July 2005 Archives
However, canoeing trips have been known to start out great but then take a horrible turn for the worse.
And so I made an answering machine message in celebration of me and the Cub getting back to nature -- or more appropriately, getting to nature. There's really no "back" to it. The sound quality is kind of crappy, especially since I recorded my stuff into headphones. I was going to tidy it up a bit, but then I realized that this was going to be played over the telephone, so I thought better of it.
Anyway, if you want to have a listen, here it is.
I don't say this with any pride, although when I noticed it was midnight, I was surprised. I didn't know I still had it in me to play the video games for hours and hours. I figured I'd either get bored or some part of my body -- my ass, for instance -- would start complaining.
I say it with even less pride when I point out that the game in question was called Pirates!.
Not "Pirates", mind you, but "Pirates!".
It's by Sid Meier, the architect of such time vacuums as Civilization and its several sequels. The latest installment, Civ 4, is scheduled for a life-destroying release this winter.
In this game, you're in control of a pirate ship, and you sail around the Carribean attacking other ships, and then you buy upgrades for your ship, do repairs, try to find your family, and get little side missions involving treasure maps and what not. I assure you it's exactly as stupid as it sounds, but there's just something about it. It's one of those games you start playing tricks with yourself over. You think, "I'll just sail to Barbados and then save and quit." And when you get to Barbados, seven people ask you to do some favor for them, and you forget that you were supposed to save.
So, if there's a moral to the story, it's that, if you have any self-respect whatsoever, you'll make sure you don't buy this game.
On a side note...
As you all know, I don't believe in theft of intellectual property. All my music, and certainly all of my software, are bought and paid for. All of it! I'm serious!
But assuming I were lying just there, and the aforementioned Pirates! was a downloaded and cracked version, don't think I wouldn't have pointed that out to myself. You know, that I was playing a pirated copy of a game called Pirates!
I found a site that will let you make your own version of the cover for Coldplay's X&Y
The above says "Hammertime!". Somehow I suspect that if Mr. Hammer had had this as the cover for whatever album followed-up "Too Legit to Quit", he might just still be in the business, living large, entering horses in the Kentucky Derby, paying his taxes in a timely manner.
Of course, that would have involved putting something other than his mug and his poofy pants on the cover. For some reason, I doubt he would have gone for it.
Bumper sticker of the day:
Dick GephardtBefore He Dicks You
Although I think the thing that made that work for me was the car it was on. It was a late 80's model Cadillac driven by an otherwise upstanding-looking white guy. Not the type of car or driver you'd expect to see with a lewd bumper sticker on it.
I had to fill up the little gas can for the lawnmower yesterday, which necessitated a trip to the Phillips 66 just around the corner from the Chateau de J. And I had the same thought I have every time I stop at that particular 66:
"If you want to know where all the beautiful people in St. Louis live, Shrewsbury ain't it."
Don't get me wrong, Stuart. They're fine people. I love the place, and I love people there, and I love having them as my neighbors. But eye-candy they are not.
If you're anything like me, you sometimes worry that you're going to be attacked by vicious flesh-eating squirrels.
You might also worry about cancer. Especially if you do that smoking thing. Which I do. For perhaps the next five days. You might even worry about it even if you don't smoke.
I remember as a kid when people were always talking about finding a cure for cancer. Which, assumably, would be one thing, like a pill, maybe, and you'd take it and then you don't have cancer any more.
Well, they already came up with the cure for cancer. It's chemotherapy. It's just that chemotherapy is pretty indiscriminate. Like it'll kill the cancer cells, but it'll also kill a bunch of other cells that you might need, like the ones that keep your teeth inside your mouth.
It's a slightly higher-tech version of sawing off the infected part of your body.
Anyway, chemo would be great if only they could keep it from killing off all the good cells. Well, they just may have found such a thing. It's the Chemo Bomb.
The drug-packed nanocell trapped inside the tumor explodes unleashing the chemotherapy drug to kill the cancerous cells. No healthy cells are destroyed so debilitating side effects such as hair loss, vomiting, nausea and weight loss could be eliminated.
The whole story can be found here.
And let's hope this pans out. I mean, how cool would that be? I'll smoke to that!
This book centers about painters (specifically miniaturists) in Istanbul in 1591 (or so). It's hard to pin down a genre for this. It's partly a romance, partly a murder mystery, and there are long stretches of people talking about art.
This book was probably the most interesting and thought provoking book I've read in a while. Some of the topics the characters talk about are: At what point does painting become idolatry? Should the size of the subjects in the paintings be depicted as they are, or as they ought to be? And if they're painted as they are, would that be a form of heresy?
Islam's relationship with iconography and depictions of reality ended up quite different than that of Christianity. Christianity settled on a love-hate relationship, whereas Islam's would better be described as a "hate-hate" relationship.
So the book is full of questions of faith that would never had occurred to me, and it forced me to stretch my mind a bit to figure out what the big deal is. But it's good exercise for a half-assed Catholic such as myself, since I've been thinking about matters of faith recently, and some of the things The Church thinks are very important are also kind of bizarre to me.
The storytelling style is interesting. It's all first-person, but who that person is continues to be passed around. So one half of a conversation will be from one person's point of view, with his internal commentary, and then, in the middle, it'll switch off to the other person's point of view with his (often diametrically opposed) commentary.
If there are any knocks on it, one is that the syntax is often a bit clunky and awkward. I don't know if that's a relic of the original text, the translation, or something intentional to give it a 16th century feel, but it was a bit distracting.
And also, I've been laboring under the assumption that, whatever their good points, the Turks are largely a humourless lot. Nothing in this book dispelled that notion.. I believe I counted three jokes total, although it's possible that there were dozens more, I just missed them.
