... found and lost

I got a notice in my mailbox today. My missing wallet was waiting for me at the post office, postage due. People are decent. I headed to my local branch office to ransom my wallet _ $1.35, postage due.

I tore open the envelope to find my wallet, slightly the worse for wear, with all my various IDs and licenses and business cards neatly arranged in the billfold. The cash, of course, was nowhere to be seen. Whoever got to it before (or after) some solid citizen stuck it in a mailbox helped themself to all my dollars, all my pounds, and even took my totally unspendable, unconvertible, lucky French franc, which apparently was in need of a top-up of whatever charmative power I had ascribed to it.

I spent the rest of the day half wondering if I should ask at Commerce Bank if anyone had recently tried to change £47 into USD, reminding myself not to be in such a shitty mood because at least my license is back and desperately wanting to start a fight with every person I passed on the street, a la Fight Club.

I will now spend the rest of the night hitting golf balls off the roof of my apartment building.

Lost and found ...

This is starting to get cruel.

Yesterday, I lost my wallet. It happend within a stone's throw of my apartment, no farther away than the Mister Softee guy stops every day, letting the sound of tinkling music and humming exhaust fans drift up to my windoes.

It all started when I was going to see if any of my hockey teammates were scrimmaging downtown. I had earlier called Crimenotes to see if he was up for some cupcakes on a plane. No sooner had I left my place than my phone rang. I leaned my stick against a wall and fumbled for it in the outer pocket of my trusty backpack. He suggested a much-loved outdoor drinking venue, and all thoughts of hockey evaporated. I turned for home to drop off my stick and shower. At some point between there and my front door, my wallet must have fallen to the ground. Only I didn't know it.

Which is why it didn't make sense when someone rang my doorbell 10 minutes later.

I assumed it was either a prosyletizer or a take-out delivery person. And a cursory look down out my window revealed no one in sight. So I didn't give it another thought until I went to get my wallet before leaving to meet Crimenotes.

I was going to write a post last night about how comforting it was to show up and have everything be normal. Because it was. When all Crimenotes' friends were asking me if I was OK and how it happened, he was wondering aloud what he'd look like if he unbuttoned his shirt to show more chest hair. (And yes, this is normal. Anyone who has read this blog knows that self-absorbtion and obsession with minutiae are just how we at CSB roll). To be fair, he did loan me $80 later.

But I really needed the beer at that point. I had $80 in cash in my wallet. Plus a couple twenties in the emergency reserve pocket. Plus my license, two credit cards, my work ID, a couple business cards I was keen to hang onto, a monthly Metrocard nearing the end of its rope, an unused monthly Metrocard, a lucky one-Franc coin I found one day and decided to keep on a whim and, oh yes, £45 that I hadn't gotten around to changing back into greenbacks yet.

All gone ... but was it? Someone had tried to return it. Possibly even a neighbor.

So I didn't cancel my credit cards. (I checked ... no one's been running up a tab at Best Buy yet.) I haven't rushed off to the DMV. I haven't flipped out and killed anyone. I'm keeping some faith here. I put up an ad on Craigslist, and posted a note on my front door in case my would-be benefactor returns.

Then, just a couple short minutes ago, it happened. I received an e-mail with the headline to my own ad as the subject. My heart skipped a beat and I clicked on the new message, gleaming white in my blue inbox:

HEY ITS THE GUY THAT RETURNED UR WALLET.. MR SOFTEE CALL ME 718 XXX XXXX JAY

I called, noting that it couldn't possibly be too late to call, as my e-mail said the message arrived "0 minutes ago". Mr. Softee answered. I told him I was calling about my e-mail, already mentally composing a blog post about the Mister Softee guy who stops in front of my apartment every day. Every day that guy was there, and every day I rolled my eyes and endured the interlude as my neighbors and their kids bought Spongebob bars and Bomb pops. And now that guy was about to ... laugh at me?

"No man, someone's playin' with you."

Dick.

I think I'll go cancel those credit cards now, after all.

Hello, asscrack

I don't know when it happened.

I don't know who decided it.

I don't know how it was communicated.

But apparently, the ladies elected to wear jeans without underpants and show ass cleavage to all strangers.

