7/03/05

      One of my favorite humor sites used to be Cap'n Wacky. Then, it went on a long hiatus. When it came back, its only update was an encyclopedia entry about giant squid. It never updated again.
      Or so I thought. Apparently, the one update they never did was to put on their up[dates page, "We don't update the updates page anymore." So I've got 18 months of stuff to cacth up on.
      The funniest so far: The Gallery of Unfortunate Star Wars Costumes.
      I'd update more myself, but now I have all this Cap'n Wacky to read.

      The phrase "a must-read" is overused on the web, but, umm, here's today's must-read: Conservatives: What's wrong with them?

Comparisons between the US and dictatorships are considered offensive, which they are. But if they fit the facts on the ground, they are also essential. Saying "it can't happen here" doesn't make it so.

The usual excuse is to say that in our case, it's different. The reason why the targeted group has to lose its rights is different. It's not the same old lunacy this time. This time it's justified.

However, the differences mean nothing. Everything is always different. Nothing ever happens the same way twice. South African apartheid is different from Saudi Arabian, which is different from ghettoizing Jews, which is different from Hutus slaughtering Tutsis. It's not the differences that tell us what we're dealing with. It's the awful similarities.

7/05

      I spent Independence Day very dependent. On the bed I could get out of, and on the toilet I couldn't stop expelling into. Yes, after 9 months, it's the triumphal return of Young's Syndrome!
      Viloent, it was. I twice puked everything in my stomach out, which wouldn't've been so bad if there was something in it besides stomach acid. Scorches the esophagus, it does. Talk like Yoda, I do.
      But luckily, I had a 3 day weekend, and today off, too. And I...uh, really didn't do anything. Although Byron went outside and caught a bird! Or he thinks that he did. He found a crow's feather, and picked it up with his thumbs, and then his mouth. then he trotted over to our gagrage to battle his new prey. In fact, I took it inside, and he's been battling it repeatedly. He's in full kitten mode: play for 20 minutes, sleep for 20, play again.
      And...umm...that's it for me today! Thanks for stopping by!

7/7

      But...I thought we were all safe from al Qaeda when we invaded Iraq! When we got Sadama bin Laden!
      A few days ago, I awoke to the clock radio babbling about how Sandra "Dipshit" O'Connor was retiring, and it went on and on for another half an hour. A week earlier, the Moron in Chief made one of his nonspeeches about Iraq or something (or nothing, as he never says anything he's not programmed to), and I awoke to endless commentary to that. So why I didn't find out until today's 3PM news that there was a terrorist attack in London? Why, wasn't there a runaway bride on the tube? Did Scott Peterson not buy Laci a ticket? Praise almighty God that the double-decker bus didn't have Terry Schiavo's blobby brain on it!
      The tsunami coverage might've lasted more than a day, if one of the 275,000 dead was a white American teenage girl in Aruba.
      O'Connor was the swing vote that forced America to crown Bush president. If she'd only voted for the other way, the world wouldn't be like it is. Seriously: the entire world would be different if she hadn't awarded Bush the presidency. Do you think we'd be dying in Iraq if Sandra Day had sided with Gore?
      I wonder if she resigned because she now realizes that the blood of the people Osama killed on 9/11 is on her hands (as Bush ignored the al Qaeda threat to America). As is the blood of everyone killed in Iraq (a war based on lies and Halliburton's bottom line). Or the blood of those in Madrid and London, the horrible extensions of the deliberate decision to ignore bin Laden and focus on the Iraqi oilfields. Did she resign because she lies awake at night, hearing the screams of the innocent? Because she smells the death and destruction she indirectly caused by pissing on the Constitution and installing Dear Leader?
      I doubt it.

      Looking for Bush's bin Laden of the moment, al-Zarqawi. Is he the mastermind behind the Iraqi insurgency? Or does he even exist?

7/10

      I wasn't expecting the return of Young's Syndrome last week, but I was expecting July Disease. Because that's what I call it, and it's July.
      All I know is that it's a yearly allergy I've had for at least a decade that makes me wish for death (as I'm a very whiny, miserable person when I'm sick). I know that it's an allergy as Jessica used to get it the same day I did, and she stopped getting it when she moved out of state. And because if it it rains, the pollen gets cleaned from the air, and I'm fine.
      And although I never know what day I'll get it, beyond "somewhere in the July 8th through 12th" timeframe, I knew which day I wasn't getting it this year: Friday. Last year, it rained 7/9-7/10, and I was only slightly icky. Friday, it wasn't just going to rain, it was going to pour. It wasn't even going to just pour--it was going to be the remnants of tropical storm Cindy. It was going to beyond downpour. It ended up breaking the record rainfall for 7/8.
      You've already guessed what happened Friday, haven't you?
      Usually, July Disease usually manifests itself as soon as I sit up in bed. "Urrgh...Not goin' to work today." And I call out sick. But it wasn't until I was halfway to work before I thought, "I really should just exit the highway and double back home." But I went to work. It's raining, it's pouring, the old man wants to vomit profusely, but IT'S RAINING, and it's July Disease and JD hates the rain. I'll feel better when I get to work! I'll put in 8 hours of good, honest labor!
      After 2 hours of good, honest, head-spinning, near-puking, Frankensteinlike-staggering labor, I went home. A 20 mile drive in a blinding sheet of rain while your brain is trying to enter cold shutdown is really good for the blood pressure. Keeps it good and high, good and high!
      I spent a lot of time (miserably) trying to figure out how the mystery of July Disease had confounded me again. It took a while, but I remembered something I'd barely noticed while driving to work: A small parcel of woods right by my condo had been inexplicably bulldozed before the rain started. If JD really is an allergy, all the trees in that half-acre spewed all their pollen out as they were being murdered. And I got a nice pair o'lungfulls before the rain.
      I went to work Saturday feeling better, as "I feel like SHIT" is better than "I feel like DEATH." I don't know why JD only hits for a day. Maybe I get sick, then get immunity for a year? At any rate, I should be sick-free for another year! Or until when they resume bulldozing the woods tomorrow...

      Via the Duck, here's the Freaky Universe of McDonald's Advertising. "You deserve a break today, so throw up and crawl away from MacDonald's!" Yes, that was a song we lil kids of yesteryear would sing. Today, I had my first actual meal beyond string cheese since I got JD, and it was GardenBurgers.

7/12

      I used to be a very angry person. I also have a barbed-wire tongue when really mad, and it got me in trouble after saying things that were hurtful. So I learned that most important lesson: Get Mad Tomorrow. You're never as mad tomorrow as you are right now. And that's the lesson I've followed for 25 years.
      And then an ugly old bitch tried to kill Byron.
      I only take him outside on Mondays now, when everyone--especially her Motherfuckerness--is at work. I let him out yesterday. He stood in one spot on the 2nd-story deck while I threw some trash in the dumpster. And then I saw a big grey sedan--oh, SHIT. The HAG is back! She's never been home before 3PM. I raced up the deck and picked him up to carry him to safety. She's tried to run him over once; it ain't happening again.
      She saw me. She could've been like she was in our encounter in the woods, and wisely kept her fat, ugly mouth shut. Instead she screamed "YOU BETTER KEEP THAT CAT AWAY FROM MY CAR!"
      Yes. Your fucking precious car you tried to use as a MURDER WEAPON. I don't have too many emotional buttons left to push, but MY KIDS are button number one.
      I believe I said "SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU WHORE!! WHY DON'T YOU MOLEST SOME CHILDREN WHILE YOU'RE KILLING ANIMALS, YOU FUCKING FREAK!!!"
      Her response was a muttered "Get a life!" and I said--no, screamed--some more bile while I placed the squirming and frightened little boy down on the deck, and he immediately ran to...the parking lot! Where DeathCar awaited. BITCH WHORE SACK OF SHIT glared at us for a second, then retreated to her lair.
      After some nice safe time exploring the garage (which he loves), he went home and I went grocery shopping. I went hiking in the woods briefly, before I decided that, while I do a much better job of being a "Threaten my cats, and I'll go PSYCHOTIC!" impression of a PSYCHOOO, I still don't know that Lucy the HAG isn't a psycho herself. One who would take a hammer to my door to try to kill my innocent little bigfoot. (Killsy would run and hide under the waterbed at the first sound; Byron wouldn't hear, and then stand defiantly growling and protecting his home--until they grabbed him and killed him)
      So I went home early. There was a carpet cleaning service in front of her place--to rinse the blood of murdered pets away, maybe? So that could've been the reason she was home early. And my screaming might've been the reason she hasn't been home since the cleaners left yesterday.
      I hate you, HAG. Keep your distance from me and my boy, and you'll be fine. But cross the line to hurting him again...
      I need to buy pepper spray. Or an Uzi.

      This looks like it's about a year old, but Bush's Spin Doctor is reasonably amusing.

      I was reading last week's Science News today, and it referred to a type of gene-cutting RNA as "a samurai-wielding ninja." While it's hard enough to think of RNA as ninjas, picturing them as ninjas waving actual samurai over their heads is harder. Possibly they're really small samurai?

7/13

      The most exciting thing that happened to me today: Leaving work, having a co-worker comment on a bag of wet trash left on our lawn, me agreeing on how people don't have respect for their environment, and me almost falling to the pavement and/or landing right on top of it when I slipped on it.
      It was a spilled bag of vomit. I really love humans!

      KIIITIES!! With ones that look like Killsy, and all seem to be polydactyl bigfoots like Byron boy. And while Byron is deaf, one is blind. Blind in the "born without eyes" kind of blind (check the 2nd-to-last pic). Hell, after all those "don't get a deaf cat" warnings I had over Killsy, my deaf cat turned out well-adjusted. Why wouldn't a blind cat, too?
      Momma Cat looks like a cross between Killsy and the Hulk. Don't mess with HER kids!

      A new daily read, James Wolcott. Yes, POLITICS again, but great stuff. Like Lileks before he became a slathering dimwit.

      I meant to steal this from Mimi a wekk ago, but I keep forgetting to: Abba to Zappa. Can you guess them all? Me, neither! In fact, I don't think anyone but a professional (and English) music critic could. (Cheat sheet here)
      "Har Mar Superstar"? Oh yeah, THAT famous guy! WTF?

