Rolled

It's shaping up to be a fine holiday week, 80 degrees today as I type this, sittin' on my balcony (laptop!) with a Dr. Pepper in hand, but the beer better be ware on account of my hitting it shortly. Nothing to do, no where to be till Thursday afternoon, and that's a damn fine way to be, friends.
So, what's what with ya'll?
It's rivalry week here in LA, UCLA v USC, those damn dirty condemns, and I know I've asked this many times before, but what's the fucking deal with USC's mascot? They're the USC Trojans, and they have a Trojan Horse that rides around on the sidelines after every touchdown.
But (and I'm sure El Borak is way ahead of me here already) in the story, the Trojan Horse is what the Greeks used to defeat, you know, the TROJANS -- im n yur base, killin yur trojanz and all that.
Do they not teach Homer at USC?
Anyway, as to the football, I think with two weeks to prepare USC will probably beat UCLA even though for the first time in a long time the Condemns are reeling and vulnerable. Yet the Bruins got their sixth win last weekend, are now bowl-eligible, so see ya in December at the PapaJohns.com Bowl or whatever. Should be a great game though, and it's thankfully (see how I did that?) a 7pm kickoff like they used to do in the old days with this game, which means 12 or 13 hours of drunken BBQ revelry at Casa de Huckleberry instead of the usual 4 or 5.
And tomorrow, I'm heading to the beach.
Suck it, Winter!
Get 'em in!

Posted Without Commentary

Out In A Flash

The new ABC show FlashForward shows perfectly how a great premise and awful execution get you no where. I’ve tried to like this show, I really have, but I’m done, I’m out. The last several weeks I hit it up on Friday mornings on the DVR but I’m taking it off the queue. The writing is horrid, I want to stab every character in the face now, the acting is terrible, and even the editing makes me cringe.
I loved the first episode of this show, but every subsequent one has left me with more and more antipathy.
Off the top of my head:

• For a show called FlashForward, there are a Goddamn lot of FlashBacks to irrelevant backstory, or constant FlashBacks to earlier moments in the show which the characters happen to be discussing at a given moment, but seriously, how many times do I need to see the chick who looks like a smooshed version of Helen Slater stare lovingly at the fat man with no shirt on her living room sofa?
• One entire episode revolved around this elaborate “moral dilemma” about getting a octogenarian Nazi out of a German prison because he had some groundbreaking intel on why the blackouts occurred. His “groundbreaking” revelation was that all the crows died, something apparently no one had noticed, but too late, Nazi’s outta jail and on the loose! Turns out after ten seconds of Googling, the investigators find a bunch of really nifty charts and data that show, of course, a shitload of crows dies – so a bunch of people already knew it. So either these are the most inept investigators in television history, or the writers knew they wrote themselves into a corner and this was the quickest way out of it. Then, through some Deus Ex Search Engine, they discover a shitload of other crows died in similar circumstances 15 years before. Now had they just Googled the dead crows to begin with, the episode would have been about 10 minutes long.
• The excruciatingly awful (and wrong!) explanation of Schrödinger's Cat by the smarmy evil (and British!) Mad Scientist who is written as equal parts Brain of Pinky and the Brain and Marvin the Martian, while trying to be a smooth James Bondian villain that absolutely cannot pull it off.
• None of the actors can, you know, act their way out of a paper bag.
• It took them way too many episodes to address the question of whether one’s future vision was immutable. I would have imagined that such would have been settled hours, maybe days into the proceedings, not months.
• The dialogue is excruciatingly trite.
• The babysitter just all of a sudden is fluent in Japanese, so she can help lead another character to some untoward future? And she just happens to know that a symbol in the guy’s book is merely “unfinished” when Japanese “experts” could not recognize it at all? And the “unfinished” symbol was only missing one small straight line? Really guys? That’s the best you can do with this?
• There’s the uncomfortable fact that the show’s narrative arc is designed to end in a matter of months, which leads to a conundrum – unfolding the narrative at a natural pace which leads to a very quick point when everything exhausts itself or unfolding it at an incredibly slow rate which requires a measure of finesse which the writers do not possess.

