Nonpersistent Memory

Well, this should have been composed weeks ago and posted at midnight, but age and circumstance are not my friends right now. Happy birthday to the official Best Kid Evar. May the road rise to meet you, Planet.

Fuck I'm old.

Happy Birthday, Kid

Yaddas. If I do one post a year (and I'm frightfully close to that), this will be it.

Happiest of birthdays to the coolest teacher in central southern big midwestern state. And, forever, the Best Kid EVar.

Fuck I'm old.

Incidental love to yo momma and daddy, while I'm here.

Old Sin

You will have noticed that this is not really a blog any more. It's an occasional postcard. Look, here's some art:

And well you might wonder, but as it happens, it's as good a symbol of why I'm sending a postcard today as any. You see, 30 years ago today, I stood one person away from the artist as she married this guy, who was the one person standing between us. There are only a few things I remember about that day, one of which is that I was already getting a little chunky and my suit was too tight. I remember the venue, because it was their house, and I remember some tidbits about other people in attendance because big social events for other people are always fraught with other other people, but I'm damned if I can remember who my date was.

Nah, I remember her too. Really, really bad choice, as it happened, and it took the artist a while to forgive me for it, a stance I found reasonable then, and now find unassailably reasonable. But forgive she did, and with a whole heart, because if she didn't, that art up there wouldn't be hanging on my dining room wall. So thanks for that, Earthgirl, and thanks even more for giving me the chance for you to become a beloved, too, after such a wretched twentysomething start.

Happy 30th anniversary, beloveds. Long strange trip and all that. For you, for us, for all. In March, I wrote about constants in my life, bedrocks of my creed. Y'all made one; y'all are one, individually and collectively. My wish for you is, always, to have the free to hike together. See you for the really weird thing soon.

It's Twoo, It's Twoo

BFF became a part of Crackerbox Palace 57 years ago today.



That vid slays me every time. And YouTube tells me we should watch this again, so here:



No BFF birthday can be complete without it:



No, we're not doing the YouTube gangbang we did a year ago, so we're almost done. But we are at the age where it's impossible to not do this thing right here:

A city is haunted by the ghost of an Icelandic opera singer. She was murdered by a giant clam.

— Magic Realism Bot (@MagicRealismBot) August 26, 2016

It wasn't a clam, it was a rock lobster. https://t.co/o0Sy59eYiS

— BLCKDGRD (@BLCKDGRD) August 26, 2016

Politics come and go. Love is unconditional, bitchez. Happies, BFF.

56 Songs

If you don't know why, you don't care anyway.

Let me say this at the outset: I know that this is a long post with a shitload of video. Tough shit. I haven't spent near enough time with him and his over the last few years, mostly because of me and mine. So here's some time, and some thought, and let's lead with the most important one of all:



Him and His. But mostly Him.





(I saw Neil Young along about that time, and I thought he looked like shit then, too).













Fucking duh:



Actually, Neil didn't look so great here either. But check out Stills in the groovy hat and suit. He's ready for Festival.

No, he really was. I mean, it was a long time ago. But yeah, he really was.A goo goo muck, I mean. And a teenage tiger. Also: Holy fuck, we've lived in interesting times.

I've always thought that Bob's got a real Porky Pig vibe going in live versions of this one, although the 80s stylings also bestow a bit of a heretofore unseen televangelist vibe :



I was a very good and obedient child before I became friends with BFF:







Lest someone think I'm calling BFF fat, this next selection is not about him.











He's Person Man, by the way. There are so many awesome versions of "Particle Man" extant that I had a lot of trouble picking one.

Here's some abject perfection to close this bunch:



Gawds, that's a beautiful piece of music. I am confident that, at the very least, BFF believes that it's better than fucking Mozart.

Us, and things that have happened to and around us in...wait for it...45 motherfucking years.









Absolutely terrible sync job with a 70s Midnight Special episode:





Okay, now this is some damned handsome Neil Young, here.











Random crap spanning the culture of our formative years.



I never really realized what an awesome resource the Midnight Special was. For instance, this video is clear evidence that brass rules, reeds blow, and disco did not, in fact, necessarily suck:











That's right. Suck on the 1980s, bitchez. In fact, here, suck on them some more. We sure did.





I watched a number of videos from that performance on M+M's YT channel. If they don't stop your heart, you weren't there, and get off my fucking lawn.

