Spent last night going to dinner and hanging out with friends, playing wii and some games. No one got wasted, no one threw up, and no one is going to tell epic stories about it. Strangely, I’m not sad about that. I got to spend quality time talking and hanging out with good friends. I guess I’m getting old.
Hanging out at Cory’s place was fun! And it was nice to wake up the next day not hungover or super tired and sleeping for half the day on New Year’s Day…
Daniel Bozhkov, Darth Vader Tries to Clean the Black Sea With Brita Filter, 2000, still from performance documentation.
Daniel Bozhkov, born 1959 in Aytos, Bulgaria, lives Nyack, New York. Bozhkov is a classically trained artist whose skills in Old Master techniques, like fresco painting, provide and unlikely foundation for his wide-ranging conceptual projects. Bozhkov attempts to capture the untranslatable experiences and ironies that confront immigrants moving from one linguistic space into another. He conveys the experience of the outsider through the language of mass culture, re-conceiving western capitalist conventions from an unfamiliar perspective, and in doing so unveils new and often uncomfortable insights.
Recent projects have ranged from the mocking performance of Darth Vader Tries to Clean the Black Sea with Brita Filter (2000), in which Bozhkov, as the Star Wars villain, attempts futile act of ecological remediation.
Hmm - for this year, it was my first year in who knows how many years I did not go out of the country (I believe the last year was 1988….), but here goes:
Washington, DC metro area (including Arlington and Alexandria, VA)
Canaan Valley, WV
Philadelphia, PA
Asheville, NC
Denver, CO
Houston, TX
New York City, NY (the Bronx)
Boston, MA
Salem, MA
Columbus, OH
Dover, DE
Total states visted/drove through this year (in chronological order):
VA, DC, MD, WV, DE, PA, TN, NC, CO, TX, NJ, NY, CT, MA, OH…(14 states and DC).
But 2009 will bring in January/February:
Ft Launderdale, FL
Miami, FL
Stuttgart, Germany,
Bodensee area, Germany/Switzerland
Basel, Switzerland
Ischgl/Mathon, Austria (for skiing!!!!)
Berlin, Germany
Wiesbaden/Mainz/Rheingau area, Germany
Frankfurt, Germany
Denver, CO
Winter Park, CO (for more skiing!!!!)
Canaan Valley, WV (for some shitty mid-Atlantic skiing….)
other places in plan for 2009: Philadelphia, Sacramento, and ….???
Top 10 Most Annoying Americanisms ↪
1. “Happy Holidays!”
Translation: “Merry Christmas but I realise you might be Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Bahai, something even more exotic, agnostic or Godless and I don’t want to offend you.”2. “Have a nice day.”
Translation: “I would like you to have a pleasant time today” or “I hate you” - or anything in between.3. “You’re welcome.”
Translation: Meaningless Pavlovian response to thank you.4. “Do the math.”
Translation: “Work it out yourself, stupid.”5. “Let’s visit with each other.”
Translation: “We should spend time together.”6. “How are you today?”
Translation: “We mean nothing to each other, but let’s pretend.”7. “Good luck with that.”
Translation: “You have no chance at all.”8. “Oh my gosh!”
Translation: “I fear you may feel that taking the Lord’s name in vain is blasphemous.”9. “Can I use your bathroom?”
Translation: “I would like to use your lavatory.”10. “Not so much.”
Translation: “That’s completely wrong.” Used on me in classic fashion by a Clinton aide back in February.
I have heard it said that when you are really in a bad situation that you are “up shit creek” or “up shit creek without a paddle”. For me, this no longer applies. “Up shit creek” now equals “On Polish Mountain”. Now this is not a racial slur. Polish Mountain really exists in Maryland and is in the Green Ridge State Forest. How do I know this and why is it relevant, you might ask? Well, last night I accidentally visited Polish Mountain and came darn close to being a permanent resident. Let’s go back to last night….