FlashForward might have worked better as a movie rather than a TV show, but oh well.
It’s notable in that it Jumps the Shark in every single episode.
I’m out.

Good God, Ya'll

It's flippin' November 17th already.
What the fuck?
I was just getting settled into October.
Ugh.
The mood around here is one of hunkering down, of fetal positions, of cradling security blankets/handguns in the cold chill of the creeping twilight of our lives.
But optimism, too.
Whatever.
Bring on the Holidays, let's do it Old School one more time before the Corpulent Crooner in the Corner busts out a parting lullaby, and by Old School I mean crass secular commercialization while we all still have a little money to burn, Baby, burn because next year doesn't look so good, what with the grim forces of reality pushing us to take stock of the things that matter. So lets dedicate this Holiday season to the purchase of goods and services we don't need, nor hardly want, and revel in the burgeoning nostalgia of it all because next year we'll be chopping down the neighbor's Ficas to use as a holder for our Holiday trimmings.
Spend!
Your favorite stores won't live to see the Spring!
Spend, damn it!
You won't be able to fill the void between you and your supposed loved-ones with gift cards much longer!
Spend, you mother fuckers, SPEND!
Spend so the O-Force doesn't have to cry when he raises taxes next year!
Spend to hold on to that sliver of a hope that every free lunch is caviar dreams and champagne wishes!
When You Save With Hitler, You Save Alone!
S P E N D ! ! !
I'm done now.

Recovery!

Catch the Fever!
Unemployment doesn't just "top" 10%, it has sailed well past it, "rocketed" past it, one might say, but don't worry because "unemployment=fun-employment" and those figures are only a "lagging" indicator of a "recovery" that is already here, and is in fact quite "robust."
Don't let the contra-positivity swing you too much, trust them.
They have charts.
That are always wrong, but at least they keep trying.
Please though, tell me, how an economy that relies entirely on consumer spending will recover if less consumers have jobs (and credit) to spend us there?
The short answer is, it won't.
The long answer is, are you absolutely fucking kidding me?

One Wonders

If I'm the only person thinking, when reading this story, if Vegemite is some kind of Haight-Ashbury Honkie WOP-in-the-Woodshed cousin of famed urban street hero Dolemite.
When I realized Vegemite is just some backwoods Down Under Aussie Sandwich Spread/Miracle Grow/Paint Thinner, I shrugged my shoulders and admitted it's probably the same difference...

A Perfect Day on Gordon Street

Twenty bucks* if you get the reference.
In a futile bid to power through the worst case of writer's block(tm) I've ever had, I'm making ya'll suffer through it with me, by just typing whatever mental effluvia sparks across my synapses when I tweak the muse muscles, and for a perfect physical allegory please imagine someone tossing a highly conductive piece of steel, perhaps a rod, onto the posts of a 12-volt car battery. That's the process I'm attempting there in the cobwebbed recesses of the gelatinous goo I call my mind.
It's Friday, at least where I'm at.
I'm taking the afternoon off from this (writing), mercifully, and wasting time on things like errands and more errands, and of course there's a BC hockey game on tonight (well, late this afternoon) and thanks to the wonders of satellite television, I actually get to watch it live.
Of course, tonight and tomorrow its back to the (writer's) block, on account of my needing to get shit done ASAFP.

* Not actual money

Tether Even A Roasted Chicken

For all those who think I'm negative, please check out VD's Return of the Great Depression blog, to disabuse yourselves of that notion right quick.
Halloween approaches, and I find myself not much caring this year for whatever reason, 'tis not the season, though oddly I am looking forward to Christmas more than usual.
Strange days.
I haven't been to the gym in a month, and I feel disgusting, and I haven't been for a run, or played any pickup games in a span of time much longer than that.
There's just too much going on, and though I'm used to wall-to-wall business, these last couple of months have been formidable.
November looks just as screwed.
Hopefully it'll mellow by December, and I can get back to it.
In other news, I despair for the future of Western Civilization in a way where I can hardly keep a straight face. My friend, a professor of rhetoric and composition (yes, there are such things) was telling me that over the last couple of years, she's noticed her sophomore and junior students turning in their papers and coursework in "textspeak" (using the letter "b" instead of "be", or "4" instead of "for", "2" instead of "to" or "too" and so forth), and that every semester there'd be more than the last. It initially started with a paper or two that would have one or two instances of it in five or ten pages.
Now, she tells me, more than half of all of her classes compose their entire papers in this, ahem, vernacular.
On the bright side, she tells me, F translates perfectly. I'd say that the best minds of my generation are being destroyed by glibness, glutted slothlike fully clothed, but we're grading on a curve here.
And there's this, from across the pond: Government outlaws parents from watching kids at playgrounds because they might be pederasts.
Finally, I share with you this:

