Intellectual Poison

Check out Zap2it - TV 2004 - for a truly awful bunch of shows that are forgettable even before you've heard of them.

No really, try a show called DOTS, the secret world of meter maids (I'm not making this up), Plan B where a single gal juggles a career, motherhood, romance and feeling fat, some as yet untitled Jessica Simpson vehicle to dumb down the universe even more (oh, don't worry, Nick gets his own insipid little crappy show too), Blind Justice where, surprise, surprise, a cop loses his sight but goes back to work to solve crime, Method and Red, the adventures of Method Man and Redman in suburbia, ooh.

Do you need more or are you already puking your guts out? Oh yeah, there's also Joey, the Friends spin off that'll likely suck sweat goat nuts from the start but legions of drooling Friends fans will still tune in for lame ass little cameos from the other friends idiots.

There are a few decent looking prospects, like The Boondocks, an animated adaptation of comic strip that is raw and reasonably funny. American Dad, from the Family Guy people should be mildly humorous.

Along with the obligatory bunch of beach shows that pretend to be dramas when they're really just ultra soft porn. They still suck but put on some music, turn down the lights and get down with your bad self while watching slow motion titty bounce beach runs (it worked for Baywatch which was among the dumbest shows ever but still people watched just to see Pam's bodacious ta-tas go up and down every week).

The best thing about driving my truck, aside from the fact that it sounds like a big diesel, is that I give no quarter on the road. People want to try and force merge with me? Fuck 'em, they can hit me, I don't care.

Just this morning I had some knob in a Taurus basically try and force his way in front of me on the on-ramp. I held my ground and basically saw his force and met it with sublime indifference. You want in? Drive faster 'cause I'm not slowing down to let you by.

Its not like I'd even notice any new dents in the truck if they did hit me but I'm sure they'd notice my flaky blue paint all mashed into their pretty little bumpers.

Side Question:
Why do the morning news people warn commuters when the CHP is going to be cracking down on a stretch of highway? The other day it was Route 80 up near Santa Rose (I think) and today it was my stretch of highway. I only saw one cop pulled over behind a three wheeled van that used to have a fourth wheel but it was nowhere to be found. Still, it seems kind of nonsensical but in a thanks kind of way.

PS
Want more web traffic to your blog? Mention Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen a few times. The world is, apparently, fascinated by these two young women. I admit that they are far more interesting now than when they were on that horrendous show with Bob Saget and John Stamos (damn, I'm breaking out in hives just thinking about it).

It was one year ago today that ShrubCo declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. Apparently someone forgot to tell the insurgents, terrorists and other malcontents with AK-47's. But he sure did look purty in that Aviator's suit and the "spontaneous" celebration of his arrival. Bleh, even the thought of this shameless prick sickens me.

And for a little irreverent smacking masking serious questions, here's Mark Morford's 11 Questions for Bush.

Pinch Sulzberger Blames His Readers for Jayson Blair Scandal at New York Times because some of them knew about Blair's misdeeds and didn't call him at his home to let him know.

Notwithstanding the fact that his own editors had been expressing misgivings and concerns about Blair's relative ability to speak the truth.

If this doesn't cause a massive boycott of the New York Times then he deserves to keep his job. But he really doesn't. Blaming his readers for not checking the factuality of his "star" journalists is among the dumbest things I've heard in a long time.

And who names their kid, Pinch, anyway?

Damn it, I had an excellent post introducing Take Back the Media's "Bush Knew - An American Requiem" that I saw last night via One Girl's Life but one misclick and it was less than vapor. Oh well, I'll attempt to recapture it as best I can. I watched Bush Knew last night and it was terribly painful to relive those horrible moments as the World Trade Centers were hit and people began to die.

It is powerful, moving and infuriating to see, side by side, the events unfold at the World Trade Center and what George Bush did. He had the time and the sole authority to give the okay to shoot down passenger planes that refused to respond to radio calls to turn away. He could have and should have acted to stop further attacks. He did nothing. In fact, he did read a book to some elementary school kids about goats so I guess that is something. But it is far, far less than should be expected of the nation's leader.

Watch it all the way through and then decide if you still think Bush is worth your vote or your confidence.

It has made me thoroughly rethink my "war" with the neighbors and that we need to be united against our common enemy rather than squabble over a stupid dent and some lies and rudeness. We'll see how that sentiment looks by the end of the day but I am thinking that extending the olive branch of peace might be called for.

Also, came across UNELECTABLE-BUSH via One Girl's Life as well. I think I will be making another category of linked blogs, Blogs Against Bush and sites dedicated to honest reporting of the facts as well as exposing the farce that is Bush's re-election campaign.

This week's questions have been lifted from one of my new favorite blogs, Blown Fuse. She's funny, her book reviews are classic and she makes me laugh and cringe at the same time.

