i haven't had a hit on either blog in three days, so there's little point in posting, but here goes.

gerald ford died of grief for james brown. since these things always happen in threes, tomorrow, someone nationally recognizable has to die. it wil also be someone with a very basic word for a last name. tomorrow, anne rice dies choking on a velvet ruffle.

it is wonderful to me that james brown's death is garnering as much attention as ford's. i mean, it should. ford wasn't president for even a full term, while james brown has been the godfather of soul for forty years. there are no term limits for that position; it is a lifetime appointment.

listen to some bootsy collins today. he was, ironically enough, bass player for both james brown and gerald ford.

it's going to be ok, tomi rae. don't let them vultures fight you off. you were the one sleeping with a 70 plus year old dude and occasionally getting the shit slapped out of you. you go get what you're due. you're tomi rae brown, whatever the lawyers say.

i watched the gameshow identity last night (with heroes over until next year, and the fact that i need to buy some new books, or at least go to the library, i'm watching more tv than i'd like. i still probably watch less than the average american. maybe 50% less.). penn jilette is a whore (not because of this show, he just is).

while watching, siouxs! made an interesting observation. all of the primetime gameshows these days are going vertical with their displays of people. deal or no deal (the non-game gameshow), 1 vs 100, and now, identity all feature a stack of humanity. i can only imagine that our corporate overlords (specifically the ones at general electric) are using their squawking peacock to further devalue the (non-wealthy and caucasion) individual. true, there are individual contestants, but they seem like caricatures that could be easily invented by our collective prejudices, and therefore serve as symbols of our unconscious rather than real people.

ok, that's quite a rant. i'd better take my meds.

i'd like to point out that my baseball blog is now far surpassing this one in terms of hits this month. siouxs! also had a good observation about this.

"more people care about baseball than [care about] what you think."

how true. even i care more about baseball than i care about what i think.

according to statcounter, my two blogs are in a dead heat for visitors in december. until today, i have posted on neither in december. i haven't been posting as regularly as i might otherwise due to the busy season at work and the fact that our computer at home is in jack's room, so no computer use after seven or so. note to self: when we move, the computer gets its own room.

i'm getting pretty excited about moving. i don't know how long we'll be able to stay in tennessee, but i need to have a change of scenery. st louis has been a good second home, and will always be familiar, but i miss home home. i want to reconnect with my family and some friends. i know things will be different than they are when we visit, but i long for the hills on the horizon. i can't wait to be able to go to the mountains when i want to again. i want to see jack's face when he sees a herd of whitetail in cades cove.

i'm scared to leave st louis, but i can't stay here forever. this will be a good change (seven-plus months and counting).

thank you, oh wise and fearless leader, for showing us the light. all of the violence in iraq is someone else's fault. thanks be to our almighty christian god that it isn't our fault, even though we did force iraq into a state of anarchy and chaos that would make any society come apart.

someone else's fault. the most beautiful three words in the world to a politician. someone else's fault means a chance at (re)election. and the best part is that it's bipartisan! double points if the people you're pinning the blame on are brown.

the economy, that's someone else's fault too, right? they say it usually takes a few years for changes in economic policy to make a significant change in the economy itself, so the current problems are the fault of those jokers from last term. you remember those guys, they're the ones who tied up hundreds of billions of dollars in a war based on false pretenses, and then funded it by cutting the taxes of the wealthy at a much higher rate than the middle class so that the poor and middle class could keep sending their sons and daughters to die needlessly and expensively.

fuck bush, just for old times sake.

one thing of interest: on the way out of knox vegas this past weekend, i saw a billboard for a place called the pleasure palace or somesuch nonsense with pleasure in there. at the bottom they listed attractions

toys * lingerie * adult novelties * fireworks

it says something about a region's culture when the smell of gunpowder can be a turn-on.

more updates as soon as i feel like it.

tomorrow is my favorite holliday behind halloween, so i thought i would mention a few things worth being thankful for (though to whom, i don't know, as i'm at best an agnostic, but whatever)

jack and siouxs! make my every day better. no matter how bad a day at work is, i get to come home and be happy right away when i see those two smiling at me, and every morning, i get to see them first so my day can start right.

the rest of my family, of course, who love us enough to be thrilled that we're coming home for thanksgiving.

i still have a few really good friends who i can always count on (and you know who you are)

despite the tightened belts that go along with siouxs! going to part time and the extra expense of a baby, we're still doing better than back when we first got together.

both cars are running well (knock on wood)

the republikkkans lost a lot of ground

the cardinals won a world series

i've been published twice in the last year

no one close to me has died this year

there's lots more than that, but that'll do for now. we're driving overnight in an effort to keep jack asleep for the trip, as he still isn't too fond of long car trips. here's hoping for an uneventful drive and a good morning once we get there and try to grab a few hours sleep before what will undoubtably be a thanksgiving feast (my grandmother is still cooking for people who won't be there for one reason or another, and even when there were a lot more of us, there were always piles of leftovers).

enjoy your holiday, and be thankful for what you otherwise take for granted.

oh yeah, and friday is buy nothing day. please celebrate and remind the corporations that we are people, not consumers

despite what might be the obvious conclusion based on this picture, i promise that we have never given this child alcohol or drugs. all i can say is that it runs in the family. my mother seems to have an uncanny ability to appear inebriated in pictures where she is no such thing (not that she doesn't drink, but i can count on my fingers the number of times i've seen her drunk, and as far as you know, i only have two fingers). i suppose there is the possibility that she's just a remarkably good drunk who indulges a lot more than it would otherwise seem, but since the same trait has appeared in her grandson, i'm guessing it's just genetic dumb luck. in jack's case, i know for a fact that he can't reach the liquor, and i wouldn't give him any for fear that he is blessed/cursed with my high tolerance, and he'd drink me out of house and home once he acquired a taste for the stuff. again, if such things are genetic, i don't think it will take too long after the first exposure.

...you succeed, but then in all subsequent attempts, fail, try another outlet.

after my first mcsweeney's submission, i have gone something like 0-for-20. however, i was asked for submissions to another site, feathertale, on the strength of my mcsweeney's piece. again, they took the first thing i offered, so i of course expect to never get anything on the site again.

so that you, my gthedamned readers can feel special, a little inside info. the piece was inspired by the question "do you have your baby gate bought?" which i then went riffing away on.

publish or perish (or continue to languish on in obscurity).

tell me i'm celebrating too early if you must, but oh hellmotherfuckinyeah! the hole they dug was too deep to climb out of with political trickery, and when you have no moral ground to stand on, it's pretty hard to effectivley attack your opponent's "values."

here in the mighty mo, claire mccaskill won our senate seat (now's the time to start working against kit bond), the minimum wage was increased, and the jury is still out on the stem cell initiative. i'm obviously hoping that one passes too, but i am pretty thrilled at the gains already determined.

this is a start.

i had a thought last night. the struggle between liberalism and conservativism ought to be a matter of idealism versus wisdom. if that were true, then the middle ground would be the correct path nearly every time. as it is, both "sides" are led by people who care more for getting and maintaining power than ruling effectively. i suppose in a way this is one of the basic flaws with democracy, but such is life. now is not the time to worry too much about democracy's flaws. today is a day of celebration, for tomorrow we get to work.

for the record, i am not a democrat (or demokkkrat, since they're only marginally better than republikkkans in many respects). i am a left leaning independent however, today, i cast an all democrat ballot (except for judges, who have no party affiliation listing, because obviously, they're non partisan, right?).

take the fuckers out. enough republikkkan befouling has gone down in the last few weeks to make me think the democrats have finally learned to play politics too. good. it's about time someone beat those sons of bitches at their own game.

if you haven't voted yet, go vote. the touchscreens are a little unnerving, but i saw the paper back up.

vote. i'll be disappointed if anyone reading this blog doesn't. i'll also be surprised if i get even one more hit today (thanks, statcounter, for pointing out that i'm just another angry blogger with a readership marginally above zero).

vote.

