Breasts, Dicks and How They Interrelate

Now one might...just might argue that blog referrals to my blog coming from blogs where teenage girls are feeling each other's breasts is in some way obscene - and, when Eryn is closer to the age of these two girls, I'll wholeheartedly agree (though I'll try to be a good Dad and ignore it unless it's part of a larger behavior problem). However, I don't really find the breast squeezing in any way obscene, just teenage girls being silly - what is obscene is making me look at things like this:



This is just absolutely uncalled for. Doesn't this ruin the breast squeezing picture for many a young, horny, teenage liberal? That's just not fair. Typical conservative elitism. Do you suppose the U.S. Secret Service does regular research to find sites the veep is pictured on and keeps an archive? Do you suppose they spend a lot of time being interested in teenagers squeezing each others breasts? Do they forward the relevant pictures to the veep himself? Maybe there should be an independent counsel to determine the answers.

A game! Guess who this is!

This is a picture from the comics in last week's Sunday Star-Tribune, from the small sidebar they have profiling a famous person for children. Can you guess who this is? I'll post a second picture later with the answer.



And the answer is...Jon Stewart of the Daily Show!

Amelie - A New Niece

My sister Allison gave birth to Amelie Mona Steer at 9:10 a.m. today - yes, Amelie like in the movie, although I'm not yet sure whether I have to add any accent marks anywhere. Mona is Ceri's grandmother - I'm fairly certain about the lack of accents on that one.

20" long
6# 11.5 oz.

Updated with some pictures (clickable for larger sizes)

Where Am I Virtually - Week 4 on the Road

Well, I officially made it to South Dakota. I thought for a while about heading toward North Dakota - but there's no Corn Palace and no Badlands - you have to go where the siteseeing is worthwhile. I have ended the week very close to Clear Lake, South Dakota. Not a very exciting town, but there are 100 women for every 82 point some odd men, and the women make less than $20,000 annually on average, so I'm a good catch, regardless of what my wife says. There should be around 200 women excited about my being in town. Spy sattelites pinpoint me somewhere near here. You'll note the large lake, that's Clear Lake - rather than going directly into town, I swung north and went around past Ulvern Park - there was a nice breeze coming off the lake, so it was good decision. The lake is really the best amusement in town, but I was fortunate to be around for the Deuel County Farm & Home Show (Clear Lake is the county seat, after all), after which I caught a sandwich at Wes and Ann's Cafe.

I always appreciate a good Ann Coulter story

Norwegianity points us to this link about Ann Coulter on the CBC program The Fifth Estate.

Update: There's video - yea!

Penzey's

Blogger's spellchecker informs me that what I really meant to spell was "penises". That's a bad replacement word in a post if it's about food.

Wasabied Steak and Noodles

The second of two Penzy's recipes I really enjoy - if you like sushi, you'll probably enjoy this.

Wasabied Steak and Noodles

• 8 oz. strip steak (yeah, um, you can use pretty much any cut of steak meat here - it just has to be tender enough to make you happy. I tend to eat my steak a little overdone, so a poorer cut works fine - if you prefer your steak on the rarer side, you might want something a little leaner/higher quality. Of course, if you're a vegetarian, I think you could make this recipe work with vegetables as well, or shellfish if you're a sort-of-vegetarian).
• 1/4 t. Ginger
• 1/4 t. Garlic
• 1/4 t. ground black pepper
• 4 oz. egg noodles
• 2 t. olive oil
• sprinkle of garlic
• sprinkle of ginger
• 2 t. rice vinegar
• 1 t. Wasabi powder (Penzey's sells three varieties - all with real Wasabi, not just horseradish)
• 1 t. water
• 2 TB soy sauce
• salt to taste (don't bother - it's pretty salty with the soy sauce)

Note: I also add shaved carrots to give it a different taste, and I imagine peas would probably taste great as well. I tend to just drop the seasonings into the rest of the food willy nilly, going a little overboard, I prefer my food with some kick - the more ginger, the spicier.

