The Different Kinds of Cool: A Second Perspective

Many years ago, when I used to write this blog on a regular basis, I wrote one about the different ways that celebrities can be cool. And I'm absolutely going to use this moment to mention that one of the people I went on about at great length, Felicia Day, has since become very good friends with someone I am also friends with, which makes me feel happy every time I think of it.

I mean... I think we were friends.

I mean... I know we were friends. But you know how time does that thing?

I remember once he and I were standing on a corner in Tribecca talking about nothing in particular, and he shared this exceptionally emotional thought with me that I still think about to this day. But I'm not going to tell you what it was.

I do often wonder if he remembers that day. Or me at all, beyond the very general outline. But I hope he does. He's cool as Hell, and I know for a fact that he remembers my name because every decade or so we run into each other and exchange the standard pleasantries that you do with that sort of person at those sorts of times. He's also super successful and I'm really happy about that, even though we don't really know each other much anymore.

Truth be told, I'm actually sort of friends with a surprising number of people you've probably heard of. Just one of those weird things that life does.

When I was 13 years old, back in 1985, I met my first best friend. We still talk, although not terribly often, which is mostly my fault. We grew up in the Minneapolis area, but when we were both 15 his family moved out to Massachusetts, which hindered sleepovers. But for many years we did a better job at staying in touch than we currently do (again, entirely my fault for reasons that we're about to explore.)

The summer after my Freshman year of college and his senior year of high school (quirk of when our birthday's land and the American school system: He's actually about a month older than me), my mother bought me a plane ticket to go and see him for a week on the East Coast. And while I was there, I met his group of four close friends. (I think it was four. The memory does tend to go.)

It was an amazing trip. Because it was Massachusetts, I feel obligated to say that it was wicked awesome.

The thing is, my friend in question has since gone on to establish one of the longest running improv monoliths in the country, one of his other friends from that group has since become an award winning filmmaker and moved himself and his family to France, and one of the others has settled down happily in Hawai'i where he's had several books published.

The point I'm circling around is something that I only just realized this evening. (For the record, I'm writing this at around 1 AM, January 1st, 2026)

My friend (and I'll always be proud to call him that) is what we might term as 'Group Cool'. People like him. He's insanely talented. He tends to accumulate cool and successful people around himself while also succeeding on his own. He also became good friends with the Tribecca friend I mentioned earlier through circumstances completely unrelated to me, which is a funny an interesting story for another time.

And if I'm being honest with myself and you, sometimes I've been sad about that. 

But it occurs to me that, much like my earlier post here about how Felicia Day is a different kind of cool that Joseph Gorden Levitt, the same is true here.

I once mentioned in these posts, (in a column largely concerned with processing my feelings about someone I loved very much choosing to end their own life), that I liked the inside of my own head. But I never really addressed it further. But then a number of things made me stop and think about it.

To make a long story short, in the last couple of years I've reconnected with at least four people from my past who went out of their way to tell me how much I meant to them and how disappointed they were that we never hung out more and became better friends.

Which was a bit of a surprise to me, since in all cases I thought that they only tolerated me as part of other company and had no idea that we could have had so much more friendship.

There's nothing I can do now to go back and fix that, but what I can do now is square that circle and do my best to work on myself, and this is where I've ended up.

I'm solitary cool.

I was so busy staying inside my own head that I never noticed that people genuinely liked me. And believe me, I'm doing my best to make amends for that. But at the same time, I'm trying to give myself the grace to know that it's ok for both knowing that people love you, and that it's ok to need time alone in your head. I wish that I had shown more gratitude to the people that didn't realize that I didn't understand that at the time.

So, I'm going to call some out. This is not a complete list.

Michael Franssen - I thought you were so much cooler than I was that I genuinely never knew that you thought we were friends. I thought I was a mile beneath you. Still do.

Bill Sloan - You're not only one of the funniest men on the planet, not only the model for what a parent should be, you're also honestly the kindest soul I've ever known. And I've known a few good ones. Looking back, you made a Herculean effort to be my friend, and I was so sure that you were cooler than me that I didn't notice. Which will be my loss eternally.

Sean McKenna - You could not have invited me to more of your closest family events and drinks, and yet I had such a fixed idea in my head that you were better than me that I never clocked that that was happening. Years later you told me that I was one of the people that you most looked forward to hanging out with when you moved to the city and that it just never happened. That was my fault, and I missed a great friend through my own stupidity.

Jill and Brian - You both know the many things I need to apologize for. Know that I do and miss you both.

And Hell, there's so many more. I'll just add that Audrey Crabtree is one of the most talented people on the planet and I should have... I don't know. Been better.

So, anyway, I still like the inside of my head. I like that it does weird shit and that I very often don't really track what other people are telling me. (That part does make holding down a job sometimes difficult though.)

I'm really trying to include inside there that 'There are people that really think a lot of you, and you need to do better by them. Just for example, you never even mentioned Victor Varnado in this entire article, and you love him like a brother,'

So. Here comes 2026. And I'm really trying to work on being OK with both solitary and letting people think I'm cool, We'll see how that goes,

It's Important to Know Your Zones

 It's come to our attention that there's some confusion regarding zones. What they are, where they overlap, how much they score in scrabble, that kind of thing.

Therefore, because we're public spirited, here is a comprehensive list outlining the salient points of the zones that you should be aware of.

You're welcome.

____________________________

The Red Zone: 

Immediate loading and unloading of passengers. There is no stopping in the Red Zone. Passengers should be prepared to tuck and roll.

The White Zone:

Overt Racism.

The Twilight Zone:

Thoughtful allegorical storytelling, often outlining the dangers of the previous entry. Oh, and that one with Burgess Meredith where he wished all the other people away and then broke his glasses. Which is a totally fixable problem, by the way. There's plenty of glasses stores out there still. He could have found something that would have worked for him.

The Erogenous Zone:

This is between you and your God. And the occasional college lacrosse team. That's nobody's business. 

The Red Zone:

An area on the football field in which the Minnesota Vikings have no idea what to do, where to go, or which end is up. (That's American Football, for our international readership, which - again - can be loosely described as playing rugby while dressed up like a robot. It's been a rough season to be a Minnesota fan, but we did at least get a shout out on Ghosts a few weeks ago.)

The Danger Zone:

Can be reached by highway.

The Dead Zone:

Reasonably good book, terrible movie, awesome TV Series. Stephen King adaptations really are a minefield.

The Friend Zone:

It's not a real thing, dude. She just doesn't want to go out with you.

The Neutral Zone:

Arranged by negotiation with the Romulans, this region of space most never, ever be entered. Unless you feel like saying 'Screw it, we're entering the neutral zone', in which case you will suffer absolutely no consequences.

We hope that this information has been helpful. Stay in your Zone.

The Posts that almost were: Looking back through the Drafts Folder

 For some time now I've been toying with the idea of coming back to this blog and starting to post again.

Once the idea of coming back and posting again really took root, the first thing I did was to log in (because it's hard to post things if you don't) and take a look at the posts that I started, once upon a time, and never got around to finishing. It was more or less at this point that I got an idea.

Given that the odds of my going back and finishing any of the old posts are roughly the same as the odds of Nick Zano bursting abruptly out of my sternum and performing his one-man rendition of the complete works of Judy Blume*, I thought it might be fun to revisit the ones that got away and see how much, if anything, I remember about what they were going to be.

*No, I'm not going to explain either of those references. 

That said, let's dive in and see what might have been.

January 24th, 2000 - The Gayvengers:  Coming out to your superhero team

This one is the one that came closest to actually existing, because I was really enjoying the thought experiment.  Here's what actually got written - 

"So a while back I came across an interesting tidbit on Twitter.  Apparently, Marvel was making a big deal about announcing soon that one of their characters is gay.

