Still Taking Up Virtual Space

No idea why this is still here. I'm down to fawning over loved ones and occasional impotent outbursts of angst. I whine on the Twitters now, when passion overcomes judgment. But yeah, it's Festival, so here's an acknowledgement that this thing is still flapping at the air. The last time I was newsy, everything went to shit. While I know better than to blame my own newsiness for the shit, I'm not inclined to say much here. I haven't been employed since just before the election, and Ilse violently yanked Databoy from Terpdom at Winter Break, for very good reasons (unrelated to my unemployment). Bam, of course, abides.

And still: welcome to the fucking Festival. Of course, the brutal and uncaring violence classically associated with the Festival is now mundane, so there's no longer any reason for that to be remarkable. Whose fault is that? Well, now, there's some angst, for sure. I'd like to have the energy to properly care. I don't. Discuss amongst yourself.

News

1. I cleaned up. There was stuff in the links that was old, moribund, dramatically changed, and in one sad case, deceased. Thanks to BFF for the inspiration to get around to doing something that's needed doing for a very long time.

2. I am unemployed. Low-effort Kickstarter ideas welcome (turns out "Bologna sandwich" was already taken).

3. Yes. Jill Stein is a fucking dipshit who has no business running for office. I don't care whether she's pandering to anti-vaxxers or actually is one. And yes, it is, in fact, one or the other. Don't fucking embarrass yourself by arguing otherwise--you got nothing. No one is putting words in her mouth or on her Twitter feed (or deleting them from her Twitter feed) for her.

4. Databoy makes his way to the University of Turtles very, very soon. I won't claim success yet, because the scoreboard's not showing zeroes. But it's close.

5. I forget what eight was for.

Honing Fierce Children

Time flies when you're not blogging very much. Bam-Bam was introduced to these pages over 10 years ago as an adorable 5-year-old terrorist who, with a single two-Couric turd, made me stop laughing (temporarily) at my own farts. Today, my little Bam-Bam is 15 years old, stands a damn good three inches taller than me, and is an actual high-school ath-uh-lete.

Bam started high school last September, after an extra year in the safety of middle school, and he attends a very fine program at a school that, while as generically fabulous as any other school in my local locality, didn't exist when I was a lad (like many other schools in my local locality, including the one at which Ilse teaches), Therefore, ath-uh-letically, it don't so much exist now, in my feverbrain. But now I don the colors (we are Red, which is fine in any other contexts, and we are, as it happens, Cougars, and y'all can have a good chuckle at Ilse for that...go on, I don't mind, cradle robbery don't seem quite so cradle-robbing after enough years have passed).

I'm further annoyed at Bam's high school because we live about 500 yards away from it; the football field is behind my across-the-street neighbors' back yards. I know far too much about Cougarville. I know the score of the football, field hockey, lacrosse, or soccer game. I know what this week's halftime show will be (sidebar: what passes for award-winning marching bands* these days is appalling). I know what the poms will dance to. I call the cops when they decide to broadcast the homecoming dance sound barrage over the stadium's PA system (this was actually the work of AV pranksters, not the school).

And still, I don the Red and cheer, because Bam is now an ath-uh-lete. Cougarville (a pretty jocky school, overall) has a faboo Allied Sports Program, which is mainstream kids and special kids playing together in sports that are reasonably manageable for kids with issues. It's supposed to be fun, although some schools (not ours) take it a little too seriously. The fall sport was supposed to be handball, and most parents agreed with Coach's assessment that handball is a bit risky for kids with motor issues. Spring will be softball, which will be an interesting test of concept-getting for Bam, to which we look forward with glee, because we're assholes. But winter...winter is bocce, played with heavy rubber balls on a gym floor. This is an actual interscholastic competitive sportsball thing, with uniforms, a referee, a scoreboard, the National Anthem, and--we are told--for one home game a season, cheerleaders. That home game is coming up this week, and we're freaking giddy about it.

Bocce is curling with balls. Sort of. A player throws a smaller ball, called a jack or a pallino, which in our world is yellow and a little bigger than a golf ball. That's the target. The object is to get one of your (red or green) rubber balls--larger and heavier, about the size of a softball, and a little heavier--closest to the pallino. You score a number of points equal to the number of your balls closest to the pallino after each team has thrown four balls. It's all pretty sedate, and very sportsmanlike--there are some times when it's okay for everyone to get a trophy, and this is one of them.

