You know, I try very hard not to be the white-trash Southern stereotype, but sometimes there’s just no escapin’ your roots

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.

It lives

But it still has a sore throat.

UPDATE (4:48 p.m.): Now Victoria has gotten this stuff.

**groan**

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.

A realization

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.

Drink is the curse of the urinating class

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.

Or maybe not.

OK, this is cool

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.

What we talk about when we don’t talk about work

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

Maybe Microsoft wouldn’t have so many enemies …

… if Internet Explorer’s error page looked like this.

Hey, if you can’t be good, at least be funny.

Getting slack in my old age

The album is dying; long live the music!

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.

See ya. Wouldn’t wanna be ya.

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.

Over the hill

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.

Straight Eye for the Queer Guy

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.

Details

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.

(Insert your own tacky, or, worse, punny headline here using the words “archibishop” and “comes.” Go on — you know you want to.)

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:

• The fact that Prince Charles, currently shacking up with longtime girlfriend Camilla Parker Bowles without benefit of clergy in violation of church teachings, will one day become, in addition to the king, the supreme governor of the Church of England (and, thus, the Anglican Communion).
• The fact that many African archbishops continue to tolerate the polygamy of many of their parishioners.

Major props …

… 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.

No surprise here

Which country am I?

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

Fair and balanced

SOURCE: Quiddity

Random acts of cuteness and parental glamour

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.

‘Cept I don’t screw around with my syntax the way he does

YODA:A venerated sage with vast power and knowledge, you gently guide forces around you while serving as a champion of the light.

Posthumous fame

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.

Scientific discovery

So that’s what happened to my casserole.

10 Songs

No reason, really.

• “Brand New Cadillac,” The Clash
• “Up ‘Round the Bend,” Creedence Clearwater Revival
• “Here Comes a Regular,” The Replacements
• “Money Changes Everything,” The Brains
• “Discovering Japan” and “You Can’t Be Too Strong,” Graham Parker and the Rumour
• “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” Elvis Costello and the Attractions
• “Henderson the Rain King,” Counting Crows
• “You Could Be Mine” and “Paradise City,” Guns N’ Roses

Tragedy

Ever seen what 19,000 barrels of bourbon look like when they’re burning?

Now you can.

Housekeeping

A couple of items:

• Haloscan was down for a bit earlier this evening, which, in addition to making my comments temporarily disappear, also slowed this page’s load time because its button in the sidebar was refusing to load. This is the first such problem I’ve noticed since switching to Haloscan.
• Speaking of comments … for the first time in this blog’s existence, I zapped a couple in a recent post. One of them used the f-bomb, but the real reason was that two commenters who, so far as I know, don’t know one another in real life, looked as if they were threatening to get into a pissing contest in my comments section, which is not what that feature is for.
• My blogroll is a bit shorter: I zapped those that have gone on hiatus or on to Blog Heaven.

A big shout-out …

… to my brother Hugh, who turns 40 today.

Yes, he’s my younger brother, if you must know.

Oh, THAT’s how it happens

“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.