DC Viking

In DC we celebrate independence by crapping on the 4th Amendment

2008-07-03T12:42:00.003-04:00

I’ve been following the internet backlash against Barack Obama pretty closely for a week or so. The issue, which seems to be getting a little traction in more mainstream media, boils down to Obama’s quick reversal on several issues soon after he locked down the nomination.

Some of these reversals are the expected policy tweaks that all presidential politicians make when they secure their party’s nomination. It’s common knowledge that our election system requires candidates to cater to their party’s base in the primaries and then move toward more centrist positions in preparation for the general election. Those of us who hold more progressive political opinions may not like this practice, but we understand that it’s a sometimes necessary action if we ever want to win an election. We understand why Obama wants to temper his rhetoric on something like gun control, but some reversals are simply too big to swallow. Obama's change of heart on recently debated FISA legislation is an example of such a reversal.

Salon's Glen Greenwald is doing a great job of keeping track of the developments in this story , which essentially boils down to:

- Obama used to think that the Protect America Act was a bad thing, particularly the parts of it that allowed the government to conduct surveillance of whoever it wanted, with little or no oversight. He thought this piece of legislation was so bad that he voted against it's original enactment, and had stated that he would filibuster any attempt to renew it.

- Obama now supports the Protect America act as the best deal the Democrats can get, even though they control both houses of congress and the current administration's policies in this arena are incredibly unpopular. One other important piece of information - if this legislation expires, the old FISA legislation becomes the applicable statute. This law was good enough to get the U.S. through the Cold War.

- Obama's campaign portrays this switch as a pragmatic piece of compromise that will ensure the protection of Americans from terrorists while portaying the candidate as 'tough on terror'.

This flip angers and frustrates me on so many different levels that it's hard to catalog how I feel about it. There's the familiar disappointment with a political leader revealing himself as a 'politician' and the feeling of being betrayed by a candidate I believed to be something new and different in politics. There's disgust at the rhetoric Obama is using, which steals heavily from the Republican party line. My biggest problem with Obama's FISA position is that he's stomping all over the 4th Amendment, ostensibly to win an election, and his actions are more likely to cause him to lose.

Republicans don't win on national defense because Democratic candidates have bad defense policies. Republicans win on security issues because Democrats will abandon their 'principles' at the first sign of conflict. Dukakis, Mondale, Kerry...the list of Democratic losers on the national stage is filled with politicians that sought to fit their ideas to what they thought the people wanted as soon as Republicans began to wave the patriotism banner around. I thought that Obama was different in this respect, and on a larger scale, he may still be; but his behavior with respect to the FISA debate makes me think that the same mindset that tanked previous campaigns is at work here.

I can't understand why Obama is reversing his ground on this. The same forces that allowed Democrats to suddenly find their collective spine and win congressional elections in 2006 are still at work, and may even be stronger. Aren't independents and 'centrist' voters ready to hear that the Bush doctrines that stated, "you can have individual freedoms or safety, but not both!" are wrong? I think so. I used to believe that Obama thougt that too. For those keeping track, this is exhibit 786 in the case for me not being very smart.

John Kerry came out of his primary campaign with the same kinds of polling leads Obama is currently enjoying over John McCain. Then he started to adjust his positions to make himself more palatable to voters. He ended up looking like a slightly more craggy version of Michael Dukakis, milquetoast and without conviction. It's early in the election, and maybe I'm just feeling a little bit of buyers remorse, but I don't think so.

I have a suspicion that the McCain campaign has been watching this all unfold with a sense of expectant glee. They're all going to sit down to a campaign meeting the morning after the FISA bill passes, and they're going to be all smiles. A senior aid is going to turn to McCain with a look of smug satisfaction and say, "See John? I told you that they'd make the same mistake." And then they're going to dust off and pass around the same play book that Republicans have been using to win national elections for 30 years. "Please turn to Chapter 1: Reinforcing your opponent's image as a waffling pussy."

Totally Boss Video Wednesday

2008-06-18T13:48:00.004-04:00

I'm still buried under menial tasks related to my move, but when I'm finally out from underneath I'll post some pictures.

In the meantime, enjoy another Hold Steady Video. Their new album "Stay Positive" is available on iTunes right now. I've only listened through twice, so I don't know where it sits in their collection, but it's definitely good.

Stuck Between Stations off of Boys and Girls in America

Moving Sucks

2008-06-06T14:53:00.001-04:00

The plan was supposed to involve me driving a moving truck from Blacksburg to DC with Miss Viking’s stuff, picking up a couch at my Dad’s house, picking up my stuff in DC and then head to the new place in Silver Spring. Well conceived, poorly executed…

6:00 AM – Miss Viking’s alarm clock goes off. I shouldn’t have stayed up late playing Rock Band, and I certainly shouldn’t have had that last beer. I head upstairs for coffee before hitting the road.

7:00 AM – After sitting at the kitchen table and drinking coffee for nearly an hour, I’m finally on the road. I’ve got a truck full of Miss Vikings clothes, various bookshelves, televisions, kitchen tables, knick knacks, and a piano stuffed into a 16’ moving truck. I haven’t driven anything this large in years, but I’m sure it’s just like riding a bike.

7:45 AM – It turns out that driving an oversized moving truck through the mountains of southwest Virginia is a little tougher than I thought. I’ve been white knuckling my way down what must be at least %80 incline hills, chain smoking, and wondering why the few motorists on the road at 7 on a Saturday morning insist on driving next to me when it should be clear to everyone on the road that I’m going to need both lanes if a major collision is going to be avoided.

8:30 AM – I’m beginning to get the hang of the truck, and have begun to pass people on the freeway, leaving my safety zone of the right lane. I’ve got my right arm hanging out the window so that I have a trucker’s tan to show off at the next rest area. I want to make sure that I blend in so that my fellow road-masters will let me know where the ‘smokies’ are waiting. I should have bought a John Deere hat…

Noon (things begin to go awry) – I’ve arrived at my Dad’s house in Woodbridge, where some sucker, I mean good friend, has agreed to meet me to load a couch onto the truck. It doesn’t fit, and we have to jam it into the truck at an angle. This wouldn’t be a problem, but I still have to load all of my things into the truck. I’m going to have to pull some of Miss Vikings things off and re-arrange the storage configuration. Years of Tetris are about to pay off.

12:45 PM – It begins to drizzle as I pull up in front of my house in DC. My buddy and I quickly begin to remove the couch and as much of Miss Viking’s stuff as we need to allow the couch to fit back into the truck at a reasonable angle.

1 PM – The couch is on the truck, and as I exit my house carrying an unwrapped mattress, the heavens open. This is not the kind of ‘isn’t this refreshing’ summer rain that you normally expect during a move. This is end of the world, Moses will have to part the seas to cross Wisconsin Avenue, kind of downpour that I expect during a move. Rain drops the size of ping pong balls begin to pelt my mattress. I scurry about, putting Miss Viking’s things onto the truck to prevent additional water damage.

1:03 PM – Miss Viking calls to let me know that she has arrived at our new house. The previous occupant has not removed her possessions from the house.

1:07 PM – With as much cargo as we could get into the truck while a monsoon is raging, I leave my old house and drive to Silver Spring. I’m wet, I’m sweaty, I can’t see the road, and a man in a canoe just cut me off going through Chevy Chase Circle.

2:00 PM – I’ve finally arrived at my new home. I dry off and wait for the movers hired by Miss Viking’s new employer to remove our possessions from the truck. While this is occurring, I pace through my new house, marveling at all of the wonderful things the previous occupant has left for us. I’m now the proud owner of a flower print couch last upholstered in 1972, five bags of aromatic rocks, an entire kitchen of dated flatware, and an odd and disturbing aroma whose origin I can’t locate.

5:00 PM – With the truck unloaded and a long day nearly complete, I decide to relax by driving back to my old house and pack the things that wouldn’t fit into the truck on the first trip.

5:30 PM – Upon arrival at my previous dwelling, Miss Viking notes that her mother’s office desk has acquired several rather visible scratches at some point during the move. I contend that this must have happened when it was originally packed in the truck or at some point during transit. She counters that I damaged the treasured piece of furniture when I removed it in the middle of an apocalyptic weather occurrence. I won’t tell you how the dispute was resolved other than to say that I loaded the truck by myself while she returned to Silver Spring.

8:00 PM – Back in Silver Spring. I shower and drink a beer as fast as humanly possible. Miss Viking and a friend have spent the last 2 hours removing signs of the previous occupant’s occupation from our house. Nothing went like it was supposed to, but it could be worse. I could have moved to Georgetown.

I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find GAMBLING going on here!

2008-05-28T12:05:00.002-04:00

No one that has been paying attention for the last eight years is surprised by the ‘revelations’ contained in Scott McClellan’s new book, but major news outlets like the Washington Post are tripping all over themselves to make McClellan’s insights front page news. The headline of today’s on-line edition of the Post reads, “Ex-Spokesman: Bush Mislead Public on Iraq.” Incidentally, the stories below the fold were: “Water is Wet”, “U.S. Economy: Been Better”, and “Men Think Scarlett Johansson is Attractive.”

The Post even lacked the testicular fortitude to lead without attributing the assertion to McClellan in the headline, which is unsurprising considering how little the paper did to question the rationale for the war in the first place. Would anyone other than administration flaks have made a ruckus if the headline had read, “Bush Lied to the Public about Iraq”? Instead, the Post took the approach of, “Listen, we’re not sure, and we don’t want to cast stones, but this Scott McClellan guy said that Bush may have been a little less than truthful about that whole Iraq War deal.”

The response of the press to McClellan’s tell-all illustrates a key point made in the book. McClellan states that far from being too liberal, the press was deferential to the administration as it made the case for war in Iraq. The collective “My goodness, isn’t this a development” uttered by the journalistic establishment shows how loathe the press has been to do their job.

The way the rest of this story will play out is easy to predict. The administration will trash McClellan on the morning shows, right wing bloggers will make excuses, and the main stream media will forget about the whole thing in a week. None of the really important questions will get asked. Instead of trying to hold the administration accountable, news outlets like the Washington Post will spend ink cataloging the he-said, she-said between McClellan and administration surrogates. Then in a four or five months when another one of these insider accounts is published we’ll go through the whole thing again, still wondering why everything is so screwed up.

But hey, at least Scotty is getting paid for keeping his mouth shut when he could have had a real impact and then suddenly finding his balls when someone waived a book deal in his face.

Totally Boss Video Wednesday

2008-05-14T12:48:00.002-04:00

This song is off one of my favorite albums from last year, and this song still gets heavy rotation in a few of my go-to iTunes mixes.

I somehow manage to be out of town every time these guys play in DC.

Totally Boss Video Wednesday

2008-05-07T14:11:00.001-04:00

Because it's always a good time for the best band to come out of Minneapolis since the Replacements.

Dear God Is It Over Yet Haiku

2008-05-06T13:10:00.002-04:00

Today at the polls,
More important than the war,
Snipers or Preachers?

At least he didn't park his Prius in the pool

2008-05-05T11:54:00.004-04:00

Rock Band is a video game that bridges the gap between gamer and non-gamer. Get yourself a bottle of whiskey, a case of beer, two or three friends with no reservations about really selling the backup harmony in Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” (even though the game doesn’t require it ) and you’ve got a recipe for a pretty decent Saturday night. People who would never think of picking up a controller and sitting down to play Grand Theft Auto will happily strap on a plastic guitar and pretend to be Ace Frehley. With the right mix of people the game becomes a cooperative event. Instead of competing against each other as you do in most other games, you’re providing support and encouragement to your band mates; working together to quote, RAWK, un-quote.

On some occasions, the ‘band’ I normally play with, “Arsenio, Hall, and Oates” gets so into the groove that we begin to act like real-life rock stars. The drummer smacks his sticks together in the air to count out time as the song begins. The guitarist calls out the tried and true, “Ah one,two, Ah-one, two, three, four.” And the lead singer gets drunk and destroys the stage.

I’m serious about that last one. Arsenio, Hall, and Oates (or “Spuckwheat and Wanky” as we sometimes call ourselves when playing incognito in smaller venues) had its first Rocking Related Injury, or “RRI” this weekend.

Miss Viking graduated from her Masters program on Saturday and we threw a party to celebrate. As usually happens when our friends get together, Rock Band gets pulled out when the group has achieved a collective BAC of about .09. What began as a large group activity; four people playing together while three or four others waited their turn and cheered the band on, devolved into Miss Viking, myself, and a lead singer, whose name shall be withheld for his protection, playing long after everyone else had gone to bed and/or passed out.

We’d all been drinking quite heavily, for quite a long time, and the quality (if not the enthusiasm) of our rocking had been going steadily downhill for about 40 minutes. We knew it was almost time to take our curtain call when both the bass player and guitarist began to see the scrolling bars on the TV screen as a blur of rainbow colors instead of the easily recognizable notes they usually are. Our lead singer recognized that the rest of the band was losing focus, and took his act up a notch to spur us on.

He increased his vocal projection, he called out encouragement during long guitar solos, and he began to dance wildly about the living room. On a hardwood floor. In athletic socks conspicuously lacking in non-skid traction control devices of any kind.

You see where this is going. During a particularly hyperactive dance breakdown, that reminded many in the crowd of a young Jack Black in the midst of some kind of bourbon induced seizure, he lost his footing. Badly. Luckily, the most expensive piece of Rock Band equipment in the room was there to break his fall.

As he crashed to the floor, the arm of our lead singer came down solidly on what would have been the symbol on a real drum set. In a ‘real’ band, that would have resulted in a solid and satisfying crash, much like a drunken singer falling into drum set. In our little fantasy world, this fall instead resulted in the thin and decidedly unsatisfying sound of a plastic drum pad snapping in two.

Minor wounds were inflicted on our fearless band leader. A long and nasty scrape required Miss Viking to dust off her civil war surgery skills. Luckily, we still had a little whiskey left, and since the drums had been rendered useless, we had extraneous drumsticks to aid in the fashioning of tourniquets. What could have been a VERY awkward closing song was mitigated by the fact that we were playing on the singer’s own drums, and not mine.

That’s right, my group of friends has more than one full set of Rock Band instruments among us. I can tell you’re impressed.

I Miss Jed Bartett Too

2008-04-25T12:23:00.003-04:00

Why is it that the only time I have any faith at all in democracy is when I watch a fictional portrayal of it on TV?

I just finished watching the last episode of HBO’s “John Adams”, and I have come to three earth shattering conclusions because of this mini-series.

1) John Adams, and everyone in his family, had really horrible teeth. I dig that HBO was striving for historical authenticity and I respect that the producers didn’t go the route of having the 18th century colonials in the series look like they just finished a weekend at a Palm Springs spa; but I spent more time considering the magnitude of halitosis that Adams’s cabinet had to contend with than I did thinking about the relevance of the Alien and Sedition Acts in today’s terror obsessed society.

2) Thomas Jefferson was kind of a prick.

3) This country will never, ever, again have leaders that care more for the well-being of the country than for their own advancement/power/ego.

Listen. I’m not naive. Okay, I’m a little naive, but I know that all of this country’s “Great Leaders” have all been real people with flaws and personal agendas. I’m not saying that the Founding Fathers were infallible, or that FDR was a god, or that Reagan was a pleasant dullard who has been unjustly elevated to the status of icon by a group of necrophiliac, revisionist, partisans, who wouldn’t know a good President from Dick Nixon. Actually, I am saying that last bit.

What I am saying is that somewhere in the last 40 or 50 years, the pursuit of national politics, be it Congress or the Presidency, has become the goal in and of itself. Very few good men or women bother with the highest levels of government. This isn’t news to most, and I don’t blame the people that could do good for the country for not submitting themselves to the 12th circle of hell that is running in a big time election. I wouldn't do it, even if there weren't a glut of incriminating pictures of me in the hands of several untrustworthy friends.

Everybody’s heard the line that may or may not have originated with Alexis de Tocqueville, “In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.” I happen to believe this. It's just too bad that we the people suck it soft most of the time.

Totally Boss Video Wednesday

2008-04-23T14:46:00.002-04:00

I'm going to play a little 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon with this week's video. We had sailboats last week. Who else has sailboats? Pirates!

"Mr Understanding" - Pete and the Pirates

Totally Boss Video Wednesdays

2008-04-16T11:09:00.004-04:00

Two things have been bothering me lately.

1) Nobody plays videos on TV anymore. Sure, you can get them easy enough on You Tube, but it's not the same. I like to have them integrated into my daily life without having to go find them.

2) The word 'Boss' is completely underutilized as an adjective.

In the hopes of correcting these situations, I've decided to introduce "Totally Boss Video Wednesdays". This week's video is "Mansard Roof" by Vampire Weekend, a band I've mentioned here before. This video actually kinda sucks, but the song is good, and it's got sailboats.

Just for reference, I don't dress like this when I'm sailing. I only wear that kind of attire when I'm trying to infiltrate a Georgetown bar.

Love Shack

2008-04-08T12:03:00.002-04:00

Miss Viking and I are moving in together. We will be cohabitating. Sharing space. Living in sin.

I was prepared to write a seven part series exposing the seamy underbelly of renting in the DC Metro Area. I haven’t been writing with regularity lately, so I was looking forward to a little continuity to keep me moving forward. Like I said, I was prepared to write this series, but events have conspired to eliminate my apartment search as a writing topic.

When I first moved to DC, I must have looked at 12 or 13 apartments and houses. The process was grueling. The geography of my new city was baffling to me, so I would drive around for hours, trying to navigate from one awkward roommate meet’n’greet to the next. By the end of the process I was so exhausted and disillusioned with the rental market and with humanity in general that I was ready to move into the first place that wouldn’t require me to sleep on a bunk below a violent felon. I was remarkably lucky that I wound up in a nice house with friendly roommates.

When Miss Viking accepted a job in Baltimore and we targeted Silver Spring as our likely municipality of residence, I expected a long and dispiriting process of house hunting that would test the bonds of our relationship. I figured this would be entertaining reading. Unfortunately (for you) we spent a grand total of 3 hours house hunting. We looked at two houses and a condo, fell in love with the last house we saw, and begged the leasing agent to hold it until June 1^st for us.

Miss Viking is convinced that we’re the ideal renters, and that is why the owner has agreed to keep the house open for a month until my lease is up. Unable to accept our good fortune that easily, I’ve become convinced that there is something more sinister at work here. This house must be the home to some evil spirit, or a vermin infestation, or possibly the neighborhood is some type of Scientology commune. I’m not sure which one would frighten me more. Rats can be exterminated, a demon can be exorcised, but there is no good way to get rid of religious zealots.

I’ll keep you updated; and if anyone knows a good exterminator, ghost buster, or Tom Cruise, let me know.

Keith Olberman - Kind of Pompous, But Kind of Right

2008-03-13T14:26:00.002-04:00

He may be a little over the top with his bluster, but I thought this clip from his show last night hit a lot closer to the mark than I did. I may be falling for a cheap trick, but I also dig the hat tip to Murrow at the end of his rants.

Geraldine Ferraro - Has been and hypocrite

2008-03-12T15:49:00.004-04:00

There are lots of angry words directed at former VP candidate and Hillary Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro flying around the interwebs right now. I couldn't in good conscience refrain from adding a few of my own.

Ferraro made a statement to the Daily Breeze yesterday, putting forth the idea that Barrack Obama wouldn't be in the presidential race if he were a white man. Where to begin with this one?

Let's start with the hypocrisy. Ferraro was a congresswoman for nearly 5 years before being tapped as Walter Mondale's running mate. Obama was elected as a U.S. Senator in 2005 after serving for seven years in the Illinois State House. I can only assume that her remarks cut to the argument that Obama isn't experienced enough for executive office. If that's the case, then neither was she. In point of fact, her relative inexperience came up during the VP debates, to which she responded;

"Well, let me first say that I wasn't born at the age of forty-three when I entered Congress. I did have a life before that as well. I was a prosecutor for almost five years in the district attorney's office in Queens County and I was a teacher. There's not only what is on your paper resume that makes you qualified to run for or to hold office. It's how you approach problems and what your values are."

That's a really good point, and her resume sounds similar to another minority running for elected office. The only difference 'on paper' then, seems to be that she's a white woman and he's a black man. Her point must be that nobody is going to vote for Clinton because she's a woman. But that doesn't hold water, either. Gloria Steinem, a pretty prominent voice of feminism, wrote in a NY Times editorial, "I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”

Okay. So if Ferraro had roughly the same level of experience as Obama when she was running for the second highest office in the country, and Clinton very obviously has supporters that are following her because she's a woman, than what exactly is her beef with Obama's popularity?

