I don't undertand the big deal here. So, the bulky one is running for California governor. So what? So are over 100 other candidates, ranging from Gary Coleman, to pornstar Mary Carey to the equally accent-challenged Ariana Huffington. But, I suppose, during a California recall vote, it's destined to become the most entertaining show on earth. Forget Iraq. Ahnuld's in the race.
As a Minnesotan, I guess I'm relieved to see the political microscope shift several states over, rather than focusing on the train wreck experience that was Jesse Ventura. Yes, I voted for him, and yes, I sincerely apologize. I'd sacrifice a goat and dance naked in its blood if it meant forgiveness. Well, that's not entirely true. At the time, with Mayor Quimby Coleman sitting on one side of Jesse, and Grandpa Skip Humphrey sitting on the other, "The Body" honestly did strike me as the best candidate. But then he was elected, and. . . well, you all know what happened then.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, I remember, quite vividly, watching in amazement the evening Jesse won the governership. There he stood, basking in all the glory you'd expect from an underdog who won an election, and somewhere in the audience, you could hear someone yell the most important question asked of every politician:
"What kind of beer do you drink!?"
I'm not kidding here. I heard it, and the two other people in the room with me heard it. That's when it struck me that the next four years weren't going to be a normal four years.
Such was our cross to bear for electing a celebrity, someone who viewed themself as so infallible, everyone else in the world was totally wrong, even when they were totally right. He was a lunkhead. We elected a lunkhead. A monstrous, self-absorbed, self-promoting, egotistical, fight-picking lunkhead. And it was a damned long four years.
I'm not saying Schwarzenegger is Jesse 2. No. But, Californians should be wary here. If they vote simply via name recognition, which is most certainly going to be the case, they'll discover, as Minnesotans did, that the man they put in office is a political lunkhead and his blunders will be made 8,000 times as bad because of the celebrity spotlight shining on him.
I do think that Arnold will suffer one of the same debilitations as Jesse. Namely, he'll deal with criticism in entirely the wrong way. Rather than try and deal with a problem, he'll go on the defensive and end up in a drawn out and embarrasing shouting match, much like Jesse and the jackals. Arnold, like Jesse before him, isn't used to problems that don't simply go away on their own. Arnold did "Junior," which was a waste of 35 mm film, but all he had to do was lay low and wait until a better script came along to fix the damage. For celebrities, dealing with issues is usually just a matter of waiting until the bad press blows over.
Not so in politics. In politics, the enemies are relentless and are more persistent than telemarketers, and their criticism will come at Arnold on a 24/7 basis, and I don't think Arnold's celebrity ego is prepared for the perpetual assault. Right now, he's enjoying what he's used to enjoying: the attention of the nation. That's just your run-of-the-mill celebrity hubris. These are the good-old days. But it won't be long before Arnold has to answer some truly tough questions, and he won't be able to simply flex his way out of them. He'll be toast. But, he still could get elected through name recognition alone. So, the lesson Arnold will learn is: "I don't have to answer the tough questions after all." And that's when hi-jinx will ensue.
Stay tuned, folks. Arnold may not be Jesse 2, but I think it could be pretty close.
I wonder what kind of beer Arnold drinks.
Readers, beware! If you own pets, their lives may be in jeopardy from some of the most unlikliest of places.
If you own small dogs, you had best keep your eyes on the skies for hawks with a hankering for canine, and if you own kittens, you had best be wary of unscrupulous snake owners itching to feed their slithering serpents a little feline cuisine.
Yes, it's time, once again, because I have no idea what else to write about, to bring you big and important news items that weren't deemed big and important by big and important media outlets. This big and important columnist, however, deems otherwise.
Imagine, if you will: you're walking your chihuahua, perhaps named Manuel, through a New York City public park on a glorious summer morning. Manuel is enjoying the outing, when suddenly you catch movement from the corner of your eye, and your eardrums are pierced by the screech of a hawk in mid-hunt. In a flurry of feathers and yipping chihuahua, you realize your furry companion is being attacked. Sound impossible? In New York, nothing's impossible.
According to an August 7 MSNBC.com report out of New York, officials on Wednesday grounded an anti-pigeon campaign employing the winged predators after one of the birds attacked a Chihuahua in Bryant Park.
Now, I understand that pigeons can be a problem, particularly in a sprawling metropolis such as New York. But, I'm just not sure whether the problem warrants an anti-pigeon campaign that employs specially trained hawks. Rather, I think it would be far more effective if, say, the city were to train a pack of particularly tough, and swift, chihuahuas to take care of the city's pigeon problem. That way, you don't have to worry about chihuahuas being attacked by hawks, and you're still on top of the pigeon problem. Plus, it would just be super cool to see a chihuahua take down a pigeon. How cute would that be!?
