Sam's Warehouse receives accolades once again

As a wee lad, all of 16 years old, I worked at the world's biggest toy store, Toys R Us. Like the working crew of any other retail establishment, my coworkers and I had developed dislikes for certain types of customers that came into the store. Parents who initiated their conversations with things like "I have a son who's eight but he has the intelligence of a twelve-year-old" spring to mind. Another was the tearful mom who showed up at our door sobbing on Christmas Eve after the store closed begging to be let in and buy some trendy tchotchke her kid had seen an ad for on TV. We always let her in, but I imagine the toy usually wound up in pieces at the bottom of the kid's closet by Valentine's Day. One of the most difficult parts of my job however was dealing with people who wanted to return an item. You would be surprised at the number of people who hope to return something after it's been subjected to months and months of abuse. On many an occasion I had to turn away the forlorn cash-seeking customer trying to return just such an item. Bearing that in mind, you can imagine how hesitant I was this weekend when I had to return a computer to Sam's Warehouse Club that I had owned for barely under 90 days.

I hated having to take the computer back because I not only had recently installed $70 worth of virus protection software on it but I had also gotten the computer for a steal. In December when I bought it, the original price at the Gwinnett Place Sam's was $750, and that was probably a good $40 cheaper than it would be in any other retail store. All they had available however was the floor model. The Mall of Georgia Sam's, also in my area, had it on sale for only $700, but they had no more in stock. When I asked a manager at one store if he would match the price of the other, he not only agreed but also lowered the price of the floor model to a mere $650. When I complimented him on how well his store was handling the post-Christmas rush, he took the handwritten price tag from my hand, scratched out the $650 and wrote $600. Floor model or not, this was a whopping $150 savings, the last $50 of which was due to nothing more than simple flattery on my part. So pleased was I with the courteous service and generous discount that I received that I sent an email via samsclub.com expressing my gratitude.

Sadly, the computer had issues from the start. Somewhere in the inner workings of the machine I would hear a ticking sound. This being the first desktop I had owned in a long time, I thought maybe that's just how they behaved. I let that slide but the Compaq Presario's errant demeanor didn't stop at mysterious noises. It refused to burn CD's, and let's face it, in this modern era of bootleg music and movies and disrespect for that antiquated thing we used to call copyright, making CD's is one of the main reasons many people use computers. If it can't make endless copies of Barry Manilow's Greatest Hits, what good is the thing? Did I mention that it corrupted several files on a flash drive I had received as a Christmas gift? This thing wreaked of bad juju, and try as I might, there was no taming the ghost in the machine.

I knew obtaining a cash refund was a near impossibility, and because technology outdates itself every twelve minutes getting an identical computer (minus the Poltergeist activity of course) was also out of the question. I would have been happy with a store credit. I did want another computer after all, and I was happy to get it from Sam's. A coworker had suggested having my visibly pregnant wife accompany me into the store which I thought was a novel idea. What self-respecting clerk would deny an unborn baby 512 megabytes of memory and a 17" flat screen monitor? With no box, incomplete paperwork and a receipt showing I purchased a big-ticket item just two days short of the 90-day return cutoff, I headed to Sam's to plead my case.

If you've never ventured into a Sam's Club, it's worth a visit. Yes, I know their corporate cousin Wal-Mart is trying to snatch away people's property by way of imminent domain to build more stores, but as long it's not my backyard, what do I care? Much like Wal-Mart, Sam's always has a senior smile and greet customers at the door. Apparently his job description is just that: smile and greet. Occasionally you'll see him perform more physically demanding tasks like coo at a baby or pick his nose, sometimes not in that order, but for the most part he smiles and greets. When I walked in with pieces of a computer in tow, I thought for certain red flags would go up and sirens would blare, but nothing of the sort happened. The greeter smiled, offered a hearty greeting, put a sticker on the monitor and directed me to the return desk.