7/17

      Wow, but my nose is producing a lot of snot! And you on the northern east coast know what that means--
      I went to BROADWAY!
      Do you know how to get to Broadway? "Yes, sir--PRACTICE!"
      (Sorry)
      Me and my musical-loving mother went to see Spamalot, the musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Y'know, I really like Connecticut. It gets humid as hell in the summer, and it gets buried in snow in the winter, but I can deal with that. The thing that irritates me is when people say "There's nothing to do-o-o-o here!" Yeah, well, no there is plenty to do, if you got off your fat ass and LOOKED for something. And if CT bores you that much, Boston and New York City aren't on the other side of the planet. I can get to Boston in 90 minutes, and NYC in 2.5 hours. I could get to the Apple quicker if I drove instead of using Amtrak, but only insane people like driving in New York (okay, my father liked driving in that real life version of Bump'N'Jump, but that was his only insanity).
      I got up at the ungodly hour of 8AM. I've said this before, if you sneer at that time, think of the time you've awakened for the last 8 years and subtract 3 hours from it. I drank my emergency Red Bull, but it still took me 2 hours to actually wake up.
      We arrived at grand Central Station. Grand is right! If you've never been there, it has 4 or 5 stories of nothing. Giant vaulted ceilings with magnificent arched windows. It helps to look up at them, as it's otherwise just a grubby rail station. We left, and my stomach knotted as my blood pressure rose. It's just...it's just that it's...HUGE. PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE. EV. REY. WHERE. I don't like cities. Hell, I don't like Hartford, CT's "big city" that has 100,000 people and buildings a good 20 stories high. In NYC, I'm in a city that has almost 3 times the population of my entire state. I walked past as many people on every block as live in my town. And I feel that I live in the overpopulated part of it.
      The first thing we came across was a street festival! The police had blocked off one street, and it was...a bunch of goddamn street vendors. We walked for 5 blocks, and it was $10 watches, gyros, $5 sunglasses, burgers, $10 100% cashmere scarfs, massages (YES total stanger, could you TOUCH ME A LOT), $15 handbags, gyros, $5 reggae CDs, repeat repeat repeat. The only break in the repitition was a bunch of Jewish...activist...I don't know, we didn't get that close. Pro-Israel, I assume, it's NYC. Oh, and some guys selling windchimes. They were very cool windchimes, but I live in a condo, and the last time we had a windchime inside, it lasted about 20 minutes after Byron discovered it.
      No place on Earth is pleasurable when it's hot and humid. New York is several orders of magnitude worse when it is. Thanks, it's not disgusting enough without the subways blowing steam from their subterranean Hades. Our big worry was the certainty of a thunderstorm. And their were 2--one before we arrived, and a one after we left the theater--oh, wait, I totally just blew the suspense, didn't I? Damn.

      We went to the Marriott's food court. Yes, it has the same name as the one in your local mall because it has the same crap. Starbucks! McDonalds! Who the FUCK goes to NYC to eat a damn Big Mac and drink overpriced coffee? We went to the sit-down part of the lobby (which was on the 8!!th floor, which was a lot of escalators). Mom said that heir prices were "quite reasonable for New York," which translated into a chicken sammitch and fries for SIX...TEEN...DOL...LARS. "The portions are huge!" she said, and "Damn right they better be!" I thought, and asked them to hold the fries. "Would you like a salad instead?" Sure, yeah, 16 fucking dollars, there'd better be naked dancing girls tossing it. And mine!
      "The portions are much smaller now," said Mom. The sammitch was smaller than the last chicken sandwich I had at Burger King, and was only okay. The salad was "wild greens," which I think meant "We went to Jersey and pulled some weeds." I asked for water as my drink, and the waitress babled something about "We only have the small bottles," and I looked at her blankly. "You just want..." she paused to let the utter horror sink in, "you only want--tap water?!" Umm, yes, water, and then she looked at me with utter contempt. Tap water!! NO, drive to Greenland and melt me an ARCTIC GLACIER, you WADDLING TOAD!
      We took the uncomfortably crowded but astonishingly fast elevator down 8 floors. Mom can go up an escalator, but never down. Oh, something about her first pregnancy and falling down a floor on one at the G. Fox department store. Which could've led to your humble narrator's unintended abortion.
      (At this moment, Killsy had one of her odd moments, and suddenly started meowing for a nice session with the back scratcher. Cats. Weird sometimes)
      We wandered for a while, killing time before the show. We saw only 1 crazy talk-to-himself person, 1 street band (South American, Peruvian I think, and who were quite good) and only 2 crazy "JEEEE-ZUS!" people, one of whom had an accent so thick all I could get from his rant was the Jesus part. He could've been screaming "JEEEZUUSS buys particle board from Lowes!" for all anyone could tell. Oh, yeah--it also smelled like New York. If you've been there, you know what I mean. Like dirt and diesel and sweat and big pretzels with mustard.
      We went to a tiny shop right next to Shubert Theater, where Spamalot was playing. I was shocked to see the Holy Grail of Holy Grail collectables, the Holy Grail Golden SPAM can! Those sold out the DAY I tried to buy one! And it was a steal at only...$12.95. A steal from me, anyway. T-shirts were a mere $29.95; fridge magnets only $12.95. Mom bought one for a guy at her job. After she'd asked me 4 times whether she should buy one at the souvenir stand inside the theater, and me giving the same answer: "It can't be MORE expensive. And you can get them online cheaper!"
      Unfortunately, we had an hour to kill. (Note: Bill is TOTALLY not thinking of that extra hour he coulda stood in bed) We wandered again, past a closed Howard Johnson's, complete with the old sign of the fat chef offering something (dumplings? Kidneys? His wife's remains?) to a retarded child and his drooling dog. Man, if you can't run a successful restaurant on freakin BROADWAY...But what really got me is that there was this tiniest scrap of land, any scrap of land, here on 42nd Street that was empty.
      We sat on a concrete stoop outside the theater. We'd passed a huge line of people waiting for cancellation tickets. Yes, one would pay $100 FUCKING dollars a ticket, and then abruptly decide to stay home and vacuum your 10 square foot NY apartment, yes. After a while--a long while, in the NYC heat, humidity, and stank--she rhetorically asked, "Are all those people in line for cancellations?" I looked at the enormous line they were in, and the nonexistant line of people squatting on concrete we were in. "There's no way there's THAT many people waiting for cancellations, and just US waiting to get in!" Yep. Wrong line!
      Not that it mattered. There was assigned seating, so it didn't matter when we got in. Wes tood in the line, and I guess there's just something totally nonthreatening about the short, scrawny Young clan. Assholes try to run over my cat with impunity, and people just picked us as the point to barge through the line. Somebody from the cancellation line (which never moved a single person) woefully asked everyone if we "had a spare ticket." By the second time he walked by, he might as well have been saying "I don't want to go on the cart!"
      Our seats were...well, they were like me! And also my Johnson "Great Society" Democratic Mom! VERY LEFTIST! They were as far to the left as you could go, without being outside the theater's left wall. So anytime anybody wanted to leave our aisle--which was incredibly often--we had to get up and let them shuffle off. And we missed some little bits of the musical, as some things led from the left. hey, whaddya want, the tickets are only $100! Each!
      I've never seen a Broadway musical before, so I had no idea what to expect. I hoped that it wasn't just the movie with songs. I don't own the movie, as I saw it some many times in theaters in the pre-VCR era that I'd nearly memorized it. But it was THE BEST THING EVER!!!! Big chunks of the movie were there verbatim, but the musical numbers were never where you thought they'd be. "Bring Out Your Dead" was one. Another one was the "mandate of the masses!" bit which segued into the Lady of the Lake appearing with Excalibur (and her pom-pom waving "Laker Girls"). And...oh, crap, forget it! It was HILARIOUS. I usually laugh sporadically at even the funniest of things, as I'm not an emotionally demonstrative guy, but man, it was LOL every few seconds!
      Know what else you do when you've been to NYC? You wipe the oil off your nose. Every hour. It's just there. Oh, and you create a lot of snot. And on the second day...it's usually black.
      Shit. It's 1AM. I've been up since 3 hours before the usual time I get up. When do YOU get up? Subtract 3 hours, and you'll know how I feel now. There's not any real excitement involved in the rest of this story, but...you'll get the few unjuicy details tmw.
      Shit! I saved a link, so I have to either save it elsewhere or...or go to bed. Or come up with a lame link before I sleep on the floor. Or save one and godDAMN I'm tired, proofread this thingyourslef I give up

      You can travel in time by using donuts! The discovery was made by Dr H. Simpson, PhD'oh.

7/18

      Yeah, I'm sure glad that I went to bed at 1AM last night. While the Red Bull I had that morning didn't wake me up, it was the only caffeine I've put in my body for 6 months. I laid in bed in that miserable half-world of "Too awake to sleep, too tired to get up" until 430.
      Oh, and the big ending to my New York story? That can of Python SPAM I bought for $12.95 was $10 on the Spamalot website! Which made me wonder and check Amazon. Where my big collectible can be bought for $4.99.
      If you're interested in differences between the musical and the movie, there were many. Some are too Pythonerdy to get into. But I will, as that's what we care about! There's the conflation of characters--the "Bring out your dead!" guys are Galahad and Lancelot. There's a female lead, and she's the Lady of the Lake. Patsy has more than one line of dialogue (he's a major character, in fact). The only key scenes missing are Burn The Witch, Answer Me These Questions Three, and the Castle Anthrax, although the nuns turn up as Jews. That was clearly a nod at the people familiar with the movie, and I'm not sure if we were that big a prescence. There was applause when the French Taunter and the Knights who say NI! turned up. Some actors did very close impressions of the original roles, right down to the voices. The Knight who said NI! not only read Palin's line "...Or you will never leave this forest--ALIIIIVE!" in his voice, but drew the last word out and rolled around his head in a most ridiculous parody of the original.
      I could go on for pages on how it was slightly different. My mom, who never liked Python (Dad did), laughed nonstop, and got Broadway references I didn't. She spotted Cats, Phantom, and Evita. All I got was the extremely obvious Fiddler on the Roof ref and the first one ("And the aptly-named 'Sir Not Appearing in this Show,'" who was the Man of La Mancha. It seemed like only I and about 4 other people got that one)
      Of course, the real differences were the musical numbers, lavish and athletic and quite Pythonesque. They somehow made a dance number out of "I'm not dead yet!" They made a Las Vegas spectactular out of "We're the Knights of the Round Table," which had the first of many over-the-top diva stylings of the Lady of the Lake. At one point, she had a number complaining "What Happened to my Part?"
      Well, I'm just getting into "you had to be there" stuff or "maybe you should get the soundtrack on Amazon (with much cheaper SPAM)" part. I hope that they release a version of this on DVD. Given that it was made by Eric "Greedy Bastard" Idle himself, I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
      It was $100 a ticket, but man, was it worth it.

7/19

      Hey! Howsa bout we see some cat pictures!

      Killsy likes grocery bags.

      They both like boxes, especially new ones.

      Despite the label, they aren't vegetables, or as the vet would say, "Kitty Schiavos." Byron, however, can be quite fresh.
      He discovered that the drawer with the cutlery was a tiny bit open, so he kept poking at it. Well, how much mischief could he get into in a drawer largely filled with plastic spoons from Wendy's?