The program, considered a success since its April launch, was suspended Wednesday afternoon. Biederman said a final decision was expected by the end of the week on firing or rehiring the hawks, although city Parks Department officials called for its end.
Firing or rehiring hawks? What kind of severance package do they get? Do they have their own union to protect themselves from unfair city salary actions? I think somebody should be looking into this more closely. Would somebody PLEASE think of the hawks here!
Ah, but let us now leave New York and travel overseas to Norway, a country that just doesn't get mentioned much in the news nowadays. So, when they do get mentioned, you know it has to be something big and important, and probably involves snakes and kittens.
According to an August 6 Reuters news item out of Oslo, a reptile expert said on Wednesday that cat owners, who hoped kittens they had to give away would go to a good home, were outraged to find that some were ending up as dinner for pythons and other snakes kept illegally as pets.
I should note here that I don't really understand the appeal of keeping a snake as a pet. Quite frankly, it creeps me out just a little bit, and here's why: snakes don't DO anything. They don't fetch. They don't respond with affection when you scratch them behind their ears. . . er, ear holes.
They just lay around, flicking out their tongues, waiting to be fed. And that's the problem as I see it. Snake owners like owning snakes primarily for the novelty of watching them eat. They have a morbid fascination with watching a snake unhinge its jaws, swallow a mouse, and then watching a mouse-shaped bolus slide down inside their pet's cylindrical body. I mean, ewwwwww.
"Some people get a kick out of seeing a kitten being eaten alive by a snake," biologist Kees Ekeli, director of the Bergen Aquarium in western Norway, told Reuters. "It's cheap and it's a good size for a medium-sized snake. It's heart-breaking for the people who have feelings for their kittens."
Gee, do you think?
But, you know, that raises an interesting moral issue. Why is it more okay to feed snakes mice and rats, but kittens are considered taboo? Discuss. I'll be here when you get back.
In the meantime, I'm going to go out and buy a chihuahua and teach it to hunt pigeons, because, you know, that would be so cute! So is Amanda Wenk. Amanda Wenk has HUGE tracts of land. Here's Amanda Wenk.
Also, I think Giselle is hot. So is a Brianna. And here Brianna . Hey, Huh, Brianna again. Amanda.
Apparently, all of the prognostication regarding how long it would take Britney Spears to shed her clothes was dead on. According to reliable sources, the dethroned princess of pop, who substituted tittilating on-stage gyrations in lieu of actual talent, has posed naked for some magazine known as British Elle.
Whether Britney actually bared full breasts isn't all that clear, but it's a sure indication that her fall from grace is in full tilt. You can judge the career slide of most female musicians according to their level of exposed flesh. Christina Aguilera is a notable exception, because she actually has talent and a damned fine voice, so when she goes gallavanting off in her pornstar dress code, I'll give her a slide.
Ah, but Britney is just an airbrushed screeching harpy with nothing left to sell the finicky public except for her body. Like Samantha Fox before her, she's poised to give the world a fading glance at her physical attributes before her next album goes to pot faster than Snoop Dogg.
Just some advice to newbie starlets who are on course to shine brightly in the sky and then flame out (yeah, I'm looking at YOU Kelly Clarkson): the music buying public won't turn out in droves to buy your crappy CDs just because you stripped down and showed the world your bodily goods. You see, we buy music we like to listen to, and only a small cadre of confused young men going through a difficult patch of puberty will actually buy your music because they like to hear your voice as they frantically masturbate to your nude photos.
If you want to be a respected artist, get back into your clothes and then go back to the recording studio. Write some songs that don't suck and sound like the poetic musings of a half-deranged hyena. Take a page out of Liz Phair's book, or Shirley Manson's, or Delores O'Riordan's. These are women who can write AND sing, even though it can be argued that Shirley Manson is a scary-looking women (though I still think sex with her would be a hoot).
So, bad luck to you Britney Spears, and good riddance. May your clothes continue to fall floorward in direct proportion to your sliding celebrity status. The trashy slut image has been done many times before by musicians far better than you, and they still dropped from sight regardless. It works for a few (although if Madonna drops her trousers ever again I think I'll blow a multitude of chunks), but mostly it's a last-ditch attempt to salvage a doomed career while making a few buck on the side.