VOTE DRUNK
VOTE OFTEN
VOTE DRUNK OFTEN

i defy the blogosphere to produce a cuter child.

i go home to this smiling face every day. jealous?

insurance hassle: jack has to go in for surgery next week, and thanks to the barely navigable fine print of my "explanation of benefits" with our new (and not as comprehensive, thanks) insurance, i'm not sure if he's fully covered for the procedure. it may be classified as an elective procedure, so it gets fuzzier already there. the best i can tell, it should be covered, but even if it is, i don't know if i'm on the hook for my deductible, his, or both. i'm already behind paying the hospital for souixs!'s stay when he was born. deductibles are a bunch of shit. insurance in this country is the biggest racket that exists.

the amazing thing to me is how much the baptists who raise me rail against gambling, but nearly every one of them is insured. insurance is just like casino gambling: no one would be in that business if they weren't assured to come out on top. the difference between health insurance and gambling is that if you're taking a lot of money from a casino, they buy you breakfast. if you're taking a lot of money from the insurance company, they might cancel your policy.

vote democrat. they're in quite a few pockets too, but at least it's a step in the right (left) direction.

condi claims "i never got the memo" despite the fact that we've been hearing about this one for literally years now. i even remember that it was headed "bin laden determined to attack inside u.s." or something very similar, and i wasn't at that cabinet meeting. will the blatant lies never end? do the republikkkans think so little of the american people? apparently so.

the g.o.p. has a lot in common with the catholic church; they're both fantastically wealthy, they both mask backwards thinking as conservatism and/or morality, and they both harbor pedophiles and protect them from harm. part of me revels in sadistic glee that this has happened so close to the midterm elections, but then part of me feels guilty for being glad that a pedophile was making sexual advances at a child. at least monica lewinski was of age. i wonder how the anti gay lobby is going to handle this...

the genocide in sudan is now a few years old, and yet dubya says the u.n. shouldn't hesitate to act. i guess we won't be contributing many troops to this one, as the people we would be helping are black (and not wealthy).

fucked up world we live in, folks.

fuck bush.

can we please have a real president again? how i long for even a non-idiot. these morons and monsters have got to go.

the ecosmashers that rule our country right now must be stopped, and i'm not even an environmentalist, really. however, i'm also not the type to shit in the water jug to save a few cents either.

the insidious bastards are learning.

dear god, it's almost election day. fuck bush's pals in a voting booth, america. they'd do you (if there was a profit to be had, anyway).

have you seen the ads on tv for "progress for america"? i haven't heard of a more bullshit name for a pac than this one. apparently, progress for america means going back to the days immediately after september 11th, 2001, and to start believing once again that the muslim world is full of murderous rage for all americans, that osama bin laden might have ties to iraq, and that americans should universally trust their president, who only has their best interests at heart. the commercial is such a bunch of jingoist garbage that says in so many words the same old lies, namely that democrats and muslims are the enemies of america (though they claim to not endorse a particular candidate etc.).

watch the bullshit if you haven't seen it already. progressives, we need some fresh ire for the election season.

siouxs! and i went for a run together last night for the first time in over a year. it was only about a mile, but it felt good. due to jack's probable dairy allergy, siouxs! had been unable to eat cheese and such while still breastfeeding the boy, so i've been cooking without dairy for a few weeks. i've been drinking less on the whole, not by design exactly, but i just have. i'm going to bed earlier on a regular basis than has been my custom in the past. i've lost fifteen pounds since he was born.

this upswing in healthy behavior is all pretty well attributable to jack. i want to be healthy enough to play with him. i want to be able to run around with him for hours, or walk around with him on my shoulders all over the zoo. he loves being outside, and i want it to stay that way. oh, i do love my video games, but i don't want jack to be a playstation zombie, so i rarely play anymore, if only not to set a bad example.

i do love that boy so. how is it that he makes me feel simultaneously old and young?

am i the only one who didn't really care who killed jonbenet ramsey the first go round? am i the only one who thinks that her "killer" is just some nut job that the republikkkans paid to take the fall, and therefore, some of the public attention away from, let's say, the war we're losing in iraq? ok, perhaps i am the only one. i am a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but still...

i also just found out this morning that pat buchanan is a special correspondant or something for the freaking today show. he seemed to be promoting his newest book, which is a primer on reasons we should fear all muslims. my feelings on the traditional media are so cynical these days that his appearance really doesn't surprise me that much. nonetheless, i had hoped that there was some backlash from the right leaning spin that was so powerful in the immediately post 9-11 landscape.

oh, right. today show:nbc = general electric. i guess they might have an interest in painting the war in a positive light.

no one, not even mrs buchanan, should have to see that man before 8 am, though.

yesterday on the radio, i heard a walgreens commercial. it's a paraphrase at best, but here's what i heard, more or less.

"understanding your pharmacist's advice isn't always easy, but if you don't speak english, it can be even harder. that's why at walgreens, we are capable of printing instructions sheets in fourteen languages. if the walgreens you're at doesn't have someone who speaks your language, they'll call a walgreens that does. that's our way of serving you better."

at no point did they stop speaking english, or even mention the name of another language that might clue non-english speakers in to what they were talking about. if you at least said "spanish," one might think that enough people would hear that and know to at least ask.

idiocy knows no bounds. donde esta la gente inteligente?

there's nothing i like better than a little poetic justice come to life. the delay ballot deal is priceless. they're just going to give up, and i guess find some other way to fight dirty. the attack ads should be funny, if ntohing else, because what alternative will they offer to the evil baby killing liberal who is the other name on the ballot? "paid for by the texas nick lampson is a jerk comittee"

so i went golfing for the third time in my life on sunday. in case you haven't been outside lately, most of the u.s. is going through a heat wave. st louis is no exception. it was 100 on sunday, and my fellow crooked-stick luggers and i probably sweated at least a half gallon each.

i've decided i enjoy playing golf, even though i am against it as a means to class distinction. i find sixty acre country clubs to be disgusting. i think people who want to live beside golf courses should have to build on the fairway and consider their swimming pools to be water hazards. i think that millions of illegal immigrants who work minimum wage (or less) jobs at country clubs should be allowed to run down elitist sons-of-bitches with high powered mowers. golf is fine, it's just the sense of entitlement that so often goes with it that makes me ill.

fortunately, dear readers, we went to tower tee par 3 course. this is the people's golf.

proof that repulikkkans only love their rich neighbors...

let me start by saying that we had it a lot better than most, as we had our power back up and running seven hours after it went off.

(wednesday) the storm itself was freaky. the (cliche) sky was green, and when i went on the porch, the wind changed directions 180 degrees four times in two minutes. the followup storm that was supposed to be thursday night didn't arrive until mid-day friday, and i was making deliveries in the worst part of it.

work was a joke. we had to scramble to rent a generator to keep our ac working and our wine uncooked. the generator we found was basically an old big rig engine without the extras like steering and brakes. i shouldn't complain, as it did the job, but i'm even more deaf that i was before i stood within a quarter mile of it. after that was done, we still made some deliveries, but mostly just sat around talking about what we should have for lunch.

(thursday) thoguh our power was on, a non-electric entertainment source is suggested. begin 1491 piece jigsaw puzzle of butterflies.

(thursday/friday) after trying to drive with traffic lights out all over town, i'm going to need an operation to remove the murder from my heart ( called a cydectomy).

(saturday) washington avenue music fest could have been better, but enough places had power to make it interesting for a few afternoon hours, and it was refreshingly nice out. skip and krowbar got a much improved temperature for the outing, as their power stayed off until yesterday.

also, really starting to hate those butterflies.

