot of me walking to class carrying a white ring binder with my Pascal notes OH MY GOD THOSE SOCKS! IS THAT WHAT MY SHORTS LOOK LIKE! OH NO OH NO I’M A NERD! A NERD!]

“At the Hill School Computer Camp…” [shot of me fitting a new reel of tape onto a VAX system]

“blah blah blah blah of the future, ha ha ha!” [staged interchange between me and Cheri; Cheri is sitting at a computer pretending to try and fail to do something; I’m shaking my head knowledgeably and pretending to explain what she’s doing wrong, CAUSING MY DOCTOR WHO PEDOMETER TO GO CLICK CLICK CLICK OH SWEET JESUS NNNNNNOOOOOOOOO!

Oh, man, that was traumatic — a window into a future filled with wedgie after wedgie after wedgie; a future where I only wore stupid clothes and acted excruciatingly, horrifyingly embarassing and never, ever got a girl to like me (I was eleven; I was starting to change my mind on the whole girl subject.) The Doctor Who hat went straight into the closet, and I vowed never, ever to embarass myself in public again.

Of course, I got over that.

In defiance of every ‘watched-pot’ axiom on the books, my dad and Risa went to visit my sister in Seattle for the week of her due date. Naturally, the inevitable occured: everyone sat around looking at each other for a week, the family went for long walks on the beach, and the station wagon sat, fully loaded with baby-delivery gear, alone in the driveway. At the end of the week, the inevitable happened: my dad left for Albequerque, a giant meteorite exploded dramatically, and four hours later Bridget went into labor. It always seems to work out the same way, doesn’t it?

Sixty hours after the meteor, and fifty-six(!!!) hours after starting labor, I have a new nephew! We’re anxiously awaiting pictures. Meanwhile, my dad came by last night to visit the bird-in-the-hand baby, and dropped off book that’s gonna be really useful for the Time Travel Guide project!

Like watching two French courtiers slap each other with hankies
I’m not proud of saying “fuck you” to a couple of Nader petitioners on the Exton train station platform this morning, but it was a knee-jerk response. In fact, I’d probably do the same thing again, except hopefully without the overwhelming aura of Pissy White Man that makes me curl my toes with embarassment when I think about it.

[John is walking to train platform, trying to avoid what look like two Greenpeace canvassers with thick clipboards.]
Canvasser #1: (Early thirties, slightly built, wearing denim-y shirt) “Sir, would you like to sign this petition to put Ralph Nader on the ballot for…”
John: (surprised) What? No! Fuck you! (walks away)
Canvasser 1: (calling after John) Up… up yours!
John: (PWM mode activated) What’s your name?
Canvasser #1: (PWM mode activated) Sasha.
John: Sasha what? You think Ralph is gonna be happy you’re shouting “up yours” at commuters?
Sasha: What’s your name? (Gets out pen and reversed business card, ready to write.)
John: Why, so you can sneak me onto that petition? Hell no!
Sasha: I’m an attorney, and you can’t go around saying… (pauses) “F-U” to people!
John: Sure I can!
Canvasser #2: (younger college student, fairly amused by PWM display) A simple “no” would have sufficed.
John: No, I disagree. I wanted a “no” with some mustard on it, a “no” plus a foot up Sasha’s ass here, so you guys will stop taking votes away from any candidate that can beat Bush! Christ, I can’t believe you guys aren’t used to this by now! Don’t you get this response twelve times a day?
Sasha: You’re the first “F-U” we’ve gotten.
John: Well, hopefully it won’t be the last. (Walks towards train, which has arrived)
Sasha: (calling after) You just got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning!

Now, reading this, it looks fairly charitable to me, like I got the upper hand in the argument. Doubtless, if Nader stumper Sasha has a blog (which seems likely; we’re practically demographic doppelgangers,) it will read the other way around. You have to remember, though, that Pissy White Man Mode means that all retorts and rejoinders are delivered in a high-pitched, whiny, half-smiling and TOTALLY FUCKING EMBARASSING way. Even if I had the forethought to call the Nader stumpers “deluded patsies of the Republican party,” I wouldn’t have managed to deliver it with a two-fingered poke in the chest, gravel in my voice, and steel in my eye; it would have come out more like “Do you have a pass to be in the lunchroom right now? You don’t? I’m gonna tell the principal!” Kate tells me that if I insist on aspirating the “wh” in “where” and “wheel”, I’m never going to convince anyone that I’m about to pull their arm off and hit them with it.

What’s worse, I’m pretty sure that I steeled Sasha’s reserve to get out there on the mean streets of Chester County and spread Naderism even in the face of occasional rude language from liberals. I guess I’m the deluded patsy of the Republican party today.

What I Did on My Memorial Day Vacation (click the list items for pics.)

Kate and I went for a long Memorial Day Weekend to visit my mom and other Baldwin relatives with new babies (picture from Robin’s site) in Belfast, Maine. While there, we: Took cousins letterboxing (link) Took the baby to visit uncles and cousins (link one) (link two) Took cousins geocaching (link) Played with the baby some more (link) Went window-shopping for a new family car (link) Drove to the top of Mount Battie The trip back was a bit of a slog, as we had two flights canceled out from under us, and missed a third due to some Delta ticket window oafishness. (gory details and baby mugshots on Kate’s blog) But we made it home eventually, and are happy to be back. Lydia’s re-acquanting herself with all the old familiar ceiling fans.

