Cowboy duck rap

I'm pretty sure this wasn't a sockless dream. Today I flipped on the tv, and ended up on Vida TV. There was a person in a large duck costume (and the duck was wearing a cowboy outfit, big hat and all), rapping in a high-pitched duck voice while two women (how were they clad? scantily!) danced on either side. Behind this was a guy working turntables, looking like a legitimate dj, except for the fact that he was backing up a cowboy duck.

I checked the station's website to see if I could identify the duck and, if so, seek out its music. My Spanish is rusty, but the duck definitely had a bit of a gangster-lite, Snow-like quality. But alas, no luck.

Duel

Duel is a great movie from 1971. Steven Spielberg directed it, back when he was interesting and not just like the old guy Hammond from Jurassic Park, the guy who built the place just to watch it become a disaster, and he just sits back and counts his money. Ok, strange metaphor there.

Anyway, I love Duel. It used to be on tv all the time. It's about a guy driving somewhere out in the desert, and this tractor-trailer starts stalking him. Dennis Weaver is the star, and he has almost all of the dialogue. You never see the driver or figure out his motive, a bit like the shark in Jaws. It's been ripped off a number of times, but never all that well. It seems too difficult for movies to leave something so entirely unexplained.

Dennis Weaver just died, as did Don Knotts and the dad from A Christmas Story (also a great movie, but everyone knows that). It's a bad month for old white guys. I wonder if Dick Cheney's been in California recently...

Dream sock theory

I clearly have too much free time. But if I'm to use that time for good, then I need to share this:

Over the last couple of weeks, I've discovered that sleeping with or without socks significantly affects how crazy and messed up my dreams are. First, though, a bit of background: in college, I sometimes tried to have crazy dreams by eating pepperoni pizza or ramen right before going to sleep. Ok, I was hungry, and such things were available at 1 a.m., and I never got into recreational drugs, so this was what I did. Anyway, it seemed to work. Then, for as long as I remember, I never slept while wearing socks. But now we live in an apartment with wood floors, and it's just damn cold sometimes, particularly for those of us who sleep closer to the windows.

Then one day a couple of weeks ago, I didn't wear socks to sleep (I seem to remember my socks getting soaked by a certain baby in the bath), and I had the crazy messed up dreams. It was kind of fun, which may speak to the easy, sheltered life I've lived, so I decided to experiment.

Today I proudly announce the conclusive results. If you're me, and you sleep without socks, you'll have crazier dreams. (Maybe I should sent a note to Scientific American.)

Radio Free Torgo

Ok, I've been working on the computer for about an hour now, and when I started, I started up iTunes with R.E.M., a playlist with 98 R.E.M. songs. I put it on shuffle, starting at the first song from the first album, "Radio Free Europe."

Every once in a while, I thought, "Wow, it keeps playing early stuff, I like the early stuff, so that's cool." I had the volume low b/c the baby's sleeping. Then, just now, I realized I had it on repeat, so I'd listened to "Radio Free Europe" 19 times.

This brings up one big point: a lot of the first album, "Murmur" sounds the same. It's great, but the sound is this low, quiet, um, murmur. The other big point: when I get into writing (which is what I was doing, working on essays), I lose all perception of what's going on around me.

Sprinters outlive long distance runners

That title sounds like a metaphor, but it's not. I read an article about that recently (running, not metaphors). Somebody studied whether the wear and tear on the body of long distance running outweighed the health benefits. The answer was, more or less, yes. Still, it said any kind of running is better than nice old-fashioned couch-sitting. Then there was that odd but true revelation: Sprinters live longer than people who run marathons.

This was great justification for abandoning my hopes of running in a marathon and just plain not running for the last few months. Aside from the tired/cold/lazy arguments, I was not running for my health. Ok, so I wasn't sprinting either, but, well, sprinting's hard.

Yesterday, though, I decided to give running a go again, having not gone since about November. The last time I went, I ran along our street, intending to run through the trails in a park about a mile away. But by the time I got to the park, I thought I was going to throw up. So I turned around and walked home. This time, I made the smart decision to run slowly. It was more like running at the pace of walking for the distance of sprinting.

