I’m sitting at the dinner table this evening, eating pork chops (Well, OK, pork tenderloin. Still.), fried apples and corn on the cob and I look up to see that my son has shut himself in the pantry, my daughter’s trying to blow up the microwave and my mother-in-law is eating leather.
But it still has a sore throat.
UPDATE (4:48 p.m.): Now Victoria has gotten this stuff.
Am apparently sick w/summer flu. (MD ruled out West Nile and Lyme’s … and strep, for that matter.) Blogging therefore may be light for a bit.
If they told me my last meal could be either an ice-cream sandwich or a beer, I’d really have to stop and think about it.
Vietnam is cracking down on people who urinate in public, but it’s finding the problem difficult to solve because the Vietnamese drink a lot of beer.
Perhaps the good townspeople of Chapel Hill, the self-proclaimed “beer-drinking capital of the world,” can offer advice.
The Northeast blackout as seen from space:
UPDATE 8/25: It’s also fake. Real photos here (20 hours before blackout) and here (7 hours after blackout).
Oh, well.
Friend: btw, have you seen the trailer for “Bubba Ho-tep”?
Me: Nope. Got a URL?
Friend: not handy – http://www.apple.com/quicktime
Friend: Bruce Campbell – the jesus of cool
Me: I’ll check it out. Isn’t he more a horror-flick kind of guy, though?
Friend: but FUNNY horror flicks! Army of Darkness rules like a slawberin’ dawg!
Me: I’ll have to rent it one of these years after the kids leave.
Friend: “Good. Bad. I’m the one with the gun!”
Me: Speaking of good and bad, check this out: http://homokaasu.org/gematriculator/
Me: According to this, my blog is 42% evil.
Me: Clearly I’ve been slacking off.
Friend: indeed – anything less than 75% is unacceptable
Me: Hey, YOUR site is only *29%* evil, so don’t be pointing fingers at me!
Friend: but I’m a white hat
Friend: you’re an evil member of the liberal press
Me: What? Since when??
Friend: run this one through there – [the URL of his ex]
Me: [The ex’s]? Hold on.
Me: Dayum. 79% evil.
Friend: she rules, dude!
Me: Clearly, we are not worthy.
Friend: I always knew that
Friend: she did too ;)
Me: Well, at least she didn’t beat you over the head with it in front of your lowlife friends.
Friend: this is true
Frequent BOTR readers know that I believe the current business model of the pop-music bidness is obsolete and failing. But none of you have ever asked me the logical follow-up question: What might a different, better business model look like?
I actually have an answer (or several answers), but MTV has one as well: The music bidness needs to stop making albums.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a single worthwhile thing I’ve ever gotten from Texas other than Amish Tech Support, moon landings and a bridesmaid for our wedding, so I can only hope that this represents the state’s first step toward secession … and that it doesn’t let the door hit it on the butt on the way out.
UPDATE: Naturally, I forgot something — in this case, Alex and Real Live Preacher. Sorry, guys.
Whether she means to or not, Michele of A Small Victory appears to be aging more gracefully than anyone this side of William Butler Yeats.
As one of the guests in Silflay Hraka’s Warren points out, you knew this was coming, but it’s still nice to see it done well.
Friend: See this? They’re gonna make blonde jokes illegal in Bosnia.
Me: The hell?
Friend: That’s what it says.
Me: You sure this isn’t an urban legend?
Friend: Dunno.
Me: OK, questions: Who defines “blonde”? At what point does “honey-colored” shade over into “dark blond”?
Friend: Good question.
Me: Also, does the law cover all blondes, regardless of provenance, or does it distinguish between natural blondes and bottle blondes? If the latter, how does one prove one is a natural blonde?
Friend: Dunno. But your analytical mind has stumbled upon an interesting element of proof in any such lawsuit — one full of all sort of possibilities for Court TV.
Me: Yeah, well, I’m detail-oriented like that.
