Ten Years Gone

Thinking that the special effects scenes of the world ending would make up for a horrible lack of plot, I made the mistake of watching the movie 2012 a few nights ago.

Here is a short list of a few things more entertaining than watching that congealed puddle of diarrhea (in Hi-Def!):

*Drinking some or all the household cleaners under your cabinet, then calling poison control and telling them what you've done.
*Punching yourself in the face.
*Sobbing uncontrollably.
*Swallowing anything you find on the floorboards of Woody Harrelson's van.
*Headbutting a hay spike.
*Sitting in an empty closet with the lights off.
*Bronzing your genitals.
*Choking to death.
*Experimenting with a DIY-root-canal-kit.

The one thing I did learn from this movie...

SPOILER ALERT!!!

...sometimes having your young child witness the violent, graphic, and total destruction of her entire planet is the most surefire way to cure her of wetting the bed.  No shit.

Contrary to intuition, scenes like this make children want to NOT piss themselves.  Who knew?

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While cleaning off a cluttered bookshelf last night, I found a unlabeled CD in a dusty case.  I classified it as garbage and threw it in the trash, before deciding maybe I should see what was on it first. Turns out, I'm glad I fished it out of the shitpile.

It was an ooooollllllllllld (circa 2000) recording of me playing guitar and singing three covers and one original.  I had completely forgotten I'd written the original song, and realized if I had thrown out that disk, I would have likely NEVER remembered writing or recording it, and lost it forever.

Here's one of the covers from that CD, I Fought The Law by Sonny Curtis and The Crickets.

Someday I may post that original.  Today is not that day.
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What's the worst thing you almost threw away?

Two Questions

I only want to know two things:

1) Does that come in a female voice?

2) Where do I plug in my shopvac?

These Boots Are Made...

A.A. Bondy's title track When The Devil's Loose.

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Those of you trapped behind a desk eight hours a day, five days a week, know tedium can be a killer of both productivity and sanity. The horrible slog between morning and lunch, then between lunch and quitting time are peppered with pitfalls of monotony. Everyone I work with has their own method of dealing with the workday doldrums, from banal conversation breaks to caffeine intake that borders on criminal.

I have tried these methods, and while they are a pleasant break from the routine, they don't do much to keep me energized once I return to my cell.

What I have found that keeps me on an even keel is an activity known as walking.

walk·ing - Pronunciation: \ˈwȯ-kiŋ\ - Function: noun -Date: 14th century

1 : the minimal amount of effort one can exert while still claiming it is "exercise" with a straight face. 
Jared claimed walking and submarine sandwiches made him lose weight, but everyone knows it was the meth.

2 : the condition of a surface for one going on foot.
Though already difficult in the low light and haze of opium smoke, the walking was made even more treacherous by the puddles of meth-barf that Jared had spewed everywhere.

Originally championed by the elderly and those too corpulent or lazy for normal exercise, walking is quickly gaining traction as the exercise of choice among the following key demographic: people who are sick as fuck of sitting behind a goddamn desk and staring at a soul-sucking screen that is slowing eating away at the quality years of their pathetic and ever-dwindling lives.  Yeah.  That demographic.

At any rate, a coworker and I started walking about three or four years ago when we were seeking a place to vulgarly complain about our jobs without being overheard.  The mile-and-a-half of walking (broken out over two walks; morning and afternoon) was just incidental to our insatiable desire to bitch and moan.

At first, our workstations were in close enough proximity to simply ask each other if we felt up for a walk.
"Hey, motherfucker. Walk?"
"Let's do it."

As time and advancement moved us further apart, it became necessary to email each other when the need for a walk arose.

... ... ... ...

I'm not sure when it happened, but at some juncture the phrases "walk" and "walking" were supplanted by images of Christopher Walken.

So for over a year now, I've been scouring the internet daily in search of new and unique images of Mr. Walken, and surprisingly, I have NOT exhausted all the available images.

Below are some of my favorites, organized by group.

There are Costumed Walkens:

 

There are Portrait Walkens:

 

And even the ever-elusive Mustachioed Walkens:

Honestly, all these Walken pictures are enough to blow a man's mind.

Fortunately, good ol Christopher can be there to reassemble your blown mind, should the need arise.


Nancy Sinatra - These Boots Are Made For Walken

Which celebrity have you seen too many pictures of?
(And no, for once I don't mean naked pictures.)
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Speaking of crazy mustache pictures, go check out some of the timeless classics HERE.

Grease-burned Thighs

The perils of cooking bacon in your underwear should not be taken lightly, but in the race to cook three pounds of bacon in thirty minutes, sometimes one must make sacrifices.