Now, setting aside the fact that making this an advertising point is a little gross, MovieBob (who I follow on Twitter because I generally enjoy the things he posts) made the exact same point that I just did but phrased better, and then finished with this codicil-

"Also: am I the only one who 100% thought this was where the "Hawkeye keeps taking calls from 'the wife'" thing in ULTRON was going?"

Which was refreshing to read, because I thought that I was the only one who had thought that.

Which led me down a bit of a rabbit hole regarding why, if Clint was gay, he wouldn't have just come out to the Avengers early on and not made a big deal about it.

Yes, these are the kind of things I think about in the morning.  You're welcome.

The first relevant point would be that coming out is difficult and stressful regardless of your circumstances, so I can totally get why Clint might be a little hesitant to take that step."

And at that point I got distracted by something and never returned to it. Basically the rest was going to be a list format of the rest of the Avengers probably responses. Natasha: Totally fine, probably already knew. Tony: Completely disinterested but likely to ask uncomfortable personal questions just because he thought it was funny. Steve: probably would be super decent about it, but it would be much funnier if he turned out to have the default anti-gay bias on the 1940s and just started throwing out casual slurs while the rest of the team just looked at him like, 'WTF, dude?' and Steve would be all, 'What? We all still think that, right?' 

And then I would have worked in some manner of 'Hulk SMASH!  No... not in that sense of the word... I mean... Hulk like and all...." which I'm sure would have been hysterical.

April 22nd, 2014 - Sure, He Lost the Election.  But Look at Lincoln's Adorable Little Hands.

This was - and I swear I'm not just making this up now - going to be a re-telling of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1958, retold as if they were, respectively, a sea otter and a teacup pig.

The entire entry consists of the three words "To be continued." 

I think I realized even as I started that this was a little too high concept even for me and just walked away.

Still fun to picture it, though.

November 10th, 2015 - No, I Don't Want to Hug Justin Long

This post consists only of the sentence 'I'm not what you'd call an early riser. I'm more of a 'Lay there filled with dread about the day to come' kind of guy.

I have absolutely no idea what that has to do with Justin Long. I mean, it's still a true sentence, but your guess is as good as mine as to what the through-line was going to be there. Did I not want to go see Tusk? Was I feeling nostalgic about the old Mac versus PC commercial campaign? I have no idea.

Justin, on the off chance that you read this, I'd totally give you a hug. Bring it in buddy.

Which leaves us with:

January 25th, 2019 - This Land is Your Land - The Annotated Lyrics

October 12th, 2017 - Just When I Thought I Was Out They Pull Me Back In.... With Their Adorable Little Hands

and

March 13th, 2015 - A Treatise on Optics.  Oh OK, It's About That Dress Again.

None of these three have a single word written beyond the title. 

The third one was clearly going to be something about that dress that was either blue and black or white and gold and got the whole internet worked up. The middle one was probably about otters. The final entry has sadly been completely lost to time.

And there they are. The posts that never were. I hope you enjoyed our little jaunt through alternate history. As I hit delete on the drafts folder of might-have-beens and never-was', let's make an effort to meet back up here tomorrow and start something new.

There's a non-zero chance that it will be about otters again. We'll see.

Celebrate Minnesota - Get on board the Lutheran Snowplow!

A fair while back now at work we got into a discussion* about what the most 'Minnesota' possible cocktail was.  Relevant background - Minnesota is the State we live and work in**.  For those foreign readers, it's one of the ones in the middle.  Not, not that one.  Yeah, you're thinking of Wisconsin. We're to the left of them.  It's cool. Common mistake.

Not Wisconsin.

*Yes, by 'got into a discussion', I do mean 'I rambled on about it at some length while everyone else politely tried to continue working.' 

**Although we are owned by Canadians now.  The company, that is.  Not Minnesota.  Well... actually, there's an argument to be made there...  Discussion for another time.  It's been good, but poutine has - thus far - been notably lacking. 

After some thought, I eventually came up with the following drink recipe:

    -2 oz. Vodka

    -2 oz. Cream of mushroom soup (prepared, not condensed)

    -Garnish with two tater tots and one pillow mint

    -Serve neat in a lowball glass rimmed with Hidden Valley Ranch ranch dressing powder.

For some inexplicable reason, this obvious triumph of a recipe was not immediately met with universal acclaim.  Although my boss, Larry, did - after a moment or two of thought - christen it 'The Lutheran Snowplow'.  So, he can't have been completely disinterested in the topic.  Or perhaps he just wanted to put a pin in things.  Who can say.

Now, one of the things that you're required by law to do as a citizen of the State of Minnesota is to make a Tater Tot Hotdish at regular intervals.  And that's not a state law, that's Federal.  Yeah, I don't know why they thought that was a good use of their time either, but there it is. A tater tot hot dish is what I'm assured the rest of the world knows as something called a 'casserole'. In its simplest form it's a layer of ground beef, topped by a layer of premixed cream of mushroom soup*** and your personal choice of can of vegetables.  I'm a corn purist myself, but a solid case can be made for mixed vegetables.  That's between you and your god.

***Pro hack - mix one can cream of mushroom soup and one can cream of celery.  You're welcome.

On top of that you dump a bag of frozen tater tots****, then bake the whole thing at 350 for about an hour.

**** If you don't know what tater tots are I don't even know how to help you.  

As I made the requisite run to the grocery store for the ingredients for the aforementioned hot dish, I realized something profound.  I was purchasing 2 of the 5 components for the greatest Minnesota themed alcoholic beverage ever conceived of in a green sand iron foundry.  Plus, I already had vodka at home, because I'm not an animal.  

The location of Hidden Valley Ranch ranch dressing powder packs is, by this point, a well-known thing and such was easily obtained.  That just left the elusive pillow mint.

I have to admit, my hopes were not high that I might find the elusive pillow mint at my local grocery store.  I briefly toyed with the thought of downloading some sort of dating app for women over 70 and looking for someone nearby, as such a woman would without question have a small dish of them sitting helpfully on a small living room table.  But fortune was with me (if not with our local septuagenarians looking for love) and the store actually carried them.  They're for some reason insisting on calling them 'cloud mints', but they are clearly the same thing.

It's happening.

All the pieces are in place.  We're doing this.

Now the question you're obviously thinking (other than 'Dear God, why?) is 'Is this a drink that's served chilled vodka cold, or hearty cream of mushroom soup warm?  And the answer to that is 'I honestly have no idea.' SO, we're going to prepare a split batch of soup and try it both ways, in the interest of scientific integrity.

As I write this, the tater tot hotdish has just been put in the oven.  All that's left now is to prep the second can of cream of mushroom soup, chill half of it, and then sit back and think about times in my life that I could have made better choices.

Will update later as we approach zero hour.

Cocktail with the red toothpick is warm. 
Cocktail with the blue toothpick is cold.

OK, the results are in and warm is 100% the way to go.  As you can see, getting tater tot garnish to balance on the rim proved to be beyond me, and the pillow mints dissolved almost immediately, which in hindsight I should have expected.

But fun fact - The pillow mint proved to provide a really fun finishing note to the overall flavor complexity.  I admit, I expected the pillow mint to be the albatross on this particular drink, but it turned out to be the MVP.

Also, powdered ranch dressing on the rim not only looks delightful but is also fucking delicious.  I would caution anyone from letting it dry on the glass though, because it appears to harden into a substance that could safely drive space shuttles through re-entry.

Also, if I tried this in the future, I would absolutely filter out the mushroom chunks, which were emotionally upsetting.

Also, and I feel obligated to mention this, it cannot help but be noted that the final product looks unmistakenly like a glass of what we might politely refer to as 'gentlemen fluid.'  I don't know what to do with that information.  Perhaps, as a courtesy, we can all just politely move on from that observation.

Your move, beverage makers of Wisconsin.

Requiescat In Pace, eh?

 

Well, October is here and for the first time in simply ages I'm not spending it as a Canadian.  Which is too bad, because access to socialized healthcare would be great just at the moment, wouldn't it?

