March of Time

It's my older kid's 21st birthday today. And my father-in-law's 77th birthday. Someone who is not mathematically inclined (which is fine) will not point out (which is fine) this morning that today is the beginning of the last 47 days of our lives when neither of us is 60 fucking years old. That we got here is remarkable, as serendipitous as (if more complex than) the random and joyful afternoon farm market meeting he referenced last week; the number of opportunities we've dodged, together and separately, to not get here, simply staggering. And those spread over 50 fucking years, almost 85 percent of our fucking lives. Pretty fucking lucky to be able to say that about anyone, ever. Go in peace.

Get Out Your Skull and Crossbones and Run It Up Your Mast

16 years gone. Fuck your calendar.

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.

I No Longer Believe in Math

I say this because it cannot be 24 years ago this evening that I stood on a street corner outside of a now-defunct hospital in the West End and happily smoked a very bad dime-store cigar with BFF to celebrate this person's birth. But the fucking calendar says it's so. And while you know what I say about the calendar, none of us could have believed for a moment how charmed we would be by her life and times, how brilliant and beautiful and kind she would turn out to be, an incalculably greater gift than (as BFF's mom used to note, not unkindly) our generation deserved.

Happy birthday, Planet, beloved. Sorry about the cluster. I try so very hard not to belabor the point, but it is, of course, your dad's fault. Love rules nonetheless.

It is traditional to remind that this child grew up to tell me that "Baby needs a new pair of fucking shoes."

Member When George Wasn't Dead?

BFF reminds that today is Sir George's birthday. He promises that this will feature, but even so, it can't feature enough. Ever. So get out your Jolly Roger, and run it up your mast.



I know I don't get around much any more. But what's important is important. See you at the Festival.

Happy Fucking Birthday To Me

Thanks, as always, to my lifelong friend and foil and intellectual trampoline and I don't know whatthefuck else.

This is a weird one, to be sure, with Databoy turning 18 today as well, and off to college (the right college, thankyouverymuch) in six weeks, and my own unemployment looming. It has been one seriously fucked up year:

-The famous dead (Bowie, Rickman, Prince).
-The infamous dead; Sasha's wretched death is sometimes just not there, and sometimes, when I reach for the phone to tell her a story made just for her, when I watch a beloved sportsball team faceplant endearingly, when the cluster that just won't stop clusters fuckingly--it was second nature to share the contents of my brain with her, to earn that guffaw, to process the undigestable.
-The loss of a thing I loved beyond measure (my work family), and of a job I sucked myself dry to earn (when we calculated the risk of my professional move back in December, we ignored extremes of probability in our analysis: probability rewarded us with a set of extremes that we could not have imagined) .
-The turmoil of externality, the march of shit changing just because shit changes.

And it's only July. There are touchstone years in our lives, years we look back on and say, "Good riddance to that fucking turd of a year." This is one of mine, and it's not over.

But I'm out on the stroll, and a john will pull up soon. Bam endures, now enduring at 6'2" tall and 190 pounds of giggle and flap. Ilse rocks. Databoy will get the fuck out of my house, and he won't have to live in an appliance box. It's not all hopeless bleak despair, and it's important to say that, to stare down the void and flip it off before walking away, to click my heels and will it gone, not caring that I'm a big doofus in red slippers.

Thanks and love to you all.

More Death

BFF mentioned this in passing a few days ago, and I guess it's time for me to get around to telling it, as much as I intend to tell. Unfortunately, my dear friend Sasha passed away on April 15 after a couple of months of chronic illness that I will not further describe.

