This has been a terrible week. Everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong. I suspect it will continue for a few days, as I can't shake the feeling that I'm like some sentient cold slot machine that must fulfill its quota of zero payouts before sliding back into the tropics.
To this gripe, I have a case in point. Had to go into work today. Not to the office, but to one of the facilities I'm working with. Got there about an hour early, and so to avoid being "that guy" who hobbles around the lobby until it's time to punch in, I stood outside for forty-five minutes, smoking cigarettes and nervously checking my text messages, even though I knew I had none. So, we hit 9:55, and that was close enough for me to make my elevator-assisted ascent to their office. I'm taking my last drags, and with mere seconds to go before I'm in the building and off to work, what happens?
A bird shits on my arm.
Now, I was hesitant to tell this little story, because technically, the last blog entry was about shit. I'm not trying to create a new trend for X-E; this was purely coincidental.
So, I'm standing there, happy that my hour-long bake in the sun was nearing its conclusion, and all of the sudden...I feel it. I didn't even need to look down to know what had happened, but I did, and it was the blackest, most tar-like bird shit the history of bird feces. It looked like Courtney Cox's open wound after Skeletor blasted her in the leg in the live-action He-Man movie.
Now, what do you do when a bird shits on you? If my reflexes and impulses are to be believed, the first thing you do is scan the area to make sure that nobody else saw what happened. It's one thing to be shat upon; it's another to be shat upon with an audience. Somehow, even in the heart of Times Square, nobody noticed. I quickly rubbed my forearm against a nearby wall to take care of the excess, then did away with the rest with what I swear to you was a napkin sent from God himself, which just happened to be laying in the back of my work bag, even though I've never carried napkins or tissues in my life.
Long story short, even after arriving an hour early, I was ten minutes late to work. Aside from needing to wash off any remnants of this most foul turn of events, I was also convinced that another bird --or perhaps the same bird-- had secretly shit on my back as well. So I lurked around the lobby for a few minutes, trying to catch a glance of my back in every not-a-mirror-but-kind-of-reflective surface I could find. Fortunately, I was just being paranoid. Even during a bad week, it's not easy to get shit on twice.
After describing my awful morning to the person I was working with, he told me that it's good luck to be shat upon by a bird. I've heard that before. Maybe I even believed it. Now that I've been there, though, I'm going to have to disagree on that one.
I actually feel a little bit better now that I've confessed. Thanks for listening. I'll be back tomorrow with a review of a Battle Beast or something.
Posted by Matt on 08/07/2007. E-mail me!
Chestnuts roasted by 
I love Good Eats but I can never learn how to cook anything from that show. When Alton starts talking about molecular structure beakdown I give up.
That’s a gripe I have with many cooking shows today. Nobody measures anything, they just say “Now we’ll take our [ingriedient] in this bowl and pour it into our mixture” and such and such. Not to mention when they start getting into spices and their specific blends of things.
I think it was Emeril that was the first chef on Food Network to have more than 1 show at once. Does he still make new shows? Or have all his shows been subjected to rerun forever? I don’t really care about his stuff anyway.
But Alton Brown is one of the better ones out there. Lots of good shows, like Good Eats, Feasting on Asphalt, and he’s the narrator for Iron Chef America.
Speaking of which, as much as I like the show “Throwdown with Bobby Flay” the show idea seems a bit cocky don’t you think?
“I’m an iron chef, and I’m going to challenge these famous cooks to see if I can make a better version of their famous dish!”
Of course, it’s not that cocky as Bobby seems to fail at this in every episode that I’ve seen so far.