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Okay, seriously, now. Does anyone know any actual Buddhist monks? I want to try an experiment with this Bosch dishwasher. #fb
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So I had a crazy thought that Anita might be on to something with this whole Bosch thing. #fb
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For those of you on Twitter, freaking out right now, don’t worry about who Anita is. It isn’t important, right now. #fb
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Her Buddhist monk, Anita’s, that is, sang. Not like he gave people up to the feds or anything, but he sang. As in songs. #fb
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Also, I don’t mean to imply that Anita owns a Buddhist monk. She was renting, of course. You can only buy Trappist monks. #fb
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Now I fancy myself a bit of a songster. I am perhaps the only person with ears who considers myself this, but it’s someone. #fb
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What if I could tame the beast (the number of this particular beast is SHE3AR55UC) with song? #fb
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You’ve all heard my saga, what harm, right? Right? #fb
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So this evening I performed all my usual prep. #fb
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I put the children to bed and closed the soundproof door to their wing. #fb
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I poured a half gallon of bleach into the Bosch dishwasher and ran it. #fb
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When that was over I poured a half gallon of white vinegar into the dishwasher and ran it. #fb
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I burned a small pile of incense. Didn’t actually have any incense on hand, so burned a plant we’d been growing on the kitchen sill. #fb
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I don’t know that we were growing it intentionally, anyway. #fb
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I said a small prayer to a vague enough god that at least one of them, should they be listening, might consider it meant for them. #fb
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I put on a long, flowing robe, which is what I do when I sing. Or what I do when I’m getting ready to sing. #fb
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I started to shave my head, got a look from my wife which I took to mean I should stop shaving my head, so I did. #fb
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Her next look I took to mean that before I went back to the kitchen I should clean up the hair from the floor of the bathroom. So I did. #fb
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I stood before the dishwasher in the light of a single, solitary candle flame with my half-shaven head. #fb
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I rested the candle on top of the counter, above the dishwasher, amongst the stains of burnt plant. Can’t sing with things in my hands. #fb
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One of the kids came in. Needed a glass of water. Got it for them. Gave them the look they were giving me back. Sent them to bed. #fb
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Knelt before the dishwasher. #fb
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The floor was kind of dirty, thought better of it, returned to my feet. #fb
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I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Caught my reflection in the glass, saw that I resembled a half-shorn fish. #fb
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Collected myself. Began to sing. Sang like I’d never sung before! Loud and ringing! #fb
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It was a Def Leppard song, which I realize may have been my mistake. #fb
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Three, maybe four notes in, the dishwasher began making honking noises. #fb
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Not like a goose, but like a truck. #fb
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There was a great tearing sound from beneath the dishwasher, and jets of tepid, food particle-filled water gushed forth. #fb
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I wasn’t going to be able to return the robes to the robe rental store. #fb
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The dishwasher lurched forward through the spray, clanking down onto the floor, crushing a finger I probably shouldn’t have left there. #fb
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I yelped, as you do when a dishwasher crushes your finger, and attempted to crawl away. #fb
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The dishwasher on my finger made this difficult, of course. #fb
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As the dishwasher rolled to one side to continue its approach, my flattened finger was freed, so I scrambled backwards. #fb
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Of course, our kitchen is rather small, so I scrambled pretty much in place. #fb
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The dishwasher door swung open and a deep, offensive blast of air hit me. It stank of the last seven nights of dinner. Or so. #fb
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I instantly wished we’d used more parsley. #fb
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I was stunned into silence. Of course, I’d stopped singing a while ago, but my singing and screaming may have sounded similar. #fb
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The fetid roar of the dishwasher reverberated throughout the house like a sewer ‘gator stubbing its toe in the stinking depths. #fb
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Only imagine the alligator had a megaphone and had also just been chewing on some dinner plates. #fb
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When the roar subsided, so did the dishwasher. #fb
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Opened my eyes, because, it turns out, a natural human reaction to being attacked by a Bosch is to close your eyes & cower a little bit. #fb
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It sat there, grim, like only a pissed off dishwasher can. The floor was slick with detritus and soapy water. #fb
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The little red ‘Clean’ light was illuminated. #fb
Month: January 2013
NHL Lockout is Over, No Longer Threatening the Mayan Ball League’s Lockout Record
So the NHL and NHLPA finally came to their collective sense (have they any?) and ended their prolonged lockout.
“NHL lockout over as owners, players reach agreement” from the Boston Globe.
Which means that the legendary lockout of the Mayan Ball League (the story of which I’ve been shilling here and other places) still holds the record as longest labor dispute in the history of professional sports.
Hockey is one of my personal favorite sports, both to play and to watch, at any level, nearly. I love watching a good Hockey East tilt, a Worcester Sharks (nee Ice Cats) game, a Super 8 series, and I especially love watching the Boston Bruins. Love, with a bitter taste in my mouth after the lockout, perhaps. Last year saw an alarming number of players coming down with concussions (the way you’d come down with a cold if colds were administered by a 200+ lb. person ramming their shoulder into your head). After one particularly bad week for the players, I began to think that the last rash of head injuries on a similar scale must have been back when the Mayans were playing their ball game with the hoops, the one at the end of which the loser would occasionally be beheaded.
So I started on a brief sketch of a history of that league, which had startling parallels to my beloved (formerly?) National Hockey League. The NHL really is the red-headed step child of professional sports. I’ve never seen a league do more to shoot itself in the foot than it. While Major League Baseball emerges from the Steroid Era and its own labor strife of the 90s, the NFL enjoys the very peak of its popularity, and even the NBA, for crying out loud, managed to avoid a stoppage in play, the NHL goes from a force gaining fans left and right to a full stop in operations, effectively killing its momentum in the sporting population’s eye and heart. It has expanded ambitiously to curious destinations for a sport played primarily in the cold, by kids outdoors on a local pond. It has had numerous of its stars (Bobby Orr, Cam Neely, and probably other players from other teams) cut down in their prime due to the brutal nature of a sport in which large men on blades and in heavy pads thunder around an enclosed space with sticks and a hard piece of rubber.
And I put it to rest. When the labor dispute began again I was so… irate? Disappointed? At loose ends? I had no hockey to watch out here in the western backwaters of the country, after all, while Boston College and Boston University and Maine and all the rest appeared on Friday nights on NESN. Whatever it was, I picked up the story again, finished it off, ending the Mayan Ball League with a whimper, rather than a bang, as my shadow of the NHL tore itself apart, slowly.
The fact that the Mayan calendar was ending also seemed like a handy time for this story to come to light.
And so that’s how that all happened.