The Captain's Travel Blog

Dear Readers, I say I have a “blog” when, in fact, I simply write occasional rambling comic explosions and duds, always twisted, and nothing resembling that state we call “normal.” I rarely just put my thoughts directly down on paper. I find that placing a piece of paper over my laptop screen just blocks my view of the screen when I try to type. And the one time I actually tried to scribble on the paper resulted in some pretty ugly scratches to my LCD screen, so I quickly abandoned this method. But let’s be honest, thoughts like mine are much better suited to being recorded on a tool that allows me to strike out entire lengthy passages with a single keystroke. Believe it or not, I could easily fill several volumes with the thousands of thoughts I deemed too inappropriate or bizarre or incoherent to publish. While my brain and liver argue it out violently inside me, my spleen thankfully intervenes and chucks these thoughts into my deleted bin before any damage can be done. But I have been told that I can blog on my computer, so I decided to try it out by writing a Travel Blog about my trip down to Washington, DC, with my 17 year old son to look at colleges. I am sitting in my hotel bed in Arlington, VA as I write this. Pardon me if at times I seem distracted, because my son is just over yonder at the desk on his laptop and he’s holding a dialogue with several voices coming out of his computer. There’s apparently a computer program called Ventrillo that allows a group of people to talk to each other simultaneously through their computers while on-line. I guess you need a server to run the program. I thought this was kinda cool, but whenever I ask my son about some nifty thing he does with his computer, I hear things – possibly not quite legal things – so I’ve learned just to nod and say “cool” and forget I ever heard anything. Seeing as how Blogs seem like a stream of consciousness approach to writing, it’s a bit risky for me. I fear typing myself to death in an endless thought loop. Thank god I suck at typing. But I will try to at least stick to the topic, which is my trip.

The Washington Monument

You can’t visit the tourist area and not see this thing. It’s just too damn big to miss, for one thing. And for another, it’s the largest Phallus in the world. I don’t know this to be true, but I bet it got your attention. But The Captain always manages to see things his own way. If you have never been to the Mall, its design is symbolic. It’s a giant rectangle with the Capitol building at one end and the Lincoln memorial at the other, with the White House off at angle to the North and Washington’s Unit smack dab in the center. The three branches of Government are physically separated, representing the symbolic checks and balances of our government which I would have studied in High School had I ever done that sort of thing. So even though the idea of the world’s largest penis watching over our government appeals to my cruder instincts, that’s not what I saw today as I stood on the majestic mound on which this monument was erected (sorry, that just came out). I saw a giant bird. Or put another way, I see the father of our country flipping off the three branches of government. The Commander in Chief who resides in the White House gets the middle finger salute. The lawmakers in the Capitol get flipped off their hill, while Lincoln gets the Bird who shits on his monument because George is jealous that Abe got a fancy Greek building while he got…well, you know what he got. Now don’t worry all you anal retentive readers, I realize that the there is a third branch of government that has heretofore not been mentioned. There’s a reason for that. Those nine sneaky judges in silly robes are laying low in the Supreme Court building hidden inconspicuously behind the Capitol building. But alas, George’s Phallus happens to be the tallest structure in DC and George can easily spy these lawyers from the tip of his, er, monument. For them, he reserves the classical digitus impudicus because it nicely complements the classical Greek and Roman architectural touches of that building.

The District of Columbia War Memorial

I am willing to bet that even those of you who have been to DC quite often have never seen this. It is way off the beaten path, far from the crowds who walk up and down the Mall to see Lincoln’s statue and George’s penis. The only reason I even know about it was because I was taking a leisurely stroll down by the Tidal Basin admiring the beautiful, creamy white dome of the Jefferson Memorial when I fatefully glanced to the right once Thomas Jefferson was out of sight. I noticed what looked like a miniature dome mostly hidden by overgrown evergreens. Even when most of the trees were still bare, this poor step child of monuments was out of sight due to neglect and indifference. At first I thought it might be a smaller gray replica of the Jefferson Memorial, but as I approached I was able to make out the inscription on the dingy gray granite that surely once upon a time had shimmered white and proud as a memorial to all those residents of the District of Columbia who perished in World War I fighting for their country. I immediately thought of a conversation I’d just had with my son about the District of Columbia not being a full member of our collection of states. Though residents can vote for local officials and for the President, they still cannot vote for a Senator or Congressman, a thought which was echoed by a bumper sticker which recalled the reason our nation declared its Independence from England: Taxation without Representation. Poor DC. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. I was sympathetic, but even so, I decided not to photograph it and waste 6MB of space on my digital camera. I felt a little guilty, but thankfully that sort of feeling never lasts more than a second or two with me. But the next time you are in DC, please visit this memorial and pay homage to our forgotten heroes, and bring a bucket of bleach solution with you.

