Time Of Your Life (Good Riddance, Kids!)

I hate to interrupt our racism reminiscing, but this just couldn't wait.

Gilmore Girls is terrible these days, so I flipped around during the last hour. I checked out a few minutes of the Maryland / Illinois game on ESPN; Brent Musburger was talking about the community service efforts of Illinois' Orange Krush organization:

"They've got a couple of terminally ill children here tonight, and they are having the time of their lives!"

Yikes.

Race For The Most Racist

I'm back from an uneventful Thanksgiving weekend in Wichita.

Please post your relatives' borderline-to-blatantly racist Thanksgiving moments below.

I'll start:

(relative sees a lowered truck a few parking stalls down)

"I guess I should park up here a bit, away from those Mexicans."


UPDATE: This topic is being tag-teamed, courtesy of Circle V. See her site for more racist fun!

Text Follies

A semi-regular feature on this site - text messages that made me chuckle these past Red-Dawn tinged months...

6/23
7:53 am
I think its funny when a guys first name is oral.
--Matt


6/30
8:45 pm
Me: im going to a movie
grandma: watch out for mexicans!
--Floyd

8:48 pm
My mom: no, seriously, watch out for mexicans
--Floyd


7/1 (the day England lost its World Cup match)
11:50 am
BULLOCKS!
--Gavin

7/14
7:54 pm
im watching a man feed pigeons with his mouth
--Floyd

7/26
1:39 am
sorry bout that
--dude who dialed the wrong number, waking me up, then decided to apologize via a text message, which again woke me up

7/31
7:56 pm
What the fuck is nougat made of? Dont misunderstand. I love it. I just don't know what it is.
--Matt

8/19
12:50 pm
Ive had it with these muthafuckin snakes on this muthafuckin plane!
--Blaine

8/25
9:59 am
I miss Pluto
--Matt

9/4 (date of the Minnesota state fair)
7:40 pm
My sisters friends husband opened 4 brooks & dunn. I think brooks is on the cowbell but it could be dunn
--Bar

9/8
7:33 am
I dont want to live in a country where you cant slaughter a horse for profit.
--Matt


9/16
10:31 pm
we are going to joes crab shack three times when we go to ok city. Wolverines.
--Matt

11:02 pm
i am going to fuck you on a pile of crab legs
--Matt


9/16
11:03 pm
Wolverines u fucking dicks
--Brian

10/5
10:13 am
Double. One bed will get all wet and we will want to sleep in a dry bed.
--Matt, responding to my query about how many beds to reserve in our hotel room

11/9
10:16 am
I have fucking muscovites all around me. Should i ask them if they have ever seen Red Dawn?
--Matt

Karen, Oh!

Before The Office airs tonight, I wanted to go on the record. I'm on Team Karen.

I haven't looked at all of the comments regarding the Pam vs. Karen debate yet, so I can add my opinion here, without influence:

I'm a Pam fan. Like Jim, I'm certainly attracted to Pam, and I share the desire to coax that adorable Pam out of her shell.

Still, I can't help but think that Jim and I are attracted to the idea of Pam, rather than Pam herself. What would a relationship with Pam be like? Wouldn't she be needy? Wouldn't you have to constantly reassure her? Wouldn't that get old?

I say it would get old. And, while it would be perfectly nice for last season's Jim, this season's Jim has a winning alternative. Karen is on par physically. Karen seems funny. Karen is self-assured. She may lack Pam's abundance of warmth, but she's no cold fish.

Plus, I'm certain Karen would go downtown - Pam, not so much.

Am I right? Am I right, folks?

Scrambled Eggs*

Fresh off designing the Toaster of the Future, my mind produced another nugget. Half awake, very early Friday morning, the phrase "Don't blame the sun for what your shadow is doing" streamed through my half consciousness.

"I should write that down before I forget it, using the pad and paper I placed on my end table for this specific reason," I thought.

"I am still very tired and don't want to move," I responded, sure that the brain that manufactured the phrase would store it as well.

But does the phrase belong to me, or have I lifted it from somewhere? The closest thing to a match I could Google was "you blame the sun as the cause of the shadows on the wall", a Yo La Tengo lyric from a song I've never heard. Before I start pasting my phrase on inspirational posters, or inserting it into a soaring chorus, I feel the need to confirm its copyright.

*Fun fact: Paul McCartney had a similar problem with the melody of "Yesterday". He woke up with the song in his head, convinced it was already recorded, and was eventually convinced that it was his own. In its draft form, "Yesterday" was "Scrambled Eggs". Same number of syllables, see? Do you see?

Road Trip

I had to give a presentation in Garden City Wednesday; I took my camera along to amuse myself during the 5+ hour drive. Every now and then, I'd roll down the window, stick the camera out, and snap a photo of the Kansas landscape. It's actually a pretty neat drive, but seeing as how it's November, there isn't much color to convince anyone how nice the Smoky Hills are.



On the return trip, I decided to detour through Mushroom Rock State Park. I'd heard of it, but I'd never been. It's a very small patch of mutant geology.



The weird thing about it is how normal the surrounding area is.



Also, I finally checked out this statue atop a hill at a rest stop east of Manhattan. I got there at sunset, which was nice.



Other assorted photos are at my Flickr account.

My Dream Toaster

Lots and lots of wild dreams lately -- women with shaved heads, women who take a job as a reporter for a local Fox affiliate and therefore haven't called me in a while -- but the filet of my subconscious appeared last weekend, as I slept in the Hampton Inn off Garth Brooks Boulevard.

The dream showed me a new (although I haven't researched the topic, I assume this is a new idea) type of toaster, wherein there is no lever or dial to set the degree of toastedness. Instead, the light-to-dark ratio is determined by the main lever -- the one that drops the bread into the machine. Machine? Simple machine. Appliance. The one that drops the bread into the appliance. For dark toast, push the lever all the way to the bottom. For lighter toast, don't push the lever so far down.

NB: I had not eaten toast for a number of days prior to the dream, and had no recent conversations about toast. I do think about toaster more than the average person -- maybe 70% greater than average. This is because I've owned the same toaster since 1997, and I hate it, but I don't see a good reason to replace it, as it still operates satisfactorily, and a new toaster, while nice, would be a bit excessive.

(...)

Business Tycoons? I Like The Sound Of That!

I must admit, Halloween was disappointing in Lawrence. I guess that's what happens when the 31st falls on a Tuesday night. Do you know how poor it was on Mass Street last night? It was so poor that I didn't take a single picture of any stranger's costume. Brutal. I did take pictures of our hastily assembled outfits, however.

Blogger is misbehaving at the moment, so you'll have to click through to my Flickr account to see the photos.