Daily Dollop

An Important Science Lesson

2009-12-17T14:25:00.000-08:00

What did we learn from the CRU e-mail leak and the less-than-flattering "inside baseball" look at the way that climate scientists talk to each other and about their peers?

We learned that scientists are not Vulcans. Rather than being passionless, logic-driven, rational creatures, scientists are very much like anybody else: driven to fits of pique, paranoia, close-mindedness, mean-spiritedness, and just generally being jerks.

It is important that everyone let that sink in, particularly you non-scientists out there. Most particularly you non-scientists who are journalists or public policy makers. The scientist you speak to may, in fact, be pushing an emotional agenda that has little or nothing to do with the issues at hand.

You can understand scientists by remembering that there are two Thrilling Life Moments for scientists.

Thrilling Life Moment #1 is to discover the way that something works that nobody else ever figured out before!

I've been fortunate enough to experience this on a few occasions, and let me tell you: it's better than booze, better than drugs, and better than sex. It's the ultimate ego gratification. You have figured out how to explain some phenomenon that nobody else ever could. And the more people that tried and failed, the bigger the high is.

The best part is when you roll out your controversial theory and your peers reject it, but then you spool out data, and proof, and challenge them to refute it, and when they can't they have to admit that you were right.

This is particularly satisfying when the peers who at first doubt you are people that you revile. And, since we're not Vulcans, scientists revile as many people as anybody else. Since familiarity breeds contempt, the most numerous group of people that we scorn is other scientists.

Which brings us to the Thrilling Life Moment #2 for scientists: the moment when you prove some moronic jackass wrong.

Yeah, you read that right: some moronic jackass. He might wear a lab coat, and he might have a PHD, but if he makes some pseudo-scientific claim that you can prove wrong, he's a moronic jackass.

The rules of the scientific method are well established, but they are essentially the rules of dominance and submission. I make a claim, and I back it up. If you test it and find it correct, you must submit to my interpretation. If you prove me wrong, I must withdraw my assertion and submit to your rebuttal.

It's all a question of who rolls over for whom.

So we should not be surprised that, when given the chance, climate scientists seized the opportunity to do both things at the same time when they were aided and abetted by an ignorant and partisan press.

These scientists were allowed to make sweeping claims without any verification at all (Moment #1) and summarily dismiss their critics as a group of cranks and morons (Moment #2).

As their egos grew, so too did their hubris: it was not enough to forecast warming, it had to be severe warming. Then dangerous warming. And finally apocalyptic, cataclysmic, the-end-of-humanity warming.

All the while they got to engage in a festival of masturbatory self-congratulation while shutting out any dissenting voices, because not agreeing with them became a sign of mental illness.

Rather than recognizing their models for what they were, they were uncritically accepted by the press and by politicians, neither of whom were capable of analyzing their work with anything approaching competence. And these moronic jackasses themselves were allowed to set the terms of debate, which they of course set to be as favorable to them as possible.

So in short, the arrogant led the blind, while the child yelling "the emperor has no clothes" was sent to the insane asylum.

This is not a good state of affairs. And it comes about because the public perception of scientists as Vulcan-like robots incapable of human greed and venality is spectacularly wrong and willfully ignorant of the basic fact that scientists, like everybody else, have emotions and do stupid things and often think only of their own self-interest.

Of course the scientists at CRU didn't want to share their data or their models. Nobody likes to be the "moronic jackass" in Thrilling Life Moment #2.

But science is absolutely not advanced by wallowing in our own human insecurities and failings. It's only advanced when we take the risk of being that moronic jackass by trying for our own Thrilling Life Moment #1.

No matter how afraid we are to do so.

NONE TO GO!!

2009-11-17T12:33:00.001-08:00

You can probably guess how my morning went:

1) Wake kids up at seven
2) Drop kids off at seven ten with woman who will take them to school at seven fifty
3) Go to airport
4) Begin pestering desk personnel about whether or not the plane has landed
5) Get thrown out of airport
6) Put on wig and glass and re-enter airport
7) Begin pestering desk personnel about whether or not the plane has landed
8) Get thrown out of airport again
9) Draw fake mustache a la Mets manager Bobby Valentine, begin pestering personnel
10) Get beaten by police
11) Put on dress
12) Sneak into airport but this time leave the desk people alone

And who should come strolling out of the arrival doors but my very own Wifey, looking like she's been put through a washing machine. Curiously, her pants were open and slipping down as she vainly tried to keep them up with one hand while she fumbled with her luggage with the other hand and balanced a purse between the two.

However, I was immediately aroused and overjoyed to see that she had the exact same thing on her mind that I had on mine: getting re-acquanted after our long absence.

"So, sexy, bathroom or parking lot?" I asked.

In response she tried to roll the luggage cart over me and swore at me like a drunken sailor.

"Long trip, huh?"

"I'm never traveling alone again," she said. "Ever."

Being a good husband, I patted her affectionately and then led the way to the car as she struggled with cart, purse, and pants. "What's up with your pants? Going for the gangster look this season?"

"What do you think happened, ass-wipe?"

I shrugged. "You changed your mind about joining the mile-high club?"

"No," she said. "And why aren't you pushing this cart?"

So I took over the cart so she could hold her pants up, which was really a shame, because at least two skycaps had tucked a euro in her panties. Unfortunately, since euros are coins, they just rolled right on through to, uh, warmer climes, if you will.

Lucky coins.

"I was running through Atlanta trying to catch the damn plane, but they hadn't announced final boarding, and I had to pee, so I stopped at a bathroom right next to the gate."

This, if you didn't know, is big news, since Wifey only pees twice a day. "Wow!" I said. "You deigned to use a public bathroom?"

"So I'm sitting there, and all of the sudden you know what I heard?"

Suddenly the story took an interesting turn. "People humping? A congresswoman soliciting for gay sex? The sound of silence?"

"I heard the final boarding call for my flight."

"My story was much more interesting," I said.

"Well, I start hurrying, and my damn zipper breaks as I'm trying to get my pants on. So I had to go on a nine-hour flight with my pants unzipped with only male flight attendants leering at me the whole time."

"That's terrible!" I gave her a big hug. "If only I'd been there."

"Why? Do you carry spare pants for me?"

"No, but I could have taken advantage of the easy access to make it a sexy flight."

She punched me again, but you know what?

I'd missed it.

So I took Wifey home, propositioned her every way I knew how (flower, liquor, candy, etc) but ended up having to go to work frustrated, if you know what I mean and I think that you do.

But you know what? IT'S OVER!

It's official: I have survived this horrible ordeal. During the last ten days, though, I've learned quite a lot. I thought I'd share some of the more pertinent things with you:

1) Wifey is an exorcist, as no ghosts or goblins ever wander the house when she's there. When she's gone? It's like the freaking Haunted Mansion hosted by Michael Myers.

2) You can go through six towels drying the floor if you take a shower with the curtain open instead of closed. But if you shower with the curtain closed, the likelihood that you'll be stabbed to death by a psycho is significantly higher, which is why I shower with the curtain open when Wifey's not around.

3) Airport security in Europe is really lax about guys with fake mustaches in dresses loitering around the return area.

4) The Eurotrash men are not lax about this and will hit on said woman with wild abandon.

5) For best results when your wife is unhappy with where you live, send her on a miserable trip somewhere else. Becuase for the first time in our five years here, she said to me that she was glad to be back and not be in the US any more. So if I can just schedule one disastrous trip every six months I should be in business, right?

6) Haggis is awful. It makes you feel like your getting a colonoscopy with a microscope made from an elephant's foot.

7) If you shriek like a little girl when you find a balloon head in your bed, you can count on one of your children putting a balloon head in your lunchbox the next morning.

8) Neither one of them will fess up to the crime, though.

9) Wifey is sleeping with the mailman. How else can you explain that we got no mail all week while she was gone, yet on Monday morning there were several letters, packages, and a box of chocolates with no address on it waiting in our mailbox when we got home? They joke's on her, though: I put ex-lax in the chocolates.

10) To most children the threat of zombie attack is far less serious than someone having pee'd on the bathroom floor. In this, children are wiser than adults.

11) When Wifey comes home after a long absence and finds the living room full of plates, dirty clothes, and the sad remains of a shattered catapult, she will look at you and say "I don't even want to know what the hell you've been doing, so don't even try to explain."

12) The girl, being an affectionate little tyke, sometimes leaves candy for her parents when they come back from long trips so that she and them can share it that night. On a related note, four ex-lax cancels out the villanous impact of haggis-related intestinal backup.

I think that's pretty much it.

Ten Down, ONE to Go

2009-11-16T14:14:00.000-08:00

Sunday dawned clear and cold, and I knew exactly two things: I was now 24 hours away from having Wifey back, and somebody was breathing on the back of my neck at 7:00 in the morning.

I quickly came to the only logical conclusion (some kind of Freddy Kreuger/Jason Voorhees Frankenstein hybrid thing come to eat my flesh and steal my soul) and karate chopped behind me without looking.

"OW! What did you do that for?"

It was the girl.

"Sorry, honey," I said. "But what in heaven's name were doing behind me breathing on me?"

Her eyes brimmed with tears as she looked at me. "Waiting for you to get up."

Oh, great, now one of them is gonna go weepy. "What's the matter?" I asked.

"What if mommy never makes it home because she misses her airplane and we have to live without her forever?"

"Well, she'd be happy," I said. "Because she doesn't like it here. And I'd probably marry a new wife, perhaps in her twenties, and have a bunch more kids who I'd like better than you two, and your life would become like some sort of nightmarish fairy tale only without the hope of having a fairy godmother come rescue you."

Note: such satirical wit is largely lost on fragile nine-year-olds at seven in the morning. Or at least, judging from the 20 minute crying jag she went on it is.

Once I'd finally gotten her somewhat settled I had the difficulty of peeling her off of me long enough to go to the bathroom, shower, and shave. Each time she sat right outside the door, blocking it, and forced me to speak to her every few seconds so that she could verify that I was, indeed, still here.

And you know how I said that haggis enters your stomach like a ton of bricks falling off a skyscraper? It leaves as easily as a drunk at an open bar, and having to respond to questions every ten seconds doesn't help you build up the head of steam that you need to finally expiate the problem.

Stupid Scots.

So we went downstairs and had breakfast, and then got cleaned up and dressed for church. We had to leave early, since I had stuff to do there, and there was much scurrying around collecting our stuff as the girl peppered me with questions and grabbed ahold of my leg and generally kept me close at hand at all times.

When we jumped in the car I threw it into gear and was ready to tear off up the driveway when I glanced in the mirror.

"Where's your brother?" I asked.

The girl looked next to herself, then at me. "I don't know. I haven't seen him all morning."

I replayed the entire morning in my head: get up, get pestered by girl, try to make my body a haggis-free zone, drink a cup of swill that passes for coffee, get dressed…

Oh shit! I never got the boy up!

So I ran inside, saying a string of dirty words as the girl chased after me yelling "Daddy! Don't go!"

Upstairs, in the boy's bed, he's completely comatose, laying in bed in his underwear.
"Get up!" I yelled. "We've gotta go! Now! Come on!"

"You leave him alone!" the girl shouts. "It's not his fault!"

"Dad, I'll get up in a minute," he groans and turns over.

I dragged him out of bed (no mean feat, since he's in the top of a bunkbed) and get him dressed. The whole time he's complaining up a storm about how he doesn't want to get up and the girl is clinging to my leg like some kind of demented pekignese and I'm trying not to dissolve into copious swearing.

"Come on! Let's go!"

"I've gotta go to the bathroom!" he says. "Just wait a minute!"

Time stops as he goes into the bathroom. I hear the jeopardy music in my ears as he's in there with the door closed with absolutely no sound.

"Oh, great," he finally says.

"What's the matter?"

"I have a problem!"

"No toilet paper? Need a book? Do you have diarrhea? What is it?"

"Somebody pee'd all over the floor again," he said. "And this time they pee'd all over my pants, too!"

I really should have gone back to bed at this point.

Much later in the day we made it home from church. The girl had a birthday party to go to, but she announced the moment we walked into the house that she didn't want to go to it.

"Why not?" I asked. "You'll have fun."

"Because you'll not be there," she said. "And I miss mommy. Can I please stay home?"

"No, you need to go," I said.

"Yeah," the boy said. "Beat it so dad and I can have some quality time together."

"Well can I take the cell phone and call you every few minutes?"

"You lost it," I pointed out.

"I didn't lose yours," she said. "Can I take it instead?"

"Yeah, that's a great idea. Then you can lose both of them."

I finally convinced her to leave, and so she did, with another parent taking her to the party (it would be my job, in three hours, to pick her up).

"Do you really want to spend quality time together?" I asked the boy.

"Nah, I just wanted her to go away," he said. "I'm gonna go play DS."

So what did I do?

Like a good husband, in preparation for Wifey's return, I vacuumed the floor, put some fresh flowers on the table, set out the children's "welcome home" cards that I'd had them make, set up the Skype webcam that she'd been asking about for the last six months, cleaned the dishes, washed the laundry, and downloaded copious amounts of porn.

Hey, I said "good" husband, not "great" husband.

Finally the time came to collect the girl, so I loaded the boy into the car and headed into the city.

I think it's great that people have parties for their children at their house. If you can stand it, it's much more practical than renting something. And I endeavor to make sure that my child goes to other parties, and doesn't just go to her own, because people who throw birthday parties for their own children but who don't make sure their children attend parties are assholes who are just in it to take presents from everybody else and deserve to get butt rot.

Having said that, people who live at the intersection of eight tiny little cobblestone one-way roads in the middle of an old city that was laid out by a syphilitic sociopath which is impossible to reach and takes about six sanity points just to navigate to should probably pick a different venue for their party.
Getting there was pure, unadulterated hell.

When I arrived to collect the girl (and her best friend, since the best friend's mom had dropped them off) I discovered that they'd had their faces painted and that they had made a "balloon family."

Every real parent hates balloons. Not only do they choke babies and animals (but never the animals you want to choke, like the cat that keeps getting into the garbage can and pooping on the front step), but children inevitably leave them scattered all over the house, forget about them, and then come looking for them the minute after you pop the balloon and throw it away.

That's when they don't pop it in their face and recoil in terror and start acting like they've had to amputate their own arm with a rusty hacksaw.

So in our house we have a simple rule: if I can find the balloon, I can pop it and throw it away and nobody has the right to complain.

So the nine balloon head people family were coming out to the car with us, and when I asked the girl whose they were she pointed to her friend and said "hers."

Whew! Crisis averted.

When I dropped the other girl off, though, suddenly the story changed: only one of the balloon people left my car, and the others went home with me.

Stupid birthday party.
When we got inside, I reminded the girl of the rule: if I find 'em, I'll pop 'em. She scurried upstairs to hide them.

Now it was time for dinner. I checked the list (and hoped that tomorrow the spell would be broken) and found that we were supposed to have…OUT.

Oh, joyous OUT! That means we can eat anything we want!

Only, it's raining and cold and I don't want to walk down to the square and get something and I certainly don't want to hassle with getting everyone dressed and going out somewhere.

So I offered this deal to the children: if they'd eat in tonight, then when mommy got back we'd strongarm her into going out to eat with us this week.

The boy quickly agreed, but the girl put up more of a fight, arguing that we couldn't violate the list, that she really wanted to go out, and all sorts of other nonsense. But ultimately I prevailed.

"So what do you want?" I asked.

"McDonald's," the boy said.

"You can't have that, that would be out."

"But I'll eat it in," he said.

"Well, pick again."

"First you desert me this morning, and now you won't even get me what I want for dinner. I'm glad mommy's coming back tomorrow."

"Me too," I said. "What do you want?"

"Peanut butter," he said.

"And you?" I asked the girl.

"Just a bowl of carrots," she said. "I had too much candy at the party."

And for me, you ask? A six-pack of beer about two minutes after they went to bed, plus copious amounts of porn.

Much, much latter I staggered into my room to go to bed. I had kept the lights to a minimum since they were in bed, and all I could think about was how the next morning I got to go collect Wifey at the airport.

I jerked aside the covers and THERE WAS A SEVERED HEAD IN MY BED!

I let out a blood-curdling shriek and jumped back. It was clear: the spirits of the house had finally made their move, and soon I would die!

I'm not ashamed to admit that, like the poor SOB in the Godfather, the sight of a head in my bead left me incapable of controlling my bodily functions.

The children came running, of course, woken from their slumber by my frantic cries.

"What? What?" they yelled. All I could do was point.

"That's where that is!" the girl said. "I knew I lost one, but I couldn't remember where." And she plucked her lost balloon family member out of my bed.

"YOU STUCK A FUCKING BALLOON HEAD IN MY BED? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU???"

"Geez, dad, it's not a big deal," the boy said. "I found two in my bed."

"I wanted them to be comfortable!" she pouted. "Mommy would have understood!" And she ran off crying.

"Go to your room!" I yelled.

I collapsed into bed. I don't know what happened to the boy, and I don't want to know. All I remember after that is that I uttered a slurred prayer as I drifted off to sleep:

"Oh dear God, if for some reason my wife can't make it back tomorrow, please let me die in my sleep. Amen!"

Ten down, one to go.

Football, Math, and Cowards

2009-11-16T13:18:00.000-08:00

So everybody and his grandmother is piling on Bill Belichick's decision to go for it on 4th-and-2 from the Patriot's own 28. It's the "safe" attack in sports talk right now, like when you want to make fun of Mike Tyson for being a cannibal or Al Davis for being a rotting mummy.

Only, the people criticizing Belichick are wrong. They're not only wrong, they're airing their math ignorance as proof of the righteousness of their cause.

Typical is Peter King, who as always is not afraid to slavishly follow where the pack has led him. He compares it to Grady Little's call in the MLB playoffs to leave in Pedro Martinez and says it indelibly blots Belichick's resume.

Firstly, let's explore King's math: he puts the odds of the Patriots making the 1st down "at 60, 65 percent." Then he says in the very next sentence that "the odds of Manning going 72 yards to score a touchdown in less than two minutes…that's maybe 35 percent."

Um, dumbass? 65 plus 35 is a hundred. So the outcome of the two propositions is exactly equal. Even if we accept the lower value of 60, our precision is so poor that it seems like these are pretty similar propositions.
And this is before we begin considering what can go wrong on a punt: blocked punt, return for TD, long return, illegal block in the back, etc. It's true that the receiver could fumble it, but more punts go badly for the punting team than go well. So there's a significant (even if minor) element of risk for the Patriots by punting.

Putting that side, though, consider this: if the Patriots make the play, they win. So the chance of the Patriots winning on offense is 65%. If they punt, and the Colts have a 35% chance to score, then the chance of the Patriots winning on defense is 65%

As proof, King enters into the ledger the Colt's previous seven drives, of which two were touchdowns, two were interceptions, and three were punts. So the Colts had scored on 28.6% of their previous seven possessions. If that trend continued, then we could concede that the Patriots had a slight edge to win on defense (71.4%) over offense.

But football, as King surely knows, is a game of momentum. And teams that are on a comeback are dangerous in the 4th quarter, when the defense begins to flag. In the fourth quarter, the Colts had scored twice and had an interception. That's a whopping 66% chance to score. If that is the real metric to watch, then the Patriots definitely should go for it: they have a 65% chance to win on offense and a 34% chance to win on defense.

And the math from the seven possessions is certainly not accurate, as we know that Indy will not punt in this situation. So we have 7 possessions, but we must ask ourselves: what would have happened on the three punts? Well, if they would have scored a TD one time out of those three, then the chances that they'll score now are 3/7, or 43%. So the Patriots have a 60-65% chance to win on offense, and a 57% chance to win on defense.

The team with the ball gets to decide what happens; the defense can only react to what the offense does. Belichick knows this. He has a 65% chance to seize a win, or a 65% (or less) chance to hope that Indy does not seize the win. So he chooses to go for it himself.

It's a courageous play, not an arrogant play. Those who are excoriating him now are cowards, who would rather kick the ball away and hope that the other team either screws up or doesn't score, secure in the knowledge that if they do score, then you can fall back on "well, that's why Manning will be in the Hall of Fame one day."

Screw that! Belichick went to seize the win, Manning be damned, and his team didn't come up with two yards. Sometimes life is like that. We were all so excited about Brady and Moss both being healthy, and we've been drooling over their record-setting offense that blew the doors off opponents two years ago.

Where did that energy from pundits go? Did they forget that this is the Patriot's strength? Why should the Pats meekly kick off and "hope for the best"? When did this become a quintessential American value?

Fools, cowards, and morons are criticizing Belichick. Others, more mature and inclined to understand strategy, should appreciate a logical move made to control your own destiny that, as is sometimes the case, didn't quite work out.

One last word on King's cowardly illogic: he compares Belichick to Grady Little because Little is hated in New England and his name despised for costing them the World Series. But you know what?

It's King and his ilk who would advise going the Grady Little route, not Belichick. A tired defense has yielded two quick scores to a resurgent offense that is undefeated, so King wants to roll the dice and fall back on it for "one last try" and "make Manning earn it." Meanwhile, Belichick would rather go with own offense, which was having a great day, and play for the win, now, and keep control in his own hands.

It's the difference between controlling your destiny and "hoping for the best", which is essentially what King advises that they should have done.

And is what Little did when he left Pedro Martinez in one pitch too long.

Nine Down, Two to Go

2009-11-14T14:13:00.000-08:00

I stare into the abyss, my soul a smoking ruin of what I thought it once was. I have transgressed every boundary, indulged in fiendish taboo, and done things which will haunt me the rest of my days. Truly, I have no need to search out any longer the heart of darkness, for it beats within my breast and fills me with revulsion.

I had thought myself a man, but now must confront the terrible reality that I am little more than a frothing beast.

The day started inauspiciously when the boy awoke me at 7 AM. On a Saturday morning. I mean, really, isn't there a cartoon or a gun or something to distract him somewhere?

"Daddy, I have something important to tell you," he said. "Wake up."

"Is there a fire?"

"No, but-"

"Is it wild animals?"

"No, but-"

"Is it a zombie attack?"

"No, but-"

"Then go back to bed or go play or something. Daddy's tired."

"Daddy, listen to me. It's more important than all those things."

Now, that got my attention. More important than a zombie attack? Really? So I pulled myself into that region of semi-consciousness where you hope to be able to flop right back to sleep, but you can still carry on a conversation without snoring through the important parts.

"Daddy, I wanted to warn you that somebody pee'd all over the floor in the bathroom."

Okay, let's review: it's seven in the morning and only one person is out of bed, the seven-year-old boy. The other child is a girl. The floor was dry when I left the bathroom last night.

Can even Columbo crack this crime?

"Can you clean it up?"

"I think so."

"Good. Go do that."

So he left, and somehow I managed to go back to sleep for a little while longer. When I woke up, I of course went to the bathroom, hoping that the conversation had all been just in my imagination.

Sadly it was true.

You know what was just my imagination, though? The idea that the boy would do a half-decent job of cleaning piss off the bathroom floor.

Wifey bitches about this all the time, but I pretty much play it off. I mean, good aim comes with time. You can't just command a little guy to shoot straight, particularly in the morning.

I'll be damned if I didn't think about putting him in diapers, though, as I stood there with piddle soaking through my socks.

After I'd cleaned the bathroom it was time for us to have breakfast. Only, supplies were running low. Which is to say that supplies are out. Apparently Wifey left us food only for seven days. That, or somebody had several breakfasts in one sitting. Personally I suspect that the family member who gets out of bed far earlier than everyone else has been having two breakfasts.

After breakfast it was time for us to go to the electronics store, the happiest place on Earth. As a bribe, I told the kids that on the way home we'd pick up McDonald's, and their attitudes went from sulky to smiling in 0.2 seconds. See how easy that was? I got to go to the electronics store, and they never had to know that I'm totally out of anything to feed them.

Voila!

I won't brag about my trip to the electronics store other than to say that it was everything I'd hoped it would be, and more. If you really want to start a store that will lure in men, you'd have bikini babes strutting around on high heels with a bar in the corner and row after row of cheap electronics while all of the giant flatscreen TV's played video highlights of the previous week's touchdowns, home runs, and injuries.

So you can take that in your feminism pipe and smoke it.

At McDonald's, I ordered the M. I don't know if you guys have this in the US, but if you do, I highly suggest that begin consuming them in large quantites before health nuts ruin this like they did the caramel milkshake. It is the best McDonald's sandwich I have ever eaten, and it almost ruined my marriage once.

We were at McDonald's a few years ago, and they were doing a survey of women to see how they liked the M. So they gave one to Wifey, and she tried it, and she didn't like it. So she rated it poorly, even after I'd tasted it and gone into heaven and punched my own daughter to keep her away from it and eaten the entire free sample that Wifey had received.

She rated it poorly! Now really, outside of the bedroom I hask Wifey to do anything for me. Is it so hard for her to lie on a survey to McDonald's in order to get them to come out with the greatest sandwich ever? They didn't release the M for years after that, and the whole time I was mad and I let her know about it.

She'd say "can you hand me that, please?"

And I'd say "I would, except you torpedoed the greatest sandwich ever invented, you bitter old harpy. Your palate is as refined as a hobo who's been subsisting on shoe leather and dog vomit."

Not coincidentally, I rarely got laid during this period, too. But finally McDonald's released the M and our marriage was saved.

What was I writing about again? Oh, yeah, lunch.

So after lunch (which was awesome. I'm salivating just thinking about it) we went out to test-fire the catapult. I had a variety of objects to throw, from a bowling pin to a toy car to a tennis ball. I'd worked quite a bit on the basket and the pivot, and all was in readiness. We drove out to the school's football field so we could test its accuracy under a variety of circumstances, from using the bungee cords to hand-firing it.

We set it up. The kids fell silent. I decided that for the first test-fire I'd hand-fire it, since in my preliminary preparation the bungee cords seemed kind of wussy, and I wanted the first shot to be impressive.

I slammed down on the counterweight, and POW!

My catapult exploded in my face. Shards of PVC rained over me. The children laughed like drunken hyenas.

I'd broken my catapult. I could have cried.

Now, feminist theorists will tell you that a man's attachment to weapons and guns is a method of overcompensation because he has a below-average endowment, but I can assure you that this is not the case. I am still hung like a donkey on Viagra. I even checked my pants later to make sure, becuase I did get showered with PVC, and everybody knows that's a chemical name that means Penilius Varicosilius Chemicilium which is latin for "Dangerous Chemical Substance that Probably Cuases Erectile Dysfunction."

Nevertheless, and all Freudian significance aside, I have a broken catapult.

I spent a few hours back at home on the couch, in a daze, mourning my broken catapult. It really wasn't fair. All I wanted was to be able to launch rotted fruit at the retirement community across the way, where they often come out on their balconies in see-through too-small bathrobes and nothing else. Is there something wrong with that?

No!

But I couldn't fix it, because the children simply wouldn't hear of going to the hardware store and the electronics store on the same day. Stupid wiener kids.

Eventually they started agitating for dinner, which is what kids will do, which is why the Donner party ate them first. So I went to the cupboard and, like Mother Hubbard before me, found it bare. So I searched and I searched and I searched and I found two things: some hot dogs (in a jar, like those aborted baby pigs you see pickled in science class) and a can of haggis.

We're not Scottish. Why in heaven's name do we have haggis? I vaguely remember trying some at a store once; did I actually buy a can? Was I mentally ill at the time?

I checked the ingredients, trying to work up the courage to eat it. Here's what it said: "Sheep Lungs, 45%. Sheep intestines, stomach, other parts: 25%. Some filler."

What the hell do you use as filler for a mix of lungs, intestines, and stomach?

So I looked over at the jar of hot dogs, which was written in Dutch, which meant that it contained "zeilieberstregensgkreeftdravenklaspfaffer."

For all I know, that's their word for "stuff so disgusting that Scottish people wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole."

"Hey kids," I asked. "Hot dogs or haggis?"

"Famine," the girl said.

"Hot dogs," the boy said.

So I fed them hot dogs, and I had haggis. I mean, how bad could it be?

Well, when it was ready it looked like somebody'd taken maggots and seaweed and mixed them up with some really old sausage. And you know what? I've developed the theory that the smell of a sheep's breath isn't because of it's mouth, it's because of it's lungs.

Then you eat it, and you discover that its appearance and malodor is only the beginning of haggis' charm. It tastes awful. And it lands in your stomach gently, like a cloud.

Well, a cloud of bricks falling off of a skyscraper.

It's hours later and I'm still tasting it. No wonder William Wallace didn't mind being disemboweled. It's probably the only way to get haggis out of your system.

Wifey can't come back soon enough. I was just pondering that when I got a phone call from her just after I put the children to bed. She was distraught.

"I missed my plane this morning!" she said in a panic. "I swear to God, the way this trip's going I'll never make it back East in time to catch my plane back tomorrow."

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" I said. "You listen to me and you listen to me good! You catch a plane, or a bus, or a car, or a fast mule, or whatever and you get your ass to the airport and you get your ass on a plane and you get your ass back here! I have had enough of this!"

There was a long pause, and she finally says "Jesus, what did you eat? I can smell it over the phone."

Nine down, two to go.

Eight Down, Three to Go

2009-11-13T14:10:00.000-08:00

I think even the most casual of my blog readers would know that I'm all about safety. That's why when Wifey left last Friday, I gave her cell phone to the girl with strict instructions: if she became concerned or nervous, or found herself waiting for me with her brother at school, she could call me.

I gave her the standard lecture about having a cell phone: it's not a toy, no playing with it, no bragging about it, no losing it, no using it to crack nuts, and all that jazz.

From that day to this, she's not used it at all, not even when I showed up fifteen minutes late to pick her up. I was very proud of her; after all, it's hard to resist temptation, and I know that having the phone made her feel like a big girl.

It drove her brother nuts that I gave her the phone. He confronted me about it one morning, in fact.

"Dad, how come you gave her the phone? Is it because you like her more than me? Is it because you think she's smarter than I am? Is it because you think I'm dumb? Is that it?"

"No, it's because I don't feel comfortable giving mommy's cell phone to somebody who can't always remember to put on pants in the morning."

"That's not true and you know it!"

"Son, you're not wearing pants right now."

He looked down (he wasn't wearing undies, either), then looked back up at me, and said in the most serious fashion possible "Good point, daddy. Never mind."

And then he went back upstairs to finish dressing.

So this morning, on the way to drop them off, I had to flap my gums. "I guess this is your last day carrying mommy's cell phone, huh?"

"No, I still get it Monday."

"Mommy comes back Monday morning, so I'll just give her back her cell phone," I said. "So this is your last day. Enjoy it, huh?"

"Yeah, I guess so," she says, wistfully looking into her backpack.

She waited ten whole minutes to call me.

I was on my way to work, driving about twice the speed limit, when the phone rings.

"Yeah?" I say.

"Daddy, I just wanted to make sure that you were going to come pick me up this afternoon after school. You're gonna come pick me up after school, right?"

"Of course!" HONK! "The phone's not a toy!"

And I hung up.

When I got to work, I immediately lept into action and started goofing off and reading sports news and stuff. I was deep into Peter King's riveting inside into gun control (read: moronic bloviation) when my cell phone rang again.

"Daddy?"

"What is it now?"

"I wanted to get a water and I asked the teacher and she said I could go to the water fountain at the end of the hall but it doesn't work so I was going to go to the other water fountain but it's not in the hall and I'm not sure if it's okay. Do you think it's okay?"

Sigh. "Yes, but I don't really think this is something you should call me about. The phone's not a toy, honey!"

"Sorry, daddy."

I suppose you can guess what came next: in between my other, more pressing work, I had to mediate three fights, RSVP a birthday party, calm her anxiety about dying someday, and assure her that I would indeed come pick her up.

I eventually just turned my phone off.

When pickup time came, I was standing out in front of the school talking to some of the mothers when the girl came bounding up to me.

"Give me the phone!" I said.

"Oh, that. Well, see, I kind of lost it. You stopped answering it, and I put it down, and I can't remember where."

At least it's not a camera phone full of naughty pictures or something, I suppose.

I was ready to go, but the boy's teacher caught up to me and asked me if I'd be willing to come help the class with their unit on simple machines. She'd asked me because I'm an engineer and Wifey had told her I might be willing to come do a demonstration with the kids.

Damn her!

I was not exactly thrilled about this until the teacher made her proposal to me: "I thought it might be nice for the children to build a catapult."

"Oh, well, why didn't you say so?" I responded. "Of course I'll help. Can I use some hot oil and burning pitch? Can we declare war on the middle school?"

She laughed. "Of course!"

I'm not sure she realized I was serious.

I suddenly realized the fortuitous position I was in: Wifey was away, I had license from the school to build and fire a catapult with a group of second graders, and the bank card was burning a hole in my pocket.

"Come on, kids, we're going to the hardware store!"

As we prepared to leave, the girl had one last little bit of information to share with me.

"You know there's a dance tonight, right?"

"I know." I also knew that the girl had two different boys currently pursuing her, and that if I had to go to an elementary school dance with the boy the likelihood that I'd get to knock out a rough model for my catapult was pretty slim.

But good parenting (and the knowledge that the girl would complain bitterly to Wifey, who was already mad at me) made me ask the all-important question.

"Do you wanna go?"

"Well, not particularly," she said. "But I guess I can go."

"But do you want to go?"

"I want to go," the boy said.

She shrugs at me. "If you want me to go, I guess I can go."

"I want to go," the boy said.

"It's not your dance," I told him. "Honey, tell me what you want to do."

"I don't want to go," she said. "But everybody else is going, so I guess I'll go. But I don't really want to. But if you want me to, I'll go. So I guess I'll go."

"I want to go," the boy said.

"Listen to me," I told her. "I don't care. It's your dance. You wanna go, we'll go. You wanna stay home, we'll stay home. It's totally your call."

"Then we'll go," the boy says.

"Shut up, boy."

"I guess, you know, if you think I should go-"

"I DON'T CARE! I WANT YOU TO MAKE THE DECISION!"

"I want to stay home," she says.