It should be pointed out that I'm a bit of a masochist, and I delight in reading stuff that would bore most sane people rigid. So, bear that in mind when I say that, overall, it was a good (if sometimes slow) read. I enjoyed it heartily, and I'd recommend it to anyone. I give it... four and a half Charlie Heads.
On Wednesday, I was having dinner with my dad, and the owner of the place, who is good friends with my dad, walked by and said, "You interested in going to the Cubs game on Friday?"
Dad responded, "In this heat? Are you kidding?"
"That's what everyone's been saying." Then he turns to me. "How 'bout you?"
"Why not?"
So, we went to the game. Me, my cousin/erstwhile roommate, my cousin's girlfriend, and my cousin's sister/current roommate. The seats were fantastic. You remember where Ferris Bueller was sitting when he went to the Cubs game? They were exactly those seats, only on the first-base side.
My dad was right about the game from the standpoint that it was freakin' hot. The air was about the temperature and consistancy of soup. But, as the game rolled on, there was a bit of a breeze, and while it was several miles from "comfortable", it wasn't bad.
About the third pitch, the leadoff batter, David Eckstein, the man who puts the "short" in "shortstop", hit a foul ball. I looked up, and thought, "Holy Jesus Dogshit, that ball is coming right at me!"
Now, there's a very good reason I don't play any sports. Something to do with the utter panic that washes over me when a ball is flying towards my head. And my complete lack of coordination. And the fact that I cringe and turn away when the moment of truth arrives, and I'm actually expected to catch a ball.
These three facts all conspired against me. After the panic set in, I went into automatic pilot, and my hand reached out basically on its own to snag the ball. This ended up not being the wisest move. The first conscious thought I had was, "Damn, those baseballs are really hard!" The second conscious thought I had was, "Son of a bitch, that really hurt!"
Since I had apparently cringed and turned away, I didn't actually catch the ball. Instead, the ball and dropped to my feet, and the asshole Cubs fan to my left was trying to grab it. When I realized what the deal was, I tried to do a rugby scrum move, and kick the ball to my cousin, who was standing right to my right. But, alas, before I could get at, the arse-shagging, Cubs-cheering son of a syphillitic whore got the ball first.
Ah, well. Che sera sera. He got the ball, but in the end, he's still a Cubs fan with a really small weenie. (I'm assuming. (About the weenie, that is.))
I clenched my fist a few times to make sure my pinky wasn't broken, and it would seem it wasn't. Although it didn't feel very good at all, and it started turning purplish around the fifth inning.
Despite all that, the game was the finest baseball game I've seen. It was a great, enthusiastic crowd. Not as good as an OU/Texas football crowd, by any stretch of the imagination, but as good as I've been around for any baseball game. The pitchers both stayed for nine innings, it was 1-1 for almost the entire game, and the good guys won in shocking fashion, with a bottom of the 11th squeeze play by the aforementioned David Eckstein, to drive in John Mabry.
The crowd went bananas, and I went bananas with them.
The only problem with those thrilling finishes is that the entire crowd is still there, which makes getting out of the stadium problematic. But it's worth it.
Now if I can only regain full mobility in my finger...
You may or may not have noticed, but I've turned on comments. I hadn't turned them on before, because, well, because I'm lazy, and I figured comments would cause me more work.
We'll see how well this works.
"I'm a good person so God made good things happen for me."-- Paris Hilton
I wouldn't even know where to start on that quote. Wouldn't even know where to start.
For any of you souls who aren't blessed as to live in the New Eden that is St. Louis, MO, it may come as a surprise to note that this town is awash in Bosnians. Yes, those Bosnians.
How Bosians refugees ended up in St. Louis, of all places, is a mystery to me. I'm sure there's a very good explaination, I just don't know what it is. Or maybe there isn't a good explaination. Maybe the story of the Bosnian migration to St. Louis involves some anonymous functionary at the State Department, a map, a blindfold, and a dart.
Whatever the case is, there's now 30,000+ of them. The influx was not without its growing pains. Apparently the first summer they arrived in large numbers, a longtime resident of South City said the back alley behind his house was a constant stream of blood from all the goats and lambs that had been slaughtered and smoked in the converted garages.
One time at a Bosnian restaurant, I asked the waiter, "How the hell did you end up in St. Louis of all places?" He said, "Well, when I left Bosnia, we could go to Germany, but there's no jobs there. I wanted to work, I didn't want to collect money from the government. I also considered Chicago, but it's too expensive there. Rent is $1000 a month for a tiny apartment, but you don't make any more money there than you do here."
So, St. Louis it is. It's been a win-win deal for everyone. They managed to take over a neighborhood that had kind of gone to seed the last couple of decades before someone took an interest in it and really spruced the place up. Some of these people are apparently expert tradesmen, and are now making American union wages doing the same stuff they were doing back in the mother country. (I contend, by the way, that St. Louis is probably the best place on the planet to be a skilled blue-collar worker. For more reasons than I have space to go into here.)
Anyway, when I hear something about Srebenica, it has more impact than it might otherwise. Since I've met some of those people. I'm sure wherever you are, you've seen the magnetic yellow ribbons, or red-white-and-blue ribbons, saying "Support our troops." One I see fairly often is a green one that says "Srebenica SomethingInSerboCroatian".
So, that's all a long-winded lead-in to say that it's the 10th anniversary of the Srebenica massacre. I'd say something poignant like "never again", but we all know it's going to happen again. The same people who allowed it to happen the last time around seem not to have learned any of the lessons they ought to have.
