Happy HanuChrismaKwansika

12/21/07

My wife likes her family. She likes traditional things. I have my suspicions that she popped, fully-formed, from the cover of a Hallmark card drawn by a drunken and dangerously insane Norman Rockwell…because her family is, like most of ours, delightfully dysfunctional. I like my family, too, I just don’t really have the seemingly irrepressible compulsion to hang out with them the way Hanni does. I have never particularly understood why someone should feel closer to another on the sheer Universal happenstance that you share a huge swath of DNA. I’m personally closer to my friends, and feel about them in the same way Hanni feels about her family. I think she has always looked upon this view as somewhat perverse. Whenever we discuss why oh why she feels we have to call every sibling on every birthday, my dear one gives me the sort of look usually reserved for wet, smelly things recently pulled from a shower drain.

I admit, in many of my opinions, I am unconventional. But I don’t think Hanni fully appreciates that my seemingly idiotic values have as much worth to me as her more traditional ones. No, dear readers, I fear what we have here is a value-superiority complex. Christmas is a prime example.

I love Christmas. LOVE it. You might think it bizarre for an atheist who seems to regard humanity with constant disappointment and distain to go a big rubbery one inside at the thought of tinsel and lights, but it’s true. I love almost everything about it*. I even love the commercialization aspect of it. I love the fact that every year it seems to gobble up more of the calendar, like some unstoppable Pac-Man juggernaut. I love that most people seem to be just a little bit nicer, even if it only means dropping a few pennies into a large, red pot because of liberal guilt under the stare of a bell-ringing madman. I love that people actually wear clothing with decorations on it a 3-year-old should be embarrassed sporting. I love the crowds, I love the shopping, I even love that it takes 2 hours to drive 3 blocks, and that you have to park far enough away from to entrance so as to require a native guide. I fucking love wrapping presents.
I love the fact that, for a few weeks out of the year, drunken, semi-dangerous individuals are allowed to dress in disguise and interact with children.

I love egg-nog, spiked with whiskey, please!

I love White Elephants, I love bad and embarrassing employee parties, I love buying toys and gloves and food for needy children. I love snow, I love the food, I love Christmas movies; I love Christmas with a sort of teary-eyed wonder that should only be possible for characters of Claymation™.

It’s a Wonderful Life makes me cry every time. But to be fair, I’m usually pretty drunk by the time Jimmy Stewart starts bellowing “Merry Christmas, you old Building ‘n Loan!” in his curiously penguin--esque voice. Ryan’s (No Longer Lonely!) Christmas Eve is a thing of beauty, ladies and gentlemen.

My wife does not love these things. She loves Xmas, but for all the wrong reasons. She seems to be operating under the delusion that Christmas is the celebration of some jive turkey who had an awfully trusting step-father and a mother with a highly suspect story. She is also under the impression that this time is about being close to your family, and that one should spend huge cross-sections of the day interacting with people who, let’s face it, we wouldn’t be friends with were it not for the outside chance we might need a kidney or some bone marrow someday. Sure, I like my family and I go to their houses to open presents and spend like, a few hours there, but nothing like the marathon Yule-fest I fear my wife has planned this year. I’ve heard some horrifying talk of…games, and dangerous speak concerning…Christmas Eve services.

But we make a pretty good compromise of it; I see far more family and consume far less booze than I am comfortable with, and Hanni only gets to play 4 hours of dominoes with her kin instead of 8. I am grateful this holiday season to be married to a wonderful, understanding and loving woman who last night described being hitched to me as taking care of a horny 4-year-old. We celebrate it in vastly different ways, but I can think of no one with whom I would rather share the forty or fifty more Christmas’s to come.

Happy Holidays, everyone. And I cannot be more sincere when I say, peace on earth and goodwill toward man.


*Well, I mean, except for the religious thing, but thankfully that’s been almost bred out of it.

It’s a Gerbil Xmas, Charlie Brown

12/11/07


As I may have mentioned in a previous post, Hanni and I procured a couple of gerbils after my goldfish, Mr. Tickles, went fins-up. Through the ignorance of myself and the pet store employee (though, to be fair, pets aren’t my fucking business) we did not end up with two males as previously thought, but a male and a female. Our first clue came when puberty descended on the male like an Acme safe. It looks like he’s carrying two hairy lima beans down there. Naturally, our house turned into a sort of incestuous gerbil-porn-show for a few days. ‘Cause, y’know, their brother and sister. The sounds of Barry White, banjo music and squeaking nigh drove us to madness. If images of freakish, inbred, flipper-baby gerbils are playing through your head, don’t fear. Provided our guys weren’t terribly inbred already (and they showed no obvious genetic defects to believe this) it’s highly unlikely incest of this nature would result in genetic monsters. Good news, Alabama! Long story short, last Friday the gerbils we named Alexander and Hamilton used the latter’s vagina like a log-flume and out came seven tiny, pink and distinctly alien-esque babies.

