white house sez: blah blah blah!

This morning, the prez at Annapolis: Who needs a new speech? Let's just feed them the same line about how the Iraqi soldiers are being trained blah blah blah.

Later this morning, Lynne Cheney on The Diane Rehm Show: Deny everything. In response to a listener's questions about suggestions of the president and vice president tying 9/11 to Saddam Hussien: "I'm not really sure what you're talking about..."

Blah blah blah. Why do they even bother? Bullshit is to be expected, but this isn't even half-assed bullshit.

southern metropolis recap

After Thanksgiving, Dick and I took a trip to visit Htrouser and Lady McT in Southern Metropolis. It was all kind of a blur of drinking, amazing large southern lesbian-made breakfasts, public transit, and Grand Theft Auto.



And the ass peach. In fact, it was such a blur that I can't remember what I had at the Flying Biscuit save the biscuit that came on the side and the totally fucking amazing grits; after waiting for an hour to be seated, all I recall is an intense feeling of joy and contentment as my hunger and hangover were conquered by deliciousness.

Thanks, HT and LMT, for the first class hospitality!

can we start a grant for this?

You know, sometimes I'm astounded by the things that have yet to be invented. I hear many people, especially those who grew up with the "Back to the Future" movie series, complaining about the delayed appearance of the flying car. The flying car is crap.



What I need is a bandaid that will actually fit over the top of my finger. Tip-of-finger injuries must abound, what with the hazards of occupational paper-shuffling and bagel-slicing being what they are. And once you get a boo-boo there, it keeps hitting everything, because it's the fucking tip of your finger.

Of the many shapes bandaids come in, not a single one easily stays on a finger without modification. I mean, what we need here is, like, a bandaid thimble. Doesn't sound so tough to me. And there can be bandaid finger puppets for the kids.

Then you can start on the flying car thing. But don't expect me to buy one. Cause they're going to be a bunch of crap.

thank fuck

Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller tells the world (well, at least the NPR-listening world) that he believes there is no god. As a member of the segment of the population happily and openly unburdened by belief in a divine force, it's a fucking relief to see someone publicly taking this stance. I particularly like, and agree with, Penn's rejection of atheism's non-belief for a belief in there not being god. I remember some similar discussion of this belief on some fellow blogger's blog a few months ago, but I don't remember quite who/when.

I've had an oddly difficult time writing this post without the use of religiously-rooted expressions. At first the post's title was "amen, brother", and I kept wanting to write, "thank god" in response to Penn's essay. But in this context I realized how weird it is for someone adamantly opposed to god-belief to use those expressions: if anything good happened, it sure as hell didn't have anything to do with, as Penn puts it, some "imaginary friend."

I imagine in the UK, an English-speaking society that seems to have a stronger and longer-standing relationship with secularism than the US (a.k.a. the land of Christian bullyism), they've developed linguistic alternatives to god phrases. I mean, maybe if I incorporated the words "bloody" and "sodding" into my speech I wouldn't need to rely on "goddamn" and "jesus christ" so much. Or, I could simply replace every reference to god or jesus with the word "fuck." For example, "Thank fuck I didn't burn the cookies!"

Fuck, now that's something I can get behind.

yet another reason to buy records

I've done a considerable amount of record-buying lately - at least, considerable for me, as I've always been a bit behind the curve of average record collector purchashing. But I attended the annual WFMU Record Fair in NYC and the grand opening of a new record store in Southern Ex-Industrial Town on consecutive Saturdays, and the result is a pretty good stack of vinyl.

I'm sure glad I didn't waste my money on CDs, especially those recently released by Sony. It seems the clever people at Sony included in their CDs software that secretly installed a rootkit that both alowed Sony to spy on users' online activities and created a weakness hackers can exploit. Story here.

Also, an extensive discussion some years ago resulted in the conclusion that records are a superior weapon to CDs when slung, frisbee-style, at high velocities.