So, rather than empty banalities, I'll just ask that everyone give a prayer for the people whose lives were lost so senselessly and needlessly. Or, if you've just decided that the existence of Paris Hilton, and the fact that she has it so good, is conclusive proof that there is no God, then at least spare a thought.
Here's a story. Christopher Hitchens. Whether you agree with what he has to say or not, there's nobody whose better at saying it.
Illinois
Sufjan Stevens
This music is really hard to define. It veers perilously close to folk at time, without quite making it there. Then it starts sounding like some variation of indie pop, but then the horns start up.
He uses some kind of mini-orchestra, with a few strings, some horns, an oboe that I can't shake the feeling isn't exactly in tune, and a banjo.
I'm on record stating my belief that pop music needs more of the banjo. And by that, I'm not saying that we need more bluegrass influence pop music. I'm saying we need more pop music with banjos. And this guy manages to do it in spades. It's not some kind of kitch or hamfisted way of doing hayseed. He takes the sound of the instrument and makes it work for him.
We also need more glockenspiel. Although he doesn't use any of that, he does use a xylophone, and that'll just have to do.
But whatever he's doing, it comes down to whether or not this is enjoyable stuff. And it's highly enjoyable. Very mellow, though. There aren't any songs on here that you might think, "Oh, this is his version of rocking out."
I had a thought that sums it up pretty well: "This sounds like a song from the soundtrack of a movie starring Philip Seymour Hoffman." Depending on your opinion of Philip Seymore Hoffman movies, this could either be a good thing or a bad thing. I think it's a good thing.
The music is always interesting, though never unlistenable. And lyrically, it's often moving. I don't usually listen to the lyrics, so if I do happen to find myself listening, it means either something's gone right, or something's gone wrong. In this case, it's a little bit of both.
His voice is, well, let's just say if Lemmy of Motorhead ever succumbs to the hard-drinking and poor diet, I suspect they won't be tapping Sufjan to take over singing duties. His voice is very soft, a little bit too breathy for my taste, and he has a rural Michigan accent that comes out in some spots.
So, I started listening to the lyrics because his voice was a bit distracting. But I kept listening to them because they were really good. I'd say he's like a gay male version of Tori Amos, only he manages to sing something other than nonsensical depictions of how shitty his childhood was.
Like the song "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." Deeply moving stuff. Or "Casimir Pulaski Day", which might be one of the saddest songs I've heard in a while. Although he was singing about someone with bone cancer. You'd have to try really hard not to make a song about that depressing.
All in all, as God said to Tony Wilson at the end of 24 Hour Party People
Out of a possible five Charlie Heads, I give this four Charlie Heads.
*Legal Notice: Salivating Dog and its parent and subsidiary companies in no way make any guarantees about anyone's ability to get you some hot girl action, regardless the music they might be playing on the CD player. Seriously. Anyone who takes love advice from Famous J deserves what he gets. Or more likely what he doesn't get.
Do you think this song is too unlistenable?
Courtesy Pop Justice
Now, dear readers, this thought has probably passed through your head. "What the hell. I mean, really. I've been reading this Salivating Dog lo these few months, and while I've been wildly entertained, has my life really been improved? I mean, seriously."
True dat! But this evening, I unveil another first! Let's call this one
The First Ever Salivating Dog Public Service
Imagine a yak has escaped from the zoo. Are you imagining it? Maybe this picture will help. Okay, now, imagine this guy has gored you with his fearsome horns. The paramedics have shown up, right as you've passed out from loss of blood. Is there someone would you like them to call?Do you have a person in mind? Good!
Okay, let's say you picked your mother. Good choice. You always were the dutiful son and/or daughter. Right now, I'd like you to go to your cell phone, and change the name you have stored your mother under. Add an "ICE" in front of the name. So instead of saying "Mum", it now says "ICE - Mum".
The "ICE" is for "In Case of Emergency". So, as the Med Techs are looking through your personal effects, trying to figure out who they're supposed to call, they'll come across the "ICE" and that's the person they'll call.
This is especially important if the person you're thinking of is your husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend, and you have him/her stored as "Tina" or "Frank". How is the dude with the gurney supposed to know that Frank isn't your butcher? Because he's got "ICE" in front of his name, that's how!
The story from which I pilfered this idea can be found right here.
I have to say I have sympathy for this line of reasoning among the gay folk of the world: "Look, we'll give up anal sex if you guys give up oral sex. It's all sodomy, you know."
Well, I can think of one instance where oral sex might be permissible, at least for us Papist folks:
- Being that conception is an important purpose of the magical sex act, and
- Being that if the female half of said magical act has an orgasm sometime after the male has made his Man Gravy, it greatly aids in conception
- Therefore, oral sex performed on women-folk in the pursuit of making babies could be permissible. But only if they're trying to make babies. And they're married.
- QED
I mean, you could make that argument, if there were such a thing as the female orgasm. But we all know that it's a myth. It's like Santa Claus: something you tell children in an attempt to prolong their innocent sense of wonder; to delay the day when they figure out how the world really works.
This isn't to say that I'm foresquare behind this whole hypocrisy thing. Most people nowadays seem to take it as given that unless you happen to live a Christ-like existence, free of sin, you have no business criticizing anyone else's behavior. This is, of course, utter nonsense.
For instance: I don't think anyone should do crack. Don't do crack, kids! And if you do crack, you ought to consider cutting that shit out.
Now, the fact that I've done drugs in the past doesn't change the fact that nobody should do crack. If I say to someone, "Hey, don't do crack," it's a pretty shoddy counter-argument to say, "Oh, yeah? Well, you did 'shrooms that one time. Remember that, Mr. Pants?" Yeah, I did, but so what? You still shouldn't do crack. For that matter, it wouldn't make any difference I'd actually done crack before. You still shouldn't do it!