      There he is, picking up (with his thumbs) and throwing down, one by one, every damn thing in the drawer. He'd give it a look while it was in his paw, decide it wasn't worthy, then fling it to the floor. I don't know what he was looking for, but he was determined to find it. Mayhap he sought the Holy Grail?

      When he was done, this is what the floor looked like. No Grail. It's under seat 101, row A, I learned that on Broadway Sunday!

      Yesterday I watched a Netflix flick, Cool World. Wow, but was that...something. It made sense every 30 seconds, but never any 30 seconds in a row. Who were these characters? Why did they do what they did? Why d--oh, wait, another screaming giant head just flew by. For no reason.
      I can't say that I wasn't entertained, or ever bored. Like in a weird dream. I spent most of the movie saying "WHAT is going ON?" until I started saying, "Who was this movie made for?" It was "like" Roger Rabbit, except it was about having sex with toons (sorry, "doodles") to make them real, and...umm, no idea, really. Given the sex, the techno soundtrack, and the general 1992 WTF?!ness of it, I finally settled on the target audience being people who did a lot of E.
      But I'll watch it again. I like Dream Movies, movies that seem like really weird dreams. And they don't get much weirder than Cool World.

7/21

      Another random link day.

      If you're as interested with animal intelligence, like I became once Killsy Einstein joined my life, here's a fascinaing article about a damn smart bird brain.

      If World War II had been fought in a chat room. LOL!1

      I'll admit that I spend a lot of time inside on the net. I also get home after sunset 10 months out of the year. I really would rather be hiking the woods. When I was a kid, exploring was my favorite thing to do. Glad I'm not a kid today! I especially love the parents who won't let their kids out of their sight, because "pedophiles are around so mch these days." Yeah, there weren't ANY at ALL until 20 years ago. No, there's the same number, they just didn't get reported like they do today. The article misses the key point: the parents are the ones watching too much TV.

      I don't have any debt problems. I've always paid off my bills. Yeah, I got a damn mortgage, but that's still better than paying rent. I knew most of these rules out of the gate, but here's an interesting distillation of several get-out-of-debt books, with plenty of good advice I've always followed.

7/25

      I used to feel guilty if I skipped updating more than one day a week. Those days are gone, hmm?
      But we all know what kind of news no news is. In fact, here's how today went. You may want to skip the rest of this paragraph, unless you're trying to go to sleep. I took Byron outside. He mainly sat under shrubs, then wanted to come home after only 45 minutes. I went to the woods for the first time in 2 months, as it was closed before today. They closed it to build a most unaesthetic dam out of loose rocks and chickenwire. No idea why. Two years ago, they mowed down a meadow, which they then left to grow into a meadow again. No idea why. A mosquito got in my ear and I squished it, and it had blood in it, ewww gross! About half an hour after remembering the time I saw a mother deer and her fawn in these woods, I saw a mother deer and her fawn. I backed away slowly while watching them, and they cautiously but calmly watched back while they had their lunch. I wondered if I should run at them screaming "OOGA BOOGA!" so that they got the idea that not all humans are safe to hang around. But mom gracefully leapt into the underbrush, and Bambi followed. Next, I got caught in construction traffic. I went to KMart and bought underwear (tightie-whities) and a frying pan. The 20-year-old pan had become a Smoker, filling the household with grey haze when it was last used. Killsy didn't like that, hiding under the chair she hides under when there's a thunderstorm. Or used to--there was a big one on Friday, and she quietly slept through it. She used to hide under the bed at the first rumble, and not come out until 20 minutes after it'd ended. But then her lil' brother came into our lives, and she saw how brave he was (not realizing that he's deaf, and only thinks of t-storms as light shows). I went grocery shopping, remembering the IAMS that was on sale, but forgetting the cat treats and the kitty milk, dammit. I couldn't get gas, as there were no pumps open. I went home and fed the kids Fancy Feast ("Tuna and Ocean Whitefish Feast in Aspic," which sounded as bad as it was, and looked and smelled even worse), which they loved.
      Hey, I told you to skip that paragraph, now didn't I?

      The results of the World Stupidity Awards. Stupidest Man went to who I voted for.

      Speaking of voting, here's the poll to select which MST3K show gets put on DVD next. Unfortunately, it doesn't list all of them, so don't be hopin' to vote for "Side Hackers." Chili peppers burn my gut!

      Pretty much all over the web today, but here's Freaky Food anyway. Amusing.

      "Irish confetti"? I get it, but I don't. Maybe that's because I'm half-Irish. (From this surpremely oddball Oddball Comic, by the awesome and unsung surrealist genius Boody Rogers)

      The Iraqis speak with one voice! No, really, they do. Suspiciously so.

7/26

      These kids today!
      We have a recent hire who's 18 years old. I know that the kids today, they love the low pants. But you could see the crack of her ass when she was standing up. And when she leaned over, which was often, she had half her ass hanging out. And that is not an exaggeration. I thought this long ago about plumbers: how do you not know half your ass is out there for the world to see? Or, since she seemed panty-free, maybe she liked the idea of everyone gazing at her Grand Canyon. One fat old guy really kept insisting that she should keep looking for that nip of Peachtree she couldn't find in the minifridge. If she bent any farther over, it would've been "FREE Colonoscopy!"
      Well, she'll learn. You can be a knockout like Jessica, a hottie like Shelley, attractive like Gina, and not do anything but be friendly, and some fat, smelly old drunk IS going to obsess on you. And the males in the store will be cried to, and we'll be called to throw the slobs out (well, except for Gina; Italian girls seem to have no problem throwing lechers out).
      Weirdest is that a week ago, Blondie was yelled at by her parents and boyfriend for coloring a few strands of her hair pink, and she immediately got them recolored blonde. But the family thinks "Step right up, have a rectal exam on me!" is okay.
      Kids today! Why can't they be like the kids of MY generation, and just keep their pants up and take some nice acid?!

      Science creates the Trojan Roach: "That's part of what the scientists have been successful at showing with InsBot. In their latest experiment, the miniature robot drew the group of insects from a darkly lighted den to a more lit location, despite the roaches' affinity for low lighting. The roaches followed InsBot for the companionship."
      Oh, yes, awesomeness, until the roachbots evolve INTELLIGENCE and lead their cockroachy armies of the night and then grow 50 feet tall and ENSLAVE US in the FOODSCRAPS ON THE FLOOR MINES! Then WHO will WE TURN TO? THEN we'll be sorry we ever dissed Godzilla and Gamera!
      GODZILLA: Ohh, hear that? NOW the puny humans want us back, to kill the alien invaders AGAIN! Did I get any appreciation for kicking Megalon in the thorax? No! Me, I'm staying right here in this enormous Lay-Z-Monster, watching "Queer Eye for the Gigantic Guy," and eating Tokyo.
      GAMERA: I'm going to the humungous bedroom to watch "Desperate Giant Houseflies," starring Mothra. Where's my bag of Cheetos "Screaming Japanese Commuters" Flavor?

      And it's time for today's It's All Over the Web Link! But I got dibs on this one--I did it over 4 years ago with Monchichi Rubbers. But, hoo boy, has the Japanese cute condoms industry exploded since then! Woo, Monkey Rubbers!

7/27

      Wow, I'm glad that I waited until now to start typing. The power went out. For a whole second! Enough to reboot the computer, reset the clock on the microwave (while I was using it to time what's cooking in the oven, so it'll likely be either over- or undercooked), and make me have to redo everything from saved programs to the channel presets on my shit VCR (if your old one gets funky, do not buy a JVC. Mnenomic: "JVC=Junk VCr"). Probably something to with that 2-hour thunderstorm we had 2 hours ago. The power outage I mean, not my VCR's crappiness.

      So anyway. At work, the registers sometimes come up short, like $20. Well, mistakes happen. Saturday they were short $80, and Monday, $140. That's a lot of money, and Bob went ballistic, assuming that someone was stealing. He went over the security camera tapes with Gina: "WAIT, what's Dave doing, taking money out of the lottery drawer?!" "Making change, Bob." "WHOA! What's Yolanda doing with that piece of paper?!" "I asked her to pick me up some food on her lunch, and that's the list of what I wanted." "Look at Chris! He just put some money is his pockets!" "Bob, he's pulling up his pants."
      If that last one is criteria for suspicion, I'm pooched. I have no hips, and pull my pants up every 20 minutes. I must've taken millions.
      G and I talked about it yesterday. How could that much money be missing from the registers? Maybe the problem lay elsewhere, hmm, maybe with the guy who handles all the money alone? Bob, who spends his workday using 10-12 Heinekens to wash down his methadone and his illegally-gotten Oxycontin? An alcoholic drug addict just might either be so fucked-up that he didn't know what he was doing, or, hmmm, need the money a lot? What's the other option, someone's just sticking his hands in the register and stuffing his pockets with twenties? Who'd be so retarded that he'd do it right in front of a security camera?
      Dumbassery, thy name be Chauncey!
      Today Bob said to me, "Ever notice how Chauncey takes the trash out a lot?" I thought for a second, then said "No, not until you mentioned it!" And he showed me the security tape. There's an employee to his right, running Lotto. There's an employee to his left, working on a computer while talking to another facing her, about to go to lunch. After he rings up a customer, Chauncey opened one register drawer, then the next, transferred some coin between them, glanced around to make sure no one was paying attention, and then, as a fourth employee walked inches behind him, blatantly scooped the twenties out of the drawer, walked away and picked up the trash can to empty. The wad of bills was easily visible in his hands as he walked outside. No wonder he empties the trash a lot. There's good money to be made!
      And when he came in today, he was taken into the office by Bob (and Dave, as a witness). I expected the session to last about 10 minutes--I mean, what was his defense going to be, "Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?" But they were up there for over 30 minutes, with Chauncey visible through the office window, gesticulating wildly and talking fast. What was his brilliantly thought-out alibi?
      "I didn't steal that money! You didn't see me stick it in my pocket!" Yes, he was taking out the trash, so maybe he threw it in the garbage. "These twenty dollar bills are so dirty!"
      Bart Simpson: "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything!" Later, Yolanda said, "Gina says he was 'street smart'!" I said, "It turned out more like he was fucking rock stupid."
      I guess there's a new variant on Occam's Razor: "Sometimes the correct answer is the most retarded."