This is the pups at one day old. See that white part of the stomach? That’s actually milk; their skin is so thin you can see right through it.

Yes, we have handled the babies, and no, she didn’t eat any of them. That’s only common in hamsters; gerbils should be fine with your smell on their tots. The only times a mother will eat her babies is if there is no water available, if they smell of something truly bizarre like an unfamiliar gerbil, or if one dies. The father’s cool, too. Apparently gerbil fathers watched a lot of Leave It to Beaver, because their fairly attentive parents.

The really troubling thing is that Hamilton is almost certainly preggers again. You see, gerbils mate right after the litter is born, and the embryos are implanted after she’s finished breast-feeding. So, in about 40 days, we will have another swarm of pink science-fiction creatures.

We have six pups that will almost certainly be black like the parents, and this one guy here who we think will be blond…or albino…I don’t even know if gerbils can be albino. It will almost certainly have pink eyes, which is visible through the skin. I’m pretty sure it’s a lab rat pretending to be a gerbil. Clearly Hamilton is a tawdry whore.

Dude. Gerbil 69. Nasty:

We are now in the uncomfortable position of either separating Alex and Hamilton and keeping him with one son and her with a daughter (they must be kept in pairs) or enduring the laughter and ridicule of several veterinary professionals until we find one who will neuter a tiny rodent.

Sometimes They Come Back

12/4/07

You know, there are certain objects that, despite their astoundingly useful existence, never really get the credit they deserve. A can opener, for instance. That is the sort of thing that you just never think about until you suddenly discover you are powerless to get into that tin of cream of mushroom. Sure, you could puncture it with a knife enough times to pry the lid off, I suppose, and after a trip to the emergency room you might even be able to enjoy your lunch. But the can opener is an object with only one specific purpose, and it performs this job so swimmingly that no other tool even comes close.

These are the things I thought while watching in horror as poop slowly rose perilously close to the lip of my toilet bowl like horribly little brown ships on a polluted tide. I’m pretty sure I must have brain damage, because despite the fact I have lamented on occasions just like this the fact we don’t have a plunger, once the danger has passed I am immediately afflicted by plunger-purchasing-amnesia. I’m no world-class pooper or anything, it just so happens that a few times a year something frigs up and the toilet suddenly reverses its only job, which is to make waste go away.

I can tell you here and now that there is no object quite as useful as a plunger when you need it. It’s not even as if you can rig some kind of MacGuyverian stand-in to work as a plunger; there is no object or combination of objects that will do. Well, I suppose you could use the hose attachment of your vacuum, but that plan seems to have three or four severe flaws, not the least of which is the horrors of accelerating feces to hurricane speeds. What’s the other option? Straighten a hanger and just sort of jab at the fibrous mass of impacted TP until it is sufficiently aerated to give way? The mind recoils in terror. A non-brain damaged person would probably get in their car and aim it toward the nearest hardware store, I guess. But not your intrepid, neighborhood reporter, ladies and gentlemen! I would have none of that malarkey. I opted for the method kids have been using to get out of doing dishes since time out of mind – the soak. I let time and water work its erosive magic until the paper fell apart and was whisked away. Thankfully, this happened automatically, because with the water level a scant 2 millimeters from the rim there was no way I was going to test the situation by flushing again. All was well by the next morning. But can I count on being so lucky next time? Images of poo logs melting all over my bathroom floor like decaying goldfish rise in the mind.

That reminds me…I need to buy a plunger.

The Devil is in the Details

12/3/07

In its ever-continuing attempt to finally make television unwatchable, Fox Network has upped the bottom-scraping once again with its new game show “The Moment of Truth.” Now, I’m sort of a default Democrat, since I happen to care whether the planet’s weather system collapses and believe that old men shouldn’t be shot in the face, so I’m pretty much on the writers’ side in this whole strike situation. But if there’s one reason to be angry as a wet badger in a bag about it, it’s the fact that the strike will invariably increase the number of unscripted, “reality” programming out there, and “The Moment of Truth” is its whorish herald.
The show features “average” people strapped to a lie detector and asked devilishly embarrassing and personal questions such as:

· “Do you really care about starving children in Africa?”
· “Are you sexually attracted to one of your wife’s friends?”
· “Do fat people repulse you?”
· “Would you cheat on your wife if you knew you wouldn’t be caught?”
· “Do you think you will be with your husband five years from now?”

Whenever I told Hanni about this historic shit-pile, she asked me how you win at such a game. My first thought was, “Does anyone win?” The object is to answer up to 21 questions. If you answer all 21 honestly, you get $500,000. The player can stop the hemorrhaging at any time, but once a question is asked it must be answered. I suppose you could argue the people participating in this televised abortion of entertainment deserve what they get, especially since they know all of the questions they’re going to be asked. You see, in order to obtain a level with the polygraph, the contestants are asked 75 questions beforehand, 21 of which will be asked on air, in front of a live audience including your soon-to-be former loved ones. They aren’t told the results of the polygraph, so I’m sure a great number of these greedy lunatics figure they can beat the box.