This whole obsession with hypocrisy is just a dressed up ad hominem argument.
However, there's a difference between arguing based on hypocrisy and the above sodomy argument. The gay folks' argument is that you can't pick and choose. You can't hurl aspersions at gay people on the basis of your religion while completely ignoring those parts of your religion dealing with behavior you're really into.
It'd be another thing if it was a "spirit is willing and the flesh is weak" kind of things. Like if you really believed in your heart you were doing something wrong, but succumbed to temptation. Nobody's perfect, and nobody lives up to every tenent of faith always and everywhere. But frankly, there are a lot of people who criticize gay sex, but love nothing better than a good hummer, don't really seem interested in doing without them, and seem uninterested in whether or not they're permissible.
This isn't to say that I'm for or against gay sex. Or blowjobs. Just that I think the gay folks make a good point.
And I can only speak for Catholics here. I don't know where the snake handlers* come down on the subject of making sweet love to someone's mouth. Although I can guess what their answer would have been as recently as 30 years ago, I don't know how their thinking on the issue might have "evolved".
You may have noticed, although you probably didn't, that I now have one of those blogrolls. Right there on the right. Check it out!
Maybe you're wondering where I get all the stories about monkeys. It's probably from one of those places. Or maybe you recognize one of those people among the "People I Know". You're perhaps thinking, "Mr. Sanders! I wonder what he's up to?" Or, "Maybe I should get around to checking out this Deep Donkey Crew. Although it's far from work safe, and I'd better remember to put my headphones on before someone starts talking about suckin' someone's dick tonight."
And, if I haven't mentioned it before, that PostSecret is really compelling.
* Editor's Note: by "snake handlers", J is referring to all Protestant sects, not just the Pentecostal types.
I finally got around to repairing the fence. Let me first explain about my neighbors. Until Friday, Charlie could get into either of my neighbor's back yard. When she got into the one neighbor's yard, their response was something like, "Charlie! Oh, my goodness how you've grown! But you're still adorable!" And when she got in the other neighbor's yard, the response was something more like this, called over the fence through pursed lips: "Um, excuse me. Your dog has gotten into our yard. Again."
So, obviously it was the gap between me and the latter neighbors that I was most concerned about. Well, I'd put up chicken wire a while back, but didn't put it down low enough. So with a bit of industry (which Charlie has in abundance), she managed to wiggle her way out after a couple of hours.
So, I moved the chicken wire lower, and this time, I stapled it down. (Before it had been tie-wrapped down.) Charlie spent about eight hours total in the back yard unsupervised, and never managed to escape, so I'm tempted to call the situation solved. However, Charlie is a startlingly unintelligent dog. Insatiably curious, but really dumb. So it's just possible that she hasn't figured out a trick of how to do it yet.
We'll see.
There's a biking trail on the route of the now-defunct Katy line, called, cleverly enough, the Katy Trail. The plan on Saturday was that the Cub and I were going to ride down it until my lungs started to give out (the over-under was set at two miles), and then turn around and ride back.
Sadly, it was not meant to be. We loaded up the bikes and took them to the gas station to fill them up with air. And I'll be damned if the Cub's bike wheels wouldn't turn. Some problem with the brakes where the pads were touching the rims, even though nobody was holding down the brake lever.
I spent about 30 minutes on the 120 degree blacktop of that freakin' Mobil station trying to fix the thing. I could either get it so A) the brakes were always engaged and the wheels wouldn't move, or 2) the brakes weren't engaged, but could never be engaged.
I had sweat dripping down my face, and my mood was getting more and more sour.
Finally, I gave up, and we took the bike to the bike store. They said it was the rims, which, after he pointed it out, they did look really beat up. Although the fact that new rims are more expensive than new brake pads or a simple brake adjustment couldn't possibly have worked into his equation. Could it?
The Cub was leaving for Ooooooo-klahoma (where the wind goes sweeping down the plain!) on Sunday morning at the crack of dawn, so I left him with the folks, and proceeded to spend a delightful night off. Not a care in the world.
I had absolutely nothing going on. So I ended up spending the evening reading the book I'd been reading, smoking, drinking freshly roasted coffee, and watching the dog run around without worrying when she's going to make her break for the forbidden yard. It was blissful.
The patio was invaded by a cicada, which started its deafening stridulation. Charlie the Hunting Dog then sprung into action, and pounced on it, barked at it, and batted it around, until the noise stopped.
The best part was when she would grab the cicada in her mouth. Not to eat it (at first), but just to move it somewhere. But the cicada didn't stop its horrible noisemaking when inside Charlie's mouth, so all of a sudden the creaking noise would be muffled, until Charlie spat the filthy vermin out.
Livin' is easy in the suburbs. That's why everyone wants to live here. Or at least, everyone should.
In the interest of making sure my puppy is happy and well-entertained, I decided to pick up a couple pig ears. I asked the person behind the counter of the overpriced independent pet store I go to where the pig ears are. She walked me over and then said, "Actually, the longest lasting of these is probably the bully stick".
"Wait a minute," I said. "Is that what I think it is?"
"Well, that depends on what you think it is. But yeah, probably." Then to clarify, in case we still weren't on the same page, "Bull have 'em, cows don't."
I ended up getting one. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine what it means that I got my female dog a wiener to chew on. Please cite the appropriate passages from Freud in your work.
Actually, from the standpoint that it'd probably kill me first, it wouldn't be cool at all. But still. You have to go somehow, someday.
And, from the standpoint that I haven't eaten any chicken in about a week or so, I'm doubtful.
