Yo Quiero - En Memoria De

Drop the Chalupa in silence as we honor the fallen. Those three words meant many things to many people, but when I hear them, I'll always think of Gidget the Taco Bell Chihuahua. She lived a long life, much like her contemporary, Walter Cronkite. Like Walter, Gidget became a trusted figure to middle America, convincing them all to wolf down huge quantities of the southwestern fast food colonoscopy preparation pinatas like they were going out of style. Toilet paper and Plunger manufacturers saw a late nineties boom. Run for the border, indeed - run for the restroom was more like it. The hairless mutt was ahead of her time - well before Jamie Lee decided to become the Activia lady.

But life is for the living and you gotta live it to the fullest while you're here. That's why my new hero is Daniel Suelo. This is a guy taking the bull by the horns and livin' da vida loca. Grasshoppers on the skillet by cave fire light. Drop the Chalupa, indeed.

Giant steps are what you take - Walking on the moon

I'm watching a "repeat" - the 40th anniversary re-broadcast of the moon mission on the History Channel. Nixon just got through talking to Neil and Buzz from the White house and his insincerity and general sliminess shines through as much today as it did in 1969.

From his disheveled appearance, Nixon must have rushed into the Oval Office just before placing the phone call - probably after doing a quick line with Kissinger in the blue room (I'm guessing, judging from the jittery speech pattern and dilated pupils).

He seems in especially high spirits chatting it up with the moonwalkers. Some might attribute the jovial mood to the occasion of our first walk on an alien world and beating the dirty commies to it but given the hour it's more likely that he had just finished his evening "constitutional" (which in his case usually meant a third world musical snuff film double feature with a shot of smack and a tub of buttered popcorn).

That always put him in a giddy frame of mind. Of course, that's just what I heard.

Tricky Dick is truly timeless, kind of like Jack the Ripper.

I was just shy of 7 years old when the moon walk was originally broadcast live but I don't remember it. I'm sure we were glued to the tube like everyone. I remember catching some of the later missions but not particularly that first one. Perhaps I knew even then that it was all staged on some backlot in Van Nuys.

Nothing Nixon was involved with, even indirectly, could possibly be genuine.

The moonshot was indeed real until he placed that congratulatory call and festered himself into what to that point had been a singular moment in history and after which became cheapened and suspect. In that Nixonian instant, the astronauts were teleported from the lunar surface to some sleazy sound stage in Porn Valley guarded by Liddy, Hunt, Colson and the rest of his plumbers and fixit boys. Phonying up the moon mission was merely a prelude to the CREEP activities to come. This was the minor leagues.

But maybe I'm being too hard on the guy. He did give me Watergate, after all, and I *do* remember watching and growing to love those hearings.

They interrupted the normal afterschool shows and I had no alternative options on the days when the weather made playing outdoors unpalatable (this was Seattle and it was pre-cable, children).

Those hearings instilled in me the political beliefs and principles that have stayed with me to this day. So I gotta say 'thanks' to Milhous for that. Were it not for him, I might have grown up to be a Republican.

Now, on to the weekly misadventures of Nancy Botwin (sweet Mary Louise) ... Alanis Morissette (who appeared memorably as God in Kevin Smith's Dogma) continues a guest run tonight as Nancy's baby doc. Weeds jumped the shark prior to first airing but I love it all the same.

Daly and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coats

Boy, the cheese is being applied thick and heavy on ABC's coverage of the British Open: agonizingly long passages of purple prose whispered over wide angled swatches of sea-swept Scottish coastline scenery [Scottish James Earl Jonesish golf whisperer]: "in the land where golf and groundskeepers were born, where kings and kilts and bagpipes and barf-bags share a noble heritage, where the sun and the warmth give way to wind and driving rain, howling like a highlander with his gonads crushed by a caber, we drift back through the sands of time ..." zzzzzzzz - , etc. ad nauseam.

And the endless interviews. And "let's get you caught up on what's happened earlier". No, how about we watch what's happening now. Occasionally, they also have showed some live golf, but that seems almost incidental.

It's all halfhearted anyway. I half expected them to bag it all and simply film Tiger traveling back to Florida instead. "Here we see Tiger at airport Security. He's elected to remove his keys and put them into the tray. He's walking through now. And he's in!"

