But I Digress ...

First Farley, and Now This ...

2007-10-04T19:09:00.000-05:00

Lisa Moore died today.

If you read the comic strip Funky Winkerbean, you already know what I'm talking about. Lisa, one of the main characters in the strip since its inception, had been dying from breast cancer for several months. We knew it was coming; we just didn't know when, or how the strip was going to handle it. But today, Lisa was led into the great beyond by a tuxedo-clad Death. (It was handled much more tastefully than I've just made it sound, trust me.)

Tom Batiuk, the cartoonist behind Funky, has caught a lot of flak for bringing such a depressing subject as terminal cancer onto the "funny pages". I can't identify with such criticism. I mean, it's not as though Mary Worth or Rex Morgan or Dick Tracy or (for heaven's sake) Prince Valiant ever had any pretenses toward humor. (Or, for that matter, B.C. But I digress ...)

Funky is just the latest funny comic strip to adopt the concept of the Very Special Episode. Heck, the recent story arc has included the discovery of an adopted teen's birth mother (the late Ms. Moore), the loss of virginity, and the theft of an old gym locker door (don't ask). I'll take those over evangelical cavemen any day.

Still, I'm personally glad that Mr. Batiuk did what he did. For you see, Lisa Moore is not a fictional character who lives on the comics page. Sadly, there are thousands of Lisa Moores who live in real houses, with real husbands and real children, who really die from real breast cancer. In our celebrity- and politics-obsessed culture, it's a good thing to remind everyone that there are people whom we know who have their own personal tragedies to deal with every day.

It has been no secret that Lisa was going to die today; for months there have been news stories reporting that this morning, she would "breathe" her last. Which brings me to something that I don't applaud ...

I find it ironic that the person who introduced the concept of killing off a major character in a "funny" strip, Lynn Johnston, would apparently seize the opportunity to upstage the heck out of Lisa's final day. Ms. Johnston, you'll remember, executed the Patterson family dog Farley a few years ago in the For Better or For Worse strip. Yesterday, as Lisa was shown about to take Death's hand for her final journey, Ms. Johnston's Grandpa Jim suffered another stroke. We didn't know it was a stroke yesterday, of course. We just knew that Jim's wife was screaming his name in shock. Were we going to lose two beloved comic strip characters on the same day?

And why would Ms. Johnston pick NOW to insert this significant plot point?

Cartoonists strike me as a rather clubby lot (don't we all look forward to the annual Swapping Of The Strips on April 1st?), and you couldn't argue that Ms. Johnston didn't know that today was going to be Lisa Moore's swan song, given that Mr. Batiuk famously creates his strips ONE FULL YEAR ahead of schedule. So what's the deal, Lynn? Why would you (apparently intentionally) try to steal Tom's thunder by having a calamity befall the Patterson patriarch? Could it be that she feels she has a monopoly on death in the funny pages, and scheduled Jim's stroke opposite Lisa's passing out of spite? One can only wonder ...

This should have been a day to celebrate Lisa's (and Mr. Batiuk's) bravery in the face of some very devastating odds. It hasn't quite worked out that way, has it?

Back From The Great Beyond

2007-10-03T18:34:00.001-05:00

I stopped posting to this blog well over a year ago, for one very simple reason. It wasn't fun anymore.

For a year, I had written all the satire I could muster up. Some of it was good, some not so good (hey, I've never been a professional funnyman), but it was all pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek.

I was shocked and amazed at the number of people who took not only offense, but nasty offense at some of the things I wrote. My last post, which had to do with the World Cup soccer final last year (and the infamous Zidane head-butt), got me branded a "racist" (I believe the word they were looking for was "xenophobe", but the point was made).

All this abuse, for nothing but a small sense of accomplishment and a few complimentary comments? No thanks.

Well, the whip marks have faded and the bruises have healed, and I'm back. I don't have nearly the time to devote to this as I once did (and I'm through with that whole trolling-for-traffic-on-the-blog-promotion-sites thing), but you'll get my best ... when I feel like it.

And the fun starts up again tomorrow. But it won't be a humorous post, I'll warn you now.

Hi. My Name is Gary, and I'm a Poker Junkie ...

2007-10-03T18:29:00.000-05:00

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 2681357

The Spread of American Culture

2006-07-09T17:52:00.000-05:00

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 through an afternoon of left turns, hoping that one car becomes airborne long enough to smash about a half-dozen vehicles into twisted, flaming metal. Even hockey is dominated by players who, long ago, lost their front teeth to flying chunks of hard rubber.

Of the more "placid" sports, baseball today is all about raw displays of power: hitting for distance, spitting sunflower seeds for distance, scratching for distance ... oh, and pitching. The elegant game of tennis has been taken over by musclebound, grunting, screaming bundles of testosterone (and the men's game has fared no better). And in a country where Mike Tyson can still draw a crowd (despite the fact that Iron Mike will threaten to eat its children), do I need to say anything about boxing at all?

I figured that any soccer match in which two countries, representing the weakest European armies of the 20th century, would try to overcome their legacy of mediocrity would be a worthy investment of time.

But not until the game's 110th minute (do we really need to honor a sport that requires a timeline?) did Zidane sprint ahead of Materazzi, then turn around and ram his head directly into the Italian's sternum. Predictably, Materazzi dropped to the turf like ... well, like the Italian army. Zidane was ejected by the referee (actually, they said he was "sent off", presumably without any supper).

And the greatest French athlete since Jean-Claude Killy ended his career, not in triumph, but in disgrace.

What a quintessentially American thing to do.

The Bravest Man in America

2006-05-01T14:38:00.000-05:00

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 from El Presidente and, frequency glancing over to make eye contact with the most powerful man in the world, proceeded to verbally disembowel him ... TO HIS FACE.

(Transcript courtesy of Daily Kos:)

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

Now, there may be an energy crisis. This president has a very forward-thinking energy policy. Why do you think he's down on the ranch cutting that brush all the time? He's trying to create an alternative energy source. By 2008 we will have a mesquite-powered car!

One might expect the assembled audience of reporters and celebrities to be thinking: "Wow, that takes guts. But it's high time somebody said it to Dubya's face. Good on ya, Mr. Colbert."

But then Colbert began skewering the reporters:

As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

And then he took on everybody else:

Mayor Nagin! Mayor Nagin is here from New Orleans, the chocolate city! Yeah, give it up. Mayor Nagin, I'd like to welcome you to Washington, D.C., the chocolate city with a marshmallow center. And a graham cracker crust of corruption. It's a Mallomar, I guess is what I'm describing, a seasonal cookie.

Joe Wilson is here, Joe Wilson right down here in front, the most famous husband since Desi Arnaz. And of course he brought along his lovely wife Valerie Plame. Oh, my god! Oh, what have I said? (looks horrified) I am sorry, Mr. President, I meant to say he brought along his lovely wife, Joe Wilson's wife. Patrick Fitzgerald is not here tonight? OK. Dodged a bullet.

And, of course, we can't forget the man of the hour, new press secretary, Tony Snow. Secret Service name, "Snow Job." Toughest job. What a hero! Took the second toughest job in government, next to, of course, the ambassador to Iraq.

Got some big shoes to fill, Tony. Big shoes to fill. Scott McClellan could say nothing like nobody else. McClellan, of course, eager to retire. Really felt like he needed to spend more time with Andrew Card's children.

You may not think Colbert's remarks were particularly funny; certainly, at various times during the half-hour monologue (complete with video clip of "Press Secretary" Colbert being stalked by columnist Helen Thomas), a substantial number of the people in attendance were extremely uncomfortable, including the Big Guy on the dais.

But what nobody can question is that while making fun of the president and the press is easy, doing it to their face is NOT. And roasting everybody in the room, so that NOBODY is left unskewered to defend you, takes balls the size of the Liberty Bell.

Well done, Mr. Colbert. You'll be getting a certified letter from the IRS any day now.

(Video of the C-SPAN broadcast, including the Colbert/Thomas video, can be found here.)

* * * * *

On the subject of politics, I have to share this with you, because it's rare that anything politically-oriented makes me laugh out loud. But I howled when I stumbled across this blog comment (scroll to the bottom) ...

But! But! You commie libbos don't understand nothing, not at all! We ace news reporter like myself and Tony Snow have strong , compassionate feelings for Rush Limpbag who is a silent sufferer of the very painful giant anal cyst condition that kept him from going to Nam and fighting Commies!

Thank you, Wayne. You had me at "anal cyst" ...

The REAL Evil Genius

2006-04-11T14:40:00.000-05:00

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 career diplomat before becoming President, is honestly incapable of pronouncing the word "nuclear"?)

It was Dubya (with the help of "Dead-Eye Dick" Cheney, who really is evil -- who else could shoot somebody and have the VICTIM apologizing to the shooter?) who entered his first presidential term knowing that he would invade Iraq, and simply needed an excuse to do so. Al-Qaeda provided him with that excuse. The Taliban in Afghanistan rolled over so quickly (suspiciously so, in fact) that America's bloodlust was not sated.

So, when Dubya set the table for his attack on Iraq, We The People were only too eager to create the justification for him: Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Dubya NEVER said this publicly. Nobody in his administration said it publicly. WE (meaning a majority of polled Americans) convinced ourselves of it, and Dubya did nothing to correct our misinterpretation.

It was Dubya who, once elected for his first term, surrounded himself with all of his dad's minions and sycophants from 41's administration. But -- and this was overlooked at the time -- he froze his dad out of the administration. Now, before he was Reagan's vice-president, George H.W. Bush was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was arguably the most powerful man in the world. Certainly the elder Bush knew more about the state of the world, and what was going on in it, than anyone else did.

When Dubya was elected, he was smart enough to let in all of his dad's influential friends, but kept out the one man with the knowledge to discourage Dubya from doing what he wanted to do all along. Why?

Because the elder Bush would NEVER have kissed Dubya's ass. He would only have interfered in Dubya's plans. And Dubya was smart enough to recognize this, and banish his father to live out his days hosting hurricane-relief fundraisers and sitting in "Diamond Club" seats behind home plate at Astros games.

And now ... it is Dubya, we find out, who approved the declassification and leaking of sensitive intelligence information that indirectly led to the "outing" of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the media, in order to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson (an ambassador, it bears mentioning, appointed to the post by ... George H.W. Bush). This is the revelation that caused me to realize just how clever Dubya really is.

Comparison has been made of Dubya's activities to those crimes authorized by the Nixon Administration (including having former Nixon staffer John Dean go to Capitol Hill and essentially say, "What Dubya is doing is MUCH worse than what Nixon did, and we kicked Nixon out of office"). But there is one significant difference between what Tricky Dick did and what King George has been doing.

Nixon broke the law. There's no proof that Dubya has done so.

What Dubya HAS done is exploit every single loophole in the system of "executive orders" that the president is authorized to make, and to further exploit his "war powers" (during a war with no clearly-identified enemy, in no specific location, and of no certain duration -- in other words, a "war" against somebody, somewhere, indefinitely) to get things done that no previous tenant of the White House would have ever had the balls to attempt. Dubya has committed all sorts of reprehensible, manipulative, dishonest, and (again, just my opinion) evil acts during his six years in Washington.

But by all appearances, and until the Conservative Media (I have previously debunked the notion of a "Liberal Media" in only three paragraphs) chooses to dig something up, DUBYA HAS DONE NOTHING ILLEGAL ... or at least, nothing "illegal" in a literal, by-the-book sense. There is no proof that he has violated the letter of ANY law (although he has laid waste to the spirit of hundreds of them). And there is almost no question that, if someone can prove illegal activity, Dubya has laid the foundation for somebody else (probably a low-level staffer) to go to jail.

That, folks, takes brilliance.

And even if "Evil Puppeteer Rove" is orchestrating everything, Dubya is smart enough to follow through and make them look like his decisions (which takes the heat off Rove and transfers it onto someone who, thanks to his own executive orders, is nearly above the law).

George W. Bush is actually pretty smart. Who knew? (And is he smart enough to keep us from trading "nucular" warheads with Iran?)

Ding Dong, DeLay is Dead

2006-04-03T23:40:00.000-05:00

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 ...

"Lost": Everything But Weight

2006-03-12T14:48:00.000-06:00

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 who looks like Rudy from the first season of "Survivor") to get on that plane, because after all, it was his destiny, were also the six numbers that caused big Hurley to win the lottery and promptly crash on a desert island where money is worthless.


Hurley		Hurley?

What we have learned from "Lost" so far is that neither the writers nor the survivors are as smart as they think they are. "Lost" no longer refers to the people on the island; it now refers to the plotline as well. Have we learned nothing from the mistakes of "Twin Peaks"? Have we not learned that once you start writing things into the script merely because they're weirdly cool, and leave the story progression by the side of the road, your audience will also be "Lost"?

And have we not learned that if a 400-pound man is stranded on a desert island, basic nutrition dictates that he would LOSE WEIGHT? Does common sense also dictate that you do not put this 400-pound man in charge of your food supply?

In fact, this reminds me of another overweight island "survivor" whose tropical diet of coconuts and figs suspiciously never resulted in any visible weight loss:


Hurley		Not Hurley

(Yeah, you saw that one driving up the block, didn't you?)

Note that on "Lost", people keep disappearing. One or two appear out of the jungle long enough to speak backwards and confuse everybody, then vanish again. The rest are gone forever. Mind you, I have no proof ... but I suspect that Hurley is eating them.

The same thing happened on "Gilligan's Island", too: an alarming number of people kept landing on the uncharted desert isle, then disappeared, and none of them were ever able to tell the authorities where this island (within a three-hour boat ride of Honolulu, remember) might have been located. Do we know that these visitors made it back to civilization? Or do we only know that they vanished from the island, never to be seen again?

Meanwhile, the Skipper kept gaining weight. You figure it out.

Shows dealing with supernatural phenomena were big hits in the '60s and '70s: "Twilight Zone" and "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" come to mind. How long did the new version of "The Night Stalker" last? An episode and a half? The only shows dealing with the supernatural that have succeeded recently are comedies ("Sabrina, The Teenage Witch"), anthologies ("Outer Limits", "Psi Factor"), and dramas centering around a teenage cheerleader named Buffy. Ooo, scary stuff.

Meanwhile, we're supposed to believe that life for a bunch of plane-crash victims depends upon six arbitrary numbers, and their ability to outwit a bunch of "The Others" who are rather pissed off for no good reason. Although, the Wife and I have deduced a reason ...

The Wife (who watches the show a lot more closely than I do) pointed out that the seating configuration on the crashed plane was five seats across, three-and-two. That means it was either a 727 or an MD-80. On a trans-Pacific flight. That means they were flying on a very cheap airline. And there were apparently no first-class passengers and no first-class cabin.

This can only mean one thing. The "Lost" passengers were flying Southwest.

And when you plug this information in, the reason why "The Others" are so angry becomes obvious. The first group of survivors found a cache of food. "The Others" have to survive on small packs of honey-roasted peanuts.

No wonder they're pissed.

Exxx-cellent ...

2006-03-01T11:35:00.000-06:00

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 "liberal" media didn't pay any attention to it, just as you had predicted. It amazes me, sir, how often you're right about these things!

You certainly have taken the right appoach, Mr. Rove. The story goes on to say that more people can name all three American Idol judges than can name three of the First Amendment's rights. Yes sir, even the black guy, Randy Something-or-Other. No, sir, I really don't know what he used to do or how he became an Idol judge. Shall I put the FBI on it right away? Oh, you've already tapped his phones. Good deal.

This is actually funny, sir. It says here that one in five people surveyed thought that the First Amendment included the right to own a pet! Ha ha, what a ridicul-- what? Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I didn't know the President felt that way about pets. It won't happen again, I promise.

It appears that most people have forgotten, if they ever knew at all, the five freedoms enumerated in that First Amendment. And Mr. Rove, you have always said that if people don't know what their rights are supposed to be, how can they possibly argue when we take them away?

Let me see if I can remember this ... the five freedoms are the freedom of speech -- that's the easy one -- and freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom to peaceably assemble, and freedom to petition for redress of our grievances. People have forgotten all about the last four of those freedoms, and all five of them are -- hey, wait just a dang minute ...

"Freedom to petition for redress" should apply to American citizens being held in Guantanamo and elsewhere around the world, shouldn't it? And "freedom to peaceably assemble" ought to apply even to those groups who oppose what our Administration is doing, I'd think. "Freedom of religion" should apply even to people who worship outside our conservative Christian base (even, dare I say, Muslims?), and "freedom of the press" means we should allow the big papers and TV networks to run with even those things that don't flatter the President. Say, what the hell are we doing by stifling all of these--

I'm sorry, Mr. Rove. I was VERY much out of line. No sir, I'm a uniter, not a divider, just like the President. No, sir, never again. I lost my head for a moment, talking about First Amendment "freedoms" like they were something important. You have my solemn promise, Mr. Rove, that I will not exercise my "freedom of speech" again. Not while I'm working in the White House!

Held Over ... by Popular Demand?

2006-02-26T15:12:00.000-06:00

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 care about the number of visitors that that blog had during the week. I always look at the number of unique clicks they provided to their renters. It's quite amazing, really, that someone who only sends one new visitor to a "renter" blog can demand - and GET - 100 credits or more.

My personal benchmark has been: I'll pay you three credits for every unique click (meaning, every new visitor) you send me. Not one credit more. And, fair is fair: When I rent out my blog, I insist that for every three credits the renter pays me, they get at least one unique click in return. Well, for the first time since I've been renting out that space ... it didn't happen. Debbie didn't get her FDA recommended weekly allowance of clicks.

So, I have given Debbie another week of renter-ship, essentially "on the house". "Smile If You're Lying" is GOING to get the clicks she paid for, dammit. Care to help the cause? Click here, or on her thumbnail link over there on the sidebar, and take a look at Debbie's quite entertaining blog. (PLEASE!)

Maybe you don't care about any of this (in fact, it's probably better that you don't), but you have to admit, I take my duties as a landlord seriously. (Too seriously. WAY too seriously ...)

There IS Joy In Mudville

2006-02-21T21:31:00.000-06:00

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 Brickhouse and Ernie Harwell and, yes, even Harry Caray (back when Caray was really good, before he started getting sloshed on ballpark beer behind the mike). Elston's job was to paint verbal pictures and report the game, and he did it as well as anyone in baseball history.

Good thing, too, because for most of Elston's tenure as the team's lead broadcaster, the Astros were known by other names. "Lastros" was one. "Disastros" was another. And, when the team moved its spring training home to Kissimmee, Florida, you can understand why the local farm team quickly changed its name to the "Osceola County Astros".

Anyone who listens to a lot of baseball on the radio knows who the Astros' current lead announcer is: Hall of Famer Milo Hamilton. But even with his legendary career in Chicago, St. Louis and Atlanta, Milo came to Houston as the number-two guy, backing up Gene Elston. Other Hall of Famers who were second-in-command to Elston include (legendary Pirates voice) Bob Prince and (legendary Phillies and NFL voice) Harry Kalas. They got into the Hall, while Elston quietly kept to himself.

Elston saw his job to be that of reporter, not cheerleader. That sense of integrity to the listener ultimately got him fired by moronic then-owner John McMullen. Finally, 20 years after he was forced out of the Astros' booth, Elston has been elected to receive the Ford C. Frick Award for Broadcasting Excellence from the Baseball Hall of Fame.

And who were two of the committee members who voted him in? Why, Milo Hamilton and Harry Kalas, of course. It's about damn time.

Way to go, Gene.

(Note: Bob Prince did not vote for Gene Elston. Of course, he's dead, so his excuse is somewhat valid ...)

Special Guest Villain: "Smile If You're Lying"

2006-02-19T17:16:00.000-06:00

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 the College Of Your Choice for four MORE years. And everything I have described is the BEST-case scenario!

So I have a lot of respect for those who choose to become parents (at least initially; if their toddler is running around screaming at my favorite dining establishment while I'm trying to eat, and the parents' method of parenting involves ignoring them completely, my respect fades very quickly).

Nonetheless, most mommy blogs consist of entries like "Two-year-old Junior ate out of the litter box today. Isn't he just the cuuuutest?" Fortunately, there are exceptions, and this week's BlogExplosion renter is one of them. "Smile If You're Lying" is hosted by a young mother in Cleveland who has a thing for Hugh Laurie (post-"Jeeves and Wooster", of course) and Nine Inch Nails. She has a troublemaking child, a troublemaking husband, and a troublemaking blog. All of this adds up to good, troublemaking fun, of course.

Do yourself a favor (and mommy Debbie, too) by clicking here, or on that thumbnail over on the sidebar, to check out "Smile If You're Lying". Come on. You know you want to.

Special Guest Villain: "The Opiate of the Masses"

2006-02-13T21:33:00.000-06:00

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, it's very refreshing to find a blog that doesn't use whoopee cushions and joy buzzers to make you chuckle.

Get thee over to "The Opiate of the Masses" by clicking on that thumbnail over in the side bar, or for those of you who don't have the patience for that kind of graphic scrutiny, just click here.

Oh, This Is Just TOO Good ...

2006-02-12T17:01:00.000-06:00

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 do with Scooter Libby. The actual "victim" was a millionaire attorney from Austin; Scooter wasn't even there. But wouldn't it have been great if the guy Cheney had shot had been Libby? Oh, the fun we could have had ...)

The $2.5 Million Headache

2006-02-08T13:18:00.000-06:00

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 that she'll have to confiscate the soda. When he calls her on her rather transparent abuse of power, she threatens him with a body cavity search.

I know I shouldn't let a television commercial make me mad ... but this one is so easy to hate. We have here a representative of the federal Gubmint -- remember, all airport screeners work for the TSA now -- who is using her badge to intimidate and harrass innocent airline passengers out of their sodas. You may think I'm overreacting, but I'm not; when I was flying out of Las Vegas one month after the 9/11 attacks, all of the luggage screening was still done by hand.

The screeners went through our bags while we watched. Fortunately for me, they were quite cheerful; when they came across my cigar case, the screener asked me if the cigars were Cuban. I told him no, they weren't, but they were pretty good cigars nonetheless. Somehow during the conversation, the screener revealed that if he so chose, he could take those cigars if he wanted to. No check on his authority, no recourse; he could just take anything he wanted from my luggage, in the name of "airline security".

And that was before airport screeners became agents of the Department of Fatherlan-- er, I mean Homeland Security. Now, of course, all airport screeners work for Dubya. And, so it would seem, would Kathy Griffin.

But let's disregard the overt abuse of federal power here to relieve some poor, dehydrated guy of his soda. Let's look at the bigger picture. Behind the guy being hassled, are dozens of airline passengers who just want to get on their freakin' plane. They have to stand and wait while Ms. Kathy shows everybody just how important she is. What is the message this is sending to the airport screeners of tomorrow? "It doesn't matter if people make it to their planes on time. If you see a passenger has something that you want, just take it, no matter how much it inconveniences its owner or all the people standing in line behind him."

I think it's safe to say, that this commercial and its implications wouldn't have bothered me nearly as much if it had starred Scarlett Johansson instead of the host of "Average Joe" ...

* * * * *

In other Super Bowl commercial news, the Gillette Company spent $2.5 million to inform us that the way people have shaved for years -- whether it was with sharpened whale bones or straight razors or even Gillette's own Blue Blades, twin-bladed Atras or triple-bladed Mach 3s -- has been completely and utterly insufficient to cure the stubbly beard. Gillette announced that it takes no fewer than five blades (plus a "Flexible Comfort Guard" and an "Enhanced Indicator Lubrastrip") to provide a comfortable shave and cure the rug burn that your wife will inevitably get from your pathetic kisses if you don't use the maximum number of blades.

As if this weren't enough (and, by God, don't you think it oughta be), Gillette also announced their battery-operated version of the same five-bladed Fusion razor. Why battery-operated, you may well ask?

IT VIBRATES.

Think about that. Sharpened steel blades touching your tender flesh, and vibrating. I just cannot wrap my brain around that concept (although clearly, there are some people who can). And, being the genius marketers that they are, Gillette must soon come out with an erotically-sculpted version for women, commercials for which will air on "The View":

(husky female voice-over) Hey, ladies ... facing another long, lonely night ahead? It's just you and your stubble ... but Gillette has the answer. Find satisfaction while you shave ...

(Clearly, I need to go lie down for a while.)