Sasha, known in some circles as TechNoir, was a complicated person, and the most private person I have ever known. She would hate even the fact that I linked those two names in print, as much as I would hate it if someone linked my serial killer Internet name with my actual name. So I'm not going to tell you much about Sasha. She was older, she was a woman, she had a job that was Washington-appropriate, she had a couple or three careers in her long life, she liked some stuff--I'm willing, at this juncture, to admit that she liked politics, the Internet, gaming, and various sports teams that are better than your sports teams, unless your sports teams are the same as hers, which are mostly the same as mine. She liked pushing Whispers' buttons even more than Ilse or I do, and Whispers his own self will tell you that this is quite some mathematical accomplishment, being that Ilse and I enjoy pushing his buttons far, far more than is healthy or kind. She liked pushing a lot of buttons--while I was a target-rich button environment for 20 years in my own right, she also enjoyed hanging around Databoy, a kid laden with buttons. She was, in fact, the original Ant Queen, the creature for which I had to create (and quickly retire) my nonexistent alter ego Insuffricubus, to the delight of some, the bewilderment of many, and the apathy of most. She made many of us better. There is no need to discuss the rest of the math.

I miss Sasha terribly. I'm lucky to have been in a position where I could.

God DAMMIT

Stop it. Just fucking stop.

Alan Rickman, dead at 69.

Of course, only Harry Potter nerds think that the totality of Alan Rickman was Severus Snape. Not that there was ever a better choice for the role.

Fuck your fucking calendar, you fucking fuck.

Touchstones

David Bowie, dead at 69. Fuck your calendar.



I wanted to add a vid of "Cat People," another incredibly powerful Bowiething, but everything on YT is fanboy bullshit or is restricted from embed. Best one I could find is linked here; it's the version from Inglourious Basterds, set mostly to the footage it overplays in the movie. I think Melanie Laurent is a pretty fucking good tribute.

BFF is letting this fuck up his day, too, which is meet and right, of course.

But really, just fuck your fucking calendar. No, really, just get the biggest dick you can and jam it right up that calendar's most painful orifice and make it fucking scream.

Fuck.

Mortality Is Making Me Very Tired

I mourn deeply today's news that Sir Terry Pratchett has died.

My sister-in-law, who has never been portrayed kindly in this blog, actually did me one of the greatest solids of my life when she introduced me to Sir Terry's writing many Hogswatches ago. Permanently redeemed herself, actually. Unconditionally.

And I can't really write any more about this right now.

AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

The End.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

Well...FUCK

Alsotoo, he was not Herbert.

(Update: Dr. Death weighs in.)
And in conclusion, well, FUCK.

Joe Cocker

Well, fuck.



Same film:



And of course, the best tribute of all:


John Belushi cantando With A Little Help From My Friends from James Lester Wright Gajete on Vimeo.

Well, fuck.

Another Bad Day In Paradise

 Pete Seeger, dead at 94.

This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender

I cannot describe how saddened I am by this. Not even bunnies can fix it.



Not. Even. Bunnies.

All the Colored Girls Go Doo De Doo Doo Doo De Doo Doo de Doo Doo Doo De Doo

Damn. Lou Reed, dead at 71.



Hey sugar, take a walk on the wild side.

The wrong Beatle keeps dying.

Let's Remember the Eternals

Friend William Wallace, aka Dreamboat to Ellen the Hon, was born on this day in 1926, and I must say, he's looking pretty fucking spry for being 87 years old. You'd never know his prostate is the size of a baby's head and his bladder's the size of a walnut. Happy birthday, Kiltboy. I've got the teddycam set up for our wives' visit next week. Who knows what we'll find on the video?

Today is the 69th anniversary of D-Day. Go back to any old June 6th, and what I said then.

And for our final mathematical constant of the day: J.J. Redick still drinks his own urine.

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.

Dr. Sally K. Ride, 1951-2012

Various newsers are reporting, and her company's Web site confirms, that Sally Ride died today. This sucks on a number of levels. Ride crashed several barriers during her career as an astronaut; she was the first American woman in space, and at the time of her 1983 shuttle flight, the youngest American to have travelled into space.She devoted her post-NASA career to promoting young peoples' interest in science, focusing as she should have on young women. She was a good scientist, a good astronaut, a good role model, a good Democrat. Most of all, Sally Ride was a great American.

