in case you were wondering, george w. bush is a liar. i agree that social security needs to be reworked, but in my opinion (which matters precious little in dc) we should divert at least a third of our defense spending to non-military aspects of our budget. that said, perhaps republikkkan voters remember w saying that he would not cut social security benefits when he was campaigning. now, he says that he will be doing so, but only for those taxpayers who can afford it. he reassured the old folks and the aging folks by saying anyone born before 1950 would see no difference in their benefits whatsoever.
i'm all for those who can afford it tightening their belts a little to help everyone who can't; hell, what kind of semi-anarchist/quasi-communist/moderately anti-capitalist would i be if i weren't. however, it is still the middle class who will end up paying for the bulk of this anyway. since every retiree currently receives the same amount of benefits (give or take a little) from social security, the middle class (who outnumber the rich) will end up giving up more than the rich, even though the rich can afford it more. this whole line of bullshit was tailor made to avoid raising the limit on what payroll levels can be taxed. (not that i really know a lot about tax law, but my mom is an accountant, so here's a rough idea as i understand it. payroll taxes must be paid by businesses up to a certain level of payroll, let's say up to $100,000 per employee taxable income. if an employee were paid more than $100,000, no payroll taxes would need to be paid on the amount over $100,000. trust me, this is primarily a tax sheltering mechanism for the well to do, not a small business owner protection.)
instead of making the wealthy take a little hurt, he's swinging at the little guy and the middle guy again. i don't much want to go to prison, so i'll continue trying to tell people about it instead of doing anything about the root problem, but if anyone were to make a few deletions from the rolls of the republikkkan party, i would not be too upset. i might throw you a party. hell, if i ever try to hold political office, i'll declare a holiday for you. someone, some nutjob with a gun (i'll temporarily lift my usually anti gun stance), please?
skullfuck bush.

apart from stlcardinals.com, several great websites done by people who read this blog, food and beverage websites, and a few flagrant tributes to utter geekdom, i realized i just don't know that many interesting websites. it may well be that i just don't surf with the empty head the advertisers want me to, or perhaps it is that i truly have managed to empty my head to the point that i can't even think of anything to search for (or even better, i'll end this sentence with a preposition, just like every other independant clause so far if i want to). anyone know a website i have to check out? let me know. i have a short list of politically motivated sites i occasionally see, but am at a loss for entertainment. i think i'm up to five once in a while readers now... where should i surf?
by the way, fuck bush

welcome, dr. von crankenhaus (or so i think)...
busy weekend... a few updates. go see kung hu hustle, as it is not only a good kung fu flick, but also hilarious. played laser tag for the first time in several years hefore the movie, and remembered how much fun sniping tiny kids can be... fast eddie's bonair is much more lively on a saturday night than sunday afternoon, but no one was eating. still couldn't find a table for an hour... fucking middle aged bastards (go back to your "w" stickered truck adn let me have a place to sit and eat my food). great cards game yesterday, almost saw a triple play in person, but as it turns out, it wasn't... barbecue went swimmingly, all food cooked to perfection. i'm still trying to wake a few brain cells up from their weekend's rest, so i apologize for the poor sentence structure.
start your week off right: fuck bush and all of his dirty, dirty republikkkan cronies!

welcome to the chaotic imaginings that are gthedamned, ms. wolfe... hopefully, you'll check in more than the one time this morning

well, it's been a long week, but if i can make it through today, i'll enjoy the fruits of my semi socialist forbears known as the weekend. i get to see a cards-astros game on sunday, and do next to nothing on saturday if i can manage, so that should prove to be the first real weekend i've had in roughly three weeks. good god, i can't wait.
congratulations to the chocolate goddess... her law and order performance outdid dennis farina's, and his name is in the opening credits. can't wait to see the aol spot.
until later, peoples, fuck bush.

obviously, they went with the mercedes... dignified, classy, conservative, but most of all "deutschland, deutschland, uber alles..."