Jeebus, that little detour into M+M almost knocked the whole fucking thing off the rails. Okay, back to work:



Yeah, I don't know why this is turning into A Neil Young Birthday, either, but that's it, I swear, I can stop any time I like.

Some songs just are, okay?

















And of course, there are traditions to uphold.


(That video, by the way, is the "Shoes" of this blog, its most posted video, by far.)



Y'know, I've never watched that video all that closely. I count at least six costume changes by Neal Innes. Well done, that.



Fucking oboe players.

I think I got this one for my fiftieth or something.



Fuck me, I actually lost one

No, seriously. I had 56 songs on the fucking list, grouped into the nonsensical fucking categories you see above, with the previously selected "best for last" number at the bottom. At this moment, there are 55 songs in this post, and no more list. What a fucking ding-dong. There's only one place to turn:



Yeah, that'll do.

I saved the best for last, dint I just?



Happy Birthday to BFF and love to Earthgirl and the incomparably awesome Planet, still the Best Kid Evar at the ripe old age of 22.

How To Embed A Tweet

BFF, he means well. There is no malice in him. Unless you're a Republican. Or a Democrat. Or a voter. But these are small matters. Today's lesson in How To Work The Internet was inspired by BFF, who launched a bunch of assrockets--as is his wont and right--about a topic on which he possesses limited knowledge (as he bloody well can, because it's his fucking blog).

By the way, assrockets are the best sort of rockets to launch, in case  you see all this as unkind or something.

Anyway, the topic was Tom Brady, aka Dreamboat, and I pitched a low-grade, non-foul hiss because BFF failed to pay sufficient attention to his Twitter feed to see that I had tweeted a joke that should go viral and make me a famous buttclown.

And then it occurred to me; BFF doesn't know how to embed a tweet. And so:

1. Find Tweet.

2. Click the three dots in the tweet. "Embed" will be one of the options. Choose it.

3. Copy the highlighted text--just like you would when you embed a video from YouTube.

4. Paste the copied text into your post (in HTML)

5. Eat violas:

FL to punish Tom Brady: Roger Goodell will claim droit du seigneur over Giselle. #DeflateGate

— Landru (@landruajm) May 6, 2015

Yes. Yes, I did just throw BFF under the bus for the sole purpose of repromoting my shitty Tweet. That. Just. Happened.

Making Time For Important Things

I often don't do it. Sometimes I forget things are important. Often, other things are more important in the moment. So we'll just call this a small victory, the more so because it ends that short time of the year when we're the same age. And even more because BFF crosses the Rubicon of age 55 today, the gnarly old fuck. Amazing that he and his can stand to be around him, really. Although he's probably less grizzled than I am, because I am given to understand that vegetarian feeding makes the long pig more tender. But I digress.

You can say that he's a dupe, he's a rube, he's a grifter (for attention, not for money, which makes it perfectly okay and then some, and you and I are, after all, the ones clicking the mice). I've said all of those things about him and to him at times or others through the stations of life, and other things far less kind, some on point and some not so. But he's my dupe/rube/grifter, I've been there for every black helicopter and startled epiphany and morbid fuck-me jig and for things incalculably more important than those bits of inexplicably MoCo lives. And while I remind you here and now, explicitly, as I do every year, that this makes me better than you, it has also made me better than me.

Expressing myself once a year about my nearly lifelong friend (John the Daftist, the She-Nurse of the SS, and 32-Ounce are the only humans with longer tenure, and theirs is biologically asserted) is a little maudlin, but it's easy. This part is hard:



Okay, that one's not hard, I do it every year. Ritual is important. Just ask Bam-Bam. Let's do a couple more reruns:





Damn, when I'm tired of that, I'll be dead. Makes me want more.



It's never as fast as I remember it being.

Thoughtfully not rerun? Naked Bong Girl (nsfw). Not appearing in this film? The worst Kate Bush song ever, in the face of stiff competition (though I'll admit that she was quite attractive when we were young--and she's only a tiny bit older than us).

And finally, because a birthday should involve an actual present:



So, y'know, happies and suchlike.

The Figure 5

So BFF posted about the incomparable William Carlos Williams, whose birth anniversary was yesterday. But he left out the part that's about me. What a fucking number 12 wanker.

