Hey fat ass, your country suffers from "chronic food shortages." What's wrong with this picture?
Posts
Bachmann's Bio
13 years ago
Friday, December 30, 2011
Kim Jong Un[sophisticated]
Hey fat ass, your country suffers from "chronic food shortages." What's wrong with this picture?
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Iran issues new warning
US says it will not tolerate closure of key strait as Iran issued second warning in 2 days
TEHRAN, Iran - The U.S. warned Iran Wednesday that it will not tolerate any disruption of naval traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, after Iran's navy chief said the Islamic Republic is capable of closing the vital oil route if the West imposes new sanctions targeting Tehran's oil exports.
Again.
***Reggie F Cat is now offering a $25 cash reward to any president that authorizes kicking the shit out of Iran***
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
3 year old dies in North Minneapolis
Stray bullet kills 3 year old kid in North Minneapolis. No surprise here, blacks kill themselves in droves in North Minneapolis.
Nice culture. Put away the guns you shit-for-brains. Some people can't understand my reluctance to embrace other cultures. This is a good example why. I prefer my culture, where gunfire isn't used to solve trivial issues. Got insulted? Shoot something up. Bad mood? Shoot something up. Someone looked at you goofy? Shoot something up. Smart. Real smart.
from the STrib:
Mayor R.T. Rybak on Tuesday called the killing of 3-year-old Terrell Lamont Mayes Jr. an "outrage" and a "reckless act," and appealed to the public for help finding who shot the stray bullet that took the child's life.
Standing on a lawn outside the north Minneapolis house where Terrell was shot, Rybak said that no one should withhold information or shield the people responsible. With two council members and police at his side, the mayor announced a $1,000 reward.
Police said the stray bullet struck the toddler in the head Monday evening inside a house in the 2600 block of Colfax Avenue N. in the Hawthorne neighborhood. He died at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at North Memorial Hospital.
The bullet that hit him came from outside the home, but there was no evidence that people inside had been targeted, said Sgt. Steve McCarty, a police department spokesman.
"Sitting on this information can only make it worse," said Minneapolis police Inspector Mike Martin. "This family needs justice."
Nice culture. Put away the guns you shit-for-brains. Some people can't understand my reluctance to embrace other cultures. This is a good example why. I prefer my culture, where gunfire isn't used to solve trivial issues. Got insulted? Shoot something up. Bad mood? Shoot something up. Someone looked at you goofy? Shoot something up. Smart. Real smart.
from the STrib:
Mayor R.T. Rybak on Tuesday called the killing of 3-year-old Terrell Lamont Mayes Jr. an "outrage" and a "reckless act," and appealed to the public for help finding who shot the stray bullet that took the child's life.
Standing on a lawn outside the north Minneapolis house where Terrell was shot, Rybak said that no one should withhold information or shield the people responsible. With two council members and police at his side, the mayor announced a $1,000 reward.
Police said the stray bullet struck the toddler in the head Monday evening inside a house in the 2600 block of Colfax Avenue N. in the Hawthorne neighborhood. He died at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at North Memorial Hospital.
The bullet that hit him came from outside the home, but there was no evidence that people inside had been targeted, said Sgt. Steve McCarty, a police department spokesman.
"Sitting on this information can only make it worse," said Minneapolis police Inspector Mike Martin. "This family needs justice."
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi gets it...
From Rolling Stone magazine columnist Matt Taibbi's blog. The guy gets it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Christmas message from America's rich.
It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.
True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.
But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.
Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:
“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”
Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.
Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”
Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.
But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.
Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.
It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.
The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).
So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.
But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.
You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.
And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.
The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.
An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.
But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.
Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.
Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed.
And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he orchestrated a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?
Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.
Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.
That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.
Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.
Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?
Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.
Just look at how Chase behaved in Greece, for example.
Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” Greece mask its debt problem for years by selling a similar series of swaps to the Greek government. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.
In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.
Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?
Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.
But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?
Of course not. We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.
People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.
What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.
Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.
But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.
Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.
But these people don’t have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls. Just listen to Cooperman, the former Goldman exec from that country club in Boca. According to Cooperman, the rich do contribute to society:
Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas…”
Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-christmas-message-from-americas-rich-20111222#ixzz1hJibJo5d
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Christmas message from America's rich.
It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.
True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.
But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.
Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:
“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”
Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.
Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”
Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.
But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.
Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.
It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.
The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).
So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.
But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.
You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.
And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.
The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.
An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.
But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.
Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.
Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed.
And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he orchestrated a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?
Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.
Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.
That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.
Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.
Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?
Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.
Just look at how Chase behaved in Greece, for example.
Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” Greece mask its debt problem for years by selling a similar series of swaps to the Greek government. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.
In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.
Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?
Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.
But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?
Of course not. We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.
People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.
What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.
Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.
But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.
Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.
But these people don’t have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls. Just listen to Cooperman, the former Goldman exec from that country club in Boca. According to Cooperman, the rich do contribute to society:
Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas…”
Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-christmas-message-from-americas-rich-20111222#ixzz1hJibJo5d
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
More Iran, just for Don...
Welcome back to my continuing celebration of one the most technologically innovative countries to treat their women like shit.
My tribute to the Iranian Navy, seen here during their Aerospace celebration [some kite reached 100 feet in the air]. Although I admit I didn't check my Jane's Guide To Pathetic Navies Of Piss-Ant Countries.
Impressive boys. [Maybe you ought to stick to what you know. Which was what again? Space?]
US. Moonwalk. Check. Reusable Space Shuttles. Check. Mars rover. Check.
Iran. Moonwalk. No. Reusable Space Shuttles. No. Mars rover. No. Cool Aerospace Division baseball cap. Check.
Conclusion: the United States is an Aerospace power and Iran is an Aerospace joke.
Clear enough?
PS. Any Iranians reading this: your country just sucks ass. Mine doesn't. [Sing-songy] ha ha ha ha ha.
My tribute to the Iranian Navy, seen here during their Aerospace celebration [some kite reached 100 feet in the air]. Although I admit I didn't check my Jane's Guide To Pathetic Navies Of Piss-Ant Countries.
Impressive boys. [Maybe you ought to stick to what you know. Which was what again? Space?]
US. Moonwalk. Check. Reusable Space Shuttles. Check. Mars rover. Check.
Iran. Moonwalk. No. Reusable Space Shuttles. No. Mars rover. No. Cool Aerospace Division baseball cap. Check.
Conclusion: the United States is an Aerospace power and Iran is an Aerospace joke.
Clear enough?
PS. Any Iranians reading this: your country just sucks ass. Mine doesn't. [Sing-songy] ha ha ha ha ha.
Monday, December 19, 2011
A rong time coming.
So long Kin Jong Il [as rendered in the politically correct movie Team America].
Now that the diminutive rice-dick with the massive "little guy" inferiority complex is dead as fried chicken, perhaps North Korea might opt to join civilization, shedding the paranoia and self-defeating policies championed by the humorous Il.
We love how he was portrayed in the above mentioned movie. We love that he hated how he was portrayed in the above mentioned movie.
Kim Jong at his best: check out the soundtrack for the above mentioned movie for his stirring rendition of "I'm So Ronery."
Never gets old.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
More Iran, and why not?
Just a quick note after seeing this picture in the paper of some Iranian jackoffs looking at an American spy drone that somehow ended up in their posession.
The humor comes from the caption, which states:
This photo released by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards claims to show the chief of the aerospace division of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, left, listening to an unidentified colonel as he points to a US RQ-170 Sentinel drone which Tehran says its forces downed.
Why that's funny is this: Iran's Chief Of The Aerospace Division. Huh? Aerospace Division? What a jackoff, leader of an aerospace division that has never even caught a whiff of space. Might as well call himself Iran's Chief Of The Aerosmith Division, because he can "dream on."
What, was Iran's Chief Of National Football League Scouting Division unavailable for the photo? Or Iran's Chief Of The Flying Shit Log Division?
That asshole's probably unemployed and just snuck onto the premises for a look-see. YOU HAVE NO SPACE OR ORBITAL VEHICLES IN YOUR ARSENAL. Just what exactly, WTF are you in charge of, Mr. "Aerospace Division?" [loud, uproarious laughter]
Nice made up job title, Gen. Alli Alli Akbar. Maybe some of Iran's noted Admirals can clarify this.
Sweet Jesus, I hate Iran with a white-hot passion.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Minneapolis Police: More Fun!
Headline and tiny capsule from Mpls. Star-Tribune:
Botched raid costs Minneapolis $1 million
City Council approved the payout nearly two years after police used a stun grenade that left a woman with permanent injuries.
[I'd give you more of the story, but ever since the STrib went back on ten years of giving away online content free.... Anyway, point is, paying for it now: just not gonna happen. Thanks anyway.]
The reason this is humorous is because even when Minneapolis cops aren't trying to be assholes, they still are! Again, a little institutional control please. How that shitbag Chief Of Cops still has his job is an absolute Christmas Miracle.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
RIP CowPotter
Farewell to great "old-time" actor Harry Morgan, who passed today, December 7, 2011.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Morgan
Liked him as Col. Potter.
Loved him as stoodgy Officer Bill Gannon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Morgan
Liked him as Col. Potter.