Whew! I got to look like a caring, considerate father and not go to the dance. I mean, it just doesn't get any better than that.

But for the record? I didn't want to go, and now I love my daughter more than this morning and I'm definitely getting her something good for Christmas.

We went to gymnastics, as always, where the boy sprained his foot and the girl almost got in a fistfight with this kid that won't leave her alone. He doesn't speak any English, and I told her he probably spoke fist, so she should explain things to him that way, but she's reluctant because the school teaches non-violent resolution to problems;

It's like Ghandi U or something. I'm a skeptic of the approach, personally. Some people just need need punching.

After that was over, though, it was on to the second-best store in the whole world (next to the electronics store): the hardware store!

I'm getting giddy just remembering it.

You know what the best part about going to a hardware store in a foreign country is? You can not only find tools that you didn't know you needed, but you can buy the foreign version of tools that you already have!

I had decided to knock out my proof of concept catapult in PVC pipe. It's cheap, sturdy, and easy to work. So I rounded up everything I needed, resisted to urge to buy several new saws, drills, workbenches, and whatnot, and sped home as quickly as possible to start building my catapult.

Of course, the stupid wiener kids started whining about how the had to eat. I unthawed a pizza and fed it to them, which they of course hated since they're perverse about such things, and as punishment I sent them to bed.

Two hours later, I had…my catapult!

And tomorrow I'm gonna fire it. I'll probably start on something simple like a tennis ball, and then work up to complicated stuff like plants or cats or whatever I can lay my hands on.

All I know is that tomorrow will be a glorious day: catapult firing and a trip to the electronics store!

Wifey should leave more often!

Eight down, three to go!

Seven Down, Four to Go

2009-11-12T12:59:00.000-08:00

The children saved my life this morning.

No, really! Typically I leave the house around 7:30, but owing to Wifey's prolonged vacation in hell, I have to wait until 7:55 to leave. Today, I had to wait tons of time in a traffic jam on the interstate on the way to work, only to come by the smoking remains of a five-car collision between a giant SUV, a semi, a truck hauling lumber, and two smears of metal with eight wheels and a blood-spatter finish all over them.

It had happened at the exact time that I would have been driving through there if it hadn't been for me dropping off the children.

Now for the bad news: I started to worry that the specter of death would begin haunting me, just like it does with good-looking twenty-year-olds in one of the innumerable Final Destination movies.

Hey, don't laugh: I have a lot in common with those people. I'm attractive, I cheated death, and I have no acting ability. If I got naked in public and had low sexual standards I'd be taking out a "Grisly Death" life insurance policy even as we speak.

However, as an office worker with a career, I long ago had my soul crushed, so I figure that any spindling or mutilation is pretty much redundant and I have nothing to fear from the Grim Reaper.

Plus, if he can't pick off a bunch of dumbassed teenagers I have nothing to fear, right?

At work I decided not to go swim at the pool during lunch (which I usually do), mostly because I'm lazy. But also because I once saw this movie where a guy handcuffed a woman to the exit ladder and her head was like two inches below the water level and she drowned and I didn't want that to happen to me today.

I don't mind cheating death once, but twice is pushing my luck.

Speaking of cheating death, I decided to call Wifey this afternoon to see how her day yesterday went. That, and I wanted to check in on my cello, which for me was the only real purpose of this trip.

Among my many talents, I am a cellist. And I own a very valuable and expensive cello. I mean, it's not a Stradivarius or anything, but it's a nice instrument. And as part of our complex negotiations two months ago, I told her it was time to reunite me with my beloved cello. She, perhaps hallucinating or simply out of her mind, agreed to do this for me.

So I ordered a nice new hard-sided case for it and a new set of strings, and I gave her a six-page note on how to adequately pack, transfer, handle, and care for my cello during the three days that it is in her care. Because I love my cello, and it's very old, and I've been with it longer than her or the children.

To quote Groundskeeper Willie, were it not a violation of God's law, I'd marry it.

The joke, as always, is on her: it's a big heavy slab of wood festooned with metal that's as tall as she is in its case that she'll have to drag through the airport. Haw-haw! There's a reason that I never brought it back with me. I mean, I love it, but it's freaking unwieldy.

When she finally answered, her first question put me off guard a little bit: "Do you know what time it is?"

"Four thirty!" I said.

(This is a running joke in our marriage. Years ago when we moved from Tennessee to Virginia, we had an eight and a half hour car drive through mountains where you couldn't get any radio reception. We each had to drive our own car. We only had one tape between us, that stupid Spin Doctors tape with Jimmy Olson's Blues on it, and the second song started with the line "What time is it? Four thirty!" One of us would have the tape and listen to it until it drove us nuts, then we'd take a rest stop and exchange it.

When we finally reached our destination, she pulled out the tape and did donuts on it in her car until its atoms came apart, then told me never to mention the group or the song again. So I, of course, always answer the question "what time is it?" with "Four thirty!" It's cute!)

So she groans at me. "You moron. It's five in the morning here!"

"Oh," I said. "So I guess you're free to talk, then?"

"What do you want?"

"I just wanted to check on my baby," I said.

"Aww, that's sweet. I guess I'm fine except for you calling me at five in the morning."

"No, not you, my cello. How's my cello?" After an icy silence, I began to fear the connection had become damaged. "Hello? Are you still there? How's my valuable and expensive cello? Speak up, you lazy Sherpa."

"I'm sorry, I thought you might be worried about me."

"You?" I couldn't believe how selfish she was being. Doesn't she realize it's been five years without my cello? "I've got insurance on you. How's my cello?"

And I said the last part in that super-slow-mo voice that you use with idiots who don't happen to be savants that you have tired of. This was perhaps not the best motivational ploy I could have engaged.

"Fine. You want to know how your glorified violin is?" She knows I hate violins, so she just said that to be spiteful. "I'll tell you how it is: it's gonna cost you fifteen hundred bucks to bring it over there."

"WHAT? THAT'S AN OUTRAGE! You can't blackmail me, you, you, you," I was stalling here, because you never want to call your wife a name that she'll remember when you're getting amorous and her teeth are near your sensitive bits. So some names are right out, mostly those starting with "C" or "B". So I chose a fairly safe one.

"You scurrilous blackmailing she-panther!" See, there's nothing bad in there at all. "Besides, even if I pay you fifteen hundred bucks, it'll go into our joint bank account, so you'll gain nothing."

She sighed. "First of all, moron, I manage all the bank accounts, so if I wanted fifteen hundred bucks blackmail money I'd just transfer it from the account you know about to one of the accounts you don't even realize we have. And second of all, the money is because the airline requires that you buy a seat for the cello. It'll sit next to me on the flight back."

"But I don't want it to sit next to you," I said. "I want it to go in the cargo hold."

"They won't put it in the cargo hold," she said. "It has to ride in the plane."

"But they put dogs in the cargo hold," I said.

"It's not a dog." And she said it in that voice that you use to warn a child that the oven is hot.

"We'll see about this!" I fumed. "I'm gonna call the airline and give them a piece of my mind!"

So I called the airline, and after thirty-two minutes scrolling through various options (why the list isn't "press one for reservations, press two for questions about carrying large musical instruments" I have no idea) and got ahold of some lady.

"Hey, lady," I said. "I want to fly my cello on a transatlantic flight, but the man says I have to buy a seat for it."

"Yes, that's right," she said. "You have to purchase a seat for it."

"But I don't want it to sit up front. I want to put it in the cargo hold."

"We don't put large musical instruments into the cargo hold," she explained. "They have to have a seat."

"But you put dogs in the cargo hold," I said.

"Sir, a cello is not a dog."

"But it doesn't bark or vomit or die in the heat or anything, and yet you make it ride up front. This is, like, reverse racism. What would Rosa Parks say?"

"Sir, I don't think this is the same at all."

"It's exactly the same! First you make dogs sit under the plane, but a cello can't? It's not fair!"

"Can I help you with anything else today?"

"Yeah," I said. "If the plane gets delayed does the cello get a meal voucher? Does it get its own hotel room if it gets bumped overnight?"

"Sir, it would stay in the hotel room with you."

"ARE YOU SAYING I'M SOME KIND OF SEXUAL PERVERT WHO HAS RELATIONS WITH A GIANT WOODEN INSTRUMENT?"

And with that the line went dead. There's something bad wrong with the connections today, I swear.

So I called Wifey back.

"What?" she said. "I was getting back to sleep."

"I wouldn't want to interrupt your dreams of naked David Hasselhoff," I said.

"What did you want?"

"Well, I wanted to tell you that thanks to your cock-up, they know that it's a cello and they absolutely insist that it rides in a seat."

"And what should I have done?"

I explained this like you explain how to turn on a light switch to a two-year-old. "The next time you have to travel with my cello, you wheel it up to the gate and tell them that it's a corpse. Then they'll certainly put it under the plane, because nobody wants to sit next to your dead uncle Duffy."

"Oh, yeah, that'll work."

"Well, not now that you've blabbed it's a cello. You're probably on a watch list. You'll have to ship it with the rest of the stuff."

"That reminds me," she said. "The car you rented me is too small. I can barely fit that giant case you ordered inside."

"Just drive it from on top of the roof like Mr. Bean," I said. "You're always bragging about what a good driver you are and-hello? Hello?"

The line went dead, but when I called back the operator told me it was busy. Weird.

So then I went and picked up the kids, and announced the good news. "We're going to the electronics store!"

"Gee, dad, I'd love to, but I can't," the girl said. "I've got too much homework."

"Me too," said the boy. "We've gotta go straight home."

I knew they were spending too much time with their mother! How dare they stiff me on the electronics store again! I mean, I only had three things I wanted to do while Wifey was gone: sleep on my back (which makes me snore), go without shaving for one day, and go to the electronics store.

Only I can't sleep on my back, because I discovered that I snore so much that I wake myself up. I went without shaving yesterday, but it itched too much and I had to go shave in the middle of the day. All I have left to declare my independence is the electronics store! I mean, it’s not like I'm going to buy anything, because Wifey would kill me. I just want to look!

"All right," I hissed. "But tomorrow we will go to the electronics store, because you'll have no excuses!"

"I'm going to be sick tomorrow," the boy said.

"Me too," the girl said.

Stupid kids.

When we got home the menu said "leftovers." Even though they'd stiffed me on the whole electronics store deal, I figured that I'd try to give them a break and make them a meal that they love which qualified as leftovers.

"Hey, the menu says leftovers, but what do you two think about scrambled eggs?" I asked.

"No thank you," they said. "We don't want to tempt fate."

"Are you sure you know how to make those?" the boy asked.

"They're eggs in a skillet!" I said. "I can make them in my sleep."

"Like your snoring?"

"Just shut up," I said.

"We're supposed to have leftovers, dad," the girl pleaded. "Just make some leftovers."

"Look, here's the egg carton. Only seven eggs are in here, out of a dozen. So there's only seven eggs left over!" I winked at her. "See? Leftovers?"

"I'm getting the fire extinguisher anyways," she said. "Just to be safe."

So I put on the skillet and tossed in some eggs. Then, to be fancy, I decided to throw in grated cheese (because cheese, like freedom, is better in abundance) as well as some cut up salami.

Now, I could have gotten out a whole new cutting board. We have twelve of them. But I figured that the cutting board already next to the stove, that I'd used that morning to slice strawberries on, was good enough. So I turned it over (to the clean side) and started slicing away at the ham.

All was well.

"Hey, that's nice," I said as the scent of strawberry vanilla filled the air. "Who lit a candle?"

I looked at the children. The girl's mouth worked but no sound came out. She only pointed in horror at me.

The boy, though, suddenly seized initiative. "FIRE!" he yelled. Snatching the extinguisher out of his sister's hands, he turned it on me and let rip with a torrent of white foamy chemical retardant.
Damn boy scouts and their safety courses. Who thought it was a good idea to teach a seven-year-old to use a fire extinguisher?

Briefly, before I was turned into a yeti, I saw that the cutting board had contacted the rear burner and began to melt. A small wisp of smoke had smouldered from the mildly deformed board.

Then everything went white.

When finally I could see again, all I knew was that the stove, the eggs, the clean dishes in the dish drainer, and me were all coated with whatever they put in flamethrowers. I hope the rumor about masturbating elephants isn't true.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm saving your life!" the boy yelled at me. "You should thank me!"

I hurled the cutting board into the sink. Other than looking like a Dali-inspired cutting board, it's actually no worse for the wear. I put the eggs aside for the moment and wondered if the chemical was harmful to eat. Then I pulled out a rag and started wiping down the stovetop to get the chemical off.

Fun fact: did you know that an electric eye left on with fire retardant chemical on it is still really, really hot? Yeah, it'll burn your hand and make you yell all sorts of words like "son of a piss!" and "gosh darn cocksucking mother ball licking criminy gobsoccers" because you're trying to hold in all the swearwords but still some leak out and your children stand there in teary-eyed horror as you hop around like an idiot.

So finally I get the whole mess cleaned up and my hand bandaged, and we're sitting around our peanut butter sandwiches and the girl looks at her brother and she says:

"I told you he didn't know how to make them."

Sigh. If they hadn't saved my life earlier, I'd murder them in their sleep.

Seven down, four to go.

[UPDATE: I realized this morning that I never went back and verified the name of the group and the album, so it appeared as XXXXX in the original post. It was the Spin Doctors, and I've corrected that now. Sadly, the anecdote is completely true.]

Six Down, Five to Go

2009-11-11T12:54:00.000-08:00

I am so screwed when Wifey gets back. And not in the good "she spent days strolling through erotic lingerie boutiques looking for things to please her adoring husband" way, but in the bad "I made the travel plans which have turned her life into a living hell" way.

I am so screwed.

The day started promisingly enough as I rolled over and realized that my cold had finally been vanquished. Hallelujah!

Ah, the Chinese. Is there anything they can't do? They've given us 9% GDP, one and a half billion people, and Charlie Chan. I think they may be the greatest civilization ever.

Well, except America, but that goes without saying.

I finally dragged my sorry butt out of bed around 9 AM and found the children amusing themselves quietly downstairs. It's Armistice Day here, see, so I don't have work and they don't have school.

And in honor of Armistice Day, angry spouses should forgive their husbands and let bygones be bygones instead of planning another Krystallnacht focused amost exclusively on their spouse's scrotum. Right, sweetie?

What's more, I had decided to tackle a problem which has crept up and is threatening to destroy our marriage: the plugged back gutter. It's about twenty feet up off the ground, but located beneath the copiously foliaged tree of death, which means that when we get heavy rains in the fall it overflows directly onto the skylight that is just above the spot on the couch where Wifey likes to sit. And of course, this makes the skylight leak.

But I had already decided that this week, to surprise Wifey, I would resolve the problem so that when she came back she could sit on the couch without using an umbrella. So even though it was heavily windy and forty degrees outside and my day off and slightly spitting rain, I cleaned the gutter, and the problem is solved!

Or to be more accurate, I paid the two polish laborers a hundred euros to clean the gutter in the back. There were three of them, but one guy lost his footing on the ladder and plummeted to a grisly death. I didn't mind, though, because it saved me fifty euros and reminded me that every moment is precious, and we need to savor it instead of throwing it away foolishly cleaning gutters and vacuuming.

So there's definitely no way I'm going to touch that front light now.

After that the children and I cleaned up a little downstairs, and did some laundry, and then made a healthy lunch.

Okay, we played Wii in our pajamas and then had a toilet-paper race. If you've never had one, here's how you do it: each of you holds a roll of toilet paper over the commode, and lets a trail of paper down into the water. Then you flush the toilet. Whoever's roll dispenses the most paper into the toilet, wins.

We played for best out of three but had to call the race on account of pluggage.

After that we figured we needed to get some exercise, so we went bicycle riding. The best place to do this is up at the children's school, so we went up there and had great fun riding around the vastly forested lawns that make up their school.

At one point the boy had to pee, but since the school was closed we had to pee the way God intended: behind a tree.

So I decided to try as well, you know, as a father-son bonding thing. I joined him behind the tree as he's just finishing up.

"You have to go too, dad?"

"Yup," I said as I unzipped. "Gotta wrestle a champ."

He turns and walks around on the other side, and I hear him greet somebody.

"Hi!" He says.

"Why hello!" says a voice I vaguely recognize. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm peeing," he says.

"Oh," the other person says.

"But daddy's not peeing," he says. "He took his pants off so he could wrestle with a champion. I'm just waiting here as a lookout until he's done, but it usually takes him a long time."

I quickly finish up and come around the tree, hoping to explain that I'm not some horrible pervert, and you know who he's with? Yes, his teacher, who has evidently come to "catch up on some paperwork." Or at least that's what she mumbled as she hurried away.

I can't wait for the parent-teacher conferences, assuming I'm allowed within 250 yards of the school by that time.

As we relaxed back in our warm, toasty house, talking about discretion, I got a call from Wifey.

She was not pleased.

"I spent two hours on the runway in Chicago," she said. "Do you realize I've almost spent more time sitting in planes on the runway than in the air during this trip?"

"That's a fascinating fact," I replied. "Did you know that Andrew Jackson once fired almost his entire cabinet because their wives wouldn't accept his friend's wife socially? And then, during the nullification crisis-"

"I'm going to nullify you!" she said. "You planned this debacle! It's supposed to snow here tomorrow!"

Wifey hates snow. In fact, like most Southerners, Wifey hates any weather where you don't sweat profusely sitting still in the shade. I like it a bit cold, so I'm sorry to miss the snow.

"The car you rented me is a piece of shit," she said. "I just found out I can't ship all the stuff I wanted to, and do you know what else?"

"No, what?" I said.

"What's in your pocket?"

"What are you, some kind of reverse Bilbo Baggins?"

I could hear her teeth grind on the other end. "What's. In. Your. Pocket?"

"You sound more like Gollum," I joked.

"JUST REACH IN YOUR POCKET DIPSHIT!"

So I reached in my pocket and pulled out my keys. "My keys."

"Your keys to what?"

"Hmm, let's see," I said. "Key to the house, key to the safe-deposit box, key to the PO box, key to the storage locker, key to the garage, key to my desk at work, and the key that I don't know what it goes to."

"Do you know what you never gave me?"

Thinking back to college, I finally realized what she was so mad about. "Chlamydia? Listen, we've been over this and over this. It was a false positive. It happens sometimes. I did not give you a VD! You never had one single symptom! That girl was just my lab partner, nothing more!"

"YOU NEVER GAVE ME THE KEY TO THE STORAGE LOCKER, YOU GIANT FESTERING PILE OF PUKE!"

There was a brief delay for a few moments with only feral snarling on the other side of the line and, I swear, the sound of someone foaming at the mouth in rage. I think she must have been attacked by a rabid animal.

"Well that's no big deal," I said. "Just go buy another lock and then ask the nice man at the storage locker to cut our lock off for you."

"You do know that I'm going to make you pay for this trip, right?"

"What? Now listen here, missy, you wanted this. It was on your list! If anybody should get paid, it's me!"

Now sometimes, as a spouse, you have to know when to truncate your sentences. If I'd stopped there, I might have more than five days to live. As it turns out, though, I went on, and here is what I said:

"I think when you get back you should drop to your knees and give me twenty, if you know what I mean, because I'm such an awesome husband that I'm taking care of your horrid spawn back here in terror mansion while you're laughing and flirting your way across the friendly skies!"

Just then the connection went dead. Hopefully she didn't hear that last part, or if she did, I can blame it on a crossed wire or something.

But if she did hear it, I'm right royally screwed.

The worst part was that the children got pissy with me for calling them horrid spawn. So as revenge I made them do their homework. For two blessed hours one worked on handwriting and reading while the other did math, and I meanwhile watched World's Deadliest Catch on TV.

And you know what? Those guys have a pretty good job. I'm thinking of joining them, oh, maybe next Tuesday when they go back out.

At the very least I'm wearing a cup to the airport next Monday.

Six down, five to go.

Five down, six to go

2009-11-10T12:46:00.001-08:00

Today, I vowed that regardless of what came to pass, there would be one goal at which I would surely succeed, regardless of cost or consequence: I would at long last cast off this thrice-damned cold, nasal drip and all.

Having made this vow, though, I was unsure of how to go about doing it. I'd tried everything I could thing of: medicine, rest, getting other people sick, liquor, porn, and eating random plants in the hope that one of them contained some unknown cure for the common cold, like you see at 2 AM on those infomercials about the rain forest.

Until now no luck.

I roused the children with cursing and threats, but they ignored me. It's like they've finally hipped to the fact that mommy's not here, and the second-in-command guy isn't worth getting all hot and bothered about. I'm like a cross between Sgt. Carter and Col. Klink, only less menacing than either.

Plus there's no sweet-voiced Gomer to help me make it through these rough patches. I did get to listen to ten minutes of recorder practice, though, which I didn't so much hear as felt through my eye teeth.

Somehow we got up, dressed, and out the door. As always the boy looked like he was packed to ascend K-2, and I swear the girl was wearing her mother's clothing and jewelry, but who was I to argue? I figured they knew what they were doing.

As I sat at work, staring out the window and wondering if the fall from my office to the ground would be fatal (probably not, I finally decided) the answer came to me: Chinese food.

How could I have forgotten the healing power of Chinese food?

You know how when you order the spiciest thing on the menu, then lard it with hot sauce, your eyes water and your sinuses clear up and you feel like somebody set off a chemical fire in your brain?

THAT's what I needed!

However, I couldn't just go to the Chinese restaurant by myself. More accurately I could, but I didn't want to. So I needed to trick some people into going with me so I wouldn't look like some sick lunatic trying to infect everyone with swine flu. Fortunately I knew just how to do this.

I went by the office of our resident health nut, who goes swimming every day and normally never eats out. But I knew the sure-fire way to get him to go with me. "Do you remember that award that I submitted our project for?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "Why?"

"I heard a rumor that we might win," I said. "This calls for a celebration!"

"Yeah!" he said. "Rumors are never wrong!"

Then he proposed we invite the other guy on the project, which I wasn't going to do, mostly because this guy eats so slowly that I once got run over by a glacier waiting for him to finish dessert.

You know how in some countries monkeys come and steal food right off your plate if you're not fast enough? This guy once lost an entrée to a sloth. He's so slow that his glass goes dry from evaporation. It takes him so long-

I think you get the point.

By all rights I did need to invite him, though, because he did do something like half the work on the project. The health nut did the other half. What did I do, you ask?

I submitted it for the award, that's what. Those entry forms aren't going to fill themselves out!

Well, I invited the guy, and long story short he came and his girlfriend came too (no, I don't know why, but there you go). I ordered spicy beef and egg rolls, and when it came I took out that super-hot sauce that they keep in the little jar with the decorative spoon that they don't expect you to use (or only expect you to use a dot of) and just slathered the egg rolls with that stuff, the table gradually growing silent.

"Are you sure you want to do that?" Mr. Healthy asked.

"It's the only way," I said. "Tell my wife I loved her."

Then I bit into it, and let me tell you, it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius!

Yowza!

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: what kind of idiot would show such blatant disregard for hygiene, sanity, and his own body?

To which I can only respond in the immortal words of Dr. Peter Venkman: back off, man, I'm a scientist.

I will admit that the first few seconds were fairly difficult, when it felt like I'd swallowed a radioactive squirrel who had an alien exploding out of it. However, I passed the first test: I didn't vomit.

My eyes watered.

My throat seized.

And, for the first time in days, I sucked air in through both nostrils.

I COULD BREATHE!

Let me tell you, after that the rest of the day was going to be a breeze. I was ready to take on the world and do whatever the day brought me. Filled with a new attitude of confidence and health that I hadn't had in days, I charged back to the office to attack the work that awaited me.

Specifically, two hours later, I attacked the bathroom when my bowels began hitting EJECT and I started to think that perhaps breathing was overrated.

Beggars in a potty emergency can't be choosy, so I had to go to the "ecological" bathroom near my office. This thing was designed by hippies who hate all human life, specifically those who go to the bathroom. The little cubicles are hermetically sealed, and when you press the button, the lights stay on for about thirty seconds. Then they go off, and you have to wait fifteen seconds to press the button for them to come on.

Unless, of course, the system is feeling perverse and the lights don't come back on and you have to wind up an unpleasant trip to the can using your cell phone as the only source of illumination.

Not, you know, that that's ever happened to me.

Finally I picked the kids up from school, and I offered them a special treat: a trip to an electronics store! I told them they could each pick something out.

See, I love electronics stores, because they're full of all sorts of stuff I don't know how to use but which look cool and run on electricity, like webcams and computer games and stuff. It makes me feel smarter just being in their presence.

Usually I have to go with Wifey, who ruins the whole thing with her "what would you do with that " and "that's too expensive" and "you already have one of those". I mean, really, what's the good of having a career and sucking up to the boss if you can't blow your paycheck on gaudy electronics?

But without Wifey (and with the bank card) I could buy all sorts of things!

Alas, it was not to be. The children, rotten little SOB's that they are, didn't want to go! And you know how it is trying to drool over gigantic televisions when they're whining and carrying on and trying to sword fight with the digital display cameras and the manager's all like "can you please control your children" and then you get thrown out and they ask you not to come back.

Not, you know, that that's ever happened to me.

So instead we went home. But as vengeance, I stopped and got Pizza Hut pizza on the way home. It's not on the pre-approved food list, but I don't care: they deserve the vengeance of the curse for thwarting my desire to look at electronics!

Mwa-hahahaha!

At home I also forced them to watch Godzilla vs Monster Zero, a classic of the genre and featuring the Godzilla victory dance. Perhaps the only one which tops this one is the all-time great Godzilla vs Megalon, even though Megalon is most useless monster ever. But it's still awesome because of Gigan and the classic line, "he's reprogrammed himself to grow!"

Sorry, that was a tangent. But I do love me some Godzilla, and I'm working hard to instill this important value in my children. Because it's important that they, like the founding fathers, appreciate that giant radioactive creatures can play an important role in society.

Plus they should understand the dangers that radioactivity can cause when in the wrong hands, leading to mutated animals, giant ants, and fire-breathing lizards. Only responsible democracies and hard-core tyrannies that want to threaten their neighbors should be allowed nuclear materials.

Unfortunately, the astronauts had barely reached Planet X when I had to make another trip to the bathroom to get over Emperor Zhao's Revenge (or whatever it was I had). On the upside my breathing was perfect. On the down side, you're never exactly pining away to smell intestinal distress.

After the movie the children amused themselves playing video games, and entered into a discussion about which Pokemon their parents resembled most.

"Mommy is definitely a Blissy, because they love their young and take such great care of them and are really nice and spread eternal happiness." The girl rhapsodized.

"Yeah," the boy said. "And daddy is a Fartachu that spews horrible gas and everybody hates!"

"Hey!" I protested.

"That's not right," the girl said. "That's called a Grimer."

"Go to bed!" I commanded.

My stomach is gurgling, and it makes me miss my cold already.

Five down, six to go.

Four down, 7 to go

2009-11-09T13:22:00.000-08:00

Do you know what the difference between mommies and daddies is?

It's that mommies use a variety of psychological weapons (from guilt to threatening to the intricate bonds of love) to help make their children into fully functional adults. It takes many years, it's very tricky business, and it requires the mother to give a lot of her time and emotional resources to do.

It looks really hard.

Daddies, on the other hand, just use daddy magic. You can solve any problem with daddy magic, quickly and easily. There's a reason that Santa Claus is a man, you know. No woman could whisk up a chimney by touching her nose, to say nothing of jiggling her tummy like a bowlful of jelly.

Here's an example: say you're cooking and a piece of eggshell ends up in the mix. What do you do?

Well, if you're a mommy, you get a spoon and you laboriously work with the eggs to fish out the offending piece of shell. It takes time, and effort, and you end up with one more thing to wash.

But with the power of daddy magic, you know that you can leave the eggshell in. Why? Because it's all healthy, baby! The only real reason to not put the whole egg in is because the shell touched the chicken's butt and you don't want it in your food. Otherwise eggshell is practically health food! And with the power of daddy magic and a hot oven and nobody watching you, that eggshell can stay right in the mix.

Problem solved!

This morning I awoke practically suffused with daddy magic. And I needed it, too, because the children were playing their favorite game: "I'll answer a question not meant for me."

After I got up and showered, I got the children out of bed and told them to get dressed. Amidst much grumbling and fumbling, they rolled out of their beds like zombies arising from the grave.

"Don't forget to brush your hair!" I yelled at the girl.

"Dad, I don't have any hair!" yelled the boy.

"I meant your sister!" I said.

"I'm in the bathroom!" she yells at me.

"Well, do it when you get out!" I yell back.

"I'm not in the bathroom!" the boy yells to me.

And on, and on, and on, until I'm dreaming of sticking their bodies in a crawl space and running off to Monaco. Not that I'd ever do such a thing.

Mostly because our rented house is crawlspace-free, and I'll be darned if I'm going to put one in and increase the property value for the landlord (see a related discussion of the hot water heater).

Also, the cost of living in Monaco is way too high. Now Sweden, that's an ideal relocation spot, except for the crappy weather and all the Swedes. Oh, and the language, which sounds just like the Swedish chef. Orgis-borgis humby-bumby!

So I finally got them up, dressed, and fed, which was no mean feat. Being a proactive father, I'd already made their lunches for today, so all I had to do was get them to put all their school stuff together so we could leave. Think of it like preparing your spell components before you go into combat.

(That's geek-talk, by the way, so be thankful if you don't understand it)

The girl finished packing her backpack with homework, lunch, and swim bag, and had a nice, neat, slim, trim, pack.

Meanwhile the boy is hopping up and down on his backpack like something out of a 50's cartoon trying to jam all his crap in there, and it's swelling up, and when he finally gets it closed it's swollen and the zippers are straining like fat Jared's from Subway's pants.

"Does your backpack always look like that?" I ask.

"Oh, yeah, don't worry," he says. "It's not a problem."

I have my doubts. I think Wifey would have mentioned if his backpack looked like a tick stuck on an artery. But you know what? He could lift it, so by the power of daddy magic, I declare this problem solved!

But I swear I don't know what he took to school today that he should have left home. And further, I don't want to know. So by the power of daddy magic, I declare this not my problem!

See how powerful daddy magic is? From using Hold Person to freeze a child to Power Word Kill on spiders to Bibgy's Offensive Fart, daddies have got all the power in a family thanks to the might of daddy magic.

Finally we head for the door and as she passes, the girl's hair takes a snap at me, and I look down on her head and I see a nest ready to harbor the entire Christmas song: three calling birds, four French hens, and a partridge in a pear tree.

"Did you brush your hair like I asked?"

The boy stamps furiously and yells "FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME, I DON'T HAVE HAIR!"

With an ego like that, the boy will go far. Perhaps even the presidency someday.

"Of course I did," the girl said in her best condescending voice.

For a brief moment, the psychic specter of Wifey appeared in the room, staring down on us gravely and shaking her head. Wherever she was, she was having an out-of-body experience and telling me, in her best Jor-El way, that this was not the way that things were meant to be.

But you know what? Using the power of daddy magic, I dispelled the specter and declared this not a problem!

"Okay," I shrugged. "Whatever."

I'm telling you, I'm at least a tenth-level dad.

(That's more geek talk, by the way)

So I loaded them into the car and we were off to drop them at the house of the nice lady who is taking them to school while Wifey is away.

In the backseat, I hear one of them whisper to the other one "He's a lot easier than mommy. He didn't even make me put on socks!"

You know what? I engaged my daddy magic to cast cone of silence around myself, and after that just didn't pay any more attention.

Once I'd dropped them off, it was off to work. And you know what I found out?

Daddy magic has its limits. See, I was thrilled because instead of drinking lukewarm roach feces as coffee today at home, I could drink from the coffee machine at work. It's got all kinds of choices: coffee, expresso, mocaccino, the works! Only today it was broken, for the first time ever. Do you know why?

It was out of water.

Now, really, I live in a country where it rains 300 days a year. There was water in the water fountain, the toilets, and the parking lot. Why wasn't there any water in the coffee machine?

I don't know, but it made me want to take the day off. So in protest I fiddled around on the Internet all day and didn't get anything accomplished.

(Technically, this is very similar to what I normally do, but never mind about that)

Sometime during the day I got an angry e-mail about one of the children not wearing socks in cold weather, but I used the powerful daddy magic spell Forward to send it on to Wifey so she could worry about it next week.

Unfortunately, my mini-vacation from the children ended, and it was time to go pick the savage little monsters up. We came home and, the specter of Mommy hanging over us like a cloud of doom, obediently checked the schedule for what we were supposed to eat: chicken nuggets.

Now, when Wifey left (about six weeks ago, if I reckon correctly) I remember her nattering something about how she didn't have time to get us chicken nuggets and I'd have to go buy them.

Like that's going to happen. I don't even know where the grocery store is. The only store I know the location of is the flammable stuff store, where you can buy gas, firewood, hard liquor, and porn. It's within walking distance of the house, which is good, because often I like to stroll over there and partake of one or more of those items before coming home.

Given that, we needed to go off-list. I informed the children of this eventuality.

"I'm not hungry," the girl said. "I'll go without."

"I want some more tuna casserole," the boy said. "But I'm going to wait over here near the exit while you make it in case there's trouble."

So we compromised: leftover casserole for me and the boy, cold hot dogs for the girl. Hey, don't laugh, it was a major coup: both children got something that they loved. I promised them that I'd use my daddy magic to keep the terrible curse of mommy at bay and get us through dinner without any problems at all.

As we ate, peacefully, the boy looked at me, and he said (and I swear I am not making this up):

"You know what, daddy? When you're gone, and mommy's here, things are hard. But when mommy's gone, and you're here, things are easy. And when you're both here, things are kind of medium."

My heart swelled with pride. This, from the boy who once told me he couldn't wait until I died and mommy married a new, better daddy. This from the boy who once told mommy he wished he were bigger so he could beat me up. This from the boy who comes into my room, checks to see if I'm breathing, and says "darn" when I am.

