Will somebody please tell me why I smoke these damn things?

OK, been watching Mad Men — intriguing enough to sample for a bit, we’ll see how it goes — and I’m looking at all those smoky offices, smoky bars, smoky bathrooms, smoky cars, smoky elevators, preschools, confessional booths, what have you, and I’m remembering how back in the day in NYC we’d come home from barhopping or shooting pool and just REEK, and have to take 4:00 a.m. showers just to even consider crawling into our nice clean beds, and how every time you’d blow your nose it’d be all black, and how much your throat would hurt, and I’m thinking, thank GOD I don’t smoke!

And it’s not that I’m so righteous and willfully clean livin. I mean, I’m all for people’s right to engage in a lawful activity … I doubt I’d attend a Million Smokers March, or anything, but the Righteous Clean Livin folk have kind of gotten out of hand, sometimes to the point where I'd like to buy a carton and light all 200 right in their faces.

But so why don’t I smoke?

Partly, it’s choice — I grew up with two pack-plus-a-day smokers, and though my mom quit for good the summer I graduated from college (THAT was a fun summer, I tell you whut), my dad never did quit, and if you saw the way he died, at age 51, you’d probably be less than inclined to take up the habit yourself, know what I mean? There’s nothing glamorous or fun or interesting about the way a long-term smoker coughs in the morning, and even if you are lucky enough to avoid cancer, you’re still fucking up your body unnecessarily — that is, of course, your choice (says she who looooves her booze and may or may not have enjoyed other types of substance-based refreshment in the past), but so you can see why my choice is not to.

But partly, it’s pure dumb luck — I sorta tried to take up cigs in high school and college, and it just never took with me. In HS, it was mostly trying to have something to do at parties that didn’t make me look like the goody-two-shoes overachiever that I was; pre-drinking, I’d light up a cig, because those were easy to get, and hey, they were at least a little bit psychoactive so you weren’t 100% Sober Sister. And my friends N. and D. and I would drive to Denton, hit this smoke shop across from the Flying Tomato, and buy cloves (eeeeeeeeeegh) and Lucky Strikes (shout out to all my homies who felt that Pump Up the Volume really SPOKE to them, man — and if this is you, I will bet cash American that you are a female between the ages of 29 and 35). And in college, I’d buy Rothmans, these Xpensive English ciggies to which I was introduced by my friend V., suave guy and lover of all things James Bond/cloak-and-dagger, whom Mr. Gleemonex and I have not heard from since 1999 and whom we strongly suspect of being a CIA spook, for real. I’d light up at bars, cause why not, and occasionally try to use them as a diet aid … but they, like all other smokes I’d ever tried, tasted so incredibly fucking horrible and did such weird unpleasant things to my head (sort of a lead-balloon feeling), that I just never did it enough to become addicted, and I think the last one I ever actually smoked was sometime during junior year of college. So, you?

East Coast 1, West Coast 0

Why can't anybody on the West Coast slice Swiss cheese to the correct fucking thinness?

You wanna be able to read a newspaper through it, which in New York City, is a goddamned given, and you don't generally even have to specify. Even the newest, greenest member of a corner deli counter staff knows this. But out here, the default is to slice it thicker than a first-generation iPod, these fucking BRICKS of unbendable Swiss. And if you say "Slice it THIN! As thin as you can get it!", they'll nod like they totes get you (which nod also conveys the fact that they think you are a pain in the ass who's totes harshing their mellow), but they'll only manage to hew it down to Shuffle thickness. This is even the case at old Italian delis, like Molinari (aka the place I want to go when I die), although I must say, the Molinari boys are better than most.

My point is, how goddamned hard can it fucking be? Christ. Next stop: rocket science.

Note: Mr. Gleemonex and I have been burning through Deadwood as fast as the United States Postal Service can get the DVDs here, so my natural amount of cursing is increasing ... sorry to all you sensitive types out there.

Well, I guess they can’t ALL have a TMBG song about them

That’s my excuse for what I consider my poor performance (36 of 43), and I’m stickin to it.

I refer, of course, to this fun little game — click on this link, and from that moment you have ten minutes to name all the U.S. Presidents. Not as easy as it sounds, bitches.

