2.28.2007

Reality Check

At some point I realized I was sobbing. Not just crying, but good old-fashioned sobbing. As my grandmother would have said, "full-out boo-hooing." Gasping for air sobbing. Quietly sobbing as not to wake up the kid. Tears streaming and such.

Day two of the "fever of unknown origin (FUO)" proceeds. Marches on like Nazi troops into Iran. But, the liquid Tylenol is now being rejected so there might not be much relief tonight. That's the bad news. Worse news is that the back up plan calls for suppositories. Never pleasant.

But, this rejection might be good too because it means she's not just fighting the FUO, but she's just pissed enough to fight me. Fight Tylenol; fight the power. Fight the system as she's being groomed.

To see her you'd think she just washed up on the shore of Florida after floating on a 2 liter bottle from Cuba or some shit. She's beat, floppy, and way too hot. Hot to the touch. Hot like a, well, like a 105-degree light bulb. Hot enough to make the doctor shrug and say, "You just have to wait these things out." Hot enough to boil the sun. Hola, amigo. Ess thees America?

She's tough though. And I'm tough. I'm sick too. But, she's sicker. She's bad ass enough to try to take care of me. I'm bad ass enough to let her. We persist.

But, why am I crying? It's not because I'm necessarily frightened (which, honestly, as a parent, you always are). But I'm sobbing because as she finally put her heavy, fuzzy, hot, hot head down, she reached up and hugged me and said, "I love you, Daddy."

"This, I believe..." (thanks, Mark) is my reason to exist.

2.27.2007

Picking/Switching Teams

Yeah, I know. Hillary, right? Woo! Best candidate. Could win and all that shit.

I still believe it, but here's the fallacy: I was working with a who-COULD-win framework.

Fuck that!

I know her politics are bullshit. So what? She could and probably will win.

But...

There's a new HNIC in town. My boy, Barry.

What was I thinking? Barry Hussein for Prez. What are you going to motherfucking do?

Rich Sez


"This is what white people do on Saturday night."

Dave Sez


"Definitely looks like a bug bite.

Have you seen anything like this around the house?"

2.26.2007

What the Hell?!

What the hell is this on my head?

Everyone has a different guess. It kind of itches, kind of tingles?

Maybe the government came in last night and implanted thought tracking chips. Maybe.

Maybe bugs have laid eggs. Maybe.

I don't remember bumping my head. But, often one forgets stuff after a bump. Maybe.

Hopefully it's not a "grooming issue." Am I dirty? Eeewww.

Maybe this is what happens during the balding process. Maybe.

Beast

So, I'm reading Matt Taibbi's "Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season" - a collection of Matt's articles and I notice he's done some writing for The Beast out of Buffalo, right?

So, naturally, I go to the Beast to see what's what, right? The lead article is called:

The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2006

How could I resist, right? But, not penned by Matt.

Taibbi writes for a number of publications including Rolling Stone [note: no link, ha!]. But, he is probably most famous for "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope" - but, hey, right?

The People Demand Our Rights

"The Flesh Club has survived so long because it's hard to prove wholesale prostitution and, more important, stripping is often viewed as constitutionally protected speech."

The people united will never be defeated [or, Ahh, the constitution!]

[clicky]

2.25.2007

2.24.2007

The Beard Deal

It's gone. The experiment is over. Not that it was a formal experiment with a control group and random assignment, but it's done. For now, anyway.

What happened? It's too much work. Normally, I shave then shave again when I either have to or it just feels like it's time. So, usually every seven to 10 days.

But, I tried the beard. I even did a little sculpting (even it out here and here...and here and here...and here...). It was the sculpting, obviously, that was the deal killer. I'm not the grooming type. More precisely, I'm not the maintenance type. God knows I could never keep a goatee or soul patch or mustache (full disclosure: I had a killer mustache from, say '83-'88, seriously).

Shave. 10 days later shave again. All off. Done. No consideration.

I think the beard forced me to focus way too much attention on myself and my face. Too many people asking about. Providing their opinions about it. Looking at me. Go away, people. Stop looking at me (but, LOOK AT ME!).

Anyway, that's it for now. Bye-bye face hair. I may try again (because the Bren tells me to), but it won't be sculpted at all. I'll look more mechanical engineer than Justin Timberlake.

Everyone is Pregnant

Currently there are four people I know - no, wait, let me count again... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - there are five people I know that are pregnant (who are pregnant). One with twins for crying out loud.

Doesn't anyone listen to me? Stop procreating! What's wrong with you people? Keep your damn pants on!

