White & Wrong

Jesse Helms is dead. 

FINALLY!!!!

He died in Raleigh, NC, at 1:15 am EST of natural causes, said former chief of staff Jimmy Broughton.  “He was very comfortable,” Broughton said.

This is proof that there is no God.  If a kind, loving God looked out over the world and saw Jesse Helms, He would have struck him down instantly.  At the very least, He would have had Helms finished off with a chainsaw enema. 

Jesse Helms was a miserable motherfucker, who used race and fear to keep himself in office.  He was proud of fighting the forces of moral decay:  civil rights advocates, AIDS victims, people who thought smoking caused cancer, etc. 

“I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year’s Eve firecrackers. I shall never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day,” Helms wrote in a newspaper column in 1956. 

It speaks volumes about Helms that he would equate the Fourth of July with Confederate Memorial Day.  As a side note, since he opposed desegregation, those school kids would obviously be all white. 

History will recognize that Helms was on the wrong side of virtually every major issue in which he acted.  Truly, I long for the day when Jesse Helms will be publicly recognized for the bigot and asshole that he was.  Sadly, that day is far off. 

“America lost a great public servant and true patriot today,” White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

Fuckers.

Guns, Guns, Guns!!!!

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down District Of Columbia V. Heller, one of the last decisions of their current term before wrapping up business, sending their robes out for dry-cleaning, forwarding the office phones to voicemail, and sneaking out of town.  Truly, a shameful decision from a shameful court. 

I, for one, am sick of these activist judges who take it upon themselves to legislate from the bench.  A perfectly reasonable law, designed and intended to protect common decent God-fearing Americans, was passed by the elected representatives of the good people of the District of Columbia.  But NO!  A handful of elitist justices, hand-picked to accomplish the political agenda of a small minority, has chosen to overrule the will of the people and the intent of the Founding Fathers.   And in doing so, they have not only substituted their own judgment . . . imposed their own perverted values . . . upon the common people, but they have overturned a century of legal precedent in order to create an imagined “right” where none existed before! 

Damn them!  DAMN THEM TO HELL!!!

Buns

As I was saying previously, we gave the bunnies away.  They were cute, they were sweet, but they were high-maintenance.  If you want to read about their arrival in our lives, I’ve back-posted those letters here and here.  Amy tells me that it’s a heart-warming story, and she recommends you read it. 

Bear in mind that she’s insane and has my wedding ring to prove it. 

The bunnies’ names were Monty (the boy) and MurderBunny (the girl).  Take a wild guess which one I named.  Then take a wild guess as to why Amy must be insane to marry me. 

The biggest problem with the bunnies was their interest in chewing.  We have power cables, data cables, etc., all over the place.  Either we had to entirely overhaul the whole house, or sequester them in a particular place.  Fortunately, this house has a small extra bedroom that we never really used, so we cleaned it out and turned it into the bunny room.  Amy, industrious little sweetheart that she is, constructed a spacious home for them out of mesh panels zip-tied together.  And, yes, I means spacious:  5′ by 5′ by 3′, with three levels and ramps.  And, no, it wasn’t simply a cage.  They liked it, they regarded it as their home, and they often slept there even when the cage doors were open (usually for several hours each day).  Indeed, MurderBunny would often run into it to escape me when I entered the room.

MurderBunny didn’t particularly like me.  <cough> bitch <cough> 

Movie Title Mash-Ups

Some years back when we lived in the same zip code, Steven Marsh and I used to play a mash-up game with movie titles.  I don’t think it every had a real name, but it was something to do on the long drive to the yo-yo championships and cons and so forth.  The idea was to conjoin two movie titles which had a common word at one’s beginning and the other’s end (for clarity’s sake, I’ll underline the common word).  I think my personal best was “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being John Malkovich”.

I may have mentioned that we did this while driving.  Obviously, we were very bored. 

A Moment From My Sordid Past

Sometime back in the early days of mass blogging (the late 90’s, I think), I occasionally wandered around through other people’s blogs.  From time to time, I would post a comment.  Yes, I’m going somewhere with this.  Be patient.

I remember posting comments on the blog of this one girl from Seattle, some riot-grrl wannabe who was always posting about the band she was in and her car and her job and some skinny sunlight-averse guy she was crushing on and so forth.  She seemed to be under the impression that every moment of her life was a profound moment, worthy of lengthy observations . . . which is reasonable, given that she was maybe 21 or 22.  I posted a comment at one point that referred to her as being goth, which I thought was a reasonable inference, given that she was cross-posting her stuff to some goth site or somesuch. 