Bam doesn't give a shit about where the ball goes, although he is often the pallino-chucker (who also throws the first ball). Oddly, he is among the team's leading scorers. This is fucking hilarious, because he usually walks up, chucks a ball, and walks away before it's stopped rolling.

What Bam does like is that every time he throws a ball--regular or pallino--the bleachers erupt in applause and cheering, some of it calling his name. He is then surrounded by his teammates--a substantial number of them cute little high school girls--who high- and low-five him and tell him he's awesome. There are something like eight mainstream kids on this team, and seven of them are girls. And every one of them is a sweet kid who's in this partly because it's an easy sport and partly because being nice to special-needs kids looks good on a college app and, I imagine, partly because some or all of them are just actually nice. He's got a lot to like.

He's number 26, by the way, a number that carries some pretty major weight in this house.

Bam is not the only kid in the house to proudly represent. Databoy goes to a different school because he managed to convince someone in authority that he's a fucking genius (he sort of is, for some limited applications of geniosity), and he's in a magnet program and an engineering program. In this, his senior year, he has joined the academic team, also known as the quiz bowl team, or hereabouts, the It's Academic team (for the TV show of the same name, although the relationship between this league and the TV show is tenuous at best). Turns out that the team's coach/sponsor is way laid back. She's a perfectly good and entertaining person and a generally good teacher, but she's a little too busy to take care of the team, especially in the form of showing up for road meets (which most are--a meet consists of four schools, of which only one can be home; Databoy's school had only one home meet this year). So it's a really good thing that, in the team's stable of parents, is one dedicated idiot who's willing to show up at road meets and be the only grownup representative of their farm-town school, a school half the size of any other in the county, a school smack at the outer edge of the county, a school that back in our day, had as many head of livestock as students, but has now emerged, thanks to high-quality magnet programs, with a reputation as one of the best schools in the state.

I'm sorry, did I actually have to tell you who that dedicated idiot is?

This academic team thing is a lot of fun for a pompous git like me; I often get to be the reader/moderator, which is howlingly funny because I am, as you know, proudly illiterate and profoundly undereducated, and as you probably don't know, prone to getting a little tongue-tied when I'm speaking. Reading out loud is an adventure. I also get to riff on the questions after they're answered, dropping random contextually related tidbits of history and literature and pop culture and inside baseball on the poor little bastards. They appreciate this every bit as much as they do any bit of twaddle emitted by their own parents, bless their little hearts. But fuck 'em, I'm doing them a favor and they're better people for having spent 35 minutes with me.

And they're awesome and funny kids. There was a countywide meet the other day, the last round of competition before the playoffs--each team plays the two teams above and below it in the standings in a giant round-robin deal. Some schools are so into this that they have two or three teams and not enough adults to manage; as a result, I ended up reading/moderating a match between two schools' B teams, two schools that I was raised to congenitally despise****. Yes, I told them so, and proceeded to tell them that they were free to call me out when I made mistakes (one of the reader's duties is to press a button after buzzer questions, to clear the system, and I'm often so excited about the next question, or the last question, or the arithmetic of scorekeeping, or my own farts, that I forget to press the button), by either calling me "Sir" or clapping like seals.

It took only three questions for the rich kids to find an opportunity to clap and "Orp!" like seals and chant, "Buzzers please Sir." Magnificent. Most relaxed match I've ever read, since I was a true neutral and didn't have to coach my team (mostly with snarling and glares, since etiquette demands non-involvement during a match, whether or not I'm reading/moderating/scorekeeping) and moderate simultaneously.

Databoy's team entered the day in twelfth place (top 16 out of 30 or so teams make the playoffs). They won all four matches despite my presence--totally unprecedented for them--and moved up to eighth place, giving themselves a nice playoff position for the first round of the playoff tournament. And a dreadful one for subsequent rounds, potentially, because we're not sure whether they reseed after each round--so they may face the one seed in the second round, if they get past the dreaded eight-nine matchup--against a team****** that beat them by 5 points--about a third of the value of the average question--in their first game of the season. The glaringly decisive question they missed, lo those months ago, involved sportsball. Databoy was benched for that match--there are more kids than spots, so they take turns sitting out--and he's the only kid on the team with a chance of answering most sportsball questions. So he's in the game a lot more now.

