But I Digress ...

I have never been a soccer fan. Not until today, that is. World Cup final match, Italy vs. France. Two teams kicking the ball all over the place and having practically nothing to show for it after 90 minutes of "action" and 30 minutes of overtime: boring. Italy winning the match on penalty kicks because someone on the French side screwed up: yawn. France's Zinedane Zidane smashing his bald head into the solar plexus of Italian Marco Materazzi, intentionally and for no good reason? Now, that's a tackle that an American sports fan can get into! I'm not proud of my bloodlust, but let's be completely honest here. When it comes to the pageantry of sports, Americans are about as refined in their choices as the Romans were when feeding gladiators to the lions. Football needs no explanation: it's really all about bodies slamming against each other. Basketball these days is about "in-your-face" stuffs and over-the-back flagrant fouls. NASCAR is sitting t...

You don't have to be politically liberal. You don't have to be conservative. Why, you don't even have to be politically MODERATE to know the truth. And the truth, folks, is utterly unassailable. On Saturday evening, April 29th, Stephen Colbert proved that he is the bravest man in America. Colbert (pronounced col-BEAR) hosts an "O'Reilly Factor" send-up on Comedy Central called "The Colbert Report" (pronounced re-PORE). Full disclosure: I don't have cable TV, since I rarely watch TV, because it's just too depressing. But Colbert (who used to be a writer and performer on "The Daily Show") has been getting rave reviews for his program. Last Saturday evening, at the White House Correspondents' dinner, Colbert was the featured speaker. It appears the organizers were anticipating some light political satire a la Mark Russell or Molly Ivins. What they got far exceeded their expectations. Colbert stood at a podium less than ten feet fr...

Ladies and gentlemen, we have been wrong from the very beginning. George W. Bush is proving himself to be, not the dumbest, but the smartest President our country has ever had. But as Maxwell Smart used to say, "If only he had used his powers for niceness, instead of evil ..." While Karl Rove is a very shrewd political mastermind who has guided Dubya to victories over Ann Richards (who, at the time she lost, had the highest popularity rating of any governor in Texas history), Al Gore (by orchestrating the hostile takeover of the Florida vote count) and John Kerry (who, let's be totally honest here, imploded under pressure), Dubya turns out to be the brains of the Dubya Administration after all. (And make no mistake. Dubya IS evil. But that's only my opinion. Let's get back to the hard facts.) It was Dubya who nurtured his own image as a stumbling, bumbling country fool to disarm his enemies. (Does anyone really think that a Yale-educated man whose father was a ...

This just in from MSNBC and the Houston Chronicle : "Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who was touched by a lobbying scandal that ensnared some of his former top aides and cost the Republican his leadership post, won't seek re-election to Congress and intends to resign, Republican officials said today." (There IS a God. And right now, He is pointing at DeLay and laughing ...) In the immortal words of Bucky Katt (from Get Fuzzy ): "You're going DOWN, Poochy!" More on this breaking story as it breaks Tommy Boy, one bone at a time ...

I don't watch "Lost". I sat through a small handful of the first-season episodes with the Wife -- just enough to make me realize where all the former "Twin Peaks" writers were now employed. (Both "Twin Peaks" and "Lost" were ABC productions. Coincidence? I think not ...) But certain things became alarmingly apparent to me faster than they did to anyone on the show ... like this silly obsession with the number 108. It was very early on that I realized the six numbers printed on the side of some hatch somewhere (or some toilet seat -- I have since lost track) added up to 108, which is the frequency with which the "doomsday device" needs to be reset. And the digits in "108" add up to 9. And the "Dharma Project" has something to do with Jenna Elfman's career, but darned if I can figure out what. As any loyal fan of "Lost" knows by now, the six numbers on the fortune cookie that led Locke (the bald guy w...