Said friends and family are even provided with a button meant to “rescue” the contestant from a particularly spiky question. Naturally, since the type of people this show would attract are the ethical equivalent of week-old afterbirth, they never use it for the intended purpose. Instead, they dive for it like a lion on a bunny whenever a question hits them where they live. For example, when asked if she would be more attracted to her husband if he dropped twenty pound of lard, the woman’s partner couldn’t jam that button fast enough. According Fox’s president of alternative entertainment Mike Darnell, “What ends up happening is they use it to help themselves because they don’t want to hear something revealed about themselves.”
So, basically what you get to witness is the worst factions of human selfishness trotted out because of greed. Fantastic. Aside from the fact you’re watching a physical manifestation of the Id, the fact that polygraphs aren’t particularly accurate may give one pause. They’re dynamite for telling whether someone is nervous or not, but in determining the validity for a statement their accuracy has been put somewhere between 80-98% by the American Polygraph Association. That’s…a pretty big gap.

A version of the show originally aired in Columbia. Of course it did; the rest of the world is America’s testing ground for shows we can’t think of on our own. But in the Columbian show the questions were…a bit different. The show was temporarily taken off the air when a player confessed to hiring a hit-man to bump-off her goddamn husband. I would have loved to be in on the meeting where that question was thought up. What sort of ad campaign would you air during that show? Rat poison? Surprisingly, Fox has decided questions related to a felony aren’t going to be part of its package.

The really depressing thing about this whole matter is that I have just described something that will be wildly successful. Fuck you, you human bastards. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go empty the world of whiskey and try to forget all this.

Source: TV Week, Darnell in Defense of the ‘Truth’

A Brief History of Time

11/26/07

As you may or may not be aware, I am taking online classes in a desperate attempt to carve out a better life for my wife and myself. I really rather like the History class that’s just wrapping up, and my final project is to do a 3-4 page paper concerning my family tree and any interesting characters several generations back. Prior to this exercise, I might as well have hatched from a giant space-egg for all I knew about my ancestry. Fortunately, several years ago my uncle took it upon himself to research the Jett family, and I had to do minimal investigation since he just emailed me all the information. It seems I have a rather…interesting family history. I suppose it should surprise no one that a man who thinks taking and sharing pictures of himself, naked, perched atop a stool is funny, would have a somewhat bizarre and really rather fucked up genealogy.

That, my dear readers, is the coat-of-arms awarded to the first known “Jett,” a Bavarian by the name of Sir Johan Van Jett, for his service in the first Crusade (1095-1099). So…great. My premier ancestor went to war because people keen on Jesus decided to kill a whole lot of folk in order to “reclaim holy land.” Also, the plundering was good back then. It seems some of the Jett line stayed in that region, evidenced by the same coat of arms above used by Baron Jett zu Munzenberg of Prussian Bavaria in 1701, and another portion went to England. I am totally going to start referring to myself as Baron Jett.

The first Jett to hop the pond, and to whom my uncle has been able to directly link us to, was Peter Jett. He came over to Virginia with his wife, kids and another family, in 1663. Where half of them were promptly killed in an Indian raid. Things are quiet for a few generations, and then it seems in the latter 1800’s our family has a rather embarrassing and loony brush with history. You may remember a feller by the name of John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln, spouted some gibberish, and leapt from a balcony to disappear off into the night. Booth injured his leg in that jump and, after ferrying across the Potomac, chanced across three former Confederate soldiers. One of them was Private (or perhaps Captain, the history is vague) William “Willie” Jett. He was sympathetic to Booth’s plight, and led him to a friend’s farmhouse by the name of Garrett where the assassin holed up for a few days. Jett was eventually found and questioned and, when threatened with a serious hanging, gave up Booth’s location. Fun!

I don’t have the specifics on hand, but I hear tell that the first Jetts to come to Missouri were horse thieves, which was punishable by death in those days. Then again, looking at a man sideways in the 19th century was tantamount to anally raping his mother, so…

Oh! One more fantastic journey down Jett lore: This gentleman is also not directly related to me, but there was a Curt “Bad Curt” Jett who received a life sentence for killing Attorney J. B. Marcum in Jackson, Kentucky, and shooting his cousin, Marshall Jim Cockrill from a courthouse window in 1902. Jett was apparently a “feudist,” which is a fancy way of saying his family didn’t get along with people. He was pardoned for reasons not entirely clear to me some 20 years later. It is, I suppose, kind of neat to have a relative with a nickname in quotes, but I think I could have been more creative than “Bad Curt.”