So: Cook the pasta. Dry the steak/meat. Rub the meat with ginger, garlic and pepper. Grill the meat (medium rare, but it's really up to you). Note that if I use a lesser cut of meat, I mix a little olive oil and the seasonings together and cook the meat in that along with some of Penzy's granulated garlic. Let the meat rest (to firm). Toss noodles with olive oil, sprinkle of garlic, sprinkle of ginger. Mix the Wasabi powder with water, stir to blend, and then mix with the soy sauce. Add the rice vinegar (I go a little light as I'm using an old, not so great, bottle of rice vinegar) to the noodles, toss to coat. Cube the steak to bite size (again, poorer cut, just precut, you won't be as worried about keeping it pink), add to the noodles. Drizzle with the wasabi-soy mix and toss again. Note: if you make twice as much Wasabi-soy mix and only use half on the noodles, you can dip the meat/vegetables in it like sushi - definitely the way to go.

Bangkok Noodles

The first of two public service announcements about dishes I've had that my friends might like, both courtesy of Penzey's.

Bangkok Noodles (which does not taste like peanut butter)

• 8 oz. noodles or pasta (flat works great - like fettucini or Asian noodles)
• 1-2 t. Penzey's Bangkok Blend (which is ancho chili peppers, garlic, ginger, tellicherry black pepper, galangal, crushed red pepper, lemon grass, cayenne pepper, paprika, cilantro and basil - just order it from Penzey's, much easier to make than crushing it yourself)
• 1 t. water
• 1t. vegetable oil (olive oil works just fine if you like it better - I do).
• 1 TB peanut butter (go natural, not Skippy's or Jiff)
• 2 TB soy sauce (use thick low-sodium if you have it)
• 1 TB rice vinegar (I go a little light unless you have particularly good rice vinegar)
• 1 carrot, peeled and shredded
• 1-2 tsp of dried shallots - optional (but good)

Note: I usually use about 1.5x this much for noodles (which is a box of fettucine noodles) because I like leftovers, and I double the rest of the ingredients because I like my food a little spicy, but it's really up to you. I also add chicken (precooked, I sprinkle it with some olive oil and more of the Bangkok blend) and a few handfuls of cooked peanuts for some texture. Penzey's recommends more vegetables: cooked broccoli, snap peas or cauliflower and perhaps using cellophane noodles instead.

So: prepare the noodles. While they're cooking, mix the Bangkok seasonings with water in a bowl big enough to hold all your noodles. Let it stand a few minutes, then add the vegetable (or olive) oil, peanut butter, soy sauce and vinegar. Whisk to blend, then add carrots and stir again. When the noodles are fully cooked, drain and shake to remove water, then toss with the sauce while hot. Sprinkle with shallots and serve.

Fligh high and stay away from Trouble

So we had a contractor on my current project, just one, and I forgot what a truly quirky bunch they can be. I was once a contractor myself, at two different firms, and at the later I "staff managed" about ten other consultants for several years, taking them to lunches, doing annual reviews, working with them on their career paths - so I have direct experience with a wide variety of them and all their foibles. This recent one was good at what he did, but his personal quirk was telling stories that didn't seem appropriate to a work setting, or even appropriate at an after work client-consultant setting over dinner and beer. For example, there was the story about how he hit a kid in the head with a log when he was younger, and the next day the kid stepped in front of a bus and died - he was unsure if the two were related, but who knew how the kid's attention span was doing after the log. Note that this story had been preceded simply with the words, "I once killed someone." And then there was the story about his friend who was having an affair with his own brother, but who decided that was immoral (not to mention illegal, although the reasoning was that it was a homosexual affair, not that it was his own brother), so he ran off and married his sister instead. It's certainly one of those stories where you don't feel inspired to reply, "That reminds me..." And today, in the readme.txt file for our project install instructions, I find this advice, "7. Fligh high and stay away from Trouble". I'm sure our install group will find a way to ensure that's the step that fails during deploy.