I got the guy who DOES have a They Might Be Giants song in his honor (someday I’m gonna be on Jeopardy! and I’m gonna win with some bit of trivia about this President’s accomplishments gleaned from this song and it’s gonna RAWK). But I missed a few, and that is not kewl.

If you do it, tell me how you fared, eh wot?

Cute and talented don't cancel out stoopid

Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay … goddammit, why don’t you PAY SOMEONE ELSE TO FUCKIN DRIVE YOUR DRUNK ASS AROUND?

Photo from http://www.pistonheads.com

Missing the point, by a fairly wide margin

Saw a bumper sticker on a truck the other day that said "MY KID'S FIGHTING IN IRAQ SO YOURS CAN PARTY IN COLLEGE!"

Yeahhhh ... that's kind of ... not how it is, at all.

Your kid's fighting in Iraq because the murderous imbecile you voted for -- twice, if the "W" emblems in your back window are any indication -- SENT HIM OR HER THERE for no good fucking reason, you deluded, self-righteous prick. Not quite as snappy on a bumper sticker, is it?

Those summer nights are callin ...

Big shout-out to all my homies spending this week out at the Wise County Old Settlers Reunion! I miss that fuckin thing, hardcore. I was gonna be there this year, but at 31 weeks pregnant, the idea of slouching around in the blasting, baking heat without the relief of cold cold beer is just untenable.

For you non-WiseCo folk: Reunion, which has been going since the 1860s, would take more words to describe than this blog editor allows, so here it is in a nutshell: The last full week of July, you and your fam move out to this campground in what used to be the ass-end of nowhere, and live in these cabins (assuming you are an Old WiseCo Family, cause these cabins are passed down through generations and almost never sold or built new) with screens for walls, rudimentary plumbing & electricity, and communal bathrooms (no showers anywhere) populated mostly with daddy-longleg spiderlike creatures. It’s hot as fuck (see, Texas? Last full week of July?). There are events in the pavilion (beauty queen contests, gospel singers, squar-dancin, what have you), and there is a janky carnival midway (dusty, creepy, and junebug central, what with all the lights at night). Things get going around dusk, where there are potlucks and whatnot in all the cabins, and then after dinner the kids go to the midway, the older folk gather for 42 and cards, and the teenage-to-mid-30s contingent cruise the midway and the cabins a few times and then eventually drift up to the parking lot to stand around and drink beer and get bit by mosquitoes and fire ants till the dawn. It’s a week of total lawlessness and of seeing every person you or your family has ever known for the last hunnert years — e.g. there you are, an overachieving sixteen-year-old who always makes her 10:30 curfew, allowed for this one week to vanish from parental oversight after dinner and until breakfast, drunk in the parking lot at 4:00 a.m., making out with somebody’s cousin from San Antonio, and then on the way to the edge of the lot with your bro’s ex-girlfriend to pee in the bushes cause it’s a long way back to the toilets proper, you run into your first- and fourth-grade teachers plus your mom’s high school best friend and the formerly superhot cheerleader who used to babysit you, and you wonder if they know you are drunk, but hey, so are THEY, and it’s Reunion so they won’t report you to your parents or the constantly-prowling-but-MOSTLY-looking-the-other-way-for-goddamn-once cops but they’ll talk about it amongst their own little knot of drunks back at the cabins, which is all good. You go home when it gets sort of hot again in the morning, shower, sleep all day, then get ready and do it all again that night.

So — peace out, Reunioneers, and may there be no one about from the TABC to harsh your mellow. I’ll be there next year, with or without Kid Gleemonex and the Mr., depending on how much drunken “remember that time” talk Mr. G. feels like he’s up for at the moment (non-WiseCo folk don’t seem to get teh awesum that is the Reunion … huh, wonder why … ).

And HHL: no fights this year, mkay? Time to pass that cape and scepter to the next generation. ;-) Love ya!

One of us! One of us! One of us!

What some folks on my daily rounds o’ the blogs are up to these days:

Chiieew!, manifesting his excellent taste in televisual entertainment once again, is loving Big Love.

