The other day my friend Dan Mitchell and I got to talking about those strange little catch phrases that pop into the English language from time to time, get ridiculously over used for a few years, and then completely disappear…never to be uttered again…except for by the incredibly unhip.

By way of example you remember “Where’s the Beef” from the 1980s?  What started out as a fast food commercial later ended up being used in a 1984 Presidential Debate.  How weird is that? 

More recently we’ve cycled through “Get ‘er done”, “talk to the hand”, “It’s all good”, and “Wazzzzzup” from the Budweiser beer commercials a few years ago.  When my Dad called me and said “Wazzzzzup?” I knew that culturally speaking we had officially jumped the shark.

 “Peace out” still seems to be floating around…although I always figured that Mahatma Gandhi is about the only person who could’ve used that phrase and had it ring true.  As soon as your average 3 piece suit wearing bank presidents and divorce attorneys started saying “Peace Out”, it kind of ceased to have any real meaning, you know?

And of course, there’s also “You GO girl!” …which I only find to be funny if you say it to super macho guy.

Within the last couple years I found myself hearing “It is what it is” an awful lot…what does that actually MEAN?  Isn’t that like saying “a refrigerator is a refrigerator” or “an elephant is an elephant”?  Whenever someone around me says “It is What it Is” I hear the voice of my high school algebra teacher Frank Kich saying “that’s little more than circular logic disguised as deep thought, Mr. Casey”…..

I’m no linguistic expert but lately I get this feeling that “it is what it is” is slowly being replaced on the over-use meter by the catch phrase “I’m just sayin’…”  In fact, earlier this week when I told my 6 year old daughter it was time for her to go to bed, she protested by pointing out that her 9 year old brother got to stay up later than her.   I reminded Lily that her brother was older and that Mom and Dad make the rules of the house, not her…and she responded by stomping off to her room and yelling “Well, jeez Dad, I’m just SAYIN’!”

If 6 year olds are using “I’m Just Sayin’”…..it must be long past time for that catch phrase to go too.

Of course…when you get right down to it……there’s not a whole lot any of us can do about the catch phrase phenomenon…..because, after all….”it is what it is”…

Peace out.

The last time I wore my fancy dress up shoes, the wife took one look at them and said, “You know….if you dropped those shoes out of an airplane over the Congo and they landed in front of a guy who’d been walking around on the scorched earth barefoot his whole life, even HE wouldn’t wear ‘em…..that’s how bad they are.”

As I’ve become an expert at reading BETWEEN the lines’ over the years, I took this to mean that Anne wanted me to get some new dress shoes.

So with no more fashion sense than I had at the age of 16 and a hundred dollars burning a hole in my pocket, I found myself in one of those giant, serve yourself discount shoe warehouses faced with an overwhelming number of questions:

Brown or black? Lace up or slip on? Fashionable or versatile?  Stay and buy shoes or spend the cash on beef jerky and margaritas?

Once my head stopped spinning, I actually managed to find 1 pair of brown shoes I liked, and 1 pair of black shoes I liked….for under a hundred bucks it should be noted…..and an hour later, I was back at home, getting the nod of approval on my purchases from Anne.

Done deal, right?  Wrong….

Later in the week I come home from work to find that Anne has set up a fan in front of the door to our closet and opened all the windows in our bedroom. 

I said, “Uh…honey….why did you set up a wind tunnel in our room?”

She said, “Well..I’ve been smelling this gasoline stench all morning, and I finally figured out it was coming from your new shoes.  So now I gotta air the room out.”  Perfect….

Here are my 4 quick thoughts on this little transaction:

1. I understand that once I’ve worn the shoes out into the world, it’s possible that I could step in any number of things that could cause them  to smell……but can someone explain to me how a pair of shoes that’s never been worn outside can smell like gasoline?  Buying shoes is stressful enough….do I really need to sniff the things before I take them to the register? 
2. Perhaps getting 2 pair of dress shoes for a hundred bucks wasn’t such a steal after all…..
3. Maybe there’s a marketing opportunity here and some renegade shoe company will start INTENTIONALLY adding a smell component to their footwear.  Just imagine, motor cycle boots that actually smell like a Harley…..wing tips that smell like….chicken wings…… and tennis shoes that smell like…..Roger Federer. 
4. Maybe it’s my fault for not checking the label before I bought the “gasoline shoes’.  The tag that said “made by the Exxon corporation” should’ve been my first clue.