Ten Thousand Sorrows

So I'm reading two books at the moment: Ten Thousand Sorrows, by a Korean adoptee, Elizabeth Kim, and The Liar by Stephen Fry, whom you may remember from the BBC series BlackAdder (he had various parts - most notably, Darling's superior). The former is about a biracial adoptee whose mother is murdered in front of her and who is later shipped to America to live with a Christian family. The later is a sort of homosexual-bisexual Catcher in the Rye that takes place in a British boarding school. Together, the two are a very odd mixture - but at least when one gets too depressing, I can switch to the other for a while or, vice-versa, when I'm feeling chipper, I can switch to something more sobering. On a mildly ironic note, I noticed this morning that the bookmark I'm using in Ten Thousand Sorrows is actually a birthday card I had meant to give my sister that shows several large people bent over with a little girl looking on and the words, "Dear God. Let me be adopted." I'm sure in some way I'm being very un-PC.

My favorite part from either book so far is from Ten Thousand Sorrows. It seems that Elizabeth's parents were a bit upset with her for desiring nice clothes and to teach her a lesson during her high school years, when everyone wants to be popular, made her choose only a single dress to wear each week. The lesson she was to learn from this: "If other kids make fun of you, you should consider it a blessing. You're being crucified with Christ so that you can share in his eternal glory." (p. 92). I bet they made her Christ-centered meals as well (come to think of it, they did make her eat eggs every day - that's certainly a religious symbol).

If that's not enough religion for you for the day, here's some recent tsunami-related missionary work you can read about.

Loathsome People

Make sure to check out Planet Dan's link to the 50 Most Loathsome People (in America) of 2004.

(Direct link to the list).

Point Break...LIVE!

It seems blogging has changed my cultural life. Last night Pooteewheet and I had our friends come over to sit Eryn after 9:00 p.m. so we could run downtown to catch a performance of "Point Break Live" at the Bryant Lake Bowl, which was not so much recommended, as it was just mentioned, by PlanetDan. I have to admit, we had a wonderful time and my wife is actually thinking of going back next week with a friend. Point Break Live is exactly what it purports to be, the classic Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze movie adapted for the stage. There is no pretense at fine acting, and one of the main characters, specifically Reeve's character, Special Agent Utah (former quarterback for the Ohio Buckeyes turned FBI agent), is actually pulled from the audience, bedecked in a wetsuit, and forcefed lines by a cuecard girl (who doubles as a wave, wearing a blue scarf and tackling Keanu now and then while screaming "Wave!") throughout the entirety of the play. Our particular Keanu was great, and even did some of the appropriate gestures (rubbing the chest, arms outspread with head bobbing slightly forward, etc.) and really came into his own during the argument scenes.

The highlights include:

• The skidiving scenes are great - with the characters actually hung from clips in the ceiling, which was apparently so crotch-wise uncomfortable that Keanu could only mutter his lines. It was fun to watch him ride Swayze down at the end, when he's supposed to have jumped without a parachute, and they're basically just wrestling on stage as Swayze yells, "We're gonna be meat waffles in six fuckin' seconds!"
• Raincoats for the entire audience because of the wind and surf emanating from the super soakers during the storm of the half century. Other props added to the realism as well, including ear plugs (for the in-audience robbery scenes), sun tan lotion and bank money (see picture below).
• Mooning - yes, real butts, on stage.
• Extensive use of the outside of the theater. Chase scenes looped through the Bryant Lake Bowl, outside, and back in, many times over, and spectators outside stopped to watch Keanu in a wet suit chasing Bodhi Satva through the snow at approximately 11 p.m. The recent snow actually made it particularly funny, as they opened up the wall to show the window which was supposed to be the beach, so the actors were wandering around outside in their wetsuits in the drifts trailing surfboards and various beach paraphenalia.
• All stress on the "subtext" part of the "gay subtext" of Point Break was dropped. Bodhi's buddies hammed it up pretty good.
• Particularly appropriate to where I work, it was noted that "Lawyer's don't surf."
• Bryant Lake Bowl has one of the best tap beer selections in the Cities - you can get Bell's Two Hearted Ale for the same price as a Summit - Bell's is an immaculately brewed ale - your Summit almost tastes like swill after a glass.

A sign we noticed while out this weekend

Updated (original 1/16/2004): I now have a picture.

At Popeye's near Uptown (actually, very close to Nicollet and Lake if there weren't a Kmart there)...an example of why I should carry my camera around at all times - it's funnier with the actual sign...

Free Flavor With Meal.