      "It's Gary," said Dave later, "I don't know why he wants to talk to you."
      Gary? Who was terribly burned when he passed out, and his crack pipe set fire to his apartment? The guy who sells his excess Oxycontin to drunkie-junkie Bob? (How do we know this? The time Gary walked into the store and told Gina, "Tell Bob that I'll have his Oxycontin tomorrow") I took the call, having no idea why he wanted to talk to me. Between the cell phone, and his simultaneously raspy/breathy voice, it was very hard to understand him.
      "This is Bill, right, the guy with the glasses?"
      "Yes."
      "Mummble mumble breeath rasp."
      "What? I can't understand you."
      "MUMBLE RASP I got what you wanted."
      "What? I can't understand you."
      "This is Bill, right? The guy with the glasses?"
      "Yeah..."
      "Remember what we talked about?"
      I've never had a conversation longer than the weather with Gary. "No, what are you talking about?"
      "This is Bill, the guy with the glasses?"
      "Yes. I don't know what you're talking about."
      "This is Bill? With the glasses?"
      "I'm the guy with the beard and the ponytail."
      "Is the other guy with glasses there?"
      "Dave? Yes, he's the guy with glasses who's black."
      "No, the other guy with glasses!"
      (Getting it at last) "Oh, you mean BOB? BOB, the white guy with glasses?" I left off the "THE GUY YOU SELL HILLBILLY HEROIN TO?"
      "No, the guy behind the counter!"
      "Chris? He's off for the day."
      "Will he be in tomorrow?"
      LOVEly.Chris drinks on the job, too. Now he wants to complete being the next Bob, popping illegal prescription drugs and staring into space with flecks of drool pooling in the corner of his mouth.
      Why do my coworkers feel the need to drink and pop pills? I don't. It's like I'm on an acid trip every time I walk in the door.

7/28

      I took Killsy to the vet when she was 18 months old. "She just doesn't want to play as much as she used to!" "Well," said the vet, "she's a cat. She's not a kitten."
      My trenchcoat is retired for the summer, and it hangs on the vaccuum cleaner, its lower edge (tail? hem?) dragging on the floor. As I got dressed this morning, Byron crawled behind it, waited, then exploded out from under it and raced across the bed. Like a kitten practicing its stalking and pouncing. He did it 4 times, and would've done it a 5th if he hadn't seen that I was done dressing, and that means breakfast time.
      It's something that 2 month old cats do, not 2 year olds. He's always going to be a kitten.

      Chauncey was given an easy out: Sign his last paycheck over to the store to cover what he stole, or get arrested. Since I'm sure his weekly paycheck is less than the $220 he stole in 2 days, and doesn't include what he's surely stolen over the months he's been here, you'd have to be really fucking rock stupid not to take that.
      That's our Chauncey!
      Yep, he's decided that because of his "You didn't see me put it in my pocket" defense, he wants his last check. They didn't give it to him, of course. But that's technically "check garnishing," which of course is illegal. I'm sure that Bush will eventually pass a law that allows corporations to randomly claim that employees steal, fire them without evidence, and then keep their pay, but that prly won't happen until Jeb steals/rigs the next election.
      He also discovered a new tactic: He phoned the owner and started yelling about how Bob is always drunk. Well, yes, but WTF does that mean? It'd work if there was no evidence that he stole, but there it is, in glorious digital color. Maybe it's a version of the OJ defense: "If your boss is a drunk, you can be a thieving-ass punk."
      So they're pressing charges. He'll be found guilty and have to pay restitution, leaving exactly where he would've been yesterday if he'd taken the Get Out Of Jail Free card, except with a criminal record.
      Rock. Fucking. Stupid.

      Movies in 30 seconds, starring bunnies. Current feature: Rocky Horror.

      Is your boss a psychopath, an egomaniac with no feelings or empathy for anyone but himself? Interesting, if overlong.

      In a closely related story, Our President, Big-Time Class Act.

7/29

      Not so much a SHAWT as a question unanswerable:
      "How cold will this beer get if I leave it in my basement?"
      ME: "(pause) Um, that would depend on how cold your basement gets." How was I supposed to know the answer to that? There could be some very hot, beer-sitting-on monkeys down there, f'rall I know.

      It's that time of the year again, kids: The Annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiiine Writing Awards. Sometimes I think that the losers are funnier than the winners, such as:

After she realized the man she had fallen in love with was her long lost twin brother and they must break up immediately, they shared one last kiss that left a bitter yet sweet taste in her mouth--kind of like throwing up after eating a junior mint.

"Rupert Murdoch’s decision to defy the 'Coulter Laws' hate speech legislations, has bankrupted News Corporation. George Soros has bought all of News Corps assets and changed its name to Liberty International Broadcasting. LIB’s networks have flourished and circle the globe with a series of satellites beaming liberal & U.N. propaganda worldwide.
      The New York City faction of F.O.I.L. is lead by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, each uniquely endowed with special abilities devised by a bio mechanical engineer affectionately nicknamed 'Oscar'."

      Winning Lotto isn't always a good thing: a $20M winner who was extremely generous to his relatives is kidnapped and murdered by his greedy sister-in-law. The article ends with a list of other unfortunate "winners."
      The winner of the first Connecticut lottery got a trophy wife who divorced him immediately, took half his money, and then he went bankrupt. A winner in another state was hit by a drunk driver 2 weeks later, leaving her sister dead and herself paralyzed. The co-winner of our state's biggest jackpot became an asshole ("If he didn't like you, he'd make sure you knew" said a friend) and immediately dumped his wife for a trophy girlfriend. They shared his remaining money when he died from an overdose of booze and Percocet--only 18 months later. And, as lottery winners' lives change so dramatically so quickly, that they have a much higher suicide rate than the general population.
      Be careful what you wish for.

      Are you the annoying co-worker?

8/1

      I ran into one of my neighbors today while getting the mail (by "ran into," I mean "almost hit her in the face with the door"). She's the nice gardener lady with the big Harley-driving, scary-looking-but-also-nice biker husband. They have 2 cats of their own, and find Byron's perambualtions about the condo most amusing. As does everyone, except for Ugly Cat-Killer Hag (UCKH!). "Can I ask you a question?" she said, asking me a question. I already knew what the subject would be--my last screaming match with UCKH! occured right outside her open window while she was home. I told her that UCKH! had tried to kill little Byron. She was aghast. She'd already talked to UCKH! after the last incident, and had been given a different story. Not unlike her spineless drunken boyfriend when we met at my job, she left out the "tried to kill his cat" part. UCKH! insisted that "the cat was peeing all over my car," and that I'd "stuck 2 nails in her tires."
      While we're not friends, we've been good neighbors for at least a dozen years (when the weather's nice, I get awakened by his motorcycle at exactly 8:40AM. "Harley Dude's going to work," I think, then fall back asleep). She said "I know him, and he wouldn't do that!" and suspected her of lying. "What color is his cat?" UCKH! said, "Orange!" Yeah, grey tabby, orange, polka dotted, same diff.
      The "he stuck 2 nails in my tires" thing is bullshit, too. It was one nail, and all I did was move it. She put it in her tire by driving over it. If there were 2 nails, the fact that I could easily find an old nail in the parking lot tells you a lot about the quality of the handymen that the condo association hires: anytime they do any work here, there are nails scattered everywhere.
      And I felt bad about moving that nail. Not because it was a dish best served cold, but I later remembered getting an oil change, and the guy calling me over to point out a nail in my front tire. "Funny," I said, "that tire doesn't leak. Should I get it taken out?" "Nah," he said, "that'd be worse than leaving it in. Nails have to hit a modern tire just right to puncture it." I did have to get rid of the tire. Two years later, and because the tread was worn out. (What I needed was a caltrop. You've prly never seen what a metal peg from a retail pegboard looks like when it's off the board, but I drove over one of those once, and my tire was flat in minutes)
      She said how she wanted to get UCKH! out of the complex, since she's obviously a loony. At that point, UCKH! herself saw us talking, and prly started talking about us talking about her, and lying to the neighbor she was talking to. She was loading up both her car and a van with a trailer attached. Since it's the first of the month, maybe she really is moving out. I've been keeping a close eye on her vehicles since one tried to run over my little boy. The last 3 weeks, her deathmobile will sit in one spot all weekend, then disappear on Monday for days on end. The first time I noticed it, she had her carpets cleaned, something you usually don't do unless you're moving. We'll see, and we'll hope. In the meantime, I'm spreading the word about UCKH! to any neighbors I have a conversation with. The more she's hated, the quicker she'll leave.
      Dang. You'd think that caltrop.com would sell them, but no.

8/2

      Dinner:

      It's delicious with fava beans and a nice chianti! SPLEEN: It's what's for dinner!
      It's just a Gardenburger with cheese. I forgot that you add the tomato sauce after cooking. Just so you don't think I ate one of the neighbors. The UCKH! would surely taste like cigarette butts and cheap beer.

      James Randi's Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. Not as thorough as Robert Carroll's Skeptical Dictionary, but filled with dry wit.

      Has April First come early? "Cheese-maker Luc Boivin threw 800kg (1,700lb) of cheese in the Baie des Ha! Ha! in Quebec late last year, believing it would improve the taste." Baie des Ha! Ha! does seem to be a real place.

      "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
      Wow! Pretty strong endorsement for skeptiscism, coming from a guy who refuses to hear any news that doesn't come from his underlings! Underlings who've spent 4 years claming that anyone who disagrees with Dear Leader is a traitor!
      Oh, wait--it means he believes in "Intelligent Design." You know, the design so intelligent that men have nipples, women bleed out their hoo-ha's monthly, and both sexes have functionless appendixes. Sure, we were intelligently designed! But God subcontracted the work to monkeys. God made Man, but a Monkey applied the Glue.

      Long, but amusing: 91 Reasons to hate Revenge of the Sith. It will be less amusing if you haven't seen Crapisode III, and infuriating if you liked it. You can sum up its exhaustive "I hated this movie" with a single one of the titles: "The Stupid Dumb Jedi Idiots." But, you know--he's right.

8/3

      Funny! Via SteveM in the Comments, Ninja Cats.

      Horrible: Wolcott on the latest tragedy in Iraq. If you thought that the invasion was justified, there's some more blood on your ignorant, cowardly hands.

8/9

      Wow. I went a whole week without posting! And I didn't even notice! And now that I have, don't care!

      And in solidarity with my newfound utter disdain for having a website, here's Ninjas: The Real Ultimate Power! I assume that its claim of 15 millon hits is like the site, a sign of hubris from its alleged webmaster, a boner-obsessed, pirate-hating 10-year-old. It's funny in that "deliberatly retarded site" way so popular a few years back.
      Hope you liked that, see you next week or something!
      (Oh yeah--the puking's started again, although I can't really use that an excuse).

8/10

      Hey, guess what happened only 5 minutes ago! I sat down here to write, then had to go to the toilet to spit out a mouthfull of puke!
      Young's Syndrome is back, my friends! HU-fuckin-ZZAH!

      An idea for a theme park that Disney hasn't done yet: "The World of No More Tomorrows." In a decade, maybe they'll open "Depleted UraniumLand" in Iraq. Until then, Rumsfeld has ordered the Main Street USA Death March.

