DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Smith Family Bookstore in Eugene stocks an impressive inventory. The floor-to-ceiling stacks of used paperback fiction are augmented and in fact buried by a supplemental stack of books, two feet high and two to three titles deep. They run the length of the aisles, on both sides, and the width of the store along the back wall.

Somewhere among those 300,000 paperbacks is a perspective that, if photographed, would scream “look at this! 300,000 paperbacks!” I didn’t find it, but I did find a used copy of a Hornby novel I hadn’t read yet, and for a good price too.

I sleep like a log. Logs don’t sleep, of course, but if logs were to sleep, that is the fashion in which I slumber: felled despite shouting (“timber!”), loaded onto a truck, driven across the county, dumped into the river, then inadvertently sunk to the bottom, preserved at 40°F for one hundred years, immobile. Or, alternatively, milled into a bannister. Either way, I wouldn’t wake up. I figure, if I’m going to sleep, I might as well do it right.

So it was with some surprise that I awoke at 2:00 AM for no immediately apparent reason. Until I breathed. Argh! The worst smell I’ve smelled, and let me tell you, that’s saying something. The room was filled with a putrid stench. I clawed at my own throat. One of my lungs collapsed. Well, not really.

Bad sign: the window was closed. So, if the smell didn’t come from outside…

But no. This was skunk. Not the sort of “dead skunk on the road” skunk-smell that you can identify as skunk even without seeing the black and white pelt pressed into the asphalt. A whiff of the carcass, even at 60 mph, is sufficient for reliable identification. I wasn’t getting a whiff of skunk. I was soaking in it.

Have you ever heard music so loud you couldn’t discern notes or instruments or melody? Have you ever gone momentarily blind in the parking lot after a matinee, the sun so bright your eyes clamp shut?

My nose was overloaded. I couldn’t really smell the bad smell; it was too big. But I could tell it was there. I could feel it in the air, in my eyes and throat. And around the edges of every breath was a whiff of something horrible, something dead or worse. (Dead things stop stinking, eventually.)

I stumbled into the living room. If anything, the bad smell smelled even worse. Further, into the kitchen, I followed the smell to an open window. I pressed my overworked nose against the screen. Fresh air! My nose came back to life. Oh, did my house stink then.

I don’t know what happened. I guess a skunk sprayed just outside the kitchen, and a cloud floated inside and settled in for the night.

I could still smell it at lunch today. I had to eat outside.

Voice of America: US Poll: 54% of Americans Say Iraq War a Mistake (mirror)

A poll shows a big swing in U.S. public opinion against the war in Iraq this month, with a majority of Americans now saying they believe the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq.

PollingReport.com shows results to poll questions about the Iraq war.

I’ve been wondering for weeks, as the news has been generally terrible and the scandals numerous, whether public opinion would really turn around — would we ever get to the point where it’s not just the people at both coasts who know Iraq wasn’t responsible for 9/11, for example. Maybe this is it?

Suffering from a sort of existential torpidity, an emotional exhaustion brought on by a temporary failure to cope with modern society’s demands to do more, more, more, we broke down and sought refuge in common broadcast entertainment: we subscribed to cable television.

Comcast offered a special rate on the Starz! premium package, which if memory serves would eventually (after the special rate expired) cost about $90 per month. $90/month to watch a couple of movies?! Hello, NetFlix! We never planned to keep the service for very long, so we signed up and briefly looked forward to having dozens of movies per day to enjoy.

Starz! isn’t one channel, but 13, some of which have separate East and West Coast feeds. We ended up getting about 18 channels that showed something appealing at least once in a while. The Starz! website displays a grid of the day’s content; I checked it frequently in eager anticipation.

It didn’t last. I don’t know if the problem is Starz! or cable TV in general, but 98% of the content is crap. You’d think that with 18 channels of movies running 24 hours/day, there would nearly always be something good on. This is definitely not the case.

I admit that we taped a pile of movies. Some of them will even be worth watching. The rest were taped in desperation — “hey, here’s one we’ve actually heard of; better tape it!” $90/month?!

After a few weeks, we’d run out of tape, and Starz! had run out of content. Scanning the next week’s grid, I found literally nothing worth two hours of my time. I called Comcast to cancel the service.

The sales rep tried hard to retain my business. And she offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse — I could downgrade to basic cable and pay less per month than if I cancelled the TV feed entirely. The TV service includes a $14 discount against the Internet service, and the price tag for basic is $12, so in essence Comcast is paying me $24/year to receive a TV feed I don’t want. I guess they get some small value out of artificially inflating their subscriber counts. Or maybe they know that every American human will, if given the opportunity, watch television at least sometimes. They may even be right.

If I find myself actually watching, though, I’ll gladly pay $24/year to stop. I’d sooner babysit your kids than watch television. Or better yet, I’ll set your kids down in front of the TV and spend the evening doing something worthwhile, like, I don’t know, picking my ass. Seriously.

I guess the best thing about having Starz! for a month is that I saw the last 15 minutes of Ang Lee’s Hulk, thereby saving myself the 123 other minutes it would have someday taken me to watch the whole thing. That is just about the dumbest climax I have ever seen. Nick Nolte, what were you thinking?

What I now wish I’d done is fill a couple tapes of FoodTV shows. It didn’t occur to me until the day after I cancelled.

Mr. Carroll fires off a few mind bombs in his rant on packaging. It’s difficult and unfair to excerpt, but in an effort to save you some time (Note: average debris.com visit length = 75 dissatisfied seconds) (I just made that up) I’ll show the passage that grabbed me:

Let’s consume pointless packaging! Great karma. In theory, within three decades or so, all the trend arrows will meet at the top of the graph, and one- third of the world will have everything and two-thirds of the world will have nothing.

That won’t happen, of course. They’ll murder us in our beds first.