To explain:

A few years back an old friend of mine got in touch with me regarding a job.  She was coordinating haunted bus tours in Saint Paul, MN, and needed tour guides.  That is to say, it was a tour of sites that were haunted on a bus which - to the best of my knowledge - was not.

A few fun facts about Saint Paul, MN:

1: It's actually the State Capitol of Minnesota, although nine people out of ten think Minneapolis is.  There's another interesting story nested inside that involving Pigs, the University of Minnesota, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, but we're already in a digression inside a digression inside a digression, so let's just leave that for now.*

2: There's a statistically significant number of sites in the City of Saint Paul that can make a reasonable claim to  being haunted.  

(A lot of this can be traced back to one small modernist hotel being built in the heart of the super rich area on Summit Avenue** back in the mid 1900s, which everyone got SUPER pissy about.  This led to a whole series of by-laws regarding how no one was ever allowed to change anything about any of the buildings in that neighborhood ever again without a personal note from God, and even that was likely to be appealed by the HOA.  The net result is that that stretch of Summit Avenue has the longest continuous run of unaltered Victorian mansions in the nation.  And Victorian Mansions accumulate ghost stories like R. Kelly does urine-porn. Allegedly.)

So, at the risk of getting back to the point, I was invited to come and be one of those guides who stands at the front of a bus-full of people for two hours at a stride relating ghoulish tales of spectral phenomena that occurred right outside your drivers' side windows or your door side windows.

But there was a complication.  The guides needed to be spooky costumed characters, because - you know - haunted bus tour.  And while I, like all right minded people, recognize Halloween as the only good holiday, I only had one Halloween costume on hand.

A Canadian Mountie.

Not the most terrifying figure looming over our All Hallow's Eve iconography. 

How, you might ask, did I end up with a Canadian Mountie costume.  Years earlier, after years of making fuzzy animal costumes for Halloween and somehow not ending up as an object of sexualized desire, I decided that maybe cute fuzzy animals did not immediately lead to thoughts of sex***, and that I should, perhaps, try something with a little more intrinsic sex appeal.  

The obvious answer was a uniform of some kind, but I wanted to also make sure to also be something a little more unique so that I would stand out.  At this point I happened across an airing of the 1980s film 'Revenge of the Nerds' in which one of the mean frat guys is at a costume party dressed as a Mountie and I thought 'Yes.  That is my answer.'  And then I thought, 'WOW does this movie not hold up in any way.  Yikes.  Just yikes.'

But still, the frat guy looked pretty good in it, so I made myself a Mountie costume, took it on a trip to Halloween in Key West, and absolutely, comprehensively, proved that the fuzzy animal costumes had NOT been the problem.

 

But back to the story.  So there I was with a tour guide job whose existence relied on my making a reasonable claim that the Canadian Mountie counted as 'spooky'.

Then, in the early waking moments one fine September morning, it came to me.  It would work.  And - more importantly - it was amusing to me.  SO I went to the home base of the tours and presented their new guide - 

Deadly Do-Right.

 Spirit of Canadian Vengeance.

Pictured, hopefully with permission, in background - Nurse Hatchet.  Who got me the gig.

And so a legend was born.  And for many years afterward my October nights were spent in an orgy of gratuitously drawn out long 'O's and attempts to work the words 'Zed' and 'Alluminium' into the stories as often as I possibly could.  Eventually I became aware of Letterkenny, and the next couple of seasons became an extended game of forcing fans of the show to identify themselves through the simple expedient of beginning each ghost story with the words, 'How're ya now?'

Good times.

All done now, alas.  Thanks to COVID, this season Deadly Do-Right rides no more, and the organization that does the tours is closing permanently in November.  It was a good ride, and I'm proud to say that more than twenty years after I bought them, I could still fit into my jodhpurs. Although they were, admittedly, sometimes tighter than others...

And so, I give you all one last time my introductory spiel from the start of every single tour.  Sing along if you know the correct pronunciation of 'house' and 'about'.

"Hello.  How're ya now?  My name is Deadly Do-Right, late of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  I was betrayed by my partner for the cost of a Tim Horton's Doughnut****, and ever since am cursed to roam the world as the Canadian Spirit of Vengeance. Which is the politest form of vengeance currently available.  And if you are not pure of heart, I will break into your house in the dead of night... znd leave a sternly worded note."

Good night, Deadly.  It's been fun being you.  Hopefully we'll meet again.

 

*In 1858, when Minnesota became a state, there were two big cities and so the compromise was that one of them would be the home of the State University, and the other would get to be the State Capitol.  Minneapolis got the University.  Unfortunately, the other City was named Pig's Eye, and had to go through some enthusiastic rebranding as 'Saint Paul' in order to make everyone not feel foolish.  Pigs Eye gets mentioned a startling number of times in the Little House on the Prairie books, which might raise some eyebrows as its primary industries were meat packing and prostitution.  Or, to put it another way, meat packing.

**When Tom Waits mentions in the song 'I Don't Want to Grow Up' that he doesn't want to live in a 'big old tomb on Grand Street', this is literally the neighborhood he's talking about.  He lived here briefly in his teens.

*** One inadvertent outcome of all this was when, after a decade of wondering where I'd put it, my old Squirrel costume showed up as the official 'Rally Squirrel' of the Saint Paul Saints baseball team.  I only have the vaguest of theories as to how it ended up there, but it's nice to see that it's aged well.

**** For a beautiful, short lived period Timmy's expanded internationally and we actually had them here, so people knew what I was talking about.

It's exactly like Go Ask Alice, but with Diedrich Bader instead of Peyote

So, the most amazing thing happened this morning, I...

I'm sorry... what?

2 and a half years...?

Really...?

Oh. Yeah.  About that...

It's fairly obvious to the casual observer that I'm not a bold user of social media.  This is for the fairly obvious reason.  I'm old and change frightens me.  Also, those kids keep walking across my lawn.

So, in addition to things like, say, forgetting about having a blog since the US had a functioning President*, I'm also not heavy into social media.  I have accounts with Twitter and Instagram, and was signed up on Tumblr until a few weeks ago when they stopped allowing pornogr a free exchange of ideas. But I rarely, if ever, look at or post on any of them.

*Seriously, who would have imagined that we'd be looking back at 2016 with longing regret?  We'd just lost Prince, Bowie, and Alan freaking Rickman** and I still think of Summer 2016 as that last moment before hope died.

** In hindsight, I wonder if the universe wasn't just politely sidling up to sufficiently cool and deserving people at the time, having a quiet word in their ear about upcoming events, and then discretely asking if they'd like to consider settling their check and making an early evening of it.

 So, there I was, pleasantly settled into curmudgeonly ludditolitry - if I might coin a phrase - when for some reason this last week a bizarre and unexpected transformation began taking place.

I started actually looking at my Twitter feed.

It's actually down to the fact that for the last couple of years I've been writing reviews for Douxreviews.com, and they're very on top of their twitter game.  Every time I post a review of something a tweet goes out notifying the world (and me) that said review exists, and provides a helpful link to read same.

So, because I'm drawn irresistibly to things with my name on them, I've gotten into the habit of  looking at other, non-me-related things on Twitter while I'm there.  It's a slippery slope, people. 

So, having gone from a person who has signed up for Twitter and resolutely ignored it, I'd become one of those people that reads things on Twitter.  And actively checks Twitter for said things to read.

At some point Twitter suggested that I follow Diedrich Bader.  I'm not sure exactly why, but I totally recommend it.  He's got a nice line in a kind of charming 'just another guy hanging out in the garage' vibe that leads me to believe that if you were hanging out with him and he suggested stealing a fire engine to drive to Mexico, then you'd totally do it because it sounded like such a reasonable suggestion at the time.*

*If you and Mr. Bader do attempt to steal a fire truck, be aware that they generally start with an ignition switch instead of a key, and you have to engage the battery first.  Also, they can be kind of a pig on gas, so expect to have to fill up again by the time you hit Rochester.**

**If you're starting in Minneapolis or surrounding suburbs.

Diedrich Bader, if the name doesn't immediately ring a bell, is currently playing Greg on the sitcom American Housewife, but if you Google him with your image search on you're pretty much guaranteed to go, 'Oh, him.  He was <that guy> in <that thing I liked>.'  Seriously, dude's been in a lot of cool stuff.

