Still wasted from the party last niiiiiigh

I am — or was at one time — a certified bartender, and one of the handy tips they taught us in class was: If someone orders a Sex on the Beach, or a Slow Comfortable Screw (whether Up Against the Wall or not), card them immediately, for they are almost certainly underage.

Man, that was a fun class.

OK, so, apropos of that advice, an article on today’s sfgate about Spring Break drinks. Now, your Gleemonex never “did” Spring Break in the MTV sense — I’ve never darkened the door of Senor Frog’s, never passed out in cheek-peeker shorts and a wet T-shirt on a bar top, never been hauled in for PI with sand and Midori in my ears, never had to call for legal help and bail money from a Tijuana jail unlike some people I know … that scene has always looked like a total nightmare to me, a date-rape-and-a-hangover waiting to happen. Plus, I spent most of my spring breaks in my dorm room, writing 40-page research papers and catching up on 2,000 pages of reading for midterms and suchlike while the cold and sleet whipped the windows. As Artie Lange would say, “WAAAAAAH.”

And this article reminds me why I hate young drinkers so goddamn much. All these asshole kids going to the bars where asshole kids hang out, ordering what their rookie friends order — beverages which are routinely terrible and/or trendy, which — ugh, grow up already. I like bars where the patrons are late 20s and up, people who know what they like and match the drink to the occasion, and aren’t constantly, tiresomely on the hunt for tail.

God, could I sound any MORE like a crotchety old lady? Who cares. Damn kids, get off my lawn!

The suck zone

News of a killer tornado swarm in several states yesterday reminds me — it’s just about tornado season where I’m from.

The photo in this post is from the April 10, 1979 tornado that struck Wichita Falls, TX — shown here shortly before it chewed the everloving shit out of the apartment complex Mr. Gleemonex and I lived in 17 years later while I was in grad school.

Tornadoes (and the other storms of the Texass summer) are AWESOME. I really really miss that kind of scary-ass, bizarre fucking weather — it’s always sunny and 67 degrees here in San Francheesy, which is nice and all, but booooring. You should hear the way people bitch on the rare days it gets near 80, or below 45, or rains more than the weakest, most pathetic drizzle. They don’t know nothing bout chunks of hail the size of your fist, or serious thunder that rattles the plates in the kitchen, or the way it smells when a real good storm is coming …

Kick-start to the mornin'

So I was on my way in to work, hustling along the street with my scarf wrapped around my neck and stuffed down my jacket (it's coldish in the mornings these days), and this be-suited, briefcase-carrying black guy passes me going the other way. He goes, "unnhh, big TITS," and keeps walkin.

Who in the what, now?

I couldn't even get mad, cause I was trying to figure out if that's what he actually said, and yeah, it was. Who TALKS like that? Who thinks that's an OK thing to say to a woman? And the funny thing is, it was the scarf making me look like the prow of a ship -- your friend Gleemonex does have quite a rack, but not the kind that distends a well-insulated jacket over two layers of shirt.

So yeah, happy Friday to us all! Let your big tits fly!

Relative concentrations of human pulchritude

Internets, I just saw the most beautiful woman who works at my company.

Now, this is a famous company that is chock-full of beautiful people, in a city where all the beautiful people come to live — whatever you are on a scale of one to ten in the outside world, subtract a full point, maybe two, when you come in this building, because relatively speaking, you almost certainly just went down a notch. The cubes and offices are bursting with slender, lithe, stylishly-dressed and impeccably groomed and accessorized men and women — the married men look put-together, the admins look sharp, hell — in this joint, even the IT people are three or four cuts above the standards of their class. Famous-person doppelgangers abound (there’s a Daniel Dae Kim, a Katherine Heigl, and a Norah Jones just in the group I work with). There’s this one woman who looks like Gina Gershon and intimidates the hell out of me (I don’t even know her name, she works on another floor), an Asian chick whose hair I stare at so hard every time I see her that I bet if she notices me she thinks I’m a lesbian, and several whose shoes, teeth and boobs really could turn a straight girl.