Where Am I Virtually

Well, I started the week on CR17, just east of Lake Lillian, sort of Northwest of Cosmos, Minnesota, which is pretty much where the Luce Line Trail ends. Specifically, N44, 57.896' by W94, 47.088'. By the time I reached Maynard, I'd moved out of anything resembling scenic Minnesota lakeland, and was entering what appeared to by primarily prairie - a precursor to the MonDak area from the look of it. By the end of the week I had passed through Montevideo (make sure to check out the Swensson Farm Museum and have something to eat at the Java River Cafe) and was camping not too far from Tenmile Creek (props to Slim Shady) on CR18, still about 30-some odd miles from the South Dakota border (N44, 57.885 by W95, 52.353).

A Chuck Palahniuk Two-fer

My most recent (completed) reading has been two books by Chuck Palahniuk (the author of Fight Club), Lullaby and Invisible Monsters. I've read a number of his books before, and these were probably my least favorite, although they were both amusing. Lullaby seems to be technically a better book, with a better plot line, a more creative idea behind it, and just more well-written overall. The basic premise is a reporter finds out there's a lullaby in a book that's actually a "culling" song (used to weed out the infirm and starving once upon a time) that's been causing crib deaths and other deaths. He embarks on a journey to eliminate the extant copies, and is forced to deal with the fact that his absolute power corrupts absolutely. However, I actually enjoyed Invisible Monsters, about a model who loses her face in an accident and her subsequent travels cross country with her ex-boyfriend and a transvestite, more, perhaps because Palahniuk just made everyone's relationship to everyone else so intermeshed and unreasonably coincidental that it was fun trying to think of how he was going to interconnect the characters next. That, and it had perhaps the best quote of both books:

"Go figure, but Texans seem to be a lot more comfortable around disastrous
house fires than they are around anal sex." (p. 276).

My Workplace is Serious About Snow Removal

I spent several hours at work today (officially sanctioned by fate, as I was rewarded with a free soda from the bottle cap of the soda I purchased), and on the way in and out was treated to seeing the snow-removal program that takes place on weekends. There was literally a line of trucks waiting for snow six deep, with at least four other trucks driving up to replace those leaving, and that was only in the first lot (out of five) - the other lots were busy as well. That just has to cost more than I pay for removal at the duplex.

Comments

Currently on the D-building cafeteria comment board:
"Could you offer more 'Christ-centered' meals?"

Response from the cafeteria crew (summarized):
"We don't know what you mean."

They must mean wine and wafers, right? Unleavened bread? Maybe a cake shaped like the Bible? Judas Iscariot pudding with silver sprinkles? Maybe just NOT french fries and middle eastern dishes?

Bike, Daddy

Eryn has been having a little trouble sleeping lately, and wakes up around 3:00 a.m. and yells, hoping that someone, anyone, will let her out of her crib to play, watch t.v., rock in the rocking chair, dance, anything that doesn't involve sleeping. Two nights ago I went in to calm her down and she was standing up, stating between sobs, "Daddy.... down... down... now... Daddy... bike... down.... bike..."

21 months old, and she wants to go bicycling at 3:00 a.m. It just warms my heart. Perhaps it's all the bicycling I'm doing on the trainer beneath her room after she's asleep that's getting through to her.

For anyone who's interested, the 2005 Ironman is April 24th! Mark your calendar.

House With Swastikas, Anti-Bush Threat Draws Attention

This article about a house decorated with swastikas and anti-Bush graffitti reminds me of a Simpon's episode in which Sideshow Bob is trying to kill Bart. He explains to the court that "Die, Bart, Die" is simply German for "The, Bart, The".

Summit's new Stout

So last night I followed the advice of the Summit Brewing Company and went to the Groveland Tap (details below - ongoing through January) in order to:

1.) Get a free Summit Oatmeal Stout pint glass
2.) Try their new limited release Oatmeal Stout (only on tap, nitrogen infused)

It's only on Wednesdays, but you don't have to drink all your four beers on a single Wednesday unless it's the last Wednesday - you can spread it out. Of course, what fun is that? My friend Dan and I did the full sampler at once. First off, the glass, very nice - pretty much a Guinness-style pint glass with the "bulge" near the top stamped with a Summit Oatmeal Stout logo - not everyone's glass of choice, but it'll do well pre-chilled in my beer fridge.

