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Electric weasels: never around when you need one

electric weasel

Dianne Odell, about whom I wrote a small post last year, was the longest-surviving resident of an iron lung. At least, she was until recently, when a tree fell across a power line and they couldn’t get the backup generator going.

Memphis. Uh-huh. That explains the Pimp My Iron Lung look.

Brrrrr. Fifty-eight years in an iron lung. Nightmare. Please to be counting of blessings, kthxbai.

May 31, 2008 — 6:40 am
Comments: 19

Electric weasel

electric weasel animated gif

As a special Friday thank-you to my dear readers I’M GOING TO FRY YOUR RETINAS.

The woman who sits next to me was on vacation this week. She expected a delivery of CD’s for a trade show to arrive Thursday. I was supposed to open it, test one, keep five for our records, and overnight the box to the London office.

Gotcha. I’m supposed to blah blah blah blah. Good thing she sent me an email.

Just as I was drifting off to sleep last night, I had a HOLY SHIT THE CD’S DIDN’T COME moment. And then I had a HOLY SHIT I’M A BEAUTIFUL FAIRY PRINCESS moment, pulled the covers over my head and drifted away.

Between you and me, the woman who sits next to me scares me shitless. She was once legendary for her sweaty, screaming tirades (“it was the hormones they had me on,” she told me later). The conflicts between me and the woman who sits next to me were so frequent and so bitter that our mutual boss referred to us as sisters. Just to piss us off. We’ve mellowed a lot over the years, but I’d still rather eat sharp, rusty things than screw with TWWSNTM.

So I’ve spent all morning tracking down that package. It was delivered Wednesday, badly addressed, and found itself with no label at all in the cubicle of the office bing-bong (“how long do you think she’d’ve sat on it if we hadn’t come looking?” my boss wondered aloud). It looked like it had been drop-kicked by an earth elemental. Everything tested out okay, though, and I got it back in the mail.

I don’t care where you work, I guarantee the guy who works in your mailroom thinks his job is fascinating. That’s a good thing, or we’d be training a new one every six months after the old one dragged himself home and smoked a Buick. But damn I could’ve lived without True Wild West Tales of the Customs Declaration Forms this morning. Just mail the thing, Sunshine…don’t chant me a Norse Edda.

It won’t make deadline, but it won’t miss by much and they have some slack.

So, happy Friday! Join me in hoisting a tall frosty…glass of…vodka and tonic in honor of TWWSNTM and Boring Mailroom Guy. Where would we be without them?

Where indeed?

May 30, 2008 — 3:27 pm
Comments: 40

My daddy didn’t buy a cow, and I won’t either

gore family cow

Ten years ago, I bought a six-shooter in a little shop in Alexandria, Tennessee. Buying a gun is a wingnut bonding ritual; it involves telling each other progressively wingnuttier stories for an hour or two before getting down to bidness. Thus, the buyer knows the seller is an honest man and the seller knows the buyer isn’t a BATF agent trying to trip him up and nick his license.

Anyhow, the shopkeep told me that Al Gore, Sr, ran a crooked cattle auction in nearby Carthage. People would come from all over (“desert sheiks in robes and all kind of thing”) to pay way over the odds for an angus cow that they, like as not, never even picked up. One man, asked on the way out what to do with the grievously overpriced cow he’d just bought, shrugged and said, “throw it in the grinder, I guess.” He didn’t buy a cow, he bought a sitting Senator.

I didn’t think much of the story, but last time I was home, I remembered to ask my dad if it was true. His face lit up, “you bet it’s true!” When he came to Nashville in the ’60s to take a position in Democrat Frank Clement’s government (my dad’s a Republican, duh), somebody took him aside and told him, “Son, you’d better buy a cow.”

Al Senior was a slick, sharp, old school Southern fraud. His son is a different flavor of phony altogether. I’ve never met him, but he’s a sort of a FOAF. My impression? Sharp as a bag of wet mice; a cipher; a bozo; an empty vessel, hollowed out to hold his father’s ambitions.

Politicians have issues the way the Senior Prom has a theme. Ex-military men become the military guy, unchallengable on all things military. Ex-doctors are experts not just on medical issues, they are the compassion guy. Women and minorities are women and minorities.

Legislators without a built-in hook generally pick one at random (this helpful video explains the process). Al picked the environment.

I believe he is genuinely puzzled that anyone would take him to task for flying around the world to tell people not to fly so much. So what if one of his three mansions uses twenty times the electricity of the average family? Don’t you get it? He’s the Environment Guy. Except when he’s wearing an eyepatch — then he’s a pirate!

That was my rambling preamble for grassfire.org‘s Carbon Belch Day. Thursday, June 12th, turn on your space heaters, open a window, set fire to something (or someone!), fart, drive around in circles, eat meat, mow the lawn. Take the pledge! DO NOT BUY THE GORE FAMBLY COW!

May 29, 2008 — 10:47 am
Comments: 72

2 br, 1.5 ba, 1 wzl

lawnchair

Somebody was scheduled to come by and look at the house tonight, but my real estate agent just called to say he canceled.

“I don’t know why,” she said, “he drove by the house yesterday morning and liked it, but he drove by again later and there was something he didn’t like.”

I’m guessing that thing was…me. In my new Wal*Mart lawn chair. With a book and a drink and a cat draped across me (no, the other one) like I’d just won the Miss Big Fat Housecat pageant and they gave me one for a sash.