But standing out above the herds of cute 24-year-olds and willowy 38-year-olds and superhot MILFs of all ages is this one woman I saw today, whom I see every now and again — a tall, slim woman of about 45, something like Helen Mirren but younger and with a salt-and-pepper bob instead of silver hair, dark brown eyes and the most perfect lips (always done in a most fetching shade of red) — she wears no other makeup that I can tell, and she has a French accent, and favors a vaguely Audrey Hepburn style aesthetic, all slim cuts and minimal ornamentation. She just looks so natural and comfortable, with such kind and lively eyes — she beats the $300 pants off every other female in the place, without even trying.

This is, of course, a far different place from my previous gig, where if you looked less like a homeless than the vomiting crack whore you stepped over on the way into the building, you were practically Angelina Fucking Jolie.

Now, THAT is some work/life balance

What kind of time off do you get from work? My current situation is OK by most standards -- 20 days per year total PTO (combined vacay, sick, personal, whatevs), plus a kind of stingy seven official holidays (the majors, not Presidents' Day and so forth). It's especially good compared to my first job out here in sunny Galivornia: 10 days per year for vacation, 3 for sick time, and that's it. When I flew to Texass for my own father's funeral, they grudgingly and extremely ungraciously allowed me three days, unpaid. I turned in my notice shortly after that ... but anyhoo. No matter what the deal is, whatever time off I have, you bet your ass I use it, because they're not getting one minute of my allotted time.

I was sent this article today on Netflix's truly revolutionary PTO policy for their HQ workers, which is: They don't keep track of it. You take it when you need it, as long as you get your work done. They don't allocate a set number of days, they don't ask you what it's for or why -- they just ... give it to you. And apparently, it works smashingly well; most people take 25-30 days a year (which is a humane and reasonable amount, IMO), and they're trustworthy about it (being sensitive to time of year in re: their particular job, tying up loose ends before an extended trip, etc.), because they are trusted to do so.

This is the way I've wanted to work all my life. My employer would get SO MUCH MORE out of me this way. It's the way I'd run my own business -- I always thought that was maybe naive of me, to expect everyone else to be self-driven and personally accountable like that, but I'd rather a few people cheat the system than everybody be so rigidly controlled and policed. And here I find out -- it can really work! Amazing.

Nobody puts Baby in a corner

Some days go by without Gleemonex witnessing a travesty, some days are chock-full. Today (so far) I've witnessed two:

1) This bitch-ass "tomato soup" they served me at the cafe at work. They were running their grilled-cheese-sandwich-and-tomato-soup special, always a hit, using the classic Campbell's variety tomato soup. And tomato soup, Internets, is not really something that bears much fucking around with. Well, they fucked around with it. It was ... chunky. With ... stuff in it, I dunno what. Green bits (basil?), red bits (tomato skin?), crunchy spices (pepper and something unidentifiable, big gnarly nuggets of it). It was oily. It was like a craptacular marinara from some tourist-trap Italian place run by Armenians or something. It was WRONG. And it ruined my fucking lunch.

2) A song, somewhere in the rap/hip-hop/urban category, that is a remake of "She's Like the Wind." Did you catch that, what I just said? "She's Like the Wind." They're seriously scraping the splintery bottom of the musical barrel if someone thought to remake this flaming aural pile, eh wot? All you women out there, ages probably 29-40 now, just got that lizard-brain memory of this shit-tacular bit of overemotive warbling by one Patrick Swayze from the immortal classic Dirty Dancing stuck in your head, didn't you? Well, sorry, but while I was at the gym, it came over the sound system, and oh good lord ... it had been given the hip-hop remake treatment (unnecessary noises and tempo changes, some random "yeah ... uh ... come on"'s and what have you), and had a crucial lyric revision: "What a fool to believe I have anything she needs" became "What a fool to believe she has anything I need." You go, boy! Um, I guess ...