Loved him as stoodgy Officer Bill Gannon.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
The sister strikes...
New post on the sister blog.
Reminder: the sister blog is for angry, violent expression. You've been warned.
http://gripes-and-rants.blogspot.com/2011/11/this-is-just-wrong.html
Reminder: the sister blog is for angry, violent expression. You've been warned.
http://gripes-and-rants.blogspot.com/2011/11/this-is-just-wrong.html
Friday, November 25, 2011
Bachmann's Bio
The sister blog, Rants My Owner Subjects Me To [And Other Musings], has unearthed some interesting information about the book cover of Michele Bachmann's recent autobiography.
Check it out.
http://gripes-and-rants.blogspot.com/2011/11/bachmanns-bio.html
Check it out.
http://gripes-and-rants.blogspot.com/2011/11/bachmanns-bio.html
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Fallon sucks, redux.
 |
| J: "I have no talent." M: "I have no shot in this election" |
A year or so ago, I ripped Jimmy Fallon ["Jimmy Shallow"] for being a no-talent turd who must have pictures on somebody in order to keep getting work. Why Jimmy Shallow? Shallow refers to the depth, or lack thereof, of his talent. In the swimming pool of talent, Shallow's efforts are strictly for wading only.
I saw this in the morning paper and immediately threw another log on the "I hate Jimmy Fallon" fire.
http://www.twincities.com/ci_19403362
The capsule from the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
"GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann received an apology from an NBC executive after an off-color song was played during her appearance on Jimmy Fallon's "Late Night," her spokeswoman said late Wednesday.
The Minnesota congresswoman received a personal letter from NBC's vice president for late night programming, Doug Vaughan, a day after she appeared on the show. As Bachmann walked onstage, the show's band had played a snippet of a 1985 Fishbone song titled "Lyin' Ass B----."
Yes, the lameass newsrag also lacks balls, in this case replacing the word "bitch" with "B----." What a bunch of f------ p------!
Back to Shallow. Fallon is showing himself to lack not only talent, but, like the Pioneer Press, testicles. He's relentlessly apologizing for his band playing a song that at least in title, perfectly fit his guest, whether she realizes it or not: Michele Bachmann never met a fact she couldn't twist, manipulate or ignore. Late-night television should have been a perfect venue to put Bachmann's feet to the fire on some serious factual faux paus, half-truths or outright lies. Never happened. Instead we got Shallow's witless prattle.
I basically stopped ripping Bachmann because her own words did her more discredit than I ever could. By the way Michele, I'd recommend you get someone other than Ronald McDonald to do your makeup.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Radio Free Wohlman kicks ass!
A special nod to innerweb pally Dave Wohlman, proud proprietor of Radio Free Wohlman. His transmissions are always good, but his current post, Transmission 13411, touches on a subject near and dear to Reggie F. Cat: cops kicking ass.
I encourage RFCat readers to check out Radio Free Wohlman with regularity. I went for the pizza, but stayed for the music.
http://radiofreewohlman.blogspot.com/
Radio Free Wohlman is also located in my blogroll to the right for easy access.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Reasons I like Jim Souhan #39
Ripped off from the Minneapolis StarTribune. Jim Souhan does great work, and this column is no exception.
Mike McQueary did not do enough when he saw Jerry Sandusky with a boy in the Penn State showers. Joe Paterno did not do enough when told of Sandusky's crime. The Penn State administration did not do enough to protect children on its campus while Sandusky used the auspices of the football program to pursue victims for more than a decade.
Now the Penn State trustees is proving that in Happy Valley, inaction and shortsightedness are endemic. Even while dismissing the president of the university and their famous football coach, the trustees are failing to grasp the enormity of the crimes committed on their watch.
What we know now is that key members of the Penn State football program were serial enablers of child rape and molestation.
Dismissing the university president and athletic director is not enough, not when your campus has been used as a safe haven and hunting ground by a pedophile. Firing Paterno is not enough, not when Paterno neglected to use his immense power to halt the abuse of children.
It is time for the powers that be to use their powers pointedly and appropriately.
Penn State should cancel the rest of the football season.
The NCAA should investigate the football program and consider the death penalty.
Many of the people who rioted on the Penn State campus Wednesday night in protest of Paterno's dismissal probably plan to attend the football game on campus Saturday. They should not be given any forum in which to voice their delusions, and certainly not a 106,572-seat stadium in which to hold an undeserved memorial to Paterno's tainted career.
Playing a football game on that campus at this time would trivialize the abuse of children on that campus, would signal to the many victims and those who care about them that beating Nebraska is more important than beginning the arduous process of cleansing the program.
Playing a football game on Saturday originally would have meant allowing McQueary to coach. No one should have to see that, and no one will, as the school said Thursday night he will sit out because of threats made against him.
Cancelling the game does not require much thought or backbone. It is the only conscionable decision.
The NCAA must display a conscience as well. This is an institution that punishes coaches for offering their players rides, that shut down Southern Methodist's football program for paying athletes.
Compared with serial pedophilia, what happened on the SMU campus is the equivalent of spitting on the sidewalk.
Let no one say that some good will come of these events, but the NCAA can use Penn State as a disgusting example of what can transpire when a college football program becomes omnipotent.
McQueary saw Sandusky with a boy in the football locker room shower. He passed the buck to Paterno, the most powerful man on campus. Paterno passed the buck to his boss. Even as rumors of Sandusky's alleged crimes proliferated and he was the target of a police investigation into his relationship with another boy, McQueary and Paterno did nothing while Sandusky used the football program as the candy with which to seduce children.
College football has long been a receptacle of corruption and greed. Only on a campus where the football coach is treated as part Pope and part Patton could such evil persist for so long.
The NCAA should prove that it cares about more than $50 handshakes between alumni and athletes, that it holds universities responsible for all of the ills that occur within their bloated football programs.
When the NCAA levies its harshest penalties, it cites a school's "lack of institutional control.'' There has never been a clearer case of university lacking institutional control over its football program than Penn State allowing Sandusky to bring children to the team's sidelines and showers.
The NCAA should shut down Penn State football at least until Sandusky has been tried and his victims have been compensated.
A football game in Happy Valley would remind us how willing too many people are to forgive abuses of power as long as the local team bolsters their self-esteem on Saturday afternoons.
Jim Souhan can be heard Sundays from 10 a.m. to noon and weekdays at 2 p.m. on 1500ESPN. His Twitter name is SouhanStrib.
Mike McQueary did not do enough when he saw Jerry Sandusky with a boy in the Penn State showers. Joe Paterno did not do enough when told of Sandusky's crime. The Penn State administration did not do enough to protect children on its campus while Sandusky used the auspices of the football program to pursue victims for more than a decade.
Now the Penn State trustees is proving that in Happy Valley, inaction and shortsightedness are endemic. Even while dismissing the president of the university and their famous football coach, the trustees are failing to grasp the enormity of the crimes committed on their watch.
What we know now is that key members of the Penn State football program were serial enablers of child rape and molestation.
Dismissing the university president and athletic director is not enough, not when your campus has been used as a safe haven and hunting ground by a pedophile. Firing Paterno is not enough, not when Paterno neglected to use his immense power to halt the abuse of children.
It is time for the powers that be to use their powers pointedly and appropriately.
Penn State should cancel the rest of the football season.
The NCAA should investigate the football program and consider the death penalty.
Many of the people who rioted on the Penn State campus Wednesday night in protest of Paterno's dismissal probably plan to attend the football game on campus Saturday. They should not be given any forum in which to voice their delusions, and certainly not a 106,572-seat stadium in which to hold an undeserved memorial to Paterno's tainted career.
Playing a football game on that campus at this time would trivialize the abuse of children on that campus, would signal to the many victims and those who care about them that beating Nebraska is more important than beginning the arduous process of cleansing the program.
Playing a football game on Saturday originally would have meant allowing McQueary to coach. No one should have to see that, and no one will, as the school said Thursday night he will sit out because of threats made against him.
Cancelling the game does not require much thought or backbone. It is the only conscionable decision.
The NCAA must display a conscience as well. This is an institution that punishes coaches for offering their players rides, that shut down Southern Methodist's football program for paying athletes.
Compared with serial pedophilia, what happened on the SMU campus is the equivalent of spitting on the sidewalk.
Let no one say that some good will come of these events, but the NCAA can use Penn State as a disgusting example of what can transpire when a college football program becomes omnipotent.
McQueary saw Sandusky with a boy in the football locker room shower. He passed the buck to Paterno, the most powerful man on campus. Paterno passed the buck to his boss. Even as rumors of Sandusky's alleged crimes proliferated and he was the target of a police investigation into his relationship with another boy, McQueary and Paterno did nothing while Sandusky used the football program as the candy with which to seduce children.
College football has long been a receptacle of corruption and greed. Only on a campus where the football coach is treated as part Pope and part Patton could such evil persist for so long.
The NCAA should prove that it cares about more than $50 handshakes between alumni and athletes, that it holds universities responsible for all of the ills that occur within their bloated football programs.