At least John Daly is keeping the thing dignified with a traditional Scottish outfit that he must have designed himself one morning in the midst of what I imagine is his usual wake-up technicolor yawn into the toilet.

Speaking of colorful, drunken cheese, looks like someone wanted some of Wisconsin's finest on their dog. Problem was she was driving the dog and the yellow stuff must have been chilling in a locked garage icebox. No immediate signs alcohol was a factor but then again, no signs that it wasn't. They don't call it 'Milwaukee's Best' for nothing, after all.

Well, enough of this golf shit - time to head to the driving range and then out for a jog - fun in the sun ...

Get your damn hands off her, Biff

Unrelated Thoughts.

This is a pretty neat story, though it immediately brought to mind (well, to my mind) the bad Seth Green horror movie Idle Hands. Perhaps this guy can get a gig doing ads for State Farm Insurance. Good Hands indeed. Even when they're Hand-me-downs (boo, hiss).

Speaking of hand jobs, Glenn Beck proves that if there is a God, he is not without a pretty good sense of humor. Fox is still the go-to place for comedy that it was in its formative years in the late 80s, (Remember Married with Children before Steve Rhoades left and jumped over the shark on his way out the door?) Who would have guessed back then that it would be the News division carrying that torch now, however unintentionally? With Beck and O'Reilly leading the charge.

I'll be the first to admit that MSNBC is often just as bombastic, teetering as they are on the left wing of the plane as much as Fox is on the wrong wing, but at least they wear their bias with some intelligence at the DOS Peacock. Don't get me wrong: Keith Olbermann's blustering buffoonery and self-righteousness is occasionally overwhelming, even to a bleeding heart, commie pinko socialist radical like me.

I love Keith and Rachel but is having just one guest with a contrary opinion asking too much? A surprisingly effective Ben Affleck captured Keith's blustering self righteousness to a tee on a recent SNL.

Still, we're talking relative degrees of annoyance. Beck and O'Reilly take obnoxiousness to a new level. I have to take anti-nausea pills before flipping the channel past Fox news since even a brief glimpse of any of the regular jokesters there without proper medicine will induce me to projectile vomiting. But they are funny.

And that's where Beck and O'Reilly and his ilk live - as clowns, not fit for the news. On the day that we lost perhaps the most iconic and respected journalist in Walter Cronkite, the contrast is blinding. These cheapjack punks are in the same business as Walter?

I guess.

In the same way that Filet Mignon and a steaming pile of dog shit are both food to a starving animal.

Well, the little guy was kinda funny-lookin'

Typical ADD evening ...
I'm flipping incessantly between highlights of the British Open and Sotomayor Confirmation Hearings, along with Sling Blade on Showtime and Fargo on IFC. Meanwhile also answering emails, finishing up a presentation, and perusing the various blogs and feeds I follow. I think Billy Bob just threatened Lindsey Graham with a Kaiser Blade (some people call it a Sling Blade, I call it a Kaiser Blade). And was that John Daly feeding Al Franken to a wood chipper? Anything's possible with that guy but either Franken's playing hooky in Scotland or Daly's on a bender in DC. You betcha.

I see in the news that Starbucks is renaming one of its coffee shops in my hometown (Starbucks' hometown too). Naming it after its address and adding booze to the menu are two very different business decisions. I always thought Starbucks ignored a massive market in the bar and club crowd. Sure you help them to survive the next day (along with Visine - that they never bundled the two together is another lost opportunity), but why not help keep the party going with Tall Skim Bailey Lattes and Grande Mocha Absolut Frappuccinos right there in the gin joint? Changing the name from Starbucks to 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea sort of dilutes the brand, though. If you ask me. Which they apparently didn't.

In this midst of pondering all this, a piece of spam sneaks past my filters that is just "off" enough in the grammar of the come-on that I have to share:

From: Jennifer Kendrick
Subject: Your life sucks; use our 26% of all our products

Need a bursting passion the whole weekend and bring wonderful pleasure to her. Take half a pill under your tongue and get ready for action! Your couch will hear a lot more hot moans, if this blue pack will be in your pocket!

Well, Jennifer's got me pegged, for sure. Sign me up. Except that my couch is busted. The back broke off, its subtle way of telling me to put it out of its 11 year misery and buy a new one. Instead, in typical proactive (or pro-something) fashion, I moved over to the recliner.