That is, if they can't get 2-liters of Purple Passion

Here's the thing: Kids do not bring wine on sneak-in-while-the-'rents-are-out dates. Kids filch warm beers from the garage, or liquor carefully siphoned from various bottles in the ol' liquor cabinet -- not enough out of any single bottle to arouse suspicion, and likely as not all mixed together in one tight-lidded container that used to hold something else (not that Gleemonex would know anything about that, ohhh no). The only "wine" kids would think to swipe is Boone's (out of the trunk of older sis's car), and NOBODY calls that sickly-sweet emetic "wine." It's just "Boone's," or "Strawberry Hill." Come on now.

Final Fo[bleaaaaaaaaarrrgh]

This weekend, my NCAA tournament bracket officially went tits-up when Oregon went down. Shows what I get for picking with my head -- 40 points, of a total possible 120. FORTY POINTS, y'all. My most pathetic showing ever. Next year I'm picking with my eyes closed.

In other news, have y'all ever read Gone With the Wind? The book, printed matter, not the overblown 1939 movie, which is a trip in and of itself. I recently read a book set in the Civil War, but from the Northern POV, and for contrast, I decided to re-read (for probably the 30th time since age 12) good old GWTW. Now, I had a real Thing for this book back in the day -- I cannot begin to do justice to the level of my obsession at the time. I just thank dog I discovered the Beatles at age 13 to take over some of that vast, writhing obsessionscape.

But on this re-read, my first in probably 10 years, I am struck by a couple of things that it is remarkable I never noticed before:

1) It's really pretty well-written. The cover is so pulpy-Harlequiny that it's embarrassing to be seen with it, but the writing is solid.

2) It's really complex, and multi-layered. Most people's idea of Scarlett begins and ends with "fiddle-dee-dee," and that's a damn shame. She's a fully three-dimensional character, as are nearly all the characters in the book, and while there might be a smidge of historical inaccuracy (Melanie's 13-month pregnancy, if you time it by the actual Civil War battles referenced in the narrative), it's really educational and engaging throughout.

3) It is INCREDIBLY, THOROUGHLY AND IRREDEEMABLY RACIST. Just AMAZING in its total, unconscious commitment to bone-deep racism. Free use of the n-word is the tiniest tip of the iceberg. I'm talking about the frequent delineation between "quality black folk" (former house and yard niggers, who willingly choose to stay with their former owners after the war) and "trashy free-issue niggers," those restless, loutish, brutish former field hands who laze about, drinking, not working, and being "uppity" to white women, thinking themselves every bit as good as white folk; constant references to their basic stupidity and need for white guidance and rule; genuine feeling that killing an "uppity nigger" is no murder at all -- just justice; howling about blacks getting the vote; total sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan; etc., ad infinitum. My GOD. How I missed, or glossed over all that the first 29 or so times, I cannot imagine -- I guess I was just inured to it somehow. But on this go-round, it's like getting slapped in the face with nearly every page.

In that way, I have come to think this is a book that should be taught in colleges everywhere; high schoolers are probably too young and immature to handle it. But a slightly more mature student could really benefit from a close reading, thinking about the ways in which this book illustrates the deeply, deeply entrenched racism of the former Confederate states (one of which I am FROM, so don't flame me, GOSH!, and also I know the rest of the country is plenty racist in its own way but that is not the topic of this post), and beginning to understand the roots of racial politics as they stand today. It's a real eye-opener.

Rarrrr.

I would like to propose a complete moratorium on the usage of "a la" and "-esque."

They drive me nuts.

While I'm at it, permanent nix also to "oh-so" and the word "gasp," especially where it is deployed in the middle of a sentence to express faux surprise.

Stop it, everyone, right now.

Words fail

I hate to be a downer, but -- seriously, this is so awful it made me sick, right here in my nice safe cube in ye olde cube farme.

I'm talking, of course, about those unspeakably horrible billboards for a charming new flick called "Captivity," with four separate mid-torture pornphotos accompanied by the text "ABDUCTION, CONFINEMENT, TORTURE, TERMINATION." Google it, I don't wanna link to it. It's that bad.