I agree that experience plays a role in preparing an individual for assuming the mantel of President, but only to a degree. It's not as if there are many jobs that accurately predict success when presented with the responsibilities of commanding the most powerful army in the history of the planet, managing a stumbling economy in the face of increasing globalism, and trying not to get caught getting head from interns. So voters have to focus on experience in the absence of good predictors of success. But, here's the thing, there are plenty of predictors of success for Obama that go beyond a list of accomplishments and positions.

Hilary Clinton has had every advantage over Obama in this race. She had an established organization due largely to Bill's previous elections, more financial resources, the backing or party insiders, an air of inevitability provided by the media, and her husband was the president. It's not like she's some insurgent candidate that was given a raw deal by the press and never had a chance to get her message out. But in the face of all this, Obama is getting people to follow him. Seems to me that having followers is a pretty good indicator of leadership ability.

Look, I agree that Obama's race may help him in some circle's. Whether that has to do with some people being able to relate to him, or believing that it's time a multicultural country like the U.S. had a little diversity at the top, or because he makes people believe in 'The American Dream' is really not germane to the issue. Race and Gender are important in this race, but with the economy struggling and our armies fighting in Iraq, I think that you would have to work pretty hard to find a voter retarded enough to be following either candidate based solely on identity politics. Obama is winning this race because people believe that he can best lead the country, and I happen to agree. Race and Gender will be a bonus for some people, just as it will be a negative for others.

If Geraldine Ferraro or anyone else supporting Clinton thinks that Barrack Obama is doing as well as he is because he's a black man and for no other reason then I'm not really surprised that they are losing to him.

Brief Thoughts With Some Guy That Isn't Jack Handy

2008-02-28T08:48:00.005-05:00

-Diablo Cody: So let me get this straight. She used to be a stripper. She wrote an Oscar nominated screen play. Her name is totally kick ass. I bet she has a really hard time finding dates.

-Irony, or a cosmic practical joke designed to make me smash my clock radio?: This morning as I lay in bed trying to come to grips with the return of winter temperatures I listened to an NPR sound bite of Defense Secretary Robert Gates discussing the Turkish incursion into Kurdish Northern Iraq. The essential point he was trying to impart to the Turkish government was this, "Your military presence in Iraq must be brief, or Turkey risks destabilizing Iraq and possibly the entire region."

- Wait till' next year: Golden Gophers hoop lost on the road to 19th ranked Purdue last night. Unless they win their next three, which includes a road trip to Indiana, they have no shot at the tourney this year. I don't think they have the horses to beat the Hoosiers away from Williams Arena, but Tubby Smith has given me hope for the future. We all know what Red said about hope in The Shawshank Redemption.

- Latest video game addiction: Burnout Paradise has all the excellent free environment driving of the Grand Theft Auto games without the post hooker killing guilt. Word to the wise; try not to get into your car right after playing. I'm told that most law enforcement agencies (and insurance agents) frown on jumping your car off of parking garages.

Same Team! Same Team!

2008-02-19T14:14:00.017-05:00

By now, most of the really interesting stories regarding the Democratic nominating race have been thoroughly analyzed, dissected, re-examined, picked clean, and been left in a ditch to be gnawed at occasionally by journalists that have run out of things to say about a beagle winning the Westminster Dog Show. The 'new and interesting' stories receiving prominent placement in political media center on Barrack Obama's plagiarism of a politician that gave him public permission to use his words and an argument over the number of ideal debates in this election cycle being twenty or twenty-one. It's fair to say that political reporters should either get lost or provide some meaningful analysis of the positions proposed by the candidates in question.

Obviously I am not a political reporter. I am a blogger, and an undisciplined one at that. I'm allowed rant and rave. I can re-visit political discussions long since settled for no other reason than I feel like it. I'm allowed to swear. Fuck. A real journalist, or even a relatively respectable blogger would never have been able to do that, and I just did it for no reason at all. I'll do it again, because it's the word that keeps popping into my head when I start to ponder this election at any length. Fuck.

Not to long ago, everyone believed that the Democratic nomination was going to be decided by Iowa and New Hampshire. Maybe if we were really lucky, the whole thing wouldn't be wrapped up until South Carolina. This was seen as a bad thing. 'Why, O why do we not let the voices of all Democrats be heard!?!' was the cry of teachers in Wisconsin and pipe-fitters in Ohio. It turns out that there was an exceedingly good reason for keeping decision making powers out of the hands of rank and file democrats. We're fucking idiots.

The field of potential Democratic nominees, with the exception of Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich, was one of the deepest in recent history. From this field of foreign policy experts, democratic populists, and immensely qualified former senior executives we have narrowed it down to the least experienced candidate and least electable candidate we could find. In addition, we've split the vote for these two right down the middle, all but ensuring an ugly nomination and groups of dispirited partisans among the losing candidate's supporters.

Don't take this the wrong way, I'm all about Obama, and up until about two weeks ago I would have happily cast a vote for Clinton against John McCain. But in the last few weeks I've begun to understand why my father, who has been a staunch Democrat his entire life, maintained such disdain for the Clintons. I was not a political animal in college. This ambivalence was partially due the unflagging national prosperity that at the time I viewed as an accepted fact of American life, but mostly I was just blind drunk a lot of the time in college.

In any case, I never internalized the evidence of the Clintons' less appealing political personality traits during Bill Clinton's Presidency. But when the Clinton campaign began to make noises about seating the banned delegations from Florida and Michigan, my perception of Hilary Clinton as a good second choice began to flag. Stories have begun to leak out of her campaign hinting that Clinton plans to sway pledged Obama delegates to her side, should either candidate fail to win the necessary votes for nomination.

We're not talking about the oft-publicized super delegates here. If this thing is close, she means to ignore voters and attempt to convince elected delegates to join the dark side.

I want my nominee to be tough enough to stand up to Republicans in the general election. What I don't want is a nominee acting like 'That Guy' in a game of pick-up basketball, so focused on personal glory that he (or she) throws elbows at his own teammates underneath the basket.

Today in class we're going to watch a movie

2008-02-06T13:28:00.000-05:00

When I began posting to this blog after a long hiatus, I mentioned that I was going spend a little time discussing something that's almost guaranteed to cause all but three readers to instantly click away, namely my love of video games.

During the winter months, which are admittedly not as long in the Mid-Atlantic as they were in Minneapolis, I spend a fair amount of time locked away from the harsh elements staring at the glowing-warming-loving-glowingness of my big screen TV while furiously clicking my PS3 controller.

Allow me to clarify my meaning when I use the phrase "a fair amount of time". If I'm not at work, or at the gym, and it's cold and/or rainy outside, I'm probably nerding out with a video game. I read books and watch movies, but this is mostly a cover to prevent my roommates from having me committed to some kind of video game detox facility. This is what happens when all of your hobbies rely on warm weather. I'm lucky that two or three weekends a month are dedicated to visits with Miss Viking.

In any case, I was all set to bore you with a review (for lack of a better word) of one of the games I've been playing recently, Call of Duty 4. Fortunately for you, my favorite game journalist posted a short video review, so you get to watch that instead. Even if you don't play video games, he's still funny, if only for his accent.

Super Tuesday Haiku

2008-02-05T14:40:00.000-05:00

Obama? Clinton?
Noteworthy either way, but
At least Mitt is through

New Music Thursday

2008-01-31T11:27:00.000-05:00

I'm absorbing Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut right now, and it's a pretty good one.

Vampire Weekend is an indie-pop outfit that stands out from the crowd by incorporating afro-pop influences into their songs. My knowledge of afro-pop is limited to what I pick up when I'm dancing badly while heavily inebriated at Ghana Cafe, so I can't tell you how authentic (if that sort of thing is important to you) their interpretation of the genre is, but it's something I haven't heard before. Different is good, as long as you know your way around your instruments, and these guys seem to.

Vampire Weekend has been getting a fair amount of buzz around the internets and from media like the Village Voice, and the reviews have been pretty positive. I've seen an occasional gripe about the background of the band, being white guys from Columbia University playing afro-pop influenced music, but I'm not sure what that those kind of class and race distinctions have to do with whether the band is any good or not. If you're the kind of person who couldn't respect the Strokes because their lead singer was filthy rich, you might not like Vampire Weekend. You might also be an ass.

Vampire Weekend write a lot of songs about the east coast elite. 'One (Blake's got a new face)', seems to be about a face lift. I haven't decided if the intent is to be tongue in cheek, if the songs are an indictment of the upper crust, or if Vampire Weekend is just being goofy. Really, I don't care. The songs are fun, accessible, and will sound even better when it starts to get warm outside. I can tell already that this album will be in heavy rotation at my backyard cookouts this summer.

You can listen to a few of their songs on their website, but the in my opinion the best of the album isn't available for streaming on the site. If those appeal to you at all, you should know that the rest are even better.

F.U.F.F.

2008-01-25T12:15:00.000-05:00

Bald guys named Curly, flight attendants afraid of flying, and rain on your wedding day. These are all examples of irony. To this list I add one more. I am the manager of an IT development project and I have a “Fucked Up Force Field.” My job is to build software. My hobby is to break technology.

My office- mate coined the acronym F.U.F.F. to describe my uncanny ability to destroy, through the sheer force of my physical proximity, numerous and varied types of electronic devices. In the past two years I have wrought the following damage upon computers entrusted to my care by my company and our clients:

- crashed operating system requiring a day of down time for re-installation by IT guy (2)

- corrupted hard drive, requiring replacement and data recovery (2)

- faulty power supply requiring replacement (1)

That’s just the stuff at work. In the same timeframe my home computer has had a power supply die and a primary heat sink fail. I didn’t know that a heat sink could break. It’s a big piece of copper alloy that conducts heat away from the more delicate parts of the computer. There shouldn’t be any moving part to stop working. But it did. It stopped. And as a result I was without home internet access for a whole week.

It’s not like I spend my days surfing virus laden porn sites. Well, not from my work computer anyway. I don’t have any strange modifications to my home computer. I don’t over-clock the processors. I don’t usually perform percussive maintenance if something small goes wrong. I just use my computer as any normal, moderately tech savvy person would and my aura kills it.

I’ve recorded this effect on non-computer devices as well. This week my iPod battery stopped holding a charge for more than 30 seconds, the display on my cell phone went black, and the fan in my home computer began to rattle ominously. Taken separately these events don’t indicate a mystical power emanating from my person, but I think that most people would agree that 10 confirmed F.U.F.F related events in less than 24 months constitutes a pattern.

Some people in my situation would renounce technology, move to a cabin in Wyoming, and live a life of seclusion where their powers would not devastate the technology our culture relies on. But not me. I’m a bad person. I’ve concluded that I’m a kind of technopath with the ability to obliterate electrical devices. So far, I’ve been unable to successfully control this ability, to make it bend to my will, but I’m convinced that with time and practice I can harness this ability to be a force for evil.

So, if you’d like to go ahead and place an early request for my services, please comment on this post. I’m sure that after I’ve had a successful test, my abilities will be in high demand. I’m available to destroy your boss’s hard drive, nuke the iPod of the annoying co-worker that doesn’t understand the concept of volume control, or to fry your big screen TV one week before your warranty expires, forcing Best Buy to provide you a shiny new one.

I’m also available for birthday parties.

One of the dull posts I promised

2008-01-21T13:50:00.001-05:00

Georgetown. You know it. You loathe it. Or you do if you live in DC and you're anything like me.

For those of you that don't live in Our Nation's Capital, Georgetown is a self-important, extremely affluent, suburb-like neighborhood within the borders of DC proper. For my Minneapolis readers: Imagine that you took the least diverse and most snobbish sections of Minnetonka and Edina, smashed them together, kicked out the black people (both of them), and then installed picturesque row-houses and high end East Coast retail boutiques. You would be well on your way to having a reasonable facsimile of Georgetown. You'd need to find yourself a few self-important young republicans to populate the bars on the weekends and maybe a 'famous for D.C.' politician and/or pundit to spice up your trendy eateries, but those are minor details.

I don't spend much time in Georgetown. You can't get there via the Metro, so I rarely frequent the pubs. The shops are too expensive for a man of my modest income, and the parking is downright terrifying on the weekends. Georgetown is Washington, D.C. for people that don't actually like cities. Put another way, Times Square is to New York City as Georgetown is to Washington. You should probably see both the first time you make a trip to their respective cities, but nobody with any knowledge of either place goes there without a really good excuse.

There are two acceptable reasons for entering the homogeneous confines of G-Town.

1) There are a couple of really exceptional bars that have some of the best views of any beer garden in the city. The view of the rowing shells on the Potomac and the Kennedy center combine, along with your proximity to the infamous Watergate hotel, to help you almost forget about the colossal douche bags jabbering away at the table next to you.

2) Georgetown is one of the best neighborhoods in DC when it comes to good restaurants. Not much you can do about that. Gourmet cooking tends to stay as close as it can to wealthy neighborhoods.

From time to time Miss Viking and I like to pretend that we're respectable adults. This only occurs a few times a year, but one of the recurring triggers for these bouts of respectability is the bi-annual DC Restaurant Week. Twice a year the best chefs in the city open their doors to the unwashed masses. For $30 bucks a head, you are treated to a three course dinner in some of the nicer settings in American dining.

It's not unlike allowing the caddies their 15 minutes a summer in the country club pool, and Miss Viking and I never miss it. So this Saturday I ventured to Georgetown for dinner. We had 7:30 reservations at Agraria which, according to the website, is "owned by and sources the highest quality products from family farmers across the country." I have no idea what that means, but they had a picture of a combine and a barn near the hostess station. I didn't know you could be trendy and still call on the symbolism of the dying family farm, but they give it a shot at Agraria. I kept expecting to hear LCD Sound System do a cover of 'Our Country'.

Since this post is ostensibly about dinner I should probably say something about the food. It was acceptable for what we paid, which was more than we should have for a Restaurant Week meal (more on that in the next paragraph). The mussels were very good and so was the pumpkin pie cheesecake. Everything else was only acceptable for the price, assuming that we had paid full price. Miss Viking's rockfish was pretty tasty, but the portion was very small. My desert was uninspiring. If you're going to price out your chocolate cake at more than it costs for me to see a movie, it should be better than average.

My main problem is that when I'm eating at these upper crust places during Restaurant Week, I always forget that while the meal may be coming to me at a reduced price, the booze is not. Miss Viking and I have before dinner cocktails, several glasses of wine with dinner, and some port or Irish coffee with dessert, and somehow I'm still mystified by my $180 check. Mental note; just because I'm only spending $60 on food that should cost well over $100 doesn't mean that I have to buy the 20 year old Port. No matter how good it tastes.

Huck Off Mike

2008-01-18T15:16:00.000-05:00

If someone of the disposition to read this blog is following the Republican primaries, I suspect they are doing so in much the same way I do. You sit transfixed in front of you laptop or television and absorb reports of ongoing Republican campaigns with a combination of glee, terror, and stark disbelief.

Glee for the continuing implosion of the Republican party, terror at the prospect that one of these half-wit demagogues might have a chance at the presidency, and disbelief that the country at large has not shouted candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee off of the national stage.

I’m not going to get started on Giuliani other than to ask a simple question. If I happen to be standing next to my house when it goes up in flames, does that qualify me to be a fire-chief?

Today I want to focus on Mike Huckabee, who is apparently in favor of turning the United States into a theocracy. Huck is against same-sex marriage and legal abortions. No surprise there. He’s a Republican and that’s their bread and butter. The surprise is how he justifies amending the Constitution to outlaw these acts. Huckabee said at a recent campaign event in Michigan:

"What we need to do," he said, "is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than trying to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family…it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God."

I’m no expert, but I’m not sure that basing public policy on the living word of God is the best way to go. First of all, who gets to be the arbiter of what the living word of God is? Second, God’s views on the flat tax and free markets have been shown to be highly suspect by a number of reputable economists.

Huckabee's a southern preacher, and he’s got a distinct set of policy ideas, which is fine. The problem is that he has no sound and rational argument for why outlawing same-sex marriage and abortion is sound public policy. He can’t tell people why this will make America a better place. ‘God says so’ stopped being a solid basis for democratic decision making a long time ago. If he can’t summon something more than an arbitrary moral compass to justify his platform, then he needs to go away.

And I think he will. The U.S. is still predominantly a Christian country, but no Christians I know embrace the kind of evangelical governance that Huck supports. While I may not be a Christian, the Christians I know (and who are probably reading this now) have too much decency and too much respect for their God to use him as a political lever and a thinly veiled excuse for bigotry. Outside of a few misguided folk that vote heavily in Republican primaries and are badly in need of a dentist and some diversity training, people of faith don’t go in for this kind of crap.

I for one would love to see Huckabee get the nomination. He might learn something about mainstream Christianity while he was getting beat like a gong.

Belated Favorite Albums of 2007

2008-01-14T12:53:00.000-05:00

Because everyone likes top ten lists.

10) Field Music: ‘Tones of Town’ – Unlike most of the music I have in heavy rotation. This album feels like it was made during a different era.

9) The Shins: ‘Wincing the Night Away' – Sounds very different than their previous stuff.

8) Les Savy Fav: ‘Let’s Stay Friends’ – This is the first time I’ve listened to one of their albums from start to finish. I’m still not sure how to pronounce their name, but I can’t stop listening to ‘Rage in the Plague Age’. Any RenFest geeks out there reading this will appreciate it. You know who you are.

7) White Rabbits: ‘Fort Nightly’ – A little bleak, but the unusual hooks…uh…hook me.

6) Arctic Monkeys: ‘Favourite Worst Nightmare’ – I never got caught up in the buzz of their first album, but this record is really catchy. Best line: ‘You used to get it in your fishnets/now you only get it in your night dress’.

5) Radiohead: ‘In Rainbows’ – Me and everyone else on the planet that likes music.

4) The Arcade Fire: ‘Neon Bible’ – Many people thought this was a letdown after their debut album. I actually enjoyed it more. Shows what I know.

3) Okkervil River: ‘The Stage Names’ – Their ballads don’t lose me nearly as much as they did on ‘Black Sheep Boy’ and the rockers display a level of emotion that many indie bands are too cool for.

2) Spoon: ‘Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga’ – Did I like this more than The National? It’s close, but I’m not serious enough to spend a lot of time nitpicking two albums I loved. ‘The Underdog’ was the best pop song I heard this year.

1) The National: ‘Boxer’ – This is one of those soundtrack records. Whenever I’m listening to it when I get off the metro, I feel like I’m in the middle of a city montage scene. Gets a ridiculous amount of play for a record that doesn’t have an upbeat or really rocking track on it. Does this mean I'm becoming melancholy?

Every time I think I'm out...

2008-01-11T09:07:00.000-05:00

I was all set for this little project to die a slow death, not having posted anything in about 4 months. But I had a conversation with a friend from Minneapolis last week and he informed me that there are a few people back home that are wondering if I was ever going to post something here.

I’ve come to the realization that I was only writing when I could say something I thought was going to be interesting to people that didn’t know me in real life. I found that the subjects I was writing about were getting a little deeper than I’d intended. That was never the intent of writing this blog.

I started posting here as a way to keep in touch with my close friends spread out all over the country. After I’d been doing this for a while and realized that the people reading this were not limited to buddies from college, I changed the way I approached writing.

I’m going to start writing here again, but I’m going to approach it with the mindset of letting people I already know what I’m up to. I’ll still comment on politics and music, because that’s what I’m into, but expect to see more than a few posts dedicated to more mundane life events; like where I went for restaurant week or which video games I’m playing when I’m avoiding the freezing rain we get in DC instead of a good healthy snowfall.

An image from the past

2007-09-27T12:08:00.001-04:00

Something very similar to Tiananmen Square is on the verge of happening in Burma right now. I thought this image was timely.

An open letter to the DC metro area

2007-09-10T10:03:00.001-04:00

Dear City,

Maybe it was the mid-summer heat and humidity on a September morning. Or it could have been a combined hangover from drinking too many opening day beers while watching the Redskins squeak out a win against a mediocre Dolphins team yesterday. Whatever the cause, everyone in DC metro area seems to have a major case of the Oscar the Grouches this morning. Bad vibes were coming off everyone I passed. I saw people screaming out their windows at other motorists on two separate occasions before I made it to the Beltway on the way to work this morning. This is not the karmic beginning I was hoping for this week and I’d appreciate it if everyone could take a collective step back before I find myself in a bar during lunch, drinking away the city’s communal orneriness and lamenting the fact that half of my fantasy football team was injured this weekend.

Thanks,

Viking

Remember when I said I was tired of election stuff? I lied

2007-09-07T14:33:00.000-04:00

I'm still not sure how he's able to run on what happened in NYC on 9-11.

Be careful if you have a wide stance

2007-08-30T09:16:00.000-04:00

I'm no great fan of our national elected officials, the Republican brand in particular, so the travails of Senator Larry Craig would normally inspire a healthy amount of schadenfreude. It's not that I enjoy the thought of homosexuals getting busted for being gay, quite the opposite in fact. If you want to cruise the picturesque bathrooms of the Lindbergh Terminal in Minneapolis or Union Station in D.C., I believe that is you god given right.