Maybe it’s the change of seasons, or maybe I pushed so hard getting the house ready and looking for Damien that I have somehow exhausted my ordinarily inexhaustible reserves of gloom, anxiety and crank, but I’ve felt all float-y and peaceful this week. Like opiates, but without depleting my stash. All I want to do is sit in my chair and snooze in the sun.

Not to worry. I’ll have a shiny new hair across my ass before you can say, “fuck off and die in a fire!”

May 28, 2008 — 4:20 pm
Comments: 19

Tuesday is the new Monday

gorgeous tiny etcetera

Oh-kay. I have just watched the entire run of Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show — and you can, too, in less than an hour.

First impression: they’re trying too hard. But I snorted a few times. If you liked Pee Wee’s Playhouse, you’ll probably snort a few times, too. The hostess, Kiko — played by creator Kim Evey, a South Korean raised in America — cracks me up completely. The rest of the format…meh.

Per Wikipedia, this thing got started strictly as a YouTube self-upload a year or so ago and quickly went viral. Eventually, Sony picked it up for their C-Spot website, which they launched a couple of months ago. I gather the purpose is to scoop up these viral turds and put a bit of polish on ’em. Budgets balloon from, like, nothing to as much as ten grand an episode.

Mmmm…cheese!

May 27, 2008 — 12:13 pm
Comments: 48

Happy Memorial Day

happy memorial day

Weasels can’t salute. Necks too long, arms too short. But the warriors among us, consider yourself saluted.

If you want me, I’ll be around back in the new lawnchair I bought at Wal*Mart on Saturday, reading an actual book. With words and everything.

Later there will be booze. And hamburgers.

May 26, 2008 — 9:47 am
Comments: 51

At least it isn’t an ass picture

rest20080523.jpg

Ten Commandments tablets to be sold at auction later this Summer. Expected to fetch $60K. Part of a 1,000 item Heston memorabilia haul going up for bid.

No word on the loincloth.

May 24, 2008 — 8:15 am
Comments: 34

Positively the last ‘Weasel’s birthday’ post of 2008

hestonstuff.jpg

What happens when you mix a Weasel, late hours, lots of alcohol, an upcoming birthday, a credit card and a sudden and unexpected NRA promotional email? You get the ENTIRE Charlton Heston commemmomerotive collection comin’ at you by mail, that’s what!

Check it: an autographed copy of the Courage to be Free, TWO ‘Cold Dead Hands’ t-shirts (one in blue and one in gray) and a be-logo’d and signatured commememomorative knife, in a signature tin (with a dent in it, dammit).

Yeah, I know. Commememmeorative knives suck. But until that logo wears off, I’m cleanin’ my fingernails with Charlton!

It’s the Friday before a long weekend. Knock yourselves out!

May 23, 2008 — 11:08 am
Comments: 33

Do not miss this!

Pah! You guys and your weak, punk-ass trolls! Behold, the mother tincture. From the Dionne Quints thread, the bacony stench of Canada:

they were born outside Callendar Ont,
you useless piece of shit ..

No, no. Our boy is only cracking his knuckles. Wait for it…

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
who was it that said nothing like this happens in the U.S.?
thats a laugh .
americans are brain washed into thinking they’re the shit ,
that they were the “main part” of every world war, and that they just own.
guess what bud some STUPID FUCKING AMERICANS posted Hitler as time magazines MAN OF THE YEAR IN 1939 , which btw was the start of WW2, you know the one where 55 million people died ?
oh yeah and also the one were the U.S. sat on there ass for the first half, and then jumped in at the end to get some credit .
oh wait that was also WW1,
and everything else you fat fucks do.
i dont have anything against the U.S., but i dont like naive people.
since your one of the most illiterate first world nations why dont you guys stop listening to media bullshit thats let out by the government of Bush(haha), learn how to read, pick up a history book, and learn how your COUNTRY IS NOT BETTER THAN ANY OTHER and if anything its corrupted, brainwashed, and obese.

Bee-yootiful. That’s what the real thing looks like, ladies and gentlemen.

My blog is complete.

May 22, 2008 — 2:24 pm
Comments: 72

Honey, I think the magic has gone out of my magic rocks

magic rocks

Lookee what I found cleaning out the sideboard!

I was going to blame Uncle B for this — he’s knows how much I love this stupid Junior Scientist shit — but the date on the package is 1988. I was 28, and going through my “oh my god I’m a grownup now and I can buy all the toys I want!” phase.

I’m still going through it. Like when I stared out sadly at people frolicking about in the lake a few years ago, scuffing my foot and thinking, “I wish I could have a stupid inflatable boat.” Followed by, “OMIGOSH, I can have a stupid inflatable boat!”

I find it hard to absorb this lesson. I don’t know why.

Anyhow, I’ve been throwing out junk for months, so I had to eat, like, four of those huge kosher dills to get an appropriate jar.

Turns out, there are instructions. The instructions are: blah blah blah blah. Whatever. I don’t really do instructions.

The Magic Solution — which I assume was once a liquid of some kind — had fossilized into a chewy brick. Not that I actually chewed it or anything. I gather that would be bad. That much of the instructions I absorbed, mostly because it was in all caps and repeated several times.

I tried to revive the magic with some boiling water and a stick. It didn’t dissolve completely, but I figured there had to be a little magic left. I couldn’t tell; the dye in the rocks seeped out and made the whole thing a milky pink opacity.

When I got up this morning and poured off the liquid, I discovered…
(SEE FIRST COMMENT).

— 8:35 am
Comments: 27