So, this morning he tweeted (see, I'm adopting the vernacular now) about a very amusing dream he had involving Allison Janney and Idris Elba, and something came over me.

I responded to his tweet, which I know is different from retweeting, and I don't think has a separate name for it other than 'responded', but it might and I don't care, because a few minutes later Diedrich Bader freaking 'liked' my tweet and responded (possibly another word) right back to it!.

And I have no idea what's happening to me now, but I swear to freaking God it was like I just unwrapped the Barbie I'd been hoping for all freaking year and I totally want to be a social media icon now!!  I want to tweet clever things now!  I want to please a clamoring pool of followers!!  I want to learn how to check and see if I have any followers!!  What exactly is a Youtube deal, and how do I get one??  Instagram - that's the one for pictures of food, right??  How does Tumblr's financial model not fall apart once they factor in the drop in usage that inevitably goes hand in hand with banning pictures of... you know what, we're not talking about Tumblr right now.

I get it, social media.  I have taken my first hit of interactive messaging, and the rush is heady and sweet, and I want me more.

I'm through the looking glass here, people.

For more 42nd Vizsla, follow me on... one of those...  app... things.  Just as soon as I figure out what my name is on them...

The business plan took a grim turn there...

So here's a conversation I had today over the work messaging system...

Me
Would you go eat at a restaurant called Two Bunny Brunch?
Assume that the waitresses are drag queens
 
Not Me
10:54 AM
I would eat there everyday
Is this an option?
 
Me
10:55 AM
A Facebook friend mentioned this morning in a comment that he'd interrupted a hawk's two bunny brunch while out running, and now I'm compelled to open a restaurant to use the name
There will be burlesque shows during your meal
 
Not Me
10:57 AM
as long as no bunnies are hurt, I'm totally in.
Pasties with my pastries!*
 
Me
10:57 AM
Oh... we will be starting each meal with a ritual bunny sacrifice at your table.
A bunny, killed by a drag queen while you watch
it's a lot of our overhead expense to be honest
plus PETA is SUPER pissed
 
Not Me
11:00 AM
well, im honestly kinda into a drag queen crushing a bunny's neck
 
Me
11:00 AM
the really weird thing about it is that it's a totally vegan restaurant
 
Not Me
11:01 AM
Dude, for real, lets go into the restaurant business together
 
Me
11:05 AM
"And now, while I get your drinks order, Mis Toulittah Pepsee will strangle a rabbit"

Yes.  This is exactly what they installed the messaging system for.

*Pasties and Pastries is still available as a name for that stripper operated bakery you've always dreamed of opening.  You're welcome.

Once Again, the Forensic Sciences Ruin Musical Theater

For reasons that aren't completely explained, I completely missed the show Bob's Burgers for the first five years of its run.*

It's still running now, for the record**

**Unless you're reading this in the far future and this is all just an historic record of some kind***

***Btw - just out of curiosity - Jetpacks? Did that ever happen? 

If you, like me, were living in a yurt and are unfamiliar with Bob and his burgers, here's the basic upshot- Bob's Burgers is a cartoon aimed for adults* that airs on the Fox network. It follows Bob Belcher and his family, who own and operate a hamburger restaurant and get into what can loosely be described as 'wacky hi-jinx'.

*In the sense that it features simultaneously more intelligent and occasionally cruder humor, not in the sense that there are boobs everywhere. Although it does score major points by showing Bob's older daughter, Tina - a girl just beginning puberty - taking her fear of zombies and overcoming it by making a conscious decision to objectify them sexually, which is - if nothing else - not the sort of thing you're going to see on just any show. So... you know... Suck it, Walking Dead.**

**Not literally.

One particular wacky hi-jinc (Is that the singular for hi-jinx, or is hi-jinx both singular and plural?  You know... like Sheep or Moose.) involved a school project about Thomas Edison and an elephant named Topsy

Now, it should be acknowledged that this episode, upon further research, contained more than a bit of slander (or possibly libel.  The courts are split in an interesting way as to whether broadcast television counts as written word or spoken.) Specifically, a big chunk of the plot is based on an apparently long standing belief that Thomas Edison was involved in the electrocution of an elephant named Topsy as part of his campaign to prove that the new Alternating Current was more dangerous than his own Direct Current*

*It turns out that this isn't actually true.  Yes, there was an elephant named Topsy that was electrocuted for being 'Bad', whatever that means to an elephant at the turn of the twentieth century, but Edison himself had nothing to do with it.  The confusion probably stems from the fact that the electrocution was recorded on a camera that Edison had patented. Seriously, the footage is still out there and VERY findable on the web, but you're probably happier not having seen it.

So in the plot of the show, Louise, the younger daughter and amusingly borderline psychotic*, is assigned to do a project about Thomas Edison.  Because the teach in question super LOVES Thomas Edison, she of course frames the whole thing as both a hit piece and (less expectedly) a musical.

*From the wrong side of the border...

Except of course that things get a bit carried away and instead of a musical about Edison electrocuting an elephant we end up with a musical about Edison and an elephant falling in love with one another.  To quote the show itself on this subject - 'If it's not man on elephant love, it ain't worth singing about.'

And so, in a very catchy and singable riff, we begin with a thoughtful Topsy the elephant musing about her own mortality with the line, 'They'll say Awww, Topsy... at my Autopsy...'

Which is very touching and whistful... until you remember that it's only called an autopsy when performed on human beings.  On an animal it's called a Necropsy.

It still rhymes, but it's not as fun and clever. Sure, there's some wiggle room to argue that the capacity for self awareness and love (not to mention being able to sing a soulful musical number) might justify bumping Topsy up to a human-like standard in order to justify using the term autopsy, but still...

Stupid science.

Here's the closing number.  Yes, that is Kevin Kline as the voice of Thomas Edison.

Hakuna Matata, Asshole

I doubt that I'm alone in indulging in the occasional bit of freeway Schadenfreude*.

*On the off chance - it means 'The delight you take in witnessing something bad happen to someone else.  The fact that the German people felt the need to coin a term for this specific emotion probably says a lot about them, culturally.**

** I kid, Germany. You know I love you

Case in point, the other day I was merging onto one freeway from a different freeway when I witnessed a driver ahead of me stage an act of open defiance against the Zipper Merge*

*A curiously heated point of contention in American Freeway etiquette. The basic premise is that when merging onto a freeway there is usually a special lane of traffic on the side from which you're entering** which goes for half a mile or so before it tapers off and ceases existing, at which point you're expected to have become part of existing traffic. The question that really gets people worked up is - at what point during that half mile should you get your act together and actually merge into the existing traffic lane. One school of thought is that you should immediately merge into the permanent lane as soon as physically possible, as waiting until the last minute means that you're rude and inconsiderate. 

That school of thought is, of course, completely 100% wrong.

The correct school of thought is that you're intended to go all the way up the half mile of side road and then take turns with the existing traffic, alternating from either lane - exactly the way a zipper closes. You can tell that this is the correct school of thought, because THE FREEWAY DEPARTMENT FREAKING FLAT OUT SAID SO.  REPEATEDLY.  The point being that they made the entire half mile stretch of road because they actually wanted you to use the entire half mile stretch. If they wanted you to only use 50 feet they would only have made that much.

Regardless of that clear and obvious truth however, almost without fail you'll encounter some asshat who feels like it's his personal mission in life to deliberately block other cars from merging into traffic, zipper-style, and the principle that they know best.

