Mind of a Manion, das dritte Teil

Kind of tired today, so I'm just going to share some things that I've got on my mind.

Mister Wrong

One of the all-time great songs that no-one has ever heard is "Mr. Wrong," by Cracker. It reminds me a lot of myself as a young man. Three passages are really frighteningly accurate -
"I drive a one-eyed Malibu without a muffler, and a tape deck that works if you kick it hard enough. Baby, if you like to read, I got some great pornography..."
"Well, no I'd rather not go and meet your family. They'd prob'ly send me back where I belong. Don't want to hear about your Mr. Right, 'cause he's out of town tonight. Baby, come and spend some time with Mr. Wrong."
"And now do you have a girlfriend? And does she look as good as you? Hey would she like to meet my brother? He'll be out of jail in a month or two..."

Roomba Deathmatch

As a gift this Christmas, I got an iRobot Roomba, one of those cute little robotic vacuums that drive around your house, cleaning and plotting to kill all humans. It's kind of fun to play with. Although I've discovered another use for it. Namely, getting the cat out from under the bed. Just turn it on and point it under the bed. The cat will emerge moving just slightly under 40 miles per hour.

It beats the hell out of slithering around on the floor, and it helps reduce the dust bunnies.

Experiments

I like to do little scientific experiments. For example, I bought these gel crystals (At Luminations. They were on clearance). They look like aquarium sand, but when you get them wet, they grow into big squishy gel crystals. I've been attempting to grow them bigger and bigger. So far I've managed to hit golf ball size. I'm trying to come up with a way to condense, combine, and restart the crystallization process. But I digress. Mrs. Manion, however, would like me to remove my lab and test subjects from the guest bathroom. I bet Watson and Crick didn't have their wives demand that they remove all the squishy pulsating blue things from their bathrooms. At this rate it will be weeks before I have an army of sentient, blue (and somewhat squishy) crystal warriors doing my evil bidding.

LM

The Best Revenge

I was at a meeting this morning. In it, one of the Penetrode bigwigs was waxing nostalgic about getting fired from one of his early jobs. He later went on to great success and wealth, while the company that fired him went under.

He closed by saying "Indeed, living well is the best revenge."

Despite an earlier warning from HR, I decided to raise my hand. "You have a question?" he asked me.

"Yes. I've given a great deal of thought to the topic of revenge, and I was wondering. What about suspending your enemy upside down in a pit full of diseased ticks? Isn't that really the best revenge?"

For what it's worth, I've been thinking about ticks as a method of revenge ever since the Manion family Christmas miracle of 2005.

Then there was one of those lengthy silences that indicates that I've shared a little too much.

"Manion, isn't it?" he asked.

I nodded.

There was another lengthy pause.

Finally, the bigwig answered my question. "Ticks are certainly a novel choice as far as revenge goes. The idea, however, is that by forcing your target - your revengee, if you will - to watch you "live the good life," you're providing a more enduring, and also more legal, form of revenge."

"You raise a valid point," I conceded. "Why don't we compromise? How about we change the saying to 'Living well while forcing your enemy to watch you while suspended upside down in a pit filled with diseased ticks is the best revenge.'"

"Well, the purpose of this meeting wasn't really to debate modalities of revenge, Mr. Manion."

"Well, if that's not the purpose of this meeting, then why did you bring it up?"

"I was merely trying to underscore the idea that sometimes a new idea can prevail against the conventional wisdom."

"And isn't that exactly what I'm trying to do?" I asked. "The conventional wisdom talks about living well, but I think Penetrode is ready for something new. Something that pushes the envelope. And the pit full o'ticks, both diseased and regular, is where we need to be. Penetrode could be leading the world in revenge methodology, but instead we're stuck in the past, with this whole "living well" garbage. Talk about behind the times! I say we invest immediately in ticks, and put our R&D department to work on the latest pit digging advances."

At that point, the bigwig's eyes took on that terrified expression that often appears on the faces of those who talk to me for more than thirty seconds. "Yes. Yes, why don't we do that," he said, edging towards the door. "Security will be by shortly to help you flesh out the details."

Strangely, security wanted to discuss the details outside, while handing me the contents of my cube in a plastic bag....

LM

Manion Trip Report - Day 3 - Tea!