I actually made it to the park and ran around some trails and ran most of the way back before deciding that, in the interest of living, I should walk the rest of the way.

Book report: Every single page of The Odyssey

I finally finished The Odyssey. It didn't take me as long as Love in the Never-Ending Time of Cholera, but I did have to renew it once. I'm not sure how I got out of reading any ancient or just old epic poems in high school and college, but I did. I read Beowulf and Gilgamesh on my own (and loved both), and still have to read The Iliad, Paradise Lost, and, well, I guess other Greek epics.

The Odyssey was pretty good. That's the short review. I was surprised at how few of the 463 pages concerned Odysseus actually sailing around having adventures, like battling the Cyclops and avoiding the Sirens. That was maybe 75-100 pages, tops, and all in flashback. The whole "slaughter the suitors" plotline dominated the second half. I think that section would make a good movie, so I don't know why the story is so often reduced to the sailing bit. Maybe because that happens first, and people don't make it all the way through.

Plus, I had no idea about Telemakhos, his son, going after him, then teaming up with him later (like a gory Batman and Robin, one that doesn't involve Osama bin Laden) to kill everybody.

It ends a bit abruptly, as abruptly as a 463-page poem can end, with Odysseus about to go off and leave Penelope again so she can get a whole new bunch of suitors for him to kill. The book conveniently doesn't mention much about her reaction to the guy coming home for one night then leaving. Maybe she really liked the loom.

I would've hated me in college

I was digging through some old archives of stuff I wrote in college. I had a weekly opinions column in the main rag for about 2 and a half years. Then, senior year, we started up a short-lived left-wing activist newspaper and I wrote regularly for that. For that second paper, most of my articles can be summed up by the title "The world is going to hell, learn about it." But for that first paper, I apparently decided to be the world's biggest jerk-off. In every article I skimmed (I couldn't bring myself to read any start to finish), I was saying how awful the administration of the school was, how terrible the students were, and how pissed off I was about the whole thing.

Reading it now, I don't really recognize myself. I remember writing that stuff, and I remember that, particularly by senior year, when I was fairly happy and content, I had to listen to Nine Inch Nails and other angry music to psyche myself up to write that garbage. I'm not sure why I kept it up.

I first got into journalism in high school, wanting to be a humor columnist or an arts critic. Then, somewhere around sophomore year of college, I got really angry. I'm just glad that's over now.

But then, looking at the other stuff in the old newspapers, remembering the obnoxious people I went to college with (before discovering a large contingent of relatively grounded people senior year), it starts coming back to me. They were mostly blonde-haired, blue-eyed, rich, Northface-wearing, Nalgene-bottle carrying, ski and/or get sloshed every weekend, live oblivious to the world type people. I better stop thinking about it before I turn into a raving jerk-off again.

Attack of the giant poultry

The Thai-spiced salmon I made on Tuesday was pretty good. The only problem was getting salmon fillets small enough to match the recipe. The supermarket fish guy (who I don't think fulfilled his apprenticeship to become a full-fledged "fishmonger") cut the fillets too big to be individual sizes, but too small to be divided nicely.

This leads into the larger problem of gigantic meat products, also known as the Cheesecake Factory conundrum. When I was first getting into cooking, I did a lot of things with chicken breasts: chicken cordon bleu, feta and herb-stuffed chicken... things like that. But the breasts in the stores always were so huge that I'd have to overcook the outside to cook the inside. (This shouldn't have been a problem with salmon, as you can eat it raw, but I'm not so into the raw fish.)

They make them that big b/c I guess we're supposed to want that. Or, you can buy the "organic" meat, which is smaller and more expensive. So you have to pay more to get less, but what you get is a size that isn't just more in line with how much you're supposed to eat, but is better for cooking.

Also, CNN.com had an article yesterday about the meat industry using carbon dioxide to keep meet looking red longer. That doesn't have anything to do with giant meat, but it seems wrong, too. I'm not chemist (or biologist, or whatever it is that knows what this does... cowmonger?), but it seems to me that artificially masking nature's way of saying, "Meat bad," isn't good.