I’m going to throw it out there because it will soon become apparent to all of you. I can be a dumbass. My wife can be a dumbass too. Two dumbasses in a car together can, in fact, spell trouble.
My wife and I had driven out to Ohio to visit relatives over the holiday. We left my brothers house at 2:00 pm eastern time. Things were going swimmingly until we got to around the Midway toll plaza on I-70. There, traffic stopped dead. Then it would go for a little while and stop dead again. Being veterans of Holiday travel, we had expected traffic but had never encountered stop and go so far out. Usually, it is bad where I-70 meets I-270 to go into Washington. This looked bad as we had ~150 to go and we were going under 10 mph hour. Do the math and we were looking at 15 hours if this kept up all the way. Being impatient, though rational, we decided to look for a better route. We found a way to cut down to I-68 through Cumberland. 68 was good but we wanted more. We knew 68 would eventually run back into 70 which was a mess. We could see by the GPS that 66 was tantalizingly close to us and would allow us to miss 70 and 270 all together. So we charted a course to I-66 with the trusty GPS…it never lets you down, right?
Well, the GPS decided to route us through the Green Ridge State Forest. We turned of off State Route 144 onto a paved road. Then it had us turn onto a well packed dirt road. We thought this odd but temporary and continued on. Then it had us turn onto Polly something or the other road. It looked like the previous road but a little narrower and it had a bit of gravel down. Here is where we both started having misgivings but decided to go on. Here is where we turned into dumbasses. About a quarter of a mile in, the dirt and gravel gave way to deep ruts. Now we are in a Toyota Corolla mind you, not a 4 wheel drive. However, the road was so narrow, we also had no room to reall turn around. So, we decided to go forward. We went down a sloping hill that had fairly deep ruts…deep enough that we scraped bottom a few times. We were committed at this point and didn’t really have any options so we pressed forward. Oddly enough, to our right we saw a small fenced in graveyard. Not sure who was buried there but it could well be other dumbasses that attempted what we were doing. At the bottom of the hill, we found a mud pit. I got out and quickly determined that going forward was a bad idea. To bad I didn’t have this cognitive ability about 10 minutes earlier. It was much wider there, so we tried to turn around. And failed…stuck in the mud.
As we often do, we decided to rely on technology and whipped out the cell phone…whoops…no service. Uh oh. So, doggedly, I pushed while the wife reved and we actually got the car turned around and pointed back up the hill…great success. But, the hill was kind of muddy too and those tire ruts that caused us to bottom out going down soon prevented us from making progress all the way up the hill. At a certain point, about halfway up, we were dead in the water and no amount of reving or pushing was going to move us. However, we discovered that we now had cell phone reception…great success.
We considered this an emergency so we called 911. They transferred us to the Maryland State Police. The Police were really not all that interested in our plight. They told us to call the park rangers. We called them. They told us they couldn’t do anything and to call a tow truck. We said we didn’t know any numbers and they said they’d call us back. Not wanting to wait, we alled a friend to a. let someone know in the event htat we didn’t make it out and b. to get us some numbers. We also called the cops back and asked them to call a tow for us because we were losing battery on the cell. The reluctantly agreed to look into..apparently having better things to do than rescue people.
We waited for someone to call. Let me set the scene…we were in a dark forest, in Maryland, near some wierd little graveyard where there was no apparent reason for there to be one, and had passed a wierd rock formation on which someone had written “Free”. I have seen “The Blair Witch Project” and now it was almost like I was living it. It was about this time in a horror movie when the psycho or the backwoods hillbilly would show up and dismember us.
Finally, our friend called with a number. That two guy told us there was nothing he could do. He tried to give us another number but he cut out and was gone. The cops called back and said someone was on their way. Thank God.