But enough about linky love, here's my Cheddar X for this week.

1. Name 3 things you absolutely love.
Sleeping in. Marinated skirt steak on the grill with fresh pineapple slices on top. My wife.

2. If you had to give 2 of them up which would they be (and why)?
I don't think I'm going to give up any of them. Sorry but I don't have to do anything except support my family. But if I absolutely had to then it'd have to be sleeping in and the skirt steak, duh!

3. What is your all time favorite memory EVER?
There are a few to choose from, 4th of July many years ago on top of the mountain in Vermont with all my friends, beating my brother at wrestling with a figure 4 across his chest and making him say uncle, graduating college, getting married on the beach. I think I'm going to go with a moment during a 3 month outdoor course I took when I actually realized that I could do anything I needed to or wanted to, if I only put my mind to it and worked hard. Its a good thing to learn about yourself.

4. What is the one thing that happened in high school that would make you avoid your class reunion?
Um, probably getting booted from private school. And lo and behold! Its worked, I've not gone back to any of those reunions even though they keep sending me requests for money.

5. What is your dream job, no matter how untrained you might be or unrealistic and bizarre it might be?
Lord God King of the Universe. Someone's gotta be in charge and it would be great fun to reign fire down upon the Vatican and make all those kid touching priests burst into flames.

6. What's one thing you think you're really good at?
Looking busy when I'm really not.

That's my Cheddar and I'm sticking to it. Go get yer own!

What kind of a pussy is George Bush? She can't meet with the 9/11 Commission unless she's got her big Dick with her? No transcripts, lawyers and big Dick right next to her. Oh wait, it gets better. They are meeting in the White House so they're on their home turf, they aren't even under oath to tell the truth and then they have the audacity to claim that they are cooperating completely?

Why are they speaking to the commission together? So they can collude to make sure that neither screws the other over by getting caught in a lie. The fact that they were allowed to appear together is utter bullshit. Why are they getting special treatment? Because they're in power or because they're guilty of misdeeds surrounding the tragedy. They couldn't even get their stories straight enough to meet separately.

Bush and Dick, a match made in heaven and then thrust upon us in hell.

The Boondocks comic strip from yesterday does an excellent job of summing up the Bush Presidency.

Oh yeah, Ralph Nader needs to bow the fuck out of the election before he hands the goddamned election over to the Resmuglican asshole party. Hey Ralph, you're smart enough to know that Bush is a cancer to this country. Step back and allow a man who's first priority ISN'T to spend more money more wrecklessly than ever before and then take more vacation days than any president in history.

Come on, Ralph, spread those legs, remove your head from your asshole and think about what's really good for the country.

Ryan wrote about this awful ad campaign a while ago and they've since rolled out a bunch of new and ever more irritating and truly horrific commercials featuring Mr. Typecast Boner Freak with the Joker Death-Face Smile stapled to his face.

Add in a grating and stupid whistle soundtrack and then double it because they always seem to show them back to back and I change the channel in a heartbeat. I don't give the first damn about Bob's new bigger, fuller and longer boner. I don't care that he can hit a golf ball better. I don't care that Bob's learning about wood. I care that the assholes who are the marketing team at Enzyte need to be taken into a field and shot.

And the stupid thing, because I'm writing about it here and now and because Ryan wrote about it before, those inbred bonerific morons think that this is a victory. Its not, its defeat of the worst kind. Any potential market you might have had with me has been flushed down the toilet (and yeah, who wouldn't mind bigger, fuller and longer, eh?).

Now, they need to die. Smilin' Bob needs to die painfully, maybe by mistaking Crazy Glue for KY, maybe by getting so horny he sticks his pecker in an electrical socket, maybe by taking a ball peen hammer to his ghoulish grinning mug, it doesn't matter, he's got to die. And I hope he takes the entire marketing team with him. Maybe a field trip that gets horribly out of control and their charter bus plunges over a fifty thousand foot cliff.

I don't care but Enzyte Guy MUST. DIE!

Or, I've gotta get a Tivo so I can fast forward through their atrocious commercials. Damn, I've just gotta get a Tivo regardless and some gold ended connector cables to allow the new HD TV to shine even better.

No, must remain focused. Enzyte Guy must DIE! Or find another line of work.

Is it just me or does Robert Downey Jr.'s soon to be ex-wife Deborah Falconer look like Kirstie Alley's brother?

To quote Austin Powers, "She's a man, baby!"

Strange that he was married to her for 12 years and never seemed to figure it out but then, he's had some pretty well publicized issues with drugs, eh?

From Yahoo News.

The quick update is that everything is perfect, the baby is an active and hard to keep the heart beat monitor doohickey on it. But we did get to hear its little swish-swish-swish heartbeat. The doctor was very pleased with P's progress.

