Vietnamization is the term for President Richard Nixon’s policy in the early 1970s to turn the job of defending
Iraqization is the future term for President George W. Bush policy in 2006 to turn the job of rebuilding
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
When does the Iraqization start?
Entry for November 29, 2005 (take 2)
Entry for November 29, 2005
Va. Gov. grants clemency for condemned man who would have been the 1,000th person executed in the US
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051130/ap_on_re_us/1000th_execution
Greatest Nerd Pickup Line of All Time:
Greates English Major Pickup line:
May I end this sentence with a proposition?
My Favorite:
Are you free tonight or is it gonna cost me?
Entry for November 27, 2005
Friday, November 11, 2005
How I lost Duncan
It was August 5th of this year and I had the Mercedes packed down with two TVs, one home theater system complete of matching black boxes and assorted speakers, one fireproof safe, a few suitcases, various unpacked household items and our two panting dogs. We had been sitting in traffic in the Bronx for over an hour because I didn't finish packing for the relocation from Maine to South Carolina until late that morning. I had not realized that the exit that we needed to take to avoid this part of the city actually exited on the left side of the freeway until it was too late. Unfortunately, in some sort of futile attempt to still catch it, I had worked my way all the way over to left before missing it. This had left me stuck in the fast lane and moving at 2 mph as I headed into the Bronx at 5 o'clock on a Friday afternoon.
Lucy had been a lucky find for us when we lived on the island of Grand Cayman. We had decided to get a dog and went to the local shelter to see if any were of adoption quality. Twice we walked by her cage distracted by other yelping, barking, howling dogs before even glancing her way. It wasn't until we heard one little "woof", as if to say, "Ahem, excuse me" that we noticed her sitting at attention next to her door. I walked over, glanced at the number 13 on her cage and then down at her. She panted, looked me in the eyes and then looked at the lock on the gate. I smiled, looked at Kela and we quietly went to get one of the volunteers. A day or so later our new black flat-coated retriever named Lucy was back at our house comfortably lying sideways across a big king sized bed.
She had set the tone for Duncan, who was herself very excited when we brought him home to her. Lucy had gotten quite lonely with me working long hours and Kela constantly distracted with the last semesters of her second year of medical school. He was a horrible deprived little puppy. I found him when I visited the local shelter in Maine (see Hurricane Ivan story further down in blog to see how Cayman to Maine happened) and thought he was cute. In actuality, I couldn't see much of him at all. Both his sister and he were huddled in the back of one of the pens scared of anything made of atoms. They had been in a shelter in Virginia until it had ran out of money and shipped its dogs anywhere that would take them. Both of them had come from the same litter and had obviously spent almost their whole lives living with large, obnoxious dogs barking all around them.
When I saw them I looked at Duncan and he leaned forward a bit to check me out. From behind me I heard, "Wow, that's the first time I've seen either of them move". A glance backwards at the eager, beaming and dog food laden volunteer told me I was in trouble. It seems that neither of them had eaten in the couple of days that they had been there. Next thing I know I was being led into another number 13 cage to inspect a dog that I was destine to bring home. The next day we had a very frightening puppy frantically searching all three floors of our home in a desperate attempt to hide from the world. Months later a calmer, larger version of that dog was trapped between a TV and Lucy in the back seat of my car on his first real adventure.
Since entering NY the AC had somehow become less effective. I blame the poor air quality of NY for somehow not providing the intake of the car with enough actual oxygen to cool off. So I had the sunroof popped up and all of the windows down about half way. It was sitting there as I flipped through channels while wishing that Kela could have come with me instead of having to stay an extra week for finals when it happened. Something in Duncan's mind sparked and he realized that he needed out of the car, immediately. In the rearview mirror I caught a brilliant golden flash of color as he jumped over Lucy and through the cracked window.
