potato skins

friday i stepped off the plane into a city much colder than nashville. detroit rock city to be exact. while waiting for my baggage i was enticed the candy machine next to the carousel. here is what i saw:

yes, you CAN believe your eyes. those are two delicious bags of friday's potato skins dangling precariously from their perch. and by the way, when i said delicious, i really mean disgusting. i've been to Friday's. i've had their potato skins. i don't know where these people get their potato skins, but they are definitely NOT the tasty appetizer. heck, it doesn't even have bits of bacon in it. too bad for the suckers who dropped a few quarters in the slot looking for something to fill their stomachs and clog their arteries. actually, what would really be funny is if it was one dude who got suckered twice. hopefully whoever it was didn't suffer from depression because bad luck like this may have been the straw that broke the camels back and caused them graduate from depressed to full-fledged suicidal. actually, it reminds me of those little quarter machines at carnivals. you know, the ones that look like this:



you know how these work. the quarters perched on the edge just waiting for the tiniest of nudges to push them over and into your hands. but that never happens. a single quarter pushed into the crowd is displaced evenly and thus instead of pushing the coins forward a distance equal to that of a quarter, it barely moves at all. well, i almost fished out a dollar bill. i

anyway, i was very tempted. but i could almost hear admiral akbar in my head:



i told myself, what the heck, three bags of potato skins for the price of one. but then i realized that even if i did get all three, i wouldn't exactly be "winning" at life, would i?

oh, and speaking of aeroplanes and aeroports, when a pilot announces their "equipment is still showing that some people's cell phones are still turned on", you can rest assured that they are full of crap. is it possible to have some sort of instrument that detects cell phone radio waves? sure. is there a way you could distinguish between those signals a few feet away in the plane and those a few feet away at gate? nope. empty threats, captain. let's face it. you and i both know cell phones don't affect your equipment.

and there's one more thing i have to rant about. while waiting at my gate i was watching CNN on the big tv. they were doing a report on a guy who had gotten help from the federal loan restructuring plan and what's a great job the government was doing. they said that his current mortgage payment was 95% of his monthly income. then later in the report he said that he walked into the building having to pay $4,700 a month and walked out only having to pay $2400. wow. that's a big difference. this is such a success. but something didn't seem right. so i got out my phone calculator and did the math. if $4,700 is 95% of his monthly income, that means that he makes $5,000 a month ($4,947.37 to be exact). so he makes roughly $60,000 a year. the new payment of $2,400 a month is still almost 50% of his income. anybody out there listening to dave ramsey knows that a house payment more than 1/4 or 1/3 of your income will be a strain. so basically this guy, even with his new restructured loan still has a house that he can't and never could afford. why is this seen as a success?

anyway, that night we played a show for 89x at the Fillmore. the place is an awesome theater and it was packed. flyleaf and thirty seconds to mars were also on the bill. this show felt different because it was for a general market radio station. there were plenty of expletives being dropped from the stage that night. what impressed me about the whole thing was flyleaf. i've never seen them before. what impressed me wasn't how they played, but their conduct. nobody told us to dumb down our message, but even i could feel an unspoken pressure to not talk about jesus. right before flyleaf played "All Around Me", lacey said unapologetically, "this is a song about jesus." later on in the set they played the popular worship song "How He Loves". i was definitely surprised.

anyway, here's a shot of the crowd:

thirty seconds to mars was awesome. i think jared leto is better making music than he is at making movies. ok, well i'm watching movies at home with my wife and my chicken nuggets are done so i'd better go. what better way to end a blog dominated by an anti-potato skin diatribe than to finish it off with the pseudo-meat we can chicken nuggets??