Thing du jour

I've decided to try out a new thing in the blog, wherein I declare something or other the item of the day. The category may be of my choosing and you bet your ass it won't be daily. It'll be like adding a feature to a newspaper, except without any of the stress of journalistic integrity or a regular audience.

anyway...Moment of the Day: I was driving out of the supermarket parking lot with the window down and I hear this sort of slightly screechy blowing sound to the left. There's a man there in his 70s try to whistle to get the attention of his wife who had just stepped out of the store. Except the dude clearly cannot whistle. Mostly he just moved a lot of air and did some spitting. You'd think, at 70 yrs of age, you would either a) know how to whistle, or b) know that you can't whistle and stop trying to do it in public. Eventually he gave up and just started yelling "Hey!" and waving his hands.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee

Hoooly shit folks, you need to check out http://www.rickygervais.com and listen to the podcasts. Ricky Gervais is the dude who began the show "The Office" (british version, which spawned the US version) and is one of the writers for Da Ali G Show. The podcast is basically him and his friend interacting with this guy Karl, who is a strange bean. Give it a shot, its free and fooking hilarious. Man, I wish my mind worked that way.

At the risk of turning my blogs into nothing but parroting back of shit i've heard, this was funny too....a short audio essay on how the indie coffee shop thing doesnt really work.

Olympics are on, and theyre currently showing Ice Dancing. Not skating, not racing, nothing involving a puck or a ball. People rag on curling, but seriously, how many people do you have to beat to compete in olympic ice dancing? There are probably what, like 25 people in the world who ice dance to begin with? Which is awkward, because there's that one odd person when they pair up to dance, and thats got to be hard on the ol' ego. But I have trouble believing that this is enough of an institution that there are real established parameters for judging and people qualified to judge and give commentary. I know skeleton doesnt really have that many participants yet either, but at least you put your neck on the line cruising down an ice chute at 70mph in a unitard. Also, you have to suffer the indignity of the unitard.

Dang, momma, git my shotgun!

A kid came up to our house today to sell magazines, and when I answered the door he looked at me for a second and then asked if my parents were home. No respect.

Same shit, different day, and for a while I considered posting my thoughts on the Danish cartoons, but instead I'm just going to catalog the greatest jokes I've heard so far about Cheney shooting a dude. Oh man. But first, a quick bit of commentary from yours truly...

Apparently people in the hunting community say that these sorts of things happen "fairly often" and its not really a newsworthy event. Ok....does that seem kind of wrong to anybody? guys are shooting eachother in the head fairly often, mundane or not....

In a potentially related story, America's hunting population continues to decline sharply. Some experts theorize that this reflects a shift in cultural values and urbanization throughout much of the country, but seriously, we just heard the hunters say they shoot eachother all the time. I think its natural selection.

*Edit*....you have to see the pic of whittington after he came out of the hospital. thats some nasty bruising! its like dawn of the dead. beware, slightly gruesome.

feel free to chime in if you've heard any good ones
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"But here is the sad part -- before the trip Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guy's request for body armor." -Letterman

"The weather back East has been atrocious. There was so much snow in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fat guy thinking it was a polar bear." -Leno

"I'll be here all day with continuous coverage of how Vice President Dick Cheney shot a 78-year-old man in the face after he mistook him for a small bird." -Ed Helms, of The Daily Show

"Newsweek's Andy Borowitz reported that the federal government had issued a color-coded "Cheney Alert" to warn of future attacks. 'What we have learned, the hard way, is that Dick Cheney can attack without warning,' a faux Homeland Security boss Michael Chertoff declared."