The dumbing-down of America is proceeding as scheduled, Mr. Rove. Here are the "Peanuts" and "Boondocks" strips from this morning's paper for you to pass along to the President. Yes, today's "Boondocks" is safe for him to look at; they're back to picking on Brokeback Mountain and leaving Iraq alone. And we're TiVo-ing "The Simpsons" for the President to watch during his workout. Speaking of "The Simpsons", I must say, Mr. Rove, that you deserve congratulations as well as our nation's thanks. There's an AP story out of Chicago this morning that reports only one out of four Americans can name more members of the fictional Simpson family than they can name freedoms mentioned in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Yes, sir, I know the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper". I remember when you said that to the President and he accidentally used that line in one of his meetings. The ...

I blame myself. I don't post that often (there's just no time!), and when I do, it's about some baseball announcer that the overwhelming majority of you have never heard of and don't care to know. Back when I was posting entries about German cannibals eating their own penises (complete with lots of sausage photos), this place was a-buzzin'. Nowadays, I can't seem to bring enough interested traffic to my li'l corner of the Web to fulfill my promises to my BlogExplosion "Rent My Blog" tenant. If you were here last week, you'll notice that DebbieCakes and her " Smile If You're Lying " blog is back for a second run. That's because I was not happy with the number of people who visited her site LAST week. The BlogExplosion blog-rental system asks bloggers to offer some of their traffic "credits" to have their thumbnail placed on another blog for a week. In selecting blogs for me to submit rental offers to, I don't...

Here's a blog entry that is guaranteed to interest absolutely, positively no one outside the city of Houston. But it's my blog, and darn it, this story needs to be told. For the first time in its 45-year history, a Houston major-league baseball team finally has a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame to call its very own. That's right, folks: of all the Hall of Famers who have worn the uniform of the Colt .45s or the Astros, none of them ever went into the Hall wearing the Houston cap. They all went in as honored members of other teams. The Astros finally have their first home-grown Hall of Famer, and he doesn't even get to wear a cap. Gene Elston was the first voice of the Houston Colts back in 1962. His last season with the Astros, 1986, drew to a close with his call of Mike Scott's division-clinching no-hitter. In between, Elston called a lot of history. Elston probably never screamed into a microphone in his life. He was one of those from the era of Jack Brickho...

I'm afraid of "mommy blogs". Wouldn't you be? I have no children, and I'd say it's extremely unlikely that I will ever have any. In fact, in my advancing age, I have come to view children as ugly but quiet for the first month of their lives, smelly for the next couple of years, hyperactive for two years after that, and then the inquisitiveness kicks in: "Why is the sky blue?" "Why does Mommy scream every time she gets on the bathroom scale?" "What are those magazines Daddy keeps hidden in the tool shed?" "Why don't I have a trust fund like Billy does?" Follow that with the onset of puberty and attitude (not necessarily in that order), and THEN, at long last, the children become tolerable to be around. Except that, at age 16, you only have a couple of good years to spend with them, and they have absolutely no interest in spending it with YOU. And after all this, you get the privilege of sending lots of checks to th...

Any blogger who calls herself "Poppy Buxom" demands closer scrutiny. When she describes herself as "I'm a bright red flower notorious for producing stuff that is enjoyable, extremely addictive, and ultimately toxic", she can be nothing less than intriguing. And when she writes blog entries that are every bit as warped as those you'll find on this very blog page ... well, this is a woman we've got to get to know better. And so, now is our chance. My BlogExplosion renter this week is, indeed, Ms. Buxom, and her blog, "The Opiate of the Masses" , reveals her to be an anarchist-socialist-democrat-Naderite who's one-quarter Communist and 100 percent Marxist ( Groucho Marx, that is). But her political leanings are quite beside the point, because more importantly for our purposes: She's FUNNY. And with so many blogs out there that merely think they're being funny (insert snide comment here) and try so hard to prove it to everyone,...

