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!

When Things Seem Just a Bit Too Normal

8/31/07


I’m going to be thirty years old this Halloween. And you know what? I’m glad.

Life seems more magical and fascinating as a child, mostly because it just plain is. Of course things were fascinating, how can they not be when you’re constantly encountering stuff the likes of which you’ve never seen before? As adults just about every single experience we have can be compared to ten other similar instances. "Yeah, that’s a pretty good apple pie, but I’ve had better." That sort of thing. Every smell, every taste, every day like something else we’ve had before, most likely before we reached our twentieth year.

No wonder people have mid-life crises; it’s not that you think you haven’t done anything with your life, it’s that you’ve done so much that nothing seems wondrous anymore. All the things you knew you wanted have arrived; they’re here. And now they have become that worst of dream killers; normal. So you have to strike out for the new and get back some of that magic you had when you were sixteen and you still thought the world was yours for the taking. But all too often this perfectly healthy desire for new experience manifests itself in the most ass-way possible and one morning you realize you’re just a balding douchebag inside trendy jeans and a Corvette. For whatever reason it seems people want to hang onto their youth forever nowadays. “Oh, thirty is the new twenty!” Jesus, really? Well that’s depressing. I like my age. I like that I don’t have to forever experience the turmoil, insecurity and downright goofiness of upper adolescence anymore. I like that I’m boring and un-cool and don’t speak in lingo that a fifteen year old finds comforting. Though, strictly speaking, I was never "cool." I like responsibility...to a point. But what’s wrong with being an adult?

Besides, new and amazing and totally-unlike-anything-in-the-world things still happen. The moon landing, for instance, buying your first house, saying “I do,” watching your baby being born, actually believing in a politician. All of these are wholly unique and un-imitatable. It seems they get fewer and farther between the older you get. Is that such a bad thing, though? If they didn’t thin out your poor old psyche could never survive past age 30. But try to imagine—or better yet, even remember—what it was like going to a county fair for the first time. Sure, they’re routine and some of the shine has come off the apple now, but what if you’d never seen one before? Maybe there’s a two-headed calf in the oddities display! Who knows what could be around the next corner; you don’t know! The sound and presence of the crowds, the burnt sugar smell of cotton candy and a not wholly unpleasant tang of large barnyard animals and hay, the taste of staggeringly sweet root beer in those tiny plastic jugs, the stomach-dropping tickle of a rickety rollercoaster run by people you wouldn’t entirely trust to tend a goldfish. The bizarre, cheap games on the midway that even then you knew were rigged. The sheer, blissful pleasure of being out on a warm summer night, allowed to stay up to the deliriously late hour of ten o’clock, and having all the endless eternity of life stretching out into the horizon ahead of you. Can you hear it? Can you smell it, dear readers?

And that’s just a shitty little county fair. Think about your first love, huh? It’s an impossible thing to bottle, that feeling. You can’t keep that sort of shiny new tingle any more than a puppy can keep from growing into a dog. And that’s okay. It’s okay that as we age some of the magic goes out of things. As long as we still remember, and keep ourselves open to it when a pale version of that magic shows up, it’s okay. Because nostalgia is the butterfly version of childhood magic. And that tastes pretty sweet, too. Go ahead, act your age, you’ve earned it.

A Tangle of Hot, Wet, Torrid, Buttery Thoughts

8/30/07

The internet has plenty of sure-fire entertainment, providing one is amiable to gutter humor, or drunk, or sort of dumb, or bored enough, or some combination of these. The magic that is CraigsList is one such site. No matter what you’re looking for on craigslist, invariably you will end up reading the categories of strange people seeking other…strange people. The romance categories are like a black hole, inexorably pulling your cursor to it as you flip through page after fluid-soaked page of the most bizarre, sort-of-frightening-to-be-living-near-them people the primordial ooze has ever spawned.