And, we have reached a milestone date. Today, P and I weigh the same. I won't say what it is but I weighed myself a minute after she did and we are the exact same, down to the tenth of a pound. I've been somewhat sick and have had a crappy appetite for the last two weeks or so which is part of it but the other of it is that the baby is getting bigger and her belly is growing still.

That and we got to sit and spin the waiting room for almost 45 minutes because they were backed up. And its really no fun to feel like your entire lunch has been wasted sitting around reading about whether or not Mary Kate Olsen is anorexic or if Jen should be kissing Matt like that. And then I found a copy of Fine Gardening and I was alright.

But still, if you know you're backed up and people will have to stew for three quarters of an hour then wouldn't it just make sense to give some folks a call to let them know to come in a half hour later? Maybe that's just me.

Two weeks to the next appointment and then two more weeks to the next ultrasound!

Are you curious about the relative level of truth the ShrubCo's re-election campaign is delivering in their ugly smear campaign against John Kerry? Swing on by FactCheck.org to get the skinny on the pretty bold faced lies they are spreading. By the way, the site exposes the mistruths in Kerry's camp as well as Bush's so don't go thinking its just a Democratic "He Lied!" site. The About Us on the site gives more background on Brooks Jackson, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, PhD and Zaheed Mawani, the three main forces behind the site.

The latest ads (endorsed and approved by Shrub himself) that attack Kerry for voting against supplying our troops with adequate body armor? Um yeah, let's see, George Bush sent them over without that equipment. The attack on Kerry for voting against the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and other weapons needed to effectively wage Bush's oil war in Iraq? Yeah, those weren't individual votes, they were votes for Pentagon money bills. The site further states that Kerry's record over the last 19 years has been in support of "vital" weapons for the military.

And, even further, that Dick Cheney himself, Georgy's puppermaster, "told the House Armed Services Committee on Aug. 13, 1989 (when he was the secretary of defense): Cheney: The Army, as I indicated in my earlier testimony, recommended to me that we keep a robust Apache helicopter program going forward, AH-64; . . . I forced the Army to make choices. I said, "You can't have all three. We don't have the money for all three." So I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 program two years out. That would save $1.6 billion in procurement and $200 million in spares over the next five years."

By their own twisted logic, Dick Cheney is just as "soft" on defense as Kerry even though neither is soft on defense at all. Dick Cheney's soft in many other places, jowls, fat rich white guy gut, between his ears, etc. but he's not soft on defense. By the way, why do they call it defense spending when we're the one's going to war in Iraq. Its hard to say its defensive when we're the one's doing the attacking.

Even John McCain, who's running Shrub's re-election campaign in his Arizona is quoted on the site. "Kerry's voting record on military spending was defended March 18 by Republican Sen. John McCain. He said on CBS's "The Early Show:" McCain: No, I do not believe that he is, quote, weak on defense. He's responsible for his voting record, as we are all responsible for our records, and he'll have to explain it. But, no, I do not believe that he is necessarily weak on defense."

The spewing of lies, the illegal use of government resources, the twisting of truths and I'm sure there are plenty of other shenanigans being done by this current regime that we'll never hear about, they all go to demonstrating the character of George Bush and Dick Cheney. These are evil men who will say and do anything to remain in power so they can bleed more of this great country of ours. They are leeches, they are ticks, they are mosquitos sucking the lifeblood from our country and they need to be sent packing as quickly as possible.

And there dealings need to be examined in great detail because I'm almost positive that they have committed crimes against our nation that they should be held accountable for.

Check out Fact Check for some straight dope.

Last week, P came home from work very upset and crying. My initial thought was that the neighbor's had been more overt pricks but no, it was work related. Apparently her company was going to have a party the next day, an all company party for everyone that works at her company only she wasn't able to go because it was during work hours and someone had to answer the phones. And yes, that's her job but they could have very, very easily brought in a temp for the last hour of the day, they could have made arrangements to rotate someone in so that she could take part in the event with her company.

As it was, they generated nothing but hurt feelings and ill will. Her attitude about her company went from one of really loving her job and the people there to one of considering looking for work elsewhere. What would you think if your company had a party and everyone BUT you could go? I'd be pissed off and would consider myself not a part of the company. It just makes sense to me. And yeah, I am adjusting my reaction to her being upset to account for being 7 1/2 months pregnant and maybe just a little emotionally unstable from time to time.

So she went in the next day and talked with her boss about it to let her know how her being excluded made her feel. Her boss, to her credit, made an effort to make sure that she could take part and that went a very long way to smoothing over any of her ruffled feathers. I hope her company learns from the bump in the road that this was, I hope that they realize that all employee events should really include all employees, not just the ones who can make it. They could have shut down the phone center early, they could have brought in a temp, they could have assigned someone to rotate in and out with her, they could have scheduled the party for after hours when there would be no need to answer the phones.

