The Perfect Father’s Day Gift

Time to get your grill on (Yes, I said it)!  It’s the Weber Utility Shirt.  Pockets!  Stain-resistant!  Mesh armpits!  What more could a man want?

Frankenstein’s Skull

Tired of politics and work and everything else that reminds you of having to be a responsible, contributing, member of society?  Waste some time checking out Frankenstein’s skull, among other things, over at Sideshow World.  It’s Friday – you owe it to yourself.

Everyone Loves Jello….

From Daily KOS a short post pointing out the best review of McCain’s speach last night:

Attaturk:

“Oh, Go with the Green Background”

“It’ll make you look like the cottage cheese in a lime jello salad” Always a good look for an older gentlemen.

The aesthetics of McCain’s speech, just mercifully completed before a slightly energized crowd of literally dozens, was awesome in how dreadful it was. No matter what Harold Ford thinks, who was somehow thoroughly moved by lime-jello McCain.

Stephen Hawking in Lego

A Flickr photostream of some fine Lego creations, including the following:

I would buy this if it were available in the toy aisle at Target.

The Andy Rooney Game

From comedian Joe Mande comes The Andy Rooney Game.

Check out this fun new game I invented! Here’s how you play: Using Final Cut Pro, take out everything but the first sentence and the last sentence from Andy Rooney’s latest segment on 60 Minutes. Then you put that on youtube. That’s it! Check it out:

via Cynical-C

You have failed me for the last time….

“Growing Up Star Wars 1977-1985″ is a Flickr photo pool with submissions from folks who grew in this magical time showcasing the wonder that was Star Wars merchandise and the joy this brought to countless children.

I got my first Star Wars action figure in my Easter basket one year. Most of my friends already had plenty of the gear and I was late to the game, but I remember finding the package that spring morning and how excited I was.

Ben Kenobi! I cradled the figure in my hands as I ran a block and a half up the street to show my friend Derick who owned just about every Star Wars toy available.

I think about it now and I am awed by and embarrassed of and jealous of
how easily overjoyed I could be by a $2 piece of plastic that looked like that creepy old guy who dies at the end of the movie that we all just couldn’t get enough of. Yich….

via Cynical-C

Foot in Mouth Disease

From the Washington Post:

Vice President Cheney apologized for saying yesterday that he has “Cheneys on both sides” of his family tree dating back to the 1600s, “And we don’t even live in West Virginia.”

The quip drew groans from the audience at the National Press Club, prompting the vice president to add, “You can say those things when you’re not running for reelection.” (The White House transcript of Cheney’s comments, released last night, described laughter instead of groans.)

I’m not judging. I just think it’s funny as hell.

Are you a good person?

Take the test and find out. My guess is you’ll be going to Hell. See you there, and I’ll bring the gin. Go ahead and try not ending up in Hell when you take this little test. Bwaaahaaaahaaaahaaaahaaaaa!

via Pharyngula

Dole on McClellan

Politico’s Johnathan Martin has a new piece up about a scathing email from Bob Dole to Scott McClellan regarding the former Bush press secratary’s new book and its unflattering revelations. I found the following to be the most interesting passage of the article:

Dole assures McClellan that he won’t read the book — “because if all these awful things were happening, and perhaps some may have been, you should have spoken up publicly like a man, or quit your cushy, high profile job”

I just don’t get it. This is like the guy hearing from his best friend that his wife once ran around on him and then getting mad at the friend for not telling him about it when it was going on. “Well, Joe. My wife may or may not be a tramp. And, I’ll concede that it is a very real possibility. But I am going to let her skate on the whole whoring-around business, and instead bad-mouth you for not having the guts to tell me about all of this when you first found out about it. No, no. I will hear no more of your tawdry accusations. You are dead to me, Joe. Now if you will excuse me, I have to get these roses to my beautiful wife before they wilt.”

What is it about the Bush administration that leaves so many of its former staffers disgruntled.

Playboy filled with… Gasp… Adult Content!

What is wrong with people? Eight years ago, Al Franken wrote a satirical piece for Playboy entitled “Porn-O-Rama,” in which he describes visiting a fictional, virtual-reality sex laboratory.

Among the items that have folks all bent out of shape are graphic descriptions of sex and a reference to his 12 year old son using the internet to research a paper on bestiality. Again, the article is satirical in nature. None of this actually happened.

Now, all of this was brought to light, apparently, last week when local Republicans began circulating the article, or information about the article – or making wakes about the article – I am not sure what they did, really, as I haven’t been able to locate the actual article anywhere on line and everyone up in arms about the thing makes reference to it, but won’t actually make it available to the general public so we can make up our own minds about it. Anyway, the Republicans brought the issue up and a few of the local Democrats took the bait and have been publicly and breathlessly lamenting their chances in the congressional and senatorial elections this fall because of Al and his”indefensible” writing and won’t someone please think of the children….

Betty McCollum, Kieth Ellison, and Tim Walz have all apparently lost their minds:

“As a woman, a mother, a former teacher, and an elected official, I find this material completely unacceptable,” McCollum said of Franken’s piece. “I can tell you it’s not playing comfortably in St. Paul, and I can’t imagine this politically radioactive material is doing very well in suburban and rural districts.”

“Ellison said the Franken article made him “uncomfortable,” citing passages on oral sex and bestiality.

Walz called the piece “pretty inappropriate.”