at this moment, there is an ecumenical council working on a seemingly impossible task. they will discuss pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, and weigh the merits of various candidates carefully, for the choice they make will have wide ranging ramifications for the rest of the world. there are no cardinals on this council. the group to which i refer is made up of altar boys from the archdiocese of duluth, minnesota, who are charged with the sacred task of selecting a new popemobile.
italian cars were long the standard for the popemobile, but have since been scrapped as they require hordes of mechanic priests (not an easy thing to find) to keep them running. the duluth council have narrowed the field to bmw, mercedes, lexus, infiniti, and the chevrolet ssr convertable pickup truck, which by virtue of universal agreement (and possibly soon to be church decree), is fucking sweet.
the new popemobile will of course have to be retrofitted with many papal options, from shroud of turin print seats to the holy water cannons in rear (guaranteed to ward of tailgating demons and pagans of all stripes). the question remains: will the new pope want to drive the new pope-mobile, or should the plexiglass dome be reinstalled? (most agree that the dome would totally lame up the chevy ssr)
the altar boys have pledged to decide soon, meeting every day after school to debate the merits of their own favorite choices. so far, they have revved the diesel engine once, creating a puff of black smoke signifying that the decision has yet to be made. the whole world awaits the day when a small addition of water to the fuel of a regular unleaded car gives us white smoke, assuring a grateful populace that a new popemobile has been chosen, and there is once again order in the world.

i haven't posted in a week. we have a big trade show coming up, and things have been a little hectic. i will try to get back to regular posting for those of you who actually read this.
why can republikkkans make money disappear and get away with it? an independant who at sixteen once lied to his mother about "what he was doing in there" would come out of the republikkkan spin cycle as a kitten raping monster, but halliburton can overcharge the gov't nearly three hundred million dollars without reprisal? have you noticed how hard it is to get a scandal to stick lately if there's a republikkkan in the driver's seat? sure, they may well sacrifice tom delay, but his offence (at least the one they caught him for) isn't even as odious of some of the things that are getting swept under the carpet. there's speculation that a conservative leaning newspaper columnist, who was paid to promote the no child left behind act (lies, through and through) only made two of the eight ads he was contracted to do, but then kept the rest of the money. newspapers are for sale, like everything else, yet people read them as gospel truth. tv is pap for the mindless, but of course tv never lied to you.
sometimes i can't believe i still live in this country. i love it in principle, but in current practice... good god.
i'd also like to say that i just love the word "odious." it really rolls off the tongue (if not the keyboard).
fuck fuck fuck that odious son of a bitch bush

returning thoughts from an unexpected trip home...
took a wrong turn (or rather, the lack of a correct one) on the way down. i was listening to the baseball game, which we lost, and siouxs! was catching up on much needed sleep, and there may well have been other mitigating circumstances, but i stayed on 57s instead of switching over to 24e. priceless moment: the following two pieces of dialogue were one right after another, but hardly a true conversation based on their independance from one another s: "where are we?" g: "sikeston?"
my grandmother is a remarkable woman. i wonder sometimes if she has ever allowed herself more than a few minutes of emotion at a time. sometimes i think that i am the successor to that strength, though i don't have it the way that they (my mom has the same thing going on) do.
haven is still cute. i know by now that this is common knowledge, but i feel the need to mention it every time i experience it firsthand. seriously, when that kid smiles at you, you can't stand up. he is currntly a ladykiller. i don't know what to expect from him when he gets older, but if he could do it all right now, he would be up to his eyes in women. (to be fair, his eyes are currently about two feet off the ground.)
i didn't think i was going to get too emotional, and for the most part, i didn't. i teared up briefly when i saw little thing of flowers from haven pinned into the casket. earl, my step grandfather never had any children of his own, and was in fact, only married for the first time when he was seventy plus years old. haven was not his only step-grandchild who was really a baby when they met, but they did form a certain special bond. when earl didn't recognize my grandmother (he had alzheimer's), he still knew haven, even if not his name. the saddest i got at the funeral was from worry about haven and how he will deal with this whole thing.
hung out with laura and jonathan on friday night, though not as much as i might have liked. harley was there, and since i haven't seen him in a few years, that warranted some catching up. he was also in the best mood i have seen him in in years, which was good to see. i also finally got to see connie, who is still as connie as ever, though her husband and her children are regulating her medication a lot more than they used to (probably for the best).
that last paragraph made no sense except to a very select few of my readers who have ever been home with me, or for (hopefully) laura and harley, both of whom i urged to check out bastardskaramazov.com. i will try to kep theings more universal in the future.
i'm watching the cards game, so i'll end here. we're losing 8-0 to the fucking phillies. what the fuck. (fuckbush)