But I have something. I'm feeling deathly ill. Although the worst part is the cough. It's a really helpless cough that just won't stop. I think the deal is that I have both phlegm and germs and tar on my lungs, and my body is trying to expel everything. However, I keep adding more tar to replace the crap that gets hacked out. Ugh.
So, there's no update today. Although I did add a logo. A logo that stretched my photoshopping abilities to the max. I did some unsharpen masks, layers, adjusted the hue, and added a cuteness filter, so Charlie's cuteness wouldn't blow out anyone's monitor.
Enjoy!
My favorite part of the table is the plastic baggy underneath the guys ass, in case waste dribbles out.
Some day, I'm sure I'll end up on this table, or one just like it. But for now, I like the fact that I'm on the other side of the table.
This is officially the stupidest site I've ever seen.
Okay, I take that back. It's not the stupidest thing I've seen. Hell, it probably isn't even in the top 50 stupidest sites I've seen. Remember The Hamster Dance? Neither do I.
But for some reason, it brings back memories of the glory days of the web, when people would come up with so many ideas, just one stupid idea after the other, all the time. The difference here is that I'll bet this guy has yet to be contacted by a venture capitalist.
Man, those were the days. You remember the webgrocers? Someone decided that some day, everyone would buy all their groceries online. That we, the public, were content to let letting some illiterate asshole making minimum wage pick out our produce, rather than us going somewhere and picking it out ourselves.
And then, they'd ship it to you. For free! Within minutes! Didn't have to pay anything! They lost a considerable amount of money on each transaction. But somehow, some way, they were going to make this thing work.
What were they thinking? It was during my Lost Years (i.e. the few years I spent in Dallas, at the tail-end of the dot.com boom and the front-end of the dot.com collapse) that the biggest web grocer -- whose name, much like The Hamster Dance, has abandoned my memory -- went belly-up. If you lived in one of the larger and more affluent metropolitan areas, you probably saw their trucks driving all around town. On the side of the trucks, they had animals made out of food products, like a bird with a face made out of a kiwi slice, a beak made out of pineapple, and black-eyed peas for eyes. I could never decide if they were kind of cute or kind of terrifying.
The thing never had a chance. In order to get close to breaking even, you'd just have to raise the price of everything or charge for shipping. Or both. And after doing that, the final tally for a shipment of groceries would be somewhere in the range of "way more money than anyone wants to pay for groceries".
I mean, someone out there would pay $10 plus shipping for a loaf of bread, but I don't know that guy.
What a bizarre decade that was. Holy crap!
Although not everything from that decade was crap. Any of you people remember suck.com? Utter genius. Writing the above, I was remembering a story they had about the dot-com crash that came out shortly before they became a casualty of it themselves. It was poignant and very sad.
Anyway, since I had quite a bit of time to spend today waiting around for other people to finish their crap, I ended up reading some stuff, reacquainting myself to it. I think the thing I like best was the pictures by the great Terry Colon. They were always so bizarre and funny to look at, and while often only tangentially related to the story, it kept you reading. Or skimming.
Like this one:
It's from a very good story about an IPO gone horribly wrong. And when you see it in the story, you get the idea what the point of the picture is. But... why a goose? Is this guy from somewhere in the Deep South and this is part of one of those folks-isms that I don't know? (Kinda like "Tighter than a tick with lockjaw" only way more obscure?) And does it matter?
I don't know the answer to any of those except the last one, and that answer is "No". You're reading the story, you see the picture, it's funny, you can tell it's something about bad things involving money. And there's a goose. Success!
You too can do funny drawings, just like Mr. Colon here. Here's his Guide to Comedic Art.
(I've noticed things about people with funny names. They're either really funny themselves or they're really bitter. They're never just kinda so-so. This goes double if the name is a body part that poop comes out of.)
New word of the day:
Apatheist someone who doesn't care whether or not there is a God.
As you're reading this, it's now Bastille Day, which was the opening shot in the revolution that toppled one tyrant and ended with the installation of... another tyrant. Way to keep your eye on the ball, guys!
Nobody does Francophobia like the greatness that is Jonah Goldberg. Here's one of his classics.
I can't add much to that, and frankly (was that a pun there?), France is doing quite a good job of destroying itself. It's kind of feels like kicking someone while they're down talking too much about them.
So, those France-haters out there have it easy. We just need to sit tight and wait for a few years until their economy collapses utterly and the race riots start, then watch the fireworks.
(And before you start giving me crap having to do with my last name, let me just say that my people left France a very long time ago. I don't feel about as much fondness for la patrie than your typical Englishman feels towards Denmark.)
It's about ethanol and biodiesel. The magical quote: "corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced." And apparently corn is one of the better plant items to get energy out of. Wood biomass requires 57% more fossil energy than energy you can extract from it.
It works like this:
You don't just start out with a corn kernel, toss it on the ground, and come back in a few months and in its place there's a nice bucket of ethanol just waiting for you. You have to plant it, fertilize it, water it (which often involves water being pumped from the ground), then harvest it. And that's just to get the plant out of the ground. Once the plant is out of the ground, you then have ship it somewhere else, mash up the corn bits and allow them to ferment, thus making the ethanol. And then -- here's the fun part -- you have to distill it. Which means applying some kind of heat (probably natural gas), and boiling the fermeted corn mush to separate the ethanol from the stringy corn stalk bits and carmelized sugar and all the other crap that will destroy your car's engine.
So, if you add up all the fuel that goes into each of those steps (fuel for the tractor and shipping trucks, electricity for the water pumps, and the heat for the distillation, etc.), you end up consuming more energy that you can possibly extract from the ethanol.