Special Guest Villain: "Finding Yourself Despite Yourself"

2006-02-03T18:39:00.000-06:00

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 "what the hell am I doing here", not unlike the one Bob Saget constantly wore while he was hosting "America's Funniest Home Videos".

If there really IS a "Housewife Mafia", Fidget would be Clemenza, the caporegime: opinionated, knows her business and everyone else's, cooks a mean bolognese sauce, and is not afraid to whack someone when the situation calls for it. In short, she's worthy of respect. She has mine. You might want to pay her a little yourself, by clicking here or on the thumbnail on the sidebar.

Media, Politics, and Agita

2006-01-30T20:05:00.000-06:00

"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 revelation became a source of much mirth and finger-pointing that dogs the former president to this day. When it was alleged in 1999 that Dubya was arrested for cocaine possession in 1972 ... well, nobody really seemed to care to pursue the story. (Footnote: Whether Dubya actually was arrested for coke possession or not is beside my point. What matters is that the story was briefly reported, but never pursued, by the MSM.)

3. The MSM in the United States is financed by its advertisers (i.e., big corporations). Big corporations are, by their very nature, extremely politically conservative. No one can seriously suggest that the advertisers don't exercise some editorial control over the MSM's news content. Indeed, most MSM outlets these days are owned by such huge conservative corporations. If a "liberal" viewpoint might alienate the corporate owners or advertisers, that viewpoint is quickly squelched; and if news breaks that might hurt the conservatives in power (and, by extension, the conservative corporations), there is every incentive for the MSM to bury it. The notion of a "liberal media" is simply propaganda designed to suck all credibility out of any news stories that the conservatives in power deem unflattering. So let's be adults, and face the truth here. Call the media whatever you like (and I frequently do), but it is NOT "liberal".

There we go. Three paragraphs, myth destroyed. "Mission accomplished" (another example of the "liberal media" abdicating its responsibility to be a government watchdog ... but I digress)

Now then ...

There was a story released last week that revealed some very interesting truths about the ability of voters of both political parties to keep facts from getting in their way, and indeed, to flatly ignore information that's contrary to their point of view. This research project involved monitoring the brains of test subjects (assuming, for the sake of discussion, that they had one) while they evaluated information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 presidential election.

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, [Emory University director of clinical psychology Drew] Westen and his colleagues say.
Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.
The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.
"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

I was shocked -- shocked!! -- and amazed to read this. You mean that there's a reason why John Kerry (and, for that matter, Max Cleland and John McCain -- in short, anyone who opposed the Republican machine at any time in the past eight years, for any reason) is considered a traitor despite his military service, and Dubya (a draft evader) is considered a patriotic hero?

Thank goodness for that. Finally, an explanation. Not one that I particularly like, but an explanation nonetheless. So what we have learned is that, once the typical voter has made up his or her mind which candidate they prefer, no amount of evidence or -- heck, let's face it, TRUTH -- is likely to change their mind.

So, with that in mind, let us turn to another story from last week (which the right-wing blogs have been crowing about), in which we find that among those who have decided whether they would vote for potential presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008, those polled who have already decided that they will not vote for her outnumber those who have decided that they will vote for her, 39 to 29 percent.

This, despite the fact that most Americans couldn't tell you where Hillary stands on a single political issue. Seems people just flat don't like her. I guess a strong, intelligent woman who values the sanctity of her marriage and supports her husband, even when said husband is a confessed philanderer, doesn't make good presidential material. (Although, on the surface, you'd think this would be somebody the Republican "Family Values" party could rally behind, wouldn't you? But again, I digress ...)

From the way Hillary has been vilified by the "fair and balanced" hatemongers since before Bill Clinton first took the oath of office, you would think she had been discovered harboring Nazi torturers who escaped Germany after the Holocaust. (Although, now that we have a world leader -- Iran's new president -- who has publicly asserted that the "Holocaust" is really just a myth, I'm sure such torturers couldn't any longer be called "Nazis". I suppose these days we can call them "freedom-defending interrogators". But there I go, off on yet another tangent ...)

I had a fantasy the other day (no, not that kind of a fantasy, please), about a conversation I might have with one of these Hillary-haters:

"Hillary Clinton sucks! I will vote for ANYBODY in 2008, as long as they're running against Hillary!"

Why?

"Pardon me?"

Why would you vote FOR somebody, when their only qualification is that they're NOT somebody else?

"Well ... I just don't want her to be President, that's all."

Why not?

"Um ... huh?"

What is it that Hillary stands for that you oppose?

"Well, um ... I don't know."

So why are you so against Hillary?

"Well ... well, first of all, she's a bitch."

Why?

(exasperated) "Why what?"

Why do you think she's a bitch?

"Okay, listen. I just don't like her, okay?"

Why not?

"Listen, you ..."

Do you know Hillary? Has she done something to personally offend you?

(long pause) "Why do you hate freedom?"

(And the sad thing is, knowing what I know now thanks to that research study, I think a conversation with a Hillary-hater these days would probably proceed exactly along these lines ...)

Special Guest Villain: "Infinitely Pie"

2006-01-19T18:00:00.000-06:00

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 I got for this week's rental, Pie's blog is the only one that conjured up the most original (and funny) notion of the Creation of the Universe that I have ever read.

And then her post from the day before contains random thoughts like, "Rabies seems like it'd be a fun disease." Now, I ask you, who else is going to come up with pearls of wisdom like that?

Best of all, Pie posts a new blog entry nearly every day. She's a lot more inspired than I am. Thank goodness for that ...

So, click here or on the sidebar thumbnail (yes, it IS an exceptionally dark thumbnail, isn't it? But still worth seeking out) and visit a truly original lady's truly original blog.

"Dude, What The F*** Is Wrong With German People?"

2006-01-12T13:52:00.000-06:00

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 Brandes but had been spared a murder conviction and a possible life sentence as the victim had yearned to be eaten.

"Yearned to be ..." WHAT, now?

Surely I'm reading this wrong. Surely the victim chose the wrong person to say "bite me" to, or maybe this was a sauce-mixing adventure gone horribly awry. But no ... we're dealing with a guy who wanted to be eaten, as in consumed, for ... sexual gratification?

But wait, the story continues. Oh, joy.

Lawyer Harald Ermel acknowledged his client had a “fetish for human flesh”, but said he was no longer a threat. “Under the same circumstances he would never do something like that again,” he said.

Uh ... yeah, sure. Being arrested and tried for murder is a pretty strong deterrent for that sort of thing.

"Defense counsel?" "Yes, your Honor?" "Would you ask your client to stop rubbing A-1 Sauce on the court reporter, please?"

(Those of you with more delicate constitutions may want to skip the next paragraph ...)

In a “slaughter room” fitted out with butcher’s bench, meat hook and cage, Meiwes severed Brandt’s penis and they both tried to eat it.

They ... both ... tried ... to ...

... ick.

I have heard of lots of warped sexual fetishes in my 42 years. I have never in my life heard of anybody who ever wanted to CONSUME THEIR OWN PENIS. Sure, Ron Jeremy's porn career was built on his interesting ability to put his own in his mouth (or so I've heard) ... but to take a big healthy chaw out of it? Most men are far too attached to their member to want to be detached from it, let alone to make sashimi out of it.

But wait, there's more. (Of course there is.)

“Due to the consistency of the penis, this did not succeed, either raw or fried,” Koehler said.

Okay gang, listen up. I am a pretty darn good chef. I have studied cuisines from all over the world. I have put things in my mouth that-- (wait, that would be a very unfortunate metaphor for this discussion.) Suffice it to say that I have even eaten Cajun food. But I have never come across any recipes for "chicken-fried penis". Not ONE. (Not human penises, anyway. Or is the correct plural "penii"?)

Besides, perhaps I'm being too harsh on ol' Bernd-Juergen. Perhaps it wasn't chicken-fried at all. Perhaps a light pan-frying is all that a good "filet of trouser snake" requires. Obviously, though, "tenderness" is not necessarily a desired quality in this dish ...

When Brandt fell unconscious, Meiwes slit his throat, pulled out his organs and chopped off his head. The next day, he froze portions of his flesh, eating some 44 pounds of it over following months.

My only thought -- the only one that could do justice to this sort of thing -- is that by waiting until the next day to freeze his kitchen sidekick, Emeril here is just begging for some kind of sick, twisted parasite to infect his ... sick, twisted body. (Okay, it makes perfect sense now.)

I think we can all agree that both cannibal Meiwes and victim -- 'scuse me, sexual partner Brandes are, or were, a couple of truly warped individuals. And perhaps you may be thinking that because I took the time to bring this story to your attention, I must be a sick bastard as well. (And please leave my last name out of this.)

But remember, oh ye in glass houses: You read this entry all the way to the end, now didn't you? You sick f*** ...

Special Guest Villain: "Blogs Are For Wimps"

2006-01-10T13:10:00.000-06:00

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 credits for a mere handful of click-throughs. But I, on the other hand, have a conscience. I give value for value received. So nyaah.)

For this week's rental, I had nine applicants to choose from. One was a previous renter. Two of them had previously rented space to me. I could only choose one. ONE. Nuts.

With sincere apologies to my friend Melissa (whose blog "Jetting Through Life" deserves your attention, even if she doesn't get the coveted Parking Space of Honor this week), I have decided to go this week with the blog that I felt was the funniest, snarkiest, most-likely-to-replace-Howard-Stern-on-the-FCC's-hit-list-iest applicant. And how can you not like a blog called "Blogs Are For Wimps"?

"BR4W" (just pretend it's a license plate, and it becomes easier to type) doesn't play fair. It's a consortium of seven bloggers, each hitting-and-running with their own warped senses of humor, and generally laying waste to all that they touch. That's my kind of blog, dadgummit! (Plus, it makes me feel better that there are seven of them, and yet between them, they can only get one or two new entries up a day. That makes me feel a heck of a lot better that I, flying solo here, don't write new posts more often.)

It will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will make you scream in orgasmic ecstacy. (Perhaps it will make you want to take some Ecstacy as well.) By now, you know the drill. Click here, or on the blog thumbnail over there on the right, and "Wimp" out".

The Mother Of All Meme Posts

2006-01-06T17:31:00.000-06:00

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 all your friends, become hideously deformed, contract terminal halitosis, and your dog will be run over by a bicycle courier on speed. And you'll have bad luck for the next six months."

Memes are much more insidious. It is simply considered to be the depth of discourtesy to ignore a meme when you've been "tagged" (i.e., covered with spray paint and abandoned) with one. And my oppressor - 'scuse me, my honorable tagger - Eric the "Blogging Boss" has seen fit to inflict one of these things upon me.

So, to ensure that this sort of thing will NEVER happen to this blog again, here is the Mother Of All Meme Posts. Let this be a lesson to all of you. (Just to make things interesting, one of the four entries for each question is absolutely true. I'll leave it to you to figure out which one.)

Thank you for sending this to me, Eric. And that chafing dish you got for Christmas that might have come from me? I want it back.

Four jobs you've had in your life:
1) Mad cow wrangler
2) Day trader in Enron stock
3) Stand-up comedian
4) Charmin quality-control inspector

Four movies you would watch over and over:
1) Dude, Where's My Car?
2) Manos, The Hands Of Fate
3) The Incredibles
4) Ishtar

Four places you have lived:
1) Inside my mom
2) Upstairs from my mom
3) Away from my mom
4) The seventh level of Hell (i.e., Las Vegas in August)

Four TV shows you love to watch:
1) "The Incredible Adventures of Bambi Big-Uns" (Playboy)
2) "Are You Going To Eat That?" (Food Network)
3) Anything with Paul Crouch and his epoxied-and-laminated wife (TBN)
4) "30 Minute Meals" with Rachael Ray (until she got married; she's not so damn perky anymore)

Four places you have been on vacation:
1) The sixth level of Hell (i.e., Las Vegas in July)
2) The fifth level of Hell (i.e., Chicago during a snowstorm)
3) The fourth level of Hell (i.e., the BVIs during the height of sand-flea season)
4) The third level of Hell (i.e., Los Angeles just about anytime)

Four websites you visit daily:
1) BambiBigUns.com
2) MSNBC.com
3) BillOReillyIsASwampCreature.org
4) IHaveNoLife.net

Four of your favorite foods:
1) Haggis
2) Tuna smoothies
3) A nice big hunk o' dead cow
4) Vegemite smeared on a chocolate-chip cookie

Four places you would rather be right now:
1) In a hot tub with Jessica Alba
2) In the studio audience of "Dancing With The Stars"
3) Baghdad, outside the Green Zone
4) Sailing the Mediterranean (with Jessica Alba)

Four bloggers you are tagging:
None. Do you hear me? NONE! Not a one! THIS MADNESS MUST BE STOPPED!

(Hey ... what's going on? My breath is getting worse, and I hear a bicycle courier crying outside ...)

TEXAS FIGHT, DAMMIT!

2006-01-05T00:21:00.000-06:00

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!

Whistling In The Wind

2006-01-02T20:19:00.000-06:00

(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 fundamentalists, who are currently shelling and suicide-bombing and generally wreaking havoc in Iraq and Afghanistan, lay down their arms and say, "You know, there's really no upside to this. How the hell could each of us who martyr ourselves end up with 71 virgins in Heaven, anyway? Where would those virgins come from? There just aren't that many alive on the planet, you know."

So, for purposes of this hypothetical, bin Laden and al-Qaeda and Zarqawi and all other Middle East militants have surrendered or walked away. And Saddam Hussein, as we know, has already been "neutralized".

Is anyone under the illusion that the Dubya Administration would, under these best-of-all-possible circumstances, withdraw our troops from the Middle East?

This is not going to be an anti-Dubya rant (that would be just too darn easy). But, like him or hate him, Dubya has shown that he has no intention of bringing our troops home anytime soon. There will always be militant threats against U.S. interests abroad. There will always be threats to Israel, or to Saudi Arabia, or to Kingdom Come that might impact American security or our economy.

Now, the reason I posed this hypothetical is because Dubya is quite unapologetic about ordering covert wiretaps, bypassing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which required intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant before eavesdropping on communications involving "U.S. persons." [link] In fact, Dubya is now on the offensive, saying that the fact that such covert (and illegal) activity was leaked to the New York Times has caused "great harm to the nation," [link] and the Justice Department is now investigating who could have dared to tell the Times about this illegal government activity. [link]

"My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important programme in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this programme is helping the enemy," Mr. Bush said. [link]

What I want to focus on is Dubya's turn of phrase: "in a time of war". The question here is, at what point might the war end? When the war against terrorism was launched after 9/11, Dubya admitted that we were facing an enemy without a specific location or identification, with no fixed timetable or measure of victory. In other words, this war was against somebody, somewhere, and could continue indefinitely.

Does it, therefore, strike anyone else as strange to use "in a time of war" as justification for keeping illegal governmental activities secret, when by the President's own admission, the conclusion of this war cannot be reached for the indefinite future? "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda," Dubya told the nation, "but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."

A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.
- James Madison, letter to W.T. Barry, Aug. 4, 1822

Dubya is very incensed that covert activity, whether legally or illegally carried out, has been leaked to the press. He's concerned that it could affect national security, and certainly, that's a very valid concern. But it seems to me that just as "legitimate" privacy interests "must be balanced" against national security [link], so, too, must national security needs "be balanced" against our constitutional rights.

... the First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.
- Justice Hugo Black, Associated Press v. U.S., 1945

If Dubya and his cronies are correct, and we cannot reasonably ask what our government is up to regarding its own citizenry (even in times of war) for the sake of "national security", then we have already become a fascist state.

We are waging war in the Middle East in the name of protecting and spreading the American style of democracy. But if the freedoms that make democracy possible can't be protected and enjoyed at home, then just what the hell are we trying to spread, anyway?

Other than, it would appear, a thick layer of horse manure that they're telling us is a bed of roses ...

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor, November 11, 1755

Special Guest Villain: "Seawave's Soliloquy"

2006-01-02T13:38:00.000-06:00

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 just the one ... but when I want to peer into the soul of a lovely woman, I go visit Sea.

I'm proud to have her as my tenant this week. Click here, or jump on that annoying little "Rent My Blog" box in the sidebar, and prepare to have your eyes opened.

Somewhere, Vince Lombardi Weeps

2005-12-29T15:43:00.000-06:00

They say, "Winning isn't everything," and boy, is that true. This Sunday, a win would absolutely suck cauliflower. Allow me to explain.

The greatest player since the last Greatest Player.

There's a running back at USC named Reggie Bush. He just won the Heisman Trophy as the nation's best collegiate player ... as a junior. Even if you're not a football fan, you have probably heard the names Jim Brown, Gale Sayers and Earl Campbell. Well, Reggie Bush is supposed to be better than at least one of them. Based on potential, Bush could be one of the best running backs of all time.

Meanwhile, there's a football team in Houston that has been the worst NFL team this season. The worst team in football one year gets to choose the first player in the following year's draft. The Texans are 2-13 with one week to go, and possess the the worst won-loss record in the league. If the season ended today, the Texans would get the first pick, and could sure use Bush.

But the season doesn't end today. It ends on Sunday. The Texans have one more game to play, and it's going to be a doozy.

See, there are four teams with records of 3-12. If the Texans win on Sunday, and those other four teams lose, there would then be five football teams with a chance to make that important first draft pick.

One of those 3-12 teams, the San Francisco 49ers, will be the Texans' opponent this Sunday. Let the "Bush Bowl" begin! (Or, I suppose, we could also call it the "Toilet Bowl" ...)

What you will see on Sunday is something that no one in professional sports ever anticipated: two bad teams, each desperately trying to lose the game, without making it too obvious that that's exactly what they're doing.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the Texans are such an inept team that they won't even be able to lose properly. Call me a fatalist (30 years of being a Houston sports fan will definitely do that to you), but I have a horrible feeling that the 49ers are going to do a better job of losing than the Texans will do.

No, that's not Ernest Borgnine. (At least, I think it's not.)

Vince Lombardi, that legendary football coach, once said: “Winning is not a sometime thing, it's an all time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”

Unfortunately, so is losing.

The only way the Houston Texans can lose this Sunday ... is by winning. If winning means they lose, then the losing Texans will do what losers do; they will lose. Meaning they'll win. Which would suck cauliflower.

If you listen carefully, you will hear the gentle breeze carry with it a faint whirring sound. That sound would be Coach Lombardi, spinning furiously in his grave ...

Special Guest Villain: "Ficken Chingers"

2005-12-27T12:24:00.000-06:00

On BlogExplosion, there is a very poor (but usually-functional) "chat room" device called the Shout Box. When I first got involved with the Gang O' Bloggers in the Shout Box, the very first person to welcome me with open arms (and the very first person to tell me how sexy my photo made me look) was Angie. So I owe her, big time.

Angie's got kids, and a blog. That's usually a deadly combination. But don't be frightened. Angie also has a sense of humor, and frequently writes about things other than her kids. How many "mommy blogs" would also point out how a Spiderman game joystick actually looks like Spiderman's ... oh, shall we say, Levitra-enhanced body part? This is a mommy blog for those of us who hate mommy blogs.

Angie's blog, "Ficken Chingers", is this week's blog renter. I strongly encourage you to click here and pay her a visit ... right after you finish reading my pieces of cr-- er, my pearls of wisdom.

Roast Beast And Tryptophan: The Post-Mortem

2005-12-25T22:08:00.001-06:00

As Kyle Broflovski of South Park sang, "It's hard to be a Jew at Christmas." But it's not impossible.

The Wife, being from a family of the American religious majority, dragged my happy ass down to spend the day with her clan, to celebrate the birth of Our Lord and Savior by opening too many presents, eating too much meat, and drinking too much spiked eggnog. Since the Jewish calendar doesn't really have a holiday designed around presents and eggnog, Christmas Day seems as good a time as any for me to get with the program.

(By sheer coincidence, this year Hanukkah -- or Chanukah or Hannukah or Chanuko or Chaka Khan, or however you spell it -- began at sundown on December 25th. But despite the "eight days for eight presents" theme that many American Jewish families have bestowed upon Hanukkah, our "Festival of Lights" is actually a fairly minor holiday, as Jewish holidays go. The gift-giving is mostly an attempt to keep the Jewish kids from feeling left out of the holiday season, not to mention an additional marketing opportunity for America's commercial retail enterprises. But I digress.)

The Wife made no secret that her preferred gift option would be jewelry. She never makes a secret of it. She began to drop hints starting, oh let's see, I think it was last February.

"I want a necklace."

"Can I have a necklace?"

"Look at this wonderful jewelry website. See all the pretty necklaces? Boy, would I sure like to have one of those ..."

Subtle as a case of explosive diarrhea, my Wife. During baseball season, she came up with the following little ditty, sung to the tune of "Take Me Out To The Ball Game":

Take me out to the jew-lers
Take me out to the store
Buy me some Cartier or Tiff-any,
I don't care, it all looks good on me!
So let's root, root root through your wal-let
Max out your gold card and more,
For it's one, two, three carats and up
At the jewel-ry store!

To say the Wife has a jewelry fixation would be ... oh, never mind. I think you get the point.

She got her necklace, and now I'm going to get my Christmas "privileges", if you know what I mean and I think you do. But that's not the point of this story.

No, the true point of this story is the Wife's recipe for eggnog. It's very simple. You buy a half-gallon of store-brand eggnog. You take a large glass or cup. You pour two shots of white rum into the bottom of the glass, and you fill it to the top with eggnog.

You give it to your unsuspecting brother, who guzzles it down quickly, casually mentioning (not in an unapproving way) the pronounced alcohol flavor. So you pour three shots of white rum into the bottom of the empty glass, fill it with eggnog, and hand it to your brother again.

Your brother drinks the eggnog, has a couple of glasses of wine, and then falls into a deep, snoring, booze-induced coma with the crosscut shredder he wanted for Christmas resting on his belly, gently rising and falling with each new snore, as the rest of the family mills around the room and laughs at him.

The Wife's philosophy is that if you add enough booze, eventually you forget you're drinking cheap store-brand eggnog. The third glass (if you maintain consciousness that long) is supposed to be a half-and-half mix of rum and nog. This philosophy works. (Although, I suspect that during her college years, she played "Quarters" with nog so that no one at school would know she was getting smashed out of her gourd.)

Add to the booze a liberal amount of tryptophan-laced turkey and the sugar crash from a HoneyBaked Ham, and you have a recipe for dormitory-style sleeping arrangements.

We remained awake and made it back home safe and sound (I mixed my own damn eggnog, thankyouverymuch) and now you, gentle Reader, get this present from me. (Unlike the Wife, you are very easy to shop for.)

Merry Christmas.

Deal Or Big, Fat, Hairy Deal

2005-12-20T11:23:00.000-06:00

It's official. The "Dumbing Down Of America" has reached a new nadir (or, if something negative becomes even more effective, does it reach a zenith?).

"Deal or No Deal" premiered last night.

Imagine a game show where the contestant has no need to even be conscious during the game play. That's "Deal or No Deal". It's the American version of a game created in the land of Heineken, legal hashish and storefront-window prostitutes, the combination of which would explain the brain-dead popularity of the concept. If you ever thought "Wheel of Fortune" was too intellectually challenging, "Deal or No Deal" is the game for you.

I watched the premiere on a television set, with the sound off. From across the room. While I was sitting in a local restaurant, where the Wife and I were having dinner with another couple. And I still knew everything that was going on.

In case you haven't watched NBC in the past few weeks (meaning you've missed their three-times-hourly promos for the show), "Deal or No Deal" is hosted by ... Howie Mandel. (Remember, the comedian who made Carrot Top look intellectual? The one who would pull a latex glove over his head and inflate it by exhaling through his nose? The guy who made one pine for the good ol' days of Gallagher? That's Howie.)

Howie Mandel. Now, if that doesn't already tell you everything you need to know about this show, go do some Sudoku puzzles and work on your logic skills. Apparently no other game show hosts were available. (What is Bob Eubanks up to these days, anyway? But I digress.)

A contestant comes on the high-tech stage, facing 26 gorgeous models straight out of the Miss Teen USA pageant (or more likely, straight out of Bambi's Boobie Bar). Each model has an aluminum briefcase. The briefcases contain a money amount from one cent up to $1 million. The player picks one briefcase, which is set down next to the contestant, but not opened. (So far, this sounds kind of like that old Chuck Barris show, The New Treasure Hunt, doesn't it?)