So…what have we learned? Well, I am descended from thieves, murderers and treasonous abettors. Wonderful. On the up side, my mother’s side of the family is so fucked up that she just found out after his death that the man she thought was her half brother was really her real brother, because her mom banged her ex-husband while married to another man. And my maternal grandmother spoke 3 languages, was a fantastic artist, abandoned her family for weeks at a time, and thought she talked to the Devil. Also, kind of a racist.

It’s a blue-eyed miracle I’m not either in prison or the booby hatch…the latter being not nearly as fun as it sounds.

Pray for Falling Pianos

11/15/07

If nothing else, I can at least rest assured that should a bolt of lightning strike any one person in my department, it will kill everyone else too because they’re standing elbow-to-elbow looking at a goddamn snow pattern that’s supposed to be a fucking sonic picture of something the size of a sonuvabitching pinto bean.

Yeah, that would be a pretty good day. Gods bless Acme.

On The Right (Am)Track

11/10/07

Just an update on yesterday’s post concerning the potentially poop-laden story about a Japanese tourist being carted off an Amtrak train for taking pictures out the window. I contacted Amtrak about the matter, and by “contacted” I mean I emailed their customer relations department since my level of apprehension concerning using the telephone to contact persons unknown to me approaches real phobia. I asked if they were aware of the story and if it had any validity, and information on their…photo-taking policy. Here is their response:

Dear Ryan,

Thank you for your recent email.

As
information, amateur photography that does not interfere with passengers or crew
is permitted on board trains. Regarding the recent article you referenced,
Amtrak is investigating the matter. While the results of investigations
involving our employees are confidential, please be assured that Amtrak is
committed to customer service and any appropriate action will be
taken.

We appreciate your interest in Amtrak and hope we can serve
your travel needs in the future.

Sincerely,

Amtrak
Customer Relations

As you might imagine, this interaction left me less than satisfied. It was, however, more than I had expected. I’m not sure whether they knew of the alleged incident before my contact, but I like to think not. Their rather vague response leads me to conclude one of several tantalizing possibilities:

1. Amtrak had never heard of this and even as we speak a crack-team of internal investigators is swooping down upon the matter like a falcon on a barn swallow.

2. Amtrak has heard of this and is in the process of punishing the offending conductor who possesses delusions of godhood.

3. The story is so patently ridiculous they won’t even bother to look into it and are merely pacifying me.

4. Amtrak has heard of it, is investigating it, and it will turn out to be false.

5. Amtrak has circled the wagons in a desperate attempt to cover up their dastardly plan to form their own sort of “Travel Gestapo,” loosely affiliated with the soulless demons down at the Department of Homeland Security.

For sheer, blogging mileage out of this story, I certainly hope it’s either #1 or 5. Honestly, it’s probably #4.

I love the fact that I have single-handedly created several tasty new phrases in this post alone that will hopefully worm their way into the American lexicon. Namely, “blogging mileage,” and “travel Gestapo.” You’re welcome, America.

Programmers: We Give Up

11/9/07

You know those awful little flash games where you get to slap a fat man’s belly or pump up a tire or shoot some chickens or something faster than a computer competitor? And then your prize is that you get some dumb ass ringtone featuring Ashley Simpson or a cat screaming or something equally awful? Yeah, MySpace is a good breeding place for this. Well, I have come across definitive proof that the programmers of these little games have done run out of ideas. The other day I saw this hilarious monstrosity:

That’s right, dear readers; you are looking at a game where you are Batman…and your goal is to punch out the Terminator. You know, as insane as it is to play a game where you attempt to shave more hair off a woman’s legs than your automated rival, at least it makes a sort of sense in the encapsulated universe in which it exists. I mean, this is just slapping two completely unrelated fictional characters together to punch each other so you can have In Da Club play whenever grandma calls. What I propose next? Strawberry Shortcake shooting Jem and the Holograms with a paintball gun.

Feel free to make up your own wildly ludicrous flash games, ladies and gentlemen. There’s a No-Prize in it for the best one!

Episcopal B.S.

11/8/07

Good gravy. Has it really been a month since last we spoke? Well…then let’s get to it.

Normally I’m one known for always enjoying a good, scathing tale about how loony the right-wingers are in this country. But there is on thing I despise worse than a barrel full of Bill O’Reillys, and that’s bullshit. I have no tolerance for untruths, whether they be conscious or whether the person spreading them is just too lazy or disinclined to healthy skepticism to check whether something is based in reality before spreading it around. The only downside to the internet is that it has made this practice infinitely easier in the form of endlessly forwarded “did you know” emails that are pretty much just full of outright lies. Whether these messages are fanciful creations by the left or right is immaterial; I would never want to influence anyone to my point of view through blatant dishonesty. Personally, I’m far too conceded to tolerate ever being wrong, so I check out my sources and make damn sure I know what I’m talking about before I impart any information. Snopes.com, people; it’s a winner.