I was sitting with friends in a much-loved outdoor-drinking venue, talking about books and beer and heat, when a trio of girls who looked too young to drink and too stupid to speak sauntered to the table next to us.

And then I got mooned.

"She didn't mean it. She must have just forgotten," I told myself, "because sometimes you're in a hurry and you forget to wear underpants."

But there it was, every time I looked up from my T.S. Eliot or away from the conversation about Stuart England. (The asscrack made freakier by our nerdfest.) The low-riding jeans an inch too loose, giving a full and unambiguous and public view of the tan asscrack, which could have been much less shapely, which bizarrely showed no tanlines, which was at once embarrassing and exciting and stupid as hell.

"I'm out of touch," I told myself, still confused, but also thrilled.

Another friend showed up, and it was time to reckon with the situation. I pointed out the asscrack. I wasn't the only one who noticed.

As if on cue, the table in front of us became occupied. It was a man and a woman, normal looking, attractive, with no signal of exhibitionism or immodestly.

The woman was in jeans.

She wasn't wearing underwear.

And the table got an eyeful of asscrack.

I could barely believe it, because at heart I'm a nineteenth century guy, and I know there are all kinds of things that confuse and surprise me, starting with electoral politics but including reading choices and Entourage and The Killers and popular music as a whole and approximately 200 other things.

Still, in the space of 30 minutes, it was two blazing, undisguised, unambigous flashes of underwear-free ass. Too much to be an isolated incident, not yet enough to be a trend.

My tabled discussed this openly. The first girl apparently overheard us. She was trying to pull her T-shirt down to cover the asscrack, but the jeans were just too low and the T-shirt too short, making modesty impossible. After a couple of half-hearted efforts she gave up and the bar returned to its harvest moon.

The war on terror in a nutshell

"We're banning bottled water, ladies' cosmetics, and toothpaste at airport security. This is nuts. These measures are giving the terrorists and extremists an unbelievable public relations success. They must be rolling around the caves of Pakistan laughing at the British government and the British people at the moment."

-Michael O'Leary, CEO of Ryanair, on BBC World

Americans abroad

Against my instructions, our former Baghdad bureau chief has left the country for his usual gig: hanging out in whatever corner of the Middle East he considers deadliest.

Those instructions went something like this:

Me: I forbid you from going. You should take a vacation instead. If you just want to go hang out in Paris, I'll pay for your trip.

Him: Ha. No.

I don't mean to make light, but still, on Monday morning I was checking my voicemail in a small-town airport and heard a week-old exhortation to meet up at the Queens beer garden, only to return home a few hours later and learn that the voice from the out-of-date message is currently speaking Arabic in Southern Lebanon.

Not only is he unafraid of toothpaste and/or snakes on planes, he's relatively unfazed by chilling in a warzone, and sends back dispatches like this:

I asked some of the people, as they cleaned up their houses (the ones that weren’t completely destroyed) what they would do next… they said they didn’t really know… “We’re still in shock” was a sort of common refrain… I was mindblown that some people had actually stayed for the duration of the fighting… rather than asking me if I had a flak jacket to spare, people were much more interested in using my satfone (no cell reception in most of the south) to call family and let them know they were alive… burned through the credit on the phone in short order…

One thing people did mention, despite the fact that their town had been sort of wiped off the map, was that they’d continue to sacrifice in support of Hizbollah and “the Sayyed” (Hassan Nasrallah)... I am finding this sentiment in both the city and the countryside… and, of course, Hizbollah was still clearly in control of the town…

On a less-harrowing note, an American-born ex-New Yorker friend of mine has been living in Amsterdam for two years. His site, too, is a far cry from a chronicle of wacky misunderstandings with foreigners, though he includes accounts like the following:

Went biking today outside of Amsterdam. Outside of Amsterdam, geologically speaking, is where the sea should be, but they filled it in long ago. Filling in the sea is a lot of work; there's only so much you can do. You can't, for example, make dry, hilly wine country. But you can make an unremmittingly flat and green expanse of good farmland. And when the sun rides high and bright, and clouds like fantastical airships drift at the edge of the sky, it's beautiful.

