Heels on the move…
“Shoot for the moon – if you miss, you may hit a star.”
– Walter “Killer” Kowalski
Eh. So astrophysics was not Walter “Killer” Kowalski’s strong suit. He was an electrical engineer for a while, though, before turning to professional wrestling. Kowalski spent thirty years rassling as a professional heel, or bad guy (though he doesn’t appear to have been one, really). He spent the last thirty running a rassling school in Massachusetts (yeah…you don’t think they just take guys off the street and let them whale away on each other, do you? There’s education involved).
Kowalski died Saturday at the age of 81. Pretty good for a big dude (6’7″ in his yoof).
Speaking of heels and frauds, Jeremiah Wright has resurfaced in the US. He preached a sermon at a black church in Houston on Sunday that MSNBC bizarrely called “conciliatory.” (For a preview of the ugly we have in store in the next few weeks, cruise MSNBC’s comments sections).
“Twenty years ago, a scrawny little kid with a pointed nose and big ears — mama from Kansas and daddy from Kenya,” he began. “An ordinary black boy raised in a single-parent home. The boy walked into my office 20 years ago to talk about his dream for a community that concentrated on things that we could achieve in common, things that united us rather than to focus on all the problems and the issues in the community about which we disagree or the things that divided us.”
Yep. Still taking credit for Obama. I loved this observation: “This ordinary boy just might be the first president in the history of the United States to have a black woman sleeping at 1600 Pennsylvania, legally.”
What does that even mean? Seriously? When was it illegal for a black woman to sleep in the White House? Wright is going to be SO much fun, if he sticks around.
Right! That’s it! It’s Labor Day and I’m still officially restesing. It’s going to be another gorgeous day in New England, and I’m going to do today what I did yesterday — pop the top on the Weaselmobile and cruise the backroads into Connecticut farm country.
Did I mention the pie? There was pie!
September 1, 2008 — 6:31 am
Comments: 30
Okay, I’m in…
He did it. He showed me something. Sarah Palin is distilled essence of awesome.
Lifetime member of the NRA. Flies her own float plane. Eats mooseburgers, kills own moose first. Nickname in high school: Barracuda. Former commercial fisherman. Went to college on money she won in a beauty contest.
Her husband is an Eskimo. Dude. Her husband is an Eskimo.
Her main claim to fame is fighting corruption in her own party — which means she won her elections in defiance of the state Republican party. She’s the one who killed the Bridge to Nowhere. So, yes, this is a sort of maverick-y pick, but in a good way. I’m psyched.
Which is good, because it started out pretty depressing. I got the date wrong; today is my 25th anniversary. I got called into my boss’ office to find the walls covered in pictures of me in my twenties. It sucks to work for the art department; they take pictures.
You know who hasn’t aged all that gracefully? Me, that’s who.
Oh, well. I got a nice little camera. And a lapel pin of the company logo. And a cupcake.
August 29, 2008 — 11:25 am
Comments: 65
The rise of the oceans will begin to slow, our planet will begin to heal…
I made this thing a week ago with a beam of sunshine in place of the lightning and it flat broke my heart when I realized “he thinks the sun shines out his asshole” is a British expression. Uncle B continues to pollute my ability to cuss like a true blue American.
So I was delighted to recycle it into this, my artist’s conception of the dramatic climax to tonight’s acceptance speech at the Ocropolis. I’m rather proud of this Obama, which I more or less drawed my ownself (well, the head is kind of a paint-over, but who’s counting?). I’m open to suggestions for other impressive things that might come flying out of his ass in the future. Rainbows. Marshmallows. Adorable fluffy bunnies. An actual policy position.
As usual, theft of the original artwork is encouraged.
August 28, 2008 — 9:52 am
Comments: 43
Alas, poor Stoaty
I made it in to work today, but by afternoon my boss ordered me home to sleep off the Nyquil. Hence, I got nothin’.
But I can’t neglect you, my minions (we don’t ever, ever, EVER want a repeat of the Hamster Incident, do we?) So please enjoy this photograph of a weasel skull. I bought it on eBay last year for ten bucks. Doesn’t it look like some kind of tiny, fangsome alien? That’s because its face is all squoze up in the first third of its head, and the rest is an improbably huge sock of skull.
To hold its giant, throbbing brain.
August 26, 2008 — 6:27 pm
Comments: 10
Michelle Obama’s unfortunate pluck
I get the impression Michelle Obama is, deep down, a pretty angry woman. But you know what really puts people off? That’s right: those scary Vampyra eyebrows. Michelle probably has a bit of a chip on her shoulder, but Michelle’s eyebrows are pissed. Michelle’s eyebrows have come to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and eyebrows can’t chew bubblegum.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Eyebrows are an artificial construct. The kinder, gentler Michelle on the right is only a pluck away (it’s just a pluck away, pluck away, pluck away). Generally, it’s not wise to take makeup advice from a weasel, but I know I’m right on this one. If Michelle came out for her big speech tonight with level, friendly, upturned suzy-housewife eyebrows, she’d bring down the house.
And that’s all the sense you’ll get out of me today. I played hooky. My cold isn’t very bad, but between that and the continued itches, I stuffed myself full of antihistamines. I’m barely connnnnnnnnnnnnnnzzzzzzzzzzzzzz………,,,,,,,,,,
August 25, 2008 — 1:34 pm
Comments: 37
And wet? My dear, the smell…
I took my poison ivy and my new cold for a spin on the river today. I rented a kayak with a bunch of friends. It was a GORGEOUS day — sunny, light breeze, low eighties. I’ve never paddled a kayak before, but I was pleasantly pleased that it wasn’t as tippy as I expected (cue music from Jaws).
