And now for something completely different

Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, who married the Berlin Wall 30 years ago. A love story, until tragedy struck in 1989.

Bizarre.

Two adjacent TVs at the gym today (which was a zoo--anyone around here work or go to school during the day anymore?).

On one, some white supremecists are showing off their 88 tattoos to CNN. (Is there a reason is news this week?)

On the other, retrospective footage of Marvin Harrison.

Huh.

Someone I actually want to talk to found me on Facebook--the guy who started calling me "Radish" in high school, when we were both working at his dad's restaurant. He's living in Milwaukee, of all places, with his wife and three kids.

Small world.

Obama Voters

Two anecdotes from my day, illustrating (along with the stuff I posted at Badger Blogger) why I will spending most of the next four years drunk as a form of self-preservation.

1) At the office after lunch, five O-bots were giving each other high-fives, and then they realized none of them knew who the governor of WI was. Not a single fucking one of them. The Palin-bashing vegan knew her Congressional representative was "Gwen Something...something long and complicated" (that would be Moore...I can see how such a foreign-sounding a name with so many syllables can be hard to remember), and one of them thought there was a Sentienthauser involved somewhere (Sensenbrenner, who doesn't represent any of them). They never got around to wondering who their Senators were.

Oh yeah, you're enlightened, superior beings, smarter and better than me. I'm so glad your ilk are running the country. Assholes.


2) At the gym, two women (I think they were women...I don't like to belittle fat people because I look like Jabba the Hutt from the neck down, but these creatures outweighed me at least 100 pounds apiece, maybe even 150, and it was kind of hard to tell what biological sex they were since they had crew cuts, but I was in the women's locker room so that's as good an assumption as any) swooning--NAKED--over the TV, which was showing the coronation. And then, they talked:

Being 1: Oh my God! It's so awesome!
Being 2: Like, this guy at school said they should just cut spending. And I was like, duh! Rich people should pay for it!
Being 1: People are so suh-STOO-pid! [Yes. She made it three syllables, which is worth a bitch-slap right there.] You can't fix anything without spending! I mean, you can't cut anything! You have to spend!
Being 2: I know! Thank God Obama's smarter than that!

There was probably more, but the whole world turned misty red and I put on my boots without putting on pants so I could get the fuck out of there without screaming "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW FUCKING IGNORANT YOU ARE?!" because it's generally a bad idea to get in a fight with 600 pounds of deadweight even if you haven't overworked your arms out of sheer adrenalinic pissed-offed-ness. All they would have had to do to incapacitate me was fall on me...

I should have asked them if they had any fucking idea what sort of spending Obama would be rubber-stamping, because I'm sure they couldn't name anything more specific than "health care for poor babies!" (without mentioning it would only be for the babies that weren't murdered on the taxpayers' dime) but it wasn't until after I was halfway home that I remembered "$350 million for fucking appliances."


I woke up today ready to give Obama and his supporters the benefit of the doubt, and they were all assholes (I won't even mention the whitey-bashing, because I can't do it in a half-way civilized manner) and imbeciles. The hell with them all.

Baby, it's cold outside.

Why do they hate us?
Ricardo Montalban.

It's a bizarre old universe.

Andrew Johnson

I was in a bar trivia contest this afternoon, and one of the questions was "Who was the only President to serve in the Senate after being POTUS?" And I immediately wrote down "Andrew Johnson" and handed it to the girl who was submitting the answers for our team.

And everyone kind of stared at me. To their credit, they knew there was a President with that name...

Last week, I read a blog post--I just can't remember where! and I can't find it!--about the possibility of Bill Clinton keeping Hillary's Senate seat warm while she globe-trots for four years. The blogger noted, for our amusement, that the only other President who went to the Senate after the White House was the only other impeached President.

And of course I was right, and we got six points.

So whoever you are, snarky blogger, thank you.