That ... um ... is pretty much the whole game. It takes two minutes. The rest of the hour is taken up with the contestant having the models open up the briefcases she didn't pick. The theory is that, if the million dollars is not in one of the other briefcases, it might be in hers.

So, just to annoy people, this game has found a way to work a cell phone into the proceedings. Yes, a cell phone. Every so often, the phone lights up and rings, and Howie ends up talking to a "Banker" who tries to buy the briefcase back from the contestant. If more high-dollar figures have been taken out of play, the briefcase isn't likely to contain as much and the banker will offer less. If the small money has been eliminated, the briefcase likely contains more and the banker will offer more.

Howie passes along the offer to the contestant and then, with all the gravitas and suspense he can muster, asks the player: "DEAL ... OR NO DEAL?"

This goes on until one of three things happen:

The player accepts the deal and wins the amount of the offer.
The player opens ALL the freakin' briefcases and wins the amount in hers.
The viewer throws a brick through the TV screen.

Now, in case the show wasn't annoying enough, the contestant gets to have three supporters on stage with her. In the first episode, the player's husband spent the hour nervously dancing around on stage like "Gene Gene The Dancing Machine" (another Chuck Barris reference) while Howie cracked jokes. As I indicated, the sound was off, but I still found myself expecting Howie to whip out the latex glove and put it on his head.

Oh, I nearly forgot: Apart from "DEAL ... OR NO DEAL?", there are no other decisions for the player to make. You do not have to phrase your response in the form of a question. You do not have to buy a vowel. You do not have to bid the closest to the actual retail price without going over. In other words, if you are capable of picking a number from 1 to 26, but have no other skills whatsoever, you are capable of playing this game.

Now, if you want to try playing "Deal or No Deal" yourself, NBC has helpfully provided a Flash version of the game on their website. It takes about sixty seconds to play. The TV show takes about an hour. That pretty much sums up the amount of filler in this show.

Critics' opinions of the show are divided. The Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Hollywood Reporter believe "Deal or No Deal" sucks, while the New York Post, Variety, and the Hartford Courant (what's a "courant"?) think the show merely stinks.

The producers of this show also produce "Fear Factor". Kind of tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it?

(And we wonder why so many people think Dubya is doing a good job ...)

Landlord-Tenant Fun And Games

2005-12-18T17:03:00.000-06:00

A big chunk of my traffic comes from BlogExplosion, which is (as far as I know) the biggest traffic-generating site for blogs on the 'Net. Traffic schemes are their game. You name it, they got it. Credits for surfing, "Battle of the Blogs" (two blogs ante up and duel over the pot, winner takes three-fourths), "Scratch Cards" (imagine a scratch-off lottery card that NEVER FREAKIN' PAYS OFF), and even occasional random credits just for being a nice person. (Or so I like to tell myself.)

Something that's becoming quite popular is the "Rent My Blog" program, in which one blog trades credits for a prominent link on another blog. And, being the independent non-conformist that I am, I jumped right on the ol' bandwagon.

Last week, I rented my blog out for the first time, for the princely sum of 15 credits. I had six offers. I took the one that signed up first. Out of the 1,473 visits I had last week from 662 unique visitors, my renter got 44 click-throughs. Now, a three-percent click-through rate may not sound like much, but compared to stats from other blog rentals, it's not too shabby. (Especially since my renter took his blog completely off-line for half the week, the yutz.)

So, today I put my blog up for rent again. I doubled the price to 30 credits, thinking it would narrow the field of candidates somewhat. Three hours later, I had 11 bidders. So much for narrowing the field.

This time, I read each bidder's blog carefully. Several of them were quite entertaining, and each of them had something unique to offer. I was sorely tempted to go with the blog that accompanied each entry with a picture of a different huge-breasted woman (the kind of bustline that, if she were to try jogging, would result in two black eyes and a severe case of whiplash), but ultimately realized the Wife would kill me if I did. Plus, there's something kind of cheap and tawdry about pandering to the masses like that, and anybody who writes an entire blog entry around the word "antidisestablishmentarianism" definitely CANNOT be accused of pandering to the masses.

Ultimately, I selected the one that I thought visitors to my sick funhouse would enjoy the most. That's it over on the top right: "Jane Loves Tarzan". I chose her blog, even though when I tried to rent hers, she shot me down cold. But I'm not bitter. Really. I'm not. I'm a better man than she is (which, I suppose, goes without saying).

It's not a uterus, dammit!

Besides being quite a witty and prolific blogger, Jane is also a USC fan, who refers to the University of Texas as the "team with the female-reproduction-diagram-logo" and the team itself as "the Uteri". Them's fightin' words, woman ...

So, one reason I have chosen Jane's blog as this week's renter is so I can watch her grovel at my feet on January 4th, right after the Rose Bowl, when her Mighty Trojan-Enz have been laid waste by the thundering herd from Austin.

Please click here or on the thumbnail in the sidebar, and pay "Jane Loves Tarzan" a visit. (Oh, and Jane: "Uteri" this, bee-yotch ...)

You Won't Learn THIS Crap On "Sesame Street"

2005-12-17T15:32:00.000-06:00

(Disclaimer: This entry contains lots of twelve-dollar words. If big words make you nervous, here's a website you'll find more to your liking.)

When I was a tender tyke, I had a talent for being a (nearly) champion speller. One particularly fond memory was of winning a spelling bee after I had already been buzzed out (the pronouncer had mispronounced the word "ingenuous", saying "ingenious", which I spelled correctly. I was reinstated to the bee in time for the final round, which I won. Nyaah).

Just because I was such an annoying child, I mastered the oral spelling of the word "antidisestablishmentarianism" in four seconds flat (a skill which I still have to this day and which, I assure you, doesn't even appeal to anyone as a drunken party trick). I didn't know what antidisestablishmentarianism meant, nor did I care. It was, as far as my tiny, immature brain could conceive, the longest word in the English language, and spelling it became a really good way to annoy my family and (rapidly-dwindling number of) friends.

In fact, it was not until I was researching another article last week that I had occasion to look up the word. Antidisestablishmentarianism really does mean something other than "long, obnoxious word". In the 19th century, it referred to opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England as the official state religion. Today, it means opposition to the belief that there should no longer be an official church in a country.

"What does this have to do with ANYTHING?" I hear you scream. Well, this leads us to the most entertaining website on the Internet: Wikipedia. You won't find the entry for "antidisestablishmentarianism" particularly entertaining. But leave it to those linguistic lackeys who contribute and revise Wikipedia to make this 28-letter word even longer (and, oddly, much more interesting) ...

Of course, I haven't seen anyone professing antidisestablishmentarianism by that name lately. Perhaps this particular movement is dead. Perhaps I'll restart it. That's right, it's neoantidisestablishmentarianism ...

We're up to 31 letters now.

In that case I will start a counter-movement: contraneoantidisestablishmentarianism [37 letters]

Making your actions: contraneoantidisestablishmentarianistic [39 letters].

Contraneoantidisestablishmentarianistically [43 letters] inclined people of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but your brains!

All that in one entry. Kill him.

What about pseudocontraneoantidisestablismentarianistically? that's longer.

Yep, we're up to 49 letters now. I can't even think that long.

I hate those people who love to pretend to be a contraneoantidisestablishmentarianist, therefore I will act contrapseudocontraneoantidisestablishmentarianistically.

55 letters ... ugh. Those overly-erudite wags have managed to nearly double the length of a word that was already the longest non-engineered-for-length word in the English languge.

And at my most obnoxious, even I would never attempt to spell contrapseudocontraneoantidisestablishmentarianistically aloud, because I would become an outcast in my own community, and deservedly so.

Now that displays of intelligence and independent thinking are considered un-American, it seems the only place language geeks can go to show off their brains is behind the scenes at Wikipedia.

Personally, I blame Dubya. (So what else is new?)

An Unsolicited Testimonial

2005-12-16T18:50:00.000-06:00

Don't get annoyed with me because I haven't posted another blog entry in the past few days. I value your intelligence, dear Reader, far too much to slap some piece of tripe together just to make it look like I post every couple of days. You deserve all the genius I can muster (which ain't much), and by God that's what you're gonna get, so I'm fighting the urge to blog about the finale of The Apprentice in favor of something really, really special.

Speaking of really, really special, I want to direct you to one of the blogs on my Blogroll to the right. "Scheiss Weekly" is written by a very prolific, very witty schoolteacher, who has a lot to say about the current state of education (as well as the rest of the world). It never ceases to amaze me how she can write so many entries so quickly, and yet so eloquently, about so many various topics.

Her blog is one of my favorites, and I encourage you to pay her a visit. Please feel free to tell her Gary sent you. She has no idea who in the world I am, so the name won't mean a thing to her. But maybe I'll get a blog entry out of it.

People Eating Tasty Animals

2005-12-13T14:00:00.000-06:00

Vegan. The very word sounds like something out of "Star Trek". ("Captain, the Vegans are locking phasers." "Sulu, get us out of here!")

Vegans and vegetarians, as you probably know, are very different things. A vegetarian won't eat meat. A vegan won't eat meat, honey, eggs or Jell-O; won't drink milk; won't wear leather shoes, wool sweaters or silk underwear; and generally doesn't smile very much.

As a proud beef-chewing, leather-wearing, Jell-O-swilling carnivore, I have a bit of trouble identifying with the philosophies of either. As a wise human once said, "If God hadn't intended man to eat other animals, how come he made them out of meat?"

Many vegetarians and vegans believe that animals have just as much right to life as humans do. Well, that philosophy is fine and dandy, except it ignores the fact that animals have been eating other animals for millions of years. Antelopes have been brought down by lions, bears have been killed by wolves, and falcons swoop down to carry field mice to their eternal reward. Heck, for some species, eating one's partner after sex is part of the mating ritual.

So why should I feel guilty about eating a steak? I assure you, if overnight, cows somehow were to develop opposable thumbs and higher intelligence and language skills, they'd start hunting us as fast as they could. Our only defense would be to tip them over, and we all know how much fun that can be.

Vegans promote theirs as a healthier lifestyle. Well, a quick Google trip to VeganSociety.com brings up, on the very first page, an announcement of the passing of the Society's founder, Donald Watson. The picture accompanying the announcement ... shall we say, does not flatter Mr. Watson.

If that is what a vegan lifestyle makes you look like, pass the cold cuts.

Mr. Watson lived to the ripe old age of 95. If I only live to the still-green age of 70, and then keel over from heart disease and cholesterol, Mr. Watson will be just as dead as I will. But on my deathbed, I'll have a lifetime of memories of porterhouses and turkeys and barbecue and hamburgers, and wonderful Mexican dishes made with lots and lots of lard, and bacon and quiches and ...

(Well, okay, maybe not quiches.)

The point is, I would rather give up a few years and enjoy the different sensory experiences that life has to offer, than to live to a very advanced age having denied myself those same experiences. Because some of the wisest advice I've ever heard was from Burgess Meredith in Grumpy Old Men:

The first 90 years or so, they go by pretty fast. Then one day you wake up, and you realize that you're not 81 anymore, and then you begin to count the minutes rather than the days, and you realize that pretty soon you'll be gone. And that all you have, see, is the experiences. That's all there is, Johnny, to everything -- the experiences!

You mount the woman, son.

That's good advice. (Especially the last part.)

Life is not about trying to survive one day longer than the next guy; it's about collecting experiences. And, as good food excites all of our five senses (we hear the steak sizzling, we smell the char, we see the juicy grill marks, we taste the wonderful flavor, and we feel the scalding heat leave burned strings of dead tissue hanging from the roof of our mouth), we should incorporate an appreciation of that food into our life experiences, just so we can say we've really lived.

Besides, have you ever heard a carrot scream as it is ripped from the ground? Well ... neither have I. But if it had a mouth, the sound wouldn't be pretty.

I'm Not For Sale ... But I Can Be Rented

2005-12-10T21:25:00.000-06:00

There are certain things I won't do with this blog. It's here as an overflow vent for my brain, not as a money-making mechanism. I won't put Google ads on here, and I won't sell space.

At the same time, I have a raging ego, and want as many people reading this nonsense as possible. Yes, I'm a Traffic Ho, and I'm not ashamed to say it. So, while I haven't sold out ... I have leased myself.

Over to the right, you'll see our first tenant in the BlogExplosion "Rent My Blog" sweepstakes: "Haunted House Dressing", by writer Jeremy Shipp. I think you'll agree with me that, if nothing else, this is the most unique blog design you're going to find. (I'm still trying to wrap my brain around some of the things he has written ...)

Putting my blog up for rent was an interesting experience. Within three hours of posting its rental availability, I had six offers from six outstanding blogs. Jeremy got the spot because he bid first -- as near as I can tell, within one or two minutes of my putting this up for rent.

To the other five bloggers who wanted the slot: You do wonderful work, and I'd be pleased to showcase you, so please bid again next week. (But I may as well warn you: the price is gonna go up ...)

It's A New Look. Happy Now?

2005-12-09T15:56:00.000-06:00

I have finally shaken free of the shackles of the standard Blogger templates (none of which are particularly exciting, and my least-disfavored of which, the "Parchment" motif, has been used by everyone and their dog).

Well, no more. This is my new look. Dark and mysterious, like the inner recesses of my brain (and the back corners of my closets). Your opinions are eagerly solicited, and will be carefully considered, then disregarded as unpatriotic.

Merry Freakin' Winter Solstice

2005-12-08T14:01:00.000-06:00

In a comment to my last entry, someone (in an otherwise complimentary note) mentioned the "anti-Christian" tone of my posts. It's true that much of the humor (if you located any) in my last two entries centered around symbols of Christianity.

But let me be entirely clear about this. I am not "anti-Christian" at all. Christianity is actually a darned nice religion, as religions go. Christianity -- REAL Christianity -- preaches love and tolerance and happiness, and I have no problem at all with that.

So, I'm not in any way anti-Christian. But I am "anti-pompous hypocrites" and I am "anti-thought police" and I am "anti-Bible-thumping omnicrats". And, if you're a true Christian, you must agree with me that the so-called "Religious Right" (which, in my opinion, is neither) isn't making your faith look very good right now. Accordingly, they should be made fun of ... while we still have the freedom to make fun of them.

Consider, if you will, the latest fight the "religious" conservatives are picking (against their own pet Dubya, no less). President Bush sent out 1.4 million greeting cards wishing his close friends and supporters a happy "holiday season." No taxpayer money went into the printing or mailing of these cards, so that's a nice gesture. Well, because Bush didn't expressly wish everyone a "Merry Christmas", more than a few "Christians" are up in arms.

"This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture," said William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Bush "claims to be a born-again, evangelical Christian. But he sure doesn't act like one," said Joseph Farah, editor of the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com. "I threw out my White House card as soon as I got it."

Ummm ... 'scuse me? Last time I checked, Bush (like him or hate him) was President of 280 million Americans, not all of whom are Christian. So where's the beef?

Now, when people tried to call the Capitol Christmas Tree a "holiday spruce", House Speaker Dennis Hastert insisted on calling it a Christmas tree, not a "Hanukkah bush" or a "Kwanzaa shrub" or whatever. Fine. Trees are a Christian symbol of the holiday, and if you wanna call it a "Christmas tree", fine. It's a tree, for cryin' out loud.

And the White House sent out a greeting card. So what's the problem?

Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association (ugh), has called for a consumer boycott of Target stores because the chain issued a holiday advertising circular that did not mention Christmas. Last year, he aimed a similar boycott at Macy's. And this year, Macy's capitulated.

At the Catholic League, Donohue had just announced a boycott of the Lands' End catalogue when he received his White House holiday card. True, he said, the Bushes included a verse from Psalm 28, but Psalms are in the Old Testament and do not mention Jesus' birth.

Oh, sorry, the Psalm is from the Old Testament. My bad. The Old Testament contains obsolete old concepts like, oh I dunno, the Ten Commandments, which the religious nutcases have come to ignore with alarming frequency.

(Does it seem strange to you that fundamentalist Christians, who believe that the Scriptures are the literal word of God, also seem to think that the Old Testament was nothing more than a first draft that was superceded by the New Testament? I mean, if the Bible is God's word, then I'd think the Old Testament is just as important as the New. But what do I know, I'm a heathen ...)

You know the situation has spun wildly out of control when the most rational voice on the topic belongs to ... Jerry Falwell?!? "There's a verse from Scripture in it. I don't mind that at all, as long as we don't try to pretend we're not a nation under God," Falwell said.

That's a sign. The Apocalypse is coming. I can feel it.

* * *

In a similar vein, I stumbled across this blog entry that points out a few more fallacies in the "Religious Right's" selective use of the Bible to inflate their importance and ridicule their enemies, while ignoring a few more ... troublesome parts of Scripture that don't suit their purposes. Good stuff.

So no, I'm not "anti-Christian". I'm "anti-dogmatic moron". There's a world of difference.

This Year, Everybody Gets Myrrh

2005-12-04T14:07:00.000-06:00

The Christmas shopping season started early this year. It starts early every year. I think in 2005, you could see Xmas decorations in some stores on the day after Valentine's Day.

In a forest of iPods and Xboxes and silicon bakeware "for only three easy payments of $39.95", we are constantly ambushed with overhyped, overpriced, over-technologized (somebody call Webster's, I think I just invented a new word) items that nobody really needs.

This is the time of year when, regardless of our religious denomination, we should hark back to simpler times. I was musing upon this as I was wandering lost among the gift-baskets-in-bulk at the local Big-Box Warehouse Club, each basket of which could be mine for three easy payments of $39.95.

It occurred to me that, back at the first Christmas, they didn't have Big-Box Warehouse Clubs or Xboxes or ginsu knives. When the Messiah of Christian mythology (remember, I'm Jewish) was born, the Wise Men didn't try to give him an iPod. They brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

And then a bolt of brilliance hit me. Of course! No more trying to match impossible-to-afford presents with impossible-to-please relatives. This year, everyone gets one of three things: gold, frankincense, or myrrh.

Gold is too expensive. And frankincense sounds too much like the monster of Mary Shelley's book, which will certainly creep out the youngsters.

So this holiday season, everybody gets the gift that keeps on giving: Myrrh. It's fragrant, it's exotic, it has Biblical overtones, and best of all, it's cheap.

Myrrh is still readily available 2,005 years later (heck, Tom's of Maine makes a toothpaste that is loaded with the stuff). Myrrh is a gum resin that comes from Commiphora trees in Somalia and Ethiopia. These days, it's mostly used in the production of incense (and, of course, toothpaste. Here endeth the lesson).

Best of all, I can get a whole box of the stuff for 21 bucks. Ka-ching! My holiday shopping is now done. Everybody gets myrrh. And if anybody were to complain, they would be damning themselves to hell, because after all, if it was good enough for the Baby Jesus, it oughta be good enough for them. (Ingrates.)

So, naturally, I mentioned to the Wife my brilliant plans to dispense with holiday shopping.

Her response: "Who's Mur?"

I Found Jesus (In A Dress)

2005-11-29T12:43:00.000-06:00

(Since my last post on serious topics was such a resounding flop, we now return you to our regularly-scheduled goofiness ...)

FACT: Most depictions of Jesus of Nazareth (in the United States, anyway) portray the kind, beatific face of a white guy with long brown hair and brown or blue eyes.

FACT: According to historical documents, Jesus was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth, two towns in what is now Israel.

FACT: Israel is in the Middle East.

FACT: Middle Eastern men, for the most part, don't look like white guys.

FACT: Jesus, according to historical documents, was born to Jewish parents.

FACT: Middle Eastern Jewish men, for the most part, look even less like white guys. They tend to have big Jewish eyes and big Jewish noses. (And in case anyone thinks I'm making racist generalizations, be aware that I'm Jewish. And I have big Jewish eyes and a big Jewish nose. So get offa my back.)

It was over a big plate of nachos that the Wife and I were discussing how the American Christian congregations have stripped the ethnicity from their depictions of Jesus, to make him look as Nebraskan as possible, and mused on how Jesus probably looked.

And as we discussed the aforementioned Facts, the Wife, with one of those flashes of brilliance that makes me love her, exclaimed: "Jesus looked like Corporal Klinger!"

I blinked. Then I smiled. Once again, the woman is absolutely right.

Jesus probably bore a very strong resemblance to Jamie Farr, frequent game show guest and host of the Jamie Farr Owens Corning Golf Classic. And, oh yeah, he had a small but significant part in a '70s TV show called "M*A*S*H".

For those of you too young to recall, when the character of Cpl. Maxwell Q. Klinger was introduced, he wore dresses and women's jewelry (in a most non-effiminate way) to try to secure a medical discharge from the Army for mental instability.

Farr was born to Lebanese parents, and with his wiry black hair and hairy arms, made a rather ... interesting picture in the long gowns and sundresses the costumers chose for him. (Thank you, "M*A*S*H" producers, for keeping him away from mini-skirts!)

And, being from the same genetic part of the world as Jesus, there is probably substantial similarity between the way Jamie Farr looked when he was 30, and the way Jesus looked when he was 30.

Kinda makes you wonder what Jesus would have looked like in Bob Mackie, doesn't it?

(Yes, I'm going to hell. Your nasty letters ain't gonna change anything. "Judge not, lest ye be judged," and all that ...)

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

2005-11-25T16:26:00.001-06:00

I'll warn you up front: This is a much more introspective, philosophical blog entry than the fluff I typically write. (Yes, I too have a deep side. You just have to spelunk for it.)

People meditate in many different ways. A few of the more disciplined of us can do it quietly, sitting in some uncomfortable yoga position and muttering "Om ...". Others of us do it at the gym, iPods fastened to the waist and earphones wedged firmly in place, rocking out to the music of the day.

My own meditation method has always involved listening to "spoken-word" recordings and movies. When I'm working, I frequently have a verbal soundtrack or the commentary track of a DVD playing in my headphones. I don't listen too closely to the words that are used. I simply find the sound of a well-modulated speaking voice quite soothing. (I find "My Dinner With Andre" to be an outstanding film if you don't think too hard about the metaphysical implications of what Wally and Andre are saying, because listening to them just talk is quite relaxing.)

One of the more soothing voices I have come across recently, oddly enough, was recorded by Timothy Leary. For those of you under the age of 40, Dr. Leary was a Harvard psychologist who, in the 1960s, began to experiment and research the effects of LSD and marijuana use. He lost his Harvard tenure (and, at the same time, became a counterculture celebrity) by advocating the use of LSD as a consciousness-expanding chemical. Because of his drug advocacy and his popularity, President Nixon called Leary "the most dangerous man in America."

Now, I have never been a user of illegal drugs. I frequently find my grip on my raging subconscious to be tenuous enough, that I'd be a fool to ingest something that would cause my mind to act in unpredicable ways. I don't avoid drugs because they're illegal; I avoid them because they have no appeal to me. I tried smoking pot once when I was 17; I was drunk on beer at the time. In a flash, the pot sobered me up. This effect frightened me enough that I lost all interest in ever trying pot, or any other mind-altering drug, ever again.

Nevertheless, I found some spoken-word tracks of Dr. Leary on the Internet, and as I had never actually heard his first-hand words on the subject for which he had been so infamous, I took a listen. Timothy Leary turns out to have one of the most soothing voices I have ever heard. I can see why so many counterculture activists of the time would have wanted to follow Dr. Leary's path to "enlightenment"; I almost found myself becoming curious as to whether I would benefit from a dose of LSD. (I'm still much more curious, however, as to what it would feel like to win the lottery. But I digress.)

Even though I was listening to a drug-addled symbol of the hippie '60s, Dr. Leary made a number of good points with his quiet, hypnotic voice. One of them snapped me right out of my meditation, stopping me cold:

Why is it that every generation forgets this lesson of the past? Why is it that each generation harasses and persecutes its gentlest, wisest, and holiest men - exactly those men that succeeding generations would revere?

Dr. Leary proceeded to opine that the reason was every human's fixation with "pleasing Mother" (which, I guess, explains most of the premise of Hitchcock's 1960 film "Psycho"), but it occurred to me that the issue is probably one of the most fundamentally indefensible in human history:

Why do we, as a race, proceed to shout down and criminalize those who preach peace and harmony? Socrates, Gautama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Mohandas Gandhi, the Dalai Lama - all harrassed and imprisoned, all (except for the Lama) martyred, all remembered fondly by history for their philosophies, but shunned as outcasts by the political and social leaders of their times. (Heck, Galileo spent his last years under house arrest for heresy for suggesting that the sun didn't revolve around the earth!)