(sunday) fast eddies bon air. six beers, steak kabob, chicken wing kabob, pork kabob, french fries, and half a dozen boiled shrimp: $25. enough said.

peace is made with at least the purple butterfly.

all in all, quite an experience. i don't know if anyone died from the heat, but overall, not as awful as it might have been. a four/five day reminder of what life was like 100 years ago.

call me a conspiracy theorist if you want. i have been called far worse. here's my thoughts on the current stem cell argument.

virtually everything discussed in congress these days is some kind of distraction technique put up by the republikkkans to hide the fact that they're still stealing money from us hand over fist (never you mind the missing katrina relief funds, or the vast sweeping tax cuts for the wealthy republikkkan base, there's a bunch of mexicans threatening your fruit picking career! hurry, before they teach your children spanish, impregnate your daughters with non-lilly-white offspring, and make enchiladas our national dish!). the stem cell debate is more insidious than usual, though. this is the republikkkans best chance to distance themselves from dubya and darth cheney they're going to have. here's how it works.
1) make it appear that a few of those incumbents whose seats are up for grabs are in favor of actual scientific progress in opposition the phony religious proclamations of the moron in our highest office.
2) dubya threatens to use the veto for the first time.
3) fake bravado from the toadies like frist, claiming that we must broaden the scope of stem cell research (especially adult stem cells and cord blood stem cells, which have shown so much promise).
4) veto
5) "we'll keep pushing for this legislation in our next term if you give us another chance..."-type speech that fades out sometime mid-november
6) see religious wackjobs? no harm done, and now all of your moral protectors are still in office.

numerous media sources are predicting that the neo-con movement is on its way out, but in my opinion, even if we get rid of the worst of them, the damage has been done. the political realm been infected, and the religious right is resistant to the pennicillin of the separation of church and state.

the hardest part is that i'm related to most of them. my grandmother gets a christmas card from the white house every year.

fuck all of those bastards.

the federal minimum wage has been the same for the entirety of the time i've been out of high school. people working for minimum wage have been getting poorer and poorer for ten years, and the republikkkans are just now figuring out that there needs to be a change? the best part in my estimation is that they don't want to do anything, but the only way they feel they won't be raped by the demokkkrats politically is to go ahead and support an increase. this is just a way to nullify the bad juju that would come from not supporting the bill. i like it when the right-wingers are on the defensive for a change. now, if only enough people could stop shouting mindless pseudo-patriotic drivel long enough to listen to the rational folk out there, we might even get to point out a few of the other things the republikkkans need to be scared of in november. like corruption, anti-privacy legislation, the anti-progress mentality, and, oh yeah, the needless waste of a money-sinkhole that is iraq.

fuck bush.

if the best thing you could brag about was "things are slightly less bad than was initially predicted," would you be crowing about it? that's just what our brave leader is doing now. has he forgotten that we were in a time of surplus under his oft villified predecessor? we were actually on our way to paying the national debt, as opposed to adding to it at a record pace.

deficit spending doesn't work for households (just ask some of my cousins); why would it work for the whole country? true, it is possible to float briefly on a wave of credit and then surge forward to pay it off, but drowning is more likely than surfing.

i've posted two days in a row. that's the all-star break for you, i guess.

fuck bush

dear vast american middle (by this i mean those who cannot be defined easily by "liberal" or "conservative" labels, not our collective enormous midsection),

please remember for just a few more months how bad these sons of bitches really are. they are sending your children to war, at this point only to "honor the memories" of the ones who've already died in the same war (go die for those already dead... doesn't sound as noble then, does it?). they've lied to you at every opportunity, and unless you're making better than 300k, they don't even like you.

elections are too far away for the outrage to last, so consider this a public service reminder from gthedamned. stay mad. they're motherfuckers.

sincerely
gthedamned

ps fuck bush

today is mine and siouxs!'s three year anniversary. we have a beautiful baby boy, and we're pretty damned happy, if somewhat sleep deprived. happy anniversary, baby.

and just for the record, the three year anniversary is the leather anniversary, which is the funniest thing i've heard all day. i think next year is the official "nipple clamp anniversary."

the following is as direct a quote of my southern baptist grandmother as my drink and drug addled brain will allow. it was directed at my uncle, who is currently seperated from my aunt, his wife of the last twenty-five years.

"jxxxxx, you read these letters. then lxxx read them, then you read them together. we've got to get this thing worked out, buddy. you've got to poop or get off the pot. you two are making me nervous. you got my nerves all up.




i sold my big lawn mower."

that's my mamaw's idea of a transition. she would have made a great news anchor.

for a very predictable reason: outrage overload. i can't work up my mad anymore, as it's been overused since 2000. figure that this lapse is temporary... every time i think i'm all out of pissed off, the republikkkans go so far over the top that i start stockpiling bottles and kerosene again. also, when jack starts sleeping through the whole night, i might have a better chance of spewing some bile; anger is easier to back up when you're well rested.

we're taking a trip to knox vegas this coming weekend so jack can meet his hillfolk family. updates when we get back.

well, after an initial success, i'm now batting .333 with mcsweeney's. i have another piece submitted, so we'll see what happens.

karl rove not being prosecuted for treason that has his name written all over it? that smug bastard. i can't even fathom how many people in washington, reporters, prosecutors, etc. the bush administration must have by the short and curlies. can't anyone get to a position to take out these sons of bitches while simultaneously avoiding the tranny hookers? 60% disapproval rating, and we can't make anything stick to this scum? it's like playing pin the tail on the turd... you might hit the right spot, but as soon as you turn around, the damn thing has dropped off again.

stephen hawking, can i come too?

so this week i am running the show as best i can in the office, as both of my bosses are in south america for the week. i hope they have a good time there, because i have a feeling it's going to be murder here. i have covered the office for a few days before, and it's usually quiet, but there will likely be at least four times this week when i am so stressed out that i threaten sales reps on the phone and/or let the frustration in my voice leak out when i'm on the phone with a customer (work enough customer service and you can say just about anything with a smile, just letting the bile trickle out the back of your head). anyway, if the week warrants, there will be updates.

jack had a pretty good weekend. we barbecued a little saturday, but did next to nothing else all weekend long. this is a very good thing, as the next several weekends will contain a trip to tennessee and a lesbian wedding among other things. i think every weekend between now and july is spoken for somehow or another.

enough for now. more when something exciting happens.

fuck bush.

[tried unsuccessfully to post this yesterday afternoon... damn blogger]


this is absurd. yet another attempt to sway the easily distractable public towards the puritanical right.

sorry for the dearth of posts lately, but in all honesty, i haven't felt like it. the g.o.p. has been fucking things up so mightily that it seemed redundant to rant about the stuff. yeah, they're dragging the gay marriage thing out again, but this time, i don't think they'll be able to influence the casual homophobe as much (it's pretty hard to burn the same gays at the stake twice).

let's all just keep hoping for a conservative/neo-con rift. i feel one brewing these days.

just for old times sake, fuck bush

it seems that the good folks at the verichip company have got a great way to sell more verichips: implant them into immigrant guest workers. wow, have we really gotten to the point of chipping people like we do pets? has anyone told the fundamentalist christians about this? can you say mark of the beast, fundies (i know you can...)?

my ploy to drag accidental traffic to my website by using the phrase "three-armed chinese baby" worked rather well. in celebration, i will choose not to harp on the fact that the war in afghanistan is proving to not be over. i will not point out the fact that the war in iraq is going worse, not better, lo these three years since we've been supposed to be done with major combat operations.

isn't that nice of me?

but fuck bush anyway. fuck all the bushes, from babs to jeb.

two posts in one morning... amazing, i know.

this baby looks surprisingly like jack.

this is hands down the cutest three-armed chinese baby i've ever seen.

as of this weekend, gthedamned reached the 200o hit threshold (i put the counter up about two years ago), thus sending my readership to heights reached by the likes of sheepfacedmonkeys.com and doihavegreatearlobesorwhat.edu. thanks to all thirteen people who actually meant to navigate to this page.

desmond dekker, 1941-2006

just a quick bit of self promotion...
gthedamned is going to be published! regular gthedamned readers have the jump on the general internet populace, as the submission was a previous post. nevertheless, now the decidedly larger audience that checks out mcsweeneys.net will get a taste of yours truly.

oh yeah, and fuck bush.
gthedamned

i still think that the immigration debate that we're having as a country right now is a dodge, much like gay marriage was a dodge. they're both great ways to get (white)middle america up in arms. who can remember gross ethics violations, misguided warmongering, or tax cuts for bill gates and his three hundred closest friends when there are dangerous brown people/creepy homos lurking about, seeking to attack our flagging economy/sacred bond of marriage (and divorce)?

that said, here's a bit of economic thought for the racists out there who want to deport all the immigrants becuase "they're taking our jobs." right now, illegal immigrants are available to work for $2/hour with no benefits whatsoever (ok, perhaps a drive to the hospital if the lawnmower cuts your hand off, but that's it, and we will be squealing the tires out of the parking lot as soon as your foot touches the ground). that's a lot cheaper than hiring a legal citizen for $5.15/hour (dear god, we need to fix that... $5.15 an hour?!!), so a lot of less than scrupulous employers are going to go with that option. if we make immigration easier, everyone will have to be paid at least minimum wage, and immigrants have the same chance at getting a job as native born white and christian xenophobic citizens. i wonder if that thoguht can turn around in your narrow, narrow mind.

so, i realize my posts last week were somewhat lacking, but it was a rough work week. i will try to get back up to pace on the ranting, but the republikkkans are shooting themselves in the feet so much these days, i've wondered if i shouldn't jinx things by pointing them out to both of my readers. any way, here's what's been taking the majority of my time...