"Dick Cheney and his buddies go down there hunting in Texas, and Dick Cheney guns down a guy. And they're hunting quail, and the quail disappeared. They vanished. And reports now that they're hiding in the mountainous area near Pakistan" - Letterman

"A mere five days after shooting a man in the face, Vice President Dick Cheney broke his silence about the incident by submitting to a no-holds-barred grilling at a public press conference. I'm just kidding. ... Actually, he sat down with Brit Hume on Fox News for not some much a grilling -- more of a teat suckle." -Jon Stewart

"If this story gets any bigger, pretty soon they're going to have to tell the president." - Letterman

"When the ambulance got there, out of force of habit they put Cheney on the stretcher. No, the other guy!" - Leno

"I'm surprised Dick Cheney loves to hunt so much. The five times the government tried to give him a gun, he got a deferment." - Leno

"Apparently the reason they didn't release the information right away is they said we had to get the facts right. That's never stopped them in the past." -Craig Ferguson

"He is a lawyer and he got shot in the face. But he's a lawyer, he can use his other face. He'll be all right." - Craig Ferguson

Menace in the Kitchen

Ive never been much for cooking, but today I was feeling adventurous and decided to make a shake, completely sans instruction. Got Daves blender down off the shelf, threw in some fruit, some ice cream, some ice, some milk..that sounds about right. Then the wheels fell off.

For whatever reason nothing was mixing, so I decided to pick up the blender while it was on and shake it vigorously. In short, everything literally came apart, the lid came off, the glass part went flying, bounced off the counter, smashed a spare fruit that was sitting by the microwave, and then landed upside down in the trash can. The base kept clattered back down and kept making a noise for a few seconds until it finally quit, either out of some built in fail-safe or crippling damage. My shake ended up distributed amongst a good portion of the kitchen.

Since Ive lived here Ive made 3 attempts at cooking that havent involved something instant or plain pasta, and one of those resulted in some paper towels catching fire, and another resulted in a severely warped cookie sheet. The other one just produced bad food and dirtied every dish we own. For stroganoff.

Paintball Vol. 1 - History & an Absence of Camo

Alright, I'm gonna educate those of you who are unitiated. It has somehow gotten so that my only hobby is paintball, which represents significant cutbacks in hobby breadth from my hobby heyday in high school where i actually played sports and shit. What can I say, I'm out of shape. Anyway, I play a lot of paintball. Not pinball, not ping-pong. Ok, some pinball. But mostly, paintball.

I've been wanting to try paintball since sometime in the early 90's, but my parents never let me. My mom has since commented that knowing what they know now they wish they had let me. I might actually be good or something, instead of just acceptably decent. Its just as well, I suppose, since I probably wouldve gotten hit and cried and quit anyway. But I digress. Been playing since 2001, been playing nearly weekly for a little over a year. Yes it is expensive, yes I am completely broke, no I'm still not that good.

A quick note of history: Paintball began ~25 yrs ago in the woods, a bunch of friends stalking eachother and playing guns. In the past few years it has come almost entirely out of the woods and onto a sort of concept field known as 'speedball,' where the bunkers are all man-made and even on both sides of the field, and the field is generally small enough that you can shoot the opposing team off the break and the games take no more than 5 minutes.

For whatever reason, I am fucking terrible at woodsball. I started in the woods, everybody starts in the woods, and you go out for the first time with your friends because you want to play guns and see how you would do or whatever. Its nerdy, but I've accepted it. I should also point out that once you've gone a couple times, the camoflauge/military-look-alike thing gets old, and you end up being glad its becoming a sport in its own right. I am confident that in a real military event I would suck just as bad having never played paintball. None of the regulars at my field wear camo except as a joke or to be retro, nobody thinks they're a sniper, nobody calls the paint" bullets," "ammo," "rounds," nobody calls the paintguns "weapons," there is not a single tree or shrub at said field, and there is no rule that if you get shot in the leg you just hop around on one leg but keep playing, although I'm not saying that last one wouldn't be funny. My point is, we're trying to distance ourselves from militia types here.

PAINTBALL =/= MILITIA TYPES. well for some people it does, but I think they were probably militia types before they found paintball, and they really need to leave me alone.