And P recognized that the party was just the straw that busted the camel's back really. She was more upset about an Excel training course that she'd wanted to get into but the only person who could cover the desk while she'd be in the class was already taking the class as well. So she felt like she was sort of being unfairly stuck in her position with out the means to improve her skillset to progress into more interesting and rewarding positions within the company.

I think things are okay now but we've made our own plans to get her a training course that she can do at home for Excel so that, when she returns from maternity leave, she'll be more able to move upward into the company.

Totally Unrelated Rule of Thumb
If a movie has one of the Carradine's in it, then it is bound to suck.

Nande came through the surgery just fine and I'll be heading over to pick her up in a couple of hours once the sedatives have worn off a bit more.

And Two More Pics from the Weekend
Highway Mirror Motos
Two Aviators Passing

Today Nande is 19 weeks old and to celebrate we're having her spayed, microchipped and she's also getting a rabies shot. I know this is a pretty standard procedure but I am still worried for her and just want the day to go by quickly so I can bring her home and let her rest and recuperate.

The thing that's been the hardest is that we haven't been allowed to feed her since 8 last night and then no water past midnight. Given that she usually gets a sip when she comes in from a potty break or will just slurp away in the morning, its hard to not give her what she wants even if it is for her own good.

Last night, when I got home and had Paul come over to help me load the tv so I could upgrade it before Circuit City's 30 day trade in/trade up deal ran out, Nande got so excited to see me that she headbutted me once and then accidentally bit my nose hard enough to make me bleed. I'm not worried about it but I thought it was kind of funny in a peculiar way, though I didn't, of course, let her know it was okay and she got reprimanded.

And the TV? Its better than the recently purchased one by a fair bit. Why? Two words, High Definition. The new box is HD capable and now all we have to do is wait until the cable company catches up. Though Playstation games and DVD's are supposed to be crystal clear on it but so far the quality has been restricted because of the cables connecting the two components to the box.

If you're out there and have some extra thoughts and good will to send along to my little Nande as she undergoes the most traumatic day of her young little life, send them on. What's that? You need some inspiration? Okay, try these on for size. Nande and the bone, Nande as Princess Leia and Nande the sleep beggar. Now send your positive thoughts her way!

Iraqi Oil via Ryano.net.

Need a better screensaver? Check out Holding Pattern, its a free screen saver that "turns your idle computer screen into an airplane window, complete with a moving aerial view." And yes, they have a Windows version too.

via MeFi.

Quick Shoutout to the Red Sox
Nice work Sox! Sweeping the most overpaid bunch of baseball players in history is cause for celebration. The only way it could have been better is if Steinbrenner exploded from rage.

Sure, the Giants and A's are struggling a bit right now but that's alright. All I have to do is look at the standings and see the New York Spankees in third behind the Red Sox and my Orioles. All I'd like to say is HA. HA. HA.

And Jeter sucks.

It was hot. Damned hot all day yesterday aside from the early morning when I was polyurethaning the planter box on the deck. But once the sun cleared the house to the left of ours, it got hot right quick in the backyard.

And I spent all day just trying to keep hydrated. I must have drunk a gallon of water, three or four sodas, a half a 2 liter bottle of lemonade and chewed on ice and still I was thirsy before I went to bed last night. It probably didn't help that I was sweating out in the sun for most of the afternoon but still, it was kind of wacky.

That and I've had a serious addiction for Cheetos lately.

That's all.

It was with gas saving joy that I found out that we have a local landfill, not four miles away from my house. Much, much closer than the one on the other side of Santa Cruz that I'd been planning on loading and taking all of the bush debris to this weekend. My chest and arms look like I was in a fight with a cat that had a knife, one good gash on my chest and another one on my arm and then hundreds of scratches all over both arms and my legs but it was worth it!

I'd loaded up the truck as much as I could yesterday, piling up branches until they were several feet above the cab of the truck, then climbing up on top of the pile and using my body weight to mash it down into a more managable size. I bungeed the tarp over the top (not knowing that I was avoiding a potentially $500 ticket) and parked it overnight before heading out to the dump this morning with Nande.

A quick drive up two exits on the highway and through some lush California countryside and I was entering the landfill. And the best part? Today was the last day of free drop offs for yard type waste like tree branches and big old ugly bushes! Sure, its not a winning lottery ticket but it was a nice surprise and made me for damned sure going to get the second load out there before they closed at 3:30.

I'm not sure what it is but I really like going to the dump. I like checking out the massive piles of twisted crap that people have given up on trying to repair, seeing the tv's with smashed in screens, the bikes with absolutely seized parts, the rust bubbling away from the steel, the vast wasteland of trash that's slowly pushed into massive piles.