You can't make up things like this . Seriously. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the fellow hunter in the face and chest with shotgun pellets. The hunting companion, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was in serious but stable condition at a Washington-area hospital, under a 24-hour armed police guard. Libby was the Vice President's former chief of staff, and faces criminal charges stemming from the leak investigation following the outing of former CIA operative Valerie Plame. Libby's testimony is anticipated by some to implicate Cheney in unethical and criminal activity. "I don't know what happened," Libby was quoted as telling a doctor. "Dick invited me to help him hunt for snipes in Texas. The next thing I know, I hear a gunshot, and I catch a glimpse of Dick laughing his ass off just before everything went black." (Okay, so I made up everything having to d...

Last Sunday was the Super Bowl. Did anybody with a TiVo really watch the game ... or did they fast-forward through the rather dull first half, and zip straight to the commercials? This year's "Super Bowel" commercials went for a record $2.5 million for a 30-second spot. Some were heartwarming (I'm still getting over sugar shock from that "Budweiser" spot where the baby Clydesdale tries to pull the beer wagon) and some just made absolutely no sense at all (did anybody like the "GoDaddy" ad they ran this year?) But one ad annoyed the living crap out of me. (Would you expect anything else from anything starring Kathy Griffin?) If you don't remember the commercial for "Sierra Mist", you can view it to the right. In a nutshell, Kathy is an annoying (of course) airport screener. She abuses her federal authority by making a beeping noise whenever she waves her screening wand over some poor sap's bottle of Sierra Mist, and informs him ...

I am one of those people who think South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is one of the most inspired movies ever made. My sense of humor skews toward the Airplane! and Blazing Saddles variety. I don't like tastelessness for its own sake, but if something is tasteless, tacky and funny ... then heck, I'm all over it. With that in mind, let me introduce you to Fidget, the renter of this week's real estate over in the sidebar. Fidget is a Florida female who is my kind of sick, demented individual. From a careful perusal of her blog, " Finding Yourself Despite Yourself ", I have determined the following: Fidget is not afraid to post photos of soiled toilets, especially her own. Fidget's daughters tend to run around topless. (They're extremely young daughters. You should be ashamed of yourself for letting your brain go there, perv ...) Fidget has enormous hooters. (She, alas, does not run around topless.) Fidget's husband has that perpetual look of ...

"Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." -- H.L. Mencken First, let us lay the notion of a "Liberal Media" to rest once and for all. There have been books written on how the "liberal" media is a myth; I can destroy the myth in three paragraphs. To-wit: 1. When it was revealed many years ago that George H.W. Bush (the Republican president) had an extramarital affair with a diplomat, nary a word was mentioned in the mainstream media (MSM); certainly, the story did not "have legs" and wasn't pursued. When it was revealed not-so-many years ago that Bill Clinton (the Democrat president) had an extramarital affair with an intern, the story never left the lead spot of the network news nor the front pages of America's daily newspapers. 2. When it was revealed back in 1992 that, while in college, Bill Clinton had tried smoking marijuana (but never inhaled), the revel...

I don't post very often here, as you probably know (that is, if you are a regular visitor and have cursed my name for not posting more often). I'm not slacking off. I just want to make sure that I have something clever to say before I say it. I know you don't want me writing on such topics as Kraft Macaroni & Cheese ("Why IS that stuff so darned cheap, anyway? And how can something that cheap taste so good?") or traffic ("Today, for the first time, I achieved a milestone. I actually got through that stop light on the corner before it turned red!"). Let's keep it funny, and somewhat inspired. So that's why I don't post very often. Inspiration is hard to come by. Fortunately, different things inspire different people. And although I might not be inspired on any given day, someone else may be. This week's BlogExplosion renter is " Infinitely Pie ", which is nothing if not extremely inspired. And out of the more than 13 bids ...