Rap Translated - watch more funny videos

When You Don't Got It

You simply have to pack it up and try again tomorrow.
If you don't have a tomorrow, then frankly you have bigger concerns.
I'm gonna start calling it "Fuck Me Tuesday" simply because I can, and it's a perfect affront to the ass bags that bust their nuts to foist some cutesy alliterative abomination in coupling an adjective with a given day of the week.
That buck stops the fuck right here, never fear, now shut up and grab me beer, dear.
Yes, I feel cheap.
What of it?
I don't care about news today, especially since it's so drearily similar to yesterday's and last week's, and on and on and on.
I find the vagaries of expression extremely curious, especially when it comes to Letters & Oratory, which is just a fancy way of saying "Word-fucking with your hand and your mouth."
You're not getting that brand of truth-telling anywhere else, friends.
It's amazing how it comes and goes, though, where for whatever reason everything I put to paper kicks six kinds of ass sideways, and it's the easiest thing in the world, and just as quickly it's all gone, like plodding through mud and molasses with cement shoes after shootin' up some prime heroin.
It's maddening.
But enough of my problems, how's life treatin' ya'll?

Dog Zone Blitz(er)

As promised, the epic Wolf Blitzer blitzed on Jeopardy clip.
The first clip is a compressed compilation of the fun, for those pressed for time.
The second is the unedited portion in all it's glory.
Actually, he wasn't doing too bad at all until the score change at 04:21, and that's when the wagon wheels depart the Wolf Cart.
Notice, too, that few of these questions are all that difficult, and Wolf sits there, holding the buzzer in full view of the camera, not even attempting to push the button.

[REDACTED]

What a bloody day/week/month/year/generation/lifetime/century/Industrial Revolution/When In The Course of Human Events/post-Renaissance-pre-Englightenment/Middle Ages/Roman Collapse/Sweet Jesus on the Cross/Roman Ascension/Greeks diddling each other/Don't Mess With My Potamians, in fact, let them go/below into the mud, sticks and seaweed from whence we came, so the fashionable opinions claim.
Tuesday is little more than the successful and much-deserved massacre of Monday as he lays in the tranquil slumber of oppressive tyrants.
But he'll be back.
So what's up in your world today?
Nothing much here, except its raining.
Better get your Turn Coat...
But seriously, that really is a non-story, for two reasons. First, did anyone actually expect her to vote any other way? Second, there's still four more votes on the Piece of Shit Comprehensive Piece of Shit bill, the prospects of which still look rather doomed despite a sweeping majority of Democrats throughout the legislative and executive arms of the government.
This is funny, if poorly argued.
While I agree on premise, it'll be a much shorter journey than anyone thinks.
Because this doesn't help.
MLB playoffs are also kicking into gear, with the NL and AL CS getting going later this week, and of course the Dodgers are playing the fucking Phillies again. I don't think my heart nor my liver could stand losing to those filthy phucks two years in a row. But the worst case scenario, is in fact the potential for the so-called "freeway" World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers, who play in the city of Los Angeles, in the County of Los Angeles, within sight of Los Angeles City Hall, and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, who do not in fact play in either the City nor the County of Los Angeles, and is far enough away that the curve of the Earth precludes viewing Los Angeles from Anaheim, even from a tall peak.
Anyway, that series would be my ultimate nightmare, for the sheer possibility of the Dodgers losing out to those bandwagon, rally-monkey freaks.
Ugh.

