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.

The Surface

On the theory that it is prudent, once in a while, to emerge into the light and gobble air, I offer this:

"...TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.” 

(Terry Pratchett, The Hogfather)

I'm done judging what you think. Even if you're an idiot. Which you may well be. Merry Fucking Christmas.

My Dream

I was rooting around in my bag and I found a pack of cigarettes and I was upset because they were shorties instead of 99s and then I remembered that I was lucky to have any cigarettes at all and I was happy. And then I knew the dream was over because I woke up and BFF was pointing and silently screaming while Digby and Atrios raped Glenn Greenwald while Obama held Greenwald's head, snarling, "Take that, Kitty Genovese," and I wasn't racist because Obama's cock was white. And then things got really weird because there was litter so I cried.

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.

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.

It's The Most Stenchiful Time Of The Year

I hate autumn.

Yah, sure, I see the flaming quality of the leaves as they transform, the heartrending beauty of the cyclical river of nature as it flows relentlessly through death and rebirth, the majesty of 106,000 drunk crackers crammed into a stadium in Knoxville to puke on the visiting Florida Gators, the timeless and eternal suck of the Washington Redskins, and I am, of course, duly moved, in what I am sure is a very profound and spiritual way.

That's all cultural, even the nature parts (because we pile into the wilderness to go take in the flaming quality, poke dead things with sticks, etc.). I hate the reality of autumn.

It's death. It's decay. It's moist bleakness, which has additive properties to the death and decay. It's fungi and molds and spores and allergies that are, for me, as cavity-pressurizing as any spring produce of tree sex. It's cold, but not cold enough to inhibit the march of dank. It's wet, but in a persistent, clinging, stinking way that doesn't wash away sin and corruption, merely lets it fester and brood and molder.

And it fucking stinks. It smells like shit, because it is, in every sense that matters, shit. Every morning this week I have emerged from the house and encountered a different fucking stench of autumnal decay. Seriously, five different seasonal stenches, ranging from simple manure to baby poop to dog poop to something akin to what the pens under the fucking Colosseum must have smelt like.

No vaguely heart-twanging undertone of wood smoke, no piney holiday comfort, nothing reminiscent of food, at least in its pre-digested state. Just decay. Decay and poop.

For the scientifically inquisitive among you, I checked. It's not me. Nor is it Bam-Bam, who is almost always at my side when I emerge in the morning, because the reason we're emerging at fucking 7 AM every day (the boy is eleven; to get him a sufficient night's sleep, I have to chunk his ass into bed at 8:30 each night, and call him to colors at freaking 6:20 AM, which process involves a lot of squirming and stubborn burrowing/nuzzling, and, non-trivially, the eternal stench of morning breath) is to throw his ass on the bus. Nothing died in my garage, or on my driveway, or in the bushes we provide in front of the house for dirty hippies and other unsavory criminals to lurk in. It's just the smell of my fucking perfectly well-ordered suburban neighborhood and the surrounding minor woods on an autumn morning.

I hear you. "Fuck you, Landru," you say, "Fuck you and your whining, and your sinuses, and your allergies, and your magical sensitivity to odors that didn't originate in your own stupid colon, as if there are any other odors."

Yeah, I hear you, and I'm hard-pressed to disagree. But still.Whatever. Fuck autumn.

Hearkening back: I promised you here, right up top, that I'd report on the outcome of some science I did. I am pleased to report that the stimulus provoked the hoped-for response, eventually. In fact, the named individual told me that the very same staff member who forwarded him a link to that very post was the person who had done up the (allegedly) ball-sucking tags. Hans purported gratitude that he didn't have to be a meanie about the tags, that I had done his dirty work for him; sadly, his minion didn't get it, and Hans was lamenting that he'd have to be a meanie anyway.  Because, y'know, I'm an actual Web professional and shit, and when I say your tags suck balls, your tags suck balls.

Asserted without warranty for my own ball-sucking tags, mind you now.

DCU 4-1 RSL

I was going to let BFF handle it, but I forgot he's more into the taste of his own navel than into reportage, plus he says things worthy of more lengthy comment than I should burden his space with. I fucking hate lazy reporting. Especially on a game without DC-area television coverage (I'm sure that footy blogfriends were all watching the remarkably mendacious RSL feed from their secret lairs in other states).