I'm no fan of the space program in real/governmental/societal terms. I don't think it's cost-effective, especially compared to other things we could be doing with our national resources, though I recognize that cost effectiveness may be hard to measure given the implications and benefits of space science for other research, and of course I'm a wet-pantied fanboy for science fiction. All that's not relevant in light of Ride's magnitude as an icon for my generation and those that followed (she was 9 years older than me--not so old at the time of her Challenger flight as to be unhip, and certainly not so old as to be disconnected from today's young scientists).

I also find Ride's death moving because it was premature, and it was caused by pancreatic cancer, which is one of the most terrifying and despicable of cancers, one that's affected me personally. Fuck pancreatic cancer. Fuck premature death. And fuck great Americans dying early.

Words Fail

Buildings tumble. The ground opens wide.

Alas, poor Burchie. I knew him well. Others, not so much.

Burchie and Blanco, at the Plex. Never forget. Never forget 4ever.

Last straw. Me and Saint Benny, we gonna have words. I could not possibly have imagined, when I wrote that last linked post, how utterly fucking inept that protected list was. Cry all you want that none of the exposed were drafted; what'd Clyde's spot on the list, or Davies' spot, buy? Not even shit.

It's true that the experience transcends the result, which makes the upcoming deadline for season ticket payment less of a big deal than it ought to be, under the circumstances (we don't know where we're playing and we have about four players on our roster). That the outcome of the transaction isn't in doubt does nothing to make paying for this any less galling.

Special for BFF: I tried to get over it. No dice.

Al Davis

Yeah. It's John Lennon's birthday, life is roasted with turmoil and sauced with grief and regret, I'm still processing whether those occupistas are dirty hippies, slackers, bums, or class heroes, it's the Redskins' bye week and I've no idea what to do about the wide receiver slot in the league where I own both Santana Moss and Jabar Gaffney, and I bought hockey tickets for a night when there's a DCU home game, again, but fuck all that, I wanna talk about Al Davis.

What a fucking genius. Brethren too wrapped up in angst to discuss anything else might label Davis as one of the exploiters (or I might be cruel, and they might be just as likely to enjoy this NFL Sunday as I am). People who didn't like him or the Raiders or his dark glasses or his style are making zombie jokes, and even some of us who liked him only put those jokes in a little box on hearing of Davis' death. I'm not sure what the decent interval for pulling them out is, but I'll get there on the math.

There are a number of salient things to note about Al Davis--a passionate student of the game, an independent-minded coach and owner who loved his franchise and his players and coaches and fans, a man who was the first in our time to hire a black coach, a man who loved to take a giant dump on the chest of the NFL corporate entity (sadly for the angst-ridden, it was mostly in his self-interest to do so). His passion for winning, beyond his passion for the game itself, was hard to match.

Look, when I was a kid, I hated the Raiders, and I sure wasn't fond of them when that little golden prick Jon Gruden was their coach. Sometimes, that sort of historical hatin' holds up under grownup scrutiny; witness my feelings about the Packers, a team from out of my team's division, not a historical rival at all, not even linked in any level of consciousness with my beloved Redskins for anything more than a single game at a time. That's how much I hated the juggernaut teams of the 60s, and it was easy for me to put the Raiders in that bucket.

Eventually I woke up and stopped buying mindlessly into villain narratives.¹ I figured out some of the shit Al Davis did in his time as a professional football icon, realized that the Raiders were doing something very different from what other clubs did (and winning their share by doing it), took a look at the names of some of the men whose fabulous NFL careers were linked to his. Holy fucking crap. Look at the plethora of stories on his passing, the list of NFL names associated with him, the things people are saying. One sports bobblehead lands on a gem of an observation: We talk about the modern era of thus and such a sport or pursuit; with a league with no Al Davis, the modern era begins now.

I admit that I only started to be a good neighbor to Raider Nation late in life, specifically when they acquired a number of players fairly dear to my heart. Today, I'm saddened for Raider Nation and for the league.

RIP, Al Davis. Just win, baby.

¹When it pleases me to stop buying in. Fuck you, I'll villainize whoever I damn well please.