**It's called an acceleration lane.  This might be considered a clue as to why stopping in the middle of it is just bone-headedly wrong.

So the other day I witnessed a pickup truck go out of his way to run someone off the road rather than let them merge into existing traffic, only to have the exact same thing happen to him when he had to merge into the next lane of traffic a mile or so later.

I immediately thought to myself, 'Hakuna Matata, Asshole', because at some point the details of the Lion King became vague enough in my head that Hakuna Matata sort of means 'Circle of Life' to me, regardless of the fact that it's a totally unrelated song and means nothing of the sort*

*You totally just hummed, 'It means No Worries', didn't you.

Fast forward to the following day, when I observed in the parking ramp a smaller car parked completely centered between two parking spots.*

*More on this vehicle another time, because the story doesn't end there

Upon my return to the parking ramp, I was somewhat pleased to see that the ramp management had left a stern note on their windshield castigating them for parking over the lines and threatening to have them towed if it happened again.  No sooner had I begun to bask in my righteous pleasure at seeing them justly struck down than I got to Lucille (My truck) and discovered that I had received the exact same note. On inspection it turned out that I was, indeed, about half a foot over the line on the passenger side (Lucille's a big girl).

Stupid Circle of Life.

Please Stop Hacking

There's an unfortunate tendency on the internet lately.*

*To be fair, there's an argument to be made that the internet is made up entirely of unfortunate tendencies, but this one stands out at the moment.

I refer of course to the unfortunate groundswell of vaguely interesting ideas being described as 'Life Hacks'

At this point any even moderately interesting new use of... let's say a dust pan for examples' sake... is getting tossed out in some endless parade of clickbait articles titled something along the lines of 'Genius Life Hacks That Will CHANGE YOUR WORLD!'

At first this was moderately amusing turn of phrase, but at this point one thing needs to be made abundantly clear to the earnest young bloggers out there...

YOU ARE NOT 'HACKING'. YOU HAVE NOT MAGICALLY UNRAVELED THE BASE CODE OF THE UNIVERSE IN ORDER TO RE-WRITE IT  YOUR WHIM. YOU STUMBLED ON A WAY TO HELP LADIES PEE STANDING UP.  
YOU ARE NOT MAGIC NOW.

 
That needed to be said.

See, Adam Baldwin, This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

For the past week or so my Internet search bar has sat on the top of my screen looking like this-

Now, at first glance this might seem like sort of an odd question, since it's probably reasonable to assume that either you're already aware of why you don't like Adam Baldwin, or you don't don't like Adam Baldwin and don't particularly care about why others do don't.

To understand how I got to the point where I had to ask the question, it's important to understand a fairly fundamental point-

I tend to be completely oblivious about a lot of things going on in the world that other people seem to care a lot about*

*Seriously... I only just this last week discovered Archer.

So, the first Thing I Wasn't Aware Of-

MovieBob

I expect there are a lot of us out there who were unaware of the existence of MovieBob until fairly recently*

*I also expect that there is a much larger group of people who still are completely unaware of MovieBob's existence for that matter

For those who are still unfamiliar, the short version is - MovieBob is the guy that did that online review of the movie Pixels that everyone was passing around on Facebook a few weeks ago.

The longer version - MovieBob (real name Bob Chipman) is one of the many people making their living these days reviewing movies (and other things) online. Until recently he worked producing fairly amusing video reviews for a specific online 'culture' site which I will not name here.*

*Mostly because I don't yet know how rude I'm going to be about them and don't want to get sued, but also partially because they appear to have treated Bob pretty unfairly.

The review of the movie Pixels (If you haven't listened to it) is a delightful profane rant about the recent Adam Sandler movie that uses a zesty mix of invective and reference to biological fluids in a way that I simply have never heard before. It's well worth seven minutes of your time if you aren't bothered by that sort of thing.

Having listened to this, I started tracking down other of his reviews to listen to, because I liked his style and enjoy listening to that sort of 'cultural critique' thing. In one of his other pieces he made the observation that he felt like Joss Whedon was the right person to direct The Avengers because at the end of the day The Avengers was going to be about the group/found family dynamic and that is clearly the sort of thing that Joss Whedon does Very Very well. The way Bob phrased this was that Joss Whedon was so good at this sort of thing that at one point he had even made 'Sentient piece of Human Garbage Adam Baldwin likeable for like a minute'*

*Not an exact quote, but pretty darn close.

The Second Thing I wasn't aware of-

Apparently We Don't Like Adam Baldwin...?

Prior to hearing this, my knowledge of Adam Baldwin was -

1. He played Jayne on Firefly, which was awesome
2. He was some guy on the last season of Angel, which was pretty good but not as good as Gina Torres had been on that show the previous year.
3. The second act of Full Metal Jacket has always felt a little formless to me (although I think that might be kind of the point).  Oh, and..
4.  He once lost a fight with a manatee

So hearing him referred to as a sentient piece of human garbage by a man who's opinion I was coming to respect in a, 'Hey, you've said a lot of stuff online that I broadly agree with' kind of way gave me a moment of pause. And so I did what any sensible person would do in the circumstances and googled it.

The Third Thing I wasn't aware of-

Gamergate

To be fair, I was vaguely aware that this was a thing.  My sum total of my knowledge about it was pretty much summed up by, 'A bunch of anonymous guys on the Internet found an excuse to justify* threatening women with violent rape while distributing said women's personal information.' It's all done in the name of 'ethics', apparently.

*Justify to themselves, obviously.

It turns out that any research about why we don't like Adam Baldwin is irrevocably linked with Gamergate, which has unfortunately led me to having to learn more about the whole thing. For example, I eventually googled 'SJW', as I had no idea what it meant and people kept insisting on using it in sentences.  (It turns out it means 'Social Justice Warrior(s)', and appears to be a catchall phrase for 'Shut up, I don't want to think about that.') The reason that the whole thing is so intertwined with Adam Baldwin is...

The Fourth Thing I wasn't aware of - 

Adam Baldwin Coined the Phrase 'Gamergate' (allegedly)

No, I'm not going to put the hashtag on it.  This whole thing is dangerously searchable enough as it is, and while there's very little that Gamergate enthusiasts could do to my credit score that I haven't done myself already there's no reason to push it.

Not only did he (allegedly) coin the term, but he seems to spend a lot of time and effort using it as a hashtag on twitter. Which sort of brings us to -

One Thing that We All Already Knew 

 

Joss Whedon is a Better Person Than You.

Or me. Or anyone else not named Joss Whedon.*

*There's a case to be made for Jane Espenson...

There's an easily findable interview with Our Joss in which he addresses the Adam Baldwin question. Essentially, the question he was asked was - 'Is working with Adam Baldwin weird since the whole gamergate thing?' to which he said (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'You know, Adam is a hardworking, decent guy that always came to work ready to work hard and do his best. That's the Adam I like to think about, not the Adam who sometimes shouts down me or Felicia Day on Twitter'

That there is pretty much the definition of a classy answer, and it goes some way toward again confirming why Joss is so beloved not just by his fans but also by just about everyone who's ever worked with him.*

*Although am I the only one who gets the feeling that there's some sort of weird vibe between him and Sarah Michelle Gellar?

This, in a big circular way, eventually led me to the answer to the question I was ostensibly researching in the first place.

One Thing We ALL Should Know Instinctively

It Is Not - EVER - OK to Attack Felicia Day

Not even verbally.

Not even on Twitter.

Not cool, Adam Baldwin.

The Grapefruit is Coming For Your Family

So for the last few weeks I've been taking a ridiculous number of pills.*

*Some backstory - NOT enjoyable ones. Turns out I had a bacterial infection in my stomach which needed antibiotics to kill it. Unfortunately, most antibiotics also kill me. Which means they have to give me low level alternative antibiotics in large quantities. So I've ended up having to take 18 pills a day for the last few weeks. Fun side effects - constant nausea, light-headedness, and the tendency to get winded standing up or crossing a room.  It's been awesome.