Whatever...congrats to all (but stop it!). Good luck with you and all your damn babies.

The hubris of you people to think you should repopulate this planet. It's not a competition, people.

What is this, bird flu?

2.23.2007

Crumbs


Collaboration of
R. & Aline Crumb <-- clicky, dammit!

A conversation with the damn New York Times (tm).

The Crumbs' Underground Comics <-- clicky, dammit!

A conversation with the damn NPR (tm).

The power of Google...an observation

"I don't know the URL for my own website where I post my own music. I have to Google myself or one of the album titles to find it. Oh, and Google is a verb.
That too.

Sometimes I just go to Middlespace and follow the links to my site from there. So maybe this should be an observation on the power of Middlespace. Oh, and Middlespace is a verb.
That too."
- RPWalk

Happy Happy

Best phrase of the morning:

"Happiness is better equated with satisfaction than pleasure, because the pursuit of pleasure lands us on a never-ending hedonic treadmill that paradoxically leads to misery."
- University psychiatrist Gregory Berns in Satisfaction (Henry Holt, 2005)

(Can't Get No) Satisfaction <-- clicky

2.21.2007

Favorite Daddy

B: Daddy. You're my favorite daddy.

Me: Favorite? Who else is on this list?

B: Mark Reed.

Daddy Rulz #s 1-4 of 100

1) Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

2) The skills pay the bills.

3) Take your time pooping.

4) Just play the (social) game sometimes; people give you stuff.

To be continued...

[I'm claiming copyright on this shit "Daddy Rulz" and all 100 in case my peeps want to do a book or some shit. So. There. I said it.]

Rehab

Jesus, is every-fucking-body going into rehab?

Either I have to open a rehab center or I have to get into one because that where everybody else is.

No matter what you do, rehab's the ultimate do-over.

Who's going next? I'm guessing Michael Jackson because he's feeling left out of the mix, er, the cycle.

Jealous Much?

th nd of privacy, u thre?

“It is a constant surprise to those of us over a certain age, let’s say 30, that large parts of our life can end up online.”

Journalism 101: Same Event - Two Views

NBA All-Star Weekend

Bill Simmons

“Undaunted, I stormed off and tore down the Strip, reaching my destination within 20 minutes and only feeling scared 347 times. As I headed up to my room to change, I had an epiphany. Wait, I don't have to make that walk again. I can just stay here and gamble. Which was exactly what happened. So what if I missed a fantastic night at Pure that featured approximately 700 funny stories (none of which can be printed here)? I got to play blackjack with some complete strangers!” [more, go clicky]


Scoop Jackson

“Inside the Venetian Hotel there was a crowd outside of Nike Town, waiting for Tony Parker and Kobe Bryant. I've been chosen to host a Q&A event with them and the Original Air Force 1 six (Michael Cooper, Mychal Thompson, Calvin Natt, Moses Malone, Bobby Jones and Jamaal "Cornbread" Wilkes). Although I have a certain love for both Tony (who is my cousin through marriage) and Kobe (because he's Kobe), sitting on stage with six of the players who helped change the game was one of the special moments of not only the weekend but a career.” [more, go clicky]

2.16.2007

How Could I NOT Call?


hello ty
tis i david
much time has passed
and shit
i was (am) thinking about you
and
writing to you
and thinking about writing to you (how i am writing to you i mean)

call me

------------------------

Almost like a dare
In haiku that is fucked up
Attractive whirlpools

So Why The Beard?


So why the beard?

Are you growing a beard?

Oh, you have a beard.

Mark already answered this question [clicky].

So why the beer?

Fun With Jesus Forziati

Fun With Jesus Forziati

Fun With Jesus Forziati

Fun With Jesus Forziati

Fun With Jesus Forziati

Fun With Jesus Forziati

2.15.2007

Oh, Working...

Toothpaste For Dinner
toothpastefordinner.com

Hardaway Hates Gays


"You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people," he said while a guest on Sports Talk 790 The Ticket. "I'm homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."

- L'il Timmy Hardaway

Humm...doesn't he know I'm gay?

2.13.2007

2.12.2007

I'm So Busted

oh my god! I'm so busted!

"So, here is our "alternadad," wrapped up in a most traditional parental concern, the "good neighborhood" question. Pollack spends a lot time searching for the "good school" and the "good health care." And, while I'm making the book sound like an op-ed, it's actually very funny. Pollack wades through the indignities of contemporary dad-dom, which include: the aerobic cheerfulness of Little Gym, "helpful" people in the supermarket, odious "Is he walking?" comparisons, the gateway drug Noggin, rude playground moms, and the inescapable paranoia of Internet message boards. But these sorts of developmental and kid-culture issues (which can dominate any media or writing about parenting) are a sideline to Alternadad's central anxieties of where to live manageably and how to support a child."