And he hasn't gotten a single sportsball question right in a competitive situation all season. Go Databoy. Go Bam.

* Aren't the overalls spiffy? Holy crap, if we'd dressed like that back in the days of onions on our belts, they'd have laughed us out of the county**. Oh, wait. They did that anyway. The song, by the way, is a dispirited and lackluster rendition of the West Virginia University fight song, which is, to my eternal shame, also my high school's fight song. Had we played it like this funeral dirge, our director, who doubled as a professional roller-skater***, would've tasered us and laughed while we jerked and danced. If tasers had been invented yet, but that would've been hard, since electricity, yea, and even dirt, had yet to be invented.

** Their formal uni is worse, worn with a USC-style Trojan helmet. Thank you once again, Jeebus, for not inflicting that torment upon us.

*** I am super-seriously not kidding here. Professional. Roller. Skater. The seventies, friends. We lived them at full speed.

**** More sidebars: First*****, as a lad, I was raised to find every other high school in the county despicable or irrelevant. Both of these schools were despicable from our perspective, although I dated girls from the wealthier of the two schools, being a particularly skeevy and opportunistic little fucking creep when I was an adolescent.

***** Second, I missed Databoy's match during that sub-round, which was just as well, because they were playing against the aforementioned alma mater. I walked into the room, shouted "Go Trojans!" (not Databoy's school mascot), gathered my seething oh-my-God-parents-are-the-fucking-worst proteges in a huddle, quietly and cheerfully exhorted them to win the fucking match, and went off to do my duty for county and school system by moderating a match between a school that mostly bested us in brawls and a school that disappointed us out of three consecutive state football titles, but whose girls were primo for a gawky little shit like me, back in the day.

****** A team representing a school at which Ilse used to teach, pretty much her favorite of her former schools, and another school with a very fine tradition of wiseassery. Synchronicity abounds.

Yeah, That

Thanks to BFF for the shout and the tunes.

Every day is a holiday at Minions, because, y'know, fuck you it's all about you. And you deserve a break today.

This year: Nimoy dead. Pratchett dead. Planet graduated. Databoy seventeen, Bam-Bam fifteen. Purple all growed up and become an engineer. Wait, did I say Planet fucking graduated?

Jeebus. Probably a good day to get hammered and eat a shitload of red meat, since Zombie's leaving his alone. Sadly, my corporate overlords--myself included, since I'm one of them--demand more today, so we'll just get to a very mild buzz sometime much later on in the day.

But oh yes. There will be a shitload of red meat.

Thanks again to BFF for the birthday love. See y'all around August 28 or so, unless something pops up that's so compelling that I have to be a jackass about it. Love, with peace out.

Autism Awareness Day

Yup. You aware? Good. Vaccinate your children. If you think that's a bad idea, then shut the fuck up and vaccinate your children. If you're not willing to shut the fuck up and vaccinate your children, shut the fuck up and vaccinate your children. Then shut the fuck up some more and vaccinate your children.

That's about all I have time for this year. Last year. 2012. 2009, and 2008. The boy? He's awesome, and I love him more than breath its own self. Yeah, he's still autistic. Whatever. Love to Kimmah and Sam and Swami and Max and to you, whoever you are.

In news of very nearly equal importance, the Maryland women are returning to the Final Four. I would say this at any time of any day of any year, but more pointedly this week, at every moment of every day: Fuck Notre Dame. Fuck UConn. Fuck Stanford (special for His Wiseness: I actually rooted for you last night).

Peace. Unless you're Notre Dame, UConn, or Stanford, of course.

An Ending. I Think.

It is to be fervently hoped that the cigarette I just finished was my last. We shall see. I am hoping that there is some value in admitting this in public, to my very limited public. Value to me; I don't give a fuck about its value to you (and therein may lie some of the problem, I suppose).