I attended with Databoy, so I was set for a trying experience, because I'm just fucking Eeyore that way. That doesn't mean I was wrong, but I was able to hoist the little fucker down one row, into a space from which he could see better, babysat by a 232 friend who shares my actual first name. This put D-boy right behind a greasy, diseased, mostly naked chick who actually turned around to talk to him because, as best I could tell, she shared his middle-school sense of humor (I saw it out of the corner of my eye, but I was game-focused and I'm relying on reports from BFF and D-boy himself on these details). I'm pretty sure it was the highlight of his life so far.

I shouldn't pound on the kid. I shudder to think what my Spank Bank must've looked like when I was thirteen.

You're welcome, honey.

I am able to take in stride without bitching the notion that we must listen to the National Anthem before a sporting event. I spent my pre-formative years as an Army brat; years and knowledge and bitterness about civil reality have not erased the instinct to dismount and stand to when I hear the call to colors. That doesn't mean I have to like everyone who sings the song, and there is no shortage of anthem singers who can't sing a lick, can't pronounce the words ("pair-oo-lus"; really? Just die.) or don't know what they mean, can't pick a key, can't resist introducing their own rhythms and rondos, have to move their hands up and down the scale as they sing, and can neither decide on a pace nor get the simple notion that you don't drag out the fucking National Anthem into a four-minute performance. Anything over a minute is evidence of capital self-absorption.

Our favorite, as BFF notes, is Stu Knazik. BFF captured a wonderful and felicitous double image of Stu superimposed over team shots of RSL and DCU during last night's anthem, while he was busy disrespecting the colors (which I hasten to emphasize that he doesn't usually do, though he's not nearly as diamond-shitting about it as I am). We were talking with Seatnine (he has no other name, though I'd probably trust him with my rent check) about the need for a commemorative shirt. Here's my offer:

Stu has a magnificent baritone voice, a perfect sense of self and place and pace, and can sing both "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Blame Oh Calcutta Canada," which is sad but necessary. He can pronounce all the words. He picks a key. He comes in close to a minute (as BFF pointed out last night in a fit of impatience that posed the relatively rare suggestion that he might benefit from a little Ritalin from time to time, as might we all, Stu did slow it down a tad in the last phrase, just this once). He is the perfect anthem singer.

We love Stu.

I did not, by the way, manipulate the image of Stu other than to crop it from something else. That is actually Stu's head floating on the decolletage of assorted young women. Go Stu.¹

See? You don't get that kind of fact-based reporting from the other networks. You see why I have to take time from a busy Sunday to blog this shite? Instead of puking it into BFF's comments?

There was a game? Oh, right. Yeah, uhm, that was fucking awesome, if completely unanticipated. DeRosario is a fucking monster when the spirit moves; he can, in fact, carry a team on his back, given a modicum of surrounding competency, provided last night mostly by Andy Najar, with nontrivial added value from Stephen King. BFF was fond of the header and couldn't stop chanting that it was the goal of the year (another and very different bout of logorrhea caused me to punch his arm, which I probably hadn't done in 35 fucking years; in my defense, he mouth-shat some obsessive-compulsive prediction about Kitchen writhing on the ground, and lo and behold, not four minutes later, Kitchen and Hamid collided at full speed. I know you can't help yourself, but really, wasn't breaking Pontius' leg enough, BFF?). On reflection, I liked Najar's breakaway goal best, especially considering how many times Najar foot-choked later in the game as he felt pressure to keep up with DeRosario. Fuck if I know why.

DeRosario's free-kick goal was pretty, but in an ordinary way. Nicky Rimando--the only RSL denizen who isn't a punkass bitch--misplayed it, horribly and inexplicably. It was the fourth goal, and I suspect Nick was pretty fucking shellshocked by then. None of the others could truly be said to be Rimando's fault.

Usual MLS refereeing bitch: What a fucking moron. I call shenanigans, I point to corruption in the system. That fucker spent the entire second half letting RSL paste DCU players into oblivion, while calling foul on every bit of irrelevant contact on DCU. The capper was Saborio's goal, on which Saborio was clearly offside. I mean, clearly, no fucking question about it. Not even fucking close. On the RSL feed, which provided the MLS highlights (there was no local broadcast), the announcers ignored it ("The flag stays down," and "The referee says he's onside!"--oh, well, that must be determinative, huh? Fuckwits.). Available replays provided no help, because the RSL production crew has no idea how to set up in RFK, and it's not like MLS was going to let us see the full development of the play. But when the ball is two feet off the server's foot and Saborio is eight to ten feet behind the defensive line? And the assistant ref has been masturbating 20 yards upfield? Yeah. I've seen our goals called back by similarly malpositioned ARs on razor-thin margins, and I have to tolerate Hamid getting dooked out of a clean sheet by that horseshit because MLS thinks the fucking Salt Lake TV market matters? Suck it, MLS, you clown-ass punks.

