Aaron Gold's non-car-related spot on the intrawebz
I am so excited to tell you that I am writing this blog post on my little old Acer Aspire One netbook, running MS-DOS 6.22 and Professional Write for DOS — the same setup I wrote with in the 1990s!
The reason I’m so excited to tell you this is that after spending more hours than I care to admit setting up this little computer and getting it to work just the way I want to, I can’t figure out what the hell else to do with it. Continue reading “Retroputing”
Back in the 1980s, the HBO comedy series Not Necessarily the News had a segment by Rich Hall called Sniglets, which were words that should be in the dictionary but weren’t. (I tried to submit one: Sklieu, noun, a toilet seat that doesn’t form a complete circle. My childhood comedy chops needed a great deal of sharpening).
One of my favorite Sniglets was musquirt: The liquid discharge that you get at the first squeeze of a mustard bottle. For some reason—well, not some reason, a very specific reason, that being that I am retentive—I get disproportionately annoyed when things don’t work as they should, and musquirt is one of my biggest pet peeves.
Why? Because it’s not necessary. No condiment should require this level of forethought nor be this difficult to operate. Continue reading “My Losing Battle Against Musquirt”
Note from Aaron: Yeah, yeah, this site is not supposed to be car-related… but recently my employer, MotorTrend, let me get away with this wonderful and silly article involving a 670 hp Corvette Z06 and a ridiculous scavenger hunt. I’m happy with how it came out, not least of all because this New York boy still marvels that he lives in Los Angeles and gets to do cool stuff in and around Hollywood.
Oh, teh “teh” thing will be funny to about four of my friends (Jeff, Steve, Jonsey and ‘Vark). To everyone else: Sorry.
It started as yet another skirmish in MotorTrend‘s ongoing Detroit-versus-Los Angeles interoffice rivalry. Editorial chief Erik Johnson and I were down to the usual below-the-belt tropes—Los Angeles offers nothing but traffic and plastic surgery, Detroit is made of snow and despair—when I, the idiot-genius, blurted out, “What do you have in Detroit that we don’t have in L.A.?
Note from Aaron: I wrote this seven years ago. Shortly after I more-or-less finished it, our dog Bayla, who is the star of this little tale, shuffled off this mortal canine coil, and I was too upset to publish it — and then, as with most things in my life, I forgot all about it. The rug is gone, too, but if you read to the end of this stomach-turning story, I think you’ll agree that’s probably for the best.
I was going to start out with a warning that the following topic might not be suitable for those of gentle constitutions. My plan was to warn whoever read this that they should carefully consider the first sentence—which, in the first draft, was “I’ve just finished cleaning a pile of horse poo from our living room rug”—and think very carefully about whether to proceed.
Then it occurred to me that if I just titled this essay “Horse Poo”, that might weed people out automatically. Continue reading “Horse Poo”
Last week I set out to tell you about the man on the train, but I got distracted by that whole episode with my headphones. I’d tell you how that turned out, but I’m still too annoyed to talk about it.
So. The man on the train. Continue reading “The man on the train and my earphones, Part 2”
I have a story about a man on a train that I’d like to tell you, but I’m not sure if I can do it, because I’m feeling rather cross at the moment. (I’ve also been reading Douglas Adams, so don’t be surprised if I write like an annoyed Englishman.)
Continue reading “The man on the train and my earphones, Part 1”
I recently experienced what may be the most strange-dash-detestable-dash-wonderful thing I have ever encountered: The snorkel pool.
For those who aren’t familiar—I certainly wasn’t—a snorkel pool is basically a man-made* pond stocked with colorful (and, in some cases, worryingly large) tropical fish.
* Normally I keep my writing gender-neutral and say “human-made”, but if this thing doesn’t have “guy” written all over it, I don’t know what does.
When I become President of the United States, I have decided what my first executive order will be:
Pilots flying to or from any city within the United States and its associated territories will be required by law to simplify their destination weather reports.
“Dude,” Mark said to me, “you need to start a blog.”
Continue reading “My friend Mark thinks I can make a million dollars as a blogger”
…the blog was formless and empty, and nothing funny appeared on the pages. But that’ll change as soon as I figure out how this whole cockamamie web thing works.