If you ride along the dyke that keeps the water out, you can see all of it as it goes on and on, and you can also see the villages, each one of them a café next to a church, surrounded by low brick and wood houses along narrow streets. And if you ride far enough you will come to Pants in Waterland. That's the name of one of the villages. Actually that's a translation, but it's accurate. I have no idea why they call it Pants in Waterland.

Pants in Waterland sounds like a Murakami novel.

And if there's anything we like on this site, it's a post that references pants.

Pants!

Better safe than sorry

Only two events to cross my television screen in the past year have been so momentously stupid that I've wanted to cast about for the nearest grapefruit spoon, gouge my eyes out and hurl them at the screen. The first was back in November when, out of an abundance of caution, Lloyd Carr decided to punt on 4th-and-3 rather than go for it. And the less said about that the better.

The second was today. I turned on CNN to find luggage handlers tossing bags onto a runway _ a runway _ at Logan Airport in Boston. Why? Because a woman apparently had smuggled aboard vaseline and a screwdriver, was acting strangely and possibly even possessed something written in Arabic.

Out of an abundance of caution, our nation's security decision-makers decided to shit themselves silly.

Seriously. Now, even if she had been the Al Qaeda version of Angus MacGyver, I'm thinking vaseline, a screwdriver and a Post-It aren't getting her too far. But she didn't even have those nefarious devices, the existence of which was breathlessly splashed across the bottom of the screen. She was simply an simply freaking out about being in an enclosed metal tube with nowhere to go. For this, she was tackled like a kicker on a naked bootleg.

Passengers said two plainclothes men on board and flight attendants ran up
the aisle and tackled the petite woman, slamming her into the bathroom door,
throwing her to the ground and putting her in handcuffs, passengers said.

And, as if that weren't enough of an overreaction ...

Two F-15s were sent from Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod to escort
the airliner, said Master Sgt. Anthony Hill, spokesman for the North American
Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo. He said the fighter pilots
can intercept, shadow or escort commercial aircraft and, if ordered, shoot down
an aircraft deemed to be a threat.

So, let's see, on a day of miscommunication and misinterpretation, we've got armed fighters poised to splash a jetliner, 200 people detained and a runway at a major aiport shut all because no one has the sense to react sensibly. Care to guess how many more mistakes it would have taken for an order to fire to be contemplated, motherfuckers, or are we be better safe than sorry?

Oh, and the reason for all this insanity is the supposed major plot to bomb planes with Sierra Mist or Pepsodent or Axe Shower Gel or whatever. Well, let's hold whatever horses remain on that front.

Someday the wolf is going to be real

A friend strongly recommended the following Keith Olbermann clip, which is every bit as damning as he said.



A small anecdote about how effective these tactics are: Much of my extended family lives in small-to-medium-sized cities in the Midwest. They occasionally travel out of state, but never fly. (Fact: I myself only flew once before age 21.) To them, air travel is an inherently scary process.

I saw them between the announcement of the UK bomb plot and my flight back to LaGuardia. Their level of concern about my personal safety while flying was touching, yes, but also insane. It was a concern better left for kidney transplants and bypass surgeries. My own response to the UK plot falling somewhere between skeptical and nonchalant, I showed a small amount of maturity (which is more than I usually show) and didn't openly mock them.

"This is just a bunch of hype," I said. They probably interpreted the remark as a death wish.

After seven years living in major urban areas and flying several times a year, my perceptions of risk do not match theirs. I'm nervous driving down a country road at night, but to my parents, it's second nature. I wouldn't think twice about boarding a flight to Heathrow, but that might literally incite nightmares for my cousin's wife.

The political effectiveness of the President's use of terror hinges relies on people who don't fly and have never seen a Muslim -- a much broader population than a narrow demographic that regularly flies between New York, Chicago and LA and doesn't think twice about jetting cross-country for a concert or a football game. Like so much else in the last 5 1/2 years, the terror warnings are just another means of exploiting people based on their geography and information biases.

To whoever sent me the Samuel L. Jackson Snakes on a Plane voicemail

Why, thank you, Hoss.

I don't know who you are, but I have my guesses.

I sat in the airport listening to voicemail and checking my Blackberry. Apparently, several people either forgot or never knew that I was on vacation and outside the reach of wireless signals. Amid drunk-dials, it was nice to be instructed not to paint my toe-nails again and to drive my cheap imitation sports car to the movie theater.

