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Sorry. but you won't be.

Monday, June 27, 2011 | 0 Comment(s)

'Brady Bunch' mom got crabs in affair with NY mayor : Politician sent Florence Henderson flowers to apologize

(i had to link to that article) that said.  I could have gone my entire human life--no matter how long or short that may end up being--without ever knowing that information.  And now you know it too.  like i said at the outset, Sorry.

This is not news.  this is something that happened.  its unfortunate, scummy, too much information, and does not deserve a headline.  we have too much news.  we have our too much information.  constantly.  we are bombarded.  i am bombarded.  i am bombarding.  i post this blog on facebook, twitter, and sometimes on my gmail status update.  i am not an innocent.  i currently have a movie on in the background, my iphone at my side, and the baseball box score running in the background.  my screens have multiple screens.  baby screens people. im a little scared of this.  and the less im scared of this i am, the more i think maybe thats what the screens want me to think.  stay tuned (ack. robot takeover pun!)

another thing that i find strange.  we are still finding new species of animals on our planet.  and yes, most of them ARE a long way down in the ocean, and getting down there is difficult.  but.  in my defense.  we've been to the moon.  so come on.  don't give me that.  and its not only ocean creatures (and wowwie are they ever creatures), an expedition to some place in south asia recently came back with photos of some crazy new tree frogs and a few other new species.  i mean, i am a fan of conservation.  a big fan. and a part of me is incredibly happy that there are still uncharted places on our planet.  but at the same time.  isn't it kinda nutso that we haven't been everywhere on the earth's surface.  i mean, we loooooooooove taking over new places.  almost as much as we love spreading diseases. this jungle must be some pretty dank friggin crack to be still unexplored.  otherwise we'd have tree houses and bungalows with glass floors and facial peels and swimming with south asia's version of dolphins (maybe dolphins?) and we'd get to watch the former natives dance a watered down version of their previously happy culture's ritual hunting preparation dance.  this is all conjecture, of course. but it probably rings some bells at the same time. 

back to the ocean.  lets get down there.  i was promised way back during SeaQuest (oh yah i did) that we would have dolphins full on communicating with us.  Lets have a friggin space race to talking with dolphins (seriously though; monkeys, chimps, and the like have had their chance to be the people's champion.  i make an exception for orangutans, however.  we had a talk, and we're cool.).  If douglas adams had faith in them, then i do too.  They are probably all down in the ocean, swimming around, babbling about how easy it would be to cure cancer for us if only they had a way to tell us.  Somehow hitting the square block and jumping through the hoops haven't exactly transmitted to subtleties of how to correctly apply beta-blockers.  You get the point.

it turns out i am almost militantly pro-dolphin.  go figure.  and now that i've learned something about myself, i'm stopping.

happy birthday brother.

Greatest Comment Ever: Could anyone tell me how to do?

Friday, June 24, 2011 | 1 Comment(s)

I'm not feeling great today.

I don't expect you to care about this per say, but my original enthusiasm for the forthcoming post has been slightly muffled by my incessant wheezing and rock-a-bily headache.  i will try to do it justice nonetheless.

Not all comments on the blog are created equal.  All are encouraged and make my heart sing, of course, but some just rise above.  There was the cardiac haiku, for instance.  And there are John's blog length comments which i know i have to set time aside to read ;).

But recently, i got what i think might be the very best one yet.  I comes from an anonymous follower and was left on my "I just can't quit you newsweek" blog post.  (Note: i received my latest free issue yesterday!).  It is pretty self explanatory:


I want to cancel my subscription, but is very hard, please could anyone tell me how to do? My resident is spoted in south America.  -anon


Um.  Awesome.

Is it awesome enough to make a list of all the things that are awesome about it.  Yes, i think it is.

1.  Someone in south America (my kind of capitalization btw) read my blog.
    (I can only hope that we are talking about South America and not some semi-literate Alabamian.)
2.  Someone in south America was routed to my blog by search how to cancel their Newsweek subscription.
3.  I love the term "spotted" in south America.  It makes me want to pop over to google maps and look for their house.  Oh, there is Cesar working on his roof!!! And i spotted his dog by the front door as well!
4.  Even someone who obviously is still in the process of learning English seems to know that Newsweek has fallen to shit and wants to cancel their subscription.  What a Catch-22.  Knows too much English to appreciate Newsweek, and not enough English to figure out how to cancel their subscription. 

And lest anyone say that i am all talk and no walk.  Here, my anonymous reader, is the support page for newsweek.  In the top left, there is a menu for "espanol."  That might also help: http://www.newsweeklatinamerica.com/support/

Good Luck Cesar!  I hope to spot you later.

The Second Little Piggy

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 | 0 Comment(s)


Outside of our little house on our little side street, kitty corner from our little community cemetery (if a cemetery can look quaint, this one does), we have a very large tree.  For this post, lets call the tree Wanda, because A) it’s fun to give plants names. B) Wanda is a particularly fun name C) I was going to call this post “A Tree Called Wanda” before deciding that it was too much of a stretch, but still I grew (pun) attached to the name.  You will too.

So Wanda is a significantly large tree that provides shade to both our car space on the left (while also providing a perch for the birds to lay down a nice base coat of bird shit on my windshield) and our front porch behind.   On the opposite side of Wanda there is an old fashioned Lincoln-log style wooden fence made by two horizontal beams (about 8 feet long) and stubbier vertical beams about every 6 or 7 feet.  On the opposite side of the fence, is our road.  

hello Wanda
Wanda’s diameter is like an average sized coffee table and it branches into a number of telephone pole sized mini-trunk branches.  (with all of this size and shape talk, I’m scared im gonna give Wanda body issues).  I promise that I tell you all of this for a reason. 