We waited about an hour before we saw lights coming through the woods. The guy came with a large flatbed two truck. Now, when we first got stucjk, I had had my doubs about how retrieveable the car was at that moment. We were on a muddy hill. The truck would have to back down to get us. I met the driver, named Daniel and hereafter referred to as the Saint, at the top of the hill. The Saint assesed the situation and quickly saw that he could potentially get stuck. So he helped us push the car off of what we were hung up on and told us to back down the hill and gun it up. We tried this several times and progressed three fourths up the hill before we could go no further. At this point, the Saint put his own livelhood in jeopardy and attempted a risky rescue. He turned around and began backing down. At one point, he tried to go forward. He couldn’t. Ladies and gentlemen, our tow truck and rescue was now stuck.
At this point, most people would have been a. pissed and b. given up trying to salvage us in favor of saving themselves. Not the Saint. He instead rigged a chain together out of several chains that just reached our car and managed to winch us up on the back. He was also hoping that the added weight would help him gain traction. It didn’t..we were still stuck. When he saw our situation initally before attempting recovery, he had called his boss and tol him to come out. However, his phone had died along the way. We gave him ours with the one precious bar remaining and he managed to get ahold of the guy, who was freaked out when they lost contact of the Saint Turns out, a few years back, some people had called needing a tow and ended up ambushing and shooting the driver. This is what they feared had happened again. When assured that the Saint had not been ambushed, the boss came out with a wrecker that had a winch. He winched the first tow truck with our car on it up the hill and we were now no longer all stuck on the mountain. The way things were going, I envisioned that tow truck getting stuck and calling another and so on until every tow truck in maryland was stuck on Polish Mountain.
In any case, we made it out, happy to take 70 which was traffic free at this point. Hell, it was 12:30 so it should have been. The trip that normally takes 5 1/2 hours took 10 1/2 because of our shortcut. It also lightened our bank account a bit as well. However, we learned some lessons about being in a hurry, blindly trusting technology, not being prepared with our car charger and a flashlight, and the general kindness of strangers.
The Saint later told us that when the cops called him, they asked if he had a four-wheel drive tow truck and he said no. They told him not to bother then but he told them that somebody had to go and help because no one has a four wheel drive tow truck. That, my friends, is a truely great deed. It’d have been easy for him, with three kinds at home and one on the way, at 7:00 on a Sunday night to blow off two strangers that had stupidly gotten themselves into a bad predicament. Moreover, he could have easily given up when he saw what was going on and where we were. But he kept trying to help.
It’s easy to forget sometimes, in the face of all the shitty things that we do to each other, that people are also capable of great acts of kindness. We often hear about the bad things and can easily become jaded. We don’t often hear about the guys making 15 dollars an hour and trying to support four kids and a wife that go the extra mile to help out someone in need. I didn’t want to let that happen this time. While what happened to us last night is certainly not news worthy, it is this kind of story that illustrates that which is good in people. It is this kind of story that exemplifies the Christmas spirit and that we need to keep going all year around. The world is a better place because of people like Daniel. To tell the truth, I have been a little jaded about people lately. And its kind of funny because it had passed through my mind that I needed a Christmas miracle to remind me of all that is good at this time. Perhaps, as much as it sucked at the time, this was it.
Sorry for the long post, but this story needed to be told.
Damn……what a story. Makes me happy that I always carry AAA maps in my car… This story reminds me of one that I read in a Stephen King novel: “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” Glad you and Amy made it back okay!
The village has a population of around 800 and is located 690 meters above sea level and lies in a valley between two mountain ranges (the reason for the low temperatures). The name Oymyakon means “non-freezing water” because of the natural hot spring close to the village.
The temperature this week is pretty low and the temperature tomorrow is a chilly -63C which based on the stats at Wikipedia equals the record low for December.
Things That Are Real: Blast Knuckles.
High-traction rubber knuckles with a built-in taser that delivers a 950,000V shock.
For when you want to rough up your attacker a bit before you smother his heart with enough electricity to take down an adult T-rex.[via.]
wow, this is getting a ton of mileage.
Reblogged for fussballmeister
This I think is by far, the best parody of the Bush & a Close Encounter of Shoes incident…..Thanks Cory!