O! Snakes on a plane

The most contagious viral marketing campaign yet, a preview of future marketing campaigns to come, clever just this one time, but goddamn this shit is going to wear out very quickly. A year or two from now there will be voicemails about the equivalents of that douchebag John Tucker movie, text messages about the Hanso Foundation, and cryptic e-mail subscriptions for some as-yet-unknown a Coen Brothers movie.

Meanwhile, the voicemail you sent me about snakes on a motherfucking plane was trumped somewhat by toothpaste on a motherfucking plane, the screening procedures for which appears to be overstated by most major news outlets.

I will take my motherfucking toothpaste on the motherfucking plane and I will promote good oral hygiene and then I will spray motherfucking silly string all over the motherfucking plane and by the time of the emergency landing and my anti-plaque rendition to Guantanamo I will have cured motherfucking gingevitis and strung the passengers silly.

Anecdotes (with photos)

I. The Comeback

Twice in the last 12 months, Cole Slaw Nation has been rocked by my sports injuries. The first came this time last year when I had a waterskiing fall that injured my ribs. Then in May came my highly controversial ankle injury: eyewitnesses describe it as an ambitious party stunt, while smear merchants on this site label it a product of same-sex jazzercise.

My return to waterskis was highly anticipated. There was concern that my ankle had not fully recovered and that the pressure of the skis would have catastrophic results.

I'm pleased to report that my waterskiing skills are back and better than ever. No ankle pains, no nasty falls. Only skimming outside the wake and the occasional stumble backward. Rest easy, world.

II. Bob Dylan is better in a minor league ballpark than at the Beacon Theatre

An illustration in being spoiled: in New York, even hard-core Dylan fans become blase, complain about set lists, and behave like seeing the contemporary Whitman is a more exciting alternative than a night of watching Lost.

In a smaller city, the crowd treats the show like the high point of the year. This makes the experience significantly more fun. Another key asset: watching him in an infield the size of Webster Hall, looking up during "It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," and seeing the Big Dipper overhead.

III. My younger cousins are not only more fun than I am, they're also more photogenic


Six-year-old cousin: You took your shirt off to go swimming.
Me: Yeah.
Six-year-old cousin: You look funny.
Me: Thanks.

IV. This was not Photoshopped or retouched in any way

I look forward to reporting back on toothpaste-related airport hysteria following Monday's flight.

The Islamic fascists

Excerpts from a superb article by Agence France Press:

Weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, Bush and his aides have tried to shift the national political debate from that conflict to the broader and more popular global war on terrorism ahead of November 7 congressional elections.

The London conspiracy is "a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation," the president said on a day trip to Wisconsin.

***

His remarks came a day after the White House orchestrated an exceptionally aggressive campaign to tar opposition Democrats as weak on terrorism, knowing what Democrats didn't: News of the plot could soon break.

***

But Bush aides on Thursday fought the notion that they had exploited their knowledge of the coming British raid to hit Democrats, saying the trigger had been the defeat of Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut by an anti-war political novice.

"The comments were purely and simply a reaction" to Democratic voters who "removed a pro-defense Senator and sent the message that the party would not tolerate candidates with such views," said Snow.

The public relations offensive "was not done in anticipation. It was not said with the knowledge that this was coming," the spokesman said.

Snow said Bush first learned in detail about the plot on Friday, and received two detailed briefings on it on Saturday and Sunday, as well as had two conversations about it with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

***

But Bush's Republicans hoped the raid would yield political gains.

"I'd rather be talking about this than all of the other things that Congress hasn't done well," one Republican congressional aide told AFP on condition of anonymity because of possible reprisals.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't "look as appealing" under the circumstances.

Because what do enormous inconvenience and public cowardice matter? Motherfuckers need to be reelected.

This country has been humiliated before the world, its citizens terrorized by their own government, and its muslims publicly slurred by the president (has he ever described Eric Rudolph [or Randall Terry] as a "Christian fascist"?). Why? Because the oligarchs need to ax the estate tax and slaughter more liberated Iraqis.

I haven't been this furious with the government since Katrina.