There is a story that has been circulating the blogosphere that I suspect, suspect, may be complete and utter malarkey. You can read the whole thing here on the Episcopal Café site, but I’ll summarize:

The posting is a first-person anecdote by Joel L. Merchant* but the website appears to actually be run by some dude named Joel Naughton. In the story Mr. Merchant is riding on an Amtrak train in the picturesque Northeast. There is a Japanese tourist snapping pictures out the window because, you know how it’s a genetically imperative that Asians hold cameras. The conductor sees this and informs the tourist, “Sir, in the interest of national security, we do not allow pictures to be taken of or from this train.” Wait for it, the story gets better.

The tourist of course doesn’t speak English and the conductor character, who may or may not be lifted entirely out of a Spike Lee movie, becomes enraged at not being understood and threatens to confiscate the camera. At the next stop the police enter the car (this time characters lifted from an early “talkie”) and through the use of a translator, inform the man that they are detaining him and will put him on the next train if he turns out not to have sensitive photos of…cows or whatever the shit they grow in New England. The tourist complains that relatives he hasn’t seen in forever are waiting for him in Boston and there’s not way to contact them. Because, I can only guess, the Japanese family, the most tech-savvy people on the planet, have no cell phones. Oh, and land-based phone lines to the Boston train station have yet to be invented. Also, email doesn’t exist, and apparently the rider for the Pony Express is passed out down at Ye Olde Taverne.

Naturally there is some grumbling by the other passengers, overheard, we presume, by Mr. Merchant. This one is my favorite: “An older traveler reflected, “I witnessed this personally in police states during the war in Europe.”” Yeah, because people talk that way. And there’s nothing like invoking the Nazis during “the war in Europe” to make a point. Subtle, Mr. Merchant.

At any rate, this did not happen. I don’t know if anything even remotely similar happened, but this story did not. It’s simply too perfectly illustrates the author’s point of view to be real. It seems to be an emotionally-charged cautionary tale about the dangers of overzealous security, but king of comes off as…literally unbelievable. Note the use of a sympathy-inducing protagonist; the only way the sweet, photo-snapping Japanese man could be more lovable is if Mr. Merchant had put him in a bunny suit.

An author whose work I enjoy a great deal (Terry Goodkind) once wrote that people believe things either because they want to believe a thing is true, or because they are afraid what they’re told might be true. In this case Mr. Merchant’s audience falls into both camps. I’m not saying this is bald-faced fucking bullshit, but it certainly has a faint whiff of manure.

This reminds me of the countless cautionary tales both from the government and religious institutions. You know, Frankie Everyman bangs Sally Sweetcheeks out of wedlock, gets a “social disease,” and they both die in a murder/suicide. Also duct tape and plastic wrap can protect you from a chemical attack.

The most disturbing part is that people seem far too ready to just take this story on face value, according to the comment section. The ingenious thing about telling a personal anecdote like this is it’s almost impossible to disprove. Even after one commenter went so far as to contact Amtrak and was informed that, yes, of course passengers could take pictures, they only say that the conductor was way out of line and the cops were overzealous. There was even an engineer and conductor trainer who commented that Mr. Merchant should have gotten the conductor’s badge number and that they are not permitted to act like that. C’MON! What’s more likely, that the entire train’s employees are lunatics and the cops at the station have delusions of being in the S.S., or that one man is an exaggerative and creative writer? I was unable to find any outside verification of this besides other blogs re-posting it. I am in the process of contacting Amtrak to see if they have heard of this and will let you in on the results, ladies and gentlemen.

Have healthy skepticism, dear readers.



* According to the Episcopal Café, Mr. Merchant “is a teacher, business consultant, and essayist. He is currently working on "The Other Side of Time; Letters to My Daughter" at a-reminiscence.”

I Like My Eggs Fertilized

10/9/07

I’m pretty sure most people are brain damaged. How else can you explain the reaction human beings have whenever someone announces they are having a baby? Naturally the most vocal on the subject fall into that most disturbing of categories, the unwed, middle-aged office lady who is way too attached to her pets. These people are so rife with unrequited love that, were you ever to actually allow their drooling insanity within spitting distance of your child, you’ll have to keep a close eye on them to make sure they aren’t sprinting for the parking lot with your progeny.

Why is the announcement of your very average and normal ability to fertilize an egg a cue for automatic congratulations? I mean, I get it if you’ve got like one ovary, have been trying for a year, or have been using hobo sperm and a turkey baster or something, but what precisely is interesting about the fact that you fucked and wound up preggers? Shit, stray dogs and poor people do that all the time, and they don’t seem all that impressive to me. I’m pretty sure something almost anyone can do is not grounds for immediate congratulations. And I can understand if you are the sort of baby-crazy psychotic who has been keeping your coworkers constantly updated with the status, cycle, and consistency of your uterus for the past 6 months. But other than that, it’s just weird. It’s like congratulating someone on their birthday. Hey, good work! Way to keep breathing this whole year!

Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be excited if someone in your family gets knocked up, (providing their not say, sixteen and really into knives,) but to be thrilled about a person you are forced to spend 40 hours a week with and never even think of unless you need to borrow some White-Out is venturing into Lunatic Land. Hooray! More people who will probably buy lottery tickets and go to Eddie Murphy movies and drive an SUV and cause me to repeat myself and just generally clog up the planet and judicial system while contributing nothing to society! Rejoice!

I guess I can give the women who are breaking this earth-shattering news a break; after all, you will eventually figure out that they are swelling to abnormal proportions, so it sort of makes sense for them to tell people about it. But there is no excuse for male coworkers to bring this up, given that we don’t know your wife/girlfriend/one-night-bang, don’t care about the fact that your nuts work properly, and can’t possibly imagine a situation where I would have to be privy to information about the spawn that fell out of your partner’s vagina. Great job with the sperm and everything, Carl, but how about we just go on pretending that we all wouldn’t rather be somewhere else and leave your germination skills out of the workplace, okey-dokie?

Wow. I must be in a particularly spiky mood this afternoon. Clearly, I’m advocating eating babies.

10/7/07

My friend Andi showed me this last night. All I can say is "awesome."

Check it.

Gerbils and Caterpillars and Moths, Oh My

10/4/07

Is that a gerbil in your pocket, or are you just some weird pervert?

First of all, sad days, ladies and gentlemen; my goldfish of some five years finally croaked and went belly-up on us. Despite my reputation as a bit of a procrastinator, it took me a mere 2 days to actually fish him out of there and throw it away. My wife’s constant urging over the two weeks that followed to actually clean out the empty, stagnant and rapidly algae-blooming aquarium, was probably just her way of dealing with the grief. I finally succumbed under threat of abstinence and we were left with this empty tank staring us in the face every day. What to do? Clearly the best course of action was to fill it with rodents.

Disturbing sexual urban myths notwithstanding*, Hanni and I decided to get a couple of gerbils. We finally settled on two males from Pet Warehouse, mostly because they were the only place within a 20 mile radius that fucking had gerbils. I don’t know if there’s recently been a run on the tiny creatures, but Springfield is certainly uncontaminated with them, ladies and gentlemen. Here are the lucky winners:

We ended up naming them Alexander and Hamilton, ‘cause I roll Founding Father style. They are slightly cuddlier than a fish, and more entertaining to watch. I just hope to Christ we didn’t make some egregious error and actually ended up with a male and a female. I’m not really into swarms of rodents. Should that be the case, we may have a new promotion here at Drunken Ramblings: Read the blog, get a free tiny mammal!

That’s not the only life Hanni and I have cultivated in the last few months, either. My mother brought me a parsley plant one day that ended up having like 6 of these guys stowed away inside it:

After some research and a hastily-assembled and spartan terrarium, I determined they were Black Swallowtail caterpillars. The really fun thing about them, aside from their wicked-awesome coloring which I’m considering copying for a suit pattern, is a little orange, fleshy fork that comes out of their head. Yeah, they totally rock a stink gland.

You would, by the way, be astounded at how much a caterpillar can poop. Fed steadily for several days on a staggering amount of parsley, the guys soon climbed the makeshift sticks and settled back into these kick-ass silk hammocks.

For whatever reason, I always thought caterpillars spun silk into a chrysalis, but that’s not the case. In fact, they attach themselves with silk, but the actual pupae is the result of a molting which we were lucky enough to watch on one of these guys, though sadly we didn’t get it on video. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen and only takes about a minute for them to complete. Here's a pretty good simulacrum of the process through a little Monarch time-lapse, y'all! -

About 10 days later here’s what we got:

Pretty, huh? We also found a caterpillar of a different sort in some corn we bought at the farmer’s market. Not quite as stunning, is the corn worm.

Also, they turn into perhaps one of the god-awful ugliest moths I’ve ever seen. But, you know, we can’t choose our species, I suppose.

That’s all the news from Jett’s Wild Kingdom, dear readers. I’m thinking our next animal project will be rearing and training a massive hoard of loyal spider soldiers to unleash upon my foes. BWA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!




*Stuffing a gerbil, shaved or not, lubed or not, into one’s asshole is clearly physically impossible if you just think about it for a few seconds. Essentially what you’d end up with is a slippery, crushed gerbil corpse acting as a terrifically inefficient and bloody dildo. Leave poor Richard Gere alone.

I Like Tortles, Too

Just in case anyone out there in cyberspace hasn't seen it yet:



Me too, kid...me too.