I suppose I should be depressed by so much garbage that will do nothing but sit in the ground for a thousand years until it breaks down and returns to its elemental forms. I suppose I should note the wastefulness of our society in creating such an enormous pile of garbage. I suppose it should galvanize me into being more enviro-friendly and less wantonly wasteful (though I'm really not overly wasteful, I don't think)

But I enjoyed it, Nande enjoyed and I especially enjoyed the regaining of the back corner of my yard (even if I now have to put in a temporary fix for the gaping hole in the fence at the bottom corner so that Nande doesn't get into the asshole neighbor's yard so she can play with their big Rottie).

After the second dump run, Nande and I headed up into Santa Cruz to go and play on the beach with the volleyball crew. It was her first time in the sand and Modoc and Brady were there as well so she was instantly happy and they taught her that digging in the sand is fun. She also went for her first wade into the ocean, I didn't take her out swimming but let her play in the breaking surf so she starts to get used to the water. Next time I may bring her a little further out but I want her to take it at her own pace. But she loved it and really had a good time when the other two dogs came down to the water as well.

By the time we loaded back up into the truck, she was running on fumes and promptly passed out with her head in my lap all the way home. She was mellow all through last night but was still super cute, moving from room to room whereever P or I was hanging out. P, by the way, began and finished the construction of a cat condo so that the cat can have her own space and not worry about the hound hounding her so much. She really did a kickass job on it and now we get to spend the next week or so cutting and stapling carpet into the frame. It'll be really nice when its all together and I'm amazed that a woman almost seven and a half months pregnant was able to start and finish the construction yesterday. The workshop is paying off huge dividends.

Ever since any possible cordial and respectful relationship with our neighbors went out the window, I've been working on how to create more privacy between their deck and ours. Right now there's a light screen on their side but nowhere near enough to effect the kind of privacy I want from these jerks.

Anyway, the other day, after I saw the mother driving down Highway 1 in her shamefully damaged BMW (pretty easy to pick out because of her vanity plate and she had the top up on a gorgeous day), their son was hanging out in his car in the driveway and smiled and waved at me as I came in. No worries, I've got no issues with the kids, they aren't responsible for how stupid their parents are acting. A few minutes after I had gotten inside, the doorbell rang and I expected to have to deal with her yapping at me about some stupid crap or another. But it was the son, I introduced myself, met him and he asked to borrow my phone to call his mom as he had accidentally locked himself out. He's a nice kid, so are their other two kids.

The funny thing is that, unless one of the kids is present, P and I are invisible to the parents. Unless one of the kids waves or says hi they won't even glance over at our side of the driveway. Yes, they are that childish and stupid. My take is that neither went to college and so the highest level of social evolution they attained was high school, therefore, they act like hormonal and ridiculous teenagers when they feel an insult or attack.

But the sad thing is that, they got what they'd asked for. All we wanted out of the whole thing was for them to admit that they shared some of the responsibility for creating the possibility of the accident by parking the car in our driveway. No car there, no accident. Pretty straight forward.

So they are petulant little dickheads and, honestly, we're no worse for their antics. Sometimes its actually pretty funny watching him walk the opposite way around his truck just to avoid having to even come close to eye contact. Then again, the weed whacking at 8:30 this morning was pretty much a solid asshole move. But I got my measure of payback.

Which brings me to my current project. I'm building planter boxes to span the entire right end of our deck. My plan has morphed over time, guided by my changing desires and the fact that wood is damned expensive. It went from a single 8 foot long, 2 feet high and 1 foot wide planter box to three 2 feet long, 1 foot high and 8 inches wide boxes to two of those and one 4 foot by 1 foot by 1 foot box. The final configuration will be nice because the three containers can be moved alot more easily and more flexibly than one single huge container.

And its been really quite alot of fun working on the boxes. Using my power tools, hanging out in my garage workshop, playing loud music over the circular saw (and yes, my circular saw has a laser in it, its that cool), the mouse sander and the jig saw, selecting tasty sounding stains and high tech urethane finishes, working out issues as they crop up and ending up with something that I like looking at. The first box was kind of the proof of concept tester and it came out well enough but its not quite what I wanted to do. It has exposed hardware and I wanted to go with the whole secret frameup design.

The second and big box came out very nicely, has absolutely no holes on the outside and all of the connecting pieces are hidden inside. Sure, the wood isn't the best quality but that's alright, I'm still working out the kinks in the design. It'll be nice out on the deck with the Golden Pecan stain on it and filled with some fast growing and view obscuring and noise muffling bamboo growing out of it. Yep, bamboo that says in no uncertain terms to them that we will be having nothing to do with them. That and I like bamboo alot and have wanted to do this for a while anyway and I needed a project to get started on using my workshop to make. I will post a pic or two when they are all finished and put together.

And then I think I may start thinking about some sort of privacy wall out front between our two driveways. Oh yeah, right where their basketball hoop is right now, only thing is that half of that sucker is in my driveway and guess what? It ain't staying. Fight childish behaviour with childish behaviour, I always say.