When the NCAA levies its harshest penalties, it cites a school's "lack of institutional control.'' There has never been a clearer case of university lacking institutional control over its football program than Penn State allowing Sandusky to bring children to the team's sidelines and showers.
The NCAA should shut down Penn State football at least until Sandusky has been tried and his victims have been compensated.
A football game in Happy Valley would remind us how willing too many people are to forgive abuses of power as long as the local team bolsters their self-esteem on Saturday afternoons.
Jim Souhan can be heard Sundays from 10 a.m. to noon and weekdays at 2 p.m. on 1500ESPN. His Twitter name is SouhanStrib.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
44% Of Traffic Fatalities Unbelted...
In my home state of Minnesota, where we are constantly bombarded with lame-ass "Click It Or Ticket" TV commercials, where Law Enforcement agencies routinely hold "saturation" efforts to induce seat belt compliance, the StarTribune posted an article today that "44 Percent Of Crash Fatalities Were Unbelted."
First off, I'm on record as saying that when it comes to what transpires within my vehicle, the state should STFU and mind their own business [totalitarianism, cough, cough].
Second, I hate the arrogantly absurd supposition that the state cares whether I die on the roads or not. They don't, nor should they. The reason Minnesota likes seat belt legislation, the reason they're "driving Minnesota toward zero traffic deaths," isn't because of some paternal interest in your dumb ass, it's simply financial: seat belt violations offer an easy road to revenue. I hate it when government lies like that.
Years ago, I used to get ticketed for having car windows tinted too dark. Cops always said that the law was there for my own safety. Bullshit. I routinely wore sunglasses darker than my windows. The truth was, it was for the cops safety. They don't like the idea of blindly approaching a vehicle where someone is inside loading a handgun to shoot them for being pricks. I get that. Just call it what it is and don't say it's for my safety.
Back to the 44 percent of crash fatalities. By my Minnesota public school math, that means that 56 percent of crash fatalities were wearing a seat belt. So, I should wear a seat belt to join the 56 percent? May we please examine our facts again?.
"We've made great progress to improve the state's seat-belt use, yet in many parts of the state motorists are making the poor choice to travel unbelted, and they are paying the ultimate price for taking that risk," Donna Berger, acting director of the state's Office of Traffic Safety, said in a statement accompanying release of the data.
"Poor choice" Donna? Wake up dear, your own statistics don't bear you out.
So what's the deal? Are seat belts worth wearing? I guess they are, if simply to avoid entering the revenue stream of "Click It Or Ticket."
A side note to all Law Enforcement Agencies in Minnesota: I'm sick of seeing your dumbass ads on TV reminding all us lowly citizens to obey the rules. Perhaps you should stop your marketing efforts and concentrate and policing your own rank and file. Have you paid attention to the newspapers this past year? Your profession is liberally littered with crooked, corrupt members. Worry about that, and not whether I'm wearing a seat belt.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Thank you.
The Minnesota Twins today announced the firing of GM Bill Smith.
Christmas comes early. Thank you.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Reasons I like Seth Meyers #8
Just saw this on SNL's fake news and loved it. I'm paraphrasing to about 90% accuracy.
"A man was arrested in Dubai for allegedly throwing a prostitute out of his hotel window. But, since it's Dubai, he was only charged with littering."
"A man was arrested in Dubai for allegedly throwing a prostitute out of his hotel window. But, since it's Dubai, he was only charged with littering."
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
On This Date In 1991.
And that's it.
Part 2 of my 2 part series on Minnesota Championship teams from my lifetime.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
This change was good, right?
Glad to see Khadafi [vintage 1986 spelling!] gone, but are we sure the change was good?
I don't know, I always thought it was the bad guys who ran around obscuring their identity like knuckleheads.
Or.
I don't know. I prefer my heroes to not wear masks.
Or.
"Trick or treat!" Aww, cute, you're Libyan freedom fighters.
Or.
Man, thank Allah it's wash day, you guys stink.
Or.
Dude. It's 91 degrees out, aren't you hot in that ski mask?
Or.
Sonovabitch! Those guys knocked over my neighberhood 7-11 a few weeks back.
Or. And this one's the best.
Yearbook photo, Tripoli Community College, Class Of 2011. Alli Alli Akbar. Class Clown.
Man, these guys make it way too easy.
I don't know, I always thought it was the bad guys who ran around obscuring their identity like knuckleheads.
Or.
I don't know. I prefer my heroes to not wear masks.
Or.
"Trick or treat!" Aww, cute, you're Libyan freedom fighters.
Or.
Man, thank Allah it's wash day, you guys stink.
Or.
Dude. It's 91 degrees out, aren't you hot in that ski mask?
Or.
Sonovabitch! Those guys knocked over my neighberhood 7-11 a few weeks back.
Or. And this one's the best.
Yearbook photo, Tripoli Community College, Class Of 2011. Alli Alli Akbar. Class Clown.
Man, these guys make it way too easy.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Fair-weather friend: naming names #1
A fun little exercise where I'm going to rip the ass of someone who wronged me within the structure of a literary format of my own design and creation. Seriously, this is mostly a writing exercise, as I'm trying to sharpen my chops back to their pre-my-life-sucks state. Think of this as poetry with an axe to grind.
Why, you ask? Why dredge up the past, why not move on? Because I can, and I can't. Who knows, if this feels cathartic enough I might rip an ass on a weekly basis. I can think of no fewer than a dozen dinks I'd love to disparage.
Ok, here goes. This is a tale from over a year ago. With any luck, the dink sees this.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So one time, during an awful, unemployed period, I
Had a friend invite me to crash and recover at his place for
A while. No strings, no bills, just supply my own food and it's cool.
Wow, that seemed like a good offer.
Naturally, it didn't take long before his altruism fled the equation.
Given his plan was to discontinue mortgage payments and lett the bank
Usurp his home, it was strange to me that he now wanted money.
Considering his request, I began to examine its merits.
Knowing human nature, I quickly decided that this was trouble.
Everyone generally agrees that paying money gets you some rights,
Even though you accede to being the Beta dog in the pack.
Now, I'm surprised I didn't burn the house down while he slept.
Sorta dramatic, I admit, but there's no code against a fantasy.
Under normal circumstances, I'd never harbor such horrific thoughts.
Clearly though, when someone intentionally tries to dehumanize you,
Karma be damned, I want them to suffer.
Shallow? Probably. Do I care? Nope. [Sound of match striking]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Serious advice: I hear you're moving to Ohio. Sweet Jesus, when you relocate there, away from all the people you know, just come out of the closet already. It's 2011, nobody gives a crap if you're gay, but keeping all that pent up inside clearly makes you a miserable bastard.
Wow that felt good. I've got a former woman boss with an ass so big you can see it from orbit that's gonna get it next! I'm lookin' at you SP.
So come back next week to see me out another asshole.
PS. If you weren't a horrible person, I wouldn't be doing this.
Why, you ask? Why dredge up the past, why not move on? Because I can, and I can't. Who knows, if this feels cathartic enough I might rip an ass on a weekly basis. I can think of no fewer than a dozen dinks I'd love to disparage.
Ok, here goes. This is a tale from over a year ago. With any luck, the dink sees this.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So one time, during an awful, unemployed period, I
Had a friend invite me to crash and recover at his place for
A while. No strings, no bills, just supply my own food and it's cool.
Wow, that seemed like a good offer.
Naturally, it didn't take long before his altruism fled the equation.
Given his plan was to discontinue mortgage payments and lett the bank
Usurp his home, it was strange to me that he now wanted money.
Considering his request, I began to examine its merits.
Knowing human nature, I quickly decided that this was trouble.
Everyone generally agrees that paying money gets you some rights,
Even though you accede to being the Beta dog in the pack.
Now, I'm surprised I didn't burn the house down while he slept.
Sorta dramatic, I admit, but there's no code against a fantasy.
Under normal circumstances, I'd never harbor such horrific thoughts.
Clearly though, when someone intentionally tries to dehumanize you,
Karma be damned, I want them to suffer.
Shallow? Probably. Do I care? Nope. [Sound of match striking]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Serious advice: I hear you're moving to Ohio. Sweet Jesus, when you relocate there, away from all the people you know, just come out of the closet already. It's 2011, nobody gives a crap if you're gay, but keeping all that pent up inside clearly makes you a miserable bastard.
Wow that felt good. I've got a former woman boss with an ass so big you can see it from orbit that's gonna get it next! I'm lookin' at you SP.
So come back next week to see me out another asshole.
PS. If you weren't a horrible person, I wouldn't be doing this.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
The Times They Are A-Changin'
For the first time in more than 40 years, a record high number of Americans approve of legalizing marijuana.
A Gallup poll released this week showed that 50 percent of us think marijuana should be made legal, while 46 percent do not.
Regionally, the Midwest was second only to the West in highest approval numbers (54 percent). Not surprisingly, people 18 to 29 were most in favor (62 percent) and those 65 and older least in favor (31 percent). More men than women were in favor. Politically, people who identified themselves as moderates, independents or Democrats all came in at 57 percent, with Republicans at 35 percent.