Just Remember

When you watch this clip, that it's Fox NOOOOOOOSE that's the hyperpartisian wingnut hacks pushing an agenda, and no one else.
I also hear the Brooklyn Bridge is still for sale, so get crackin'.

And This Would Be

The best movie ever made:

If they, you know, would make it...

This Could Be

The worst movie to ever have been made:

Nobody's Fall But Mine

Apologies to Led Zeppelin, of course.
Though technically the autumnal equinox passed on September 21, I don't consider it Fall until:
1) The weather reflects such and/or
2) October 1 arrives on the calendar.
I know I've said it again and again, but I love this time year, Autumn by far is my favorite just about anywhere in the northern hemisphere. Pick a place on the map there and I guarantee right now is it's most calm and pleasurable time.
Last week, average temp here was 109, right now it's 81, and by Saturday 73.
Sure, the downside is the windswept fires that rage on and blot out the sky, but fuck it.
Yours truly is cracking open a Karl Strauss Oktoberfest beer or twelve and settin' out on my balcony with a radio and a good book.
Fuck yeah.

How To Kill A Huckleberry

Bullets, daggers and artillery are useless.
What you do is change the temperature from 112 degrees on Sunday to 85 on Monday and 71 on Tuesday, and watch the hi-jinx ensue.
Huck's a bit slow today, to say the least, as his immune system grinds to a spectacular halt.
News, news, news, what the Hell is going on today?
Vox has a new book coming out, and I dare say he might be even more pessimistic than I about the economic outlook. Guess what the Mother-in-Law's getting for Christmas the Generic Day of Amalgamated Winter Revelry derived from a melange of Pagan rites, Greco-Roman mythology, Solar worship, Aborigine Dung Bathes, Meso-American Solstice Sacrifices, and, grudgingly -- in flyover country no less -- the birth of the "Christian" Jesus, not to be confused with Jesus (Hey-Sooooze!) who works "in the shadows" down at the Day Labor Center.
My erstwhile foe, President Barack "The Islamic Shock" Obama is lyin' mythmaking again, fabricating Health Care Horror Stories out of whole cloth. Not that it really matters much anymore, the lines have been drawn, the curses cast, and a body can count all of the nation's undecideds on one hand with plenty of digits to spare. Whether one side or the other prevails at this point is only a matter of course, that the Campaigner-in-Chief still finds it prudent to sell his plans again and again says all you need to know about how well that's going for him.
To wit.
And if that weren't bad enough for the O-Force, this:

They cashed out retirement funds to build their business during the 2008 presidential campaign. Now they have 3,000 jack-in-the-boxes with smiling Barack Obama puppets inside — all sitting in a California warehouse, waiting to be sprung open for $29.95 apiece. For Barack-in-the-Box creator Heather Courtney and her husband, David Manzo, the Obamamania that drove sales so fast they could barely keep up during the inauguration is over now. Sales have slowed to a "sporadic drizzle," the 36-year-old artist said, in part because the president's just not as popular.

For those keeping score at home:
Pederast Clergy -- worthy of media derision, scorn and legal prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.
Pederast Filmmakers -- Ain't no big thing.
Global Climate Change(tm) is going to kill us all, never mind that it's getting colder, that just proves the point. Or something.
I found a beauty of a handgun in the consignment case at the gun shop. Once the I get through the waiting period, I may post a picture. I got a hell of a deal.
This will be in the back of my head the next time I hit the bench press.
Hassenpfeffer, Inc.