In that there have been many days when the most I'm physically capable of is laying on the couch watching TV and not enjoying a lovely cocktail*, I've pretty much spent the majority of September irritatingly sober, pukey, and watching television**

* It turns out that alcohol magnifies the whole 'nausea' thing by about 5000%. Not a mistake you make more than once.

** Plus side - I finally got around to checking out Bob's Burgers and Archer***. 

*** Seriously, how had I missed Archer?

Now, it turns out that if you're watching a lot of TV and are sober (which I do not recommend) you become irritatingly aware of the commercials. And of course, in that meds were the cause of my current state, I became even more aware of the commercials for dodgy medications.

You know the ones - Handsome and/or lovely young commercial actor standing on a windswept beach and unable to poop/sustain an erection. You know, like you do. Finally the name of some new miracle cure for whatever the problem is is referenced at which point the handsome/lovely actor in question begins running through a field of flowers (presumably on their way to pop a squat or hold a trapper keeper awkwardly in front of their bulging trousers. This then leads to some soft lit nature shots while a voiceover lists the many horrible things that the medication will ALSO do to you*

*Why is anal leakage always on this list?  Is there any man-made pharmaceutical that does NOT immediately cause anal leakage? 

This then segues to some polite-but-firm legally mandated warnings about what not to do while taking the medication*

*And yet for some reason 'Don't wear white pants' never seems to be on this list.

The other night I was watching one of these, and the 'Don't do what Donny Don't Do Does' list began as usual - While using this product, don't drive, don't operate heavy machinery, don't vote in any national elections, etc., etc..  Then in the middle of this list they threw in, 'Don't eat grapefruit.'

Now, is it just me, or is that a curiously specific instruction?  Not citrus, specifically grapefruit.

I choose to believe that someone writing copy for that ad had been hanging out with a buddy who sold grapefruit the night before who had completely pissed him off somehow. (Perhaps he ate the last potato skin, who can say with fruit-sellers). Still stewing over the argument, he throws the grapefruit thing into the 'Don't' list with a profound sense of 'THAT'll show him.'

In my mind, that's how the world of advertising works.

Dig-Duggar

For those too young to remember, back in the 1980s there was a videogame called...

Wait, hold that thought.  Let's clarify.

Back in the 1980s, videogames were something that you had to actually leave your house to play.

I know.  Take a minute with that. It's a bit of a culture shock.  Breathe through it.  Better?  OK.

So.  In the day, videogames all lived in a store space in the local mall called an 'Arcade'. These videogames were large stand up contraptions roughly the size and shape of a telephone booth...

Dammit...

OK, roughly the size and shape of one of those streetside things you can buy newspapers out o...

Oh for crap sake.

Um... Photo booths?  Do we still have photo booths? No? What about voting booths...?  We still do that, right...?

OK.  They were about the size and shape of a voting booth*

*People of Florida, you're just going to have to google it.

Anyway, an arcade was a darkish room full of neon signs and these large stand up videogame machines that you had to put quarters into to play.  They were about six hundred times larger than a video game station you might see today, only played one game each, and almost never involved scoring points for raping prostitutes. Also there was Skeeball.  Which was awesome.

One game that we particularly awesome was called Dig-Dug. In it you were a pudgy little guy relentlessly digging himself further and further down while trying to avoid attention from the other people around you.  If one came to close you had a special tube you stuck in them and pumped until they exploded.

Which brings me of course to Josh Duggar

To establish my cred on this issue up front, I was WAY ahead of the curve on the whole 'Hating the Duggars' thing.  I've despised them from back when their show was called Two Kids and We're Planning on Having a Couple Baseball Teams' Worth More Because We're Too Stupid to Understand Birth Control. They represent everything wrong in modern culture with their smug hypocritical stupidity, simple expecting to be handed everything they could ever want simply by shouting louder and louder how Jesus only loves people like them because apparently the fundamentalist bunch just eats that shit up. They contribute absolutely nothing to the world except bigotry, hypocrisy and a steady workforce for Matt Staver's secret camp for manufacturing knock off wallets for export

Whew.  As I said.  I despise the Duggars and everything they stand for.

So, Josh Duggar then.  Assuming that you live in a yurt, let me bring you up to speed.  After spending many, many years on TV telling us all how Jesus hand carved their family out of the purest ivory and they are always perfect, it came to light that they had to add the caveat 'Except that time we totally let our oldest son repeatedly molest four of his younger sisters without ever facing any consequences'

According to their press release, they found out about it, told Jesus about it, and Jesus looked back at them and said, 'Aw, you guys.  I could never stay mad at you. We're totally good.  You tell him I said go ahead and molest away.'

Now this story has more or less faded by this point, except for one unfortunate thing. The Ashley Madison website (That's the one that exists solely to provide people a forum to cheat on their spouses) got hacked, and it turned out that our boy Josh had a couple of accounts with them. Now, there's no actual evidence that he hooked up with anybody, but he did prepay for the 'Guaranteed Affair within three months package'* and did not request a refund

*A real thing btw

 So, that's Women and Children crossed off of Josh's 'Things I'd like to have sex with' list. At this point I'm enthusiastically looking forward to the almost inevitable announcement that he's been caught having anonymous gay sex in a public restroom. Not because I enjoy watching bad things happen to the Duggars (although I certainly do!) but because he's this close to pulling off the hat trick and it would be a shame if he didn't make it.

It's the same reason we rooted for American Pharoah at Belmont.

In Retrospect, I Kind of Blame the People of the Mountain

So many years ago, back in the halcyon age before the Internet (and computers for that matter...) I had a grade school teacher who was a bit of a hippie. 

Regularly at school assemblies he would bring his guitar and we would all sing songs along the line of 'If I Had a Hammer', and 'Leaving on a Jet Plane', with the lyrics written on huge sheets of white paper in the front of the school gymnasium. 

One of Mr. Case (for that was his name)'s standards was 'One Tin Soldier'. For those unfamiliar with the song in question, you can review it here*

*As presented in The Legend of Billy Jack**

**I'm not going to even attempt to explain The Legend of Billy Jack

Now, the song is a pretty straightforward 70s peace anthem swaddled in vaguely Tolkien-esque middle-ages village imagery*

*If you could fit the entire 70s into a giant stock pot and let it boil for a very long time, it would eventually reduce to something not unlike the song 'One Tin Soldier'

So the basic story is this - We have the Mountain people who supposedly have a 'treasure'. We also have the Valley people who live next door and would very much like to swing by and borrow a cup of treasure. The Valley people send a polite note requesting the treasure, the mountain people send a deliberately vague note back, and so the valley people slaughter the mountain people and discover that the treasure is, in actual point of fact, the words 'Peace on Earth', which are for some reason know only to the mountain people hidden under a rock.

Now, as a kid I readily accepted that this was a story about bad valley people who killed their neighbors, but looking back on it now I can't help but think that the Mountain people have to take at least some of the blame for the whole situation. I mean, I don't want to blame the victim here, but let's take a look at how easily the whole situation could have been cleared up by having the following simple conversation-

VALLEY PEOPLE

 Hey, we've heard you have a bunch of treasure. 

The 411 is that it's tons of gold. We'd like you to give it to us.

 FYI, we're totes willing to kill for it.

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

I'm sorry, what?  We couldn't hear you over our enormous beards

VALLEY PEOPLE

Your tons of golden treasure.  Please give it to us. 

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

Oh... I totally see where the miscommunication here is.  

We don't actually have literal treasure like gold or silver or anything like that.  

When we say treasure we're talking about a 

metaphoric representation of peaceful coexistence.  

VALLEY PEOPLE

You what now?

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

 We wrote the words 'Peace on Earth' under a rock. See?  Look, you can totally see it.

VALLEY PEOPLE

Why would you even do that?

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

It's ... like.. a metaphor.