Now, if you don't mind, Britney, just show us your tits and be done with it.
But, please, don't sing.
I had a phone interview scheduled this morning with an IBM manager to talk shop about a new offering that he is itching to get some coverage on. That's fine. No big deal. I looked up his contact information, picked up the phone, dialed the appropriate number, listened to the phone ring, and. . .
Almost the exact instant he picked up the phone, at almost that EXACT instant, my stomach made an angry gurgle that sounded as if a pit bull had been turned loose in my intestines and was chasing a rabid squirrel. Before the sound even subsided a little bit, my large intestine made a massive and overdue delivery to my colon. I mean, this was sudden, and the situation went from uncomfortable to truly drastic in less than five minutes.
But, there I was, stuck on the phone, trying to jot down what the guy was saying, trying for all the world to write down direct quotes while all the while my mind was screaming "What are you doing!? Don't you realize you have to shit bigger than at any time in your life?! Don't you realize how dire the situation is?! Get off the phone, you fool! Run, do not walk, to the bathroom! Right! Now!"
But, this was a very busy man I was speaking with. Setting up the interview had been tricky. Plus, I didn't know how to just tell him I had to go while he was in mid-sentence. And he had a lot to say, and by that I mean he just wouldn't stop talking. He droned on and on and on, while I sat, butt cheeks clenched, tears welling up in my ears because now things had simply started to just plain hurt.
I tried several times to head off the conversation, I tried to steer him in a direction that would lead to a prompt end to the call, but he just kept going down different paths, almost as if he secretly knew I was just nanoseconds away from blowing a mud cake that would coat the entire office. The pain and discomfort were becoming unbearable.
Finally, FINALLY, I was able to get off the phone, after the most excrutiating 28 minutes in recent memory. I shuffle stepped out of the office and started a mad dash for the bathroom, only to discover that. . .
The cleaning ladies were in the bathroom! They had that stupid fucking yellow "Do Not Enter" sign propped up outside the door. Un-fucking-believable! The world was conspiring to make me crap my pants.
I shuffled back to my office and grabbed my badge. I then gingerly made my way down one floor to a different bathroom, which, upon entering, I discovered that every damned stall was occupied!
Except one.
One stall door was ajar, indicating vacancy. My glorious anal release was just moments away from being realized. I entered the stall and closed the door behind me. That's when I noticed the flusher on the toilet was non-existent. There was no flusher. It was a flusher-less stall. There would be no flushing being done this fine day.
No matter. This was an emergency situation, after all. In a truly dextrous display of de-pantsing, I shimmied my jeans down at about the same instant my sphincter finally just gave up the clench. I won't disgust you with the details, except to say I felt as though the Dairy Queen soft-serve machine was stuck on high.
Of course, since there was no flusher, I had no choice but to leave my handiwork for someone else to deal with.
Hey, it's not MY job.
Heh.
Heh, over 800 visitors to this site today already, and it's not even noon yet. Tara Reid's breasts are apparently still a hot commodity on the Internet today.
I like beef jerky. I mean, I won't go out of my way to buy the stuff--I'm not addicted to it or anything--but if the opportunity presents itself, I'll gnaw on a stick of dried and salted beef.
Yesterday after work, for example, I discovered a stick of jerky in the arm-rest compartment of my car, put there by a fabulous girfriend who thought I would enjoy it. And, you know, after work last night, a stick of beef jerky was almost exactly what I wanted.
Now, I didn't realize until yesterday just how much meaningless blather is stamped on your typical stick of beef jerky. For example, the stick I ate on the way home yesterday said it featured "Real Beef." Well, now, that's a relief. Here I thought I was chomping on a cow impersonator, perhaps a pig that happened to be a master thespian and fooled the USDA into believing it was actually bovine.
The thing is, because it was stamped "Real Beef," that must mean there are beef jerky enthusiasts out there who are truly worried about getting sub-par beef jerky, perhaps cut with 30 percent donkey. In the cut throat world of beef jerky competition, companies will resort to some pretty underhanded dealings to get their dried meat sticks to market.
Examining the wrapper further, I saw that my beef jerky was also "Peppered." Well, that's good news, I guess. But, really, what does that even mean? In beef jerky parlance, I gather that "Peppered" means that it has a kick to it--that it's hot. Well, then, just say it's HOT. Peppered doesn't tell me anything.