Call me paranoid if you want….but I can’t shake the feeling that somewhere….deep in the Congo….there’s a barefoot guy….laughing hysterically at me right now…..

This past weekend I joined over 2,000 riders in the 20^th Annual Courage Classic, a 3 day bicycle tour that benefits Children’s Hospital. 

Here are 8 quick thoughts on that experience:

1.       When I put on my cycling gear Saturday morning, Anne said “you’re the only person in the world who can wear spandex bike shorts and still look like you have no butt”.   After spending 10 or so hours in the saddle I was wishing I had a little more cushion to work with back there.  My tush feels like Tiger Woods was hitting it with a 9 Iron all weekend.

2.       The nice folks over at Campus Cycles hooked me up with a top of the line Trek Madone road bike for the Courage Classic.  This thing is sleek, efficient, and incredibly light weight….in other words, everything I’m not.  Or as I heard one guy remark while climbing Battle Mountain- “Unless science can find a way to turn my belly into carbon fiber, I don’t think it’s the bike that’s really slowing me down, y’ know?”

3.       Going over Vail Pass my bike computer gadget said my RPM’s were around 65….which means I was spinning the pedals about once every second.  At the time, I was going 3 miles an hour.  If you get a chance today, go for a jog in a wind tunnel while someone sticks sharp needles into your quads…that should simulate the experience pretty closely.

4.       Noah, my trainer from Define Fitness, sent me a text at 12noon on Saturday that said “Are you keeping your RPM’s above 80 like I told you?” I texted him back “My RPM’s are only above 80 when I’m going downhill with a tail wind.”  He wrote back “Good luck. Should be a fun day for you.”  This proves my point once again that trainers have NO sense of humor whatsoever.

5.       When I finished the ride on Day 1 the kids were waiting for me at the finish line and the first thing they said was, “Where have you been Daddy?  Uncle Brian has been back for like an hour already.”  I said, “Uncle Brian is younger than me, he doesn’t have kids so he has a lot more free time to train than me, and besides I never liked him anyway….he’s kind of a show-off.”  Where have I been?…..puh-lease….

6.       On Sunday I was so hungry I defied the conventional yogurt/banana/power bar pre-ride breakfast option and went high protein with bacon and eggs instead.  On the early part of the ride I felt like I was really cruising past a lot of other riders…but then it occurred to me that people were intentionally avoiding riding directly behind me so they weren’t down-wind.  Rats. I’m not Lance Armstrong….apparently I’m Dunce Ham-wind….

7.       I ran into my sports anchor pal from 9 News Susie Wargin just before we started to climb Vail Pass…..in fact, I started the climb before her…but about 15 minutes in I heard someone say “Nice work, Casey.  Keep it up.”  And there went Susie whizzing past me….riding side saddle, juggling bowling balls and sending text messages on her Blackberry.  I should introduce her to my brother Brian…they’d probably get along famously.

8.       Ever watch a person who has no use of their legs climb 4,000 vertical feet pedaling a hand cycle?  Ever see a person do a 58 mile bike ride carrying oxygen?  Ever see former and current Children’s Hospital patients put aside their own medical issues and personal challenges and ride 150 some miles through the Mountains of Colorado?  Wow….talk about Defining Courage.  That’s it in a nut-shell.

At its very best, the human spirit may just be the single most powerful energy source on the planet.  What a humbling and gratifying experience to get close enough to see it in action.

Over the weekend I was watching some TV with the kids when I happened to notice that whatever show we were watching was on channel 173 or something absurd  like that.  And so I turned and looked at the kids and said, “You know….when I was a kid, our TV only had 3 channels.”

My son said, “Why?  Couldn’t you guys afford anymore channels?”

I said, “No…there weren’t any other channels back then.  Just CBS, NBC and ABC.”

So my daughter said, “Well..how did you watch Sponge Bob or Hannah Montana?”

I said, “There was no Sponge Bob or Hannah Montana.  We had Saturday morning cartoons and that’s about it…”

Evan was holding the TV remote in his hands at the time…you know the thing that’s about the size of a brick and has more buttons on it than a 727 these days…..and he said, “So, if there were only 3 channels, your remote control must’ve been pretty small…”

I said, “TV’s didn’t have remote controls back then, buddy…..if you wanted to change the channel you had to get up and change it…”

As if to clarify for once and for all that we were clearly having one of those “generation gap” type of discussions, my 6 year old daughter thought this was the most hilarious thing she’d ever heard in her life and immediately burst into fits of hysterical laughter.