Of course it’s inappropriate! And, in the wrong context or in the wrong venue, it may be unacceptable. But let’s not forget that this was in written for and published in Playboy Magazine. You remember, that adult magazine with the pictures of the nekkid womens and the frank sex talk and the boobs and the butts and whatnot? If you are uncomfortable with that sort of thing, don’t buy it and don’t read it. No one is forcing this on you.

McCollum said the piece, in which sex acts are explicitly described, is tantamount to pornography, noting that the Star Tribune would not publish it in its entirety.

Scandal! Porn in a porn magazine! But really, so what? The Star Tribune wouldn’t print most of what appears in Playboy. I can’t think of a daily news periodical that would. And Playboy, bless them, wouldn’t print most of what you find in your local paper. Context.

“I have to ask myself, can I explain it to my 11-year-old daughter? I’d have considerable difficulty,” Ellison said, adding that voters who have talked with him about it are “just sort of appalled.”

I would have to ask why would you bother discussing this with your 11 year old daughter? Do you regularly open the latest issue of Playboy and go over things with your kids? Who would do that? Do your hear dirty jokes at parties and repeat them to your children? Do you go make Powerpoint presentations of you and your spouse and run the slides past the kids? No! It would be inappropriate.

But Al Franken wrote an adult piece for an adult magazine. Eight years ago. Seems like the appropriate venue to me. It wasn’t news then, and it shouldn’t be news to anyone now. The only reason you might need to discuss this with your children is because some adults with their panties in a bunch dragged it out of its appropriate context and into the public sphere. So, let’s place the blame where it belongs, with those holier-than-thou, moralizing hypocrites or whom “family values” is a cheap political tool to further their own political agenda.

A. Whitney Brown pointed out years ago in his book “The Big Picture” that it’s the people who get all riled up about funny things being inappropriate, that make them inappropriate in the first place by taking them out of their proper context. He illustrated his point by referring to an incident in which Ronald Reagan, during a sound check prior to a radio interview, said, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” It was a private joke among the people in the room and their was laughter. It is important to remember that this was in the midst of the cold war, and there was a thick tension between US and Russia. Was the Joke inappropriate? Perhaps. But it was made among friends and in private. But, it was the folks who broadcast the thing and put it out there for all to hear – who took it out of it’s context – that made it into an incident.

For me it all comes down to it being OK to tell a dirty joke to people who like hearing dirty jokes.

Wii Fit Fun?

So, on Monday night we ordered a Wii/Wii Fit bundle from Target. It arrived yesterday and I played around with the thing for waaaay too long last night.

My first observation would be that you must must must wait until the children are in bed before breaking out the Wii. As enthusiastic as they are to play, a two year old and a four year old simply don’t yet have the mad gaming skilz required for simulated bowling, nor the patience to learn. They are able to pitch fairly easily in the baseball game as there is no button pushing required – but they get shelled – home run after home run – and they want to actually take turns – like after every pitch. This means I you spend more time moving the remote from wrist to wrist then actually playing games.

First thing I did was create Miis for everyone in the family. I did a pretty good job – Mine is bald with big, thick glasses, Marcy’s has red pigtails, chunky glasses and a half-bemused smirk. Once I finished with this, I moved on to setting up a profile for myself in the Wii Fit software. This is where the humiliation begins.

I enter my height and age and the balance-board thingy weighs me and am presented with my BMI. It’s not pretty, but then I knew it wouldn’t be. The real kick in the chops, however, is that the Wii then proceeded to take my Mii avatar, the one I created to look like me, and made it fatter! Asshole! And the Mii even got kind of slump-shouldered and depressed looking. It then went on to berate me as a couch potato and make fun of me after I performed various exercises.

Here’s the really perverse part about it. I enjoyed myself. This machine tells me to do stuff, I only manage to do the stuff it tells me to do half-assed, and then it makes fun of me and ridicules the way I did it. I’m grinning like a half-wit and laughing to myself and then hitting the continue button to play some more and suck at something else. This went on for hours.

Maybe this will help me get in shape, and maybe not, but can this really be good for my self-esteem?

I’m guessing my psyche can take the abuse.

Out of the Mouths of Babes…

“I don’t want Charlie’s prostitute-tranny-infested sperm. I have two beautiful kids. We’ll leave it at that. I am so over him. He’s the one who can’t move on. He’s disgusting and he’s hit an all-time low.”

-Denise Richards commenting on the rumor that she sent an email to ex’s, Charlie Sheen’s, fiancee Brooke Mueller asking for Charlie’s sperm so she could have another kid.

“There are times when I wonder if writing about topless hot chicks and Britney Spears all day is even worth it anymore. Then there comes a story like this.”

-Blogger “Todd” at I Don’t Like You In That Way commenting on the Richard’s/Sheen story.

A guide to undisciplined messaging

Politico has a short piece on the verbal gaffes that have permeated the Democratic primaries. I particularly liked the following…

James Carville told ABC’s “Nightline” that if Clinton gave Obama “one of her cojones, they’d both have two.”

Back to Work!

Just back to work after the long, Memorial Day weekend. Up at the cabin from Friday to Monday. Built a fire pit. Hours of work to move what amounted to 11 very heavy rocks. Cut and split some firewood and Marcy finished painting the kitchen and living room/entry way. Several weeks before we will be able to go up again.