Recall

After boxing last night, I stopped to fuel up my Toyota.  I had changed back into my street clothes (bluejeans, white t, cowboy boots) and thrown on a jacket to fend off the brisk evening air.  I went through the standard motions at the pump:  sliding my card, selecting "yes" for receipt, selecting the grade, tasting the gasoline, putting the nozzle between my legs and delicately but intimately penetrating my car's freshly uncorked gas-orifice-hole while emitting a faint moan...  You know, the typical things EVERYONE does when they fill their tank.

You should see me refill the radiator...

After topping off my car, I gently pulled out the still-dripping nozzle while sweetly whispering "I love you, baby" to my car, then climbed back behind the wheel and noted my mileage on the receipt.  Placing the receipt in a huge pile of its brethren (I'll update my MPG spreadsheet one day, I swear to Thor), I dropped into gear and got on the road.

Something was wrong.

At first I thought perhaps it was bad gasoline.  About fifteen years ago, the same purveyor had a large batch of bunk petroleum that caused fuel pump failures in almost every car that so much as drove past the place.  But the chain-store's reputation paid a heavy price from that incident, and they have had an overly paranoid quality control unit ever since.  So the only bad gas in my car was probably the result of my dinner (bangers & mash).  [Man, those obvious, low-hanging-fruit jokes are always the best.]

My next thought was that I needed to check Toyota's recall list once again to see if perhaps my make and model had been recently added.  I guess it could happen, however unlikely, that my accelerator would suddenly develop problems after so many years and untold thousands of miles of trouble-free operation.  It was possible, if not plausible.

The more I analyzed the "something is wrong" feeling, the more I began to realize that it WAS the accelerator.  It was immediately popping up when I raised my foot, no matter how quickly I pulled it away.  "Holy crap, my car has design flaws that have proven fatal in some instances.  It's late, I'm tired, and now I'm running the risk of becoming another statistic in a massive recall campaign."  My brain went from sleepy to panicked in a hurry as I contemplated my options.  "Man, it's almost like the accelerator is stuck to my boot!"

Then I tried to move my boot left and right across the gas pedal.  It would not budge.

Goddammit.

I stepped in gum.

...   ...   ...   ...


But maybe that's just the fix that Toyota needs for their accelerator issues:  A stick of Juicy Fruit on the soles of your kicks - problem solved.


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Help yourself to these images:

Without Warning

No one told me.  Seriously.  I thought what I was doing was in the best interest of everyone.


You see, I have a dirty mind and a crass mouth, and a hard time reining in either one.  It's not really a secret, and I make no apologies for the abominations generated by my head.  And, I can still see how it could easily offend some people. In fact, sometimes that's the point.

Like how my mind instantly converts "Slippery When Wet" into 

the FAR more hilarious expression "Shit And Fall Back In It."

Yet I assure you, I was looking out for the delicate feelings of faceless, nameless people when I told Blogger I wanted to enable their Adult Content Warning.  "This will be great," I told myself.  "I won't have to apologize to nuns or justify myself in front of a federal judge or listen to crying kids tell me how I 'made baby Jesus cry'.  Perfect solution."

And so I selected the option in my settings window and never gave it another thought...

Until today.  Today I decided to "View Blog" and then (after clicking through the Adult Content thing) start clicking on "Next Blog" just to see what other interesting blogs I could dig up.  It's a maneuver I try about twice a year in order to see what the other random prisoners of Blogger are up to, leave a few non-sequitur comments, and try to milk a slightly less pathetic number of followers (to no avail).

Four of the first five sites I visited using the above method were exclusively devoted to spanking and leather (not either, both).  The fifth was just pictures of naked women from India.  Now, whether or not these sites made me uncomfortable or became instantly bookmarked is beside the point.  The point is, Blogger now assumes that I'm into some kinky-sex-tricks without my specifically and directly informing Blogger that if I am.

Actually, I suppose that's not entirely true.  There are a number of possible explanations for my adventures through assland. 

The first is that everyone except Captain Paddle And The Bare Assed Bandits abandoned Blogger in favor of some other venue.  Judging by the amount of complaining I hear from bloggers about Blogger for its free and functional service, that is an equally sad and real possibility.  People will complain about any damn thing if you give them enough time."These free and flawless diamonds just don't sparkle much on cloudy days.  They must be shitty."  Still, it seems unlikely that everyone just up and left one afternoon.