GenX is squeezing my heart, real hard, with memories of the summer of 1994, a summer during college when Mr. Gleemonex and I left our sweltering Harlem sublet and took the LIRR out to the end of the line every weekend, spending lots of them at GenX’s house listening to World of Morrissey over and over, drinking gin and tonics, and expanding our culinary horizons by leaps and bounds — often using produce from the very garden pictured in this astonishing cluster of photos (one of which you see at right).

Liberally Lean in the Land of Dairy Queen, blogging from my hometown in the T.X., is just about causing me to hemorrhage.

Tina Ballerina is bringin it every day with the incredibly rude, crude and astonishing.

Guinness 74 is admitting to a lolcats addiction. Now seriously, this is irredeemable, and I’m afraid I’m going to lose some of y’all by admitting it, but my homes G-74 (whose only flaw is that he’s a Red Sox fan) stepped up and admitted it, so taking courage from this brave act, I’m gonna say it, here and now: I … I like (oh this is hard) … I like I Can Has Cheezburger, OK? It is bizarrely, intractably addictive. I don’t check it every day, but when I go there, I stay there. The frickin lolcats suck me in! Goddammit.

Is it better than a sharp stick in the eye?

I think not. I mean, not that I want a sharp stick in the eye -- ouchies! -- but if I'm ever sent to a re-education camp and forced to watch stuff with my eyes held open with duct tape or whatever, this is what they'll force me to watch. I would manage to self-induce a stroke or a myocardial infarction within about four minutes.

The idea of seeing this movie is so repellent to me, I'm giving it its own tag. The phrase is courtesy of the ever-quotable Hip Hop Lawyer, who applies it to a great many of the same things I would, and do.

Hairspray. Godamighty.

The abyss briefly yaws open ...

A few days ago, I got an email from my mother-in-law, who is genuinely one of the nicest and sweetest people on Planet Earth -- she emails me all the time, she lurves me, I lurve her, and it is generally all good. But THIS email -- y'all -- she starts it off with a chipper, cheerful "I just love your blog!"

Time stopped. My eyes bugged out. My mouth dropped open and I heard myself in slo-mo going "oohhhhhhh ... nooooooooooooooooo ... "

It was a horrific thirty or so seconds before I realized she didn't mean THIS blog. Thank the disco-dancing christ, she doesn't know this one exists -- not that she's not, you know, hip and all -- but she's from Ohio, get me? I kind of try to shield her from the excesses of my personality -- she's a nice lady, she doesn't need this kind of agita.

So, J-dawg, if you ever do read this blog, despite my best efforts at prevention -- I apologize in advance for the Olympic Freestyle Cursing, the references to refreshments I may or may not have enjoyed in the past, the be-boppin' and scattin' on the Jesus thing, and various other crudenesses and unladylike utterances that are the meat and potatoes of Damn Kids, Get Off My Lawn. I'm real sorry you had to see all this ... but I yam what I yam. Let's go, um, have some coffee and donuts and forget this ever happened, 'k? :-)

The Unhappiest Place on Earth

So yesterday, Mr. Gleemonex had to go to Guitar Center in search of some wall mounts for our axes (he accidentally left them off the order he placed with Musician's Friend a couple days ago). He thought he'd also try out a couple of guitars, browse around a little.

Yeahhh. Not with the hairy, gigantic Dave-Mustaine-lookin mothafucka standing in front of a huge stack of amps, plugged in and whalin away like only a Guitar Center Guy would do -- blasting the shit out of those amps at full volume, totally getting off on himself as Guitar God, deedly-deedly-woraaaauuuuwwww-deedly-deedly-deedly-deedly-chuk-chuk-chuk-reeeeeeeeeuuuuuwwww ...

You know what I mean? All these fucking licks those guys play instead of music, thinking how KICKASS they sound? While everyone else in the store grimaces and twitches and either leaves as soon as they can get out of there ... or kinda hangs around till they get their own moment in the awesome Guitar Center spotlight.

Needless to say, Mr. Gleemonex left without buying the (incredibly overpriced) wall mounts, and vowed never to go there again, which vow he, like most musicians, will keep until the next time he's been away long enough for the amnesia to blur this memory and there's something he needs sooner than he could get it by ordering online ... and the destructive cycle begins anew.