Apparently they're all over the place in "edgy" urban areas, and are already being pulled because of the outrage they generate (undoubtedly part of the point -- the "buzz," which is a word I already hate but in this context just about makes me stroke out and die hemorrhaging). But Internets, this shit is so far over the top that it really defies words. I can't articulate the sickening dread and overwhelming disgust I feel, looking at this stuff.

Who ARE these people? Why must we live amongst them? Whose sister, whose mother, whose daughter will be the object of their festering, woman-hating disease next?

The killing blow

Looks like Warren's candidacy is DOA. He has committed the mortal sin of acknowledging and appreciating female beauty other than that of Liz, Our Lady Of Perpetual Purity. And he clearly means it in a sexual way, as opposed to a virginal "we can live together in the same apartment but we'll have our own rooms so of COURSE there's no gettin it on!" type of way, like they tried to play with Liz's kollege boyfriend, Lowdown Cheatin' Eric.

Countdown to Granthonification begins ...

Of stalkerazzi and etiquette matters

You know, Liz is awfully overdressed for a BYOB thing. I'm also fairly certain that despite the fact that she's invited Warren as her date, this is going to be the Great Moment between her and Granthony -- the sighting across the proverbial crowded room, doncha know. He'll be moonily staring at her looking lovely in the company of a studly guy with a cool job, she'll turn his way just in time to see him drop half a Hostess Powdered Sugar Donette down the front of his brown corduroy suit jacket, she'll find that incredibly endearing and suddenly decide she desires donut-breathed obsession more than hot sex and interesting conversation, he'll blow most of the crumbs out of the pornstache, and she'll be drawn as if by tractor beam into his waiting arms ...

BLEARRRRRRRRGH. HRAAAAWWWGH. KBLAAAARGH. [flush] ptui.

I'm still disproportionately annoyed, btw, by the fact that this superhott party IS BYOB -- adults do not throw celebrations at which refreshments are not provided. You're not in kollege anymore, and it's not some neighborhood block party or family-n-friends potluck type of thing. It's like having a BYOB wedding, for fahq's sake. Gaaaaaaaaaaah. Immature cheapskates! It's like these friends of mine who, whenever they invite you over, they never have beer in the fridge -- they always suggest YOU go out to the corner store and get some for us all to have. Guys, we're all in our thirties -- can we please assume you will offer us refreshment when you invite us to your home? You notice how WE do that for YOU, always? Can we not do the chip-in-two-bucks-and-write-your-name-on-a-solo-cup thing anymore, you cheap bastards? Thanks.

Game day: Wait, is Delaware a state?

I'm taking a break from watching my NCAA tournament bracket get its nuts crushed. Wanna play a game?

First, from the brilliant Hip Hop Lawyer, a movie game I'm surprisingly bad at (being a lifelong movie addict and a degreed Film Studies student, eh wot): Invisibles. They show you a movie still, with the faces and any bare body parts removed -- it's just their clothes, hats and eyewear standing there -- and you guess the movie. I warn you -- it's a lot of fun, and an unbelieveable timesuck.

Second, from Pop Culture Junk Mail, another quiz thing I'm not quite as good at as I thought I should be: From the second you click on this link, you have 10 minutes to type the names of all 50 states. They can be in any order, but you have to spell them right. I blazed through the first 20 or so, squeezed a few more out of the swiss cheese of my brain, blazed a dozen more, and then got UTTERLY STUCK at 44 for the last three whole minutes. I missed six states. Oi. If you do it, tell me how you did -- and what your method was. I started with the Eastern seaboard, hit the west coast, then my home state and its neighbors, then just kind of went rando.

And finally, not a game, but the most awesome snippet I've read on the Internets in the last couple of days: From the always- kickass Out of Character, a word about biscotti:

Like biting into a licorice-flavored pumice stone. And sometimes they'd dress it up, disguise it like a cookie and I'd fall for it only to find myself cracking a tooth on a licorice-flavored pumice stone coated in brown wax.