A second possibility is that when I enabled the Adult Content Warning, Blogger instantly assumed I was uploading photos of my weirdly half-shaved, half-tattooed crotch.  Here again, I can see the inclination to stereotype anyone using the Adult Content Warning as a pierced fecalphile; there are a lot of freaks out there, and grouping them together helps maintain order in society.  However, just because I use words like "cockshits" or "dickbeard" it doesn't make me a gimp-rubber (someone who rubs gimps, not a substance extracted and vulcanized from gimps).

Third, I've been assigning choice labels/tags to a few of my posts, and perhaps that controls the direction in which the Next Blog button points me.  I've decided to test that theory by including some choice labels in this very post.  I'll put on a white lab coat later, and analyze the results.

Finally, the most chilling thought is that before Google/Blogger sends me on my Next Blog journey, it first scans through my previous posts and picks out keywords and themes in order to give itself some direction.  Which would indicate that there is an algorithm out there stained black by my barely-coherent, half-drunk rantings...
So when SkyNet becomes sentient in 2016, the first things it may seek out are butt beads and Pabst.

"I need Sarah Connor and a tube of lube."

Anyway, that's why I've disabled the Adult Content Warning again.  And just in time for this lovely post.

Happy Saint Patricks Day.

Friday Audio Visuals

First the Visuals...

In addition to angering PETA, I suspect that sitting in this chair will open a gate to hell.

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...Then the Audio


In case someone has not already informed you, music totally kicks ass. Even the music that you don't like kicks ass. It may not kick YOUR ass, but then, this world isn't all about you. So stop being such a self-centered a-hole all the time. Jeez.

For example, while personally I might find the music of Dave Matthews or Jack Johnson or John Mayer to be limper than a transvestite's cock at the Playboy Mansion, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of women* out there who frequently finger their bean to the dulcet tones of this lifeless strain of acoustic adult contemporary vomit. Some people like it, some don't. I'm squarely in the "don't" camp. I like my music to fall to either side of that genre: slower and more mournful or faster with some growl and some teeth. I'm convinced that the Mayer Matthnson Band's music is what the house band plays in the musically flaccid limbo of weak-sauce purgatory, probably while everyone eats vanilla yogurt and stares into their cell phones. I can't help but think that this music is the "adult" equivalent of the Jonas Brothers; easily packaged lowest common denominator garbage. Anytime I catch a track from one of those artists, I find stirring within myself feelings that usually culminate with a huge yawn or a moderate dump.

(*Note: clearly the men who willingly listen to those artists have gaping manginas.)

But I will allow that there are people who are fans of that style of music and musician, a few of whom may even be regularly sober. It takes diff'rent strokes to move the world, Willis. Yes it does.

But just like "it's not all about you" it's also not all about me either. Except ... this is MY blog, so I guess it is all about me. So let's talk about a few songs that I like. And by "talk", I mean I'll write words, and then you'll read them.

... ... ...

Besides the ludicrous uptick in new and never used gym memberships, the dawn of the new year is also remarkable due to the engulfing flood of music blogs posting their "best of the year" collections. As such, it's a fine time to go catch up on the cream of the previous year.


Here are two of my favorites from 2009. One is by the son of actor Anthony Perkins, but totally reminds me of a dylan/springsteen/costello hybrid (in a good way) instead of Norman Bates.

Elvis Perkins - Doomsday

The other is by a recently deceased supporter of my new favorite charity, Sweet Relief. I'm kinda bummed I didn't get into this guy until after he died.

Vic Chesnutt - Flirted With You All My Life




Although both of these songs are written from a personal perspective, they approach the subject death in two strikingly different ways.

One is an upbeat, flippant-attitude, horn-heavy, toe-tapping good time (once it gets going). It is an overwhelmingly positive song that somehow gives a light feel to a very heavy topic. I'm not sure if it looks at death through the lens of naivete, or is just too damn positive to let even death kill the mood.

The other seems a good deal more personal, and (to me) therefore a bit more moving. When he sings about cancer and his mother, Vic Chesnutt pours out so much of himself that he actually makes me want to punch Death square in the cock-knuckle.

Oh, and not like you could tell from listening to that track, but Mr. Chesnutt was paralyzed from the waist down at age 18 in an accident that left him with limited use of his hands. That was in the early eighties, about six or seven years BEFORE he cut his first album. Looks like Vic grabbed Adversity by both balls and then slapped it around until it became his servant.


Kinda makes me feel like a mangina owner myself, considering what a total hack I am even with my two perfectly functional hands.

Anyhow, there's some music fo yo ass. Now you can get back to whatever self-involved thing you were doing before you foolishly surfed here.

Happy March

Caption this.

Then mourn how us puny humans were not similarly endowed.