You probably shouldn't actually be copulating in there, though. I don't want to hear it while I'm trying to use the bathroom with out touching any fixtures, and copulation participants should be concerned with the cleanliness of the floors in addition to the cleanliness of their partners.

But whatever. Where you're going at it with another consenting adult is not really the point here. I'm more concerned with the fact that Senator Craig runs with a gang that's bread and butter is carrying around a big sign that reads 'God Hates Homos.' When your campaign contributions and votes come from the same sort of people that beat Matthew Shepard to death, you don't get to hang out in the 'gay' bathroom at the Minneapolis airport without someone calling hypocrite on you.

My first reaction to another Republican Senator engaging in behavior that was clearly gay while stridently declaring that he was as straight as the Marlboro man was to realize that Freud was right about a couple of things. But after the initial joy over another conservative hypocrite getting caught trying to bash gays in bathrooms in between bashing gays in the Senate I had a realization. This guy didn't really do anything wrong. Unless I'm drastically misinterpreting the available information, Craig didn't even get to the good parts of this Slate article before he was arrested.

Craig was arrested for tapping his foot underneath a bathroom stall. To my knowledge he didn't offer anyone money. He wasn't actually engaging in a sexual act when he was busted by an undercover cop.

According to USA Today's account of the police report, "At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot. ... Craig then proceeded to swipe his hand under the stall divider several times."

Can they really bust someone for that? Swiping his hand underneath his bathroom stall? What if he was just out of toilet paper? Can't somebody spare a square for Senator Craig?

I'm far too lazy to look up the actual statute that supports this charge, but unless he actually 'presents' himself, as Christopher Bean of Slate so eloquently put it, this really isn't much different than the time I made kissing gestures at the cute girl sitting next to me in traffic.

So instead of doing cartwheels over another member joining the 'Mark Foley Club for Sexually Hypocritical Legislators' people should be considering the fact that you can get arrested for taping your foot in the bathroom.

Think about that the next time you've got a song stuck in your head and nature calls.

Random thoughts with some guy that isn't Jack Handy

2007-08-21T22:16:00.000-04:00

- August. Everyone that has enough pull to get out of the city for the month does so. I'm still in DC, so that tells you everything you need to know about my social station.

- Digging the new Spoon album as well as the new Okkervil River. I'm listening to Challengers (the new The New Pornographers wouldn't have made any sense) as I write this. Maybe it's a grower, but my initial response is 'meh'. Neko Case is still hot, though.

- I've spent entirely too much time analyzing my draft strategy for the upcoming fantasy football season. My justification is that the Vikings are going to be so awful that if I want to watch the NFL this year, I'm going to need someone other than Minnesota to root for. This really requires its own post, but I don't have the stomach to analyze the craptactitude that is the Vikes squad this year.

- At least the Twins had a good year. What? Damn.

- I can't deal with anymore primary election analysis for a while. Let's just give it to Dodd and call it a day. This is what I'm reading instead of CNN. Say what you will about the importance of informed citizenship, but right now I'd rather look at pictures of Jessica Biel.

I hate it when I'm right

2007-07-24T15:00:00.000-04:00

Told you so.

YouTube debate to change Presidential Politics...or not

2007-07-23T15:54:00.000-04:00

Tonight the contenders for the Democratic Presidential nomination will participate in a nationally televised debate co-sponsored by CNN and YouTube. The questions to be answered by the candidates will be submitted via YouTube video clips. This new wrinkle has been generating some publicity on mainstream news sites, but I’m not convinced that this new approach is more than a gimmick that has been latched onto by a press corps already bored with a marathon primary campaign.

On the surface, generating questions from the YouTube community seems like a great idea. The American electoral process could certainly benefit from additional public interest, however it’s generated, and this format might motivate individuals that would not normally pay attention to an early primary debate to tune in. But are people interested enough in the YouTube brand to turn on a debate? I clicked over to the YouTube homepage and was surprised by how little promotion for the event I saw. I expected a banner ad to be plastered across the page, highlighting the key role YouTube was playing in the American electoral process. Instead I found a small sidebar ad, halfway down the page. It was below an ad 4 times its own size, asking users to create a ketchup ad for Heinz. The lack of advertising on the YouTube sight may not matter, as on-site advertising is probably unimportant to the live viewership numbers. I have a suspicion that the type of person that is likely to be attracted to an event by YouTube sponsorship is just as likely to avoid the televised debate and watch short outtakes on the site.

Aside from what effect the YouTube tie-in may or may not have on public interest, another issue with this format is the inability to ask follow-up questions. Any candidate that has ascended to this level of politics, with the possible exception of Chris Dodd, will be prepared for any of the canned questions offered in a debate. The only time most candidates show anything approaching candor is when answering a follow-up question after they’ve already expended their talking points. Removing the circumstances that force candidates to express actual opinions reduces the debate to little mare than kabuki, which is what some people already see them as.

The implied benefit of publicly produced video questions is that the questions may be more likely to address what are seen as valid issues instead of lobbing softball questions that candidates can easily dance around without ever answering. Whether or not candidates have a say in which questions are finally aired, these videos will be just as carefully selected as any other debate questions. Whether generated by e-mail or the League of Women Voters, these questions aren’t going to suddenly reflect the national tone. Real spontaneity and candor is not going to be achieved in these debates, and video taped questions are not going to change that.

Creative questions from the YouTube community might make for more watchable television, which won’t hurt the effectiveness of the debates in the long run, and the use of video may provide some added emotion or context that could elicit a more honest response. Both of these consequences of YouTube generated questions would be positive, but the likelihood of their occurrence is doubtful at best.

There are, however, two cases in which the YouTube debate could make an impact on this race. If some image from one of the videos goes viral it could draw attention to a particular issue, or to the race as a whole. In one previewed video a woman suffering through cancer treatment is asking a question pertaining to the health care system and removes her wig to reveal a completely bald head. If an image like this gets stuck in the collective consciousness then people will remember the YouTube debate as having an effect on the 2008 elections. This seems like a real possibility to me. I can foresee someone that submitted a particularly clever or eye catching video getting 15 minutes of internet fame and parlaying that into some real focus on their issue during the campaign.

There is another, more entertaining, possibility. Amateur video can be a tricky medium to analyze. I wouldn’t want to be the censor scouring these images for something truly subversive. The possibility that some enterprising auteur sneaks in the web address for Nader 08’, or a site devoted to sheep porn is pretty real. Something offensive could sneak through based solely on how sheltered some of the censors might be. I for one would love to see Hilary Clinton try to answer a question about immigration reform that was asked by someone standing in a room full of obscure bondage paraphernalia.

I Ran From Cheney (a play in one act)

2007-07-20T14:01:00.000-04:00

The setting: The Iranian presidential palace after the publication of this article. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sits behind his desk, working on a crossword puzzle. The Iranian Minister of Defense enters. He is obviously agitated, as evidenced by his disheveled appearance. His tie is loosened and his his beard looks as if it has been the victim of a very recent nervous tugging.

Minister of Defense: Your magnificent excellency, I must speak to you.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: What is a 4 letter word for 'erogenous zone'?

MD: Nose?

Mahmoud: Hmmm. Writes in his crossword.

MD: Sir, I'm sorry to interrupt your daily crossword, but I have some important news.

Mahmoud: Really? Do you have an advance copy of the new Harry Potter? I really can't wait to find out who dies.

MD: No sir, this isn't good news. I have some information about President Bush. He's going to be undergoing a medical procedure on Saturday. A doctor is going to insert a camera into his anus.

Mahmoud: I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere about WMD, but I fail to see how this is bad news.

MD: Bush is going to exercise the 25th amendment.

Mahmoud: Is that the one that repeals prohibition?

MD: No. It's....

Mahmoud: Oh! Oh! Is that the one that limits marriage to one man and one woman?!? I've been studying the U.S. Constitution, I think I know this one.

MD: No sir.

Mahmoud: Alright. I give up. What does this one do?

MD: This is the one that modified the details of Presidential succession.

Mahmoud: I'm not sure I follow. Every idiot knows that Bush is not a very successful president.

MD: Your wonderful awesomeness of presidency, this is the one that says Bush can temporarily abdicate his authority as the Chief Executive.

Mahmoud: I'm sorry. You're not making any sense. What does that mean exactly?

MD: Bush is giving his Vice President temporary power over the Office of the President. Dick Cheney will be President of the United States for 2 hours tomorrow.

Mahmoud: Shit.

Making Spoons

2007-07-19T12:04:00.000-04:00

I've been digging on the new Spoon album, "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga". Sure, the title could probably use some help, but the songs are nice. The album is good on first listen, bordering on great if you give it some time sink in.

"The Underdog" is the first single, and primary songwriter/lead singer Britt Daniels described it in an Onion AV Club interview as a Van Morrison song. I like it because I don't hear many good pop/rock songs that use horns without giving me the impression that band put the horn line into the song just so they could have a song with horns.

You should watch the video too, if for no other reason than I need someone to explain to me how the song relates to the video.

Bonus Material:

This story is probably familiar to any DC readers, but I had to throw it in for my friends back home in Minneapolis. People like this exist where I live.

What I did on summer vacation

2007-07-13T12:42:00.000-04:00

I’ve been on the East Coast for three years now, and until last week I had never made the trip to New York City. This was not a deliberate choice, and I always meant to make the trip, but something always seemed to prevent it. Last week an event I couldn’t pass up was taking place in New York on July 4^th. The Minnesota Twins were playing in Yankee stadium, and Johan Santana was pitching. I had to go.

Day 1

Because of a lack of vacation days, Miss Viking and I only had time for a two day trip. We took the train up early on the 4^th. Rail is the only way to travel. I’ll admit that the lack of security on ‘The Vermonter’ made me a little nervous, but the train was more spacious, cheaper, and far more relaxing than a plane. If you factor in the amount of time you spend on tertiary tasks when you fly (getting through security, getting a cab at the airport, etc…) the train is almost as fast door-to-destination if you’re going to Manhattan. Also, the airplane doesn’t give you picturesque views of lovely Wilmington and the backside of Baltimore, so you’re missing that piece of Americana when you fly. What better way to celebrate the birth of the nation than riding a train past images of stereotypical urban decay? To be honest, there was some nice scenery in parts of Delaware, but there’s more than one reason people don’t want to live near train tracks.

We made it into town with just enough time to check into our hotel and hop on the train to Yankee Stadium. First impressions of New York - not nearly as overwhelming as I’d been expecting and the people were more polite and approachable than I’d anticipated. Granted, I was only in town for two days, but my sense is that most New Yorkers are less prickly than your average Washingtonian. As long as I wasn’t doing something really stupid like asking which street I was on while standing in front of a sign, everyone I approached was helpful without making me feel like an idiotic tourist. This worked out nicely for me, because on several occasions I had trouble determining if an approaching train was uptown or downtown bound.

The trip to Yankee Stadium is one that every baseball fan should make if they have the chance. While the park didn’t inspire the type of awe that it obviously does in some Yankee fellaters like Billy Crystal or Bob Costas, I was constantly aware of how much baseball history was inextricably linked to the field below me. I kept imagining Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle running down fly balls in center field, and when Lou Gerhig’s ‘Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth’ speech played on the jumbotron during the 7^th inning stretch it gave me a neck tingle.

For most of the game it looked like rain, but we didn’t get wet. The Twins managed a win, and Santana pitched solidly, if un-spectacularly. Miss Viking and I had a few beers in one of the Bronx pubs while waiting for the crowds to disperse enough to get aboard a train without having to trip children and shove the elderly. Miss Viking looks down on these activities as a legitimate past time.

After stopping in the hotel to wash up after the game, we enjoyed a fantastic dinner at a little Italian place in TriBeCa that was recommended by a friend. Like much of the rest of the city, the restaurant was sparsely populated because of the holiday, and for most of our meal we had the upstairs dining room to ourselves. The entrees were only very good, but the pasta course we shared and the cheesecake I had for dessert were ridiculously delicious. As you might expect, a multi-course meal with the amount of wine Miss Viking and I can drink during an extended meal was quite expensive in New York, but it was well worth it. After our long day, a giant meal, and the usual amount of wine for a Wednesday, we cabbed it back to the hotel and proceeded to crash hard. The only fireworks we saw was a brief flash between skyscrapers as the cab took us home.

Day 2

What very easily could have turned into an exercise in killing time turned out to be the better of the two days we spent in New York. Our train didn’t leave until 3:30 that day, and without a good place to leave our bags (Penn Station no longer lets you leave bags in lockers…stupid terrorists) our options for the day were limited. Since most of the museums won’t let you in with a giant duffle bag and a huge pink backpack, we decided to walk from our hotel in Mid-town East down to Penn Station.

It was a gorgeous day to trek across Manhattan. We stopped at Grand Central Station so that we could say we had seen it and then had a great breakfast at Pershing Square. It goes without saying that the people watching in New York is exceptional, and that was how we spent the morning. After finishing breakfast we walked to the New York public library. I wanted to go inside and re-create the opening scene of Ghostbusters, but we didn’t feel like hassling with our bags, so I took a picture in front of the Lions instead.

After Miss Viking resisted the urge to spend a month’s rent on all manner of smelly powders and lotions in one of the fancy boutiques on 5^th Avenue we killed the afternoon along with whatever cash was left in my wallet at an outdoor bar in Bryant Park. It was around noon when we sat down, and we had a large time sitting in the perfect summer breeze, drinking $9 beers, and watching Manhattan walk past us on its way to and from lunch.

We made a brief stop in Times Square after lunch. It was the only place in New York that gave me that sense of New York as you see it in a movie or on TV. The sheer size and color of the place is dazzling. Everything about it is over-the-top. When I first saw it, I couldn’t help but crane my neck back to see all of it like some kid from Nebraska that just fell off the turnip truck. People are swirling around you, and the noise is constant. After 5 minutes of standing there like an idiot I realized that Time Square might as well be part of Disney World. Most of the people there were tourists, gawking just like I was, and all of the eateries are hyper expensive chains that no local would ever spend money in. After realizing that I was standing in a Potemkin village for tourists, some of the shine was off Times Square, so we walked down to Penn Station and split the most expensive pastrami sandwich ever before leaving New York.

Miss Viking snored on me for most of the train ride home.

Here, read these

2007-06-26T13:01:00.000-04:00

There are times when I see an article or link that I feel like writing about, but then I realize that I'm lazy and I'm not going to have time for a lunch break. This is one of those times.

- I've only been to four of these events, and I'm ashamed to admit that the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships is not one of them. [101 things all sports fans must experience before they die] from the World Wide Leader

- Doesn't have a chance. The only thing that scares border state conservatives more than brown people is brown people with expanded labor rights. [Hitting a wall on immigration] from Salon.com

- And here I thought Hitchens was Rage Boy. [Look forward to anger] from Slate.com

- Prepare for the necropalyspse! [The Last Stand] from Free Web Arcade

- I don't really have a joke for this, but a list of all the bad things the C.I.A. was up to in 1973 is pretty sweet. Only 700 pages though? Ok, maybe a little joke. Good stuff starts on about page 5 after clicking the 'Family Jewels' link. [CIA 'Family Jewels'] link from BBC on-line

Won't someone think of the children?

2007-06-25T15:26:00.001-04:00

This Washington Post Op-Ed decrying the scare tactics of environmentalists trying to raise awareness about global warming was written by Emily Yoffe. As near as I can tell, her environmental research qualifications are limited to having written the Dear Prudence advice column for Slate.com. I had a hard time pinning down the actual opinion she is supporting, but she made the following points in her Op-Ed:

- Al Gore believes that the threat we face from global warming is very serious.
- So many people agree with Gore that according to Yoffe, "An Inconvenient Truth is going to be shown in schools...a children's television show is planned...[and] Live Earth concerts on July 7th are expected to raise millions.
- Yoffe agrees that it may be getting warmer and that changes to our environmental habits are 'commendable'.
- We shouldn't scare children by discussing these issues in the public arena or, presumably, in schools.

Alright, so the last point is technically an opinion, but she does a poor job of supporting it. Also, it's an idiotic opinion. Yoffe seems to believe that the best way to avoid terrifying kids is to pretend that whatever they are afraid of doesn't exist, or to sugarcoat the root cause of their fear to the point where they aren't afraid of it anymore. While this may be a bang-up strategy when dealing with the boogey-man, I don't think that making sure your feet are not hanging off the edge of the bed is going to keep the ice caps from melting.

Here's a novel idea, why don't we tell our kids that global warming is real and can have real consequences. That way when you spend the money for that trip to Disney World on a big screen TV you can tell the kids that you're only trying to reduce green house emissions by not flying. It's win/win. You get a TV and the kids get to believe they won't burst into flames at the park.

Since I don't own any children myself, I was wondering what all of you breeders out there thought about this. Am I wrong? Should we, in the words of W, be concerned about what are children is learning about global warming?

Music Recomendation: The Rumble Strips

2007-06-19T13:43:00.000-04:00

Sounds like: The sweet sentiment of Bishop Allen mixed with the punk rhythms of The Exploding Hearts and the poppy horns and creative keyboards of Beulah.

Makes me want to: Steal an old VW Carmengia and work it out on a curvy, tree-lined stretch of road.

I grabbed three of their free MP3s at Obscure Sound and they’ve been in heavy rotation for the last week or so.

Their first full length, Girls and Weather, hasn’t been released yet, but the freebies are great, fun, summer tracks. I can’t wait for the LP. If you like your hooks without a lot of production, you'll like The Rumble Strips.

Problem Solved

2007-06-13T15:06:00.001-04:00

While watching the only slightly over-rated “Letters from Iwo Jima” a few nights ago, I had a sudden insight about the way our government is fighting the war in Iraq. It was so simple and fair that I was amazed it hadn't been thought of already*. The U.S. government should be issuing war bonds! Instead of allowing future generations of Americans to pay for the war in Iraq (plus interest) in the form of the national debt, we should be paying for this war as we go.

The administration misses no opportunity to compare the current war to World War II, and it’s nothing short of a complete marketing blunder to miss this crucial product tie-in. Instead of patriotic Americans spending $2.99 on a yellow-ribbon car magnet to demonstrate their patriotism and support for our fighting men and women, they could purchase genuine %100 authentic U.S. War Bonds. With easy-to-manage-on-any-budget minimum denominations of $1,000, I’m sure that the %30 of the country that supports George Bush would buy as many as 6 or 7 of these things.

Consider the myriad ways that money could be spent. With $7,000 the frugal bargain hunters at the Pentagon could buy any of the following…

- 2 M-16s

- Personal Body Armor (partial set)

- 10 pairs of combat boots

- 20 MREs

- 30 gallons of gas

And so on…

I read a fairly broad cross section of news and politics, including quite a few conservative blog summaries, and it really surprises me that I haven’t seen more outcry from conservative news sources and blogs asking the federal government to issue war bonds. Of course, in order for war bonds to make fiscal sense these bonds would have to produce extremely low yields, but buyers would be investing in America and supporting the war at the same time. What god-fearing, patriotic, conservative American wouldn’t jump at the chance to do that?

So let me be the first to sound the call. We need War Bonds. Once all of the patriotic Americans like Sean Hannity, Michell Malkin, and Ann Coulter have put their money wear their mouths are, there will be no need for the President to request another supplemental funding bill.

*My apologies if some patriotic conservative is already advocating this. Is it you Ollie North? I'll be it is.

My Reader Missed Me

2007-06-11T14:00:00.000-04:00

I’m a little bit rusty here. It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, but I won’t go into some kind of self-reflective exercise about the meaning of blogging and why I haven’t written anything for a while. This whole thing is for kicks and ego and I don’t think that anyone reading takes what I write seriously enough to need or want an explanation for the absence of new content. To be honest, I haven’t written anything because I didn’t feel like it. I probably wouldn’t have ever picked this blog up again if it weren’t for a few people from Minneapolis mentioning that they still check the site to see if I’ve written anything new. It turns out that vanity is a powerful motivating force.

Right now I feel like writing, so please forgive me if I’m a bit off the mark, not having exercised my writing muscles. It turns out they atrophy, just like any other muscle group.

NCAA Basketball Haiku

2007-03-14T09:21:00.000-04:00

My bracket is done
Beer, hardwood, gambling and beer
I've got Friday off

This! Movie! Stinks!