I'm his favorite parent! Let's hear it for the awesome power of daddy magic! I think I've gained at least two levels thanks to Wifey's trip! I must be up to Sorcerer by now!

(Please pardon the excessive geekiness of the preceding sentence)

But of course I needed to hear it in full, so probed for the ultimate payoff, the phrase that I could use to gloat and demean Wifey for the rest of our marriage together:

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

"It means he likes you better than mom," the girl said.

"No it doesn't!" he said. "It means that since he doesn't know any of the rules or how to do anything we can get away with whatever we want! I haven't changed my underwear in days and days and days."

And with that he dumped milk all over my plate trying to do a fist-bump with me.

Little SOB! I showed him who was boss: he spent the rest of the night practicing doing his handwriting while I harangued him about his poor attitude. His lettering ended up fairly smeared with his tears.

I swear, where do they get this attitude? I'm all about respect and treating other people justly. I never do or say bad things! Kids these days. It's the TV, that's what it is, all right.

Finally, utterly humiliated, I sent the children to bed, ignoring the bickering and trail of toothpaste in the hallway to come upstairs and type out this summary of my day before crawling off to bed for another horrifying night here in Death House.

I feel drained, as if I've lost several experience levels from the chill touch of the Specter of Wifey, reaching out to punish me for not eating the chicken nuggets like I was supposed to or some other obscure violation of some rule that I never even knew existed, like how children are supposed to wear socks or something.

I'll tell you this much: if she thinks I'm going to water her plants she's fooling herself, that's for darn sure. Even so, I think I'll check the list to see if there's anything I need to pick up on my way home tomorrow.

You know, just in case.

Four down, seven to go.

Three Down, Eight to Go

2009-11-08T13:31:00.000-08:00

When I awoke this morning, the only way that I knew that I hadn't been slaughtered by an errant poltergeist overnight was the feeling of cotton slowly swelling my groggy, befuddled head.

Ye gods, what a night!

I went to bed early because I was horrifically stuffy and exhausted. Everything I did yesterday seemed to sap my strength, as if I were Sisyphus constantly struggling to make some kind of progress against the Herculean task of watching two largely self-sufficient children all by myself while nursing a head cold.

Even the nap wore me out!

But the sweet release of sleep was not to be mine. I couldn't take Nyquil for two reasons: firstly, I needed to be aware for the inevitable break-in by some sociopath hell-bent on slaughtering me in a gruesome, SAW-esque fashion. I needed all my powers of detection at peak strength to be ready to detect and flee from just such a problem.

Secondly, if one of the children hollered for me overnight and I didn't respond, they'd complain to mommy, and then I'd wish that a homicidal maniac had broken into the house.

So I settled down to a non-drugged sleep. The sacrifices I make for my children! But sleep came slowly because, as I may have mentioned before, our house is haunted by the heavy-breathing floor-creaking daddy-creeping ghost from hell. And I swear I heard scratching on the roof all night, but I'll be darned if I'm going to open the door and discover my dead boyfriend's body hanging by his heels and then have some hook-handed maniac hunker down in the back seat and slaughter me as I drive home.

Or, you know, something like that.

Worse, when I did finally drift off, I awoke from time to time with a river of snot flowing freely forth from my sinuses, and I had to towel it off with tissues. And then I had to repeat the whole thing again, going back to sleep with all the scratching and screeching and me wetting the bed with no small regularity.

I was pretty parched by morning. Plus I had enough tissues stuck to my head with snot that the kids thought I was a mummy and hit me with a dictionary.

The first thing I did (after rubbing the imprint out of my forehead) was to take a shower. And let me tell you, I'm coming around on this whole "bigger hot water heater" thing that Wifey's been pushing lately. She just might be onto something.

Then I went downstairs and started heating a cup of hot water, when I realized that there was no coffee to be had. So I did what any normal person would do: I howled obscenities and tore the cupboard apart.

And there, in the back, I found it: "NEW NESCAFE DESSERT COFFEE: NOW WITH LESS ROACH AND SHOE SHAVINGS!"

Ooooh, baby! It was caffeinated! I don't care if it's made from goat foreskin; I'm drinking that stuff down!

From the first sip, suddenly a chorus of angelic voices resounded throughout the kitchen, and I swear I levitated a few inches off the ground. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! I am saved, brothers and sisters! Saved!

Take that, Wifey!

Now I was full of vigor and ready to go. All was well with the world! So I loaded the kids into the car and we went to church. Not much to say about that, except that we arrived well before the time we usually arrive when Wifey is here with us. Not that I'm saying that she's the delay, I'm just saying…

I better stop now. Let's just say all went well.

When we got home, it was time to start laundry. I don't know if you've ever tried to sort and wash and dry laundry with a seven and nine year old, but this is not the easiest of tasks.

First came the complaints, which I deftly parried by asking them if they wanted their DS's to become my property until Mommy returned.

(It's fortunate that they don't realize this is totally a bluff: I mean, am I really going to take the thing that distracts them in complete silence for hours at a time just because they're being a pain in the ass? Of course not! If Wifey doesn't come back, which is a distinct possibility, I'm going to marry those DS's and give them guardianship over the kids, since I'll expect them to do a good bit of the raising of the children.)

Second came the questions: does this white shirt go in lights? Do these black pants go in darks? Can bears climb trees?

This last one from the boy, for no real reason. I told him it depended on the bear, and he starts running through all the bears he knows: what about Polar Bears? Grizzly Bears? Winnie the Pooh? The Country Bear Jamboree Bears? What about them, huh?

I told them it didn't matter since all bears would be extinct soon under the world government's "Earth for Earthlings" policy, and that seemed to satisfy him. When they questioned me about it, I told them to ask their teachers, who were all big fans of the United World Government.

That'll learn those meddling teachers for criticizing my kid's lunches and sending home shitty little notes about telling your kids to be "friends" with everybody.

What if some other kid's a jerk? I tell my kids that if some kid is hassling them, just aim for the face and punch as hard as they can, since most children have a glass jaw. I even give them punching lessons.

Well, when mommy's not around I do. Not that I did that today. Or at least, not that I'll admit to.

After laundry was well started the kids wanted to know what was for lunch. I convinced them to do scrounge, where we just dug up whatever. So the girl and I polished off the chicken man from yesterday (not a man who is a chicken, but chicken bought from a man). And the boy had a hot dog.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the end of the leftovers.

The next few hours are kind of a blur. I remember telling the children to leave me alone, and I remember them not doing it, and I vaguely remember telling the girl to go do her homework or something, but quite frankly, it feels like I spent about forty years in solitary confinement with a speed-addicted two-year-old jonesing for a hit.

I realized as evening wore on that we'd need to do something for dinner. I was about to propose ordering Chinese when I remembered that Wifey has hexed the house to rise up and destroy us if we don't follow her list. So it's time the check, for the first time, what Wifey's put on the menu, because she doubtless bought the ingredients too. Or so I dearly hope.

And the lucky winner is: tuna casserole!

Well isn't that just great? The boy's favorite meal, which unfortunately requires preparation and lots of dish-washing before it's all said and done. Not coincidentally, this is also something Wifey doesn't particularly care for, nor does the girl.

So it falls to Daddy to make this, and yet both children know Wifey was the one who prepared the menu, so she gets all the love and adoration from the boy for including his favorite meal. It's like being married to Machiavelli sometimes.

Wary of having glass shards in close proximity to my testicles again, though, I dutifully followed the menu. So I'm cooking away when the girl wanders in.

"Can I help?" she asks.

"Sure! Grate a block of cheese!"

See, in our family, when a recipe says "sprinkle cheese" what it really means is "put a six-inch layer of cheese on top." Because cheese is like freedom: the more you have, the better off you are.

Then the boy wanders in. "Can I help?"

"Sure! Set the table."

"No, I want to help cook," he says.

"I don't have any job for you."

"Oh," he looks around wistfully. "So then can I have some cheese?"

So we're putting all the ingredients together, and when the girl dumps the cheese on top of the casserole, I see something that horrifies me: her nails contain the dirt and grime of several weeks beneath them.

"Did you wash your hands like I asked?"

She shrugs. "I dunno. I don't remember you asking."

"I'm pretty sure I did," I say. "Those nails are filthy, and you've been fondling our cheese for the past ten minutes!"

"This one's fine!" she protests, holding up her first finger. I see that it has, in fact, no nail.

"What are you talking about, doofus?" I ask. "You don't have a fingernail there."

"What?" she looks at her finger. "I did when I started. I remember because I had just cleaned the dirt out of it using your toothbrush, because this is the finger I pick my nose with, and I want it to be clean."

Serenity now. Serenity now. Serenity now.

So I was faced with a dilemma: to eat, or not to eat, the tuna-and-booger-fingernail casserole. On the one hand, it's just whatever fingernail's made of. It's not harmful. On the other hand, it's a fingernail. Although, if you think about it, it should have been semi-clean. But on the other hand, it's a fingernail.

I ended up deciding to eat the casserole. Oh, don't make that face: if you screwed around with the damn thing for thirty minutes in a cursed house, you'd cook and eat it too. So just spare me your high horsing.

But I will admit that I scrutinized dinner a little bit more judiciously than usual.

After dinner, we were cleaning up when a foul, wretched smell reached my nose. It seemed like a mix of stinky cheese, unwashed socks, and motor oil.

"Shh!" I warned the children. "I think we have a prowler in the house. Probably a Frenchman."

I hefted up a golf club and began creeping through the house. But no matter where I went, he was one step ahead of me, his foul odor lingering behind him but me catching neither sight nor sound of him.

Finally frustrated, I stopped.

"Have you found him yet, dad?" the boy asked.

I took two whiffs and replied. "Yup," I said. "And he is you."

"Ha ha!" the girl laughed. "You stink!"

"I can't stink!" the boy protested. "I just showered, uh, you know, uh,"

"That's what I thought," I said. "And what about you, little missy? When did you last wash?"

"I went to swimming on Monday," she said haughtily. "So you can forget about me smelling bad."

"Both of you in the shower," I insisted. "You know your mother wouldn't let you go to school stinking like this."

"But mom's not here," the boy said slyly.

"Yeah," the girl said. "And you're cooler than she is."

Now, I have to admit, I was tempted: it's not like the kids sleep upwind of me or anything, and the lure of being "cool" is pretty strong. And they do go to swimming on Mondays, which is a lot like taking a bath.

But letting your kids wallow in their own filth is the sign of being a bad parent. It's also a sign of being a hippie, and the last thing I want to raise is a hippie.

(Slight digression: there are lots of things I can handle my children deciding to become, up to and including a lawyer. But I will feel that I, as a parent, have failed if my child goes on to become, in descending order, an environmental engineer, reality-TV star, sociologist, or hippie.)

So I took the children upstairs and washed them. But since it was close to bedtime, I had to give them a DAW, or Daddy-Assisted Washing. This is where I control the water and hose them down, then they wash off, then I rinse them. Kind of like in a prison movie.

The girl went first, and all went well. She knows the drill. Then they boy came up. I should have foreseen trouble based on how giggly he was when he got in, but stupidly I foresaw nothing.
At one point I have to put shampoo on his head. So I hand him the shower nozzle and say "hold this perfectly still."

Which, translated into child language, means "Spray me in the face with this and then drop it and let it spray me all over with hot water while you stand there and cry that there are bubbles getting in your eye."

After he got out I realized that his armpits were completely dry, while mine were totally soaked.

Do you suppose Wifey will notice if there's only one child when she gets home?

Then it was off to bed for them, and now Daddy's going to go have some quality time with a soon-to-be-empty unopened bottle of whiskey.

Only eight more days left.

This is the End...of Day 2

2009-11-07T12:41:00.000-08:00

The kids are in bed. My head is throbbing. But I've reached the end of the second day of being without Wifey. Which, if you think about it, is really the first full day. But I digress...

After I'd showered and shaved, I felt somewhat better. We went and did a little shopping at the open-air market, it was time to prepare our costumes for the Halloween party tonight. See, we'd been invited to a costume party, and after much deliberation I had convinced the children that we should go with "theme" costumes so we can all dress the same.

Our theme? The Royal Family from a deck of cards. So the girl was the Queen of Hearts, the boy was the Jack of Diamonds, and I was the King of Clubs (complete with golf clubs, because I love a good pun). Wifey, ever helpful, had designed and executed three really fabulous card fronts for us to wear.

All I had to do was finish the back of them and then figure out a way to get them to hang on us, which only took me about an hour and six yards of tape. Ah, tape. Is there any problem it can't solve?

While I was in the middle of this, I got a call from Wifey.

"So, you're alive!" I said. "That's good!"

"I envy the dead," she said. "I really do."

And then she proceeded to tell me her tale of woe from yesterday. I can't possibly hope to convey to you the entirety of her awful trip, so let me hit the high points:

She sat next to Dr. Doom's mother. No, really! After hurrying through security and making her way to the plane, she ends up sitting next to a rotund Latvian woman who proceeds to detail her entire life story to Wifey, up to and including ten minutes ago when she got lost trying to get to the gates.

But wait, there's more! It turns out that this woman's life is a series of misfortunes caused by other people giving her misinformation (Wifey told me she suspected a bad case of dumbassery on the part of Mrs. Doom).

The best part is this: they were stalled on the tarmac for five hours. So Wifey spent five hours sitting still listening to this, then nine hours in the air listening to this. She put in her iPod, and Mrs. Doom talked. They ate dinner, and Mrs. Doom talked. She tried to sleep, and Mrs. Doom talked. She watched the movie, and Mrs. Doom talked.

In my mind, I see the scene from Forrest Gump where Bubba is talking all about shrimp, only in a Latvian accent.

Desperate for something else to do, Wifey tried to get out her find-a-word book. Wifey likes doing these, but I don't, because I always get distracted trying to find dirty words they didn't mean to put into the grid but have on accident.

So Mrs. Doom starts pointing out words over her shoulder! How Wifey managed to keep from throttling this woman I will never quite understand.

Finally they begin the descent, and Wifey begins to dream of a life after Mrs. Doom. However, her new best friend had other ideas.

"After we land," Mrs. Doom says, "Can you help me find the luggage claim area."

"Yes, whatever," Wifey says, proving that she's a better human being than I am. "Just shut up ten minutes."

So Mrs. Doom shuts up ten minutes, and in this time, suddenly Wifey realizes something.

"You're not a citizen, are you?"

"No," Mrs. Doom says.

"Well, then, I can't help you. I go through a different passport control line."

"But you could wait for me," Mrs. Doom says.

"I have another flight." Wifey says. "But since I missed it, they've scheduled me on some different flight, I'm sure, and I don't know which one it is."

"I have a connecting flight too," Mrs. Doom says.

"But what if while I'm waiting for you my flight takes off?"

"It won't," Mrs. Doom says.

"But what if it does?" Wifey says.

"I only need you to show me where the luggage claim area is."

"I'm pretty sure there's a sign," Wifey says. "And besides, if I was near one of those rotating belt things and you were there I'm certain that I'd shove you on it and hope it decapitated you."

Okay, she probably didn't say the last part, but I'm sure she thought it.

When, finally, she arrived at the airport she couldn't get out fast enough.

So she's going through the customs area when an airport inspector comes up to her and asks her which flight she was on. The inspector frowns and says,

"Ma'am, we have reason to believe that there was a violation of the passenger's bill of rights during that flight."

"Really?" Wifey asks. "Because we sat on the tarmac for five hours with no food or drink?"

"No ma'am," the inspector says. "Is it true that they showed Land of the Lost?" Wifey nodded. "The horror," the guy says as he wanders off. "The horror..."

Well, after hearing that, I said the only thing to Wifey that a loving, caring husband can:

"Thank God I wasn't there. The kids would have driven us crazy."

Unfortunately, at that moment the line went dead.

Anyhoo, after a nap we were ready to go to the party decked out in our costumes (see what I did there? Card-themed costumes yield a lot of puns!)

It was quite a hootenanny, let me tell you! These people really know how to throw a party! And while everybody came as a wich, or vampire, and the kids came dressed as Clone soldiers (which I am convinced is either a neocon plot to lure kids into the army or a progressive plot to rob us of individual identities), we were the only playing-card themed costumes.

We were the hit of the party.

Everybody was amazed and impressed.

The whole crowd swooned over us.

Until the slutty she-devil arrived and knocked the wind right out of our sails. I mean, how do you compete with six inches of sheer red fabric, spiderweb tights, and double D cups?

You don't, that's how. But, being a man, I didn't mind so much.

The other part of the party that was good was that the people had hired a magician to entertain the children, so I didn't see hide nor hair of them for two hours. And at this rate, any break I get from them is magical in and of itself.

Ahh, sweet release.

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and we eventually had to leave and come home. I cleaned us all up and sent the children to bed.

And I'll be going there myself quite shortly.

Two days down, nine to go.

Morning, day 2

2009-11-07T00:43:00.000-08:00

By my reckoning, I've spent over 120 nights away from home since we moved here, or about 1/3 of a year. Four whole months. On those nights Wifey is solely responsible for everything to do with putting the kids to bed, and then turning out the house, and then going to bed herself. She never, not once, mentioned to me that we live in a house that makes the Amityville Horror look like Cinderella's castle.

How in the hell does she do it?

I'm laying in bed listening to all kinds of shit last night: heavy breathing, footsteps upstairs and downstairs, boards creaking, kids occasionally murmuring in their sleep, and noise from outside that was definitely some psychopath checking the windows to make sure they're locked.

But oh my God! I don't know how to lock the windows! Shit! What if she left one open? What if, right now, some seven-foot CHUDD-eating monstrosity is looming over me with a rusty chainsaw planning on sodomizing my vacant eye sockets as I scream for mercy?

So, in short, I kind of had trouble sleeping last night. Finally I drifted off into a fitful, nightmare-plagued sleep.

When I groggily came awake, I was pleased to find that my head cold, which had migrated to my vocal cords, had decided to come north for better climes and was back in my head. So I felt like crap.

Finally I dragged myself out of bed. I found the girl quickly, but the boy was nowhere to be see.

*whew* All that worrying for nothing! How could I forget that the monstrous evil infecting the house would go for the youngest kid first? Silly me.

So I was unrolling the fire ladder to go out the window (because I figured that, like Chucky, my zombified son waited downstairs to slaughter us with a cheese grater) when he pops up from under a pile of sheets and yells "BOO!"

I pissed my boxers.

Once we'd gotten everything cleaned up, and I'd threatened to murder him, we went downstairs for breakfast.

My head throbbing, I went for the one morning cure that solves everything: coffee.

I am the only coffee drinker in the house, and I only drink caffeinated coffee. It's not that I have anything against decaf, it's just that if I'm going to waste my time fiddling about heating water and mixing in coffee and whatnot, I want some kind of payoff.

Drinking decaf coffee is like being a lab rat trained to hit a button to not receive a pellet.

So I open up the coffee container and find that IT'S FREAKING EMPTY! I mean, really, is it so hard for Wifey to keep my coffee thing full for me? Apparently it is. But she doesn't care, because she's six hundred thousand miles away laying on a beach with some thong-clad muscle man massaging her toes.

First she curses the house, then she flushes my coffee down the toilet.

After a lot of rooting around, I found three different kinds of decaf tucked away in the cabinets. WTF? I guess those 120 mornings when she wakes up alone, she's making decaf coffee for somebody who isn't me.

We'll see who gets who with a cheese grater when she gets back, indeed.

Finally I came up with a stopgap solution (scraping enough coffee out of the empty container to make a lamentably weak brew that taunted you with its inefficacity) and made myself some coffee. I felt marginally better.

"What do you want for breakfast?" I ask the children.

"I want a special breakfast!" the Girl says. "Because mommy isn't here. Pwease?"

Sigh. Okay. So we rooted through the "special breakfast" stuf, and found Blueberry Cheescake muffin mix, which mommy hates. So we had a very special father/daughter bonding time making blueberry cheesecake muffins.

They boy, meanwhile, played his DS and ignored us fully.

When I bit into the first muffin, I remembered that Wifey wasn't the only one who didn't care for these things; they taske like lard with artificial blueberries in it. Ugh. But the girl liked them, so she ate mine, the boy's, and hers.

After breakfast, thwarted in my drive to defeat my cold with coffee, I decide to go with the other sure-fired cold cure. "I'm gonna take a shower," I said.

"What about my breakfast?" the boy asks.

"Get whatever you want," I say.

"But she got something special!" he says. "Why?"

"Uh," I didn't really have an answer for that.

"Because he loves me more, duh!" she says.

He starts to get mad at me when I cut him off. "Hey, only one of my children scared the piss out of me this morning!"

Defeated, he slumps off to go get his own breakfast. Daddy wins!

So I decide to come check e-mail, because I didn't get a call last night about Wifey getting in, so there's probably a note on e-mail. And what I received there simultaneously filled me with dread and delight:

"Dear Passenger,

Your 10:30 AM flight has been delayed until 2:35 PM. Because you will then miss your connecting flight, we have booked you on the following flight: 8:30-9:45. Thank you for your understanding."

The e-mail from Delta arrived at 10:45 PM. That's right: it came well after the plane left. Now, really, how can that possibly be of any use whatsoever? And, unless I missed my guess, given the time change it meant that Wifey (who goes to bed around 10 PM) was up until 4 AM her time trying to get to her destination.

Man, is she pissed. I'm sure flames are shooting out of her eyeballs. I'm only hoping she didn't strangle some airport person and end up getting hauled off to jail.

So why does this fill me with joy?

Duh! Because I'm not there, idiot! When your wife is in full-on Godzilla mode set on destroying everything and everyone around here, you don't want to be present!

Plus, I still owe her for the hex on the kitchen, the lack of coffee, and never telling me that this house is terrifying at night.

It's now 10 AM. Time to face the day.

One down, Ten to go

2009-11-06T12:45:00.001-08:00

And so, dear reader, we reach the end of day 1. The children are in bed, I'm sitting down at the computer, and Wifey's…well, I'm not so sure where Wifey is. Probably on a beach getting suntan oil rubbed on her back or something.

Before she left, Wifey made this really complex menu for us, an exhaustive calendar of the children's activities, and a list of when her plants need to be watered.

(Quick note for any plantologists out there: does peeing on a plant count as watering it? Just let me know in the comments. Thanks!)

Personally, I admired her optimism.

"Are you sure you can handle this?" she said as we tearfully parted this morning at the airport.

"Pfft," I waved her off in disdain. "What could go wrong?"

I mean, come on: I outweigh the children by about a hundred pounds, I know both their names, and she gave me the bank card. Is some situation that I can't handle going to come up? I sincerely doubt it. I mean, I'm not Ward Cleaver or anything, but I'm certainly better than Homer Simpson.

So I hopped in my company car and drove to work, not even pausing to see if she could struggle the suitcase into the terminal. If she needs help, she'll hail a skycap or give up or something. For all I know she's gonna spend the next week hiding out in the Airport Sheraton or something.

(Digression: ironically enough, my company car is the car she uses, while I drive around in "her" car, because the car I bought for myself began hemorrhaging oil and had to be retired the same week I finally qualified for a company car. Let's hear it for dumb luck!)

At three, it was time to pick the little darlings up from school. So I zipped on over there, parked up near the football field, and made my way to the pickup room to get the boy (who, like a prisoner, must be paroled from school, unlike the girl, who wanders wild and free after school like a trustee with a weekend pass).

It was so dark that there were bats roosting in the light fixtures. A layer of dust had settled over everything. According to the clock on the wall, it was three thirty. But where were all the children?

After a bit of wandering around, I finally stumbled across a room with my child in it. I waved to him, and he didn't even acknowledge me before turning back to whatever it was he was working on over at the little table he was at.

I've been a father for nine years now, so I know exactly what the next step is: you go and noogie the child until he cries for mercy. And I was headed over to do exactly that when the room monitor, some little pencil-necked teacher's aide creep I'd never seen before in my entire life, stopped me.

"And who are you here to pick up?" he said, looking at me like I was some kind of kidnapper.

"That one," I said.

"Can I see your ID?" he asks me. So I flash the guy my ID. Take that, pencil-necked wannabe grown-up hall monitor!

"That's not you," he sniffed.

Oh, crap. Upon further review, it wasn’t me. It was Wifey's ID, since I'd just grabbed it out of my car, which is actually Wifey's car, while my proper ID was in her car, which is actually my car. So I tried to just play it off.

"But…you know her, right?" I asked. "I'm her husband. It's not like I jumped her in the parking lot and murdered her and stuffed her in the boot of the car and now I'm trying to pick up her children to sell them…"

Have you ever been about 30 words into a sentence and realized that what you just said was horribly inappropriate, verbalized in the wrong place, and overheard by six or seven strangers?

Yeah, me too.

So they're all looking at me and I pull my hands out of my pockets to prove that I'm not standing there "jingling my keys" or wearing those Freddy Kreuger razor gloves or whatever when the boy finally comes over.

"Okay dad," he says. "We can go now. I finished making you a paper gun. Here." And he hands me this paper gun that he's folded up. "See, I drawded some blood on the barrel just the way that you suggested, here and here," he says. "Where's mommy? Did you get rid of her already?"

"Let's just go," I say as everyone icily stares at me. "We've gotta go find your sister, okay?"

The teacher's aide squats down to talk to the boy. "You know, if you ever don't feel comfortable, you can always talk to a grownup here at the school. You know that, right?"

"Yeah," the boy says. "But daddy says if I don't feel comfortable I should just try to fart it out and as long as it doesn't stain my underwear there's no problem."

"What a delightful child," one of the women says as she stares daggers at me.

Oh, well, they were probably bitches anyways.

Then we went out into the playground to find the girl. Once I'd gotten ahold of her (easier said than done; she nearly knocked me over tackling me from behind) I got out of there ASAP.

When we got home, I checked the food schedule: pizza. Well, that could mean anything. For example, there could be frozen pizza, only I didn't find any. It could mean that I have to make pizza from a box, but that simply isn't going to happen. It could mean that I should order pizza, which sounds great.

Only, I just got over a cold, and whenever I have a head cold they always settle in my voice box and I can't talk right for two or three days. So I have this completely scratchy, bizarre voice. I couldn't order food on the phone in English, much less in the foreign language required to have anything here.

So I made the executive decision to damn the torpedoes and eat whatever we please for dinner later. The children, duped easily, quickly agreed. Freedom, thy name is bachelorhood!

But before dinner we have to go to their Friday activity, gymnastics. So I bundled them into the car and off we went to Little Gym. I, personally, couldn't wait. Every week they have a different theme at the gym, and this week is my personal favorite: pajama week.

As I always joke with Wifey, I keep hoping that one of the firm-bodied young instructor women will come to work in a tight little red negligee or something.

Sadly, this never happens. We have one instructor in flannel armor, a dude wearing swim trunks and a shirt, and a new girl that they've never had before wearing hot pink flannel pants.

Oh, well, better luck next year.

So the kids do their gymnastics thing, and I pull out my laptop to start writing this very post. And you know what? Battery's dead. So I get to watch the kids doing gymnastics.

And the only thing more boring than watching them do the same gymnastics routine I've seen for the past five years coached by a dude in swimtrunks and two refugees from the flannel factory is…I'll get back to you on that.

But of course, this week we had a big surprise in store for us: they were filming!

Yay! That means we get to go inside the big gymnastics room and watch the film! Oh, boy! Then spend several minutes watching the film of what we just saw! Hooray!

And do you know what the best part is? Do you?

I bet you don't!

This gym is used by children all week! In Europe! And it's Friday! And it's the last class of the day!

And it smells like a bunch of dirty Frenchmen had a rotten-egg food fight but were interrupted by some skunks and then the sanitation department buried them all in the refuse from a stinky cheese factory/papermill warehouse!

Oh boy!

I will admit that I don't know the Geneva Convention rules by heart, but I'm fairly certain my human rights were violated having to sit in that room and be assaulted by that smell.

Thankfully, mercifully, eventually the tape was over and we went home and immediately started making dinner, since we were all hungry. For the children, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and for daddy some microwave rice stuff that I love.

Being in a playful mood, I decided to play a joke on the boy. So I got out the strawberry jam to make his sandwich, then I threw a red plastic cup at him to make him think I'd thrown him the jam jar, so that when the cup bounced plastically off the floor he'd freak out and we'd all have a big laugh.

Instead, it hit him in the eye and he started swearing like a wounded pirate. His sister screamed, thinking the jelly was falling, and dove for it, knocking me to the ground and dropping the glass full of milk she was holding, shattering it everywhere and giving me a milk shower in the process.

I think there are glass shards in my underwear now.

After much crying and recriminations (and a not-so-satisfying dinner), we resolved never to go off-list again. Apparently mommy has cursed the house.

Home Alone

2009-11-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, despite the gloomy economic climate and my general worthlessness as an employee, my company offered me a contract extension to remain overseas for a few more years, and I accepted. That evening, I came home and told Wifey the good news.

"Guess what? I got a three-year extension! We're staying, baby!"

I knew there would be trouble when she said to me, "You know, I agreed to come over here for three years, and now you've signed an extension to keep me here for eight. I'm starting to feel like I was lied to."

So, sometime later, I was presented with a list of demands, eight things that she said were absolutely required for her to be happy over the term of the extension.

Like any good husband, I knew that only half the list really mattered. See, if I did all of them, then she'd just think up more stuff. If I didn't do any of them, there'd be hell to pay. If I did half of them, though, I'd have some bargaining chips when my company offers me another extension in three more years.

But the trick is that I needed to figure out which half of the things were important, and do those, and then ignore the other stuff.

Based on the age-old adage that there's no such thing as a stupid question, I decided simply to ask her "Any chance you'll tell me which of these are important and which ones I can ignore? 'Cause this list is kind of long."

Based on the dick punch I quickly received, the age-old adage is, at best, misleading.

But being a clever husband, I honed in like a laser-beam on the ones that I thought were probably important. Well, after I could focus my vision again I did.

The first item was easy: BUY SOME ANTIQUES. I figured she'd find it a pleasant surprise if I resolved one item immediately, so the day after getting the list I nicked on down to the second-day-bread store, purchased a loaf of week-old rum raisin loaf, and that was that. Because when bread ages past its sell date, it's an antique, right?

Based on the dick punch I received, though, she didn't mean it in quite that fashion.

So I pawned the kids off on a friend, took her off on a whirlwind tour of an antique store, bought something really old and probably too expensive, and crossed the first item off the list.

Advantage: Plebian!

The second item on her list was also easy: GET MORE STORAGE SPACE IN THE GARAGE. So I loaded the family into the car and went to Ikea, since they're full of stuff that you can easily construct to store the mountains of crap that fills up your garage and turns your house into a fire hazard.

At least, Ikeas in a normal country are like that. Our local Ikea was, sadly, lacking in any shelf stuff. They had all the six-inch-high beds you could ever want, though, just in case you've got some deep-seated desire to sleep very close to the floor.

So we ended up going to Brico, which is what K-Mart would be if it were run by Lawn Gnomes dedicated to slaughtering all of humanity by selling them dangerous and difficult-to-assemble items from inside a warehouse that smells like pee.

Okay, the "smells like pee" part K-Mart already has down, but you get the point. Miraculously, though, we found two incredibly heavy metal shelves that would do the trick, and I got them loaded into the car with only a partial hernia.

We got them home, and quickly I had not only assembled them but I'd cut my thumb from webbing to nail via this cool spiral that bled profusely enough that one shelf is known as "daddy's extra digit."

But they're up, the garage is neater than it ever has been, and another item was crossed off the list.

Advantage: Plebian, again!

The third item on the list was so laughable that when I saw it, I thought for a moment that it was some trick on her part to lull me into a false sense of security. But no, there it was: TRIM THE *@$&! TREE!!!

This combined two of my passions: using an obscure tool and destroying stuff. I practically raced out of the house when I saw this one with my long-handed overhead tree saw in hand. Ten minutes later I'd practically denuded the darn thing. No dick punch even necessary!

When I got back inside, I grinned at her. "I don't know why I never did that before," I said. "That was pretty fun!"

Note to self: after Wifey complains about something for three years, when you finally resolve it, don't admit that it wasn't a pain, or you might get a dick punch.

If you're keeping track at home, once I could stand and breathe under my own power, the score was now Plebian 3, Wifey 0.

The fourth item, though, brought me up short with a feeling of dread in my stomach: FIX OUTSIDE LIGHT.

Listen, I've done a little wiring in the house. But I draw the line at fiddling around outside on a ladder in a country where it rains 98% of the time. So there's no way I was touching that one.

On to the fifth item: MORE QUALITY TIME TOGETHER.

"You mean naked quality time, or quality time like doing stuff with our clothes on?"

She just raised an eyebrow at me, so I went on to item six: WIRELESS INTERNET IN THE HOUSE.

WTF? What am I, the Verizon guy? I couldn't hook up wireless internet if my life depended on it. I'm also half afraid that the radiation from a wireless in-home network might cause lupus, or erectile dysfunction, which is probably what she wants anyways because I'm hung like a donkey on Viagra.

So I skipped on to item seven: BIGGER HOT WATER HEATER.

Yeah, not in a rented house, babe. I'll tell you what: as long as I'm upping the property value for the landlord, why don't I build on an extension and install a Jacuzzi?

So I finally arrived at item eight: GET STUFF FROM STORAGE LOCKER.

Now, if you read our vacation odyssey from two years ago, you might remember our trip to the Storage Locker of Doom. And you might recall Wifey's reaction to seeing the stuff in there . And you might recall my joy.

Apparently, though, this has worn off, because there are some "things" she wants from storage. I don't know what, and I don't want to know what. It's enough to realize that unless I want to risk irradiation, raise the property value of my rented house, or become a better husband, this is pretty much my last option.

Oh, sure, I could let her cash in my life insurance by electrocuting myself on the front step fiddling with the driveway light, but I'm not running for super-husband here. And I don't even park in the driveway, either, she does.

However, a devious plan formed in my mind: you know, if I were to arrange it so that Wifey went to the storage locker, leaving me behind, then she would have to fulfill this item on her list.