The Great Figure
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city

A print of this used to hang on my crackhouse wall, click to DeMuthanize*

Fin.

*All hail Phil Plait.

Oh, Fuck Me

Yesterday was his 54th birthday. I missed it because I had a bad day, then I had a worse one that further devolved into chills, fever, cramps, and some really unpleasant other stuff. So it's 2 AM, and I'm sweating like a pig, hopefully because the fever is breaking.

And so...happy belated fucking birthday, BFF.

BFF

BFF has managed to lose his free domain name associated with his free blog management software. I have never heard of anyone having a whit of trouble with Blogger, but apparently he feels he has been exiled (and assures me that there is an army of Blogger-disenfranchised out there beyond my horizon).

Now, the President himself landed a black helicopter in my yard and promised me that this difficulty--which I say in all seriousness as an actual Web professional, no one in the entire human universe could possibly deliberately replicate--is because dogma-N (and yes, this kind of stuff is exactly how he got that name, lo these 30 or so years ago) likes Brad Manning and Ed Snowden. Then he fired a drone at my neighbor. So I guess it's real.

Anyway, he's here for now. I've whacked him from the rolls until he settles, because I'm not going to change it every other day while he gets it resolved, and because I'm not sending you to the fuckware site at which his domain name presently resides.

Update: BFF correctly corrects me in comments. He paid for the domain name. So like his theorizing, my mockery is misplaced. Fine metaphors, as someone says, abound.

This is not to say that Google should offer domain names through cheapass nobody low bidders. And trust me on this: I know from cheapass nobody low bidders. But it's not uncommon or unique to Google. I just had a similar, much lower-profile experience with another IT leviathan whose productivity software you are forced to use--a black hole between a big name and some schlubs to whom they outsourced a chunk of human interface, in this case their e-store.

Which cycles us back to this: trust no one. Which is a highly synthesized, overly simplified, and completely useless version of BFF's point.

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.

I'll Simper About Shared Values On Time This Year, Thanks

Last year? A day late. The year before? Overslept. Pretty fucking shabby treatment for a fucking blog holiday, possibly the premiere blog holiday of the year hereabouts, since I certainly am fond of D-Day, now that I consistently remember it as Kiltboy's birthday too (h/t Hamster--the nick is his doing, and better than mine). So it's a day early as I write this, because we willna be foo'd agin (Crivens!). We'll just give this here bloggity scheduler thing a twirl.

Of course, I'm a dick, and I snarked at BFF mightily on the Twitter machine this morning about something pointless, which got me to thinking/realizing about what I had to get done before tomorrow, which precluded the longform snark, which would've really been classless. So here we are.

I actually started thinking about this months ago, for a change, and so you're getting something that's not David Bowie, though you'll get that at the above two links, so good enough on that. No, I wanted something summative. Something like:



I know, right? Totally different time of imperium, totally different time of life, but all the exact fucking same thing, right? Except American bands came back and shit. But, y'know, that's just a diversion in the river of conscience.

So there's that, because, well, we mustn't, y'know. That's one founding principle for this year. Here's another.




That's right. Suck on Martha Hull, bitchez. Here, that was so fucking awesome you should suck on her again:





That's where we come from, X-gen/millennial whelps. Low tech, beer-fueled, Cold War-powered angst while wearing our shitkicker hiking boots and slamming into each other at top speed, at least top speed for drunken not-really-grups on dope. I think I mighta gotten to touch someone's breast at one of those once, too. Woot.

We didn't even know we were going to elect Reagan yet, the Iranian hostage crisis hadn't happened, the World Trade Center was barely built, let alone twice bombed, and Richard Fucking Nixon was still an excellent moral compass. Try growing up with that shit and tell me how hard your life is when you didn't get a fucking cell phone until you were 14 and Obama didn't buy you a fucking pony. Right. Off my lawn, & c.

Happy Birthday, BFF, you geriatric fuck, and props to our boomer brethren. Because generational war beats the fucking shit out of class war.

United 1-2 KC: This Ain't Hard

Shatzer and others correctly tag the critical meme here: high pressure (and secondarily, inability to suss out a 4-3-3). DCU can't cope, and never has. Shatzer and others completely fuck up the impact of missing players; no, Korb and Chabala is not a dropoff from Russell and Woolard, except to the extent that Chabala had joined the team only three days before. Look, if you can't understand that the team has managed to tactically correct for Woolard's incredible slowness, and incredible fucking stupidity, to the point where you believe that Daniel Woolard is a credible starting left back for any team that doesn't have some bar's name blazoned across its shirts, I can't fucking help you.