Conceptions -- Pre, Mis and Immaculate

It is amazing how frequently and predictably yours truly is accused by his liberal family and friends of being a scumbag witch-burning Christianist, only to be met by robust, derisive laughter.
Likewise, I continue to be amazed by the "conservatives" (Republican) of my family and friends who insist I'm some anti-war limp-wristed liberal, accusations met with equally derisive laughter.
I am, of course, neither -- or possibly both depending on your point of view, but the underlying biases of both strike me as thoroughly hilarious. It should be pointed out that:
I've never burned a witch nor am I a Christian.
My wrists are, frankly, fairly stout and I'm not against "war" as a concept, a metaphor, a way of life or something to get drunk and do one weekend a month and two weeks during the summer.
I am, however, also not an "anti-Christian" and I am also unsupportive of every "war" that's been foisted this century so far.
I believe in free trade, and I believe government -- as it does in everything it attempts -- fails horribly in the arbitration of said trade.
On moral grounds, I am an anarchist (at least an anarcho-capitalist) but certainly not the ironic kind, that are so often really just statist little bastards living on their parents' dime, looking for any excuse to shake their fists at The Man.
On practical grounds I'm for a deadlocked and divided government.
I believe the single greatest harm to befall society is the sweeping acceptance of positive rights.
That's where it all starts, where it stops, nobody knows.
I believe morality is not implicit to the human condition.
I am certain there is a winning idea in lampooning a world run by celebrities, based on the growing trend of PSA-style Call-To-Action videos that are all the rage now. Anyone want to go in on a movie treatment together?
It'll make millions.
I believe the entire breadth of 20th century philosophy can be blamed on technology and the Industrial Revolution, and it's interesting only in seeing the teetering construction of grand Jenga Towers of logical incoherence.
Not all thinking is good thinking.
I believe there's nothing a good drink can't make better, that every person needs a hobby, and that "philanthropy" is not now, nor will it ever be a valid career path.
Now that the record's straight, have a great Wednesday!

Fail

Word of the day, word of the week, of the year, of the life.
Mark it down and underline it, save it for the posterity that laughs defiantly at your pathetic and feeble foibles, ensconced as they are in their own delusional blanket of self-confidence, sprung from the mangled melange of contemporary mores clumsily grafted together and stuffed wholesale into the liminal layer of the body politic, bloated as it is from the gases released inside borne of it's own demise, spent and expelled, too, as the perfect templar to be mocked by their antecedents as a justice well and truly served.
Cold.
Happy Monday, ya'll.
Good weekend?
Mine was fine, a little crook, a little shine, a sign stuck in the brine of another work-a-day week, a setup so perfect, you can't help but malign.
C'mon now.
In the news, my erstwhile foe, President Barack "On the Clock" Obama foisted himself all over the television again, while the NY Post notes that the NY Times has devoted more than two miles of print coverage to the O-Force since his ascension election, and I dare say the Common Man(tm pending) is getting a bit tired of the theatrics.
So, naturally, White House thinking leans toward more appearances.
Huck's beginning to think the scariest thing about creeping fascism isn't the creeping or the fascism, but in the tiresome lectures, again and again, so on ad nauseum.
Now that summer is just about over and fall is set to take over, of course the temps here in LA indicate that summer has arrived, finally. 103 degrees is the forecast for every day this week.
Yay.
For some reason I've been reading a lot of contemporary philosophy lately, and I think it's starting to bring me down. You know, more than usual. God, what dreadful dreck most of it is.
I blame the Industrial Revolution for that.
And swing music.
Football's bringing me down as well, and after watching Sunday's match-up between the Chargers and the Ravens, I think I'm going to be thankful if a lot of Chargers games are blacked out from dwindling attendance.
Looking back on 2009, I don't think I've been to a theater to see a movie at all yet.
Don't know if that says more about the quality of they year's flicks or just how completely I've become divorced from the medium. 2008 only saw me in the theater once, 2007 twice, and 2006 I do not recall.
Take it for what that's worth.
I've been thinking a lot about the nature of things, about natural law versus Natural Law, the underpinnings of the fallacy of "positive rights" against the tattered remnants of Paine's Rights of Man, and I'm still sifting it all together in this little pea brain of mine.
And I close with this, the very Model of a Modern Major Epic Fail:

One area of extreme distraction is kids. “Across the happiness data, the one thing in life that will make you less happy is having children,” said Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at Wharton who co-wrote a paper called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” “It’s true whether you’re wealthy or poor, if you have kids late or kids early. Yet I know very few people who would tell me they wish they hadn’t had kids or who would tell me they feel their kids were the destroyer of their happiness.”

The Hell you say...