Booze, Guns, Booze, Cigars, Booze, and Booze (boozy booze)

Ever since I started writing in primary school, instructors have always advised me to know my audience, and write with them in mind. That's why I composed this post specifically for Blogger, a well-known and favored outlet for literate women with still-nested children and a penchant for some thing called etsy. Because really, what better audience or target demographic exists that could so easily relate to my previous weekend's activities?

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I was invited by some friends to a hunting cabin for a long weekend. Leaving early Friday morning, we drove out to the exact middle of nowhere, as pavement turned to gravel road turned to dirt road turned to trail, before finally devolving into just a pair of muddy ruts with two-foot tall saplings growing between them. Somewhere between dirt road and trail, the beer drinking began in earnest.

Though comprised exclusively of mud, this is still considered a "dirt" road.
I can confidently classify it as "dirt" because I am holding a camera, not a beer.

After a few miles of tooth-rattling off-roading, we arrived at the cabin. From there, we proceeded to act like Anti-ATF Agents (the other Triple-A): Drinking copious amounts of beer, smoking ignorant amounts of tobacco, and firing MANY hundreds of rounds through a variety of firearms.

Sadly, this wasn't one of the guns.

I got to fire a sniper rifle this weekend. You know, those guns you always see in movies where some cop is on a rooftop with his cap on backwards while his lieutenant barks "as soon as you have a clear shot, TAKE HIM OUT!" through his headset. Yeah, one of those guns. What's more, the fellow camper that was instructing me on its use was an over-qualified professional with the weapon due to his exacting employment requirements. He showed me how to work the stabilizing sandbag that rests under the butt of the rifle (the more you squeeze, the further down it aims). It was super-cool. I killed a bear mountain lion wolf beer can from sixty yards out. I was pretty impressed with myself ... until he showed me how accurate he was at six hundred yards. Then he asked me if I needed a diaper change before I laid down for nappy-time.

Figure 3.7: a professional's perception of Krëg's firearms mastery.

I also got to fire a World War II-era Australian-made bolt action British 303, the recoil from which almost knocked me into the next county.

"He was last seen holding an Enfield rifle in one hand, a Pabst in the other, and flying ass-first towards Texas...."

The 303 was a solid weapon, and fired like a dream. I couldn't help but imagine I was plugging Nazis while squeezing the trigger. Blow ze heads off ze Germanz! Ja! Gut! But at a little over $2.50 per bullet, the owner was NOT enthusiastically handing out ammunition. So quite a few of the imaginary Nazis escaped to imaginary Argentina.

Other fine firearms I fired included a shotgun, a Beretta nine, and a Wather 22. It was speculated that the only sure way to shoot at and hit a beer car with a 22 caliber pistol is to hold the pistol firmly in your right hand and look squarely down the sights at the beer can target in your left hand.

But the camp "party" gun was the GSG 5, a semi-auto 22 with an expansive clip and a holographic sight.

Similar to this, except wielded by drunks.

Firing tiny .22 caliber bullets from a 22-shot clip as fast as you can pull the trigger, this little number is to straight adult males what the Red Ryder BB Gun was to Ralphie Parker. Except if you shoot your eye out with this thing, your brains go with it. Also, your mom isn't Melinda Dillon. Unlike pistols of the same caliber, this gun is actually capable of hitting a target further than ten feet out, and unlike rifles of a higher caliber, you won't go broke pulling the trigger.

This past weekend, the beer cans knew no end to their torment, as we would ritualistically rip their heads off, suck out their precious innards, and hang their empty husks on a nearby bush. Then we'd fill them full of holes. You'd probably think that we'd have grown bored of this rather quickly, but you'd only think that because you probably don't have a penis. It was fun on a bun.


It's been a little too long since I've spent much time away from an urban area, and I didn't realize how much I'd missed it. The campfire, the bedroll, the nickel-ante poker, the few dozen beers... [wistful sigh]
As a bonus, we were able to gloat to the people back in town what lovely February weather we had. My hometown was shivering at around 40°F and blanketed with rain and gray skies. We wound up on the lucky side of the weekend cold front, as while we experienced a brief downpour Sunday morning, the temperature hovered around sixty, and the sun made things feel even warmer.

Who knew that the iPhone was good for something other than expressing your pretentiousness.
Click this bad boy photo for panoramic goodness.

With all that drinking and smoking and shooting things and burning things, you'd think I spent the weekend at the cabin running a high risk of injury. And you'd be right. But oddly enough, the riskiest situation I was involved in all weekend occurred after we left camp and were back on blacktop.

