Midweek musings....

So I clicked on a story about possible border control measures or something,
and it had THIS pic w/it:



O.K., this is possibly the funniest thing I've ever seen. "Watch out for running people, complete w/ totally drug along toddler, fleeing madly across the freeway!" Good Lord!!

In other news, in case you're putting together a backyard football team, DAVID CARR IS NOW TRULY AVAILABLE!!!!! Go for it!!!

Resortin' to Extortin'...

Rex Baird...what to say? Upstanding community member, PHD, and all around very get along-able with guy. And yet... Disgrace lurks in everyone's past, my friends, and Mr. Baird is no exception.
I was able to locate, fairly easily, THIS PHOTO. Now, Nadi feels Rex's shirtlessness amongst our shirtyness should be quite embarrassing enough for Rex. I disagree. First of all, I don't really see how this is NON-embarrassing for the rest of our obviously drunken asses. And secondly, he's obviously been working those abs, and why work the abs if your not going to rip off your shirt at any remotely reasonable moment?
So I dug deeper. I dredged through photos and memories that God help me I never hope to see again, so black a mark did they leave on my soul, sear at the back of my eyes.. . At one point, when all was bleakest, I remember being curled up on the floor, sobbing my guts out, imploring the sky WHY fucking WHY... oh wait, that had nothing to do w/Rex, that was like, every day at high school.
And then, FINALLY, I found THIS, a truly horrible picture of Rex. Nice dress buddy! And, hey, that's my brother you're sitting on!
Incriminating, maybe. photoshopped, maybe. But embarrassing? OH HELL YEAH!!!
Sorry YOU had to suffer, too, Spence. Now your penchant for PQotD is making sense....

new story, part 1

I’ve been counting backwards from thirty-one million, six hundred and twenty-two thousand, three hundred and ninety-nine for 15 days now. Progress is slow, mainly because I only “count” attempts that I don’t get distracted from halfway through by some random noise or fleeting thought, and I’ve noticed that I tend to subvocalize a lot of the time to keep from losing my place, which also slows me down. I also don’t count ones that I do while asleep, which has cost me quite a few, especially once I got about 4 or 5 days into it.

It’s kind of like that old joke about being a vegetarian…one guy says to another, “Hey, I read that vegetarians live longer,” and the other guy replies, “I don’t know about that, but it sure SEEMS longer!” It’s like the anti-TV, the anti-video game, instead of looking up from a screen and seeing that five and a half hours have passed since the last time you could say with any certainty that you had a conscious thought, you come up from a session, write down the last number you got to, and see that 17 minutes, that six and a half minutes, that not even three or four minutes have actually passed, and as far as you know it could have been hours.

So I made the mistake of telling this to a girl I met in a bar a few days ago, I obviously wasn’t getting any counting done with all the distractions there anyway. She had been at the jukebox with her wallet in hand, lost in that pre-decision phase where you try to check out what the jukebox has on it without standing so close that anyone else interested in playing some tunes assumes that you’ve already put in money and are actually making your selections. It’s harder with modern jukeboxes, since to get a real feel for the scope of the music on there you have to page back and forth through it a couple times, where in the old days you could just check out the whole selection from afar, as long as your eyesight was good enough to read all those tiny labels from more than a foot and a half away.

continue to part 2 of the story...

Real Estate agents are for shit!!! (AKA Spencer's Peeve of this particular 5 minutes)

OK, OK, all of you who are feverishly studying for your real estate licenses, just relax...maybe it's not ALL real estate agents who are for shit, but it's definitely all of the ones in Baltimore. We are currently unwilling spectators of an event that, were it not so financially repercussive for us, could hardly be less gripping: will we receive the mail that our agent has been promising to send us for what seems like forever, or will the sweet embrace of death from old age wrap us in its bony yet somehow diaphanous clutches first?
Out of the gate, it seems like the smart money is on the ravages of time on the mortal coils of the wife and I, but perhaps our representative in the city that blights the earth like a giant calliope of human suffering and misery can stage some kind of miraculous comeback and, I don't know, BE BOTHERED AT SOME POINT TO BUY SOME STAMPS, CRAM SOME STUFF IN AN ENVELOPE, AND FIND A FUCKING MAILBOX!??!?!?!

Stacey's PEEVE O'THE WEEK!!!