My opinions on Summit Oatmeal Stout - not exactly favorable. It was interesting - I'll give it that - it doesn't really taste anything like a Guinness. What it does taste like is sort of grainy. There are actually two tastes to it - a sort of smoother, dark, alcohol-tinged taste that I imagine is what it would taste like if it sat around for a year before being served, and another grainy taste that's sort of like a cross between eating chocolate malt (in grain form) mixed with a bit of dry oatmeal - that taste I didn't like. Of course the Winter, EPA and Grand were all delicious.

I topped the whole experience off with a Groveland Tap Juicy Lucy - that's a cheese-injected hamburger for those unfamiliar with it. You can get a much better Juicy Lucy at Matt's Bar on 35th and Cedar (don't go to the 5-8, not nearly as good). The one at the Groveland tasted a bit like it had been laced with salt. Dan refused to have a Juicy Lucy because he once burnt his lip on one, so he ordered the fried cheesy mushrooms instead...with obvious ironic results.

Even better - while I was off having four beers, Pooteewheet was home taking care of Eryn, shoveling the drive and making cupcakes. She sent a bunch to work with me, so if you're here, please come have one.

Details:
Round The World With SummitEvery Wednesday in January, stop by the Groveland Tap in St. Paul (1834 St. Clair Ave.). For only $10, enjoy each of the four flavors of Summit on draft: Oatmeal Stout, Extra Pale Ale, Winter Ale, and Grand Pilsener. Keep your glass once it's empty!

KQRS, Monty Python, Michael Palin and all that

So I was listening to KQRS this morning (I don't know why I bother, yesterday they compared prison conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan to conditions at Catholic school - I have yet to hear of allegations of glowstick abuse at Catholic schools, but I could be wrong, and I don't particularly want to run the search and see what comes up) and Tom Barnard gave a short little history of how the Monty Python troupe had criticized too-soft interrogations thirty years ago in their Inquisition skit. Now I can't point to all of the members' politics, but I'm pretty sure that they weren't saying that there wasn't enough real torture in the world.

I don't think Terry Jones likes George W. Bush and his policies much at all, in fact (or those of Tony Blair), and if you've never read his story about "I'm losing patience with my neighbors Mr. Bush", you're missing a fine piece of satire. He writes frequent columns for The Guardian, that alone makes him so far left most conservatives would stick to the other side of the street when they see him.

Graham Chapman is dead, but he was gay, so at best he would have been a Log Cabin Republican, which in the last election would have put him directly at odds with the President.

Eric Idle isn't particularly a friend of the Administration either - I quote Wikipedia.
In June 2004 he released the "FCC Song" on the Internet, which became quite popular. The song critizises the US Federal Communications Commission and the George W. Bush administration.

John Cleese: Well, I don't want to shell out 27 Pounds to find out John's politics (sorry), but he was an atheist for a while, doesn't like the Church of England, turned down membership in one of the royal orders, and is famous for using the word "fuck" in a eulogy, not exactly values the right embraces. He did not write the article about the Axis of Just as Evil, but he may have left a comment on William Gibson's blog to the effect of...
"How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness."

And Michael Plain - well, I just don't know - he's a little more difficult to pin down. If you can find something, leave me a comment.

Safety First

Courtesy of the Washington Post via Yahoo

U.S. Tells D.C. to Pay Inaugural Expenses
D.C. officials said yesterday that the Bush administration is refusing to reimburse the District for most of the costs associated with next week's inauguration, breaking with precedent and forcing the city to divert $11.9 million from homeland security projects.

Maybe the Democrats should keep their allotted Inauguration tickets instead of giving them to Republicans in order to help maintain national security.

This sounds like those MASH episodes where

they have to ship someone to Japan because they can't handle it in Korea. I think my wife would find it very distressing to know that I'd gone to Iraq and died of a "non-combat related illness". Anyone have a good link to what these illnesses generally entail (I see speculation about depleted uranium and hauling toxic chemicals on the web and I imagine some of it is just normal getting terminally sick that happens in any sizeable population, but you'd think they'd add "appendicitis" or something at that point). It gets a little creepier when one of the soldiers probably has ancestors in the same clan homeland in Scotland as yourself.