"The anger surrounding alternadad and hipster parenting derives from the idea that these new parents don't want to "grow up" and act like parents. Instead, they give their kids fauxhawks and inculcate them with a precious taste in music and "film." I agree that this can be irritating, but find me the set of parents who haven't, consciously or not, indoctrinated their kids into a little family cult. And who's more annoying: the 3-year-old who knows Mandarin or the one who loves Devo? The difference between an alternadad, a banker dad, and a soccer dad is ultimately aesthetic and pointless. Sure, Pollack is psyched when Eli develops a love of the Ramones and Spider-Man, but most of his book recounts his struggle to find what America used to offer easily: a solid house, a living wage, a decent public school."

Neal Pollack's "Alternadad"

[clicky]

On The Great Boston Terrorism Hoax

From our friends over at Wooster Collective,

Some Thoughts On Last Week In Boston

I couldn't have better summarized.

2.09.2007

A Confession

Uh, for the record....

I am the father of Anna Nicole's baby.

I hope things are clearer now.

2.08.2007

Pornartgraphy

Pornartgraphy

Porn-art-suffix "graphy" (derived from the Greek verb γραφειν (graphein), "to write").

here

and

here

Barry Hussein

The caption should read, "Damn I'm smooth."


Maybe I'll change my position....

2.07.2007

Genius

Today:
Did you watch the David Cross Do's and Don't on VBS?

I knew "Mr. Show" was a work of genius. As was "Arrested Development."

But those tattoos take the prize. Fucking mad genius. And commitment to a bit.

David Cross exists on a different plane.

-RW

Consider This

Today, in a perfectly normal (for me) business correspondence, I note that I wrote the following sentence:
Consider the intentional ambiguity.
Dang! That's up there with, "Insanity is the attractive whirlpool" of yester-year.

Consider, that!

Guest Post - Dave Wave, Big

The Universe, Explained

An infinite surface area in a finite, bounded space
where you can go forever small, but not forever large,
where things look different depending on what order of
magnitude you exist on.

[oh, clicky!]

2.06.2007

Torch Passed


Puns & Progressions


Astronaut Charged With Attempted Kidnapping

A Love Triangle of Astronomical Proportions

Astronaut Charged With Attempted Murder

AstroNut Gal a Product of Maryland & DC

Diaper-Wearing Rocket Jockey Collared for Kidnapping

The Diaper Did It

Crazy Love

Space Junk

Says, Devo:

She was walking all alone
Down the street in the alley
Her name was sally
She never saw it
When she was hit by space junk
In New York Miami beach
Heavy metal fell in Cuba
Angola Saudi Arabia
On x-mas eve said NORAD
A soviet sputnik hit Africa
India Venezuela
(in Texas Kansas)
Its falling fast Peru too
It keeps coming
And now I'm mad about space junk
I'm all burned out about space junk
Oooh walk & talk about space junk
It smashed my baby's head
And now my Sally's dead

[clicky de pic-y]

LifeLog - Ooooo, Scary

LifeLog is...


a project of the Information Processing Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. According to its bid solicitation pamphlet, is to be "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities. The objective of this 'LifeLog' concept is to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships."

LifeLog aims to compile a massive electronic database of every activity and relationship a person engages in. This is to include credit card purchases, web sites visited, the content of telephone calls and e-mails sent and received, scans of faxes and postal mail sent and received, instant messages sent and received, books and magazines read, television and radio selections, physical location recorded via wearable GPS sensors, biomedical data captured through wearable sensors, The high level goal of this data logging is to identify "preferences, plans, goals, and other markers of intentionality."

2.05.2007

"Can I Play This Guitar?"

Uh, Mr. Prince, yes you can.

Jesus. Did anyone else see that? Seriously though. I was all questioning whether or not Prince was a good pick for the Superbowl (tm) Pepsi (tm) halftime (tm) gig. What am I? A fucking nut? A crazy nut? Of course he was. File under: duh!

I don't even remember who won the game. In fact, I'll probably forget who played in the game in a couple of days, but I'll remember the halftime show.

I got this in the electronic mail this a.m.:
"Prince put on a guitar hero monster show. 'I'm sorry, is my androgynous dick in your Pepsi (tm) Superbowl (tm) Halftime Show?'"
I heard this one this morning too:
"Prince was the Superbowl (tm), man!"
Uh, no goddamn lie. I was questioning Prince. Where did I ever grow those balls? That's why I'm an office monkey and he's, uh, well, he's Prince.