i've been posting very regularly for the past several weeks. there will be a short break in this, as siouxs! and i have to go to a family funeral in tennessee. i hope the rest the of the week is uneventful (for me, at least).
until soon
g

game one. i am going to be breathing cardinals today through friday, when the birds come back home. it's really kind of absurd how much of a baseball fan i've become. growing up knox vegas style, there were the knoxville blue jays, later changed to the knoxville/tennessee smokies (and were, at least then, a stl farm club), and when i was younger, we used to go to bill myers stadium to watch some fine minor league ball. if i saw a total of six innings in the perhaps dozen games i attended over the years, i would be amazed. i didn't know what to watch for, and subsequently didn't care too much about the outcome. i was mostly preoccupied with the "bad part of town" in which bill myers stadium sits (i think they tore it down), and fellow fans. i was also entranced by the sometime mascot (for minor league baseball, as far as i can tell), "the famous chicken," who was famous, apparently, on the virtue of being both famous and a chicken. if the chicken's website is to be trusted, he is also famous for being from san diego. how exactly i made the transition from caring more about the antics of a man in a chicken suit than the game being played to the rabid cardinal fan i am today is a story best left up to my therapist/psychiatrist/warden some day.
on a totally unrelated note, without ever having been to a 4h meeting, i think i have guessed what all those h's stand for. here's my list, but don't correct me if i'm wrong: horticulture, husbandry, home economics, and ho's. if that isn't the real 4, i'll eat my hat. more specifically, the beef jerky hat my cousin made me in 4h.

the final four is in the stl, and all i can think about is the away opener for the cardinals tomorrow. as you might have guessed from the last several posts, i am not the huge college basketball fan many make me out to be (i've heard one story that i am a fourteen foot tall 968lb duke fan; not only is this preposterous on a size basis, as there's no way i've pushed past the 935 mark, but also a true laugh that i would like my devils blue. i much prefer the standards of red and black, with the occasional pastel demon thrown in "for the ladies.")
but holy shit, there's about to be baseball again for the next six months... if it weren't the day after daylight savings time day (the bad one), i would hardly be able to keep still. well, that, and the beer marinated tissues.
i barbecued scallop/bacon kebabs last night. they were phenomenal, but i think next time i may have to melt some cheese over them to get the non-kosher triple play. would it have to be pig cheese, or will any old mammalian dairy product do? to anyone in the know, please advise.

i say "fu-uu-uu-uu-uck bush!"
and then shake it like you caught it on fire

failing that, just worry about the fuck bush part.

mitch hedberg and the pope... guess which one i'm more upset about.
i don't mean to be crass, and if anyone who reads this post has a problem, feel free to write me on a comment or an e-mail, but the pope was an old guy already. he wasn't bad as popes go, but his insistence on continuing the prohibition of roughly one in five people worldwide from utilizing birth control is positively cruel.
that said, back when i was a youth growing up in the southern baptist church, i was a pretty big jp ii fan. there were definitely some concessions to common sense made while he was on his watch.
i need to take a lesson from that howler monkey and get back to the funny stuff if i want to keep all three of my readers. thanks to statcounter, i have a decent idea of who you are, but even then it's more guess than anything else. as best i have been able to discern fom the info given to me by the good people (or robots) at statcounter, the bulk of hits coming to this blog are here by accident. many of them seem to be doing research on either the apache chief geronimo or the black panther elmer "geronimo" pratt and find little old me, far less revoutionary, though in no way embarrassed at the association. the rest of you, my visitors, seem to actually know me and yet somehow you still want to know the details of my life and hear me ranting about politics. perhaps you don't, but in any case, you're still looking out of habit, and i thank you.
by the way, i'm adding a new link (here, if i can't get the template changes in quickly enough). one of the only reasons i still pick up the riverfront times, a once decent free weekly run by the most liberal guy in the stl now turned mass produced mtv-ish bunch of porn and real estate ads interspersed with dick and fart jokes about local aldermen, is ths cartoon, which is a pretty good source for real information as well as a good "i think i'm gonna throw up at the realities of living in the u.s." kind of laugh pretty much every week.
i really need to work on my sentance structure. the only way to follow the sheer number of independant clauses and such in that last sentence would be to diagram it. i won't diagram it for you, but maybe if you asked siouxs! really nicely...
goodbye, mitch hedberg. you are already missed.