dogs i don't like:

1. chihuahua on the north side of my house that barks all the time.
2. beagle on the west side of my house that barks all the time.
3. large and frequently-unleashed rottweiler across the street.
4. very large and apparently free-ranging neighborhood poodle.
   
5. marmaduke.
   

birth announcement

drinking and listening to alkaline trio

man, this is high school all over again.

skullduggery and adventure on the high seas (lake?)

my girlfriend invited some friends and me to her cottage in michigan a few weeks ago. from a conventional viewpoint, the weather was terrible-- overcast skies and chilly winds were interspersed with booming thunderstorms for much of the weekend. but rather unexpectedly, the shit weather made things really fun.

saturday morning brought a torrential downpour that lasted into early afternoon, after which we finally spent some time on the beach. the storm spawned big rolling waves, colossal by lake michigan standards... which means coastal folks would have found them cute and quaint, but they were badass for a prairie-dwelling midwesterner who's only once set foot in an ocean.

the water was frigid and the waves large enough that i constantly felt off-balance. occasionally, i would fall and attempt to surface directly into another oncoming wave, inhaling bunch of lake water (probably best that i don't think about how gross that is) and likely looking rather foolish.

for a few seconds each time, the world was dark and cold and weightless and i had no control over anything. i imagine it was a bit like drowning but not scary because i wasn't in any real danger... so it was kind of fun. i wanted to stay longer but everyone else was cold, so we left.

the next day's weather was more summery, charring my ghoulish pallor to a shade nearly within standard parameters for healthy human beings.* we found an small sailboat with no sail partially buried in the wet sand near the water's edge. it was clearly abandoned, so we decided to try our luck with a little voyage.

while we were digging it out, i kept thinking "this is heavy as hell and it's filled with shitloads of wet sand, there's no way we're going to actually get it into the water." after we were paddling around in the boat, i kept thinking "there's no way this is going to stay afloat, there are huge cracks in the bottom." after a lot of bailing and brief, implausible thoughts about rigging a rudimentary bilge pump, i kept thinking "we're pretty far out, i hope i don't wind up as one of those newspaper stories about idiots who do something stupid and hurt themselves." but we didn't and it was fun. my two shipmates were true swashbucklers, to be sure.

after a while, we realized we had drifted pretty far south and decided to turn back. we tried to leave the boat where we came ashore, but some lady in a folding chair yelled at us. she was cranky as hell for someone who had her own private beach, so we kept walking. eventually we dumped the boat where we found it along the tideline. within seconds, the waves were reburying it with wet sand.


* at least on my forearms and the back of my neck.

bizarre e-mails, #4

i'm sincerely hoping this one is someone playing a rather uncool prank on a friend...

unfortunately, it's probably more likely someone's asshole ex-boyfriend causing trouble.

*EDIT: i should add... i blacked out what appeared to be someone's real first and last name and address, down to the person's apartment number.

clownin' around

a bit too busy today for a real post, so here's a picture of a poster i saw at my favorite deli:

i googled it and i think it's an old wine label. i just thought it looked sweet.

also, is it just me or does that clown look extremely sinister? like imagine if he were standing on top of a pile of skulls instead of bunches of grapes.

a few pictures i've been meaning to upload

the aftermath of the pride parade from my friend's apartment.

i have no idea what this means, but it seems like some very poor phrasing in the lower right.

i think this place went out of business because it wasn't clear enough that they sold food.

bumper sticker archives, #1

i think bumper stickers are a rather fascinating form of self-expression. you have this tiny rectangle with just a few words to sum up a piece of what you're all about and broadcast for all the world to see.

a lot of them are boring (i.e. political affiliation, alma mater, trade union) or tasteless/stupid (i.e. "i do what the voices in my head tell me" or "my other ride is your mom") but i see some real gems from time to time in my neighborhood.

for example:



this truck belongs to a guy on my block. the "i <3 violence" sticker alone is absurd enough to qualify as noteworthy, but there's more to it. not only is the owner a chicago cop, he put a sticker proclaiming his love of violence direclty next to his fraternal order of police sticker.

if i were a cop in a city with as many ugly memories of police brutality as chicago, i probably wouldn't go out of my way to reinforce that perception. i dunno, maybe he just really likes ultimate fighting or something.

do any vegetables actually grow on trees?

if you follow political blogs at all, chances are you've come across this video:



yes, this lady looks very foolish... but as someone who had the misfortune of listening to hours of concerned citizen monologues during my journalism days, she's pretty standard in terms of rambling imbeciles at government meetings.

if you attend meetings at any city government/school board, you eventually WILL encounter someone as ignorant and poorly prepared and terrible at speaking as santa cruz lady. if you're particularly unlucky, that person will be a board member.

in fact, the santa cruz lady isn't even all that bad. she was boring and didn't make any sense, but you just tune that out when you realize it's not going anywhere.

far worse are the people leading quixotic crusades about local issues or against certain board members. i always found it really ironic that even if people had valid beef with the board, probably 95 percent of them doomed themselves just by stepping up to the microphone. adults who speak like inarticulate third-graders don't get taken seriously.

i remember this one guy who called himself "dr. drainage." giving dr. drainage my phone number was easily one the biggest mistakes of my journalism career.

every single week, he'd be at the city council meeting droning on and on about sewers and storm water and retention ponds and god knows what else. to be fair, he wasn't a standard "village meeting idiot" because he was actually quite bright- just abysmal at presenting his ideas.

i guess the reason i find this video so odd is santa cruz lady is basically just like sarah palin in terms of incoherency and ineptitude at presenting ideas, yet millions of people wanted palin to became our vice president. i think this is probably my favorite takedown yet of palin's gibberish speeches.

guerilla tactics at the movies

sunday was one of those sticky-humid days best spent in an air-conditioned room, so some friends and i went to see harry potter and the half-blood prince. wanton spendthrift that i am, i indulged in a $5 medium fountain drink to celebrate my first 2009 summer blockbuster movie experience. livin' large, baby!

the movie was way more badass than i expected and i was really enjoying it. i'm a very casual HP fan, so i didn't care about it diverting from the book's plot. frankly, i don't even remember the book very well.

apparently, people also complained there wasn't any explanation of what happened earlier in the series, which seems slightly ridiculous to me. harry potter is one of western civilization's most phenomenally successful and ubiquitous book/movie/video game/unintentional sex-toy series. if the hogwarts crew has been quidditching under your radar for the past decade and you finally decide to see what all the hubbub's about by going in cold to the sixth movie... well, you probably deserve to be lost.

unfortunately, my aforementioned diet coke splurge meant i had to get up in the middle of the movie. nothing kills the mood like using crowded theater bathroom. during my whole trip, i kept thinking about how bad real life sucks compared to movies and how i'd rather be blasting shit with magic.

real life continued to suck once i returned to my seat. some churl kept throwing chewed-up candy. it seemed like he was targeting the girls directly behind me but i was catching collateral damage. after the third time i was struck, i decided to pull some rambo shit and go on the offensive.

i grabbed a bag of discarded popcorn from a garbage can in the lobby, then reentered my theater through a different door and found a seat way in back where i could see everyone. as soon as that little fucker threw something, i'd be on him like an hawk. i was planning to whip the whole bag at his head once i found him. or, if he was someone who could possibly beat me up, i would just throw stuff at the back of his head from the cover of darkness in a bit of poetic justice.

unfortunately, i was robbed of sweet vengeance because i never actually caught anyone in the act of throwing anything. i'm pretty sure it was this one douchey suburbanite teenager. he definitely would have been the "whole bag at the back of the head" scenario.