it's hard to be mad at anyone when this is waiting at home for you.

to: jack
from: daddy

regarding your mothers favorite lullaby, "hush little baby," i have a few observations that it would be to your financial benefit to hear.
first of all, disregard the opening lines completely. you are still only one month old, little baby, and if you want to say a word, please do. it would be thrilling, and we could probably make some good investments off of all the infant product endorsements. if you have a particular word in mind, go with that, but if not, i'll bet we could make a lot of money with "similac." practice it in your spare time.
secondly, this mockingbird that is alluded to, i will assume is trained to sing a little snippet of a tune. i would hope so, as mockingbird song is not so pretty when they aren't imitating. if we're going to have to be cleaning up bird shit off the carpets, we'd better at least get a pleasing jingle out of the deal. however, we might actually hope for the mockingbird to be tone-deaf, as the replacement has far greater value. should the mockingbird be songless, your mother has agreed to buy you a diamond ring. i know this seems dangerous, and in fact, it is, but we will most certainly be putting said ring into a safety deposit box for you. before doing so, i will be taking the ring to a reputable jeweler, as your mother has a tendency to buy products as advertised, without further inquiry as to the quality of the workmanship. i will take her condition "if that diamond ring turns brass" to be an oversight, and not some sort of wealth reducing alchemy, for we both know (even you at such a young age) that metals cannot be transmuted into other metals. therefore, we will assume that your mother is only concerned with the diamond itself, which we will snatch out before she tries to trade it in on a looking glass. frankly, the diamond is the real bargain here. i'll buy you a looking glass, jack. we'll not be trading diamond rings for mirrors, not matter the composition of the ring. take my advice. i may not be an investment banker, but i know a ripoff when i see one.
i don't know if your mom expects the mirror to have some kind of preternatural glow or what, but if it proves not to "shine" (perhaps it just needs a good cleaning), you're getting a bottle of wine out of the deal. even considering our relatively lax views on underage drinking, i would assume that she's looking for a bottle with some aging potential. one would hope that she would at least consult me on this one, as i do work in the wine business. i'll try to get you a good vintage of bordeaux, but it'll take some doing, and frankly, you might be better off keeping your investments in something more stable, like perhaps, diamonds. this is also where things start to go way downhill for you in terms of profit potential. your mom, on the condition that the bottle of wine "gets broke" (a painful misuse of grammar, and from an english teacher, no less), will buy you a billy goat. now, i'm not saying that there is no money in a goat, but to make a real income from them, you'll need several milking goats (therefore nanny goats, not billy goats), and some cheese making facilities, neither of which is possible in our apartment.
"if that billy goat runs away, mama's gonna buy you another day." this is puzzling to me, as i can't figure if it means that you're out of luck and will have to start afresh tomorrow in this whirlwind commodities trading, or if someone has a contract on your life, and she has been wiring the assassin funds to stave off your execution. either way, tomorrow, let's see if we can get another diamond. if we keep stockpiling them for a few weeks, i know a guy. we can go live out our days in the Caribbean. as long as she learns a little about exchange rates first, your mom can come too.

what do you want to bet that if you're reading this blog, you're a target of the nsa phone record collection? it does make you highly suspicious after all. this blog contains subversive materials/writings, and its author is not a blind flag-waving screamingly zealous pseudo-patriot, so, by association, you are a terrorist.
i realize that this must come as a shock to you, but i have a few tips to make coming to grips with your obvious emnity towards the united states a little easier.

- when making phone calls to your terrorist buddies, be sure to use a clever code. for example, when you mean "we're going to set off a roadside bomb along the entire length of i-70 to strike at the heartland" you could say "we're just going to sit around the house and watch a few movies."

- change your e-mail signature to "yours in terror."

- whenever speaking outdoors, aim your head skyward. how else are the satellite lip-readers supposed to figure out your evil machinations?

- be sure to speak ill of our dear president when in public to identify yourself as a terrorist.

- when booking a plane ticket, try not to give away too much info. for example, try not to say "i'd like a one way ticket through the wall of the oval office, i mean, to the dallas/fort worth airport."

if you follow these steps, your transition from being a terrorist (secretly, unbeknownst, even to you) into a fully functional terrorist (as broadcast by the nrc and the nsa) will be smooth as can be.

go ahead and cut those capital gains taxes again. go ahead and cut the taxes on dividends again. it ain't gonna matter after the poor and middle class revolt.

and oh yeah, you mean jack abramhoff wasn't the only crooked lobbyist in washington?

burn, fundies, burn.

so let me get this straight. dubya wants to put the head of the nsa, perpetrators of the illegal and frankly terrifying wiretap scandal in charge of the cia? i know they're all seperate organizations, but i'm pretty sure cia chief trumps head of the nsa. so either the guy is the mastermind behind, was complicit in, or was totally unaware that this wrongdoing was taking place, and he's getting a promotion?

let's try a comparison. you are a cashier for a family owned restaurant. one day, the cash register turns up empty. the managers try to put up a smokescreen, explaining to the owner that the till needed to be emptied to pay the insurance premium, but the fact remains that the money is missing, almost definitely by illegal means. now, you are the person in charge of the cash register. only you and the managers ever have access to the drawer, and you are the one who stands by it all day long. if you sat there and let the till be stolen, you deserve to be fired for negligence of your duties. if you used your key to open the drawer, and then waled away, letting one of the managers take the money, you deserve to be fired for being a part of the conspiracy to steal. if you had the idea in the first place, you're probably going to jail. but amazingly, after one manager quits to avoid a big fuss over the whole thing, the owner decides to make you manager in his place.

apply this to the situation we're seeing, and get back to me.

and here i thought dubya was so tight with vincente fox because of his proficiency en la lingua español...
good god, the man can't even speak english properly, scott, why would he be able to speak a second language fluently? the funniest part is that his ignorance is being used as a protective measure here (and not in a "i have no reccollection of that, senator" kind of way).

and according to this headline, he can't count either.

god, i only wish this excerpt meant what i thought it did...
Republicans fear an Election Day massacre.
see the full article here

this is downright scary on multiple levels. sure. lots of people in the country (and the rest of the world) pray. that's no excuse for a theocratic regime like dubya's. also, i think it's funny that he thinks the average citizen would be asking him about potholes.

and finally, this is a few days old, but is perhaps the most frightening of all. i'm not saying there shouldn't be any check on the supreme court's power, but the lawmaking body shouldn't have oversight of the law checking body. period. especially not the highest court in the land.

republikkkans are scary when they're cornered...

thank god for our brilliant lawmakers. they're talking about passing a law that would place penalties on energy price gouging. how revolutionary. does anyone believe that there will be a single corporate bandit taken down with such a law? this law would make a nationwide standard for price-gouging (likely at the expense of states with a lower cost of living), but it won' t address the real problem. oil companies are currently taking a certain percentage of the price of oil as their profit. this percentage has remained the same even thought the price of oil has skyrocketed, pulling the profits through the roof as well. when the price of oil goes this high, the oil companies need to lower the percentage to take some of the pain out of filling up.
but i guess that makes me a communist.
fucking republikkkans.

bolivia has nationalized its natural gas industry in an attempt to avoid being exploited by the energy gobbling united states, adding another latin american country to the list of "people who are tired of being exploited by the united states." another major component of this group is "most americans."
even most of the democrats don't really care about the little guy. (one of) the problem(s) with representative democracy is that too much effort is expended trying to be reelected. we need to cut their salaries down to a living wage; maybe then, we could get some leaders who were actually in it to be the voice of their constituents. i'll bet they'd fight a lot harder for universal health care if they were uninsured.

yeah, i'm trying to pick a class fight. rich political bastards.

