Pinkerton's Weblog

The Humiliation Potential of Shaking a Black Man's Hand

I hadn't seen him in a few weeks, and so things start normally. "Oh! Hey! How you doing?" I say, smiling and walking over.

"Jay! Not bad! How you been, man?" he asks.

So far so good. I make a move for a handshake—pretty standard territory where I come from for someone you haven't seen in a bit. I opt for a standard three-pump-release shake for the occasion—firm and decisive, but not too firm, so as to make it clear I'm about friendship as much as business. Following the third pump I go for my standard release-and-hand-to-pocket maneuver, so as to better jiggle change and rock on my heels while talking.

But then suddenly, like an F-18 fighter jet whose controls won't respond, it all goes wrong. He stops my hand in mid-release from the third pump and, without warning, segues the pump into a 45-degree-angle hand-lock.

Flustered at the audacity of his rebellion from handshake norms, I nonetheless try to regain my composure. Alright, I guess we're doing this now, I think, and hold the hand-lock for two seconds—what I estimate to be a decent amount of time for a handshake that, to my mind, implies a level of brotherhood I hadn't been prepared to acknowledge. Uncertain if I'm supposed to lean in for a combo back-pat or not, I end up not. It's not like he saved my life in a car fire or anything, I think.

I wait for him to release the hand-lock, which he does, and it is here where I make my crucial and devastating mistake. Unmindful of the possibility of a third stage to the handshake—at two stages, the entire ordeal's already gone into overtime, in my mind—I let my hand down...and leave him hanging. Before I can even react, he segues from the 45-degree-angle hand-lock to a closed-fist tap, while I already have my hand halfway into my pocket.

Horrified that I've disengaged from the handshake before it had come to a full and complete stop, and just as scared that I might look uncool in front of a black man, I quickly bring my hand back up for the fist-tap. He pretends like the entire handshake business has gone off hitchless and starts talking, but I know he knows: I, the dorky white guy, fucked up his cool black guy handshake.

If I can take any solace from the ordeal, it's with the perspective that maybe he's the one who should feel embarrassed. The three-pump shake is the established norm. Any deviations not worked out ahead of time shouldn't automatically be assumed to be part of the shake canon. What if I'd gone for a single-pump tight-squeeze shake with an elbow-grab combo right when he brought out the hand-lock? There would have been a four-arm pile-up and blood all over the place. There's no room for freestyling in the handshake arena.

Still, though—I screwed up his cool black guy handshake. Man.

How To Not Kill Yourself While Brewing Coffee

Upon purchasing your Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker (Model 6395) as I did earlier tonight, be sure to treat yourself to the 14-page User Manual (available in both English and convenient Spanish for the English-impaired). The manual doesn't offer many surprises in its day-to-day operation — from pouring water to spooning coffee grounds into a filter to pressing the button labelled "on" ("encendido" for our Spanish-speaking friends), brewing a pot of coffee with this appliance is a fairly rote and obvious affair. Setting the digital clock may pose a higher degree of difficulty for some, but once one gets past the learning curve of the "hour" and "minute" buttons representing the hours and minutes one could press until the correct time appears on the digital clock, it seldom gets more advanced.

No, the real joy of reading the User Manual is that almost the entirety of its 14-page length concerns itself with the vast number of ways in which your coffeemaker is prepared to kill you. In this the authors are thorough and exhaustive. In fact, the manual is confident that you probably already know how to make coffee, and relegates the actual instructions to the back of the manual as an afterthought. Instead, the reader is plunged face-first into a veritable A to Z of coffee-making tragedy, starting with page one, "Important Safeguards".

Important Safeguards

More pedestrian manuals might sugarcoat their warning pages with assurances like "may scald the skin of children..." or "if not careful, a fire could possibly...". Not the grim Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker User Manual. Expect no coddling here. Sunbeam shatters your rosy coffee-making world right off the bat with a little wake-up call:

When using electrical appliances, to reduce the risk of fire, electric shock and/or injury to persons, basic safety precautions should be followed.

Note the care Sunbeam takes not just to make it clear that its coffeemaker can and will set the incautious coffee lover aflame, flood their bodies with electrical current and batter them senseless— the Sunbeam manual goes one step further, making it clear that every single appliance in your home is a potential flame-spewing deathtrap for the thoughtless and irresponsible. Having offered up this bleak outlook on morning beverage-making, Sunbeam wastes no time digging into grisly specifics:

1.) Brewed coffee and grounds, both in the brew basket and decanter, are very hot. Handle with care to avoid scalding. 2.) Scalding may occure [sic] if the lid is removed during the brewing cycles.