So I'd get one item off the list for free without having to do anything at all!

As you can imagine, that cinched the deal for me: storage locker here she comes!

I marched straight into my bosses' office six weeks later (hey, like I said, I'm not running for super husband) and presented it to him like this:

"Now that I'm gonna be here for eight years instead of three, is there any chance that my wife could go get some stuff out of our storage locker and have it shipped here?"

"Sure," he says. "We want her to be happy, you know."

When I repeated that to Wifey, her reaction was classic:

"Shit. If I'd known that, I'd have asked for more."

Oh, well. Live and learn, Wifey!

So this morning, I loaded Wifey onto a plane bound for America. Now it's just me and the kids for ten whole days while she works like a galley slave to cross an item off her own list.

Game, set, and match to Plebian!

Unless something goes wrong while I'm totally alone with the kids without Wifey, who typically takes care of managing them and is the only one in the house who knows where everything is and is the only one who can ever manage our son without getting so frustrated that she wants to break something over his head or swallow poison, whichever is closer at hand. Oh, and did I mention that the Girl is worried that she's about to start puberty and has already told me that she misses her "girl talks" with mommy and might have to have one with me?

I'm beginning to think there was a hole in my plan. And I'm right royally screwed if she doesn't come back in ten days.

I'll keep you (and Wifey, if she thinks to read the blog) updated on our progress…

Back to normal

2009-11-06T08:34:00.000-08:00

Okay, so we're going to go back to the satire/humor angle I'm used to working, starting with the next post. That last one was kind of an aberration, see. It's not like I'm wise, or thoughtful, or even very bright.

And for all those of you who have been pining away for another of Plebian's Seria Adventures, it's time once again!

Rope a dope?

2009-11-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

So I'm reading American Lion, the biography of Andrew Jackson. As a Tennesseean, I have always loved Jackson. He's basically the only TN president worth a damn (the others are Johnson, famous for being impeached, and Polk, famous for, uh, having a name very close to a common meat product).

What I've always loved about Jackson is this: when he lost the election of 1824, he believed he'd been screwed in a backdoor deal by Henry Clay and John Q. Adams, with Clay taking the Secretary of State under President Adams in return for throwing his support to Adams. This all despite Jackson having won the popular vote.

So Jackson did what any clever politician would do: he spent the next four years criticizing the administration, decrying the corrupt bargain that had defied the will of the people, and worked his way into the public imagination as their savior.

He won the 1828 election, unseating Adams and causing a furor.

When he took office, the Washington insiders were horrified. They despised him. Some of them opposed Jackson on everything on the grounds that if Jackson wanted it, it must be wrong.

Despite all this, Jackson remained popular with the people and, more often than not, got what he wanted done.

I find this interesting because we've only ever seen this strategy used once in the past forty years, when Reagan kept himself in the public eye after losing to Ford in 1976 to re-emerge four years later as the "people's champion" in the 1980 election. And Reagan, as you may know, ended up with a successful (in his eyes) presidency.

In 2000, Al Gore could have used this strategy. If he'd simply conceded, kept himself pushed forward as a stern critic of George Bush, and not gotten distracted lecturing about global warming, I'm convinced he'd have easily cruised to victory in 2004. But for some reason, Gore didn't do this. How he could miss this strategy, coming as it does from the founder of the Democratic party and a president from his home state, always perplexed me.

I wonder, though, if this isn't the place that Sarah Palin is carving out for herself. She certainly seems to be in the heads of the establishment, which despises her. She's clearly set herself forward as an opposition voice to the Democratic Party and President Obama. She seems to be making her case directly to the people, as Jackson once did.

She can leap upon every misstep by the President, every error by his cabinet, every unfortunate incident, and use it as a club against them and then explain how much better she would do. And with no real duties of her own to perform, there is nothing to yell back at her except insults, which rarely resonate well outside of partisans.

Witness the power of her "death panels" attack. She says it, the Democrats go apoplectic, and finally they end up changing the provision. Whether it's a fair attack or not, or a fair comment, a woman who is essentially a private citizen riled up the entire Democratic party and forced a change in a proposed bill.

That's more power than actual elected Republican congressmen have.

She has set herself up to spend the next three years as an optimist, explaining how it could be done better, while her opponents must explain poor performance(bad) or embrace failure(worse). That, to me, sounds very much like a hybrid Jackson/Reagan strategy.

I'm not saying that Palin's destined to be president. I'm saying that, at the current time, she certainly seems to be running a better strategy than any that's been deployed since Reagan lost his challenge to unseat Ford.

And that may explain a lot of the hair-tearing that surrounds her by Democrats.

Can this strategy be defused? Certainly. Here are four ways Obama could cut her off at the pass:

1) It's the economy, stupid: tomorrow, appear on TV and say a variation of the following: "My fellow Americans, let me be clear: the economy is our top priority. Starting from today, November 6th, my administration is pushing every other issue to the back burner until the suffering from this global recession has abated. We may have inherited the problem, but that won't keep us from creating the solution. Yes we can!"

Then, enforce ruthless message discipline: we don't talk any more about health care, or card check, or cap-and-trade, until unemployment is dropping and the economy has clearly recovered. So long as something else is atop the agenda, the American people assume (rightly) that the President and the Democrats don't care that the economy's in the tank.

Go on TV every week and talk up the economy. Livestream it over the internet. Call it a monitor-side chat. FDR would be proud.

This, incidentally, sank the first Bush and elevated Clinton. So it's inexcusable for them not to know this.

2) Ignore the critics, say nothing, and then repeat: it's maddening that a gifted campaigner, who has the media stepping atop one another to defend him, feels the need to crouch down to take pot shots at radio personalities and former governors. There's an old adage about getting in a pissing match: always piss up. When you're president, you can't piss up! So don't get in pissing matches, morons!

This goes for his surrogates, too. When David Axelrod whines about Rush Limbaugh, it elevates Limbaugh. The recent hand-wringing over Limbaugh's commentary makes me laugh: who is it that elevated Limbaugh to the President's level? It wasn't Limbaugh; it was the President himself by getting cheesed off over the infamous "I hope he fails" line.

When Reagan re-ran for election in 1984, Mondale desperately wanted to debate him. Reagan, with a monstrous lead, wouldn't have it. Why give Mondale's campaign any oxygen, when ignoring it was all that was required to win? So this is what Reagan did, unable to hear Reporters asking "why won't you debate?" because of the helicopters.

Reagan wins in a landslide. Why is Obama pumping pure oxygen to Sarah Palin?

3) Laugh and the world laughs with you: For me, candidate Obama's greatest moment in the campaign was when he was asked what his greatest fault was at a debate, and he said he had a messy desk. The other two candidates (Clinton and Edwards, if memory serves) answered after him and gave the typical "sometimes I care so much it keeps me up at night" answers.

After the debate, Obama joked that if he'd known the answers were supposed to be like that, then he'd have said that his greatest fault was that sometimes he went out of his way to help old ladies across the street (or something to that effect). It was funny. It was human. It made us like this guy who, like us, thought that a lot of this political stuff was phony and stupid.

Where did that guy go? I'm not asking for a comedian as a president, but the dour, stern-faced, angry president who sends on-air corrections and runs a White House tipline is a fary cry from the one who could laugh at himself eighteen months ago.

4) Remember whose shoes you fill: President Obama. Until 2012 (and perhaps beyond) he is our President. The office is worthy of respect, regardless of the man (or woman, someday) who fills it. It's the office that was filled by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and other bold, visionary men who, for better or worse, changed this country and its people.

It was also filled by William Henry Harrison, James Buchanen, Jimmy Carter, and other men who are better forgotten than regretted.

But at all times the President should carry himself with dignity. He should be wary of expending the dignity of his office in political pursuit. He should treat other heads of state with respect and dignity, regardless of his personal feelings. Our President should succeed at those things to which he turns his hand, because he is our President.

He should represent all of us, not some of us, and he should never apologize that we exist, nor grovel in the face of other nations. Just as we would not grovel to him, nor should he ever expect us to.

Clinton did not let himself be made a fool of on the international stage by prostituting his office in a vain (and fruitless) civic pursuit. Monroe, in the infancy of our nation, told the Europeans that they were not welcome here, and that they should look elsewhere for colonies, instead of groveling before them and begging their forebearance.

Our President should never bow, nor kiss a ring, nor show any obesiance to any other ruler or potentate on all this planet. We are a free people, and he is our leader.

President Obama needs to remember this: carry himself with dignity. Let a mayor throw out the first pitches, and let a governor campaign. Let an assemblyman harangue policemen.

The President has more important things to do.

So, yeah, it's been a while

2009-11-05T13:29:00.000-08:00

Yeah, yeah, I know; it's been a while. A long while. I've been rather swamped at work. On the one hand, this is a good thing: the whole global recession hasn't really impacted me at all. On the other hand, it pretty much killed off my blog.

But, I got an e-mail asking me, basically, "where the heck did you go?" And I see that I have two followers despite not having posted in many months (which is comparable to having two interregnums and forty Italian parliaments in real time).

So I'll post twice today, because inspiration struck me earlier today. And this counts as a post. Honest, it does.

Yeah, that'll make up for it.

Through the Looking Glass

2009-07-21T21:08:00.001-07:00

While others waste their time conspiracy-mongering about the Obama birth certificate, a great and hideous cabal works its nefarious will to alter the United States in ways we cannot possibly imagine, spearheaded by the Republican arch villain Karl Rove.

I speak, of course, about the ongoing efforts to sell southern California to China, which is happening under our noses and with the express written consent of the NFL.

When I tell people about this conspiracy, they inevitably pass through three phases: disbelief, followed by ridicule, and finally spittle-flecked outrage at this plan.

Read on and prepare your salivary glands, my friends.

Here are the facts:

California is impoverished, and is in fact paying bills by sending misspelled IOUs written on used cocktail napkins that have been coated in the Ebola virus in an attempt to either discredit or slay their creditors.

California’s Republican governor is a foreigner famous for having come from a communist country in the east.

The US is deeply indebted to China, and is taking on more and more debt every day to fund Obama’s lavish plans to socialize everything from health care to underwear (or didn’t you read the Boxer-Reid bill ‘Fruit of the Loom Relief Act of 2009’?).

Sarah Palin is doing everything in her power (faking pregnancies, resigning as governor, and even giving lapdances to Bigfeet) in an attempt to draw public attention northwards on orders of her Rovian master.

Obama is a lousy sportsman and has long harbored an intense disdain for surfing, ever since a group of surfers beat him up in junior high school, which is why he encouraged North Korea to nuke his home state of Hawaii (plot only foiled by the timely intervention of Kim Jong-Il’s bout of Explosive Flatulence). With southern Cal out of the way, there will be no surfing enclaves left.

No NFL teams of note reside in southern California, and the NFL is desperate to go global despite the obvious barriers to playing football outside of the US, most notably the rampant mental deficiencies in other cultures that make them enjoy soccer (which is erroneously translated as football in most other languages).

Obama’s secretary of state has close contacts with numerous Chinese officials and previously helped sell them other important US landmarks, such as the White House.

The Chinese recently toured Southern California with a torch to check it out, not unlike a prospective homeowner looking in the crawl space of a property with a flashlight. Before you scoff, remember that in many third-world countries a torch is just like a flashlight, and San Francisco is very much like a crawl space, only it smells worse.

At this point, as the spittle collects in the corner of your mouth, you might be wondering why Karl Rove wants to carve Chinafornia out of the southernmost part of the Golden State. The reason is quite simple: to create a permanent Republican majority. With those leftists gathered on the southern part of the state now getting what they deserve (re: communist enslavement), the northern part of the state will swing right and suddenly the guaranteed 55 Electoral College votes for the Democrats will disappear.

Illegal immigrants from Mexico will now be China’s problem, not ours. China will likely handle them in the respectful, humane way that they handle other problems, which will satisfy Rove’s dark thirst for blood.

Even the Democrats gain something, which is why they are supporting this vile effort: they’ll be rid of Nancy Pelosi.

The Real Civil War Analogy

2009-06-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

Some people think that Obama is the new Lincoln. Others think he's the second term of Jimmy Carter. They're both wrong.

Barack Obama is serving the first term of George McClellan, Lincoln's do-nothing general who ran on the Democrat appeasement platform in 1864.

The similarities don't stop at their party: both were first-class politicians, both had persecution complexes, both blamed the previous administration for all their problems, both talked big but never particularly accomplished anything, and both sat on their hands when action is called for.

We don't specifically know whether McClellan would have intervened to save sailing ship manufacturers during the rise of steamboats, only to see them go bankrupt anyways. But he probably would have. Whether or not he would have also turned their management over to scurvy-ridden merchant seaman we can only guess.

And we can also only guess at whether or not McClellan would have pissed on his most ardent supporters and told them it's raining, but he did run as a pro-war candidate with an appeasement platform, on an appeasement ticket, with a peace advocate as a running mate. The will of his party, at least, seemed clear on this issue.

Whether those who wished to continue the war would have slavishly followed McClellan after he signed away half the US to the Confederate States of America is unknown, but I like to think they'd have shown a little more sand than the gays, Jews, businessmen, and peace advocates who Obama has so far spurned as he enforces the DOMA, demonizes Israel, socializes the economy, and continues Bush policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo.

The only real mystery is why Republican elites didn't flock to McClellan in 1864, pronouncing him a "man of great character" and "somebody we can do business with" despite obvious signs to the contrary.

They must have had some kind of commitment to principles or something back then.

How novel.

Attacks on Pirates Making Them Bolder, Study Says

2009-04-27T14:35:00.001-07:00

A non-partisan think tank, the Organization for Promoting Right-Wing Agendas (OPRA) today warned that recent counterattacks on pirates near the Horn of Africa could lead to "disastrous consequences" and would mean an escalation of pirate raids, not a decrease as some have suggested.

"Shooting and killing pirates only makes them bolder and causes their number to swell," said OPRA spokeswoman Cheyenne Markoni-Spitzhughes from their London offices. "Over two hundred years of data have shown that there's a direct correlation between dead pirates and the incidents of piracy on the high seas, with more dead pirates meaning more attacks. The world needs a better way."

Instead, OPRA suggests that world governments form a new UN agency dedicated to opening call centers in Somalia, where the pirate's natural aggressiveness can be channeled into more productive venues. "After all," Markoni-Spitzhughes said, "if they're willing to try to take over an oil tanker then they should be comfortable cold-calling people to see if they're interested in switching their long-distance carrier."

Top Democrats scoffed at the warning, however, calling OPRA a "thinly-disguised stink-tank for the Republican smear campaign."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters that "every thinking person knows that pirates are like any other terror-wielding outlaw group: if you shoot them, then there are less of them active, and potential recruits inevitably turn to another, less dangerous line of work, such as tasting food additives or being a bungee cord tester."

President Barack Obama painted it in even starker terms in his White House address. "Despite Hollywood glamorizing pirates in their shameful movies, and Disney making pirating seem fun in their disgraceful rides, we will continue to bring shock, awe, and death to anyone who would prey upon the weak and the helpless on the high seas."

Economic Freedom and the NFL

2009-03-26T12:01:00.000-07:00

The intertubes are all abuzz with the latest from the NFL, namely the coming shift to an 18-game season and dropping two preseason games. The consensus among sportswriters, their commenters, and drooling idiots (but I repeat myself) is something along these lines:

"Good, because charging full price for preseason games is a total ripoff, man. Those games totally suck!"

Let me be blunt: the NFL will charge whatever they want for the preseason games, and so long as somebody pays it, it's not too much, and the price is not a rip-off. If you feel spending for preseason games is a waste of money, use the tried-and-true method that other consumers use with the Shamwow, New Coke, and the Segway Scooter: don't buy the damn thing.

But please, spare me the faux-populist outrage against "exorbitant" ticket prices. For one thing, most of the simpering nimrods doing the bitching can't even spell exorbitant. For another, nobody forces you to go to preseason games. In fact, if they suck so bad, you should be thankful to have a reason not to attend.

If the NFL started auctioning off used jock straps (complete with ball sweat!) on E-Bay, I'd not only steer clear but have to clean my E-Bay account with bleach. But you know that some wannabe's somewhere is willing to pay $110 plus shipping and handling for a used TO jock strap. Maybe even more if it was worn in a big game, or had authentic "battle stains" on it.

And that is right, and good, and the natural state of capitalism. Exercising our economic liberty to make stupid choices about sporting events and memorabilia is a form of freedom, and we should encourage people to do that.

Because freedom in abundance is never a bad thing.

REVEALED: Obama is Rovian Plant!

2009-03-16T15:07:00.001-07:00

An explosive new expose set to publish next week will reveal that, far from the starry-eyed newcomer he poses as, Barack Obama is actually a Manchurian candidate cooked up by none other than longtime Conservative blackguard Karl Rove. While White House officials have scoffed at the allegations, some Democrats have privately admitted that they had begun to suspect this themselves.

"Cozying up with lobbyists? Putting the deficit on steroids? Trying to re-establish the welfare benefits that were discredited in the mid-90s? It's been clear a long time that something's not right with Barack Obama," said one Democratic senator. "The only thing he could do worse is get distracted with some side issue, anger our critical allies, and have half his nominees withdraw in disgrace. Oh, wait!"

Among the charges the book makes are that President Obama:

-Is obsessed with making Rush Limbaugh the pre-eminent voice on television and radio, thus ensuring that the Conservative message is heard by as many people as possible

-Intended to thoroughly discredit the traditional press as starry-eyed and naïve, by first sweeping them off their feet and then by treating them like a sophomore on prom night, leaving them puffy-eyed and sore-assed

-Staffed his cabinet with the worst caricatures of liberal excesses, from anti-Semitism to rampant hypocrisy to a total disregard for basic tax law

-Has not been criticized by George Bush not because the former president respects tradition and the honor of the office, but rather because Bush knows that Rove is really the one pulling the strings of the Obama administration

-Sleeps in Star Trek pajamas

-Wanted to revive Democrat's image as "tax-and-spend liberals" by acting as a tax-and-spend liberal

Calls to Rove's sinister subterranean lair for comment were not returned, likely because the peals of his sinister laugh were echoing off its cacophonous ceiling.

News from the Future

2009-03-03T11:36:00.000-08:00

News from the Future

2009-03-02T11:36:00.001-08:00

News from the Future

2009-02-18T12:12:00.001-08:00

(Note: Living as I do near the Hadron Collider, I expected strange things to occur once they'd fired that thing up. And lo and behold, I have started receiving e-mail updates of news from the future, just like that show Early Edition except with a lot bigger audience. So I'm going to pass along to you my news updates from the future.)

Ford to Declare Bankruptcy

Ford Motor Company, the only automaker that is not part of the US Government Automobile Fabrication Corporation, announced today that its 2009 losses have driven it into bankruptcy and that it will likely have to lay off up to 40% of its workforce and may eventually sell all assets.

The move comes a week after GM unveiled its newest car, the Michelle, a sporty 3-seater made of 98% recycled parts. As all other models have been declared redundant, the Michelle is considered to be "the new standard" for GM and represents a conversion to all-green technology, getting 38 miles per gallon and capable of reaching highway speeds in excess of 48 miles per hour in non-headwind driving. Although the base cost is $36,000 per unit, after government rebates, dealer incentives, and buyer subsidies the cost is $1200, which after the New Car Stimulus Act of 2009 means that the consumer must only pay 1/3 of the sticker price, or $400.

Ford's truck line had already collapsed after the other member of the USGAFC, Chrysler, introduced the Kenyan, a sturdy two-seater with almost one and a half tons of pure towing power and a bed just over twenty square feet. The Kenyan gets eleven miles per gallon of 100% ethanol, whose $19.50 per gallon cost at the pump is reduced for consumers by 75% after the Renewable Fuels Subsidy Act of 2009. Though some have criticized its unique 3-axle design, its $750 price tag (after rebates and subsidies shave off some of the $62,000-per-unit cost from the factories) have had consumers lining up to purchase the unique vehicle.

In unrelated news, both companies have petitioned the government for an addition $62 billion, nine weeks after receiving an addition $78 billion from the government. The moves are necessary, say industry experts, because the stalemate in negotiations between Unions and Management are entering their fourteenth month. At issue is the desire of management to trim pensions for workers with less than ten years seniority by 1%, which according to a UAW spokesma "is tantamount to selling out future generations of workers forever."

Meanwhile sales of Ford's newest flagship automobile, the Daisy, have sagged after a promising start. The seven-seat "green" minivan has suffered from its excessive cost of $24,000 and criticism from environment groups, who say that its 45 MPG is unacceptably low for a vehicle that doesn't run on 100% ethanol blends. Also exacerbating the problem is the $4,000 penalty consumers must pay for the Daisy's excessive carbon footprint, as well as a $2,500 "sourcing fee" for buying outside of the USGAFC approved dealer network.

Ford has indefinitely postponed the release of the 2010 Hayek, which was designed to compete with the Michelle. The five-seat sedan would have been made of 99% recycled parts and in tests was capable of up to 70 MPH with an efficiency of 45 MPG, but its forecasted $18,000-per-unit cost was deemed "untenable" in the current market.

Former Vice President, Nobel Laureate, Oscar winner, and Pulitzer Prize author Al Gore said that the announcement showed that capitalism and environmentalism can work together to create a vibrant market. "Ford is paying for its decision to remain outside the USGAFC, and consumers are responding by choosing vehicles with a more environmentally sensitive production process. Once again the free market, guided by the benevolent hand of government experts, has proven to be the most efficient engine for effective social and environmental change."

A Night at the Ballet

2009-02-16T12:23:00.000-08:00

As the great philosopher Moe Scyzlack one said, "we're all pigs, Homer. The difference is that every once in a while you pick yourself up out of the muck, clean yourself off, and show your wife that you love her."

With all due respect, Moe is an idiot.

Six months ago, Wifey informed me that one of my husbandly duties was that I was responsible for taking her out once a month without the children so that we could spend "couple time" together.

This was in the context of a discussion about my many failings as a husband. And by discussion, I mean that she spoke in a louder-than-normal tone of voice and I nodded vigorously.

Hey, I haven't been married for fifteen years on accident.

I did pretty good at it for a while. In August we went to see a movie that I loved and she hated (Cloverfield). Then in September we went to a one-night-only tractor pull, and the next month I got so drunk at Oktoberfest that I vomited down the shirt of one of the busty waitresses. Good times.

For some reason, Wifey didn't seem too upset that we didn't go out for the next three months, and I figured that meant I was off the hook.

With Valentine's Day coming up, though, Wifey decided that it would be a glorious idea to reaffirm our love and commitment. When I told her I hated Valentine's Day and that I didn't want to go anywhere, she offered to send me up Swan Lake with a Nutcracker I'd never forget.

Seeing her interest in ballet, I decided to see if there was a show in the area on Valentine's Day. And lo and behold, I found us boss tickets to Romeo and Juliet the Ballet, by Prokofiev, danced by the Moscow City Ballet.

Like I care, but she's into this kind of thing, so I figured it'd at least get her in a good humor, which is what 90% of marriage is all about.

When we went to dinner, I could see that she was really excited. She had a twinkle in her eye and a lift in her step that I hadn't seen in years. I began to get excited, thinking about the post-ballet entertainment that I had planned, and which by the Valentine's Code is required of any woman who attends an event where her spouse or significant other is forced by social protocol to wear a tie.

Hey, my tie may have read "I'm With Stupid" with an arrow pointing up, and have had a naked woman concealed on the underside, but it still counts, even if it was a clip-on.

We entered the ballet at promptly 7:50, in order to be well seated before the 8:00 curtain up. This was the first time I'd been to the ballet, and I learned three things:

1) It didn't start until 8:15

2) It takes at least 15 minutes for a ballet character to die, which is a problem in a show where half the characters are going to be murdered or commit suicide.

3) In the ballet, no one can hear you scream.

We were halfway through the thirty-minute "dance of love", where Romeo and Juliet roll around, kiss, dance on tip-toe, then repeat ad infinitum, when Wifey leans over to me and says "I have a secret."

"What? You have a secret bottle of poison stashed somewhere?" I ask.

She shakes her head. "I'll tell you later."

Then she kisses me on the cheek.

So I'm running through all the possible secrets she could have: she bought me a present, she's got polio, I have only minutes to live, she's willing to walk out at intermission, something. But I come up with nothing.

Finally, mercifully, intermission comes. Then, all too soon, it's over, and I march back into the Bataan Death Dance.

The second act starts with some sword fights, which of course culminate in Tybalt killing Mercutio, which sets off ten minutes of women in black shrouds dancing around and Mercutio staggering this way and that, never actually dying but not able to live out the rest of the ballet (although they do drag his corpse back and forth a few more times).

Just as Mercutio falls, Wifey leans over to me and whispers in my ear "I'm not wearing panties." Then she gives my earlobe a little nibble.

I now considered three courses of action:

Course #1: Do nothing.
Course #2: Jump on her like a trampoline.
Course #3: Verify whether or not this information was true before embarking upon Course #2.

You have to understand that in the entire course of our lives together, the only time Wifey has ever left the house without panties is, well, very much never. In fact, short of showering, I think she wears panties all the time. Oh, maybe not underneath the full-length circa 1860's flannel nightgown that she wears to bed. But I'd never know, since it's like +5 Plate Mail in terms of protection.

Besides, Course #1 seemed like an insult. If she's being honest, I figured she wanted me to show interest. And I was interested. Very interested.

Even in Europe, though, I'm pretty sure going at it like wild gibbons per Course #2 would get you arrested. Well, not in Amsterdam, but anywhere else it's dicey.

So I opted for Course #3.

Since I don't want this to turn into a Dear Penthouse letter, I'll just give you the broad brush stroke of what happened: I reached over under the coat on her lap and, a few opened buttons later, verified that I had received an accurate account of the state of her undergarments.

Course #2 was looking better and better all the time. In fact, I suggested it, but she rebuffed me to continue watching Juliet flail about as she tried to decide whether or not to drink the sleeping potion (total time required: 45 minutes and 22 seconds of toe-standing indecision).

In due time the ballet was finished. I think Romeo won, but I'm not quite sure, since I didn’t pay that good attention to it; I was distracted by other things. People started clapping, dancers started bowing, and I started drooling.

I jumped up from my seat, her coat in my hands so that I could help her into it like a true gentleman. My watch snagged ever so momentarily on something, but I ignored it, and I saw a shower of small white confetti bits fly out over the audience from behind us.

"Nice touch," I thought.

Wifey looked up at me in horror. I looked down at her in lust. The old lady in the row in front of us, who had turned to see what hit her in the back of her head, screamed and fainted.

There was Wifey, in all her commando glory, dress now torn open to her waist, looking for all the world like she wanted to murder me where I stood. And here I was, slobbering and shaking her coat at her and urging her to get up so we could go discuss politics and backgammon in the parking lot.

Yes, the full reality of what had happened had not yet sunk in. To be honest, I was doing most of my thinking in the southern hemisphere, where such concerns as morals and decency rarely see the light of day.

Fortunately, people swarmed to help the collapsed old lady. The house lights were brought up. I dashed into the aisle, urging Wifey to come with me, always capering a few steps in front of her and shaking her coat at her like some kind of crazed medicine man as I tried to get to the car, and paradise, as quickly as possible.

Behind me came Wifey, cursing and trying to hold her dress together and catch up to me. And behind her a group of people shouting for everyone to get out of the way, that the old lady needed to be taken out into the air, thus attracting the most attention possible to her as she tried to climb the stairs and not give everyone seated along the aisle a money shot that they'd not soon forget.

Judging from my angle, she failed miserably, and I think I saw one or two camera flashes as she came along behind me.

I was out the door quickly, an angry Wifey right behind me, now screaming curses into the night. "WOULD YOU STOP AND GIVE ME MY COAT, YOU MORON?"

I began to suspect that the night would soon take a somewhat less-than-pleasurable turn.

She didn't speak a word to me as we headed back to the parking lot, trying as she was to hold her dress closed, pull her coat down, and walk all at the same time. My Spidey-Sense was tingling, telling me that to speak was to die, so I kept my mouth shut.

The warm breezes of the Southern Hemisphere were extinguished, snuffed out by the sudden resurgence of the ice cap from Wifey.

When we reached the parking lot, it was closed with a big white gate. So we stood, and we waited. And waited. And waited. Slowly, other patrons began filing out and stood in line behind us, pointing and whispering, with the two of us standing at the center of a small circle now surrounded by gleeful onlookers, at least one of whom was kneeling and pointing a camera phone at Wifey.

"Did you have a good time?" I asked.

"Let's see," she said. "My favorite dress is ruined, I was exposed to half a theater, and I'm standing out here freezing my hoochie off waiting for the gate to open. Do you suppose I had a good time?"

"You've probably lost a little of your ardor, then," I said.

She glared at me.

"How about when we get home, I'll see if I can help you relight that pilot?"

She glared at me with death in her eyes. I knew all hope was lost, so I tried my trump card:

"Since I went through all this trouble to set up our night out, just to be fair you should still plan on having intense verbal negotiations with my silent partner when we get home."

Whereupon, to my great chagrin, she showed me the Nutcracker.

Have I mentioned how much I hate the ballet?

A Letter from the US Economy

2009-02-05T12:38:00.001-08:00

Dear US Populace,

Though in the past I have never directly addressed you, preferring to act either via unseen methods (the so-called "invisible hands") or through sweater-clad proxies, I am taking the exceptional step of speaking directly to you, the US taxpayer, during this time of our joint crisis.

I have taken this drastic measure because more and more of you are being misled by charlatans, fools, and gun-toting religious nuts who want you to believe that I will receive little or no benefit from the stimulus package that is currently passing through congress.

I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth, and I shall be stimulated more thoroughly than Ron Jeremy after swilling down a Cialis cocktail and dropping into the Playboy grotto.

Perhaps you live in a fairy-tale world where cat feces miraculously shape themselves into effigies of the Virgin Mary strangling Christ by his umbilical cord, or where bicycle paths spontaneously carve themselves in areas where they are patently infeasible and unnecessary, but here in the real world it takes tax money forcibly removed from your pocket to provide these valuable social services to the chronically unskilled and underemployed.

During your morning commute on the Interstate, where you see a large empty expanse of terrain beside the road, I see a place where an ultra-modern, high-cost light rail system could endlessly shuttle half-empty trains back and forth in an eternal procession of protected union jobs and hopelessly outdated railworker benefits packages, all taking people from a place they don't live near to another place they don't want to go.

Assuming, of course, that no tit mice or red-crested dungbombers would be disturbed by the installation of such a rail system, in which case it will have to be rerouted through a residential area.

I have read several economic "columnists" claim that there are legitimate concerns, but I can assure you that they are invalid. Even now sociology and performing-arts majors are flooding the rolls of the unemployed; don't they deserve a chance to be hired by a shoddy construction outfit owned by political cronies of the ruling party so that they, too, can have the life experience of constructing shoddy high-density housing that will crumble into disuse within the next 3 to 5 years?

To those of you who still feel that my stimulus is less important than your paltry tax dollars, which you will doubtless squander selfishly thinking only of yourselves, remember that when I am angry my wrath is terrible to behold. If you think that my boundless rage will be slaked by closing thousands of Starbucks and brutalizing the journalism industry, you are fooling yourself.

Inefficient car manufacturers are only the beginning. Unless I get my stimulation, I may turn my attention to other trillion-dollar operations that are poorly run.

Like your government.

Why Baseball is America's Sport

2009-01-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

While the unthinking cosmos turns in its splendor around us, and our national soul is rent asunder on the political stage, it is always comforting this time of year to know that we can turn our careworn eyes to sports to find ourselves reflected in its warming glow.

But this warmth comes not from the beer-soaked artificial grass of the football field, with the communist NFL teams each vying to be more average than one another and the slaveholding plantations of College Football using computers to see which one gets to discriminate against the Mormon colleges. Nor do we see ourselves in the vast array of minor sports, from lacross to hockey to basketball.

No, I speak of that truest of American sports: Baseball.

Baseball is a microcosm of life, capitalism, and truth: rich teams like New York or Boston are able to shower players with money, thus allowing them to hold a competitive edge that can never be erased. This is good, and right, and completely American. Who wants underdogs succeeding when we have rich, cocky favorites to support?

You see this attitude rightly reflected in sports film. When I saw the first Rocky, there wasn't a dry eye in the house when cocky champion Apollo Creed finally put the common street man in his place. Once again sanity reigned, and the favorite won out over the plucky underdog. This is why Rocky is a successful movie that won a screenwriting Oscar, the first ever awarded to a functional illiterate.

Who among us cannot help but smile when the rich, elite private school that recruits players from out of state wins out over the small, rural public school in the local sporting levels? This is right, and good, and the way that the world should work: underdogs should lose, because that is why they are underdogs.

There are signs of hope in the NFL that this mediocrity might finally begin to fracture, and we could once again have the elite and the scum, which is the way of the world. Everyone I know is praying for an uncapped year, so that we can finally see football teams vastly overpay for fading stars at the tail end of their careers, just as we so often see in baseball.

Because as the old joke goes, what's the difference between Lehman's CEO buyout package and Carl Pavano's contract with the Yankees?

The Lehman CEO wasn't a part-time employee.

Cowboys to Build Second Locker Room

2009-01-19T13:48:00.001-08:00

Jerry Jones today hit back at growing rumors that the Dallas Cowboys sought to part ways with troublesome wide receiver Terrell Owens, saying that his organization "valued this great receiver and all of the contributions he can make on the field."

However, the Quixotic owner announced that there would be changes to the Dallas stadium for the 2009 season.

"Listen, I'll admit that the guy's a locker room cancer," Jones told reporters. "So we're going to be building a second locker room, just for T.O. It's gonna be eighty thousand square feet, with Italian marble sinks, a solid gold locker, and mirrors everywhere so that TO can see his favorite person night and day. And it might not even be in Dallas: we're thinking of putting it in Austin, where someone with TO's personality can fly under the radar."