A day later, I checked her blog and she had replied that she wasn’t goth.  Instead, she rattled off a list of things that characterized her (riot grrl, technophile, etc.), but that really she was too complex for any pigeonhole.  She said, with a tinge of pride and a bit of arrogant challenge, that people were always trying to put her into a box and then were surprised that she didn’t fit.  I replied that anyone can fit into a box; it just depends on how much cutting needs to be done.

A day later, I checked her blog and she had disabled the ‘comment’ function for non-members.

 

 

Heavy Sigh

Tired.  Haven’t posted much in recent weeks for several reasons.  First and foremost, of course, is my ongoing status as a lazy bastard.  Others include working on of other writing projects, dealing with assorted work and home issues, and most recently a looooong drive to deliver the bunnies to a new home.  Of course, you don’t know anything about the bunnies, probably.  Sweet, adorable, and just not suited to our lifestyles, the bunnies were an unexpected addition to our home.  About this time last year, actually. 

Recently, by which I mean yesterday, we were finally able to pass the bunnies on to someone who would give them the attention they deserved.  It took a while, but we finally found someone who fit the bill, and so we found ourselves driving several hours to deliver them.  And the huge pile of miscellany that went with them (food, litterboxes, toys, a 5′x5′x3 cage . . . ).  Then we set it all up for them.  Then we chatted for a while to be sure they were appropriate to the task.  Then we drove home.   All in one day.  We got home about 3 AM. 

And there was the Thursday night/Friday morning adventure with Bucky, aka “the little green feathered bastard who doesn’t know how goddamned good he has it.” 

I’ll get these stories.  I promise.  I’m just a wee bit tired right now. 

 

P.S.  Did I mention I have gay fish? 

Bad Suggestions

One of my co-workers is going to be giving birth to a girl in a month or so.  She said that she and her husband are having trouble coming up with girl names, so I promised I’d provide a list of completely unsuitable names.  I don’t think she took me seriously.

 

Nevertheless,   I came up with a list.  Most of these names are saints drawn from Saints Preserve Us (Sean Kelly & Rosemary Rogers, 1993 Random House).  For these particular selections I have included that saint’s feast day and, when available, the recognized areas of patronage or maybe some other useful note, as long as I can keep that entry to one line. 

 

A Memorial Day Observance

Headline:  Bush Calls On Americans To Remember War Dead

Subtext:  And Overlook That He’s Responsible For 4,000 Of Them

Suckitude

Yep, life is a big barrel o’ crap right now. 

As I type this, my wife Amy is in Prescott, Arizona.  She’s trapped in a house with her mother, Penny, and her mother’s significant other, Roger, with no escape until her flight home on Thursday.  I, on the other hand, am trapped in our home with three birds, two cats, two rabbits, three boxes of fish, 1.5 metric craploads of plants, and a loaned DVD of “Grandma’s Boy” that I have to watch before Tuesday. 

There’s plenty of things that need doing around here, and I’m not getting a goddamned thing done.  I’ve always be pretty lousy at time management, so I’ve set myself a couple of particular goals to accomplish before Amy gets back.  If I can get that short list done, then anything else is gravy. 

Task one:  get together the physical set-up for my new 55 gallon tank.  Since that much water will weigh in excess of 500 lbs, it needs a fairly strong stand.  We settled on the cheapo version, consisting of cinderblocks, planks, and plywood.  The wood needs waterproofing, the blocks need painting, and all of it has to be done outside unless I want to kill the pets. 

Task two:  finish GTA: San Andreas.  I try not to play this one around Amy, but not for the reasons you think.  As far as violence goes, GTA:SA has nothing on Manhunt2, which is a vicious, bloody mess of a game.  It’s because I tend to reference the character’s speech when I’m playing the game.  CJ, the protagonist, is an urban gangbanger, while I am a somewhat unholy combination of tweedy academic and white trash.  Consequently, ‘urban’ colloquialisms sound exceedingly odd coming from me.  Amy does so much eye-rolling that I’m afraid she’ll sprain something. 

So that’s my plan for the next few days.  Gonna suck. 

 

Unproductivity

Sorry, haven’t blogged anything in a while.  Part of it is that when I’ve had free time, I just haven’t been up to any serious effort to write anything.  Part of it is that I haven’t had much free time.  My wife Amy is going to be leaving town for about ten days, and it’s going to really suck.

Her mother recently sold her place, despite the market downturn, and is going to be moving across the country.  And, of course, she needs Amy to help her move.  So Amy wil be helping her load up her stuff and drive it from Florida to Arizona. 

As fate would have it, I’ve been having to put in some work at my parents’ place for the last couple of weeks.  Just an hour or so a day, but it eats into my free time with Amy, which would be less of a problem if she weren’t about to disappear for a week and a half. 

If nothing else, I’ll probably get a bit more blogging done while she’s gone.  Maybe I’ll clean.