The conversation: BFF captured a postgame midfield conversation between the aging but beloved Clyde Simms and Saint Benny. He speculates that it related to Clyde's gradual and sad breakdown. I think the relationship is more indirect. From the hand gestures, I'd speculate that they were talking about one of two things: the goal that spoiled Hamid's clean sheet, or the difference between how the team held this lead and how they didn't hold the lead on Wednesday night. I was (and am) actually inclined toward the latter, based entirely on the gesturing (which was not all that emphatic, and which is the only clue we have, other than the fact of the conversation--which was, as BFF points out, really unusual).

Maybe I'm being too hopeful; I hope that Benny and Clyde recognize the difference here, that the team kept attacking and didn't drop into backpassing and timewasting until about the 76th minute, that they kept up pressure throughout, and that Marc Fucking Burch started at left back, in addition to the more obvious note of King in the middle and Da Luz at left mid. I'm sick of Burch getting no cred. Yeah, he's slow. Yeah, he orbits the ball before he kicks it. Here's something Marc Burch hasn't done: get cut by the fucking Fire, the worst fucking team in the Eastern Conference. Raise your hand if you've done that. Yes? You, Daniel Woolard?

Is my hope too steep? I dunno. We riffed a little, after the lead grew to 4-0, on whether it would be worse for the club to choke the lead (thus inspiring us to abandon all hope) or to hold on to it (thus propelling our hopes  into a shoe-vomiting festivus against Phunions, motherfucking cocksucking shitbird douchatory Fire, the KC Cheese Wiz, and probably even fucking Portland, Zombie Troy Perkins rising from the ashes in RFK, stealing Barra Troy's voodoo hat, cleansheeting us out of the fucking point we'll need to claw into the playoffs).

Inconclusive. Outlook cloudy. Ask again later.

¹Yes. Yes, Goth, it is pretty fucking remarkable, isn't it?

Kidney Stones in the Tract of Excellence

I'm really bored. I'm in the far-away place, again, though at least I spend tomorrow coming home for one day off (during a week I invariably spend out of the office, ideally with Ilse and Bam-Bam, while Databoy hies off for his traditional school-break week of worship by his grandparents, Joseph and Mary). I'm watching the first Tuesday Night Football game ever, because it's there (Thesis: Cris Collinsworth is a transvestite. Discuss non-pejoratively¹ amongst yourselves.). And because Sasha is one good Michael Vick rip away from dealing me my second fantasy football title game loss of the season (gratz to Dr. Death for saving his one FF victory in six tries this season for a title game).

Thanks also to Purple for the awesome Webcam cock video. Okay, it was actually an awesome Hooded Negro imitation. It's the little things that make life worth living even in the face of the drone of I-75 300 yards from my hotel room window.

Also: Christmas was very very good to me. Thanks to Ilse for the exceptional shirt and the dirty video games.


¹ Tscha, right.

On Navelgazing

I love my friends. Honest, I really do. I'm not as horrible a person as I'd really like to be. But some days, I would like to be. It's neither politic nor kind to post one's horrible thoughts on one's friends' own blogs. Especially when I'm one. You are one, aren't you? But thoughts are had. Even for those I love best and most. Oh yes they are.

Hackneyed, true. Possibly even copyrighted, though I'll claim fair use--after all, they're just laying around on the Toobz. All that, none of it good. But expressive nonetheless.

And seriously. I love my friends.

Personal data: home after a week there. Here until I go there. Which is the day after Sweet Baby Jesus day. Un-fucking-real. I'd really like to tell you what I'm doing there. But I can't, because a certain part of the government would hunt down every one of you and grope the fucking Sweet Baby Jesus out of you. And you wouldn't like it. Even if you're into that sort of thing. Believe me, you're not that into it. Trust me on this. Because, as we noted, I love my friends. But to their navels, I say:

Peace out.

