Sudan: Just Batshit Crazy

What the hell?

What is wrong with these people, that they, who profess to be so devout, yet kill their own countrymen and women by the thousands, burning, looting and raping from village to village while hiding behind a thin excuse of a rebellion, and yet turn loony at the story of an elementary school teacher, in that godforsaken country only out of a desire to bring some light into a dark place, who innocently follows her students' wishes to name a teddy bear Mohamed?

What the hell?

I have strict rules against speech that may be construed to be hateful against any group of people. But I'm making an exception in this case.

I am so taking Sudan off my World Tour schedule.

I Feel Better Already

This is the Gävlebocken

...now that I know that I can keep tabs on the Gävle Goat this Christmas.

He seems to have been the brain child of the Gävle town merchants to scare up Christmas season traffic. The first Gävle Goat (a giant version of the traditional Swedish goat of straw, yes, traditional goat of straw) was erected in 1966. Apparently, since then, the most exciting part of having a giant goat made of straw in your town square was waiting to see if it could make it through the holidays without being burnt up by the local hooligans. In the past 40 years, it has been torched 22 times.

I like the idea that Sweden has hooligans. Who knew?

This was the Gävlebocken

This year, they say they've got that baby doused in flame retardant chemicals, and are "very confidant" that he will make it through the season. We'll see about that...

Too Cold.

It's been unseasonably cold. And then wet and cold. And then more (okay, by now) seasonably cold. And then really wet and cold.

I feel strongly that I should not have to honor any obligations outside of the house when the temperature drops below 40 and the sun never truly comes up before it dips down again.

Maybe if I just tell everybody that I have night blindness they will feel more forgiving. I'm not sure that there is such a thing as night blindness, but if there is, I'm signing up for it. I hate driving at night. Double that for rainy nights. Eddie Rabbit can shove his rainy nights up his country bumpkin butt. (Look it up, youngsters.)

Check this space soon for the Christmas Spirit to kick in and the Mood of the Piglet to improve.

You Need a Little Talking Heads, Don't You?

Once in a Lifetime

By David Byrne and Brian Eno

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful
Wife
And you may ask yourself-well...how did I get here?

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the moneys gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the moneys gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...

Water dissolving...and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Carry the water at the bottom of the ocean
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/in the silent water
Under the rocks and stones/there is water underground.

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the moneys gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? ...am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
My god!...what have I done?

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/in the silent water
Under the rocks and stones/there is water underground.

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the moneys gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...

Family Dynamics Illustrated

I'm not sure what you can measure in this photograph by measuring the acreage taken up by the personal space of one particular tousle-haired trouble maker. Everyone on the right side of the photograph seems to be scrunched together, in part out of affection, but also out of necessity to fit into a frame filled mostly with Dean (with his arm around wife Jenny) and those on the left trying not to violate his sphere of domination. If you cut this photo in half, you would have a picture of seven people on one half and a picture of four people on the other (three, as this is a community property state).

It almost looks like he was leaning against the wall with Jenny, and everyone sort of gathered around him for a picture as if he were one of those theme park cutouts. (Have your picture taken with the hipster! He looks so lifelike!)

Hope you had a nice, stress-free Thanksgiving.

Wish List, Version XXVIII

• I wish I had more time to paint.
• I wish I had an extra camera battery.
• I wish water tasted better.
• I wish my cat respected my furniture.
• I wish chocolate was really good for you, and not good for you in the way red wine is good for you (i.e., mostly bad, but with a single redeeming quality, a quality which for me could be termed "mood stabilizer").
• I wish I could move objects with my mind.
• I wish good always triumphed over evil.
• I wish Dana Carvey had a TV show. Maybe a variety show, like a latter-day Carol Burnett show.
  
• I wish you could work out by reading.
• I wish I hadn't missed yet another committee meeting last week.
• I wish the voting public were smarter.
• I wish those producer guys wouldn't be so piggish and settle the writers' strike fairly. (I don't need The Daily Show. I can quit any time I want. I just don't want to.)
• And (obligatorily),
• I wish for World Peace and Global Cooling (or what I like to call World Coolness).