Jones had other plans, too. "We're not just putting him in a separate locker room, though. He'll have his own staff, from coach to trainer to ballboy, dedicated to making TO happy. A separate uniform for TO. A different charter flight. A different practice schedule. Everything designed to keep TO completely isolated from the team except on Sunday afternoons, some Monday nights, and Thanksgiving Day."

Some questioned whether the plan, dubbed Typhoid TO around Dallas headquarters, went far enough. One inside source said that "everyone is completely sick of hearing TO, TO, TO. Well, everyone except Donovan McNabb and Jeff Garcia, who are laughing their butts off at us."

Fluffy Bunny Prices Soar

2009-01-08T11:10:00.001-08:00

European markets sagged today on news that the fluffy bunny shortage is expected to continue, with prices more than doubling to 55 euros/bunny on the German stock exchange. The move comes after the world's largest Fluffy Bunny exporter, Hamas, released a statement that their primary processing facility had been destroyed by angry Israeli soldiers wielding unfair, high-tech weaponry.

"Once again the evil crusading Zionists have shown their true colors and turned their computerized weaponry on our fluffy bunny facilities," said a Hamas spokesman late last night. "In addition to the total destruction of the fluffy bunny plant, we have also had severe damage to three schools, and old folk's home, and one entire side of our Sesame Street set was burned down. Big Bird was killed in the attack, and we still haven't located Oscar the Grouch, although a badly-burned trash can lid was found that may have been his."

Sue Messersmith-Cooper, president of International Response, criticized the US and Israel for their continued attacks on Fluffy Bunny factories. "How much longer will the citizens of this world put up with the barbarians who insist on destroying these cute, defenseless, fluffy bunnies? After coalition forces razed facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and continued sanctions strangle the fluffy bunny economy in Iran, was it really necessary to launch an illegal, immoral, and indefatigable attack on the poor Gazans, whose only source of income is fluffy bunnies and 'Hang In There!' cat posters?"

Even in the US ordinary consumers are starting to feel the pinch. Shopping with his family in New York, blue-collar worker Greg Packer said that "I'd planned on getting a fluffy bunny for my fiancée for Valentine's Day, but now I don't think I'm going to be able to afford it. I hope that Obama can do something to change this situation, otherwise it'll be a really long, cold night."

Candidates Line Up for Illinois Election

2008-12-09T14:43:00.000-08:00

With Democratic leaders calling for indicted Illinois Governor Rod Blagovich to resign, it seems clear that a runoff election will soon be coming to the Land of Lincoln. As such, numerous would-be Governors are flooding the state with applications to make sure that they can get a shot at being governor of the incoming president's home state.

The current leading candidate is former NFL star OJ Simpson, who hopes his experience outrunning federal prosecutors will allow him to avoid the fate of the last two governors.

Also expressing interest is longtime Democratic standard-bearer Al Gore, who feels that the state's proximity to the water and several fine all-you-can-eat buffets makes it the optimum location to continue hectoring citizens about the coming global apocalypse.

A popular dark horse candidate is California Governor and Republican Arnold Swartzenegger, although he would like to churn out a few more wretched movies before driving another state into the ground.

Bill Clinton has been mentioned as a possible successor, but politely declined, saying he's holding out for something more prestigious than a mere governorship, perhaps working with young, ambitious men and women, helping them learn vital skills that will help them succeed in business and politics in the future.

Most surprising of all, though, is that former Illinois senator Barack Obama has tossed his hat into the ring, saying that not only does he love campaigning, but he also hopes to burnish his meager credentials with some executive experience before trying to make the jump "to prime time."

Plebian and the Mysterious Missing Classmate

2008-12-02T10:23:00.001-08:00

I received the strangest call the other day. It was round about 7, and I was drying my daughter's hair, when the phone rang. Like a good homeowner, I answered it, and for my troubles I was met by static.

After a few moments, I was able to discern just a few things:

*The person on the other line knew me (they did, after all, refer to me by name).

*They were calling from the International Space Station, evidently deep within the Van Allen belt, because all I could hear was massive static.

So I instructed them to wait and call me back in a few minutes, to see if that would alleviate the problem. They did indeed call back a few minuets later, and I was able to figure out a few more things:

*They had gone to high school with me (they did, I think, refer to the proper high school)

*Their name was either Tom Simpson, Pete Krugerand, or Funky Winkerbean, I'm not sure which, and I couldn't understand through the scratching when I asked him to spell it out for me what the name should be.

At this point, and despite my protestations, Funky insisted on asking "So…SCRATCH-HISS-SCRATCH…do you…SCRATCH…ember…HISS…me?...SCRATCH"

"No, but I might if I knew who you were!" I insisted. The first two I'd never heard of, and I never cared for Funky Winkerbean anyways. Stupid band geek.

"Oh," the dude sounded really disappointed. "Oh, I see...SCRATCH! HISS!"

"HEY!" I yelled. "I'd probably know who you were if I could understand you! You've gotta call me back on a different line so I can understand you!"

And at this point, the line went dead.

Great. Just great. This is going to bother me for the rest of my life, you know?

And I can just see the headlines now:

"Beloved local businessman Funky Winkerbean committed suicide this evening, leaving a note behind saying that he's tired of going unnoticed in this faceless society. Funky was despondent because his dearest childhood friend forgot all about him and hung up on him earlier in the evening."

The funny thing is, Wifey has gone certifiably around the bend over this. Listen, it's no real hair off my ass if I reconnect with Funky one way or the other. Sure, it'd be nice to know who it was that called me, but he probably was just trying to trap me into buying him dinner so he could have me drugged and extract my liver to sell it to an organ trafficking ring.

Because that happens to me all the time.

But for Wifey this has become a quest. She's hunted down all the people we still keep in touch with from high school and asked both of them if they'd handed our number out. Which they hotly deny, but I swear one of them has beady eyes and I never trusted her anyways and she probably put us up on the bathroom wall under the line "for a good time call…"

So, on the off chance that one of my 40 readers is either my old friend Pete Simpson or Tom Krugerand, please be sure to call me back, because I'd really like to talk to you and catch up about old times, and I'm sure I'll fake remembering you better once we get off of a terribly staticy line.

If it's Funky, though, well; lose my number. And don't bother asking why, you know the answer!

On Teenage Values

2008-12-01T14:37:00.000-08:00

Over the past forty years, some groups have gone to great pains to “liberate” women and convince them that they are equal to men in every way, most importantly by freeing them from ancient constraints on having liberal amounts of sex with any toothy metrosexual of their choosing.

Naturally, this liberated attitude has spread from the 20-something set, and now we are not only suffering from the stories of saggy-breasted swingin’ grandmas going to key parties, but more and more we learn that there is a veritable army of trampy bimbos in high schools across the land eager to outdo each other in proving that they are eager to bed any jagoff with an earring and pants whose seat drags the ground.

This is wrong, and it threatens to destroy the very fabric of society.

It used to be that, if you wanted to get a polite kiss on the cheek, you had to take a girl out to dinner, then some sort of amusement, such as a movie, paying spectacle, or any number of fine miniature golf/bowling establishments. After you’d done this every other week for 3 to 6 months, you could arrange to have “car trouble” and, after a heavy petting session, perhaps convince her to have negotiations with your “silent partner.”

As you can imagine, this did not come cheap: there was food to buy, gas to purchase, diversions to arrange and pay for, and angry parents to dodge. And we won’t even begin to discuss the investment necessary to “go all the way”, up to and including purchasing the plastic diving bell for your little Nemo before he goes twenty thousand leagues under the girl, one of the more humiliating life experiences for a seventeen-year-old.

However, as the grainy health film they’d shown us in sixth grade drove home, the next time you had unprotected sex a bacteria known as Penus Falloffus would infest your testicles causing, among other things, jock itch and erectile dysfunction.

And having no penis will be difficult to explain in a locker room of wiser boys, all of whom spend an inordinate amount of time staring at each other’s genitals and going “how did you get that festering welt in your Johnson area?”

In order to meet the economic needs of high-class ladies (the ones that didn’t smoke nor go with boys much larger than you), you needed to make money. And since time immemorial, during the fall teenage boys have made money via the most noble of professions: leaf raking.

Here’s how it works: you pick a big house owned by an elderly widow, you take your rake, and you show up one morning and offer to rake the entire yard for ten bucks. She agrees, and an hour or two later you’re ten bucks richer, you’ve eaten some cookies and lemonade, and if she’s a particularly desperate widow you’ve received an offer which you politely declined but which you wonder about during dark nights of the soul for the rest of your life.

[If you accepted the offer, you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting it, unless you enjoyed it, in which case you’ve just discovered your true calling: gigolo.]

Of course, ten bucks isn’t much, so you have to do this over and over. And eventually you run out of widows, so you move down to the elderly, then simply the lazy, and eventually (if there are enough teenagers in town) you’ll rake leaves for anybody who pays you ten bucks.

This does not happen, of course, if there are sluttily-writhing teenage girls under every other section of bleachers. In this case every zit-farmer just goes dragging his tool kit through the dirt, and eventually he finds some girl who’s just desperate to look cool, and that’s it. And what with “hip” parents and these giveaway clinics, you don’t even have to buy the latex spacesuit before you send Buck Rogers down to check out Planet Hooch.

And this is wrong.

Worse, this irresponsible behavior is responsible for hundreds of deaths in the North and Midwest every year, because these same teenage boys used to fill up their Nookie Fund in the winter by shoveling driveways.

But without them, fat old men are dying by the droves as they try, desperately, to get the driveway cleared so they can make their weekly run down to the VFW to complain about kids nowadays. And the complaints aren’t going to make themselves, you know.

So I implore all teenage girls out there to just cross their legs and hold out for dinner and a show. Really, it’s not too much to ask.

If you won’t do it for the elderly widows who need their yard raked, then at least do it for the fat, old men who are keeling over just because you couldn’t hold out for dinner and a show before you turned into Sharon Stone, minus the icepick, but probably plus better acting skills, because let’s face it, your paramours don’t have the benefits of being trained by an elderly widow.

In the end, you’ll be getting something, too. Trust me.

Pleb the Builder!

2008-11-24T14:26:00.001-08:00

One of the chief disagreements that Wifey and I have had regarding our charming European home is the lighting in the living space on the ground floor. This common area houses both our living and our dining room, and in the past we have illuminated it via several Ikea pole lamps.

I like Ikea pole lams. They’re cheap, which is nice. They’re portable, which is also nice. And when your spouse turns them off, if she does it slowly you can imagine that you’re at an upscale gentleman’s club and she’s about to give you a private dance, particularly if you choose that moment to jam a fiver in her panties and grope her.

Or maybe that’s just me. Okay, I don’t use the fiver, but I do grope. It’s one of the best non-verbal ways to say “I love you”, right?

Wifey, however, does not like the pole lamps. In fact, she finds the bottom level of our house much like a dungeon: dark, cold, and filled with people that she really doesn’t care for.

Some time ago, I accidentally installed a new wall lamp in one corner of the room. This unit has been operating now for a month without either burning the house down or going on the fritz, so Wifey decided to give me a little more challenge: she bought a chandelier.

I came home from work one evening to discover the thing in a box on the table, and her proudly telling me that she’d gotten it on sale: only sixty euros. That’s a hundred bucks in non-Monopoly money, which is actually pretty good for lamps here.

Needless to say, I was terribly excited with the thought of climbing atop a ladder, drilling holes in the ceiling, and hanging a forty-pound mass of metal and glass directly overhead. So I did what any husband does when faced with a similar situation: I procrastinated.

Weeks passed, and although eating around the box with the chandelier posed some problems, it eventually got to where we viewed it as one of the family. It was a lot less trouble than the kids, I can tell you that.

All that changed Friday . Wifey went out with friends, and I had to cut out of work early to pick up our children. Plus the two children of her friend. Plus the daughter of a woman that we don’t particularly care for but whom Wifey shuttles around sometimes. Other than the times that she gets so annoying you want to toss her in a creek in a burlap sack, this kid’s not so bad. So I hear; I spend all my time with her looking for burlap sacks.

Well, we got home, and the children went upstairs to play. I was a little disgruntled with Wifey, so I decided that the best way to take it out on her was to finally hang this stupid chandelier.

No, I hadn’t been drinking, but I do suspect mental illness played a strongly contributing role here.

I got the mounting bracket up, then hung the thing up, then realized it was time to go again, in order to get all the children ferried to their varying activities. “I’ll be back,” I said to the unwired chandelier waiting for me.

Jokingly, I told the children I was going to leave it hanging a few hours to see if it fell down.

Several hours later, we returned, to find not only Wifey but also the chandelier, right where they should be. Wifey was somewhat less than impressed, as the chandelier didn’t yet work, but did appropriately ooh and aah that I’d gotten it hung.

She did not ooh and aah when I said “if you think it’s hung well, come check me out.”

Come Saturday morning, I jumped on the task with both feet: Operation Light-the-damn-dining-room had begun! I spent some time swearing, splicing wires, and getting everything just so. My shoulders aching, I prepared to make the final tie-in of wires to chandelier.

“Do you want me to do anything?” Wifey asked.

Since children were present, I couldn’t say what I was thinking, so instead I opted for “just sit there and look pretty. I’ve got it all under control.”

Just as I said this, the house leapt six feet into the air. Either that, or the chandelier fell six feet as I knocked it off its hanger. The net effect was the same: with a loud crash, glass went everywhere, Wifey’s table, which she loves, was brutally scratched, and I had just payed a sixty-euro dumbass handyman tax to stimulate the local economy.

Wifey’s chandelier, whom I had eaten dinner next to every night for the past three weeks, was utterly destroyed.

Have you ever done something stupid, and just after, wished that you’d be injured so that you’d get some sympathy instead of blame? I felt just like that. In fact, I leapt off the ladder, hoping to break my leg or shove a shard of glass through my foot, but instead I ended up just smashing more glass flat.

If you thought the house was cold before, it was nothing compared to how cold it was gonna be, trust me.

“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll just pop out and get another lamp, right?”

“Wha?” Wifey had lost all capacity for rational speech. “Guh?”

“Great! Let’s go!”

So off we went. Turns out, though, the lamps were on sale for a limited time only, and now cost 120 euros. Well, not so bad: almost 200 euros for a lamp. Still less than I expected to pay. Right? Right?

“Hey,” I joked. “You wanna get two for when I smash this one also?”

This joke did not pan out as I had hoped.
Upon return to the house, I did what I should have done in the first place: I punished the children and sent them to their rooms. Helps me focus. Then, with a degree of skill that would make any home-improvement Bob from Vila to Thebuilder jealous, I wired up and hung my very own lamp.

And lo and behold, there was light. Lots of light. The bottom floor is now no longer dark. It’s still cold and full of objectionable people, but I’ll be darned if I’m moving out or paying exorbitant heating rates.

I have, however, moved all those Ikea stripper-pole lamps up to the bedroom, where they belong.

Cultists, the NFL, and you

2008-11-20T13:27:00.000-08:00

Some people worry about foreign strife, while others are kept up at night by a tanking economy. But unlike such ephemeral concerns, the thing that worries me is that a current NFL personality will start up a cult of personality that will end up making the Manson Family look like the Simpsons.

Okay, that was a bad analogy, because the Simpsons are awful, and just watching them will make you want to gouge your eyes out. How about they make the Manson Family look like the Osmond Family?

You're probably thinking to yourself: there goes Plebian, being crazy and worrying about something that could never possibly happen, and making up exaggerated scenarios for comedic effect.

Well, you've got some nerve, you know that?

Anyways, think about all the cult-like leaders currently roaming the landscape in the NFL right now. Think about the disproportionate influence that previous NFL personalities have held over this country's culture in the past. Why, Jim Brown alone was responsible for 23% of all Blaxploitation films in the early 70's.

Here are the guys I'm keeping an eye on:

Brett Favre

I once had a sportswriter friend who criticized Brett Favre at a Sports Illustrated Christmas party, saying that he threw too many interceptions and his personality was essentially Terrell Owens, only without the charm. They never found the guy's body.

Really, has anybody ever enjoyed the free pass from criticism that Favre has enjoyed throughout his career? From flagrantly mispronouncing his name to screwing his former team (in a plethora of ways), Favre can do no wrong for fans and the media bobbleheads.

How can I get to be Favrian? "Well, you cost the company six gagillion dollars, but it was a gutsy move to gamble all our money on 00 on the roulette wheel, so I'll let it pass. Just try to be more careful in the future, okay?"

Cult-O-Meter Risk: LOW. If he did start a cult, it'd probably get intercepted by the Feds pretty quickly.

Norv Turner

Everybody knows Norv Turner's downsides: he looks like a creepy neighbor you expect to turn up on one of those "Wanted" posters in the post office, his only claim to coaching genius is being lucky enough to have Troy Aikman, Emmet Smith, and Michael Irvin on his offense, and his teams are perennially tagged as "underachieving" without anyone ever pausing to think that maybe it reflects on him.

The potential upside to having Norv Turner as your coach? You'll get a new coach within a few years who can rebuild the shattered husk of a team he leaves behind. Note that this didn't work out so well for Oakland, though.

One amusing thing is watching sportswriters and bloggers continue to labor to find excuses for why San Diego "underachieves" without throwing up their hands and saying "look, obviously, the guy sucks as a coach."

Cult-O-Meter Risk: NEGATIVE. Turner would probably take over a successful cult, but then run it into the ground and end up turning all the members Presbyterian or something. Any chance we can get him into Scientology?

Heath Shuler

How is it that an average college quarterback for Tennessee got so heavily drafted, deep-sixed his own career with an ill-advised holdout, flamed out in the NFL, then got elected as a Representative for North Carolina, and is now being touted for the Senate?

I dunno, but it doesn't happen without some really creepy explanation involving either pictures, fraud, or mass hysteria. And great cults are built on all of those things.

Plus, the chant factor for his name is pretty high: "Shuuuuulllleeeeer." Go on, say it. Just not while smoking dope, or you'll end up peeling him grapes in your underwear. And trust me, that's no picnic.

Cult-O-Meter Risk: MEDIUM. Did you know that he has a realty business based in Tennessee, yet is a Representative from North Carolina? If he starts nosing around Guyana, we'll bump him up to SEVERE immediately.

Tony Romo

Not only does he have Favrian-level apologists who never point out that he chokes in big games, and not only does he have movie-star good looks, and not only does he have hagiographic media coverage, he has the praise of Jessica Simpson, saying that he's "calmed her down."

Anybody who can calm down a Hollywood Starlet has Rasputian powers beyond wildest imaginings.

And that's without starting to discuss T.O. shedding great big tears over him.

Cult-O-Meter Risk: BE AFRAID. Be very afraid.

Why I Love Toyota's 'Saved By Zero'

2008-11-18T13:28:00.000-08:00

And why you should, too. Let us count the ways:

1) It's from a car company that's not begging for billions of dollars in tax money so it can continue to hemmorhage cash.

2) Anything that keeps The Fixx off the streets is a good thing. It's been a long time since "One Thing Leads to Another", you know? They could use the residuals. Either you let Toyota pay them, or next thing you know they'll be in the bailout line, too. And next you'll have Thomas Dolby and Rockwell asking for a handout to boot. Are you ready for that?

3) Peter King hates it (point 8b). And if it gets under the skin of an odius hypocrite like King, then it must be for the good of society.

4) ESPN's Sportsguy hates it too (point 17)! It's like garlic for Boston Red Sox fans or something! And Lord knows we need something to repel them. Somebody start playing this outside Ben Affleck's latest movie set, stat, and save us from another Fever Pitch debacle.

5) Anything that sets off those two I back whole-heartedly, in an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" sort of way. If I still read Dr. Z, I bet I'd find the trifecta of evil are united against this commercial, making it the new James Bond.

6) I live in Europe, so I don't see US commercials, so quite frankly, even if it's awful I don't have to suffer.

7) The song pretty much sums up the Democrats this year.

8) Come to think of it, it sums up the Republicans, too, except they lost. Sunk with Zero might be more appropriate.

9) Quick: name another memorable car commercial. Just one. Can't think of one? That's because now you've been...Saved by Zero!

10) Because I hate the dancing transformer car commercial, that's why. See? I could name one, because I haven't been...SAVED BY ZERO!

IBMS: Oil Companies No Longer Evil

2008-11-13T14:41:00.001-08:00

The International Bureau of Moral Standards today announced that oil companies were no longer evil, owing the precipitous drop in oil prices, and that their executives would no longer be considered undesirable people and their profits considered excessive. They have instead been downgraded to “greedy”, in line with most other capitalistic enterprises.

IBMS head Doris Grey-Sterling told reporters that “this is truly an exciting time to be alive, what with oil companies no longer headed by evil, devilish men devoted to destroying the poor, and Americans finally proving that they’re not racist. In fact, everything is beautiful, and we look forward to four years of peace and harmony now. I can’t remember a time when things were possibly better, except perhaps the halcyon days of 1925 to 1928.”

In other actions, struggling artists and journeyman infielders were continued listed as “noble” while all lawyers outside of the public defense and community organizer roles maintained their “soulless” status.

Political Dictionary

2008-11-13T14:38:00.000-08:00

Ageist: (??) This word has no apparent meaning.

Candidate: (n) The least worst person from each political party who is put forward in an election. “I couldn’t decide if I thought the candidates this year were more pathetic than the ones in 2004 or not.”

Columnist: (n) Someone who wants to see the Democrat win. “Even though I am a conservative opinion columnist, I must say I like the cut of Obama’s jib, and recommend him as our next president.”

Discredit: (v) To destroy all shred of respectability; note that this does not appear to be possible in most places. “You’d think that airing ignorant conspiracy theories about major public figures would discredit certain highly popular writers, but somehow they keep their job.”

Harpy: (n) See Entertainment Dictionary entry on The View

Hick: (n) Non-Washington Republican. “The hicks might enjoy all that aw-shucks stuff, but to those of us in the know, it seems so dreadfully hoi polloi.”

Host: (n) Someone who wants to see the Democrat win. “It might have been short-sighted for some talk-show hosts to go so overboard endorsing Obama.”

Inevitable: (adv) Doomed to failure. “Hillary Clinton will inevitably be the next president of the United States” or “A far more conservative Romney will inevitably win over the maverick John McCain.”

Integrity: (n) Quality which may never be questioned. “Nobody doubted his integrity, they just said he was misleading about a whole lot of things.”

Journalist: (n) Someone who wants to see the Democrat win. “I question Chris Matthews’ objectivity as a journalist.”

Libertarian: (n) Wonkish oaf who is never happy, despite probable rampant drug use. “As a libertarian, I hate every candidate, yet am too incoherent to form a political party of my own.”

Presidential Election: (n) Quadrennial Event where America comes together to vote for the president of the entire world, who will give hope to the hopeless, champion international justice, fix problems at home and abroad, and manufacture a diet soda that makes your farts smell like rainbows. “I just hope those dodgy Americans get their presidential election right this time.”

Recount: (v) Process whereby votes are added to one candidate or another until the desired party gains victory. “Hey, Dave, recount those votes until Franken’s up by a hundred, would you?”

Sportswriter: (n) Someone who wants to see the Democrat win. “I know I pledged to be only a sportswriter this year, but can’t you just feel the betterness of everything now that Obama has won?”

Vice-President: (n) Single most important position in the government which must never be handed over to someone who is not an expert on every single subject known to mankind, up to and including who is the current Miss Djibouti and what the name of the Prime Minister of Fiji’s cat is. “The best thing about having Biden as vice president is it means his idiocy is out of the Senate, where it can do real harm.”

McCain Eager to Return to Regular Job

2008-11-06T14:13:00.001-08:00

With the presidential campaign finally over, Republican nominee John McCain told reporters today that he is eager to return to his true job in the Senate, where he hopes to be able to pick up again right where he left off.

"I love the Senate," said McCain in a relaxed interview Wednesday, his first after losing the presidency to Barack Obama. "I have a lot of old friends there, I like working on new legislation, and it's the only place where I can really indulge in my favorite hobby: sticking my thumb in the eyes of conservatives."

McCain said he didn't expect there to be any repercussions for his heated rhetoric on the stump. "I think that most of my Democrat friends understand what politics is about and won't hold it against me. Anyway, all of the worst stuff came from that crazy Alaska woman I was forced to saddle myself with in order to appeal to my base. I always thought that we needed more bipartisanship, which is to say, Democrats in charge of just about everything."

He said that his first priority would be "forming gangs in the Senate to find compromise on any and every issue of importance: energy, defense, the second amendment, whatever. The important thing is that we centrists gang together and meet our far-left opponents halfway, because that's what democracy is all about."

Scientific Community Excommunicates Heretic

2008-11-06T14:11:00.000-08:00

Spokesmen for the UN's IPGM (International Panel on Giant Monsters) today announced that they had delivered their harshest sanction yet on a former internationally-renowned scientist who had begun to question their conclusions on Giant Monsters.

Guy Renauld-Fourtier, spokesman for the IPGM, said in a press conference that "further dissent shall not be tolerated, and those who speak out against the pre-drawn conclusions shall be cast out, harried, and ultimately forced to either recant their heresy or spend their lives without ever having a government grant again. And this is for the good. No data will even be considered which might go against our preconceived hypotheses."

The condemned scientist, Michael Crayton, had recently issued a controversial paper titled "Attack of the Boondoggle: how fake giant monsters are causing real economic hardship." In it, he not only questioned the efficiency of the Kong Protocol, which calls for installing giant cyborg monkeys across the globe as an anti-GMA system, but he further questioned whether or not giant monsters are real at all.

"How do we know that there are hundred-foot, fire-breathing reptiles just below the surface of the ocean waiting to destroy us? Just because somebody claims there are?" he wrote in an editorial in noted right-wing crank newspaper The Wall Street Journal. "This whole thing could just be a way to enrich alarmists, while ignoring the very real problems of water shortages, traffic congestion, and the continual fouling of the air by rising burrito consumption."

Self-appointed GMA spokesman and Nobel Peace Prize winner John K. Mondale, in London for the opening of the shadow puppet version of his groundbreaking film An Uninvited Guest, said from Zuirch that he felt the punishment was too lenient.

"Ostracization isn't enough for him, in my opinion," said the former US Vice President. "He should be stoned, or drawn and quartered, or at the very least have his tongue cut out to prevent him spreading this vicious, foul lie that there aren't any giant monsters about to devour us all. If you want more of a quote than that, you have to give me an award."

Closer to home, the ACLU said that they weren't concerned with the silencing of the scientist because "free speech only applies to that speech which conforms to the government-regulated perception of truth."

(Editor's Note: It's been a while since I did one of these. The first one is here.)

What's next for Ted Stevens?

2008-11-05T15:25:00.000-08:00

With a possible conviction hanging over his re-election, Ted Stevens may be persona non grata in most places. But at least one town in Alaska has already started a "Stevens for Mayor" drive, and said that regardless of his pending legal troubles he will always be welcome there.

Stevensville, Alaska, is a small town located forty miles outside of Fairbanks. The main employer of the 1400-person town is the nearby Ted Stevens Prison, which is where the embattled Republican Senator may end up serving any jail time if he fails to win his appeals. The town is also home to the Ted Stevens Moose Museum and a VECO construction office.

From his house just off the Ted Stevens Expressway, resident Johnny Mackerson says that Stevens' experience would help the locals to "maximize the benefit of our great infrastructure here, from the Stevens Snowmobile School to the Stevensville Arena, home of the Stevensville Bagmen, four-time ice football champions. And with the soon-to-open Tedbridge over Stevens Gorge, we hope to be able to add lots of exciting outdoors activities."

Spokesmen for Stevens said that while the senator was originally not interested in the post, he has changed his opinion since discovering that the town, a primary recipient of both state and federal funds, has "little to no budget oversight."

Early Election Polling Results

2008-11-04T16:55:00.000-08:00

Top-rated pollster John Zigby, who successfully predicted not only the 2004 George Bush victory but also accurately forecast Al Gore's ultimate eating problems, has released his early data from the 2008 presidential race.

As expected, Obama is showing a commanding lead (70% or more) among starry-eyed youth, gun-toting lowlifes, and welfare/drama queens. However, what is also surprising is his good showing among pencil-necks (60%), arugula fanciers (58%), and cigar aficionados (52%), all traditional Republican supporters.

McCain, meanwhile, has seen his support among minorities more than double George Bush, capturing 4% of their vote so far. He also has a commanding lead (80% or more) with bluehairs, gun-clinging bible thumpers, and bitter angry women who despise the patriarchy.

Especially noteworthy was the two-hour line near polling stations in West Virginia to apply for temporary work permits for coal miners to work outside the United States in the event of an Obama victory.

Based on the surveys, MSNBC declared Obama the winner with "seventy million billion" electoral votes. The logic for this was explained by Keith Olbermann:

"McCain is a violent psychopath who will destroy the world. IMPEACH BUSH!"

First Space Votes Make History

2008-11-04T13:51:00.001-08:00

In a historical first for any election, astronauts aboard the International Space Station today cast their ballots for president. The voting, widely hailed as "taking Democracy to the stars," went smoothly despite the obvious logistical problems attendant with taking votes from people thousands of miles away from their home states.

"It makes Dixville Notch look like the pompous, backwards jackasses they really are," said spokeswoman Helen Thomas-Crudump from ACORN, which had spearheaded the charge to register the astronauts. "And with seven hundred and forty-five people in the space station, most of them registered Democrats from the state of Pennsylvania, it's clear that we need to make sure that their votes are counted."

She noted that "it's just like Fort Penguin, Antarctica, where over two thousand soldiers from the Third Ohio Infantry are currently serving, who ACORN helped to vote early. We're committed to getting every vote to count, in our zeal even sending the same vote to two or three different precincts."

Not everyone was pleased with the move, however. Joe Biden warned that he felt "this might be the first step on the road to a war with the Klingons, or the Russians, whichever one of them it was that had those big ears and drooled a lot. Oh, yeah, that was Laura Bush!"

When no one laughed Biden promised to "throw your asses all in prison once I'm in the White House."

The Fly Hunter

2008-10-31T15:31:00.001-07:00

I hate flies.

What's more, I don't feel at all bad about it. I love all of God's creatures equally, and believe that they should be allowed to live in their own environmental niche without any provocation or torture beyond what is necessary to render them useful or tasty.

But flies are not one of God's creatures. They are the creation of the devil, and deserve to be treated as such.

Proof #1: flies like to eat poop. Lots of you will protest that dogs do as well, but dogs don't land on the poop, get it all over their multiple feet, then take back off, only to land on the honey bun that you were about to eat, wipe off six very poopy little feet, and then fly off to go land on some more poop.

"Oh, come on, it's a microscopic amount of poop!" some of you are saying right now.

You know what else is microscopic? Ebola. And I bet you don't want to eat any of that, do you? I don't know about you, but my personal daily allowance for feces is 0.0 grams.

Proof #2: They make an annoying buzzing sound and smack themselves, over and over, against your window, your lights, and you, yet never just drop dead to the ground.

Proof #3: I'm pretty sure that flies cause erectile dysfunction.

Unfortunately for my sanity, we're having a fly infestation at work. Yesterday, when I came in, there was a very large, very ugly fly buzzing around the hallway. Our ceilings are about eight feet here, so it's out of the question to whack it with a magazine, and the damn thing wouldn't land on the ground to get a good swat at it.

My European colleagues had resorted to what Europeans do best: bitching about it.

"It's very annoying!" my seven-foot-tall colleague complained. "There's no way to hit it!"

"That sound is driving me mad!" said another.

"I'm going to have to take a personal day!" complained a third.

And on and on and on.

Finally, I did what every American does when confronted with this kind of issue: I decided to take matters into my own hand. I took a large piece of paper, rolled it up, and fabricated the three-foot Fly Swatter Deluxe.

When I came out into the hall, they simply goggled at me.

"What are you going to do?" asked one.

"I'm going to kill that damned thing," I said. "And keep it's body as a trophy."

So I took a big swat at it with my FSD, managing to stun it and drop it to the ground. As it lay there, twitching its little fly legs, I stomped on it and turned it from fly to smear in a matter of seconds.

"What have you done?" asked an aghast colleague.

"You killed it!"

"Why did you do that?" asked a third. "You could have let it go!"

"It deserved to die," I said. "Stupid fly."

One shook her head sadly at me. "Barbaric."

"No," I said. "Barbaric is to sit with the flies and accept that they are swarming all over you. Civilized is to kill the damn thing, realize there are another ten waiting to take its place, and going on with your work."

Needless to say, I didn't win any popularity points on that one. Nor did I win any points by insisting that everyone call me "Fly Killer" for the rest of the day.

But what cinched up my reputation as a barbaric American was what happened next.

I was sitting in my office the next day, minding my own business, when I heard a buzzing against my window. I looked up to see another fly, slightly smaller than the one that I'd smeared the day before, sitting at ease.

So I slowly took a plastic cup, crept over, and caught the fly inside. Then, sliding a piece of paper under the rim, I created my fly prison: an overturned clear cup with a fly inside. I let out a whoop of joy which brought my coworkers running.

"What have you done?" asked one.

"I caught a fly," I said. "I am no longer the Fly Killer. I am the Supreme Fly Hunter in All the World!"

"The poor thing," said one. "Will you let it go?"

"No," I said.

"Are you going to keep it?"

"No," I said. "I'm going to leave it here as a warning to the other flies until it dies, and then I'm going to have it stuffed and mounted and put up on my wall as a trophy to remember my glorious victory. And I'll have my Fly Swatter Deluxe bronzed, as well."

They all looked at me in shock for a moment. Finally, one said "how much does it cost to have a fly stuffed?"

In my shock, I dropped my fly prison, losing my victim. It took off into the air, buzzing around my office.

In retrospect, I should have simply let it get away, but in my urge to kill, I began laying about with the Fly Swatter Deluxe, attempting to knock it out of the air. Unfortunately, sensing sympathy from my coworkers, it headed towards the door, and I followed, bellowing and thrashing.

And I proceeded to hit at least four of my coworkers about the head and shoulders with the Fly Swatter Deluxe.