8/12

      I ran out of little trash bags, so the kids' stinky litter clumps went right into the little trash can. I grabbed it to empty it today, putting it in my car for the drive to the dumpster. Putting it on the car seat, rather than the floor. And it fell over, leaving stinky pee litter everywhere.
      Today's SHAWT: me.

      I normally wouldn't link to an ad, but here's one that you'll like if you're a a fan of the Civilization series. Actually, it's funny if you've ever gotten a wee bit too much into a game. In fact, it's funny even if you haven't, because on one of the addicts. Note how that the game's makers aren't afraid of alienating any part of the audience by clearly portraying him as a dimwit. That's a sign that America's becoming more civilized right there.

       An amusing collection of one-liners from Ebert's 40 years of hating bad movies. It does leave out a few of my all-time favorites, though. Such as his reviews of Dungeons & Dragons ("It looks like they threw the game away and photographed the box") and Charlie's Angels ("like the trailer for a video game movie, lacking only the video game, and the movie."

      Kirk Cameron: Right-Wing Behind.

8/15

      Sorry, but it's unmotivating to type while you're puking.
      Sunday, Monday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday...ugh. And it's the Big Puke, wherein everything comes up, and keeps on coming up. To make it even more enjoyable, it generally begins with violent dry heaves. The kind where you spit blood. And I get unending diarrhea! And my nose instantly fills with snot, so I'm puking and gasping for breath at the same time!
      Whyyyy is this back? I thought I was done with Young's Syndrome. I wondered if maybe it was enviromental--it ended after I stopped working in 2 smelly, dusty old likker stores and moved to a new building. (I went back to an old store after we'd moved out, and was startled to discover just how much it smelled like rancid vinegar from 15 years worth of broken wine bottles) I wonder if that's the case here. Today was the first day that the windows have been opened in 2 months, thanks to the end of the heat and extreme humidity. Maybe I've just been breathing the same stagnant, crap-in-the-AC's-filter air for too long.
      I hope so. Random puking sucks.

      SHA (someone else's)W(Sa)T(urday): Yolanda went to the McDonald's drive-thru, and asked for "2 cheeseburgers, a chicken sandwich--" "We can't do that!" interrupted the drive-thru girl. "We can't put chicken on a cheeseburger!" Good thing she didn't ask for a milkshake. Maybe that they can do.

      A guy calls the police to complain about a noisy crowd leaving a bar he lives by, then fires a shotgun at them. Last sentence of the article: "Cotnoir, now a Marine reservist, was a military mortician in Iraq. During his deployment last year, he was responsible for preparing soldiers for open-casket funerals." Jeez, you'd almost think that the guy was under stress of some sort.
      Be prepared to read variants on that story for the REST OF OUR LIVES. Mission fucking Accomplished!

      End of an era: The Wall Street Journal on Disney closing their last 2-D animation studio (in Australia--the one where long-time friend of this page Mimi currently works). "Walt was known to spend years trying to find the best way to deploy the talents of certain of his artists, and perhaps he would have found new ways to use the unique qualities of the hand-made moving image--its inherent warmth; the happy accidents of the human touch; the immediate intuitive link between brain, hand and drawing instrument; the special flexibility and style that is so different from the dimensionality, essential coolness and realistic imagery of CGI."

      Speaking of CGI, go rent Kung Fu Hustle. It's really funny (especially the first half), and the battles just get more and more insane as the movie progresses. It's violent, but in the Roadrunner way (sometimes literally, as when 2 characters begin racing with spinning legs, and one ends up plastered across a billboard). A true live-action cartoon; great fun. And if you don't smile at the ending, I'll bop you with this here lollipop.

8/17

      YES, I SUCK! I run a terrible site that never updates. Hey--remember when I was funny? Well, stop remembering. It's OVER. I SUCK NOW.

      So let's just hear some happy music.
      

" For those who missed out on the live record, or are new to the wonders of Konono No.1, here's the story: twenty five years ago, Konono formed in Kinshasa, an area between Congo and Angola, performing their own version of traditional Bazombo trance music, incorporating the then-unwanted distortions of their haphazard homemade sound system. They left the bush and settled in the capital where they were forced to compete with the harsh sounds of the city: cars, trains, buses, shouting, etc. So with very little to work with they fashioned pick-ups, microphones, loudspeakers and amplifiers from stuff they could find on the street -- old car batteries, pots and pans, magnets, even branches. Their main instrument is the likembe, a kind of thumb piano. Konono features three of them (bass, medium and treble) and this sound, the electrified and amplified likembe, is what defines Kinono No 1."

8/18

      Thanks for the words of support, but I meant "I suck" in the sense of "I never update." And "Never have anything to say." The sense of "This page sucks."
      Otherwise, I'm the COOLEST SLOB EVER.

      Crap stolen from other pages, the ones that actually update:

      "He's taking the hobbits to Isengard!" Funny because it's stupid.

       The old Negro space program. Funny because it's smart.

      Weird Science on the Religious Right. Funny because they're stupid! Hey, wait, it's not funny at all...

8/22

      It must be the weekend! I'm puking!
      I cleaned out the AC filter earlier this week. It wasn't that bad, although I admit I wouldn't know how bad "bad" would even look. I ran it while the windows were open, in case there was still some gunk inside, and I got a wee bit sick.
      Then Saturday came, and with it, the high heat and humidity. If it's a choice between my health and my cats' comfort, you know which I'll choose. So on went the AC again. And I spent most of Sunday puking or diarrheaing or blowing my nose (that's one of Young's Syndrome's greatest joys--my nostrils immediately fill with snot so that I have to breathe through my mouth. While puking. So it's "HOO-WAAALP! gasp gasp gasp HOO-WAAALP! gasp gasp gasp," repeat as necessary.
      The humidity passed this morning, so I opened the windows again, and outside of briefly living that internet catchphrase, "I just threw up a little in my mouth," I'm seemingly okay. So far.

      What did I do yesterday to get my mind off my woes (and my stomach)? I watched a DVD. I saw it recently in a Google ad--"a lost cult classic!" And it's one of Jessica's favorite movies. I realized that she was, hmm, maybe 9 years old when it came out, and I don't know how long it's been since she's seen it. But it's about a fad I liked that attacked a fad that I hated. I Netflixed it. How bad could it be?
      I had the bad timing to get a job at Kay Bee Toys in 1983, just as a thing called "Cabbage Patch Dolls" became America's latest stupid obsession. My district supervisor was offered sex for one. A Kay Bee manager became famous on TV for threatening unruly mothers wanting dolls with a baseball bat (famous, and unemployed). Christ, how I hated those fat ugly dolls. "In other countries, they have food riots," I would sneer. "In America, we riot over dolls."
      So I really got the joke when the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards came out. More so, when I found out that one of the artists making them was Art Spiegleman, and the cards were paying the bills while he wrote Maus. I still have a pile of them.
      So how bad could "The Garbage Pail Kids" movie be? It made the puking look good! The budget looked to be about enough to buy 10 packs of the gum. Anthony Newley somehow managed to not overly embarass himself, but the child lead was, as they say in Boston, wicked retahded. Everyone else was an asshole, including the Kids. The plot was about...a fashion show?! Yes, the snotty, puking, farting, knife-wielding GPKs make lovely clothes. Lovely 80s oh-my-GAWD-that's-hideous clothes. There's also a plot "about" finding the other GPKs on Earth (I guess they were aliens?), and we're cheerfully told later on that they were all crushed to death in garbage trucks by a malevolent government conspiracy. Not that that wasn't an appropriate fate, but in a kid's movie, it's an odd touch. Sort of like Bambi's mother getting shot, then Bambi and Thumper getting hit by an SUV (except that you don't care). Oh, and they SING! Yes, an uplifting-not song about "We can do anything by working together," as if somebody decided that, for 3 minutes, the characters should be role models. And they work together, stealing sewing machines to form their own sweat shop so that a greedy bitch and her abusive thug boyfriend can make money off of them. They also have a great closing number, with lyrics like "You got a pail/You got a lid/You can be a Garbage Pail Kid!" How about "You've got horrifying hydrocephaly/You're a sociopath/Do the math!"
      The movie is not recommended. It's so bad, it's beyond bad. I had to turn it off repeatedly. I think that only my weakened state helped me get all the way through it. You know you're in trouble when you start thinking "This is too bad to watch" 10 minutes in.

      Remember that "Help Rhino pick the next MST3K DVD" poll? The results are here.

      What I saw recently wasn't Ugly Cat-Killing Hag (UHCK!) moving out, but her wormy boyfriend moving in. Apparently because he has no job, as his car never leaves the parking lot (or he might be working 3rd shift; it's not like I'm creeping around the complex at 3AM in my ninja suit). At the same time he moved in, she...somethinged. She leaves for half of Monday, then her car disappears until somewhere between late Friday to Sunday, then she leaves again. Jessica opined "Maybe she's a stripper!" "You haven't seen her!" I replied. "If she took her clothes off, all she could strip would be paint!"
      With him here all the time, Byron doesn't get to go out anymore. But we made an agreeable compromise: he gets to go to the garage. And he likes the 4 interconnected garages more than the outside, and I do too. Even without the Deadly Douchebags living here, we had too many close calls with dogs, cars and the woods. In the garage, there's nowhere he can go where he can hurt himself. He can make himself a nuisance with other people's stored possessions, but that's much more controllable.
      Weird: while we down there today, there was work being done on the complex. A power tool started up, a low droning noise, and Byron perked up the instant it started, and looked in the sound's direction. Then he walked towards it, and when it stopped, he stopped. He sat down and looked puzzled. Almost like he heard it...

      I always toss any new boxes or bags on the floor. The cats love 'em. For some reason, they're particularly fond of Poland Spring trays as beds. Last night, Byron decided to make a tent from the newest one.

      And the word is called "copycat" for a reason.

8/23

      Bob's Guide to Cat Pwning. Lots of helpful advice! Such as "Don't iron your cat when wet." Hell, I knew that!

      There's no real need to click this--the pertinent part is at the bottom and it looks like she doesn't know how a message board works--but the hag who tried to kill Byron is a self-proclaimed devout Christian. As Jesus said, "Kill the beasts and children." "Blessed are the meek, but stop those fucks before they inherit the Earth." "Turn the other cheek, put the car into drive, and run over a pet." It's all in the Bible! The St John of Gacy's Version!
      As if it were possible for her to sink ANY lower in my estimation. She believes that Jesus drove the money-lenders from the temple because they were giving money to the Humane Society. Yeah, hag, I'll bet Jesus is giving you a big thumbs-up in Heavenland, since he just loves animal killers. He was all about forgiveness--except for people who let cats sit under your car for 2 minutes!

