Well well well. Can’t think of any mistakes you made in the so-called War on Terror, George? Need a little help? OK, how about the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq? Under the false pretext of the WMD you now can’t find, not even under the desk in your office? Remember that?
Seriously, though. You otherwise acquitted yourself brilliantly. You laid out all those distortions, lies and rabble-rousing button-pushing jingoistic propaganda just like Karl R. and your other handlers trained you. I bet you’ll get a nice little bump in the poll numbers (which don’t concern you, of course).
Oh by the way: fuck you.
Rock, Paper, Scissors, Deadpan
Is is just me, or is there note something funnier-than-shit about this deadpan treatment of rock-paper-scissors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock%2C_Paper%2C_Scissors
I Can’t Fix Shit
I can’t fix shit. I can’t install, assemble, repair, maintain, build or otherwise perform any manner of mechanical activity on any physical object whatsoever.
I am a klutz.
There, I said it, and I don’t regret it.
Now I can go back to trying to install a gate to keep our eleven-month-old from tumbling down the stairs.
PS: I exaggerate. In fact, I have: assembled stuff — furniture, baby equipment, gas barbecue grill — that still has yet to fall apart; patched and replaced bicycle tubes; replaced all manner of computer parts; done very basic plumbing repairs without fucking up (and have also done them with fucking up); and so forth. But it’s slow, painful and perilous, because I am a klutz. Though I read instructions and how-to books, usually something comes up that is undocumented. That’s when a person needs creativity, courage, imagination, balls, talent, skill. I have a little of the first three, but very little of the last two.
Sunday again, oh my….
Spanish election
The socialists would have won the Spanish election without the boost given them by the government’s mishandling of the Madrid train bombings. The Madrid correspondent of the respected German weekly Die Zeit reported that while polls may be taken in Spain at any time up to an election, the results may not be made public in the two weeks prior to an election. Polls taken in Spain during those crucial two weeks, she wrote, showed that the socialists were steadily gaining on the government. While they undoubtedly got a push from the aftermath of the bombings, they would have taken over the government without it.
Professor B’s note: The point being that you’d be unlikely to know this if you relied solely on the USA’s corporate media. They have generally failed to report that the Spanish people were going to kick out Aznar’s party anyway, for disregarding the popular will by supporting the US invasion of Iraq; they would have us think that the catastrophe and its scandalous mishandling were the sole causes of a stunning upset victory, which is just plain false. Good thing my dad reads German.
Alcohol Can Affect Your Judgement — for the Better
I’m sitting at my computer struggling with GnuCash 1.8.1, trying bring my financial records up to date after months of neglect so I can get my data organized for my tax guy. (I have splendid excuses for procrastinating, but take my word for it so I can spare you.) I try to run a transaction report and keep getting a useless error message “There was an error while running the report.” No shit. I go out there and google for some help and come up empty. I think, dude, let’s see if there’s a newer version. There is. I think, dude, you should upgrade. Ah, but if the upgrade opens some hideous can of worms and makes matters worse, what then? I confess: I am somewhere beyond newbie but way short of expert in matters Linux. The venerable RedHat Package Manager is famed for its ease of use, but how do you roll back an upgrade with RPM? I could research that and figure it out but I am under pressure here and have little patience. So I think, dude, just download the rpm and upgrade. But I hesitate. This is my only Linux machine, and if something goes seriously wrong, with all my financial data in a massive XML data file that dumb-ass Windoze programs like Quicken and Money do not understand, I am fucked. Time to make a decision.
Enter our reliable old friend, alcohol. I think, dude, go upstairs and pour a nice hefty vodka with cranberry and OJ, and knock it back. I do this. Then I go back to the machine, close GnuCash, become root, run
rpm --upgrade gnucash-1.8.8-0.9.i386.rpm.
It sits there thinking for a few seconds so I go back upstairs (to the liquor cabinet) to await my fate.