today marks the three year anniversary of the flightsuit aircraft carrier "mission accomplished" speech. three years ago, our president tried to claim that major combat operations in iraq were over. in that three years vast numbers more american soldiers have died than during the official war itself. every day, thanks to dubya, rumsfeld, cheney, etc., we create new terrorists (and though it was hardly true when it was a talking point, now there are lots of foreign fighters using iraq as a great place to hurt the people of united states on pennies a day). can we really continue to believe that this man has the best interests of our troops in mind? are there any remaining military families who are glad they voted for him instead of kerry? as only a man who has never risked his own life can do, george w bush is wasting the lives of our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, and a disproportionately large percentage of our working class and poor teenagers. does this man care about anything but his own personal wealth (and the wealth of those close to him, so they can be there to bail him out as his dad had to on more than one occasion due to his business incompetence).
he doesn't care about any of the lives lost in the name of "freedom." he profanes the names of the september eleventh victims by using them the create more useless death and to perpetuate the fear that makes everyone else willing to give up their rights. he casually spends the lives of our troops to fight a meaningless war, and now is talking about the possibility of doing it all again in iran, which is much larger than iraq, and would be infinitely more dangerous for our already weary military.
happy anniversary, you vile bastard. i'd wish you to taste the acid that should come from your contemptible deeds, but you'd probably have something from your pharmabuddies for that already.
fuck bush.

really? you mean he doesn't want to tax his freshly infused tremendous family wealth? who would have thought. god forbid the government try to take in more money to slow the hemmoraging economy.
are the neo-cons the most fiscally irresponsible lawmakers ever to hold power in the united states? well with the exception of andrew " 'mater sack" wilkinson from the fictional tennessee district of hog holler county, who actually burned the tax revenues from his constituents before buying a wagon large enough to transport the entire hog holler county seat (he claimed it was a way to avoid property taxes, and won every subsequent election in a landslide, even though it never worked. what can i say, my people aren't always the brightest.), the answer is unequivocally and somewhat confusingly, yes.
tax-and-spend is considered a bad word when applied to liberals, but where does tax-cut-and-spend-anyway fall in the spectrum? this is really going to suck in about ten years (not that it's a picnic now).
dipshits.

ok, a little more on this whole attempted popularity-saver push from dubya...

opening up the federal oil reserve is a too little/too late prospect. while it is already paid for, it amounts to a drop in the bucket when compared to our nationwide thirst for fossil fuel. the trickle from the federal reserve might just cover this weekend's nascar race at talladega. now, before you think i give a damn about nascar, think about this: my warehouse manager is driving (roughly 500 miles) to alabama to see this parade of fuel waste. average nascar events are attended by 100,000+ spectators. even if most of them aren't traveling quite so far, just try to imagine how much gas that amounts to for one "sporting event." we might as well just be pouring the stuff on the ground.

as for record oil company profits, here's what our fearless leader has to say:
"Americans understand, by and large, that the price of crude oil is going up and that the prices are going up, but what they don't want and will not accept is manipulation of the market. And neither will I."
i'm sure he conducted a thorough poll to determine what americans will accept. i'm sure said poll was conducted at gas stations, and was not limited to drivers of luxury vehicles, but rather a representative segment of the population. no way those of us in the lower 90% would ever want government intervention to keep us from spending rent/insurance/food money on gasoline. no fucking way.

ethanol: not a solution if it requires more fossil fuel energy to make than it produces. period. if we can use renewable energy to make ethanol, then we can talk.

that's our president. that's a man with his finger on the pulse of the nation.

goddamn, fuck bush

who would have thought an oil man would try to solve our energy woes via gasoline deregulation? it's so simple, a (hideously self-serving and greedy) monkey could come up with it...

sickening

another good night for jack. we got to sleep for three hour stretches, and he wasn't fussy until this morning when i had to get up anyway. it's amazing to me that a two week old baby could have so much personality. i don't get to go home for lunch today (well, i could, but siouxs! and jack won't be there), so today is going to be something of a drag.
on the plus side, here are some more pictures. what can i say, the boy likes to sleep (mostly in the mornings, just like his old man).

good weekend. jack has more personality everyday. yesterday, we barbecued the stuff we bought the day before he was born (purchased in an effort to get him going... obviously, it worked). i broke the landlady's birdfeeder, we invented a new sport (tongball), siouxs! picky sister ate shrimp. a good time was had by all.
i'm sure i have voiced my distaste for wal-mart at some point on this blog. i'm not alone in hating the monoculture bohemoth, but it seems that our dear friends in organized labor are standing up to fight. on the whole, i am pro-union (at least when they are actually fighting for their members, and not just to keep union brass salaries high), so needless to say, i'm right behind them in this one.
do we really need to be funding the chinese economy to the extent that wal-mart is? i have nothing against china, but in our quest for ever lower prices, we're managing to tank our own economy. at the rate we're going now, at least by the time jack has kids of his own, he may be the one doing the "outsourced" job (eventually, americans will be forced to do jobs at less than the going rate for the indians and chinese who are getting them now.) if this sounds paranoid, so be it. i'm strongly against pure capitalism, and i'm sure it comes out in these rants.
stop sam walton's monster or pay the consequences!

oh yeah, i'm a whore

i almost forgot... i'm selling cafepress stuff now as the ideas come to me.  rudegear, cheap!

god bless those magnetic ribbons. they're doing so much for us as a nation, and helping our armed forces know we support them to boot. did you know that each and every magnetic "support our troops" ribbon has a tiny camera embedded in it with a satellite uplink, so that the troops we're doing so much to support get to see the smiling faces of those they are fighting for every day? it's really remarkable how much money and effort the government and the private sector are willing to put into our troops comfort.

wait a minute. the proceeds from those ribbons don't go to the troops at all, do they? they go into some clever bastard's pocket (and the pockets of all the less clever bastards who followed his lead). putting a ribbon on your car doesn't really support our troops at all, does it? even flying your flag high won't help the war effort, will it? the ribbon on my car says "support the magnetic ribbon industry," and my brother the marine thinks that's hilarious. we as americans (i said we, so me too) are great at making a show of our patriotism, but not so good at actually acting on it. we'll spend seven dollars on a ribbon that says we support our troops that does no good at all, but if the truth be told, our troops would be better served if each of us sent them seven dollars so they could start saving for some proper body armor. true, rumsfeld won't allow them to wear non-military supplied body armor (or spend enough to get them the official gear), but it would be a start. perhaps they wouldn't have to spend their spare time welding plates to humvees if we really did support them.
the senate might as well have one enormous magnetic ribbon on it that says "we're rooting for you guys!" god damn, i hate (most) politicians, the self serving bastards.

but at least i have jack.

i just realized that there were as yet no pictures on the blog of jackie boy. here's a few for your viewing pleasure (please note, the mullet on gthedaddy was a one weekend only thing; we all got the chance to laugh our asses off, and now it's all thoroughly short).

jackie boy goes in to see the pediatrician for the first time since the hospital today, and i'll bet he's really rather quiet for her. this is because last night he never slept in bed for more than an hour at a stretch, demanding the rest of the time that one of us be holding him, not in bed. on the plus side, he really seems to like reggae and traditional ska, siouxs!'s and my favorite musical genres of late. true, you have to bounce him in time with the beat for it to work, but the island music does seem to work better than other types. it also helps if you sing along, which can be a bit tricky if the singer's jamaican accent is strong enough. though my imitation of vowel sounds is pretty spot on, i don't always know what i'm saying.
needless to say, i'm freakin' tired today. perhaps i'll post again later.

iran so far away, redux

jack made sure we knew his lungs were working well last night, so no one gets a free pass today.

 

after a week's absence, i almost have my stuff reorganized the way it's supposed to be.  i hate it when other people do my job, if only because they'll do it differently and i won't be able to find anything.

 

how is it that we haven't had a massive backlash against the president yet?  that bastard needs impeachment (i'd suggest burning at the stake, but that might constitute a threat), and yet we're letting him and his buddies whisper about nuking iran?  the best part is that we want to drop a nuclear weapon on them to stop them from advancing their nuclear (we're still not sure if it involves weapons) program.  we're still the only country that's ever nuked anyone, and look how popular it made us then.  god forbid we let a country in the oil producin'-est region in the world exist without fucking with them.

 

oh, yeah, and all this while the price of oil and therefore gas continues to skyrocket.  god, i wish i had massive oil holdings right now; profits would be through the roof.  maybe if we go to war in another oil producing country, they can go even higher, but surely no one would be in a position to endanger american lives for a greater profit margin.  that's why we never let the wealthy elite into the government, right?

 

sometimes i wonder if the people in this country want to be lied to.  it sure seems that way sometimes.