8/24

      I just had me some Eggs Benesplut. That's store-brand "Better'n'Eggs" with bland American cheese and supersharp Vermont cheddar. I just flew in from the omelette, and boy, are my stomach tired!
      Well...that made no sense.
      Who named it American cheese? Did they say "Wow, this is totally bland and tastes like the plastic it's wrapped in! That pretty much sums up America!"
      Is there American cheese in other countries? Or is it called there Canadian flavorless or Australian wussy?

      And...well, that's it. That's all I got today. But--you read it! So that means that I WIN!!!

8/25

      My stomach was a little unhappy tonight, so for the second day, I had breakfast for supper. Eggo blueberry waffles! Haven't had those in years. Also haven't bought maple syrup in years, and Aunt Jemima had only enough in her for about 1 waffle. So we went a little light on the syrup and added some honey, and had four.
      What do they make Eggos out of these days, plywood? I've got this undigestable mass sitting in my gut. Eggo, leggo my stomach!

      These kids today and the way they dress!! (Yes, I'm old) Why, I saw a whippersnapper at work today who had his pants real low! How low? His belt was buckled BENEATH his crotch. Hey, wait a second...
      I just tried it,and surprisingly, you can still walk. Not very fast, obviously. And I wouldn't want to run, what with the "belt buckle rubbing against my scrotum" thing.
      I was a teenager in the late 70s, and YES, I had my yearbook picture taken while wearing an earth-tone leisure suit. As stupid as that looks now, at least it looked okay in '77.
      And that co-worker teen was wearing her "take a gander at the top 3 inches of my ass crack" pants again. In 10 years, I guess teens will just walk around naked.

      The url they gave me looks extremely me-centric, so I won't list it. It's for a new Homescan panel. These people are the Nielsen ratings people. For a dozen years, I've used a handheld UPC scanner for my purchases. I get points to redeem for gifts by doing this (that's where my Bose computer speakers came from, among many other "things I want but don't want to pay for" did). The new one is apparently a different version of the Nielsen devices:

Wear the Media Receiver every day, from the time you wake up until you go to bed. The device automatically receives signals from the TV programs you watch and the radio stations you listen to.
Right before going to bed, place your Media Receiver in your Recharger.
That's it!
Late at night, your household’s Data Collector will silently transmit your household’s information to our main computer by making a short, toll-free call.

In addition to “speaking out” about what we all listen to and watch every day, all panelists will receive special weekly and monthly cash rewards, plus entries into weekly and weekend sweepstakes just for MVP members!

      Update: I filled out the form, indicating that I "may or may not" participate" (without more info on the money, it's not). I was placed "under consideration," and "For agreeing to participate in this panel, your household will receive $2 in cash via mail."
      Two whole dollars?! And they put it in bold type, like it was a million?

8/29

      Why am I allergic to Sundays?
      Four--four!!--full-body pukes, and I won't even go into the rest of my toiletry experiences. It was my personal worst since Young's Syndrome started.
      I've been blaming the air conditioner, but it was off all week. And that night, the humidity hit 97% (and it wasn't raining), so I turned the AC on for the sake of the kids, and feared the worst for myself today. I even ordered an air purifier.
      And today I was fine. *shrug* Back to hoping it just magically stops again, I guess.
      (Actually, if the HEP air purifier doesn't work, I'm going to the doctor, and start that fruitless diagnostic game all over again)

      Search hit I gotted: "fat games for kids that arent viloent or sex sells". They didn't use quotes like I just did, so they got about as many hits as there are atoms in the Universe. This page was #3!! But why are you worried about sex sells viloence? Are the kids violently sexy? Is that a problem you have with "fat games"? Are there fat games? There's sumo, but those are really giant muscles, not fat.
      You could have a fat game, I guess...Throw Harry Knowles and Rush Limbaugh into a pit with knives, wave a bucket of BBQ back ribs and a bottle of Oxycontin as the reward, and then let them fight to the death. Who would win? Rush would be impervious to Harry's Inane FanBoy Prattle attack (being deaf and all), but it would take a lotta stabbing before he hit any of Harry's vital organs. And I think that Rush might get bit by Harry's sidekick, Salacious Crumb. But, y'know--Oxycontin. Rush'd be more motivated. Maybe we should up the ante: back ribs AND a Jessica Alba nude scene!
      It'd be close. Very close.

      Is this a joke? A self-proclaimed doctor of psychology, Dr BLT, has a site of conservatively-themed, just-dang-awful songs for you to listen to right here.
      There's too many to get through in one night, but I listened to 3 at random and they're...awesome! Maybe you noticed that, if you clicked on his main page, and heard his mighty intro song. Which I thought was about Jesus at first, but wasn't He the Corpus Christi, not from Corpus Christi?
      If you want a pair of examples of his Gontermannish genius, here's "The Folks at Sadly No!", with its amazing harmonies, and his brilliant cover of the Bowie/Eno classic, Heroes.
      It's Wesley Willis on Prozac! And I've only heard 3 songs! The other one was about how he hates Cindy Sheehan.
      Like Daveykins, I think he mistakes "popularity" with "people hitting my page to laugh at me." Assuming that he's not some metajoke himself.

8/31

      Yesterday I drove past the gas station I always use, and thought, "Good thing that I gassed up yesterday, when it was a dime a gallon cheaper!" Today, that station had lines into traffic at its pumps, and all the vehicles were SUVs. I wondered if people were panicking over the "hurricane" we were going to get today, which was supposed to be just a bunch of rain. Then I passed the next gas station, which was nearly empty. It's prices had gone up 40 cents in one day. I've never seen that happen.
      And that's what people talked about at work--the weather that never got as bad as they claimed (it was windy with drizzle), and the price of gas. When I drove home, less than 9 hours later, that station's gas had jumped another 15 cents, to over $3 a gallon. I've never seen gas go up twice in one day, never, and I worked in gas stations back in the later "energy crisis" days.
      When I started reading my daily websites, I came acoss the news that gas will soon hit $4 a gallon. It was only after I got farther into my reads that I discovered that New Orleans has been hit by the country's worst disaster in 100 years, the worst since the 1906 San Fransisco earthquake. Remember all that fearmongering about the "imminent second attack," possibly with a "dirty bomb," that Bush used to keep as much of America as scared and gullible as possible for years? This is worse. This is what an American Hiroshima could look like, an entire city evacuated and unlivable for weeks or months or longer. And it could've been prevented or at least greatly ameliorized, if Bush hadn't diverted the money to Iraq. And hadn't sent the National Guard and Reserves there to be targets, rather than do the damn job they were designed to do here at home.
      Bush, at the time, was busy playing his new hit song, "My Pet Goat Likes to Drown."

"Oh, My Pet Goat likes to drown,
When all the whities are safely out of town.
And as for the people who are brown,
Like My Pet Goat, they'll be seen afloatin' upside down."

9/1

      Katrina is the straw that broke Scalzi's back:

Suffice to say that my longtime hedge of suggesting that George W. Bush is only the most incompetent president of the last 80 years is no longer in effect. As it stands, only James Buchanan now guards the way between George Bush and the black abyss. Bush's appalling statement wasn't just another example of the man's personal obliviousness, it's an encapsulation of his administration's entire ethic: It doesn't know anything it doesn't want to know anything about.

      Remember those brain-slugs from The Wrath of Khan? They exist! Fortunately, so far only in the tiny brains of grasshoppers, and members of the Bush Administration.

9/3

      All over the web, as it should be Scalzi on being poor. It'll break your heart and boil your blood at the same time.
      Did you know that the relief trucks were held up--so Bush could stage another "Mission Accomplished" photo op? What more does this sociopathic rat bastard have to DO, before we impeach him? Kill a baby on national TV? Oh, wait, he killed babies WHEN HE HELD THE RELIEF CONVOYS UP.
      My Mom, on Friday:

I need to vent! What took the president so long and the government to respond to such devastation? I know you don't have the answer and neither to I but I have to say that I am ashamed to be an American. Why couldn't they have air dropped water and food to these poor people who had nothing to begin with? What is going to happen to all of these people down the line that have been bussed to Texas? Where the hell have the American people been when they didn't recognize the poverty level in this country? Why are we spending all of our money in space programs and wars? Then I heard some stupid commentator say today that because the president toured the area (4 days too late) that his approval rating would probably go up. Are they kidding? Who in their right mind would think that a good job is being done? This is going to have such far reaching problems with the way we treat those poverty ridden people and the fact that they are almost all black. Maybe it is finely a wake-up call to everyone albeit many years too late. I know you think of me as a bleeding heart liberal but I am glad that I am and I hope that I will never change and, I think, that you are probably proud of me for that belief. I am absolutely sickened by the whole thing. Yesterday my alarm went off and I inwardly groaned because I had to get up. Then I thought to myself, I am in a comfortable bed, I am going to get up and take a hot shower, then eat whatever I want for breakfast and then stand in front of my closet to decide what I should wear and go off to work and get paid for it. I thought shame on me for even thinking for a second "woe is me".

      We all love catnip news!

9/5

      Okay, this "spend every weekend puking and shitting" thing has officially become Old. As much as I don't want to admit it, the only thing I do on the weekend that's different from every other day is sleep in. Because I love to sleep. I do not love to puke and shit. So I guess we're going to have to experiment with getting up every day at the same time. God damn it.
      In 6 weeks, I've lost 15 pounds. That'd be good, if I didn't start out weighing only 135.

      New CAT TOWN EPISODE.

      A communal LiveJournal called "Customers Suck." Most are the usual short retail horror stories, but you do get the occasional epic, such as The Saga of Fingers.

9/6

      Thousands dead in New Orleans? TEN thousand? Or could it be--oh God...PLEASE no.
      And all those stories about those DEPRAVED CHILD-RAPING MURDERING NIGG--err, "poor people," oh sorry, that's starting to look like a rascist lie. Funny how that lie began circulating around the same time people started blaming Bush for doing nothing about the disaster...

      Anger Break! Devo's song "Pink Pussycat" comes alive!

9/7

      SHAWT: A customer whom I HATE ANYWAY declared today that the reason that all those people died in New Orleans was because--wait for it--"They were too rich. We have it so easy in this country! So they just sat back and thought someone would come rescue them, instead of leaving! It's their fault; no one can blame Bush!"
      Now, I'm a total "Holiday in Cambodia" kind of guy. Some people in this country do need to realize that they are not the center of the fucking Universe. They need to have the perspective to put a minor, temporary annoyance aside as the trivia that it is. Such as last week, when this same hag began SCAHREAMING at me because she claimed that she was next in line when she wasn't. Time spent arguing with the bitch over this imagined crisis: Over a minute. Time she waited once she STFUed and I took care of the guy who was next: 10 fucking seconds.
      These pro-Bush Nazis have entered a total denial of reality. If Bush ate a live, screaming baby on national TV, they'd say "It was the baby's fault! It shouldn't have let itself get so close to his mouth!" Whatever they hear on right-wing hate radio dittoes itself into their empty skulls, and they parrot it out like the dutifully retarded robots that they are.
      Kicker: The bitch was a toothless old black woman, who spends $20 a day of her Social Security check on lottery tickets. A walking hate radio cliche. Do you think that Rush or Bush would care if she became a floating corpse, or sneer at her bloated body and say "She chose to die"?
      Why would she support the worst president ever, one who wouldn't stop to help her if she was on fire, unless it was to piss on her to relieve his full bladder? I wouldn't be surprised if it's because Bush is "a good Christian." As we all know, Jesus hated empathy in any form. And when he said that stuff about "helping the least of us," he meant "help feed them to the alligators."
      It's too bad that one of the prizes in the lottery isn't being dropped in the middle of the Atlantic with a life vest and being told, "Hey, show some personal responsibility! Swim to shore! You can rent a passing boat--you're rich! Rich in ignorance, arrogance and sociopathic cruelty!"
      By the way, the "SH" in "SHAWT" today stood for "Shit Head."