One of them went down in a heap, one beat a hasty retreat, one spilled coffee all over herself, and the other surrendered Monaco and most of France. On and on I surged, only dimly aware of the pleas for mercy from my coworkers, coffee and tears mixing beneath my feet as I lunged, striving to kill the buzzing speck which had befouled my morning.

It zipped, upwards, through a crack in the ceiling tile and was gone. It had escaped. I stopped, suddenly aware of the sobbing forms lying around me and the growing smear of coffee, tears, and now urine that was slowly oozing down the hallway.

The fire alarm shrieked and doors up and down the hallway slammed shut as my colleagues, terrified that I would turn the Fly Swatter Deluxe on them, huddled under their desks and called their spouses for a tearful goodbye.

I stood, conquering barbarian, in the destroyed wreckage of my once-calm office. At my feet lay a coworker, clutching at my ankle, pleading for mercy.

At that very moment, the elevator dinged, and the boss stepped out. He cast an eye over the scene: the red siren throbbing angrily, two employees face-down, me panting and holding a snot-stained roll of paper, my tie askew, every other office door cracked open just a touch to allow those inside to peer out and see what was going to happen.

He cocked an eyebrow at me, waiting for an explanation.

"Don't worry, sir, I killed the fly. It won't be troubling us any more."

He nodded. "Good job. I hate those things." Then he walked on by and down to his office.

There's a reason why my boss only keeps one American around.

A Moral Delimma?

2008-10-30T15:41:00.000-07:00

Let's say you're on a crowded bus in a foreign country, waiting to be shuttled fifty meters over to the plane, when onto the bus steps a person who, you are quite certain, is a transvestite.

How much staring is *too much*? I mean, can you take a glance, think to yourself "geez those five-inch stiletto heels look awkward on shim" and no more? Can you stare longer at the long, bleach-blond hair cascading awkwardly down the shoulders and wonder why shim didn't pick a more less-glaring hairstyle?

Is it okay to search in vain for an Adam's Apple, or is that considered gauche?

I feel that the social auspices of this situation are currently poorly-defined. I know all the rules about looking down a woman's blouse, or having a chick try to stare up your shorts. But with people pushing the boundaries, it's time we began to establish societal rules of conduct for those of us who are square and not sure how to deal with these situations.

Could somebody write Dear Abby on this?

"Dear Abby: how long can you stare at a potential transvestite in a public setting before you've crossed over from stunned onlooker to obnoxious gawker? And is it ever okay to just straight-out ask 'hey, you were once a dude, right?' Signed, Rubbernecker

"Dear Rubbernecker: The rule for transvestites is the same for trying to catch a glimpse of panties on a woman sitting in a too-short skirt: one to three seconds is allowed, but anything over five and you're leering. And unless you plan on buying him/her/it a drink, you may never ask what was the original tool kit. "

That seems like a decent rule, doesn't it?

Editorial: McCain Should Concede

2008-10-27T15:27:00.000-07:00

[In the interest of early compliance with the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine, we are bringing you this special editorial from the New York Times.]

On the eve of this historic presidential election, instead of focusing on the historic transformation of the United States from a racist backwater into a leading nation for progressive values, the entire world is captivated by one question: what is John McCain thinking?

The aged senator, whose Panamanian birth certificate admits to at least 72 years, insists on holding a vote on November 4th. Worse, he and his running mate, the nattily-dressed siren from Alaska, insist that they actually may win a victory in the election, inflaming passions around the country and dividing an already-fragmented electorate.

We ask why McCain insists on maintaining this fantasy, and the answer is that, deep within his crusty heart, he must hate this cradle of liberty. Why else would he force voters to the polls to choose between the future and his benighted version of the past?

Doubtless there are some holdouts, locked away in their mountain-top cabins, who will take a break from polishing their automatic weapons and writing their six-hundred-page manifesto against society, and turn out to vote for the worst-prepared vice presidential candidate in the history of the republic and her fossilized running mate.

Regardless of that, though, Obama will surely sweep through the polls like a breath of fresh air after passing an open-air sewer, and the country will be woken from the nightmare of the Bush presidency into a new dream of cooperation and sharing that will lift our spirits to new heights of glory.

One for all, and all for one, just like the musketeers of old!

After the pain of the 2000 stolen election, and the unseemly Swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004, it is only right that we unify the country by acclaiming, not voting, for the next president. Obama needs to know that he has the full support of every citizen of this nation, and that we will not tolerate any form of dissent of any kind.

If John McCain were half the honorable man he claims to be, he would concede now, before the election, and allow Obama to sweep into office unanimously, with the full backing of an all-Democratic congress to allow them to do the repairs to this leaky country that it so sorely needs.

To do otherwise is, dare we say it, unpatriotic.

How I Lost My Jacket

2008-10-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

One of the most endearing things about Wifey is that she takes great pains to ensure that everyone in the family is always outfitted in clothing which is in good condition and adequate for the weather, yet never purchases anything new for herself without outside intervention.

I once lost the entire contents of my underwear drawer, many of which were collectible, because she decided that when the fabric of your tightie whities becomes transparent, that means that it's time for them to go. I had been wearing some of those pairs since I was in high school. Meanwhile, she wears T-shirts whose designs have literally been washed off over the years.

Two months ago, when temperatures started to regularly drop below 80° in the morning, she pulled out her light jacket. It's a gray hoodie zip-front sweatshirt jacket, and she's been wearing it for the last seventeen years, ever since somebody left it at my parent's house after a Christmas party and she rescued it from being trashed by promising to give it a good home.

So last weekend we were preparing to go out, and she said to me "some of my friends said that it's time for me to get a new jacket. What do you think?"

"There's nothing wrong with that jacket." I said. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with any of her clothing. I'm not Mr. Blackwell, god rest his bitchy soul, so I generally don't venture any opinion on any textiles whatsoever.

"That's what I think," she said.

See, I should have stopped there. Probably would have gotten laid. But instead, I decided to freelance.

"I've always liked that jacket," I went on. "It's sort of a retro-hobo look that has equal facility at keeping away both panhandlers and religious fanatics. Even winos in the throes of alcohol withdrawal would think twice about trying to bum change off of somebody whose jacket cuffs have load-bearing grunge on them."

After that, not only was I not getting laid, but she'd likely revoke my groping privileges for the foreseeable future. Undeterred, and not noticing the look on her face, I continued to riff on the jacket.

"Forget those knife-proof jackets popular with UK school children, that jacket just oozes security," I said. "Whose gonna mug somebody who can't afford anything better than that piece of crap? Not to mention the very real risk of serious infection from the layer upon layer of grimy stains and…"

It finally dawned on me that my mouth continued to run off of the teleprompter in my head. I guess this is what Joe Biden feels like.

A silence hung between us, as if to say if you think you're seeing her naked any time soon you'd best have pictures, only you never took any, and if you suggested it now they'd never find your body.

"You're not finding this humorous, are you?"

"Thank you for your opinion," she said. And that was that.

Well, this morning, lo and behold the temperature has reached "chilly" for me (less than 50), and so I decided that I needed to get my light jacket out. Unlike Wifey, my light jacket is new, and has the benefit of being waterproof with a hide-away hood and an internal pocket for important documents, like the stupid European ID that is too large for a conventional wallet.

Only, my jacket wasn't there. I was rooting through the closet when I heard Wifey in the other room.

"How do you like my new jacket? I didn't even know we had it. I found it in the closet yesterday, and since you hate my hobo jacket, and nobody was using this one, I decided that this is my new light jacket. All my friends just love it."

I found her standing in my jacket. Now, you have to understand two things about Wifey:

1) She's on brain medication, so there's every possibility that she does not, in fact, remember that this is my jacket.

2) I'm more than a little bit afraid of her.

What could I do? I could protest, of course, but that would certainly mean extending the nudity ban that has chilled our bedroom relations. So I did what I should have done in the first place.

"That jacket looks great on you," I said. "Really chic and sexy."

She gave me a hug and walked out to take the kids to school, with a mysterious smile on her face.
Damn her! Fortunately, though, I have a backup jacket from Carlsbad Caverns.

Stupid hobo jacket. I'd burn it, only I'm afraid that I'd catch bubonic plague from the fumes. Or worse, erectile dysfunction.

Boring Math Stuff

2008-10-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

Mrs. Peel has a post on Monty Haul and how it doesn't apply to Deal or No Deal. It's boring math stuff, but is just the kind of thing I like. I understand and concur exactly with her conclusions.

Now, here's the situation on DoND: you have picked a case, eliminated the rest, and now you are down to two cases. You know one has the million, and the other has one dollar. Should you switch, or stick with the case you picked?

It makes no difference what you do. Here's my thinking:

If there are 30 cases, your chance of picking the million at the outset is 1 in 30. So the chance the million is in one of the other cases is 29/30.

You eliminate a case. The chance it was the million case is 1/29. There are now 28 cases left.

In fact, there are 28*27*26... ways to eliminate the remaining cases to get to having just two cases, the 1 and the 1 million. That's a lot of potential paths. The chance that you follow one of these paths is about 28!/29!, or 1/29.

So it seems to me that when you get to two cases, there's a 1/30 chance the million is in case 1, and a 29/30*1/29 = 1/30 in case 2.

Ergo, do what you want, since the odds are even now.

I'm not enough of a math stud to be sure this logic is correct, though. Anybody else out there who is?

Wherein I Meet Someone Important

2008-10-20T14:37:00.001-07:00

Today on the bus in Rome, I met a very important personage: the Bahaman Ambassador to Europe. So while the rest of you were trying to break through your employer's adult content filter to download bootleg pictures of Scarlett Johansen kissing Penelope Cruz, I was hobnobbing with international movers and shakers.

It happened like this:

The first thing you do when you get on a plane in Rome is you wait on a bus for about fifteen minutes. They do this in order to save valuable jet fuel by parking far away from the airport, and to provide gainful employment for surly bus drivers.

So we waited, and waited, and waited. We'd been waiting for about ten minutes when one woman asked the lady standing next to me "You're going to Brussels?"

"Yes," the lady responded.

"Oh, no!" said the woman, and she jumped off the bus and ran away.

There was a moment of stunned silence from everyone in the bus. "You know," I said to the lady next to me. "She just assumed you were correct."

"I guess I look like I know what I'm doing," she said.

"I believe I'd have asked somebody else if they were also going to Belgium. It's entirely possible that you were the one on the wrong bus."

Well, we got a big laugh out of that, and then proceeded to discuss what had brought us to Rome. I mistakenly assumed she was American, but she told me she was from the Bahamas. When I asked her what she was doing in Rome, she said:

"I'm on an ambassador's visit to Rome."

"Wow! You're an ambassador?"

"No," she admitted. She pointed to a very nicely-dressed man standing nearby. "He's the ambassador. I'm the political officer."

I would now describe what a political officer did, only she didn't describe it to me all that well, and admitted that it's kind of vague. I got the feeling it involved doing a lot of stuff for the ambassador that he didn't feel like doing, and attending boring meetings while he hobnobbed with monarchs.

She's actually the second political officer I've ever met, and the other one didn't describe the job nearly as well as she did. He just told me he has to work long hours, which was enough to let me know it's a job I never want to have. I'm still hoping to replace George Jetson someday soon.

However, I can share with you these facts about the ambassador of the Bahamas to Europe:

1) He has a very nice political officer, since she introduced me to him while we were waiting to board the plane. I didn't think much of her taste in shoes, though, and I told her that three inch heels were probably not appropriate for travel. She admitted as much, but said it's a risk of the job. And to think, I complain because I have to wear a tie to work sometimes!

2) He wears bitchin' suspenders. I didn't tell him this, although I did mention it to his political officer, and she said he'd be delighted to hear that. When she introduced me, she mentioned that I liked his suspenders, and I then complimented him on them, although without the expletive. I'm a moron, not an imbecile. He took it as graciously as you can.

3) He wears cufflinks, and they are quite nice. Why don't more men wear cufflinks? It's a little bit of extra bling that you can stick on your shirts to personalize them, and it opens up a whole new non-tie avenue of gift-giving. I'm thinking a cufflink revival is overdue. Why did we stop wearing them? Plus, wearing cufflinks means that fewer buttons will be harvested every year, which will probably be good for the environment, unless we buy cufflinks from China or something, in which case they'd be made of tri-methyl-ethyl-lead and lead to a worldwide clubfoot pandemic or something.

4) He's very nice. Even though he was forced to shake hands with some idiot on the tarmac in Rome, he handled it with grace, and laughed, and chatted with me a little bit. He's the third most important person I have ever shaken hands with. The first is a US ambassador, and the second is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

5) He wears a Bahamas flag pin on the lapel of his suit. I didn't even know these existed. Do you suppose that a lapel flag pin exists for every country? Probably so, except for maybe Canada, where the natives are embarrassed and wearing them is probably illegal.

What Not to Do

2008-10-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a piece of gastronomical advice: if you ever find yourself in Italy and suffering from intestinal distress, don't order the seafood kabobs.

It only makes things worse.

I'll spare you the gory details, other than to say that I have spent the entire flight in prayer that I don't need to change seats. And underwear.

I work in a soap opera?

2008-10-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

I have become convinced over the past few days that I am working in a soap opera. The only thing we're missing is a guy with a black mustache who screws all the secretaries and ends up getting promoted because he has incriminating evidence about the boss.

Oh, wait, I forgot that he left the department about six months ago, and now he's a Vice President with a Secretarial Grotto instead of a pool.

For one thing, the guy with the office near the coffee machine is often crying. I'll go down to get a cup of joe, and there he'll be, watery eyes rimmed with red, quietly sobbing at his desk. I swear it's like he's either a heroin junkie who needs a fix or he just found out that his girlfriend ran off with his sister.

Worse, they just changed out the coffee machine, so now it takes practically forever to get your drink. So there I am for forty-five seconds while he quietly sobs, without even the basic dignity to close the door to his office.

I have to say something, right? But at the same time, I don't want to hear his tale of woe, and I don't really know him, because I make it a rule not to socialize with anyone whose office is more than two doors away. Too much walking.

So I've decided to do the only thing that is both masculine and allows us both to keep our dignity: I punch him in the crotch and say "there, now you've got something to cry about!"

Then I leave. Hey, I'm the only American; they expect me to be nuts.

Then there's this other guy who spends about half the day in the only toilet in the men's room. I don't know what he's doing in there, but when he comes out he has a big smile on his face and is practically singing.

All I know is I don't shake his hand. Ever. I figure it's better that way.

Add in the haunted water fountain, the fact that every other week somebody goes to the hospital, and the guy that looks like a hobo who nobody knows and who seemingly sleeps in the abandoned office at the end of the hall, and you have a very strange work environment, indeed.

At least all is going well with me, except that I've become addicted to the tomato soup from the new coffee machine. I don't even like tomato soup, either; it's just that this stuff is 25% salt, and I don't eat salt anywhere else, because it leads to hypertension, which can cause heart attack, stroke, and more serious problems like erectile dysfunction.

So I'm drinking ten cups of tomato soup a day, which when you factor in coffee means that I'm crotch-punching crybaby like twenty times a day, which HR has warned me I need to limit to five times a day or face a verbal reprimand.

Which is okay, because my knuckles are killing me.

Home Improvement, Plebian Style

2008-10-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

Like most women, Wifey doesn’t understand home repair.

Men know that every home project has three phases: the first phase, where you grossly overestimate what it is you are capable of doing, the second phase, where you spend vast amounts of money purchasing items which are directly or indirectly related to the task at hand, like getting a new cordless drill for a painting job on the logic that something might need to be re-hung, and the third phase, where you bleed and swear at the job in question until your wife is afraid to ask you to do any further work on it for fear of your health and/or sanity.

That’s home improvement, in a nutshell.

Women always think that home repair should be like This Old House, where people whisper expletive-free phrases, the fat guy with the beard never bleeds, and the antique table ends up in better shape than when you started.

I’ve got news for you: around my house, if a table needs some finishing work done on it, we call it kindling.

This weekend, though, we took on a fairly routine home task: we bought Ikea furniture. I like Ikea furniture, because it has directions with no words inside and the pressed wood smells like a Swedish forest. Fortunately, it doesn’t smell like the Swedes who assembled it, who often remind you of the hind end of a moose just after a meal of baked beans and chili.

The girl needed a new armoire. Since houses in Europe have the delightfully quant custom of being totally closet-free, we all have our hanging items in armoires, and the girl had outgrown hers. But it was nothing that Ikea couldn’t handle. We dutifully measured the space available: 105 centimeters.

Yes, I do everything in metric. If you don’t like that, go furlong yourself.

At Ikea, though, Wifey fell in love with an armoire that was 135 centimeters long. Being a good husband, what did I say?

“If you like it, get it. We’ll figure out how to make it fit.”

Now entering Phase 1. Since we were in Ikea, we also decided to get glass curio cabinets and a new baker’s rack to replace our current baker’s rack, which is in perfectly good condition but only weighs about fifteen pounds and can be easily folded down.

The new rack weighs eighty-four pounds and is slightly smaller than a Yugo. But it does smell of Swedish pines, which is a major upside.

Phase 2 was now accomplished.

We lugged all this out to the car, and Wifey did what she always does when it’s time to lift up something heavy: she batted her eyes at me and thrust out her chest and said “how can I help?”

With testosterone coursing through my veins and machismo now flooding my brain, I was not about to let Wifey help me fill the car up with cheap, imported pressed wood furniture, so I wrestled it into the car myself. In the process I herniated myself in several places, but I forgot to swear.

On the way home I made several jokes about stopping suddenly and having the boxes come hurtling forward to decapitate her. For some reason, she found this less than humorous.

Having learned my lesson, I kept my eyes north of the border and insisted that she help me lug the boxes upstairs. She tried me the time-honored woman’s trick of explaining that if we broke the boxes open we could carry everything upstairs easily in several trips.

Like I’m gonna fall for that. You know who makes the trips? Me, because she’ll end up unbuttoning the collar on her shirt or something and using cleavage to make me stupid. I insisted that we carry everything up, in boxes, because otherwise “we might scratch the wood.”

Yeah, right. Like that’d ever happen. Pressed wood’s indestructible, isn’t it?

After wrestling with them for the better part of half an hour, we got the boxes upstairs. We hadn’t sweat that much together since our wedding night, and only then because we discovered that the Chinese condoms I’d bought were expired.

Then we each took up our positions, ordained by the cosmos to be Wifey reading the directions, and me dutifully ignoring them to put it together “the way that seems right.”

We have put together most of our furniture this way, and in fact it works quite well. In all the time we’ve done this, we’ve never broken a piece.

What’s new, though, is that the children now “help” us. Mostly, they do this by running off with pieces and tools, or sticking dowel rods so far into their holes that they are lost forever.

And I’m strictly forbidden from swearing at the children, for reasons not entirely clear to me. Sometimes they deserve it, you know?

Two hours later, as something resembling an armoire began to take shape, I smashed my thumb with a hammer. I emitted a string of vile curses, because everybody knows that swearing at a smashed thumb makes you feel better.

“Are you bleeding?” asked Wifey.

“No, doesn’t count.” I said. Then I turned and, because I was preoccupied by the smashed thumb, I tore the top cross bar in half just by brushing it with my leg.

Stupid pressed wood. There goes our perfect record! Why don’t they just build the shitty thing out of balsa next time? At least then it’d be light.

Wifey gasped, the girl cried, and the boy just shook his head at me as if to say “I thought you were a man!”

I emitted another string of curses. “Get the tape,” I said.

“What? You’re going to tape it?”

“You have some other magical pixie dust way to stick the damn thing back together?” I asked.

Note to self: this is not conducive to intimacy.

When I’d finished taping it together, Wifey said “We’ll just stick a bow on it or something.”

“I’ll tell you where I’d like to stick it,” I muttered.

“What?” she asked me. “What did you say?”

“I love you sooooo much,” I responded.

Then we finally got it together. It only took us three hours and a minor squabble. Not bad, I say.

Next up: the all-glass curio case.

This was a bit trickier, if only because glass is often sharp, breaks easily, and is heavier than all get out. Midway through the job, I managed to slash myself and started bleeding. Not on the glass; it was actually on a Canada Dry can that I decided to crush with my bare hands before tossing it into the garbage.

Phase 3 was now complete.

As I was trying to get the darn thing together, Wifey was cautioning me all the while “don’t get blood on the glass! Don’t get blood on the glass!”

Finally it was ready to put into place, and the hang the door on it. “Just hold it there a second,” Wifey said. “I wanna clean it off before you put it in the corner.”

She left to go get the glass cleaner, the boy going along with her, and I took a moment to rest and revel in a job well done.

That, and I farted. Listen, at this point, it was one of the few bodily functions I still felt chippy enough to go through with. I could barely walk, I’d herniated everything, all my digits were throbbing from being hit with a hammer, and I’d cut myself on a drink can.

It’s amazing I was still upright.

Well, Wifey comes back, and she launches into this sniffing dry-heave, where she bobs her head, wrinkles up her nose, looks around the room, shakes it off, then starts it all over again. Every third one, she looks suspiciously at me.

“It smells like rancid moose toots in here,” Wifey said. “What happened?”

“Fine!” I finally admit. “I did it! I farted! I cut the cheese! That rancid smell is me! Me! There! Are you happy?”

“Daddy!” the boy said. “That’s awful! And in MY ROOM!”

“Good lord!” she said. “I thought there was a sewer leak or something.”

“Is this the thanks I get for putting together all this furniture all day?” I said.

“Well, you’re hardly finished with it, are you?”

Sigh. I should have bought that cordless belt sander.

The King Code

2008-10-06T12:55:00.001-07:00

Many of you probably read Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback column today and totally missed the hidden subtext of his political denouncement of John McCain.

That's because many of you are dimwitted cretins. Fortunately for you, I am here to spell it out for you.

The background is this: King has sworn off political commentary this year in order to avoid alienating his readers, as he did during the 2004 and 2000 elections by his rampant boosterism of Democratic candidates. He made this vow two weeks ago.

Last week King came under fire by readers for re-airing a Chris Rock quote about Sarah Palin, where he said her choice for VP was so bad he expected it to have come from Al Davis. Many equated this to political commentary and let King know how displeased they were for violating his promise.

King renewed his vow, declared to be apolitical, and closed up his column by noting that he could listen to Keith Olbermann talk all day.

Translation: from now on, King will send his shout-outs via coded message.

So what were his coded messages this week? They are on this page. Just after praising Spike Lee's new film (calling into question King's tastes in movies), he tells us that:

l. Finally got to see the premiere of Family Guy, and if I had to pick, I'm not sure which TV character I'd chose as the best in history -- George Costanza, Barney Fife, James West or Brian the dog. Brian's quite a maverick.

We know from the use of the word "maverick" that King is referring to John McCain. And look at the list of characters that come before: loser Costanza, incompetent Fife, womanizing West, and Brian, who is an alcoholic dog.

What King's really saying: John McCain is a dying racist who plans on turning this country over to a crazed Christianist who will drive the Zionist agenda and lead us all to destruction, where we will be forced to eat dogs to survive.

I see through your ruse very clearly, Mr. King. Shame on you for violating the sacred trust between coffee-breathed sports journalist and reader!

King ends with this point:

m. Best pizza in New York, if you like thin crust similar to the best pizza in Italy: Fiorello's, on Broadway, between 63rd and 64th.

Which, as you no doubt realize, is a tacit admission that he likes to dress up in ballerina costumes and drink camel urine in hopes that they will help rejuvenate his waning libido. Oh, and he's frustrated because the only thing he's gotten by consuming up to 64 cases of penis-enlarging pills is massive flatulence.

Any idiot can see that in the subtext.

Wherein Wifey Lets Me Down

2008-10-02T11:57:00.000-07:00

Today Wifey received this call straight out of the blue:

"Hello," said the kind woman on the other end. "My name is Barbara, and I'd like to invite you to an elite, high-level fundraiser for Barack Obama."

What do you suppose Wifey said?

You'd expect that, given that her husband is an anonymous blogger with at least three readers, she'd leap at the chance to attend an elite, high-level overseas fundraiser for Barack Obama that was stooping to cold-calling any Americans they could find the number for.

It's the very definition of a target-rich environment for a master satirist such as myself!

But she just said "No, thank you."

And she hung up the phone!

Just thirty minutes at that affair would've written my blog for a week. A couple of hours would have kept me blogging up through the election! And can you imagine the fun I'd have had making an ass of myself?

Plus, I never get invited to any kind of elite, high-level events. Oh, sure, I got thrown out of an elite gentleman's club one time, but that was hardly my fault. I still maintain that it was her boob groping me, not the other way around, but the bouncer saw things differently. So did I, after he broke my glasses.

So I'll have to make do without whatever wisdom gets dispensed at these events. I must really have arrived, though, because four years ago nobody asked me to any kind of fundraisers for John Kerry.

But in 2008, Europe is apparently a swing state. Or a failed state. I can't ever remember the difference.

Being a good husband, though, I'm not going to hold a grudge or demand remunerations from my wife. She was, after all, trying to spare us the horrors of having a campaign flush with cash hit us up for money just after a Wall Street crash put another five years onto my career. For this, I will thank her.

But she better not complain about being groped again, I can tell you that. Because this time the bouncer's not there to save her.

California to Export Energy by 2015

2008-09-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

After a long battle between faux Republican governor Arnold Swartzenegger and the California Legislature, which is mostly communist with a green garnish, the government of the largest state has committed itself to developing its vast resources of smug for the production of clean energy, which it hopes to provide to the rest of the nation.

“Just the smug from San Francisco alone could power the Eastern seaboard!” said Green Party chairman Karl Lenin. “And if we can get even one of the smug generators in West Hollywood or Beverly Hills operating, we’d be able to power every state west of the Rockies! Except for Wyoming, home of Dick Cheney and a festering hellhole that should be depopulated.”

A spokesman for the governor called it “yet another nail in the coffin of Arnold’s political career and a clear sign that the constitutional ban on non-citizens running for president was a very good thing.”

Scientists pointed out that there is no known way to turn smug into anything other than annoyance, but other than global warming they are typically wrong about everything, so they may be ignored.

Millionaire investor T. Boone Pickens said he looked forward to selling the Smug Collectors, because “whether or not they work I’ll get my millions selling them.”

Al Gore said that while encouraging, the step didn’t go far enough. “We’ve reached a tipping point, a veritable point of no return, where we are over the knife edge and past the event horizon. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m out of trite phrases, and I have to go now because I just got word that another one of my houses has been burned to the ground.”

Gore Mansion Destroyed in a Fire

2008-09-29T14:20:00.000-07:00

Angry youths wearing green masks today stormed the Gore compound and burned it into the ground, declaring it “a hazard to children and other living creatures” because of its massive consumption of electricity, natural gas, and Ho-Hos. The rioters also overturned a Twinkie truck that was making a delivery.

There were no reported injuries.

The move comes just after Gore exhorted his followers to act with “civil disobedience” against any organization which might be harming the earth by carbon emissions. It was not clear at press time whether or not Mr. Gore had intended himself to be a target, and he was unavailable for comment due to being en route to Swaziland via private jet to collect the 2008 “Good Citizen’s Award for Fossil Fuel Avoidance.”

A spokesman for the protestors said that they intended to find Gore’s boat, which they had christened “The Goreitania”, and sink it as well.

“Al won’t mind,” he said. “He’s cool with us tearing stuff up and breaking windows to slake our thirst for environmental justice. After all, we’re just helping him live more simply, like when George Bush beat him in 2000 and retired him from politics. That’s why from now on, I’m voting Republican, to give our messiahs more time to concentrate on their vision!”

My Day in Hell

2008-09-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

Greetings from hell!

Okay, maybe that’s a bit strong. But I spent the day in at least Purgatory, or Dulles Airport, whichever is less pleasant. Okay, Purgatory.

Anyways, I’m in Italy right now on business. Trust me: this is less exciting than it sounds. Quite frankly, Italy is strange. Very strange.

First of all, the men carry purses. I’m sorry, there’s just no way to take a guy seriously who’s carrying a purse. Maybe that’s sexist of me, but that’s just how I feel. I also feel that women who wear too-tight T-Shirts and insist that they be appreciated for their brains are morons.

This is Plebian, and I approve that message.

So I spent part of the day in meetings going over some stuff with guys who carry purses. Not tough-looking camo purses, either; some of these were beaded. They were men carrying beaded purses!

And I’m not implying these guys are gay, either: every calendar featured a naked woman and the screensaver would have made Larry Flint pause for thought. If they were gay, the did the worst cover-up job in the world.

Worst of all, though, was the purse-wearing dude who thought so much of his underwear that he wore his pants around his ankles. And his collar flipped up. Instead of looking cool, he looked like my five-year-old getting dressed in the morning asking me for help.

Except my five-year-old doesn’t carry a sequined yellow purse to go with his outfit.

Then, in the afternoon, having been totally bemused by the Italian men, I got to experience the joy of working with Italian women. It was enough to make me long for the men.

One woman had decided that business casual included a tight white t-shirt that fit her about twelve years ago, when she was fourteen. Now, though, she’s grown some, plus hit puberty, so the shirt is very stretched. No problem: underneath this she wore her hypno-bra, a swirling black-and-white patterned thing that was virtually guaranteed to call attention to the fact that her T-Shirt was too small.

It was like she was trying to hypnotize people with her breasts. Personally, I always thought that only worked when the woman wore those tassled pasties and made them swirl in opposite directions.

The other woman forced me to reflect upon this business etiquette question:

You’re in a meeting with four colleagues, all of whom are more or less the same level as you. One of them is sitting across from you, and for reasons unknown to the cosmos doesn’t realize that her right breast has escaped its bra and the low-cut shirt and is now resting on the table, with the nipple staring at you like the worm in the bottom of a tequila bottle.

What do you do?

Say “Geez, it’s nippy in here. Would you please open a window?”

Or something else?

I’m open to suggestions, because I never did figure out how to manage that situation in a suave and elegant way.

I finally gave up, left the meeting, and went purse shopping so I could fit in.

Why not copy this show?

2008-09-25T14:11:00.000-07:00

I’ll say this much for the Germans: they may smell bad, be rude, and start worldwide wars with abandon, but they know how to make a good news show.

Here in Italy, of course, the German news shows are very popular, mostly because it’s German law that every news show must include some thin pretense for nudity. Whether it’s a hard-hitting investigation of a couple who performs striptease, or an in-depth report of the life and times of the strip club G-String, you can count on full-frontal nudity when you tune in to the German news.

Or, as they call it, Hetnewsiulkriekenstreegerstargenfartbus.

Tonight’s thinly-veiled excuse for skin was a hard-hitting expose on whether women rated themselves equal to the way that men rated them. In order to do this, they collected five women and then had a panel of three men rate them on the attractiveness of their face, their butt, their breasts, and their outfits, then compared it to how the women rate themselves. As you can guess, some nudity on the part of the women was required.

What was funny was the disparate women they chose. It was like they decided to do a boxing contest, only in one corner they had Evander Holyfield, and in the other corner, Andy Dick. We all know that Andy Dick could be beaten up by pretty much any other celebrity, up to and including pop stars.

I mean, even Miley Cyrus could kick his ass, no question.

Their version of this was to have one beautiful woman with gravity-defying breasts up against two normal-looking women, one homely woman, and one woman who had a really nice personality, according to all her friends.

Honestly, which one are three horny doofuses going to vote for, given this sorry lot? Not the girl with the nose ring, and not the fresh-faced girl with as many curves as a Kansas highway.

They’re gonna go for the beauty queen whose breasts rupture forth from whatever outfit she wrestles them into. She could have worn a burlap sack and still won the “Outfit” competition, which in fact is what she did.

Why don’t we get treated to in-depth news studies like this, instead of survey after survey about the differences between liberals and conservatives?

Open Letter to David Blaine

2008-09-24T11:03:00.001-07:00

I hate to break this to you, but your continuous attempts to shock and amaze us are sort of bordering on lame. Hanging upside down? Really? That’s the best you could come up with? You could have at least hung upside down suspended by your nipples, like something Kris Angel might do. Now that would be freaky!

While you want to shock and amaze us all with your “endurance magic”, the reality is that you’d struggle to be the coolest guy at a Guinness Book of Records Reunion. I mean, that dude that can fit pool balls in his mouth? That’s impressive and dangerous, plus it’s a perfect party trick. How many homes just happen to have a thirty-foot-boom crane and a glass cage in the backyard?

Outside of Las Vegas, I mean.

I’ve got more news for you: the ladies don’t love magicians any more; that boat sailed when Claudia Schiffer found out that David Copperfield was both gay and a pervert. All the supermodels are dating fat comedians now. You were born in the wrong decade: should have been born in the 80’s. Then you, too, could have had a nasty divorce from Christy Brinkley.

Come to think of it, she’s available. You know what would be a magical feat of endurance? Stay married to her longer than two weeks and not have it end in a bitter tabloid divorce.
Do that, and we’ll all be true believers.

How Golf Could be Better

2008-09-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

Golf sucks, and it’s boring, and I’m not at all sorry to be the one to tell you that.

If by some inconceivable chance you’re one of the people who finds watching golf exciting, you’re weird, and I hate to tell you that everybody you know thinks that you’re weird. “He likes golf!” they whisper behind your back, laughing at you.

Many sports writers recently struggled with a way to dress up the US Ryder Cup victory, and settled on “US Finally Reclaims Ryder Cup.” But about 90% of those headlines started out as “Guys you Never Heard Of Win Trophy You Don’t Care About in Sport You Don’t Watch.”

The other 10% started out “Why I Love Golf Again” but the stories were never finished because their families, out of love, held an intervention and got treatment for the affected person.

Some people love golf because it’s a struggle of man against ball. Listen, not disappointing your wife by finishing in ten seconds is a struggle of man against ball. Golf is more a struggle of caddy against hanging himself out of boredom.

But, being the helpful guy I am, I’ll offer some suggestions for how we can improve golf.