And we, as a society (regardless of which society it is), while we preach tolerance of countercultural viewpoints, haven't changed one bit. If Jesus were to return to earth today, he'd be jailed or assassinated in no time flat.

(Apropos of nothing: Here's an interesting clip - funny, but sad at the same time - showing what a political ad might have looked like if Jesus had opposed Dubya in the 2004 presidential election.)

Right now, we live in a world where Israel fights terrorist attacks with terrorism of its own. The U.S. arbitrarily suspends international treaties, the Geneva Convention, and the civil liberties of its own citizens in the name of fighting terrorism. Hatred is the order of the day. What possible chance does someone who preaches love and beauty have against such a vicious social order - especially when we need love and beauty now more than ever?

Timothy Leary, where are you now that we really need you?

BO-Zha-Lay Nue-VOE

2005-11-17T17:44:00.000-06:00

On the third Thursday of each November, the Wife and I make a pilgrimage to the local spirits mega-store for a time-honored ritual. For it is on this day that the new Beaujolais Nouveau is released to a thirsty public.

From IntoWine.com:

At one minute past midnight on the third Thursday of each November, from little villages and towns like Romanèche-Thorins, over a million cases of Beaujolais Nouveau begin their journey through a sleeping France to Paris for immediate shipment to all parts of the world. Banners proclaim the good news: Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé! "The New Beaujolais has arrived!" One of the most frivolous and animated rituals in the wine world has begun.

Less than a month ago, these Beaujolais grapes were on the vine in the Bordeaux region of France. And now, a small portion of their fermented juice is parked inside a case of wine bottles in my dining room.

Beaujolais Nouveau is definitely not a wine to be snobbish about. It's meant to be chilled (not cellared), to be drunk now (not aged), and to be guzzled (not sipped). It's like box wine, but with two important differences:

1) It's cheaper; and
2) It's a hell of a lot better.

Here in Houston, where the Wife and I are quite well wine-educated but our favorite bottles include "Marilyn Merlot" and "Old Fart", the case price for the Georges Duboeuf 2005 Beaujolais Nouveau works out to about $7.19 a bottle. Although the price has climbed over the years, you still can't beat that for a bottle of vin ordinaire.

Duboeuf, who is the largest negociant (wine grape broker) in Bordeaux, writes: "This should prove to be an excellent year. I have rarely seen a crop so healthy. ... I am so bowled over by this marvelous crop that I am convinced of the exceptional quality of the fast approaching vintage."

This being the first day of the Beaujolais Nouveau release, many wine shops will run out of their initial allotment quickly. That's certainly the case at the neighborhood store, where I had the good fortune to arrive literally two minutes after their allotment did. The Nouveau was literally being moved into the store when I grabbed the first case.

We've got ours. And we look forward to toasting our wine tradition tonight, with a glass of the cheap, good stuff.

Somewhere, Pat Robertson Is Smiling

2005-11-15T13:17:00.000-06:00

Marguerite Perrin is America's newest celebrity, and as any good celebrity does, she now has her own bobblehead doll. But I'll get to that.

I should clarify. Her friends and family know her as "Marguerite Perrin". The rest of us know her as that crazed, wild-eyed, rotund, toothless, screaming "God warrior" from the past couple of weeks of FOX's "Trading Spouses". (You know, the raving lunatic on the plugs FOX ran for about a month before the show aired? If you watched the World Series, you saw it a half-dozen times per night ...)

This blog entry isn't about the fine example of Christianity at work known as Marguerite (although, in a nutshell: This "devout Christian" mom - though you couldn't tell it from her judgmentalism and temper - was paired up with a pagan family, and was not only condemning everyone and everything she saw in that house to Hell, but when she got home, launched into the famous tirade about everything in her pure household having been contaminated by non-believers).

No, actually, this is about the brilliant eBay auction featuring a handmade, one-of-a-kind "God warrior" bobblehead doll. Crank up your computer's audio and click on the link, and brace yourself for the kind of genius that makes you wince.

You'll first hear a brilliant New Age-y tune that samples Ms. Perrin's tantrum quite nicely. But read on, and you'll see that this bobblehead doll not only looks like her, but comes with 12 - count 'em, twelve - sound samples! Yes, now YOU can have this screaming nutburger in your house, 24/7!

(Oh ... and as of midday 11/17, the bidding is currently up to $750. I hope the entrepreneur responsible for this made a mold, and can churn out a few more of these - I smell a marketing opportunity! Oh ... no, wait, that's just Marguerite ...)

(P.S.: Be sure to hover your mouse over M.P.'s disembodied face halfway down the page, to see her change into something quite appropriate.)

* * *

On the subject of going to hell, I got a good laugh from this page which I stumbled across while researching this entry. Not that the way I stumbled across it is particularly interesting, but it shows you how my mind works:

The eBay auction page has a graphic near the top which allows you to click on a number and hear one of the samples the bobblehead doll will say to you. The numbers are 1 through 12, but for some reason, they omitted the number 5. The Wife mused that perhaps Marguerite found that particular digit to be un-Godly, although we agreed that "6" was a more likely candidate, since "666" was considered to be the Mark of the Beast and all that.

Well, that led me to wonder who might have had the intestinal fortitude to order the phone number 666-666-6666. Well, type that into Google and notice the first two excerpted words of the very first entry listed; quite apropos, I thought, but certainly not for the faint of heart.

But the Wife pointed out that there is no "666" area code, so I Googled 666-6666. Once I got past Corky and the Juice Pigs and the New York limousine companies, I found this page. (I particularly liked the entry for 1-900-666-6666 - "Live Beasts, available now! One-on-one pacts! Only $6.66 per minute! [Must be over 18]")

Hmmm ... you know, maybe it would be safer for me to blog about children and puppies and Liberals. I certainly shouldn't be left to my own devices on this thing.

Battle Of The Blogs: Not Too Proud To Beg

2005-11-14T16:46:00.000-06:00

Okay, I knew my sense of humor wasn't for everybody. But this is getting ridiculous.

I have entered BlogExplosion's "Battle Of The Blogs" seven times. That means putting up 70 hard-earned credits in the spirit of "friendly competition". My record in those competitions is a not-so-friendly 0-and-7. (Well, you can't fault me for consistency.)

The irony is, I thought the recent "Charlie Brown on steroids" mock screenplay was one of the most inspired things I had come up with recently. You may see that as tragic. I see that as a glimmer of hope for the imminent return of my creativity.

I have been surveying a lot of blogs on BE lately. Most of the ones that tend to win the "Battles Of The Blogs" tend to fall into one of the following categories:

o "I have kids and they're a handful, but I love them anyway"
o "I saw the CUUUUTEST dog this afternoon"
o "The Fleemistat XQ428R has 12 GHz of power and is the raddest video card for gamers"
o "Here's a link to a pithy comment that somebody else wrote"
o "All liberals hate America, and Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh always speak the truth"
o "Have you found Jesus?"

Now, these aren't the universal winners, to be sure. Two of the lowest-ranked Battle blogs belong to a Phillipine IT corporation (0-for-31) that excerpts press releases from tech companies (I'd link to it, but their server went offline as I was writing this - no joke), and to an evangelical balloon artist (0-for-27) who spreads the Lord's word through his animal sculptures.

This is who I'm down there at the bottom of the pack with.

Heck, even the dead-last lowest-ranked Battle blog sports a record of 240-717, which gives him a winning percentage of .251. My winning percentage, in case you need help with the math, is .000.

And so, I'm begging. My ego can't take much more of this. I am asking for your pity vote. Let me win just one "Battle Of The Blogs". Just ONE. Just enough to validate my existence on the planet.

(Do you feel sorry for me yet?)

UPDATE: I won my first battle! Thank you! Whining and griping got me a victory ... hmmm, maybe our current Administration is onto something ...

It's The Great Steroid, Charlie Brown

2005-11-10T16:56:00.000-06:00

EXT. A BASEBALL FIELD

It's springtime, and the Peanuts gang is getting ready to fling the horsehide around. With a peppy Vince Guaraldi tune playing in the background, LINUS, LUCY, SCHROEDER, PIG-PEN and SNOOPY are taking turns at batting practice. With SCHROEDER in full CATCHER'S GEAR behind the plate, and PIG-PEN on the pitcher's mound (which is obscured by a cloud of dust), LUCY swings the BAT and hits the HORSEHIDE on a liner to shortstop, where SNOOPY catches the ball in his mouth. LINUS, in the on-deck circle, carefully folds up his SECURITY BLANKET and approaches the plate.

PIG-PEN
Hey, has anybody seen the round-headed kid today?

LUCY
When I saw him yesterday, he was even moodier than he was the day before. He's getting Charlie Brownier every day!

SALLY walks by.

SALLY (to LINUS)
How is my sweet babboo today?

LINUS
I'm not your sweet babboo! Where is your brother?

SALLY
He'll be here soon. He said he had to take a B-12 shot, whatever that is.

SCHROEDER
Do you guys think we can actually win a game this season?

LUCY
With that blockhead as our manager? Are you drunk?

SCHROEDER
Only a little ...

SCHROEDER is interrupted by a loud, angry scream out of frame, followed by the sound of splintering wood. Into frame comes CHARLIE BROWN, scowling and frowning, and carrying a broken BAT HANDLE. CHARLIE BROWN'S head, which was already too large for his body before, is now hugely disproportionate to the rest of him. When he speaks, his voice is deep and raspy, like Larry King after a two-day bender.

CHARLIE BROWN (to everyone)
What the hell are you looking at?

SALLY
Big brother, you've changed ...

CHARLIE BROWN (to SALLY)
Zip it, you little shit, or I'm gonna replace your contraceptive gel with superglue!

LUCY
Charlie Brown, we need to talk.

CHARLIE BROWN
So talk, bitch.

LUCY (takes a deep breath)
Charlie Brown, we've all noticed some changes in you in the last couple of weeks. You've gotten meaner, your head has gotten larger, and your testicles have gotten smaller.

LINUS (sotto voce, to LUCY)
How do you know his testicles have gotten smaller?

LUCY (sotto voce)
None of your goddamn business.
(to CHARLIE BROWN, normal voice)
Meanwhile, you're pitching the horsehide over 110 miles per hour, and you're hitting home runs 500 or 600 feet. Now what we want to know is, why?

CHARLIE BROWN pauses, glaring at LUCY. Then, he breaks down crying.

CHARLIE BROWN
I'm so tired of losing all the time! I just want to win one game! I just want to score one run! ONE RUN! Is that too much to ask, you skanky piece of ho-meat?

The GANG looks at each other. Then:

LINUS
Charlie Brown, are you juicing?

Before CHARLIE BROWN can answer, a tall ADULT appears at the side of the frame.

ADULT
Bwa bwa bwa, bwa bwa bwa bwa ...

The ADULT hands CHARLIE BROWN an ENVELOPE and leaves. CHARLIE BROWN opens the ENVELOPE and reads the letter inside.

SCHROEDER
What is it, Charlie Brown?

CHARLIE BROWN
It's a Congressional subpoena. They want me to testify against that BALCO guy who gave me the -- um, the ... nutritional supplements.

THE GANG (together)
You're a blockhead, Charlie Brown!

CHARLIE BROWN
Good grief!

If I Had Something To Say, I'd Have Blogged By Now

2005-11-09T20:01:00.000-06:00

Blogging is rough when you have nothing going on. Oh, I could blog about Scooter Libby, or Bush's plummeting approval ratings, or how the most talented player in the NFL has pretty much wrecked his career with his big mouth, or what a lying sack of steroids Rafael Palmeiro is ... but EVERYBODY is blogging about those things.

And since "Lost" is in reruns, and the Mad Angelenos are in Europe, and my few measly GOOD ideas are going to my paying gig (sorry, blog-fans), I find myself sitting in front of my computer, picking crumbs out of my belly button and trying to find something warped and humorous to say. (And how I got crumbs in my belly button, when I've been fully-dressed and without snack food all day, I dunno.)

But, since my lady is suffering from the Creeping Crud, humor is not foremost on my mind. (Shame, too, because I've conjured up some great non-sequiturs but have come up with no context in which to place them.) All I'm doing is realizing that we can either go on vacation this year, or get our pool re-plastered and re-decked, but not both. And, while a swimming pool may not increase a home's resale value, a crappy swimming pool can darn sure decrease it.

Not much of a blog this time, is it? Trust me, when I have spare flashes of brilliance, I shall share them with you. (And if anybody can recommend a good street source for flashes of brilliance -- the high-quality, pure stuff -- please let me know.)

Past Time For Our National Pasttime

2005-10-29T13:56:00.000-05:00

"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again. Ohhhhhhhh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come."
- "Terrence Mann", "Field of Dreams" (1989)

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."
- A. Bartlett Giamatti, 1988

"The season's over. Now what do I do? I'm bored out of my skull ..."
- Me, 2005

Takei (Rhymes With Gay)

2005-10-29T00:10:00.000-05:00

I am very unhappy with George Takei.

Takei, also known as Mr. Sulu from the original Star Trek TV series, announced on Thursday that he's gay. He has come out of the transporter room most flambuoyantly, citing the influence of the character he portrays in the play Equus as having inspired him to go public.

In so doing, Takei has completely stolen the thunder from Sheryl Swoopes' announcement on Wednesday that she's gay. Doesn't seem particularly sporting of George to step on Sheryl's coattails, particularly since six-foot-tall Sheryl can beat the snot out of five-foot-eight George. (But she wouldn't, because he's 68 years old and, you know ... gay.)

I was particularly taken aback by Ms. Swoopes' announcement. Swoopes, a WNBA star, is a lesbian? I am shocked -- shocked! -- to hear that there are lesbians in women's sports! Particularly since, 20-some years ago, I was a radio play-by-play man in the women's athletic department of a major university. I knew a lot of female athletes in a lot of different sports, and let me tell you this: That was one of the leanest dating periods of my life.

So, the hip new thing is to announce you're gay. Ellen DeGeneres has done it; Nathan Lane has done it; Rosie O'Donnell has done it; and Anderson Cooper is waaay out there. The Queer Eye Fab Five are still hot (I'm talking about their careers, now), and rumor has it that even Harvey Fierstein and Richard Simmons just might be a little light in the loafers.

It's hip to be gay. It almost makes me wish I were gay, just so I could come out and be trés chic. (But, alas, I prefer the fairer sex -- a preference that Sheryl Swoopes and I have in common.)

Well, Phooey.

2005-10-26T23:51:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to the Chicago White Sox.

If the Houston Astros can't get a base hit off of a tiring Sox pitcher Freddy Garcia, when Astros pitcher Brandon Backe turned in the best pitching performance of his life, then the 'Stros don't deserve to win.

But hey, we got farther than the Dodgers, Angels and Red Sox did ... so, now that I've alienated all of my readers, I'm gonna go drown my embarrassment.

All Your Base (and Home Plate) Are Belong To Us

2005-10-26T01:24:00.000-05:00

The Chicago White Sox have won 10 of their last 11 baseball games, all in the playoffs. They have come from behind to beat the Houston Astros in their last two games, and now lead the World Series 3 games to none. In the process, they have beaten our three best pitchers, who are arguably the three best pitchers in the National League.

Now the Astros' World Series hopes are in the hands of ... Brandon Backe?

Here's hoping we can at least keep from embarrassing ourselves tonight. Win one -- just ONE, for cryin' out loud ...

Home Field Advantage, My Ass

2005-10-25T15:58:00.000-05:00

Our local radio station just announced that the retractable roof at Minute Maid Park will be open for tonight's Game 3 of the World Series. The retractable roof, last time I checked, is part of the Houston Astros' home field. That's where they'll be playing Game 3 tonight.

The Astros wanted the roof closed. That would have been their home-field advantage, which they are supposed to enjoy for Games 3, 4 and (if necessary) 5 of the Series. Major League Baseball, however, doesn't want to pass up their aerial shots of the diamond as provided from the Met Life blimp or the Coca-Cola blimp or the "Family Guy Only On FOX" blimp.

So, good-bye home field advantage. Hello, crass commercialism conspiring to once again send a tiny but significant streak of luck the way of the Chicago White Sox.

For those of you who aren't baseball fans, you may be asking, "What difference does it make?" Well, when the roof is closed and the seats are full, Minute Maid Park is the loudest stadium in baseball -- maybe the loudest sports venue anywhere. Obviously, that helps the home team. Open up the roof, and it's just another ballpark.

It's supposed to get down into the 40s tonight. Didn't MLB learn anything with the drizzly, chilly weather in Chicago during Game 2? Didn't they learn that the players and, more importantly, the fans should be allowed to watch the game in a reasonable amount of comfort? Those fans who bought their tickets at face value (all 14 of them) paid $185 a piece; just about everyone else paid hundreds or thousands per seat. I say, give 'em shelter.

It's the Astros' home field. Let them decide what to do with it. Thanks a lot, Bud Selig, for once again making the exact wrong call ...

So You Think YOUR Job Sucks ...

2005-10-25T13:37:00.000-05:00

Last night, the Wife and I were at the local big-box warehouse club. The name of it is unimportant, but every time I shop there, the five billionaire Walton kids get to fight over another buck of my money.

There was a man in there, dressed much nicer than the typical warehouse club employee. Shirt, tie, nice slacks. He was apparently selling video karaoke systems. I know this because he had a microphone in his hand, and was singing.

And absolutely nobody was paying any attention to him.

Had he been playing the autoharp and singing "Sureflow, Sureflow" at a medical supplies convention (there's a "Mighty Wind" reference for one or two of you), it wouldn't have been any less pathetic.

Lord, do I hope that guy was on salary ...

Houston, We DO Have A Problem ...

2005-10-23T23:24:00.000-05:00

Boy, do I hate to drag out that cliché, especially after ranting the other day about its overuse ... oh, but deal with it.

The Astros are in trouble. BIG trouble.

All season long, our closer Brad Lidge has been one of the most feared pitchers in baseball. But he has given up game-winning home runs to two of the last three batters he has faced -- after giving up only five homers in 70 appearances during the regular season. Let's put an even finer point on that stat: since June 1, Lidge had given up only two home runs in his last 47 regular-season appearances. And now in the past week, he's two-for-two.

After Lidge gave up the home run to Albert Pujols, Jayson Stark of ESPN wrote: "This year, in the regular season, [Lidge] blew just four saves. In his next save opportunity after those four, his numbers looked like this: 4 IP, 1 hit, 0 runs, 7 whiffs."

Well, Lidge's line after his NLCS blown save now reads: 1/3 IP, 1 hit, 1 run.

So the big question has become: Does Houston even have a closer anymore? Or, like former Yankees second baseman Chuck Knobloch (who after years of major-league baseball experience, suddenly forgot how to throw the ball to first base), has Lidge become a baseball-phobic head case that is now a much bigger liability to his team than an asset?

The Astros have Monday off. They're going to need it.

Boom.

2005-10-23T21:47:00.000-05:00

You saw this one driving up the block, didn't you?

Astros lead in the bottom of the 7th, 4-2. Dan Wheeler lets two Sox on base, and with two out, on what should have been a foul ball, the ump ruled that Wheeler had hit Jermaine Dye with a pitch (it actually hit his bat). The Sox cleanup hitter, Paul Konerko, is next to bat.

If you're an Astros fan, you already knew how this would end. The new pitcher, Chad Qualls, must not give Konerko anything to hit.

First pitch: Boom.

I wish I could say I'm disappointed, but the truth is, in a situation like this, you come to expect things like this when you're an Astros fan ...

It Sucks To Be Me

2005-10-23T17:28:00.000-05:00

Just finished playing in the PokerStars Blogger Championship. 1473 of us started the tournament. With 191 of us left, I was doing fairly well, on the button with KK. Doofus across the table, who has been trying to put the entire table on tilt for an hour, calls me all in with QQ. Only two cards in the deck can save him. Figures, a queen hits the flop. Bye-bye, Gary.

I don't mind losing poker hands -- it's part of the game. But somehow, it's particularly galling to get outdrawn by the most obnoxious (and arguably worst) player at the table. And it seems that "obnoxious" and "worst" go hand-in-hand oh, so often.

It also chaps me when I'm raised all-in by a player who has a worse hand than I do, and he's the one who catches to beat me. It seems only fair that, if he's the one who's going to raise me all-in, that I should be the one to suck out on him. That would be fair. (And if pigs could fly ... well, I sure wouldn't want to be standing underneath 'em.)

Just found out the goob who drew out on me is under 21. That really sucks. It means I'm more than twice as old as he is.

And don't give me that poker-book crap about "In the long run, the better player always wins." Hey, lemme tell you something: NOBODY is around for the long run. The "long run" is millions of hands over millions of years, when the number of hands played gets so large that statistical anomalies (like, oh, getting sucked out on a two-outer by an obnoxious dweeb after he raises me all-in from behind, and don't think this is the first time this has happened to me, nosiree) get lost in the sheer magnitude of the totals.

Poker is the only game in which a terrible player, playing at his absolute worst and with the odds solidly against him, can beat a great player, playing at his absolute best -- CONSISTENTLY. Maybe not indefinitely, but consistently nonetheless. I'm not saying I'm the absolute best (far from it), but at some point, you have to realize that God is trying to send you a message: "Schmuck, put down the cards and walk away."

Poker sucks, and then you die. (But at least I'm done with the tourney early enough to watch the World Series. )

* * *

Remember that the Atlanta Braves beat the Houston Astros in Game 1 of the National League Division Series. The Astros won that series 3-1. Then the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Astros in Game 1 of the NL Championship Series. The Astros won that series, 4-2.

And mind you, the Anaheim Angels beat the Chicago White Sox in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series. The Sox then swept the Angels to take the series, 4-1.

My point? The Sox have won Game 1 of the World Series. My prediction: It's over. Astros are a mortal lock now, baby ...

Houston, We Have A Cliché

2005-10-20T18:21:00.000-05:00

Did they have to go and do it?

Last night, the Houston Astros won their first National League pennant in 44 years of existence. Astros skipper Phil Garner looked right into the TV cameras and beamed, "Houston, we have a Series!"

This morning, the Houston Chronicle's banner headline read, "HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PENNANT".

Oh, sweet fancy Moses.

I'm particularly disappointed in the Chronicle. Think of all the potential headlines that would have made for fantastic round-the-globe repetition:

"AT LAST!"

"ASTROS FINALLY REACH ORBIT"

"GET DRUNK AND SCREW"

Instead, we get a re-hash of a 35-year-old panicked understatement from Apollo astronaut Jack Swigert. You may remember it from the movie Apollo 13, when they gave the line to Tom Hanks because, hey, he's a bigger star than Kevin Bacon: "Houston, we have a problem."

Boy, if I had a dime for every time I had heard that line, or a variation thereof, in one medium or another ... well, I'd have a lot of dimes.

During the Hurricane Rita traffic jam: "Houston, we have a traffic problem."

On Presidents' Day: "Houston, we have a mattress sale!"

When the BP refinery blew up, 60 miles away in Texas City: "Houston, we have a mushroom cloud."

And during my last physical exam: "Houston, we have a prostate."

Well, I have a new one to float. It's "Houston, we have had it UP TO HERE with that damn cliché!"

Jack Swigert is dead. We should let his exclamation rest in peace with him.

Lights-Out Lidge On The Open Prairie

2005-10-19T14:22:00.000-05:00

"Who am I? Why am I here?"

- James Stockdale

Or, more specifically, "Where the hell have I been?" Glad you asked.

I just returned from two weeks of work in Los Angeles. Because I'm self-employed and have to shell out my own overhead (what the rest of the world calls "travel expenses"), I load my days up with so much work that there's very little time for more mundane, but much more fun, tasks.

Like blogging. Or breathing.

I do take quick time-outs to enjoy the simple things, though. Sunday night was my last evening in L.A. I stood on the balcony of my hotel and watched the beams of the full moon, rising in the east, wash the city with its gentle light, leaving a delicate glow in its wake.

Until, that is, I realized that my balcony didn't face east -- it faced west, towards Santa Monica. Then I noticed the complete cloud cover and absence of anything resembling a moon, and I realized that the "delicate glow" was emanating from the radioactive April Winchell. After considering the possibility that April was, indeed, mooning me, I went back inside.