Thanks to alcohol and codeine, I got off to a slow start. We decided to have high tea. This was, I think, the highlight of the trip. We got all dressed up and headed to the Savoy. If you want to see the Savoy in all its glory, it's the setting for the final scenes of the Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts movie, "Notting Hill"

The Savoy was awesome. You enter this huge, beautiful room, with lavish decor and trompe l'oeil paintings, big plush chairs, and a pianist. From there you're seated and pick a tea. Then they bring you these multitiered serving plates. The system is pretty simple. One tier has little sandwiches, one has little pastries, and one has scones. If you manage to clear a plate, they bring you more. Or, if you happen to really like the blue cheese and walnut on a sliced baguette little sandwich, they'll bring you lots of those.

We simply sat there, drinking tea and soaking up the ambience. The pianist played mostly classical, until I pleaded with him to play "Goldfinger" because I was feeling very Bond. Lance Bond.

And he did.

He actually played Goldfinger.

Truly, my life is complete.

We stayed at the Savoy, drinking tea (Earl Grey) and champagne (Laurent Perrier) for most of the afternoon. Inevitably, two pots of tea sent me to the mens room. The Savoy mens room is nicer than any room in my house. It has big leather chairs, an assortment of personal grooming products, and newspapers from all over the world. I had a hard time leaving.

Eventually, we left and wandered back up to Leicester Square. There we bought half-price tickets to "A Comedy of Errors" performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The performance was excellent. My only issue is with the script itself. I can forgive the two-sets-of-identical-twins thing that Shakespeare liked to use. I just think that giving both twins in each set the same name was a little unimaginative. If I ever have twins, I'm not name them both Antipholus, despite savings in name tags. Plus the other set of twins was named Dromeo. Not Romeo. Dromeo. I mean come on, at least invent a new name.

After the play let out we headed up to Covent Garden and my second favorite wine bar in the world, the Crusting Pipe. It's a cool place with lots of little underground cubbies in which you can hang out. There we had a late dinner and I had some more champagne.

They pretty much had to chase us out. So we wandered back to the hotel to plan for Day 4 - Shopping!

LM

Manion Trip Report Day 2 - Art!

So we woke up and decided to hit the Tate Modern. Unfortunately, my A to Z (prounouced Zed, 'cause it's cooler that way) was out of date and didn't include the Tate Modern.

Our "best guess" approach ended up putting us a few miles away, at the abandoned Battersea Park power plant. This is awesome if you're a fan of Pink Floyd album covers. Less good if you're aiming for a modern art museum.

So we walked up the Embankment along the Thames, passing the London Eye and an interesting Dali exhibit.

Finally we got to the Tate Modern (also a converted power plant, thus the error. It was pretty sweet. Lots of art. I like modern art. I don't always get it (a time lapse movie of a decaying rabbit may be art, but I'm not hanging it on my living room wall) but it's much more interesting than a thousand paintings of fruit and fat merchants' wives. The Tate had an exhibit of thousands of stacked white boxes. I'm not sure what it meant, but it was fun to walk around thousands of piled and stacked boxes. We weren't supposed to touch them but I did. Inappropriately. Until Mrs. Manion made me stop.

On the way to dinner, we stopped at a Boots (local equivalent of a CVS), because I had a headache. I just grabbed what I thought was the strongest drug you could buy over the counter. The label was forty-three syllables long. Paracetamol dihydro-something-or-other. I gave up after the first six or seven.

Note - not correctly identifying the drug you are taking can have interesting results later in the evening. Anyway...

From there we ended up having dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe. When I lived in the UK it was the only place you could get a decent burger. One of my fondest memories is of skipping class, sitting in the Hard Rock, drinking an MGD. Good times, people. Good times....

So I popped back a couple of pills and washed them down with a couple of MGDs. From there I got crazy bad loopy. Turns out the syllables I didn't bother to read spelled out C-O-D-E-I-N-E. Yeah. Mix and little codeine and beer and get ready to enter a serious coma. Which brings us to tomorrow...

LM

Coming Monday, Day 3 - Tea!

Justified Rage - Update!

So, you may recall the small amount of plagiarism that took place involving my wife's pet, "Small Amount of Cat". Lex Armenia, the gentleman involved, has posted an explanation of his actions.

You can read it here - Small amount of cat? Nope, large amount of crap.

Although his explanation seems unlikely, particularly the part about Elvis and the probing, I'm going to take his word for it. (For what it's worth, he should have involved ninjas. I always believe stories with ninjas.)

Thank you for handling the matter with honor and BeefTasty!