I'm not convinced that the blame should lie entirely with Olsen, who has coached the team to shorter passing, single touches, good ball movement. There was none of that in evidence last night, and I'm hard-pressed to believe that Olsen came out before the game and told the team, "Hey, let's languidly drop long balls back into KC's laps, and stand around on defense, and apply no pressure at all, except for you, PartyBoy and LongTanJohnson."

Not that I don't have questions for Saint Benny. For instance, why is PartyBoy marking fucking Teal Bunbury on corners? And even bigger philosophically (though not in practice--Bunbury's goal was on Pontius, he knew it, and he thumped his own chest in acceptance in the afterglow), why the fucking fuck is a goddam moron like Brandon McDonald marking that giant Aurelien Collin, instead of the taller, smarter Dudar? Why, when Branko came up with a kneebummy, did you fucking put in another D-mid instead of, say, Stephen King, who once in a while shines in center attack (unlike Saragosa, who was not in any way cut out for the job he was asked to do last night)?

On to my critique of BFF's analysis, which is what prompted this post in the first place:

Worrisome if not distressing.

Take a Valium. It's one game. The outcome and the methodology were predictable--as, I concede, you're about to admit in a few sentences.

Minus DeRossario, minus Woolard (replaced by some journeyman with two workouts with the club) 

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Last night showed what DeRosario brings: bullying the rest of the team into running. Now, that's nontrivial, I'll admit. But we also left behind DeRosario blaming the rest of the team for him being 34 years old. As to Woolard, no. Just no.

And beloved, I'm not sure how you so easily spouted the most myopic, ill-informed, and goopingly unironic description of Mike Chabala that you possibly could, but...wow.

I wonder how much of it is United's lack of athleticism versus Kansas City's. Man for man, Kansas City was bigger, stronger, faster.

I long for the day when Japanese movie monsters run wild in the streets of Kensington, just so I can watch you flap your arms for a few seconds before I myself am consumed.

It's easy to look bigger, stronger, and faster than someone who's not moving. Athleticism...I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.

They swarmed because they could. United panicked on the ball because they had too.

They swarmed because United didn't move, and didn't move the ball. United panicked on the ball because no one moved off-ball. That's part of the tactical deficiency Shatzer's talking about. Again, being too fucking lazy to do your job isn't a failure of athleticism, it's a failure of getting your deadwood road-gaming ass to move for some portion of 90 minutes.

Someone is going to take out Kitchen. He's dirty...

 Woot! I get to throw a bone!

Yes. Yes, he is.

He's also United's best player, but he's dirty.

Holy crap. Can you make just one point and move on before you completely fuck it up, beloved? No, he's not. Pontius is a better player. Hamid may be a better player. Boskovic may be a better player, but we'll never know because he's such a terrible fit for the club. Salihi may be a better player, but we'll never know because...

Long Tan sucks. Sucks. 

Well...only sort of, so far. Unlike anyone between Hamid and the front line (with the exception of Andy Najar, for 20-second stretches, and Danny Cruz, who came in far too late to have an impact), he worked for a living last night. He has the same problem everyone else on the team has--he can't volley, and I really wish that Saint Benny, who could volley, would fucking do some fucking drills on hitting balls on the half-volley, because the need to settle the fucking ball and make love to it before directing it goalward has gotten pretty fucking stale.

By which I do not mean to exclude the very real possibility that LongTanJohnson sucks.

Saragosa sucks. Sucks unto suck.

I disagree. Saragosa was--stunningly, I know--misused. Last night was, and I admit that there were challenges but still, a frightfully instructive example of how not to manage a formation with the players available. He was a terrible choice to plug in when Branko went down, without some adjustment of roles and relationships and positions.

Part of the thing here, and it's a part we're loathe to admit, is that Benny is a really, really fuckawful in-game coach, and a poor tactical manager. Can this improve? Maybe. Given time, he'll improve more in a year or two than Tommy Soehn or Curt Onalfo will for the rest of their lives.Will he get time? Will he deserve it? Beats the fuck out of me.