Progress Through Jealousy

I am a Webhead. I don't mean to overclaim, because I'm not, really, not compared to Sasha or Elric or the folks who work for me, one of whom will check in to chide me despite my brutal honesty. But my day job involves a lot of knowing what's up with Web technologies and content and strategies. One of my adorable little gifts--or not, depending on your perspective and the given value of "adorable" and "gifts"--is that I speak fluent Web, understand how things should work, know something about the place of the Web in communications strategies, sort through hours of technical blahrg from actual Webheads, and then distill the whole mess into something that actual Webheads can run with, rather than getting endlessly trapped inside their engineer-like minds.

Wow, that got unnecessarily dense and self-serving. Anyway, the point is that I have reason to be jealous when my friends have cooler Web toys than I do. I commented sort of obliquely, sort of approvingly (but not recognizably enough) on BFF's dynamic blogroll toolio, back when I raped his aesthetic sensibilities. The thing has really grown on me. I like it at BFF's place, and I like it at other places whereat I've seen it. I am jealous that he has a toy that I do not.

Well, enough of that shit. I rearranged the furniture and now I'm dynamically blogrolling, because I didn't realize how easy it was. Sorta puts the lie to the whole first graf, huh?

So there are goodbyes; some friends haven't updated their blogs in months. If they tell me they're not done, I'll relist them (lest you think I'm a complete idiot, I kept the wife, who posts about three times a year, if that). I said goodbye to an insufferable celebrity prick (I'll bet you don't miss him). And because of the dynamic nature of the blogroll toolio, some people who don't have update feeds ended up in the "Just Links" section, which is not dynamic (I may revisit this--Elric doesn't look bad in BFF's dynamic buddies section). I think I might've dumped one or two other sites that I almost never visit.

There's also a hello. Jack is a decent enough fellow who's perfectly willing to trade gratuitous unkind suggestions in a spirit of theoretical discourse. Until very recently, I've sort of shied from him and his blog, engaging him in conversation once or twice at BFF's place. But I noticed a little while back that Minions was appearing in his dynamic toolio, and I've since been contemplating returning the kind. Jack frightens me a little, because he's one a them deep thinkers, and as I like to remind you, I ain't. I can cope with deep thought from BFF; it's the habit of years, and I don't find it threatening coming from that vector. On the other hand, Jack's been blogrolling me, so he is obviously a man of varied, and sometimes low, tastes. Recent events sealed the deal. Welcome Jack.

Another lil thing opened up the time to do this facelift; I'm stuck in rural Sucktucky. That's becoming a regular event--this is the second of three trips in four weeks, with, it appears, more to follow. Now, it's possible that good things will result from all this travel and sturm und drang and weeds-level management of a business line with which I am only familiar enough to blow some pretty decent smoke (not Web, FTR) and a contract type (fixed-price) that's way riskier than what I'm used to and a customer (I can't tell you, because I've already said more than enough for some folks to figure out who I am) that's way different from my usual comfort zone. Good things for me and mine, professionally, I mean, and like many of you, I do not have the luxury of doing what pleases me for a living--I work to be a materialist oinker (unlike, I suspect, some nontrivial number of you), which includes, of course, feeding Ilse, Databoy, and Bam-Bam. Anyway, rural Sucktucky breeds time, because I've been in planes and cars all day and working at this point in the day is beyond possibility. Hence: change! No hope advertised or promised. Ciao.

Pissing and Moaning

I don't want to make light of the suffering of my compadres who have been (I presume) without power for over 30 hours after yesterday's near-tornadic-force event took a big cheesy dump all over my local locality's utility infrastructure (although my friends who live in walled-off high-security enclosures where electricity never fails can, with all love, go fuck themselves, at least right at this moment, and even that's totally unfair, because I live in a neighborhood with buried utility lines, and it's not really supposed to happen here, either).

So it is not in the spirit of demeaning the longer-suffering that I lodge this plaint. Consider, though, the pathos of those of us who barely suffered during a 90-minute loss of power after yesterday's storms, emerging fully powered for last night and this day--then watched the lights die at about 9 PM this evening, on a perfectly calm, clear night, probably because my local electric power company flipped a switch somewhere. I'm posting this on my netbook, with my cellular modem, because I'm really pissed off, and this brief connection to something that operates on electricity is making me feel, for a few minutes, slightly more sane. This will not operate the machine that keeps me from snoring (and allows me to sleep in the same room as my beloved wife--in fact, that allows me to sleep at all, because I'm so fucking pampered that I sleep very poorly, if at all, when I can't use the machine). It will not...well, fuck it, that's really all I care about right now, actually. Never mind.