Potentially related news, some asshole stole my registration sticker off the back of my truck, it ripped in the process so they got nothing but now I've gotta go spend a morning waiting in line at the DMV to get another one. I would like to think it wasn't the assholes next door but there's a sneaking suspicion I've got that it was them. They seem that idiotic.

[Update: Sunday morning: Proof of the last line above. P just got back from an expedition to Orchard Supply and they are cleaning the BMW right now only they've turned the car around so that the damage is facing away from our house so that we won't know that they spent the insurance money on their bills instead of on getting the car repaired. They are truly stupid people who think that we're as dumb as they are. I looked out the bedroom window and laughed long and hard at their antics. I'll be heading to the bamboo place later on today, I think. After I've applied the first of two or three coats of the quick dry polyurethane. And I may also get some trim finish pieces at OSH too to clean up some of the edges on the planter box.]

Total tangent question, if dog's sense of smell is like a hundred times better than a human's then how can they stand their truly horrendous nose melting farts?

In this day and age of near daily exposes of religious shenanigans (and by shenanigans, I mean Father Humpsaboy and the codified coverup mandated by the Vatican), it is just a wee bit hypocritical and, well, stupid for the Pope to refuse communion to John Kerry for supporting a woman's right to govern her own body. Ethan posted No Communion for Pro-Choice Politicians in the comments and I had to post it here and on MetaFilter.

Overnight, according to SiteMeter, Intellectual Poison recieved its 80,000th visitor and 120,000th page view. Yeah, I know that's a good week at some blogs but hey, I'm still happy about it.

It is time for some hot, melted . Let's quit the jibber jabber and get into the questions.

1. What is the worst or best insult someone's said to you?
I think the one that I disliked the most and had to endure for a full weekend was the visiting brother of a friend (who also happened to bring four or five of his high school buddies to visit his little brother at college, yeah that type of guy) who decided that I looked like the monkey pal on the Speed Racer cartoon. I got to spend a weekend being called Chim-chim. Until he passed out one night and I stuck some poop in his open mouth and took pictures of him.

2. What's the lamest platitude you know?
Oh golly, there are so many stupid little cliches that people trot out when they don't have their own words for situations. I hate "It was probably for the best" because you know it wasn't. "You only live once" is another pretty stupid one. "Takes one to know one" is also logically inane. "Birds of a feather flock together", um yeah, unlike birds of a fur or birds of a scale who don't like to hang out with each other at all. Actually, I think part of the definition of a platitude is that they suck so I pretty much don't like any of them.
[Update: Heather over on In No Particular Order reminded me of my all time least favorite platitude, "We can still be friends," usually delivered by your about to be ex. If they were your friend then they wouldn't be ripping your heart out and stomping on it with golf spikes, would they? Besides, its just a booty call ploy anyway.]

3. Do you pick up hitchhikers? When was the last time you did?
I will if I've got the time and the space. The last hitchhiker I picked up was a girl at a bus stop, she put up a bit of a struggle but I got her into the trunk of my car and......no wait. No she was actually hitching to get to the hospital because her sister had been admitted overnight and she had the car. It was about a month and a half ago.

4. What's your favorite fruit and how do you like to eat it?
I think my all time favorite fruit is the basic Fuji apple but lately blood oranges have been moving up the charts. Best way to consume almost any fruit is raw I think.

5. What's your favorite drive or drives?
Skyline Drive or Highway 35 the runs the ridge between Santa Cruz and Palo Alto, it runs into La Honda where Alice's Restaurant is and , on a nice weekend, there'll be a couple of hundred bikers hanging out. Take Highway 9 out of Santa Cruz, which is great ride all on its own, up through Felton, Ben Lomond, Brookdale (yeah, where the haunted and muy cool Brookdale Lodge is) and through Boulder Creek. Hit Skyline, hang a left and enjoy a road that allows you to look left to the ocean (on a clear day) and look right down into Palo Alto and the Silicon Valley. It doesn't hurt that the road is well maintained and is the asphalt equivalent of crack for a motorcycle.

6. Which begs the question, what's your favorite hike or walk?
Probably West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz. You can walk up from the Boardwalk and enjoy ocean views, surfers at Steamers Lane, the occasional nekkid folk on It's (strangely its a sometimes nude beach within site of the road and one of two on West Cliff) and, if you go far enough, you end up at Natural Bridges State Park which is just beautiful.

And there ya go, that's my Cheddar for this week.
Want to get some cheese? Head on down and get some!

Some of you may have noticed that there's a new addition to Intellectual Poison. After initially being rejected by Google AdSense for not being cool enough, they reconsider or relaxed their requirements and I was invited to join the club of blogs with adverts on them.
I'm still playing around with the configuration and may end up even switching templates to better accomodate the additions. That and the site's ready for an update anyway.