2007-03-12T13:24:00.000-04:00

For the first time in my life, I wanted to get up and leave a film before it was over. ‘300’ is one of the worst things I have ever paid money to watch, and I saw ‘The Last Action Hero’ in the theatre. The only thing that kept me from leaving the Saturday night showing and stepping into the bar down the street was the fact that the rather larger group I ate dinner with before the show was spread out all over the theatre. At the time I deemed it too rude to shout a suggestion that they join me at the bar, but in retrospect most of the audience would probably have understood if I had run to the front of the theatre and screamed, “Guys, this is movie is horrible! Let’s go get drunk!” In fact, some people that I didn’t eat dinner with would have probably joined us in flight.

Where to start?

The acting was atrocious, but it was hard to know whether this was caused by the actors themselves or an underlying deficiency in the script. I’ve finally decided to hold the actors and the writers responsible, as there’s plenty of blame to go around. The dialogue was sophomoric, and the delivery was at turns wooden and hyperbolic with no in between. The Spartans are continuously screaming about freedom in the most clichéd manner imaginable (the queen actually says 'freedom isn't free'), but I never understood nor saw what kind of freedom they were referring to. Beyond King Leonidas telling his troops that Freedom is the reason they are going to take on all of Persia, the movie doesn’t give the viewer a single hint regarding the fabulous liberties that these men are ready to die for. As near as I can tell, the Spartan Bill of Rights consists of; The Right to Forced Military Service (at seven years of age), The Right to Ridiculously Defined Abs, The Right of Eugenic Selection, and The Right to Use Improbably Attractive, Severely Drugged Women as National Security Advisers.

The director was apparently compensating for a lack of character development or any semblance of dramatic tension when he edited the film. Slow motion cuts of Spartan warriors slaughtering Persians, elephants, rhinos, and deformed giants were used often enough to add a good 30 minutes of screen time to this clunker. Every 5 seconds of battle footage shown at regular speed was followed by about 15 seconds of over-stylized slow-motion. The secret of the Spartan warriors has been revealed. They utilized a primitive version of the flux capacitor to slow down time and carefully plan each sword stroke. This technology was lost to the ages until Keanu Reeves used it in ‘The Matrix’ to dodge bullets and seduce Carrie-Ann Moss.

I’ve read several reviews that declare the cinematography and imagery to be the single redeeming quality of this movie. These reviews are totally wrong. The redeeming feature of this movie is not its special effects, which can be found in some of the better video games currently available. No, this movie is redeemed by its progressive attitudes regarding gender roles. This movie is, to my knowledge, the first ‘major’ motion picture that somehow manages to be homoerotic and homophobic at the same time. In one representative scene, King Leonidas of the Spartans flexes his massive abs, poses to further accentuate the ludicrous leather cod-piece he is wearing, and then proceeds to tell his similarly flexing, cod-piece wearing troops that they are far manlier then the ‘boy-loving’ Athenians. How very broad minded.

The most horrible aspect of this movie is that there is a good story in there somewhere. The ‘Battle of Thermopylae’ could make for a decent war movie if a different director gave it the generic ‘Saving Private Ryan’ treatment and a little bit of subtlety. This movie, for all it's hype and billing as a revolutionary war/action movie, has the least interesting violence I've ever watched. Unfortunately, the fans of the graphic novel upon which this drek is based turned out in numbers to give this relatively low budget flick a good opening weekend. I am fully expecting to see more movies that adhere to this style of film-making which is long on cliché, CGI, and hyperbole and short on actual entertainment. The other downside is that I’m going to have to start doing a lot more sit-ups.

Top 5 things I daydream about while I’m riding the Metro

2007-03-06T12:33:00.000-05:00

5. Playing center field for the Minnesota Twins.

4. Surviving a Zombie apocalypse and being forced to flee into the ruins of the Metro system before finally enacting my plan of vengeance against the undead hoards that stole my life.

3. Going back to bed.

2. Sharing a car with Dick Cheney and stealing his metro-pass, forcing him to beg for release from the station.

1. Neko Case.

We interupt your regularly scheduled snark...

2007-03-05T13:12:00.000-05:00

For the past few weeks, Hilary Clinton has been dancing around the technicalities of whether or not she is sorry that she voted for the Iraq War Resolution. This seemingly small, press-driven, mini-scandal perfectly encapsulates why I’d vote for Jessica Simpson before I’d nominate Hilary to represent the Democrats in the 08’ election.

Hilary has made several statements that seem to hint at her regret for voting in favor of providing the President with authorization for the use of force in Iraq. But she refuses to come out and say as much. On the surface this issue is trivial hair-splitting, the equivalent of Bill Clinton defining ‘is’, and unworthy of such media attention. But if you dig a little deeper her unwillingness to apologize for something widely recognized as ill-advised hints at how far she is willing to go to protect her image of toughness.

Fact #1 - Women are perceived by many voting Americans as being the weaker sex.

Fact #2 - Democrats have been painted as soft on the issue of national defense since the Carter administration.

Fact #3 - Hilary Clinton is a woman (pretty sure, the jury is still out on the whole cyborg thing) and a Democrat (technically).

When I accepted these facts I came to the conclusion that Hilary might be more dangerous than the current President when it comes to foreign policy. Consider the following scenario; Hilary is elected and inherits the Iraq War from the previous administration. Bush obviously has no interest in leaving Iraq and being labeled as a cutter and/or runner, so whoever wins in 2008 is going to have it dropped at their feet. If it’s Hilary in the White House, she’s going to be forced to act against the better angels of her nature. It will be impossible for her to pull U.S. soldiers out of Iraq, even if it becomes obvious to everyone but Joe Lieberman that the troops need to come home. She’s simply too afraid to be painted as a weak woman and Democrat, and as a result, she’ll lack the toughness to make any kind of concession.

I can see this playing out in any number of other geographical hot spots. Despot A makes inflammatory remarks, Republican mouthpiece B says that Clinton is weak if she does nothing, first female president C overreacts and weakens the standing of U.S. in the global community. Rinse and repeat as necessary. That's why when the time comes, I'm casting my vote for the Japanese guy from Heroes.

Pharoh, let my Blogger go

2007-02-22T09:31:00.000-05:00

My favorite part about this whole thing? The hearing lasted a whopping five minutes.

Egypt really needs to get its courts under control. With the explosion of these media-circus cases that drag on for minutes and minutes, how will the Egyptian legal system find the time to bury female adulterers up to their necks in the desert and chuck rocks at them? It's a sad state of affairs.

Your Democratic Presidential Contenders: May the least worst win

2007-02-20T16:15:00.000-05:00

Here's a handy primer on the individuals that want to be your Democratic nominee for the Office of the President of the United States of America:

Joseph Biden – Senator from Delaware

Pros: Experienced legislator with strong foreign policy credentials, has been in the Presidential spotlight before (88’).

Cons: Makes a John Kerry speech seem concise and to the point. Thinks Barrack Obama is the first clean black person to become a public figure. Winning Delaware is nearly as pivotal to becoming President as carrying Alaska. Didn’t do so hot the last time ran.

Barrack Obama – Senator from Illinois

Pros: Smart, clean, also fresh. Doesn’t wear ties very often. Lack of Washington experience means that he can run as a reform candidate.

Cons: Middle name is Hussein. Lack of Washington experience might mean that he has no idea what the hell he’s doing.

John Edwards – Former Senator from North Carolina

Pros: Is the son of a mill worker or something, has experience as both a Presidential and VP candidate, has good hair.

Cons: Has been totally slacking off since 2004, spending most of his time eating cheetos and watching reruns of the West Wing on Bravo. Still curls up in a corner and weeps when he thinks of the ass kicking Cheney gave him in the 04’ VP debates. May not actually be a Kennedy.

Dennis Kucinich – Congressman from Ohio

Pros: Um…

Cons: He’s f-ing crazy.

Hilary Clinton – Senator from New York

Pros: Raised $300,000 in the time it took me to write this sentence. Her campaign will have an air of inevitability if she does well in the early primaries. Who doesn’t want to see Bubba running around the White House for four or eight years with no responsibilities and a wife too busy bombing stuff to keep track of him?

Cons: Nobody can stand her. Is having a hard time triangulating her stance on the whole Iraq War ‘thing’. May be a cyborg.

Chris Dodd – Senator from Connecticut

Pros: Isn’t Dennis Kucinich.

Cons: Connecticut is no Delaware. Eyebrows don’t match whatever the hell he has on the top of his head.

Random thoughts with some guy that isn't Jack Handy

2007-02-05T12:57:00.000-05:00

- The Super Bowl is barely over, and I’m already thinking about baseball season. The World-Wide Leader reported today that the Twins have signed Justin Morneau to a one year, $4.5 million dollar contract and Yahoo! Sports reported that the Twins are negotiating a potential contract extension with Joe Mauer. That’s the good news. The bad news? The Twins are likely to lose Torii Hunter and Johan Santana at the end of the season, sooner if the Twins are out of the pennant chase and decide to unload them for 30 cents on the dollar. I’d be amazed if they were able to keep one of them. It’s bad enough that they’ll be leaving, but I have this awful feeling that Johan will be moving down batters in pinstripes after he leaves the Twins.

- Speaking of the Super Bowl, when is the NFL going to move this thing to Saturday night? Not only would this improve the game as consumer product, it would also help the United States economically. First, you would have the increased bar revenues that would come from having people stick around the pub after the game instead of fleeing home to guzzle gallons of water and chew Excedrin. Second, you would have a tremendous increase in productivity in the workplace; fewer workers with hangovers, less idle chatter around the water cooler, fewer people squeezing one last drop of football blood from the internets on the company dime. Someone needs to make this happen. I’m looking at you, Terry Tate.

- The Senate. What a bunch of ninnies. These 100 men and women are supposed to be helping to run this country. Right now they’re arguing about whether or not they are going to possibly open debate over a non-binding resolution that may or may not express opposition to the President’s escalation of the Iraq War. Maybe if they actually craft this resolution they could deliver it to someone that has the power to act on its sentiment. If only there were are branch of government that were supposed to serve as a check on the President’s power. Someone that had the authority to somehow take action if they really disagreed with the conduct of the war. Someone that could decline to fund additional troop increases if they felt strongly enough about the matter to really stick out their collective necks. Too bad the framers of the Constitution didn’t think to create a branch of government to serve that function. My 7^th grade civics teacher was wrong. Thomas Jefferson was a moron.

- I’m digging on my new PlayStation 3. I’d write some kind of full review, but there is a limit to the level of my inner dork I’m willing to share with the general public. For now I’ll say that the pros include the wireless controller, stunning graphics on a good HD TV, and tremendous potential to introduce some creative and unique games using the system’s superior hardware. For the cons; the initial release didn’t have many great games and the near future doesn’t look any more promising. The built in WiFi is tricky to get working on certain network configurations. Also, the thing was friggin’ expensive. The cost of the system, a game, an extra wireless controller, and the HDMI cable came to more than what I paid for the motorcycle I rode in college. In addition, I’m pretty sure that its causing my electricity use to increase drastically. When I turn on the PS3 it makes a sound like a Ghostbusters proton pack heating up and the lights dim in the house. Energy efficient this sucker is not.

Cats can sense evil

2007-01-30T14:28:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link of the cat-washer in action at some kind of pet product trade show.

It's not a new clip, but it reminded me of the funniest cat story I know. Don't worry, this isn't one of those shmaltzy, heart-warming pet stories. In fact, I'm pretty sure thinking that this story is funny makes me a bad person.

My girlfriend has a down comforter with a cover on it. This cover has an opening that is easy for a cat to get into, but difficult for it to relocate once inside. I liken it to a man falling through the ice and not being able to find the hole he punched.

One bright, summer day I came strolling into my girlfriend’s bedroom. There appeared to be a cat under the comforter on the bed. It was moving slowly back and forth under the covers, as if it were looking for something under the blanket (turned out to be the exit).

Now, this cat is utterly terrified of me. My girlfriend is in school 4 hours away, so I'm at her place about once a month. Whenever this cat sees me in the house, his eyes get really big and he makes a mad dash for his hiding spot, sliding all over the place on the hardwood floors and smashing into shit as he goes. Don't see him for the rest of my stay. It's good stuff.

ANYWAY, the scairdycat is under the covers. I make some comment to the cat, calling it a dumb animal or something of the like, and he realizes that his arch enemy is in the room with him. I'm in the room, and he's trapped in a giant shopping bag, only someone has tied one end closed. Realizing the danger he is in he starts moving back and forth faster and faster to try and find the exit. Naturally, this strikes me as funny. I begin to laugh. Now that cat knows he's in real trouble. Not only is he trapped, but judging by the laughter this trap has been set by me, his nemesis.

He panics. Forgetting that the bag he is trapped in is on a bed and not the floor, he accelerates clear off the edge of the bed. The comforter slides a foot or so as he leaps clear of the mattress before it pulls him swinging back into the side of the bed with a satisfying thump. At this point, I lose it. I'm officially cackling and the cat starts going bananas, swinging from the side of the bed in the comforter cover. This is when is occurs to me that cats have claws. There is a deranged cat out of its mind in terror swinging around in the brand new cover to my girlfriend’s comforter. Fuck. So I run (still laughing) to the side of the bed to try and push the cat up onto the mattress, so it will stop shredding the cover. As soon as I put my hands underneath the cat it shoots up the side of the bed, across the mattress, and flies off into space on the other side of the bed. This is followed shortly thereafter by another thump and more hysterics on my part.

The cat hears this laughter and utters this long, low, rolling meow. If you could take the saddest loon call you've ever heard, the sound a coyote howling at the moon on the loneliest of desert nights, and mix it with the noise Lassie would make if Timmy were trapped under a bus and couldn't get his mom to understand, you would be close to the sound this cat made as it dangled helplessly from the side of the bed. Loosely translated the meow said this. "So you have defeated me, my old enemy. My will is broken. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more for ever." And he stopped moving. Completely gave up. Just sat there in a ball at the bottom of this partially shredded cover.

When my girlfriend finally came down the stairs to identify the sound of all the commotion, I was no longer laughing. I was lying on the ground about a foot from the motionless cat which was still hanging in the comforter. I was making that soundless, breathless non-noise that is all you can muster when something has completely shattered the comedy space-time continuum.

I'm not allowed to "play" with that cat anymore.

State of the Union Haiku

2007-01-23T12:43:00.000-05:00

The State of our State?
LBJ, Nixon might know,
Twenty-Eight is low

The Tom Brady Myth

2007-01-22T13:56:00.000-05:00

Let me first say that I think Tom Brady is a great quarterback. You don’t win three Super Bowls by luck. If I were going to make a list of the 5 greatest quarterbacks to play football during my lifetime it would include Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Tom Brady, John Elway, and Brett Favre. I have no issue with sports writers and fans giving Brady the praise he has earned and truly deserves. What I do take issue with is the tendency to assign him the laurels of greatness even after he has played a mediocre, or downright bad game.

I was thinking about this as Brady was preparing to take the field in the closing minutes of the classic game played last night between the Colts and Patriots. He appeared calm and ready on the sideline, taking warm-up throws in anticipation of yet another miraculous win. He looked like he knew that the Patriots were going to pull it out and I thought to myself, “He doesn’t have it this time.”

Throughout these playoffs, Tom Brady has been less than great. His combined stat line for this post-season was:

70 completions out of 119 attempts, 5 touchdowns with 4 interceptions, and a quarterback efficiency rating of 76.5.

If he would have put up those efficiency numbers during the regular season, he would have been the 19th rated quarterback in the NFL behind Jon Kitna and Eli Manning, and in front of Matt Hasslebeck and Mike Vick. While passable, those aren’t the kind of numbers that deserve praise. His previous two post season passer ratings were 92.2 and 109.4. I may have a poor understanding of how these ratings are calculated, but a drop of 20 odd points would seem to indicate to me a player having a subpar playoff run.

The Patriots won their game against the Chargers last week because they got all the bounces and their defense made plays when they had to, not because Tom Brady was a cool and calm leader. He threw a crucial interception that would have been crushing if Troy Brown hadn’t stripped the ball from the defender and given the Pats new life. Yet at the end of the day announcers and sportswriters were tripping all over themselves like Reggie Wayne, rushing to declare that Tom Brady had once again come through when it mattered. They conveniently forgot that his mistakes throughout the first three and one half quarters put the Patriots in the position of needing heroics in the first place.

Brady made a throw that was nearly identical to the Troy Brown fumbleruski to end the Patriots hopes last night. It was a forced pass over the middle that was intercepted not because the pass itself was thrown poorly, but because he made an error in judgment by throwing it at all. As with the infamous Chargers pick, Brady threw the ball into the congested middle of the field, completely misreading the coverage.

Brady is nearly deified by the sporting press in all things he does, and this shouldn’t surprise me. Many sports writers like the easy story. It takes fewer words to say, “Tom Brady won,” than it does to explain the true dynamics of what occurred on the field and why. But this slant takes enjoyment out of the game. In addition to being intellectually dishonest, this approach to sports reporting robs the game of drama and depth. So instead of the sometimes dull, sometimes transcendent true story of the game viewers are instead treated to pre-packaged montage segments with voiceover by Bob Costas. When reporters keep it simple and honest, the game can create all the necessary drama.

Last night Peyton Manning, a great quarterback that has played some poor games against the Patriots in high pressure situations, played a strong game and came through at the end of the night. If reporters took the same approach with Manning as they do with Brady in downplaying poor performances, the game would not have had nearly the dramatic impact. Then I would have to watch another segment about how the hero of the game, Peyton Manning, overcame a troubled upbringing by his NFL quarterback father to win the big game and make millions of dollars looking like a dork in MasterCard commercials.

Radio Free Tenleytown; or DRM and you, why Steve Jobs Sucks it

2006-12-29T13:04:00.000-05:00

Miss Viking gave me a great birthday present this year. Being aware of my passion for music as well as my compulsion to try and drown myself in the Sport and Health pool as a means of exercise, she bought me a water-proof mp3 player that fits on the back of my goggles. It’s a nifty little gadget. Instead of using standard ear buds to transmit sounds it utilizes smooth pads that rest on either side of my head just in front of my ears and behind my eyes. These pads conduct sound into my ear canals through my skull bones somehow, and seem to work best when there is water in my ears, i.e. when I’m swimming.

I gave the device a test run yesterday, and I’m suitably impressed. I tossed some mp3s onto my new waterproof player and put in a few thousand yards. My new toy brought me entertainment before I even entered the water. A women sitting in the deck-side hot tub noticed my ‘head phones.’ She watched my entrance into the pool with a focus that could only be explained by her obvious anticipation of my upcoming electrocution. Sadly, she was disappointed, and I went on to enjoy my music filled swim without shock. It’s amazing how much of a difference having some tunes makes on a longer swim.

Infused with a new motivation for the pool I began planning my workout play lists before I was even home. In my head I transposed likely songs with swim sets and asked myself crucial training questions such as, “should I use Bill Conti’s ‘Gonna Fly Now’ at the begging of my sprint set to get the workout started on an inspirational note, or should I save it for the tail end of a long distance swim to restore my flagging determination?” These are serious questions. What if my ‘Rage Against the Machine’ is overheard by someone sharing a lane with me? Will I be ostracized as some kind of radical? Will people realize that the politics of the music is secondary to the raw aggression that will help to fuel my workout? Will some aquatically inclined Senate staffer or CIA analyst have me put on a list populated by the kinds of people that jog while listening to Woody Guthrie and fuck to Barry Manilow?

These questions would have to wait for answering. When I returned home, a horrible truth hit me. I’ve purchased a fair chunk of my music from iTunes. I’ve always been vaguely aware of DRM and what it means, but like Nancy Reagan and every other good American I’m unable to appreciate the full impact of an abstract idea until it has direct consequences on my own life. There will be no Bill Conti swim playlists, because iTunes has gone above and beyond in protecting myself from the digital rights to the music that I purchased. For those of you unfamiliar with the way iTunes works, any song purchased from their on-line music store is playable only on an iPod. This is there way of ‘protecting musical copyright.’

I’m all in favor of protecting the rights of artists and contrary to what one might assume about my economic philosophy based on what I’ve written in the past, I’m pretty much a free market guy. I’ve never downloaded music illegally, and if a friend has a CD I enjoy I’m much more likely to purchase it myself than I am to have him rip a copy for me. But the way that Apple approaches this whole issue of digital rights gets under my skin. Apple is a corporation that has always tried to sell itself as an outsider with a conscience. They bill themselves as the thinking persons alternative to Microsoft, but they utilize many of the same sketchy business practices that made the Evil Empire the Evil Empire. There is no difference between Microsoft’s old practice of foisting Windows upon PC users and Apple forcing people to play their music on an iPod. They don’t lock iTunes music to the iPod to protect the artists. They do it so that they can keep consumers locked into the iPod in the face of planned obsolescence. When your iPod eventually dies or is no longer supported, you have little option but to purchase a new iPod unless you want to sacrifice whatever music you’ve purchased from Apple.