Make it a Biathalon
How about this: throw a couple of rifles in the old golf bag, and between holes you have to hit a target at five hundred yards? Then, when your opponent tees off, you can try to shoot his ball out of the air to give him a five-stroke penalty. People might actually watch that, plus the errant shot would be great for ratings.

Dinosaurs and Pirates on Every Green
There’s a reason Putt-Putt is so popular, and it’s not because the fat guy behind the counter sells beer to minors. Okay, that’s about half of it, but the other half is because people love trying to knock the ball between Abraham Lincoln’s legs.

More Bob Barker
Everybody loves Bob Barker, even if his presence does sometimes unfortunately lead to more Drew Carey.

Catapults
I haven’t yet figured out what we’d do with them, but don’t we all agree that at least one sport should involve catapults? Maybe we could shoot the clubs out of them, or the golfers who don’t make the cut, or the rejects that fill the galleries. But it’d certainly dress up the game.

Exploding Balls
Not every one, but imagine if, before the game began, they knew that one ball in 50 was explosive. Every time they wound up, you’d be hanging on the edge of your seat to see if this was the one that blew up. Every golfer would hesitate just a little, knowing that the next tee shot might send him hurtling forty feet backwards.

And send golf ratings hurtling to the moon!

Why Alitalia is Bakrupt

2008-09-23T13:01:00.000-07:00

I flew Alitalia today. If you didn’t know, they’re losing three million dollars a day and any moment now they’re going to stop flying altogether, because that’s the best way for them to stop wasting taxpayer money.

Oh, sure, you quibble that it’d be easier for them not to hemorrhage taxpayer money by not being subsidized by the government. But come on: it’s not like they’re an investment bank or something.

First, let’s look at what Alitalia does right:

Attractive Stewardesses
With the exception of Qantas, Alitalia has the best-looking stewardesses in the air. They’re all young, fetching, and fond of wearing their blouses with the top five buttons undone. This makes drink service not only easy on the eyes, but a nice erotic diversion from the fact that you’re hurtling through the air at six hundred miles per hour piloted by a guy that can’t pronounce the letter “r” correctly.

Beards
Every male working for Alitalia has a beard.

That’s pretty much it for what they got right. Now, let’s examine some of the problems with Alitalia:

Socialist Work Ethic
It takes, literally, three people to do the work of one in Alitalia. This might be connected to the attractive stewardesses, because you have two baggage handlers ogling the attractive stewardess while the third, whose beard is too sparse to compete with the two hirsute oglers, is forced to do all the work by himself.

Color Scheme
Alitalia’s colors are green, red, and white, just like the Italian flag. Which are also the colors of the Mexican flag. I’m not saying that Italy and Mexico are essentially failed states with nothing to show for 100+ years of existence, but I can’t think of a polite way to end this sentence. Everybody knows that you go red, white and blue, or you’re screwed.

Plane Hygiene
I can say, without a trace of hyperbole, that the plane smelled like Rosie O’Donnell’s armpit after she finished wrestling Roseanne Barr for the last piece of chicken. If Rosie just ran a mile. While being pelted with expired yogurt. In Summer. I don’t think the plane was originally sold in this delightful scent. Yes, it was a four-hour-flight, and yes, I do have a headache. Thanks for asking.

Food
I opened the little box to find this: a plastic-sealed bucket of pasta and chicken, and an open container of chocolate custard that had left a big doodie ring on the box top because it had no covering at all. The pasta tasted like it’d be marinated in Crazy Death Seasoning, so I was left with Signori Turdy’s Chocolate Boom-Boom. I ate it, of course, but I didn’t like the thought that chemicals from the box probably leached into it and will give me erectile dysfunction.

So there you have it: a hard-hitting and thorough report of why Alitalia is bankrupt. And they say blogs don’t do "real" news and analysis. Nertz to them, I say!

Ride 'Em Cowboy

2008-09-19T12:49:00.002-07:00

I decided to seduce my wife last night.

The problem is, there are precious little avenues open for me to attempt this. We've been married for fifteen years, and I've shot almost every bullet in the chamber, so to speak. So whatever I try, it has to be original enough to catch her attention, but not so original that she wants a divorce.

If you know what I mean, and I think that you do.

I eventually settled on the only logical choice: dressing up like a naked cowboy. After all, it’s well-known that she can’t resist a sexy cowboy.

We had a cowboy costume left over from earlier this year, so about ten minutes before she usually goes to bed, I snuck upstairs to prepare a surprise for her.

The excuse that I gave her was that I was going to turn on the electric blanket and get the bed ready. We keep the house at a balmy 50° F in order to save on our energy bill, which in turn cuts down on the amount of money that we send to Vladimir Putin and his goons at Gazprom.

See what sacrifices I make for world harmony?

She stayed downstairs, working on writing something out. I didn't know what it was; I mean, she tells me these things, but I don't focus on them.

The costume was leather chaps, boots, a vest, a cowboy belt, and a hat. That's it. Once I had it all on, I like to think that I had the "erotic cowboy" look down. Yes, I looked obscene. That was kind of the point, you know?

However, I was a little concerned about the full-on nudity aspect of it. So I took a red bandana and fashioned a sort of "junk pouch" out of it to keep it from being completely lewd. I was tastefully lewd, I like to think.

I was ready. I imagined that she'd come in, be completely wowed by my sexy costume, become aroused, and we'd make passionate love and then pass out in each other's arms.

Don't laugh. It's the audacity of hope.

I head her downstairs, working on whatever it was. And so I waited.

And I waited.

And I waited.

Twenty minutes passed with me standing upstairs, unable to move because the boots would make too much noise, in my 50° F house, buck naked except for leather chaps, a vest, and a bandana that was rapidly deflating.

I went from "erotic cowboy" to Viagra ad within the first five minutes.

Finally, I heard her moving around downstairs, shutting off lights and getting ready to come up to bed. When she switched on the light to the bedroom, I came swaggering out of the bathroom.

"Somebody call for a cowboy telegram?" I said it in my sexiest cowboy voice.

"Oh my God!" She started laughing. "You look ridiculous!"

This is not conducive to intimacy.

"I don't look ridiculous!" I protested. "I look sexy!"

She shook her head, tears running down her face. "No you don't," she said. "You look like a reject from the Village People."

Needless to say, whatever bandana boost I had maintained through the cold winter night was pretty much killed off by that comment. So, dejected, I changed out of my cowboy costume and got ready for bed.

At about twelve thirty, she shook me awake. I was immediately awake, hopeful that she'd reassessed my offer.

"Hey, Hopalong Assidy," she said. "You're snoring. Go sleep on the couch."

Happy Trails, indeed.

AAPS Condemns "New Crusade"

2008-09-19T12:49:00.001-07:00

A leading civil-rights organization spoke out today against "the ongoing crusade" in the United States and warned that unless corrective actions are immediately taken "the future will be bleaker than at any time in the past two hundred years."

The American Association for the Protection of Strawmen (AAPS) issued a statement today that they were very concerned about the direction of the presidential election.

"Things usually get heated around this time of year," the statement said. "But since the conventions, our offices have seen a surge in attacks on Strawmen. Since John McCain announced his VP nominee, over six thousand strawmen per day have been tortured and murdered. We are particularly concerned by reports that both campaigns have been caught abducting strawmen from their homes."

The AAPS took the unusual step of naming several leading suspects in the ongoing attacks on Strawmen. "Particularly reprehensible has been the behavior of some so-called 'Mainstream Media' figures, who have killed four or five strawmen per show over the past few weeks. We estimate that Keith Olbermann, Daily Kos, and Time magazine are responsible for at least 40% of all Strawman-related violence."

A spokeswoman for the AAPS urged Americans of all political stripes to set aside their hostility for strawmen. "It's time that we realize that strawmen are just like us, with hopes and dreams for the future, and we should allow them to realize those dreams without living for fear that someone will jerk them up and destroy them in front of a howling, frenzied crowd without any regard for logic or reason."

The Untold Story of the Hadron Collider

2008-09-15T13:05:00.000-07:00

CERN, Switzerland: A group of physicists decided to play God las week and almost doomed humanity in the process. Thankfully, a latter-day Hercules was on site to prevent the experiment from going out of control and news reports are that, for the moment, the world is safe.

As the pencil-necked geeks looked on in horror, a cascade of reactions led to the creation of thirty black holes, each more ravenous than the last. They quickly forced their way through the isolation chamber and menaced not only the scientists but the stability of the Earth itself.

Because all present were physicists, and even worse European, they were unable to do anything except beg for their lives and offer anti-American rhetoric in a desperate attempt to placate the subatomic threat.

Fortunately for humanity, Chuck Norris and his family were vacationing in Switzerland last week as well, as Mr. Norris had anticipated that there might be a problem when the scientists opened the Pandora's box of particle collision. Norris acted quickly, penetrating deep within the fortress-like installation, and after a series of throat kicks and crotch punches the black holes were dissipated into their component particles.

Early reports indicated that Norris was slightly injured when scratched by a pencil from a swooning scientist, but later it was revealed that when Chuck Norris wants to sharpen a pencil he just rubs it against his diamond-like skin and it was in fact the pencil which was injured.

Is This Argument Really Necessary?

2008-09-15T12:59:00.001-07:00

So at church yesterday, I heard one of the reliably Democrat parishioners hectoring one of the reliably Republican parishioners that "Jesus was a community organizer, Pontius Pilate was a governor!"

Let me say right here that I don't feel it's ever appropriate to interject party affiliation into religious discussion and claim one party is more "Christian" than the other. They're both highly flawed vessels, from a spiritual point of view. But this is the one lady that inevitably wants to inject Democratic talking points into any religious discussion, so I like to needle her when I can.

For parity's sake I do the same with the Republicans. Okay, it's really because I'm a butthead and I enjoy needling people. Anyways, I decided to get my two cents in.

"Ooh, ooh, can I play?" I butted into their conversation. "I've got one: Ronald Reagan was a governor, Joseph Stalin was a community organizer. Your turn!"

She goggled at me a moment, lost for speech. Apparently she'd only planned one move in advance, just like Barack Obama.

"I've got another one! How about Franklin Roosevelt was a governor, but Nathan Bedford Forrest was a community organizer?"

"Who?" said the Republican. Apparently history's not his strong suit.

"He founded the KKK," I said.

"Um, uh," she continued to founder.

"I can come up with another one!" I said. "How about Thomas Jefferson was a governor, Pol Pot was a community organizer? Does that one count?"

"Oh yeah?" she finally shot back. "Well, Martin Luther King was a community organizer, but Jimmy Carter was a governor!"

"Yeah, but Jimmy Carter was a Democrat," I said. "And so was Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot. Are you sure you wanna play this game any more? Or can we just say that I win?"

She just gave up and went away. Which was too bad, because I hadn't even broken out "Julius Caesar was a governor, Hitler was a community organizer" yet.

World To End?

2008-09-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

Scientists are warning the public that there is a very good chance that the world will end tomorrow, Wednesday, September 10, 2009. Sometime in the morning, two highly-charged particles will slam into each other, with implications that are impossible to precisely predict.

"We're expecting the end of life as we know it," said spokesman for the scientific group ALARM. "Worst-case scenarios include a black hole that sucks everything into it and Hell freezing over. Best-case is that Clinton agrees to help with the campaign, but since we don't have any early indications that Obama has hired a bunch of nubile interns we're pessimistic that this will be the outcome."

While many scientists have expressed confidence that the reaction will be fine, ALARM experts have been flooding the Internet with speculation that the situation is much less rosy.

"Obama is running out of steam, and he's forced to make a deal with the devil, only he just got finished beating the devil's wife, calling the devil a racist, and has a reputation for casting people aside the moment he's finished with them. You think Clinton will forgive and forget all that? If so, you're fooling yourself.

"That's why we expect disaster tomorrow. So eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we re-enter the Clinton Zone. It's like a black hole, only much, much more annoying."

Mountains and Molehills

2008-09-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

There are approximately 345 days of rain where I live, about half of them during the summer (the other half are on weekends). It is not unusual to have 25+ days of rain in July, August, or both, as was the case this year.

So when the sun comes for one its rare visits, everyone enjoys it, even if it means dressing wildly inappropriately. Such was the case today when, after a spectacularly shitty Sunday, we were treated to one of the 14 blue skies which we see every year.

Naturally, here in health-conscious Europe, everyone was eager to produce as much Vitamin D as possible. For the men, this means short-sleeved shirts with a tie to produce the dorkiest faux professional look possible. For the women, this means low v-necked tops, since a woman can display a shocking amount of skin and still be professionally dressed.

I suppose that's because strippers are a type of professional, but I can't say for certain.

Thus it happened that as I purchased my sandwich today, I found myself standing in a line that was 20 people long and offered ample opportunity to check out the lay of the land, so to speak.

Almost everyone was observing the "Blue Sky Rules" accordingly, myself included. Sure, there was one woman wearing what looked to be toga made from old 70's curtains, but everyone else was going for the short sleeve/low top casual look.

My attention was drawn to one particular woman in a light blue top with the V in her shirt that came to just above her navel. In addition to the typical riddle of "what's holding up her breasts?" that one always asks when presented with this type of shirt, her mammaries presented an additional puzzle:

Is that a third nipple?

Listen, for an observer of the bizarre like myself, this is not a question asked lightly. I consider myself cut from the mold of Ripley: I find the strange and bizarre and blog about it here for your amusement. This is why I often find myself in life-threatening situations involving teenagers or burying dead animals.

It was with that spirit in mind that I examined, in detail, the third nipple perched between her breasts. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, a mole with another mole on it, the entire package placed inartfully between her boobs.

Unfortunately, her problems extend far beyond a moley nipple (or a nipply mole)and troubles with her mirrors. Turns out she's touchy, too.

"What the hell are you looking at?" she asks me.

It's amazing how well her voice carried in the packed sandwich shop full of work acquaintances who were now staring at me like I'd order a turd sandwich and a bottle of piss.

What could I say? A number of responses flew through my head:

"I dunno, but you better take it to a dermatologist."

"Is that a tattoo or a birthmark?"

"Did you know your mole's perkier than your boobs?"

"Paradise by the dashboard lights!"

"Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh."

"I'm sorry, I've been blind since the accident."

However, I immediately discarded all those responses because they're against my religion (Puss-Fu). I settled for a mumbled "um, sorry" and prayed that the line would move faster.

Of course, it didn't, and everyone stared at me for twenty minutes like I was a pervert simply because I'd gotten caught staring at the moley boob (boobey mole?) of a woman twenty years my senior.

I hope you all appreciate the humiliation that I go through for you.

Classified Ads of the Damned

2008-09-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

HELP WANTED
Large lakefront town with poor economy, weak infrastructure, rampant crime, and civil corruption seeks mayor. Must be good dresser, haberdashery enthusiast. Prefer eunuch. Contact motorcity@hellhole.mi.

Football team seeks owner who is not an egomaniacal moron that spends money like a drunken frat boy at a Girls Gone Wild filming. Will accept Steinbrenners, Schotts, or pretty much anybody else. Contact redskins@ohpleaselethimsell.dc.

Leading political party seeks congressional leaders. No tin-eared, ham-fisted, corruptly incompetent louts need apply. Also seeking clue. Contact democrats@congress.gov.

Former presidential candidate seeks documentary filmmaker to tell "the real story" of my fall from grace, focusing on malfeasance of press and villainous Republican smears. No experience necessary; prefer big jugs. Send photo (preferably topless) to HairyJohn@theotheramerica.us.

Network seeks anchors for pretty much any show at any time to replace cast of unprofessional cretins currently employed. Must be able to not foam at the mouth for one full hour, garner more than a 0.1 Nielson rating, and avoid on-air bickering with cohosts. Contact MSNBC@disaster.net.

SEEKING POSITIONS
Aggressive go-getter with track record of accomplishment and 18 million supporters looking for position with open-minded major political party. Experience hosting lavish parties, campaigning and being passed over for younger men. Contact hillary@bitter.PUMA.

Likeable nimrod searches for position where I can spout populist nonsense and preen in the public eye until 2012. Contact Huckleberry@gibberish.ar.

FOR SALE
LIKE NEW! Faux Greek temple backdrop, perfect for picnics, arugula fairs, or Sophocles. Some ego damage. Contact BO@hubris.com.

Want precious metals? I've got tons available at rock-bottom prices! Next shipment should arrive in 2012. Contact Phelps@aquaman.com.

Need some goodwill? We've built up a little, and we'd like to sell it…cheap! While the market is hot! We're willing to give it away for pennies on the dollar simply for the illusion of "progress"! Just contact republicans@congress.gov.

WANT TO BUY
Seeking high-powered telescope with infrared lens for observing local wildlife, specifically interception-prone quarterbacks as they get in and out of the shower. Not a stalker, just a really, really interested fan. Contact peterking@lovemesomefavre.hunky!

Need backpack-style baby carrier that allows child to be seen clearly from any camera angle yet prevents it from making noise to distract from rousing speeches. Contact sarah@notapropjustagimmick.ak.

I have mixed feelings today…

2008-09-04T15:26:00.000-07:00

On the one hand, I am extremely excited to see that I scored a link* from the head Moron himself, Ace. Yay, me! The Great One actually read words that I wrote! Now I know the thrill-up-the-leg feeling of Andrew Sullivan looking at himself in the mirror.

Now for the downer: Purple Avenger stole my bit!

For the record: no, I don't believe that, and no, there's no hard feelings even if he did. He had the same inspiration that I did and ran in a totally different direction. I found it amusing that we had similar ideas (pull out the old MM Photoshop) yet used it in completely different ways.

Having said that, if he really did steal my bit I'm gonna treat him like Moe treated the original Alfalfa.

* = It must be noted that I have scored a previous link from Gabe on Ace, about which I was also extremely excited and very appreciative. I well recognize that Gabe is an upper-echelon blogger compared to me. But your first link from Ace himself is special. At least, it feels special to me.

One Night in Denmark

2008-09-04T15:21:00.000-07:00

I had to go to Denmark last week. If you've never been, know that Denmark is famous for three things:

1) LEGO building blocks.

2) Vikings

3) The most unfriendly populace in Europe.

We (my colleague and I) landed at about 8:30 PM and caught a taxi to the hotel. It was about an hour away, so by the time we finally got into the lobby it was 9:20.

We checked in quickly, and surprisingly enough without exchanging a single word with the surly desk clerk. After dumping our stuff in our rooms, we headed to the restaurant for dinner.

It was about half full, with waiters busily carrying stuff back and forth. We waited patiently for someone to seat us, but nobody ever came. Finally, we took matters into our own hands and sought out a server.

"We'd like a table, please," I asked him.

"Hold on," he said, and promptly entered the witness protection program, never to be seen again.

So we tried another server. "Hello, may we please be seated?" asked my colleague.

"It's nine twenty," the guy said. "We stop serving dinner after nine."

We waited a moment for him to laugh, but he never did. Danish people don't laugh, you see. Apparently he was serious.

"We'll take anything," my famished colleague begged. "We don't care! An egg, some toast, whatever you have!"

"We don't have anything for you," he said. "It's after nine."

"Can we eat somewhere else in the hotel?" I asked. It was a big hotel, after all.

"You can get a sandwich in the bar," he said. Then, he turned and stormed off as a plate of Lobster came by us headed for Table 12.

"I've got an idea," I said. "Let's start a fire, and when these people evacuate we can eat their food."

Ultimately, since we didn't have anything to start a fire with, we headed over to the bar. In order to prevent this in the future I have now taken up smoking.

The bar was jam-packed with drunken Danish businessmen having some kind of party, regrettably without nubile Nordic women drinking too much and getting topless.

They had, however, gotten out a piano, which one of them could play just poorly enough that you could make out the tune that they were butchering in their horrible English. It would have been Simon Cowell's nightmare.

Finally, after fifteen minutes, the barkeep recognized our right to exist and asked us what we wanted. Another twenty minutes later, we finally received our order: two beers and two sandwiches.

Did you know that in Danish, "sandwich" means "brown bread made from cow cud and covered in goat cheese with raw fish on top, smothered in horrid sauce that makes you long for death"?

Yeah, I didn't know that either.

Finally it was off to bed, after watching about ten minutes of Danish TV, which appears to consist mainly of CSI reruns dubbed into Danish. This was playing on three channels, and the fourth was weather.

In the morning, I resolved to see if I could pull off people's heads and switch them around like my old LEGO figures.

NFL Gambling Preview

2008-09-03T13:59:00.000-07:00

Most sports web sites give you lots of accurate information and tips to help you gamble, yet scrupulously avoid actually using the word "bet" to keep from offending sensibilities and hold up the fiction that NFL games aren't rigged by a big Eastern syndicate.

They also participate in the fiction that there are teams outside of the East Coast (geographical area: Massachusetts to Washington, DC) that are good.

You won't find that here. I guarantee that my information is inaccurate, but I will give you keen gambling advice. Specifically, don't bet on football games, because you can't predict anything that's going to happen. Seriously. There is no logic to it.

Okay, if you have to bet, do this: bet against the favorites in every game the first two weeks, because the fact is nobody knows who will be good and bad at this point in the season, and a few monster wins will help offset your losses. Then stop betting altogether or you'll lose what you've gained.

Further, I refuse to participate in the geographical fiction that there are decent teams outside of the greater New York area. To this end, I've renamed every division.

AFC Inside New York Division
Eastern New York Heroes (aka New England): 6-12
Listen, it's possible that the Patriots are singularly different than almost every other team that loses the Super Bowl. It's possible that these robotic superhumans will shake off the emotional detritus of falling short of historic perfection and achieve greatness again. It's possible that the fantastic luck of the last 6 seasons will continue. But it ain't likely.

Western New York Cattle-Themed Nimrods (aka Buffalo): 8-8
The last time the Bills were good, Jim Kelly still played for them. In related news, he's still athletic enough to start at almost any position on the team and replace the player currently filling that slot.

Over New York Atmospheric Pollution Deliverers (aka NY Jets): 1-15
Reality: Brett Favre is not the quarterback he once was, and the quarterback he once was was average. The solution to the Jets was not Favre, it was to move out of the AFC East.

Southern New York Futilloids (aka Miami): 0-16
This year, they finally make perfection. And no, I don't buy the Bill Parcells mystique as GM. But thanks for asking!

NFC Inside New York Division
Southern New York Oil-Drilling Barbarians (aka Cowboys): 4-12
This team will be marred by several fistfights over who has the prettiest face, sexiest girlfriend, and who touched who during the slumber party over at TO's house. But all will be forgiven, until the team loses two in a row and tempers flare and the entire team falls apart, much to the chagrin of the horrid undead mummy that owns the whole thing. But he likes rebuilding, so it shouldn't keep him depressed for too long.

Downtown New York Pigeons (aka Philadelphia): 12-4
I tried to think of something funny to put here, but I couldn't come up with anything. So consider this a recycled "they once hit Santa with a snowball" joke and let's let it go at that, okay?

Greatest Team in History, Best Manning Brother, Awesomely Awesome Titans of the Gridiron New York Giants: 8-8
I don't understand how Eli Manning is suddenly "equal" to Peyton Manning. Would you suggest, straight-faced, that Trent Dilfer is also the equal of Peyton Manning, based on their equal number of Super Bowl victories?

Trump Towers Egomaniacal Owner's Team (aka Washington): 2-14
If I lived in the Washington, DC area I'd be selling "Snyder Must Go!" shirts at every home game. He's like George Steinbrenner, only absent the keen judgment.

AFC Northern New York Division
Industrially Derelict Anachronisms (aka Pittsburgh): 12-4
In order to bolster attendance at Pirates games, the Steelers will give away 100 Pirates tickets to everyone who attends a Steelers game in September. If even one fan shows up for a baseball game, it'll double normal attendance.

West New York Flaming Lakes (aka Cleveland): 7-11
If you made keen financial decisions like the Browns do quarterbacking decisions, then you're reading this from a free computer in the library, where you not incidentally live since they foreclosed on your house.

Sing-Sing Slammers (aka Cincinnati): 1-15
Can we officially call Marvin Lewis a failure? Or is he only a failure if there's a crime spree during an actual game?

Southern New York Hypocrites (aka Baltimore): 3-13
I had the pleasure of living in Baltimore for three years when they finally stole the Browns from Cleveland, and I can honestly tell you there's not a more wretched hive of scum and hypocrisy than the jerkoffs who live there. Their attitude was "the NFL screwed us, so we're perfectly justified in screwing Cleveland!"

NFC Northern New York Division
Frozen Famous Ray's Pizza (aka Green Bay): 14-2
Imagine that you were a plowhorse, working all day pulling a gigantically fat man who simultaneously whipped you and bragged about how much work he was doing tilling the field. Then, one day, the man not only fell off the cart but you actually got to run him over. Wouldn't you suddenly feel light as a feather?

Ethnically Insensitive Greenwich Village Persons (aka Minnesota): 12-4
There's only a limited amount of time that the Vikings can continue to be bad, right?

Lesser New York Zoo and Amusement Park (aka Chicago): 2-14
If you know of any good quarterbacks in the greater North American area, you might want to drop a line to the Bears front office, because they can't seem to find one.

Manhattan Rasputins (aka Detroit): 2-14
It's really too bad that Voodoo Priest Matt Millen uses all his dark powers keeping the Ford family enthralled, because if he spent just a fraction of that malevolence on the other teams Detroit would go undefeated and win the Super Bowl.

AFC Southern New York/New Jersey Redneck Division
Visiting Out-Of-Towners (aka Indianapolis): 16-0
Anything that Tom Brady can do, Peyton Manning can do better. Which is why the undefeated Colts will lose in the first round rather than in the Super Bowl.

Damn Tourists (aka Jacksonville): 8-8
I don't know what to say about this team other than every year they are promised as the next big thing, and every year they are average. On the upside, though, I'm not a fan.

Ellis Island Gap-Toothed Hicks (aka Tennessee): 6-10
On the upside, the Titans don't face UCLA. Plus, 4 of the 6 wins should come in the latter half of the season to help excite people for next season, when they'll again underachieve until the playoffs are out of reach.

Southern New York non-Oil Drilling Barbarians (aka Texans): 13-3
Proof that sportswriters are churlish: the absolute lack of articles apologizing for lambasting the Texans for taking Mario Williams over Reggie Bush. After excoriating the Texans for daring not to take a darling-of-the-media RB, the performance of Bush has once again proven the futility of taking the position high in the draft.

NFC Southern New York/New Jersey Redneck Division
Non-Casino Affiliated Pirates (aka Tampa Bay): 8-8
Have we officially decided that John Gruden's not a genius? Or is the jury still out on that? And if he's not, do we admit that Tony Dungy is? And if Dungy is, can we adequately explain why this wasn't properly understood a few years ago?

Albany Ineptitude (aka Atlanta): 7-9
You don't just bad-luck your way into the circumstances that have landed Atlanta in to the lowly state it is in today; you have to want to go there. Kind of like visiting 5 grand a night call girls while being governor.

New York Parks and Recreation Swamp-League Champions (aka New Orleans): 6-10
Because the NFL is all about sweetness and light, they continue to do everything in their power to depress Saints attendance by scheduling as few home games as possible.

Golden Gloves League Champs (aka Carolina): 2-14
Isn't it depressing that the Panthers have had more legitimate heavyweight fights than Madison Square Gardens in the last ten years? You throw in the cheerleader scandal from a few years ago and I'm starting to wonder if Carolina isn't the new cultural center of the US.

AFC Western New York Coastal Elites
East River Surfer Dudes (aka San Diego): 6-10
Fact: the new NFL rule book forbids cloning players and using them at every position, because there was a rumor that the Chargers intended to do this to get around their limitation of having only one LT. Of course, if they had done that, the postgame news conference after their inevitable playoff loss would have had more complaining than the Vagina Monologues.

Upper New York Soulless Automatons (aka Denver): 10-6
The biggest question around the Broncos this year is how they'll mishandle Jay Cutler once again, since that seems to be the preoccupation of the organization.

Non-Casino Affiliated Pirates, AFC Version (aka Oakland): 1-15
If we were really serious about toppling dictators, somebody'd liberate the Raiders from Al Davis. Until that happens, I'll know it's all talk and no action.

Western New York Midwestern Affiliate (aka Kansas): 4-12
Again, I'm stumped for something to say about them, other than to wonder how Kansas was ever considered "West".

NFC Western New York Non-Great Lakes Division
Starbucks Coffee Uninspiring Cup o'The Weak (aka Seattle): 12-4
Seahawks victories are like currencies, so you need to convert them. Every win is worth half a win in a real division, and every loss counts double.

New York Museum of Natural History (aka San Francisco): 1-15
If there's one team whose best days are certainly behind it, it's the 49ers. But man, the Alcatraz tour sure is nice.

Eastern New York School of Geography (aka St. Louis): 8-8
One last hurrah for the Rams, who after this year will be outsourced to India in order to save costs. This move makes sense, because the Rams have been phoning in games for years.

New York Institute for the Criminally Inept (aka Arizona): 3-13
The best thing about being a Cardinals player is that you can freely schedule your time outside of football, because you know you'll be available from the last week of December onwards to do whatever you want.

Cursed by Derrieres

2008-09-02T14:40:00.000-07:00

I've had a bad day.

It started, as is often the case, in the morning. We had a lot of wind, and everyone is back from vacation, so in addition to thousands more idiots on the roads during my commute there was plenty of wind shear on the rickety bridge that I have to cross over the canal.

Add in that every truck in Europe has these cute little flexible sides and wobbles like a drunken Joe Namath trying to propose to sideline reporters and you see what the problem here is.

I finally made it, and was very proud for not losing any paint off my car. I was carefully wending my way up the hills towards my office, obeying all posted speed limits and obeying signage, when my attention was diverted by underwear.

Red panties, to be exact. My Underwear Sense went off, telling me that panties, bra straps, or other feminine undergarments were observable within a six-hundred-yard radius.

She was crossing the street up ahead of me, and the wind was whipping fiercely, and she had a whole Marilyn-over-the-subway grate thing going, only she's a one of these brazen European women so the notion of modesty never crosses her mind and I get a view of her ass as she tries to make it around the corner of the building.

Hello, nurse!

I did what any normal man would do: I enjoyed the show, totally oblivious to the fact that I was in fact piloting 1500 pounds of metal powered by explosive fuel and traveling at speeds high enough to do more damage than my deductible.

Finally I came back to myself when she turned the corner and I realized that my rear-view mirror was laying about ten yards back and the scraping metal sound was not, in fact, the latest hit song but was rather the car scraping against the guard rail.

I'd been wondering what the fireworks outside were; turns out they were sparks from the fender.

I pondered briefly how to explain this to Wifey. I had three options:

1) I could lie, and tell her I just scraped it against a building
2) I could tell the truth, that I was distracted by another woman's ass
3) I could tell her it happened while the car was parked

If I chose 1, she would mock me. If I chose 2, she would mock me and maybe not be intimate with me for some time. If I chose 3, we both got the fun of blaming somebody who never existed, as if we were pretending to be OJ Simpson.

Option 3 is the winner! Since the car was already dinged, I just double-parked it and left it for dead. After all, I was in a hurry to get to work and begin creating value for my employer.

Okay, I admit it: I was in a hurry to catch the 8:05 show of Red Panty Lady.

Sadly, she'd given me the slip. I could have ridden up the elevator with the remnant of the smoking posse, but I opted instead to climb the stairs because it's healthier. And I'm all about healthy choices.

That, and accidental nudity.

The day went pretty quickly, and other than actually being busy wasn't so bad. I discovered at lunch that the smokers had decided to crowd the doorway in a mass five jackasses deep, so I had to wade through their nicotine stench to reach fresh air.

I mean, really, smoke all you want, but is it truly necessary to stand right in front of the only door to do it? Can't you move three feet to one side or the other? It's like watching cows go into a slaughterhouse, only the cows are slowly turning to leather before your eyes.

As I bought my sandwich, I was treated to the 12:15 show of Red Panty Lady (I remembered the floppy tan skirt). Turns out that up close, and with her clothing all in place, she's not so much to look at.

By which I mean she's ugly enough to frighten pug dogs and curdle milk with her two-watt smile. My treasured memory from this morning quickly turned into me feeling somewhat seedy, and not in a good way.

Thankfully, I keep a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in my desk for just such occasions, so I rinsed my eyeballs out to purge them, a la The Crying Game. And we will never speak of this again.

In order to resolve the issue of the dented car, I used the Machiavellian strategy of parking it up the street so that Wifey couldn't see it. I figure I can get away with this for a few months while I figure out a good excuse, plus it'll give me more walking.

So you could say that the whole thing was good for my health, if not for my insurance bill.

On the walk to the house, I passed by a wood delivery service that had piled six hundred and forty three pieces of wood in the neighbor's driveway. They had a crew of three picking up wood pieces and carrying them around back to stack.

My Panty Sense tingled, and I noticed that the chick who was bent over to pick up some logs had holes in her pants; specifically, she had holes just below her ass cheeks big enough to reach for paradise through, so to speak.

Hello, nurse!

So I did what anybody would do: I enjoyed the view. At least, until the chick straightened up, when I noticed three pertinent things:

1) A mullet
2) An Adam's apple
3) Facial hair

The chick was a dude! AAARGH! And I'd left my hydrogen peroxide back at the office!

I was immediately creeped out. What the hell was wrong with me today? I was cursed by asses!

But then I reflected a moment: do gay guys get creeped out if they make the opposite mistake and check out a dude, only to find out it's a woman?

If I were a sociologist, I'd ask the government for a hundred million dollars to study this. I'd call it "Responses to Misdirected Attention by Sexual Orientation" and invent a metric called "Ookiness Factor" to compare how gays and straights respond to this situation.

Screw it, I think I'll ask for the money myself. I mean, how hard is it to be a Sociology major? All you have to do is bitch about how no one will hire you, ask for a government job, and be bad at math.

I've pretty much got two out of three of those down already!

The Fuel of Industry

2008-09-01T14:13:00.000-07:00

Where I work, we have coffee machine that dispenses many different kinds of drinks, from espresso to café au lait to hot chocolate. It is, as you can imagine, one of the finer fringe benefits to my workplace.