Bingo. GnuCash is rocking and I am back in the ballgame, thanks to a sound decision arrived at with the aid of the demon alcohol.
Sunday and HBO: veg heaven
I’m already euphoric just thinking about watching The Sopranos tonight.
Then there’ s that new western, Deadwood. I was already favorably disposed to it from seeing the promos, but when the opening sequence started, and I heard that music and saw those images, I knew I was in love.
Perhaps it’s a generational/sentimental thing. The western genre is practically dead; no one does it any more in this age of bullshit so-called reality shows. When I was a kid growing up in the sixties, there were plenty of westerns in film and on TV. I was fascinated by the macho atmosphere, the hokey-folky wisdom, the horses, guns, cards, whiskey, violence. The saloon doors, the player piano with that clinky sound…
Now comes this ultra high qualiity show where the creators went to the trouble of researching the shit out of the history of Deadwood, Montana, to bring you a beautifully produced work that de-romanticizes the old American west in the manner of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. (For the record: I won’t be suprised if some critic has already compared Deadwood to Cormac McCarthy, but I haven’t read or heard any such comparision, so maybe, just maybe: you heard it here first.) And so you have a character named Ellsworth who stands at the bar, having just traded his $170 gold piece for bar credit, and proclaims: I may have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand before you today beholden to no human cocksucker.” How can you not love it?
Color and Boxing
I first became aware of the beauty of boxing in the mid-fifties. The “Friday Night Fights” sponsored by Gillette “Blue-Blades”. My father and great-uncle made it a ritual: Dad chain smoking Luckies and drinking bourbon (straight, if you nancy boys were wondering) and my uncle smoking his pipe (Granger Rough-Cut) and sipping blackberry brandy. I was supposed to be in bed but would sneak downstairs and watch/hide from the doorway. What an exotic scene: a room full of smoke and the two grown men in my life watching a snowy black and white TV screen and yelling as the two men on the TV tried to fucking beat the shit out of each other.
It was a religious moment.
Back in those days of black white and shades of gray, the fighters were in the “light” or “dark” trunks that usually had their names in bold letters on the waistbands. It was the south then, when it was “did you see that nigger hit that white boy? Man, them niggers can box” Ingmar Johannsen was the hero but Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston came along and the white boys had to admit that those coons could pack a punch. And then came a guy named Clay who beat Liston and I was amazed that these white trash – I – hate – niggers types were actually upset. Maybe that was the beginning of the realization that niggers weren’t all that bad; well, some of them – “not the uppity ones”. Ah, those were the halcyon days of my youth.
I was watching the HBO fights tonight and remembered the professors early bit about the “fighter in the blue trunks with the whitish golden tassles and the fighter in the blue trunks with…” (or something like that) and the advent of color hit me over the head. My! How things used to be easier before color. Maybe TV should go back to black and white. Blood is just a really a really dark color. “Raging Bull” is a great work of art – the slo-mo of liquid squirting out of pummeled noses is just like the Friday Night Fights of my childhood.
What to do now? The boxers are from everywhere and every “race” but we have to be PC and not notice that one is a square-headed-retarded looking former commie russkie and the other is a cauliflower-eared, puffy eyed, white double-wide trailer trash from northern Maine. Now did you notice that I didn’t mention the gook in the red corner and the mick in the blue corner?
Real Family Values
Family values were out in full force on Saturday, March 20, 2004 at the anti-war demonstration in New York City, as you can see if you click the thumbnail to display a JPEG of my 10-month old daughter, my wife Marie, and Professor B himself observing the one-year anniversary of the Bush administration’s criminal invasion of Iraq.
thank you, Sopranos
Thanks to a recent Sopranos episode, I can’t even take a dump now without thinking about Johnny Sac sitting on the pot, smoking a cigarrette and bitching to Tony about shit. Here I am with my pants down around my ankles — where’s my goddamn cigarette? And I don’t even smoke.
How can a person in so undignified a posture be so self-righteous? The sheer chutzpah of Johnny Sac is stunning.