“La la la….look at me…I’m Daddy….getting up to change the channel on the TV….”  Grrreat…..

In having this conversation with my kids, it occurred to me that there are probably quite a few other things that were a part of my life that they will have absolutely no point of reference for…..here are a few of ‘em….

-          Rotary phones with chords on them that didn’t have a voice mail option
Regular gasoline
Having a paper route
the Snoopy snow cone machine
Roller skates that came with keys and the phrase “all skaters, change directions…”
lining up quarters on the panel of a video game to ‘reserve’ your spot
Manual typewriters
riding in the back of station wagon without car seats or seat belts
8 track tapes that clicked over from one program to the next in the middle of a song
catch phrases like Mr. T’s “I pity the fool”, Gary Coleman’s “Whatchou talkin’ ‘bout Willis” and…..Arthur J Fonzarelli’s “Heeeyyyyy….”

Near as I can tell, the only way to find solace in being a victim of the generation gap is realizing that someday my kids will find themselves having to explain just  how antiquated their childhoods were to THEIR children…and THAT is a moment I’m looking forward to witnessing….

On May 7 of this year, the news broke that Dodgers slugger Manny Ramirez had tested positive for performance enhancing substances and would serve a 50 game suspension as penalty. 

What with all the big names that’ve been caught up in the steroid scandal, I can’t imagine anyone was terribly shocked when Manny joined that list back in May. 

While he hasn’t exactly offered the same public explanation or apology that A-Rod did, it isn’t hard to imagine that if he did, Manny might take the very same approach:  it was an accident, the substance in question was prescribed by a doctor, I didn’t know what I was using was illegal, the sun got in my eyes, the dog ate my homework, it wasn’t me it was some guy who looks like me, even though “Hey..when you play the game at my level, there’s a lot of pressure to perform, so I did what I felt I had to do” might be closer to the truth.

I wouldn’t pretend for a second to know what the expectations and demands are like when you’re a high profile professional athlete like Manny Ramirez…but I contend that whether you’re a welder, or a truck driver, or a banker, or a teacher….we’re ALL under a tremendous amount of pressure to perform each and every day…..and while the stage may be smaller, most of us can’t jab a needle in our butts to increase our productivity…..nor can we take solace in having a 200 million dollar cushion to fall back on either.

How about driving a 10 year old car with a bad muffler to your job and spending 12 hours working in a meat packing plant so you can feed your family and come up with 60 dollars in co-pays when your kids get sick?  Now THAT’S pressure to perform.

My 9 year old son is a huge baseball fan….and when my nephews and I coach his teams every summer we stress over and over and over again that excellence and achievement are important….and winning is great…..but the most important thing is to play the game the RIGHT way…because selling out what you believe in in order to win, is a lose-lose proposition.

On Wednesday night Evan and I were watching the Dodgers play the Reds in LA.  Manny was out of the lineup due to a sore left hand but manager Joe Torre called him in to pinch hit in the 6^th inning with the bases loaded and the score tied at 2.  And almost as if it had been scripted by Hollywood, Manny Ramirez hit the very first pitch he saw over the left field wall for a Grand Slam homer.

And as Manny the victorious was rounding the bases to the cheers of 40 thousand Dodger faithful, my son looked up at me and said, “Wow, Dad…that was awesome.  Someday I want to be just like him…..”

Driving down University Boulevard earlier this week I passed a church that had the following words on its front yard sign:  “Ability without honor….is useless….”

And it occurred to me that pretty soon….. I might need to use those exact 5 words to start a discussion with my son about baseball, life, and choosing your heroes very very carefully.

In the middle of my 8^th grade year, our religious ed instructor Sister Mary Helen decided that as part of the confirmation program, each student would have to pick one Sunday where they would stand up in front of the whole church and read the Prayers of the Faithful.  In the hand-outs she gave us, Sister was very specific about the student’s responsibilities in this matter, right down to the clothing we had to wear….for boys, that meant absolutely NO dungarees ……we were to wear pants with a crease, a white button down shirt, a suit jacket, and, of course, a tie.

Unfortunately for me, come the weekend of my turn, my Dad was out of town on business, and it hadn’t occurred to me or my Mom that neither one of us had any idea how to tie a real honest to goodness grown-up tie until about 6 o’clock Sunday morning.  Uh-oh….Sister Mary Helen wasn’t gonna like this….

Now keep in mind, this was back in the medival days….. no computers…… no internet…..no google search…..no 300,000 different websites dedicated to the art of the Windsor, the half Windsor, or the 4 in hand knot….no sir….back then, if you didn’t know how to do something, the only option was to find someone to teach you….and in this case, it had to happen pretty quick.