9/10

      Our old friend Mimi takes art commissions, and I got mine yesterday. Can you guess the subject matter before you click to see it?
      I have the original, and soon it'll be professionally framed and matted. Someday she'll be famous, and I'll point to it on the wall and say, "Why, yes, that is an original Mebberson. No, sorry, it's not for sale. That's my family."

      25 Mind-Numbingly Stupid Quotes About Hurricane Katrina And Its Aftermath.

9/12

      I'm on vacation, so this is my week to test the latest hypothesis (in a long line of hypotheses) as to what causes Young's Syndrome. I plan to get up every day at the same time I do when I have to work, and thus see if it's caused by oversleeping. Which would be great if it was, as I hate throwing up. And shitty if it was, as I love oversleeping. A win/lose situation.
      Yesterday, the alarm sounded, I turned it off, suddenly it was 2 hours later. The experiment wasn't going as planned. But, a couple of hours after getting up, puke puke puke. So I guess that proved the hypothesis. Proved it so well, that I was back in bed after only 8 hours awake. So...
      I get sick if I sleep 11 hours, but not if I sleep 9. Shouldn't I get sick every day? At least 90% as sick as when I sleep in?
      Why does it seem to happen when I get 11 hours by sleeping in, but not when I get 11 hours by going to bed early?
      Why is the only way to stop puking going back to bed? Shouldn't that just make it worse?
      Why are you still reading this? You some kind of puke-freak?
      I have, for as long as I can remember, coughed my lungs up for several minutes after getting out of bed. If you heard me, you'd think I smoked 2 packs of Camels a day. And the puking always starts as coughing, then becomes dry heaves, then 2 hours later when I put something in my stomach, bleaarrrggh. I asked my PCP about the coughing before this current misery first started, and he said it could be that I'm allergic to dust mites in my bed. But those things need the indoor humidity to be above 50% to live, and my hydrometer says it's at 30.
      The next test of the hypothesis came today. I crawled back into bed and slept for 14 hours. Did I puke? Yes. But yesterday, I was incapacitated by it; today it was just "Here's comes that half-pint of Poland Spring!" And seriously--water makes me vomit? That's an allergy that I'll bet would kill me pretty quickly! But having slept longer, shouldn't I have been more sick today if it's caused by the bedroom?
      That's the whole problem. If it's an allergy or sleeping, I should be sick all the time. And I'm not. I guess I'll just keep experimenting.
      Stay posted. You twisted puke-freaks!
      Oh, and what's up with this? I go to bed Thursday night feeling peachy, peachariffic in fact, and wake up with an aching, apparently twisted ankle. I limp all day. I go to bed with a twisted ankle, and wake up with a bad ankle and a painful, busted-up thumb. I spend the day discovering that, why yes, one does use one's thumb periodically. I go to bed with a bad ankle, a worse thumb, and wake up with a less-bad ankle, a better thumb, and a stubbed big toe that's purple with a mauve nail. Fun Fact: When you walk, you use your toes! Even the busted one! And, like that time I fell during the night and fractured a rib, I have no memory of how these injuries happen.
      I think it's the bed. Trying to kill me. I should sleep in the tub from now on.

      I made a vet's appointment for the White One. Scheduled shots and a checkup mainly, but she somehow has got all fat again, despite having a personal trainer to chase her around the house. And while she's always been lazy, she never has slept as much as she recently has. I switched her back to the diet Iams food, and after a week, she slimmed down. Another week, and she's become more frisky. At one point, she took the fight to her brother, and scared him off so that she could chase his laser dot for a while. That has never happened. (Don't worry, she hasn't become a bully--this morning, she let him eat all of her beloved Fancy Feast just so that she could lick him)
      As for him and his safe trips to the garage...He climbed up all the boxes in my storage area to walk atop the area next to mine. You'd think that if there's 4 condos with storage areas, there'd be 4 storage areas, not 6, right? The one next to mine is one of the strangley unused ones. It's 6 feet high of wood and chicken wire and padlocked shut. Twice Byron has made it to the top, and then cried because he couldn't get down without my help. Today, as he made his way up there again, I thought, "You know, some day he's going to jump into the--" KA-THUMP! went 4 giant feet. Went in with no way out. He looked perplexed.
      I immediately rescued him, armed only with a pair of wire cutters and a vague memory of "Hogan's Heroes."

9/14

      I haven't accomplished much on this vacation. Sunday basically didn't even happen; Monday I broke Byron out of stir with a wire cutter; yesterday I did the laundry; today I bought groceries. WHEEEE! VACATION IS FUN!!
      Yesterday I also dropped off my Mimi art at the framing place. I thought that that would take about 10 minutes, and it did. Plus about another 30, because Framing Guy was chatty. But he clearly knew what he was doing. And I chose the place very carefully: It's a quarter mile from my house. Also, it's received repeated Best Of awards over the years. I was hoping to get it by the end of the week, as the days they're closed are the same as my days off. But nope, gotta wait until October and pick it up before work. And one of the pieces went from being Jessica's birthday present to also being her Christmas gift. Framing and matting is expensive.
      Today I also did something I didn't want to do--take the Divine Miss K to the vet. But it was time for a booster shot, and I was concerned about her weight and her eyes. What I should've been concerned about was the lout who was leaving as I waited for Killsy to be taken in. Hey, loud yuppie 'swipe, what's the point of putting your 40-pound, ill-mannered and drooling puppy (yes, 40-pound puppy) on a leash if you then throw the leash on the ground? So the smelly thing can just randomly wander the vet's office, while the techs try to corral it and keep it from eating my cat? Well, it didn't try to eat her, actually, what with Killsy being in a carrier. "That's a cat, you know what cats do," he said to Smelly Droolsalot, then to me, "The neighbor's cat slit her nose right open!" Christ, maybe Fido shouldn't be sticking her nose into my cat's carrier then? If you've ever felt the gentle touch of my sweetheart's tiny, mother-of-pearl, delicately-manicured Fists of RAZORY DISSECTION, you wouldn't be stuffing your snoot right in the carrier. And this has happened before? Not to dis you dog people, but a cat would learn from an incident like that. So would a smaller dog. As I've said before, bigger the dog, smaller the brain. It's a scientific fact. The bigger they get, the more of their brains get taken over by their more important brainal regions, the droola obligatta and the cerebral stinkox.
      She growled, which she doesn't do unless pressed. She remained growly.
      But all went well. She was shaking, but I think that was from the dog. She didn't flinch when she got the shot. Her weight is as high as it's ever been (just shy of 15 pounds), but she's reacting well to the diet food. And I finally asked about her eyes--as I guessed, No, cats eyes do not normally change shade 5 times in 6 years. But it's not a health concern.
      When she got home, I gave her some kitty treats. She settled down, but looked more thoughtful than usual. I wondered, Is she thinking "It's good to be home," or is she thinking "He knows that I HATE going there! Why does this happen every year?!" I petted her, and she hissed at me and retreated for a nap. So I'd say it was the latter.

      Brief movie reviews:
      Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: They called the book unfilmable. And they were right! Not in the sense that "it's full of drugged -out craziness," as they had the visual effects budget for that, and it was Terry Gilliam directing. But there's a big difference between reading about it and seeing it. I liked it for about 30 minutes, which marked the point where I realized that I'd just seen the same 10 minutes 3 times. It would've been unwatchable, had it not starred Johnny Depp.
      Lord of the Rings, Extended Edition: I've been wanting this for a long time, and finally found a really good sale on the complete set. Online. There are problems with online shopping; in this case, not realizing that they added 15 minutes to the movies and split them onto 2 discs! Yeah, get wrapped up in the movie, then without warning, get up and change the discs like they were for a 1985 laserdisc player. I will admit that about half the stuff was "Why wasn't this in the movie? It explains what's happening." which is a pretty high ratio of good to garbage. The other half was just the way they made the movie--filmed every bit of live action footage they thought that they might use, then discarded what the didn't feel necessary.
      To further inflate the price, they had 2 discs per movie of stuff I'll never watch. Not the bargain I thought that it was. I'm more likely to watch the original versions, just to keep from changing discs.

      Life on Earth is so diverse, and lives in the most extreme environments. So I'm sure, given the incalcuable numbers of star systems in the Universe, that there must be life on other planets. I really don't believe in life from other planets that devise UFOs that defy every known principle of science, rushing hordes of Greys here so that they can finger our asses. Shit, we've scanned genomes ourselves without anally probing millions of gullible dimwits, why can't their "superior technology" do it?
      Another thing that makes me not believe in Little Grey Men is that there is nothing on Earth that looks as much like a human being as a Grey does. We're 96.5% genetically identical with chimps--shouldn't they look more like a human than something like a Grey with 0% come-from-the-same-planetness? That you don't think that elephants aren't the fucking weirdest things you've ever seen is because you had those Babar books as a kid. Shouldn't aliens seem--well, more alien than these crazy things we share our grocery stores with?

9/15

      Okay, stupid stomach, OKAY. You win!
      One thought I had before starting vacation was, "And I won't have to listen the 'Big Hits' station they play at work for 9 days! Just the classical station!" And WNPR decided that my weekday should be filled with the "John Roberts Confirmation Morning Drive Zoo" show. Yeah. Who wouldn't want that as their background music?
      "Mr Roberts, what is your opinion on stabbing puppies and then feeding them to crocodiles?"
      "That may come up in a future case before the court, and so neener-neener."
      "Mr Roberts, are you not now, at this moment, stabbing a puppy while holding a crocodile on a leash?!"
      "It's possibly an aliigator, and there might one day be a case involving gator vs croc discrimination, so, la la LA, can't HEAR yooou!"
      Crimeny. Why is the only job interview where you don't have to answer any questions the one where you get the job FOR LIFE? And shouldn't this whole simply ended with "He's only been a judge for 2 years, now he wants to be Supreme Justice Dark Lord?" Do you slop out the OR as the hospital janitor for a month, then get appointed to Head of Surgery, based on your refusal to answer questions based on human anatomy? Didn't we learn the "unqualified dickhead put in a position of greatest responsibility leads to utter incompetence and failure" lesson with FEMA's fired horse-fucker boss Brownie?
      I guess not. No one seems to be complaining about the fact he's been replaced as the Rebuilder of NOLA by Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove, who also has no experience with disaster control. All Turdie's ever done has been being Dumbya's spin doctor!
      Oh, wait--I guess that DOES count as experience with disaster control. Carry on, fat pasty-white traitor guy!

