See You Later, Astrogator
My main problem with daylight savings time is that it typically fucks up my sleep. For example, I'm pretty sure that DST was responsible for a dream I had over the weekend in which I ate lunch with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. You'd think that such a dream-experience would be awesome, but this one wasn't, for this reason: the meal we were eating consisted of seven courses, and it took a very long time to get through--as a matter of fact, I never did make it to the end of the meal in the dream. Frasier's dad from that show Frasier and His Whack-tastical Adventures (a.k.a. "Frasier") was there, and he seemed even more pissed off about the pace of the lunch than I was. At one point, President Nixon excused himself from the table, and I complained to Henry Kissinger that the meal was lasting an exceptionally long time; Kissinger told me that I shouldn't complain, because Nixon customarily ate meals consisting of 19 courses; he had cut the meal we were sharing to seven courses because he had things to do. So, I guess it could have been worse. Ultimately, the point is this: I'm pretty sure that this whole "Richard Nixon only ate 19-course meals" thing is true, a message communicated to me from beyond the mortal coil. Accordingly, I expect Nixon biographers everywhere to include this juicy factoid in future works about our thirty-seventh president.
Perhaps I'm being unfair to DST. Another possible reason for the dream was that I saw this article the other day, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Purporting to list the "top sidekicks of all time", it fails to include Henry Kissinger altogether. Where would Tricky Dick have been without the K-Man? Not fighting chocolate-addicted prostitutes on the moon, that's for sure (if you'd like to read more about that adventure, it's available at your local library in book-form, under the title Dick Nix Nixes the Trick-Turning Twix-Chuggers). Another problem I have with the article is that it lists Knight Rider's K.I.T.T. as a sidekick. Can we really consider K.I.T.T. to be a sidekick? No, we can't. Trans Ams--especially 1982 Trans Ams--are nobody's sidekick. They are, simply, a force to be reckoned with. We forget this at our peril. What a bunch of shit.
One person that the aforementioned article mentions is the venerable Chewbacca T. Collingsworth, whom you may know by his nom de adventure, Chewbacca. Check out my recent run-in with Chewie: my library keeps shelves full of books in the parking garage, and these books are free to anyone who wants them. Over the weekend, I found and took from the shelves two Star Wars books about the adventures of Han Solo and Chewbacca from 1979, entitled Han Solo's Revenge and Han Solo and the Lost Legacy. I took them because I was hoping that they were collector's items and were thus worth money. Alas, they are not. Worth money, that is. But also, they're not collector's items either. Oh well. Regardless, while researching the Han Solo books, I came across a series of books about Lando Calrissian; I realized that if you want to teach someone English, give him/her these Lando books, and they'll be fluent in no time. If you don't believe me, just check out these titles: Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu; Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon; Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka. Seriously, if you could master those words, you could master any words; I mean, it looks like the alphabet vomited or something. Evidently, the titles of the books aren't their only component steeped in grammatical nonsense--just look at part of this novel's plot description from its Wikipedia page: "For a year Lando and Vuffi Raa, his robot astrogator, had roamed space." I've been speaking English (not necessarily well) for, like, a while, and I'm having a hard time figuring out what the fuck is happening in that sentence. Astrogator? WHA? I'll leave you with this thought: you can lead an astrogator to water, but you can't make it steal the Millennium Falcon.
