Whatever You Are, Be A Good One

This guy I work with is some kind of interactive programmer/ multimedia maestro genius. He just came up with a way to make stuff that was videotaped look like it was shot on film. I guess he's been working on it a long time but had never really perfected it until today.

He tried to explain it to me, with the filters and the layers and the interlacing progressiveness, but I didn't really understand.

So he showed me a few seconds of video on his screen and swiveled around to get my reaction. I nodded, and said it looked pretty good. I mean, it looked like a normal, boring old scene from a movie. Then he showed me the original video it came from, and the difference was so obvious I gasped. The original looked flat, and harsh, and really low-budget. And not charmingly, organically low budget or anything either. It looked like raw butt.

Let us now applaud the magical Mr. Simon Sangar. And while we're at it, how about a big hand for my mom, who devised a method for health insurance companies to compare different hospitals and see who provides better care for less money.

And my wife Penelope, who tried to reconstruct another artist's method of line construction and ended up discovering her own unique, proprietary style.

And my friend Brad, who has somehow fixed more hopelessly broken things than I can even remember, from the snapped speedometer cable that he snaked down the firewall and socketed back into the car's transmission and held in place with some quick-weld putty to the hot-water clog in my house's plumbing that he shrewdly traced to one six-dollar fitting, moments before I was to begin sawing through the pipes in the entirely wrong area.

And my friend Evan, who was kind of a burly gent when I met him but decided not to be and now runs friggin' marathons and blows his nose on his shirt.

And my friend Grace, Evan's wife, who wrote advertising campaigns trying to convince people to become nurses and quit to become a nurse.

Hurrah, all of you.

Someday, when I, uh, invent a new literary genre, I'll, um... use it to immortalize your accomplishments.