Well, here it is, my long hinted at yet as not realized post that will shake you up and make you say "Hell-O Aunt Bessie! And it's NOT about how this year I DON'T WANT TO GET FIRST PICK IN THE UNCLE RICO'S DRAFT!! AND EVEN IF I DID I WOULDN'T PICK L.T.!!!., either, as shocking as that might be. Today I will discuss my annoyance with FLAMINGLY EFFEMINATE GAY MEN!!!
Yeah, that's what I said. Now, before you all go running off to cover all traceable links you may have to me as friend/lover/sister/former shoe-salesperson, please allow me to first defend my statement and then explain why I think I have developed this quirk.
In my defence, I believe I am well within my rights to make this statement. I have stated an annoyance for, not a hatred of, said gay men. Secondly, this is not an annoyance for ALL gay men, simply the flamingly effeminate ones. Thirdly, I in no way think there is anything "wrong" with being gay in the first place, as I believe that homosexuality is determined before birth thanks to one's particular genes, and therefore acting on those impulses is perfectly natural.
In addition to that, NO-ONE, I don't think, would take umbrage about a post in which I lambasted girly-girls, or "metro-sexual" guys, and my complaint about these aforementioned gay men is the same as those would be. Nor do I think any of those groups, yes, EVEN those darn facial-getting "metros", should give half a crap about what I or anyone else thinks, and should go on acting any way they want to.
All in all it makes sense that I, as a bit of a "manly-girl", would hardly want to see a bunch of "girly-men" flitting about and making me look and feel even MORE manly!! What's with all this calling each other "ladies", "girls" or even, oddly enough, "bitches"? (I would, and HAVE, verbally lacerate(d) anyone who dared to call me that, even in jest.) No lesbians I have ever known, even the most "butch", called each other "dudes" or "boys"! Very Strange. And the whole giggling like a schoolgirl/gossiping constantly bit, as exhibited, say, on "Project Runway", is just the oddest thing to me (as it would be to the daughter of the kind of uber manly-man Dad that I have. He's the kind of guy that would duct tape his own arm back on after some power saw accident, and then finish the job.) And to be fair, I'm sure that the perfectly coiffed and delicate guy from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (Carson somebody?), for example, has no desire to watch my non- mani/pedi'd self stomping around his T.V. screen, wondering how many times I can get away with "Febreezing" my shirts before I have to wash them! (approximately 3).
So, now I begin my explanation of why I find myself with this particular annoyance. No matter how hard I might try, I will never be "un petite fleur", more "mule de paquet". Even when I'm all fancied up, I pretty much feel like Jeremy Shockey in a dress. Except that he has better hair. And maybe a better tattoo, although mine is pretty cool too, just smaller. And really, being a girl in the first place is not the greatest thing ever, except for having boobs and the ability to wear awesome shoes, it pretty much sucks. Unless you want to go through the "amazing"(!?!??!?!) process of giving birth, I suppose. DO NOT WANT!!
So, in re-reading this, I have decided that it is not controversial at ALL, and that truly I have spent more time bashing myself than any FLAMINGLY EFFEMINATE GAY MAN, and that only the most annoyingly P.C. of people could have anything to say about this. And I'll bet, and I would LOVE to get a response on this, that even some gay men are annoyed with these guys, too.
So there it is, finally! Now I just have to hope Spence doesn't pull out "hatred of...gay men" as one of his big block quote deallys. Plllllbbttt.

A dog in a sweater

Hey all, I guess it was inevitable that 75% of my posts would eventually be about our foster dogs, since that's pretty much where we spend our free time. But through the magic of the interwebs, I can not just TELL you how adorable one of our fosters is, I can SHOW you as well!
Her name's Tula, and yes, she's the one in the sweater, although the sweater is now defunct, due to either Tula or one of our other dogs chewing on it so much that it began to look kind of like the top Jennifer Beals wore in "Flashdance"...for those of you who are not older than dirt, "Flashdance" was a "talkie" filmed in the early days of Hollywood, a film whose plot consisted of an extra-terrestrial creature who came down to earth, ate candies, touched children with his freakishly long glowing finger, rode a flying bicycle across the moon, and taught us all that to be TRULY human, we just need to love and understand each other better. I think Jennifer Beals's character was a welder who danced in her spare time. I'm not sure how this related to the other story, if at all, except maybe there was something about leg warmers.
ANYWAY, without further ado, here's a little movie that Heidi and I put together featuring Tula, that also includes two of our dogs, Nubbin and Stella. Nubbin's the smaller black dog, Stella the larger.
It's hard to tell from the video, but Tula in that sweater looks like a guy in a dress. Not like a transvestite, just like some frat guy who gets a little too drunk and puts on a dress that's about 4 sizes too small for him, because he works out kind of a lot. That, or kind of like Hillary Swank.
Sadly, we had a lot of witty dialogue/banter (much in the same vein as this post, actually!) that we had to cut out of the final version due to the writer's strike. Unions, man...

Book Club!!!!

OK, so here's how it's going to go down. I'm going to post an initial comment to this post on Kafka's Metamorphosis, our first book club book. Read it online or download it, also free, here.

So if you want to read the book club thread, click on the title of this post, and let the magical exchange of ideas carry you away!

Resortin' to Dumb Sight Gags!

I thought it was only fair to throw a picture of me up here, now that I've gotten Mark all pissed off by visually accusing him of sagging his pants like one of those damn kids that won't stay off his lawn! Also, this has seemed to be a direction to take the blog that is quickly driving away the few readers that we had, so we've got that going for us, which is nice.

So, here we are, one more twist on the "marathon" joke, one more crudely rendered drawing, one more day ticked off the calendar in anticipation of Stacey's coming mega-post! May we all survive it.