Once at the return desk I presented my receipt to Claudia Cashier and explained that I had purchased the computer as a marked down floor model. She listened as I nervously explained that the drives weren't working and that I had attempted to rectify the issue several times myself by using Compaq's online chat support. Allow me to interject here that trying to communicate with a non-native English speaker halfway around the planet about technology via a medium that was designed for tweenagers to tell who hearts who is an utter waste of one's time. At any rate, Claudia at Sam's was most helpful. She called someone over from the computer department who gave a cursory glance at the cart of failed technology. Without being prompted I rehashed my story of trying to repair it according to the transoceanic cyber-tech's shoddy directions. I went on to explain that I regretted having to return it after buying it for such a bargain basement price. I maintained the calm and courteous composure I usually find gets me what I want in negotated retail transactions, but I was also prepared if need be to defend myself against potential accusations of computer abuse. No, I didn't download any malicious software; No, I didn't stick peanut butter in the disk drive; No, I didn't trust Dotcomma BinLaden to tell me how to fix it. But the Sam's computer guy just nodded saying that all the components were there.

"Do I have to get store credit?" I asked Claudia.

"You paid cash: You're getting cash," she said counting out hundred-dollar bills. Sweet.

I returned to the Mall of Georgia Sam's that day and purchased a nicer computer than the one I had returned. It only set me back $700. Three months ago the upgraded model would have gone for around $900. I also successfully reinstalled the virus protection software on the new computer without much ado. In fact, I'm really floored at how little to-do there was regarding the whole transaction. The way I see it, I got three months worth of free computer use. I even restored the gifted flash drive to its original unblemished state.

Sure, I had to reformat and wipe off all the tunes, but in the age of modern technology Barry Manilow's hits are just a mouse click away.

Standing eggs on end for the vernal equinox

Well begosh and begorra! Another truth falls the way of myth. Before getting to the bulk of what I want to say, let me preface by stating that I never believed Elvis Presley was alive after 1977, nor did I trust in that whole Neimann Marcus cookie recipe fiasco, and it never would have dawned on me to believe Mikey from the Life cereal commercial died from mixing Pop Rocks and Coke. As a kid, that last one might have seemed more plausible to me until I watched my younger cousin Adam mix the two deadly ingredients while riding in the back seat of his parents' car. The carbonated sugar muck bubbled over the neck of the green bottle and got all over the car upholstery, but after drinking what was left, Adam went unscathed. I have always prided myself on not being the gullible type, and I'm not one to buy into the latest meme just because everyone else does. There is however a popular myth that, until this morning, I took as scientific truth. You can imagine my bitter disappointment when I discovered evidence to the contrary.

The actual year eludes me, but I distinctly remember taking a Polaroid picture of three eggs all of which I successfully righted on end out on the front porch of my parents' home. Although this may be a fabrication that I later came to believe as true, I also seem to remember them falling over one by one in order from right to left. I think it was my mother who had introduced me to this concept of standing eggs on their end during the vernal equinox, but there had also been a news story on it one year, so I was sure it must have been true. I wasn't a scientifically minded kinda kid so I didn't understand the process behind it, but it was supposedly due to some special gravitational pull and consequently some ultimate cosmic order to the universe unique to that particular calendar day. It all sounds hoaky now that I think about it, but until recently I bought it hook, line and sinker.

What's so special about an egg anyway? Why wasn't the rumor propagated that you could stand a cucumber on it's end on the first day of Spring? Or a light bulb? Any round-ended object? Count Chocula? After all, if you could stand an egg on it's end one day out of the year, why wouldn't a Weeble stand on his head that day also? I imagine the incredible edible egg came into the picture as a symbol of fertility during the equinox the same way we worship plastic eggs and chocolate bunnies for Easter. Millions of years ago one fine Spring day some caveman steps out of his hovel and sees that since the weather has warmed up chickens lay more eggs and rabbits do it bunny style. Apparently he was so excited he decided to paint the egg and stand it up on it's posterior. If you think our fertility rituals are weird, get a load of this: When we were in Prague, my wife and I saw men coming home from the florist with willow branches. According to Czech legend, the men beat their women with the sticks to increase their fecundity. Then the women, as a thank you I guess, offer the men an egg. Wild, huh? I suppose anything's better than marshmallow Peeps though.