Until copyright laws are updated to reflect the realities of current information technology, Apple is well within its rights to act like a giant hypocrite. But they shouldn’t expect to hold onto their carefully crafted image as a ‘different kind of tech firm’ while they are doing it.

Top Albums of 2006

2006-12-18T19:45:00.000-05:00

I have absolutely no qualifications for creating a list of great music. This puts me on par with roughly %99 of so-called "music bloggers" when it comes to the ability to objectively evaluate what may or may not constitute "good" music. For the most part I think music bloggers follow the lead of a few influential websites (Pitchfork Effect anyone?) and a chain reaction is created from there. That being said, there are a two DC bloggers I read quite a bit that are producing some decent writing about music. One devotes quite a bit of space to music and music news, and one writes about all things local and just happens to have really good taste in music.

My list is shorter and less well researched than almost every other list you're likely to run into on the internets. If you want a more informed opinion you should really check out the two sites I mentioned.

I spend a lot of my music buying budget catching up on albums I missed in previous years because I tend to do a lot of purchasing after reading lists like this one. Not like this one per se. But other lists that are longer and are backed by better research. The point is that I don't buy that many albums the year they are released. I wait until somebody else tells me that I'm likely to enjoy a particular album and then I purchase it. This results in one of two reactions. I'm either pissed that I listened to some stupid tastemaker when I don't like a supposedly great album, or I kick myself for not having discovered a band when they were at the peak of their coolness. Why couldn't I have owned this album when casually dropping the title of the obscure gem at the end of the record would have made me sound hip and in the know? But I just can't justify buying 100 albums a year when I'm not getting paid to sit and listen to them all, so this system will just have to do.

I do get lucky with the 15 or so new albums I buy every year, so here are the 5 albums of 2006 I would take with me if I were stranded on a desert island and had the time to pack music before I was marooned. If it's too short or not informative enough or the records aren't that good, well, you get what you pay for.

1. Boys and Girls in America - The Hold Steady

Now I know how people in Jersey felt when Bruce Springsteen was coming up. These guys would be my favorite band even if they weren't singing about my hometown. It doesn't hurt that The Hold Steady makes music about places that I used to hang out, drink, and get into some of the same kind of trouble as their characters (on a greatly reduced scale). What really matters is that they can play the hell out of their instruments and they tell great stories.

Craig Finn sings a little more than he did on the previous albums, and some of the songs are more anthemic, but the basic goal seems to be the same. Create a good rock album by focusing on a very specific and detailed set of circumstances and people. It's pretty much the same old rock stories; a clairvoyant girlfriend that can handicap horse races, a love story set in the detox tent at a rock festival, and a drunken poet that tosses himself into the Mississippi River because Minnesota winters suck and his brain isn't firing on all cylinders. You know, the standard stuff.

2. The Monthly EPs - Bishop Allen

While not technically an 'album', I'm including these EPs because this is a cool idea that required more creative energy every month than some bands summon every three years. When they put out the first one of these (one 4 song EP every month for a year) I figured that the quality of the EPs would taper off or the band would simply collapse under the weight of self imposed deadlines. I didn't love every EP, they sometimes skew a little sweet for me, but there are tons of catchy sing-in-the-car songs throughout the months. My favorite EP, February, has three tracks that stand alone as great singles. People are sleeping on these guys. If they have anything left in the tank when they finish with this experiment they probably have at least one really good album in them.

Any band that can write a good song about The Battle of the Ironclads and their favorite winter coat is OK in my book.

3. Fox Confessor Brings the Flood - Neko Case

Oh Neko. Your voice makes me think impure thoughts. Come run away with me to Barbados. We will lounge by the sea and drink Magaritas while I feed you peeled grapes. You can serenade me with epic songs devoted to our love while I earn our simple living robbing tourists of their travelers checks. One day our children will wear grass skirts and play in the sand.

4. The Loon - Tapes 'n Tapes

Another band with Minneapolis roots, I caught these guys at the Black Cat on Halloween. Not only do they put on a good live show, but Josh Grier was dressed as Dave Chapelle's crackhead character.

I have no idea what half the songs are really about, but I can still feel the emotion. They sound like throwbacks without sacrificing any originality. I have a feeling their sophomore album is going to be totally awesome or utterly terrible. I have nothing rational to offer as support for that conjecture.

5. Ten Silver Drops - Secret Machines

I debated this one for a while. I almost went with The Decemberists, but I just bought that album, so I'm not sure how well it'll hold up yet. I thought about Dylan, but I've already got two bands with Minnesota roots on my list. I didn't want to be that much of a homer, and anyway, I really like this album. It wasn't all that well received critically, and I'd be surprised to see it on very many end of the year lists, but I dug it.

Honorable Mention: Modern Times by Bob Dylan, The Crane Wife by The Decemberists, and The Obliterati by Mission of Burma.

So there you have it. Poorly researched advice from some guy you shouldn't trust. Don't blame me if you buy one and don't like it.

Random thoughts with some guy that isn't Jack Handy

2006-12-17T21:19:00.000-05:00

- The Decemberists new album is pretty great. It's got a lot of the "pop for lit majors" that I liked about the last one, with something new thrown in. It took me a while to figure it out, but I think they might be channeling Pink Floyd on a couple of songs.

- Blood Diamond was a decent flick and I've always thought that Leo was a pretty good actor. Between The Departed and Blood Diamond, it's been proven once again that I'm usually right. Unless I'm not. The last ten minutes of the movie could have been left on the cutting room floor as far as I'm concerned. Hollywood sucks most of the time.

- Roamed the National Museum of Natural history this weekend. Dinosaurs are cool no matter how old you are. So are sharks in IMAX 3-D.

- Is it just me or are kickers in the NFL missing a lot more field goals this year?

- I have to admit that the National Christmas tree was impressive, even to a heathen like me. They could have toned it done just a bit, though. I'm not positive there was a tree under all those lights. And why wasn't Goldy Gopher anywhere to be found on the Minnesota tree?

- My first live hockey game in over 15 years involved a lot more Jack Daniels than the last. I don't know nearly as much about the NHL as I used to, and I still miss Neal Broten.

When Good Bands Go Bad

2006-11-28T16:48:00.000-05:00

If you’ve been consuming music for long enough, you have a few of them in your collection; albums (or whatever you call an LP of mp3s) you used to really love that have been rendered nearly un-listenable due to subsequent releases by the artist. ‘August and Everything After’ by the Counting Crows is a good example. This was one of my favorite CDs in college. It was a little depressing, but it was great rainy day music, and at the time I thought it was pretty good. I remember listening to it and thinking to myself, “Wow, these guys are going to be good, I’m excited for their next album.” Then they put out 2 crappy disks, and by the 4^th album they were so hard up for material that they covered a Joni Mitchell song. Not good.

When I listen to the album now it’s still decent, and it still reminds me of college and sitting around my room drunk and vaguely depressed after getting shot down by some girl at a party; but the memory is tainted. I can’t listen to ‘Omaha’ without thinking about ‘Hanging Around’. When I hear ‘A Murder of One’, I jam out for a minute to the last song on the album, enjoying its slightly redemptive tone after what turns out to be a pretty disheartening record. Then I think about the love theme to Shrek and I throw up a little in my mouth before I put on something by Big Head Todd and the Monsters.

Tons of artists fall apart like this, and it’s not just the sophomore slump that bands fall into when their first album is better than it has any right to be. I’m talking about records so bad that the reputation of the band is thoroughly destroyed forever; records so bad you find yourself in arguments at bars and parties defending the first record of a band that’s most recent work was the soundtrack for a movie about a CGI ogre. Liz Phair is another perfect illustration. If you have to add a disclaimer to your appreciation of an artist with, “I mean her old stuff,” that’s a pretty good sign that the career has gone of the tracks somewhere.

Why does this happen? Obviously, creating just one album that is any combination of artistically impressive, entertaining, and/or successful is extremely difficult. A let down on subsequent efforts is to be expected. But to put something great out there and follow it up with something so awful that you sully the reputation of the first seems to stretch plausibility. It’s like Tom Brady throwing 5 touchdowns one week and then suddenly playing badly enough to get cut by the Patriots the next.

I’m not sure what the underlying reasons are. I don’t know anything about creating music. I’m a consumer. My exposure to the creative process is limited to tagging along with a musician friend of mine when his band took weekend road trips to rock outposts like St. Cloud, Minnesota or Aimes, Iowa. The only two things I learned about producing rock music on these trips is that most bars in Midwestern backwater towns have shitty sound guys and it’s hard to save enough cash for studio time when you let me drink on the band’s bar tab. But even if I can’t identify the root cause that makes these artists suddenly embarrassing, I have a pretty good idea of when a band is at risk of suddenly going in the tank after putting out some good music. Bloc Party, Gnarls Barkley, I’m looking at you.

After listening to enough music, you can almost feel it when a particular band has shot their wad. I’m not saying I can identify a one hit wonder when I hear them %100 of the time, but there are certain bands that I hear and think to myself, “I hope they invested wisely.” And I’m not saying they should hang it up, either. If I could get paid to put out shitty records that traded on the excellence of my first, I’d do it in a second. I just wish I could listen to ‘Exile in Guyville’ on my iPod without feeling the need to explain that Liz Phair used to be good to any one that might glance at my display.

Side Note: The Hold Steady was excellent at the Black Cat in DC this weekend. I think the first time I saw them the band may have been a little tighter, but the second time around was definitely more fun. If they’re coming to a city near you I highly recommend taking in a show.

I don't think that's David Letterman on the phone

2006-11-14T19:09:00.000-05:00

I’m not one to spend my time scouring blogs and posting nasty comments about what somebody has taken the time to write down, and I happen to believe that there are major issues with our immigration policy that need to be addressed, but I ran across this post this evening and couldn’t in good conscience let it pass. This is an actual Top 10 list of the reasons illegal aliens are a threat to the American way of life that someone posted. I thought the blogger was joking until I got down to about reason number seven. My comments are in italics. Enjoy.

10. Proliferation of foreign flags being flown in US and in some cases
American flags being burned.

Um..huh? I didn’t realize that someone flying another flag was a threat to the U.S. We’ve managed to survive Pearl Harbor, a Civil War and American Idol. I don’t think someone with a Brazil sticker on their 83’ Civic is going to be the thing that finally topples the Republic. And most people entering the country illegally are here because America is nicer than their own country. I don’t see a lot of people getting totally pissed about the improvement in their way of life and torching the flag, but heating oil prices were pretty high last winter, so maybe there was an epidemic I missed.

09. Sacrificed goats and various other animals due to rituals being performed in Adams Morgan, etc.

There must be epidemic of goat slaughtering going on in the Morgan that I didn’t know about. That’s two epidemics I was unaware of. Maybe the immigrants needed something to cook over their pile of burning American flags. If you want to avoid this kind of barbarity while visiting Adams Morgan in the future my advice would be to skip Heaven and Hell on the weekend.

08. Ethnic fiedoms and enclaves being established in certain neighborhoods and speaking native languages and refusing to learn English.

I’m guessing that he meant to write fiefdom here. When insulting people for not knowing the language it’s a good idea to give spellcheck a quick click before hitting publish.

07. Identity theft mainly involving social security numbers.

Ok, this may be a problem, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most identity theft is perpetrated with the goal of buying a lot of crap that you haven’t paid for. Wait a minute…how can illegals afford so many goats and flags? I’m ordering a credit report right now.

06. Demeaning the institution of marriage to obtain US citizenship fraudulantly.

Sorry. The gays are already doing this. You’re stealing talking points here. Unless you’re referring to gay immigrants you have to come up with a new reason number 6.

05. Degradation of what it means to be a patriotic American and earn citizenship legally.

Point well taken. All patriotic Americans must earn their citizenship legally. Except for those Americans that were born here after we stole the country from the Indians. They don’t have to be patriotic.

04. The ability of Mexico, Latin America and other countries to ignore their responsibility to improve their economies and way of life for their poor.

I happen to agree with this one. Crap. On the bright side, these countries are just following the example set by the U.S. with regards to our poor. Except for Latin America. That isn't a country.

03. Gang-related violence and the corresponding costs to jail felons.

Like we wouldn’t have this problem without immigration issues. I saw “Boyz in the Hood” twice man, I know what’s going on in Compton.

02. Costs associated with the healthcare, and social services. etc, required for the uninsured and unemployed.

Again with scapegoating of illegal immigrants for the way we’re screwing up our own country. Cause the immigrants are the reason we spend more money than any other country for middle of the pack health care. Project much?

01. Terrorism (remember Sept 11th).

Stealing talking points again here. Set aside the fact that the 9/11 report stated that the attackers snuck in through legal loopholes, everyone knows that Saddam is the one responsible. Doy.

The Fantasy Football Question

2006-11-14T15:46:00.000-05:00

I write this at the risk of exposing myself as a gigantic nerd. Years spent carefully cultivating a self image that is equal parts brilliant cynic, drunken rogue, and passionate renaissance man are about to be flushed down the toilet. Playing fantasy football alone is not grounds for being forced to wear the Scarlet D, but the reality that I spend time thinking about the marketing and societal ramifications of fantasy football will surely out me as a capital d Dork.

While watching an NFL pre-game show several weeks ago I heard one of the studio announcers say something to the effect that people who took part in fantasy football leagues were losers. I’ve heard similar thoughts expressed on numerous occasions by ex-football players and coaches as they babble their way from cliché to cliché while they try to announce a game. Criticisms range from labeling fantasy football a distraction that takes away from the game to the oft repeated charge that it re-aligns team loyalty.

The first problem with announcers and color commentators belittling those who play fantasy football is that they are insulting their consumers. Maybe the customer isn’t always right, but I still don’t see how abusing someone for how they choose to utilize your product makes financial sense. If my ritual of folding a jumbo slice in half to create a pizza sandwich was suddenly greeted with screams of derision and open mockery, I would most certainly get my jumbo slice down the street the next time I felt the need to consume two thousand calories of dough and cheese-like substance in ninety seconds. Similarly, your average fantasy football geek is going to watch the NFL broadcast that devotes the least amount of airtime to calling him a sexless pipsqueak. It’s simple avoidance, really.

The second issue is this; why should I feel any loyalty to a professional football team? I know all about the heard mentality of man, and the desire to belong to something larger than yourself, yada, yada, yada. But why should I care about the geographical differences between the New England Patriots and the New York Jets? If I were a pure purist of the football faith, I would respect the Patriots more for their ability to win three out of four Super Bowls in the salary cap era than because I may have been born just outside of Boston (i.e. New Hampshire). And if I were a pure purist, which I am not, I would not be cursed to root for the Minnesota Vikings merely because I was born in the suburbs of Minneapolis and had the profound misfortune to have been raised on a steady diet of Bud Grant, Tommy Kramer, and Leo Lewis.

The gigantic corporations that are NFL franchises care nothing for me beyond my ability to pay for their product, nor should they. They have no loyalty to their fan base. As season tickets become more expensive than a used car, there is a noticeable lack of discussion among NFL ownership about what the skyrocketing cost of attending games does to the ability of blue collar, die hard fans in cities like Pittsburg or Cleveland to show up on Sunday to throw batteries at opposing players. Stadium seats are slowly being filled with more affluent ‘fans’, and the people who used to show up four hours early to drink beer and cook brats are having the same parties at home instead of at Heinz Field. There is nothing morally wrong with this effect and it probably reduces the amount spent on game day security and sanitation as an added benefit.

I believe in the basic principles of economics and if the forces of supply and demand dictate that a nosebleed ticket for an exciting match up between the Tennessee Titans and the Oakland Raiders is $120 plus parking and concessions, far be it from me to suggest the possibility of a federal subsidy on stadium pretzels and watered down beer; but owners shouldn’t be surprised when the fan base starts showing more loyalty to players on their fantasy roster instead of the players on the crappy home town team. Likewise, the networks shouldn’t be confused when fantasy football geeks stop watching the actual games and instead sit in front of their computer every Sunday waiting for statistics to update. Imagine it; large groups of semi-drunken men huddled around pizza crusted laptops while they anxiously await the latest download of fresh data. This is the second greatest fear of the NFL; the first greatest being that everybody goes outside and plays a pickup game of touch football. But let’s be serious here, that’s never gonna happen.

Dems win Senate: What it means for me

2006-11-09T15:51:00.000-05:00

Everybody is talking about the election and what the Democrats taking congress means for the country. Donald “Uncle Remus” Rumsfeld and his unknown knowns has been shown the door. Bush the Elder has already sent in one of his guys from the glory days of Iran-Contra to impose a little realpolitik on the Pentagon. So good stuff there, but the political landscape for the next two years is not radically different than what we would have had with a GOP congress. Don’t get me wrong, I did a little victory dance when AP announced that Webb had shown Mister Maccacca where he could put his good ole’ boy act, but not much is really going to change. Republicans are so afraid of sharing ideological ground with Dubya at this point that they were going to force him to change course on Iraq anyway, and Bush doesn’t have the political capital to do much more right now than clear brush in Crawford. So the GOP was going to hide under their collective desks for two years anyway and not do anything to antagonize the voters.

The Democrats will come in and make a show of bipartisanship. They’ll pass a few bills with GOP support. They won’t be able to get anything controversial past Bush, and they’ll be walking on eggshells. They realize that the voters have them on a pretty short leash. Once you get the electorate awake, you have to be careful what you do while they are still paying attention. So in the end, slightly better for the good guys, but no major accomplishments that the Democrats will be able to point to at the end of the day. And as long as there is someone keeping an eye on George, making sure he doesn’t have Ted Kennedy strapped to a water-board in Cheney’s basement or something like that, I’m cool with not fixing Social Security for a couple of years. Just don’t break anything worse than it already is and I’m happy.

The real change to come out of this election will be an improvement of the local bar scene. I know this sounds like a stretch, but bear with me. Roughly 35 Republican elected officials are going home to Jesusland. I don’t know too much about how these staffs are comprised but let’s assume that each of these 35 Republicans has 5 senior staff. Each of these 5 senior staffers has 5 or so assistant senior staffers and each of these underlings has 5 or so assistant-to-the-assistants, interns, admins and assorted political leaches hanging around, wasting my oxygen. So that’s 35 X 5 X 5 X 5 or 4,375 fewer Republicans. Since I have no idea what I’m talking about, let’s also assume that holding leadership of the House and Senate, along with the individual committees of these august bodies requires the services another 300 or so Republicans that will now have to hit the road. I know zip about lobbying but I’m going to assume that losing 35 seats and the majority in both the House and the Senate is going to reduce the demand for conservative-type lobbyists, also known as fuck-sticks. Let’s say that each elected official can support 5 fuck-sticks, which means that DC is now 175 fuck-sticks lighter. The mistresses and wives will probably go home too. Knock off another 50. By my completely arbitrary and almost certainly inaccurate calculations, 4,900 Republicans will be leaving the city come the end of the lame-duck session. Running a search for bars in DC on AOL’s Cityguide produces a list of 285 bars of varying quality and repute. I’ll grant you that most of the people I’m describing here would never hang out someplace like the Velvet Lounge or DC9. In fact most of them probably drink in Bethesda, but I’m making a statistically tenuous argument here and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let something like the facts stand in my way. 4,900 assholes. 285 bars. That’s 17.2 fewer assholes per bar.

What does this all mean for me? It means that on the average night out I’m much less likely to run into some self important blowhard that keeps spilling his Dewar’s and water on me. I really hate that. First of all, respect my personal space. Second of all, who orders a Dewer’s at Madam’s Organ?

17.2 per bar. That’s a lot of jerks that will be quickly removed from my life. Those three girls at the end of the bar, wearing pearls over their sweaters and talking about how feminists are ruining it for everyone and making it much tougher to get a guy to buy dinner? Gone. The dude next to me giving frat boys everywhere a bad name while he tries to decide which of the three girls at the end of the bar will be most impressed by that fact that he gets coffee for Rick Santorum? History. Mike Dewine? Totally gone, and thank god, because he always blows his cigarette ashes all over the place when he gets hammered. That’s just plain inconsiderate.

4,900. 17.2 per bar. Expelled. Re-located. I know that they’ll be replaced by similarly self-important Democrats, and while I find them only slightly less distasteful on a personal level, I tend to agree with their politics. Also, their women are a lot better looking and are a lot less likely to remind me of Katherine Harris.