 

remember, socioeconomic strata only exist to scare those on the plane above (until you get to the can't-possibly-get-rid-of-it-all wealthy, who aren't scared of anything) and to keep minorities from gaining a foothold in politics.  fuck those greedy bastards.

welcome to the world, jackie boy

for those of you readers who didn't already guess as much, bootsy has made his entrance into the world.  Jack Everett Judd was born april 10th at 1:34pm in st. louis, mo.  he weighed 8lbs 9oz, and measured 22in.  he is utterly amazing, and well worth the thirty plus hours of labor (don't take my word for it; his mother says so too).  he's unbelievable, and here i sit, at work for the first time in ten days, missing him after only being gone an hour.

some highlights of my week off from blogging:

- jack.  what an amazing baby.  he isn't fussy, he sleeps pretty well for a newborn.  there were a few times in the hospital we had to send him to the nursery to get a little sleep, but on the whole, he was good about sleeping for goodly little stretches.

- siouxs!  a woman i have more love and respect for every day.  she dealt with the 34 hours of labor, and then, after three hours of pushing, went ahead with the c-section she had been dreading, just to make sure our little jack was ok.  since then, she has been progressing well, healing from major surgery at an unimaginable rate.

- st mary's.  the majority of the nurses were great, but those that weren't were vile.  i'm just sayin'.

- siouxs!'s family.  her sister tee was our doula (something like a midwife, for the uninitiated), and she was fantastic.  another pillar of strength in that family.  since jack's birth, her sister jeni has been absolutely amazing.  she has done several major favors for us every day, and all just to get the chance to see jack.  i hope that it is us that eventually get to return all of her love and help.

- the baseball.  i mean, did you see that game yesterday?

- the kaktabulz.  the eleven year reunion was this weekend (we somehow forgot about the ten year), so a few great old friends came to see our little jack and catch up.  it was only a few hours for me, but it was great.

- diapers.  in the hospital, jack seemed like he was never going to need a new diaper.  he went almost two days without pooping.  since then, it's been virtually nonstop.  i don't know how, but he seems to be able to bend space in order to pee on things he isn't even touching while wearing a supposedly super-absorbent diaper.  oh, and last night, while i was changing him, he managed to pee on his face.

 

i'll add more when there's less work to do, or when i'm home and can't sleep at seven pm.

at the drive in

non politics for a moment.

siouxs! and i recently purchased poison's greatest hits (which only has five great songs on it, but we're still not used to the whole i-tunes etc. thing).  needless to say, i have now listened to the song "talk dirty to me" more times in the last month than i did when it was on the radio, and in this time i have made a few observations.

just before the instrumental break, singer brett michaels urges guitarist cc deville (best porn afficionado/guitarist name ever) to "pick up that guitar and talk to me."  however, since it is in the middle of a rock song, one would assume that cc already had picked up that guitar, perhaps as much as a few minutes before.  i suppose it is also possible that he had briefly put down that guitar.  secondly, in a song called "talk dirty to me," one would think that a band trying to look as manly as possible would not ask one another to talk (dirty, we can only presume) to them.  admittedly, most hard rock/metal bands of the day were not the most masculine of folks, but they were mostly so vehement in their homophobia (see: rob halford), that such an exhortation in some bands would instigate a fistfight.  i don't know.  perhaps the guys in poison were cooler about such things (see: randy rhodes).

my last issue is with the guitar solo itself.  while any instrumental break can be metaphorically taken as "talk[ing] to me" (with the posible exception of certain bass lines, which are more appropriately "walking to me"), talking dirty is another matter.  the guitar solo in "talk dirty to me" is, at best, "talk [reassuringly] to me."  the closest thing to talking dirty is the little riff at the end, which could feasibly translate to "i'll let you see me naked, maybe."  cc deville should have taken a lesson from (perish the thought) joe perry of aerosmith, whose riff describing "just a little kiss, like this" in "walk this way" accurately describes a girl putting her whole tongue in your ear (you decide if that's pleasant, but it's definitely dirty).  for that matter, cc himself has done better in other songs (see: "unskinny bop").

so really, all i'm saying is this: "talk dirty to me" is a rock song about underaged sex.  it is not a ballad (see: "night moves", bob segar), and the solo should reflect as much.  cc, pick up that guitar and write me a new solo.

...short for scooter pie

never thought i'd say this, but bless you, scooter libby.  good lord, keep pushing, fellow progressives (it seems that's what people who used to be called liberals are now).  keep talking, scooter.  expose the crimes of the powerful.  see how they like their hour a day in the exercise yard.

there is a light at the end of this darkness!  think of it... a time when the most hawkish republikkkans will have to hang their sheepish heads when reminded of the corruption and evil perpetrated in the name of "conservative values."

no bootsy yet, but i'm thrilled at the thought of the vast improvements to the world s/he will be born into if this all pans out.

these are a few...

just because i'm always so negative, here's a few things that make me happy (in no particular order).

 

-feeling bootsy kick when i'm talking

-the smile on siouxs!'s face during the same

-reggae music and jamaican ska

-tony hawk licensed video games

-great plays in baseball, especially the cardinals

-wings and beer (fucking yay!)

-some of the modern drunkard chat board posters

-finding a five dollar bill in just washed and dried jeans

-ska and punk covers of terrible eighties songs

-other people's babies that smile at me

-kids playing outside

-great pinball tables

-making duct tape wallets

-halloween costumes in the spring and summer

-rockabilly radio

-cold beer, hot day, and a rack of ribs

-fixing things around the house

-soul music that falls in my vocal range

-the last half hour of a drive home to tennessee

-writing successfully

-clean baby smell

-the end of a good run

-breathing cold, dry air out of the freezer

-making my army men sculptures

-shooting pool with my grandfather

-real letters, either postal or electronic, from friends

-good stand up comedy

-walking the dogs on a pleasant day

 

that's enough positive mental attitude for one day.  if i'm not careful, i'll go all hippy or something.

 

impeach bush.

 

 

ding, dong, delay's reign of terror is dead

much like i didn't see the final score of the fla/ucla game last night, i didn't find out about tom delay stepping down until this morning, and what a smile it brought to my face.  the fact that he's voluntarily stepping down now means he needs to do something to keep from hurting the whole party, which is great.  i don't think getting rid of one of the most corrupt majority leaders in american history will do too much to help the republikkkan party's image (after all, they did make hime majority leader), but they think it will help, which is perfect (nothing will help at this point but razing the whole power structure).

we're winning, people.  we're showing the corrupt, the wealth protectors, and the religious zealots that they cannot keep us in check with a dismissive word or by branding us traitors for disputing the government's false claims.  everything that is great about this country is about to come back into focus (it may take a few years, less if we can impeach that bastard).  what a reward for living through the dark age this could be...

 

oh, and the redbirds showed the phillies who's boss, and scott rolen made them regret trading him away, so all is good with the world.

 

according to the cardboard wheel, today was supposed to be bootsy's birthday.  we'll see...

 

fuck bush.

opening day

the baseball begins in four hours.  dear god, how i've waited.

 

still no bootsy, for those who are interested.  siouxs! has a doctor's appointment today, so hopefully we'll know a little better what the time frame is from that.

 

on the off chance that you read this blog, lw, thanks for the phone call.  it's nice to know people are thinking about us right about now.

 

no politics today, as all those republikkkans seem determined to dig their own graves.

 

busy weekend, especially to have a pregnant wife.  my sister-in-law's birthday was saturday, so we went to eat a lot, then sang karaoke until it got too smoky at talanya's for the baby.  all in all, it was a lot of fun (and perhaps the last karaoke for me for a long time).

 

go cards.  fuck bush.

random friday stuff

i'm back in this moment to moment mentality... i can't concentrate on anything today.  people are pissing me off without meaning to.

 

baseball is about to start for real, and i'm excited about that, though i doubt i'll be able to follow it as much because of the baby.  we'll see.

 

i had a dream about bootsy last night.  s/he spill kool-whip on me.  i wish i had a read on that one.

 

republikkkans... bastards

 

demokkkrats... innefectual bastards

 

i've been so busy at work lately, i haven't had time for these flighty spells.  at least today is friday.  i need a drink.

 

perhaps more later.

fuck bush.

vaffanculo

antonin scalia, aka tactmaster flash, is a real dick.

we all knew this anyway, but now, we have it on camera.  and i quote, "to my critics, i say, ?vaffanculo."  let's break that down, shall we?

"to my critics" - by whom, tony can only mean every american who doesn't want to  torture the brown people.  those bastards.  how can any good red-blooded american not find it in their heart to attach alligator clamps to the nipples of any afghani/arab we can get our hands on (and if he/she is a terrorist, bonus!)? 

who else might be a critic of antonin scalia?  those terrible people who think every woman is a hostage to her own uterus?  those people who don't value human life so much that they'll kill for it?

critics of antonin scalia: the gays and gay sympathizers.  in fact, anyone who thinks that anything other than missionary position vanilla sex is ok must be a critic of scalia.