Petrified, I flew open the door of the car and sprang from it into traffic as if I was shot from a gun. Hands up, flailing and madly running after him I ran headlong into traffic. New Yorkers, as pleasant as they are, responded by all stopping and not making a sound as I tried to corral Duncan back into the car. Actually, what really happened is that they all started honking and yelling from their car windows that I had just robbed them of 2 seconds of their life which they could have spent honking and yelling at someone else. Duncan, who had never seen a New Yorker - let alone heard one, headed directly for the side of the road and shot under a small hole in a fence lining the freeway. On my way to the fence I glanced back at the Mercedes, idling in the fast lane with the driver door open and Lucy's head peeping over a TV in the back seat. I hit the fence hard and jumped it coming down on the other side in a role only seen in action movies. As I leaped from my stuntman-like maneuver and headed off in the direction he was running I noticed that I had adopted a line of red liquid that was now following my path. Upon closer inspection I realized that the liquid was blood and it was coming from the chunk of brain like meat now protruding from the palm of my hand. Discouraged, but still at full speed, I continued after him.
It was really only a matter of time before he lost me. He was a nine month old Golden Retriever puppy running for his life and I am an out of shape 29 year old man bleeding and screaming his name like a madman. I vainly circled the block that we had emerged from and flagged down a passing police car. At this point I finally realized that I had lost a bit to much blood. I know this because these are the words that came out of my mouth, as I stood there now covered in blood, to the New York Police Officer, "Excusemesir, I just lost my dog on the freeway where I left my Mercedes and now I'm bleeding on your car have you seen him?" To his credit the officer did not immediately shot me. He did hand me a stack of Duncan Donut napkins and say, in a cool NY cop way, "Nope, but we'll see what we can do." He then drove off probably mumbling about how this part of the Bronx didn't have a crack problem when HE was a kid.
Defeated and loopy I headed back to the still idling car that I had left with our other dog sitting in the fast lane with the driver side door still wide open. This time I crawled through the hole in the fence and just weaved back and forth between stopped cars in traffic until I reached the Mercedes. At this point I took a minute to take stock and call Kela to tell her what had just happened. I'm not quite sure what I said, but I don't think it came off as smoothly as it should have.
Traffic, by some sort of miracle, had started moving and I headed back in the car to circle the block a few more times. Kela called back and told me that she had informed the local Animal Rescue locations, the NYPD, NYFD, several friends in the area and possibly the NY Mets. Beaten and finally very Duncanless I found my way back to the highway and called Kela back. She has relatives in NJ, one of which was a nurse. I informed her to inform them of my condition and ETA.
A few hours later and a couple of wrong turns pulled into her uncle's house only to be taken right back out to the hospital. Again, a couple hours later I was once pulling back into her uncles house, this time 8 stitches and some heavy narcotics richer. I don't know where I slept that night or for how long. All I remember is waking up in the morning, saying some sort of generic gratitude and continued driving to South Carolina.
The next weekend Kela drove down from Maine and walked the area putting up signs and talking to shelters. Before I had left Maine we had gotten him a new collar and an electronic chip located on his back in case we ever lost him. We haven't seen or heard from anyone in over two months and have come to convince ourselves that he was taken in by some old woman who just happens to live in a bad neighborhood in New York and needed a friend.
Purgatory is network TV
For some odd reason tonight the TV was on and I for one would like to blame the fact that I was overly generous with a flu I brought it home for dinner a few days ago. So there we were, quietly and sickly sucking down spaghetti and watching Alias when I realized that this might actually be the worst show ever. It’s like they took the cliché ridden bad scripts from all of movies and TV shows that are exactly like this, hung them up on a wall and threw darts at them until they had enough to fill their time slot. This show was so painfully bad that I don’t understand how and why anyone watches this crap. Needless to say, I was merciless to turn the damn thing off because the flu had compassionately decided to let me hurt from my bones out instead of the usual boring nasal cavity on down adventure. It was at this point, unable move, that I began to wonder if the acting and dialog had somehow created a vacuum and sucked all life directly out of the room leaving me unknowingly dead. Unfortunately, this was not true - it was still on and refused to end.