VALLEY PEOPLE

Why did you put it under a rock?

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

Because shut up, that's why.

VILLAGE PEOPLE

Why are we even a part of this conversation?

VALLEY PEOPLE

Oh CHRIST, not them again.  Screw this, we're going home.

See?  Totally cleared the situation up and nobody had to get slaughtered even a little bit.

Honestly, it's like the Mountain People wanted to get wiped out.

#SadHulk

A bit of backstory -

For the last couple of months I've had an ongoing issue of some kind going on in my guts.  I'm still not sure what's going on exactly, but my current theory is that an alien is going to erupt from my sternum at any moment.

As part of the ongoing quest to figure out what exactly is going on I've been going through a series of medical tests. First the simple stuff - bloodwork, etc. That showed nothing wrong. Then the 'poo samples' saga (which has already had far too much discussion here)  This also came back and showed nothing wrong. Then we progressed to the ultrasound to check organ function - this was notable for including the following exchange-

ME:

I suppose this is where most people make the obvious joke 

about finding out if it's a boy or a girl.

VERY NICE ULTRASOUND TECH LADY: 

(In a voice of unspeakable weariness) 

... yes.

Once the ultrasound came back showing nothing wrong we moved on to something called a radioactive injection test*.

*Because apparently the name 'Fiendish Death Ray Test was already taken, but they still wanted to sound really sinister.

As tests go it was fairly non-threatening (despite the ominous name). The basic upshot of it is that they put an IV in your arm and fill your veins with radioactive goo. Then they mount you on an enormous metal sandwich board  and scan your organs for traces of radiation. The practical upshot of this is that you can watch on the conveniently placed monitor as your liver, gall bladder and small intestine all light up in dayglow colors as radioactive goo gets processed through them.

Now the answer to the two obvious questions -

Yes, the test came back showing nothing wrong, 

and

No, I do not appear to have been turned into the Incredible Hulk

I confess to being disappointed on both counts.

While I had to wait to hear back from the clinic for the first answer, I ascertained the second on my own through the simple expediency of recruiting a colleague at work to attempt to make me mad and see if it caused me to transform into a giant green* rage monster**

*possibly grey 

** Arguably not the world's most controlled experiment...

One slight procedural hitch - I don't really get angry very often, which caused a little difficulty. So in practice the experiment ran more like -

HELPFUL COLLEAGUE:

Did you hear?  You're not going to be allowed to have a teacup pig at work in the new offices

ME:

Oooooh.  <Sad Noise>

HELPFUL COLLEAGUE:

No, you're not supposed to get sad.  You're supposed to get angry!

ME:

But that's really sad news!

HC:

If you don't get angry how are you going to turn into the Hulk?

ME:

Well... maybe some Hulks aren't triggered by rage.  Maybe some Hulks are triggered by other emotions.  Maybe I'm Sad Hulk.

HC:

Sad Hulk would be Awesome! Sad Hulk would say things like "Sad Hulk wrote you poem. You probably won't like."

ME:

"Sad Hulk Eat whole tub of ice cream.  No one ever love anyway..."

HC:

"Sad Hulk lay down until DIE."





Please begin submitting your own quotes from Sad Hulk with the hashtag #SadHulk.  My debilitating stomach pain will totally be worth it if this ends up on the Nerdist.

The Subtleties of Poo Transfer

A few years back now I was diagnosed with an H. Pylori infection. For those fortunate enough not to be familiar with the microscopic bastards in question, they're bacteria that have found a way to live in stomach acid. As tiny parasites, alone they're irrelevant, but when they gather in large numbers they can cause discomfort and nausea. Much like the Tea Party.

Typically this is a simple infection to clear up with a shout of antibiotics.  Unfortunately, two things prohibit this for me -

1: I'm allergic to pretty much all of the effective antibiotics

2: I'd just as soon not have my throat swell shut and die.

I ended up having to spend three weeks taking seventeen lesser antibiotics every single friggin' day - by the end of which I was actively hoping to be killed by falling airplane waste.

So as you might imagine, I was less than thrilled to discover recently that chronic stomach issues might be a recurrence of the same thing.*

*The other options are Ulcer, Gall Bladder failure, and imminent Alien protrusion.  It's a crap shoot at this point.

First they sent me in for an ultrasound, which appears to have eliminated both gall bladder and Alien (although not definitively). To determine the presence of H. Pylori required some labwork. Which meant delivering unto them a sample.  Of poo.

Friends, there is no casual way to hand a stranger a small vile of your own poo.

It simply cannot be done.

Even amongst the closet of friends such an exchange can be difficult. For example, apparently such a thing is not an appropriate Christmas gift...

Here then, because I am super helpful, are some suggestions for making your poo handoff come out just a little more smoothly.

-The 'Drop and Run'.
A variation of 'Look, what's that on fire over there', followed by dropping your kids off at the pool and running for dear life - the most crucial part of successfully achieving this one is to have your sample clearly labelled.  Otherwise you don't get any credit for it and end up having to do the whole thing overt again.

-The 'High Five'
What clinic receptionist wouldn't be pleasantly surprised to get a perky morning High Five?  Sure, He (or she) might be a little disconcerted by discovering a sample of fecal matter left in their hand afterwards, but I bet they'd be so amused by the whole thing that they'd totally just laugh it off. 

For bonus points you could try the 'Up High. Down Low. Straight Through. Here's Poo'

-The 'Really Cool Bartender'
This requires that the receptionist has a really log (and relatively slick) counter and that they are sitting at one end of it.  Careful not to overshoot, or you'll again have to start over. The bonus part however is that if you pull it off correctly you never have to get particularly close to them, and how often can you say that about someone holding your feces?

-The 'Owning It'
 Walk in and calmly announce in a loud and confident voice, 'I am here to drop off a sample of my own feces. Which I have personally collected within the requested time frame and secured in the provided container. Take my feces, and do what tests you will. For I am comfortable with this, our interaction.'

That look she will give you?  That look is respect.


You're Welcome.

Suicide - 1 A.D.

I should stress at the outset - This is in no way a cry for help, I'm not particularly depressed*, and there's absolutely no reason for anyone to see this column as a cause for concern.  No, you may not have my record collection.  Just wanted to make that perfectly clear before we begin.

*Although I would not turn down a cookie. 

Almost exactly a year ago a good friend of mine killed himself.

It still feels weird typing that, although the whole thing has reached that curious level of simultaneously feeling like it only happened a day or so ago and no longer being able to remember a time before it happened.

I don't think, generally speaking, that any of our mutual friends were aware that we were particularly close. Most of our conversation was done through texting since we were rarely in the same place at the same time. That said, we chatted via text most days.  About a lot of serious stuff. At the time he died he probably knew more personal information about me than anyone else on the planet. I like to think that I'd had the same level of confidence from him, but I couldn't say for sure.

Something strange happened after he died. While he was alive I never gave a thought as to whether or not anyone else knew that we were as good of friends as we were. It just never crossed my mind. After he shot himself I realized I was developing a strange resentment of how no one knew. Our friendship had always been in Stealth Mode, and now that it was gone I became obsessed with the fact that no one had known about it. I had a recurring urge to try to force the fact into any conversation I could.  (I think I managed to resist the urge most of the time, although probably not as well as I'd like to tell myself.)

Without sugar-coating it, I had a strong drive to try to make his death about me.*

*I'm making a concerted effort to not delete that sentence, as it's not a comfortable thing to admit to myself. I suspect that it's probably a pretty normal response to the situation, psychologically speaking. Normally I would ask my friend Carol, who's a trained psychologist. Or psychiatrist. Now I think about it I'm not actually sure which. I'd like to be able to ask her that as well. Unfortunately, that's not possible.

Carol died of her cancer a few days ago.

