The Verdant Dude

I'm totally going to ruin it with this post, but we've had just about the best Winter in recent memory so far. Weather-wise, that is. And by "best", I mean warmer than usual with no snow.

In fact, we had our first snowstorm of the year over this past weekend. A convenient little storm that began overnight on Friday and into early Saturday afternoon. All that meant to me was staying home with my woman and our recuperating cat (Wolowitiz is doing much better now, thanks), and drinking a whole mess of bourbon. Slept in Saturday morning and then went out to shovel about 4 inches of some dry powder.  It was glorious. The easiest snow removal day in memory.

I don't know why I even bothered, though. The weather forecast was for rain and 50 degrees on Monday, which is exactly what happened. By the end of the day, just about all the snow from the weekend was a memory.

I've been actually appreciating the warm weather even more than the lack of snow, even though those obviously go hand-in-hand. Went out to get the mail today in a t-shirt and it felt like around 60.  I'm sure it was colder, but it really didn't feel that way.

So January is almost over, and February is looming.  Normally a month when we get slammed with snow and cold weather.

But I'm hoping that this trend continues.  Right through the Winter and into Spring. 

A mild Winter is just what my soul needed.

David Wooderson is back, girls. And he's just as cool as ever. Check out Matthew McConaughey reprising his best role ever after 19 long years.  The song is courtesy of Butch Walker and the Black Widows.  Dig.

"The older you get, the more rules they are going to try and get you to follow. You just gotta keep on livin', man. L-I-V-I-N." - words to live by.

h/t: The Interrobang

I've mentioned before that our female cat, Gogo, is nearly impossible to catch in a photo.  Because she never sits still for even a second all day long. Yet, somehow, Gia was able to snap a picture of the elusive yak-cat with her new iPhone 4S.  We call her that because...well, look at the hair.  That's some yak shit going on, isn't it?

click to view the full horror of the yak-cat

Maybe she was sitting still because she was worried about her brother, Wolowitz. He's in the kitty hospital right now recovering from a blocked urinary tract.  Poor guy.  He went in yesterday, and we get to bring him home tomorrow morning. The house isn't the same without him.

This is what every day is like in our home.

Except we have four crazy cats instead of just two. And we don't keep our litter boxes in the living room. Not even when the cats were just wee kittens.

Meow.


The smacks to the top of the head and the young kitty taking a "shiver/stare" crap in the litter box is our Gogo to a fucking T.

She generally likes to wait until we are cleaning out the litter boxes every day to do her business.  As if to say "Thank you, human. For giving me an appropriately clean place to take a shit. Now clean this mess up! I may have use for it again in an hour or so.  Chop chop!"

Every year, I like to re-post something that I wrote about the Golden Globe Awards way back in 2006. Actually, I forgot to re-post it last year for some reason. Maybe because Ricky Gervais did enough as the host to make me forget how much I despise this sham of an awards show. 

So in honor of Matt LeBlanc winning a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy last night (seriously...for acting!), here's my nearly annual rant on the event.  Cheers! - Earl



01/19/2006 8:28 PM EST - date of original post.

Sofia Vergara - insert Golden Globes joke here

Hey kids! As you may have figured out, I'm a bit of a film fan. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that I like to watch the annual award shows to see who takes down the big prizes each year. I was a little bored the other night watching the Golden Globe Awards when I decided to find out who/what the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is all about. If you are not familiar with the group, the HFPA is the organization that determines the nominees for each award category and subsequently votes on the winners for the Golden Globes. But who are they? I mean it never made much sense to me. Are they Hollywood press reporting in foreign countries about the entertainment industry? Are they foreign press working in Hollywood? Who are these people that the media focuses so much weight on around award season? Surely it must be an astoundingly large number of critics and reporters from around the world weighing in on the best that Hollywood has to offer. Hundreds if not thousands of dedicated men and women working tirelessly to hand out awards that are the pre-cursor to the big daddy of all entertainment awards, the Oscars. Right? Wrong!

The HFPA is a non-profit organization of somewhere around 90 international journalists based in Hollywood whose purpose is to disseminate information about film and television to a world-wide audience. 90 JOURNALISTS! Are you kidding me? These 90 men and women are the only voices and votes for an award as seemingly important as the Golden Globes? Now don't get me wrong. The HFPA does some fine work, I guess. In 2005 they donated $1 million to various arts and cultural programs around the world in an effort to further the advance of the film and television. They also donated $250 thousand to the Red Cross. That's mighty white of them.

Where do they get the funding for their charitable work, as well as the funding needed to run the non-profit organization, you may ask? Well, they receive a sizable licensing fee from the networks to run their annual event...the Golden Globe Awards. They also receive licensing fees from various cable networks for allowing them to report from the red carpet. Hm-mm. So let me get this straight. The HFPA (all 90 of them) collect licensing fees from an award show that they run in an effort to award excellence in a field that is already swimming with too many awards. And they give out those awards in the award show that they sponsor, which in turn provides them with the revenue that they need to keep handing out awards the following year? Holy self-sustaining stroke-fest, Batman! And I thought I used to get confused with The Terminator and all of its time-line questions. Wait...how was John Connor born if he needed to send his own father back in time to be with his mother in the first place, and, and, and...system failure!