Last weekend Hanni and I found ourselves perusing the “Men Seeking Women” portion; always a gold mine of loneliness with just a hint of sweaty desperation. The prize for the saddest thing I have ever seen goes to this guy, who kind of looks like a broke-ass David Copperfield:

This fella, Dave, we’ll call him, as most of the characters on craigslist, fancies himself a bit of a ladies man. Forgetting for the moment that if that were true he wouldn’t need craigslist, not only is Dave courteous enough to give priority to those females who provide a picture (no fatties!) but he also gives you lucky ladies a taste of his romantic flavor with a staggeringly strange bit of prose torn from the pages of Penthouse Forum. If this is any indication, the flavor of his romance is probably liver. It’s long-ish, but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut any of it. For those of you with short attention spans, I have highlighted some particularly wonderful sections in bold.

This is me and you...

The soft supple skin of her leg brushed against the torrid firmness pushing hard against the Diesel denim of my pants. It was a simple movement where she lifted her leg and strattled mine as I sat on the chair in that dimly lighted club. It was different then usual, I was not in control. The scant sighting of the soft lace of her ruffled panty, just barely covering what would be heaven to me, brushed past my cheek as she straddled me facing me on the chair. The classy so perfect way she moved almost cat like, Her eyes screamed at me to take her hips and pull them tight against that torid hard pressing persuasion of hormones.

Her legs taunt, felt warm on each side of my waist. Her hands a rapid blur pulled the belt from my jeans and undid the buttons allowing all of me to press past that pretty white ruffled honey dipped fine lace, into her tight hot wet enveloping butter sweet softness of her peach tasting heaven to me. I was bad! I didn’t wait! I came hard! I so could not help my self. She had teased me mercilessly. I clenched down hard! I gave everything to her. Each clench of mine was met with a clench of hers her eyes holding mine the whole time, taking all of me and squeezing me tight pulling every bit of my soul out of me into her. All those times I had dreamed about her, I had traced the lines of her lethal curves in my mind. It was so good! It was more then I could hope for. Her softness pressed so firmly against me her smell so inviting, God I so wanted her. The single thing running through my mind .. I am in her! I am so in her! She is letting me be in her! SHE SO ROCKS!!!

My Words if you let me, will tangle your soul and push the envelope of adventure. What do you want to explore?! Where do you want to go today!? Whose world will you rock today?!

Know in your mind that every one that gets to experience you! Your world gets a treasure that they should hold onto and cherish forever! For all those who have gotten to experience being one with you, I know deep in my heart that It would not be a moment I would easily forget nor would I toss it aside! I would cherish the moment forever as I do you in my life.

So…basically he’s describing a fantasy where he fucks a stripper. Wonderful. “I am so in her”? Ye gods, Chandler from Friends has gotten desperate. And what the shit is up with the part where he starts talking in advertising phrases? “Where do you want to go today?” That’s the Microsoft slogan circa 1995, friends and neighbors. Cruising the internet for emotionally crippled women with no self-respect I can understand, but poorly-constructed whacking literature I cannot abide. However, Dave gets the prize for Author Least Willing to Cut an Adjective with this: “…pretty white ruffled honey dipped fine lace, into her tight hot wet enveloping butter sweet softness of her peach tasting heaven to me.”

Want to contact our friend here? Want to be Mrs. Creepy Copperfield? I got the hook up:

ATangle of thoughts
(http://springfield.craigslist.org/m4w/398281531.html )

Thank You for Coming

8/29/07

You know, I almost feel sorry for Republican Senator Larry Craig from Idaho. I’d be a lot more sympathetic if he wasn’t so hilarious. Recently a round of homoerotic innuendo stemming from his arrest in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for “lewd behavior” toward an undercover cop has put the brakes on his reelection bid for ‘08. Apparently that particular men’s room is well known to be a good place for a little pinch-and-tickle. Craig pled guilty to the lesser charge of “disorderly conduct.”

“Under stress” from newspaper investigations into his sex life was the odd excuse Craig gave for pleading guilty to the charge, in what was probably the most defensive, oddest press conferences ever yesterday. (See it here) He also said that he “overreacted” in copping a plea, whatever the shit that means. Craig claimed that he “did nothing wrong,” and actually spoke the words “let me be clear, I am not gay, I have never been gay.” It was about that point where I lost my shit and nearly crapped with laughter. If the phrase “methinks the man doth protest too much” has ever given you trouble, watch this spectacle and I think you’ll understand.