LM

Manion Trip Report Day 1 - Rage!

So, we staggered off the plane. That's always the toughest part of going to Europe. Your body thinks it's about 5 AM. The clock says 10 AM. All you want to do is sleep, but you can't. If you do, you never adjust to the time change. So instead, we pressed on, from Heathrow into London. Finally we arrived at our hotel, the Melia White House.

And there my first mistake came to bite us. I had booked a hotel for the same day as our flight, forgetting that the flight was overnight, and that our first day would actually be the next day. As a result, when we walked up to the hotel's desk, a smarmy spaniard explained to me that (when we hadn't shown up yesterday) they had assumed we weren't coming and sold the room to someone else. I pointed out that I had paid in advance for the room. The clerk pointed out that he didn't give a rats ass. After taking a moment to compose myself, I explained to the clerk that he had two options:

1. Provide me with a room in the next five minutes
2. Prepare for a size ten Nike enema

What can I say? Going without sleep makes me irritable. Anyway, we got a room.


So after ditching the luggage, we hauled into the city. Our first stop? Lunch at the Tokyo Diner. The Tokyo Diner is a great little restaurant in Soho. They serve really good Japanese food for cheap. The best part is that they absolutely refuse to accept tips. Is that great or what? I think the place is run by a cult or something, but I'm prepared to accept some amount of indoctrination for good and inexpensive food. I was bummed that they don't have gyu don on the menu anymore, but Mrs. Manion and I ordered katsu don instead, and enjoyed it tremendously.

From there we ordered walked around the city for a few hours and turned in early. It's always tough to do much on the first day.

LM

Tomorrow, Day 2 - Art!

Justified Rage

Yes, finally, I have that sweetest of all things - justified rage. Normally, my rage is best described as random, or possibly senseless. That's because the targets of my vengeance haven't really done anything to deserve it. I mean, I usually invent a flimsy pretext, but the rage itself is pretty much just me running naked through the office wanging people with a sack full of pudding.

And I'm okay with that. Somebody has to be on the business end of the rage, and best it's not me, you know? But now, I've actually been wronged, and have the chance to exert rage with a purpose.

"What happened, Lance?" you ask. "Who was foolish enough to cross you, knowing the horrible, disgusting, and mostly-likely-flaming-bag-of-poo-based nature of your vengeance?"

And the answer is simple - Lex Armenia.

Lex and I knew each other in grad school. Lex and I played Quake together. That's a special bond, there. Lex came to my wedding to Mrs. Manion. That's not quite as important as the Quake thing, but still.

And Lex has stolen the name of my cat. And we're not talking about Sack of Garbage here. We're talking about our very own Small Amount of Cat. A kitten belonging to Mrs. Armenia (a charming woman I in no way hold responsible for Lex's clearly degenerate and criminal behavior) is appearing on DailyKitten.com and going by the name of Small Amount of Kat. And does the phrase "Small Amount of Cat is a registered trademark of Mercenary Words copyright 2005 all rights reserved" appear tattooed onto the kitty in no less than 16 point type?

No!

So I'm suing for a 20% cut of all of the cat's future income, one case of Fancy Feast BeefTasty cat food, and demanding that the cat be renamed to "Lance Manion Rocks You Like a Hurricane."

I'm expecting the BeefTasty to arrive in the mail shortly.

LM

A Very Manion Virus

Sorry I've been delaying posting pictures from my recent trip. It's just that I've been really sick lately with some sort of Serbian Death Virus. I'm getting better, but it's a slow process.

I'm reminded of when I worked at Pfizer on their clinical trials database. For those of you who care, I'm 21-CFR-11 certified. Yeah. Makes the chicks go crazy when I tell them. You'd be amazed at the stuff you can find out in a clinical trials database. You see things like drugs that cure some disease 90% of the time, but that other 10% immediately croaks. Or drugs that have unfortunate side effects that are much, much, worse than the problem they purport to cure. I'll leave this one to your imagination. Suffice to say, if anyone offers you compound CY-40-IH, choose death instead.

Anyway, I'd be walking around a research building, near the pathogen labs, and suddenly someone would sneeze. And everyone edges away from that person. Or you'd feel like you had a mild cold. And then you'd remember that the early stages of ebola presents with cold-like symptoms.

But I've been away from Pfizer for a while, so I almost never worry when I start coughing up blood. With luck I'll be hitting on all 8 cylinders again shortly.

LM