Safety 1st

Little Dude learned to crawl and he learned fast. Yesterday I went out to get some "baby-proofing" gizmos for the apartment. I'd been suspicious of the Safety 1st company, the people who seem to have the market cornered on terrorizing parents about potential deathtraps lurking everywhere. I'm waiting for them to put out the Baby Ball, a giant gerbil ball, then a Baby Ball lock, to keep it in place, then a Baby Ball stick, for poking airholes so the baby can breathe, then a safety latch for the stick...

Anyway, the cop who installed our car seat 8 months ago told us about the metal rods in the Safety 1st car window shades, and how they become Flying Death Spears in an accident. Also, the mirrors you put on the back seat so you can make eye contact with rear-facing babies (as they all are for a year) are breakable glass, and in an accident, the baby is rear-facing so his or her head hits the cushioned seat, not broken glass.

And yet, there I was, shopping for outlet covers and toilet seat locks. (I gave up looking for an unbreakable mirror, besides, he can turn his head around now to see us in the car). This morning, I drilled in some drywall screws and attached the cd racks to the wall. Paxton tried to help with the drill, but I decided that might not be putting Safety 1st.

Without the rack to pull down, he decided to discover the wonder of cds. He liked the taste of The Philadelphia Experiment (a jazz trio). Liz Phair was ok. R.E.M. and the Chili Peppers were good, too. When he got to Tom Petty, he was a bit too close to Pearl Jam and their cardboard sleeves for me, so I let him go back to using the drill.

Cooking for short-hairs

One of the reasons I decided blogs were ok was that Julie Powell woman, who recently published Julie and Julia, a book that began as a blog (a blog I never read, incidentally). She decided to get through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, cooking each recipe in it.

I thought that was pretty cool. I'm not going to do that, but I am going to post about my adventures in cooking. We were away this weekend, so not much cooking happened (I even had McDonald's once, in Freeport, which was ok despite my swearing them off forever after Super-size Me -- but with the baby, stopping at the local Thai place is a little less convenient, making home-cooking all the more important).

So anyway, yesterday I made a beef stew, which was ok, and then my second venture into bread-making: French braid bread. This was awesome. It rose perfectly, and baked to near-perfection. It was actually fairly easy. I don't know why bread seemed so intimidating. The hardest part was braiding the dough. The cookbook assumed I knew how to french braid. I guess that's gender-bias, or long-hair-ism. Fortunately, MN was there, and she reasoned that I needed to learn anyway, in case we have a daughter and MN isn't there to braid her hair.

But tonight I'm going for Thai-spiced Salmon fillets. Fish is always a bit questionable. My biggest hurdle in learning to cook was handling raw chicken, because I didn't eat fish, but now I eat a little fish, and fish is kind of nasty. Jim Gaffigan has a great bit on his new cd about how when fish goes bad, it smells like fish, so how do you know? Also, he talks about what he likes on fish: anything that makes it taste not like fish.

So I went out and got fresh ginger root, coriander seeds, and we're gonna try this (there's more to it than ginger and coriander, we just already had the other stuff).

It definitely felt like an achievement to be walking with my fresh salmon and ginger root behind a guy pushing a cart with Ding Dongs and frozen pizzas. Although, a Ding Dong pizza would be awesome. Maybe tomorrow...

Peace accord brokered

I think, perhaps, it says something about Massachusetts that the roads were clogged on Friday as everyone tried to flee to New Hampshire and Maine. Not even sub-zero temperatures in Maine could keep away the Massholes. But we made it eventually, and all was good.

Paxton, always interested in fellow little people, was introduced to Marcus (age 2). It had already been a big day for Paxton. He'd explored a hotel in Portland, almost gotten blown away outside a Best Buy (which would at least have spared him from having to be inside a Best Buy, almost got blown away outside two L.L. Bean outlets (where I was unsuccessful in replacing my 9-year-old winter coat -- they take exchanges forever, but they didn't have any winter coats in my size I liked), and he met an affectionate Doberman named Reese (like the PB cup) (unfortunately, not pictured)

But Marcus seemed most interesting. Paxton immediately went in for the hair. That's his standard move. He likes shiny things, too, like necklaces and earrings, but Marcus didn't have those things, so it was all about the hair.