[this portion ripped from the headlines...]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's not just that 50 percent of the populace want it legal, it's that it takes only 46 percent of the people to prevent it. The "want-it's" outnumber the "don't want it's." I don't want a minority of people telling me anything, whether it's about smoking pot or buckling my seatbelt.
What kind of dumbass society allows half of the population to be prohibited from using something by a smaller group of people? The "smaller" half, the half with the big stick up their arse, stand opposed because, you know, naturally if we allow pot, we'll all be strung out on heroin by Christmas.
Note to government in general: keep your effin' paws out of my life and what I do in the privacy of my home or car. Controlling freak SOB's.
I'm not even gonna trot out all the old bullet points of the legalization argument, because what really pisses me off about the now controlling minority, is their total intransigence. They grew up educated on Hoover Era [J. Edgar, not Herbert] propaganda and totally bought in to what they were told. They took the distorted truths and outright lies and gave them the same credibility that they accorded the civics teacher who taught state capitols.
Man, the older I get, the more I associate with the Libertarian philosophy.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
I'm With Stupid
[Yes, I actually did go AMA and cold turkey drop a med, resulting in an intense feeling of being energized, precisely what the aborted med was supposed to provide. Sometimes, and usually without significant longevity, I have the ability to harness my thoughts and abilities together to see things differently, for lack of a better description. Things seem more naturally organized. I have a better sense of things consequentially two or three steps down, as opposed to my typical myopia. I even get a spider-sense.
Just kidding there obviously. At least on the "triple." Anyway, when I'm clearheaded like this, when it's all pulled tight, nice and neat: it's a good feeling. My life struggle has been to get that switch permanently left in the "ON" position. The absence of that medicine feels like the switch is thrown.]
Without any prior provocation, I decided to listen to "Long Shot" tonight, the opening track of I'm With Stupid. It was three, seriously, three...three seconds before I knew I was going to sit down and immediately listen to the album play out. There are not many albums that inspire that sort of allegiance from me. I can't say the album is one of the ten best ever, or some other ludicrous title, but I can say it easily remains one of my ten favorite and most listened to. Recorded in a manner that could just have easily been live, the playing is sharp and concise without being flashy, observational and intelligent without being confrontational. Aimee Mann has been churning out smart, hooky pop ever since, but I've never felt that she topped this early apex.
Like many tracks on this album "Long Shot" has a great minimalist vibe. For those of you new to the program, the term "minimalist," and its' application as music "axiom," and the subsequent discussion it spurred in the great, former forum and all-around hangout place, And Your Bird Can Swing, was apparently one of the final straws that broke Frank's back. Blank Frank, who ran the joint without help, was a terrific guy; optimistic, warm-hearted and kind to a fault, it unfortunately caused Frank undue stress when members of the forum would snipe at each other publicly, which would obviously and invariably occur given enough time. Anyway, none of that's important now.
"Long Shot" is what I mean by a recording that embodies the spirit of minimalism. Perhaps our definitions differ, but at least you now understand my frame of reference. "Long Shot" is brazen, telling you immediately and often that "you [effed] it up." Rhythmically urgent and chugging with a simmering tension brilliantly underscored by tambourine, the song resolves emotionally on the realization that "all that stuff I knew before just turned into 'please love me,'" an observation as emotionally intelligent and reflective of how life really unfolds as you will find anywhere. I'm With Stupid brims with many similar keen observations; Ms. Mann's emotional IQ is off the charts, a trait she has displayed regularly since Everything's Different Now, released in 1989 when she was 'Til Tuesday. Interestingly, when performed live, Aimee often sings the penultimate line, "and all that stuff I knew before just turned into 'please love me'" an octave higher, wringing even more intensity out of that loaded observation..
"Choice In The Matter" is actually one of the few non-essential tracks in this collection, although it's fun to hear "merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream" replaced with "hope you drown and never come back" as the pairing to the "row, row, row your boat" couplet. It's not that this is a bad song, it's just that it suffers in comparison to the handful of absolute gems liberally littered throughout this release. The musical approach of this track is similar to that of its predecessor, and indeed the album as a whole stays true to this approach throughout the duration. This album reflects the sound of an artist in a groove, hanging out there and playing in confidence.
"Sugarcoated" follows, and again, is somewhat underwhelming when compared to the album as a whole. The rock solid musical foundation is still there, but overall the song lacks one of Aimee's trademark astute observations.
By the time the fourth track rolls around, newbies to the album may feel their commitment begin to wane after two relatively average numbers. However, if they stick around, they are greeted with one of the albums great songs, and a reason to keep listening. With "You Could Make A Killing," featuring great backing vocals by Juliana Hatfield, Mann hits her mark from the onset, noting that "there is nothing that competes with habit." We all know the right thing to do, but we fall back to old habits. I've lived that a dozen times and nearly as many ways. Hatfield's supple background vocals so help this track that they forced me to seek out her own solo output. I really haven't said much about the lyrical subject matter of this classic album, but being by Aimee Mann, you can probably guess, and you would guess correctly, that her sights are on the emotional dysfunction present in relationships either disintegrating or ripe for it. This track is an absolute highlight.
"Superball" is the follow-up track, and while lyrically it's not as rich, musically it's a minimalist joy. Clocking in at just over three minutes, "Superball" is the shortest track on the album. It may be the sonic equivalent of pretty wrapping on a slight present, but it still sounds amazing, with John Sands primally pounding his kit with style as the song fades: brute force of the prettiest order.
"Amateur" again features stellar backing vocals by Juliana Hatfield, and just like the earlier "You Could Make A Killing," it's a stone cold classic in the dysfunctional pop pantheon. "So I wasn't thinking clearly," Mann sings, "so you didn't think at all, I thought that was protocol." Again, shes nails it, life to a "T." People don't always make the best decisions, in fact they often live with decisions they know are shortsighted in some futile, misguided attempt to remain where they know they shouldn't be. Relationships are always tough, especially when people wear blinders.
"All Over Now" signals the final non-essential track of this set. It still sounds good, especially when it musically echoes the fade of "Superball" to great effect during its own fade.
"Par For The Course" is a nice simmering torch song which hinges on the realization that for many things in life, especially relationships, "timing is everything."
With "You're With Stupid Now," a near title-track, the album elevates itself with some amazingly strong content, and the final twenty-five minutes of this set are as strong and smart as any twenty-five minute shot of music you'd care to name. The lyrics are typical great Mann lyrics, but what truly makes this one a classic is the aching intensity of her reading, nearly a duet with her producer and primary musical contributor, Jon Brion. Many of the tracks on this CD require me to re-listen to them as soon as they end, and this song is no exception. It's that good.
The one track people likely know from this set is next. "That's Just What You Are" features exquisite backing vocals from the Squeeze boys, mixed among so damn many astute observations that you end up being jealous you didn't write this song yourself. Once upon a time this track appeared on the soundtrack for Melrose Place. Thank the fates for not having it remembered for that. A complete tour de force, this track embodies everything that makes Aimee Mann's music desirable, with a wildly accessible mix of pop hooks and street smarts making it all but irresistible.
"Frankenstein" follows. Calling it an oddity is tantamount to calling the sun bright, but it works. Chris Difford and Glenn Tillbrook of Squeeze again provide impeccably good backing vocals, this time to a lighter song possibly placed here to provide a break from the heavier emotional material surrounding it.
"Ray" follows, and it's an amazing song. Jon Brion wonderfully colors the music with tack piano as Aimee sings the most overt examination of a relationsplit on this album. Zeroing in on the hurt and "coulda's" that surface, Mann examines her decisions, only to resign herself to futility "cause some things you know, and some you just believe in [and] hope it comes out even." People play hunches, especially when it involves other people. God bless the dreamer who goes after what is not guaranteed. This track is easily a highlight, as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.
The album concludes with "It's Not Safe," an uplifting finish to an incredible work. "A thousand compromises don't add up to a win." No ma'am, they don't.
After a lengthy silence, a brief "Her Majesty" if you will, returns and echoes a lyric of the final track, "you're the idiot who keeps believing in love."
A tremendously gifted songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Aimee Mann is the reason I have no respect for Britney Spears and the other pop-singer-as-whore dance performers of her ilk. Next to Mann, they simply, embarrassingly, pale.
If you give this album ten spins, I can almost guarantee that you'll get to twenty without prodding from me.
My apologies if this reads rough, as I worked late into the night on it and didn't bother to indulge anything more than cursory proofing.
I'm With Stupid is a fantastic album: treat your self and get acquainted with it. If you don't own a good copy, send me an e-mail and perhaps I can find where you can get a copy. Is that in code enough?
Lastly, I offer a thank you to the many fine fellows I was able to "meet" and associate with at Frank's old place. There's a few dozen of you and you know who you are. It was your company and chat that kept me interested in the forum long after I did any real downloading from the place. Even better is being able to keep those associations in the new post-forum era. Friendship is not a "limited time offer."
Monday, October 17, 2011
Reasons I like Jim Souhan #36
From his latest online post. A lot of people seem to dislike this guy but I think he's an absolute pro, in print and on the radio.
http://www.startribune.com/sports/twins/blogs/131986313.html
"Gov. Mark Dayton has been very even-handed, smooth and presidential in his handling of the Vikings' stadium debate. Now he's saying that a 1-5 record makes the stadium iniative less popular.