Election Day Haiku

2006-11-07T13:22:00.000-05:00

Time to vote again
Can we replace all of them?
Adlai S. was right

Tore down Babylon and put in a parking lot

2006-10-26T10:57:00.000-04:00

I was in Las Vegas for a bachelor party recently and upon returning from this long weekend three truths regarding the existence of a place like Las Vegas occurred to me;

1. Las Vegas might be the city most representative of America in the U.S.

2. The “Disney-fication” of Las Vegas is changing the city into an image of how Americans expect Las Vegas to be.

3. Statements 1 and 2 are in no way opposed. In fact, they are related.

Truth #1: Las Vegas is representative of America

Tourists in Las Vegas are the physical manifestation of how Americans would act everyday if social morays and basic concern for physical well being were tossed out the window. This is not a particularly original idea, but that doesn’t make it any less true. If it were socially acceptable, most people would engage daily in the kind of hedonism that makes Las Vegas so popular. Think about it. Who doesn’t want to eat too much, drink too much, and chase a shot at the big score while being surrounded by members of the opposite sex possessing those attributes most prized in members of the opposite sex? That’s the core of the American Dream right there. Hunter Thompson knew what he was doing when he took his Easy Rider trip to Vegas.

Here’s a little anecdote that illustrates Vegas = America. One sunny afternoon in Las Vegas I found myself strolling down the strip with a friend of mine. We were more than a little drunk and since it was noon we were looking for a place to have a late breakfast. We wandered along, commenting on the strangeness of Las Vegas in full daylight and considering the hundreds of options we had for a truly exceptional brunch experience. Literally overwhelmed by the possibilities, we walked around until we became lost. Intoxicated, hungry, and disoriented, we found ourselves in front of one of the gigantic new malls that have helped to add shopping to the list of possible excesses that can be indulged in Vegas. Knowing that there was sure to be a food court inside, we went in and had cheeseburgers at Wendy’s. Bombarded by choice and excess we chose the least cosmopolitan and most familiar. If that’s not America, I’m not sure what is.

Truth 2: Because of the Disney Effect, Vegas is morphing into how people expect Vegas to be

Standing with my friend, waiting for the Las Vegas Monorail, I watched people line up to drive cars on a closed track next to the Sahara hotel. People were paying twenty dollars to take three laps around a track that was laid out in a configuration that was similar to the driver’s ed courses I’d navigated in high school. I expected to see Formula One race cars or at the very least some high end exotics, maybe a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. Instead the car that came off the line and swerved surprisingly carefully at the first turn was a new Cadillac. The next was a Pontiac roadster. I did see one or two Corvettes; but these were all cars that I could have rented by the day for little more than what people were paying to drive them slowly around a track. I saw no squealing tires, no near misses. With full coverage and the right stretch of Paradise Road, I’m fairly certain I could have pushed the performance envelope of the new STS harder than the people puttering them around the track.

So that’s what is being passed off as entertainment. Twenty dollars that could be spent on a couple of bourbons or a less-than-reputable dance, wasted on test driving your neighbor’s new car, brought to you by the same people that created the Tea Cups. Don’t get me wrong, you still have the requisite drunks and compulsive gamblers trying to experience a purist Las Vegas. But slowly and surely, Vegas is turning into a place that looks down on the guy with a beer in each hand wading through the fountains in front of the Paris Hotel.

Las Vegas has started to cater to this kind of thinking. We all think we want choice and excitement. What we really want is the familiar disguised as adventure. In Las Vegas there are dozens of really nice Holiday Inns that are disguised as the best hotel you’ve ever been in. Getting lost in the MGM Grand for two hours doesn’t mean that you are in an exciting and adventurous place; it just means that the most efficient way to keep people gambling is to make it impossible for them to leave. Most of the hotels are visually impressive based on their sheer size and the amount of neon used; they don’t really have much to offer in the way of architectural innovation. Vegas has always been about giving the people what they want, and what people want just happens to be the safe disguised as the greatest bachelor party ever.

Truth #3:

If Las Vegas = America
and
Vegas = Disney World; changing to meet expectations
then
America is slowly becoming Disney World

So not only is this kind of mentality destroying a city that used to stand for sin, drunkenness, and debauchery (all things I support 100%), its changing America into TGI Fridays. “Hey everyone, look at all the fun you should be having! Isn’t this re-creation of a small town main street in the middle of suburbia wonderful and authentic? I bet they have a suitably benign ethnic restaurant that we could frequent! Let’s go!”

But I still love Las Vegas. Where else can I wander drunkenly into a Wendy’s with a lit cigarette without being invited to leave?

Does this mean I'm not a patriot?

2006-07-12T14:42:00.000-04:00

I'm beginning to worry. I seem to have developed an affinity for football. Not the American kind. I mean the sport where the only real piece of equipment a player uses is his shoes. They call them boots.

At first I thought it was just the World Cup, something that would pass. Then I started reading the soccer articles at the world wide leader that weren't about the World Cup. I started following the local team a little closer. I located the pubs that televise Premier League Football games on the weekends, and have been trying to decide which team I should support. What does being a fan of Arsenal say about me? Will I look stupid wearing the Manchester City jersey? I purchased tickets to a game this weekend at RFK as well as a soccer video game for my playstation. I asked my roommate if he wanted to go outside and kick the soccer ball yesterday. We don't own a soccer ball.

My name is DC Viking, and I like Football, I mean Soccer. I mean Futbol.

Comcast and HBO are conspiring against me

2006-06-16T10:49:00.000-04:00

There is a plot to force me to spend evenings outside listening to the dulcet sounds of summer, to catch up on my reading, to *shudder* talk to fellow human beings. It’s bad enough that I’ve been sacrificing quality blogging time to do productive things like go to night class and swim laps after work. But now HBO and Comcast have hatched a diabolical plot to pull me off the couch when I’m finished being productive each night.

First, Comcast started gouging me on my cable bill. This is nothing new. The introductory rates that I’ve been enjoying for the last year have been expiring, causing me bill to jump a little bit every month or two. Five bucks here, ten there, another five here. It’s brilliant if you think about it. Who is going to change their viewing habits over an additional five ducats a month, especially when you split it four ways with your roommates? Nobody. You won’t change your cable package, even though you don’t need 100 extra channels at an additional twenty dollars a month. Give up Japanese Cooking East #2? Are you mad!?! It’s only costing me five bucks a month. I spend more money on dental floss!

Comcast went too far this time, however. This month my bill jumped forty dollars, and nobody has been able to properly explain why. I’ve received several thoroughly confusing explanations involving the expiration of my introductory rates, the practice of ‘billing forward a month’, and the price of tea in China. Whatever. This has nothing to with money. It has to do with the monopoly Comcast has on cable in this town. I’m fighting the man. I've made it my mission to receive a clear explanation for why my bill went up and to discover exactly what I am paying for. Thus far I have been unsuccessful. I’m pretty sure my last e-mail to Comcast, laced with sarcasm and flow charts, has caused the head of the dim witted customer service associate I have been corresponding with to explode. I expect to get nowhere with this project, and am fully prepared to spend money on DirectTV installation costs and pay the same amount monthly in order to be able to tell Comcast to take their HD digital receiver and shove it.

The second prong of this insidious campaign to put fresh air in my lungs is being launched by HBO. I’m not sure if anyone is actually watching Deadwood, but I’m addicted to it. It’s got cowboys, whores, dirt, deceit, whores, gunfights, and whores. It’s also the smartest thing I’ve seen on TV in a long time, and I don’t normally pick up a program and follow it religiously. It’s Deadwood and Lost, for me, otherwise I’m watching movies or whatever is on DiscoveryHD.

So of course HBO is canceling the story, which was envisioned as four parts, after the third season. That makes sense. Invest time and money in the enterprise. Spend three years building an audience and developing characters and setting up a story arc to climax during the fourth season…and then pull the plug on the last lap. Bastards. If HBO isn’t going to keep me off the streets, what will become of me? Will I turn to a life of crime? Will I finally call my mother? Maybe I can cancel HBO and get NetFlix instead. But HBO is only five bucks a month…

You find heroes in the strangest places

2006-05-04T11:30:00.000-04:00

By now, any blog that has any interest at all in politics has written about Stephen Colbert's incendiary speech at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. The response has been pretty much as you would expect. Most lefties are saying that it was an amazing moment of cultural importance. Most on the right are focusing on the fact that they did not consider him to be funny. I think I've made my political views pretty clear recently, so I don't feel the need to go into why I think Colbert was on the mark with his criticism of the president. I’ll say this, it takes a certain amount of testiculr fortitude to stand a few feet from the most powerful man on the face of the earth and tell him you think he’s running the country into the ground.

The most important lesson in this is that a comedian was forced to take this kind of stand. This incident has received so much attention from non-traditional media sources because there is a large segment of the population that feels that the press are not doing their jobs. Main stream media shouldn’t be an attack dog for the party not in power, but they must serve the interests of the public by questioning our elected officials. If our elected officials are not forthright, then the press must become aggressive in the search for truth. This is not about political affiliation. The timidity of the press under this administration sets a bad precedent for the next president, which is likely to be a democrat. A republic does not function properly if its citizens are not well informed, and like it or not, we rely on the press for that information.

I’ve added a link to a blog devoted to thanking Colbert, and it’s worth a look, regardless of what you think of his personal politics. Real patriotism is about questioning the people that are running our country, and it’s worthwhile to thank someone that had the guts to do so.

Zen, aquatics, and a fate worse than death

2006-05-02T10:07:00.000-04:00

I love working out at the pool on Saturday. No work related stress to burn off. No need to feel rushed. It’s just me and the water, I jump in and everything disappears. External stimulus is reduced to the sound of my arms hitting the water and the occasional bubble going past my ear as I exhale. All I can see is the black line down the center of my lane. As I cross into the area of the pool under the skylight, the world is all blinding light and reflection. When I cross back into the shade it’s cool and calm. I perform a well executed flip turn and head back up the pool again, turn and come back, turn and return. After a while my brain starts to shut down non-essential functions. I stop counting the laps. I become a perfect swimming machine. There is no past. There is no goal. All my faculties are devoted to perfecting my movement through the water and unnecessary thought ends.

On the rare occasions that I reach this Nirvana-like state; when I’m not thinking about what I’m going to have for dinner or if I have work to finish, it can take me a moment to acclimate myself when I’m done swimming. So imagine my surprise and alarm as I finished my workout one Saturday morning to the sound ‘Achy Breaky Heart’. I stood panting at the end of the pool, confused, as the warble of Billy Ray Cyrus echoed weirdly around the swimming pool.

What’s happening? Where am I? Who am I? Have I crossed over? Oh God. I’m dead. And if 90s contemporary country is playing in the afterlife… I must be in Hell. Crap. I knew I shouldn’t have eaten my roommate’s last slice of pizza. That was the final straw and now I’m stuck listening to this for the rest of eternity. I’ll bet they’re going to play Brooks and Dunn next. I hate the ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie’.

And then I glance very slowly to my right. There, in all their spandex glory, are 15 large aged women with buoyant foam tubes wrapped around their gargantuan waists. They are bobbing back and forth in the water, two lanes over from me. These monstrous women wave their arms back and forth to the beat of this satanic music. A slightly older, slightly slimmer, woman is pacing back and forth on the deck next to the pool, shouting directions at them. “Feel the burn! Work harder ladies!” OhdearGodinheavenIaminhell. It’s all I can do to stifle the screams bubbling up in my burning lungs. Oh no, the leader sees me. There are only two plastic lane dividers between me and the pack of “Whopper Demons”. Any minute now they are going to tear across the pool, beat me senseless with those foam tubes, and chew the tasty, exercised, flesh from my body while flames shoot from their eyes. NoooooOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Someone splashing the wall in the lane behind me snaps me out of it. Slowly, reality creeps back in. It’s only a water aerobics class. The music has changed to Lionel Ritchie. They’re not going to devour my delicious flesh. I’m not dead. These women are just doing as I am, getting some exercise. But they do it to Billy Ray Cyrus.

They exercise to ‘Achy Breaky Heart.’

And that’s when I realize that there are places worse than hell.

Congress will save us...GAK

2006-04-28T12:17:00.000-04:00

I’m sure this has been mentioned somewhere else on teh internets by someone better informed and more erudite than I, but our elected representatives suck it. Gas prices are increasing and oil company profits are way up, and the Senate responds with calls for a 60-day suspension of the gas tax, price fixing probes, and 100 dollar consumer rebates. Way to take the long view guys, this doesn’t reek of election year C.Y.A. at all. It’s not like we need major revision of our national energy policy or anything. No really, this isn’t the time to have that conversation.

This plan of suspending the gas tax while giving out free money has the dual selling points of increasing the deficit while doing absolutely nothing for prices at the pump. One minor drawback; I’m not so sure that the public is going to fall for it this time. Create a bazillion dollar Medicare boondoggle and we’ll look the other way, because we don’t really care that much about our sick and aged. Give the Executive Brach carte blanche to invade anyone that it wants and we’ll happily acquiesce, just as long as you provide us the most basic illusion of security. But if you let gas prices rise too much we’re going to have you drawn and quartered in the town square. We’re never going to make the connection between some of the previous policy decisions we ignored and the current state of affairs, but we’re going to be spitting mad regardless.

We’re addicted to our cheap fuel, or so the President tells me, and if we don’t get our fix we’re going to come after someone with the pitchforks and torches. We can’t get at the oil companies, what with the lack of real choice and the inability to vote with our pocketbooks, so I have a feeling that the angry villagers are going to head down a door and pay a visit to congress. It’s going to be a bad election cycle to for incumbents of every stripe, but I think that the GOP is going to wind up holding the short straw in the end. Right or not, people associate Republicans with Big Oil. And even though the Dems have been afraid to stand up to the GOP for the last 6 years, they’re probably going to benefit from all this. Americans can tolerate cowardice a lot easier than they can tolerate 4 bucks a gallon.

Previously on Lost...

2006-04-27T13:42:00.000-04:00

Is there any concept in the entertainment industry lazier than The Flashback Episode? Other than reality TV, I mean. TV producers get together and decide to wring another week of new episode ratings from material that viewers have already seen. Some people may have even seen the shows twice, if they watched the reruns during the breaks in scheduling designed to put all the new stuff on the air during sweeps. Granted, these are sad and lonely people that have neither access to the myriad of quality programming on digital cable nor the capacity to make friends and influence people.

But my point here is not to make fun of pathetic shut-ins being forced to choose between Alias re-runs and The Daytime Emmy’s, easy as that may be. I want to know how the networks get away with this. There’s no other area in life that tolerates such an egregious display of chutzpah and lack of originality. We wouldn’t stand for a novelist cutting and pasting the best parts of his previous books together and slapping a new title on it. Even the lowliest-of-the-low recording industry will deign to include one or two crappy new tracks when it inevitably puts out the oxymoron that is the Best of Coldplay album.

I know that big media corporations rely on the fact that the intelligence level of the American Public is on par with a bag of Cheetos, but this is one step too far. Do you know what would happen if I tried this at work? I’d get fired. You don’t want me to get fired, do you McFly? Do you!?!

In addition to pissing me off, the networks are treading a dangerous line with copyright infringement on this one. Pulling crap that would never be accepted in the real world is the exclusive territory of the U.S. Congress. The Senate won’t take this lying down, either. As soon as Trent Lott finishes crafting a bill calling for the construction of the world’s largest outdoor ice skating rink in downtown Jackson, he’s going to be coming after them. And if there’s one thing that big media doesn’t need, it’s a cantankerous southern senator who’s still pissed that Matlock was cancelled.

Reading Balzac, Knocking back Prozac

2006-04-25T12:09:00.000-04:00

There are times when you need to get out of the city, when the overwhelming crush of sharing a small piece of swampland with so many human beings grinds down your sense of perspective. Bear in mind, I’m a city boy and an urban dweller by nature. Walking through a crowd of pedestrians on their way to work, the dubious smell of vendor hotdogs, the noise a city makes during lunch hour; these are all things that make me glad I live in a place that allows me to rub elbows with people I don’t know.

But there are times I find myself wishing that all these idiots would just go away. I’ve come to the conclusion that sitting in traffic triggers these feelings. I’ll be rotting in a traffic jam, and I realize that I’ve spent the last 5 minutes devising suitable and horrific punishments for minor traffic infractions. Rubber-necking? That’ll get you thrown in the stocks, naked, on the corner of U Street and 14^th. Tail-gating? Your car now has a governor prohibiting you from traveling at more than 15 miles per hour. And if you don’t get out of the left lane when I come speeding up behind you on the beltway? I’m sorry sir; you’re going to be serving as the District’s ‘special’ Sunday parking officer in Logan Circle. Just remember, Jesus wants people to double park.

When my Zen abandons me, and I start harboring images of large women from Kansas getting chewed alive by serrated metal stairs while standing on the left side of the escalator, I realize that it’s probably time to get out of the city for a weekend. Luckily, Miss Viking lives in Southwest VA for grad school right now, in the mountains around Blacksburg.

The whole distance relationship thing has numerous drawbacks; wear on my car, weeks between amorous contact, high gas prices, not being able to share events that occur during between Sunday and Friday, weeks between amorous contact, traveling west on I-66 on a Friday night, and I go weeks between amorous contact. Did I mention I sometimes go 14 to 21 days without getting any? It’s true. But the upshot of Miss Viking living 4 hours away is that it provides the opportunity to get away from humanity for a couple of days.

I could feel it starting to happen last week. Maybe it was all the extra people on the Mall for the Cherry Blossoms a few weeks ago. Or it could have been the spring cold that curtailed my stress relief at the gym. Whatever the cause, I could feel a minor case of misanthropic dystopia coming on. Time to get out of dodge.

A weekend at a very big house in the country was just what the doctor ordered. A heavy dose of margaritas followed by a series of Jack Daniels taken orally. Mix in an afternoon spent outside reading Umberto Eco’s new book while watching the neighbor kids fly kites, and I forgot all about those silly fantasies involving a two-thousand pound ACME cartoon weight and the BMW Mini-Cooper that took two parking spaces last week.

I feel much better now; ready to be a productive member of urban society again. I owe it all to the majesty and wonder of the Blue Ridge Mountains and copious amounts of alcohol. Seeing my girlfriend for the first time in 11 days, 5 hours and 13 minutes might have something to do with it too, but I’m not sure if it’s a correlation or causation kinda thing.

The password is "Gilby's"

2006-04-19T14:30:00.000-04:00

Some poor misguided wanderer found my blog with the following search string: "drunker sex party".

By clicking my link on the results page they proved themselves to be thoroughly confused. Or someone that I went to college with.

In either case it’s nice to know that I rank number two on MSN's list of good ideas when a gin soaked orgy is what you're in the mood for. It's like "Eyes Wide Shut" at my place on a Saturday night; only not as good looking, way drunker, and with better dialogue.

Lessons from the weekend; Easter Edition

2006-04-17T14:54:00.000-04:00

- Don't try to travel on I-95 on a holiday weekend. I have already learned this lesson at various times, but it has been reinforced yet again. Distance from my house to Woodbridge; 35 miles. Hours of my life that I spent traveling this distance on Friday night that I will never get back; 2.

- You can encounter some scary, backwards-ass, yokels if you travel a few hours south of Washington, DC. Seen on the front of a car in Fredericksburg; a very prominent Confederate flag. Seen on the back bumper; a sticker reading "Jesus Loves You". Heritage, not hate.

- A storm hit on Saturday evening just as the Viking Family had finished striping and sanding all the wood on the boat. Being in a sailboat while dime sized hail smacks against the hull is like being inside of a giant popcorn popper.

- Not many people frequent Arby's on Easter Sunday.

Thought I should check in

2006-04-12T16:41:00.000-04:00

Work has been incredibly busy the last two weeks, so my lunch hour has been spent working instead of updating my blog or reading Bill Simmons. Things look to be calming down and hopefully I'll be able to post a little more regularly. Although I'm sure that the two readers (Thanks Nato!) that still check in semi-regularly love my publication pattern of nothing for two weeks, followed by three straight posts, followed by nothing for two weeks. I'm going with the tried and true formula Lost has been employing with its new episodes. It doesn't seem to be working as well for me.

One quick note, because I couldn't say it any better with a longer post. Neko Case as the 9:30 Club on Sunday was amazing. She is insanely talented, and it comes across two-fold during her live performance. She was surprisingly funny and unsurprisingly sexy. I think I may be in love with her. I would be in trouble, but I think Miss Viking is too.

The first day of spring

2006-03-26T16:18:00.000-05:00

The Amelia and the Ferry
Originally uploaded by Tide19_2000.

It's not officially spring until I've spent a chilly March weekend helping my Dad put his sailboat in the water, and it is now officially spring.

This isn't out boat. At this point on Saturday, she still looked like an entire flock of osprey had spent the winter in her rigging; so I took a picture of the neighbor's boat, the Charlotte Amelia, with the Merry Point Ferry crossing in the background.

I'm badly in need of a shower and a shave, but a day of work on the boat followed by a few too many drinks at a tidewater pub was sorely needed.