By 7 o’clock Sunday morning, full blown panic had set in….and so my Mom decided the only shot at redemption was to call our 75 year old neighbor, Mr. Arthur Greep, and ask if maybe out of the goodness of his heart, he could find the time somewhat immediately to tie a tie onto a wayward 14 year old so that he might avoid the wrath of Sister Mary Helen and successfully deliver the Prayers of the Faithful to the teeming masses.

I, of course, was mortified at this prospect….but fortunately, the general feelings of stupidity that had swept over me all morning made the embarrassment seem almost tolerable by comparison…. And so I skulked across the street with my tie in one hand and what was left of my pride in the other….and knocked on the door of The Greep’s house.

Now in hindsight, Mr. Greep could’ve just tied my tie around his own neck, slipped it over his head and onto mine, and sent me on my way in a matter of minutes…..or he could’ve given me one of those stern old guy lectures about how he had learned to tie a tie at the age of 5 while walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways….but instead, he put my tie around my neck, one of his ties around his own neck, and then we both stood there in front of a mirror while he very gently showed me step by step how to tie a tie.

Once I had done it successfully, Mr. Greep made me un-tie the thing, and do it over and over again, until he was absolutely sure that I could do it myself….and then he gave me a pat on the shoulder, a firm grown-up kind of handshake, and sent me on my way.

There’s a saying posted on the bulletin board at my daughter’s school, and it says the following:  tell me how to do something and I forget…..show me how to do something, and I remember….help me do it for myself, and I understand….which I think is exactly what Mr. Greep was going for that day….. 

I still don’t wear a tie very often, but whenever I stand in front of a mirror to tie one, I always think of Mr. Arthur Greep…..

And for the record, even Sister Mary Helen would have to admit that I absolutely NAILED The prayers of the faithful…….

Pink Floyd was part of the 1969 Apollo Eleven Moon landing….in a way….

They actually provided a live soundtrack to BBC coverage of the event!

Though it never got released, you can check out the ”Moonhead” video here!

About 1 o’clock Tuesday morning the wife woke me up from a sound sleep to tell me that a thunderstorm had knocked out the power to our house which meant my alarm clocks wasn’t going to work……and when you get up at 3 in the morning, this sort of thing can be disastrous. 

Here in the 21^st Century,  everything is digital and plugged in… we don’t have a stock pile of those old Ozzie and Harriet style analog alarm clocks anywhere in my house and since I didn’t trust myself to just wake up automatically at 3am…. I was sorta stuck….until I remembered that my cell phone has an alarm function on it.  A HA! So, off I trudged to the kitchen to fetch the cell phone.

Now, in my defense, it’s 1:15 in the morning, I’m half asleep and FULLY annoyed so I’m not exactly focused on the task at hand……but here’s a quick list of things I discovered my cell phone can do while trying to figure out how to set the wake up alarm:

It’s got a calendar, a calculator, several video games including Tetris and Pac Man and a function that removes red-eye from saved pictures…. who knew? 

It also has 200 speed dial settings which I don’t ever remember actually programming so in my haste to find the alarm function …I accidentally called my boss AND my dentist at 1am which is nice…

In randomly pushing buttons I discovered both a mobile IM AND a chat option and I considered using one of them to get in touch with someone at Verizon to ask WHERE THE WAKE UP ALARM SETTING IS…but even half asleep that didn’t seem like a good idea.

Turns out my cell phone shoots video…so I got some nice footage of my knees…and last but not least, with the accidental push of two measly buttons I discovered that I can change the read out on my phone so that ALL the characters and numbers appear in Mandarin Chinese.  Unfortunately, this would be helpful only if the Mandarin Chinese words for “Set Alarm Clock” are, in fact, “Set Alarm Clock”.

So 25 minutes later I FINALLY find the alarm setting…but now I’ve broken out in some sort of flop sweat and I’m too upset to go back to sleep….so I lay there for 90 minutes staring at the ceiling until I doze off at 2:57…..and it’s a good thing I only DOZED off because after all that work, you know what my alarm sounded like when it beeped:  (insert random cell noise here)

Oh yeah…that definitely would’ve woke me up…..maybe my cell phone has an alarm setting for “fly landing softly on rice paper 200 yards away”….. next time the power goes out, I’ll give that one a try.

Or maybe I’ll just save myself the trouble and use my cell phone to call in sick.  I’m pretty sure I know how to do that……even in Mandarin Chinese.