Marcus didn't seem to mind too much, though, which was cool. He even offered to share his juice with Paxton.

By the end of dinner (turkey for us, bananas for Paxton), everyone under four feet tall got into his pajamas, and Paxton just wanted to hug Marcus before he headed home (Marcus wasn't driving, of course, not after all that juice).

Notch another state

Here's Little Dude last night, naked with excitement over going to Maine. Our little weekend trip was his idea. He did some research online, found a knitting convention for M-N, and hooked us up with some friends from our KH days (it's funny, or, not really funny but fitting, but all of our friends with whom we used to work at KH have all quit or were, like us, "not rehired due to... cutbacks? ok).

I almost died today when a woman who seemed to be reading a book while driving attempted to change lanes into my car's personal space. I honked and she looked up from her book (maybe she was reading this). I get pissed about that stuff, and drivers on cell phones, but then sometimes I do it, too. Mostly, I have a track record of looking at maps while driving, lost in the seventh circle of Massachusetts hell. At least I don't read pornography while driving.

February of broken things

As I mentioned a while ago, MN was in a bit of a fender bender a few weeks ago. Getting her car patched up has been a big hassle. But it’s almost there, so that’s cool.

It turns out, though, that February is the month of broken things. After the car, our printer, which was a nice somewhat expensive laser printer that I bought just over a year ago because I print out so many poems and whatnot, decided to start eating a chunk out of each page – the lower right corner, the tasty fulcrum of all paper. I figured out there’s a problem with the tray, and today I called a repair place, they said bring it in, I drove there, that took 45 minutes, with the baby, got the baby inside, got the printer inside, he said it’s a $45 dollar deposit in cash or check, no plastic, I didn’t have $45 in cash, he said I could mail the check, then he'd start to look at it, I took the baby to the car, then realized I didn’t like the whole thing, so I went back and took the printer. If it’s gonna start at $45, I could just buy a new printer.

Meanwhile, another essential tool for every writer, my desk chair, also broke. This was also about a year old. Ok, I actually broke it by standing on it to get a box, but it sucked nonetheless. A piece on the base broke so instead of gliding on its wheels, it scrapes along the carpet, quietly pleading, "Kill me, kill me."

Throughout all of this my “Low Coolant” light has been on in my car. I’d have been more concerned about this, but I checked the coolant, and it was ok. The light also popped on sporadically, without regard to the actual heat of the engine. Still, I’ve been driving around with the heat on to keep it cool, even on days like today, when it was near 60.

After the printer fiasco, I decided “Screw that” (“Screw that” being a common mantra for me these days), and I took the car in to a garage I like. They said the sensor in the resevoir is broken, no big deal, they’ll order the part and fix it with my next oil change. They also topped off my low brake fluid (which didn’t cause a light to go on). All for free. Plus, they let me change the baby on their couch, which I normally wouldn’t do, but it was a nasty bathroom. They were cool.

Then I went to Office Max, where things are cheap and service is crappy (that’s on their nametags), and bought a new chair on sale cheap, plus a 3-year warranty for $5. Oh yeah, I may not stand on this chair this year, but in 2 years? I’ll have forgotten today and I’ll be showing Paxton how to have a good time by kneeling on the chair and spinning as fast as you can as long as you can until you fall off. (Or reliving the Karate Kid ... remember that? That was awesome.)

Oh, and one last thing. At the job fair, my only super nice sport coat that my parents bought for me because they’re rich and I’m not and I’ve nursed through a year of teaching – it ripped, before my first interview. I didn’t take that as an omen, I just was thankful we were packed in like sardines (tangent: I think sardine cans mostly exist today simply because of that simile) and I had to sit sideways often, so I just sat so they could see the rip. [post subtitle: Posting of the comma -or- Posting of the long, run-on, never-ending, keep it going sentence]

Little Dude = Velociraptor

So it's become apparent that Paxton has many qualities that made the velociraptor so useful in Jurassic Park (and raised the question of why anyone would recreate a previously little-known dinosaur that can easily enter human-size buildings, turn doorknobs, terrorize children, unless one had future movie rights in mind).
I put the boy in his exersaucer the other day, in the kitchen, and he managed to reach beyond its confines, open a drawer, pull out a box of plastic wrap, and tightly seal a bowl of guacamole. (Ok, he didn't do that last part, but he did have the plastic wrap out).