Couch Update: One Down

I moved my painting studio back into the sun room, so the Dania couch had to go.

How embarrassing: we tried to give it to Goodwill, but they wouldn't take it. It was too ugly for Goodwill, people! We ended up taking it to the dump.

So long, couch that Goodwill turned their noses up at. You were cute before the cat turned on you.

This Just In: Disappointed Alumna Vows Never Again to Place Her Faith in Duck Football

Crushed. Ouch. I yelled at my dogs last night and I was in a rotten mood all day. Sports should not have such power over me. I laugh at people like this.

Dennis Dixon's Knee: You are dead to me. Brady Leaf: Dead. Duck Defense: Dead. Bellotti: Dead. Arizona: Don't get me started.

Dixon: If you have any smarts, you will limp around the rest of the season and get that knee back in shape for your pro career. Don't completely wipe it out for these damn Ducks. They're not worth it.

Update: Damn it, he should have been out for the season before the Arizona game, and Bellotti should have prepared his team to play without him.

Bellotti: you say you were just trying to help Dixon continue to play like he wanted. That's crap. You were using him. You should have been the adult, benched him for his own future, and worked on your Plan B.

Dixon: Get your knee fixed and spend the rest of the year in the weight room. You look like Olive Oyl out there. Put some meat on your bones if you want a chance in the pros.

Okay, I'll go back to my regularly scheduled nonsense now.

Hints for the Homeowner

Here's a hint I like to use:

Never rake your yard until after the big autumn wind storm. If you're lucky, you will come out ahead on that one.

It's a Good Thing Cats Are Cute

We own three sofas, we have two rooms in need of a couch, and yet we have no couches that are actually presentable as grown-up furniture that one might encounter in a grown-up house.

I will elaborate:

Sofa 1: Part of an early conversation-pit-style couch-and-love-seat set in veridian green velvet with pink highlights that screams 1990 louder than MC Hammer singing U Can't Touch This. It's still in remarkably good shape on account of the fact that I have a slight phobia of sinking into gooey couch cushions, thus it has had its cushion foam replaced twice, the last time with foam dense enough to use as space shuttle tiles. It is comfortable, ugly, and moderately ruined by the damn cat using it as a scratching post. We tried to keep the cat away. We gave her several of her own scratching posts, which she delighted in never, ever touching. She would rather lay into the velvet as deep as her claws would go, and pull out long strands of former couch.

Coco on the Hammer couch.

Sofa 2: Once it was clear that the green couch set was out of date and on its way to cat-scratch hell, we found a couch at Dania. It was as firm as Danishly possible, widened out at one end to be at once hip and yet also deep enough to fit two sets of middle-aged hips. The cat set herself the task of destroying it at night while we were asleep. One day we had an avant-garde piece of living room art, and the next day we woke up to a garage-sale markdown. The first couch was looking dated so we couldn't really blame her for that one, but now this cat just cost us fifteen hundred bucks. We tried to take it to an upholsterer once. He gave us an estimate to fix it of about how much we paid for it, and promptly went out of business. I keep trying to think of ways to mask the damage, but I'm afraid of making it look worse and then having to explain the mess to the guy at Goodwill when I drop it off.

Sofa 3: Okay, one more try. This time we are living in a house with a latter-day craftsman-style theme, so we come home with a craftsman-style couch with oak arms and legs that the cat cannot sink her claws into. Brilliant. Except that the couch is nearly as comfortable as trying to sleep across three chairs in the airport.

Now we have a family room, a living room, and a sun (read dog) room, and we keep cycling these misfit couches around the house, waiting for each of them to become something they are not - either pretty, whole, or comfortable, and all three are failing.