This is why this team is at least a year away - they would have lost this game with starters. Their second-stringers suck, and in MLS, you need good second-stringers. United doesn't have any.

That's where you're totally steering the boat onto the reef, beloved. You just said the second-stringers were all hurt. The bench was the third-stringers. Some of the regular starters are second-stringers, and the team has managed to correct for that enough of the time.

I disagree that they would've lost the game with starters--the only one not in was DeRosario. Might his arrogance and sheer dislikability have made the difference? I actually think it might've been the difference between a loss and a draw, but who the fuck knows? Would his presence have kept Benny from making the defensive adjustments that cost the game--or caused him to make different ones that worked? Not putting Dudar on Collin after the very first corner kick was a huge tactical error. Chabala's unfamiliarity with the system, which drew him so far into the middle that he lost his mark on the back post as the Traitor Graham Zusi charged in, certainly didn't help. Pontius in a crucial role in defense on another set piece (but wait! it worked with Tino Quaranta!) was sub-optimal, too.

I do seriously doubt that physical differences were the key here, given the stunning errors in judgment (didn't you hear me, half a county away, screaming about putting Dudar on Collin?) that both Saint Benny and the team laid out there last night. The really disturbing thing to me is that I knew we'd lose when we turned on the game. If, thousands of miles away, I knew that (and so, clearly, did BFF), what the fuck is going on with the team that they can project it so unerringly?

Harkes sucks.

Wynalda's wife doesn't think so. Boo-ya!

I miss The Bow-Tie, and The Bow-Tie sucked.

No, he didn't. He was the glue that kept us all together. He was goooood.

How I Confused My Literate Blogfriend. Or Not.

I have some. Literate blogfriends, I mean. Jim is way the fuck smarter than me, at least in his oeuvre and some nontrivial number of others, so I mostly just look at his pictures and skim over the stuff with the alphabets because it just gives me sads.

I discovered this thing today called the Flesch-Kinkaid Readability Index. It's pretty cool and utterly fucking meaningless. It calculates, in theory, the grade level at which you write, and the ease of readability of a given passage of text. I found it in some story about how congresscritters speak, on average, at a 10th-grade level, which was meant to be an insult. I shoved some work-related writing samples into this online calculator thing and discovered that I write at a 12th-grade level with a readability index of 41 (the lower the index, the more dense and incomprehensible the writing). A sample of recent Minions posts yielded scores of 10/50 (the Moog post), 12/47 (the hockey coaching post), 12/45 (the Mothers Day rant) and, stunningly, 10/54 (the Bam-Bam post, which earned me a cookie from Jim, and thanks for that, Jim). Jim's most recent prose post (other recent work has consisted of pictures and quotations), about Mittens' gay-hatin' garnered a 14/32. This makes Jim measurably smarter than me, so STFU, QED.

Yeah, it's a toy, and a pretty stupid one, at that. A Slate article I read about it called it "reductionist," and that's pretty spot on. Actually, I think it was a Weigel piece, so it probably couldn't decide whether it scored an infinity/infinity or a 6/smartass. But I had fun reductionizing myself.

So anyway, I lit into Himself, lovingly and a little bit, because the day had reached the point where I was no longer fit to do the things people pay me to do, and the peasants would've thought ill of me if I'd had the sedan chair brought around as early as 4:45. A little cruise led me to a brief mention of DCU midfielder Branko Boskovic, beloved by Himself because he's from one of those Balkan places, and Himself is also a 'Vic/'Vich, great-grandma from Buda and great-grandpa from Pest, or some such trifle, and he's all prejumidiced and suchlike. He claimed it's because he likes tens.

And I ranted, in the comments therein, about Tennism. You can poke over there for the rant, if you care, or not. Jim did, and I'm suspecting he regrets it, which is a shame because he's never done anything bad to me.

A ten is an center attacking midfielder, a playmaker who can also score. We're talking about footy here, by the way. Famous tens include Johan Cruyff, Zinedine Zidane, and others I'm too lazy to remember, but knock yourselves out in the comments. Less famous tens--who are pretty significant here because they significantly contributed to BFF's and my conversion to Tennism (by playing for DC United), would be Marco Etcheverry and Christian Gomez (first tour of duty, pre-obesity). Less famous tens who made us wish for Marco Etcheverry and Christian Gomez, mostly because they weren't tens or were sucky or washed-up tens, would be Marcello Gallardo, the Ginger Fucking Midget (who may well have been shorter than Gallardo, who was nicknamed El Muneco--The Doll), Freddy Adu, Matias Donnet, Rod Dyachenko, Justin Mapp, Justin Moose, Santino Quaranta, Jamil Walker, Rodney Wallace, and Christian Gomez II (The Fattening). Some of those guys had value as footy players, but they all sure sucked balls as center attacking midfielders.