So, despite the fawning of certain farm-state senators about the many virtues of ethanol, it would seem it's worse than pointless. It actually increases our dependency on foreign oil. Unless they're doing all their distilling with coal (not with all the clean air regulations we have) or nuclear (do people outside of Springfield still use that?), then effectively, we're using up 1.29 gallons of foreign oil (or some equivalent of natural gas, also usually of foreign extraction) to make 1 gallon of ethanol.
Basically, this "ethanol as oil alternative" crap is like the guy (you know the one) who drives 20 miles out of the way (thus consuming $2 worth of gas) to fill up at the one station in town that's 10 cents a gallon cheaper (thus saving himself $1.50). A lot of time and effort that in the end loses him money.
Down with ethanol (unless it's in bourbon form)! Down with biodiesel!
Thought for the day
Children are 200 to 700 times more likely to develop bulimia or anorexia than they are to develop Type II Diabetes (source here, math here).
The two questions, which are to be completed as an exercise for the reader.
- Which one is more of a problem today: eating disorders among children, or diabetes?
- Which one is most likely to be exacerbated by all the handwringing about the "obesity epidemic"?
Please show your work.
(I have no idea what that means. I think it refers to the fact that Mr. Kinneson, God rest his soul, was fat and hooked on cocaine. (How does that work, by the way? I though cocaine was an appetite suppressant.) So, I guess my point was that not only can you get a lot of food at those all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet joints, but you know they're all fronts for drug running. That's why Chinese delivery guys have the best shit. You know they do. And why it was his right foot, that truly is a mystery.)
Now, I'd like to unveil a new feature, in the interest of making the world a better place for all my readers (all three of you). I'll call it:
Culture Corner, with Famous J
Daler Mehndi is a Sikh. How can you tell? He's got on a turban. Rule of thumb: if you see an Indian guy with a turban, he's more than likely a Sikh. And Daler Mehndi is a Sikh. I looked it up.The other thing to know is that Sikhs aren't Hindus. And they often get highly offended if you suggest they are. They're some kind of fusion religion that claims to have taken the best ideas from Hinduism and Islam and made some kind of Super Religion. A Serpentor religion, you might call it, if you were felt like risking the eternal punishment for blasphemy and the ridicule for being such a nerd. So, despite there being elements of Hinduism in it, they're something different. It's like if you were to suggest that Christianity and Judaism are the same thing, really. I mean, however true it might be, neither group wants to be associated too closely with the other.
So if you see a guy who's always wearing a turban, just be safe, and don't refer to him as being Hindu. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to how that would come up in conversation.
See, that's the kind of guy I am. I'm trying to spread, well, if not exactly understanding and a deeper appreciation for other people and their beliefs, at least I think everyone ought to know the bare minimum about other people to keep from really awkward scenes.
I was just looking at that word "awkward". I'd never noticed that it has those two W's right near each other. You might describe the spelling as being awkward, but that would be dorky, and I'm probably the only person who's dorky enough to do that.
If you're reading this, then apparently the switchover is successful for you. This had been hosted on a web server program running on the PC in my bedroom, i.e. the same one I use to listen to music, check my checking account balance, read stories about monkeys, and look at dirty pictures. Well, everything except the dirty pictures thing, because I don't do that. Anymore. Seriously, I don't.
The biggest problem with this setup is that my connection wasn't great. It was pretty fast, but sometimes, if I or Charlie stepped on the phone cord, the connection went down, and the Salivating Dog ceased to exist, until I figured out what I'd done. Or, if I tried to download tonight's Family Guy episode, the server would either be unavailable, or slow as molasses.
So now I have a new setup. It's now running on a three-year-old PC in the closet at work. Yes, I'm stealing bandwidth from work to share my ridiculous and not terribly interesting insights into life and shit with you, my three readers.
So, in one of those lemons-to-lemonade things, I suppose it's for the best that I haven't said anything interesting yet, if I had said something that really blew the doors off people's understanding of the world, one of you assholes would have forwarded it to a bunch of people. (I know exactly wich one of you would have done it, too.) And next thing you know, it would have turned into one of those All Your Base All Belong To Us-style internet phenomenon things. And frankly, my erstwhile PC/DSL combo couldn't have handled it. And if such a thing were to happen today, well, it'd end up hoovering all the work's bandwidth, and, while I probably wouldn't get canned for it, they'd be (as Beaver would say) really sore at me.
So, here's to me never saying anything to interesting and being in no danger of starting!
I had to pick up stuff at work, and on the way home, I stopped by the old coffee house I haunted while I was living off the Loop. I handed the aforementioned puppy dog off to a friend and went inside to get my steaming hot cup of black caffeinated goodness.
I had the song "We Are the World" stuck in my head for some reason. In fact, it so filled my head that it spilled out, in the form of me singing it to all and sundry at the counter. All of whom then had it stuck in their heads.
Well, when I came outside, the person who had been holding Charlie said, "Billy Corgan petted your dog and said she's very cute." I assumed she was joking, so I said, "Funny, just last week, Ron Silver did just the same thing. Apparently this dog is a B-list celebrity magnet."
Turns out, she wasn't joking. Billy Corgan was in town this evening, and actually walked by the coffee place -- probably while I was belting out the Cyndi Lauper part of the bridge* -- and actually patted my dog on the head.
So, Mr. Pumpkins has a discriminating eye for adorable puppies. This in no way excuses the violence against music during his dubious musical career. Hell, it doesn't even excuse the fact that his near presence knocked "We Are the World" out of my head (a welcome development) and replaced it with the wretched "1979" (talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire.) But it's something at least. I now have one good thing to say about him. Other than that, the guy is basically Morrissey, only without the talent and the singing ability and the sense of humor. Just the mopeyness.
And Charlie got her head patted by him. So she's got that going for her. Which is nice.