Ray Romano, who isn't really my source on great stand-up, had a good bit on the old Dr. Katz show about having twin boys. He said imagine having someone there egging you on to do all those things you know you shouldn't: "Go on, you can jump from there. You can totally make that." Paxton just listens to his inner Little Dude sometimes, and therefore all hazardous chemicals are stored out of reach -- until he figures out how to climb walls ... coming soon: Spiderbaby.

Book Review: The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons

I'm actually reading The Odyssey right now, but I took a break to read that book's polar opposite, The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons. Ok, I guess the polar opposite of The Odyssey would actually be something like this, but just go with me.

This book wasn't that great. I'd read Garbage a few months ago, and that was much better. This book made me realize many of the problems with short poems: there's very little room for crap and smarminess. Virgil Suarez once criticized my short poems for being too jokey and light. I was pissed at him for a while, but Ammons helped me see what he meant.

My valued book critic Doug, who just did a big lecture on Ammons, referred to this book as bathroom reading. Doug works at the Academy of American Poets, so maybe this is the type of book they actually have in the bathrooms there.

But let me give a couple of the highlights:

Their sex life

One failure on
Top of another

Exotic

Science outstrips
other modes &
reveals more of
the crux of the matter
than we can calmly
handle

Late November

The white sun
like a moth
on a string
circles the southpole.

Pebble's story

Wearing away
wears

wearing
away away

Pedagogy agog

The smart gain
knowledge

and learn to
express

themselves to join
the

world of power
where

it pays to
know

little and say
less.

Spaghetti + Pirates = Cool

Any explanation of Intelligent Design that involves spaghetti and pirates is cool with me. If you go to the web site, check out the hate mail. I think it's funny how hate mail tends to be so poorly written -- do only the semi-illiterate write hate mail? or are the writers so overcome with rage that their grammar suffers in direct proportion to their anger?
I'm not sure, but this was worth having a two-post morning. (By the way, thanks Keith, you rock.)

Cheney's got a gun, Ashcroft still sucks

So Dick Cheney shooting a 78-year-old man on some sort of rich people's psuedo-hunting adventure was bad, and the attempted cover-up of Cheney not having a proper license to hunt, the waiting until the old man was stable and no longer likely to die, and the idiotic stone-walling by Scott McClellan was bad, too. But a smaller story on NPR this morning was worse.

John Ashcroft gave a speech yesterday in defense of the possibly illegal Guantanamo detention center. His justification for keeping all those people prisoner without bringing charges against them, and without having any intention of charging them, is that during World War II, if you recall, as he said, the U.S. keep thousands of people in detention centers just to get them out of the population and prevent terrorism.

I have to admit, I'm not an expert on terrorism, like Ashcroft, or Cheney (who apparently has to pay people so he can be driven to where birds are, so he can step out of his car and shoot at them), but my understanding of the Japanese internment camps Ashcroft was referring to is that they were a very bad thing, an embarrassing episode in a supposedly noble war. Of course, this comes from the same line of thinking that has attempted to glorify McCarthyism as somehow getting a bad reputation, when McCarthy was actually a great American. Ok, sure.

Good tv

Fox ran the last four episodes of "Arrested Development" on Friday night, opposite the opening of the Olympics, as if to say, "We were going to run infomercials, but we already paid for this, so here it is."

It may get picked up by ABC or Showtime. I hope it does. It's a great show. And fortunately for me (and perhaps much of its fan base), I hate Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Bob Costas, and the Winter (white people) Olympics. Ok, I don't hate the games, just every conceivable aspect of the NBC coverage.

But "Arrested Development" went out well. Incidentally, I just found out that Portia de Rossi is actually married to Ellen DeGeneres. That's funny, b/c her character on the show is married to David Cross, who's gay, but living in complete denial. Of course, that part of his character isn't as funny as his terrible attempts at becoming an actor and his fear of being naked.