Overall, it was pretty bad. I was the oldest by several years, so we missed all the questions about 70s TV shows (they were on after my bedtime). I got all the answers about 80s songs, American History, and geography. We finished in the 3nd quartile, well out of the money, but not last. Heh.

Heads up!

Glad I read this after I finished driving across Indiana...

MARKLE, Ind. -- Five deer that wandered onto a highway overpass jumped to their deaths onto Interstate 69, one of them crashing through a tractor-trailer's windshield, police said.

You have to get six paragraphs in to learn the human was uninjured. Way to report, AP.

Late fall is a stressful time of year for deer, DNR spokesman Phil Bloom said.

Farmers are removing the last of their crops from the fields, reducing the animals' food supply even as deer breeding season is in full swing.

Any of these factors could have pushed the deer onto the highway overpass, Bloom said.

You expect AP articles to be written with a "human activity makes Bambi sad" slant, but when the DNR guy subscribes human emotions and motivations to animals...

(When I lived in Indiana I bought a 1940s pinwheel quilt top in Markle. It's got some feedsack fabrics in it, but mostly dress prints. I never expected to reference Markle ever again.)

Mail call

I get the weirdest snail mail. I wonder which publication sold my name to the company advertising permanent non-surgical birth control "now that your family is complete"? Tacky. Not to mention I've been using a very effective non-surgical all-natural method for more years than I want to think about, called "My Face." As soon as I figure out how to bottle it, I'll be a kajillionaire.

Then I got an e-mail about Shutdown Day, "one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the Internet." Apparently we're supposed to pledge not to turn on our computers on a Saturday next month, which would make it an experiment OFF the Internet, unless they're all going to log in with their iPhones.

I'm having a hearty but rueful laugh at all the nitwits planning to spend the day "playing with their kids" or "going outside"--you shouldn't need a global initiative to do that stuff on a special day. Nothing's stopping you from doing it RIGHT NOW. Mankind has jumped the shark.

I poked around on the site, and there's a bunch of yapping about "promoting sustainable development", which as far as I can tell means "going back to the 17th century." And screw the improvements in people's lives brought about technology. Individual suffering makes the world better for the collective.

Scrabble Babble and the TSA

Greeting from Indianapolis, which apparently still only owns two snowplows.

In the past 18 months, I've triggered a bag search with swabs for explosive residue at Mitchell International Airport with the following items:

• pork chops (that kills me)
  
• Play-Doh (that was dumb)
  
• cheddar cheese shaped like a cow (that I bought at the airport)
  

Yesterday my new digital countdown device--with no shut off--breezed right through security without a second glance from anyone. Huh.

There was an informal session of pickup games last night at the church where the tournament is today; my first games against live humans in 14 months. Bloodbath. :P In the third game, I played against an older and elegantly dressed woman. About 3/4 through, I had ?AEILOT (the ? is a blank tile) and all I could see was ELATION, but there was no place on the board to hook it in. But there was an F with a lot of spaces behind it, and FELLATIO got 61 points. My opponent challenged, since she was unfamiliar with the word, so we got the tournament director, who is the friend I'm staying with, who insists he's never met me before as he looks it up in the official word list (and of course, the commotion draws attention from people nearby who have finished up their games).

The word is on the list, of course--all the dirty words are allowed in tournaments. And you can hook an N onto the end.

I'm so embarrassed. But hey, 61 points.

Be Ready.

"Hillary Clinton is a Communist!"

So, I had to wait around the post office this morning for the passport window to open (which it did, 15 minutes late, after the family waiting ahead of me went over to the stamp counter to bitch...). Always interesting people-watching at the post office.

The best was a woman about my age and size, lesbian-separatist boots and haircut, who found a "don't forget to vote for Hillary" postcard in her box, shouted "Hillary Clinton is a Communist!!" at the lobby, and ripped it up and threw it on the floor. Everyone in the line was kind of stunned...she went to the stamp counter, bought some stamps, and on her way out, she shouted at us again. "Hillary Clinton is a Communist!"