* * *

Because I spend two weeks at a time in L.A. when I go, and I like to have my own car and my own stuff (without worrying about airline baggage limits), I have driven from Houston to La-la Land many, many times. I swore that this would be my final driving trip (it's 23 hours, and even with an overnight stop and plenty of audiobooks to keep me company, it's a very tedious drive).

When you're driving through the Arizona desert, east of Tucson and west of civilization, it's not easy to pick up radio stations. Unfortunately for me -- a die-hard Houston Astros fan for nearly 30 years -- Game 5 of the National League Championship Series was being played. When I was driving through Phoenix and Tucson, I could pick up the radio broadcast of the game loud and clear. But now, here I was, somewhere far away from the middle of nowhere, and Astros closer Brad Lidge takes a 4-2 lead into the top of the ninth inning of the elimination game.

If Lidge gets three outs, the Astros go to their first-ever World Series. Thirty years of personal suffering would be rewarded with glee. If I couldn't be at the stadium in person, I would at least get to share vicariously in the victory over the radio.

If, that is, I could pick up a freakin' signal. But all I could hear was static.

Willcox, Arizona (Interstate 10, mile marker 340) apparently doesn't have a radio station. Or anything else. I had pulled off the highway to find a bar with a TV set, which would undoubtedly have been tuned to the game. It was 8:30 at night.

Willcox was deader than Tom Sizemore's career. Nothing but a couple of convenience stores and roadside restaurants was open. No bars, no saloons, no pubs, and NO TVs. Dammit!

Meanwhile, Lidge had gotten two quick outs. The Astros were one crummy out away from the Series. And while I was scrambling around the deserted town, seriously considering renting a cheap motel room just so I could watch the end of the game, "Lights-Out" Lidge got lit up.

Not until I finally got to El Paso some three hours later did I finally hear the result: two strikes on David Eckstein (one strike away!), and he singled. Then Jim Edmunds walked. Then Albert Pujols took a strike, and belted a slider that would have left the stadium if the roof had been open.

Win or lose tonight, I'll be blogging about the Astros tomorrow. Here's hoping I'm nursing a champagne hangover while I'm doing it.

It's Payback Time, Biyotch!

2005-10-09T23:43:00.000-05:00

Today was a good day to be a Houston sports fan. The Astros smoked, embarrassed, and totally destroyed the Atlanta Braves to win the NL Division Series. (Okay, so 7-6 hardly counts as a shellacking, and having taken 18 innings to finish the game, the Braves may not be the only team destroyed. Good thing the Astros don't have to play again until Wednesday -- Lance Berkman may be sound asleep until then.)

Now comes the piece of resistance: getting even with those girly-men from St. Louis who have the bird on their uniform blouse.

Last year, the Astros were within one game of going to their first-ever World Series. It would have been the first time in their 42 seasons. Roger Clemens was starting that Game 7. He had been brought out of retirement by the 'Stros for precisely this reason: to pitch the home team into the Big Dance. And ... he blew it.

This year, the Astros are only four wins away from going to their first-ever World Series. If they make it, it will be their first time in 43 seasons. Clemens is a big reason they're going to the NL Championship Series: he pitched the last three innings of today's 18-inning nailbiter. Out of the bullpen. First time he's pitched in relief in 21 years. Apart from Andy Pettitte (who will be starting Wednesday night's Game 1) and Roy Oswalt (who got burned up in yesterday's game), he was the last Astro on the bench.

And Chris Burke -- the second baseman who may never get to start at second base because some guy named Biggio just keeps producing and producing -- launched a walk-off homer to put the Braves (and all us devout Astros fans) out of their misery.

The Cardinals are ... well, the Cardinals. They swept the Padres. Big whoop. They ran away with the NL Central, but their record was no match for Houston's major-league best after May 15.

And I have a feeling that, come Wednesday, there are gonna be a few surprises in the NLCS. And the victorious team will be the one wearing red. Not Cardinal red -- brick red.

They say payback's a bitch. Hey, St. Louis, here's a friendly word of advice:

Prepare yourself for the bitch.

Taking The Hint

2005-10-08T16:10:00.000-05:00

I've been working in Los Angeles for the past five days. I'm out here for two weeks. During this trip, I was supposed to meet up separately with no fewer than three people, for dinner, drinks or coffee (respectively). Yet once I got here, not one of those three people have responded to my phone messages or e-mails.

And of those three people, two of them were established friendships (or so I had thought), and one was a person whose mutual acquaintance we were looking forward to making (or so I had thought). But all three of them have blown me off.

I know the problem can't be my breath, since none of these people have been around me recently to be olfactorily offended. I doubt it's my personal hygiene, since I do bathe with reasonable frequency. And unless they heard about my highly-contagious tuberculosis (which I've done my best to keep secret), concern for their health around me shouldn't be a factor.

(Okay, I was kidding about the TB. My lungs are actually quite happy to be out of the Houston humidity for a few days. And the smog in SoCal has been extremely light since I've been here, so special thanks go out to the L.A. drivers for keeping their emissions down during my visit.)

But the questions remain in my mind: Is it me? What did I do?

I can certainly understand how real life gets in the way, and how our planned visits might have to be rescheduled for another time. What I can't understand is how people who had been frequent correspondents suddenly just don't think I'm worth a quick return call or e-mail: "Hey. Something has come up. Thanks for thinking of us, and we'll try it again next time." It makes me wonder if those friendships were ever really there in the first place.

My apologies to those of you who have been waiting for a funny missive; this one certainly doesn't qualify as amusing. But I've been very busy since I've been here, and now that I have time to catch up on my thinking, I find that I have to chew on rejection by silence, three times over. And I can't help but wonder what I could have done to rank so low on the priority lists of three people that are so very different, yet all seem to agree on one thing:

"Gary isn't worth my time anymore."

Shilling For A Shilling

2005-09-30T13:54:00.000-05:00

I have registered to play in the
Online Poker Blogger Championship!

This event is powered by PokerStars.

Registration code: 8488912

Whee.

Bill Bennett, The Bilious Babbling Boob

2005-09-30T00:02:00.000-05:00

Blame the "liberal media" for once again grabbing hold of a conservative's stupid statement and disseminating it to We The People, thereby bringing embarrassment raining down upon him. No matter how richly that embarrassment is deserved, those damn Libs should just keep those little indiscretions hidden under the rug, where they belong.

(Just like the Republicans did when Bill Clinton got caught with his fly unzipped. But I digress.)

Reagan's secretary of education Bill Bennett has a radio show. (I know, I was surprised as well.) And Bill The Boob made a rather ill-advised comment on his September 28th broadcast:

I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

Now, to put his comment in context: His caller had hypothesized that the potential lost Social Security revenue from all aborted fetuses since Roe v. Wade was decided, would have kept the Social Security program fully funded. And Bennett was specifically addressing the theory in the book Freakonomics that the crime rate had fallen as the abortion demand had increased.

Still ... Bennett is a boob. No doubt about it. (And I mean no insult to all the lovely boobs out there. You know who you are, and discreet photos are always appreciated.)

The heck of it is, technically, Bennett is absolutely right. You could abort every black fetus in America, and your crime rate would go down. Similarly, you could abort every white fetus in America, and the crime rate would go down. You could abort every Hispanic fetus, same results. Asian fetuses? Same results.

For that matter, you could abort EVERY SINGLE FETUS conceived during the next twelve months, and the crime rate would eventually plummet. It stands to reason that, if you reduce the number of people being born, you will also reduce the number of people committing crimes. Heck, "ethnic cleansing" has been going on in the Middle East for many years now, and petty crime is down. Brutal murders by roving bands of religious fanatics may be on the rise, but petty crime is pretty low.

An inherently logical statement, however, does not necessarily make that statement rational. Or, for that matter, wise to inject into popular discourse.

But it is also not necessarily wise to try to grandstand on that display of ignorance to make your own political hay. That's why Democrats should not be screaming for Bennett to apologize. It would make a lot more sense to just let him twist in the wind, as Tom DeLay and Bill Frist and Michael Brown and, yes, even Dubya are doing.

Although they were foolish enough to have elected Dubya to a second term, the American people are not so stupid as to ignore the self-destructive hypocrisy of the "Family Values Party". By screaming about the GOP's mistakes from the top of Capitol Hill, the Dems only soil themselves with the ambient stench rising from the mess. Better to let Bill Bennett stink this one up all by himself.

DeLay: GOTCHA!

2005-09-28T13:58:00.000-05:00

I generally try to leave politics out of this blog. There are approximately three million blogs on the Web that deal with politics on a daily basis, and this isn't one of them. But today, I must allow myself to gloat just a bit.

An Austin grand jury has indicted Tom DeLay on a charge of criminal conspiracy. The (former) House Majority Leader (House rules require him to give up the leadership role while the indictment is pending) faces two years in prison for conspiracy to launder corporate political contributions.

Unlike most liberals, I'm not happy about DeLay's indictment because he's the ranking Republican in the House. I'm happy about it because Tom DeLay is a royal asshole-prick-moron-jerk who deserves all the bad karma life can throw at him.

Here is a partial list of Tommy Boy's stunts that I can name off the top of my head:

o When Houston's Metropolitan Transit Authority was seeking federal funds to build the initial phase of its new light-rail system, DeLay (whose district borders southwest Houston just outside the city limits) put language in the federal transportation bill that specifically prohibited Houston, and no other city, from using federal funds for light rail. This, after the voters of Houston had already approved a light-rail referendum at the polls.

o After the 2002 state elections gave control of the Texas Legislature to the Republicans, DeLay orchestrated the re-drawing of the state's districts for the House of Representatives. The districts were re-drawn to ensure that five Democrat congressmen would have to oppose strong Republicans for their seats. DeLay did this, even though the state had just been redistricted two years earlier according to the results of the 2000 Census.

o When the re-drawn map came up for a vote before the Texas Legislature, state Democrats fled Texas to break the quorum. DeLay asked the Justice Department and the FAA to track the Texas house speaker's private plane, so that Texas DPS officers could arrest the Democrats and bring them back to the Texas Capitol. (Fortunately, their jurisdiction ended at the state line, which is why the Dems spent the first special session in Oklahoma and the second one in New Mexico.)

o A year ago, when the possibility was first raised that DeLay could be indicted, the House Republican Conference approved a rule change that would have modified the rule requiring DeLay to give up his leadership post if the indictment came down. (Fortunately, the full House didn't go for this crap.)

o Tom DeLay was lighting up a cigar in a Washington, DC restaurant, and the waiter asked him to put it out. The waiter reminded DeLay that, being in a government building, no smoking was allowed. DeLay's response: "I am the government!"

Tom DeLay is not a nice person. And, partisan politics aside, it's nice to see a truly nasty man begin to finally get his.

I'll keep watching as his ship goes down. And gloating.

Hurricane Haiku

2005-09-26T18:43:00.000-05:00

Sweat dripping from brow

Raking leaves into a bag

Branches puncture bag.

Hefty makes weak bags

But it's all I have right now.

Raking never stops.

Limbs and leaves all o'er

Got to clean this big mess up

'Fore the lawn guys come.

Knowing them, they won't

Clean up the mess from Rita

Without charging more.

As big "blow jobs" go,

Rita was, shall I just say,

Unsatisfying.

But mostly, I'm glad

That nobody local died.

Especially us.

And glad we didn't

Have to depend upon that

Crappy gen'rator ...

Mundane Musings On A Monday

2005-09-26T13:21:00.000-05:00

It's hot here. VERY hot. You'd think the hurricane would have cooled things off a bit, but no.

Yesterday it got up to 101 degrees. With the 51 percent humidity (yep, Houston's mugginess factor is on the rise again), that meant it felt like 121.

When it's too hot to go swimming, you KNOW it's too freaking hot. (Did anybody remember to remind God it's September?)

So now, we're getting heat advisories from the National Weather Service. Personally, I've heard quite enough from the NWS during the past week. Wonder if I could persuade them to take a couple of weeks' vacation, and to turn the air conditioning up before they go?

Not to fear. In a week I'll be arriving in Los Angeles, where it's currently a nice, comfortable 74 degrees. Since for the last week I've been "Hurricane Boy", I'm half-expecting an earthquake to hit while I'm there. That would dovetail nicely with the way this month has been for me so far.

(You think Mr. KABC would put me back on the radio to report on an earthquake?)

* * *

Okay, so I know that's not much of a blog entry. I'm decompressing. I used up all of my creativity during the hurricane. Bear with me until my stress level ramps back up. Knowing me, it shouldn't take long.

Hurricane Post Lucky #13: The Post-Mortem

2005-09-24T12:58:00.000-05:00

God, what a mess.

Leaves all over the front yard, and covering the bottom of the pool. Our neighbors across the street have several tree limbs down in their front yard. (Silly us -- we foolishly paid a guy to thin out our tree a couple of weeks ago. The guy across the street gets Rita to do it for free.)

But, as far as the eye can see, absolutely no damage at all. Not to our house, or to any of our neighbors'.

We lost power here for a grand total of five seconds. Since I have a UPS on my computer, I didn't even have time to shut down before the power came back on. It was off just long enough to force us to reset every digital clock in the house. We have enough electronics here that at night, when all the lights are off, there is faint glowing coming from multiple points -- almost enough to navigate by once your eyes have adjusted to the darkness. Well, last night, all those glowing points were flashing.

Last night, I was too damn tired to care.

We've had the adrenaline pumping for three days, anticipating death and destruction and mayhem and broken windows and missing roofs and no showers and sweltering temperatures. The worst we suffered here? I was finally forced to clean out the garage so we could stash our cars in it. Our cars. Did you know two of them fit in a two-car garage just perfectly? Who knew?

A few hours of raking and scooping, and you'll never know anything ever happened in this neighborhood. I'll worry about those who lost everything later on. Right now, I'm just grateful that our lives haven't been seriously disrupted. I don't think a few hours of selfishness is inappropriate. I'm going to spend it holding my wife and telling her how much I love her.

But what the hell am I going to do with all of this ice I bought?

* * *

The gridlock is now heading toward Houston. Even though the mayor and governor have said "Don't come home yet, we haven't assessed the damage" (or, for that matter, figured out a re-population plan that would avoid the same problems the evacuation caused), people are heading to Houston. And the traffic jams have already begun.

There is no gasoline in Houston. There is no food. If you want a cold beer, you might be able to find a stray ice house that remained open throughout the storm, but that's about it. No pizza deliveries, no newspaper deliveries, no mail.

No mail?!?

Yep, it seems that old "Neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night" crap the Postal Service likes to quote doesn't say anything about hurricanes.

Since most of Houston was never under a mandatory evacuation order, officials can't deny residents of those areas the ability to come home whenever they want. But the big concern is how to get gasoline back into the city. Officials are not going to put the contraflow plan back into effect for returning traffic; they're saving those "outbound" lanes for gasoline tankers and emergency vehicles.

The problem is that once the tankers get here, they will be facing stations that are closed. The station owners and their employees may have evacuated. Coordinating this so that tankers and employees are there at the same time is going to be a mess that will take days to untangle.

Similarly, Southwest and Continental airlines won't be resuming flights in and out of Houston until tomorrow, because so many TSA baggage screeners had gone AWOL before the storm. Getting those baggage screeners back on the job (and handing them their asses on a platter) before resuming air travel is also going to be a challenge.

And my hands still smell like gasoline from messing with that damn generator a couple of days ago. It's the only gasoline smell you can find for 100 miles ...

* * *

I switched this blog over from my usual smart-assed comments to the hurricane story because, like so many other people, I was fascinated by the on-the-scene reports from those who were riding out Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. I thought I could do the same thing here. But certain conditions had been presumed: a working generator for when the power went out, lots of mayhem and destruction to report, and of course, national media coverage and mass adoration for my selflessness in bringing the story to you. (Hey, I got an ego too, yanno ...) None of those things happened.

From a dramatic perspective, this blog has been a total flop.

But I never expected the total success, either. I was a guest on L.A. radio, which is something I had never done before. Clearly, I was heard by dozens of people. I have received so many nice blog comments that I am genuinely touched and humbled. And I re-learned something I had long forgotten: how to write as well as I can speak. My strongest talent is extemporaneous speaking, but reducing those words to writing quickly was, for me, a lost skill. With this hurricane, I seem to have gotten it back. (Can a book deal be far behind?)

So, to April Winchell, Mr. KABC, everyone who read and enjoyed my dispatches, and most importantly, those of you who told me you did, I thank you. This has been a wonderful experience, and I wouldn't mind repeating it sometime (without the hurricane, of course).

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled rants and commentary about nothing much in particular ...

Hurricane Post #12: Saturday, 12:30 am

2005-09-24T00:33:00.000-05:00

Houston didn't dodge a bullet. We dodged a cannonball.

It's nearly 12:30 in the morning, and we never even felt particularly strong winds here. The rain is yet to come -- the eye of the hurricane hasn't yet come parallel to the city of Houston -- but the damaging storm surge and furious winds aren't likely to have an impact on us here.

What a letdown.

Don't get me wrong; I wasn't looking forward to broken windows and missing shingles and tattered gutters. Nor was I looking forward to comforting my wife through a night of howling winds and crashing thunder. But after days of preparing for the worst, and anticipating the worst, to find out that ... NOTHING HAPPENED ... is an incredibly anticlimactic way to end this vigil.

But make no mistake. We're going to hear a lot more about the effects of Hurricane Rita, because it is now predicted to make landfall (in about two hours) just east of Cameron, Louisiana. Cameron is not heavily populated by people. It is heavily-populated by petrochemical facilities, including Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminals and part of the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas are also heavy petrochemical centers. Those cities are expected to flood under a 20-foot storm surge. Cameron is expected to get a 15-foot surge. This isn't going to be good for any of us.

* * *

My thanks to Mr. KABC for letting me be part of his show for a couple of evenings. I spent about ten minutes chatting with him and Dr. George Fishbeck on KABC Radio in L.A. tonight.

Dr. George and I have something significant in common. Neither of us knows who the heck the other of us is.

But Mr. K, I appreciate the forum. And if you're in L.A., my radio stint is probably over, but please don't let that make you a stranger to this blog!

I'll post again in the morning.

Hurricane Post #11, Friday 11 p.m.

2005-09-23T23:04:00.000-05:00

First, thanks to everybody who has added such thoughtful comments to this blog, and to my mirrored blog on Myspace.com. (You're not missing anything; the other one says exactly what this one does.) Without exception, your comments have been positive and encouraging, and I really appreciate it.

Second, I checked in with Mr. KABC about a half-hour ago. He has a guest in the first hour, so I'm probably going to come on in the second or third hour to tell him that not much is going on here. And it's not. (Lack of tragedy makes for very boring radio.)

We've had a very light, steady rain for the past hour or so. Winds are gusty but not too strong. Obviously, I still have power, and I still have a DSL connection. Rain on the west side of Houston is anticipated to be four inches or less tonight (when did "four inches of rain" become a blessing?), and although winds are probably going to kick up as Hurricane Rita makes landfall about 3 a.m., obviously we are going to get off extremely easily.

One bit of somewhat hurricane-related news is that a fire has sparked in Galveston's historic Strand district. The winds in Galveston are much stronger than they are up here in Houston, and the burning embers are flying all over the place, threatening other historic buildings. Developing story. Galveston is obviously going to fare a lot worse than Houston will.

Back after the update on KABC ...

Hurricane Blog #10: Friday, 9:45 p.m.

2005-09-23T21:50:00.000-05:00

We in Texas are lucky. But our neighbors in Louisiana, once again, are not.

It's beginning to look like Hurricane Rita is going to come ashore just east of the Beaumont-Port Arthur area, right on the Texas-Louisiana border. Remember, everything west of the eye of the hurricane is on the "weak side". But everything east of the eye is gonna get socked.

And right now, southwest Louisiana is getting socked.

From AP: Steve Rinard, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Lake Charles, said he could not keep count of the tornado warnings across southern Louisiana. "They were just popping up like firecrackers," he said.

Emergency vehicles with FEMA are already staging at Reliant Park -- the same place that, just a week ago, was still sheltering evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. Regional disaster assistance is going to be dispatched from there as soon as the eye crosses over us, at about 3 a.m.

Meanwhile, the fear of a storm surge was a bit overblown for us. Because we're on the west side of the storm, and the winds are blowing north-to-south, the Houston Ship Channel is actually experiencing a "reverse surge" -- pushing water down into Galveston Bay. This puts Galveston Island in an interesting, but very real danger: being swamped from the land side, rather than the Gulf side.

Galveston Island is a barrier island. These huge, glorified sandbars are ever-shifting, transient coastal features. They gradually build up from silt and sand deposited on the coast by inland rivers. Nature designs them to disappear as they absorb the pounding from the Gulf waters. Typically, sand and silt are washed off the leading edge of the island, but are re-deposited on the back side.

Well, beach erosion in Galveston has been a long-evolving story. It's some of the most-desired property in all of Texas, because 99 percent of the time, it's all beautiful beach and clean salt air. But as the beach erodes and the vegetation line moves, beach homes that were once well off the beach, are now on public state property.

And people who can afford beach homes can also afford to lobby elected officials quite successfully. Two years ago, officials spent millions of dollars to renourish "starving" beaches on the western end of Galveston Island, adding acres of shoreline. That summer, a minor hurricane, Claudette, made landfall down the Texas coast. Although the storm only produced about 45 mph winds in Galveston, it stripped away a third of the new beach. A University of Texas study estimates that most of west Galveston Island, where the lion's share of new development is taking place, loses 9 feet of coast a year.

So even though Hurricane Rita's full fury has missed us, it will be interesting to see how much of Galveston Island will be left when all this is said and done.

* * *

I'm expecting a call from Mr. KABC at about 10:30 p.m. Central time to set up another appearance on tonight's show. I believe I'm going to be on at 9 p.m. Pacific (11 p.m. Central). The live audio stream can be found here.

Hurricane Blog #9: Friday, 8:15 p.m.

2005-09-23T20:26:00.000-05:00

About an hour ago, the first drops of rain started to fall. As I write this, we're still getting a very light drizzle, with light gusts of winds. From here, not much of a hurricane so far.

On the Texas-Louisiana border, however, things are getting quite hectic. Heavy rain and winds are hitting Lake Charles, blowing east to west. Over us right now, the clouds are moving north-to-south, blowing out toward the Gulf. That's good news for us for two reasons:

(1) The outer arms of Rita are coming ashore in Louisiana, rotating counter-clockwise around the offshore eye, and by the time those arms brush up against Houston, the winds and rain are pretty much spent.

(2) The north-to-south winds gather up dry air from outside the hurricane path and drag it across us, absorbing quite a bit of the water and wind that is left in those spiraling arms.

My sister in Katy (25 miles due west of downtown Houston) has lost power. For the life of me, I can't figure out how -- the sky looks ugly, but the storm hasn't hit this side of town yet. At this point, we're just waiting to get this show on the road.

That's about all that's going to get on the road. I spoke with my mother in Nashville -- 850 miles away -- and the gas stations are sold out there as well. It appears there is no gasoline in this part of the country.

Meanwhile, by this morning, at least three people had already been arrested for looting. Three kids were rummaging through an evacuated middle school, looking for electronics.

Looters would be well-advised to remember that in Texas, many civilians are licensed to carry concealed weapons. Think about that before you try to break into that pawnshop ...

Hurricane Blog #8: Friday, 5 p.m.

2005-09-23T17:07:00.000-05:00

We're going to dodge this bullet. But we might get a bit splattered by the impact nonetheless.

It now appears very likely that Hurricane Rita is going to make landfall to the east of Galveston Bay, over toward Beaumont and the Louisiana border. Good news for us.

Bad news for my wife's brother, who lives in Beaumont. And not good at all for the residents of Lake Charles, Louisiana, who are about 30 miles east of the Texas-Louisiana border. Lake Charles happens to be where a lot of the evacuees from Hurricane Katrina had found hotel rooms. Well, a good number of those hotels are on the lake ... right next to the casino riverboats docked beside them. And I think we all remember what the casino barges in Biloxi and Gulfport looked like after Katrina passed through.

We're now worrying more about flooding -- not from the storm surge, but from the rain produced by the hurricane. Rita is considered a "dry" hurricane, and as long as the storm keeps moving quickly, it probably won't dump more than 5-8 inches of water on us. Houston's bayou system can handle that amount of rainfall, with minimal flooding, and even with a small storm surge pushing back the other way.