Fuck you, Pepco.

Update (7/27, 6:55 AM): I got up at 6:25 after sleeping poorly, but at least I had, thanks to the grace of Ilse, the bed; she was kind enough to take the couch. The power came on at 6:45.

Fuck you, Pepco.

Landru Hacked

My primary email, and this blog's email, got hacked early this morning. Because Google is a pack of assholes and I am not very bright (that account was not well set up), the old blog email is dead; the new one is over on the right.

Also: I'm not being held at gunpoint in London, regardless of what emails purporting to be from me might tell you. I apologize to those of you who have been worried or inconvenienced by what some soon-to-be-one-very-sorry-motherfucker did to me this morning.

A Short Tribute to My Best Friend and Ben Domenech

Here's what I think: the tipping point has tipped.

Here's what I think since the last time I thought something and blarghed it.

We're ants, but ants driven by power, not survival.

Unless I think that power equals survival, in which case we're doing math, which I don't do. Aren't ants a cool metaphor?

Yes a bad mood, a bad cold, a bad soccer team bring out the apocalyptic in me,

"Things that bring out the apocalyptic in me" is a very limited-edition release. Nah, just joshing you.

but you don't think that capital's suits know how fucked-up their sandcastles are

Yes. We do. Thank you for bringing home once again the meaningless moral void that is my mindnumbing pursuit of feeding my babies and not having to work until I'm 85, assuming I have the grace to inflict myself on others for that long.

and are developing schemes to maximize profits in the fucking crumbling of their fucking crumbling sandcastles?

Crumbling? Awesome. Do I get a free pass on up against the wall? Will you feed Databoy and Bam-Bam for me? And find someone reasonably clean to provide booty calls for Ilse? By the way, do you know that, even when I'm pretty much stealing your tax dollars (in a moral sense--I am not criminally defrauding, nor have I ever, criminally defrauded the United States Government), I'm still selling bodies cheaper than the government could employ them? Bodies are cool. Sorta like this.

Aw, crap. One of those had flies instead of ants. Totally ruined everything.

Yes, they would rather incinerate the planet than not buy that fourth Hublot Black Caviar Bang.

Dood, I'm capital (though small-time), and I don't even wear a fucking watch. Will you let it the fuck go? You're letting the fucking terrorists win.

Yawn.

Well, exactly. All that fucking Cold War stress is fucking exhausting, and to make the post-Cold War stress exactly the fucking same, except compounded exponentially by angst over Marx' abject and, really, inexcusable failure to provide a functional model for civil society, and coupled with a perverse fascination with fucking Derrida (and really, parse the gerund however you want), is positively draining. Go throw discs, would you?

(With, as always, nothing but love. I started the morning by sliding/falling down the stairs¹. How you doin'?)

¹ I'm fine. Just a little bruised. And not even in the head. Really.

World Autism Awareness Day 2009

Woot. It's time to celebrate, again. Oh, wait a minute...

We first visited WAAD last year, and what a post that was. What's changed? Not a lot, except that Bam-Bam's food choices are a little narrower these days than they were a year ago.

Idiots still abound. The science blogs to your right have done their usual fine job of covering the idiocy. CNN continues to let Larry King invite Queen Idiot Jenny McCarthy onto his show to allow her to spread misinformation that furthers her goal of killing people. Minions commemorates Jenny's this with a new sidebar link to the Jenny McCarthy Body Count, which tracks the number of U.S. deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses. Way to go, Jenny. Every single one of them is on your head. Time chose today to help CNN out with its Jennyrobics, in an appalling interview in which Jenny tells us that children with disabilities are called "shadows" and that she'd cheerfully sign her kid up for the measles, a potentially fatal disease. All of this is in aid of her latest premeditated and willful attempt to kill people with preventable diseases.

By the way, Jenny hates "toxins" in vaccines but is an avid supporter of Botox.

Meh. Enough of that. I'll look forward to CNN's and Time's coverage of holocaust denial, Flat Earthism, and the Easter Bunny (hippitus hoppitus!)