 

i guess that's why he told us all to "go get fucked up the ass" in that cute sicilian accent of his.  sorry tony, but i don't swing that way.  if there was any real justice in the world, you'd be hearing that every night in sing sing (but not just in italian).

 

pardon my (possibly misspelled) french, but "vas tous fait foutre en cul, antonin."

 

or "chinga tu culo."  whichever works better for you.

rah! rah! rah!

the demokkkrats have a plan!  it may not be much, but it's a start, and it's something we can all get behind.  that's right, five years after the terrorists attacked us, let's actually go get osama bin laden, the guy responsible!  who'd have thought?  after careful searching, we have determined that he is not in iraq (where he was never even rumored to be, but wouldn't that have been clever of him?).  all of our intelligence leads us to believe that he is in afghanistan or (more likely) pakistan, some of the toughest country on the planet.  fortunately for us, the area is largely populated by afghanis, some of the toughest people on the planet!  someone over there can probably point to the right cave, or perhaps to the dialysis machine that he has to get to on a pretty regular basis.  justice will be served!

and then, we can stop making things worse in iraq.  we'll need to pull back on our troops there, though not all at once.  in all likelyhood, we're going to be paying for that mess for years to come.  hopefully it's a problem we can help with "aid" as opposed to one that will have to be paid in "blood" collected by all the "people who never in a million years would have been terrorists had we not pissed them off so much in the last three years."

stand together, demokkkrats.  you might just be onto something.

 

fuck bush.

la migra

ok, frankly, i think it's a political dodge at a time when republikkkans need to take some heat off of themselves and dubya, but here it is: immigration. 

 

there's a sign on the statue of liberty that basically says we want to add all of the world's strivers and seekers to our mix.  some of the greatest achievers throughout american history have been immigrants.  with the exception of the native americans, we are all immigrants.

 

blah blah blah, you've heard all of that before.

 

i say open that shit up.  let 'em all in.  yes, quarantine the diseased, background check if necessary, but open the borders.  worried about illegal immigrants taking american jobs?  if everyone is legal, no one can pay an immigrant a dollar an hour to bust his ass all day long.  we would even be creating jobs, as we'd have to get a lot more immigration officials to handle the increased flow.

 

if you take the "keep them out" mentality that most conservatives have towards non-white immigrants and combine it with the christian fanatics wanting to outlaw abortion and gay adoption, it all becomes clear.  they want to have our very own home-bred underclass.  let the bottom rung speak english they say in their xenophobic shrieks.

 

(here's hoping an el salvadorian) fuck(s both of the) bush (twins).

anticipation

still no bootsy yet, but it's looming closer.

 

slow weekend, busy monday.  we have a container-load of wine coming in today, and as i have been for the past week or so, i am trying to ready things for my absence.  i spent the weekend fixing things, installing a baby gate (mostly for the dogs), figuring out how to put the car seat in, and other such preparatory stuff.  i feel like i need to be done preparing now and just wait for the baby, but every time i try to sit down, i think of something else that really would be easier to do now.  modern drunkards have told me to sleep, but that isn't so easy right now either.

 

sometimes recently i have been thinking about bringing a baby into this corrupt and dangerous world.  i refuse to teach this baby that fear is a way of life like the republikkkans are trying to sell us, but at the same time, there are so many things that i will have to fear for my child that my mother didn't have to worry about when i was growing up.  despite my patent refusal to fear the arab world, dubya is creating tomorrow's america-hating terrorists today.  according to the online database, there are dozens of registered sex offenders living in a two mile radius of my house.  christian fundamentalists are worming their way into greater levels of power in an attempt at a christian theocracy in which i don't want my child to grow up.

 

i refuse to live in fear.  call me a sci-fi nerd if you must but "fear is the mind killer."

 

fuck you, dubya.  i'm not afraid of you.

kill 'em all, and let the devil shake their hands

i'm a few hours late in seeing it, but i just read an americablog post about left wing loonies versus right wing loonies.  the basic premise was that we left wingers don't have the same level of hatred and fear that the right wing psychos do.  i would have to ammend that statement somewhat.  as anyone who has read more than one post of mine knows, i am quite full of anger.  invective spews forth from my mouth and fingertips any time i hear of the latest atrocity.  i seeth every time i see a neo-con bastard lying to the populace on tv, and bubble over with hatred every time i hear republikkkan talking points reported as fact by "objective" news sources.

 

the difference is that mine is righteous anger.  likely due to my literalist nature, i have an overdeveloped sense of fair play.  i never did fully come to terms with "well, the world is unfair" and as a result, i am a liberal.  fair play also explains to some large extent my belief that not everyone deserves to live.  in my opinion, if a murderer can be proven to have killed another person maliciously, their life is forfeit.  or, on a broader scale, if an administration official sends people off to die with callous disregard for their lives (and on evidence known to be flawed), their lives are equally worthless.

 

that's right, i am am really saying that.  bush, cheney, rumsfeld, etc. deserve the chair, the gas chamber, lethal injection, hanging, or beheading for the iraq war.  afghanistan is another story; at least we had some reason for being there (though regime change was not it).

 

i guess my usual fuck bush isn't strong enough today.

"bar" = twat

just in case anyone thought i missed it, barbera bush is a twat.  i'm usually inclined to give the matriarch of a family the benefit of the doubt, but seriously, to make a tax deductible donation to her son and herself?  when our baby is born, can we make a tax deductible to the baby?  well, let's see,  if we channel it through a legitimate non-profit organization, then earmark the enourmous sum for use with a specific company that the baby will run and we have invested in...  i think we can pull this off.

 

fuck all them bushes...

don't fear the irony

conservatives are a bunch of whiny little brats, according to a study at uc berkeley.  ok, perhaps every study coming out of berkeley is a little suspect, but it brings up an interesting point.  fear makes people conservative.  fear makes people look to traditions for the answers rather than seeking them in the here and now.  fear of foreigners makes them tighten border security, even as the fear of having to scrub a toilet makes them then pass guest worker legislation.  fear of arabs is beaten into the population to alleviate the elite's fear that the oil is going to run out, then this raises the price of crude, thus alleviating the wealth monsters' fear that profit margins might fall.  fear of biological warfare is parlayed into increased duct tape profits.  fear of change gets an incompetent reelected, almost every time.

 

fuck bush

question for the two person multitudes

i really hate it when someone else does my job.  yesterday, my immediate boss got into a twenty minute phone call that i had already taken care of.  the whole thing could have been taken care of with a quick "did you do x already?," but instead turned into a twenty minute phone call and a passive aggressive hint that someone else has to do part of my job for me.  i hate people sometimes, and passive aggressive people all the time. 

 

i've been thinking about splitting this blog into two.  one would be my political rants, one would be everything else.  my four readers, what do you think?  do you mind the mixed-up-never-know-what-he's-gonna-post-next nature of this blog, or (perhaps more to the point) do you even care?  i so rarely get comments that i wonder if anyone actually reads this stuff.  i'd continue anyway, because it serves as a semi-diary for me, but that's me.

 

check out the new annotated rant.  very informative and funny.

 

fuck bush

can't believe...

dear god, i spoke too soon in my last post.  dubya announced today that troops will stay in iraq until the end of his presidency.  i thought that him still being president for three more years was punishment enough, but now he's just letting us know directly that the poor and their children mean nothing to him.  let's see, 2300 american dead in the first three years, so by extrapolation, 4600 during his reign of terror (and god knows how many iraqis)?  how many deaths can one being take weighing on one's soul?

tuesday afternoon ennui

i think i'm suffering from outrage overload.  true, i am still capable of high moments of passion, but these days, our government pisses me off so much every day that i feel like i can't retain new grievances (that is, unless i drop one of the existing ones).

 

the cardinals need a quality second baseman.  how i wish i could play second base.  or baseball.  or sports.

 

still no baby, but the prospect looms ever closer.

 

the status quo seems to be pretty damned static right now.  i'm saving bottles and kerosene to change that.

 

fuck bush.

 

 

monday afternoon tired ass tired

that dirty bastard son of a bitch prez is trying to use his own failures and idiocy to get his wealthy folks tax cut/education funding slash passed.  please, both of my readers, tell two someones about this.  if we continue spreading the news, maybe something will be done.