Coffee grounds show their dark side here; they may look damp and gross, but if given half a chance, they will scald you and laugh while they do it. Even an innocent action like removing the lid of the coffeemaker will result in swift punishment.

3.) Do not touch hot surfaces. Use handles or knobs. Operate only with all lids in closed position.

The first sentence of this warning seems somewhat out of place with the rest of the page, since it's not really specific to brewing coffee with the Sunbeam 12-cup coffeemaker. "Do not touch hot surfaces"? No matter where you are and what you're doing, that's just good damn advice.

The trick, I suppose, lies in being able to identify which surfaces are the hot ones. In my experience, this is where things can get tricky. Metal and bronze surfaces left out in the sun all day are obvious targets (cars, bronze statues, smelting pots, etc.). But as this warning seems to infer, hot surfaces potentially lurk around any corner, and you ignore them at your peril.

I would not, of course, recommend that you live your life in fear of touching things. Rather, if you have children, I suggest you let them touch everything first. Plug the Sunbeam in and wait twenty minutes. Encourage them to play with it, and write down the parts of the coffeemaker they can touch without alighting in flame.

4.) To protect against electrical shock, do not immerse cord, plug or machine in water or other liquids.

Once again, sound advice. If I could offer one complaint, it's that in its effort to address every contingency in which a coffee aficionado might meet an unsuspecting doom while brewing up joe, the manual can get a bit exhausting. For instance, I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would try to plug in my coffeemaker while submersed underwater, as implied above. However, let's assume for a second that I was actually that motherfucking determined to make coffee — I doubt a written caution would be enough to deter me, since a tidal wave crashing into my kitchen clearly wasn't.

5.) Close adult supervision is necessary when this appliance is used by or near children.

If you have a child who loves the taste of coffee, Sunbeam counsels that you watch with scrutiny while they make it, presumably to avoid any accidents as a result of their attempting to brew coffee underwater or while touching one of the appliance's many ludicrously hot surfaces.

Of greater importance here, though, is the fact that adult supervision is needed not just when used by children, but near them — the upshot of this apparently being that if your child wants to watch you brew coffee, Sunbeam recommends that you're present for this.

Perhaps Sunbeam's legal department should have played it safe, and simply advised that children be kept out of the house at all times when the Sunbeam 12-Cup is in use. Most likely several parents need to coffee-scald their children from three rooms away, with the subsequent lawsuits resulting in a more blanket warning.

6.) Unplug from outlet when coffeemaker or clock are not in use.

Unplugging my coffeemaker when I'm not using it is good advice no matter where you come from. However, my Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker comes equipped with a digital clock that, by the very nature of how people use clocks (i.e. looking at them, getting the time), tends to be in use at all times — meaning that Sunbeam would rather I unplug my coffeemaker except when the clock is in use, which is always. Perhaps they meant "in use" in a stricter sense, meaning that any time I'm not specifically looking at my coffeemaker for the time, it should be unplugged. In this scenario, I would simply have to plug in the coffeemaker every time I needed the time, go find the time from a clock, then simply program the digital coffeemaker clock to be completely up-to-scratch with my daily appointments. That done, I would promptly unplug the coffeemaker so as not to risk killing my children.

It's unclear which interpretation Sunbeam's solid wall of attorney would rather I adopt. In either case, though, Sunbeam's warning makes it abundantly clear: they probably pay their attorneys far, far too much.

7.) The use of accessory attachments not recommended for Sunbeam products may result in fire, electric shock or injury to persons.

Finally a warning that's actually applicable to day-to-day life: advisory as to how to properly modify your coffeemaker for maximum performance. According to Sunbeam, you shouldn't. But according to your heart, you're already dead inside if you don't. Besides, if Sunbeam didn't want you to put a gas pedal on your coffeemaker, they should have explicitly stated it. It's one of only four or five things they haven't explicitly stated in bolded type, really — which is pretty much a green flag to outfit your coffeemaker with a deisel engine, or I don't know my legalese.

8.) Do not use outdoors.