At some point in the future, I'm going to quit smoking. And I'm not talking in the "I'll quit when they pry the cigarette out of my cold, dead hands" way, either. I mean the real quitting smoking. Like of my own free will. Unless the Calvinists are right, in which case, because I was predestined to.
But still, I hope never to become that odious creature, the self-righteous ex-smoker. You know the guy. Just like your garden-variety self-righteous non-smoker, only there's something a bit more insufferable about him. He sniffs his nose at the active smokers with just a bit more superiority towards himself and venom toward the other guy.
Anyway, it's my solemn pledge that when I quit smoking, I won't be that guy. And anyone reading this, if I seem to suffer from a bit of that-guy-edness, you're welcome to slap me around.
But whatever my feelings towards people poluting their lungs, when that magical day comes that I'm officially not smoking, I hope I always keep in mind the view from the other side of the fence. That I'll put in a good word for smokers when people give them a hard time. (Which is all the time) That even if I loath them and don't want to be around them, that I'll remember that they're people, too, and they're just making different decisions than me.
I hope I maintain my objectivity. The same objectivity that allows me to hate potheads, but be for legalizing pot.
This is a very long, and not very interesting, lead-in to a story I read giving a primer on epidemiology vis-a-vis second-hand smoke, as linked from some U.K. outfit called the Smoker's Liberation Front. They used that as a lead-in to comparing studies of second-hand smoke.
Basically, the conclusion is that while studies maybe kinda-sort indicate that second-hand smoking might perhaps be bad for you, they aren't very conclusive. Like the data says that second-hand smoking might be bad for you, but it doesn't correlate so closely that they can really determine if it's the second-hand smoke, or if they just picked a bad sample (like too many asthmatics, or some such). Or maybe there's more lung disease among children who spend time around second-hand smoke, but they're also more likely to live in polluted cities or have after-school jobs in coal mines.
So while, yes, perhaps children who spend a considerable amount of time have more problems with their lungs, it's not really clear whether or not it's the smoke that causes it. And even if it is bad for you, is it so bad that it's worth banning all second-hand smoke in all public places, indoor and outdoor? And even if it is absolutely horrible for you, what business is it of the government's to stop me or anyone else from hanging around it?
From my brief experiences with quitting smoking, I'll agree with the non-smokers on this point: second-hand smoke smells bad to people who aren't smoking. But if that's really the only bad thing about it, then leave the smokers in peace. If it's a problem, just don't go there. Or open your own bar that doesn't allow smoking.
This should be a no-brainer. This is Golden Rule stuff. But some people just can't mind their own business. The Puritans are alive and well in this country, only instead of worrying about my morals, they're worrying about my health.
* "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, just realize! Oh, that a change can only come!"
"Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué"
- Argentine expression, which translates "I have a Che [Guevara] T-shirt and I don't know why"
The above is from this story (Which, unfortunately, requires registration, but is worth it. (But then, I don't usually link to stories that require registration but I think are stupid and a waste of time reading. (Okay, sometimes I do that. (But not too often. (And this isn't one of those times.)))))
I've thought for a while that I need to make a t-shirt of Pinochet. Like, make a stencil of this picture, maybe. And assuming anyone recognizes who he is (highly unlikely) I would have the plausible defense that all these assholes are walking around in Che Guevara t-shirts, so I figured that wearing the likeness of bloodthirsty murderers is what the cool kids are doing these days, and I thought I'd wear something from a different murderer from everyone else.
Which, of course, would be completely unfair. To Pinochet. Pinochet is one of two dictators I can think of who shrank the size of the government and increased property rights. (The other being Ataturk.) And it's no accident that Chile is now the fastest growing economy in Latin America. Well, Argentina might be growing faster lately, but being that it collapsed completely a few years back, it still has a pretty big hole to dig its way out of.
But anyway, back to Che.
It was inevitable that at any anti-war protest before the latest Iraq war, someone, or probably several someones, would have their Che shirts, and if someone really wanted to make, um, whatever point they were making, they'd they'd be waving around one of those big Che flags.
So, what point might they have been trying to make? That all war is bad? No, couldn't be that. Unlike the revolution that brought William and Mary to power in England, nobody has nicknamed the Cuban Revolution "bloodless".
A quote:
"As Marxists we have maintained that peaceful coexistence among nations does not include coexistence between exploiters and the exploited."In other words, he's all for peace, unless he don't think the other country deserves it, in which case, he's all for war. Isn't that the mindset they're supposed to be protesting?
Or maybe that they're stauch believers in human rights? Um, no, couldn't be that, either. He presided over the excution of hundreds of people, often without trial. Or with a trial, and "owning property" being an ex post facto capital offense.
The low-end quote of the people executed in La Cabaña, the prison for political prisoners that he oversaw for less than a half a year, was 179. That's the low end. To put this in perspective, while governor of Texas for six years, George W. Bush presided over the execution of 150 people. None of whom were journalists or children.
How 'bout this one:
In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: "I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain.... His belongings were now mine."Um, shouldn't his belongings be "the people's", comrade? Sorry, continuing...
Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim "was really guilty enough to deserve death," he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: "He had to pay the price."Or maybe these protestors with the Che flags are protesting the fact that the U.S. military isn't bloodthirsty enough. Here's a quote from his "Message to the Tricontinental":
"hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine"In any case, this fellow is a very odd poster child for protesting what the U.S. government might be up to. Not exactly setting the bar of expectations for decent behavior very high.
This kind of crap would be, well, it wouldn't be excusable, but you could put a mark in the "pro" column if there were some results to back it up. They broke the eggs, now where's the omelette?
