Rambling Rhodes

Coffin Talk

There's a lot of news today about a woman being fired for taking pictures of coffins bearing American dead coming home from Iraq.

Personally, I don't really want to see pictures of coffins.

Except for maybe this one.

Or this one.

Ah, this one, too.

Ooh, can't forget to mention this one.

Oh, one more.

Asia Carrera hawking coffins? This world is too cool. Asia Carrera.

Lileks On Fire

James Lileks, in his latest Newhouse column, just had me both laughing out loud and thinking "Hell, YEAH!" But, that's my usual reaction to Lileks' stuff. Read it if you're interested, don't if you're not.

Great paragraph:

One suspects that the number of undecided Americans may be fewer this week than the last -- at least if they heard about the U.N. reaction to Israel's ballistic dismissal of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Hamas' leader-of-the-week. What a loathsome man he was. A architect of death and terror. Religious bigot, child-killer, slaughterer of fellow Arabs. Israel finally takes him out. The United Nations springs into action -- to consider a resolution to condemn the attack.

And:

Nations have no friends. Nations have interests.

That has to be true; a Frenchman said it.

UPDATE: Basically unrelated, but still damned funny.

UPDATE AGAIN: An interesting take on Iraq/Sout Africa.

The House That Hates Me

Many of you no doubt already know that I bought a house last week, and for those of you who don't know, well, you know now.

Here's what I've learned about home ownership so far: my house doesn't like me all that much. I can say this based on two early incidents that do not bode well for the future.

The day I closed on the house, I waited around for my girlfriend to come down from the Twin Cities because she wanted to be with me during my first in-depth tour of my new house. Girls are weird creatures like that. I could buy a can of athlete's foot spray, and my girfriend would want to be with me for the initial application. Okay, I'm kidding. . . somewhat.

So, anyway, my girlfriend and I arrive at my new house, at which time I discover I don't have the key to get in. Now, I was 99.9 percent certain I had the key before leaving to go to the house. I mean, I was POSITIVE I had it. So, the fact I suddenly didn't have it bothered me to no end. We retraced our steps. We went back to the point of origin. We went EVERYWHERE. Nothing. No key.

There I stood outside of the house I just paid an amazing amount of money for, lacking any means of entry. Okay, let me rephrase that last part: lacking any TRADITIONAL means of entry. I started an in-depth security patrol of my new house, probing for potential weaknesses I could exploit. I found a weakness, in the form of a basement window, which I popped out of place and slithered my way into the darkest basement EVER.

Now, keep in mind, I didn't know my house all that well, so I wasn't all that sure what room I had just dropped into, and it was so amazingly dark, I could just as well as been in a cave. What transpired was a lot of clumsy bumping around as I walked into several walls and grabbed at many loose wires, which frankly spooked the hell out of me.

I'll tell you what: there are few things more disorienting than being caught in pitch darkness in a basement you're not at all familiar with. I think you could make a pretty creepy movie based entirely on that concept alone. I hadn't believed in monsters and ghosts for at least a couple of years but, as I fumbled my way aimlessly around that darkened basement, I found myself once again entertaining the possibility they existed, and they no doubt existed about five inches from my face, taunthing me from a safe distance.

I finally half-discovered, half-fell-up, the basement staircase and I was monumentally relieved to find a light switch at the top of the stairs. Oh, light! Beautiful light! Chaser awayer of all imagined ghosts and demons!

My girlfriend was waiting patiently for me at the front door, and she wasn't surprised in the least that I materialized inside the house because, she explained, she had heard me banging around in the basement for the last five minutes or so. Girlfriends can be so helpful like that.

We walked through the house for the first time with me as the proud owner and, proud owner that I was, I was most proud to find a spare set of keys so I wouldn't have to crawl through the basement every time I wanted to visit my home.

The next day, we arrived triumphantly, ready to get to work on updating my purchase, and within the first few minutes, I found the missing key sitting squarely in the center of the driveway. Stupid key.

One of our first tasks was to go around the house and remove all the light switch and outlet covers. It was during this exercise that my house tried to kill me.

One outlet cover, in particular, apparently took offense at me trying to remove it, and it reacted in such a way as to spark and buzz loudly, while sending a considerable electrical jolt cascading through my body. The resulting power surge blew a fuse which, once I had sufficiently recovered from the shock, required me to go back into the darkened and unfamiliar basement to replace the blown fuse.

All in all, however, so far home ownership has been an enjoyable experience. And, if all goes well, the house will kill me sometime next week.

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A Place To Call Home - Part Deux

I closed on my house on Friday, so, obviously, I've been working on my house all weekend. All pictures here are thumbnails, just in case you want to look more closely at a house built and not updated since 1958.

This is the living room, where, apparently, I'll do most of my living. You'll notice a considerable amount of painting supplies in the picture, owing primarily to the holy God-awful color scheme prevalent, oh, throughout the entire room. By the time this picture was taken, my girlfriend had painted most of the trim around the crown moulding and door and window trim. The sheer size of the living room ensures I'll be on great terms with Sherwin-Williams for the foreseeable future.

Oh, and speaking of color schemes, check out the dining room/or extended kitchen.

Be sure to check out the chandelier which, I'm sure, was entirely hip in 1958, when the house was built. I don't know about you, but the prevalent color of urine yellow has prompted me to have to pee.

So, let's instead go into the kitchen.

The most recent appliance? I'm not sure. It's either the refrigerator or the microwave. It's certainly not the range, or the stove. The range features a push button console that, I think, Capt. Kirk used to fire on the Klingons. We continue with the frightening color scheme, now featuring a hideous some sort of dark green in golf pant stripe pattern.

We continue on to the bedroom, which was apparently painted to resemble a pack of Wrigley's Spearmint gum.

I should note here, and note here emphatically, that the carpets featured throughout the house WILL. NOT. STAND. That's the beauty of the house. There are gorgeous hardwood floors just below the circa 1958 carpet. Granted, the floors will have to be sanded, and stained, and sealed, but oh boy will they be freakin' unreal!!! As for the bedroom here: as of tonight's insane amount of work, it's largely not Doublemint Fresh. It's a wonderful color picked out by my girlfriend.

That's not to say there aren't color scheme nightmares yet to address. I give, oh my God, the pink room. THE PINK ROOM!!

By the way, keep in mind, the ceilings of both the bedroom AND the pink room were the same colors as the wall, so I of course had to slather three layers of white ceiling paint on the, er, ceilings. I keep meaning to do more with the pink room, but I just can't do it, because. . .

So. Much. Pink. I keep thinking of panthers. Pink panthers. And Barbie. And then I want to puke. Thankfully, the bathroom is right next door, where I'm confronted with. . .

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Yaaaaaaaakkkkkkkkk!

Oh, by the way, you may be wondering about the huge porch. It's still a huge porch, but right now I'm using it to store all the trash I'll get rid of eventually.

There are other pictures, but it's getting late. I'll show you the basement (haunted basement, I think) and some outside pics as well.