The latest identification of U.S. casualties in Iraq reported by the Department of Defense:

DoD Identifies Army Casualties
The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier supporting Operation Enduring Freedom and two soldiers supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. A review of records revealed the omission of news releases for these soldiers.

Operation Enduring Freedom

Staff Sgt. Robert K. McGee, 38, of Martinsville, Va., died June 30, in Manila, Republic of the Philippines, of non-combat related injuries. McGee was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, Fort Lewis, Wash.

Operation Iraqi Freedom

Sgt. 1st Class Otie J. McVey, 53, of Oak Hill, W.V., was medically evacuated from Baghdad, Iraq, on Sept. 23 for treatment of a non-combat related illness. He died Nov. 7 in Beaver, W.V. McVey was assigned to the Army Reserve’s 706th Transportation Company, Kenton, Ohio.

Sgt. Foster Pinkston, 47, of Warrenton, Ga., died Sept. 16, in Eisenhower Army Medical Center in Augusta, Ga., from a non-combat related illness. Pinkston was assigned to the Army National Guard’s 878th Engineer Battalion, Augusta, Ga.

I bet this fed a lot of people

After all, Jesus might come down personally and divide one rotting fish and a bucket of tainted, foul drinking water into enough for the masses - so all is good. Personally, I'm a bit more pleased with my company which is double matching donations to the International Red Cross and few other charities.

Lifted wholesale from The Revealer:

Gallup Prayer
07 January 2005
CNN reports the results of a poll it conducted with USA Today and Gallup, and finds that Americans offered more prayers than cash to the victims of the tsunami at a rate of 75% of respondents claiming they offered prayers, and 45% claiming they gave money. Are we so devout, or as Revealer contributor Adam Becker suggests, so impressionable? Becker writes: "As if when polled many people are going to say, 'No, I did not pray for all those dead people.' This is an excellent example of how stupid information gathering can make the country seem more religious than it probably is."

Kevin Blogged - Part V

Larry’s Dead

Chapter I – Kevin Blogged
Chapter II – Tall Brad
Chapter III – A Mysterious Malaysian
Chapter IV - A Hairy Swede
Chapter V- Unix for Dummies

Note, any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental.

She was the kind of girl whose arm you vaguely remembered licking in an amorous, drunken haze at an office Christmas party the night before while her friend, some Minnie Driver-look alike, scowled on, unapproving, but who, when the bright and cleansing rays of the morning sun lit your crumpled clothes nest on the cold living room floor was nowhere to be found and certainly wasn’t available to explain to you why you were bruised and covered in stale pretzels and crumpled song requests for such quixotic classics as “Get a Life”, “You’re Dunk” and “Drool On Her Arm a Little More, Idiot”. You wouldn’t even know her name if you hadn’t read the scrawled I Am Christy nametag situated revealingly within her mostly unbuttoned blouse. And come to think of it, where the hell was your $20?

Regardless of her reputation, she’d had her heart broken at least a dozen times and then a few more, and one too many of those lotharios could point at her with the cold words, “There was a time when she was my backburner girl.” She’d have sung it like her own personal blues anthem, but she only sang when she was drunk, so everyone had tired of the tune and now she only hummed it to herself.

She’d heard through the grapevine that Larry might be dead, that Brad might in some way be culpable and was currently cooling his heels in an Inver Grove hoosegow, and that Ming have been moved by HR into a solitary cube on LL a good fifty feet away from anyone else, but she was unwilling to check it out for herself, it was just too far to walk. If Larry were dead, he wouldn’t be in her meeting later that morning and if Brad were incarcerated, at least he wouldn’t be hitting on her friends. She’d always harbored an uncomfortable suspicion that he was constantly looking down her blouse. She knew she’d be looking down her blouse all the time if she were that tall. She tucked her foot beneath her, leaned back in her gray cubicle chair, thought about her breasts, unbuttoned another button and reached for her Unix for Dummies cheat sheet. But where her trusty companion should have been, her hand closed on nothing larger than an arrow-shaped sticky note emblazoned with the words Aiming for Excellence. She worried at first it might be another love note from the arm licker, but on third glance she realized it was something altogether different. It was a note from Larry. His voice echoed eerily from beyond the grave, trying to bounce between the gray and brown cubicle walls, but getting no further than the first cube because of the acoustic-dampening properties used by all large companies in employee workspace construction. Nevertheless, the note let her know in no uncertain terms what his undead presence could not, that he had borrowed her cheat sheet.