Summer bounty

Here’s what I can’t wait for: This year’s heirloom tomatoes.

I am a FIEND for tomatoes, and I’m incredibly picky about them. No hothouse varieties, no whiteness inside, no blackened or green seeds, and they shouldn’t make noise when you slice them (wintertime tomats, picked in Mexico or someplace and shipped up here while still green, can sound like apples being cut — urgh). Sometimes I cave, desperate in January, and buy the least-objectionable-looking one at the Schmafeway for to go on my bacon sandwich. It is always, always a terrible disappointment. No flavor, wrong bad texture, yucko.

But in the summer — ohhhh, kids, the summer. Round about mid-July where I’m from, those dark-red fatties start appearing on tables everywhere, sliced and salted as a side dish, or cut up in pico de gallo, or loaded onto hamburgers and BLTs … dude, I just drooled.

The saddest thing about the house I live in now is that its microclimate can’t really sustain tomats. Tomats are so easy to grow in the right climate — as long as you don’t let them dry out completely, they thrive on scorching, full sun. And that’s exactly the problem with my place: cold and foggy all “summer” long, goddammit. I always do plant a few tomats, and they do produce — we had ripe ones into early December, if you can believe that, from the one sad, neglected-looking vine that was left — but my home tomats are always thick-skinned, small, and tough. Flavorful, but tough.

So I buy heirloom tomats from this farmers’ market grocery a couple of doors down from my local ghetto-ass Schmafeway; last year, they started ridiculously early (late May, maybe? Early June?) and were mumble dollars a pound. What’s that, you say? How many dollars a pound? Mr. Gleemonex, skip over this part, OK? (They were $8.99/lb.) And I BOUGHT THE HELL OUT OF THEM. Nearly every day, I’d stop by, get a beautiful red-and-orange striped, or watermelon-green-striped, or bright honkin yellow, or purply-black, or red-purply tomat or two, take it home, slice it, salt it, toast some bread, smear bread generously with mayo, put it all together and chow that sammy down.

OK, just drooled again. I gotta get this under control.

So, seriously — I am DYING for this year’s crop to start coming in (they do get less expensive later in the summer!). If you live where they grow well, do yourself a favor — plant some. And if you have the means, track these suckers down and eat them while they’re in season.

Life is too short to eat crappy tomatoes.

And yea, there was hope once more

Guess what, Internets? It actually isn't 100% up to me to shine the light on what wriggles ignorantly under the rocks in my hometown! Astounding, I know.

Today's Mess features a letter from a local who apparently thought that calendar kerfuffle was as stupid as I thought it was. I know there had to be more people thinking the same thing, and it warms my cold, black heart to see evidence of it. I don't know Cheryl Cole, but bless 'er for speaking up. I'm glad I kept my meddling ass out of this one, at least in that forum. heh.

I drove 42nd Street/ In my Cadillac.

Good car to drive, after a war.

Courtesy of the always-interesting growabrain, an old Wired piece on a subject near and dear to the coal-black heart of your friend Gleemonex: the end of the world! Specifically, 20 ways the world could end, from the sudden-global-death variety (e.g. giant asteroid) to the slower-but-sure (superbug that kills all the humans).

Young Gleemonex, having spent her formative years in the benighted time in America’s history known as the Reagan presidency, developed quite a taste for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios, Armageddon, the big kablooey, Global Thermonuclear War, what have you. The goddamned Weekly Reader fed that shit to us every Tuesday (in addition to telling us about Samantha Smith, and urging us to narc out our parents for toking jays) — what else were we supposed to think? We got a faceful of The Day After when we were nine, we got WarGames and the killer bug AIDS and Ol’ Grandpappy Reagan telling us we might get vaporized by the Rooskies any minute now, maybe even tonight while we were watching That’s Incredible!, but don’t you kiddos worry — we’ll empty the holes on our side too, so NOBODY makes it out alive.