With every assertion Craig got consecutively more rainbow-colored. By the end of the speech he might as well have been wearing watermelon lip gloss, leather chaps and a baby t-shirt tied just under the nipples, bellowing to the crowd that he loved him some pussy! I am continually dumbfounded by people who feel the need to constantly attest to their stalwart straight-ness. Craig might as well be saying it around a stiff cock, because people who are really straight don’t often get accused of oral sex in the men’s room of Washington’s Union Station (2004), cruising for men at an REI store in Boise (1994), rumored to have had relationship with House pages (1982), and whispers of…something in his college days. Read all about it here. Craig’s response to the 1994 allegation was priceless as well:

“I’ve been in this business 27 years in the public eye here. I don’t go around
anywhere hitting on men, and by God, if I did, I wouldn’t do it in Boise, Idaho!
Jiminy!”

Normally I would consider Craig’s sexual proclivities his own damn business and nobody else’s. He has a right to privacy and I think forcibly “outing” someone is one step above pushing toddlers into traffic. I couldn’t care less that he likes wiener and frankly I am saddened by the fact that he is so consumed with self-hatred and guilt that he has to troll for dick in men’s rooms. I can even sort of forgive the fact that he’s diddling around behind his wife’s back. What I cannot abide is a hypocrite. Not only is Craig a Republican (and we all know how friendly they are to the gay community) but whenever Clinton got busted for Monica, Craig was all-too willing to wag his finger of shame. Craig felt Clinton would be getting a “slap on the wrist” if all he received for the affair was censure, and went on to say,

“The American people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy, a naughty boy.
I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think
that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.”

Although let’s give credit where credit is due; let it not be said that Senator Craig resorts to gutter language. His vernacular is so clean it squeaks. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an actual human say the word “jiminy” in conversation.

This comes at a particularly bad time for the party of the elephant, as many of them are coming up for reelection and the Republicans are terrified Democrats will get an even stronger majority in Congress. Craig is, let’s be honest, probably unelectable to retain his seat. But, given that a Democrat hasn’t been elected to the office since the early seventies, just about any Republican can probably win in Idaho. Well, any Republican who doesn’t play for the pink team, that is. Because nobody cares if you’re taking lobby kickbacks or chalking the administration with unqualified cronies, but kissing boys? Well that’s just fucking gross.


Sources:

Ain’t gay and won’t quit, says Senator Craig – Daily News Washington Bureau

Larry Craig: Still Not Gay – Washington Post

The Fall of the House of Jett

8/23/07

I realize things have been a little hushed on my old blog front, ladies and gentlemen, and I apologize if any of you are going through withdraw without long-winded, rambling columns from yours truly. I started taking online classes at OTC last week and am still getting acclimated to the system they use, as well as getting back into the role of a student after twelve years distance from school. Nevertheless!—I wish to impart an experience upon which my wife and I embarked last weekend: Plummeting thousands of feet through the air for no reason other than modern Caucasian life has become far too predictable and pedestrian.

Individually Hanni and I both always wanted to be able to check “Skydiving” off our imaginary lists of Life Experiences. It’s nice when our lists overlap like that, since I sincerely doubt “Indulge man-crush by hanging out with Bill Shatner” and “Create an army of paper maché warriors” rank anywhere on Hanni’s aspirations. So when the opportunity arose for us to accompany her friend Rosanna and this fellow Will to throw ourselves at the ground, we quickly accepted. The trouble was, we accepted a full three weeks before the jump, so we had plenty of time to just sort of sit around and grow ulcers over the thought of plummeting 10,000 feet at 120 miles per hour.

Truth be told I wasn’t terribly nervous about it. Skydive Missouri has never had a fatality in its 30-year operation, though they were a little vague about what constituted a “serious injury.” Also, I figured that either things would go swimmingly, or I would be dead; either way no worries. My dear wife, however, experienced the kind of nervous trepidation and white-hot terror usually reserved for people under heavy artillery bombardment.