That's a blatant copout, and the kind of statement that makes us hate politicians. No one, whether stadium proponent or opponent, should base a decision that will affect the state for good or ill for the next 30-plus years on how Donovan McNabb is playing this season.
The Vikings are a state asset. Different people will value their presence in different ways. I'm a sports guy. I value sports and think there are intangible benefits to having a team in state as well as tangible economic benefits. If you don't value sports, I don't expect you to agree with me.
But the decision should not be based on a win-loss record, whether the Vikings were 6-0 or 1-5. The decision should be based on the value of having an NFL franchise in our state. And if Dayton or anyone else wants to argue that we should let the Vikings leave because they're 1-5, I would argue that Minnesota eventually would decide to lure back an NFL franchise, and that acquiring another franchise will be much more expensive and complicated than building a stadium for the current franchise, which, for all of its faults and big losses, has been remarkably entertaining and competitive for decades."
http://www.startribune.com/sports/twins/blogs/131986313.html
"Gov. Mark Dayton has been very even-handed, smooth and presidential in his handling of the Vikings' stadium debate. Now he's saying that a 1-5 record makes the stadium iniative less popular.
That's a blatant copout, and the kind of statement that makes us hate politicians. No one, whether stadium proponent or opponent, should base a decision that will affect the state for good or ill for the next 30-plus years on how Donovan McNabb is playing this season.
The Vikings are a state asset. Different people will value their presence in different ways. I'm a sports guy. I value sports and think there are intangible benefits to having a team in state as well as tangible economic benefits. If you don't value sports, I don't expect you to agree with me.
But the decision should not be based on a win-loss record, whether the Vikings were 6-0 or 1-5. The decision should be based on the value of having an NFL franchise in our state. And if Dayton or anyone else wants to argue that we should let the Vikings leave because they're 1-5, I would argue that Minnesota eventually would decide to lure back an NFL franchise, and that acquiring another franchise will be much more expensive and complicated than building a stadium for the current franchise, which, for all of its faults and big losses, has been remarkably entertaining and competitive for decades."
7 billion humans and rising rapidly
http://www.startribune.com/world/131954293.html
From the article:
She's a 40-year-old mother of eight, with a ninth child due. The homestead in a Burundi village is too small to provide enough food, and three of the children have quit school for lack of money to pay fees.
I don't care how cold this sounds, but lady, I hope all your kids die, you goddamn dumbass. Close your effin' legs and figure out how to feed the first half-dozen before you make more.
This is how the world gets ruined for all of us.
Not enough resources, so in order to procure them, someone's gonna have to go to war.
Bang, boom, mushroom cloud.
Asians and Africans that's aimed at you. Stop procreating until you at least have a pot to piss in. Maybe next year you can get a window to throw it out of.
"Hey, you know what would make all this overcrowding and overpopulation better? More kids!"
Goddamn dumbasses.
 |
| That looks comfortable. Nice work, Chinese dumbasses. |
From the article:
She's a 40-year-old mother of eight, with a ninth child due. The homestead in a Burundi village is too small to provide enough food, and three of the children have quit school for lack of money to pay fees.
I don't care how cold this sounds, but lady, I hope all your kids die, you goddamn dumbass. Close your effin' legs and figure out how to feed the first half-dozen before you make more.
This is how the world gets ruined for all of us.
Not enough resources, so in order to procure them, someone's gonna have to go to war.
Bang, boom, mushroom cloud.
Asians and Africans that's aimed at you. Stop procreating until you at least have a pot to piss in. Maybe next year you can get a window to throw it out of.
"Hey, you know what would make all this overcrowding and overpopulation better? More kids!"
Goddamn dumbasses.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Daily Funnies
What's this?
Correct. An E*Trade baby smashed on the curb after someone tired of it's smart mouth.
Correct. An E*Trade baby smashed on the curb after someone tired of it's smart mouth.
Iran's supreme leader warns US over allegations of plot blah blah blah
http://www.startribune.com/world/131942743.html
Again, you stupid bearded jackoff, praise your twisted god that I'm not in charge or I'd hang a mushroom cloud on your MF stupid ass so fast you wouldn't have time to realize what a stupid bearded jackoff you are.
Or.
[grabs crotch] Warn this, you stupid bearded jackoff. I take a warning from you about as serious as a green, runny shit.
Or.
Can someone just give this guy a 9mm round or three to the cranium.
Or.
Did you see bin Laden? You want that same model moonroof installed in your head?
Or even better.
I can barely contain the giddiness in my heart when I think of what a joy it would be to simply beat the living shit out of you with my bare hands. Bearded jackoff.
Again, you stupid bearded jackoff, praise your twisted god that I'm not in charge or I'd hang a mushroom cloud on your MF stupid ass so fast you wouldn't have time to realize what a stupid bearded jackoff you are.
Or.
[grabs crotch] Warn this, you stupid bearded jackoff. I take a warning from you about as serious as a green, runny shit.
Or.
Can someone just give this guy a 9mm round or three to the cranium.
Or.
Did you see bin Laden? You want that same model moonroof installed in your head?
Or even better.
I can barely contain the giddiness in my heart when I think of what a joy it would be to simply beat the living shit out of you with my bare hands. Bearded jackoff.
Friday, October 14, 2011
An all too loud echo.
Goddamn, it's been a tough year to be a cat around here.
One of the things I really enjoy about where I live is having four distinct weather seasons. They're all too hot, too cold, too wet and too dry, but they're distinct.
Fall has slid in very nicely this year, with that special, fresh crispness it brings to the cooler air. The sun rests lower on the horizon and disappears into the night, hours before it did just sixty days ago.
Last week, the occupant of the other half of the duplex I reside in, took her cat into the veterinarian and had her euthanized. The cat was twelve.
The cat had been healthy for years, but was quickly overcome by symptoms that were eerily close to what befell my Rudy half a year ago: rapid weight loss, vomiting and litter box issues. An all too loud echo.
The day before the last day of its life, that cat answered to her name quickly, purred vigorously as I held it and readily snapped up the moist Pounce I offered it. There was too much life left in that cat to kill it. I found that sad.
Supposedly the cat was suffering from multiple ailments, most seriously of which was a thyroid condition that would require around $50 a month to keep healthy.
I'm grateful that I never had to enter that particular parlor of hell, where a cost-benefit analysis decided the fate of my beloved pet. I hate the idea of a pets lifespan defined and decided by dollars and cents.
Rest well, cat. Just know that if you had been mine, you'd still be here eating Pounce and kicking sand.
One of the things I really enjoy about where I live is having four distinct weather seasons. They're all too hot, too cold, too wet and too dry, but they're distinct.
Fall has slid in very nicely this year, with that special, fresh crispness it brings to the cooler air. The sun rests lower on the horizon and disappears into the night, hours before it did just sixty days ago.
Last week, the occupant of the other half of the duplex I reside in, took her cat into the veterinarian and had her euthanized. The cat was twelve.
The cat had been healthy for years, but was quickly overcome by symptoms that were eerily close to what befell my Rudy half a year ago: rapid weight loss, vomiting and litter box issues. An all too loud echo.
The day before the last day of its life, that cat answered to her name quickly, purred vigorously as I held it and readily snapped up the moist Pounce I offered it. There was too much life left in that cat to kill it. I found that sad.
Supposedly the cat was suffering from multiple ailments, most seriously of which was a thyroid condition that would require around $50 a month to keep healthy.
I'm grateful that I never had to enter that particular parlor of hell, where a cost-benefit analysis decided the fate of my beloved pet. I hate the idea of a pets lifespan defined and decided by dollars and cents.
Rest well, cat. Just know that if you had been mine, you'd still be here eating Pounce and kicking sand.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Good news/celebration
A quick note.
I'd like to congratulate my father on kicking six different kinds of crap out of Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I guess eating healthy and staying in shape has some benefits. I wish someone had told me that. I'll have to remember that in my next life.
There are a lot of people in this world I can do without. My father isn't one.
When I was a teenager I had a lot of anger towards my father. That's not uncommon for that age, but it still hurt him. Years later, when I began my extended run of fuck-ups, my Dad was always there for me.
I've actually been very fortunate to retain a small cadre of loyal and supportive family members, and I appreciate them all.
But it starts with Dad.
Score one for the good guys.
I'd like to congratulate my father on kicking six different kinds of crap out of Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I guess eating healthy and staying in shape has some benefits. I wish someone had told me that. I'll have to remember that in my next life.
There are a lot of people in this world I can do without. My father isn't one.
When I was a teenager I had a lot of anger towards my father. That's not uncommon for that age, but it still hurt him. Years later, when I began my extended run of fuck-ups, my Dad was always there for me.
I've actually been very fortunate to retain a small cadre of loyal and supportive family members, and I appreciate them all.
But it starts with Dad.
Score one for the good guys.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
time for something actually Important
If you are one of my regular readers...yes, there are a few of you...this post will be different from the content usually located here.