As I posted to my Facebook wall (how did we do public grief before the internet? Does anyone even remember?) I had a similar feeling.  I posted something along the lines of 'My friend has passed away from cancer', and moments after posting it I thought to myself, 'What are you doing?  You're Facebook friends with her husband.  He'll see that.  This is his loss, don't try to make it about you.'

I think at the end of the day that the problem is just that we as a culture (generally) and I as a person (specifically) just don't handle death particularly well.  We lack the vocabulary to talk about it openly, and so it turns into a non stop game of 'Is it OK for me to be feeling this about that.'  Meanwhile, Reality TV has spawned an entire sub-culture of people who do take every situation and make it entirely about themselves, and for god sake we don't want to be like them.

So what is that? What do we do about it? Why can't we just say, 'Dave was my friend. Carol was my friend. And it super sucks for me that they're gone.'  Sure, It also sucks for other people. It sucks more for some other people. That doesn't make it suck less for me.

Maybe at the end of the day, all we really want is some sort of affirmation that even though our friend is gone, our friendship with them still mattered. Regardless of who did or didn't know about it at the time.

And here's a cute video of penguins who love each other having adventures, because Carol would have liked it and I could use such a thing right now.

Too Hot for Science Friday

I was listening to public radio on my drive in to work the other day (Pretentious Dog Alert) and happened to catch a regular feature they do called 'Science Friday'*

*Because it's on Fridays.  And about science.  It's hosted by Ira Flatow, who once upon a time hosted the TV show Newton's Apple. This is mostly notable because it was given a shout out on an episode of Archer, which means that Ira is officially cooler than you or me.

There were a few stories being discussed on this particular day.  The first of them was a little piece about medical problems in the Koala population in Australia.  Specifically; research has determined that over 50% of the Koalas in Australia have Chlamydia.

Feel free to take a moment at this point to say to yourself, 'What the HELL is going on in Australia??'

Now, Ira went on the specify that this is not the same strain of Chlamydia that humans are capable of getting, but it does still reinforce the need to discuss past partners every time you want to get intimate with a koala.  It also explains the Australian folk saying, 'Hey, get your whore Koala off of my lawn!'

Tomorrow:  Science Friday Continues

Tom Brady's Balls

First off, let me say hello to those of you who ended up here via a Google search looking for something entirely different.  I apologize for the confusion and wish you luck in your quest for certain photos.  Might I suggest using image search to help speed up results.*

*Probably not a great idea if you're at work however...

For those who haven't been paying attention to the story by virtue of not being American or having standards in what you consider 'newsworthy', the US has currently been embroiled in something that the media insists on calling 'Deflategate'*.

*They call it this because people are inherently stupid and seem Hell bent on believing that 'gate' is a suffix meaning 'Scandal' as opposed to just being part of the name of a hotel. I've already gone on about it at some length here, if you're at all interested.

The basic upshot of this particular scandal is this -

American Football (which can be loosely described as playing rugby while dressed as a robot) has a regular season of seventeen weeks during which each team plays sixteen games.*

*Each team is allotted one week out of those seventeen to not play. They call this a 'bye' week for reasons I don't understand and can't be bothered to Google.

After the end of the regular season the league picks the teams that had the best records in their respective divisions, two other teams referred to as 'wild cards' and one team that doesn't stand a chance in Hell but everybody feels sorry for, and those teams play a series of postseason games to determine which two teams will play the Superbowl*

*A sporting event notable for the fact that the vast percentage of people watching it on television are only doing do to see the commercials, Janet Jackson's nipple, or both**

**Ms. Jackson's*** right nipple is currently a spokesnipple for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Their ads are surprisingly tasteful.

*** Because I'm nasty.

Now, relevant to this story - the franchise team out of Boston is called The New England Patriots. I don't know why they identify themselves as being from New England instead of Boston, but I assume that it's to distance themselves from the accent.  Like any group referring to themselves as 'Patriots', they spend the vast bulk of their time attempting to be as large a bag of dicks as they possibly can. (more on that phenomena here... but be aware, I accidentally spoil the end of Goldfinger somewhere around the last paragraph)   

The Quarterback for the NEP is a man named Tom Brady. (For the foreign among you - the Quarterback is the one in the middle with the good hair.) And according to information that came to light after the fact, he apparently had one of the equipment boys adjust his balls before this year's championship game.

<I'm going to take a moment to savor that last sentence>

More specifically, (and less like a twelve year old) he had someone take all of the game footballs into a quiet room and let a bunch of air out of them because that apparently make them easier to catch. The Patriots went on to win that game, and then to win the Superbowl the following week, and then back to their regular schedule of Narcissism and dutch ruddering*. Eventually a commission looked into the whole thing and released a statement that while they were pretty sure he had tampered with the footballs they were absolutely certain that he was kind of a prick, and so they suspended him for four games, fined the team a bit of money, and went back to their regular schedule of resolutely ignoring spousal abuse.

*definitely turn off the image search before looking that one up.

I hope that this has explained the situation.

Run, Forrest! Preferably, Directly into a Combine Thresher!

In case the title doesn't make it clear, let me state one thing unambiguously.

I HATE the film Forrest Gump.*

*But only because it's a worthless, trite, hack-job, piece of shit that only exists to take away two and a half hours of your life that you might otherwise do something productive with.

I've gone so far in the past as to state unequivocally that every single person involved in the making of the movie should be beaten to death with a VHS copy just for having inflicted it on the world.*

*With the exception of Gary Sinise.  He's suffered enough

So, earlier today I was taking one of those online quizzes that seem to be one of the three reasons that Facebook exists.  The quiz was: How many of these 100 important books have you read.  Now, I'm down with literacy, and I get that this kind of lists is fairly subjective (but seriously... Bridget Jones' Diary...?  No.  Just No.)

I was nearing the end of the quiz when I came across entry 98 - John Kennedy Toole's* steaming excremental tome, A Confederacy of Dunces.

*Yes, I know he committed suicide years before it was published and his mother pushed to get it published posthumously and blah blah blah.  That's all very sad.  The book still sucks.

This caused me to publicly make a pissy comment* about the quiz in question, in which I referred to A Confederacy as the Forrest Gump of literature**

*One of the other two reasons Facebook exists.

** Yes, I know it was also a book.

I should clarify what I mean by that.  When I refer to anything as being the Forrest Gump of its Oeuvre, what I mean to say is that it is relentlessly shit, and yet people insist on pretending like it's not only not shit, but somehow an amazing breakthrough in whatever medium it's infesting.

So, in the interest of clearing this up - Here are the reasons why Forrest Gump is utterly, relentlessly, Shit.

1: The moral of the story is pretty much 'Go ahead and pity-f*ck the developmentally disabled guy who has a crush on you because you never know when you might accidentally die of AIDS in the early 80s and have to dump your kid on him'

2: It substitutes - at EVERY turn - crass sentimental nostalgia for character development, theme, plot, symbolism and storytelling.  We're not supposed to be following a character's journey (which is good, because Forrest clearly doesn't take one - he's 100% unchanged by each and every event of the film.  But we're not supposed to notice that.  We're supposed to spend the entire movie going, 'Aww...remember John Lennon?  Remember that shit happens T-shirt? Remember when films were supposed to be about plot or character development?'  Neither does Robert Zemeckis.)

3: And this is my real problem with the movie-

IF YOU SET UP A BOOKEND STRUCTURE FOR YOUR STORY YOU DO NOT GET TO SPEND 45 MINUTES POINTLESSLY SCREWING AROUND AFTER THE FINAL BOOKEND SCENE.

It's not my fault as a viewer that you completely forgot to tell a story before that point, and it's too late to try to do so now. Particularly when the story you cram into those last 45 minutes is so relentlessly condescending, trite and noxious.

Honestly, I would rather spend two hours and twenty-five minutes helping someone control their gastro-intestinal bleed than sit through this again. At least the guy with the GI bleed would KNOW that he was pouring shit all over me, and might even be apologetic about it.

I'm glad we got that cleared up.