I have been smoking regularly for something like 38 years, though my first was longer ago than that, probably at summer camp when I was 14. I honestly don't remember, but it seems by far the most likely beginning. It was a beginning to my life as a pointlessly punkass contrarian, a thrill-seeker, a counter to sensibility and propriety. I had been, until that moment, a violent anti-smoker, and I was intellectually well aware of the health risks. I recall freaking out when I was 7 and my parents--both essentially non-smokers who could, back in the 60s, smoke an occasional cigarette socially--lit up after a dinner in a restaurant. My change became complete when I started swiping Larks from my father's parents--both of whom smoked until they were in their 70s (my grandfather, the Original Recipe John the Daftist, smoked until about a year before his death from COPD).

For a long time I smoked two packs a day, Winstons by choice, Marlboros sometimes and then always when I succumbed to the peer-pressured notion that Winstons were pretty freakin' gay. Then the world stopped letting people smoke at their desks, and rightly so, and I cut it to a pack of Camel Lights a day because the Marlboros (along with a steady stream of marijuana smoking) were making me noticeably unhealthier.

I quit for nearly a month almost 10 years ago. I had a heart attack, and was mildly impressed by that, and stopped, aided by a common smoking-cessation antidepressant I won't name. It made me itch. It made me insane. The drug, I mean. I had the heart attack the weekend before Thanksgiving, and I don't think I stopped right away--I think I waited until just after the holiday. I spent Christmas Eve with my brother and his family; my mother was visiting them. I bought a pack of smokes on the way home.

My bout of pneumonia, accompanied by the worst cough ever, chest pain that is at best musculoskeletal (and we are now fairly certain that it is), some potentially rather dire potential diagnoses from various test results, and the prospect of prematurely and irrevocably leaving Ilse, Bam, and I suppose Databoy, the lights of my life, has thoroughly frightened me, for reals, my genuinely risk-humping nature laid open, the frontier of risk aversion now discovered (in my personal life--professionally, it's more calculated, by many more orders of magnitude). Boy, do I feel like a pussy. Seriously. 38 years of the Devil may care, and now this, simpering about the game clock, veering away from the head-on. The only thing I can think of that would be more shameful would be acquiring formal religion (and in a way, my frenzied dash to perceived safety is a rejection of my previously established semi-formal secret religion). I'll get over it.

I hasten to add that while the dire stuff is not ruled out, it now seems far less likely, based on a visit to my newest doctor, a pulmonologist. Part of how we rule it out is for me to stop smoking, and we have created a cunning plan that includes nicotine replacement, a therapy I had not previously considered. I hasten slightly less hastily to add that it's not like I actually hate Databoy. He's just a thought-provoking series of questions, is all. I am a 53-year-old long-time smoker with cardiopulmonary issues. I don't have the fucking energy for thought-provoking series of questions.

So there it is, on the Web, my hope, my innards. I accept your good wishes for this enterprise whether or not you express them, and honestly, I'd probably prefer that you didn't, with one exception, because my contempt for you does not extend to actually wanting to disappoint you in some meaningful way. I am genuinely sorry to tell you that the exception is almost certainly not you; she is a visitor of delicate and extreme rarity, and there are very, very good reasons that she is the exception, in that she is the one human being on this planet from whom I will tolerate, unconditionally, any wee dram of optimism. And three of you just figured out that math.

And don't ask. I'll fess up if need be, or maybe, if need be, one of the local denizens who knows me in real life will attempt shame as a tool. Ask the She-Nurse of the SS how that works out. A tubercular cigar brothel/butcherteria in Tegucigalpa, to make an educated guess. In fact, the one person out there in the world who absolutely does not get that it's not okay to ask--the farthest thing from okay, in fact--is the She-Nurse.

The header quote stays. Only years will tell if it's applicable, and chances are it is, whether or not I stay quit. You really don't smoke for 38 years without shortening your life in some measure, even if you luck out and that measure is small. There's some magical thinking that only compounds the shame, hmm?

Goodbye, smoky treats. I will do my very best to never speak of this again.

Me

No, really, that's about all, though you could meander over to bDr's joint for some blog holiday tunes, or you could take a trip back to this month last year, which I just tapped to see what I did for 52, and which, it happens, is pretty fucking representative of this blog and many of the things it stands for--peace, freedom, iconoclasm, hockey, and hating on sports figures and Republicans. Themes I missed that month include soccer and metaphorically buttfucking stupid fucking hippies, but y'know, it was still a pretty good month.

