I need some stimulation (or Give me my $600, bitch)
January 30, 2008
Russell Roberts’ take on the pending stimulus package:
Love that word—stimulus. It sounds so scientific. With the right stimulus, you can even make the leg of a dead frog twitch. A heart attack victim gets the stimulus from those chest paddles and bam. Back to life. My online dictionary defines stimulus as something that “rouses or incites to activity.” Sounds like the perfect prescription for an ailing economy.
But if politicians know how to stimulate the economy, why wait for a recession? If you can make the economy grow, why wait for bad times?
One answer is that a healthy patient doesn’t need medicine. But the other possibility is that it’s all hot air. Maybe we don’t know how to make a $14 trillion economy move very quickly. And if we did, it would take a lot more than an injection of even 125 billion dollars.
Various Artists: (romantic) Rule for living
January 29, 2008
Breaking up is hard to do:
and you have to learn to let that love go:
Resurgent wildlife (or Do wolves eat kittehs?)
January 28, 2008
Earlier this week, Jerry Miller found the carcass of a badly mutilated deer in his backyard in the 4400 block of 34th Avenue. Along with blood spatters and matted fur, he found large tracks. He called Bill Christman, owner of Christman’s Wildlife Service, who believes the tracks were too big to be from a dog or coyote.
Mr. Christman said he believes the tracks were made by a gray wolf.
That’s fucking great. I already had a close encounter with a wild turkey at an ATM. Now I have to worry about wolves in Illinois?
Various Artists: (economic) Rules for living
January 26, 2008
Grab what you can, bitches:
If you’re rich, drugs are necessary :
Looks + Brains = Money:
My congressional district has a wang
January 25, 2008
What is this, you ask? Unfortunately, it is the map of my congressional district, the 17th district of Illinois to be exact. I call it the Fonzie fetus with a wang map.
Here is the tour from north to south: It starts at the end of that big pompadour in Sterling and heads westward toward chez moi. It then follows the river southwest to Quincy (ignoring that birth defect that is Kewanee and the chin of nothing but corn), then east through the middle of God Only Knows, Illinois. This is where it gets fun. Turn north at God Only Knows and you enter the wang of the 17th district. It consists of parts of Springfield ending up in Decatur. And when I say parts, I mean laughably small parts.
Here is a close up of the Springfield part of the wang:
I guess those people on Williams Street in Springfield have much more in common with me, 200 miles away, than they do with their neighbors on West Allen Street.
Shit like this makes me wonder if it is even worth it.
UPDATE: I forgot. We were featured on The Colbert Report.
I love the Midwest (we’re so resourceful)
January 24, 2008
A Davenport woman faces criminal charges for allegedly attacking her husband with a weapon she made from a can of corn and a sock.
Ronco: Rules for living (as seen on TV)
January 24, 2008
Speaking louder makes you popular (and dance in a funky way):
Smoking is fun and you should live with it:
But wait, there’s more…
Frostiness makes everything taste better:
I’m here, I’m queer and I don’t need a cabinet full of cleaners
January 23, 2008
Now that I outed myself (with the help of a recent commenter):
I’m covered in someone else’s DNA (or Nightmare on Memory Lane)
January 22, 2008
I spent the day cleaning one half of a duplex I own. It’s a one bedroom garden apartment (such a nice term for living in a basement). The former tenant lived there for almost eight years. He even paid me over $40,000 for the privilege. The downside is I spent my day on my hands and knees sucking up and scrubbing off his detritus (and how the fuck does ketchup get on the ceiling?).
All this takes me back. In college, to support myself, I worked for a janitorial service. I had three regular gigs that I did six/seven days a week. I started at 4 AM at a bar (the smallest but the most disgusting job, especially with a hangover). The biggest headache was vacuuming up all the popcorn spilt from their free popcorn machine. The biggest barf factor was the bathrooms (and to anyone interested, men and women are equally disgusting in different ways (ask for details)). That took about an hour and a half. I then drove halfway across town to a Carlos O’Kelly’s Mexican restaurant. I cleaned the dining area and the bathrooms there (who cleaned the kitchen was a mystery to me. I made it a point to never to eat there). Most of my time was spent on my knees with a handvac under the booths, where my trusty Electrolux couldn’t reach. I had the greasiest knees in town but I always found a ton of change and an occasional bill ($20.00 was the largest and when you make $4.75/hr that’s a fucking gold mine) I bought my work jeans at Goodwill (whether they fit or not) since I went through so many pairs. That job took about two hours. After that, home, a long shower and classes. Then at night, I cleaned a newly built car dealership. So nice in comparison. No grease, no popcorn, no pissy bathrooms. My main complaints there were the white ceramic tile floor in the showroom that showed everything (I had to take a scrungie to all the black heel marks) and the passive-aggressive notes left by the salesmen (assholes).
If my schedule was open during the day, to earn a few extra bucks I would clean vacated apartments. Sometimes I got lucky with a nice apartment where people actually cleaned a few times during their stay and it would be a breeze. Most of the time (we’re talking college students here) it was four years of soap scum in the shower and unyielding chunks of baked on frozen pizza residue in the oven. I think this is where my misanthropy began.
I’ll tell you one thing; I’m always nice to people who are doing this sort of work. .
Various artists: Rules for living
January 21, 2008
Pipe wrenches and dirty t-shirts are hot (ok, so that’s not so much a rule for living as a rule for loving)
Eyeliner can be a good thing:
Get up, bitch!
With that, this series has officially died.