 

i've been breaking my ass in the warehouse all day, so today will be a short post, unless they manage to make me angry enough to post again.

 

fuck bush.

and iran so far away

what will it take to take down this dangerously powerful monster?

who can stop the runaway freight train loaded with evil?

what can we, as americans, do to stop these religious zealots from destoying our way of life?

 

as no doubt my astute reader(s) have already guessed, i don't think that iran is a danger to us, theocracy or no theocracy (us or them).  i believe the head of the joint chiefs of staff when he told us that iran was not responsible for creating ied's for the iraqi insurgency.  true, they are seeking nuclear weapons, but pakistan and north korea already have them, and you don't see us fucking with them, now do you?  if something isn't done soon, we're going to fight another wrongful and meaningless war.  someone needs to explain to dubya that the crusades were over hundreds of years ago, and they were largely unsuccessful and wasteful of materials and human lives (not that he cares about the lives).  at one point i felt like we as a nation needed to stop policing the world.  now i feel that we need to stop bullying the non-nuclear powers of the world.  why do we pretend to care about african genocides when we continue to tyrannically subdue populations ourselves (or, at the very least, propping up dictators to do the job for us)?

 

i know you can't talk to a "christian," (well, i can't anyway) but we need to reclarify that the teachings of christ say that it is never appropriate to kill people.  or hate people.  or harm people.  or even hurt their feelings.  time for some cheek turning, you "christians."

 

jesus would be so disappointed.

 

fuck bush.

short thoughts

happy st patrick's day.  if you don't drink some jameson or guiness today, you're un-american.

 

the baby is getting really close.  it's hard for me to believe that soon i will be responsible for the life of another human being.  i'm so excited and scared to death at the same time.

 

some marketing company tried to figure out how best to advertise using my site (or so statcounter tells me).  that's pretty funny.  is there an anticapitalist magazine out there, or some other patently ironic thing that wants to advertise with me?  if so, drop a line, and i'll think about it.

 

short post.  readership has fallen off from a peak of double digit hits a day, so my motivation is less than spectacular.

 

fuck bush

pre-emptive rant

dubya's white house released a document today that defends the strategy of pre-emptive war.  it is based on the assumption that no one else in the world is capable of making their own responsible defense decisions.  it implies that democracy is the only form of government we as a nation will tolerate for other nations (though history shows that that is not at all true). 

nuclear non-proliferation is a joke anyway.  the number of countries that probably have the technology at this point to build at least a small nuclear weapon probably numbers in the dozens.  the idea that "countries who didn't have it by this point in time can't have it at all" is foolish, as evidenced by the fact that multiple countries (like u.s. ally israel) just ignored it and got the bombs anyway.  meanwhile, we who were allowed to retain our weapons built more and more and more in readiness for a statistical impossibility.

how many time can you kill a person, anyway?

let's get those terrorists before they get us.  hell, let's get 'em before they become terrorists.  let's just gas all the arab children.  yee-ha.

 

i really hate being american sometimes.

 

fuck bush.

gthedamanifesto (now brief enough for american attention spans!)

making a quick referal to americablog, one of my favorite sources for info about those bastards.  check out the longer post about the washington post's mislabelling bloggers as the "liberal base" of the democratic party.

 

a few words on that topic myself.  i am pretty liberal on the whole, as the profile stuff to the right would attest.  i do believe in big government as the only possible alternative to the (infinitely preferable but virtually impossible) no government option.  though my liberalism isn't pure, neither do i consider it an inappropriate or even scathing label.  i'm proud to be pretty damned liberal.

 

that said, i am not a part of the democratic party's "base."  i am essentially pragmatic in this regard.  the democratic party represents a shift toward my side.  i do not think that a third party can win real influence until one of the two currently in power goes down in flames.  of the two, i'm hoping that's the one with a wing currently on fire.  basically, i want the republikkkans out because they're so good at playing politics, even when they're openly evil, they get support.  the democrats are essentially weak due to their pandering to the "centrist majority," and as such my angry liberal people's party would be able to gain a foothold.

 

until then, vote democrat: they're not strong enough to be (genuinely) evil

 

and fuck bush.

short attention spa... hey, a bird!

i can't concentrate on anything these days, as i'm too eagerly anticipating the babay, but here are a few short bursts of rant for those who care.

 

hell yes, russell feingold, i want to see the president censured, but not just for the wiretapping.  too bad it didn't really stick, because all politicians are inherently a bunch of pussies, too afraid to actually take a stand and risk pissing off some mythical centrist in their electorate.

 

mad cow wouldn't exist if we didn't feed cows to cows.  as long as it's cannibalism we're going for, we should be practicing it ourselves, not forcing it on other unsuspecting species.

 

the next republikkkan who wants to claim that iraq is not in a state of civil war needs to go there.  there aren't minimum body counts to call it a civil war, it just is.  look who's fighting who, and you'll see (and our troops, god bless 'em, are pretty much shooting anyone who looks scary, which is to say at this point, defiant and iraqi).

 

how long till we go to war with iran?  the bastards in the white house only have three more years, if we're going to let our religious extremists get into a fight with thier religious extremists, they need to work fast.  actually, here's a better plan.  send james dobson, pat robertson, bill frist, that kansas bastard who likes to picket funerals, and anyone else screaming about jesus and trampling on his teachings to alienate and destroy everyone who's different from their boring asses.  fucking xenophobe/homophobe/muslimphobe sons of bitches.

 

tom delay is going to end up getting a promotion, firm handshake, and a blowjob for his fine service and (lack of) ethics.  lets not pretend anymore.

 

fuck bush with an i.e.d.

rediscovered: rant-squirrel

we put together the baby's room yesterday afternoon, and then i had a complete kitchen meltdown.  i tried to make a roast with potatoes, carrots and onions, but there wasn't enough liquid to cook the vegetables in, and they just dried out.  let me assure you, you cannot boil predried potatoes or carrots until they become tender.  i have tried.  it sucked.

 

one of the dogs picked up a squirrel corpse last week, and since then, i have to hold them away from the place it has been decomposing away.  now it's supposed to get cold again after a weekend of shorts weather.  this squirrel's going to be here till june.

 

that bastard's down to 30% approval.  30%!  russ feingold wants to "censure" the president; i say we ride his ass out of town on a rail.  thirty percent is a failing grade, period.  given the partisan state of the union these days, fifty-one seems pretty damned good, but thirty is still piss-poor.

 

can we get some lobbying reform already?  it sure seemed like a big deal for a minute there, but now that they've managed to shut abramhoff up, no one remembers.  again, we're stymied on making any real and meaningful change by the shortness of the american attention span and the willingness to sweep all evil deeds under the rug that runs rampant in the republikkkan party.

 

my coffee tastes like soap.  i haven't washed my mug in a week.  i blame the religious right, trying to clean up my language.  fuckin' assholes.

 

fuck frist.  (that looks really dirty.)

no, sony jim, this here is a bar

behold, the rare saturday morning blog post.  note the variant plumage...

 

our dvd player is fucked up.  no bother, we've got a playstation 2 that serves as a dvd player.  the playstation, however, has a child lock (hint: if you hit (x) five times in a row, you've figured out my code) which gives a level rating to each film you might attempt to watch.  it doesn't do this with video games, which i find a little odd, as modern video games are among the most disturbingly violent things i've ever seen (not that i'm complaining, just pointing out the fact).  anyway, out of nine, last night we put in "domino," which warrants a six.  it begins with "adult language" and a severed arm (we didn't get any farther than that, as siouxs! can't watch such graphic things around dinner time).  "can't buy me love" (i think, my eighties movie knowledge is lacking) which was rated pg-13 was an 8.  to the best of my recollection, there were no severed arms in "can't buy me love," not even so much as a finger.  there couldn't have been too much foul language, because pg-13 movies are only allowed one "fuck" per flick.  what evil, greater than maiming, shooting, and swearing gives this movie its high parental control level?  drinking.  drinking to the good people at sony, is worse than violence.  drinking may not be for everyone, sure, but chopping off people's arms is not for anyone.  booze is made to have a good time (though some people overuse the good time).  big fucking guns are made to put large holes in people (though some people never put big fucking holes in people).  which do you rate as more corrupting to our children?

 

fuck madd and the neo-prohibition movement, you killjoy bastards.