We really, really want Branko to be a ten. That's because he could be, although he prefers to play out left, because his right foot sucks every bit as much as the noodle dangling from the end of the late and lamented Marc Burch's right leg. And even though he's slower than Databoy trying to eat asparagus, and not a whole lot more enthusiastic about the team's preferred pace (to Branko's credit, he's shown more energy in the last two games, which he has started). It's also because we really like Dwayne DeRosario, who is probably more of a natural ten, and Hamdi Salihi, who is also probably something of a natural ten, up top.

Of course, in BFF's case, he also wants Branko to be a ten because of the fucking Balkan connection. But that's neither here nor there.

By the way, the other half of his ancestry is German, so he's not all bad. And he can't help that wrong side of Pennsylvania thing, so it's unfair to mock him for it, even though it is pretty tragifunny.

A point, a point, there was a point...right, how I confused Jim. I didn't. That was a lie. He pretended to be confused, and placed his cultural origins in...uhm...well, exactly the same generational spot as me and BFF, which really isn't very surprising at all, now, is it?

But the whole thing left me troubled and vaguely confused, and not because of Jim, because of the demons in my own shadows. Leaving only one place to turn:

These bunnies stripped Mary Ann and left her in the creek.

This bunny is enjoying itself just a little too much.

You can't fool me. This bunny is a motherfucking space alien.

 

These bunnies are creeping me the fuck out, but I'm guessing Sasha digs them.

Okay, I was wrong. These bunnies are creeping me the fuck out.

 Fucking rubes. You fall for the bunny trick every fucking time.
 

A Promised Discourse on Walmart Derangement Syndrome

So it all started over at BFF's place, my godzillan steps into a likely unpopular speculation that makes even me a tad fluttery as I try to articulate it. He linked to a YFWP story about a Walmart going up on Rockville Pike, on the heels of another over in Aspen Hill, the second and third MoCo Walmart-branded legacies of Old Dead Sam (there's a Sam's Club in Gophershole, and maybe another over in Wee-Tone, or maybe it's the other big club box--beats the willies out of me).

I don't give a flying fuck about Walmart any more than I do about any other ginormous retailer. Sasha weeps of a tragedy in that the proposed Wallyworld outlet will glass over a shithole shopping center that happens to contain her favorite bagel joint. Fuck that, it can move across the street to the abandoned former Hooters.

Comments hilarity ensued, all in good fun, and it took blogquaintance Richard (who is, I posit, as literary and thoughtful as I am snarky and reductionist--and if you think I'm overdrawing my credit for snarky and reductionist, then please do me the favor of extending him my overdraft and then some for literary and thoughtful) to crystalize my point; from the perspective of the loosely affiliated community over at BFF's place, what's the difference between Target and Wallyworld? Richard--like Ilse--frequents Target. I surmise that this is, in part, because Richard has a youngish child. From a complicity perspective, Target is a lesser evil for those of us who have to cover little growing humans in textiles--and I think we can all admit that this level of complicity is probably preferable to alternatives like, say, the Division of Child Welfare. I suspect that many of us will admit that it's even preferable to draping our wee folk in homespun.

The point extends, as it did in BFF's comments; unless you're living a life completely withdrawn from our consumerist culture--including your diet--you're not free of complicity in this nightmare. I suspect few of us in that circle are so completely withdrawn. I know Sasha isn't--one of her plaints about the proposed WallyWorld is that it'll increase traffic on her secret back escape hatch into...a nearby Target.

I'm not trying to throw unreasonable stones here. At rock bottom, "I fucking hate Walmart" is good enough, isn't it? I myself dislike asparagus and Exxon and the Dallas Cowboys while buying into all manner of related corporatey goodness. But let's get real. On the merits, Walmart is no particularly worse than any other big box (I'll concede its hostility to unions, though I'll ask if Target, since we seem to have defaulted to them as the comparison, is a UFCW bastion).