No explanation is forthcoming here, leaving one to assume the shrinking violets at Sunbeam are simply unwilling to vouch for their product in such an anything-goes environment as the outdoors. This is a company, keep in mind, that provides its consumer base with a 14-page bilingual manual to avoid obliterating itself by pouring coffee grounds in a filter, adding water and pushing a button. Add in a nearby forest as a factor and the manual would balloon out to 500 pages to account for the various coffee-related owl attacks, bear maulings and lightning storms you could later sue them for. So long as you're in a hermetically sealed kitchen with one counter, one coffeemaker, a sink and an outlet, however, Sunbeam is confident you'll probably only be able to kill yourself in roughly twelve different ways.

9.) Do not let cord hang over the edge of a table or counter or touch any hot surface.

I'll be honest: if you've bought a Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker and haven't yet run screaming from your kitchen in terror, you have balls made of titanium. That's just the sort of consumer Sunbeam's after, friend. Enjoy each sip of your home-brewed coffee as if it were your last — since, according to Sunbeam, that's a distinct probability.

Warning #9 strikes me as little more than a combination of previous, much superior warnings. I wouldn't want to imply that Sunbeam's User Manual is treading water by now, of course — still, the main ingredients for disaster here appear to be cord-pulling children, hot surfaces and scaldings. Old news, Sunbeam. You got anything else we need to know before our kids brew us up a scalding pot of coffee, or were you done? Pussies.

10.) Do not place appliance on or near a hot gas or electrical burner, or in a heated oven.

I'd like to think I've been pretty charitable so far with Sunbeam's various attorney-sanctioned safeguards. Having said that, if you're stupid enough to think you can make coffee by putting a coffeemaker on a gas outlet or in an oven, no user manual on the planet is going to keep you alive past the weekend. It's a miracle you haven't tried to cram your dog into the gas tank of your car yet or suffocated after you put corndogs in your lungs. Coffee is beyond your grasp, and Sunbeam shouldn't feel obligated to cater their warnings to you. Confine your liquids to room-temperature tap water and move your way up to tomato juice. Only then, when you've worked your way through several "primer" drinks, will you have the experience and confidence to brew up a pot of oven-fresh coffee.

11.) Do not use appliance for other than intended use.

I suspect we're at the end of the real warnings here, as Sunbeam seems to be talking exclusively to the sub-normals now. If you've ever been at a lecture, you'll remember that all the good questions usually get asked first, and people eventually start asking the speaker just about anything to pad out the hour. This seems a lot like that. "Okay, so that's all the major stuff out of the way. How much time we got left there? Ooooo. Fifteen minutes? Okay, uh... oh! I should also mention that the Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker should not be used as a suppository. Also, do not apply Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker directly to face. Uh. Explosives and nerve toxins should be kept separate from the coffeemaker's water reservoir at all times."

12.) Use on a hard, flat level surface only, to avoid interruption of air flow underneath the appliance.

I wasn't aware that coffeemakers needed air flow. I sort of assumed grounds + water + hot = coffee, which just goes to show you that Sunbeam's list of safeguards has a little something to teach everyone.

I hadn't been planning on using my coffeemaker on non-flat surfaces (hills, fjords and the like), but I admit I'm curious as to how putting a flat-bottomed appliance on a flat surface could possibly improve airflow underneath it.

Special Cord Set Instructions

With all the ways in which their product intends to destroy you out of the way, the Sunbeam User Manual finally gets down to the nuts and bolts of its product: namely the power cord, and why it's so short:

Specal Cord Set Instructions A short supply power cord is provided to reduce the hazards resulting from becoming entangled in or tripping over a longer cord.

This was easily my favorite part of the entire manual, since it's such a brazen, obvious lie. Sunbeam made their cords short because a short cord takes less material to manufacture than a long one, and Sunbeam saves money. The first time I tried to plug my coffeemaker in, I thought there'd been a design error, as the cord in the back extended barely eight inches and resembled less a conduit of electricity then a vestigial tail. When I finally got to this section of the User Manual and read that this cumbersome and irritating feature was designed into the coffeemaker on purpose, I had to laugh at Sunbeam's balls. It's one thing to give your customer a cord the length of a child's running shoe with which to extend to an outlet, forcing you to rearrange your entire kitchen to accomodate it; it's another entirely to suggest that by denying you a further helpful few inches of cord to play with, they're in fact snatching you from the very jaws of death.

"Tripping over a longer cord"? Who makes coffee on the floor? How much cord was in the original design that there was enough surplus cascading around the kitchen to trip someone? With its current design of about 6-8 inches of cord, is Sunbeam infering that adding another 8 inches to help you reach an outlet on your counter would entangle you? Is it possible to get entangled in a foot-and-a-half of cord?