Bam-Bam remains who he is. There's been no breakthrough in his development since the last time we discussed this, and maybe there will be one someday, or maybe there won't. We do what we can. He does what he can, giggling most of the way. This morning, Bam-Bam and I will get up, and he'll snuggle into my lap for 5 minutes (possibly grabbing my hands and placing them on his butt, indicate that he wants me to drum lightly there for a few beats, or maybe we're past that now), and eat his Wild Berry Poptarts and his Krispix, and ask me for a video (it will be a Sesame Workshop production, his current video obsession) before he gets on the bus to go to school, and turn around and throw his head back so he can look at me upside down, and bounce on his trampoline after he throws me out of his playroom so that he can have some time to be Bam-Bam before the world starts making demands of him.

I'm okay with all of that, because there's no other rational choice.

Give a thought to Bam-Bam and the rest of the spectrum, and vaccinate your fucking kids. That is all.

Star Wars IV: A New Hope

Look, I can't be having with all this hope and change crap. Of course, I am overjoyed that, at noon, our 8-year national nightmare is no more. This is, in fact, the day we've been waiting for. But you people? You're taking a big dump on my city. Did I particularly want to head into town today to see John the Daftist and other relations? Well, yeah, it would've been nice, actually. They're all kinda crunchy and stuff, for moneyed elitists, and they've descended like flies on an Aunt Jemima-covered superhero.

The two basic inaugural themes never change. I well remember an Inauguration Eve 16 years ago*, similarly rife with...uhm...hope and change. In fact, I seem to recall another imminent inaugurant, from...uhm...a town called...uhm...Hope.

The other theme, of course, is Fuck You, Peasants, Mind If We Take A Dump In Your Living Room For Four To Eight Years?

Are we glad Barry's going to be Preznit in a little over 2 hours?** Duh. Can y'all leave my town and let the man get down to making splendiferiously good and vomitoriously bad decisions? Yes. In the approximate words of another bringer of hope and change: Yes, you can. We have a government to continue to fuck up, just like we always have, regardless of leadership ideology, and your portapotties are crapping up our park.

*There's a story here, involving alcohol, hundreds of hookers in fur coats lining the streets of Northwest DC, preznitential motorcades, more alcohol, and...uhm...alcohol, although I think there was some food in there, too. So I won't bother telling it.

**Barry called me, and told me that he doesn't mind if I call him "Barry." He also told me that it was tough shit that I think there's a 72-percent chance that the new Ubertsar of the federal agency whose budget pays for my family to eat and be warm and have fast Intertubes will turn out to be a dipshit. But that's okay. Barry's honest** with me, and I'm honest with him.

***For a given value of "honest."

Today in Culture

95 years ago on this day, this drivel premiered. Around 87 years later, I got suckered into seeing it with then-wife Gamara and some friends, including William Wallace (known to you hereabouts as "Steven") and his uberfabulous spouse Ellen the Hun, on the pretense that it was "Russian ballet," which was, of course, technically true, but not in the sense that I thought (which would have involved Tchaikovsky and babes--as Gamara and the real mastermind behind this crime knew perfectly well).

Now, it was a great evening overall, and an experience I'm glad to have had; we had wonderful food and wine and rode in a limousine to the Kennedy Center and laughed our tits off. But one man knows that I haven't forgotten this ignominious act of betrayal:



Hope you're happily commemorating this crucial day in cultural history, Hamster Hamlet, you tights-loving Europoof.

Never forget!

All About You (Redux)

Yeah, sure, long time no see. These are the things I have to say:

Four words: Jimi Hendrix sex tape.

More words: Read Respectful Insolence daily. Why? Why. Why. Why. Why. Enough? Okay.

I can't tell you the story of my month, for various reasons that...well, that I can't tell you about. Work was hard, and it was lots, and there was some need to respectfully listen to someone screaming at me without reminding her that she's really, really gallingly fucking stupid. But that's done, I've been off for a few days now, and I've got another day off tomorrow, and then it's back to real life, for a time. Maybe, with that, I'll return to blogging a bit more regularly.

Lost in Existence

Fast times as microregional demichief of banditry for a Thieves Guild registered enterprise; victims uhm, customers become a tad uppity as we negotiate their new victimhood schedule.

Kindly lower your already exceedingly low expectations for this blog; I'll post when I can.