The YFWP story points up some proposed legislation by my local county's governing body:

But after the Aspen Hill announcement, five County Council members sponsored a bill that would require some big-box retail stores to sign, or make a good-faith effort to complete, a public-benefits contract with community groups. After its introduction last Tuesday, the legislation drew ire from developers, big retailers and chambers of commerce.

The bill, which has not been passed, would affect both Wal-Marts because they would be more than 75,000 square feet.

Well. I wonder what the fuck that means. Oh, look:

"If these big box retailers want to move in, they have to sign a binding agreement with the community, and the community has a major say in what that store looks like," [Council President] Ervin said.

Community input could include whether employees are hired from within the county and whether the business uses green technology.

So...ginormous superstores already in place are exempt? Wow. Cuz, uhm, there are a boatload of big boxes round hereabouts that easily exceed that 75,000-foot mark. Ervin, a notorious sack of crap, also seems to be using the issue to drive a wedge between two sizeable unions. One of them is a UFCW local. The other is a UFCW local consisting of county government employees--a constituency that Ervin, as noted in my linked post, despises, reviles, and shits on at every opportunity. I sort of think the proposal is reflexive obstruction. On the other hand, I'm not all that sure how much it matters--I reckon Wallyworld is probably capable of conjuring up enough of some shitstorm of corporate responsibility to outsmart the likes of Valerie Ervin.

Oh, right, the point: Sasha supports this legislation. I'll pass on levying (in detail) the guilt by association, at least here.

A final note: No word yet on what poor Hans Riemer thinks of this. But maybe he'll see his name in Google reader (the point, in fact, of this paragraph), blanch when he sees my blog's name next to it, and let us know. That is, if he thinks anything shareable yet (he's a clever lad, our Hans, and one of my favorite things about him is that he typically shuts the fuck up a whole lot and lets other councilmembers duke it out in the pages of the Gazette). Full disclosure: I once ordered a glass of water for Hans at lunch when he was off taking a phone call. I'm told that doesn't mean I have to register as a lobbyist.

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?

GAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Fucking hurricane. Fucking cancelled DCU game. Fucking destroyed brain cells.

Yesterday (yesterday, dammit!) was his birthday. Wish him happy.

Things Literary and Artistic

First things: it started for reals today, the faraway project that has consumed me and torn me from the loving bosom of my family, and late tomorrow I shall leave this place out by the highway off in deepest America for at least 4-5 weeks, the longest stretch I will have been away from it for nearly 8 months. Joy doesn't start to describe it, fellow East Coast urbanites.

I can also say that not only did it start, it started really, really well, and I am proud of and grateful to the several dozen underesteemed, mostly youngish rural Americans who work for me on this project, for their cunning and tremendously hard work and their motivation and their commitment to a thing done well for an entity I despise, despite that entity's best efforts to queer the deal. Opening Day for a big project is always fraught with little buggy things. Not so today--I can't imagine how, realistically, it could have gone better. By about 10 AM, when it became clear that we shot, we scored, I had secured from battle stations and the adrenaline crash had started, and the magnitude of the crash makes clear that this was one hell of a fucking rush. You're not reading this, mostly youngish rural Americans (and if you accidentally are, STFU, because it's a total coincidence that you think you know who I am, and it's someone else who's not me), but thanks. A tear to my eye, much larger than the one I gave Julius James last week, for reals.

But I digress, and I bore. Funny, if mostly unintelligibly clouded by literary wankitude, discussion of Moby Dick over a post and a couple of posts worth of comments over at BFF's.

I'm with the Dick haters. I learned long ago (see BFF's for cryptic clues if you give a fuck, or don't) that the novel (sperm!) is an extended and dreary metaphor (sperm!) about boyparts (sperm!) and their issue (sperm!). That is to say, it is about sperm, sperm, sperm, harpoons, sperm, sperm, harpoons, sperm, sperm, and sperm. Sure, epic framing story, way better than, say, The Menagerie and far superior to the horrific crap the same folks erected around Harlan Ellison's epic and legendary and beautiful The City on the Edge of Forever. And BFF will tell you that it's melodious, or some such poofy literary shit, and frankly, he's entitled to that sort of poetry because, well, you know, he just is.