So yeah, Intellectual Poison is now attempting to pay its own way and generate a little income via click throughs but I don't expect that the ads will be very obtrusive at all, if they become a distraction then I'll just opt out of the program, no biggie. This is a concept I think I want to import over to the Cheddar X (which'll have new questions up as soon as I'm done here) because that'll mean that it can support itself and that means its own domain and web space.

I'm still considering moving to a better blog engine but have my reservations about MuNu (sorry, Jim, I know you want us all to move over) and the spam bot attacks on Movable Type aren't especially appealling. We'll see, this is working decently for now but I'd love to integrate comments and a few other slick features that some of the other places have built in.

Yesterday, while playing around with Nande in the back yard and also checking on the progress of my little vegetable patch. The sugar snap peas are really starting to grow well and I'll need a larger frame for them to grow up into soon, the corn is starting to take off as well but is having some bug issues are something because some of the leaves are a bit ragged. Anyway, Nande kept digging at one corner of the little area and I assumed that she was trying to dig out the stake that was holding up that side of the lattice that keeps her out of the vegie patch.

But when I went to check out what she was digging on, I found the leathery end of an old rawhide bone that had been buried in the yard for at least a couple of years. It was nasty, covered in dirt, soft and just slightly moldy in a few spots. In other words, it was like puppy crack. Nande got ahold of it and ran away from me whenever I'd come near her for fear I was taking away her prize.

I knew it wasn't the best thing for her to nosh on but I also thought it was a good time to let her learn a little more about being selective in what she eats (yeah, I know, its not working and will likely never work). Because it was so old and soft, she pretty well chewed through it in about fifteen minutes and ate the whole thing.

Fast forward several hours. I took Nande out to go potty as I was getting ready for bed and P had been asleep for a little while already. She's really pretty excellent at peeing where she's supposed to now and she did her business and then came back up onto the lawn and laid down. She was absent mindedly eating grass and generally just looked somewhat unhappy with the state of affairs.

And before I knew it, she'd deposited a rather large portion of the contents of her stomach (which was most of her dinner and the nasty rawhide coils of that bone) on the lawn. A minute later she tossed the rest of her stomach's contents up leaving two large piles of dog puke on the lawn. And, because she's a nasty dog, she immediately wanted to eat it right back up. Yeah, nasty. I took her back into the house, gave her a little food to fill her stomach up again and went out to dispose of the thick messes. Luckily, they were firm enough to be scooped onto my shovel easily enough and then deposited into the trash can out by the fence. I'd forgotten that there no bags of trash in there so now we've got a puke lined trash can which, I'm sure, will get ripe in the next few days in the sun. Oh well.

Nande slept pretty well the rest of the night going from about 11:30 until just before 5 this morning without needing to go out and potty. And she was pretty thirsty by that time as well.

Man o man, I love it when people get their own bad karma coming back on them to sting and make their lives suck.

P stopped at home during a break today to spend a little time with Nande and saw an imminent disconnect notice on our door from the water company. Which would normally be a serious bummer, pain in the ass and time to scramble to find some cash to keep the water flowing. But, here comes the best part, it wasn't for us, it was for our asshole neighbors! Hahaha!

Sure, it goes to explain a lot more about why she was such a rabid bitch about getting the money to "repair" her car. She needed it cover their bills and they're still underwater (though soon they'll have no water at all, ha!).

Which is kind of funny because she should have been thanking us for hitting her car and generating some damned income for them. Instead they treat us like we're lepers that can spread the disease just by looking at us. What dinks.

I know its not really that great a personality trait to crow about other people's misfortunes but, for the amount of crap they've visited upon us, both P and I are pretty much laughing our asses off all day today. Its our hope that they have to downsize or whatever and they have to move away. It'd be awesome to get some people living next door that we actually like.

And that could also afford to repair or replace their half of the fence line that we share. As it is, they won't be able to do anything. But he sure does have a nice and shiny new truck.

Ain't karma a big ol' stinky bitch?

[Update: I've been wrestling with dropping this post as I do realize that its somewhat mean spirited to cheer someone else's troubles. But you know what? Screw it, they have still done nothing but behave like children so screw them. And we really wouldn't mind some new folks moving in next door anyway.]

Need a little slang in yo' life?
Gizzle your shizzle over to Snoop Dogg's Shizzolator and pizzimp your blizzog up some, fool!
Thizzanks go to Jizzay for the Lizzink.

Notwithstanding the fact that The Shield is a pretty violent and, I think they call it, hyper-realist show in and of itself. It is. Sometimes its really pretty shocking to watch.