For the curious and the concerned: still coughing, but more energetic and essentially recovering. Not gonna dah.

For that one guy who thinks I haven't said "fuck" enough in this post, and he knows who he fucking is, if he's even fucking reading: Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck FUCK.

For Sasha: Yes. Ghostie. Sorry. Still hard to talk for more than 15 words in a row.

And for Herself: Get the fuck out of bed, go get some fucking eggs, and fucking cook my fucking breakfast. What the fucking fuck, honey?

Information Free

Beloveds know I've been recovering from pneumonia for over two weeks now. Please focus on "recovering" rather than on "pneumonia." Thank you.

Items and judgments:

The Surveillance State: Yes. Of course it's bad. You think it's news? Holy shit, how do you keep from drowning when you look up in the rain?

Glenn Greenwald: Shut the fuck up and enjoy the Confederations Cup, you self-promoting bitch. Or the protests against it. I don't give a fuck. Just shut the fuck up.

VRA: Holy shit. What a pack of fucking tools.

DOMA: Isn't John Roberts a fascinating human being? Savior and tool? Jeebus.

That'll do. Vamos United.

Happy Birthday

He's 13 today. Happy Birthday, Bam-Bam. You're still the one.

It's Not Johnny's Birthday

So, no one's actually Youtubed the song without doing something not at all cute to it. So instead you get a loop of a piece of it played backward, a weird little tribute to the flat Earth and weather balloons that look like space ships.

Why? Sheeya, right. If I told you I'd have to kill me. I may have to kill me just for doing this much. Don't ask. I mean, you can ask, but I'd have to kill me.

As for the mundane, uhm, well, yeah. Still not so good. Runnin' on Jackson Browne's farts. Mine smell better.

Thank you for accompanying me to this brief and insubstantial visit to the PoMo dojo.

Who I Miss Today

Fuck your calendar tells me I'm a week early, but that pretty much explains it.



You know what I hate? I hate it when the wrong fucking Beatle dies. The optimist's view would be that we're done with that shit. My view is fuck you, optimist. Come a little closer, optimist. Closer. Closer.

SMACK!

Fuck you, optimist. I hate it when the wrong fucking Beatle dies. You'd think that by now, 32 fucking years later and 11 fucking years later, I'd have my fucking panties untwisted. But I don't. So fuck you.

This here is fucking awesome:



Spanish subtitles. Jeebus, the Internets are fucking great.

So, yeah. Fuck you. Especially if you're...you know who you are. But you're not reading, so triple secret fuck you.

Special super awesome love shoutout to Purple, who's getting his first Landru-free day in like a week. Poor fucking bastard.

Earl Weaver

You are not ambivalent about Earl Weaver, who died early this morning while on an Orioles fantasy cruise. You either have no idea who I'm talking about, or you didn't care about baseball at the time, or you loved him, or you were an American League umpire, or you're a fucking Yankees fan or a Sox hump and I have no further use for you (with two notable exceptions).

I left the church of baseball in 1996, the day Peter Angelos fired Jon Miller, and didn't go to another ball game until about two years ago, when I went to see Nationals Park. I've since found that baseball is too fucking slow for me to really enjoy, though I credit the leisure of it, the opportunity to talk for hours while the game unfolds, the relaxation and submission to the spectacle. I personally do better standing for two hours, leaning forward, yelling spasmodically at whichever outfield player is not shooting the fucking ball, and cracking wise with BFF and Ilse. But that's me, and I don't judge those who love the game and the church.

Before my apostasy, though, I spent an awful lot of time on 33rd Street, and was an Oriole fan for the last two years of Earl's reign, and his out-of-retirement year. This was also no small thing; I had been a Senators fan as they flamed out of existence, and childhood bitterness is hard. But places to go get stoned and slam brews weren't, and Memorial Stadium was a fine such place. I was there.

I can no longer sort out what happened while Earl was managing and what didn't, in terms of the big picture, or, for the most part, what happened while I was there and wasn't. I know I was there the night Tippy Martinez picked off three guys in one inning. I was there for a three-homer Floyd Rayford night, and I remember that as being on my birthday. It was on the ride home from Memorial on a bus that my brother, 32-Ounce, got his name.