But seriously, kids. Sperm. I have yet, in 40 years since, to hear a more compelling explanation, even from BFF, who's about as superior to me at comp-lit stuff as the Federation are to the Pakleds technologically. Hmm. Seems I'm vigorously rubbing a theme here. Oh well. Some say that's my greatest utility, and I have no cogent defense agin that theory. And let's not trivialize the Star Trek/sperm connection.

Let's flip elsewhere for further literary and artistic insight. It says here that some assclown hilariously thinks that Picasso conceived cubism as a misogynistic plot. The punchline, of course, is that the assclown writes this for First Things, a mostly Catholic journal that makes a dedicated pretense of interfaith contributions. Boggle. But read Edroso's post for some awesome commentary and meme-extension on this majestic assitude.

"Why?" you might well wail."Why do you, Landrucutus*, of all people, feel a need to pretend to any fucking substantive insight on literature, art, or really, anything other than sports or farting?"

It's a fair question. The truth is that you know what I think about me, and about Wisconsin and Egypt and admiring, and agreeing in every respect with, a SCOTUS opinion authored by Antonin Fucking Scalia, and rural America, and the ICC, and what My Local Locality's governing legislative body is getting ready to do to my wife and her ilk (which includes BFF's wife). The truth is that, of late, I've mostly used this space to whimper and otherwise proclaim my pulse to beloveds whose primary and utterly understandable reax (of late) are along the lines of, "Oh? You're not dead in a ditch somewhere along I-75, or tied to a tree grunting and squealing? Well, good for you, then, I suppose, sure, why not?"

I gotta say, I've thought about this long and hard (SPERM!) for the half hour or so I've spent writing this, and I'm pretty sure it boils down to fundamental insecurity about BFF's massive superiority in literary appreciation and his considerably less substantial superiority (mostly on account of being married to an artist and having fathered another artist, imhoe) in art appreciation, which is all a shame because we're not at all competitive except that's a lie and we are, totally. That's sort of an astonishing realization (except it isn't and shouldn't be), given that I just started popping this off (sperm!) after I read a couple of things and connected some dots that aren't really connectable except in the stream (sperm!) of my consciousness. Jealousy? Really? Jesus H Fucking Christ on a Wobbly Fucking Dryrotted Crutch, Landru! Get a fucking grip!

Finally: someone in one of the hotel rooms bordering mine is going at it really long and hard (sperm!). I mean, thump thump thump thump thump thump thump, at a really astonishing pace and rhythm, I mean we're talking like Surfin' USA or 52 Girls, sustained for a ridiculously long time. Salud, neighbors. And, of course, sperm!

Just thought you'd like to know.

*My friends call me either Landru or "Hey, Asshole," although my mother still tends to stick with "Dammit" and my wife mostly goes with, "Dood, what the fuck?"

Meme Song Right Now

I usually leave this music shit to the other guy, but a meme's a meme.

Obscure Rambling

I am told that BFF's inability to manage picture widths is deliberate. One of the beauties of having a BFF true is that we can mockingly and scathingly disagree about aesthetics, morality, the nature and importance of truth and beauty, and how badass black helmetball uniform jerseys look, come up gigglingly agreeing to disagree, and move on to the next topic, as long as neither of us becomes an actual Republican. And given various threats by each of us over time, the epistemological implications thereof, and the resulting results and fallout, I'm not even sure about that last bit. So here it is: while the picture widths blowing out his column widths are totally fucktarded, they're not indicative of anything beyond a little aesthetic fucktardery, which is by far the most liveable of the things over which we agree, by nature, to disagree.

In that same vein, I'd like to point out that, while we fear what we fear, and I find the Bay Bridge quite frightening, and we all fear for our children on a permanent sort of basis, I find neither the possibility of a supercollapse in the next three years nor Michelle Lissel all that compelling. Now, Barbara Manatee? She's the one for me.

I spent three days after my hospital release feeling utterly zombified. I'd like to blame my last post on that, but I can't, since I still seem to be brainsing the same topic, more or less. Today I woke up perky and feisty, and lived my life accordingly. Tomorrow? Who the fuck knows? And since this post is turning into exactly the sort of drivel that is the reason why I don't just post whatever's on my mind, and is in mortal danger of turning into a stream-of-consciousness vomit rainbow that would make Hunter Thompson kill himself all over again, I'll just check out until next time.