About a week ago, while mmf and I were eating dinner and watching some television on the couch, we heard what sounded like 1.5 seconds of a noise I would describe as “crackling” and then a sound I would describe as “bad news.” The sound was accompanied by a physical vibration.  There was an impact accompaniment.    With the blinds closed, mmf and my first reaction was to look at each other.  Like I said, the sound after the crackle, the “snap” or “pop” if you will, was definitely not a sign that our night was about to get better and more relaxing. 
We run to the front door, we are on the porch. 

First reaction?  My car is safe!

Second reaction?  Holy shit, the tree branch/mini-trunk just broke off, crashing through the wood fence like butter and completely stopping traffic from being able to pass in either direction.  It was essentially a big branchy leafy telephone pole stretching from 4 feet onto our rental property to 4 feet into the ditch on the opposite side of the road.  Not good. 

We called the police.  It’s one of those times when you just dial 911 and don’t even think of trying to figure out what the “local number” for the police is. 

Third Reaction: How the hell did that branch not hit any power lines?  Pure dumb luck folks.  There is no other reason.  There are plenty of lines to choose from, this tree missed them all.   Thank goodness.

All and all, as huge potentially house or car crushing tree branch falls go, this was a pretty good one.  Just one little problem of a blocked road in the darkness.

Minutes later, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men had come and lit up our avenue with blue and white flashers.  Cones were put up and chain saws sawed.  The speed with which the whole process took place made me wish these were the same people working on paving our roads.  They were efficient and as quiet as one can be under the circumstances.  An hour later the flashers were gone and the road was silent once more. 

Grover examines the damage.  That's his favorite pee spot that got destroyed.
It all seemed to happen so fast.  Boom. A branch falls in the night.  Boom.  You worry your car is crushed.  Boom. Crisis averted.  Light Camera Action.  And scene.  It all might have seemed like it had been a dream had  . . . well . . .

Had the road crew not only removed the part of the branch that was physically laying across the road.  The moment a millimeter of that branch was on grass (our grass), they stopped cutting.  Which means that we still have a huge length of tree branch lying across our demolished wooden fence.  Our yard kind of has the look of country bumpkins who drunkenly decided to build a cross in their from yard, got the wood, then passed out and forgot about it.  

"hey man, its not on the road"
You know, classy.

Human Roadkill

Thursday, June 16, 2011 | 0 Comment(s)


Today I had to pretend to ignore a discarded band-aid cotton ball combo that was lying on the changing room bench in the locker room.   I would say that there is a 94% chance it was from a blood draw at the health center, because it was a shimmery reflective kaleidoscope of a band-aid, the kind that a grown up would only wear if someone else put it on them.  I have had such band-aids put on me.  At the health center.  That’s the other way I know.  And so, here I am, sitting on an already pretty gross bench between a used blood clotter and someone’s dirty bathing suit hanging outside their locker.   And I wonder.  Is this really worth it?  Do I care about swimming that much? 

I do.  I really do.  Even when I hate swimming, I love it.  I hate it as one hates laying the foundation of one’s own success.   
 ________________________

Another disturbing trend I’ve been noticing is that people have begun attempting suicide by running or walking into my moving car.  Now animals having been doing this for years, but it seems that we humans needed smart phones to get us moving toward vehicular self-manslaughter (lady-slaughter?). 

Example one, I am making a left turn off a busy road onto a side road, and I am stopped, waiting, with my turn signal on.  I see a woman, surfing her phone, starting to walk across the side road in the cross walk.  I wait until she has a good head start across the street and then I begin my turn.  As I get closer, she full stops in the middle of the street!!!! to typiddy type type on her phone.  In the middle of the street!  My dog knows better than that.  I swerved left (the side street didn’t have oncoming traffic so I could swerve where oncoming traffic would have been coming from).  As I passed, I certainly took the time to project out the window, “really, RIGHT in the middle of the street?”  Suicide.   It’s the only explanation.  She was trying to make it look like an accident.

Today, I watched 4 people waiting patiently at a crosswalk for a walk signal.  Unfortunately, instead of the “Walk” sign popping up next, the other green light came on, giving my lane of cars the left hand turn green light.  But those pedestrians had been waiting at least 20 full seconds, and they decided that “damn, it feels like its our turn to walk.”   So they did.  They walked straight toward the lit red words saying "DON'T WALK"  Perhaps that thought that sign was only referring to the little people.  They walked right to where we, the oncoming cars, desired to drive.  In this case, since we couldn’t just bowl them over (well, I couldn’t because the car in front of me wouldn’t go), I decided to sing a nice loud audible song out my window to the walkers that went approximately like this, “look at that beautiful ‘don’t walk’ sign, all red and asking you to not walk.  Boy do I wish you could read it, because that way you would know not to walk . . . “

I should make it clear that those were not the exact words to the song that I sung, both because I can’t remember now, and because it went on for some time.  The general feeling and tone, however, remain the same.   Which is to say that they both heard me, and looked, and one even gave me a semi-dirty/confused look.  I felt fine about it. 

We aren’t done.  I’ve had to swerve around at least 2 other downward facing dingbats who think they can simultaneously pass that last level of angry birds while navigating through town.  It’s as if the invention of the smart phone has deprogrammed the “moving cars > pedestrians” equation out of our own internal hard-drives.  Which can mean only one thing . . .

Road kill ain’t just for squirrels anymore. 

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