But then they showed a short preview for a movie called Meltdown, they also showed a damned long preview for Denzel's new asskick movie Man of Fire but that's another post. Meltdown is the heart warming story of terrorists targeting and taking over one of America's 103 nuclear reactors. Yeah, whodda thought we had 103 of the buggers? So we are now forced to consider the possibility, and of course since it will be portrayed so well, the real possibility in our minds that terrorists are probably stalking the nuke plants right now and that people in this world really and truly do want to ruin and destroy America and kill as many of us as possible.

Wow, really that just kind of sucks to read in print. It sucks that the fear we are all immersed in every day has palpable reasons, look at Madrid, look at Indonesia, look at New York. Fear of terrorist attack, fear of the boss catching you looking at nudie pics when you should be working and you sneak peeks anyway, fear of the nimrod in the Monte Carlo who's just spun a hundred and eight degrees ON THE HIGHWAY who then proceeds to actually drive his car across the highway to get back heading south, fear of all the dangers my as yet unborn little kid faces that I will be powerless to protect him or her from.

The culture of fear lives on. Fear of the creeping suspicion that everyone everywhere BUT you are in on some kind of huge and bizarre conspiracy to confound and slow down your life while making money hand over fist that you'll never sniff a dollar of, fear that no matter what you do you'll never find true love or worse, fear that found true love and let it get away, fear that one day you will have to realize that you either settle or you grow old alone, fear that you really are nothing but a bag of wind and some false confidence, fear of attack in the night, fear of losing everything, fear of losing my family, fear of fearing too much.

Fear because the world is a dangerous and violent place ruled by fear that fuels anger and depression and all the other societal ills. No wonder the pharmco's are doing such a bang up business. People are scared of damned near everything and the fear manifests itself as anger and the anger is contagious. One pissed off dickweed in a commute can wreck about a hundred people's days and they may go on to wreck a hundred more. Who hasn't gotten to work one day and actually not done anything wrong but you still get reamed by your boss anyway? Bad days are contagious in a way that good ones just can't duplicate.

Meltdown, add this to your list of nightmares brought to you by Fear Unlimited. Fear's gotten us to where we are today. Fear makes you look at your neighbors and wonder if they've got bodies buried in their basements or if they're pedophiles. Fear makes you see yourself, in way over your head like you're drowning. Fear keeps you up at night watching bad tv and thinking about shotguns and closed circuit tv and security systems.

On an aside, this is supposed to be TV turnoff week.

Hey AOL, I heard you're losing money faster than a drunk millionaire in Vegas.

Thought I might pass along a bit of advice on how to not only save a bunch of money but how to also preserve whatever meager shred of good will you still have remaining in the marketplace.

How about you stop blanketing the entire country with your lame ass free AOL cd's? Stop inserting them into my magazines, stop peppering them all over the stores, stop mailing them to and making me wait in line to get my "package" from you morons?

Tally up the total cost of this incredibly stupid and wasteful campaign and then reconsider your tactics. Every single time I get one of your free CDs in the mail, I not only throw it away, I smash it so that no one else can use your crappy little Only-The-Internet-We-Decide-Is-Safe-For-You bullshit either. I haven't bothered to count how many of your lame promotional offers I've trashed but its gotta be more than a hundred by now. That's a hell of a lot of money for trash, isn't it?

Do us all a favor and reduce your extremely stupid and unproductive marketing campaign. The world will breath a sigh of relief and you might actually find that people are open to trying your shitty service again. I'm not one of those people but I'm sure there are some people out there that need to have their hand held while they surf about on the big bad Internet.

Just a thought.

First off, I'd like to let everybody know that today is Nande's 18th week birthday. She weighed in at a pretty whopping 39 pounds this week. Which means she's putting on weight rather quickly these days and now she's due to get spayed before she breaks 45 pounds so we're looking at later this week. Poor girl doesn't know what's coming at all but I think she'll be fine.

New Word
Based on one of the recent comment threads on Plain Layne, this one is all for Ryan.
Subverseve - attempting to overthrow or distract a person or power by the use of rhymes.

And In The Numbers Have Conspired News
Check out Number Spiral if you get into freaky number stuff. Its pretty amazing information and I've long suspected those pesky numbers of getting together and forming a conspiracy.

I almost forgot, today is 4/20. The day that all the stoner high schoolers ditch school to hang out and smoke dope and rebel against the man or something. Four twenty day came about because the police code for a marijuana violation is, surprise, surprise, a 420. Those wacky kids! [Update: The 420 police code thing is bunkum, Snopes: 420. Thanks to Intellectual Properties for busting me on that one.]

And out here in Santa Cruz land, the UCSC students usually gather in a field up above campus to debauch like mad monkeys. Only this year, it'll be a muddy stoner fest. Which isn't an issue for the same students that put on an annual parade of mud people where they strip naked, roll in mud and parade through downtown (and no, I'm not joking).

Anyway, peace all and smoke 'em if you got 'em unless someone's just freshly repaved your throat with hot lava, then its probably best to abstain this time around.