All this got me to thinking: what other words are stamped on beef jerky? My inquisitive nature brought me to the local Kwik Trip, where I perused the assorted beef jerky offerings. Let me just assure you here. . . after a few minutes staring at racks of competing beef jerky brands, the term "jerky" starts to lose all meaning. I started wondering what the hell "jerky" even meant. So, to refresh my memory, I consulted a dictionary.
jerk·y2 ( P ) Pronunciation Key (jûrk)n. Meat cured by jerking. Also called charqui.
Okay, like, ewwww. But, wait a minute, maybe I'm being too narrowminded about what they mean by jerking. Let's find out.
jerk2 ( P ) Pronunciation Key (jûrk) tr.v. jerked, jerk·ing, jerks To cut (meat) into long strips and dry in the sun or cure by exposing to smoke.
Ohhhhhhh, that type of jerking. Never mind.
But, getting back to my Kwik Trip beef jerky perusal. First and foremost, what the heck does "Kippered" mean?
To cure, by splitting, salting, and smoking.
Ohhhhhhh, okay, gotcha. But then, you really can't call it jerky now, can you? Wouldn't it become "beef kipper" or "kippered beef." I mean, calling it beef jerky that's been kippered seems like overkill, really. First, they dried it, then they smoked it, then they salted it and smoked it again for good measure.
There is a lot more to relate, but I just realized I have a bunch of work to do today and I must get to it. More jerky-related nonsense coming later.
Melissa, my girlfriend, the woman with whom I have considerable coitus, is really attuned to gay culture. I guess that's understandable, being that her dad is gay and all, and her good friend in her interior design classes at the university is very gay and dons women's clothes when the mood so strikes him. So, yeah, she probably understands gay culture far better than I do.
Invariably, her preoccupation with all things gay tends to spill over into my little world, and I find myself watching programs that I would never, ever, ever, ever watch unless Melissa has control of the television remote.
Consider Friday night.
As we lay in bed, with Mel happily clicking through the channels, she discovers. . . Bravo. Now, Bravo was featuring a Cher concert. Okay, you know, whatever. Maybe I've just been stupid all these years, but I didn't realize, until that very moment, that Cher is considered an icon of gay culture. I mean, this is Cher we're talking about, a women who thinks a spool of thread constitutes a wardrobe. How could she be an icon of gay culture?
"How can you not know that?" she asked me. "She changes outfits after two or three songs because, if she doesn't, some of her gay fans will actually complain."
I did not know that. But, now that I think about it, it makes a lot of sense when you think about Jack on Wil and Grace and his obsession with all things Cher. I guess I just never made the connection.
Following the Cher concert, Bravo rolled out one of their newest programs, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. Now, seeing as how I was fresh off my first televised Cher concert ever, I thought I had filled my gay quota for the evening, but Melissa insisted. I don't know what to tell you about QESG, except to say these guys were REALLY gay. I think it would be interesting to see what those five guys would think of my living establishment, food tastes, and wardrobe. It would probably take four full episodes to straighten me out, er, so to speak.
By this point in the evening, I had pretty much absorbed as much gay television radiation as I thought possible, but then Bravo rolled out Boy Meets Boy. And. Mel. Insisted! Soooo, I watched this bit of homosexual reality television in which a gay guy has to pick from a group of 15 elegible men. There is a hitch, of course, and that hitch is that, amongst the gay men, there are a few straight men trying to pass themselves off as gay in a bid to win fabulous cash and prizes. This little fact is unknown to the guy to the choosing. He thinks all the men are gay. Reality TV fever. Catch it!
So, of course, Melissa and I sat there for a full hour trying to guess which men were gay and which were straight. It was a very gay night.
Would I recommend any of the shows we watched? Actually, yes I would. QESG is a laugh-out-loud scream, and Boy Meets Boy has the whole "is he or isn't he" thing going, which helps to strengthen your gaydar. However, I can't see myself tuning into the shows unless Mel is with me clicking the channels. I'm just not into gay culture quite as much as she is. Perhaps that's for the best.
(by the way, extra credit points if you can tell me where I conjured the title for this blog entry)
No, this isn't some reminiscing about my old Nintendo that came with Super Mario Brothers, so if you came here looking for tips on how to beat Bowser on the last level, I suggest you go elsewhere.
My senior year of high school spent in Tokyo was a jarring wake-up call to the real world. Far removed from the sheltered environment of Harmony, Minnesota and my class of 43 students, my Tokyo class consisted of over 100 students from 46 nations around the world. Japan offered enough of a culture shock; experiencing the cultures of 46 countries at once was a rude awakening.