...by 1997, the thirtieth anniversary of [Guevara's] death, Cubans were dieting on a ration of five pounds of rice and one pound of beans per month; four ounces of meat twice a year; four ounces of soybean paste per week; and four eggs per month.Aha! There it is! Two two-egg omelettes a month! Although, hopefully it's a soybean paste omelette, since it'd be a shame to waste this half-year's supply of meat all at once.
We can't pin all that on Che, since he left shortly after the Revolution. (Although his economic management while he was there wasn't exactly stellar). He went on to launch more uprisings throughout Latin America and Africa. Each one was a failure, the last, in Boliva, leading to his death. For that matter, the only success he had was against Batista, whose army, I take it, could probably be defeated by the Jefferson County chapter of the NRA.
And now we come to The Moral of the Story. The Moral: Che Guevara was a monster and an incompetent and anyone wearing a Che t-shirt is either a moron or has a dubious sense of morality. And since, as usual, I'm delivering about as much quality commentary as you people are paying for, read the story for yourself.
Tonight, me and the dog played a game I'll call "Making Charlie's Attention Deficit Disorder work for J". It works like this:
- Take a toy, and get Charlie fixated on it, like it's the center of her universe, like this thing I'm holding is everything she's been living for. This involves waving it around in front of her. Seriously, it doesn't take much. Even without my enthusiasm for the thing, there's always something (a stick, a leaf, a rock, a bunny) that's the most fascinating thing she's ever seen. Until the next thing she sees.
- Toss the toy as Charlie goes running like a bat out of Hades after it.
- While she's trying to retrieve the new center of her universe, grab another toy. After Charlie has found her prize and is strutting about the back yard like the Queen of Sheba, say, "Hey, Charlie! Look what I got!" Go back to step one and repeat until Charlie is an exhausted wreck.
Then, the dog being sufficiently worn out, I was going to write some big long something-or-other but I ended up cleaning and trying to set up the future home of Salivating Dog (i.e. some machine in some closet somewhere). Which will be online and spitting out web pages just as soon as I figure out how DNS and BIND work. (Please, don't follow that link there. Seriously, you'll claw your eyes out. I know I did.)
So, it's off to bed for me.
First off, the Cub and I saw War of the Worlds. The Cub gives it a Thumbs Up. I also give it a Thumbs Up. This was the most suspenseful thing I've seen in a while. My back was sore when I got finished with it, since I was all balled up in a knot watching it.
If there's one caveat, it's that when you turn your cell phone off before the movie, it might not be a terrible idea to turn your brain off as well. It's a very silly movie, to be honest. But if you were expecting Remains of the Day, well then, you're probably not as smart as you think you are.
Not only that, but there are pretty big plot holes, and some scenes where, as I was leaving the movie, I started thinking about. "Hey, wait a minute! How come the aliens were..." or "Why didn't they just..." Which would have spoiled it if those thoughts popped into my head while I was watching the movie.
And the worst part of all was the super-secret surprise ending where you discover that "The War of the Worlds" is actually a sled, a symbol of Tom Cruise's lost innocence. *
Oh, crap. I suppose I should have prefaced that with something like Spoiler Alert!
It should probably also be pointed out that we saw the movie on the Megascreen at the Galaxy in Chesterfield. Which was awesome and lived up to its billing. I had been complaining that we don't have an Imax theater in this town, but if that screen isn't at least as big as the Imax screen, I'll eat my hat.
It should also be pointed out that I'm still pissed off at Wehrenberg Theaters for getting rid of that awesome theme music they had when I was growing up. If you spent any time in St. Louis, and you're old like I am, you know exactly what I'm talking about, and more likely than not, you're also pissed off. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, I don't think I could possibly explain it to you, and I'm sorry I brought it up.
I spent all day today being the "adult supervision" in Chesterfield at the folks' place, while the neighborhood kids all blew up stuff. It was fun. I still feel like a sham when I end up being the adult supervising, and am thus obliged to put that in quotes. My supervision ended up looking like this:
J: Nah, put the black cats in a star. Like this, with all the fuses pointing toward the center. So when you light the fuse, they'll all go off at once. See, you've just got them on top of each other. You can't rely on the one exploding to light the other ones. That never works. Okay, run! Everyone!
Charlie was considerably less enthusiastic. Some dogs don't seem to mind explosions. Some dogs do. Charlie is of the latter group, and she spent most of today hiding in the most secluded corner of the patio.
On the positive side, Dad cooked baby back ribs, which were awesome. He's got the grilling thing figured out way better than I do (which makes sense, since he's had a gas grill for the last 20 or so years.) So, Charlie got a few leftover ribs out of the deal. It wasn't all misery for her.
Today being the Fourth of July, the day the Declaration of Independence got back from the printers, it's a time for reflecting what an awesome country this is.
Here's my quasi-proof as to how awesome this country is:
Think of how many people you know in their 30's who have absolutely no idea what they want to do with their lives. And how many of them are starving while they get that figured out? Assuming they ever do get it figured out, which, if you've been out of college for 10 years, and you're still not sure you know what you want to do with your life, it's probably not going to happen.
I know several such people. Granted, I know quite a few dirtbags, but still. And none of them are, in fact, starving. You know this country has really achieved something when you have all this dead weight -- sleeping in their mother's guest room, waiting tables with a master's degree -- and yet, despite these deadbeats bringing us all down, we still, as a nation, have it this good.
Okay, it wasn't a very good proof. In fact, it was pretty terrible.
But still. I like it. Proof or not, this is a great country, and those deadbeats remind me of that.
* No, sillyhead. That's not the secret surprise ending. If you don't know what movie that's the secret surprise ending, well, you need to get out more, and you probably already know that.