By sheerest coincidence, I was thinking about a scene this morning from the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut . The kids are surfing on the Internet, and stumble across a German scheisse video. (Just think "poo" and Cartman's mom, and you'll have all the information you need.) As they scream in horror and quickly click away, one of the kids exclaims: "Dude, what the f*** is wrong with German people?" And then, this afternoon, I stumbled across this story , and asked myself the same question. A convicted German cannibal returned to court on Thursday for a retrial to determine if his killing and eating of a willing victim amounted to murder. Oooookay ... The bizarre case of sexual fetishism and gory details of the crime have transfixed the public in Germany and beyond, while legal experts have argued over the definition of murder. "Sexual fetishism "? Uh oh ... He has admitted killing Berlin-based computer specialist Bernd-Juergen Brande...

I'm getting pretty good at this BlogExplosion "Rent My Blog, Dammit" thing. Basically, you sell that little 122-by-91 pixel space over in the sidebar to another blog for a week. They pay you in traffic "credits". If you're a good "landlord", you'll do a bit more work to help promote their blog (such as, say, this blog entry you're reading right now). If you're a bad landlord, of course, you completely ignore your renter and devote your energy to recycling your chewed pencil stubs. I think I'm pretty good at this because none of my renters has received a "bad deal". Each one has gotten at least 23 unique click-throughs (meaning at least 23 different people have "clicked" on their blog thumbnail to read what they had to say) during their week. And I try to charge a fair price, which to me means you pay no more than three credits per unique click-through. (Some of these idjits charge -- and GET -- 500 credi...

Uh-oh ... looks like I've been tagged. (WAIT - DON'T GO YET!) I tend to avoid "memes" like the plague. I think it's supposed to be pronouced "meem", but as far as I'm concerned, you can pronounce it with two syllables, thusly: "Me! Me!" Memes are like chain letters. Someone, most likely fighting a drunken stupor and squinting at their monitor through a cloud of marijuana haze, thinks it would be a good idea to make the lives of other bloggers a living hell. So they write a meme, then "tag" four of their soon-to-be-former friends to fill in this thing, add their names to the bottom of the list, send ten dollars each to each of the people above them in the list, and send it to four of their soon-to-be-former friends. Or something like that. At least regular chain letters have the cojones to threaten you if you break the chain: "Pass this along within the next fifteen minutes to everyone in your e-mail list, or you will lose a...

The Rose Bowl is over. (2) Texas 41 (1) USC 38 Vince Young, the Longhorns' MVP, outperformed both of Southern Cal's Heisman Trophy winners combined . After 35 long years, the University of Texas are college football's National Champions. HOOK 'EM HORNS!

(I wish to digress from the usual rollicking humor you'll find here to make a political statement -- for all the good it'll do -- so please bear with me. And, if you're like me, if it appears the blogger's political opinion differs from your own, you'll tend to surf away -- but let me ask you to bear with me until the end, because this statement is not what it first appears to be. Your comments are welcome, because if anyone has differing viewpoints on this, I'd sure like to hear them ...) Let's engage in a hypothetical experiment. Let us assume, for a moment, that first thing tomorrow morning, Osama bin Laden showed up at the entrance to Baghdad's Green Zone and said, "I don't want to be on the run any longer. You're going to get me eventually anyway, and I'm tired of living in caves. The humidity messes with my portable dialysis equipment and makes my beard all frizzy." And let's assume further that all of the Muslim militant ...

If you remember "Saturday Night Live" back in the '80s (when it was funny), you remember the segment "Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey". Mr. Handey had been doing way too much thinking on the toilet, and shared the results of his private meditations with us, with absurd results. There is really no relation between Mr. Handey's "Deep Thoughts" and those of my renter this week, Seawave (so, come to think of it, I really don't even know why I mentioned him). But if you read some of Seawave's blog, you'll find some "deep thoughts" that will really make you think. Check out just a couple of her posts, and you'll agree that Seawave is a loving, caring, deeply spiritual individual who isn't trying to push her belief system onto anybody else; she just wants everybody to be happy. And these days, we need an army of Seawaves to try to spread some non-sappy cheer and non-cynical love around. We will have to make do for now with ju...