“Damn it.” She immediately looked around for someone to hit. Now there was no choice but to walk to his cube, after all, a dead guy wasn’t going to be bringing anything back to her, and her meeting had already started three minutes ago. She stomped down the walkway past the rest of her group fuming and muttering to herself, “If he got blood on it, I’ll kill him again. First Brad uses my CDFFL winnings to pay for group legal, now my cheat sheet…” As she stomped past Lisa, Lisa didn’t even looked up, but just enjoined, “Well, wherever the hell you’re going, button up.”

What passes for stupid fun at my house

This note left for all visitors by Pooteewheet:


And this mug I bought for her that pretty much calls her ugly in not quite so many words. My friend Mike would probably love this picture as I'm often telling the story about how he was at a bar with Pooteewheet, myself and a bunch of other contractors and after a while stood up and announced, with my wife sitting right there, "I'm going to the end of the table with all the pretty women." One of the bigger mistakes of his life and a story that's told only slightly more often than the one about his neon pink bicylcing bibs, the accidential discovery that our wives are cousins and the redheaded waitress at Billibong's who wouldn't talk to him after she found out about his political leanings. His other big mistake was getting drunk enough to have this picture taken and letting me put it on my website with accompanying music. I'm pretty sure that's what the world looked like (and sounded like) to him when the picture was snapped.

Scary Movies

Pooteewheet has been dying to go to a scary movie - not so long ago she was looking at Darkness, until I pointed out that RottenTomatoes had given it a rating beneath The Cranks. 4%. So I was going to recommend that if she felt better this evening, maybe she should go to White Noise, but I think the 00% rating just might be the lowest rating I've ever seen on RottenTomatoes - right there in the same range as Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever or House of the Dead, which we were both so so so unforunate enough to watch (I admit to it only because I posted my Netflix list in an earlier post).

Mr. Cranky doesn't really think much of Darkness either. He hasn't reviewed White Noise, but I expect it will get the big atomic explosion with the accompanying phrase " Proof that Jesus died in vain." if it really is a 0%.

Daily Show and Falwell

I saw this yesterday and it's a rerun, but it was so funny I went looking for the quote and found a link to the clip. The Daily Show had several bits discussing how the administration and the right were propagating misinformation about sex, stds, etc, and had a clip by Jerry Falwell in which he compared giving condoms out at schools to giving cookbooks out at fat farms. When they came back to Stewart, he opined (I paraphrase from memory), "What if they were cook books about how to eat healthier?"

Quicktime Video Link to the clip (4.7 megs) - also some stuff about James Carville masturbating - just a warning in case you don't want to think about it...ah...to late, eh?

Links courtesy of OneGoodMove.org

Getting Back in the Groove

I know I've been woefully inadequate at posting since the day before New Year's - chalk it up to lots of vacation, lots of family sickness and a busy project. I do have another chapter of Kevin Blogged available that I'll get out there tonite - it's a rest night from cycling, so I should have plenty of time. Which reminds me, I noticed in my ride diary that Erik and I went riding last year on February 21st - in the middle of January a year later that seems even stupider than it actually was, although the wet and cold made for a memorable ride.

In the meantime, here's a wonderful quote from Christopher Moore's "The Stupidest Angel":

"He'd been playing Barbarian George's Big Crusade on the PlayStation at his friend Sam's house, and they'd gotten into the infidel territory and killed thousands of the 'Rackies, but the game just didn't have any way to exit. It wasn't designed so you could ever get out of it, and before he knew it, it was dark outside and he'd forgotten, and Christmas was just going to be ruined. He wanted an Xbox 2, but there was no way Santa was going to bring it with a home long after dark AND a didn't even bother to call on his list."