All the bishops of the Anglican Communion will be gathering in England, at their parishioners’ expense, to discuss what to do about the fact that its American section, the Episcopal Church, has confirmed as a bishop a non-celibate gay man. Colbert King suggests that they’ve got more important things to worry about and that, for consistency’s sake, they also ought to worry about two other things:
… to new-media guru J.D. Lasica, whose link to me in his 8/14 post on Fair and Balanced Day warmed the cockles of my Sitemeter account and made this the busiest day in this blog’s 16-month history.
(J.D. is not paying me a thing, however, to tell you that he has a chapter on Internet journalism and the Ken Starr investigation in the new book Thinking Clearly, edited by Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell, who head the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Check it out.)
‘Course, playing link whore at the Official Fair and Balanced List didn’t hurt, either.
You’re Texas!
You aren’t really much of your own person, but everyone around you wishes you’d go away, so you might as well be independent. You’re sort of loud-mouthed and abrasive, but you do have a fair amount of power. You like big trucks, big cattle, and big oil rigs. And sometimes you really smell. But it’s not all bad, you’re big enough to have some soft spots somewhere in all that redneck madness.
Take the Country uiz at the Blue Pyramid
Victoria: Daddy, are you going to the store?
Me: Yep. You need anything?
Victoria: We’re out of tomato soup. Can you get some?
Me: Sure.
Victoria: Can you get the four cans in one thing?
Me: Package, you mean? OK.
Victoria: If they don’t got packages, get three or four lonely cans.
* * *I was home for a while with Hooper today — he’s recovering from a particularly bad sinus/ear infection — when he decided he needed to go poop.
This is good, deciding he needs to go poop. No complaints about that. Problem is, he’s still deciding this after pooping in his diaper.
When I catch up with him, he has completely disrobed in the bathroom and is preparing to hop up on the toilet.
“Daddy,” he says, completely unnecessarily, “I nekkid!”
Unfortunately, I am unable to catch him before he hops, and slides, up into position. Eww.
“I go poop,” he announces.
“Past tense, kid,” I reply.
“Hey,” he says after a couple of minutes, “I pass gas!”
Pause.
“I pass gas again!”
He slides — Eww, again — and hops off the pot, then turns around and looks into the bowl.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah, buddy?”
“Where da gas go?”
“Good question, buddy. In fact, what makes you think it’s left?”
He shrugs. I begin cleaning him, and the bathroom, up.
YODA:A venerated sage with vast power and knowledge, you gently guide forces around you while serving as a champion of the light.
My friend Jim Rosenberg’s dad, Marty, died recently. Ann and I went to the funeral, even though we’d never met Marty — we know Jim, and who Jim is probably tells us everything that was important, and good, about Marty. Indeed, the overriding theme of the tributes paid to Marty at the funeral was his devotion to his family and how that informed his frequent comment, “How we spend our days is how we spend our years.” I got the sense that for Marty, a bad day with the family beat a good day anywhere else, and God knows there are far worse ways to live.
Soon after the funeral, Jim created a posthumous, online tribute to his dad: a collection of doodles his dad had executed while sitting in any number of interminable meetings. Jim, his kids and Marty’s other grandkids apparently have curated the collection, and you can see it now at The Marty Rosenberg Online Museum of Doodles. And you thought you knew how to survive interminable meetings with style ….
Totally unrelated note: I sympathized with the large numbers of people, including some of my fellow members of First Presbyterian, who had hoped years ago that Temple Emanuel would stay downtown, across the street from us, rather than building a new sanctuary at a less central site. But, having been to the new sanctuary for Marty Rosenberg’s funeral, I now have to say: Wow! What a beautiful building.
No reason, really.
Ever seen what 19,000 barrels of bourbon look like when they’re burning?
A couple of items:
… to my brother Hugh, who turns 40 today.
Yes, he’s my younger brother, if you must know.
“So this is why people who get cramps drown,” Bigwig of Silflay Hraka thought, floating still and quiet about 5 feet down. “They are remarkably painful.”
Been there. Sympathize.