But as I've mentioned before, hurricane guru Dr. Neil Frank sees high-pressure areas to the west and the east of the hurricane's projected track, each area alternating between strengthening and weakening. The hurricane will continue to move in the direction of the strongest high-pressure area, which means that the storm may well stall somewhere between the two areas. If that stall happens, it could happen anywhere between Galveston and Dallas. If it stalls, somebody is going to get 20-25 inches of rain.

And if that happens over Houston, it'll be Tropical Storm Allison all over again.

Last night on his radio show, Mr. KABC tole me that he didn't recall hearing about Allison in June 2001. Our understanding here in Houston was that this was very definitely a national news story. Please comment and tell me: does anybody remember Houston getting flooded a few months before 9/11? Or did I simply assume that the story was not as big as we thought it was?

Anyway, if the storm permits, I'm going to be back on with Mr. K tonight. Airtime is 9 pm Pacific time (11 pm Houston time). The live audio stream can be found here.

And speaking of live Internet streams, if you want to see video of the local coverage I prefer, go to khou.com. When you see just how un-photogenic Dr. Neil is, you'll know how good of a meteorologist he really is ...

Next report when the winds pick up.

Hurricane Blog #7: Friday, 1 p.m.

2005-09-23T13:20:00.000-05:00

The story just shifted back to New Orleans.

A patched levee failed in three places, and water is rising in the city's Ninth Ward once again. The good news is, nobody's there; the economically-depressed part of town was one where many evacuees couldn't get out on their own, which means they couldn't get back on their own. Certainly, the rising water isn't likely to do more damage to the Ninth Ward than has already been done ...

Meanwhile, in Texas: A bus evacuating residents of a Houston-area nursing home caught fire near Dallas, with as many as 24 dead. Early indications were that the bus, which had been on the road since yesterday, caught fire because of mechanical problems, possibly overheated brakes. Then passengers' oxygen tanks started exploding, turning the vehicle into an inferno.

The big story of Hurricane Rita is not likely to be the damage caused by the hurricane itself, but the traffic. It's time to admit it: The single largest mass evacuation of a region in American history is a resounding failure. There will be a lot of finger-pointing in the coming weeks, but such an operation required flawless cooperation between the City of Houston and Harris County officials (whom, in my opinion, did yeoman work), and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), the Texas Army National Guard, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), and (gulp) FEMA. The state and federal response has been marginal, considering the scope of the project, but it has not been adequate, and it has not been successful.

As I write this, buses are being dispatched to evacuate people from the FREEWAYS. Consider the irony of that for a second; people who had the means, the ability, and the desire to get out of the Texas Gulf Coast area, now have to be rescued from the evacuation routes.

We know that the contraflow plan (diverting outbound traffic to use inbound lanes as well) wasn't implemented soon enough. And we definitely know that there wasn't enough gasoline sent to the area to take care of the evacuees. When this event is investigated in a couple of months, I think they'll find that most of the stalled traffic on the escape routes was caused by cars running out of gas on the lanes of the freeways, and traffic moved so slowly that those vehicles couldn't get an opening to be pushed to the side of the road.

The outer cloudy bands of Hurricane Rita are now brushing up against Galveston, and the breezes outside my house are starting to gust. Dr. Neil Frank has noticed that the eastward drift of the eye of the hurricane seems to have stopped, which means that the eye of the hurricane is headed straight for Galveston Bay. If Rita remains a Category-4 hurricane, this would be the worst-case scenario envisioned by local experts. (Note: At 1:30, Rita was downgraded to a Category-3.)

The worst-case scenario would push the storm surge into Galveston Bay. This, in turn, would surge into the Houston Ship Channel, and into the network of bayous that usually drain water from the city into the Gulf. That means flooding, and lots of it. The good news is, the center of the hurricane appears to be weakening a bit, and the weaker it gets, the better.

We shouldn't get gale-force winds until after dinnertime tonight. The key for us here in Houston is that the hurricane makes landfall to our east. If it makes a hard left turn and comes ashore to the south of here, we're going to get the worst of it. And my plans to ride the storm out in relative safety and comfort will have gone horribly, terribly awry ...

Hurricane Blog #6

2005-09-23T00:02:00.000-05:00

I just spent a very pleasant hour with Mr. KABC on Southern California radio. (Boy, it felt good to be back on the air again, if only for a little while!) I didn't embarrass myself, and while I might not have been quite as glib as I try to be on here, I thought I did a fair job. Fair enough, in fact, that Mr. K invited me to be on the show again tomorrow night.

I pointed out that in 24 hours, we're likely to be riding out the height of the storm, and even if we can get a phone connection, it might be too noisy to have much of a conversation.

Mr. K: "Hmmm ... that would make for great radio."

Me: "Hey, anything I can do to help ..."

Nonetheless, Mr. K and I will try to make a connection for his show tomorrow night. If I'm not cowering in an interior closet, that is ...

* * *

I have been thinking about an indication that I gave during the radio show tonight, however, that I want to elaborate on.

Mr. KABC asked me a lot of questions about my personal situation. My personal situation during this hurricane is pretty good: we have food, we have water, we have shelter, and if the hurricane stays on track, we'll be on the "dry side" of the storm. I probably sounded pretty blasé about the whole thing.

I want to emphasize, though, that this storm is nothing to be blasé about. People are going to lose their homes. People are going to die (one person already has). Billions of dollars in wind and water damage are going to occur. Please do not think that because I see this hurricane as a personal inconvenience, that I think it's going to be that way for everyone.

The truth is that I am going to be in the middle of this storm, and if I think of it in terms of its pure destructive potential, I'm going to be too paralyzed with fear to accomplish much of anything. Maybe I'm deluding myself (just like the New Orleanians did who ignored the mandatory evacuation order) into thinking that I can outlast Hurricane Rita through sheer force of will. But, when you get right down to it ... what choice do I have?

As I pointed out on the air, there comes a point of diminishing returns, where the inconvenience (I should have used the word "hardship") of staying becomes less than the inconvenience/hardship of leaving. That's why we're staying put. I have no desire to ride out this storm inside a car stranded on the side of a freeway somewhere.

I'm sure I will have more thoughts about this Friday morning. Sleep well. I'm sure going to try to.

Hurricane Mini-Post

2005-09-22T22:23:00.000-05:00

Greetings to those of you who are listening to me on KABC Radio in Los Angeles. Here are some links you will find very helpful if you want to watch streaming video of the news coverage here in Houston:

KHOU-TV (CBS): http://www.khou.com
KTRK-TV (ABC): http://www.abc13.com
KPRC-TV (NBC): http://click2houston.com

Also see the Houston Chronicle website: http://www.chron.com

More after the radio show ...

Hurricane Blog #5

2005-09-22T19:51:00.000-05:00

Ah Fame, thy quivering arrow is about to pierce my thorax ...

Tonight, this blog goes national. La Winchette pulled a couple of strings (or yanked a couple of chains, more likely) and as a result, I'm going to be on KABC Radio in Los Angeles tonight. I'll be on the "Ask Mr. KABC" show, featuring Mr. "Mr. KABC" KABC. For those of you in the Southland, it'll be the 9:00 PM hour, on 790 AM. For the rest of you, the live audio stream is here.

It figures that, 17 years after my last hurrah as a struggling broadcaster, I finally break into a major market. And it only took a natural disaster to make it happen. Life works in funny ways sometimes ...

(And Mr. K, I promise to lay off the sauce until the guest spot is finished.)

* * *

The generator is a no-go. It appears that this thing hasn't been used in 15 years, and the carburetor is clogged, the fuel line is brittle and breaking, and it's painted an ugly color. Fortunately, if the opportunity presents itself, I have a cigarette-lighter adapter for my laptop and a dial-up modem if the phone keeps working, so I may get to keep blogging for the duration of this thing.

Meanwhile, Rita continues to slip inexorably towards us, step by step, inch by inch. Isn't it nice to know that while I'll be sweltering in the misery of the worst storm to hit in years, you will still be able to read about my woes in the air-conditioned comfort of your own homes? (Assholes.)

The commute time is 16 hours to San Antonio (200 miles) and Dallas (250 miles), and 11 hours to Austin (160 miles). We have cast our lot with the strength of our house. And judging by some of the other crappy surprises we've found buried within the walls here, I wish I could be more optimistic. But we're all strapped in and waiting for this ride to start. Midday Friday, it will begin.

I'll see if I can get one more post done tonight, after my visit with Mr. KABC.

Hurricane Post #4

2005-09-22T15:09:00.000-05:00

Lost in all the discussion of possible disruption to the nation's gasoline supply due to Hurricane Rita, is the potential damage to the source of another, much more valuable natural resource.

Hurricane Rita could quite possibly disrupt the nation's supply of Tabasco Sauce.

Avery Island, Louisiana (click on the map) is not really an island. It's a salt dome about eight miles south-southwest of New Iberia, surrounded on all sides by bayous. Dr. Neil Frank (who knows more about hurricanes than just about any other man alive) predicts a 21 percent chance that Rita will make landfall near New Iberia.

The streets of Avery Island may run red with hot sauce. Oh, the humanity!

From the Tabasco website: "The next pepper crop is ensured by the McIlhenny [family] who personally select the best plants in the field during harvest. The pepper seeds from those select plants are treated and dried and then stored -- for use the following year -- both on the Island and in a local bank vault as a hedge against any disaster that might befall future crops."

Pepper seeds in a safe-deposit box. Chew on that for a moment. But it looks like they're gonna need 'em.

* * *

We're now getting reports of people, who are trapped in the freeway gridlock, suffering heatstroke. Interstate 10 is reported to be backed up solid from Houson all the way to San Antonio -- a 200-mile-long traffic jam.

We're quickly reaching the "point of no return", where if we're not in the process of evacuating, we're best advised to stay put, lest we end up having to ride out the storm on the freeway.

From MSNBC: "'We ended up going six miles in two hours and 45 minutes,' said [one lady], whose neighborhood is not expected to flood. 'It could be that if we ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere that we’d be in a worse position in a car dealing with hurricane-force winds than we would in our house.'"

I'm not fond of that prospect.

Hurricane Blog #3

2005-09-22T13:40:00.000-05:00

Okay, so much for my brilliant ideas.

Turns out that the alternate escape route I had come up with is good to a point, but because that's an evacuation route for the town of Victoria (further down the Texas coast), it's likely to be just as busy as all the other freeways. So, there's a very good chance we're going to have to ride this out.

There is no gasoline to be found in the City of Houston. Everything is sold out, and a large number of places (quickly reaching a majority) are closing up shop, even though landfall won't happen until Friday night. I would drive around to try to locate some gas, but that activity itself burns up precious gas, and if I don't find some I will have screwed myself.

There is some good news to report. A friend has an ancient gas generator, and we're going to test it out this afternoon. My neighbor has a gas can with about a quart of fuel in it -- just enough to see if the generator still works. If it does, we'll bring it over here, siphon gas out of my wife's car's tank to keep it running, and plug the refrigerator and a fan or (maybe) a window-unit AC into it. That leaves my vehicle full of gas so we can leave if the power doesn't come back on within a day or two.

Folks, you absolutely would not believe how surreal this is. April might be able to share some thoughts about what L.A. was like during the riots, which is the only common experience I can think of that might compare to this one. Except, of course, that nobody's shooting at me. Yet.

The supermarkets have been absolutely jammed for two days. There are three close to my house, and two of them have closed for evacuation. I made the mistake of going to the third a while ago. Checkout lines are streaming halfway down the aisles. ATMs are empty and banks have closed. As goods and supplies become more scarce, the roads are getting quieter.

I guess this is what the 72-hour evacuation window that they're complaining New Orleans didn't get is supposed to feel like. I don't know that any city in world history has ever had more advance notice that a natural disaster is going to hit, or been better prepared for it, than Houston/Galveston is right now. I don't have any sense of impending doom ... but I'm anticipating one hell of an inconvenience.

Quick news update: The "contraflow" (lane reversal) on the major freeway to Dallas has opened. Now they're working on the contraflows to Austin. People who left home with a full tank of gas hours ago have now run out on the freeways, so the Texas Dept. of Transportation is dispatching tanker trucks filled with gas to set up at rest areas and fill up stranded motorists. This, of course, completely ignores the question of how the tankers are going to get to the rest stops in the first place. But it's a nice gesture nonetheless, and maybe it will help keep the traffic flowing and nerves calm.

After all, it's nearly 100 degrees in Houston right now, and you can't sit on a concrete freeway without air conditioning. Which burns gas, which empties the tank, which means you no longer have air conditioning. It's a wonder we haven't heard about people opening fire on each other on the highways yet.

When the first strong winds hit tomorrow night, I'll sign off. Until then, I'm aware that national news coverage of this storm is a bit spotty, so I'll keep blogging until then.

Hurricane Blog #2

2005-09-22T11:08:00.000-05:00

What a difference a day makes ...

Hurricane Rita is now projected to make landfall east of Houston, near Beaumont. (Click on map for a larger version.) This means that, rather than being in the nasty northeast quadrant of the hurricane, Houston is likely to end up on the "weak side" with lighter winds and a bit less rain.

Of course, a local TV meteorologist pointed out that "if you get hit by the weak side of a freight train, you're still gonna get hurt." Rita is still a Category 5 hurricane, even though it has weakened slightly. Forecasters think that it may weaken to a Category 3 by the time it makes landfall.

However, the real story here in Houston is the traffic. Lines at the airports are four hours long -- if you can even get to the airports. Because Galveston and all coastal areas have been evacuating through Houston's freeway system, gridlock on all highways are being reported, for up to 100 miles outside of town. The average speed is ONE MILE PER HOUR. And, with Houston stations quickly running out of gasoline, there is no place locally for people to refill their tanks. With evacuation taking so incredibly long, even people who filled their tanks up before hitting the road find themselves running out.

Texas is taking the unprecedented step of reversing traffic flow on the inbound lanes of most major freeways, so that all lanes will lead away from Houston, but the logistics of such a maneuver (mostly removing concrete barriers that divide traffic) are delaying its implementation.

Even though it looks like our house will be spared the worst of the wind and water, it's a certainty that the electricity will go out. Figures that yesterday, Houston set a new heat record. Pile the 200-percent humidity that the storm will bring on top of that, and I really don't look forward to sitting here without air conditioning.

So, we're still strongly considering evacuating. The problem now is, how the heck do we get out? We have a neighbor who is acting as "advance scout" for us, who will drive against traffic toward Corpus Christi, then to San Antonio, and finally to Austin. It's double the distance of a direct trip to Austin, but will probably take us less than one-third the time that a direct evacuation would cost us right now. Our neighbor will let us know how the traffic looks.

Might we have outsmarted the rest of the Texas Gulf Coast in finding a way out of here? Stay tuned ...

Hurricane Blog #1

2005-09-21T16:51:00.000-05:00

A few of you might want to know what's going on with those of us here in Houston, so I've provided a bit of a "hurricane primer". Just in case you care. Which you probably don't, since you're in L.A. or Boston or somewhere that doesn't get hurricanes. But I don't live on a freakin' fault line, so I guess it all evens out ...

I've taken this Texas coastal map, based on The Weather Channel's projected path as of this afternoon, and added some landmarks that you might be hearing about on the news. (Click on it for a larger version.) Right now, the center of the projected path is Matagorda Bay, which is about 120 miles southwest of Houston. That means that if the eye of the hurricane makes landfall at Matagorda Bay, Houston is in the northeast quadrant of the storm -- and the northeast quadrant is the one that packs the most rain and wind.

Dr. Neil Frank is a local weathercaster, and formerly was the director of the National Hurricane Center, so when a hurricane is on the way, he's the one I listen to. He just told us that we could see 100-MPH winds as far north as Conroe (45 miles north of downtown Houston) and as far west as Katy (25 miles west of downtown).

I live five miles from downtown.

Our evacuation plan is that as of tomorrow afternoon, if the eye of the hurricane is still projected to hit Matagorda Bay or north of there, we're getting the heck out of Dodge.

Flooding is not going to be much of a concern more than 10-15 miles in from the coast, so we're not likely to see any flood damage. The wind is the dangerous part. Karen and I are half-hoping that the wind will take away our crappy old carport, so that the insurance company can buy us a sparkly new one. But, we shall see.

More later ...

Maybe Darwin Was Wrong

2005-09-20T18:38:00.000-05:00

Here's a photo of a dumb guy.

Joe McGee plays in the pounding surf as strengthening Hurricane Rita moves near Key West, Fla., Tuesday. ( J. Pat Carter / AP)

Joe McGee is a moron.

That surf-worn concrete pylon beside Mr. Moron says "Southernmost Point Continental U.S.A." I have stood beside that pylon. I have looked out over the Caribbean from atop that seawall.

And folks, when it's placid, and you can see that gently-lapping water sparkling in the afternoon sun ... trust me, you do not want that shit (literally) washing over you.

Key West has two of Florida's 10 most-polluted beaches, according to state data released by a national environmental group and reported here. "Higgs Beach and South Beach, near the Southernmost Point [italics mine], were unsafe for swimming 22 percent and 30 percent of the time, respectively, in 2004 due to high contents of animal waste matter, the Natural Resources Defense Council reported.

"The pollution, even small traces of which can sicken people, often washes into the ocean at unsafe levels after rains." Rains like, oh I dunno ... like the Florida Keys are currently getting.

It's also a known fact that Key West's sewage system isn't the most reliable. When the system stumbles, that effluent has got to go somewhere, and the ocean surrounding the key seems like a likely bet (although clearly, not a safe one). Charles Osgood commented five years ago, "Sewage is leaking from faulty cesspits, septic tanks and sewer systems directly through the porous coral foundation of the islands and into the marine ecosystem. Tests have shown that the contents of a toilet flushed down a cesspit can show up in nearshore canals in a matter of hours."

By now, it's nightfall in Key West, and I'm sure Joe McGee is doubled over a toilet somewhere, hoping to flush either his system or the toilet bowl, whichever he can clear out first ...

Hurricane Kat-Rita?

2005-09-19T20:27:00.000-05:00

Here we go again. And now, rather than playing host to the evacuees from a Category 4 hurricane, it looks like I may be an evacuee myself.

Tropical Storm Rita is on track to nick the Florida Keys, strengthen into a hurricane, and head straight for the City of Houston. Estimated landfall is Saturday morning. And, trust me, if Rita stays on its current path, Karen and I won't be here.

Even though Houston is a city above sea level, and our home isn't in a flood-prone area, we have already arranged to stay at a friend's house outside Austin. So, if the storm hits Houston head-on, don't worry about me and mine. We'll be safe and dry in the city where I was born.

(Although I think I'm going to go buy a couple of cases of bottled water, just in case ...)

I'm Going To Be Afraid. Always.

2005-09-18T21:16:00.000-05:00

Oh, my head ...

I was watching the Emmy Awards when I was exposed (... yep, "exposed" is the word) to a commercial that has set the women's movement back about thirty years.

The tag line: "Have a happy period. Always." And "Always", of course, is the brand name for the absorbent feminine hygiene soaker-upper.

On a wicked hunch, I typed "always.com" into my trusty, non-absorbent web browser. And yep, it's the Internet home of the aforementioned pads. And on that website, you'll find the answer to the question, "Why can't men understand women?"

Here is the opening screen to the United States version of the website:

This is the time of the month that chocolate was created for.

This is the time when no toe nail should go unpolished.

When the gym will get along just fine without you.

This is the time when, if something is even slightly annoying, the world should know about it.

And if you feel like crying, there is no inappropriate time or place.

It's your period.

You have the right to make it the best period it can possibly be. And we're here to help.

Okay, I'm afraid. This is everything I have come to fear from PMS-enhanced ladies, summed up in seven lines. And I don't care if it's accurate. Chocolate's fine, toenail painting is fine, slacking off from the gym is fine. But when such a woman finds something even slightly annoying, they all seem to seek me out to rant about it.

I'm frightened. Hold me. (But not if you're being, you know, "visited by your friend". And if you are, have a happy one. Always.)

The Crickets Are Chirping ...

2005-09-15T13:31:00.000-05:00

... inside my brain. I don't have a thought in my skull. Well, that's not strictly true, of course (although there are those who think I said it pretty accurately), but for the life of me, I can't think of anything significant to write about.

Notice I said "significant". I'm not going to write about mundane crap, nosiree. The three of you who read my rantings deserve to have your worlds ROCKED. But the stuff that I'm stewing over has either been done to death (Katrina, definitely no pun intended), beneath my dignity to acknowledge (Britney Spears and her new son, Damien), or of no consequence to anyone but me (What do you mean, AstroWorld is CLOSING?!? Assholes. So what if I never go there anymore? At least it was THERE, like a trusted and very expensive friend from childhood ... but I digress).

(By the way, is it just me, or does the bad age make-up on Six Flags' mascot "Mr. Six" make him look like Dana Carvey's turtle character from "The Master Of Disguise"?)

So, nothing really to report here. But the Dalai Lama told me that when I die, on my deathbed, I will receive total consciousness. So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.

Campbell's Chunky Toxic Soup

2005-09-11T15:45:00.000-05:00

Here is more flora from the intestine of the international news. (Or is it fauna? Flora? I get them confused ...)

AND, OF COURSE, HALLIBURTON GOT THE CONTRACT

The Gulf emirate of Dubai will build a city of life-size replicas of seven wonders of the world at an estimated cost of $US1.5 billion ($1.94 billion) to house offices, shops and flats, a developer has said.

Three buildings will be modelled on structures that were part of the original list of the "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" - the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Others will be replicas of more modern wonders - the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Great Wall of China, a statement said.

The Great Wall of China? Lifesize? I didn't know Dubai was big enough to house a 3,946-mile-long Great Wall. Nor did I realize that Dubai was being threatened by nomadic bands of Mongol hordes ...

MORE TALES OF THE MENTALLY UNHINGED

A Pennsylvania woman, Brenda Smith, upset over being bitten by a neighbor's dog in May, shot the daughter of the dog's owner and then took another neighbor hostage, police said.

Smith shot Jennifer Strohl, 20, after confronting her about the alleged poisoning of Smith's dog. Strohl's mother said Smith wore a long blond wig and ''goofy clothes'' during the incident. ''We all knew she was upset about the bite and she was bugging all the neighbors about my dogs, but I never thought she would end up doing this, that she was dangerous,'' the mother said.

According to the arrest affidavit, Smith told police that she never meant to shoot Strohl: ''I meant to shoot the dog, not the lady, but at least now I'll be able to get some sleep tonight.''

And in a related story, Smith has already been nominated to be the next head of FEMA ...

NONCONFORMITY IS VERBOTEN. PREPARE TO BE ASSIMILATED

Three Oklahoma honor students who say they have never been disciplined before were sent home from school for dying their hair purple, blue and red, respectively. The girls -- all freshmen and all straight-A students -- said they were not warned before being told they would not be allowed back in class until they changed their hair color. The absence is considered unexcused, according to a discipline report given to the students, which means they will not be allowed to make up any tests or assignments they missed, they said.

Well, it's Oklahoma. That explains it.

AND WITH THAT, NEVADA LOSES ITS BRAGGING RIGHTS

Although soliciting sexual favors on the street is illegal in Rhode Island, authorities say a loophole in state law allows prostitution behind closed doors — including in storefronts that advertise as massage parlors and spas just blocks from City Hall. "We don't have a law criminalizing prostitution indoors," said Providence Police Lt. Thomas Verdi, who leads the department's anti-prostitution efforts.

Two words: ROAD TRIP!!!

OH, JUST SHUT THE HELL UP ALREADY

Hip-hop star Kanye West is advising his white counterparts that they can only use certain slang terms when they're out of style for black people. The rapper - who recently charged that President Bush "doesn't care" about African Americans - believes that certain slang words should only be able to cross racial barriers when they're no longer in style for black people.

He says, "I think white people are allowed to say 'bling'. They are allowed to say old-school black slang, like 'hottie' and 'homie'. Actually, I do not think that (white people) are allowed to use slang until it is at least a year old. If you say a slang word too early, it's like you're trying to be black. So as long as the slang is a little played out, you're all good."

It's about darn time the African-American community had its own arbiter of language, I say. Kanye has appointed himself the William Safire of the inner city. Now, if someone would only answer just one question for me: WHO THE HELL IS KANYE WEST?