Justine Bateman had a great cameo on one of those last episodes. Going completely against the Mallory role, she plays a prostitute who attempts to seduce Jason Bateman's character, but he's convinced she's his sister, even though she's not (even though she is).

In other tv news, I've decided to declare an end to "The Simpsons." I don't think it's been consistently funny in years, and I saw the last two new episodes, and they were both incredibly bad. Maybe all the good writers are working on the movie, which is finally in production, about 10 years too late to matter. But for now, I'm going to stick to "Scrubs" and "Lost." "Scrubs" is great almost every time I'm able to catch it, and "Lost" was great, and even though it's now uneven, I'll stick with it for a bit.

Hire me

Today was day 2 of a 2-day meat market/recruitment conference for independent schools. Yesterday I got all fancied up, dropped off the boy with a sitter, got dropped off at the train, and headed into town like a regular commuter. Once there, I spent the day in the Fairmont Copley Plaza with about 8 billion fellow candidates and 2 million school heads.

I was pretty lucky because I had 12 interviews yesterday. Then three today, for a total of 15. I guess most people had maybe 2-5 on average. Probably lots had more, but the folks sitting all day around the tables reading books and eating pretzels were plentiful and sad-looking.

15 interviews is a lot to absorb, and as someone who doesn't like talking about himself in general, it grew old quickly. The first interview this morning ended with the guy telling me he liked my resume, I'm still a candidate, but I didn't show the enthusiasm he wanted. He said he wasn't convinced it wasn't there, just that I didn't show it in the interview. I laughed and said I got up at 5:30 yesterday, took the train in, spent 2 hours prepping and fishing for add-on interviews to my 12 already scheduled, then had 11 back-to-back-to-back-to-back 1/2 hour interviews, then an hour break, then one more interview, then took the train home, slept a bit, got back up at 6, took the train again, and here I was, partially lost voice, sleep-deprived, sick of talking about myself and listening to people say "Our school is great because we're going to cut taxes, win the war, and defeat the Commies" over and over, and you say I'm not giving you enough enthusiasm? Go to hell.

Ok, I didn't put it quite like that. But I said some of that. Anyway, now I have to write back to the ones I liked, if I can figure out what my notes mean. I had to take notes, but I have lots of notes that mean nothing, where I was writing where they were saying something that they thought made them unique but really was just like every other school.

That said, I did think about 11 or 12 were good places to be. Of course, there are another 5 or 6 schools with my resume that I'd also like, but they're west coast schools not at this conference. There were a bunch of L.A. schools there, just not SF or Washington schools. There's another conf. in SF in March, maybe they go there. The L.A. people were a bit snotty. One was the "enthusiasm" guy. Another one I talked to yesterday and he seemed to be completely jaded and bitter about students being unwilling to learn. Dude, then why are you the head of a school?

Dancing with Torgo

In the above picture, Torgo is about to ask the lady for a dance. Maybe. Not really.

Last night we went to a dance lesson. We did a little bit of salsa, swing, the foxtrot, and something else... the lambada? No, not the forbidden dance. I think it was the waltz. I already knew how to waltz, though. That's my standard club dance. Whenever the dj plays my jam (Banjo & Sullivan, "I'm At Home Getting Hammered (While She's Out Getting Nailed)"), I bust out the waltz. But now I have some new moves, so beware.

"Love Actually" actually has a lot of actors

We watched "Love Actually" on Saturday, but it's taken me a while to write down the names of everyone who's in it: Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, Hugh Grant, Keira Knightley, Colin Firth, Rowan Atkinson, Billy Bob Thornton, Elisha Cuthbert, Laura Linney, Jesus, Buddha, Dick Cheney, Denise Richards, Claudia Schiffer...

Ok, I think that's about it. Then there were about 10 or 11 significant roles by actors I don't know. I've decided to pad this post with images, since there are so many to use.

This is one of those movies where Alan Rickman gets tempted by the devil, Rowan Atkinson acts silly, Colin Firth learns Portuguese, Elisha Cuthbert is just there to be hot (successfully), Keira Knightley is mostly there just to be hot (successfully), Denise Richards is just there to be hot (again), Emma Thompson actually has a full-fledged character to play (unlike many of the other actresses), Dick Cheney is a jerk, and Hugh Grant ends up on the stage at a school production (was that About a Boy, too?)