      And that proves my point! Which was--wait, that wasn't the reason I brought that up. The radio alarm came on, and I awoke to Roberts not answering anything, so I turned it off, fully expecting to hop out of bed. Which I did. Two hours later. And, YES, stomach, that makes you King of the World, and Master of All You Throw Up.
      Yep. It makes no sense, but sleeping late (but not going to bed early and sleeping longer) makes me puke. Okay, stomach. Point made. Will never get a nice day in bed again. Thank you, fucking stomach. Thanks loads. Loads of vomit.

      Well, the DSL seems to be semi-down (it claims I'm connected at 100MPS, but after 15 minutes, it hasn't loaded a single page). So I guess that I'll go do something offline, and leave you with something goofy: Hey, he's not non-blonde AT ALL!!

      Yes, the page disappeared yesterday. The DSL went down while I was FTPing this up, and it kept clocking out.
      Note to SBC Yahoo: I know you want to keep up the fiction that you haven't outsourced all your tech support to India, but when the guy has a thick Indian accent, and I can hear a woman in the background giving him hints in Hindi, you really can't fool me into thinking that he's American by having him claim his name is "Brian."

9/19

      My new favorite spam: "Only Humans with an IQ of at least 120 are allowed to: click here," on a zip file called "miracles_of_the_quran." That's 120 measured how? In Kelvin?

      I'm a lucid dreamer. I always know that I'm dreaming, and I can influence the path of a dream, turn it off by waking up, or even pause it, go to the bathroom, and resume it when I return to bed. The only time I have a problem with it is on nights like yesterday. Dinner didn't agree with me, so I couldn't fall asleep until around 5AM. Since I'm now banned from sleeping late (unless I want dinner to really argue with me, and storm out of my stomach in protest), I just laid there hoping to fall asleep. Every time I go too long like that, when I do fall asleep, I have the worst kind of dream: I dream that I can't fall asleep. For some reason that always fools me into thinking that it's not a dream. Even if, like last night, the reason I can't fall asleep is because these dog-sized white flying dragon things keep attacking me outside my childhood house, and I have to keep flying in the air to fight them with my amazing superpower, which was to hit them with a ray from my hands that turned them into wads of paper that burst into flame. It wasn't until I began debating which members of the Fantastic Four I should call in to aid me ("The Human Torch would be good, but what could the Thing do?") that my brain said "Dude, you're dreaming this shit."

      Speaking about shit that I waished I'd only dreamed rather than saw, Battlestar Galactica, original series: worn-out melodramatic sci-fi cliches from 1978. Battlestar Galactica, new series: worn out sci-fi cliches--FROM THE TWENTY-FIRST CENNNNTURYYYY! And they both have a bowl-cut brat named Boxie. The new version did improve on the old by cutting right to the chase--all the characters are as unlikable as Boxie! Good move!
      Oh, how clever, the Cylons put a chip in Baltar's brain so that it controls his mind! No, wait--they put in a chip that only makes a tiny and invisible blond devil pop up on his shoulder and jab him with her pitchfork, saying "Hey, sexy Baltar! Wanna kill all humans?" You'd think that a race of robots wouldn't be so much like retardbots. Why, I bet that their IQ is only 119!

9/21

      Y'know, when the MOST interesting "observation" one can make is "Hey, 2 days ago I was at the grocery store, and they had a huge CHRISTMAS DISPLAY up! Can't they wait until it's not SUMMER before they do that?! Ha ha, am I right?!" one needs to question why one has a webpage in the first place.

      Or when one steals a link from the place one always steals one's links yet again. Where's the place in America that's the safest from natural disasters? Hint: Don't expect to bunk with me!

      I'd so rather read a page than write one.
      Here's a page by someone who hasn't burnt out yet.

      And don't freak out or whine at me over this. You know that I get sick of this page regularly. This is one of my regular sicknesses, and, yes, that usually means I post 10 times the next week. But there are so many better pages out there...go read them. This one is very tired of being a page. 8&1/2 years is a long time for being anything, let alone a web page. For a web page, it's ancient. It's tired. It's very tired of being a page.
      If you whine, I will kill you. Telepathically. Somehow or other. Or, alternatively, with monkeys.

Autumn

      There's only one good thing about autumn. When it gets cool at night, Killsy sleeps in the bed with me and Byron. I'm not sure why she does this; in the summer, it's cooler in the bedroom than the rest of the house. And she's never there for more than 30 minutes twice a night anyway. But she doesn't sleep next to me, like the Toemaster, but on me, and I have lovely cat-infused dreams.
      After she left the bed about 20 minutes before the alarm, it was feedin' time for the critters. "Where's your sister? Kill Kill? Where are you?" I found an empty beer box pushed to the wall, with a little white face and nothing else visible. "Disembodied Head! Would you like some food?" Despite having no body from the chin down, Disembodied Head ate plenty, thank you.

      [insert eating segue]
      I've said "If I ever ate McDonalds again, I'd puke" for a long time. Far longer than my current gastric problems, in fact. I never liked their food, even 30 years ago when I was a teenaged stoner (and that says a lot about their food-like objects). It began to really bother me when I worked in the mall. I noticed that their food smelled good when I was eating it, but it stank terribly when someone else did.
      For some twisted reason, it lately occured to me that "their food that would make me puke" meant burgers. I suppose that a fish sandwich and a small fry would prly go down pretty easy. And with no desire to cook tonight, that's what I bought.
      After eating: Hey, that was tasty! The fries were way too salty, and the bun started to taste gross by the end, but I might buy this again. Assuming the drive-thru line wasn't as slow as it was tonight.
      Eating +1 hour: Okay...I've felt better. Was it the bun or the salt? I'm guessing bun, and also guessing that it'll be longer than I thought before I eat there again.
      E+90 minutes: *barf* Just a little, nothing violent.
      E+2 hours: There's puking that sounds like spitting, like I'd done 30 minutes before. Then there's "hoo-WAALP!" when a bunch'o luncho comes up. Then there's "BLAAAARRRRGGHH!" which sounds like an entire hippo is coming out of your gut, and it's still alive. Seriously--I've done a lot of unplanned hands-on research into vomiting over the last couple of years, and this was the loudest I've ever been. I'm sure the downstairs neighbors heard me. Usually, I puke the top of my stomach's contents, the liquids. Nope, everything came up, whether creamy or chunky style. It was mainly this white goo. Prly the bun. Next time I eat at McDonalds: an hour before I want to leave work early.
      E+ hour 45 minutes: "Hey! Remember me? I'm your lower intestine! Why don't we spend 15 minutes getting reacquainted here on the toilet!"
      E+ the rest of my life: I'm Not Lovin' It.
      And just yesterday I said how much I hated posting! All I need to inspire me are my bodily dysfunctions.

9/23

      I managed to drive all the way to my mailbox before pulling over 'n' pukin' this morning. Kinda sad when you can't hold down a glass of water for 3 minutes.
      And what was I greeted with when I got to work? A co-worker with a big, reeking bag of McDonalds' fries and fish sandwiches. I decided to do the store's banking right then, rather than revisit the Golden Retches.
      At the bank, the line moved quickly (for a Friday, anyway). But the line was long enough that one old guy got really pissed when the next teller took a drive-thru cusomer instead of him--just like he'd get pissed if she took a customer in the bank if he'd been in the drive-thru. So he made his Angry Grunt Noise and stomped out of the place as loudly as he could make his flip-flops stomp. I heard him slam the door at the exact second the teller took the next person. So, if he'd waited about 10 more seconds, he would've been waited on. The next 3 people, including me, were at the windows a few seconds later.
      The thing is...he was the FIRST PERSON IN LINE. I can see leaving if the line is long and you're at the back, but what's the point when you're next? Haven't you invested enough time that it'd just be wasting a greater amount of time to storm out, and then have to come back again?
      And if he'd turned and looked just seconds after his dramatic flipflopping in anger when the line moved, he'd have seen that brief little smirk that we service people have that means "All you just proved is that you're a tard."

      7 years later, and I still get (usually from people much younger than me, which is pretty much anyone but Wilfred Brimley now, and I think he's dead, so I'm just gaining on him, and this sentence is way too run-on, so let's ignore the parantheses and just start again)
      7 years later, and I still get co-workers who wonder why I'm happy working the Boozateria, when I once had what every Cool Kid thought would be the dream job: Working in a music store. Typical job interview with a Cool Kid I'd have back then:
      COOL KID: I want to work here because it'd be so cool to get paid to listen to music all day!
      ME: Yeah, it'd sure beat working your ass off! Hey--if you find a job like that, could you let me know where I could get one like it, too?
      A lot of interviews ended right there. But seriously--is it a good idea to say in your interview "I plan to do no work"?
      One of my nephews made the same statement to me, forgetting that I actually once worked in a music store. I told him about the Boxes. These were the boxes that LPs used to come in, a foot across on every side. We'd take the job applications we'd get, throw them in the box, and when it was filled after about 2-3 weeks, we'd tape them shut. We'd write the month we'd received them, and 6 months later, we'd throw them in the garbage. Without ever looking at them. Because that's how many apps we'd get, and how few people were even worth the 10 seconds it'd take to scan their job history.
      Which is one reason why I'm glad I sell liquor. Otherwise, I'd still be like this music store dude:

Dear "Metal" Kids,

What is with you guys and your stupid shitty death metal? You do realize that a bunch of D&D geeks wailing on their poor helpless instruments and shrieking like Cookie Monster with a painful hernia does not make good music, right?

9/24

      Maher on the rumors that Bush is hitting the bottle again. I hope Bush is! So that I can throw him out of my store.

      I love Abbie the Cat, a "blog written by a cat" that pulls it off. It makes me laugh.
      I didn't laugh today. I cried. You may, too.

9/28

      The more immoral a society is, the more religious it thinks it is. In fact, the religiousness may cause the immorality. And no, the country in question isn't a repressive Islamic one.

      It's that "mannequin falls bonelessly through some spheres" thing again, without the original's "uncanny valley" weirdness. But it's more fun this time.

9/30

      As sophomoric as it sounds, but funny: Farting Preacher.

      The world's worst lottery winner. The front yard full of garbage is a nice touch.