Perfect

Found this over at Cranky Prof's Cranky Epistles. I edited down the text size because really, who needs 130% font size anyhow?

You're The Sound and the Fury!

by William Faulkner

Strong-willed but deeply confused, you are trying to come to grips with a major crisis in your life. You can see many different perspectives on the issue, but you're mostly overwhelmed with despair at what you've lost. People often have a hard time understanding you, but they have some vague sense that you must be brilliant anyway. Ultimately, you signify nothing.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Entertain me

I've been having bad luck with movies lately. My netflix cue has hit a dry spell and I'm looking for suggestions.

I did go to the bookstore today, student loan check burning a hole in my pocket....ok not quite. I was good, I bought discount books. I've considered checking out the local library, no pun intended. But until then it was the bookstore or bust. I picked up a Christopher Moore book and "I Like You - Hospitality Under the Influence" by Amy Sedaris. The Sedaris book is chock full of helpful entertaining tips like this one under "Children's games"
"Note: If for any reason a child's clothing catches fire, prevent the child from running because this adds oxygen, causing him to burn more quickly. Roll the smoldering child on the ground or in a rug. If a youngster breaks through the ice, have him kick his feet and wriggle to a solid surface. Kerosene is an accelerant: try not to mix it with an open flame unless an escape route is cleared. Stay in single file. Don't scratch and never put that in your mouth. The eyes are the most vulnerable part of the wolf. When cornered, jab something pointy into this area."

The pictures are great, especially for anyone familiar with 1960s cooking/food "art".

Now I must return to my outline for the most boring lecture imaginable - The Syllabus and... (where "and..." is anything we're lucky enough to cover after we finish dissecting the syllabus). I always start out with the intention to be minimal, to not read them my syllabus because wow it's so damned boring. But then while I'm deciding which parts I need to underscore by going over them in class, I recall problems which occured during past semesters, problems which felt like they maybe could have been avoided if I'd gone over that part of my syllabus in more detail. The next thing you know I have schematics up on powerpoint slides and pie charts of the grading rubric. I realize this is excessive and I'm finding myself quickly tiring of it so no doubt I will soon settle on the middle of the road, then skip about half of that when I'm actually presenting it.

3 things

Three things that made me laugh today:

- Reading "Naked" by David Sedaris. I laughed so hard and so long that tears were streaming down my face, even after I put down the book. My god that man is FUNNY.

- The pad ad I saw on TV while waiting for over an hour in my doctor's office today. According to the comforting female voice over, this is the only pad that "soaks up worry". A____ suggested we get some and wear them on our heads.

- The blue puffy paper shorts I had to wear for my exam, and the face I am making in this picture (a mix between damned amused and impatience with the digital camera flash which delayed what had been a regal looking poofed out crotch pose I struck just before this one).

And the winner is...Dukes of Hazzard?

The Boston Globe reports: "Both Dukes of Hazzard, and the new Bill Murray flick Broken Flowers premiere this Friday across the country, and the red carpets have been tied up all week." Oh, which to see?

I am NOT a movie snob. While I didn't think it was a great movie, I did laugh at Deuce Bigalow. However....Indulging anything Dukes of Hazzard related, to me, is to come dangerously near a nightmarish bicentennial brand of hyper patriotic retro-new country wasteland. Writer and director are relatively small and not choc full o'anything but crap. And yet someone paid to make this movie. I do believe it is a sign of the times.

Knowing that there is a Dukes of Hazzard movie and that the Boston Globe staff writers announce it in the same write up as the new Jim Jarmusch movie (devoting three pages of pics and blurbs for Flowers after eight cleavage and whitened tooth filled pages for Dukes) recalls the words from Hunter Thompson's ether drenched observations of a disturbingly similar variety of "good clean american fun" nearly 34 years ago. "The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich. "

I see a long line of fate, national destiny stretching out from then to now, from Las Vegas in 1971 to Dukes of Hazzard 2005. I suspect that a map for this journey could have been read in the bumps, dimples, and craters of Richard Nixon's now deceased ass. But alas we missed our chance. Perhaps now we'll never know what's coming, where this path we are all on will lead to next. I only hope folks like Jarmusch keep doing what they do.

Hamburglar or Grimace?

My sister and brother once posed the following question to me.
Hamburglar or Grimace? If you had to fuck one of them, would you fuck the Hamburglar or Grimace?

I had no idea where this came from. I still don't. It sparked a lively, revolting debate at the time. I thought of it again recently.

I was catching up on the news today, checking out the story on a certain conservative commentator's suspension from CNN. It caught my attention although I don't usually follow the TV news or I guess what I can only loosely refer to as popular media. I do the AP stuff, look up a story on Google if it interests me to see what else has been written on it. This one, I think the reason it caught my eye was because I feel like there's been a degeneration of what the public seems to be willing to accept as serious journalism. I know, another hint that I really am naive. You'd have thought life would have smacked that out of me by now. Golly, I don't know though. I remember little slices of TV news from childhood, and it just seemed like although there was always this sensational side of the news, everyone knew that this type of sensationalism was not to be confused with "serious news". There was a distinction. I don't think there is anymore. Not when a debate on CNN, not FOX, but CNN who at least when I still watched TV touted itself as this very respectable news source, ends with one member of the debate storming off the set in a huff and swearing - not that I have anything against swearing but the conservatives are the ones who are just crazy about the indecency. For a high profile political hobnobbing conservative commentator to swear on CNN, I mean that's like Bush getting video taped dropping one of his daughters off at a clinic to have an abortion or Lynn Cheney publishing a novel with homoerotic overtones.

So there I was reading this story about the CNN commentator, and a quote in it reminded me of another person I think needs to go on the "odious fuck" list. I won't put the name in because the assbag or his numerous dim disciples troll the web for his name I am sure. Assbag makes a habit of not just ripping on politicians, government officals, journalists, or high profile (paid) editorial staff online. He goes out of his way to find small fry private folks who are using indy media resources to express or discuss their views. Assbag seems to like to get all bunched up (and to encourage his readers to launch ad hom attacks in the name of journalistic inquiry) about even clearly very personal and non-pro blogs like this one. And while it might be kind of unique to have a bunch of crazy conservative birth defects' opinions on my health, school, and love life, I dunno, I guess I don't really want all of them to have a link to my blog bookmarked on their browsers.

If you follow internet political malarky of the mass media variety (journal), you'll possibly know who he is (street). I only know of him because this spring he made a habit of insulting someone close to me in his online column (wall). You know, you google your friend who writes editorials for her school paper and your results include christofascist web rants referring to her via some assbag's mass media journal publication. Those people are dangerous spooky psycho and it kind of pissed me off that this guy targetted someone dear to me in his big media smear column.

Well, I've given it some thought and after reading various bios on the assbag, I've decided that among other things, the man is entirely unfuckable. This may in fact be his problem. Perhaps I should start a campaing to send him sex toys? Make the world a better place?

So here are your choices.
If you absolutely had to fuck one of them, who would you have sex with?

a. Hamburglar?


b. Grimace?


c. This assbag?