Pinkerton's Weblog

Word is Bond

A huge, "wow-is-that-ever-cool" to Heikki Mylläri, who listened to me bitch in a recent post about how I accidentally deleted a comic I was gonna remake, and got sick of my whining. He not only managed to find the comics, but even posted them to his server and let me download all the files (which—given that every page is a high-res jpeg, every issue has 30 pages, and there are many issues—can rape bandwidth pretty fast).

Say what you will about the internet, and its tendency to bring out the worst in people in terms of flame wars, overly critical opinions and overall mean-spiritedness. All I can say is, someone named Heikki doesn't know me from a hole in the wall and was willing to help me out. It's like that movie Pay it Forward, with the exception that it doesn't render you immediately retarded when you come into contact with it.

Thanks, Heikki. May the Hammer of the Gods drive your ships to new lands. Ahhh-ah-AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...AHHH!

Afternoon Delight

Date: last Saturday
Time: morningish
Agent Assigned: Jay Pinkerton
Agent Mission: wait around for gas guy
Reason: gas was turned off
Reason (supplementary): gas bill not paid
Mission-authorized Weapons: stealth; cunning; bus pass

Mission Status: FAILED

Full Report From Agent in Field:

Okay, so here’s the thing. Everybody talks like it’s always summer in Los Angeles, and they’re all liars. Elaborate conspiracy involving the Los Angeles tourism board? I leave it to you to be the judge, but yes.

As a Canadian, I learned about California like most non-Californians do: through Hollywood. I understood what Hollywood was telling me: living in LA meant lots of palm trees as viewed from the windshields of expensive cars. See also: big-breasted bikini babes walking small, whimsically effete dogs. See also: flashbulb montages of cornfed midwesterners becoming A-list Hollywood stars... but at what price.

When I packed up my things in Toronto and moved to sunny LA, I put all of my full-length pants, sweaters, coats and long-sleeved shirts in a box, due for my parents' garage with most of my other stuff. Eager not to look like an out-of-place Canadian in mittens, toque and parka, I'd decided to blend in from Day One with a tasteful selection of shorts and t-shirts.

As a result, I've had to spend the majority of my disposable income since getting here rebuying full-length pants, sweaters, coats and long-sleeved shirts. Because Los Angeles, once you boil off the bikini babes and palm trees, is essentially a large urban sprawl awkwardly crammed into the middle of a desert. And deserts, as I soon learned, become extremely cold at night. (Most climates get insulated at night by their humidity. Temperate deciduous forests, for example, have 80% humidity during the day. This water reflects and absorbs sunlight—at night the water acts like a blanket, trapping heat inside the forest. Since deserts are about as humid as Angela Lansbury's vagina, they retain no heat and cool down rapidly when the sun sets. Deciduous. Also, science.)

This puts me in an awkward position, since almost everyone I know is from Canada, where it's "holy shit, is it cold" freezing right now. I'm finding it hard to illicit sympathy for the mild chill in the air when the person I'm talking to just finished wrestling a polar bear for the last seat near the fire.

At any rate, the desert chill became more of an issue recently, when an online payment failed to send itself and the gas was turned off on us for a week and a half. For the last few days I've taken to wearing two full sets of clothes to bed, since around about 3am my room becomes a carpeted walk-in meat freezer. Add one of the harshest cold snaps in California history into the mix, and the land of eternal sunshine and palm trees had me seeing my breath every morning.

My roommate had arranged for the gas guy to show up last Saturday to switch us back on. Since he had to go out for the afternoon, and I had no plans extending beyond watching DVDs while drinking a pot of coffee, I happily agreed to wait around for the gas guy.

“He should be here late morning,” my roommate explained on his way out of the door.

“Awesome,” I called out over my Batman cartoon. I illustrated my advocacy of his statement further with an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

Time passed. DVDs may have been watched. Coffee may or may not have been brewed. Bed hair on certain parties may have been left uncombed. Pants, in fact, may have been ignored entirely. Masturbation may have been achieved, made easier with the lack of pants. Not to alarm anyone, but pizza —normally an after-hours staple—might even have been eaten for breakfast. I leave you to fill in the blanks yourself as to what sort of Saturday morning it was for one James Pinkerton. If a trim, incredibly fit person had jogged by on their way to hang-gliding class and caught a glimpse of me, they would have been so repulsed they'd have imploded into a black hole of disdain. I probably would have felt bad about it, too. So I found it wise to pull the shades.

By 4:00 the gas guy was conspicuously absent. I was getting anxious. Pissing away a whole morning? I laugh at pissing away a whole morning. But it’d been hours. Fuck this guy. I wanted to leave the house. Now, normally I'd go into my bedroom and grab my keys, which are in a yogurt container on my dresser (figure 1). But since I was just going across the street to the store and then racing back so I wouldn't miss the gas guy, I didn't even bother.

Still in a coffee-stained t-shirt and pajama bottoms, and with gratuitous amounts of bedhair and B.O., I threw on my shoes and headed out the door. I made sure to give it a rattle to see that it was unlocked. Then I shut the door behind me, double-checked to make sure, and realized that I'd somehow managed to lock myself out of my house. Allow me to explain both my idiocy and the doorknob's.

See, most doorknobs work as shown below (figures 3 and 4).You have an unlocked door, the doorknob can rotate. Locked, it doesn't. What I discovered was a previously-unknown breed of knob, wherein a locked door still has a rotatable knob from the inside (figure 5).

As fascinating as it was to have uncovered this new technology, my surprise was mitigated somewhat by being locked out of the house in semen-crusty PJ bottoms and a stained shirt, looking for all intents and purposes like a homeless man. Worse, I'd now have to walk to work, talk the janitor into letting me into the office (no keys), then root through my desk for the cell number my roommate had given me ages ago so he could come back and let me into the house.

I called him and he did, to make a long story short. Sadly, while I was gallivanting around LA in my pajamas, the gas man came, rang the doorbell, and left. So my room gets to stay freezing for a few more days until we can get another appointment.

The moral here: Always check the knob. And by this I mean: always check with the knob, so you know he's aware how a locked door works before you leave him to wait for the gas man.

National Lampoon

Since I took over as Managing Editor of the National Lampoon October 1st, we've increased our reach per million by 70%, and as you can see from above, we've managed to double our daily reach.

People are finally starting to put their preconceptions about the Poon behind 'em and look at some of our content, a lot of which is really funny. Last week two of our articles went viral, 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time and, shortly after that, the 2004 Safe Toy Shopping Guide.

Steve Holt!