Oops! Almost forgot Friday’s Weasel
Do y’all ever have that terrible dream where you squeeze and squeeze the trigger but the hammer never falls? Maybe it’s a girl thing.
Sorry about the pervasive lameness of posting lately. It’s going to continue like this for some time. My home life currently consists of sorting all my worldly goods into either shipping boxes or garbage bags. And now things are heating up at work, too.
You know, I don’t think anyone properly appreciates how difficult it is for a lazy person to get along in this crazy, crazy world.
November 30, 2007 — 7:17 pm
Comments: 61
Look, I’m a little sensitive about my snubby, okay?
Whoa! What’re the odds? That’s Enas Yorl and his brand new Smith & Wesson 686 onscreen in the background there, me and mine in the foreground…turns out Mr Minority has one and McGoo has one, too.
This is my bedside cannon. My “holy shit, lady, you aren’t kidding!” piece. It is very big and shiny. It makes an extremely loud bang. I suspect it would make exceedingly large holes in bad guys, but happily I’ve never had to test this theory.
When I moved to Rhode Island, I arrived unarmed and stayed that way for twenty years. I knew the rules were more restrictive up here in Yanquiland and I figured buying a gun wasn’t worth the trouble.
But then I bought a house on a corner lot. Sound travels funny here. Somebody slams a car door, it sounds like bad guys moving around in the basement. One night, I found myself creeping down the stairs clutching a tack hammer like Conan the Ovarian, and I thought, “this is too stupid.”
Turns out, while it’s nearly impossible to get a concealed carry permit in Rhode Island, all you need is a “blue card” to buy a gun and keep it in your home. To earn your blue card, you need to pass a background check and a written exam.
I am now going to tell you how to pass the written exam. Ready? Here’s the secret: there is no condition under which any gun can ever be considered unloaded. None whatever. Just fired six rounds out of a six shooter? Still loaded. Just completely disassembled your pistol into its umpty-ump constituent parts? Still loaded. Crushed it flat with a backhoe? Loaded. Aliens blew our lovely blue earth to smithereens and just as your lungs collapse in the cold nothingness of outer space a molten glob of metal that might possibly once have been your favorite revolver sails past your ear into the void? Count on it, it’s loaded.
Yup. See, they took the old common-sense recommendation that it’s safest to regard every gun as loaded and morphed it into a nonsensical declaration that every gun really is loaded all the time. Put your hand on your heart and say something stupid, and we’ll give you that blue card.
I wonder how many rosy-necked sons of the soil were too proud to say something that dumb to earn their papers?
November 29, 2007 — 5:45 pm
Comments: 69
There I go again
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s about two things I’m especially good at: gluttony and gratitude. And four days off!
I do it up big every year, with turkey and dressing and potatoes and peas and candied yams and those peculiar gluey white supermarket bake ‘n’ serve rolls I love so dearly but only buy for special occasions because they’re pharmaceutical-grade empty stodge. Then the cats and I sit down and eat ourselves spherical, pass out in an unseemly tryptophan coma, and wake up to three more days of vile, uncontrollable gas and glorious leftovers.
Friends and coworkers — and family especially — have always considered my attitude toward holidays unseemly and inappropriate. As an old maid, I guess I am expected to spend national holidays drinking weak tea, nibbling a dry biscuit and thinking how different things would be if only I had a family. At least two relatives phone each Thanksgiving (and, for that matter, Christmas) and ask wistfully if I am celebrating again. “What, with the turkey? And everything?” They sound exasperated.
My stepmother is especially resentful. She likes nothing better than getting us all together for T’day — but not for warm, happy, a very special episode of the Waltons reasons. See, she can use the big diningroom when there are people over. And the good silver. And we can all sit up straight in our Sunday best and pick at tiny servings of exotic food.
I did it, like, once. I was terrified the whole time I’d have a sudden, mysterious outbreak of adult-onset Tourette’s. I did say something especially stupid to my little brother. I forget what it was. (I’m lying. Of course I remember what it was). The experience was everything Thanksgiving isn’t.
Well, this year, she wins. This is likely to be my last Thanksgiving in the US, and she’s going to buy me a…a…oh, sweet Jesus…a dress. So, see, I have to go. I’m leaving this afternoon.
Back on Saturday. I don’t know how often I’ll have net access, so I’ll auto-post some shit while I’m gone.
What’s the opposite of thankful? Oh, yeah…dead drunk.
Ohmigosh! I almost forgot! It’s the anniversary of my favorite own post ever. Last year, I spent some time over the Thanksgiving holiday creating this moving tribute to Damien’s jaunty balls, snipped off in a tragic veterinary incident the week previous. The procedure did not, contrary to expectations, mellow him in the slightest.