20 years ago I was living in a rental house with 4 guys I knew from school and after 6 months in the place we discovered that a family of possums had burrowed their way under our front porch and decided to make their home somewhere behind our basement walls.

As you may remember from that zoology class you had back in school, Possums are nocturnal critters.  This means that while my room mates and I were trying to sleep, the possum family was busy burrowing, building nests, hunting for food, and generally making an unholy racket deep in the recesses of our house.

So one Saturday night around 9 o’clock I walked out the front door to go to work, and there, sitting on my porch, drinking cheap beer and smoking rank cigars, were all 4 of my room mates.  To a man, they were all dressed in camouflage….a few of them were wearing ski goggles and bandanas… and one of my buddies even had eye black smeared on his cheeks so that he looked like a deranged extra from the set of Braveheart or something.

As if this weren’t disturbing enough, someone had lit our charcoal grill, and one of my room mates sat silently….. staring into the embers and slowly turning a cast iron rake over and over in the coals.

It’s like my front porch turned into a Stephen King novel while I wasn’t looking.

I said, “Uh…fellas….what’re you doing?”

In some sort of strange Deliverance inspired drawl, my buddy Dan said, “Well….it’s possum huntin’ time…”

I said, “What’s with the super heated rake there, pal?”

Dan said, “Well…you jest never know when one of them critters is gonna turn on you…”

I said, “And in the event that happens, a room temperature rake wouldn’t do the job?  It’s gotta be super heated?”

Dan didn’t say anything….he just continued staring into the embers of the grill.

My buddy John stood up with a cigar clenched in his jaws and said, “We’re not gonna kill the possums…..what we’re gonna do is, use the rake to bang on the side of the house…which is gonna scare ‘em out….and then we created this maze out of old card board boxes so that when the possums come out they’re going to run straight into this trash can over here. And then, tomorrow, we’ll release them into the wild.”

In surveying this scene, my gut feeling was that when I returned from work the next morning, my house would be burned down and at least one of my room-mates would be at the hospital having a super heated cast iron rake removed from his skull…..so early the next morning, just around sun up……imagine my surprise, when I walked into my front yard and saw a garbage can sitting upright with two pieces of ply-wood and a brick on top of it.

After removing the…ahem….”safety mechanism” from the top of the can, I looked inside to see 3 very scared, but very much alive, possums…..soon to be released back into the wild.

If you’re flipping through the Discovery Channel this week and you happen to see one of those extreme outdoor shows called “Dorks versus Possums”, you’ll know they stole the idea from me.

Every year the Washington Post asks readers to take any word from the 

Dictionary and alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, 

and then supplying a new definition:

Here are 10 of the winning words from this year:

1. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high….experts considered the 

possibility that giraffes were actually to blame for the spread of giraffiti….

but since they don’t have opposable thumbs, using a can of spray paint 

would seem nearly impossible…

2. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject 

financially impotent for an indefinite period of time….or forever…

which ever comes first….

3. Glibido: All talk and no action….this word would seem to be most applicable 

to your local singles bar….or perhaps in the District of Columbia 

when Congress is in session…..

4. Ignoranus: A person who is both stupid and a jerk….

and if there isn’t at least one ignoranus in your office then I have to figure you’re 

self employed and work from home

5. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was 

your money to begin with….of course, you can always take solace in the fact that 

at least the government didn’t spend it before they managed to give it back to you…

though they tried their best from what I can tell…..

6. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly…..researchers indicate that 

Billy Bob Thornton and Britney Spears may have both been 

reintarnated at some point……

7. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas 

from penetrating. Unlike the ozone layer, which seems to be disappearing rapidly,

 the bozone layer unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

8. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting some action…

”Well before I took a job as a test pilot, I used to wrestle alligators, but now I’ve decided

that it’s okay to live off my trust fund after all…..”  

C’mon guys….admit it….you may not have heard the word before, but you know 

EXACTLY what foreploy is……

9. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? 

And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer…..

locally speaking, this word will probably get a lot more use in 

Boulder than say, Commerce City

10. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at 

you rapidly..and if you’ve never experienced the Dopeler effect, 

you just don’t sit in enough meetings at work every day……

Feel free to try and work these brand new words into casual conversation 

at the office today. Your co-workers will either think you’re exceptionally smart 

and start asking for your advice and insights…..

or they’ll think you’re exceptionally weird and just leave you alone…..

either way sounds like a winner to me.