We really should drop the whole lot off at Goodwill and try again, but that would entail spending money we promised to someone else - mainly the electric company, but that's another story involving a furnace from another time when electricity was cheap and it seemed like a good idea to heat a high-ceilinged, attic-less house with a jumbo-sized hair dryer.

I'm going to go move the furniture around some more. It will help me stay warm.

Diversionary Tactics

The country's going to hell. Everybody's credit card is maxed out and Christmas (in the shape of Bad Santa) is leering at us from around the corner. Pakistan is this close to freaking out. Bush has messed up Iraq so bad that Iran is leering at HIM from around the corner. Bush's itchy trigger finger is back. Your ARM has just blown up. Some poor soldier's arm has probably just blown up somewhere. What to do?

List stuff!

How about favorite movies?

• Monty Python's Holy Grail
• Spinal Tap
• Princess Bride
• Animal House
• Some Like it Hot
• Ace Venture Pet Detective (really)
• The Austin Powers trilogy (Scotty don't!)
• Anchorman
• Amadeus (I need this on DVD)
• Edward Scissorhands
• The first Fletch movie (the book was better)
  

I like:

• Johnny Depp
  
• Peter O'Toole (what's he doing in this list?)
  
• Dana Carvey (watch his concert (word?) performances)
  
• Robin Williams (watch his early performance shows when he was probably completely fueled by powdered substances - his brain is moving so fast you can practically watch the synapses melt)
  
• Hugh Laurie (watch the entire Blackadder series from BBC. I mean it.)
• Christopher Guest movies
• The first five years of Saturday Night Live (um, not that I'm that old, I just hear it's cool to like stuff that's before your time, ditto for the next item, and, um, not that I remember the days when the high school had actual ditto machines and not copy machines), and
  
• The Original Bob Newhart Show (More goo to go!)

The Best Bad Movies

• The first Terminator. Sweet, sweet eighties. And a naked, garbling Ahnold. Gold.
• Bram Stoker's Dracula. The one with Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker. Bloody worst English accent ever. Absolutely appalling. Anthony Hopkins overacting. Weird beastiality scenes. Gary Oldman using a blood-dripping Transylvanian accent. Who knows if it's authentic? It's like caramel in your ears. Totally, satisfyingly over the top. Let's all plan on watching it next Halloween at our house.

There. Thinking about Bram Stoker's Dracula always makes me feel better.

The cheeldren off the niyeet. HHHHHwhat beeeoootifool mussich they mayik...

Surfing the Web so You Won't Have To

You might need to know how to light a fire using a potato. And when you do, you will know.

This Post Redacted

I was going to post about how I was wondering this morning, as I was flopping along down a hill with Scotty, how long I had to flop so loose jointedly and carelessly before I started walking stiffly so as not to jar my brittle old limbs.

Then I remembered how the Captain hates my "impending doom" posts and thought better of it.

It is fall, though, and my thoughts turn so easily to The End.

Instead I'll post another pretty picture.


Here's another picture of the Eagle Creek trail because I heard it suffered some bad landslide damage and will be closed for a while.

Becca (and Brian): our peer pressure paid off. You got to see it before the trail gave way (and not during)!

Score!

Overheard at the Humane Society

I do a little data entry for the Humane Society for Southwest Washington every Wednesday. My actual entry of data is slowed, but my entertainment level is highly raised, by the fact that my little desk sits just off to the side of the animal intake desk, where found or unwanted animals are brought in.

Sometimes I type with a tiny puppy in the pocket of my stylish purple volunteer apron. Sometimes I share the space with wild geese, while we both wonder what they are doing there.

This is a snippet of conversation that I had to write down so as not to forget and deprive the world (or my four readers) of:

Elderly Lady, bringing in a cat that she obviously loves but can't keep: "...and I have papers that say she's been spayed."

Clerk: "Oh, good, because otherwise we would have to guess."

Elderly Lady: "What do you mean you would have to gas her?"

Clerk: "No, GUESS. We would have had to GUESS."

I love Wednesdays.