Glurge: Or, What’s Really Wrong with America

Internets, I had the misfortune of having to watch TV in real time this weekend (a baseball game we forgot to set the TiVo for, and so picked up in about the 4th inning and immediately began screaming about how the fuck are you guys actually gonna SPLIT a series with the TAMPA BAY DEVIL RAYS, screw you guys, you don’t DESERVE to make the playoffs, which rant was thankfully premature and unfounded).

So I ended up seeing a really, really horrible commercial, the kind that makes you question whether you, or all the rest of them, are the intergalactic auslander: KFC boneless “chick’n” wings.

Good GOD, people. Have you seen this commercial, or Shatner forbid, the actual item (in the, ah, “flesh,” as it were)? It’s these … sort of … nuggety things, formed to kind of look like the unholiest of chicken parts, the wing (now THERE’S something that’s a lot more ag than it’s worth — the chicken wing, christ). And you’re supposed to dunk them in this reddish-brown MSG/sodium/Doberman-slobber potion they’re calling BBQ sauce, and — get this — put them in your mouth. Chew, swallow, repeat.

Not even the drunkest wino in the Fort Worth Stockyards at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning in the year 1980 would eat this shit, even if you told him it was a fried apricot pie made by his sainted Gran and gave him a fresh pint of MD 20/20 to warsh it down with.

Apropos of Nothin, Just Like I Like It

“Where’s Squeaky Fromme when you need her?”
—my officemate Sweet T

Threefer Madness

From the Friday the 13th grab bag:

This … seems a little harsh, doesn’t it?

CONTEST - The Wise County Sheriff’s Posse is looking for queens, sweethearts and little miss contestants for the Sheriff’s Posse Rodeo Queen and Sweetheart Contest. The contest closes July 17. For more information call Alina Smith at (940) 466-9457 or Cindy Stephens at (940) 427-2146.

I mean, what’s the Sheriff’s Posse got against beauty queens?

Why don’t we just get Miss Cleo installed as our Homeland Security chief?
Did y’all catch the news a couple of days ago, where that numbnuts Chertoff — who’s supposed to be right the fuck on top of, you know, THREATS TO OUR FUCKING HOMELAND — was gabbing on the record about how he has a “gut feeling” we’re gonna be terror-attacked by the end of the summer? He provided no details, of course, and seems to be unable to explain why his “gut” tells him so (hint: chaos of Iraq and our consequent inability to pay attention to terror threats anywhere = resurgent al-Quaida ‘n Pals). But look out, America! “I ain’t sayin there’s gonna for sure be a terror attack — I’m just sayin, know what I mean?” Ugh. You know what MY gut tells me? You guys are a bunch of crazy assholes with Dorito-laced vomit for brains, and you endanger me, my country and in fact the entire world more every single day that you continue to suck air. Fuck you very much, and fuck your “gut” too.

Fellow FBOFW prisoners only:

I have to say, I LOVE that the wee perfect sweet adorable lil’ cottage of John an’ Elly’s dreams is turning out to be a money pit.* That Stibbs pimp is livin it up in Monaco right about now, hangin out with high-grade hookers and laughin like a maniac at how he fleeced these two giant-butted suburban yokels and their princely spawn — and Stibbs, baby, I’m right there with ya.

*My dad, whose construction skillz paid the billz (you know, sometimes, when they got paid at all), and who lived in our 100+-year-old house for 25 years as it fell apart all around us and got sporadically repaired — by him — thought The Money Pit (and its original source, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House) were the Worst. Unfunniest. Movies. Ever. He haaaated them. Reasons fairly obvious, eh wot.

We can’t stop here! This is bat country!

