Thursday

There are people who only communicate by shouting. It is a large and spread-out family. Lots of them are spectators at sports venues, sometimes they are children with their eyes pinched tight and red mouths open wide. I worry they will never learn to speak, but it isn't my job to teach them.

I'm not worried, but I am afraid, to be killed in an automobile accident, particularly by someone with a "git r dun" bumper sticker. It's been a longtime goal to think of something to sarcastically ask the owner of said bumper sticker: "So is that a band, or...?" but "git r dun" is both something whose cultural relevance has almost completely passed, and the kind of thing I'm even lamer for devoting thought to than the people who enjoy it. Mentioning this desire shows that not only am I petty, but that I am bitter for having failed to subvert the lowest form of communication imaginable. Any day I'll think of the perfect thing, and that's how we'll all know it's much too late to make fun of that concept and the people who embrace it.

Tomorrow I will make a cole slaw with my favorite pepper, the serrano. I will be placing it atop a barbecue sandwich. This will result in pleasure.

I have found a bar that serves PBR. To ease my shock, the waitress assures me it is available in stores, but she is wrong. I did not tell her this.

Are UFOs real?

Tuesday

Every time someone fails to stump a skeptic, I smile. How do you prove photography to a blind man?

Monday

"The harder you work, the lucker you get."

I always thought Larry Bird said that, but when I thought about writing it here I looked it up and whaddya know, the internet says it's Gary Player. Larry Bird is the best basketball player who ever lived and I've heard he's my neighbor. I'll not prolong this confusing introduction and just move along with the story, which has to do with luck.

The reason for luck isn't easy to determine (but it's comforting to think it's deserved when it happens to us). We live in a vast nonlinear causality field, and that gives a lot of people a lot of problems. Mostly stupid people who want the world to be stupid like they are. But assuming I'm not one of them, which is debatable, I'm at least so accustomed to thinking the way they trained me to that I habitually find it strange that we live in a nonlinear causality field, and that luck is something worth mentioning. It'll be a different world once we shed the familiar notions in ways I'd never considered. This is fodder for another time which, like most times, will never come. (Which is also an interesting concept, but you see how this can easily become laboriously labyrinthine.)

[Technical terms follow. If you would like to skip this, go down to the paragraph that starts with BRING ON THE PUSSY AND THE LIQUOR. I'll try and tie in something about luck there, too, so as not to alienate you, my beloved audience.]

I got lucky today. I was tightening some microstella screws on a 2130 when I bottomed it out on the balance wheel and just spun as if free. I had torn the threads off and that equals bad with a capital b. So I moved it back out, tenuous purchase and all. A lack of friction to this degree is so close to horrible as to make no difference, and sometimes your body tells you how bad is what you've screwed up and done. My loupe fogged up the way it does when I'm suddenly upset, and there prevailed a powerful sense the world was mine to lose. It was about to be such a pity, nothing to be done but to purchase a new balance complete; admitting defeat and waiting for Rolex to send a tidy package that fixes everything and saves your sorry ass is never the preferred route for a purist. I drew it out about seventy clicks into position, and then the other side, and then the extremely improbable happened. As a sort of last glance back at the wreckage, I put the watch on the timer to see how it would come out, and the delta was six seconds. I checked again in six positions and I'll be damned if it wasn't like I'd never screwed up at all. I sped the watch up till it came out to about two ahead cumulative and then put it in the case like it belonged to Pandora. Some watches you're gladder than others to be done with. What this mean for that watch though, is that the next person to regulate it will discover that it takes very little trouble to move those. It may be me. Good luck to us all.

I'm going to be hung up on luck now, I can tell.

Forget the pussy and liquor thing. I can't think of a way to make that even close to as much fun as pussy and liquor. For those who skipped ahead only not to see the words I promised leading a paragraph and then had to attend watchmaking school to get to this point in the narrative, I'm sorry. Send me the bill and I'll pay your student loans. You can trust me, because I've kept my word every single time this has happened.

So I'd love to pat myself on the back and say that I got lucky because "that's just how good I am", or "that's how hard I work" or something I could feel great about, but it isn't that simple. In fact, no one has the faintest idea why events transpire the way they do. That astonishes me completely, the act of which fails to satisfy/makes me feel like a character in a cheap art house production about a guy who appreciates the world ho hum isn't that nice. Puke.

Tomorrow's another day off so it's back to the baby bath that is the gulf shore for poor me. I prefer the waves in the Atlantic. Also, there are far more awesome naked titties on south beach at spring break than there are here. Not that I'd trade my town for that one.