Eventually Kela was able to fight the dark forces of the sickness and find the remote. Now we don’t have cable so our other options were the Apprentice and some show that seemed to consist of nothing but commercials. Frustrated she decided on anything but Alias. Again, there we sat, slightly lower in our couch as before, wishing for death. This show was amazingly just as bad – except it seemed slightly more scripted then the last. The dialog was that of a group of 12 year olds with the vocabulary of 15 year olds wearing nicer cloths. Now I’m not sure if it was just the parade of losers who compete on these type shows, the writers or directors for these shows or the fact that network TV has obvious run out of ideas, but this tired line of unoriginality couldn’t get any worse if they just combined all of these shows into one big nonsensical clusterfuck. Which gave us an idea...
Click
“So then I was like, that was so mine and he just took it.”
“I saw my opportunity and stepped up my game to make sure it stayed ours.”
Click
“We need to go get that before it does any more harm.”
“Ok, I’ll cover your back. Be careful in there.”
Click
“WE’RE HERE WATCHING THE ACTION AT Honda, Toyota, Ford, GM, Chrysler, Hyundai, Peugeot and Schwinn in Saginaw…”
Click
“It's like he wanted us to lose it.”
“I totally had it handled…”
Click
“HEEYYAWW”
“Grab it and let's go!"
Click
“UNBELIEVABLE!!!”
Click
“It was his fault. Everything was perfect until he took over.”
“The plan was bad. There was no way to win with that plan and that is why I lost it.”
Click
“Way to save the day, the world owes you again. If only they could know…”
“Yeah, I just wish I was normal.”
Click
“THIS WILL NOT BE REPEATED!!!”
Click
“So then you lost it. So you’re fired.”
Click
“I'm not sure I can handle this job anymore."
"You have choice, besides I think I love you."
Click
“WHY ARE YOU STILL SITTING THERE!??!?!
Click
Thursday, November 10, 2005
What is wrong with these people?!?!?
It occurred to me today that there really is nothing sadder then watching people attempt to act tough. So here is the thing people: you’re either a bad ass or you not. Wearing camouflage, scowling, throwing up gang signs, pimping out your Honda, wearing labels you couldn’t spell without looking at them and attempting to look larger then you really are is not fooling anyone. Underneath those overpriced shoes, bad haircut and purposely distressed pants is just a person who wants attention. Stop trying to defend your turf, protect your woman/man and show off how rich you are. No one is ever going to think that you are more then your base. This is especially true if you are female. Just because you saw that girl on TV knock out that 6’4” dude with a kick doesn’t mean you can do it. It’s a TV show, it’s not real. You weigh 109lbs and could be knocked out with a flip-flop. Now I do understand that you are a lonely little person, but imagining you’re a real mo-fo is only going to get you hurt somewhere down the road. So please, for the last time, knock it off – you look like a complete tool.Sunday, November 06, 2005
Entry for November 06, 2005
What do you think of the previous me?
Am I someone you're proud of, someone you know?
Was there patience in watching which way I would grow?
Was it your goal to keep me on track;
To let me grow up and never look back?
Why did you do it? I really don't know.
What made you love me that long ago?
Was it your place that kept you there?
Or was it your heart that made you care?
Can you know before your own?
Before you dare to bring one home?
When I look back at its past what will I see?
Will I see myself to some degree?
Am I allowed to look, is it my place?
Or will I in turn just see your face?
Anagram fun: 'raw fire phony', "ah, winery prof' and 'why afro ripen?'
In a compromise to keep our TV off as much as possible I have conceded two hours a day to both Ellen and Oprah Shows to Kela. So as it was, I was hobbling through Oprah’s show yesterday wondering if it had both always been an hour long and if Einstein ever considered the effect on perceptible relativity on the concept of time using the variable of a mass hoard of constantly screaming women. The topic was on men’s thoughts with guests Jay Leno, Brian McKnight and some sports writer. They were forced to answer some inane questions such as ‘why does my man go to strip clubs and why do they look at online porn’. At the end of the show Oprah and her legion of mindless nodding women all agreed that men were different and slight less evolved then women.