This is bogus, my friends. It's just another example of mutual masturbation that the media machine that is Hollywood has fashioned out of thin air. It made me sick to read about this, and if I ever see another weepy, blathering idiot of a winner (like Felicity Huffman this year back in 2006) crying about how this is the greatest night of their lives I may actually vomit on my television screen. "You really, really like me...all 90 of you! You really, really like me!" Actually, it's possible that only 25 of the members liked you, honey. Or whatever number of voters that is needed to beat out whomever came in second place. What a piece of crap award this is!

Once again, feel free to applaud the charitable work that the HFPA does. But let us not kid ourselves. Most of the money isn't going to help poverty and starvation in Africa, or to help relief efforts in India Haiti. No, most of the money is handed out in the form of financial grants to cultural institutions to help further their own causes. There is some good stuff in there, but most of it isn't of the do-or-die type of relief.

You can find out more about the HFPA on their website, that is if you can stomach it. Me...I'm done with this award show in the future. I always thought that some of the choices were a bit odd (C'mon...have you seen Geena Davis in "Commander in Chief"?), but I always thought there was some kind of integrity about the awards themselves. I don't know what goes into the voting for the Academy Awards, and I'm sure it ain't perfect. I just don't know if I have the heart to do any research on that right now. Sigh.

Oh, and if you were wondering why I placed a picture of the stunning Scarlett Johansson (decked out in stunning scarlet, thank you very much) Christina Hendricks Sofia Vergara at the top of this article, it wasn't so that we could make some blatantly obvious double entendre about the Golden Globes and her outfit. I just think she's got some nice hoo-has.

I was reprimanded by a dude who smells like a wet dog yesterday for abandoning ye olde Verdant Dude since the holidays.  That wasn't my plan.  Nor was I planning on a specific timetable for rejoining South Blogistan.  I guess his little nudge worked because here I am.

Now what?

I hope everyone had a healthy and wonderful Holiday season.  Mine was a bit fragmented.  Gia went down to Charleston to see her family before Christmas, but I stayed local to see my family.  But I made it down to SC in time for New Year's Eve and Day, so we just celebrated double then.  All good.  We've both been back for about a week now, but we still haven't really settled into a routine.  Other than watching Sons of Anarchy marathons every night.

Much like me with this here blog.

I didn't make any New Year's resolutions.  They never work out too well for me.  But I have promised myself that I would do my best to move forward.  Move forward from what?  Well...everything.  Work, family, life.  A lot of times I get into these ruts where I just remain static.  Or worse, I start back-tracking.  So a generic "move forward" is something I am striving for in the new year.  Let's see how that goes.

I hope I can fill this space with interesting posts, or at least posts that don't make you want to vomit.  That's a thin line I'm constantly walking here.  I'll also try to post some more on our collaborative food blog.  I just posted a little something over there yesterday.  Then there is the radio show.  Now that the holidays are over, hopefully we can get back to a regular schedule in the Cornfield.  I'm wondering if Sunday nights aren't really the best time for this thing.  I'll keep you posted.

Other than that...I got nothing right now.  I hope you are all enjoying the New Year!

Oh, one more thing.  I got this package of old photos from when I was a kid over the holidays.  I may post a few of them here and there.  Below is one of them that I sent to a friend and she did some kind of clip-art thing with it.  It was from a cell phone picture that I took of the original, so it's not very clear.  Except, of course, for the rugged good looks.

Behold The Verdant Dude at age 6 or so in all his glory!!!

Charlie Bucket called...he wants his hair back.

Great article today from scribe Joe Posnanski about Babe Ruth and The MVP Formula.  But, as usual, my favorite part of the thing has nothing to do with baseball at all.  He compared something or other to an episode of Bewitched, and then...as he does...he had to include a Pozterisk.  What's a Pozterisk?  I'll let Joe explain:

Pozterisk (PAHZ-tur-isk), noun. An aside that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything but is thrown into the middle of the story because the author thinks it’s funny.

See?  He named it after himself because of his extremely heavy use of them. So anyways, here was Joe's Pozterisk about Bewitched:

*My daughters have taken a sudden liking to the show "Bewitched." And it reminds me of something that has always bothered me -- was Darrin insane? I say yes. He had a wife that looked like Elizabeth Montgomery and could do pretty much unlimited magic. She constantly wanted to use that magic to HELP him. And he basically yelled at her a lot and told her to STOP using that magic and become a suburban housewife? Huh? … The question goes double for Larry Hagman in "I Dream Of Jeannie?"

I've always thought the same thing.  Fools.

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