I'm a pimp

I haven't blogged much in recent days because I have been busy studying for my project management professional certificate. I spent the better part of a week studying for this thing, and I'm glad I did because the exam was brutal.

One of the people I work with has a good example of what the exam is like. The questions are appropriately ambiguous so as to trip you up by getting you thinking too much. Here's her analogy:

What color is the sky?

A. Blue
B. Black
C. Orange
D. Indigo

Your thought process works like this: "Of course it's blue! Wait...at night it's black, and at sunrise or sunset it can be orange...indigo is a more specific shade of blue...Frick! You know what? Fuck it, it's blue."

And so it went for 4 hours. My only comforting thought was that if my ex-wife could pass this thing, then surely I could. But then a nagging thought kicked in....what if I don't pass? How big of an idiot would that make me? I only know of one other person who failed it and she failed 3 times and was forced to wait a year before taking it again. Could I be that big of a dud? As it turned out, no. I did far better on the exam than I thought I would, and even that would have been more than I needed to pass. Now I have my PMP certification, so you can call me a PiMP.

Talk Soup

Driving to work today in a blinding fog, I began to wonder why it's always said that fog is as thick as pea soup. I understand that pea soup is thick, but who eats it? And it's green! Fog isn't green! I think the analogy should be more appropriate.

Jim: "Man, this fog is as thick as clam chowder!"

Bill: "New England or..."

Jim: "Of course New England, jackass. Nobody eats the other one."

El Nino Rules! I can't believe it didn't work

A long time ago one of my friends came up with an idea for a bumper sticker. In the winter of '97 we had a lot of snow in the high country courtesy of "El Nino." If you've never heard of this phenomenon, it is related to a cyclical temperature change in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. When it hits, it creates bigger, more moisture laden storms that end up dumping more snow in the mountains, and therefore, on the slopes of the ski areas. This sticker had a skier on it and next to the skier it said "El Nino Rules!" He spent a couple of grand on the design and printing of the stickers, and to my knowledge, never came close to breaking even.

I have to wonder why it didn't work. There is no shortage of people willing to permanently deface their cars with stickers - all the "Kerry/Edwards" stickers still running about are ample evidence of that. There's no shortage of odd messages, either. I think he just missed the wave of the news coverage of El Nino, and that meant he's stuck with 10,000 ads for El Nino.

The more I see out there, the more I think he was just a stride off. Lately I've been seeing a new phenomenon around town - the amateur athlete sticker. Some of these stickers are made for people's kids who play for their school team, and I can sort of understand the sticker thing for them. Parents will go to almost any length to support/coddle/placate their kids. But the one I saw had the same logo as the jersey the man who got out of the Humvee was wearing. Yep, now people are getting stickers made of their softball teams, adding their number to the center, and plastering it right on their car.

Most of the people (I would include myself in this category) I have played softball with would be hard pressed to be called athletes. We're the kind of players that are more concerned with how much beer we can drink than with winning the game. We play for what I would call "fun," which is what recreational leagues are supposed to be about. I certainly did not feel strongly enough about the game, or derive enough of my identity from it, to advertise my team and my number everywhere I went.

There's another faction that play the game competitively. For them, it's what they spend all their time thinking about. They dread the off season, but use the down time to build their skills, or "skillz" as they might say today. They often used to play baseball in high school, or maybe college, but certainly didn't make it to the bigs. Since they never got famous playing small ball, they have invented a method to promote themselves locally. Like Al Bundy recalling the glory days of his high school football career, this is just sad. Although, if there's a ski team called "El Nino" anywhere, my friend might be back in the money!

Who says baseball isn't a contact sport?

On the news a couple of weeks ago they ran a video of a guy getting hit by a baseball player going after a fly ball. The big joke by the newscaster was that the guy drops his beer. Just like the Christmas boobs, they missed the funniest part. He got hit so hard he was knocked out of his pants! Check it out:

You have one page...

I have been doing some writing experiments where I give myself one page in a spiral-bound notebook to write something, anything. I think of a topic and go. One page, non-stop, free form brain dump. The only rule I have is that I can't censor it...of course that means some of it is pretty cheesy, but that's the point of it - if I agonize over getting everything just so, it will take forever to get anything written. If you've never done it you should...it's a freeing feeling letting your mind run for a page without restraint From time to time when I have nothing in mind here, I'll let one of them drop here. Here's the first one:

He put his headphones on and immediately heard the opening strains of ELOs "Living Thing." He knew this was a bad idea. If anyone - the cops, Bertoli's men, some random civilian witness - came in, he wouldn't be able to hear them. But then, what if it was one of Bertoli's men? If they knew he was up here he'd catch a nugget in the brain anyway, and if that were the case he would prefer not to know it was coming. Cops? Civilian? No, he was safe. So, he turned up the volume a little.
The irony of the song was not lost on him. He liked the juxtaposition - hearing Jeff Lynne lament "It's a living thing....what a terrible thing to lose" just before he pulled the trigger. It was a private joke, one that only he would get, and that kept him focused. "If you can't have fun at work," he thought, "then why do it?"
The door at the side of the building opened and two of the largest men he'd ever seen came out. As they walked to the Lincoln Navigator he wondered why the lumbering giants were so often chosen as bodyguards. They're slow, immobile; easy to hit as result, and rarely knew where the real danger was coming from. Oh well, it made his job easier. He watched as the gargantuans used mirrors to sweep the underside of the car for explosives. It was almost showtime.
He drew the rifle up to his shoulder and flipped the covers out of the way of the ends of the scope. The quarter mile closed to a few feet as his eye settled in and he centered the cross hairs on the forehead of one of the two lumbering bodyguards. He let it rest for a moment, then moved it to the door as guard number two pulled it open.
A well dressed man walked out of the building. Bertoli. He was followed by three other men - Vampa, Pastore and Genoa. "This is it." he mused. "The biggest hit of my

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