C-O-2-Times the Pleasure

9/17/07

There are seemingly endless reasons to hate the Wal-Mart Corporation. I could probably do an entire series on the slew of evil practices in which the largest company in the world engages. Not since the roaring days of the African slave trade has the world seen such unfair and rampant distain for common workers, whether it’s the fact that managers illegally adjust overtime off of an employee’s timecard onto the next week, or the fact that Wal-Mart counted 28 hours per week as “full-time,” or the fact that, in an effort to squeeze every delicious drop of profit at the expense of human decency, Wal-Mart has installed a rolling work hours where employees are just sort of “on call” 24 hours a day with no set schedule. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Wal-Mart offered a health care plan so staggeringly expensive that they knew employees wouldn’t be able to afford it, and then encouraged them to go on welfare and Medicaid instead, effectively passing off responsibility to the US government. And, of course, there’s the fact that Wal-Mart gets huge subsidies from local government to come into a town and drive all small business to bankruptcy with lower prices that are immediately raised after all competition has been killed. No, forget all that. Today I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart: meat.

I enjoy cooking a great deal. Point of fact, other than booze pretty much all of my disposable income goes to food. Fortunately I’m a pretty good cook so my wife pretty much leaves me to my own devices where culinary decisions are involved. I think she would rather be blissfully unaware whenever I spend $6 on a single ounce of saffron, or $12.99 for a single, dry-aged steak. This information would just cause her mind to recoil in horror. But if you want quality, sometimes you just gotta pay for it. This is a principle with which Americans are terribly uncomfortable, which is why Wal-Mart is so popular. I will concede that it is terrifically convenient to get all your shopping done in one place, but at the end of the day all you’re left with is a little saved time and a cart-load of cheap crap. Shirts that dissolve immediately upon contact with water, lights that burn out if you’re so careless as to turn them on, pots and pans with the heat distribution properties of a moldy tangerine, and, well, moldy tangerines. This is not good stuff, dear readers. But the single most abominable sin against humanity Wal-Mart affects is what they have the unmitigated gall to call “meat.”

It looks pretty good, doesn’t it? Long rows of brilliantly red beef of all cuts merrily sitting inside large plastic containers; what could be better? Well, not all cuts, since Wal-Mart no longer employs butchers in favor of pre-packaged meat imported from gods know where except that it’s not from American farmers. So you can’t get anything cut to order; what you see is what you get. But that’s just peanuts, here’s the butter: The reason the meat looks so good is because it’s treated with chemicals to retain that ruby-red color pretty much forever. It could be as spoiled as Paris Hilton beneath that taught plastic wrap but it would still look like it was cut this morning. They way this is accomplished is by using low-oxygen atmospheres and treating the meat with carbon monoxide. I know, it sounds delicious. That’s why the packaging is so puffed and tight like that; it’s a specific atmosphere inside the packaging necessary to keep it looking good. So essentially that ribeye could have sat in an unrefridgerated truck in Death Valley for a week, then delivered its payload to the store and you would never be able to tell the difference.

Wal-Mart claims that it doesn’t use CO2-treated meat anymore, but independent tests have shown that, as of last year at least, they were still selling meat treated by carbon monoxide. All of that aside, if you’ve ever tasted Wal-Mart meat, the point is really moot. I won’t say it has all the flavor and texture of a coconut husk, but it’s close. Yes, it is a little cheaper, but only by a very slim margin more than overshadowed by its similarity to shoe leather.

According to the company’s facts page, “We made the decision to expand our case-ready meat program to better serve our customers.” If anyone out there believes that, I have a bridge in New York I’d like to sell you. They fired all their butchers (they were dangerously close to unionizing) and went to pre-packed, hermetically sealed foodstuffs because it’s fucking cheaper for them, period. They are also particularly terrified of letting you know where the meat comes from, heavily lobbying against country of origin labeling (COOL). Their reasoning here is that “COOL applies costs to the system and provides zero benefits to the consumer.” That’s according to an exec in an interview with Beef Magazine. Yeah, I don’t want to know where my meat comes from either. Are any of the cleaning crew mysteriously missing?

I’ve pretty much boycotted Wal-Mart for this and many, many other reasons. I’m not asking you to do the same, but in the interest of decent food, please consider a goddamn grocery store that at least has people who’ve touched the meat they’re selling. Good day, ladies and gentlemen.


Sources:
http://www.consumerfed.org/pdfs/CFA_Wal-Mart_CO_statement_5.16.06.pdf.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/14/122225/59
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_4839.cfm
http://www.walmartfacts.com/articles/2462.aspx

The Pub Crawl

9/6/07

I should tell you that the Annual Billings Pub Crawl is in no way organized or sanctioned by the City of Billings. It apparently started when a few people decided it would be fun to go to all three of the town’s bars in one night. Last year I went with Hanni and there were about 30 people. This year, intermittently, I think the number may have been closer to 40 at the highest tide. The only thing that urks me about Hanni's crowd is that they all seem to operate in the “Matlock” time zone, meaning their functions start around 7 in the evening. Which, any sane person will tell you, is so early in the night as to be ridiculous. There is no call for falling into unconsciousness at the tender hour of only 1 a.m. on a weekend night, ladies and gentlemen. But I digress…

We started at the VFW, which is far and away my favorite of the three, if not high in the running for my favorite bar ever. Although, they did lose points because between last year and this year they removed the shuffleboard table.