I won't be celebrating music. I won't be ripping the Palin's for being whatever they are. I won't be taking the local LEO's to task for excessive force. I won't be mocking the Muslims for being knuckleheads or laughing at the new moon roof installed in Bin Ladin's cranium.
This one's for real.
I don't like people. I really don't. They're full of shit, self-serving and short-sighted. I have room in my life for about twenty people, including friends and family. Twenty might even be high. I suffer from social anxiety, among other things. As a corollary, I genuinely enjoy solitude.
I'm pretty sure that works both ways too. I think I'm probably a difficult person to like. I'm a bridge-burner. I burn my bridges. Seldom intentionally, but the effect is the same nonetheless. Three years seems to be about the limit. After three years I completely wear out my welcome with both employers and girlfriends. Friends too. In fact, I once burned a bridge with my best friend, but he was "best" enough to deal with it, forgive and move past.
I'm okay to be around, pretty loyal, and fairly interesting, but it's all that baggage that makes it difficult. Baggage from twenty years of poorly treated depression and mental illness occasionally has me come off as flaky. Or angry. Or unreliable. Or just not someone to be around. I get that and I'm ok with it.
At this point, I've given up on the idea of permanent cohabitation with a woman because I just don't want to compromise that much. That's what I remember from my relationships: compromises. Oh, I also don't wanna raise someone else's brat. No thanks.
I'm losing sight of what this post was supposed to be about.
Let me tell a story.
In September of 1996, I was regularly working the overnight shift at SuperAmerica on south Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis as a Shift Leader. That's the title they would give you to heap more responsibility upon you but not really the commensurate pay. Irregardless, it was an okay gig, paying the bills, fitting my night-owl lifestyle perfectly and affording me a sack-a-week habit. I'd start at ten at night and be home after finishing the books by seven-thirty in the morning.
At the time, I had a girlfriend living with me in an apartment just a few blocks from work. For me, she was more a girlfriend of convenience than of any particular passion. She indulged my whims and most importantly, was cool with me hanging out on the couch, getting stoned and listening to music; my prior girl didn't share that same enthusiasm about pot. Actually that's an understatement: she hated it, naming it as a primary reason for splitting.
My typical post-shift routine was to walk across the street to a little coffee shop, sit and drink a latte while reading the newspaper, then return home to get stoned, listen to music for an hour or so and finally settle into bed for my "nights" sleep. It was during this sleep on an otherwise nondescript day, that I woke to my girlfriend calling my name.
Waking, I saw a little black kitten crawling up the covers toward me. It was very cute in that kitteny way, eyes agog and filled with wonder, looking very happy to have a new home. I didn't remember discussing the addition of a kitten. I already had Reggie, who was a year and a half old by now, and I was content with that, but somehow between her explanation of why she bought him and this new guys enthusiasm at having a home, I couldn't utter a word in opposition.
She explained that the pet store had him living in a pen with several younger, smaller kittens, obviously from a different litter, and after observing numerous patrons it was obvious that he wasn't going to stand out to anyone. Everybody always goes for the younger, "cuter" animals; she feared his euthanasia. The reasoning seemed sound, and I've always hated visiting pet stores because of both the overwhelming desire to liberate and love all those animals and the profound disappointment in their eyes when you don't.
My only concern was whether Reggie would accept this interloper. He did, checking him out without much fanfare and going about whatever he was up to. That was the final vote: the new guy was in.
I quickly named him Rudy because when I looked at him, he just looked like a Rudy. It seemed to fit well and had a nice rhythm when used in conjunction with Reggie. I still remember his feeble early attempts at meowing, saying something that sounded like "yick." My boys, as I came to call them, weren't what I would consider fast friends. They didn't seem to do many things together, but were very comfortable around each other.
The next year though, when Reggie broke his leg, Rudy immediately laid down next to his "brother" when he returned from the vet, sporting a blue cast on his left rear leg. I always found that special, the communication between animals and the show of support during a time of distress. For pain relief, the vet suggested crunching up a children's aspirin. I knew Reg wouldn't go for that. I tried anyway and was proven correct. Desperate to give my animal some relief from his discomfort, I did something I was generally against in principle: I got him stoned. It worked of course, and his night of misery finally ended. When he woke the next day, Rudy was still at his side.
Around this time, my girlfriend was considering getting rid of Rudy, as she seemed to develop an allergy from being around him. From his behavior, it was obvious that Rudy loved her a lot, and why not, after all, she was his liberator. I lobbied against giving Rudy away, telling her "just look, he loves you so much it feels good for him just to be near you." So Rudy stayed.
About a year later, the girlfriend left. In one of the rare instances of foresight in my life, I had declined a marriage proposal from her a few months previously. She abandoned Rudy to me, finally getting away from the allergens that bothered her so. At the age of two, Rudy was now mine, and even though I had begun to become allergic to my boys and further develop asthma from that, I never would consider being apart from them. I hate it when people get pets and then quit on them when they're no longer cute or convenient. Having animals was always something I took seriously.
The following dozen years were a very dark, listless and depressing time for me. I went from job to shitty job, moving more times than I care to count, cycling through women and remaining generally unhappy. More than once, facing imminent eviction, I considered the merits of no longer living. Those plans never got very far because I couldn't reconcile forcing my animals to have to adapt to brand new people and places; I just couldn't do that to them. As someone with no children and no plans for any, my boys, at the very least, served as surrogates. They kept me alive.
Through the years I enjoyed seeing my boys personalities grow. Reggie was easy, because he closely mirrored his owner: a sedentary homebody with gusto for the dinner table. Reggie was, and continues to be, happiest when he is near his owner. He's not shy to ask for affection because he knows he will always get it. Reg also has a penchant for wagging his tail in rhythm to the music I'm playing. Having a cat that digs music seems pretty cool to me.
Rudy was always a little more complex. He wanted the attention and affection just as much, but only when he was ready for it. He was also demonstrably smarter, figuring out how to open up cupboards or turn door handles. He had a vocabulary much greater than Reggie's and was trainable as well. Once he learned to walk on the sidewalks, and not wherever his mind and body could wander off to, he enjoyed going on regular walks after sundown with me. He would often want to stay outside for an hour or more at a time, just hanging out, relaxing, exploring. I have never seen another cat that would walk around the block without a leash.
In another apartment, Rudy performed his own version of Punk'd by opening a kitchen cupboard and resting inside. My girlfriend at the time had gone into the kitchen to get a glass, opened up the wrong cupboard and was startled by the sight of Rudy's eyes peering back at her. She screamed like she had found a corpse. I laughed. She didn't. I'd like to think Rudy did.
A few years later, a roommate of mine took off on a late night, alcohol fueled bender with some friends, accidentally letting Rudy out. Rudy would absolutely wander if given the opportunity, which is why his outdoor time was always supervised. I don't know what he did for the six hours he was outside, but when I woke in the morning and noticed him missing, I went straight for the door, opened it, and found him sitting there a little anxious and more than ready to come in. I'll never forget that he both knew where his home was and had faith I'd come looking for him.
The absolute funniest thing I ever saw Rudy do took place in a whorehouse. Seriously. Okay, it had been a whorehouse years ago and was now just another in a long string of apartments for me. My description of this will never do it justice, but I can't ignore the anecdote. The place had ridiculous ceilings, eleven or twelve feet high. Rudy loved heights. High cupboards, refrigerator tops, anywhere he could achieve elevation, so the converted house of ill repute held great appeal for him. As I fell asleep on my sectional couch, Rudy went to work, easily jumping up to my kitchen countertop. Due to the high ceilings, my kitchen cupboards didn't extend all the way up, allowing him to further jump up on top of the cupboards. There was a water pipe about two inches above the cupboards, about an inch and a half in diameter. The pipe extended about a foot past the front of the right edge of the cupboard, then made a right-angle left-turn for about four feet before entering the wall. With what I can only assume was an exquisite display of great balance and dexterity, Rudy made his way out on the pipe, perhaps imagining himself as a tightrope walker, and navigated the left turn, finding himself in the center of the lengthy stretch of pipe when I woke. Rather than seeing him balancing delicately, I saw him hanging there, like he had completed a set of pull-ups. Casually, too, no sense of panic. Then he dropped and I panicked, fearing for his safety as I bolted upright. In the second it took for me to reach him, he was already walking away from the scene as if nothing had happened. That made the image of him hanging there helplessly, humorous, and not horrendous.
My boys have always been there for me, year after year, event after event. When I've come home from work, devastated that I'd been unjustly fired from a good position [note: VisionWorld and SunRay Optical can still kiss my ass], they would intuitively cuddle and hang out with me, not letting me dwell on failure. When I would lay in bed, streaming tears during that initial shock of a relationship ending, my boys were there. They've simply been the most important things in my life, and the enrichment they've imprinted upon me is substantial.
In January of this year, Rudy became ill, having a difficult time keeping food down. He lost substantial weight very quickly and I feared he wouldn't see March. Being unemployed, I was unable to take take him to a veterinarian so I researched everything I could on the internet. I came up with a few possible maladies, but no real solutions. Rudy loved life though, and fought valiantly, refusing to "complain" and living his life much as he always had. The weight loss, and the accompanying loss of strength, affected his ability to jump and he was suddenly landlocked. I began to carry him up the steps to let him enjoy the outdoors that so fixated him. When he began having issues with loose stool, the chance of recovery seemed diminished.
