Category Archives: Modern Living

If you haven’t gotten your Halloween costumes squared away, you’d better get moving.

I thought about dressing up as a nun, but my wife reminded me that it would make two years in a row I’d appeared as a woman. She has a point. There should probably be a statute of limitations on how often you can dress in drag before it’s considered a habit. Pun intended.

On the other hand, I could just go as a hobo.

Years ago dressing as a hobo for Halloween was HUGE. It required zero preparation or planning, cost nothing, and was incredibly easy. You’d get some old, ill-fitting clothes from your father’s closet, smear soot on your face, put on a hat, and you were a hobo. Naturally, you’d carry a bindle, the traditional hobo bag tied to a stick.

The great thing about dressing as a hobo is that everybody knew you were a hobo. If people have to ask what you’re supposed to be you have a problem. Halloween is not a time for subtlety — and like parody, if you have to explain the costume, you’re being too obscure.

But maybe the days of the hobo are over, replaced now in the popular consciousness by something else people understand: the homeless. Same thing, you say? Not really.

There was never anything tragic or sad about being a hobo. No consideration of a past shattered by substance abuse or mental illness, no discussion of a life wasted. The hobo was a venturer, making his way on the rails, tumbling along from place to place, the king of the road.

Thankfully, trick or treat is still big in my neighborhood. I predict that this year vampires and zombies will be very, very big, and we will have the usual smattering of princesses, ghosts, and superheroes. However, I’ll be ready with something in addition to candy for the hoboes who come to the door, maybe a can of soup or pair of warm socks. Their parents should get a kick out of that while scouring the goody bags for suspicious candy.

How much trouble do you have pulling the plug?

I spent the long weekend on Wolfe Island, Ontario, a place better known for cows, shoreline cottages, and wind turbines than lightning fast Internet. Where we were staying, they didn’t even have a phone, so from the time we left Friday evening through Monday night when we returned home there was no internet. No email, no blog comments, no Facebook, no Twitter.

I looked across the water in the evening to the lights of Kingston, a city with free wi-fi on every corner and didn’t care. There was no shaking, moaning, or sweating. Unlike caffeine withdrawal, there was no nausea or vomiting.

There were, unfortunately, lots of cell phones. For my money, mobile phones are the most disruptive devices on the face of the earth –in fact I’d rather sit next to someone blowing on a vuvuzela than a person talking on the phone. That’s really saying something.

At one point over the weekend, someone needed to talk to a person sunbathing out on the rocks. “Does she have her cell phone?” We could see her from where we stood. It wasn’t that long ago that you’d just have to walk over there and speak to them — or better yet, leave them alone with their moment of peace.

Do yourself a favor this Summer and unplug, even for a few days at a time. It’s not as painful as you think. Who knows? It might suit you. For example, I even managed to avoid the free wi-fi at the Thruway rest stops all the way home. I did stop to use the bathroom, but no Internet.

No, this is not another post about the ValleyCats Bobblehead contest. Can anybody say, “Jump the shark?”

Instead let’s have a look at getting your own bobble made. Clifton Park blogger Roz Tofinchio, AKA “Crabby Old Roz,”was kind enough to provide us with an artists rendering of me as a bobblehead, holding a “personal massager” from the Solutions catalog. That’s is a deeply, deeply disturbing image. Don’t look at it for too long; it may burn your eyeballs out.

Anyway, there are lots of companies that can make you or a loved one into a bobblehead. The way it works is you send them a picture and and they do their bobble magic, which you can see here on this page at Bobbleheads.com.

You must be saying, “Rob, that’s gotta cost a fortune!” Nope. You can get a custom bobblehead made for under $80 if you use a stock body — more if you want the whole thing customized or want to do a couple bobble instead of an individual.

Why would you want to do this? Imagine what a great Father’s Day gift this would be — or you could give mom a bobble of you to keep on her desk at work. Or I suppose if your favorite player in the ValleyCats contest strikes out, you could just make your own. But that would be a little weird. Almost as weird as voting a hundred times.

Young Bill Gates

As if the dark days of winter were not dreary enough, there is a pall of quiet desperation hanging over my house. Not the whole house, just the family room.

We are suffering from the loss of the Xbox 360.

The darn thing up and died over the weekend. This means no Grand Theft Auto. No Call of Duty Modern Warfare. No Left 4 Dead 2.

I’m not much of a gamer, so I don’t feel the pain. When I play it only takes seconds to be cut down in a hail of bullets or eaten by zombies. At 48 it’s hard to remember which button fires your gun and which one is for running away. And no matter what team I pick in Madden NFL 09 they end up looking like the Detroit Lions.

But to a fourteen-year-old boy? Xbox failure equals crisis.

So as fixer of all things digital and analog, the first thing I did was get online and try to figure out how to repair it myself. How hard could it be —it’s just a computer.

What I found were various homebrew remedies guaranteed to solve the problem . One of them involves wrapping the Xbox in towels and letting it get very hot, as if you can sweat the demons out of its circuit boards. Another called for drilling holes in the motherboard and installing scores of tiny plastic washers.

Now the Xbox is in a cardboard box somewhere between here an Arizona on its way to be repaired. The good news is that Microsoft did such a lousy job building these things that they actually fix them for free, even if they’re a year out of warranty. They even paid for the shipping.

The Xbox shall return. Until then we will…I don’t know, talk?