It used to be that I drank one cup of coffee a day, back when I had to pay for it myself, right in the morning to get started. But now, I drink one cup a day, followed by another four cups to get through the morning, then one cup after lunch, then another one just before I drive home so I don't nod off.

Yes, I am a bit jittery, and there has been some insomnia, and occasionally I distinctly detect the aroma of burnt coffee grounds when I pee, but other than that there have been no side effects. My wife says I'm paranoid, but I swear that the PBA really is monitoring our house.

So this morning, as always, after I'd turned on my computer I grabbed my cup and headed down the hall to the coffee machine. See, that's the essence of multitasking: while the computer warms up, so do I.

It's like going to take a dump while you're waiting for a 5-MB e-mail that you sent to thirty people to finally process: you and your computer acting as one. I'm practically a cyborg in this regard.

But when I got to the machine, it was out of service. The coffee man was in the process of adding new beans, changing the filter, and checking the level of water, milk, and other stuff. Only the coffee man wasn't there; his cart was, and the machine was open with his keys in it, but nothing else was going on.

"Where's the coffee guy?" I asked the unfortunate bastard whose office faces the machine.

"He just opened the machine and left," the guy said. Then he called me a string of expletives for asking, because he's not the keeper of the coffee machine guy.

There's a reason the sorry SOB has that office. It was supposed to be mine, but I suck up to the boss in order to keep things like that from happening to me.

[Let me note in passing that whoever decided that it is legal for the coffee people to change the machine out at 8 AM should be beaten with a sack of nickels. The coffee machine should only be out of service in the afternoon, never in the morning, and absolutely never on Monday morning.

I think it should be a crime, in fact.]

Lacking legal protection, I did what any rational person would do: I decided to wash out my cup. I like to clean it when the encrustation of filth gets so thick that it begins to cause coffee to spill out when I fill it, thus impacting how much I can drink. We weren't yet to that point, but better safe than sorry. Besides, it beats doing work.

I don't know how long it takes to load my computer, but I'm guessing it's like thirty minutes. It'd be longer, but I haven't converted to Vista yet.

I went into the bathroom and ran some water from the sink into my cup. As I stood there, the door to the toilet cubicle opened, and out came the coffee guy.

He looked like death, but not yet warmed over. He was beet-red, sweating, and he stank. I don't know if he was out tying one on all night or what, but he looked like he'd been eating off the floor of a seedy movie theater. And judging by the stink coming from our only toilet cubicle, it was just as out of service as the coffee machine now.

"Hello," he said as he breezed by me and WALKED RIGHT OUT OF THE DOOR WITHOUT WASHING HIS HANDS AT ALL!

Let me repeat that last bit if you missed it:

HE DETONATED A WWI-ERA MUSTARD GAS BOMB IN THE TOILET, PRESUMABLY BIOLOGICAL IN ORIGIN, AND THEN WALKED OUT WITHOUT WASHING HIS HANDS!!!

I exited the bathroom to see him putting his feces-covered hands all over everything, rubbing his doodie germs on filters, bean containers, and water spigots with equal abandon. It was like watching a horror movie in slow-mo.

There were now two choices available to me:

1) Not drink any coffee
2) Drink some coffee and maybe die

What could I do? I had to have coffee.

So I hatched this cunning plan: I went up and down that hallway saying "Good Morning" to people, shaking hands and brandishing my empty cup, and asking them if they wanted to grab a coffee with me.

"He just cleaned it, so the beans are extra fresh!" I insisted.

I got enough takers to go ahead of me (5) that I figure they flushed out the machine pretty effectively. Then, and only then, I trusted in the power of hot water and coffee to keep me from being in any real intestinal distress myself and had the first of my five cups.

Only I had ten, because I'm really nervous now that I've got Pharaoh's revenge again, only this time Pharaoh will be in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention.

I just think this is funny

2008-09-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

Ed Driscoll likes to frequently reference the memory hole, that place where unpleasant stories go to die. But what happens when you have a political party that shoves everything down the memory hole, including much of its own past positions and ideas?

You end up with a page like this one on the DNC website, called "History of the Democratic National Convention." It's got some historical information, as well as a list of past convention cities. Below the list we find this footnote:

Source: CBS News

Don't you think the Democrats really ought to just know where all the conventions have been, without having to ask CBS News?

For some reason, this just strikes me as really funny.

Safety First

2008-08-28T11:24:00.001-07:00

In order to be more healthy, I've decided to start taking the stairs at work instead of the elevator. This isn't some rinky-dink commitment, either, like getting a colonic before the Oscars. I work on the eighth floor, so when I go upstairs there are a lot of them for me to climb.

I've also started eating healthy lunches. For example, today I had a ham sandwich, an orange, some potatoes, and a bottle of water: nothing but health food for me. Okay, it is true that the potatoes were fried and salted, the ham sandwich was a foot long and covered in mayonnaise, and the orange had chocolate on it, but it was healthier than my usual lunch eating spoonfuls of sugared lard out of the container.

After I was finished, I decided I wanted a chocolate waffle. So I grabbed some change out of my desk and headed down the stairs. Since I didn't know how much the waffles cost, I decided to grab 1.50, which was a fifty-cent piece, two twenty-cent pieces, and six ten-cent pieces.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, I decided to toss the handful of coins up in the air and catch it as I walked out into the stairwell. I caught eight coins, but the ninth (a ten-cent piece) got away from me and went "Ching!" on the stairs and bounced up into the air.

Plonk! It hit the handrail and went vertically.

Whack! It hit the wall on the other side, and then in a totally improbable bounce it ricocheted off the stairs again. I couldn’t have done it if I wanted to. So now the coin was on the landing for the 7th, and I was on the 8th.

Ching! Plong! Whack! It ricocheted again, dropping another flight of stairs, and was on the 6th. I couldn't see it any more, but I could hear it echoing through the stairwell.

Ching! Plonk! Whack! Fifth floor.

Ching! Plonk! Whack! Fourth floor.

Ching! Plonk! Whack! Third floor.

Ching! Plonk! Sploink!

"OW! Dammit, my eye!"

That didn't sound good. I waited a moment and heard no more coin bouncing, but I did hear a great deal of cursing from the bottom step.

"Hey, asshole, you just hit me in the face!"

I held my breath, saying nothing. I didn't recognize the voice, but it was one of those voices that sounded like it might be coming from somebody with hairy knuckles. And statistics show that hairy-knuckled people are both prone to violence and typically bigger than you are, probably because they're more closely related to gorillas.

"That's it, fucker, I'm gonna come up there and kick your ass!" the hairy-knuckled, overreacting, angry man said.

I heard heavy treads on the steps far below, which is no mean feat since they're made of concrete. This was definitely somebody I didn't wanna meet in the stairwell.

"There's no way you could make it all the way up ten flights of stairs!" I used the huskiest voice I could muster up to try to sound tough.

He continued to climb. "Bastard! You're gonna be shitting shoe leather for a week!"

That really didn't sound good. "Yeah? Well, you'll be making change from your eyeballs!"

And I threw the entire handful of coins down the stairwell, trusting in luck that at least one would hit its mark. Preferably the fifty-cent piece, since it was the biggest.

Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching! Plonk-plonk- plonk- plonk- plonk- plonk- plonk- plonk! Whack-whack- whack- whack- whack- whack- whack- whack!

And so on and so forth, until around floor four I heard the sound I'd been waiting for:

SPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINK!

Followed quickly by "Son of a biiiiiiiiiiitch!"

CRASH! BANG! POW!

Then silence for a few seconds, followed by an ominous groaning.

I decided I didn't need a chocolate waffle after all and went back to my office.

And I also decided to go back to eating sugared lard.

Clinton Simply Following Obama Pattern?

2008-08-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

New York's Junior Senator Hillary Clinton may have ended her 2008 presidential campaign last night by encouraging her supporters to acclaim Barack Obama the nominee, but make no mistake: she's following a template forged by the master politician himself.

"Think back to the 2004 convention, when the Democrats nominated their weakest candidate in a half-century," said a source at Politico. "Who delivered an electrifying address that catapulted him onto the national stage? An unknown Illinois politician with thin credentials and a far-left background named Barack Obama, that's who. Is there any reason to think that 2012 won't see history repeat itself?"

Though many were sad to see the end of what has been called "Donna Reed meets Cinderella meets Mr. Smith goes to Washington", Clinton Supporter Evelyn Millbanks put the loss into perspective. "Four more years of seasoning and accomplishments will definitely put her on the short list for 2012. After all, a dream deferred is still a dream, right?"

Pundits said that, while few rated her chances late last year, her campaign success has opened eyes to just how far a woman can go. "To come this far, and almost grab the brass ring, really shows you how far this country's advanced," said one commenter. "There's no shame to losing out to two political heavyweights like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, that's for sure. She can be proud of what she did."

These Things I Believe

2008-08-27T14:15:00.000-07:00

It's platform season, so I thought I'd supply a list of things that I believe, because one of the things I believe is that people who believe differently from me are wrong.

And I'm not afraid to say that.

1) I believe that stupidity is both hereditary and catching, so if you have stupid parents or consort with lots of stupid people, it's almost certain that you'll be stupid, too.

2) I believe that when my wife painted my son's fingernails last week, that was wrong, and if we were to divorce that should be grounds for me getting custody of the children.

3) I believe that paper clips should only be stored in a small bowl, and never in one of those mock-guillotine-radiation chambers so you have to stick your finger down in there and worry about getting erectile dysfunction.

4) I believe that the government shouldn't subsidize art or sports, except for the activities I enjoy, like football and musical theater.

5) On the subject of governance, I further believe my taxes should be lower, but that your taxes should be higher.

6) I believe most art is crap and artists are stupid, which can be proven by listening to them explain their crappy art using stupid, meaningless phrases. I think this correlates to my first belief.

7) I believe caring people don't let their loved ones get degrees in sociology.

8) I believe that it should be legal to wedgie people who use Latin phrases in arguments.

9) I believe the plural of platypus should be platypi, because platypuses looks like the name of an STD that you hope your girlfriend doesn't have.

10) Also on the subject of language, I believe the plural of moose should be meese.

11) I believe that when you discover that everyone else thinks you're wrong, you should suspect a global conspiracy to hide the truth. Anything else would be irrational.

12) I believe that monkeys in the zoo should be required to wear pants, because they make you look bad in front of your date, and their libertarian nudism and wanton scratching is further demoralizing to those of us who chafe within our Dockers on a hot summer day.

13) I believe that we should set aside a Hawaiian island and allow people to hunt criminals who have received the death penalty, and film it, and then we'd have a hit show on our hands.

14) I believe we were wrong, as a people, to stop putting ne'er do wells in the stocks in the town square and pelting them with garbage. We were also wrong to stop wearing the great big black hats with gold buckles on them. We were not wrong to do away with the dresses that went from chin to ankle, though, because ta-tas are meant to be enjoyed, not bundled away like flatulent relatives when visitors come over.

15) I believe that you can't buy love, but you can buy hair and vodka, which should get you pretty close.

16) I believe that if you work hard, stay out of trouble, pay close attention to your investment portfolio, and treat people right, you'll end up paying far more taxes than the slovenly drunkard who has repeat appearances on 'Cops' for beating up total strangers, and in the end you'll both be dead and he'll have been on TV a lot more than you will have, unless you do something crazy like die in some seedy motel room while having a sexual tryst with a B-list celebrity.

17) I believe it's impossible for us to say which person in the preceding statement led the fuller life without knowing which B-list celebrity it was.

18) Speaking of has-been celebrities, I believe the biggest problem with shows like Dancing with the Stars is that it leads people to believe that would-be porn stars like Kim Kardashian are stars, whereas they are in fact skanks.

19) I believe you've spent more time reading this list than was probably justifiable.

20) I believe that kids these days are wrong, and it was better in my day. I didn't use to believe that, but then I turned 30.

Grammar Not Included

2008-08-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

This is a pathetic statement:

Sea ice is the primary habitat of polar bears. They depend on it to hunt their primary prey, ringed seals, which create lairs on ice for breeding maintain breathing holes with powerful claws.

Not because I feel bad for the drowning white agents of icy death, but because it makes no sense whatsoever. Try reading the damn thing a second time! Who's maintaining breathing holes with their powerful claws? The bears? The seals? The Leviathan waiting to be released by Gaea to destroy us all for our crimes against Earth?

Sheesh. And I still labor to get over 20 hits a day. I must really suck.

First National Bank of Love

2008-08-26T14:11:00.000-07:00

It's not on accident that I have been married for fifteen years. For most of those years I was married on purpose. And fifteen years is a long time, especially once you consider that the average celebrity is only married long enough to cheat at their reception.

Friends sometimes ask me what it takes to stay married for so long. Or at least, they would if I had friends. But I don't have friends, which is one of the secrets of staying married for a long, long time.

I'm kidding. If you're a man, then the real secret to staying married for a long time is realizing that your marriage is like a bank. It works like this:

When you get start dating someone, you open a "Love Account" with them. From then on, everything that you do is either a deposit or a withdrawal from this account.

Surprise her with flowers? Deposit. Run over her dog in the driveway? Withdrawal.

Take her to a chick flick? Deposit. Get caught opening an account in another branch? Big withdrawal, both from this account and possibly from the blood bank.

And so on and so forth.

If at some point you bounce a check (by, say, sleeping with her best friend and her sister in the same night) then the relationship is over, and your account is closed without further penalty, except perhaps her making disparaging comments about your male adequacy to everyone that you know.

This problem can be easily solved through relocation.

On the other hand, if you build up a large enough account at a particular branch, you can purchase a Diamond-Backed CD. Every CD is unique because they have various rates of return, depending on the branch, and their lifespan is not fixed. But some points are common to all Diamond-Backed CD.

Your branch will, on some routine basis, credit your account. Rates and periods vary by branch, but you can generally figure out the rate and frequency of return before purchasing your CD if you pay close enough attention.

With this periodic payment, you can begin to make routine withdrawals without worrying about zeroing out your balance, such as adopting the habit of sitting around in the living room every Sunday afternoon in your underwear watching Baywatch and scratching yourself with the remote.

Remember, though, the principle of deposits and withdrawals still holds. Only now if you bounce a check it's a big deal, and will end up costing you massive bank fees and penalties (generally half of what you have, plus a monthly fee until you die).

It's also worth noting that the exchange rate from when you first opened the account has changed. Things that were valuable before are worth less after purchase, and what was worthless before may now be highly valuable. The exchange rates will not be posted, nor can you find them online.

For instance, let's look at flowers. When you first open your account, buying flowers is a big deposit, like when you used to find five bucks in college and knew that tonight you'd eat something other than uncooked Ramen noodles.

Once you've bought a Diamond-Backed CD, buying flowers represents a much smaller deposit. It moves the account up some, true, but it's not going to buy you much more than an evening in a bar with your friends. If you want to go to a strip club, or if your friends are women, you'll have to either make a bigger deposit or accept that your balance will drop.

Luckily, new revenue opportunities do arrive when you purchase the Diamond-Backed CD. You can make a deposit by, for example, scrubbing the toilets or changing the baby. You will also receive a substantial insurance payment if you receive a spider-related injury. Before, these opportunities didn't exist.

Unfortunately, most branches do not offer a routine statement of account beyond giving you general signs of your fiscal well-being, such as slapping you every time you touch them when your balance has almost dropped to zero. Investors are advised to carefully monitor their branch for signs that their account is critically low before making any serious withdrawals, such as buying a sportscar with their children's college funds.

What most men do not realize, though, is that the Diamond-Backed CD also offer rewards for maintaining a high balance (some branch offices do not offer this, which is why many men choose to sell their Diamond-Backed CD at a loss of half their net assets in order to open a CD at a more appealing branch). These rewards far surpass a mere 1% cash back on travel to the continental 48 states on weekdays in the winter.

Your branch may give you such exciting gifts as a free pass on forgetting things, control over the TV remote, private modeling of lingerie, and a wide variety of sexual diversions delivered to the privacy of your own home (or office) in a completely legal and cost-free fashion.

How's that for fringe benefits?

Democratic VP Candidate Shocks Nation!

2008-08-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

[Until we have a democratic VP candidate, I'm running one of these each day.]

Registrants on the Obama Warning System have just received the following text message, shocking supporters and opponents alike:

"VP: Ashton Kutcher!"

"It's a perfect choice," said an Obama strategist. "We need somebody who makes Obama look coherent without a teleprompter, and Ashton can certainly fit this need. Plus, he helps us shore up the youth vote, becuase kids love a good Ashton Kutcher romp."

Movie critics look forward to the convention video, which will doubtless be titled Dude, where's my bounce?

Democratic VP Candidate Shocks Nation!

2008-08-21T14:31:00.000-07:00

[Until we have a democratic VP candidate, I'm running one of these each day.]

Registrants on the Obama Warning System have just received the following text message, shocking supporters and opponents alike:

"VP: Scarlett Johansson!"

Reporters swooned over what was quickly dubbed "the most beautiful ticket in generations" and "a match more perfect than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers."

"They'll dance their way out of the convention and into our hearts," said a hard-bitten, cynical, New York Times reporter. "Finally someone has come to sweep away the cobwebs of bitterness and replace them with sunshiney rays of wholesome happiness."

A feeling of euphoria spread over the land, resulting in a major poll bounce for Obama, bringing him within 4 points of John McCain, or just outside what might be considered within the margin of error for the poll.

I Turned Over My Testicles, Too

2008-08-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

The other night I was playing a video game with my children. We were all having a lot of fun: it’s a cute little game where you have a little farm and you run around doing stuff like growing vegetables and whatnot. Well, you can also go fishing.

Since I’m all about fun, I went fishing. I spent the equivalent of twenty days in the game fishing. All my crops died. All my animals wandered off. My barn burned down. I lost everything except my shanty, which is how I understand that all farms turn out anyways.

What did I have to show for it? One fish, that I caught on my very first try. Every other attempt I caught nothing. Zilch. Squat.

So along comes Wifey, who plays a lot of video games, if you count the self-checkout aisle in the grocery store. Without that, not so much. She did play Galaga back in the day, but after that she stopped.

The phone rings, and I handed her the controls. “Here,” I said. “You can go not catch fish if you want.”

You know the rest of the story: she caught sixteen fish in ten minutes. It’s like they’re mesmerized by her tits or something and they just can’t help but jump up on the bank with her. Sure, I feel the same way, but damn! At least let me have a shred of pride here, all right?

So I came back from the phone and took the controls away from her, wrestling them out of her hands. “Now that the game has fixed itself, I’m sure I can catch fish!” I declared.

“No you can’t,” said the girl. “It’s mommy’s speciality.”

“Yeah, dad, you suck,” said the boy. “You’re too much of a dork to catch fish.”

An hour later, I hadn’t caught anything. Hell, she’d even caught a pair of boots. Me? Nothing.

I would like to officially note that this cheeses me off.

So I took the children outside to jump on the trampoline, leaving her to angle alone. Hey, it’s not like she doesn’t make me do lots of stuff by myself, too.

We were bouncing, having a grand old time. I was watching the kids do flips and drops and stuff, and I had the worst idea ever for an out-of-shape over-thirty guy on a trampoline with his kids.

“Hey, watch this!” I said. “I’m gonna drop on my butt, then spring back up on my feet!”

“Do it!” said the girl.

“Yeah, do it!” said the boy. “Can I sleep on your side of the bed with mommy after you kill yourself?”

“Oh, ye of little faith!” I said. “Watch me!”

“Make sure you keep your hands behind you,” said the boy.

Listen, I’m not going to trust little Oedipus on anything, so I just scoffed at him. “I don’t need your help!”

I got up a good bounce, about four feet in the air, and then I pulled my legs up and prepared to triumphantly spring back onto my feet.

Only, I got twisted a little: after my butt hit the trampoline, I began to rotate backwards, and soon I was headed back towards the ground head-first. So I did what any normal person would do: I yelled a swear word and panicked.

I landed head first, wrenching my neck, and I got my feet tangled up in the net. I ended up hanging there for a few seconds as the children paddled my butt and yelled “bad daddy!” because we’re not supposed to touch the net when we bounce.

Finally, I extricated myself and crawled inside.

“I think I’m crippled!” I said. “Help me!”

“Just a minute,” said Wifey. “I’m pulling in my sixty-eighth fish!”

If I wasn't so afraid of her, I'd call her a dirty name right now.

Things Your Coworkers Don't Want to Hear

2008-08-20T14:43:00.001-07:00

Most coworkers exist in a different place in your life than your family and friends. They're acquaintances, but not particularly close. After all, the only reason that you and they are together is mere happenstance and not any particular desire to spend time with one another.

Some coworkers, though, don't really understand this and will often transgress the bounds of propriety. Below is a list of things that I think every coworker should understand are just not typically acceptable.

"Can you look at this rash/mark/mole/lesion?"
Unless your colleague is a doctor, don't go to them for medical advice. If it can't be pulled off with a staple remover, odds are that they won't know how to help you. An extreme no-go is anything you have to disrobe to show to somebody. Remember: whatever ugly thing is growing on you will be discussed around the coffee machine for the rest of your career.

"Let me tell you about my children…"
There's a chance that your coworkers want to hear about your children. It's about 0.5%. If they're curious, they'll ask. Otherwise shut your pie-hole.

"I'm leaving early to go to the hospital for an operation."
This only counts if nobody knows why the hell you're going, and you don't tell anybody anything other than this. It's a big gray area: do we ask what you're having done? Is that too intrusive? Does the fact that you told us mean that you want us to ask? Thanks for ruining my whole day worrying about the appropriate response to your potentially grave health problem that might actually be getting botox injected into your ass.

"This girl was so freaky!"
As impressive as your sexual conquests are, remember that you're at work, not in the gym locker room. Keep your speech appropriate for the occasion. By all means, blow off some steam with your male colleagues by regaling them with your freaky girlfriend stories. Just do it outside work hours. And remember that nobody likes a braggart, so even if it's true you might want to soft-peddle it just a tad.

Anything that involves crying
When a woman cries in your office, and nobody died, you really don't have any idea what to do. Run away? Hug her? Kill yourself? Even worse is when a man does. Call me an overmasculine creep if you will, but it's all I can do not to say "man up and stop your bawling, dude."

"I'm having trouble at home…"
Good, keep it there. Unless your homicidal husband is on the way to the office with a gun right now, I don't want to hear about it. My wife bitched me out over the way I do dishes last night, but I'm not dumping that in your lap. This is a double no-no because it always ends in tears.

"You look so sexy. If I wasn't married/dating/working with you/whatever…"
It doesn't matter how true it is, how innocently it's said, what the reason is, or anything else. It's creepy. It's super-creepy if she works for you or is a lower level than you. As Confucius so wisely said, "Never stick your dick in the cash drawer."

"It's that time of the month…"
LALALALALALALALA! I can't heeeeeeeaaaaaarrrr you! Here's a quick tip for women: the only time a guy cares about your monthly cycle is when he wants to have sex with you and this information is pertinent to your availability. Otherwise, we don't wanna know. It's not like I'm jogging across the hall to tell you that my balls itch really bad this morning. Show some consideration, okay? Please? For the love of God, think of the children!

Democratic VP Candidate Shocks Nation!

2008-08-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

[Until we have a democratic VP candidate, I'm running one of these each day.]

Registrants on the Obama Warning System have just received the following text message, shocking supporters and opponents alike:

"Prez: Hillary, VP: Obama!"

Hillary Clinton quickly swooped to make it official, declaring that "I am pleased to have finally taken the proper position atop the ticket, where I so truly belong. The democratic party is now unified, and any attempt to modify this arrangement should lead to riots and bloodshed that will destroy the tattered remnants of this once-grand political mainstay."

For his part, Obama calmly accepted his demotion to vice president. "It's where I belong, really," he beatifically told supporters. "I just got outmaneuvered, again, by somebody who spent eight years worrying about keeping the Israeli and the Saudi Arabian delegates seated at separate tables. Do you really want me as your president?"

John McCain, out of great respect for Hillary Clinton, announced that he plans to withdraw from the race. "I said it'd be the politest race in history, and what is more polite than a gentleman stepping aside for a lady?"

In related news, John Edwards mentioned that his wife still has cancer and that, for her sake, he should be considered a viable candidate for an important post in the Clinton-Obama cabinet.

Bombshell Allegations Threaten to Sink McCain

2008-08-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

For the second consecutive presidential election, a candidate's war record has come under fire from those who served with him. This time, however, it is the Republican candidate who will have to answer serious charges about how he really spent the war.

The charges, which are dubbed "Swift Boat 2: The Revenge" after the scandal that sunk John Kerry's presidential bid in 2004, have been circulating for weeks in the blogosphere but have recently caught nationwide traction following advanced publication of excerpts from a damning book titled "Industrial Light and McCainiacs: the Real Story of the Hanoi Hilton."

Written by noted POW expert Colonel Robert E. Hogan, the book is set to be published in September just after the conventions. The book was slated for publication much earlier but was derailed by the untimely death of Hogan in what some have called a government hit job calculated to look like an ordinary death by influenza and falling down stairs onto several knives and at least three bullets.

Hogan's book alleges that McCain's captivity was actually fabricated by the US government in order to create "the perfect political candidate to prevent any outsiders from ever challenging the establishment and taking the presidency." This candidate, John McCain, would only be used in very limited circumstances, such as the accession of a minority to the presidency or the potential return of liberalism, which the government previously prevented by the assassination of the Kennedy twins.

Hogan's research showed that McCain and his captors, rather than being held in the steamy jungles near Hanoi , were in fact captive on the island of Molokai . While the other prisoners believed they were in a Vietnamese prison, McCain knew the truth, and his long periods in "solitary" were actually spent reading and playing ping-pong in the Officer's Mess.

Many have speculated that this is why he recently stole a Soltzenietsen anecdote as his own, and that his limp is due to slipping on a shuffleboard disc, which, unlike most normal people, he was a fan of long before he became an elderly person.

The retired army Colonel also provides a photograph showing that the head jailer of the reputed prison was, in fact, played by Pat Morita. The photo was declared "true and accurate" by an independent research company, Mapes/Rather Investigative Services.

"The worst injury John McCain suffered in the war was tennis elbow," said a spokesman for the book. "Colonel Hogan proved this, and that's the reason that the government had him killed. But the truth must out, so we're doing our part to let people know what kind of vile man John McCain really is."

But not everyone is convinced. Right-wing sites have been spreading misinformation about the book, particularly by defaming its author. "Everybody knows that Hogan was a pervert," said one angry commenter on the right-wing hate site CNN.com. "He caught bird flu at a chicken orgy and was convicted six times of public indecency with farm animals!"

Democratic Chairman Howard Dean emerged from hiding, where he was hoping the election would not collapse into failure and prove his incompetence, to demand that McCain address the charges. "John McCain needs to come clean with the American people and prove that he didn't actually spend those years in captivity in Hawaii and that there's no gigantic, secret conspiracy that has destroyed every shred of evidence to the contrary. If he can't do that, then he's not fit to lead this country."

Barack Obama, the probable Democratic nominee for president, called the issue "a distraction from the real issues" and called on McCain to "answer them fully and completely with corroborating evidence and faultless timelines so we can focus on debating the future of this nation."

Democratic VP Candidate Shocks Nation!

2008-08-19T14:00:00.001-07:00

[Until we have a democratic VP candidate, I'm running one of these each day.]

Registrants on the Obama Warning System have just received the following text message, shocking supporters and opponents alike:

"VP: Hugo Chavez!"

"It's the perfect choice!" cooed an Obama supporter. "He speaks Spanish, has loads of executive experience, is internationally known, and loves America even more than Barack does. They're the perfect team!"

John McCain called the pair "an axis of evil" because he is hopelessly out of date with today's hip youth culture, which would really have preferred to hear them dissed as being "not hizzle with the schnizzle."

In related news, John Edwards mentioned that his wife still has cancer and that, for her sake, he should be considered a viable candidate for an important post in the Obama-Chavez cabinet.

I am the world's foremost Bigfoot authority

2008-08-18T15:09:00.000-07:00

Let's get one thing straight: they're extinct.

I got a letter from Amanda Beals at MainStreet.com, where Jim Cramer desperately needs an editor. She wanted me to link to a piece about how much a makeover for Bigfoot would cost, which I'm not going to do because they clearly left out the services of a taxidermist, which of course you'd need to properly prepare a Bigfoot for display.

Because, and I repeat myself here, they're extinct.

A quick search reveals that the prolific Ms. Beals somewhat papers blogs trying to drum up links, which sent me from "feeling special" to "feeling cheated upon" within a two-nanosecond interval. I have no idea why this should be, since all she's doing is what every responsible blog owner does: try to publicize their product.

Well, except me. I just spam by cross-posting everything to those foolish enough to sign me up as a coblogger.

Guido, Bow Before Me!

2008-08-18T14:24:00.002-07:00

Wifey and I went bowling over the weekend. It's been some time since we did this; in fact, if memory serves, we went bowling a little over a year ago on our last US vacation. Oh, sure, we've been playing Wii sports since then, but that's hardly the same.

Or is it?

To start off, I was captivated by the single greatest bowling innovation I have ever seen: the shoe conveyor. They have about thirty trays, each of them holding 4 or 5 pairs of shoes, and as you watch the trays are continually rotating from bottom to top. When your size passes by, you simply take them off the tray and go your way.

It was awesome. I took four pairs just to fully enjoy it.

Once we were ready we headed to our lane, #5. To our left was a group of four 20ish students, and on the right a 40ish couple that liked to bowl a couple of frames between fondling one another at the scorer's table. You might say that first she stroked his balls, then she threw hers.

The students were an altogether different matter. One was a Guido (flipped-up collar and sweatband included), one a sweaty drunkard, one a full-on glasses-wearing math major, and the last a fugitive librarian catching a few moments away from the books. The librarian was the only female, and the males were desperately competing for her attentions by showing off their bowling prowess.

Little did they know that a heaping helping of American Emasculation was cruising towards them, like Jaws surfacing beneath a skinny dipping hippie.

Wifey and I selected our balls and I went first. I waited for Guido to finish his first throw, and then I took my shot.

WHAMMO! A strike for Plebian. Not a wobbly strike, either: pins flew everywhere, like a Tomahawk missile had hit the back of the lane.

The Guido simply stared at me, open-mouthed. And it was then that I perchanced to look upon their scores: seven frames gone by, and not a one of them over 60. Amongst their group, if you bowled 105 and didn't win it was because somebody had the game of their life and maybe got to 110.

Now, I don't like to brag, but I can bowl well. Oh, not wonderfully or anything, but anything less than 125 means I had a horrible game. When I'm in practice I get 160 to 175. My personal best is 195. This is mainly because I can do two things consistently: throw the ball straight and throw the ball hard.

I calmly walked back to our table, and Wifey said "You suck, you know that?"

Then it was her turn. Wifey is a competent bowler, usually able to do around 90 to 110 if she's in practice. Her first shot wasn't nearly as impressive as mine, mostly because she got distracted by the guy to our right doing a tonsil-and-panties check on his wife right at the end of their lane.

I figure he was congratulating her on her robust showing the previous frame, where she knocked over four of the ten pins. Don't laugh; she didn't even break 50 in the three games she bowled while we were there. She seemed to average about 30.

I jumped up, hurled the ball down the lane, and got another strike. And, once again, it looked like an explosion at the end of the alley.

The quartet to our left were awestruck. Not only had I gotten two strikes, I had gotten them in a row! The librarian dared to speak to me, and asked me if it was my first time.

"Not quite," I said. "I grew up bowling."

My next two shots? Both strikes. Yes, I opened the game with four strikes in a row. Wifey also put in a strike and a spare, so she had nothing to be embarrassed about. But I was on fire.

By the fifth shot, all motion ceased when I was preparing to bowl. While everyone else waited with baited breath, Wifey yelled out encouragement to me:

"You suck!" she said. "Choke! Choke! Choke!"

I hurled the ball, and immediately winced. Bad throw. "Shit!" my yell echoed throughout the silent alley.

WHAMMO! A fifth strike. Wifey laughed and gave me a big kiss, much to the disappointment of the women in the adjacent lanes. The dude to our right gave me the stinkeye, as his 62 now seemed almost as impressive as John Bobbit on a porno set. Sure, it has some shock value, but next to the real thing it's just pales.

In hushed tones, the math major noted that even my bad throws were better than their best. To his friends, he wondered from whence this awful specter came to ruin their chances to score with the frumpy librarian, who was now enraptured by my bowling acumen.

The answer is yes, I did blow your night on purpose. Vive l'America!

On throw six, my arm started aching. Hey, not only am I out of practice, I'm not as young as I used to be. I still wish I could tag out when I'm putting on my socks some mornings. So my aim fell off, and although the end of my game was not an embarrassment, it wasn't up to my standards.

Final score? 197. This is not that impressive on a US lane, but in these surroundings that made me PBA-eligible. Consider this: take the two highest scores from Guido and chums, sum them, and you'll still have enough to fit in the woman to the right's average score.

So the bystanders were impressed, and more than a little bit awestruck.

Wifey and I bowled a second game, and I actually didn't do very well (129, mostly because my arm was killing me by then). But my two-game sum was highly remarked-upon by our neighbors, and when we left, they were sorry to see us go.

Wifey, it must be said, would have been competitive within Guido's group, despite the fact that she had what was (for her) an awful game and didn't break 100.

"So," I said to her as we left. "Did seeing that display of bowling prowess give you a new appreciation for just how awesome I really am?"

"Not really," she said. "I've seen you with your pants off."

Ouch.

After that we went to play mini-golf in an indoor, black-lit course. All I'll say about that is this: mini-golf is an evil game and everyone who is any good at it is a she-devil, particularly those who won't even flash their husbands on a vacant course because "I think they have cameras in here and I don't wanna get thrown out."

Pffft. It's Europe! As long as you don't get body fluids on the course I'm pretty sure anything goes, doesn't it?