Yet he fought on, living with joy into March and April. When April began, Reggie also knew something was up. Suddenly, he was always laying by and sleeping next to his brother, perhaps remembering how Rudy had stood vigil when he had broken his leg years earlier, or maybe he was just showing love and support to an ill family member. Either way, it was touching.
I talk to my boys regularly - I told you I wasn't well - and when Rudy began to struggle with day to day things, when the quality of his lifestyle began to deteriorate, we had a talk. I had told him that when he reached "that" point, when he had fought long enough and hard enough, if he let me know, I would take him to the veterinarian for a peaceful resolution.
I've always liked the "little" things that my boys came to enjoy. Reggie loves to lick the condensation on the outside of my soda cans. Reggie loves cold water and ice. Reggie loves getting a haircut. Rudy loved heights. He loved the outdoors. More than anything, he loved the sound it made when I would tap my finger on the top of one of his food cans right before I opened it. He would never fail to get up and come over when he heard that sound.
On April 27, he failed to answer that bell. Despite his continuing illness, it was still stunning to me; he had just told me, the fight was over. I placed the horrible call that I will likely have to make at least once more in my life and made an appointment with the pet doctor for the following day.
With his brother and I by his side, Rudy passed that evening in our bed, craning his head back, touching my hand and letting out a last purr before moving on. That's still the hardest, most difficult and saddest experience of my life and writing about it now still rubs that wound. My dear sweet little boy with the large personality. His passing took a piece of my heart with him and not a day goes by where he isn't prominent in my thoughts.
Rudy would have been fifteen on August 8th. I wrote this to remember and celebrate him on his birthday. Rest in peace my boy, you will always be in my heart.
I won't be celebrating music. I won't be ripping the Palin's for being whatever they are. I won't be taking the local LEO's to task for excessive force. I won't be mocking the Muslims for being knuckleheads or laughing at the new moon roof installed in Bin Ladin's cranium.
This one's for real.
I don't like people. I really don't. They're full of shit, self-serving and short-sighted. I have room in my life for about twenty people, including friends and family. Twenty might even be high. I suffer from social anxiety, among other things. As a corollary, I genuinely enjoy solitude.
I'm pretty sure that works both ways too. I think I'm probably a difficult person to like. I'm a bridge-burner. I burn my bridges. Seldom intentionally, but the effect is the same nonetheless. Three years seems to be about the limit. After three years I completely wear out my welcome with both employers and girlfriends. Friends too. In fact, I once burned a bridge with my best friend, but he was "best" enough to deal with it, forgive and move past.
I'm okay to be around, pretty loyal, and fairly interesting, but it's all that baggage that makes it difficult. Baggage from twenty years of poorly treated depression and mental illness occasionally has me come off as flaky. Or angry. Or unreliable. Or just not someone to be around. I get that and I'm ok with it.
At this point, I've given up on the idea of permanent cohabitation with a woman because I just don't want to compromise that much. That's what I remember from my relationships: compromises. Oh, I also don't wanna raise someone else's brat. No thanks.
I'm losing sight of what this post was supposed to be about.
Let me tell a story.
In September of 1996, I was regularly working the overnight shift at SuperAmerica on south Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis as a Shift Leader. That's the title they would give you to heap more responsibility upon you but not really the commensurate pay. Irregardless, it was an okay gig, paying the bills, fitting my night-owl lifestyle perfectly and affording me a sack-a-week habit. I'd start at ten at night and be home after finishing the books by seven-thirty in the morning.
At the time, I had a girlfriend living with me in an apartment just a few blocks from work. For me, she was more a girlfriend of convenience than of any particular passion. She indulged my whims and most importantly, was cool with me hanging out on the couch, getting stoned and listening to music; my prior girl didn't share that same enthusiasm about pot. Actually that's an understatement: she hated it, naming it as a primary reason for splitting.
My typical post-shift routine was to walk across the street to a little coffee shop, sit and drink a latte while reading the newspaper, then return home to get stoned, listen to music for an hour or so and finally settle into bed for my "nights" sleep. It was during this sleep on an otherwise nondescript day, that I woke to my girlfriend calling my name.
Waking, I saw a little black kitten crawling up the covers toward me. It was very cute in that kitteny way, eyes agog and filled with wonder, looking very happy to have a new home. I didn't remember discussing the addition of a kitten. I already had Reggie, who was a year and a half old by now, and I was content with that, but somehow between her explanation of why she bought him and this new guys enthusiasm at having a home, I couldn't utter a word in opposition.
She explained that the pet store had him living in a pen with several younger, smaller kittens, obviously from a different litter, and after observing numerous patrons it was obvious that he wasn't going to stand out to anyone. Everybody always goes for the younger, "cuter" animals; she feared his euthanasia. The reasoning seemed sound, and I've always hated visiting pet stores because of both the overwhelming desire to liberate and love all those animals and the profound disappointment in their eyes when you don't.
My only concern was whether Reggie would accept this interloper. He did, checking him out without much fanfare and going about whatever he was up to. That was the final vote: the new guy was in.
 |
| Checking out the new guy, circa September 1996. |
I quickly named him Rudy because when I looked at him, he just looked like a Rudy. It seemed to fit well and had a nice rhythm when used in conjunction with Reggie. I still remember his feeble early attempts at meowing, saying something that sounded like "yick." My boys, as I came to call them, weren't what I would consider fast friends. They didn't seem to do many things together, but were very comfortable around each other.
The next year though, when Reggie broke his leg, Rudy immediately laid down next to his "brother" when he returned from the vet, sporting a blue cast on his left rear leg. I always found that special, the communication between animals and the show of support during a time of distress. For pain relief, the vet suggested crunching up a children's aspirin. I knew Reg wouldn't go for that. I tried anyway and was proven correct. Desperate to give my animal some relief from his discomfort, I did something I was generally against in principle: I got him stoned. It worked of course, and his night of misery finally ended. When he woke the next day, Rudy was still at his side.
Around this time, my girlfriend was considering getting rid of Rudy, as she seemed to develop an allergy from being around him. From his behavior, it was obvious that Rudy loved her a lot, and why not, after all, she was his liberator. I lobbied against giving Rudy away, telling her "just look, he loves you so much it feels good for him just to be near you." So Rudy stayed.
About a year later, the girlfriend left. In one of the rare instances of foresight in my life, I had declined a marriage proposal from her a few months previously. She abandoned Rudy to me, finally getting away from the allergens that bothered her so. At the age of two, Rudy was now mine, and even though I had begun to become allergic to my boys and further develop asthma from that, I never would consider being apart from them. I hate it when people get pets and then quit on them when they're no longer cute or convenient. Having animals was always something I took seriously.
The following dozen years were a very dark, listless and depressing time for me. I went from job to shitty job, moving more times than I care to count, cycling through women and remaining generally unhappy. More than once, facing imminent eviction, I considered the merits of no longer living. Those plans never got very far because I couldn't reconcile forcing my animals to have to adapt to brand new people and places; I just couldn't do that to them. As someone with no children and no plans for any, my boys, at the very least, served as surrogates. They kept me alive.
Through the years I enjoyed seeing my boys personalities grow. Reggie was easy, because he closely mirrored his owner: a sedentary homebody with gusto for the dinner table. Reggie was, and continues to be, happiest when he is near his owner. He's not shy to ask for affection because he knows he will always get it. Reg also has a penchant for wagging his tail in rhythm to the music I'm playing. Having a cat that digs music seems pretty cool to me.
Rudy was always a little more complex. He wanted the attention and affection just as much, but only when he was ready for it. He was also demonstrably smarter, figuring out how to open up cupboards or turn door handles. He had a vocabulary much greater than Reggie's and was trainable as well. Once he learned to walk on the sidewalks, and not wherever his mind and body could wander off to, he enjoyed going on regular walks after sundown with me. He would often want to stay outside for an hour or more at a time, just hanging out, relaxing, exploring. I have never seen another cat that would walk around the block without a leash.
In another apartment, Rudy performed his own version of Punk'd by opening a kitchen cupboard and resting inside. My girlfriend at the time had gone into the kitchen to get a glass, opened up the wrong cupboard and was startled by the sight of Rudy's eyes peering back at her. She screamed like she had found a corpse. I laughed. She didn't. I'd like to think Rudy did.
A few years later, a roommate of mine took off on a late night, alcohol fueled bender with some friends, accidentally letting Rudy out. Rudy would absolutely wander if given the opportunity, which is why his outdoor time was always supervised. I don't know what he did for the six hours he was outside, but when I woke in the morning and noticed him missing, I went straight for the door, opened it, and found him sitting there a little anxious and more than ready to come in. I'll never forget that he both knew where his home was and had faith I'd come looking for him.