This has led to a lifetime of being way into stuff like Ebola, On the Beach, the Chicxulub Crater, The Stand, Alas, Babylon, Battlestar Galactica, Ray Bradbury, Terminator — even stupid shit like Deep Impact. If it’s fiery and/or involves the destruction of the entire human race (except perhaps for a hardy, ragtag band of survivors, natch), I’m all for it.

Yeah, so, like — happy Monday, y’all!

Let not the unclean holidays be printed upon thy calendars, lest my wrath be loosed upon thee.

OK, Internets, I’ve sat on this one for awhile, half-assedly plotting my brilliant rejoinder to a recent letter in the Opinon pages (opinions are like assholes: everyone’s got one) of the Cowburg Klaxon (not its real name).

But I think I’m gonna have to give it up, and just post about it here. This is one of those wingnutty explosions of illogic that actually defies response — it’s not just unreasonable, it’s anti-Reason. It would be hilarious if not for the INCREDIBLE FUCKING STUPIDITY.

This demented lady — a frequent letter-writer of a dim but committed sort — starts off talking about how much she loves calendars, has em all over her house and in her purse and themed ones in the fuckin bathroom, etc. And but oh nooooo!

This year when I purchased my calendars it was very different. What is usually a joy for me turned out to be very trying and forced me to take a stance on what I believe as an individual.

What happened? Was a calendar advertised as “baby bears” actually full of young beefy hairy guys in assless chaps? Do tell!

I purchased my desk calendar from Wal-Mart and brought it home. After I placed it on my desk, I realized there were Moslem holidays on my calendar.

Holy shit. Moslem holidays. MY EYYYYYYYYYYEEEES!

The bim “thought about taking it back,” because “after all this is Decatur, Texas, not Iraq or Deerfield, Mich.,” but decided to just scribble out all the heathen towelhead holidays with her Pen of Righteousness instead. Then she went back to Wal-Mart and bought two more calendars — horsie ones this time, wheee! — but THEY HAD “MOSLEM” HOLIDAYS IN THEM TOO!!! What if Jesus came by her place to Rapture her up, but spied the “Moslem” holidays in her calendar, and thought to himself, “Fuck her, I ain’t Rapturin anybody who’d allow a calendar (pre-printed by a global corporation seeking to reach its largest possible audience) displaying dates important to people who don’t believe in My divinity to hang on her wall! This bitch unclean.”

I love it, too, that she claims she’s not prejudiced AT ALL, and isn’t “against the Moslem people,” she just doesn’t want to have their dirty-ass America-hating holidays written in tiny print on her calendars. I’m sure she’s equally incensed by mentions of Chinese New Year, May Day, Purim and St. Patrick’s Day. Think about it: What if she had to write her white grandbabies’ precious birthdays down on a square shared by “Ramadan begins?” They’d be tainted for life, that’s what.

She’s threatening to boycott for life all calendars from Wal-Mart, and all calendars made by “the Meade Corporation which printed [them],” and asserts that Wal-Mart should consider who they’re selling to. And this is the kicker:

I realize it is not politically correct for Christians to speak out in this day and time, but who wants to be politically correct anyway?

This old chestnut again. Oh MAN, the wingnuts love “politically correct.” They love it so much they want to take it out behind the middle school and get it pregnant. Nobody else has said it for twenty fuckin years, but these blockheads can’t get enough of it.

And I love the sense of persecution, too — as a “Christian” (many of whom frankly I doubt Christ would recognize as such, should he return someday), this lady is in the overwhelming majority in her community and state, with the mainstream media and the entire apparatus of local, state and federal government at her beck and call for six-plus years and counting. Yet she and others like her persist in pretending to oppression and claiming downtrodden, reviled underclass status. It’s amazing, the pretzels their minds will twist themselves into, ain’t it?

