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Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

A bitter, cursed comedian waits under cover of darkness in a rowboat on the water beneath a roadside inn. He’s paid the innkeeper to murder the comedian’s employer, a privileged womanizer whose wandering eye noticed the comedian’s daughter.

Finally, without a word, a sack drops through the floor and into the boat. Before dumping the the cadaver of his despised lord in the river, the allows himself one last look at the face of the man. There, he discovers not the face of the man, but of his own daughter. Now finally does the comedian understand the nature of his curse.

That’s the end of Rigoletto. It never fails to make my skin crawl.

The Stupidest People (yet again)

We played “Stupidest People” for the preliminary round of the Songslam. There’s no video available just yet from Friday, but here’s the song from Zille:

The Stupidest People

But wait there’s more! Remember that time we got “inspired” and came up with the idea for she was? That was also the day of conception for 4 or 5 more proto-songs, amongst them, this one. And at least for this example, the first run improv worked out for the whole song, save a few revisions.

Proto-Stupidest People

Mobilize the Idiots

This never gets old. Correction: this is getting old. Video footage and interviews of a recent Teaparty anti-healthcare rally. Of course we don’t know that the entire crowd was as ignorant as these folks interviewed here, but it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t too hard to find enough people at the rally who literally didn’t know what they were talking about.

What really baffles me is why anyone would be willing to travel across the country to join in the rally and yet have absolutely no desire to inform oneself.

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It’s Toph’s birthday today, so
Happy Birthday Christopher

Xmas

Have a look at my pictures from Xmas 2008.

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Those Damn Birds

On the home stretch of her PHD, Julie has completed writing and is now revising and doing the finishing touches. It is a race against the clock, and tensions are high. Sleep cycles are stretched and completely out of sync with the rotation of the earth. Tempers flair, and dishes are washed on a less than daily basis. It’s like living with meth addicts.
Finding time to be good to oneself is very important in days like these. Yesterday, I took her to lunch at the Sushi place on the corner — there are at least four in the neighborhood. Going for a daily walk is also nice, although unlike Frank, we never bring any furniture we find on the street home with us.

And this weekend is the famous Fete de la Musique, which is a veritable orgy of busking and free concerts.

Meanwhile, Julie has enlisted her little mom to help with the proofreading, which has been an ordeal of itself. Although a very literate woman, things like copy and paste, or the fine difference between “save” and “save as” are a complete mystery to her. This is compounded by the fact that she is dealing with a computer with a German language operating system.

Fortunately, there is logmein. Although I had thought about doing it before, I could absolutely kick myself for not finding a solution like it earlier on. You install it on your mother-in-law’s computer with a password, and then you can access and control it remotely via a web browser. Amazing. Totally cool. Logmein.com

Our young birdies don’t come to the flowerbox anymore, although we see them around still. We’ve populated all the pots and boxes with shishkebab skewers to discourage anymore flower box romance taking place, cause Brother, we don’t need the hassle. However, with the warm weather and the windows open all day, we’ve had a damn pigeon fly into the flat three times in the last four days. Not cool. We are getting a cat.

Maxine for President

I had been meaning to post this last fall, but then things got busy. Nonetheless, with Clinton still in the race til the bitter end, I thought I might as well get it in anyway.

Last Fall, I received a chain letter from someone and it read like this:

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Dum dum dum dummmmm

This is definitely one of the worst chain mailings I’ve gotten since …the last one.

What makes this one so special is that it starts us off with a little anti-immigrant demogoggery, then whips us into a rollercoaster ride of how great things were before those regulatin’ liberals and–somehow–political correctness ruined everybody’s fun.  It leaps right into a –misquoted– pro-God-in-the-pledge thing falsely attributed to Jay Leno, and then ends us off with a vague little motivational blah-blah.  And remember folks, if you’re stupid enough to not be an evangelical Christian, don’t come whining to the person who sent it to you, just delete it!

Just to make sure you UNDERSTAND everything, THE important WORDS are written BIG like THIS.

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