Proud To Be A Texan

2005-09-09T15:37:00.000-05:00

This cartoon makes me feel very proud of my city and my state. Thank you, Jim Borgman.

What Happens In Las Vegas ...

2005-09-08T14:04:00.000-05:00

(In an effort to return to more lighthearted fare, regarding the latest on Katrina, I'll just refer you to Keith Olbermann's comments on our Gubmint's response to the disaster, here. I'll have more to say on the subject later, but for now, let's brighten the mood a little bit ...)

I'm home. And I believe I can say, without fear of contradiction, that five days in Las Vegas is plenty. (And this is coming from a former resident.)

It was quite the eventful weekend. Let's see ... we drank, attended a wedding, drank some more, watched the bride pass out in her mashed potatoes at the post-wedding dinner, tippled a bit, learned that the groom's daughter had picked up a limo driver and missed her flight home, imbibed a little, listened to the screaming from the adjacent hotel room where the daughter and the groom were having it out, sipped the fermented grape, paid WAY too damn much for a bowl of pasta, chugged a brew or two, and were accosted on the Strip by more timeshare saleswomen than by panhandlers and porn hustlers combined.

And oh yeah, we drank.

We're all familiar with the "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" tag line. Well, there's a huge billboard on Flamingo that reads, "What happened at the Palms ... never happened." Karen was desperate to climb up on the billboard and spray-paint "Including Britney Spears' first marriage", but cooler heads (mine) prevailed.

Karen hit a slot jackpot and she got so excited, people were convinced she was having a seizure. Now, you must understand that Karen is fascinated by small, shiny objects. She likes to watch the reels spin. She is, without question, the happiest slot player in the entire casino, even when she's losing. And let's face it, when a buxom blonde starts bouncing up and down and giggling, she's going to attract attention. And Karen can bounce and giggle for hours on end. So when she hit the jackpot (only $100, but on a penny slot machine, that's a big-un), she insisted on sitting there and watching her credits increment upwards. Ten thousand credits, one at a time. She could have hit a button, gotten her money instantly and continued playing, but not my wife; she sat there until every single penny had been electronically, slowly credited to her. I had long since given up and gone back to the poker room.

My significant event was that I won my way into my first-ever World Series of Poker event: the $500 buy-in No Limit Hold'em tournament. This was easily the biggest tourney I had ever played in. (And no, I didn't win. Nor did I get to meet poker babe Jennifer Tilly. But I spent a lot of time fantasizing about both those things.)

And then, there was the alcohol. But since we hardly left the hotel (a rarity for me, who usually tries to get away from the Strip as often as possible), we posed a risk to no one. Except for Karen, who got too excited playing slots and accidentally knocked a cocktail waitress into a bank of nickel machines, causing them to topple over and start a domino effect that took out half the slot machines in the casino.

Or, maybe she didn't. Remember, what happens in Vegas ... never happened. (Because you're too damn drunk to remember it.)

New Orleans: Anarchy Would Be An Improvement

2005-09-01T17:58:00.000-05:00

I still can't bring myself to dish any humor right now. The news that rescuers in New Orleans are being SHOT AT -- not carjacked, not threatened, but SHOT AT for no reason -- is really pissing me off.

A medical evac helicopter tried to land at a Kenner-area hospital. There were over a hundred people waiting on the helipad, many with guns. The pilot refused to land. I don't blame him; he'd almost certainly have been skyjacked.

People who donated their boats to relief efforts have given up, because people were firing shots at them as they rescued stranded residents. People are "commandeering" (read: stealing) evacuation buses. Even military helicopters are being shot at.

(I apologize for having no links for these; I'm clicking from blog to blog and from news site to news site rather quickly.)

And my big question is: WHY? How can ANY rational human being justify shooting at rescuers? Demanding that they be rescued, sure, I can buy that. But just firing shots at rescuers for no reason?

Karen suggests that if the looters and criminals can maintain the lawlessness -- if they can keep the police and military from gaining control -- then the criminals remain in charge. (Not that there's anything left to be "in charge" of ...) But we're no longer talking about a disaster, or a "war zone", or lack of civilization. We're now talking about something we in the West have never seen before: a complete breakdown of social order.

I'm off to Las Vegas for a few days (a trip that cannot be cancelled at this late date). Maybe it will give me some distance from the disaster, and I can be a bit more entertaining when I get back. I certainly hope entertainment will be appropriate when I return.

Katrina, Welcome To Houston

2005-08-31T12:17:00.000-05:00

For those of us who live on the Gulf Coast, this is no time to spin humorous yarns. The reality of what has happened to New Orleans -- only 350 miles away from here -- is beginning to sink in. That entire city is, someday, going to have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

And now that we know all of the refugees in the filthy, sweltering Superdome are coming to the Astrodome -- only THREE miles from where I live -- the reality of Hurricane Katrina has just moved into my backyard.

Now, under the circumstances I can't object to 25,000 homeless people moving into my neighborhood. But the Astrodome is literally only 200 feet from Reliant Stadium, where the Texans play. And football season is starting. That means we'll have 75,000 well-heeled football fans and 25,000 homeless Louisianans right next door to each other for eight Sundays this fall. What will that mean, exactly? It will be interesting to see how that develops.

And as the looters -- folks, they're criminals -- get evacuated from New Orleans, will they be coming to the Astrodome too? Now THAT, I'm not going to be very happy about.

I'm glad Houston can help out New Orleans in this time of crisis. But Hurricane Katrina just became intensely personal to me, and I don't yet know how I feel about it. I guess we'll find out in the next couple of weeks.

Stupid People In The Big Easy

2005-08-29T13:32:00.000-05:00

Certainly, nobody wishes harm to the people who escaped from New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit this morning. And of course, everyone's thoughts are with those people who, either due to lack of resources or ill health, had to hunker down and try to ride out the storm in place. About ten thousand of them made it to the Superdome.

But there's probably 80,000 people in the area south of Lake Pontchartrain who thought they could beat Mother Nature at her own game. Those people are officially STUPID. And it's hard to feel compassion for people who possess such profound stupidity.

From the AP, here: WGNO reporter Susan Roesgen reported that New Orleans police had received more than 100 reports of people trapped on their roofs.

I think I usually have a fair amount of compassion, but if I were answering the phones at the New Orleans Police Department this morning, I'd be fighting the urge to hang up on these idiots. "You're stuck on your roof? Sorry, we're not coming to get you. There's a hurricane blowing out there, and we're not risking our lives just to save your incredibly stupid ass. You had your chance yesterday. See ya." >click<

"I'm not doing too good right now," Chris Robinson told the AP via cell phone from his home east of the city's downtown. "The water's rising pretty fast. I got a hammer and an ax and a crowbar, but I'm holding off on breaking through the roof until the last minute. Tell someone to come get me please. I want to live."

Tell us, Mr. Robinson, did you want to live when your mayor and governor went on the air yesterday morning and told all New Orleans residents to GET THE HELL OUT? If you had no car, did you call the police yesterday afternoon and ask them to move you to a shelter? Or were you one of the thousands of morons who figured "My home is my castle, and I'll stay with my castle" (at least, until your castle took on ten feet of water)?

I'm reminded of the story of the devoutly-religious gentleman who was placidly rocking away on his front porch as the hurricane approached. The police came by and said, "We've got to get you out of here now!" The man refused, saying, "God will take care of me." When the flood waters rose and the man had to take refuge on his roof, the National Guard came by in a boat and said, "The levees are about to burst! Get in!" The man waved them away, shouting, "God will take care of me." And as the waves covered the roof of the house, the man was perched atop his chimney as an Army helicopter hovered overhead. The soldiers dropped a rope ladder as one shouted through a bullhorn for the man to climb up. "God will take care of me," the man muttered as he sat there.

And when the flood waters had covered the chimney, the man found himself in Heaven, facing God. "God, I don't understand," the man complained. "I was certain that You would take care of me." God glared at the man. "What do you want from me? I sent you the police, a National Guard boat and an Army helicopter. Schmuck."

I share God's disdain.

Things The MSM Didn't Tell You

2005-08-27T21:58:00.000-05:00

Ripped from headlines around the glove are these masterpieces of journalistic effluent, which Fox News didn't see fit to share with the rest of us. Hmm ... maybe Fox is onto something ...

THIS IS NOT A GOOD OMEN

From Sri Lanka: Two doves freed at the launch of the Prime Minister's presidential election campaign Friday were killed instantly when they flew into a ceiling fan, police said.

There was a similar accident involving a dove in June last year when the Public Security Minister tried to free a dove at the launch of multinational UN peacekeeping exercise, but the bird was already dead after being too tightly squeezed.

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves ...

SOME PEOPLE SHOULD LIVE IN A CABIN IN RURAL MONTANA

From Cleveland's WEWS NewsChannel 5: A Garfield Heights woman is in trouble with the law after being accused of making dozens of false complaints against several of her neighbors.
Police say they have a long list of false complaints she filed over the years against her neighbors, numbering 79 complaints in all.

Her main targets were her next-door neighbors. The charges she made against them ranged from trespassing, to child abuse, to "engaging in unnatural acts with their animals."

This lady kind of makes Gladys Kravitz look like the Welcome Wagon, doesn't she? (That's an obscure nosy-neighbor reference piggybacked onto an obscure neighborhood-welcome reference. Two points for me.)

VIAGRA IS FOR WIMPS

From Johannesburg, South Africa: The hunt is on for three women who ambushed a 30-year-old man and forced him to have sex with them at gunpoint.

Rape is almost never funny. Almost. But in this case, if this guy was "physically able" to have sex with three women while staring down the barrel of a gun, he's got the weirdest fetish I've ever heard of in my life. Surely, he has a lucrative career waiting for him in the American porn biz ...

YET SOMEHOW, WALTER KOENIG STILL DOESN'T HAVE ONE

From the AP: The late comedian Chris Farley has been honored with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

Fans, friends and family surrounded Farley’s star, the walk’s 2,289th, in front of the Improv Olympic West theater where the actor used to perform. Among other celebrities in attendance were "Saturday Night Live" alums Chris Rock and Adam Sandler. "I think every fat comedian owes him 80 bucks that’s working today," Rock said.

Farley had about a five-year career in television and movies -- about one-eighth the length of the career of Walter Koenig, best known as Chekov from the original "Star Trek". Every other core member of the "Star Trek" cast (except for the security guards in the red shirts, which got killed in horrible ways by the special-guest-monster in every episode) has a star on the Walk of Fame. Not Koenig. C'mon, Johnny Grant, what are you waiting for? NAME A STAR AFTER SOMEONE YOU LOVE! (It'll be recorded in book form in the U.S. Copyright Office ...)

The Lunatic Fringe Strikes Again

2005-08-25T15:00:00.000-05:00

I have long been of the opinion that one out of every 12 people in the United States is a stark-raving lunatic. I seem to remember reading a poll once that asked, "If you were given a choice between winning the lottery or having your eyes gouged out with red-hot pokers, which would you choose?" Eight percent chose the red-hot pokers.

That eight percent is what I call the "lunatic fringe", and politics has nothing to do with it. It's the people who do things that the other 11-out-of-12 of us cannot begin to comprehend.

Take, for example, this story from the Boston Globe: A 19-year-old man, who was supposed to be cleaning up a cemetery as part of court-ordered community service (after he broke into an apartment building), allegedly broke into a sealed Civil War-era mausoleum, pulled apart a skeleton, and played with the bones. AND TOOK PICTURES OF HIMSELF DOING SO.

"It's bizarre, absolutely bizarre," said Lieutenant Richard Siemasko of the Newburyport police. "I can't even imagine what was in his head. This is just a whole new level of weird for me."

A phenomenon which I now call "the April Winchell effect" (which leads one to make snarky comments that are wholly inappropriate to the subject matter at hand) overcame me when I reached this paragraph further down the story:

Jennifer Williams, 16, said it was the talk of the city. "Everyone has been talking about it," she said. ''It's so gross. Why would you want to play with old bones?"

Jenn, I think you might want to direct that question to Anna Nicole Smith ...

(Oh, I'm a-goin' to hell for that one. But it was worth it.)

Sam's Club & Wholesale Head Shop

2005-08-24T20:43:00.000-05:00

I was shopping at Sam's Club today (the wholesale-club arm of Wal-Mart, Incorporated) and among the items I picked up was the 55-gallon drum of Cascade dishwashing liquid. (Okay, so it's not that big, but when I picked it up it felt as if it were 55 gallons. What can I say, I'm a wimp.) I made my way to the checkout register and put my items on the conveyor, including the bottle of Cascade.

The checker looked at me and asked me if I was over 18.

Now, I'm a 42-year-old guy with a beard, over six feet tall, with age bags under my eyes. I haven't been carded for anything in over 20 years -- let alone dishwashing detergent. I seriously considered responding with a smart-assed answer, until I realize that TSA agents at the airport ask you stupid questions all the time, and if you don't answer seriously and truthfully, you might end up in a holding cell with some of the babies whose names are on the "no-fly" list. Since I didn't want to deal with unsmiling security guards at that moment (the frozen shrimp would certainly thaw), I paused for an appropriately disdainful length of time, then simply responded, "Yes."

With that, the checker burst out with a laugh and chortled, "I can't believe they make us ask that!"

It turns out that, when you buy large quantities of dishwashing liquid (and at Sam's Club, what other quantities do they have?), the checkers are now required to ask you for your age. What the teller told me was that kids were now lacing their marijuana with Cascade before rolling it into joints, to get some kind of higher high.

This struck me as rather silly, but hey, who am I to question Wal-Mart? After all, the company wants us to Buy American (assembled from parts manufactured in other countries), loves the mom-and-pop merchants of Small-Town America, and values the contributions of our nation's labor unions. If they want to card us for buying dish detergent, hey, shouldn't I just take it at face value?

Well ... no.

When I got home with my shrimp and my "drug paraphernalia", I turned to the trusty Internet to find out the truth of this. Here is what I learned during my tour of the marijuana-growing websites out there:

o A few drops of dishwashing detergent added to water, or to an organic pesticide, will help kill spider mites, which seems to be the bane of marijuana growers. Apparently, the soap breaks the water's surface tension and makes it cling to the tiny mites better.

o Dishwashing liquid seems to be able to keep drug-sniffing dogs from detecting large quantities of marijuana. (Or so this lady thought; she got busted anyway.)

o Drinking liquid soap or dishwashing fluid is frequently used by employees to mask their pot consumption on workplace drug tests. (It doesn't seem to work very well, though; seems it will make the urine specimen cloudy.)

Couldn't find anything about kids lacing their weed with Cascade, though. Maybe that's what the checker at Sam's was on.

And by asking for proof of age, might Wal-Mart be implicitly encouraging marijuana use in their customers over the age of 18? Someone report this to the Dubya Administration, quickly. I'm sure we can get dishwashing liquid on the list of controlled substances in no time flat.

Assassination: It's The Christian Thing To Do

2005-08-23T12:17:00.000-05:00

I bandy about my share of insults, but I reserve the term "crackpot" for people who really ARE crackpots. ("Crack" + "pot" = ... hmmm, there's some drug-addled significance there, apropos of something. But I digress.) Calling someone a "certifiable crackpot" is not something I think should be taken lightly.

But then again, neither is calling for the assassination of a sovereign leader that you disagree with.

Pat Robertson is a certifiable crackpot. There, I said it.

Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former presidential candidate (of whom Al Franken did a killer impression of on "Saturday Night Live" a bunch of years ago), called for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, here.

"You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," Robertson said. "It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop."

Let me flip through my Bible here ... plagues, locusts, thou shalt not, thou shalt not-- ah, here it is. Exodus 20:13. "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Now gee, there's gotta be a footnote here somewhere carving out exceptions for political threats ... nope, can't find one. Sorry, Pat.

"We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator," Robertson continued. "It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

Wouldn't it be even easier to have someone escort Rev. Robertson to the looney bin, where he belongs?

Vegas: What Happens Here, Is Actually Pretty Dull

2005-08-22T18:02:00.000-05:00

In a week and a half, I'm off to Las Vegas to attend a friend's wedding. Yep, you read that right: Labor Day Weekend. The town will be jammed with vacationing Californians. So do us both a favor, and just stay the hell out of my way.

I lived in Las Vegas for two years, in the mid '90s. While I was there, Steve Wynn was building a huge Tuscan-style villa and lake (complete with dancing waters, which would be fine if they weren't dancing to Celine Dion songs) in the middle of the Strip. Since then, Kirk Kerkorian foreclosed on the villa and the lake, and Stevie W. built a mountain in the middle of the Strip. I fully expect Michael Gaughan to put Wynn back on the street soon enough ... but then, what will we call Wynn's big brown edifice at the corner of Sands and Las Vegas Boulevard South?

Vegas is proof of the concept, "It bloody well IS the heat, not just the humidity." Vegas heat sneaks up on you. Once, when I was living there, it was 115 degrees one summer afternoon. I wandered outside for a few minutes to rescue some object from my car before it liquefied, bubbled and burst into flame. I returned to the sanctity of my air-conditioned abode and couldn't figure out why my clean shirt suddenly had white stains on it. Then it hit me. In the short time I had been outside, I was sweating profusely, but I didn't know it because my perspiration dessicated as soon as it was exposed to the air. The white stains were the salt distilled from my sweat.

That's what Vegas heat does to you. (That, and the fact that it bakes enough brain cells for you to think, ten years later, that someone would find that anecdote amusing.)

The key to having an interesting time in Vegas (as opposed to a GOOD time, which my wife has just by parking her ass in front of a nickel slot machine and watching the wheels spin with something approaching manic glee) is to get away from the Strip, get away from Fremont Street, and actually see the city. (Not that there's much to see; apart from those two areas of town, the tallest building in the city is eight stories. And the "Spaghetti Bowl" is nothing more than the intersection of two freeways, where somebody was too stupid to just build a cloverleaf and be done with it. The Orange Crush, it ain't.)

I found Vegas to be the place dreams go to die. (Sounds pretty depressing, doesn't it? Yet quite profound, if I do say so ...) There are at least two bars, complete with video poker machines, on every major street corner. There are more mobile home parks in Las Vegas than in the entire state of Alabama, only they have walls around them so they look a bit more like "residential communities". (Yeah ... "residential communities" that are a block square.) And there's a lot -- a LOT -- of baked brown dirt.

Still, within an hour's drive of Vegas, you have Red Rock Canyon to the west and Valley of Fire to the east (both of which raise the desert to high art). You have Mount Charleston to the north (a ski resort an hour from Las Vegas? The hell you say!) and Hoover Dam the other way. And, everywhere you look ... well, there's dirt.

I'm not looking forward to the heat, but I am looking forward to the wedding. I know a little bit about weddings in Vegas. Because that's where Karen and I got hitched. (And "hitched" is the perfect word to describe it.)

You must understand that Karen's approach to life is a lot like mine: Don't take yourself too damn seriously. And, being the second marriage for both of us, we had both done the "big wedding" fiascos. This wedding was going to be for us. So, we were going to make it the campiest wedding we had ever heard of. We invited nobody. We rented a convertible, both of us wearing jeans and casual shirts, and Karen pinned a veil to her hair. The veil billowed in the wind as we drove.

After a brief stop at McDonald's (just to finish our preparations), we pulled into a wedding chapel on the Strip. This one is famous for its drive-thru wedding window. We drove into the "Tunnel O' Vows", and gazed upon the cherubs and stars painted upon the canopy. (We nearly rammed the chapel wall while trying to read the inspirational message that wove through the cherub-star display. Whose idea was it to put a hard right turn there, anyway?) We pulled in behind a group of Harley bikers, who were finishing up their own ceremony. I think one biker was marrying another. Knowing Harley lovers, though, he might have been marrying his bike. I never found out the truth.

After discreetly passing the McDonald's bag to the "teller" at the window, we placed our order. "One wedding to go," we said, "and we'd like fries with that." We giggled as though we had invented the funniest joke in the world. The teller balefully glanced at us, as though we were the fifth couple that day to pull said stunt. The minister appeared, and while a kindly stranger took photos of the ceremony, we became husband and wife. Then the minister gave us our wedding fries. We toasted our nuptials with a small Diet Coke.

Since no one was behind us and we had use of the Tunnel O' Vows for a bit longer, we got out of the car and set up shop on the rear spoiler. I have a wonderful photo of my bride and me cutting into the wedding Hot Apple Pie, and feeding it to each other. (We tried freezing a piece for our first anniversary, but after a while, months-old Hot Apple Pie was just too disgusting to keep in the house. Sentimentality be damned.)

Then, we roared off into the sunset -- or at least, we tried to. Shortly after we pulled out on Las Vegas Blvd. heading downtown, a road rage incident erupted in front of us: woman in the car was cutting off guy in the truck, guy in truck whips in front of her, slams on the brakes, and gets out of the truck with fists clenched. Being newlyweds with other items on our agenda, we opted not to hang around to watch the fun. Ah well ...

The wedding we'll be attending just before Labor Day is going to be at the top of the Stratosphere Tower. It'll be a windy summer afternoon, and I'm expected to wear a suit. In 115-degree heat. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to that.

Oh ... and this is the bride's fourth marriage. This might end up featuring more fireworks than that road rage incident.

(If they think they're gonna get me on that roller coaster, they're nuts ...)

Oh Dear God, Please Make It Stop

2005-08-19T12:51:00.000-05:00

From the AP, here: Kelly Monaco will defend her dancing title against John O’Hurley on September 20th. That’s when they’ll go toe-to-toe for "Dancing with the Stars: Dance-Off" on ABC.

Sweet fancy Moses, it's a rematch. Will the madness never stop?

It wasn't enough that the first six weeks of this show (an air-conditioned version of "I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!") was very clearly rigged in Ms. Monaco's favor. Look at her competition. Rachel Hunter: looked like she was in labor most of the time. Joey McIntire: not bad, but he's no John O'Hurley. Evander Holyfield: 'nuff said. And Trista Sutter: ugh.

And then there was Mister Smooth, O'Hurley himself, who returns for the rematch. The guy who exudes refinement and class. The guy who glides across the floor, obviously having a blast (which is what dancing is all about). The guy who SHOULD have won. And over there, holding her winner's trophy in one hand and her costume top in the other, is Ms. Monaco, snotty attitude oozing from every pore of her flesh.

Consensus popular opinion is that John-O won. Yet on the final show, the three dance judges (one of whom was Fook Yu from "Austin Powers: Goldmember", so I guess we know how qualified THAT panel was), in a moment of absurd theater that rivaled anything on "The Gong Show", gave Kelly the first perfect "10s" of the entire series. (Kelly Monaco: the Nadia Comaneci of the ballroom dancing world. Chew on that for a moment.)

Pop quiz: Which of these six "celebrities" stars on a current ABC show? Oh, just guess, go ahead. Can you say "cross-promotion"? Can you say "rigged like the carnival midway games"? (Not like I think a lot of "Dancing" viewers would tune in to see "General Hospital" just because Kelly won, but we all know TV execs don't think like the rest of us.)

So, on September 20th, John-O and Monaco will tango and meringue (that's not a dance, that's a dessert topping) and waste another hour of our lives as they have a "dance-off". And the judges will be there, but they won't get to vote. Only YOU, the television viewer, shall choose the winner! And on September 22nd, there will be another show, where they will annouce the winner but only after they run clips from ALL THE PRECEDING FRICKIN' SHOWS.

Makes you pine for "Fear Factor", doesn't it?

To me, the worst part is not the dancing. It's Tom Bergeron. For some reason that I can't explain, the mere sight of the man makes my skin crawl. No, literally. My skin tries to leave my skeleton and go someplace where it won't be exposed to Tommy Boy.

Don't get me wrong. Bergeron was fine as host of "Hollywood Squares". Of course, with that show, he had a tight production structure and funny people to play off of. Not a lot of ad-libbing came from the host's podium. It was about the time that Bergeron took over as host of "America's Funniest Home Videos" -- a show so vapid that it twisted Bob Saget's face into that of a man in the middle of a perpetual root canal -- that Tom really started to get on my nerves. Was it the pithy, unscripted wisecracks? The smarmy smile? Personally, I think it was the Flowbee haircut. But whatever the reason, it became obvious that the mere sight of him made my hand twitch for the TV remote.

