President Bush still sucks ass

I haven't mentioned our shitty president lately. This quote by Robert Dreyfuss from a recent column sums up the Iraq debacle nicely.

"The war in Iraq was not a "mistake." It was a deliberately calculated exercise of U.S. power with a specific end in mind - namely, control of Iraq and the Persian Gulf region. It was illegal and remains so. It was a war crime and remains so. Its perpetrators were war criminals and remain so. Its goals were unworthy and remain so."

Music music music

I bought the most amazing album today. It's the Allen Toussaint and Elvis Costello collaboration called "The River in Reverse." I'm playing it right now while writing this and played it earlier today while cleaning up before I had guests over. If you just like music you will like this album. It's angry, it's joyful. The production is amazing. Elvis' vocals have never sounded better. There's even a song with a borrowed melody from Professor Longhair's "Tipitina" and the give 'Fess songwriting credit, which is nice. I'll be playing this sucker in my car for the next few weeks.

In my back yard

Well, it's not my yard. It belongs to all the knuckleheads that live in my building. But I was out there alone a short while ago and saw one of the most beautiful green anoles I have ever seen. He must have been six inches long and he was eyeballing me the whole time I was trying to take his picture. He even expanded his throat a couple of times. I wish I could have caught that before he scampered away. Beautiful animal.

More information on my little green friend can be found here.

Satan's sugar water

For the longest time I have been addicted to Mountain Dew. Today is day two of my attempt to not drink caffeinated sugar water. Mountain Dew is a monster. I may allow myself a Mountain Dew squishy every now and then at the convenience store on Selwyn. I'm pretty sure god drinks Mountain Dew squishes. I've been trying to drink more geen tea to offset the cravings. I have a whole cupboard full of various green teas I purchased at the Asian market on North Tryon St. I am going to make a dent in that collection over the next few weeks.

Crappity crap crap crap

Chris just sent me an email that informed that Tiger Stadium is going to be torn down. They got that backwards. They should tear down that horrible new stadium and then do what they should have done years ago, refurbish Tiger Stadium. I guess it's not to be. I always thought there were three things in the sports world that were untouchable: Tiger Stadium, Wrigley Field and Fenway Park. Thankfully the people in Chicago and Boston have done what they could to save those fields and change the structures enough to satisfy whatever desire for change that exists also. Putting seats atop the Green Monster at Fenway is a great example of modernizing an old park instead of destroying like in Detroit. Probably the biggest reason Tiger Stadium wasn't saved was the fact that Detroit doesn't have a vibrant center city like Chicago. Detroit has areas that are a wastelands and they didn't have the attendance at Tiger Stadium they needed in order to keep using it.

Daily life in North Korea

Amazing photographs.

New kid in town

Wow, I just saw this news story. Donald Hall is going to be the nation's new Poet Laureate. He's a superb poet and a great commentator on poetry. He's one of my favorite writers. One of my prized possessions is a letter from him from about ten years ago. It's a deserving honor for Mr. Hall.

Chris' beautiful table

I was horribly mistaken when I referred to the cheap table I threw away the other day as a cheap table. That table was a rock. It was a the apartment living version of the great wall of China. It was a plant stand and friend for almost ten years. We did not shame the table by using it merely to hold our food. It was used to hold the plants that contributed fresh oxygen to the poisonous air of our dank apartment. That table was atlas, our plants the world. That table was parachute infantry, bad air was the German army. The table was bedrock on which the soil of our life-giving houseplants rested. The table was a launching pad, our plants space shuttles that spewed out sweet O2 instead of thousands of tons of pollutants like the real space shuttles. So it was made of cheap pressboard and rocked dangerously if you bumped into it and so what if it was covered in ten years of cat vomit, dust and soil and was bleached by the sun, it was not cheap. It was merely falling apart. A crumbling piece of shit eyesore that needed to be burned years ago.

Space, beautiful open space

Since I have lived in my current apartment for about 37 1/2 years now there seems to be less space available than before. For years there has been a cheap dining table sitting next to the back window that has functioned as a bulky plant stand. Saturday during a trip to Home Depot I bought a metal shelf kit for about thirty bucks. Put it together (no tools required, except for a mallet), broke the table into pieces, threw the pieces into the dumpster, slid the 72 inch high shelf next to the window and placed my plants on it. Woila, thirty plus feet of space free. Now I don't have to turn sideways to get past my bike and into the kitchen. If I can only get Wendell to throw that broken television in the dumpster then even more space will open up.

Holy Crap

I can't believe I got in. I'm sure what I am writing right now will be lost once I try to post it.

I watched the first two episodes of the new season of Dennis Leary's firemen show, Rescue Me. It's not bad. It's no Sopranos but what is? Sometimes on the show it seems like the characters are just spouting Dennis Leary type lines. He gets writing credit so it makes sense but it takes away from...uh...characterization. It can seem like there is a whole room of Dennis Leary's hurling insults at each other. Kinda scary, a whole room of Dennis Leary's. Also, both episodes have ended with a whole lot of melodrama. I know the Sopranos can have pretty strong endings but they are trying a little too hard on Rescue Me. Each ending was laugable after a while. That really can take the air out of the previous fifty minutes that were pretty good. Why do that? Stupid TV, be smarter.

Beth mentioned that she hasn't been to crazy about the author who wrote that book about the Cold War I just finished and I can see why. In the book I thought he gave Ronald Reagan way too much credit. I just can't accept that Ronald Reagan was a visionary. Maybe he was a realist when it came to dealing with the Soviets and maybe he got lucky that the Soviet Union was so weak by the time he got into office so what he did worked but calling him a visionary is a too much for me to swallow. Pope John Paul II? Sure, he had vision. Lech Walesa? He put his ass on the line, a true hero. Reagan? No way, man. Perhaps the only thing he did right was dealing with the Soviets. I think he got lucky.

Vacation

I've been on vacation for the last ten days. You may have noticed from the lack of postings that, not only was I on vacation from work, I took a break from the blogging thing. I've probably lost the five readers I do have because of that. But like, Troy has said before, keeping up with a blog can be a bit of a monster sometimes.

What I did on my late spring vacation:

1) Got some good sleeping in.
2) Didn't read enough. I don't know what's up with that.
3) Went to Target and bought a new fan and a small grill.
4) Saw the new X-man movie (not all that good, to be honest).
5) Watched the Pianist finally. That movie is pretty darn good. What was especially harrowing to me in that movie was the randomness of the killings of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Late night raids of homes and the pulling of men from formations after a day of forced labor.
6) Grilled out about four times. I had shrimp last night. Harris Teeter has shrimp on sale for $4.99 a pound right now. You can't eat much better for five bucks than that. The smoky flavor in the shrimp after grilling them is truly a treat.
7) Golfed twice.
8) Played croquet twice.
9) Read some of The Cold War by John Gaddis. I'm really enjoying it. You can't beat history written well.
10) Watched Memoirs of a Geisha on DVD. It had a good sountrack and we all agreed that it would have been better if it was less of a soap opera and showed us more of the day to day life of a geisha (which is what I expected).
11) Bought and played the Godfather game for the Xbox.
12) Watched a good bit of the NASCAR race at Dover.
13) Went and saw Lenny at the Comet Grill.
14) Watched Wendell consume a couple of martinis at Fairview Grill.
15) Played guitar one evening.
16) Spent a little too much money.