Linger on, your palin blue eyes (apologies, Mr. Reed - Ed Wood, all is forgiven)

I figure we're in the early stages of the Empire Strikes Back if one were to apply 'Lucas'-onian ('Lucas'que?) principles to current American political reality. The election last year was the attack on the death star, the climax if you will of 'A new (Audacity of) Hope'. But we're a couple of years yet away from Obama losing his hand to Dick Cheney and finding out the uncomfortable truth about his lineage. (Kenya is not Wyoming? They have similar forms of democracy, I've heard.)

Rom Emanuel is Han Solo - David Axelrod, Yoda - Hillary, Leia
Joe Biden is Chewbacca (or maybe he's Jar Jar, arriving appropriately inappropriate into the wrong movie)

Or maybe I have it all wrong and Cheney is the emperor.

The appendage, perhaps then, is due to be lopped off by Darth Palin ("Barack, I am your Mother").

Perhaps, too, I also have wrong the particular appendage that is in peril.

It sort of fits, though.

Think about it. Okay, don't think so much - feel about it - the truthiness can't be denied.

They both apparently enjoy basketball (or, in the latter case, at least basketball analogies and how apparently all the great basketball players like to leave the game in the 4th quarter). She can see Russia from her house - he just saw Russia from his mobile home (Air Force One).

You'd think that her youth would rule such a thing out, but I always thought that she had a little 'Highlander' in her ('There can be only one - please God').

This would all imply that he got his literacy, poise, and sanity from his father's side of the family.

But the opening credits have barely trailed off the screen - we have a long way to go before we have to worry about Ewoks roaming the planet, Hip waders drying in the east room, book burnings and literature lynchings, and Michelle's garden giving way to a smelt pond. A while to enjoy things before Mrs. Maverick and her Alaskan Geese (apologies to Dr. Green) go to Washington while Jimmy Stewart does cartwheels in his casket.

And that's another movie for another time.

"I found America hiding in the corner of my wallet
It's a well kept secret, thought that I had better swallow it
Before they make me spit out the truth
Before they find you're lying about your youth

B movie, that's all you are to me
Just a soft soap story
Don't want the woman to adore me
You can't stand it when it goes from real to reel
Too real too real
You can't stand it when I throw punch lines you can feel" - Declan Patrick MacManus, 1979


Time to focus on the tasks at hand this morning: code reviews, finishing the software documentation presentation, continuing the java concurrency presentation and wondering where this all leads. Does the falling tree make a sound in the forest if no one is there to hear it?

Judge not lest ye be Judged? Ha! Here come tha Judge! Here come tha Judge!

Boy the Peacocks were struttin' their stuff in the Senate Cambers today, technicolor plumage at full staff. An entire day essentially wasted - the nominee not asked a single question - in other words, a normal first day of the Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing.

Filled to the brim with rich, delicious exhibitionism from Senator Foghorn, Senator Leghorn, the Gentleman from the Great Expanding State of Gasbag Blowhard, and the Lady from the Show-off State of Ego Unbounded. And this with Joe Biden safely tucked away now in the Executive Branch. We miss you in the Legislative Branch, Joe, but I only have so much space on my DVR hard drive and have to work during the day. (I say this with all love for our VP - I voted for him and love his unchecked honesty, if not his unchecked verbosity.)

Lindsey Graham, whose opinions I usually agree with about as frequently as I did with George Bush (which is to say, 'never'), actually got it about right today:
'... this is mostly about liberal and conservative politics more than it is about anything else'

Despite all that, I think today was the highlight. I think these things are more enjoyable when it's a Republican nominee in the hot seat: the Dems are much more entertainingly comical than their GOP counterparts when they're being indignant.

The Elephants are usually only more amusing off-duty when they're toe-tapping in mid-western airport men's rooms or hiking the Appalachian trail with Evita ('Don't Cry for me South Carolina'). There are always exceptions, but usually that happens when the off-duty buffoonery can't contain itself there (The Queen of Hip waders, for instance). In general, though, the Right are pretty consistently dull in their idiocy.


I'm a bleeding heart commie pinko liberal but even from my vantage point teetering as I am out on the left wing, I can see that the super villains are never nearly as buffoonish as the good guys are. The Joker, who is a clown for crying out loud, is the least comical character in the 'Dark Knight'. Remember: Obama's cool and relatively gaff-free maneuvering is an aberration and generally not the rule.