But anyway, back to the vernal egg balancing. It's a sham, folks. Well, not a total sham. You can balance an egg on it's end during the vernal equinox if you work at it hard enough, but -- NEWS FLASH -- you can do that any day of the year. Equinox, solstice, tax day; it doesn't matter. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason or gravitational anomaly or special order to the cosmos on March 20th or 21st that doesn't occur every other day of the year. During both equinoxes, there are equal amounts of light and darkness. That's it. That's the magic.

If you're wondering how I got wind of this debunking, or if you too are one of the mislead sad sacks rushing out once a year to balance eggs on end and you're not yet convinced that your efforts are fruitless, click here. That's a link to a site I found via Google that dishes out the scientific truth about this widespread theory and offers up evidence to the contrary. The author also gives links to other sites that go into even more detail about the equinoxes and why they're not much more special than any other day. It's on the internet, so you know it's gotta be true.

Movie reviews on Netflix get two thumbs up

Who is the patron saint of the internet? I don't know either but whoever he is, I give him a standing rogation. Through what other medium can a highschooler be a master hacker, or a serial killer masquerade as a horny cheerleader or yours truly be a published movie critic? That's right. Thanks to the wonderful people at Netflix, my reactions to cinematic blockbusters and time wasters are posted right up there with the likes of Roger Ebert and Eleanor Ringel. Netflix, for those not in the know, is a paid service whereby subscribers go online and select movies they want to watch. The movies are then mailed out with a postage-paid envelope so the DVDs can easily be returned once viewed. My wife and I have subscribed to this service for a few years now and can't say enough wonderful things about it.

Most recently I've been exploring the write-your-own-review feature. This is where I get to express my thoughts about what I've seen and it gets broadcast via the innerweb to anyone on the planet who values my cinematic opinion (and really, who wouldn't?). There are a few guidelines Netflix asks me to keep in mind, i.e. no profanity, no spoilers and no misspellings, the latter of which is probably the most abated rule. They also ask that I refrain from submitting one-word commentaries. In their estimation "Sucks" or "Excellent" does not a movie review make. Submissions should also be greater than 80 characters and less than 2000, so the review "Not since Ishtar have I seen such a pathetic excuse for a movie as this" with only 71 characters should be amended to "Not since Ishtar have I seen such a pathetic excuse for a movie as this dog squeeze" (82 characters).

So far I've reviewed twelve movies, some of which are foreign, some not, some funny, some not, some dog squeeze, some not. All movies get a star rating between one and five stars, five being the best. Whenever I click on the number of stars that corresponds with my vote, I picture Ed McMahon shouting out rankings on StarSearch. Wedding Crashers gets . . . [insert dramatic pause] . . . three stars! And Broken Flowers gets . . . [insert dramatic pause] . . . FOUR STARS!!! I have awarded five stars to a number of movies, only one of which I've reviewed, and sadly a number of movies have merited one star in my book. Admittedly, some of these one-star movies I haven't actually seen, but I'm sure if I did, I'd give them one star. This is the case for anything with either Hellraiser or VeggieTales in the title. I have absolutely no interest in watching people killed by Pinhead or accepting a talking legume as my lord and savior. Magnificent acting and budding sexuality in a film however as in the case of both Fat Girl and Me and You and Everyone We Know, if satiating enough will get five stars. My average rating is between three and four stars.

The reviews people write on this site are sometimes more interesting to see than the movies themselves. Like anything else you find on the internet, the material is only as good as the person providing it. One subscriber who identifies himself only as RupertPupkin writes the following about Veggie Tales: Bible Heroes:

Vegitables rock. i like vegitabels. I like to eat vegtbles.. vegie movies are; fun becase they have carrots. I want more vegtbles 9 s i can eat more arsparugus have to seethis computrw movie its like watching real vegitlbes movie

Doesn't that just beautifully capture the whole essence of the Apostle Paul's letters to the Corinthians?

About Breakfast Club, a movie I rated five stars, a reviewer Def American writes "Judd Nelson. He is soooo cool." Why the superfluous O's? Is Def American stretching to meet the 80 character minimum? He also claims to have "cried like a girl" when the closing credits came on. Gene Siskel must be rolling over in his grave.