On your first ever jump, you have to go tandem. Essentially this means you have someone who actually knows what they’re doing strapped to your back in case you get up there and turn into a large, quivering mound of pudding.

Now, I said I wasn’t scared or nervous and that’s true, to a point. The closest to being intimidated came when we got 2 miles up, threw open the door of the tiny Cessna, and stepped out of the bloody plane onto a platform the size of a shoebox. At this point the only thing holding us up is the instructor’s grip on the strut that holds up the wing, and we’re whipping along at 85 miles per hour. I lean my head back and, as instructed, shout “Ready! Set! GO!” and we’re off!

I can attest that earth’s gravity works spectacularly well, dear readers. What is skydiving like? Well I tell you this, it’s nothing like a roller coaster, or even going over a hill in a car, you know where your stomach drops out from under you? None of that. It really doesn’t feel like you’re moving at all. Best I can say is it’s like standing in front of an enormous fan blowing hurricane-speed winds. Also, the ground is rapidly leaping up to meet you. The instructors say that freefall is supposed to last for 40 seconds, but it felt no more than twenty to me. The next thing I know I’m looking at the ultra cool altimeter strapped to my wrist and it’s reading “6000 feet.” I signal to the instructor that I’m ready to pull the cord (you have to signal, it’s way too loud to speak) and reach down to find…nothing. That’s right, despite how many, many times I practiced it, I cannot find the damn ripcord. Never mind that the pull is the size of a salt shaker and bright, bloody orange; I can’t find it.

I don’t panic; I know we have at least ten seconds before the situation becomes critical, so I just keep looking for it and just as we rocket past 5000 feet I find the cord and—

Ba-WHOOM! The canopy balloons above us as my instructor yanks his cord, having noticed I was having trouble finding mine. That’s the only thing I regret; if given another second I could have pulled our chute but, alas, it was not to be.

The 5-minute canopy ride down was amazing. It’s totally silent up there and you’re just drifting over the land like an airship outta Final Fantasy. And they let you steer the chute, so that’s awesome. We pulled some tight spirals on the way down and landed with nary a stumble. It cost a whopping $90 per person for pictures and video so I opted not to get them, but you’re in luck, ladies and gentlemen; Hanni got both and you can see all the photos here on her page. Bear in mind that winds at that speed sort of make the human body look like an elfin mummy.

I would point out that I went this entire post without succumbing to the urge to use any combination of the phrase “jump out of a perfectly good airplane.”

Mira, Mira on the Wall

8/19/07


78 trillion miles. That is, seventy-eight with twelve zeros after it, miles. There is no analogy, simile or metaphor known to man which I could use to illustrate how great a distance that is; the human mind simply cannot grasp it. 78 trillion miles is 13 light years*, and that’s the size of this object:

That light blue, gossamer tail is glowing material being spewed from a red giant star named Mira as it hurtles through space at 80 miles per second. Mira, pronounced MY-rah, Latin for “wonderful,” is deep in her death throes, which is what has caused this massive venting of her elements. She’s been known to astronomers since the 17th century, and has about the same mass as our own Sun. But Mira is running out of the Hydrogen which powers a star’s fusion, and has bloated to 400 times the size of our star due to loss of fuel. It's the same thing that will happen to our star when Sol finally gives up the ghost. At this size, gravity can no longer hold Mira together properly, and her mass gets shunted off into space like dry ice vapor, creating this “tail” which makes Mira look like a comet on steroids.

The picture is actually an ultraviolet image taken from NASA’s orbiting telescope Galaxy Evolution Explorer, and it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before. The “tail” is made up of enormous amounts of star dust, including oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. This colossal amount of star vomit is seeding our galaxy with vast stores of raw material which could eventually form new stars, planets and solar systems. NASA scientists believe there are probably many more of these objects pinballing around the Universe, and it’s just one method by which new celestial bodies are born from the remnants of the old.

Twenty bucks says my wife has not read this far.