I kept thinking of "Magnolia," where there were also too many plotlines and not enough development. But while "Magnolia" was a total downer with great acting, "Love Actually" is much more chipper with some very good acting. I still have no idea how some of the characters relate, or who some of them are, but it was a good time watching them, and it is both funny and moving, particularly near the end, despite how obvious it gets.



Ok, I think I'm out of things to say about the movie, but I still have all these pictures. Here's a fun fact: In the beginning, there's a wedding scene where a band pops up out of the crowd and starts playing. This is a take-off on Jim Henson's funeral (according to imdb), where the puppeteers popped up with the Muppets, at Jim Henson's request. That's cool, but also a bit weird -- stealing an idea from a funeral...

Now I really have nothing to say. This paragraph is going to be about cookies. I love cookies. Chocolate chip, peanut butter, snickerdoodle, oatmeal raisin -- they're all good. Yep, cookies. Here are more pictures:

Support the troops

This is another postcard from the Post Secret site. It got me thinking about the rabid fervor behind the Support the Troops message. The Right is always condemning the Left when the Left wants to cut military spending and not go to war for not supporting the troops. The Left is always trying to reconcile the complicated position of being anti-war but pro-troops. This problem led to John Kerry being the '04 candidate, and was the basis for much of his lousy campaign.

Al Franken talks on his radio show about going to USO shows in Iraq, which is great for him because he's so far left-wing, but he's willing to go and perform for a bunch of people who probably don't know who he is.

Many people seem to say, "Well, I know someone over there and so of course I support them." I know two people who've been in Iraq since the war. One is in the army. He went back voluntarily because of some thrill soldiers seem to get in going to war. I guess that's part of being in the army. Another used to be military, and now works for Halliburton. He's gone a few times, and his incentive is easier to grasp: he makes boatloads of money, as in, retire before age 30 and live well money.

This postcard helped me realize my problem with the 'anti-war/pro-troops' argument. The troops are inherently, implicitly, inexcusably linked with war. It's part of being in the army when you shoot people, and that isn't something I support. It's their job to drop bombs and terrorize civilians and torture prisoners, and I don't support that. If there was a draft, I'd hope for the safe return of those who went against their will. But there isn't, and everyone who is there is there because at some point, he or she made the decision to take a job that involves killing people.

I don't think there's anything righteous or virtuous in what they're doing. I don't want them to get killed, but I don't stand by them because they risk their lives. I support the people who risk their lives everyday because they have no choice -- people like the Iraqi civilians, and the civilians in many other places who just happen to live in violent areas. But as for the people who choose to go to such places, gun in hand, I don't support them.

from Post Secret

I hope this isn't one of my wife's students. Especially since they're in 8th grade.

Mediocrebowl

The last few years I've been rooting against the Patriots, so this year I wasn't particularly interested in which team won. I just wanted a good game. It wasn't a good game. I thought it was a bit sloppy and boring. The Seahawks had their chances and blew them. The Steelers won by default, by screwing up less.

Then there was the halftime show, with the Rolling Stones censoring their lyrics twice. First, they edited "Start Me Up," which doesn't have many lyrics to begin with (and honestly, it's a weak song, too). Then in "Rough Justice" (because everyone came to hear the Stones play one of their new songs), they cut the words "cocks," which in the context of the song is talking about a rooster.

I know it's easy to pick on the Stones for being so old and still singing "Satisfaction," but it did look like Charlie Watts would rather be working on his taxes than playing the drums. And I think I saw Keith Richards actually lose mental contact with his hands while playing the guitar. I think when you need a back-up band (as they had last night) to fill in the parts you're too tired to play in a 3-song set, you need to give it up.

Ethelbert wisely noted that the commercials were lousy, too, except the Fed Ex one. That was great. I usually love the king from the Burger King ads, but that musical number was a bit weird. And what's with the new Coke drink slogan: "Let your man out"? That was disgustingly sexist, and actually made Pepsi's "Brown and bubbly" not seem quite so stupid.

Oh well, we had some good enchiladas.