The answer, of course, is no; never in a million years. So you really have to salute Sunbeam for a design choice made specifically to improve profitability and inconvenience their customers, passed off to you, the apparent clumsy idiot, as their helpful way of preventing you from strangling yourself with a foot of cord on a kitchen counter.

Assholes.

You Made It!

Congratulations! You are the owner of a SUNBEAM Coffeemaker.

Don't worry about that strange new feeling coursing through you; that's simply pride you're feeling from buying the Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker. Oh sure, you could have gone with the six-cup. But last time you checked, you weren't a huge pussy. Anyone who says the Sunbeam 12-Cup is too much coffeemaker for you to handle is talking smack and needs a slap in a certain part of their face: the mouth part.

Happy brewing! Watch out for that six inches of cord now!

Misc.

On Productivity

I seem to have hit upon the secret of productivity: cold, cold temperatures. I recently came across the thermostat in the condo I share with a roommate and discovered that the heat had been turned off. I set it so that if the temperature dropped below 68 degrees, hot blasts of steamy air would billow from ducts until the place was once again toasty.

LA, it turns out, is built in a desert and, like a desert, gets really hot during the day and freezing at night. For the last three or four weeks, I’ve taken to waking up at 5:00 or 6:00 am because of the chill. I’ll try to curl up into the comforters as best I can to warm up, then finally give up and run for the shower for the blessed, blessed warmth. Already up and showered, and facing the unpleasant thought of hanging around my chilly apartment for another few hours, I usually get dressed and go to work by 6:30 or 7:30, which, needless to say, is utter madness.

Having found the thermostat this weekend, I’ve since enjoyed two mornings of not having my room become a walk-in meat freezer around 3 am. Because of this, I’ve slept in a further three hours on both days, then laid in bed for another hour in drowsy, womb-like warmth before climbing out of bed for a leisurely masturbation session, then a shower and some TV before waltzing into work around 10:00 or 10:30, when everyone else at my office does. Now, at 12:30 in the afternoon, I’m already lazily sipping at a coffee and thinking about skipping out early.

The lesson from this should be clear: comfort is your enemy. But since all evidence seems to point to more temperate climates yielding less industry, then logically, the Northwest Territories should be responsible for every scientific and creative innovation since being colonized -- and as far as I know, the Northwest Territories' contribution to science has to date consisted of the snowball and the dead seal. Plus, let’s not forget that Captain America was frozen in an ice cap for fifty years before being discovered and thawed to fight international super-crime with the Avengers – and those fifty years of ice encasement mark, let’s be brutally honest, the least prolific of his career. So perhaps it’s not that warm temperatures make everyone less industrious, per se, so much as they make me less industrious. Or maybe it’s simply that I, unlike Captain America, am hot-blooded. Check it and see. I’ve got a fever of a hundred and three.

On Girls Mentioning Their Goddamn Boyfriends All the Time

I was chatting to a friend who’s been hanging out with a girl who constantly brings up her boyfriend. I’d been through this whole "hanging out with the girl who can't stop jawing about her damn boyfriend" situation and offered my sympathy. Unless her boyfriend is off signing Declarations of Independence or colonizing Mars, his day-to-day actions simply don’t merit the constant updates to me, the frankly disinterested third party.

Don't these girls know the universal flirting code? Honestly: one mention and the point's been made. Continuous mentions just comes off as gratuitous. Talking endlessly about a boyfriend is, when translated into flirt-code, literally like saying "You don't have a chance You don't have a chance You don't have a chance" in non-stop succession – the verbal equivalent to some sort of water-powered windmill groin-kicking machine. I suggested he parry with some flirt-code of his own to level the playing field again, saying things like "I value our friendship too much too ever jeopardize it," which to the best of my knowledge translates directly to "You're not nearly attractive enough to have sex with."

On Los Angeles

Many have asked about my continued silence about LA. Do I like it there? Am I having fun? Empirically speaking, do I wish they all could be California girls? Respectively: yeah; yes; and most definitely. LA's fine, the job’s infuriating but fun, and the ladies are of sufficient grade-A standard to make me wish the world could, indeed, be composed entirely of girls of the California persuasion.

There does seem to be a downside to all the luscious, sun-dappled T & A, however. The daily immigration of North America's hottest ladies to Hollywood has made the gene pool perfect to the point where I keep waiting for the moment where, like in a Michael Chrichton novel, it all goes wrong, and we're forced to pay for our genetic hubris with rampaging supermodels in a theme park reduced to a frantic game of suvival.