No more news on my lunch break

2006-03-23T15:13:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Salmon Rushdie’s new novel. It was a very good, but not great, book. Most of my book club (I know, I couldn’t be a bigger nerd if I tried), agreed that it was a fine example of its particular genre, but it wasn’t transcendent. The reason I bring it up at all is that one of the themes that Rushdie comes back to again and again in this book is the conflict between diverse cultures, and how they can be magnified when the conflict is rooted in religious difference. This is something I’ve been rolling around in my head of late, trying to get my rational head around the idea of all the different people, cultures, and religions that have to co-exist globally. Trying to apply reason to the whole thing. Trying to think about it in terms of geopolitics and human nature.

And then I read this article on my lunch break…

…and I lost my shit. Time out for all the organized religions. Not to sound like Rodney King, but can’t we all get along? If you’re so afraid of a competing idea that you want to execute the people with that idea in their head, your world view might not be built on the strongest foundation.

You say you attend a local church that does a lot of good in your community? Groovy. I volunteer at a church meal program even though my skin sizzles a little bit when I walk into the building. People with a healthy sense of perspective and common sense can have all the religion they want. But you with the clever bumper sticker explaining how %90 of the world is going to burn in hell? You can wrap your Mini Van around a 20 foot steel cross for all I care.

I hate getting fired up about this crap.

I may have to stop at a local watering hole instead of going to the pool tonight.

Lessons from the weekend, Saint NCAA Edition

2006-03-20T15:18:00.000-05:00

You should learn something new every weekend. This weekend, a weekend filled with college basketball, St. Patrick’s Day, and a visit from Miss Viking; I learned the following things.

- I know nothing about college basketball. In fact, I know less than nothing. If a green space alien crashed his flying saucer into the Earth and in the process sustained a mind liquefying injury he could still fill out an NCAA tourney bracket with more success than I did this year.

- You can go to the bar on drinking holidays and not feel the need to inflict violence on your fellow man. To expand:

St. Patrick’s Day is usually amateur night when it comes to drinking. Being a professional consumer of spirits and hops, I avoid bars as a general rule on St. Paddy’s. If I do go out, I go to a dive bar that is far enough off the beaten track to avoid the influx of idiots that descend on any place that doesn’t appear externally to be out-and-out dangerous. That being said, I spent Paddy’s at a few bars on Capitol Hill this year and was pleasantly surprised by the absence of thrice a year drinkers (Paddy’s, New Year’s, Halloween) spilling their pints down the back of my shirt and hitting me in the face with green beads.

- Men don’t care how idiotic we look a great deal of the time. We’ll happily bring our NCAA tournament brackets to the bar with us, stare intently at them for most of the evening, and then wonder why we didn’t meet any girls.

- Miss Viking is perfectly comfortable ending a bar-going evening at the American Legion post for bourbon and pull tabs. She did need a brief explanation of what a pull tab was, however.

- ‘Da Club’ upstairs at the Hawk and Dove scares me. Not in the, "I’m afraid for my safety", kinda way. It’s more of a, "I weep for our future", deal.

The futility of persistance

2006-03-13T13:30:00.000-05:00

Don't Give up. Don't ever give up. Jim Valvano said that, and he won a NCAA basketball championship.

With the greatest sporting event of the year rapidly approaching, I intend to take those words to heart. I'm not going to stop fighting. I'm going to win my office pool this year. I'm going to research all the teams. I'm going to make phone calls. I'm going to study the minutia. When that doesn't work I'm going to get my friend’s 5 year old daughter to fill out a bracket for me. It can’t hurt, and I think the red crayon will give that entry an air of professionalism.

My University of Minnesota Golden Gophers juuuuuuuust missed a bid to the Big Dance this year, so I'm going to adopt the Duke Blue Devils as my team for the tournament. I can't help it, I always root for the plucky underdog, and this Reddick kid seems like he could be an NBA draft prospect if he could just get some publicity. Maybe someone should introduce him to Dick Vitale.

Number 34 in your program, Number 1 in your hearts

2006-03-07T13:23:00.000-05:00

I’ve never been the kind of sports fan that felt compelled to collect signed memorabilia. When I was young I had a baseball card collection, but I wasn’t the kid that had them tucked away in hermetically sealed plastic to preserve their value. My baseball cards had wrinkled edges and cherry-coke stains on them because I was always using them to play imaginary games on my bedroom floor. I’m not even sure where they all wound up, but there is a reasonable chance that they suffered the clichéd demise of being tossed out by my mom sometime during my teen years. The one piece of sports ‘junk’ that I keep around my apartment is a baseball signed by Kirby Puckett. When I heard on the radio this morning that he had died, I was reminded of why the baseball meant enough to me to still be sitting on my desk almost twenty years after it had been signed.

Growing up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul suburbs, everyone loved Kirby Puckett. He was our Michael Jordan. He was our Wayne Gretzsky. He was our ‘Puck’. In 1987 he led the Twins to their first Championship. In 1991, he did it again, and his Game 6 performance is known even to non-Minnesotans as “The Puckett Game”. But we didn’t love him because of his ability. An athlete can be admired for his talents, but to be loved is something else entirely. We loved him because of the way he played the game like a little leaguer. Part of it was the smile. He never stopped smiling. I remember him standing on first base after getting a single, laughing and smiling with the opposing first baseman. I remember him jogging back to the dugout, grinning after stealing a homerun by bouncing off of the center field wall like a pinball. He always looked like he had just realized that someone was paying him to play baseball.

The kids loved Kirby because of how he looked, too. He was almost one of us. He was 5 feet, 8 inches, 230 pounds of kid, scooting around the Astroturf in center field like a roadrunner from the Robert Taylor Homes. Most center fielders have some grace about the way they play, or at the minimum some obvious athleticism that colors their movements. To a kid accustomed to running and jumping like a normal human being, a professional baseball player roaming a gigantic expanse of outfield turf is a magical being. A Titan with a thunderbolt for an arm, legs like a gazelle, and power the other way. But Kirby was funny lookin’. He was squat. He was the fat kid, the one that waddles everywhere he goes. If he was standing still you would wonder what the third base coach was doing in the middle of the outfield with his gut hanging over his belt. He didn’t look like he should be able to do the things he could do. When he jumped out of the batter’s box and took off down the first base line, he transformed from a pudgy kid into a cartoon hero, and you knew that he was going to be safe at second, because the coyote never catches the road-runner. Watching him play the outfield from the cheap seats, he sometimes appeared to have no legs. Just a gigantic head sitting atop a round pile of uniform. His legs were just a blur. And then he’d have the ball for an instant before it was rocketing back into the second baseman, leaving imaginary vapor trails behind it.

When I was nine I waited in line for 4 hours at the local Shinder’s baseball card and comic book shop to have Kirby autograph a baseball for me. He was only supposed to be there for 2 hours, but when the time ran up and the line was still out the door he kept signing. I don’t know how long he sat there, but when I finally reached the front of the line two hours after he should have been gone he was still smiling and laughing, patting kids on the head and giving out high fives. I don’t remember if I said anything to him, but I can remember how he seemed to be enjoying sitting in the chair and signing his name a billion times.

Puck went blind in one eye, and had to retire before he was ready to be done. He was 36, but he was still at his peak. He always said that he didn’t regret how his career ended, but he fell on hard times. The midget super hero ran into legal troubles. He became obese. His wife left him. When he was photographed at a benefit or a charity golf tournament the smile wasn’t the same. And even though I’d never known him, and I don’t usually relate to celebrities, I felt sorry for him. He’d brought so much happiness to me and so many other kids in the 80s and 90s in Minnesota that it did seem right for him to be so unhappy.

Before I left for work today I took the baseball Puck signed for me when I was a kid out of the plastic shell it rests in on my desk. I’m not sure why I keep it in the case. The ball is a little marked up and dirty from sitting in a mitt for a few years and the bottom of the ‘y’ in Kirby is smeared. I don’t think I’d be able to sell it now, even though he’s a dead Hall of Famer. Not that I’d want to.

Looking at the baseball I had signed halfway across the country, 20 years ago, made me feel old. Thinking about a puffed up Kirby Puckett dying of a stroke at the age of 46 made me feel mortal. I sat there for a minute, thinking about what a fucking depressing way that was to start the day. I wanted to go back to bed.

I know it sounds cheesy and trite, but I pictured Puck catching a ball and then bouncing off the plastic baggie/wall they used to put up in left-center field because the Twins shared the Metro Dome with the Vikings, and it made me feel better. I thought about the way the PA man, Bob Casey, used to call his name when he came up to bat. “Batting third, for your Minnesota Twins, number 34, KiiiiiirbEEEEEEEEEEEEEE PAAAAAAAACKIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!!!!!” I could hear it in my head, and it sent a chill up my spine. I finally put the ball down and drove into work.

I’ve been sitting here all day, trying to get some work done, but it’s not going so well. I keep daydreaming like a little kid, thinking about baseball and Puck. And damned if I wasn’t craving a Dome Dog with relish and mustard for lunch.

This sausage with extra cheese brought to you by the council on family values

2006-02-10T13:29:00.000-05:00

It appears that PepsiCo is now in the business of protecting the American Family.

I noticed this non sequitur when I was enjoying my Friday afternoon junk food fix, a deep dish pie from Pizza Hut. I was waiting for the ESPN website and needed something to occupy my short attention span in the 4 seconds it was taking for Bill Simmons to load. Luckily, there was a pizza box sitting on the chair next to me. There, in screaming 56 point font and red lettering were statements like:

-Ask your parents who there favorite teacher was!

-Did you ever win an award or trophy!

-Beg your Dad to pay attention to you!

OK, I made that last one up, but these pizza boxes freak me out a little bit. Are people so loathe to conversate with their families that they need topic suggestions from a pizza box? And if Pizza Hut is going to suggest conversation topics they could at least show some creativity, or at the very least ask an open ended question.

Child: Did you ever win a trophy Mom?

Mom: No.

And they go back to watching 'Everybody Loves Raymond'. Next time you're having pizza with your family try one of these. They are guaranteed to elicit some interesting conversation.

- Bring up uncle Marty's drinking problem.

- Play 'How Many Partners' with the entire family. Guaranteed to end with Dad on the couch.

- "Mom. Dad. I'm gay."

Somehow I'd be a lot more uncomfortable if my family was actually reading questions from the top of the box in order to break the silence. Next to that, talking about the sexual history of my parents doesn't sound nearly as nauseating.

Your tax dollars at work (A play in one act)

2006-02-09T21:02:00.000-05:00

photo by uncleboatshoes

It is Tuesday morning. The dapper and competent DC Viking takes a break from working for the man in order to renew his Washington DC vehicle registration on-line. He takes a sip from his delicious cup of Starbucks coffee, anticipating a quick and simple exchange of $87 for a window sticker and a cheap cardboard card that will allow him to drive and park in Our Nation's Capitol.

DC Viking: I'm extremely excited to be renewing my registration using the convenient, state of the art DC DMV website. What an amazing and wondrous time we live in.

(Our hero's brow furrows when he notices an additional charge of $100 for a traffic camera ticket that must be paid before he can register his car. He picks up his phone and calls the number listed on the website. After navigating the automated options for several minutes he finally reaches a real person.)

Service Agent: Ticketing department. Ticket number please.

DC Viking: S007458217. But it's not mine.

SA: What can I help you with?

DCV: This isn't my ticket.

SA: I see.

DCV: No really. Could you please tell me when and where this ticket was issued?

SA: It was issued on June 1st, 2003 on the corner of Massachusetts and Wisconsin.

DCV: See! That can't possibly be my ticket. I lived in Minneapolis in 2003!

SA: The ticket is on your record.

DCV: Yes, I know that. Could you give me any other information? The make of the car perhaps?

(There is a pause as the service agent types into his computer. No doubt a cutting edge Apple Jr.)

SA: It was an Audi.

DCV: My car is a Jetta.

SA: I can see that on our system.

DCV: Great! So you can remove the ticket?

SA: No.

DCV: Who was the Audi registered to?

SA: I can't tell you that.

DCV: Was it registered to me?

SA: No.

DCV: Great! So you can remove the ticket?

SA: No.

DCV: Why not?

SA: I need your registration.

DCV: For my Jetta?

SA: Yes.

DCV: But you have it there, don't you?

SA: I need your registration.

DCV: But you just confirmed that I have a Jetta registered in my name.

SA: Sir, I can't help you unless you fax me a copy of your registration.

DCV: But you’re the DMV! You know it’s my car! And you said that the Audi wasn't registered to me! I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I don't understand the logic that prohibits you from deducing that this ticket is not mine.

SA: Sir, I can't help you unless you fax me a copy of your registration.

DCV: Fine. What's the number?

(Our hero, being patient, flexible, and compliant, faxes the required documentation and then calls the service agent back.)

DCV: Did you receive my fax?

SA: Yes.

DCV: So I can register my car because the ticket is being removed?

SA: No.

DCV: Oh God why?

SA: This Jetta is being leased by the same company as the Audi.

DCV: So?

SA: That's quite a coincidence.

DCV: I'm not sure I understand.

SA: The lease to your Jetta is held by the same company that holds the lease on the Audi. That's quite a coincidence sir.

DCV: Not really. Maybe one number was written incorrectly on the ticket. Instead of the Audi getting the ticket, I got it. One number off, see? Please?

SA: I'm afraid you're going to have to prove that you never owned an Audi before I can do anything for you sir.

DCV: But how am I supposed to prove a negative?

SA: I'm afraid you're going to have to prove that you never owned an Audi before I can do anything for you sir....

(Curtain Falls)

Hurley has good taste in music

2006-02-06T12:29:00.000-05:00

" I guess I heard about original sin,
I heard the dude blamed the chick, I heard the chick blamed the snake."

- The Hold Steady

I should have written about The Hold Steady last Thursday, but I was hung-over. I'm also lazy. But if anyone read this blog, I would be doing them a disservice by not getting in the wayback machine and revisiting the show last Wednesday.

The Hold Steady is like your favorite bar band with 10 times the musical talent, poetic songwriting, and a penchant for the kind of dirty fingernail Americana that The Boss used to sing about before he became too successful to run in those kind of circles. Craig Finn sings/speaks/white-guy-raps stories about suburban Minneapolis drug dealers and conversations about the bible set in the Tampa Bay party district. He tells these stories while the band bangs out excellent, straight forward, rock ‘n’ roll and he gesticulates like some kind of sign language interpreter with a meth habit. While some people find his voice to be nasal I don't see it, particularly in the live show. I think trying to add 'real' singing to the overall sound The Hold Steady have going would be a mistake. Finn's voice is unique and it meshes nicely with the surprisingly subtle ‘dive-bar rock’ sound they have. I think you'd need a set of really gravelly pipes like the aforementioned Springsteen to pull it off.

The crowd at the Black Cat wasn't nearly as raucous as they should have been. I think part of the reason for the lack of energy was the surprising number of 18 plus-ers I noticed in attendance. I connect to The Hold Steady because they sound great, they sing about my home town, and they make me want to sit at a smoky dive bar. It didn't occur to me that they would appeal to the high school set until I looked around the Black Cat and realized I would have to be careful about buying a round without contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Once I had noticed the little-uns, the reason was self-evident. A good bit of the story in the songs revolves around teenage outsiders etc... It doesn't matter that most of the kids in the Black Cat carried themselves like they bought their clothes at Needless Markup with dad's credit card and can only relate to the how of the drugs in Finn's songs and not the why. The point is that these kids are too cool to give any energy back to the band, even if said band is putting on one of the best shows they are likely to see in a venue as small as the Black Cat.

To be fair, I think that a second factor contributed to the atmosphere being other than the beer soaked mayhem I had been hoping for. It was a week night. The Hold Steady probably hears more cheering than clapping at shows because they practically cry out for you to listen with a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other. It would appear that not all the working stiffs in DC share my fortitude/stupidity when it comes to the week night concert. Too bad for them. Not over serving yourself a little at a Hold Steady show is like going to the Minnesota State Fair and not eating cheese on a stick. You just don’t do it.

The show itself was phenomenal. There’s a gutter poetry in the lyrics that almost teeters on cheesy calculation in the album, but there is no insincerity to be found in the live show. From the spastic lead singer to the gospel organ riffs, the music and performance are honest. The band played a few songs from their first album, sticking mostly to the stuff from Separation Sunday. “Stevie Nix” and “Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night” stood out in particular among a set that didn't have any sag to it. They hit a few brand new tunes, as well, playing a song about poet John Berryman that was called “In Between Stations”. It was tough to pick out all the lyrics, but it left me optimistic that they haven’t used up all their karma on this album. They played a mean set and I’d love to see what they can do with a crowd that really gets behind them.

So, to Craig and the rest of The Hold Steady (because I’m sure they troll the interweb for reviews written in blogs with a weekly readership of 12) I’d like to say that I’m sorry DC seemed tired last Wednesday night. Come back and do a Saturday show for the drinking crowd and we’ll make it up to you.

Mayor for 3 to 5

2006-01-12T10:49:00.000-05:00

What an amazing and screwed up city I live in. Marion Barry has once again tested positive for drug use. The same Marion Barry that failed to report half a million dollars of income to the IRS over the last few years. The same Marion Barry that was convicted of cocaine possession in 1990, when he was set up by ‘the bitch’. The same Marion Barry that has incidents like these dotting his record. How did this guy manage to keep stepping on his own dick so publicly? Why did people keep giving him the chance? Those aren’t rhetorical questions. I’m really asking.

It’s not like the personal and legal troubles were the only things to raise red flags regarding The Mayor for Life. It’s well known that he and his cronies managed to mismanage DC and its finances so heinously that partial financial control of the city was given to the federal government and DC home rule was set back at least 10 years. Yet he was given another chance on the City Council.

He is still tremendously popular in Southeast DC’s Ward 8. The tone of the man on the street reactions in the papers this morning was not one of anger. They feel sorry for the guy. They empathize with him. I’ve never understood the allure of wanting to elect the candidate that you can most relate to on a personal level. This goes for Marion Barry as well as George Bush. I want my leaders to be better than me. I want them smarter and more experienced. I don’t want to have a beer with them. I sure as hell don’t want them smoking crack with some broken down hooker in a cheap motel room. I want them to be so damn sharp that I would be intimidated by their intellect. Most people don’t see things that way. The sheep want to be comforted by the fact that their elected officials, while wealthier and more famous, are just as stupid as they are.

Ward 8 elected Barry as their councilman to give a big middle finger to the rest of a city that is growing and prospering while they are not. While I can respect their sense of anger and disenfranchisement, I can’t respect their judgment. The single finger salute is not the way to tell the rest of the city that you would like a piece of the prosperity pie. Going out and getting some slick, calculating representative like Adrian Fenty would go a lot further towards that end.

Older. Wiser? Drunker!

2006-01-09T13:00:00.000-05:00

What would you have if you held a dance party and nobody could dance? You’d have DC9 on a Friday night, the final destination of my birthday fiesta this weekend.

I’m a big fan of the Liberation Dance Party they throw on Fridays. It’s energetic without being packed, the drinks aren’t totally overpriced, and the DJ spins a great mix of music that you wouldn’t normally hear in a place that is expecting people to dance. I never knew that you could shake it to The Arcade Fire. Apparently it’s not only possible, but extremely entertaining; both for myself and for the young women sitting in the booth by the dance floor. Not for the same reasons though.

That’s OK though, because here’s the thing, somebody forgot to invite the cool kids. Other than one or two members of the fairer sex that were moving just well enough to avoid embarrassment, I didn’t see one person that I would describe as a good dancer. Because nobody can dance, everyone does. This is good for me. Actually getting me on the dance floor requires an amount of liquor that precludes being able to dance for shite.

This goes without saying on U Street, but there was nary a popped collar in the joint. (Do people still do that? I haven’t been to Georgetown in a while so I may be a little out of the loop.) There doesn’t seem to be a bar ‘uniform’, either. I saw the requisite T-shirt, jeans, and Chucks. I saw someone that looked like they came straight from their office X-mas party. It says something about the atmosphere of the bar that I didn’t think either was dressed improperly.

Maybe I have a skewed perspective because it was my birthday and I had a few too many two buck Schlitz’s at The Velvet Lounge before we made it to DC9, but I dig the vibe of on a Friday. Everyone seemed to understand rule number one of the drinking code, you go to the bar to have fun.

In contrast, I was at the 18th Street Lounge last weekend. Physically, it’s a great space. Early in the evening it’s a great place to chill, but by the end of the night I found myself wanting to throttle someone. Call me misanthropic, but the place was packed with wall-to-wall assholes. The bar was four deep, and everyone was boxing out and throwing elbows like it was the Final Four. Relax a bit people. There is plenty of booze for everyone. Wait patiently, know what you are going to drink when you get to the bartender, and be polite. It will make your drink ordering experience much more pleasant. It also helps if you don’t pay for your apple-tinis with a card and ask the bartender to close your tab right away.