To say I was homesick that first month (and even beyond) would be a severe understatement. Nothing, NOTHING, made sense. Even though the students at St. Mary's International School were supposed to speak only English on school grounds, practically everyone just glommed together in their own cliques and chattered away in whatever language suited them. It wasn't uncommon to hear a mix of Japanese, English, Korean, German and Arabic coming from the same conversation. I couldn't just jump into a conversation that interested me, because I couldn't understand what the hell anyone was talking about.
Beyond the language barrier were the athleticism and intellectual barriers. Here in the U.S., we put a lot of emphasis on athletics, with academics seemingly taking a secondary roll. At St. Mary's, the reverse was true. My classmates were some of the softest wussies (albeit incredibly intelligent soft wussies) you could ever imagine. Here in the U.S., I was a really good wrestler. In Tokyo, I was unbeatable. In the U.S., I was the third ranking academic kid in my class. In Tokyo. . . well, let's just say there was a long line ahead of me in the grade department. There were students who would ace their exams and get all the extra credit to boot, resulting in, and I'm not kidding here, a grade point average of 4.5. Unreal.
I was absorbing all this newness, and I was pretty much resigned to the reality that friendships would come hard, and I was also pondering a plane ticket home (where things made sense), when I almost had a nervous breakdown, in band of all places. I played trumpet, and I played fairly well. However, band in Tokyo was radically different than band in Harmony. As I sat there, sweating through sheet music that everyone seemed to know but me, the instructor, Mrs. Webster, started quizzing students on something called music theory. I didn't have a fucking clue what music theory was, but everyone else seemed to be having no trouble whatsoever answering the questions. And she was getting closer and closer to calling on me. When she did eventually call on me, I was a wreck. I just started throwing out answers in the hope that one would be correct. "A Sharp?" "B Flat?" "C Major?" "D Minor" "Major Major?" "Sergeant Major?" "Lieutenant Sergeant Major B Minor First Class?"
Finally, Mrs. Webster moved on, leaving me clinging to my last shred of sanity, like a tornado that ripped through a trailer park. I was shattered, and I remember shaking uncontrollably. In retrospect, it was no big deal, and was really quite funny. But, as a 17 year old drastically out of his element, it was a morbidly humiliating experience. At the end of class, I was determined to just walk out of the school and just retreat back to the apartment and never come out again.
"Hey! Hey, Ryan, wait up!" called a voice behind me as I walked absentmindedly out the door after class.
I turned around to see a fellow trumpet player, Mario Arias, running to catch up with me. I knew him only by his face, but I also knew he was one of the more popular guys in my class.
"Listen, man, she took a lot of us by surprise with all that music theory shit," he said, and I realized then just how transparent my anguish must have been. "Don't sweat it, okay. This place takes awhile. It's pretty fucked up."
First off, it was nice to actually talk to someone who was speaking just English. Second of all, it was super nice talking to someone who knew how to swear, and swear really well. Just that brief back-and-forth gave me the strength to get through the rest of the school day, and over the next couple of days, Mario and I talked more and more.
I'm not sure why Mario reached out to me. He was one of the more popular kids in the class, from what I could tell, and he had no shortage of friends. I think he saw a lot of the difficulties he endured when he first came to St. Mary's a couple of years ahead of me. Whatever the case, he became a friend at the moment I most dearly needed one.
Mario claimed dual nationalities; American and Malaysian, if I recall correctly. His father was an ambassador in Tokyo and he lived in the ambassadorial complex in the nightlife capital of Tokyo, Roppongi. Through Mario, I became friends with a couple of Canadians, Jeff Wilson and Tyler Finch, a big Swedish kid, and fellow wrestler, Jens Larson (who was also the most dominating wrestler I'd ever seen), another wrestler, Hashi Riegler, and several others.
Mario, though, was the best friend I had there, and I never appreciated how valuable of a friend he was until years later when I happened to leaf through my old yearbook. I remembered when we last spoke, just hours before my plane whisked me back to Minnesota. It was a hot June day, and we had just stopped at a local convenience store for a pop. I was so eager to get on my plane, it didn't really register that I would probably never see Mario again, the guy who, many many months before, had literally saved me from insanity.
We shook hands, Mario and I, and then I caught the walk light and crossed the street. The last I saw of Mario was him giving a quick wave from the curb before turning around and walking the other way.
I got into work today, all prepared to set the world on fire and get that big important article done by Wednesday, and not eat or drink anything until I get it done. And then I find out IBM moved the announce date back a month. So, my Monday all of a sudden became substantially less critical. Ahhhhhhhh.