Top Ten Favorite Books of All Time

So often, Your Gleemonex is all about hatin, which is fun and indescribably good for one’s constitution. But this list is about love, people — LOVE. Honest affection and warmed heart-cockles. Witness, if you dare, the softer side of Damn Kids, Get off My Lawn:

Pride & Prejudice: I could largely take or leave the rest of the Austens, and certainly the Brontes — I mean, I like ‘em fine, mostly, but this is the one I’m taking to my desert island. (Jane Austen, 1813)

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: Like nothing else ever written. The funniest, most fucked-up and possibly most important semi-novel in American lit — Kerouac and Salinger can just step off. (Hunter S. Thompson, 1971)

To Kill a Mockingbird: If I were forced to pick the #1, this would be it. (Harper Lee, 1960)

Ballet Shoes: Perfect and beautiful, from the first page to the last. (Noel Streatfeild, 1936)

The Stand: I have four copies (including one hardback, and one signed by Steve himself thanks to the good offices of Mr. Gleemonex), just in case I lose one. (Stephen King, 1990 edition)

Song of Years: I haven’t liked BSA’s other stuff as much — all of them except for this one are, I dunno, laden with pointless sadness — but I like prairie shit (witness the shelf of Laura Ingalls Wilder), and this is the best of the best. (Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1939)

Generation X: Coupland’s best (with Microserfs a close second, IMO). Maybe I just read it at the exact right time in my life (summer of 1995), but it really got to me and has stayed with me ever since. (Douglas Coupland, 1991)

Rebecca: So beautifully crafted, so tense and doomed, such a completely realized world — just amazing. (Daphne du Maurier, 1938)

Here is New York: If time travel ever becomes possible, y’all can look for me in New York City in 1948, cause I’m going there and I’m staying there. (E.B. White, 1948)

Emily Post’s Etiquette, 1945 edition: Section headings like “The House With Only One Maid,” “When He Is From the Wrong Side of the Tracks,” and “A Real Thoroughbred Despises Cheapness;” rules for throwing the best house party weekend at your place in the country; advice for conducting oneself in modern business situations; the proper way to express condolences — what’s not to love? Open this book to any page, and you’re in another galaxy — sure it’s sexist and aimed at a social strata that has nothing to do with me (or you, most likely, if you’re reading this blog), but it’s such a fantastic look into the minutiae of a time and place long gone in so many ways. Practically speaking, the basic precepts still hold true, and we could all do with a little more graciousness, don’t you think?

Photo ©2006 Mark Chang. Original is here.

Le Sportsac. Heh.

Proof that the Internets (a series of tubes) has (have?) a hive mind: Right after I post some shit-talk about John “I Am the Phallus, Goo-goo-goo-joob” Updike, Internets superstar Sarah D. Bunting (aka Sars) posts a Vine question on why she hates him, and gives a very nicely detailed explanation of same (focused more on the actual writing than the rampant misogyny that tends to be my focus). I’d call it a meme, but A)it’s pretty small in number, thus far, and B)only douchebags say “meme” anymore.

So hey, anybody watch the All-Star game? It got exciting in spite of itself at the end there, didn’t it? Good times.

But Fox’s bloated overproduction of the event nearly goddamn turned me into a soccer fan, I tell you what. Those bullshit little “pieces” they did on certain players (often shoehorned into some, you know, actual gameplay that we consequently missed), all that Yay America! horsepucky, the blaring music during the intros and ceremonial shit that Steve Spielberg would reject as too schmaltzy and rah-rah for one of his Greatest Generation strokefests (I sang along, at one point, some lyrics of my own invention: “Amerrrricaaaa! How awesome it uuuuuused to beeee! Back in the daaaaay! When everything was totally perfect and there weren’t any problemmmmms!”), ten hundred metric tons of self-congratulatory verbal diarrhea, awkward miscues and timing issues unworthy of even your local cable access channel — and last but not least, a flyover of military jets to the music of noted war hawks and Lee-Greenwood-fellow-travelers U2. Oi.

Is it time for the second half to start yet? Please, pretty please?

At right: My new fave baseball player. He looks like the 70s called and said, “No, it’s cool, you can hang out in ’07 for awhile. Come back anytime though, man.”

Two-Fer Tuesday

1) I just read someone described as an “enfant terrible.” Now, Internets, you may or may not know, but the literal translation for this term is “insufferable douchebag.” It’s true!

2) A friend of mine got married a few months back, and the schwank hotel where she had the ceremony and reception offered, as part of the package, a free ice sculpture. She, being a right-thinking girl, was like, “Ice sculpture? The hell?” But I was ALL OVER THAT. Shit, somebody offers you a free ice sculpture, and you get to pick the form of the beast, you do the only thing that it is possible for a right-thinking person to do: You get ‘em to make that thing in the form of a giant Van Halen logo. HELL to the yeah.