College Mascots

That last blog seemed a bit too boring for me, referencing history and shit. So I am returning to my comfort zone: silly human behavior. I understand that college mascots have a long and storied history. But after visiting three colleges in two days, I think things have gone way too far. Let’s start with the University of Maryland Terrapin. Terrapin is a fancy name for a turtle. I don’t see the appeal of a slow, ugly quadruped, I really don’t. But that really isn’t relevant to the story. It seems that every school mascot gets a statue. So as part of our tour, the ridiculously perky tour guides made every member of the group rub the snout of the large bronze turtle for good luck. Like sheep, we all did. And clearly so did everybody else because his nose was more shiny than the rest of him. Well, more than most of him. Some invisible compulsion drove The Captain to walk behind the turtle and lo and behold he had a shiny tail. I opened my mouth to ask…but thankfully for the normal people on the tour (pretty much everybody else) thought better of it. One more thing to research on the Internet!

So it was on to George Washington University and the Colonials! Colonials actually makes sense for this school. Yet, they still felt the need to place a statue of an animal on a busy street corner in downtown Washington DC. You will never guess what the animal is in a million years so I’m just gonna tell you that it’s a hippo. The tour guide told some lame story about a former University President who made an impulse buy and brought home a large bronze statue of a hippopotamus, which is derived from the Latin words for Horse and River. Yes, I took three painful years of Latin in high school just so I could explain this to you! (The etymological origins of the word are actually Greek, but if I had told you this then I could never have penned that last sentence.) Well, the President’s wife unbelievably refuses to allow our River Horse into her home and before you know it, our donated statue was affixed to a concrete block in the center of the GW campus. And yes, once again, we all rubbed his stupid shiny nose, much to the amusement of the matriculated students walking past. I started to walk behind the Hippo to take a peak but decided at the last second that it would be better for all involved if I didn’t. That one, thankfully, will remain a mystery.

Today we stood within the Ivy covered walls of Georgetown University, which had its unique perspective on these matters. Yes, there was another bronze statue right in the center of the beautiful campus green; not of an animal but of the University founder, some old, constipated looking guy in academic robes sitting on a chair with books stacked underneath. The tour guide explained that the original statue never had books under the chair. Rather, students from days of yore would take their books at the end of the year and stack them under the old guy’s chair as a joke. It would rain and the books would get musty and smell, so finally the school added the permanent bronze books to put and end to these collegial shenanigans. All I could think was: what a freaking boring story. But it got worse. For some unthinkable reason, he goes on to explain how Georgetown students are called “Hoyas.” Apparently, back in the day when football was played with leather helmets and many of the students at the all male Jesuit school were studying to be priests, they somehow thought that it would be swell fun to combine a Greek word with a Roman word to describe the team’s defensive line, which was like a “Hoya Saxa” which roughly translates to “Rock Wall.” I started to doze off so before I fell over from boredom I walked behind the statue of old constipated and lo and behold, the piece of his ass sticking out the back of the chair was shinier than the rest of him! I hailed a passing student and asked him about this and he just laughed and shook his head and said, “Sorry, I graduate in three months.” End of story, so to speak.

So believe The Captain when he says: If college mascots could talk, many careers would be ruined.”

Yours at my wit’s end!

The Captain

The Captain Talks Insurance

I’ve called myself an Insurance professional. I’ve also been known to embellish. I do in fact work for an insurance company. And though my work has been called amateurish, they do pay me in legal tender to do it, so, like an athlete, I qualify as a professional. But please don’t ask me what I do for a living and I promise not to ask you to read your insurance policy.

They sent me away down South for three weeks when I first started working just so I could study insurance policies. But here I am, twelve years later, and I still can’t quite figure out what they mean. They are written in English. Or at least, I recognize most of the words as English words, with some foreign looking ones interspersed. I am going to try and define for you some of these foreign sounding words using practical, real life analogies to test my mettle as a true Insurance professional. So here it comes: The Captain’s real life parable of Insurance terminology.

The Parable of Dumbass and his “Friends”

Remember when you were in High School and the pressure to have a girlfriend was greater than the need to actually like her? You complained to all your friends about the human Peril and all the damage she was doing to your psyche until one concerned comrade agreed to take on your pain one Friday evening by taking her off your hands. This is called Indemnification. And remember how they went to the movies and she went straight into his hands, literally? This was the payment for the promise to take on your pain, or what we in the biz call Premium. And remember how they went back to her parent’s bedroom and did it and were so hammered they forgot to use birth control? Shortly thereafter a Paternity claim ensued. And even though he never intended for this to happen, your buddy was now committed to paying that claim. In fancy Insurance language, this poor bastard was Estopped. And remember how pissed you were at your other friends who so generously supplied the Wild Irish Rose used by the Estopped? How you tried to exact revenge on them only to discover that the right to Subrogate now legally belonged to – no freakin’ kidding – the Estopped? And how you planned for weeks to exact revenge on the Estopped and the Peril and ambushed them at a Lamaze class with water balloons and an M80? And how they made a claim against your parents’ Homeowners Liability policy and how the claim was denied because it was an Intentional Act? And how Mom and Dad kicked your sorry butt out on the street?

Thus sayeth The Captain: Aramaic is easier to interpret than an Insurance policy.

Yours with all new friends,

The Captain