I believe I discovered why the drinks are so fantastically cheap; apparently the Billings VFW exists in a time-warp and we were paying 1986 prices (see picture below). Seriously, though, $2.50 for a 7&7? Bacchus be praised! Even at $1 tip each I still made out swimmingly, and the barmaid was quite generous with the liquor-to-Sprite ratio.

Hanni and I played some spectacularly bad pool. I think there was one game where our team didn’t sink a single ball. Except for maybe the cue ball. I am powerfully happy that I married someone as dangerously un-athletic as myself. Whenever we vacated the place all that was left were a bewildered bartender and one relieved-looking old fellow at the bar.

A scant few blocks away, “The Bank” is a quasi-tavern situated inside—what else—an old bank.

I have to say I do dig the outside façade. The inside is roomy and they have somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand songs on the juke. The only negatives about The Bank are that it’s privately owned and keeps no set-in-stone hours, and they only serve beer and wine coolers. I had to make due with Corona, but the heroic amounts of spirits I had consumed at the VFW made sure I was in no danger of sobriety.

Come to think of it, none of the bars and precious few of the shops and restaurants in Billings keep rigid hours. They seem to operate more on a “whenever we feel like it” opening and closing time which is the sole dominion of mom-and-pop businesses.

Earlier in the evening I was promised that we would not be frequenting Billings’ third watering hole. I was lied to. I hate The Oasis. Hate it. I hate this bar with the fiery intensity of a matador afflicted with gonorrhea. Hanni’s brother Peter is a fire fighter, and was a first responder in Billings. He recalled with disgusted amusement that nary a weekend used to go by when they weren’t called out to Oasis because someone had gotten beaten with a crowbar or something.

Imagine, if you will, a dodgier, less-classy version of Patrick Swayze’s Roadhouse. Now add shit-kicking karaoke and a smattering of people who count the time they got a sloppy yawn* from a girl in a vomit-covered Skynyrd t-shirt their sophomore year in high school as the high point of their life, and you’ve just about got it.

This year for whatever reason The Oasis wasn’t as bad as last year. There was a smaller crowd and less republican sing-a-longs, so it was tolerable. All in all it was a good night. But goddamn…I hate that fucking bar.




*Sloppy Yawn: aka – a blowjob.

Fair Game

9/5/07

Long time readers of my blog will no doubt remember last year’s post concerning the 2nd Annual Billings Pub Crawl. Well last weekend it was that time again, and this year it coincided with the annual Billings Fair. All this and Labor Day weekend? Good gravy, however did I survive the revelry? In deference to our out-of-town and international readers, I should explain that Billings, Missouri is a tiny little town about 18 miles outside of Springfield, with a population of around 1,100 souls. It’s the type where you can see the “Thank You for Visiting” sign from the “Now Entering” sign, and it is from this sleepy little burg that my dear wife graduated high school. I can’t decide whether being there reminds me more of Children of the Corn, or Doc Hollywood, but there is something quaintly creepy about the place, not the least of which being the fact that my wife is related through some convoluted buggery to 9 out of 10 of its residents. It’s a nice place to visit, I should say.

Two years ago the village elders or whoever it is that makes decisions about these things decided that having rides at the Billings Fair was somewhat superfluous. Thusly, you get all the enjoyment of eating bad food and playing crooked, cheap games for even cheaper prizes while breathing exhaust fumes from the “tractor pull” without any of the distraction of actual fun that rides would bring. Oddly, it seems you don’t need carnival rides to attract carnies; they are just sort of drawn to the place like flies to a cow pie.

I’m pretty sure this guy is trying to shove a funnel cake into his mouth while shotgunning a giant Slurpee. I’m pretty sure he had pork cracklins in his pockets.

I was curious whether “Italian Charms” meant charms from Italy, or charms made by Italians, or perhaps charms to keep away Italians...

Turns out it means cheap crap with a nice dose of passive-aggressive racism:

And just what the fuck is going on here?

I shuddered each time a child crawled out of the Giant Smurf Vagina tunnel. It was like watching a log flume of alien births...being clitorally stimulated by a humping dolphin. Great balls of greasy fire.

Worst. Ring toss. Ever:

That day would have been a great time to be a thief in Billings, as the entire police force was at the fair. There must have been some vile terrorist plot to explode the bouncy castle, because they even had some guys in black t-shirts that said “Police,” complete with handcuffs and all, who claimed to be “police volunteers.” I didn’t even know that existed. I’m pretty sure “Police Volunteer” just means you like hitting people with sticks and wearing a mustache.

A dry burger, one jar of pickled watermelon rinds, and a fantastically delicious funnel cake later, we departed the fair en route to the first stop along the infamous Billings Pub Crawl. Tune in tomorrow for that tale, dear readers!