Course, I left the entire shelf of Stephen King untouched.

Spent the whole weekend — really, from the time we got up Saturday till about 8:00 last night, when we ate dinner crashed on the couch watching Entourage — making room for Kid Gleemonex in our house. This involved moving-level activity in every room but the kitchen, and was very productive and satisfying but Jesus H, was it a pain in the ass. Mr. Gleemonex was a champ, doing all the trips to Home Despot, measuring, planning, furniture disassembly/reassembly and heavy lifting, while I did tedious but necessary things like de-crapifying the giganto computer desk (Visa statements from 1998, anyone?) and vacuuming cobwebs off the baseboards.

One of the most satisfying chores, for me, was culling our well-overfilled Entire Wall o' Bookshelves of items we didn’t need to have at the ready — crap books that will now live in a box in the garage. Besides dupes, financial advice books, pointless boring everlasting sci-fi and the like, here’s what got the heave-ho:

John Updike: Hate you, hate you, haaaaate you, you misogynist old bastard. Had to read you for grad school, never will again.

William Faulkner: Sorry, man. Never got it, never will.

Melissa Bank’s Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing: An ill-advised foray into chick lit. There’s 90 minutes I’ll never get back.

Ayn Rand: Please, bitch, get over yourself.

Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser: Britrock stars of the Renaissance though they both be, who’m I kidding, even pretending I’d settle in for an evening’s read of these guys?

Sophie’s Choice: Goddamn, what fantastic suck. Couldn’t get past about 50 pages. Fuck you, Styron. Go hang out with your fellow penis-worshipper Updike.

Hemingway: Meh. Go back to impressing impressionable young men, sir.

CS Lewis’s non-Narnia works: I am SO TIRED of the Christian apologists. You’re out, CS.

Virginia Woolf, all of which was bought because of school requirements: I think I’m at the point in my life at which I can safely declare that my feminist cred does not depend on liking — or professing to like, or even publicly owning the work of — Virginia Fucking Woolf.

And now my bookshelves are filled only with good stuff, great stuff, awesomely bad stuff, old friends and reminders of strange dashes into fringe ideas, just as a good bookshelf ought to be ...

This Week in Gleemonex History

Ten years ago this week I was on my way to London for a summer semester of grad work in my university’s British Studies program. Six credits’ worth of pub-crawling, reading, museum-going, jaunts to Paris and Edinburgh, running along the Thames, and missing Mr. Gleemonex terribly. [Waves hi! to Tish, Zeke, and Chuck -- hell of a summer we kids had, eh?]

Twenty-seven years ago this week, inspired by the weatherman’s bitching about the record number of 100+-degree days so far this summer -- but definitely at my dad’s instigation -- I was attempting to fry an egg on the concrete of the carport at the side of our house. It had cooked up a fair bit by the time the cats got to it.

Three years ago today was my first day at my current employer, and we still had unopened boxes in the living room of the windswept house on the edge of the continent from our move out of North Beach. (I, uh, got a tie tack with the number "3" on it in interoffice mail, commemorating this work-anniversary. So there's that, hey.)

Sixteen years ago Wednesday I was on the Mall in Washington, D.C., with a bunch of my fellow Congressional pages (plus somebody’s crushariffic friend, Christian Fletcher) at the end of our term, scarfing picnic food and listening to Cab Calloway, then watching the fireworks.

One year ago Wednesday, all of our friends were over for a second full day of BBQ-ing, beer drinking, bocce, safe ‘n lame fireworks lighting, and, once it got dark, damn near getting in trouble with the law down on the beach with our kickass Missouri-boughten Real fireworks.

Fourteen years ago this week, I was working extra time at the cantina-that-wasn’t, because I had taken the entire next week off for Mr. Gleemonex’s first visit to the Great State of Texass.

Twenty-two years ago this week, I was down in South Padre Island with the fam (plus Kevin and the late Sergio) on perhaps our greatest trip there, eating shrimp till we couldn’t eat no more, getting sunburned, staying on the beach for like 10 hours a day, and shooting massive fireworks into the Gulf of Mexico on the night of the Fourth.

