funreasonable!

hi friends, 

bet you didn't know i had a blog still! well i do and in the months and months it has been since i posted anything, i have been doing nothing but preparing for this blog post. 

it the best when people don't pay attention to the implication of the juxtapositions they create, it is like puns for my eyes! also, there are some images here that just don't seem like good ideas. exhibit a: 

josh hamilton (DRINK BOOZE) made a very mature decision to (DRINK BEER) abstain from his baseball team's revelry (GET DRUNK ON RUM) celebrating clinching a playoff (HAVE YOU EVER TRIED A RUM & BEER MIXED DRINK, I THINK THEY CALL IT THE UNIMAGINATIVE SAILOR) spot. hamilton has a checkered past of (LOOK AT THE LONG HAIRED MAN STANDING ON A BARREL OF RUM DOESN'T THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO GET LOADED ON RUM) substance abuse.

exhibit b: this isn't a juxtaposition so much as a REALLY TERRIBLE AD.

but hey, i'm glad we're far enough removed from our proud country's dark past of ACTUALLY TORTURING PEOPLE that we can laugh about it. or at least use it as a means of getting people to a website where we FUCKING SELL BATTERIES.

(yes, i watched sam kinison recently, no he's not funny, but he's SO OUTRAGEOUS AH AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!)

a thought, part two

today i sauteed some asparagus in bragg's liquid aminos and dr. pepper and my first thought was now this is why i don't smoke weed. i'm already dumb enough. (for the record, however, the asparagus was a success.)

but the thing is that some of the smartest people i know smoke pot and some of the fittest people i know eat like garbage disposals. and i knew an actuary who was an interesting guy. so what i am thinking is that maybe we are less defined by the choices that we make than we'd like to think and maybe that's a good thing.

i am t-pain

(full disclosure: i am actually t-peña.)

jesus and wade boggs

i don't mean to offend anyone or anything but i was just sitting around thinking about thinking and how our brains make connections between seemingly unrelated things and specifically i was thinking about wade boggs and jesus.

(now before you get all "they aren't hardly unrelated because all humans' DNA is 99.9% the same and so wade boggs is more closely related to jesus than he is to his 1983 topps rookie card ($17.95, near mint) and blah blah blah..." i wasn't like trying to identify the most dissimilar things i could think of, so back off and stop interrupting me, or i'll never get to my point.)

anyway, i was quick to make the obvious connections between jesus and wade boggs, being that they both are said to have done things that no ordinary human is capable of. (though, to my mind, wade boggs drinking 32 or 36 beers on a cross-country flight and willing himself invisible during a knife fight at a night club are the more believable of the feats ascribed to each figure. after all, the man won 5 batting titles and was notoriously compulsive about his routines, waking up at precisely the same time every day, eating fried chicken before every game and starting his windsprints exactly 7 minutes and 17 seconds before the first pitch. i am willing to give a person like that the benefit of the doubt.) 

oh, and also they are both known for their superstitions. jesus believed that there was a god who was all-knowing and also that he was this god's son, and wade boggs believed that his success hitting a ball made of horse skin would continue only if he hit the same number of balls on the ground during practice every day. i guess those two are kindred spirits, no wonder they both popped into my brain.

bitch i'm i.m. pei

that's all i gotta say.

florida

i have seen two cars upside-down on the highway in my life and another time i saw a helicopter on the roadway, blades spinning, blocking all the lanes of traffic on I-95. i'm not sure what happened. and when i think about things like car accidents, i think about the events that must have led up to that moment and i think how these minor decisions that we make in our lives can have huge consequences, you know? i mention this because i was down in florida visiting my grandmother who lives there and my parents who don't live there and who also left a day before me, so i had a morning to myself before i was supposed to return the rental car and fly back to portland. 