Posted w/o Commentary

And That's That

I wasn't going to post on this, but I guess I will because someone needs to.
The Fox animated comedy King of the Hill aired its series finale last night, and with its passing closes the book on possibly the last decent show on network television. And by "decent" I don't mean in terms of quality, rather I mean in terms of morality, of decency, of something the whole family could watch together and come away feeling good. Odd coming as it does from the same man who gave us the ubiquitous Beavis and Butthead, but there you go.
Yet KOTH's comedy was never boorish or cheap, never mean spirited or blue, and yet it was still funny. Sure, much of that humor came from protagonist Hank Hill's "corny" moral naivety plied against the rather more coarse and vulgar underpinnings of contemporary popular culture. But from this came, I think, the show's greatest strength -- Hank never wavered and held firm to his moral compass, and at any rate the show never devolved into the unabashedly giddy meanness that comprises so much of "comedy" on television today, including the show's replacement -- Family Guy spinoff "The Cleveland Show" which promises to be just about the same as its predecessor, simply transposing a fat black guy for a fat white guy.
Fox's goal of three solid hours of the same kind of boorish, "shocking" humor has reached fruition, sadly.
A tip of the hat to the passing of a great show.

These Are The Days Of Your Lives

A man gets to a certain point in his life where he no longer sees himself as moving forward so much as stuck in neutral, a moment when he realizes the remembered past and the foreseeable future fit all too snugly into the comforting warmth of dusty routine, that life somehow ceases to satiate itself on the consumption of goals fueled by its own relentless inertia. Instead it all becomes rote, oh, look, killed another Monday, well Hang In There Kitty, It's Almost Friday, and look at that, time to kill another weekend, and on, and on, and on, until the Mortal Coil no longer wishes to glut on the dwindling grist of your soul upon the Mill and casts you off into the dustbin to go on without you.
So, how was your weekend?
Mine was alright.
Whole lotta football, as to be expected, and some thesis writing, also expected, and much laughing at the doin's and transpirin's in the world. The "9/12" project brought anywhere from 1,001 to 2.5 million people to the Capitol, trying to send a message to The Man, er, The One, that they're Mad As Hell, And They're Not Going To Take It Anymore(tm) at least until 3pm when their permits expire. No word on how many Who Is John Galt t-shirts were sold or how many Tea Bags were flapped in defiant ire.
My erstwhile foe, President Barack "Takin' Stock" Obama had a pretty decent week, sort of, except for being called a liar to his face on national television. The O-Force has managed to staunch the bleeding polls at least on his health care initiative, though by all accounts the "robust public option" is as sure as dead. Although his tone deaf insistance on blaming the mathematically impotent GOP for "blocking" his initiative is getting tiresome. It ain't the GOP at all, but Blue Dogs Democrats that sit in swing districts comprised of constituents that didn't magically become ultra-liberals upon the O-Force's Ascension to the Cherry Blossom Mountain, and only voted (D) as a matter of referendum on the (R) that previously held the seat. But attacking anyone with a (D) in their title isn't good press, so boogie men aplenty.
And sure to make the phony "recovery" that the pundits insist is happening all the better, we've managed to spark a trade war with China over the weekend, so that should end well. That, if you didn't already know, is a bad, bad thing.
And, of course, some people are clamoring for a full-fledged invasion of Post-War Germany. World War I, that is.
Oh, and one more thing for the Press getting all up in arms about the Lying Liars who call out their Lord and Savior on national television: they're on to you guys.
Anyway, Happy Monday!

Truth with Visual Aids

The Heckle Heard 'Round The World

My reaction?
Meh.
It's nice to see South Carolina represent, but still.
At any rate, if a U.S. President doesn't wish to be called a liar it'd probably be best not to lie then, but c'mon. Who expects that anymore from anyone who puts "public official" on their resume?
Also, if a U.S. President wishes to enact a British-styled Health Care system, he shouldn't be none too surprised when he gets a British House of Commons-style response.
Considering just about everything in that speech of his was a lie, a strawman and an overt appeal to the worst aspects of the human condition, it should also be noted that nothing in it was new. The O-Force said what he's been saying all along, hoping against hope that this time people will start buying it.
Time will tell on that score.

Posted w/Commentary Inherent

Where Huckleberry Lives