Seriously, he could call it a career right here. Done. "Out, y'all." I remember saying two things:
  1. "I'd fuck him." <-- a metaphor
  2. "He came to own."
Blow-out winner and MVP: Mr. Prince. Not just funky. Not just soulful. But, guitar fucking hero!

Sez, Village Voice (clicky):
Prince made it work by immediately forgoing the idea of groove, highlighting his Hendrix side rather than his James Brown side. He also jammed a ton of material into his set, only about half of it was his. He's been doing time in Vegas lately, and he must've been honing his sense of pandering; I'm not sure how else to explain the chorus of "Proud Mary" he threw into "Baby I'm a Star." And he must've also been honing his sense of the absurd; I'm imagining the Foo Fighters sitting around last night watching the game and peeling their jaws off the floor when Prince launched into "The Best of You." But he found room for fierce displays of raw technique: liquid falsetto yowls and shockingly discordant squalls of solo guitar. And he finally had a platform big enough to fully explore the outer limits of his sense for spectacle, prancing around a stage shaped like the symbol he stopped using seven years ago and casting an enormous shadow across a billowing sheet during one solo. A part of me wonders if he didn't somehow create last night's torrential downpour himself just to give us the moving visual of a stadium bathed in purple light and soaked to the bone as he finished "Purple Rain" without a hair out of place.

2.02.2007

Ty's 2007 SuperBowl (tm) Pick!


Ohh, who's gonna win? [clicky here to find out]

So exciting...

"Dullard"? And A Twenty-Three Skiddoo To You Too


Bill Gates on Vista and Apple's 'Lying' Ads

Sample banter from Newsweek Article:
Newsweek: Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?

Bill Gates: I've never seen it. I don't think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?

Well, certainly we've done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

Does the entire tenor of that campaign bother you, that Mac is the cool guy and PC—

That’s for my customers to decide.

Ha! I repeat, I have never owned a PC or anything that ran Windows. Yeah, I have a pretty kick-ass-for-a-PC set-up at work, but it doesn't even approach the shameless OSX imitator level. It's so funny, too, when people laugh at me for using Apple gear.

Hey, Microsoft, looks like the terrorists are winning.

Dr. Eden Had a Very Colorful Office

It's just a plant by Ricardo Cortés

Interesting, educational, approach.

We. Will. NEVER. Forget.

2.01.2007

Thongs


From Vice Magazine's "Omigawd: The Vice Guide to Girls"
by LESLEY ARFIN AND AMY KELLNER

It's kind of an A-Z thingy, you know? But, this caught my eye and I so agree:


HONGS

"One question: Why? I own one thong and the only time I wear it is on laundry day. And typical me, every laundry day I forget how fucking annoying they are and I find myself picking at invisible wedgies the whole time. But you can’t pick thong wedgies because a thong IS a wedgie. You are choosing to give yourself a wedgie. And why, because it looks hot to dudes when you lean over and they see the little stringy triangle sticking out? Where were you born, Asbury Park? Do your kids go to preschool in a casino? Thongs are fucking cheesy! If you don’t want your panty lines to show (reconsider, however, panty lines can be really hot) then why not just wear… nothing? What a shocker. And don’t be scared that people will be able to see your woo-woo like Paris and Lindsay. Those girls want to show off their vaginas. And why shouldn’t they? Vaginas are way prettier than thongs."


Thongs are kinda gross, don't you think? And, in addition to the above, the worst part of thong panties is that relatively huge brand tag that is ever present (see photo, note the tramp stamp too). Look at that thing.... It's like a parking ticket.

Boo, Mopes. Boo!

The Boston mayor and AG and even Deval keep calling this advertising campaign, a hoax, a prank, and a stunt.

It was none of those things. It was not the intent of anyone to make it appear that they were placing bombs. It wasn't a joke. They were not trying to mimic weapons of any kind.

Somebody panicked and now has some of the scrambled chicken ova on their faces. Collective panic is a motherfucker, huh?

These kids were placing ads (they were working). They were not, contrary to Rep. Ed Markey, "Scaring an entire region, tying up the T and major roadways, and forcing first responders to spend 12 hours chasing down trinkets instead of terrorists...." The first responders did that all themselves.

WTF? The boogie man cometh. I think, indeed, the terrorist are winning. America, fuck yeah!

See also:

Dolphin Toy Mistaken for Bomb (could I make that up?)

From Dan: Geburtstag's Party