There wasn’t much standing room to be had anywhere, so you had to do the ‘moving-sideways-through-the-crowd’ dance all night, which happens. If you go to a bar, occasionally it’s going to be a little over crowded. I understand that nobody likes to be jostled, but if you’re standing in the middle of the doorway some people are going to need to get past you. Tossing a hip at every person that needs to move past you to use the bathroom does not mean you are the alpha in the bar. It means you have a small penis.

Right. So a good time was had by all at DC9. The hangover didn’t rise above a low throb, and I didn’t do too much damage to the bank account. I did gain a painful reminder of a universal truth that should be ignored only at great peril. When your evening beverage census consists of Schlitz, Jaegermeister, and bourbon, you should not make a 3AM run to rotten Ronald’s for a quarter-pounder and chicken McNuggets.

I may be getting older but I refuse to grow up

2006-01-06T15:23:00.000-05:00

Today is my birthday. I know this because my mother called me at work this morning and sang to me in her slightly off key, MinnesOta accent. I've been in existence for 29 years. As I have been informed several times today, that's almost 30.

Having a quarter life crisis is all the rage these days, but I haven't been able to muster the grandiose sentiment that would be neccesary for this kind of self examination. I'm supposed to be thinking about settling down, having kids, and moving to the suburbs. Aren't I? Am I allowed to have a quarter life crisis about not having a quarter life crisis? Should I be more concerned that I'm not married with 2.5 children and living in Reston? Or should I be worried that I'm not one of those high powered assholes you see Blackberrying their way through their metro ride to some very important meeting? If I am I guess I missed that memo.

I'm a 29 year old man/boy that lives in a house with three roommates. I still drink a little too much. I can still sit for hours at a time killing zombies in front of the HD. There was a keg at our Festivus party. I'm basically a college kid with more money, a marginally better understanding of life, and a less ego-centric world view (not much less, but every bit counts).

My Dad took me out to lunch today. He mentioned that when he was 29, I had just been born. He didn't say it in an accusatory manner. It was in no way an indictment of me or the way I'm choosing to live my life. It was an observation. When he was 29 he had started his family. I'm 29 and I'm going to go to the Velvet Lounge tonight and drink Schlitz from a can. I don't have the same responsibilities that he had at my age. I'm cool with that. Sometimes I am a grown up. Scratch that. Sometimes I'm an adult. A grown up is someone that doesn't see the intrinsic value of a water balloon launcher.

As I was saying, sometimes I'm an adult. I have somehow managed to fall back asswards into a great career, despite the fact that I didn't finish college. I take night classes because I know that I'm going to need that piece of paper somewhere down the line. I pay my taxes and invest in my 401(k). I almost never show up for work with a hangover.

OK, so maybe I did have a little introspection in me today. To sum up my self-analysis.

DC Viking = case of arrested development

DC Viking also = Adult

Groovy. Now if you will excuse me I have to decide what I'm going to wear the bar tonight.

I've got yer Christmas cheer right here buddy

2005-12-09T09:53:00.000-05:00

I would like to apologize to my loyal readers for the lack of content the last few weeks. Nate, Laura, I'm sorry.

Between a new project at work, finals, and this holiday season I keep hearing so much about I haven't had time to take a deep breath, let alone post to my blog. Not that I have the time now, but this little project is in danger of going the way of all my little projects if I don't force myself to update it, even when I don't have time. If it means that I'll have fewer moments to sit on the couch with a beer and turn my brain off, so be it. That's the kind of sacrifice I'm willing to make for my readers. If I don't, I could be down to reader, and we've got bills to pay around here.

Speaking of bills, I'm totally breaking up with Christmas. Boycotting the holidays crossed my mind, but by the time I committed to it the line of no return had been crossed. My mother had already started Christmas shopping, and what kind of total bastard doesn't get his mother a Christmas present when she gets him one.

So next year I'm going to start early. Around July I'm going to start dropping subtle hints, something on the order of, 'Gosh I love the 4th of July. There's a holiday you can get behind. Not like Christmas. Did you know that Christmas was originally a communist plot to destroy Woolworth's? Think about it. You don't see many Woolworth's these days."

I'll continue on this tack for a few months, laying the groundwork. Nothing obvious mind you, that doesn't start until Halloween. That's when the holiday boycott kicks into overdrive. Start telling people outright that I believe that Christmas has lost its meaning, go all Charlie Brown on their ass. Then just before Thanksgiving, I'll let my family know that I don't want to exchange presents, that their love and radiant faces are all that I need to warm my heart and hearth.

Then when I find out that my Mom bought me a present anyway I can run down to the CVS on Christmas morning and get her a bottle of mouthwash with a bow on it.

It's not me, it's all God

2005-11-23T10:06:00.000-05:00

I'd like to thank my mother, my agent, my producer, and most of all, God. Without his divine intervention I would not be able to write snarky entries about DC traffic.

Actually, I'd just like to thank DC Blogs for highlighting my blog on Monday. KOB and the rest of the team over there do a really nice job of keeping tabs on the DC "Blog Scene" (Blog-iverse? Blogistan? Coalition of the Blogging? Someone needs to make a decision here). If any of my 4 readers haven't been to the site, it gives a good general feel of what people around town are writing.

To continue in the Thanksgiving spirit here is a list of the 5 things I am thankful for this holiday season:

5. Patrick Fitzgerald - I'm thankful the Special Prosecutor has shown that an administration cannot out a CIA operative without a proxy for those responsible being indicted. [DOJ]

4. 'Separation Sunday', by the Hold Steady. Proving once again that everything good comes from Minnesota. [The Hold Steady]

3. I'm thankful that I don't have to drive further than 15 miles this Turkey Day. [MSNBC]

2. Monica Belluci. [Find your own link, sicko. What kind of blog do you think this is?]

1. I'm thankful that in 24+ hours I will be basking in the time honored tradition of American gluttony. I will stuff my face. I will have three servings of gravy, one of which one will not include another food substance, just the gravy. I will loosen my belt to prevent intestinal damage. I will fall asleep sitting up on the couch, while watching football and drooling. I will eat a second piece of pumpkin pie when I wake up. I will drink to much wine. I will add 5 pounds and have no idea why.

Happy Thanksgiving!

40 points for Grandma

2005-11-18T15:59:00.000-05:00

I don't drive in the city very often. It's usually unnecessary for me. Why would I go through the hassle of hopping in my car, fighting traffic, and then circling for 20 minutes trying to find a parking spot when I can just take the metro? I'm still new enough to the city that semi-reliable public transportation that does not have to involve a rickety city bus is still a happy novelty to me, and I’m lucky enough to work and live near a metro stop.

When I do drive, I'm sometimes mystified by the lack of regard the drivers in my neighborhood seem to have for the pedestrians that are about. Maybe it's because I live in DC Lite, and so many of the drivers are coming in from Maryland for a quick errand? Maybe trying to run over pedestrians is normal for DC drivers? Is there some competeition I'm not aware of that awards points based on number of pedestrians pegged, double for little kids and the elderly? I'm as swift a driver as the next guy that isn't Dale Earnhardt Jr., but I'm not going to mow down little Tommy on his was to private school either.

I only mention this phenomenon because today a very impatient man in a very large SUV was intent on testing the impact resistance of his grill, using pedestrian commuters as his test subjects. This morning I drove to work, and being the good hearted and magnanimous person that I am, agreed to drop my roommate at the metro on my way. After letting him off, I was making a left hand turn onto Wisconsin Ave. I had the green arrow, but the crosswalk was occupied by pedestrians. The SUV immediately to my rear showed his impatience by giving a little tap of the horn. I myself will use this tactic if someone has spaced out and isn't going through a light. Since I was well aware of the status of the turn signal, I pointed out my window to the pedestrians in the crosswalk, thinking this would explain the predicament we both faced. It did not. He gave me a good 2 second blast of his horn to which responded with the universal symbol of grace and composure, an extended middle finger.

Not smart, I know. Miss Viking has already lectured me on this. "Don't flip people off in traffic. Didn't you hear about the guy whose dog was pulled from his car when he did that?!?" I hadn’t, I have no idea what that means, but rest assured I have already had my senselessness pointed out to me.

The walkway clears. I pull through the intersection and stop at the next red light. The man in the SUV is so incensed that he barely misses rear-ending me as he barrels up to the light. At this point I consider that the single finger salute may not have been the brightest idea. So I attempt to explain myself further, to make clear to my new friend that I didn't stop at the red light in an attempt to cause an accident and also that I am apologetic for our recent misunderstanding. I point out my window towards the red light. This does not clarify the situation. He backs his car off my tailpipe, and pulls into the lane next to me, hurling epithets at me through two layers of glass. In an attempt to make myself look like a childish idiot in addition to a sarcastic bastard, I mimic pedestrians walking with one hand while pointing to the crosswalk behind me with the other.

At this point his window goes down. Obligingly, I roll mine down. From his point of view I am apparently a, "Bitch-Motherfucker" and, "I had the turn arrow". When I explain that there were people in the crosswalk he informs me that, "They had a Don't Walk sign!" After enlightening me on the finer points of the rules of the road, he pulls away leaving me to ponder how many points I missed out on by not smashing headlong into the crosswalk.

It had to be at least 250. I’m pretty sure I saw a guy with a seeing-eye dog.

Mass genocide is the most exhausting activity one can engage in, outside of soccer.

2005-11-11T08:49:00.000-05:00

This just in, Pat Robertson is still a lunatic. In related news; sky is blue, water is wet, and Germans still love David Hasslehoff.

Robertson informed citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania that God was going to go all Sodom and Gomorrah on their asses because they didn't include intelligent design in their school curriculums. Seems reasonable.

How many more comments like this does Robertson have to make before self-avowed Christians stop taking him seriously? I'm not saying that all Christians agree with his opinions, but 1 million viewers still turn in to receive his wisdom on topics ranging from homosexual responsibility for the 9/11 attacks to the necessity of assassinating democratically elected heads of state. 1 million. That's more than the number of people that saw Doom. Other than guys wearing Laura Croft t-shirts, I mean.

New Rule: When you start lobbying God for the destruction of people that disagree with you, you don't get to have a television show. Unless your co-host is Tara Reid. Because I would totally watch that.

Televangelist Warns of Evolution Doomsday [MSNBC]

This year we've reset our clocks to the 21st century

2005-11-09T09:19:00.000-05:00

So the Dems took the governor's house in Virginia. It's hard to get too excited about this, but it’s nice to know that the voters have moved past the point of falling for hysterical, Willie Horten-esque ads about how Kaine will set criminals loose on the street. OK, that may be an exaggeration, but the death penalty ads that the Kilgore campaign had been running were pretty bad.

Another of Kilgore’s ads drove me nuts. “Tim Kaine, too liberal on taxes. Too Liberal to be Governor,” or something like that. The way this word has been demonized pisses me off. Same deal with conservative. It’s a way of sneaking a message to the extreme wings of the parties into the main stream media without having to take direct responsibility for the sentiment. It’s not the message that gets me hot (although I don’t like being called a coward). It’s the way the parties try to distance themselves from what they really mean when they use one of these terms. Going forward, if we can agree to the following definitions, I think I can accept the way these terms get bandied about.

Liberal = Fag-loving, pot-smoking, wellfare-supported, cowardly, hippie.

Conservative = Racist, ignorant, racist, ignoramus.

Libertarian = Anti-social.

Green = Delusional.

Are we all on the same page? Sweet. Now that the election is over, I can go back to enjoying the Eastern Motors ads.

I'm a grown up

2005-11-07T10:32:00.000-05:00

I went to a birthday party for a friend on Saturday. He and his girlfriend live near Capitol Hill, and I was excited to have an excuse to check out some of the bars on 8th Street. I haven't had the chance to imbibe in that neighborhood yet, and if there is one thing I enjoy it is imbibing in a new and interesting bar. This post isn't about the party, which was a blast; it’s about my hellish morning trying to get back to my house.

7:00 AM - Wake up. Realize that I'm on a bathroom floor. But it's not my bathroom floor. How embarrassing. I hope nobody had to use the bathroom while I was passed out with my arms around the toilet bowl. I really hope nobody actually did. Pick myself, and what little pride I have left, off the floor and walk out to the couch in the living room. The birthday boy is passed out, sitting up in a really uncomfortable looking chair. What a moron I think, and fall asleep on the couch with my shoes still on.

9:00 AM - Wake up. Realize that it’s approximately 97 degrees in the apartment. One of the more charming features of this apartment is that the heating system is a 1920's era radiator. It never turns off. The only way to regulate the heat in the living room is by opening a window. Someone, probably me, closed it at some point the night before. Dehydration is a serious concern. I get up and have 3 aspirin with a Big Gulp™ of DC tap (mmmmm...carcinogenic). I briefly consider walking to the Metro and heading home to my own bed, but rule in favor of a nap. Standing makes the room spin, and I'm pretty sure I can't deal with a 40-minute metro ride just now.

10:00 AM - Wake up. Eyes glued shut because I didn't take out my contact lenses. Temp still equivalent to Tikrit in August. Must. Leave. Sauna. Luckily, I don't have to endure the field sobriety test of finding my shoes and tying them, because I never took them off. Remind myself to punish whoever is responsible for my pain. Realize it’s me. Realize I'm being punished. One less thing on my to-do list.

10:15 AM - Exit Apartment building. Sunlight. How nice.

10:30 AM - I take the metro to and from work all the time. In a city, nobody ever wants to converse with random strangers on the street. Today, no fewer than three people try to wish me a good morning and/or speak to me. My brain is unable to formulate responses in English, so I trudge past my well-wishers, contributing in my own small way to the insular social dynamic of life in DC. I briefly consider mugging one of the friendly people for a pair of sunglasses, but I can’t see through my gummy contact lenses and therefore can’t tell who might have some on. It occurs to me that it might be a good idea to take a cab home instead of powering through a metro ride in my condition. But I spent too much money last night. No reason to add to the damage.

10:35 AM – Eastern Market metro station. Gratifying darkness and solitude. Nobody seems to be taking the train. Maybe my morning is taking a turn for the better.

10:40 – Orange Line to Vienna. First two stops, no problem. Last few, notsogood. I’m concentrating on fighting the nausea that spikes in my throat every time the car bounces. Breath deep. Only a few stops to go. Try not to think about the strange odor emanating from the seat behind me. Try not to think about the 7-11 Big Bite™ I ate at 4 in the morning. Sweet Zeus are we there yet? If I can get to Metro Center for my transfer, I can pull it together before I have to take my next train.

10:50 – Metro Center. The train stops. Then my stomach stops. The doors open and I flee into the sweet, sweet freedom of...Sunday afternoon tourists. I wonder if I'll be arrested if I throw up in some kid's backpack? Luckily, nobody seems to want to stand very close to me. I wonder why. Perhaps the smell? Or the fact that my hair is standing straight up and may have lint from the bathmat I used for a pillow?

11:10 – Passing Woodley Park on the Red Line. I’ve spent the last two stops trying to decide if I can jump off the train at a stop, throw up in a garbage can and make it back onto the train. Waiting for another is not an option. I determine that I don’t have time for the bolt n’ barf; so on the train I sit, trying to decide if I’ll get busted for public drunkenness at eleven in the morning if I get sick on the train. I can’t decide if the nausea is making the headache worse, or if the headache is making me want to throw up. Doesn’t matter, I’m going to lie down in front of a train at Cleveland Park.

11:30 – Home. After holding myself together for the remainder of the ride, I shamble down the hill to my house and pry my contacts from my poor smoke stung eyes and crawl into bed. I forget to take off my clothes from the night before.

The Lesson: There are times when cab fare is money well spent.

Drunk Mustache Guy Doesn't Live Here Anymore

2005-10-28T10:49:00.000-04:00

The bar stools are empty. Final, sad drops of beer fall from disconnected taps. Bathroom floors go unsoiled by urine. The Malt Shop has closed its doors.

If you have never had the pleasure of patronizing the fine establishment on the corner of Wisconsin and Brandywine, you have missed out on one of life's rare and smelly experiences. For years it has existed in a section of northwest DC that could easily pass for suburban Bethesda. Unspoiled by the entrenched gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood, but spoiled in so many good ways, this bar was an outpost of cheap, drunken debauchery in an area that sorely needed it.

My roommates and I tried to drop by last week for a few beers and a game of darts, only to find that the Malt Shop had moved next door. In the process they've merged with the seafood restaurant that used to be located downstairs, and apparently gone respectable. They've cleaned up their act. There are no shabby dartboards to be seen. The bar is well lighted and odor free. Men in suits walk about the smoke free room without fear of being accosted or of getting vomit on their Brooks Brother's tie.

It is a sad day for beer soaked idiots everywhere.

So you've decided to start your own blog...

2005-10-24T15:19:00.000-04:00

Just what DC needs, right? Another ego-centric blog about the daily events of a relatively unremarkable white guy.

This blog is mainly for my friends and family back in Minneapolis. I've found it increasingly difficult to keep in touch with them as my life in DC becomes more 'my life', and not something that I'm doing for a few years until I move on. In other words, I'm lazy. I'm also self-centered, so if individuals of discerning taste and questionable work ethic happen across this blog during their daily grind, much the better. Some other things you should probably know about me:

- My spelling is atrocious. Spell check has a hard time determining which word I'm spelling incorrectly. That's OK, though. I heard somewhere that Einstein was a rotten speller.

- I'm a political person. This isn't a political blog, so if my thoughts wander in that direction, I'll try to reign them back in. There are smarter people writing more informed and more entertaining things about politics than I. I'll try to stay off their turf. I don't want to get beat up by Wonkette.

- I can't partake of distilled spirits at the Herculean rate I once did. This doesn't stop me from trying. If I do decide to share my most recent attempt to drown my liver, I'll do my level best to avoid rehashing the same stupid drunk story that everyone has heard a million times.

Bear with me while I get acquainted with this application. Hopefully, I can play with the design and make it a little more interesting to look at. Otherwise you'll only have my writing to concentrate on, and that's not going to benefit anyone.

DC Viking

In DC we celebrate independence by crapping on the 4th Amendment

Totally Boss Video Wednesday

Moving Sucks

I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find GAMBLING going on here!

Totally Boss Video Wednesday

Totally Boss Video Wednesday

Dear God Is It Over Yet Haiku

At least he didn't park his Prius in the pool

I Miss Jed Bartett Too

Totally Boss Video Wednesday

Totally Boss Video Wednesdays

Love Shack

Keith Olberman - Kind of Pompous, But Kind of Right

Geraldine Ferraro - Has been and hypocrite

Brief Thoughts With Some Guy That Isn't Jack Handy

Same Team! Same Team!

Today in class we're going to watch a movie

Super Tuesday Haiku

New Music Thursday

F.U.F.F.

One of the dull posts I promised

Huck Off Mike

Belated Favorite Albums of 2007

Every time I think I'm out...

An image from the past

An open letter to the DC metro area

Remember when I said I was tired of election stuff? I lied

Be careful if you have a wide stance

Random thoughts with some guy that isn't Jack Handy

I hate it when I'm right

YouTube debate to change Presidential Politics...or not

I Ran From Cheney (a play in one act)

Making Spoons

What I did on summer vacation

Here, read these

Won't someone think of the children?

Music Recomendation: The Rumble Strips

Problem Solved

My Reader Missed Me

NCAA Basketball Haiku

This! Movie! Stinks!

Top 5 things I daydream about while I’m riding the Metro

We interupt your regularly scheduled snark...

Pharoh, let my Blogger go

Your Democratic Presidential Contenders: May the least worst win

Random thoughts with some guy that isn't Jack Handy

Cats can sense evil

State of the Union Haiku

The Tom Brady Myth

Radio Free Tenleytown; or DRM and you, why Steve Jobs Sucks it

Top Albums of 2006

Random thoughts with some guy that isn't Jack Handy

When Good Bands Go Bad

I don't think that's David Letterman on the phone

The Fantasy Football Question

Dems win Senate: What it means for me

Election Day Haiku

Tore down Babylon and put in a parking lot

Does this mean I'm not a patriot?

Comcast and HBO are conspiring against me

You find heroes in the strangest places

Zen, aquatics, and a fate worse than death

Congress will save us...**GAK**

Previously on Lost...

Reading Balzac, Knocking back Prozac

The password is "Gilby's"

Lessons from the weekend; Easter Edition

Thought I should check in

The first day of spring

No more news on my lunch break

Lessons from the weekend, Saint NCAA Edition

The futility of persistance

Number 34 in your program, Number 1 in your hearts

This sausage with extra cheese brought to you by the council on family values

Your tax dollars at work (A play in one act)

Hurley has good taste in music

Mayor for 3 to 5

Older. Wiser? Drunker!

I may be getting older but I refuse to grow up

Congress will save us...GAK