This begs the question...

What is it exactly that the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office needs all those sex toys for, anyway? Clearly their employer is less dedicated to work-life balance than one might hope. Or maybe the county is actually more than usually dedicated to work-life balance. I can't decide.

Seriously, Mr. Davenport, we get it. No, really, we women want to be on your side, truly. Men are totally, absolutely necessary for our sexual fulfillment. It's just that you're so damned unreliable (by which I mean anything ranging from "sleepy" to "absent"), easily tired, and, frankly, just bad at breathing underwater--probably has something to do with that pesky evolution thing. Mr. Davenport... Ralph... I'm afraid this is the very situation for which the phrase, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" was invented. I strongly suggest that you hie yourself down to the local sex toy emporium (or maybe just to the local sheriff's office) and pick out something pretty. Because you're not going to win this one. All you're doing is crippling one of the strongest parts of any community's local economy and making the Internet strong enough to crush you like an eggshell.

But, you know, it's your call.

Jags Only

Tonight I went with a friend to a tony Scottsdale restaurant that we were auditioning for a third friend's birthday dinner. It passed--the food was fantastic, the service was indulgent, and it was worth getting dressed up for, but they still let us eat there. This is important because I never, ever feel at home in a fancy restaurant. I always feel like I'm a millisecond away from being thrown out by some bouncer who'll then hurl my purse at my head, just to make his point. That scene in "LA Story" where Steve Martin has to submit to a credit check and Patrick Stewart's fifteen-point questionnaire about where he "summers" to get in to L'Idiot? Yeah, that's pretty much what I imagine every time I go to a restaurant where you need reservations.

I also dread the recurrence of not one, but two experiences where I have involuntarily hurled bread at a fellow-diner. It's one way to meet people in public, but I wouldn't recommend it, because of the crippling humiliation. Don't look at me like that. Some places have those dinner rolls that are really, really crusty. They're hard to tear, and they can really get away from you. I know I should just steer clear of the bread basket, given my unfortunate tendency to bean the snootiest-looking bloke in the room with flying bread, but I'm addicted to carbohydrates. It's a legitimate condition. Totally beyond my control.

Fortunately, tonight I looked very cute, did NOT order any wine, was NOT offered any bread, and only managed to embarrass myself three or four times. And the waiter was very, very nice about ignoring the telltale ravioli-shaped splotch squarely between the tapas plate and my plate. (Seriously, you can't take me anywhere. But in my defense, raviolis are really slippery.) I had practically managed to overcome my cataclysmic lack of entitlement when I had the quintessential Scottsdale experience. My friend was graciously walking me to my car, and we stood next to it while he finished his cigarette. And then this dude in a jag pulled out of a parking space across the way, stopped about six feet away from us (and about one foot short of making his turning radius). And he honked at us.

This was not Inspector Morse's jag. This was one of those sleek little numbers, sans bonnet leaper. The man had PLENTY of room to pull out, he just wanted to emphasize that we and our Prius did not belong in HIS personal parking lot in HIS personal snooty city. And the best part is that not 30 seconds after we obligingly moved six inches closer to my car and he pulled out, ANOTHER jag pulled into that space (a sleek little number, this time with a bonnet leaper). Apparently the whole of Scottsdale is reserved for dudes with Jags. Didn't we get the memo?

This makes me even more determined to take my friend there for her birthday. That's right, you heard me. The geeks are taking over Scottsdale. Ignore us at your peril (and watch for flying bread).

I am not Dave Gorman

Just when I was thinking that I might not have time for the Daily Show, they do the one thing (well, I'm a consumer whore, so maybe I should say "one of the things") that will guarantee that I will at least fast forward through it on my Tivo--they put Dave Gorman on the show. Last night's program even included one of his trademark charts, which have even more appeal to me now than they did when I first saw them. Once you've seen people present equivalent charts to justify their spending of billions of dollars at an actual corporation, Dave's get a LOT funnier.

Of course, my REAL question was why is Dave in New York, and is there a new show that I can see? Alas, no such luck (at least, not according to his website). Which is probably a good thing, since I could barely afford to drag Siobhan to his Googlewhack Adventure here in Scottsdale, where we were probably the youngest people in the not-so-packed audience. No, seriously--we were in the minority that didn't BYOO (bring your own oxygen) and didn't have to swot up on "that newfangled internet thing" before we went to the show.

I keep hoping for "Are You Dave Gorman" (Dave's quest to find "loads" of Dave Gormans--where "loads" = 54--to settle a bar bet with his then-roommate, Danny Wallace, who later went on to found a cult almost entirely by accident) to play on television here again, so that I can force unsuspecting people to watch it. But Dave is managing himself, shrewdly, as a commodity, and has elected to keep himself scarce.

I hope they have Comedy Central in the Home for the Improvement of Those Addicted to Parentheses. Wish me luck.

Treadmill, Sweet Treadmill

So I have a treadmill now. The personable and entertaining person came and dropped it off this evening. Alas, we were two helpless women in the middle of a community full of retirees,* so the treadmill didn't make it down the stairs. I'm only mildly put out, though, because this means that it lives upstairs, where my Tivo is a working, happy Tivo. If it were downstairs, it would be in the workout room with the unhappy Tivo, which sulks all day and only watches CBS (it's geriatric, and its channel-changing ability is compromised--I keep telling it that CBS no longer shows Murder She Wrote, and that it should try watching other channels, but it likes Criminal Minds). So from a health perspective, this is probably ideal, because it means I can walk on the treadmill and watch all the programs I'm addicted to, rather than watching them while sitting lazily (albeit fetchingly) on my ass.

And, a bonus. While the personable and entertaining woman was trying to single-handedly load the treadmill into her RAV4 (did I say she was intelligent? well, I stand by that, but she may be ergonomically challenged), she broke a nonessential piece off the treadmill, so she charged me even less for it. I tried to give her the full price, since the treadmill is already a pretty hefty piece of exercise equipment for the original price and is still fully functional, but she dropped it by a full third. This means that I am fabulously wealthy, which in turn means that I can go get dinner.


*The one studly guy in my complex, the one I always see walking his adorable golden retriever, was nowhere to be found. There is never a studly guy around when you need one, or at least, that's been my experience.

In The Desert

So I'm outside this weekend, reading and sipping my tea on my balcony, and this sweet little lady comes out of her townhome across the way. And she sweeps up in front of her townhouse, and comes out with a dustpan and clears up whatever she found out there.

Then she gets the hose.

She hosed down her blacktop for twenty minutes, scrubbed it with a broom, and then hosed it down again. I want to be clear, there's nothing in front of our townhomes. There's an asphalt parking lot occasionally interrupted by a tiny gesture that says "we could landscape here, but as you can see, it's blacktop." All the tiny landscaped bits are watered with an automatic system. Behind the townhomes, it's spectacular--grass and trees and shrubs and water and ducks and fish and turtles. But in front, it's blacktop, and that's all she wrote.

So here are my questions.

Did someone die in my parking lot, or is this just general maintenance? Since this is Mesa, land of the retired, I'm going to assume that there was no drive-by (although the idea of a crochety old dear on one of those runaround scooter things just losing it over some squabble with our HOA, Falling Down style, has a distinct appeal). Does she know why it's called blacktop? I mean, she does understand it's not going to look like a sidewalk, right? Does she know she's in the desert? Woman, seriously, I know you probably moved here from Iowa or someplace where water falls from the sky and then things grow, but in case you hadn't noticed, it takes some serious work to get that water here. And why does she care? Will I care what my blacktop looks like when I'm 80?

Yeah, I agree. It seems unlikely.