That time I grinned. She wasn't looking at us, or I might thanked her for her candor.

The family in front of me had been yapping about how much better Canada is than the U.S., so I thought I'd best keep the rest of my thoughts ("Obama's not far off...") to myself. But it's so damned refreshing to hear someone use the word "Communist" as an epithet, for a change.

Not to mention that was just weird!

White stuff!

Finally! A storm lives up to the hype! There's even wind!

...the accumulation for Milwaukee was pushing the season up the charts, from number 40 to within reach of the top 25.

I can't believe how much people have bitched about this winter, and now I learn it's not even Top 25 material...?

I love snow.


I just a had dumb argument with a friend who thinks I shouldn't read Gregg Easterbrook's ESPN.com column because he also writes for The New Republic (do they have any credibility left?) and, I quote "W will be disappointed in you." I thought that was the stupidest thing I've ever read, until he changed it to "Fred Thompson will be disappointed in you" when W's 'disappointment' failed to shame me.

Admittedly, I find only 30% of any give Easterbrook NFL column has any actual football content, and if the argument had been "because he's a pig who thinks women are objects who should cater to his viewing pleasures" it would have held weight.

But I didn't realize there was a blacklist of writers I wasn't allowed to read, much less that any politician gives a shit what I read.

Would be counterproductive anyway; the major appeal conservatism holds for me is that the alternatives are unfair, unfree, and unproductive. Easterbrook's socialist blather (the Super Bowl column is no exception) just reinforces that appeal. There was one earlier in the season, or maybe end of last season, that really stood out, where he was going on about how horrible it was that individuals and corporations were being allowed to buy Boeing 787s (eventually, heh) for individual usage. It stood out because the Boeing 787 is indirectly paying my rent. Without those horrible individuals and corporations being free to choose to spend their money as they see fit, I might still be living in my sister's basement and stocking kitchenware at the outlet mall for $6/hr.

Dog blogging

My aunt's malamute, Adam, is writing his memoirs. OK, the ownership goes the other way, but there was no smooth way to construct that sentence without using the default human convention...

When I was a kid my mother used to say quite frequently, "You're just like your aunt!" (my dad's sister), and it wasn't a compliment, which I didn't understand until I was much older. When I was 11-12, we went to St. Paul for her ordination as a Lutheran minister; how freaking cool is that? Not cool in my mother's family: Kinder, Küche, Kirche--but when they say Kirche they don't mean "lead the service", they mean "fill the pews and shut up." And yet, if all God wanted us to do was make pies and babies, he would have made us pretty and dumb instead of, well, how we are.

[I've been reading a biography of Queen Victoria's daughter Vicky, the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who really pushed the "women's place" business the same way his grandfather did, which about the time my mother's ancestors were leaving northern Germany for Iowa. That part of the book seemed very familiar somehow.]

But nevermind me. Adam!

Is there nothing that woman won't destroy?

Scrabble is one of "Oprah's Favorite Things." I hate it when that woman puts her stamp on stuff I like, I really don't want people thinking she influenced me. Bleah.

Anyway, against my better judgment, I was talked into registering for a Scrabble tournament next month. It's not like living-room play; there's a clock, strict rules about dropping tiles under the table (don't ask), and 2-person games only.

I haven't played any Scrabble since the last tournament I was in fifteen months ago (same organizer talked me into THAT), which was the first time I played a timed game since I moved to Milwaukee. It's a good hobby for the socially inept, the terminally boring, the pedantic, and the mentally ill. Like having a blog, except all the letters are capitalized. :)

I'm kind of hoping obsessing about two- and three-letter words for a few weeks will be slightly less unhealthy than everything else I've been obsessing over lately.

Public Service Announcement

Someone from the 920 area code just called looking for Euell to get the number of Artie because they're trying to set up a surprise party for "unintelligible"'s daughter Shelly.

So Euell, drop me an e-mail, and Shelly, try to act surprised, OK?