Bouncing from project to project, I’m trying to figure out how a time traveler could derive standards of time, distance, and mass accurate enough that common physics and engineering formulas (G = 9.8m/s², for example) would be accurate and reproducible.

I like the idea of publishing the exact length of Cheops’ sarcophagus, so a time traveler could use that to derive a meter, but I’m sure there’s a simpler way.

I’ve been trying to get the Retropod store up by Memorial Day weekend, so that I’ll at least have finished one recent project. I wanted to make a nice gasket to hold an iPod in half-inch neoprene. Measuring and cutting with an Xacto knife leaves a wandering, haggled cut. After Googling on “neoprene gaskets” for a while I discovered that what I probably wanted was a “steel rule die”, which is basically a knife edge mounted on a piece of plywood.

I found a place in West Chester that makes dies, so I sent them an Adobe Illustrator file of the shape I wanted and, a couple of days later, picked up the die. Man, that was fun — like printing out a thing.

The next challenge was to get the neoprene to actually cut. It’s very squishy, and it takes a LOT of force to get the knife blade to pierce the neoprene all the way around. I tried jacking the car up onto a plywood, die, and neoprene sandwich, but that worked only intermittently — one corner would cut, the pressure would be relieved, and the rest would only be lightly scored.

After futzing around for a while, I discovered that all I had to do was kind of push the top plywood-and-neoprene layer down with my thumbs, working around the die in a circle. So, less industrial, but better results. Now I’m working on putting up the store page!

Sooner or later, everybody you Blog about reads the post. It’s because of Google, of course — everybody does a search on their own name and their friends’s names occasionally. Here’s a list of various people that have contacted me after finding various bits of this site:

• The owner of the first-ever Mozzarepa truck in NYC.

• Various former girlfriends of Kieran Downes find his M4K pictures online and want to know how they can get back in touch. Ditto for college buddies of Gerard Viau.

• A childhood friend contacted me when I named him in an early post as my junior-high-school smut-mag connection. Since that dubious honor was googling higher than his online resume, I took it down in a hurry.

• I heard from the friend of a young, Midwestern chamber-of-commerce member whose online profile I had stumbled across in my search for the Defend Brooklyn T-shirt. Since I posted the story, she had become a police officer in Detroit. This spring, she and her partner were shot and killed while sitting at an intersection. I removed the mention.

• My friend Rommel Kott Cuellar, he of the Mexican Forklift Story, who became a SWAT team member in the state of Tamaulipas and recently apprehended an FBI 10 most wanted felon. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to mind the description I gave him. Did I mention I once talked him out of buying a tiger?

• Some toad-biting indie-film promoter wrote me with some veiled threats: “I am concerned over similarities between your concept and ours.” R-i-i-i-ght, as if there wasn’t plenty of prior art on this concept. Frankly, I think it’s sour grapes because I registered my domain name a year before him, so I didn’t have to use the definite article. Nyaaah!

• Motivational speaker Anthony Robbins, who borrowed the Ultimate Water Gun, took it to Singapore, then had his personal assistants threaten to sue me when I mentioned the fact on my site. I’ve been trying to negotiate an UWG loan to a heavy-metal band in Philadelphia, in return for recording a song caled “Anthony Robbins Can Bite my Crank.” Which I’ll post, naturally.

• I heard from the “real” inventor of the Super Soaker, who was carrying on a bitter and vengeful feud with the cabal of scientists, corporate bastards, and Venusian telepaths that screwed him out of the fruits of his work.

• This weekend, I was contacted by a person who had been deeply affected by the work of Red Cross volunteer coordinator John McGee. John was the one who organized the Red Cross’ efforts to work with the thousands of New Yorkers who showed up at 66th and 7th on September 11th, offering to do something — anything — to help. I spend a couple of days helping out, mostly making copies, telling people where the blood centers were (remember the big urge to give blood?), and attending Red Cross training sessions that John led. He was funny, organized, down-to-earth, and made a big difference. I realized pretty soon that we weren’t helping John, really: it was the other way around, and he was ministering to us by helping us feel like we were doing something. Plus, I came away with some good, real-world tips. For example, Red Cross shelters can’t accept donations of prepared food, since they have to follow the same health code restrictions as restaurants. It’s a big challenge for shelter operators to politely turn away plates of brownies, apple pies, ham roasts, and casseroles prepared by people who just want to help. John’s solution? Keep a fire company handy — “those guys will eat anything and everything.”

  John passed away at the end of 2001, and he’s sorely missed.
  

I’ve ordered a steel rule die so that I can start marketing the Retropod in a few weeks, but nothing I can say can compete with those BABY PICTURES!

For those of you who remember The Mexican Forklift Story, Part One that I posted last year, or those that I’ve told the Missionary Man story to, you might remember hearing about my Mexican friend Rommel. Who I just heard from for the first time in 12 years: now he’s a leader of a SWAT team in Mexico, and instead of a nitrous-injected Mercury Tracer, he drives a 2002 Crown Vic Police Interceptor. Here’s what he’s been up to lately. Nice collar, Dr. Kott!

Rommel sent me some pictures of himself in a tactical vest, bristling with explosives and weaponry, gripping a distinctly nonplussed FBI Top Ten fugitive by the elbow. Which, in a rare display of restraint, I’m not going to post here.