Same as it ever was

I … can’t even really get outraged, you guys. I’m sickened — I mean, you can actually smell the ass-stank coming off of this 2D “comic” strip — but fuck, if Liz wants to spend her life with this passive-aggressive, limp, moist horrorshow, she can fucking have him. I am robbed of words. But to tide you all over, here are some cherce comments from threads otherwheres on the Internets that I read every day discussing FBOFW:

I'm completely astounded at the number of people who are all "Awwww, Anthony and Liz have found their twu wuv at last." I assume these are the same people who spend money on Precious Moments items and voted for Bush because they figured he would uphold family values.

I note that Liz is already barefoot. She's 2 degrees from pregnant.

Having seen this [coming] from ten miles away doesn't make it any less traumatizing.

“Dear America,
Happy birthday, ASSHOLES. AAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Love, Lynn
ps, suck it”

I wouldn't say no to a swarm of giant mutant spiders right about now.

FOOB: Is it not time to finally shorten the name of the feature, shift from the comparative to the superlative, and distill it to its essence: Worst.

Heh, "foul pole."

I suspect that there are more than a few people in America today who are hoping that Barry Bonds will take a tumble down a flight of stairs real soon, breaking his tibia in seventeen places and prematurely ending his illustrious baseball career, too bad so sad no HR record.

Now, though I myself am of mixed feelings about the Bar -- I am not among the ill-wishers above. I'm just saying, I bet there are more than a few out there.

These are the kinds of things I have the mental space to think about, while the Yankees punctuate long stretches of sucking the big wet one with occasional flashes of brilliance (see: last night's game).

Thanks to csr_reporting_is_my_life for the photo link ... klassy lady, that one.

The restless and the damned

Random thoughts that occurred to me during the completely sleepless hours between waking at 3:57 a.m. and the alarm clock going off at 7:15:

— In re: the foot, or elbow, or ass, or whatever that is lodged against my lowest right-hand rib: Would removal of that rib necessarily count as “major” surgery? Because three more fucking months of this ... holy flaming balls.

— It is a very, very special type of friend whom you can call from a bar that you have been in with your husband and y’all’s friend Lebowski for over two hours on a Saturday afternoon at 5:00 and say hey, can me and these couple of drunks come to your house? We can be on the road in 15 minutes and in your driveway in an hour and a half! And they say, without hesitation, “Hell yeah, come on over.” And you go, and hang out with them and jam till 4:00 a.m. and swim in their pool and play with their kids and finally move your lazy ass homeward around five the next afternoon.

— Everybody should be watching Big Love (on HBO), because it’s a great show and but also because the recaps on Mighty Big TV are frickin awesome. For instance, from a couple weeks ago: “If there's anyone who can get away with having their face magnified fifty times and then have its gap-toothed rictus suspended motionless above a defenseless citizenry, Bill Paxton isn't him. Imagine driving along and looking up and thinking, Holy Christ, it's Chet from Weird Science!”

— We have to go to see our financial planner today, an utterly humorless and frighteningly competent little man who is the grownups’ equivalent of a school principal. We pay him to tell us what to do with our money (the part he doesn’t take in fees). The other day, Mr. Gleemonex was talking about buying some gadget or other, and I said, “Quick! Buy it before [Thor] says we can’t!” And I was only sort of kidding.

— Speaking of principals, did anyone else think, back in elementary school, that Mr. Young (the principal) and Mrs. Carraway (the school secretary) were married to each other? Or was that just me?

— This one’s for my fellow prisoners of the evil fascist FBOFW regime (the rest of y’all can stop reading here, you lucky ducks): Why did April capitulate? I mean, Gerald told his slack-jawed yahoo buddies that he totally tapped that ass (when he DID NOT), and now he’s gone over to the Dark Side (playing for La Roadside, Rebekkkah, in the Special People’s Telethon) — what did he do to earn April's forgiveness? Secondly: So, great, Mason’s flaw (besides suddenly morphing into Mr. Kelpfroth over the course of a wedding and meal), is that he’s a big ol’ drunk. Faaaantastic. Now Granthony will save the day, stepping in to start the dancing with Liz, and we’ll rhumba one step closer to the Great Dread Inevitable.