I’m especially proud of the soundtrack. Do you know how hard it is to compose appropriate theme music for excised testicles?
November 19, 2007 — 6:25 am
Comments: 43
This weekend? Clean the basement!
November 16, 2007 — 11:07 pm
Comments: 70
Stinks to high heaven
· In September of 2000 TV station France 2 showed footage that it declared was the murder of Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Dura by the IDF. It became iconic. It was shown and reshown and resulted in a hefty body count.
· After further scrutiny, it was clear that the film didn’t show what they said it showed. In November of 2004, media watchdog Phillippe Karsenty called bullshit on France 2, claiming the incident was staged.
· Charles Enderlin and Arlette Chabot of France 2 sued Karsenty for libel and, with an assist from the shameless Jacques Chirac, France 2 won.
· Karsenty appealed and demanded the raw footage of the incident. The appeal judge concurred.
So today saw the release of 18 of the supposed 27 minutes of raw tape. Film. Disc. Whatever. Among the revelations: al Dura peeking out between his fingers some time after his ‘death.’
Richard Landes of the Augean Stables is, as usual, on top of this one, too. For metabackground (don’t you hate fake words with “meta” in them?), Landes also runs Second Draft, which includes an excellent collection of data on Pallywood.
I met Richard Landes at Acepalooza when, asked my name, I blurted out
my own real name. This so shocked basic weasel protocol that
I walked away before I realized I had been conversing with one of
my favorite bloggers.
— 11:51 am
Comments: 12
And thus ends a lame week, lamely
November 9, 2007 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 84
Seven little nekkid dudes and an apology
Blame Mrs Peel for the ‘things I do when I’m in a long, boring meeting’ meme. Blame me for recent bloggy lameness.
I haven’t quite figured out how to blog from my new digs yet. Being unable to go to sweasel.com isn’t a problem; I can just as easily write offline in Notepad and post it later. The problem is that, without the internet, I don’t know anything worth posting about.
Yeah. Whaddya know. I sit there at my desk all day like a big stupid pumpkin, my mind a perfect and absolute blank.
“Heh,” I think, “I’m thinking nothing. They think I’m thinking, but I’m not.” Who knew I was so Zen?
But fear not, my imaginary friends who lived in the computer. We’ve come too far and debased ourselves too low to give up on it now. I’ll think of something. You can trust a weasel.
Hey, I know! Cute cat pictures! That’s bound to be a crowd pleaser!
November 7, 2007 — 5:35 pm
Comments: 28
Say goodbye to the ass end of a bad week
November 2, 2007 — 11:41 pm
Comments: 19
Everything old is old again
The night was made for love, according to such perpetual sentimentalists as Lanny Ross.
But not according to me.
At my advanced age, the night was made for such prosaic chores as getting to the column you didn’t write during the day.
Unobserved, you can sit around in your shorts, stare at the typewriter and sip hot milk until, touched by inspiration or desperation, you begin to write.
Typical blogger. In this case, Paul Coates of the Los Angeles Mirror, writing fifty years ago. A selection of his columns is currently being republished in the LA Times blog section.
The whole page has a sort of wait…what year is this? quality. Teen gangs. Drug addiction. Rogue cops. Gambling. Crime. Mexicans. The problems and the solutions are all of a dreary sameness. Air pollution? Electric cars. Teen pregnancy? Less scorn, more compassion. Rising prison population? Rehabilitation, certainly not more prisons.
Your humble weasel is just a little younger than these words and has thus spent one (1) whole lifetime reading this exact journalistic blah blah blah. I can’t help thinking…any disease that has hung around for half a century without either killing the patient or getting better has to be both less malignant than the pessimists would have it and less amenable to cure than the optimists tell us. It’s also getting pretty damned old.
I am only a little more web-present in this office than when I was flat out offline for two weeks. But this site inexplicably turned up during a legit Google images search (I find some of the weirdest nuggets that way) and, as the entire page had already downloaded itself, I felt entitled to read the whole thing. Starvation may have made this site more interesting than it actually is. But it is interesting, and if nothing else, the fun period ads running alongside make it worth a browse.
November 1, 2007 — 6:32 pm
Comments: 2
Huh. This again.
Man, am I glad somebody reminded me it was Hallowe’en. I saw a helpdesk nerd go by my cubicle with CD’s taped all over his shirt and thought somebody’d slipped mescaline into the water cooler.
This’ll be short and pointless. My trip home was a cascading clusterfuck. There was some boring delay at every stage of the journey. By the time I got home, I’d been at it twenty four hours…an experience I would have laughed away in my youth (ha HA), but rough duty on an elderly weasel. Then a few hours sleep and in to Soulless Incorporated.
My mind is a perfect and absolute blank. Into which I shall now pour alcohol.
October 31, 2007 — 5:16 pm
Comments: 23