Mira’s not alone inside that cloud, either. She travels with a companion star, a white dwarf around which Mira orbits. Our single-star solar system appears to be the exception rather than the rule; about 2/3 of star systems have binary stars like Mira. Scientists think she will eventually vent all of her gas into space, forming an amorphous nebula, eventually collapsing into a white dwarf**.

Mira is about 350 light years from earth, if you want to try and wrap your mind around how far away that is.


Source – A Star with a Comet’s Tail; Science@NASA

--Image taken from http://www.space.com/images/h_in_sun_redgiant_03.gif

*The distance light travels in one earth year. At a jaunty clip of 300,000 km/second, that’s about 6 trillion miles every 365 days.

**A white dwarf star is about the same mass as the Sun, but is only as large as the earth. Therefore, if you could stand on a white dwarf, you’d weight approximately 330,000 times what you weigh here. Just to put into perspective how dense a white dwarf is, a teaspoon of such star matter would weigh about 40 tons here on earth.

Methinks the Man Doth Protest Too Much

8/14/07

An open letter to my coworker who sits two spaces away from me:

Dear Madam,
If you do not cease and desist the constant, low-pitched humming along with whatever dumb-ass music that is piped into through those headphones into that empty melon atop your neck, I will be forced to stab you in the face. That is all.

________________________________________________



Sometimes I wake up dreaming that I’ll stumble across the following job posting in the want-ads:

WANTED: Antisocial curmudgeon to write reviews of why things/people suck. Some gourmet cooking involved. Must have extensive knowledge of adult cinema. Pay starts 100K/year.

Speaking of work, I have recently enrolled for online classes in order to acquire my Associate’s Degree, from which point I then plan to attend MSU in order to get a much-belated bachelor’s degree in…something. What that will be, precisely, I’m not sure. The trouble is that there’s really no job I can imagine doing and not at least disliking if not downright hating. I presume this is a common affliction among humans, being as that 99% of us have to work or else risk the new and exciting opportunity to sleep under a urine-stained overpass. I dunno; do you like your job? Surely there must be people out there who at least don’t mind their jobs if not actually like them. Right?

My wife, for instance, teaches 7th grade Communication Arts. She went to school for 6 years and obtained a Master’s Degree to do this. While she hates getting up in the morning and sort of dreads the end of summer vacation, once she’s actually at work and teaching, she likes her job. This baffles me. I have never entertained such a feeling about anything I’ve ever been forced by circumstance to do. I’m terrified that the job I have now is as good as it gets, relatively-speaking. While I make a paltry wage, it’s probably more than I deserve for doing, essentially, what a mildly talented armadillo could accomplish if only it had opposable thumbs and a coffee mug that said something about it not being essential to be crazy to work here, but it helps. However, the work is so terminally easy that I can listen to audiobooks all day while the 3 brain cells it takes to perform my tasks go about their business. Also, if I work diligently at it, I can go an entire day without speaking to a single human being, which is a beautiful thing for a man who is perhaps one team-building-exercise away from going all Howard Hughes on the rest of the world. (Hence, the online college classes.)

Another nice thing about my job is that I’m pretty much left alone by my superiors. And as much as I may think some of my coworkers might have missed a chromosome or two when conceived, my bosses are intelligent, generally decent people. Not only do I get decent benefits, but I have a staggering 4 weeks of paid vacation. Plus, I have zero actual responsibility, not to mention that as soon as the magical little numbers on my computer’s clock hit 4:30 I’m out the door.

So no, my job offers me nothing in the way of fulfillment or intellectual stimulation, the pay is low and I sort of get this slippery, doomed feeling on Sunday evenings, but it’s not all that bad. I’m sort of terrified that I will graduate, get a much higher-paying job with an extra fifteen hours of work a week, plus responsibility, deadlines and the sneaking suspicion that I was happier before. But Hanni and I are planning on buying a house and, eventually, squeezing out a couple of genetic copies of ourselves, and I just don’t think my current paycheck can handle all that. So I look at it this way: I’ve already spent some fifteen years in the workforce, if I can just graduate and find a job I don’t downright loathe, maybe I can grind out another thirty or so years until retirement. Is that how most people look at the world? Am I being Mr. Pouty-Pants here?