I didn’t take a camera, which is just as well. After successfully paddling six and a half miles (per the GPS), I tipped the fucker over within fifty feet of shore. I was last one in, and my friends stupidly stood on the bank and watched me flail around uselessly for awhile before someone asked if I needed help. Frankly, I think those bastards were all laughing too hard to put back in.
Once the kayak tipped, it had next to no bouyancy. And I was wearing sneakers, so I had next to no traction.
Eh. My new GPS is (reasonably) watertight, and I had wisely left my wallet and stuff in the cargo area of somebody else’s kayak. Somebody not quite so retarded.
More booze, please.
August 23, 2008 — 7:18 pm
Comments: 26
Yup, God still hates me
Today is my twenty-fifth anniversary on the job. Twenty five years of working for the same boss and punching the same time clock. Everything else about it has changed, though.
I was hired primarily to be an illustrator, back when that meant ink and magic markers and pretty, colorful crayons on paper. But an in-house shop does everything, so I also had to do paste-up and publications design, darkroom work, technical illustration, signage, floor plans…you name it. I once illustrated a Basic Hygeine for Retards book, because someone on the kitchen staff had horrible B.O. and everybody was afraid to tell him.
I worked there two years before we bought our first computer. I got to watch all those fields transition from manual (primarily based on photographic technologies) to digital. It was very cool.
Well, I thought it was very cool.
Anyhow, when you have a major anniversary, you get to pick out a gift ahead of time and there’s cake and stories and stuff. Only…nothing. The topic didn’t even come up today. You don’t bring these things up — it’s a pretend surprise — so I’m thinking maybe because I was late picking out my gift (a pocket camera) that they’re still waiting for it.
Oh, and I’m coming down with a cold.
August 22, 2008 — 5:10 pm
Comments: 28
Never try to con people in a language you don’t speak
“Hello. Nice sites! I also looking for free porns?: <URL here>” — that spammer guy in my filter
“A leader that God has blessed us with at this time.” — Nancy Pelosi, testifyin’ for the messiah
Oof! It hurts to watch the left flail around trying to communicate with us mouth-breathing redneck ‘wingers, doesn’t it? You can hear the little hamster wheels in their craniums squeaking: “These morons voted for Dubya. Twice. How hard can it be to put one over on them?”
A little beer, a little jesus, some eagles and flags and shit and eh voilà, those poor red state boobs’ll never know what hit ’em. Some lefty site I was cruising this morning had a comment congratulating the team for the great job they were doing with branding.
No. No you’re not. The faux ‘presidential seal’, the upside down flag badge, the weird retro-dustbowl iconography of the Buy American logo: pure iconographic gibberish. You’re speaking political Engrish.
It’s like…remember when your hipster mom tried to jive talk you in your own groovy lingo? Even if she got all the words right, she never got the music, because it wasn’t hers to get. When you try to talk ‘winger to ‘wingers, you embarrass yourselves and you embarrass us and you never even know it. Just like mom.
Now, Bill Clinton could speak fluent redneck. He grew up in the tents of the enemy. He was an oily, flatulent huckster, but he had the language of right-wing flag-humping populism down flat. You Obama people? You don’t. Stop trying.
August 20, 2008 — 10:39 am
Comments: 77
Happy Alevromoutzouromata!
Yup! Yesterday was Alevromoutzouromata already! We missed it. Although, you know, once you get to Underpants Day, you know Alevromoutzouromata can’t be far behind.
Alevromoutzouromata is Greek for “people throw flour at each other.” Kidding? Der Spiegel says nein. People of the little village of Galaxidi in Greece celebrate the end of Carnival and the beginning of Greek Orthodox Lent by dancing and throwing 3,000 pounds of colorfully dyed flour at each other. The day is known, brain-hurtingly, as Clean Monday. (Click for pictures).
It all got started, quoth the Tourist Bureau, at the beginning of the 19th Century, when the Ottoman occupiers (read: killjoy Muslims) forbade the celebration of Christian holidays. In protest, the men of Galaxni painted their faces with ash and danced solemnly in the village square on the Monday before Lent. And then when the Muzzies were gone, it was all, like, ‘FOOD FIGHT!’
Weird? Pff! Not even the weirdest Clean Monday celebration on the Island of Greece. That would have to be the Penis Festival of Tyrnavos. There, once a year, you may dress up like a winkie and eat things that look like peens, drink strong beverages from tallywhacker-shaped cups through straws shaped like weiners, stir the spinach soup with unthinkable utensils and sing songs about boners.
I knew about this one. One of my roommates in art school was Greek — a city girl from Athens. She described how her family drove across the island one year on Clean Monday and unwittingly drove into the middle of Peckerfest. In a convertible.
Traumatized for life, poor girl. “Huge penises! They were…all around the car. Pressing against us…dancing…singing…waving things. Oh, it was horrible!”
Despite the timing, this is an explicitly Dionysian festival — another big fat Olde Worlde religion mash-up. Let us hope Galaxidi and Tyrnavos never get together for this one.
August 19, 2008 — 12:45 pm
Comments: 28
Hello? Is this my blog?
You get the feeling everybody in the blogosphere is just phoning it in lately? Me, too. I mean me, I get that feeling, but also me, I’m phoning it in.
Maybe it’s the Summertime Blues. Maybe it’s this godawful presidential election. Maybe it’s the one-fifth of my skin that’s covered with crusty, weeping pustules that itch like a fothermucker.
Oh! And they gave me some work today. That I have to do! Can you believe?
Anyhow, please enjoy this black and white photograph of a phone, which I nicked off the internet and added a reflection and the words “ring, ring” to with Photoshop.
August 18, 2008 — 5:53 pm
Comments: 28