And it doesn't matter that I'm pretty sure that all three of those things happened in 1983, so Earl wasn't managing; it was Earl who symbolized the era, whether or not he was the club's active manager. Earl is the manager I associate with those things (there was always a suspicion that Altobelli, who guided what was essentially Weaver's team to a World Series win, was just a puppet anyway). What, you thought this was about you? Or Earl?

Earl Weaver: King of the three-run homer, pioneer of matchup statistics, defiler of umpires' shoes (and on another shoe note, say the words "Earl" and "shoe polish" to any O's fan of the time, and you will get a broad smile), battler for the common fan, a man who recognized that by 1982, Jim Palmer dressed better than he pitched, Hall of Fame manager, and the last great thing about the Baltimore Orioles. Until Peter Fucking Angelos drops.

What Are You Doing Here?

It's Christmas, for fuck's sake. Go away. We're fine. Hope you are too, but if you're sashaying around the Intertoobz looking at blogs that haven't posted since Thanksgiving, you might want to go play with your new toys instead.

Things To Say, Part Infinity

I spent Saturday making a little day trip to New Hampshire for a memorial service. As happens with these things, the purpose was awful, but necessary; the visiting was far too short and great fun. I saw many beloveds, none of whom I'd seen for at least 9 years.

Not the point, though. The point is New Hampshire, and Yankeeland in general. What a fuckity place. I'm sorry, New England beloveds, but I just fucking hate everything between New York and Maine. I recognize this as a matter of aesthetics, an entirely me problem. Your accents pierce my eardrums, your need for a Dunkin Donuts outlet every 11 feet eludes me, and everything is so fucking quaint it makes me wish I were hurling. If not for the presence of beloveds, and your presence on the road to lobster, I would cheerfully agree not to despoil your land with my presence. Immersing in your rock-ribbedness for a day is always a culture shock, and always makes me realize how very happy I am to keep myself south of the Mason-Dixon line, but not too far south, knamean? I guess there's value in your existence right there, so exist on, and shit. Just shut the fuck up, stuff a cruller in your dunkin hole, and we'll do just fine.

Jolene: Not you. Not Whispers, either. Y'all have softened it up enough. Unlike the entire fucking state of New Hampshah.

I experienced all of this in the presence of John the Daftist, the She-Nurse, and 32-Ounce; the departed was a family friend of over 45 years, and the relationship among three families such that his passing demanded our presence as a family unit. I organized, helping the family's disparate tentacles to see that this was a thing we really needed to do. I rented the car, did the driving (yes, I threatened to Stop This Car), kept the peace, maintained the sobriety. It's fucked up, having aging parents, especially in a family that puts the diss in dysfunction. And that fucking well knows who the oldest son is, and isn't afraid to remind him of it every 6 fucking minutes.* It was the first time in something like 35 years that I'd been in the same car, or even in that confined a space, with my parents and brother. Before we had even boarded the first airplane, I texted this to Ilse: "Shoooooot meeeeee." While I was glad to see extended-family parents and sisters, my mood about the overall enterprise didn't improve. Oh, right. Not the fucking point. My bad.

I took pictures that crystalized what struck me. Please forgive the shitcam.

As Yankee as Yankee gets.

Some things just cry out to be shared.

If you don't understand this intuitively, Robert Rodriguez can explain it for you.

You probably need to blow this one up to get the point. But it's a gift to a friend.

I probably should've played it.

* Yes. You're old. You're going to die. All I wanted was a fucking Pepsi.



** If you expected futbol...tough shit. We'll just do a solid fuck you for violent felon Andre Hainault and biased shitdick Ricardo Salazar, and manfully stride forward to next weekend. (Seriously, Salazar, not even a foul? Fuck not only you, but your entire bloodline, especially the ones you hold most precious, you corrupt piece of dung, and with whatever flavor of cock you find most vile; games turn on moments like that one, you could not have got it more wrong, and your willful ineptitude took away whatever bit of starch United might've been able to summon--thanks a lot, you macho retard, for deciding that during that moment, arm-tackling a guy on a breakaway was fair fucking game. You're fucking pathetic, Ricardo Salazar, you fucking hijo de puta. Sure, come look me up, we'll watch the fucking replay together, perro.)