Best case scenario? Hanni gets a monumentally better-paying job with a private school and I get to be a househusband and take care of the kids in between writing phenomenally popular novels. Yes…I think I’ll have one of those, please.

Soaking Wet Keywords

8/7/07


Technically I have two different blog sites; the one on MySpace and one on Blogger. They have duplicate content, and the MySpace one gets decidedly more consistent hits by a factor of about 10 or so. Really the only reason the Blogger account exists is the fact that I find the MySpace text and picture editor frustrating to the point of madness. After publishing on Blogger I can just copy and paste directly into MySpace and the formatting stays intact…mostly.

The hits on the Blogger page are wildly inconsistent and, I think, usually by accident. That is to say, I believe about 16% of the hits are from people who actually read the thing. They seem to consist entirely of either people doing an image search, or wild-ass Google searches that can’t possibly leave the seeker much satisfied with what they find. And let me tell you, some are outright hilarious. A staggering third of the searches involve looking for info on the Flexaway System. Here’s a list of the top 8 keyword searches that led folks to my blog:

1. Avril Lavigne* peeing herself – (30th Google result…yikes.) I’m not sure what precisely they were looking for, whether it be some kind of doctored photo with the Canadian weirdo engaged in golden showers or some horrible event caught by the paparazzi, but what they got was my witticism concerning Avril starring in her very own comic book.

2. Flexaway VS Facial Flex – (#1 of only 4 entries! Can you say “cornered market?) Clearly some savvy shopper was searching out the merits of one company’s product that stretches your face to supposedly remove wrinkles over another’s. I suggest using an iron.

3. Ryan Jett – (#2 result with a bullet!) Woo-Hoo! Somebody did a Google search for my name! Okay, it was probably me…I’m simply too vain to actually check the log and confirm that I’m the only one fascinated with all that is Jettman.

4. “Showing your vagina” – (a staggering #32 in Google results.) Quotes, no less! And not just “a” vagina, but “your” vagina. I like to think this is some saucy, slow-witted coed who is weighing the pros and cons of flashing her rosebud. I’m sure with the heroic amount of porn I surf I’m bound to unknowingly come across her at some point.

5. “Movie Gallery” + Missouri + Crying + Nixa – (Huh? I have no clue; it no longer comes up.) Frankly, imagining the thought process that would lead to this line of inquiry makes my butthole twitch. And the odds are (Nixa being my hometown) that I might know the person looking this up. I am truly befuddled and a little concerned.

6. “I do apologize for approaching you” – (7th result) This one might actually have been helpful to the searcher. The language is taken directly from an email sent out by “Helen Kolonga,” the fictional Ivory Coast heiress who’s imaginary parents were killed and just needs your help depositing her millions into your bank account. But out of context it sounds like something you say just before committing a sex crime.

7. “Susie Feldman” – (I have no fucking clue because after 6 pages I got tired of looking for my entry.) Susie is Corey Feldman’s wife. The only mention of her I have is in my recent polite inquiries as to whether the A&E show “The 2 Coreys” is a terrible show, or the worst show.

8. Phamaldahide corpse – Okay, I lied. This one is my favorite, not least because mine is the only link that came up when I Googled it. You would be surprised how many times people searching “phamaldahide” alone link to my blog, but to be the only one with both embalming fluid and putrefying flesh in one post? Well that just makes me warm all over. I would love to see “phamaldahide corpse” as a category on Ebay.


Of course now since I’ve posted all of these search words I’ll just get more hits from disappointed patrons searching for the above phrases. I’m hoping eventually someone will look up “Bette White” and bukkake so they can link to this blog with false hopes.




*While I will not hesitate to make fun of the odd little Canuck, I have to admit to liking her new(ish) “I Don’t Like Your Girlfriend” song. And you can’t help but respect any ditty that has surreptitiously crept into seemingly every movie and TV soundtrack due to simple, perfect lyrics and an insanely hyperactive beat. I think I realized this around the time it showed up in an episode of Big Love. Kudos, Ms. Lavigne. She’s still kind of a loony, though.