Now, the problem is that "Dancing With The Stars" was a live show. And you'd think Bergeron, as a long-time radio morning host, might be a good choice to improvise his way through this minefield of Evander, Trista and Fook Yu. Well, if you like the annoying, smug smile on Dubya's face most of the time, you'll love Bergeron's. Smug and annoying and very proud of the one-liners he's tossing off on national TV, the only difference between the two (apart from Tom's much stronger command of the English language) is the knowledge that Tom Bergeron isn't going to declare war on any Middle Eastern countries anytime soon. (North Korea, he might.)

When "Dancing With The Stars" returns for its next installment -- and you know it will -- can we please, please, PLEASE GOD PLEASE make the new host ... John O'Hurley? Because he's vastly more entertaining than Tom Bergeron. And he did a good job hosting "To Tell The Truth". And best of all, he's actually played the game, so he can provide an ex-jock's insightful analysis.

But most of all, he's got a MUCH better haircut than Tom Bergeron.

Frightening Facts & Meandering Musings

2005-08-16T18:19:00.000-05:00

There is no better value for your entertainment dollar than the news. Here are some items ripped from today's headlines:

BASS 1, HUMAN 0 - IT'S A FINAL

A fish caught in an east German lake near the Polish border not only got off the hook but also lured a 46-year-old fisherman to his death, police in the eastern town of Eisenhuettenstadt said Tuesday.

THEY SHOULDA USED EBAY

A rush to purchase $50 used laptops turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far as to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.

MY TONGUE IS GETTING SHPILKAS

From the Houston Chronicle: Gene Simmons, of the rock band KISS, was not born with the name Gene Simmons. His birth name was Chaim Witz, and he was born in Tirat Ha-Carmel, Israel. Who knew?

It does not appear that his tongue has been circumcised. Makes you wonder how observant Chaim really is.

AND FINALLY ...

I've been getting a lot of spam lately (as I always do), and one subject header keeps appearing over and over, and now it's keeping me awake nights:

Who was the marketing genius who thought up Cialis SOFT TABS? It would not seem that you'd want an erectile dysfunction drug and the word "soft" anywhere near each other ...

During the 2004 Super Bowl, while the rest of the world was fixated on Janet Jackson's nipple flash, nary a peep was heard about Mike Ditka shilling for ... Levitra. (I'll pause while you try to get that mental image out of your mind.) But it wasn't bad enough that "Iron Mike" was pitching pills that turn men into crowbars. Then he had to start pitching footballs -- through a tire swing.

My wife and I were impressed by the magnificent subtlety of a aging jock throwing tight spirals through the center of the tire swing and screaming "OH, YES!" after every throw. If memory serves (we were laughing too hard to count accurately), the commercial featured three tosses in a row, from three different angles. Not to mention three screams of "OH, YES!"

I bet nobody tried to tell Ditka about no damn "soft tabs", nosiree ...

Cindy Sheehan: Part Of Our Administration's Policy

2005-08-15T12:11:00.000-05:00

If you're reading this, you're someone who draws their own conclusions regarding politics and the way of the world, rather than someone who passively swallows whatever propaganda Fox News ladles into your mouth.

In other words, you're an intellectual and a free thinker. Why do you hate America? (But I digress.)

So I'm certain you already know about Cindy Sheehan, who has spent the past ten days in a field outside our Dubya-in-Chief's Crawford, Texas ranch. (Footnote: Texas is a big state. Please don't presume that just because King George II was born here, and for some inexplicable reason was elected governor here, that he reflects the sensibilities of anyone else in Texas. Except, of course, for the oil men. And the cattle ranchers. And the bankers, and the defense contractors-- On the other hand, forget I said anything.)

(Footnote 2: But we DO have the best barbecue on the planet, and not even Bush can screw that up. Anyway ...)

Ms. Sheehan only wants a few minutes of Dubya's time to ask an admittedly-loaded question: "Why did you kill my son?" And if I were Shrub, I wouldn't want to answer that question either, because no direct answer is acceptable. But if I were Shrub, I would most definitely want to appear sympathetic to her plight. I would want her to look less sympathetic, and to defuse that, I'd give her 15 minutes of my time and get her the hell out of my face, and out of the public eye. She has publicly said that's all it would take to shut her up, so by gum, I'd swallow hard and do it.

What I wouldn't do is try to make her appear less sympathetic by having my minions attack her. But true to form, that's the tack Dubya took, and also true to form, boy, have things backfired.

And, true to form again, Bush just flat doesn't care.

We can presume that Krauthammer, Malkin, Drudge and Barnes got to their positions at the top of the right-wing ink-smeared dung heap by having some modicum of intelligence. (Footnote 3: Notice that I did not include Bill O'Reilly in that list of names. I still think the only reason O'Reilly has such a big soapbox to stand on is because he has pictures of Rupert Murdoch sharing conjugal relations with a wallaby. Intelligence has nothing to do with his popularity, and Bill O proves it every time he opens his mouth.) And with a smidgen of intelligence, one would think that to paint the mother of a soldier killed in battle -- by any definition of anyone of any political stripe, a "war hero" -- as a treasonous, anti-American political shill, would be a big mistake.

Well, as I pointed out in my previous blog entry, "mistake" is no longer in the vocabulary of the Ruling Party. If something turns out to be wrong, say it anyway. Say it loudly enough and assume it somehow becomes the truth. And that's exactly what they're doing to Cindy Sheehan.

And as of yesterday, it got worse.

Yesterday (Sunday), one of Dubya's Crawford neighbors (who also happens to be one of Ms. Sheehan's neighbors, at least until Shrub comes to his senses or goes back to Washington, whichever comes first and don't bother placing any bets) fired a shotgun during a prayer service at "Camp Casey" (named for the lost son).

Larry Mattlage told sheriff's deputies and the Secret Service, "I aint threatening nobody, and I aint pointing a gun at nobody. This is Texas." He said he fired his gun in preparation for dove-hunting season but when asked if he had another motive, he said, "Figure it out for yourself."

Oh, great ...

It's not enough that Ms. Sheehan has had to deal with the intellectual crackpots of the airwaves. Now she's got to deal with the physical crackpots, who just happen to be heavily armed. This is Texas, after all. (And because Mattlage was on his own property and fired his gun into the air, over his own property, it's entirely legal. Because it's freakin' Texas. I'm so proud.)

Now, Dubya has (as usual) backed himself into a corner. He can't meet with Ms. Sheehan now, because then he would be perceived as caving in to her demands. It would mean that he made a mistake by not visiting with her at the beginning of her vigil. And, as we have learned, George W. Bush has NEVER MADE A MISTAKE IN HIS LIFE. Just ask him.

On the other hand, if he continues to snub Ms. Sheehan, the right-wing hacks will continue to attack her. Which will make the Republican Party look even more like the party of insensitive cretins who never know when to stop piling on. Which could cost the GOP some political support, and maybe even some votes -- maybe even too many to allow the Pubs to steal another national election. Which could cost them control of Congress, or the White House, or both.
Guess which option Dubya will choose? Of course he's going to choose his usual path of arrogance, opting to save face even at the potential cost of his party's leadership role. Because Bush doesn't care; he's got his, and future generations of politicians can fend for themselves.

Ahhh ... "fend for themselves"? Do you see where my point is going?

The Dubya Administration is handling the Sheehan matter exactly the same way it has handled everything else that has crossed its path. Whether it's Alaskan oil drilling, war in Iraq, global warming, or running up the national debt (remember that? It's where all the federal budget deficits get lumped together for future collection, and gosh why don't we ever hear about that anymore?), what matters most to this president is getting what HE wants. Cindy Sheehan doesn't enter into that equation. And neither do the rest of us.

So, what about the American people whom Dubya is supposed to represent? What are we supposed to do as our nation and our planet are stripped for parts? How are we and our children supposed to survive?

Well, Bush did argue for NASA funding to send us to Mars. Now I think I've figured out why. And if we want a place for future generations to survive, it looks like we'd better get on the stick ...

Why Do I Hate Freedom?

2005-08-15T12:05:00.000-05:00

George Orwell, of course, was right. He was just off by about 20 years.

In Orwell's book 1984, written on the walls of the Ministry of Truth, were three slogans:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Those slogans are being carved over the White House portico even as we speak.

Ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the face of patriotism has been changing. No longer is it enough to hold your hand over your heart and recite the "Pledge of Allegiance" with a tear in your eye. Knowing the proper way to display and dispose of the American flag is now passé. Dubya and his minions have redefined patriotism for all time.

We learned during the 2004 presidential election that serving with valor in combat doesn't save you from being called a "traitor", even when the people orchestrating that chant are draft-dodging chickenhawks. And now, with Cindy Sheehan being snubbed by "her" President and vilified by the right-wing talking heads, losing a son in combat isn't even enough to make you a Good American. No, you must agree with everything our Dubya-in-Chief says, thinks and does, or you shall be taken to the town square, pilloried, and have rotten fruit thrown at you.

One of my "Friends" on MySpace asked a darn good question in her own blog. Lil' Sucka wrote: "When did dissent become treason"?

Oh, sometime around 9/11. Now, if we had learned nothing from Bush/Rove's attacks on John McCain's service record during the 2000 presidential race, we learned that under Shrub, dissent would have become treason soon enough, but people would have had to have been persuaded. Minds would have had to have been molded. Media would have had to have been manipulated. Those kinds of mass brainwashing usually take a lot of time.

Al-Qaida pulled it off for him in an hour and ten minutes.

And although Bush/Rove have proven they are capable of a lot of terrible things, even I don't think they orchestrated the attacks of 9/11 in a bid to consolidate power. But don't think for one second that Bush hasn't thanked his lucky stars for nigh on four years now that it happened. And if you think he really feels any sense of loss for those thousands of lives that have happened on his watch, just look at Ms. Sheehan, standing out in that field, waiting for someone without a media credential to pay attention to her from across the electrified fence.

They say that if God did not exist, man would have had to invent Him. And, in a way, I believe that if 9/11 hadn't happened, Bush would have had to invent something similar to it, even if it had just been a pipe bomb at a vacant bus stop, just to scare the bejeezus out of us. I don't want to believe that, but I believe it nonetheless.

As it is, Dubya and Rove have been using 9/11 the way DeNiro's Al Capone used a baseball bat in the movie "The Untouchables", beating us all mercilessly about the head and shoulders with it until we submit peacefully. I'm sure the families of those who perished on that horrible day are thrilled that their loved ones are all being recalled as good, God-fearing Republicans who would want Dubya to continue playing with his green plastic Army men. (Never mind that most of them were Democrats or foreign nationals.) We shall wave the Stars & Stripes over Iraq -- why did we even bother with Afghanistan, again? -- in memory of those whom Saddam Hussein may have conspired with the Taliban, al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, and Al Franken to kill.

Oh, did I say "Al Franken"? Is Al Franken really an American-hating traitor? According to Bernard Goldberg, yes he is.

Goldberg has written a book called 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken Is #37). There's an excerpt here. And, when you read the excerpt, it becomes very obvious that Goldberg feels disagreeing with the majority is no longer simple disagreement -- it's treason. Now, we liberal whack-jobs (meaning, anyone to the left of Ann Coulter) had been joking for a while that of course the Right feels "dissent = treason". We joked about it because we didn't want to believe it. We didn't really think they could possibly feel that way. But when you read Goldberg, and Coulter, and listen to Sean Hannity and Michael Savage and their ilk, they don't seem to be joking, do they?

The point is, our political system has devolved to the point that "spin" is no longer the favored method of dealing with unpleasant facts. The newly-preferred method is to ignore them altogether. Pretend they don't exist. Cover your ears and scream la-la-la-laaa loudly. Stick your head in the sand. Because if you pretend hard enough that those facts don't exist, eventually, they sure as hell will disappear.

And if you bring those unpleasant facts up again, you're a traitor. End of story.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Orwell forgot one:

TRUTH IS SEDITION

On this topic, add the following blog links (thank you, Eric Alterman, who talks about way too much off-topic stuff for me to link directly to his own MSNBC blog):

Harold Meyerson, here.

Ariana Huffington, here.

And Cindy Sheehan herself, here.

Good stuff, and all directly on-topic with this blog entry. I'm probably going to blog again about Ms. Sheehan today or tomorrow.

Computers Suck, And Then You Die

2005-08-14T12:01:00.000-05:00

My computer is finally back up and running. It took three frickin' days, but the problem turned out to be nothing more than a bad memory card. And for all the flack Microsoft (of course you know, "micro" = small, "soft" = limp) catches about being the Monolithic Wal-Mart Of The Technology World, they really pulled my tail out of the hole. And, as I mentioned before, didn't charge me a cent for it. Kudos to them where it's deserved.

It was Microslob (sorry, old habits die hard, but I'll try to show them more respect from here on out) that helped me isolate the problem. They kept checking back with me, ad nauseam, until they were convinced that my problem was resolved and they could close out the trouble ticket. And yes, my tech's name was Rajneesh, and yes, he's located over there somewhere in Obpurnamsheeshi. (Which makes me wonder why Microscum -- oops, I did it again -- advertises service hours of 5 am to 9 pm Pacific time, when not a soul answering their phones is in any of the American time zones and could only be noshing on beef-free Big Macs during that time period. But once again, I digress ...)

There are lessons to be learned here:

1) While Microsoft's software may suck, their service ain't so damn bad. Even if they have exported thousands of jobs overseas, and even if they do overcharge for beta software, their Indian employees are good eggs. And if they don't stop calling me over and over again to ensure that everything is now all right with my computer, I'm going to start sending them packages of Omaha Steaks and boy, will THAT get their bovine-worshipping attention ...

2) While their service may be good, Windows XP software IS that damn bad. I was one of the first-ever people to use a Mac, and if there were any software worth a damn available for it, I'd still be using one. Windows still crashes without telling you WHY it crashed. At least Macs pointed at you and laughed out loud before going down. (Much like a couple of girlfriends in my past. But again, I digress ...)

3) Yogi Berra said "It ain't over till it's over." Well, with Microslave (oops, sorry), even when it's fixed, it ain't fixed. Now that the file structure on my hard drive has been re-built and now that the drive in question has been de-fragged, it still takes a full SIX MINUTES -- yes, you read that right -- for the Windows splash screen to disappear and my desktop to show up. And I'm stumped. I got no clue why that is. But is it worth another call to New Delhi to figure out the problem? My gut tells me that I had better be happy to have gotten all the free support out of Microvole (dammit, sorry) that I did, and leave well enough alone. (After all, if I can't find the answer on Google, it's not worth having, now is it?)

To summarize: (a) Microsoft is NOT the anti-Christ. (b) Microsoft IS the semi-evil, misunderstood Satan (with the deep baritone singing voice) from the "South Park" movie. (c) Indian nationals are our friends. Just trust me on this. (d) If a sinkhole opened up in Redmond, Washington tomorrow and swallowed the Microsoft campus whole, no one would miss any of them; they've already outsourced every significant job function we need out of them.

And (e): You never really appreciate how important your bank accounts and your internet porn are until you think they're gone forever ...

Computers Will Make Our Lives Easier, My Ass

2005-08-10T11:59:00.000-05:00

It's 1:30 in the morning, and I've been drowning my sorrows with about a half-dozen beers. (It's okay; I'm big and I'm a Texan, which means I can drink more than the rest of you. Don't try this at home. Besides, I've had those eight beers over about eight hours, so I've kept up with my liver. But, as usual, I digress.)

I've been slurping Anheuser-Busch's finest because I'm trying to drown my sorrows. Because last night, my computer died. And I, generally a techno-savvy kind of information technology savant, can't bring the damn thing back to life.

Did I download a virus? Can I blame this whole thing on Microsoft's sorry excuse for a Windows built-in firewall? Or did my computer just decide to contract PMS and be ornery for five days? As of now, one and a half days into my ordeal, I don't know.

It started yesterday. I was in the middle of work, and I walked away from my PC for an hour. I don't know what the heck I was thinking, because as soon as you give a computer the unsupervised opportunity to play a practical joke on you, it will join the opposing side. And so it did.

All of a sudden, my PC would no longer recognize any of my hard drives. My bank accounts: frozen. My MP3s: disappeared. My work product: inaccessible. And all my internet porn: Oh sweet Jesus, don't get me started.

With the exception of a desperately-needed haircut, I have spent the past 32 hours of my life (not counting sleep; what are you, nuts?) trying to get this computer back into a state where the damn thing will function. My current situation is so bad that (you won't believe this) Microsoft, which generally charges $35 for a service call, REFUNDED MY MONEY. Now, when Microsoft won't take your money, you KNOW you're screwed.

And I am most definitely screwed.

I am so glad God created laptops, because it allows me to share my lament with the rest of the world. But for cryin' out loud, is it too much to ask for the Miracle Of Modern Technology to actually WORK the way it's supposed to?

I mean, when Bill Gates and his minions are taking pity on you, you can pretty much bank on the fact that you're HOSED ...

So, when you're surfing the internet on your perfectly-tuned computer, I hope you will think of those disadvantaged folk whose computers became our enemy. And watch your back. You could be next.

Peter Jennings, R.I.P.

2005-08-07T11:58:00.000-05:00

Well, it seems like every time I get ready to unleash a humorous rant in your direction, something serious happens that takes precedence. And this is a big one, at least as far as I'm concerned.

The last credible TV news anchor has passed away. Peter Jennings was 67. Lung cancer -- smoking -- killed him.

There's Something About April

2005-08-02T11:53:00.000-05:00

If you go back to my MySpace profile, and look in my (very under-populated) Friends list, you'll see the smiling face of a gorgeous brunette. (No, not Tom.) Her name is April. And we've never met, never spoken to each other.

So why do I feel we were separated at birth?

April is an L.A.-area voice actress and radio personality -- you can definitely call her a "celebrity". Now, I've become quite passé about celebrities. I work with many, I'm friends with some, and heck, I even have a couple of them on my cell phone's speed-dial. Celebrities are people too, and most of them -- most of them -- will only act like the stereotypical "celebrity" if that's how you treat them.

(I'll digress for a moment to tell you this story. I was an extra in the film "Casino". There is nothing like working for a day as an extra to shatter the Hollywood glamour mystique for good. The face of the huge casino set that you saw in the movie? Silk-screened canvas. The back? Raw plywood. And our "dressing room" was a concrete parking garage on the premises. We would be herded up to the set when we were needed, and were left in the garage when we weren't.

So, late in the day, I'm standing out in the parking lot, getting some fresh air, and I find myself standing face-to-face with the film's star, Robert De Niro. [Actually, since he's about 5'9", it was more like face-to-Adam's-apple, but that's neither here nor there.] But there was no "BIG STAR" and "little movie extra"; we were two professionals on the set of a film. I nodded at him, and he nodded at me. We smiled. I believe we were about to strike up a conversation.

And then, a rather large female extra comes out of the garage and begins screaming. "OH MY GOD! IT'S ROBERT DE NIRO! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!!!" [Oh come on, you're working on a Robert De Niro MOVIE! Whom did you expect? Go change your pants and get a hold of yourself!] Needless to say, Mr. D beat a hasty retreat.

The moral of the story: Celebrities are people too. Treat them like a celebrity, and don't be surprised if they act like one. Treat them like a person and they'll respond like a person. [Except for Tom Cruise. That guy's just nutty as a Zagnut bar.] Anyway, back to April ...)

I found April's website when her father, a former TV star, passed away. I had been a fan of his, and knew of April only from some of her voice work. So, when her father died, I punched up her name on Google and ended up at AprilWinchell.com -- and was shocked to read that she was getting hate mail from fans of her father. In response, April wrote a blog entry that I thought was one of the most inspired, most brilliant essays I had ever read. Mustering more tact and diplomacy than I ever could have under the circumstances, she managed to describe her grief about losing her estranged father, reveal her pain and anger over the hurtful e-mails she had been getting, and gently remind us that what we see on the screen, or hear on the air, is rarely the truth.

She ended her essay with the line, "Please try to forgive me if this causes you unhappiness. I am at a place where it's your life or mine, and I have to save myself." There is so much hurt and anguish buried in that sentence. And at the moment I read that, all I wanted was to give her a long hug.

So, I did something I had never done before: I wrote my first fan letter. And my letter extolled not April's talent or her work, but what I had seen of her personality. She wrote back and we've exchanged a couple of brief e-mails since then.

But I have also had the chance to listen to April's archive of radio shows, which I had never heard live since I'm over 1000 miles away. I have gone through about 60 hours of April's broadcasts in the past month (it's okay, I work at my computer, and listening to April beats listening to Sean Hannity all to hell) and am just flabbergasted at how similar her take on the world, and her sense of humor, is to mine.

Now, for those who know me, it's no secret that I had a difficult childhood; heck, we all did. And for a long time, I was hesitant to talk about it, because we had a roof over our heads and food on our table, and I knew there were kids who had it a lot worse than I did. But what I have learned from April is that you can have a tough, painful childhood even when your family is rich and famous. In fact, it can even be worse for those kids, because nobody wants to believe the horrible truths about someone they idolize. So when the victim speaks out about their famous folks, the public does what people have done for centuries: they attack the messenger. And the pain of the abuse gets compounded, and the victim gets further victimized. And that's something I know a little bit about.

Despite our very different backgrounds, April and I have a lot in common. It has shaped our senses of humor and the way we view the world. I feel connected to her by our pain.

And I still want to give her that long hug. And April, if you're reading this: It is my fondest wish that someday, I will get to.

The Political Spectrum Is A Moebius Strip

2005-07-31T11:46:00.000-05:00

(Welcome to Baby's First Blog. As long as I've been living and working on the Internet, I have yet to inflict my opinions on the rest of humanity, unless I have been personally there to pound the table and send the silverware flying. So, pull down your face shield, and let's start running this carcass through the meat saw:)

I have long felt that the spectrum of politics is actually a continuous loop That is, if you go far enough to the left, you actually come back out on the right. A liberal can become more and more pinko, until all of a sudden, whammo! he finds himself a Christian right-wing nutjob.

Okay, so my logical allegory has skipped a tiny step or two. My point, though, is very well validated by the current political state of the nation. I'll explain in a moment.

I have always considered myself a political moderate who leans just a bit to the left: fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and just to the left of center on foreign policy issues. In other words: Live and let live, treat everybody fairly and equally, but keep your hands off my wallet while you do so.

The problem is, the country's right wing is now controlled by "Christian" reactionary wackos. If that is now the right wing, that means that those who were formerly "conservative" are now moderate; those of us who used to be "moderate" are now liberals, and those of us who used to be "liberals" are now Amoral Heathens Who Hate Freedom.

Isn't it ironic that the people whom we used to call the "Amoral Heathens" are now (here comes my point!) ... the "Christian" reactionary wackos? I mean, think about it: these people want to stamp out free speech and free thought, want to pillage the Treasury and our natural resources for their own profit regardless of the cost to future generations, and want to make our nation a one-party dictatorship.

Umm, 'scuse me, but ... doesn't that sound like someone who Hates Freedom?

Plus, there is nothing Christian about these political "Christians". Those folks supposedly believe in the Gospels of the New Testament, in which Jesus said, "Love thy neighbor as thyself" (pretty good words to live by, even if you don't otherwise buy into the gospels). And "Judge not, lest ye be judged." And lots of other good Biblical advice that has nothing to do with religion.

Well, these "Christians" prefer to disregard Jesus' teachings. They can't wait to hate their neighbors and to judge others. (And to make a buck in the process, if at all possible -- and with Jesus, ALL things are possible!)

In other words, I put it to you, dear Reader, that those we call the Bible-beating reactionary right are actually the Marx-quoting radical left, but with different underwear. And the Pat Buchanans and Jerry Falwells and Rush Limbaughs of the world -- xenophobic hate-mongers, but generally harmless and kind of amusing to watch in a train-wreck sort of way -- are now the "mainstream" of the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan would now be considered a down-the-middle centrist. And I, the former moderate, am now a Lib, and the new right wing asks me and those like me, "Why do you hate freedom?"

So, for those of you who Hate Freedom as much as I do, here's a little ditty by Eric Idle that pretty well sums up my feelings toward the current state of the Gubmint and the president's political "base".

(Note: If you are easily offended by dirty words or free expression of one's opinions, you probably won't want to click on that link. But knowing you, you will anyway, and then you'll write me to tell me how offended you were.)