I was riding in that red truck in front of which I am standing in the above photo, and my bedroll (fartsack!) and pillow were crammed into a garbage bag in the truck bed. Shortly after turning onto Highway 69 and blasting north out of Stringtown, we passed the prison. I had consumed a few (five) beers on the way out from camp (on private property only) because I didn't have to drive and I didn't want want those beers to get lonely in the back of the truck. So of course, my bedroll and pillow wait until the LEAST opportune moment to vacate the truckbed and onto 69. Even with the sober driver's lightning reflexes, we still rolled a good eighth of a mile further than my displaced gear. So piss drunk and filthy, wearing a jacket akin to John Rambo's in the movie with the same surname, I stumble down the breakdown lane to get my trashbag full of sleeping accoutrements. I sling it over my shoulder and proceed back towards the pickup. Only then do I notice a sign halfway between the truck an myself that issues a warning to motorists.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck fuck.

Also at this point, I notice that the weather has turned cold, gray, and windy, and that I REALLY need to pee. I was pretty sure that running to the truck would only arouse suspicion of any watching authorities, so I tried to remain calm while steeling myself against the brisk north wind.

When I got back to the truck and stowed my bag, my pilot only had one sentence for me: "I never took the truck out of gear, because I was sure the heat was going to show up and haul you in."

... ... ... ...

Three quotes overheard at camp:
"I'd suck a fart straight out of her ass." (referring to a beautiful actress)
"I've drank so much beer I could shit through a screen door." (referring to ... well you get the picture with this one)
"My last three farts had beer head on them." (Come to think of it, I'm not sure we had any conversations that didn't reference beer or farts. I may have even had one heated discussion that consisted solely of pop-top noises, belches, and flatulence.)



Two jokes overheard at camp:
funny
Q: How many Hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: It's a really obscure number that you've probably never heard of...

and sick
Q: What is so awesome about getting 14 year-old boys into the shower?
A: When you slick their hair back, they look like they're eleven.



Here's some campfire for you (smell and heat not included).







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Next time I'll remember to update Twitter when I'm out of town. No wait. No I won't.
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When Gary coyly asked his wife for meatsleeves, she totally misunderstood.

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Have a good weekend.

Lazy Post

Caption this photo.
Then go wash your eyes.

Friday Audio Visuals

First the Audio...

I have a massive band-crush on Spoon. It's not a new thing. I've had it about eleven or twelve years, ever since a friend pushed A Series Of Sneaks under my nose. Their new album, Transference, dropped last week, maybe the week before (or several). It is one of their better albums to date, although a bit messier and without some of the studio polish which they regularly wield like a weapon. The low-fi sound, abrupt starts and ends, and smeared vocals all add up to a positive sum and leads to a good end. It's deliberately messy, and it works.

It took me a few (seven) listens through the entire album to isolate my favorite track. At first I thought it was Out Go The Lights, for the singular reason that it contained the lyric "You became like that on which your heart was fixed," one of the most ass-wrecking lines I've heard in a while. The songwriter in me is jealous of that lyric, mostly because it accurately describes the life paths of MANY of my friends, and possibly even my own. But that song also gave me a Coldplay vibe, which is a total non-starter. So it was removed from contention along with The Mystery Zone, with it's drums and bass counter-punctuating each other to create an infectious rhythm.
Ultimately, I've settled on Trouble Come Running as my favorite, because of its tempo and ability to kick shit from wall to wall. I'd post a link to it, but I can't seem to find one. So go buy the album and listen for yourself.

Instead, here's one to Metal Detektor.

And a motion picture talkie:



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Then the Visuals...

A friend in town for NYE tested out his new camera on myself and friends. Considering how drunk everyone was, I'm surprised ANY photos came out as anything more than blurry abominations.





Have a good weekend.

Jesus Puppy

People have seen the image of Christ in everything from fridge mold to French toast to the shroud of Turin.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

In order to illustrate my point for a childish email argument earlier this week, I ran an image search on Google for the phrase "Jesus Puppy".

I was surprised by the wide variety of the results.

They ranged from oddball crackpottery

To aesthetically nauseating
To slightly amusing
There were even a few cute ones




But NOTHING quite as remarkable as the image of Jesus that one day appeared on a puppy. It must be the result of the Lord's divine intervention, as a symbol for us all to have faith in him.

Pictured: Finally! Evidence of God's divine, compassionate presence.

Or maybe it's just a dog's ass.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

People need to get a grip, and quit looking for "proof" or "evidence" of God. Belief doesn't work that way; science does. For all of science's proof and evidence and hard facts, when it comes down to base motivators for human action, it cannot trump the power of belief.
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Take a gander at THESE mind-raping tattoos.