Sunday

The redhead and I are heading to Miami today to fulfill my longtime dream of listening to that Will Smith Miami song in the car all day. Also, we'll be seeing an old classmate of mine and sunning our buns on south beach, figuratively speaking. I don't know how I look in a g-string and I won't be finding out today.

I read war nerd's column, which is about the historical inconsistencies of the movie "300". Since I don't know anything about Spartan history he could be making it all up, but he never is, and especially because I'm already very familiar with Hollywood's Mel-Gibsonification of history to glorify armed conflict, I'm more interested in the actual catastrophe taking place right now due to the pre-modern thinking of our national leadership wielding unprecedented destructive power, I'm not going to go see this film.

Saturday

ideas plz

If i have a piece of flat anything, and i want to fold it so it makes good packing material in three dimensions, what's the best way to do that?

'Cause here I am with all this flat stuff and all these packages to ship.

Oops, I left out something important. How strong is the tendency of the flat things to revert to to their original shape? If it was plastic, you couldn't get it to stay very well. Let's say it has the property of regular white office paper. Unless you'd prefer tinfoil or something else. We have to assume though, obviously, that the folds we create will tend to stay there.

Let a splinter of light and joy into your life of dreary preoccupation with doom; look at these stupid rap album covers!

Neal Adams thinks the world is growing. Paul wanted to let me know so he sent me a link to a video about it.

I find it slightly irritating that people are branding brandlessness at Are you Generic?

Pretty typical that the Karl Rove puppet show is never going to get in trouble, no matter what they do.

Who owns the national debt, in a pie chart

A hundred foot deep pool in Belgium looks like fun.

Heaven's gate videos, pre-heaven's gate.
Kind of reminds me of rapture ready.

Wednesday

Tuesday

Monday

Sunday

Saturday

Friday

How

is this chick supposed to ride this bike in those shoes? Women can be so unreasonable.

Wednesday


Tuesday

smorg




twirl a squirrel

It's not that I don't have anything to say these days, it's that the occasion to express tends not to coincide with sitting in front of the keyboard. One a these days the words will come out again, but not today.

Monday

it's like a monkey war

Sunday

how to cut out the middle man

Halliburton moving its headquarters to Dubai

A chart: __ is the new __

The scene of the crime, if Ted Haggard's meth-fueled man-love is a crime, for sale on ebay.

Friday

Favorite new comics site since, and maybe since before, Nedroid,
Brad Neely

Ambiguity disclaimer: there may be no topping the sad bear.

junkiness

is a website where someone made the best joke I've seen in a long time, at the expense of today's favorite target.

bravo

Behold the Marilyn Manson of politics!

Watch the hole in her face spewing forth idiotic bile!

Wonder how this person came to be!

Spin! The wheel of Coulter!
thanks rk

And remember these guys? The right brothers, performing "I'm in love with Ann Coulter". They're so patriotic it makes the eagle cry.

Tuesday

want, want, want

I want a samoas cupcake, after the great girl scout cookie, which I love. (Am I wrong to want a little girl to make girl scout cookies herself? For authenticity's sake?)

Bush wants a commission to investigate the Walter Reed hospital. So its recommendations can be ignored, just like the nine eleven commission.

"Scooter" Libby wants to go back in time and not be such good buddies with the goldbrickin' country ruiners.

I want to laugh as Mark Levin, right wing noisemaker, friend of Hannity and enemy of the country, weeps into his tear-stained Ronald Reagan pillowcase.

You want to be at Twins spring training earlier today. First real bratwurst I've had since we've been here. No Summit beer, though. Seventy-one degrees. It was so nice my misery index (cumulative) dropped five and a half points.

Sunday

a list — which, sadly, is hardly exhaustive — of things that need to be done to reverse the unwise and lawless policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney

Saturday

how to be a good party member

Watch Skeletor call John Edwards a faggot, then cheer.

As if she's the norm. Somebody should have given Ann Coulter a hug as a child but fucked up and handed her the dexatrim instead. Why we all have to suffer for this escapes me.

How poisonous have things become? How did people get this complacent, so desensitized to other people making their associations for them? There are many questions for a person who isn't a goddamned idiot.

With the forces of Coultervision advancing as quickly as they are, it's enough to get me on valium. I'd still rather be miserable than stupid, though. Maybe one day I'll come around. Maybe not.

Friday

cool

The Voco clock

Thursday

It won't be long before we're all working at Taco Bell, so let's browse respectable jobs that used to exist while we still have professional self-respect, however inflated it may be:
Lost labor

music!


Jon Fahey plays steel guitar, 1978... some of the most beautiful music ever to come from the instrument.