Heretofore unrecognized benefits of outhouses

So beginning at around noon, all of downtown San Francisco was without water for an hour or so today. Seems the city was working on some reservoir something-or-other, and neglected to account for “high” water usage rates … in midday … in the downtown and financial district … which is full of offices … full of people … who generally need a restroom and/or other water service sometime around noonish on a Thursday.

An announcement came over my building’s PA system telling us there is no water service, and — get this — “DO NOT USE WATER, INCLUDING TOILETS, UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.”

Here it is, 2:46, and they still haven’t told us any different. Allegedly the water is back on, and the chuckleheads responsible for the whole debacle are going to try doing their little work project some other time (like at NIGHT), but seeing as how I’m on a high floor, the water pressure’s not yet back up to flushin’ level in our neck of the woods, and people are starting to bug out a little.

Good times. Good times.

Goddammit, are they TRYING to make me buy a car?

Sat next to a guy on the bus this morning who was reading a magazine, which seemed harmless enough, as magazine readers are not Chatters in general. Parked my bag, slumped down, pulled my jacket hood down over my eyes, checked out ... only to discover that my seatmate was a Throat Clearer, of the Random Interval Variety (subspecies: at least twice per minute).

Oh HELL no.

And also? He had that old-guy schnot smell going with every exhale, the one involving weak black coffee, stale cigarettes and phlegm. The iPod, though it prevents my intended nap, takes care of the throat clearing (more or less), but it can't do a thing for old-guy schnot smell. Why, WHY didn't I scooch past Sleeping Beautifully-Made-Up Chinese Lady and take the inside seat beside her?

Half a dozen awesome: Things Jack Bauer cannot get enough of.

—Kicking the shit out of other countries’ embassies in L.A. That’s foreign soil, motherfucks.

—Vouching for scumbags. He knows their proverbial new leaf may not have been entirely turned, so to speak, but he’s fucking Jack Bauer and he’ll make sure the cockbags do what they said they’d do.

—Inadvertently causing the death of innocent bystanders. Starting with the late great Officer Macy Gray, in Season One, you just gotta know: Merely being in the same time zone as Jack Bauer can result in your untimely death.

—Separating people from parts of their own bodies. Micro-Tek Halo, cigar cutter, bullets, it’s all the same to him — the method matters less than the result.

—Breakin the law. There ain’t a felony, misdemeanor or high crime this badass son of a bitch hasn’t committed — twice.

—Delegating responsibility. Just kiddin. Somethin needs doing, Jack Bauer get it done, and that’s all you bitches need to know about that.

Frak. FRAAAAK!

BSG: As of last night, you are dead to me.

Dead. To. Me.

Half a dozen awesome(?): DVDs in my Netflix queue

Positions 27-32 (of 89, plus 12 saved/as-yet-unreleased titles) on the Gleemonex household Netflix list:

27. Bride and Prejudice
28. The Corporation
29. Gia
30. Brokeback Mountain
31. Triumph of the Will
32. The Wire: Season 1: Disc 1

Make of it what you will ...

What's in slots 27-32 on YOUR Netflix (or equivalent) queue? Don't cheat, don't explain, don't re-order the list and THEN tell me -- just write down the six titles occupying those positions as of right this minute.

Burnination of the mouth, via UPS

Best Maid Sour Pickles are the best, sourest, most perfect semi-food item in the known universe. Made in Fort Worth, sold in stores regionally, and now, they’re available online (I got a four-pack delivered to me just today, and only in the nick of time -- I'm down to about a half-dozen in my last jar at home!). I’m pretty much the only person I know who can stand them — seriously, the pucker factor on these alleged ex-cucumbers goes up to eleven — and though they have almost negative calories, the sodium in one pickle pretty much covers your RDA of that particular nutritional element, not to mention taking care of your vinegar dosage for the week (I typically eat 3-4 at a time, if that tells you anything). Mr. Gleemonex gets the grimmest look of horror on his face whenever he sees me going for a Best Maid Sour Pickle, forget witnessing me drinking the juice … man, it’s unholy. If by “unholy” you mean awesome, which in this case I totally do.