Expressing thoughts on a movie comes easily when the film is one I'm not overly crazy about, but I struggle with reviewing my favorite flicks. How many different ways can one say a movie rocked? Well, there is that old extra O's on the word "so" trick, but frankly I think that's played. Self consciousness kicks in, and I worry that I overuse certain words or expressions. "Cinematic masterpiece" is fine for one review, but after that I feel like I should employ another turn of phrase. "Awesome film" would work for Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure but not for Schindler's List.

My hope is that I convey my thoughts well enough in a review so as to give the reader adequate information. This way they can decide whether they want to rent the film. Visitors to the Netflix site do have the option of clicking on an icon to acknowldge my review was helpful (hint hint), but because I'm fairly new to the whole thing not a lot of people have reviewed my reviews. Most of my blurbs have the endnote that one person found the review helpful. Some show no response at all. I'm very proud of my review for Chumscrubber however. A whopping five people found that review helpful. Five! Ok, I may have clicked on the icon a few times, but that's still two people who found it helpful.

One not counting family.

Dinner at Eno and Michael Bublé

Last night my sexy thang of a wife and I ventured into the city to enjoy a dinner at Eno before heading to the Michael Bublé concert at the Atlanta Fox Theater. Elaine had given me the tickets as a Valentine's Day gift and we had been looking forward to this ever since. As thirty-something suburbanites we save trips into Atlanta for those special occasions like going to the theater, taking in a nice dinner or seeing what's on the sale rack at Ikea. With a license plate that identifies our SUV as hailing from north of Spaghetti Junction, we stick to the main arteries in town and avoid stumbling into the parts my mother would refer to as "lock your doors." We try to put on our hipster faces and prepare for the disdainful looks we receive from the uber-urbanites wearing their designer clothes and walking their designer dogs. Ah, the pretense of it all.

The Fox is located on Peachtree Street (as opposed to West Peachtree, Peachtree Circle, Peachtree Center or Peachtree Crack Cocaine Lane) but getting off on the Peachtree exit from 85 South to get there is a mistake. Doing so at rush hour will dump you right in the middle, nay right at the tail end, of the infamous downtown race that cruises along at the breakneck speed of four blocks per hour. When you factor in the road construction delay at the 800 block and the road destruction delay at the 900 block, you regret not packing a picnic lunch and some sleeping bags for the trip. The only thing more humiliating than being passed in traffic by a blue-haired octogenarian is being passed in traffic by a blue-haired octogenarian on a HoverRound. I dropped Elaine off at the restaurant to secure our table and paid a whopping $15 to park.

Eno (pronounced "Eno") fancies itself all of a sidewalk cafe, wine bar and an intimate fine dining restaurant. Too many notes? Maybe, but this turned out to be a nice place to get our eat on. The restaurant's smack dab on the corner of 5th and Peachtree, so every seat offers a view of business people, the occasional homeless and theater-going SUV drivers from outside the perimeter. My wife alerted our waiter to the fact that we had concert tickets, so when I joined her at the table he promptly suggested we order as soon as possible to assure getting out of there before the show. Elaine ordered salmon while I got the North African inspired lamb shank with fregula. What's fregula, you ask? It's like cousous but coarser and rougher. What's couscous, you ask? I like to think of them as Arabian grits. What are grits, you ask? Be gone with you, you culinary plebeian! I also got a glass of Château Redortier Côtes du Rhône. She snuck a sip from my glass and it reminded us both of our trips to the South of France. Good good stuff, that provençal libation.

Twenty minutes after we ordered, we still had no food. Meanwhile another couple sat at the table behind us. When our waiter approached them and learned they too had concert tickets, our waiter pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration and sighed. His suggestion to them was that they only order appetizers. They one-upped him and only ordered drinks. Too bad too, because if they had been shoving food in their mouths we wouldn't have had to listen to this man's diatribes on how much he makes and how good he looks. For those interested, and by the level of his volume he must have thought that included everyone in the restaurant, his commissions this month alone would amount to a little over $4000. What's more is that by his own admission he looks good enough to have dated pretty much everybody he's ever wanted to date. When he said this to his dinner companion, Elaine and I both laughed audibly. I felt a little bad for the guy because this was obviously a first date and the romantic in me always roots for the guy on those occasions, but this guy was doing more than nervously rattling off at the mouth. He was nervously rattling off at the mouth about how wonderful he was. Gross. I hope for his sake his date was more impressed with him than we were. My back was to him, but Elaine thought he overestimated his appearance by a longshot.

