bigtiny sez....

I was in 10th grade and things were rocky at home. My father and I had never gotten along well. How does one get along with an abusive megalomaniac? Dad was a foreman with a company that installed underground utilities for other companies, the majority of the work being digging trenches, burying conduit, and pulling cable through it for the phone company. He was a proud blue collar worker. After 8 years with the company and a reputation as one of the toughest, most productive foreman, he was head of a large crew and taking down a cool $5.60 an hour. We didn't get on well, and as I grew older and matured, our relationship deteriorated. He was particularly unhappy about my aspirations as a musician and took every opportunity to let me know about it. I could never understand what his problem was until I grew old enough to realize that music was one thing (maybe THE one thing) that I could do reasonably well, but that he had absolutely no ability to do. He couldn't carry a t...

I've mentioned it in this blog before, but it's an amazing technological time we live in. Everyday, people from all economic strata use and benefit from amazing technologies. It's also a great time for design and the meeting of design and techology. iPhones, iPods, computers, medical devices, cars, you name it, these devices are ubiquitous and influence peoples lives in ways that I think we as a society, don't fully understand. There's one industry though, that I've noticed for the amazing leaps in design and function in the past several years. No, it's not sports cars, it's not the Segway, it's not Apple. It's the baby products industry. I live in a neighborhood that contains, well let's face it, a lot of yuppies. These couples are having kids left and right these days, and because I live in an urban environment, it's possible to observe them out walking or running errands, all with their kids in tow. The first thing that caught my e...

Most of us, as we travel through life, acquire a nemesis or two. Holmes had Moriarty, Superman had Lex Luthor, Tom had Jerry. I've had my share of them, schoolyard bullies, underpaid bosses with Napoleonic complexes. But one of the worst I ever had was my sixth grade teacher -- Miss Murray. Miss Murray and I were chemically predisposed to hate each other. You know the feeling, you walk into a room and meet somebody you've never seen before in your life and the hair stands up on the back of your head and you just don't like the motherfucker! That was me with Miss Murray. It was a crappy school year and we fought, oh we fought, tooth and nail throughout the year. I was upbraided for talking in class, my grades were all above "C"s (which was demanded by my crazy father, but that's another story) and since the numbers couldn't be made to lie, report cards always noted problems with my 'attitude' and 'comportment'. I hated that bitch! T...

I like to eat. Really. I appreciate well prepared food, be it some regional peasant fare or expertly crafted haute cuisine. I like to cook too, and I'm pretty good at it. I refuse to use a recipe and tend to like to prepare simpler, straightforward dishes. Sometimes after watching a cooking show or perusing a menu on the window of a fancy restaurant, I like to play a little game where I think about ideas for dishes that, frankly, sound uhhh, not so good. Here's a few ideas: -tuna pudding -peanut butter soup with canned asparagus spears and cranberries -angel hair pasta with stewed prunes -waffles with anchovy paste -oatmeal with braised eel -baked trout stuffed with parsnips and Brachs caramels -pan fried calves liver with orange sauce -egg rolls stuffed with cottage cheese and vienna sausages -gaspaucho of strawberries, waermelon, peaches, and oysters with a chicken fat meringue Isn't this fun? The best part is that one will hopefully never have to eat any of this! ...

I was walking home from the grocery store yesterday and a flight of urban pigeons caught my eye as they flew toward me. As usual, a couple of them were flying precariously low, so that as they came closer I instinctively ducked. When this happens I'm not near as concerned that a pigeon is going to collide with me as I am that one is going to shit on me. It's happened. Anyway, all of this got me to thinking about...err...shit! I know this isn't an attractive topic for the old blog, but think about it -- for something as useless as shit, the human race has come up with a lot of words for it. They say Inuits have 100 different words to describe snow. I decided to see how many words came to mind to mean shit. Here goes: shit crap caca dung cowpie (specialized) manure spoor droppings guano excrement turd feces scat ordure That's about all that I can some up with. 14. That's 14 words to describe something that's useful for two things, fertilizer and medical dia...