To this I agree and disagree. Plus, this is simplified misunderstanding should shame any sexually aware woman who can actually think without being blinded by the constant and blatant male bashing on this show. So let’s handle this one accusation at a time. First of all, yes men go to strip clubs (I don’t, but I understand why) and watch porn. But that is how men are sexually stimulated. Women, generally, are stimulated by thoughts and feelings associated with sex. This is why, according to a recent study, 53% of all mass market paperback fiction sales are romance novels. They not only outsell all other genres but outsell all others combined. Was that mentioned? No. Why? Because that doesn’t fit into the standard Oprah mold. Oprah does nothing to ever try to make women better individuals (prettier occasionally). They do this while, unless it’s a male celebrity attempting to sell something, continuously lowering the bar for men by always portraying them in the worst possible light. All Oprah shows can be narrowed down into four categories:
1. Something some men are doing is evil
2. You CAN look prettier!
3. This celebrity has a movie/book/album coming out
4. See, someone else has a crappier life then you and they picked themselves back up. You could do the same!
For those of you wanting to argue with this (I mean the females who are reading this) I offer the following chart from the previous month of October:
Date Aired Show Title Matching Category
10/31/05 Have You Let Yourself Go? 2
10/28/05 George Clooney's Big Buzz and the World Series Champs! 3
10/27/05 Oprah Presents Another $100,000 Reward 1
10/26/05 The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake At Night: A Million Little Pieces 3
10/25/05 A Hilarious Surprise for Michael Jordan 3
10/24/05 9/11 Widow Stuck in Her Grief 4
10/21/05 Her Husband Tried to Kill Her Three Times 1
10/20/05 Gay for 30 Days 4
10/19/05 The Number One Killer of Women Revealed 1
10/18/05 A Pro Football Player's Secret Shame 4
10/17/05 8 Women Oprah Wants You to Know 3
10/14/05 Jay Leno Introduces Us to Amazing Kids 3
10/13/05 Oprah's Bad Hair Day! 2
10/12/05 Oprah Special Report: Inside the Lives of America's Poor 4
10/11/05 The Oprah Show Captures Accused Child Molesters 1
10/10/05 O the Buzz: Reese Witherspoon, Ricky Martin and Nate's Big News! 3
10/7/05 Uma Thurman on Love, Marriage and Men 3
10/6/05 Are You a Racist? With the Cast of Crash 3
10/5/05 Sarah Jessica Parker, Orlando Bloom & Matthew Fox Reveal Their Favorite Places 3
10/4/05 Kidnapped by a Pedophile: The Shasta Groene Story 1
10/3/05 How Faith Hill Changed One Woman's Life Forever 3
Now understanding that we all occasionally need some mindless distraction, I have no problem with the mindless National Enquirer or Cosmo type crap (Categories 2, 3 and 4). What bothers me is the constant and backhanded degradation of men on her show (Category 1). Only the worst of men is ever represented and any positive real men are either celebrities selling something or backed by a ‘strong and courageous’ woman. As if no man could ever be a strong good person on his own.
Oprah isn’t the only one who does this. Most sitcoms on TV feature a big, dumb, overweight man supported by an intelligent, attractive, rational woman. As a man who is fairly proud of his ability to be intelligent, dependable and loving I do not feel that this TV version is accurate in any way. It is intentionally distorted as such because it has become the acceptable norm to bash males. This was originally condoned to compensate for decades of repression at the hands of white men. But those days have come and past. Neither my generation nor my parent’s generation had anything to do with that history – yet we still accept the punishment from generations we never knew. So I ask you, is it not hypocritical for women to continue this practice of degrading men because the current trend is to pretend that they are less evolved then they are? Do we all not see the future repercussions of such actions? What intelligent human would want to go through that gender reversal of power again and again? What would you think of a person who has to demean others in order to make themselves feel better?
Brian
PS I DO like the Ellen show
PPS The anagram is of 'Oprah Winfrey'Thursday, November 03, 2005
Entry for November 02, 2005
Do you ever wonder if we are living in some other future galaxy’s singularity?