The absolute funniest thing I ever saw Rudy do took place in a whorehouse. Seriously. Okay, it had been a whorehouse years ago and was now just another in a long string of apartments for me. My description of this will never do it justice, but I can't ignore the anecdote. The place had ridiculous ceilings, eleven or twelve feet high. Rudy loved heights. High cupboards, refrigerator tops, anywhere he could achieve elevation, so the converted house of ill repute held great appeal for him. As I fell asleep on my sectional couch, Rudy went to work, easily jumping up to my kitchen countertop. Due to the high ceilings, my kitchen cupboards didn't extend all the way up, allowing him to further jump up on top of the cupboards. There was a water pipe about two inches above the cupboards, about an inch and a half in diameter. The pipe extended about a foot past the front of the right edge of the cupboard, then made a right-angle left-turn for about four feet before entering the wall. With what I can only assume was an exquisite display of great balance and dexterity, Rudy made his way out on the pipe, perhaps imagining himself as a tightrope walker, and navigated the left turn, finding himself in the center of the lengthy stretch of pipe when I woke. Rather than seeing him balancing delicately, I saw him hanging there, like he had completed a set of pull-ups. Casually, too, no sense of panic. Then he dropped and I panicked, fearing for his safety as I bolted upright. In the second it took for me to reach him, he was already walking away from the scene as if nothing had happened. That made the image of him hanging there helplessly, humorous, and not horrendous.
My boys have always been there for me, year after year, event after event. When I've come home from work, devastated that I'd been unjustly fired from a good position [note: VisionWorld and SunRay Optical can still kiss my ass], they would intuitively cuddle and hang out with me, not letting me dwell on failure. When I would lay in bed, streaming tears during that initial shock of a relationship ending, my boys were there. They've simply been the most important things in my life, and the enrichment they've imprinted upon me is substantial.
In January of this year, Rudy became ill, having a difficult time keeping food down. He lost substantial weight very quickly and I feared he wouldn't see March. Being unemployed, I was unable to take take him to a veterinarian so I researched everything I could on the internet. I came up with a few possible maladies, but no real solutions. Rudy loved life though, and fought valiantly, refusing to "complain" and living his life much as he always had. The weight loss, and the accompanying loss of strength, affected his ability to jump and he was suddenly landlocked. I began to carry him up the steps to let him enjoy the outdoors that so fixated him. When he began having issues with loose stool, the chance of recovery seemed diminished.
Yet he fought on, living with joy into March and April. When April began, Reggie also knew something was up. Suddenly, he was always laying by and sleeping next to his brother, perhaps remembering how Rudy had stood vigil when he had broken his leg years earlier, or maybe he was just showing love and support to an ill family member. Either way, it was touching.
I talk to my boys regularly - I told you I wasn't well - and when Rudy began to struggle with day to day things, when the quality of his lifestyle began to deteriorate, we had a talk. I had told him that when he reached "that" point, when he had fought long enough and hard enough, if he let me know, I would take him to the veterinarian for a peaceful resolution.
I've always liked the "little" things that my boys came to enjoy. Reggie loves to lick the condensation on the outside of my soda cans. Reggie loves cold water and ice. Reggie loves getting a haircut. Rudy loved heights. He loved the outdoors. More than anything, he loved the sound it made when I would tap my finger on the top of one of his food cans right before I opened it. He would never fail to get up and come over when he heard that sound.
On April 27, he failed to answer that bell. Despite his continuing illness, it was still stunning to me; he had just told me, the fight was over. I placed the horrible call that I will likely have to make at least once more in my life and made an appointment with the pet doctor for the following day.
With his brother and I by his side, Rudy passed that evening in our bed, craning his head back, touching my hand and letting out a last purr before moving on. That's still the hardest, most difficult and saddest experience of my life and writing about it now still rubs that wound. My dear sweet little boy with the large personality. His passing took a piece of my heart with him and not a day goes by where he isn't prominent in my thoughts.
Rudy would have been fifteen on August 8th. I wrote this to remember and celebrate him on his birthday. Rest in peace my boy, you will always be in my heart.
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| The guy just loved to roll around on cement. |
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| Rudy near the end, the fatigue plain in his eyes. |
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Brian Wilson Live At The Surf Ballroom
This is definitely one of those instances where words, no matter how apt, no matter how descriptive, are simply insufficient. On Sunday night, July 31st, I watched Brian Wilson in concert for the third time, this time at the legendary Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. Granted most of its legend comes from who died after playing there, but still, in all fairness, it's a pretty nice venue. Decent acoustics, intimate to the tune of four feet from the artist and a museum in its own right.
I previously saw Brian at his US premiere of SMiLE at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis. It was spellbinding, mesmerizing and tear-inducing to see his performance of the abandoned album that played such a large part in derailing both his music career and his life. It was an experience that would be difficult to approximate, much less surpass.
I saw him on his following tour in support of That Lucky Old Sun. This time it was at the State Theater in Minneapolis. Both the Orpheum and the State have the benefit of being nice, smaller, seated venues with warm, realistic acoustics. This concert was also superior, both because of the quality of the album he was touring behind, and my relative proximity to the stage: fourth row, third seat from center.
So the scene was set for a letdown. [Speaking of letdowns, Mike Love, and his fraudulently named "Beach Boys," played the same night about three hours north of me at Mystic Lake Casino. No word yet on whether he wore his traditional shitty-looking faux-Hawaiian shirt with his self-esteem and bald-spot protecting baseball cap.]
Back to Brian. His tour program typically unfolds in this manner:
1] an hour or so of classics, with some wonderfully obscure tracks thrown in before an intermission
2] the complete album he is touring behind, before another intermission
3] a return to absolute gold classics for his encore.
Brians recent album, Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin, is a nice, jazzy subdued affair, but I had concerns about how it would translate to the stage, especially after getting everybody pumped up with an hour of chestnuts. Brian was hip to my concerns though, as his concert modus operandi was altered for this tour.
This first segment remained the same, as this setlist will attest.
1] California Girls
2] Do You Wanna Dance
3] Catch A Wave
4] Wendy
5] Then I Kissed Her
6] Little Deuce Coupe
7] Surfer Girl
8] In My Room
9] Please Let Me Wonder
10] Row, Row, Row Your Boat [sung in rounds with the audience]
11] Don't Worry baby
12] Salt Lake City
13] Drive-In
14] When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)
15] You're So Good to Me
16] Do You Wanna Dance
17] I Get Around
18] Do It Again
In a break with recent format though, Brian played only a mini-set of tunes from his recent Gershwin album before diving back into a full hour onslaught of amazing classics. The second setlist, as procured by me and autographed by band members Darian Sahanaja, Scott Bennett and Paul Mertens, was as follows:
The second encore consisted of only one song, and in another break from previous tours, it wasn't "Love And Mercy," this time sending us home with "All Summer Long." Both songs are great, but I think I prefer the uber-serenity of "Love And Mercy" as the closer.
Overall, the performance was world class. It took Brian about three numbers to really hit his mark, muffing a few early lyrics and struggling with his voice at the onset, but from then on, he was aces. His band, as usual, was flawless, although I missed the string quartet he brought along on the two previous tours. Also missing was Taylor Mills, the lone female voice in his band and a pretty face to look at. She was mentioned by the band during introductions, so I speculate she might be "with child."
Note: I forgot my damn camera so all these images are from my Palm Pixi. While lacking the zoom and resolution a genuine camera would provide, it nonetheless provided images far better than I could sketch.
So how close was I to the stage this time? Stagefront, about five feet to the left, which meant that whenever Brian looked at his monitor, placed to the right of his keyboard, his line of sight was my beaming face. I swear to God during "Pet Sounds," Brian was stoically listening to his band crush the instrumental, when he glanced down at his monitor before returning a smile, appropriately enough, to me. Pretty damn cool. I felt like Marcia Brady mooning over Davy Jones in that one Brady Bunch episode.
Again, how close was I to the stage? Here's what it looked like when Paul Mertens did a stagefront sax solo.
He was inches from me. One of several great, multi-instrument players in Brian's band, and a nice friendly chap as well.
Brian played his keyboard more than at the previous shows I'd been to, looking active on about eight of the tracks before strapping on his Fender bass for the last few numbers of the first encore. I also thought he appeared a little more frail this time, displaying shaky hands as he sipped his water bottle and requiring a hand to help him down the steps when he exited the stage. He was also a little grayer this time, but hell, he's sixty-nine, so I think he's allowed that.
It can't be understated how fantastic, and sympathetic to this material, that his touring band is, clearly showing the familiarity of four major tours and years of kinship.
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| From the onset, the foot was tapping. |
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| Darian Sahanaja, who was directly in front of me |
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| The setlist I captured |
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| The man, the myth, my hero |
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| Strapped with the Fender bass |
Post-concert I was blessed to chat with the three who signed my setlist: Darian, Scott, and Paul. In fact, I made Darian laugh.
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| Sharing a chuckle with Darian |
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| Darian, right before I lifted his wallet |
An amazing night, loaded with ready-made memories. If this does indeed prove to be Mr. Wilson's final tour, I will have no regrets. An amazing performer with an amazing catalog, who overcame amazing personal strife to put on an amazing show.
My cap is doffed to you Mr. Wilson.
Note: clicking on the pictures will give you a larger view of them.
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