Either way, my proximity to the UCLA campus has allowed me to get a few phone numbers. However, the hottie-to-norm ratio here means, I suspect, that I'd better get used to hearing "I value our friendship too much too ever jeopardize it."

Work's fine, if frustrating creatively. I don't really even need to go into any detail to explain why -- I'll simply say that every Hollywood cliche you ever heard about backstabbing, career climbing and allergies to original concepts are all true. I'm desperately trying to cling to my sense of fair play, being polite, treating others as you would have them treat you and being honest in a city where everyone sees these qualities as quaint weaknesses of a bygone era.

On Looking Back

I recently decided to do a retrospective on some of my obituaries over the years, and went trawling through a Yahoo group I used to post at with about fifteen other friends. From 2000 to 2003 there was on average 20-60 posts a day. Most of these guys I knew through comedy connections, and in looking through it last night, I couldn't help but think: "What a waste." There are something like 12,000 posts on it now -- no way to export or save them for posterity, of couse. And it's funny -- people posting bits, images, article, essays and scripts, constantly, throughout the days and weeks. And the only people reading it were each other. Most of it now, sadly, is unusable, as so much of it was spoofing contemporary events or needed the context of what was being discussed. A while ago I picked through it and pulled out some posts of mine that I later sold as articles -- poking through it now, I still haven't touched the surface. One of these days, years from now when I completely run out of ideas, I'm going to dive into it and drain that pool dry.

On How You're Doing

Well, enough about me. How's you doin'?

Ol' Dirty Bastard (1968-2004)

Rapper Dead at 35; Surprisingly Clean; From Legitimate Parents

Rap artist Ol’ Dirty Bastard (aka ODB, aka Dirt McGirt, aka Rapass Hookerpunch, aka Choc-o-Jesus) died in a recording studio this past weekend from complications brought on by wrecking, after failing to properly check, hisself. Bitch was 35. (In rap years, ODB was a robust 94.)

ODB is the latest in a series of tragic studio-related rapper deaths, including 2pac Shakur's when his rhymes became too punishingly intense for his heart to withstand; and Notorious B.I.G.'s, who choked on a between-tracks sandwich after rap enemies hid a phone book under the lettuce.

Born to father Big Filthy Bastard and mother Fat Dumbshit Whore, Ol' Dirty proved himself to be a musical progidy early. His mother fondly remembers how he refused to play an instrument, dealt heroin from his bedroom, got knifed five times in the stomach and was eventually acquited in the strangling death of a rival drug dealer at his school. "Even then, anyone could tell ODB had the gift for hip hop," she says.

As a member of 90’s rap group Wu-Tang Clan, Bastard revolutionized the musical landscape through his many arrests in gang shooting involvement, security officer woundings, illegal possession of body armor, driving with a suspended license, shoplifting and violent threats to a former girlfriend. Said Amadeus Mozart of Bastard’s contributions to the musical canon: “Truly n***a was ahead of his time.”

Many artists struggle with broadening their musical development while juggling the expectations of their fanbase. ODB chose to follow the route Pablo Picasso and Henry David Thoreau trod by becoming a recluse for his art, having himself sentenced in 2001 to four years in prison for drug possession and violence on his girlfriend.

According to bandmates Method Man, RZA and Ghostface Killah, their bandmate is remembered both as “[unintelligible]” and “[expletive deleted].” Though many artists would not be able to live up to such praise, Bastard’s musical canon proves he was all of these expletives and more.

Bastard is perhaps best known for his slurred, barely intelligible rap cameo on the Mariah Carey video “Fantasy”. For a man whose most memorable moment was as a guest star in the video of a forty-year-old former dance choreographer for a song written by a corporate entity, it is difficult to appreciate the depth of the loss to the musical community. Perhaps it will become clearer over time, when in subsequent videos Mariah Carey shakes her skin grenades from a helicopter without the benefit of ODB being used as a rapping chair. Only then, maybe, will we appreciate the magnitude of this tortured poet’s passing.

Bastard is also known for the instructional video “Never Touch Restaurant Food After You Touch Your Penis,” which he recorded as part of a public service after his arrest in 1999 for touching restaurant food after touching his penis.

In lieu of flowers, Bastard’s estate wishes that malt liquor be poured onto the ground, so that it can join with the Earth’s nutrients and be used to create future superstar hip-hop artists.