now i hope you'll indulge me for a minute while i veer off-course, but there are some things about florida that you should know. first of all, on the way there you'll be sitting in an exit row with the largest man on the flight. and you, being broad-shouldered yourself, will be unable to sit with your back flat against the seat and so for the duration of the four hour flight from vegas to orlando, you will sit cock-eyed against the wall while the electrician next to you burps up the beer and sausage he had in the airport, and you might find the slowly-evolving scents of his digestion interesting if you hadn't given up meat two years ago. then you will wait for your bag with a woman wearing red knit hand warmers and an ed hardy tank-top in the 82 degree florida evening. then after four hours in the orlando airport (where they mercifully have wireless internet) waiting for your parents to arrive, you'll pile into a rented chevy malibu that costs $148 per day and drive down the coast for an hour and a half to your grandmother's house along a route that used to be lined with fragrant orange trees, but is now a series of strip malls, your favorite of which houses a restaurant called "beef o'brady's". ah, irish cuisine, the pinnacle of culinary achievement! (ah, strip malls, the pinnacle of commercial achievement...!) but hey, it's not all bad, there are still some open spaces left along the drive, though they are principally gated communities abandoned by their developers with solitary gatehouses guarding hundreds of acres of paved cul-de-sacs and crab grass. 

(and in defense of florida and to avoid coming across as something of a sourpuss, i did have a nice time. my dad and i caught (and released) a bluefish, a sea trout, a mullet and a bar jack, i got a few laughs out of my grandmother who has all but succumbed to her alzheimer's, i cooked some dinner with my mom and played golf with my aunt and uncle. oh there were manatee and dolphin and an egret i saw eating a rat, there was body-surfing and a rocket launched from cape canaveral that we all watched from the backyard. florida, i don't love you and i am still upset about 2000, though i am pretty sure you voted for gore, but as long as you have people i care about in you, i will put up with you.)

but so, my original point was something about the way things work out and how our insignificant decisions can have profound effects on our lives and the reason i brought that up in the first place was because i was driving from grandma's to the airport back along that gauntlet of floundering commerce and i was driving pretty slow in the fast lane, which i don't usually do unlike the drivers from the states of california and massachussetts, who seem unaware of the fact that the left lane is for passing and not traveling the same speed as the cars next to you. but anyway i was in the left lane, slowly gaining on a truck that was a couple hundred yards in front of me and mc hammer's "you can't touch this" came on the radio and something flew off the truck. i don't know what reason any radio station could possibly have for playing mc hammer in 2010. but what flew off the truck in front of me was a windshield from one of the junked cars it was hauling. the entire windshield, 30 feet in the air. it landed a few feet in front of my car in the right lane and the malibu was pelted by pea-sized bits of shatterproof glass. now what if that windshield had landed on my car? would i have boarded this plane safe and sound, or would i be upside-down in well-rated american car, wheels spinning on the side of highway 520 outside of orlando?

thoughts on the politics of the day

i was reading about the democratic house leadership's strategy to bring health insurance reform to a vote. i don't think many people understand parliamentary procedure. sometimes i like to read articles about politics on the internet all day and inevitably when i get to the comments, i read things like 

"A single member bypassing a vote by calling something 'deemed" passed without a vote is in violation of our Constitution and NOT indicative of a Representative Democracy." 

first of all, the house will mold the senate bill to their liking and then a vote will be held on their "fixes", with every house member understanding that their vote on the house revisions is an implicit vote on the senate bill as well. there is a reason this strategy is called "deem and pass" and not just "pelosi sez".  voting twice,  once on the passage of the senate bill and then on the house's revisions would serve no purpose other than to give opponents of the bill greater opportunity to rant and rave and express the health insurance industry's qualms about reform. and bloviate, my god the bloviation!

second of all, for all the cries of fascist and dictator and traitor, you would think that these people were trying to include zyklon b in school lunches. the libertarians, always entertaining, but never ones to engage in reasonable discussion without introducing hyperbole and creepy threats, are screaming for revolution. offering to introduce house leadership to hell and make speaker pelosi "@#$@ her pants".  don't you realize that our democracy works in such a way that if you don't like the policies of the people who have been elected, you have the opportunity to vote them out of office? if they happen to be reelected, that is more or less an indication that your fellow americans disagree with you. 

armed revolution? limited government? no health care? from the sound of it, you might enjoy sunny somalia!

but then again, i cannot see the appeal of malls, suburbs, the black eyed peas, ed hardy, SUVs, mcdonalds, i think thomas kinkaide is a miserable artist, i think michael pollan and paul krugman are generally right, growing and raising your own food is a rewarding, healthy, economical and beneficial activity, bicycling is a fun and healthy means of transportation and money is not a measure of success. that said, i believe everyone should have the opportunity to succeed (however they define success) and the government can and should be a catalyst for that success. i guess i'm a fascist too.