Yeah. Fuck Blogging for Reals.

Or for Real, the Franco-loving fucks.


Damn, that's terrible audio, innit? I like being nostalgic about shit that happened while Brezhnev was still alive, don't you?

Here's some more bad audio. I'm stuck on this song this week:



Liverpudlians are funny. Take cur, beewur of darkness. And yeah, I know whose birthday was this week. No, it's not a holiday here either, never has been. I get weepy in December, because that's just a weepy fucking time on top of the unpleasant anniversary, but the birthday, not so much.

Here, here's another John Lennon tribute:




Okay. I lied. It's not a John Lennon tribute at all. Did you catch Neal Innes there, in the red plaid jacket, red bow tie, and years-ahead-of-its-time pornstache? Fucking awesome. Rutles forever, bitchez. Most awesome sketch ever, at least tonight, and I'm not even drunk.

Heh. Like apples, Sasha?

Fuck It, I'm Through Saying Shit For Myself

I succumb. Fuck words, just look at my fucking videos and intuit my meaning. Or not.
Hint: Not.

Also: if you're a gamer, check out Geek and Sundry, Felicia Day's relatively new site (with accompanying YouTube channel). Y'know, if you haven't.

Hint: Felicia Day is the person fronting the band.

Suburbia

It's 5:45 PM on a weeknight in outer MoCo, and there are severe storms approaching fast. It's a favorite time for me, and I stepped onto the deck for a smoke before the storm. Lookee what I found.

Yes, the doe in the middle is taking a dump in my yard.

Unconcerned by the likes of me, the little savages continue to strip my landlord's trees.

Trippy.

The Festival & c.

Yeah, it's that day. Legitimate debate rages on whether you'd rather give up a birthday bang to me, Patrick Stewart (STFU, honey), or Han Solo, but of course that's your call, because even more of course, it's all about you.

On the state of the sentient computer:





Love to all the peeps.

Assorted Nothings

Oh hi. I'm a day late for keeping up my monthly schedule of doing very little.

Things you should know:

-I'm sick. This is day four of a nasty upper respiratory infection. My head hurts, my sinuses hurt, my ears hurt, I'm coughing, and everything sucks. I went to the urgent care yesterday, where they shot me up with powerful steroids (it's an intramuscular shot and they want to put it in a large muscle; you do the math, and no cock jokes, this means you Ilse). I also got a variety pack of scrips, so I'm zoning on more steroids and antibiotics. I hope to recover by Monday, when I have to board an airplane to go to that rural place.

-Wow, Blogger's new interface is beyond-belief awful. Thanks, Google, you fucking control freak shithead user experience failures. If you can find some time in between unlawful egregious violations of the law and simple human decency, go fuck yourselves.

-On the one night I needed to get to bed by 10, the Capitals played until 12:30 AM and lost in triple overtime.

-I don't give a fuck about politics, although I would like to ask that my friends in North Carolina vote no on Amendment One.

-Ilse, Databoy, and Bam are fine. Databoy made his stage debut in M. Butterfly the other weekend. Okay, okay, I lie. It was Aladdin Jr. I like my way better. He was a guard. He was overenthused by his sword. When he did some slapstick, middle school girls in the bleachers behind us shrieked like he was the Beatles arriving at LaGuardia. Ilse and I both turned around and mouthed, "Really?"

Okay, this post satisfies some linkers' requirements that I post once a month or so. Keep pimping me, bros.

Nope, Still Nothing

I'm still consumed by work and family and, in the time that doesn't take up, conspicuous consumption. Things of note:

I'm going bracket-free this year, but of course I'm interested in the Terpchix.

The Washington Capitals will make the playoffs. Barely. They'll even pull off a first-round upset there. Then they'll vomit on their shoes and everyone will want Dale Hunter fired.

DC United disturbs me, but go see Fullback for the details of that.

Also: your worst trade ever is my thank Ba'al we're getting a quarterback, even one who's a pig in a poke.


Gee, isn't that Jew-hater guy who busted on Sandra Fluke an asshole? That's really all the analysis it deserves here, although there's certainly lots of funny stuff out there about it. A little blogroll archaeology is all you need there.

What? You say you're dying to talk about blogging? Uhm...no, you're not. Trust me. You're not. At least not with me.