Our food did finally arrive. My dish looked like something Wilma would serve Fred Flintstone. It was a huge hunk of meat with the bone sticking out served on a bed of the aforementioned pasta and diced carrots. The whole dish was swimming in some sort of reduction sauce, but I didn't pay enough attention to know what it was. I'll tell you this though: It was tasty. The meat practically fell off the bone and melted in my mouth. As big as the mutton shank was, the chef was kinda frugal with the fregula though. I downed this like a famished trogladyte and ordered a second glass of wine. Elaine and I both ate in a matter of minutes, not because we were worried about making it to the show on time but because the food was just that tasty. Too good for talking, we like to say. The bill came to $70 which for two entrees and two glasses of wine ain't too bad. We'll go back.

For the record Michael Buble puts on one hell of a great show. Not only does he sing in that crooner fashion the Rat Pack did back in their heyday but he also has that same showman quality on stage that Frank, Dean and Sammy must have had. Michael Buble was even funnier than the comedian who opened for him was. Great White Northern comedians take note: the fact that you're Canadian isn't all that funny. The main act upstaging you by improving upon your lame jokes however, now that's funny. Michael Buble awed his audience with some great musical impersonations of Johnny Cash and Michael Jackson. Elaine was hoping to hear the Spiderman theme which he didn't sing, but the stuff he did sing was incredible. For the last encore he turned off the mike, stood on the edge of the stage and just belted out the last stanza ino the audience. That guy's got some pipes on him!

Women swoon over that Michael Buble and he knows it. I think the reason he allows flash photography is because the more photos he lets people take, the more likely they'll post them up on his message boards and drive up ticket sales. He says at the beginning of the show that he knows it's the women who drag their guys out to see him. Granted, he was right in my case, but I loved the concert nonetheless and I got to take my date home and snuggle up next to her. As for the guy who had dined next to us, whether he can say the same thing I'll never know. At least if he can't get a girl to go to bed with him, he's still got his commissions and overinflated ego.

My dad turns 65

My old man celebrated his 65th birthday today, so I stopped by my folks' house on my lunch to raid the fridge express my congratulations. Chocked full of anecdotes and always willing to share them, my father has always made for a fun conversationalist. To those who've told me I have the gift of gab, I'd have to say that I inherited it from him.

Today he remembered something he had done some forty-odd years ago. When he was a young sailor on night duty somewhere over the Atlantic, he pulled a small notebook from his pocket and wrote If I live to be 65 years old, the date will be March, 1 2006. I wonder what I'll be doing on that day?. I found this thought-provoking. Afterall, who hasn't stopped and wondered what they might be doing at some point in the future? It immediately brought to my mind the day in 1980 I proudly proclaimed to my bus driver that I would live to see the turn of the century. Then seven years old and awed at having seen the calendar turn from 1979 to 1980, I too had calculated how old I would be at some seemingly far-off point in the future.

When we crystal gaze like this, we tend to fancify things. When I envisioned the year 2000 as a seven-year-old, I'm sure I thought of jet packs and androids. Now as an expectant father I foresee my daughter being a master violinist or a state senator -- maybe even a violin playing senator riding around on a jet pack with an android. While serving in the military my father had considered emigrating to Australia. Maybe sitting in the engine room that night in the mid-1960s, he pictured himself at age 65 a retired admiral running with kangaroos or playing sea shanties on his didgeridoo. Whatever the vision we conjure up, it's almost always grandiose and flattering.

As for my dad's question as to what he'd be doing on this day , he said that now after all this time he finally knew the answer. "On March 1, 2006, " he said to me, "I'll be walking my dog."