The Verdant Dude

It's back on.

YAY!!!!

It's been a rough week, but we also consider ourselves fortunate.  Irene wasn't as tough of a bitch as the media made her out to be.  Still, we live right on the water on the North Shore and the high tide on Sunday morning looked to be about 5-6 feet higher than normal.  The bridge crossing the harbor was under about 2-3 feet of water at that time.  Got some cool pictures of us wading across the bridge around then that I'm going to have to upload one of these days.

And the area down by the water where we normally park was under about 2 feet of water.  We moved the cars up the hill onto the street before the storm for that very reason.  The water was about 10 feet below and about 20 feet away from our back door, so we never really had much worry about losing anything to water damage.

No real wind damage either, but there were a lot of downed trees and lines all over the neighborhood.  I guess that's why it took this long to get the power going.  I dunno.  What's weird is that we did have power (and cable and internet and phone) for around 2 hours on Sunday night.  I don't know what happened in between that left us without power for almost 72 hours.  Weird.

But we stayed dry and safe and we didn't burn down the house with the candles we had going.  So, like I said, we were fortunate.

Hope the rest of y'all weathered the storm just as well.  Or were well clear of its path.

Cheers!

Gia went out today for some emergency provisions in anticipation of the doom that may be Irene this weekend.

Notice the empty water bottle

Let's see what we have:

• Midnight Moon Apple Pie Moonshine.
• Jim Beam Bourbon.
• Huge jug of cheap white wine.
• Catdaddy Carolina Moonshine.
• Mostly empty bottle of water.

So we're good.

Crap! I hope we don't lose power. We are gonna need a lot of ice!

You know, in all this time, I don't think I've ever posted a real photo of me.  I've posted pictures with my hand or a Lebowski action figure in front of my face, but never an actual photo.  Let's remedy that, shall we.

What are you looking at?

Disgusted yet?  Yeah, me too.  That's my most recent favorite hat, by the way.  A straw porkpie job that is perfect on a hot summer day.

We were at the Bar at Husk in Charleston, SC.  A really great joint that I am going to review for y'all sometime in the near future.  In the meantime, enjoy my review of The Tattooed Moose in Charleston while you gaze longingly into my bright blue eyes.  You know you want to.

Was down South visiting Gia's family this past weekend.  A hella time was had by all.

Except...

Well, we were left with watching her parent's little Yorkie for a few days.  He's a sweet little guy, but he quickly reminds you (or me, specifically) of why large dogs are better than wee ones. Here's a brief synopsis, bullet-style:

• He can jump up on a bed or couch, but he won't jump down.  He'll just sit there and whine loudly until you pick him up.
• He will eagerly climb down stairs, but he won't climb up them. He'll just sit there and whine loudly until you pick him up.
• His oddest behavior? He refuses to walk on non-carpeted floors.  Hard-wood floors, tiled floors, etc... He just won't cross those thresholds.  He'll just sit there and whine loudly until you pick him up.
• He never likes to be alone.  He needs to be with you in whatever room you are in.  And if there happens to be some un-carpeted territory between you and him?  You got it. He'll just sit there and whine loudly until you pick him up.

Did I mention he whines? Loudly?

Ugh...how I hate a whiny dog.

Participated in an interesting episode of Just Talking to the Cornfield last night.  Normally, we have a set agenda that we try to follow.  Something like this:

• 9:00-9:10 Greetings and Salutations (whatever happened to Christian Slater?)
• 9:10-9:30 TWIB Notes (TWIB stands for "This Week in Baseball". Screw the trademark!)
• 9:30-9:35 Trivia time!
• 9:35-10:?? The week's topics.  Normally it would include a statistic or trend that one of us would want to discuss.  Maybe a segment on our "Cornfield All-Stars".  Maybe a segment of "Tales from the Cornfield" or "Tales from the Shitter"...stuff like that.

I've been in Charleston, SC for a few days, and I wasn't really eager to put any energy into doing the prep work for the show this week.  So on Saturday, when the Colonel emailed me an agenda, I greeted it with less than my usual amount of enthusiasm.

So I replied with an idea.  How about a show about nothing?  No agenda, no segments, no limits, no boundaries.  We could and would talk about anything and everything.  My co-host agreed with me 100%.  It was on.  A Seinfeld-esquian journey into nothing at all.

Seriously...it's worth listening just for the intro alone when we channel Jerry and George.

It was a hoot!

Check it out either on Talkshoe or iTunes.

Courtesy of Kenny Fucking Powers, with a hat tip to my bro who smells like a wet dog for telling me out it in the first place.

So I've been thinking that we, meaning me, should probably stop drinking during our weekly broadcast of Just Talking to the Cornfield. Because, apparently, when I get drunk I like to use racist stereotypes for comedy. Like my man Kenny Fucking Powers up there. My co-hort isn't blameless either. He likes to poke fun at the Jews. Mostly because he is a Jew, and that's what he does.

Here's some of the full-on racist comedy from last week that you missed if you haven't listened in already:

• The Colonel told a tale about a recent trip he made down to Kentucky and an unexpected hotel room visit by an young African-American woman who may or may have been a hooker.  Because everything we know about black people we learned on Living Color, we lovingly called her ShaNayNay.  Or ShaNiqua.  Yeah...
• I did a brief impersonation of this young lady where I referred to the Colonel's gleaming white mini-van of manliness* as "fly".  Ahem.
• At one point, we simulated a conversation between Albert Belle (black man) and Kenny Lofton (another black man) of the Cleveland Indians (circa mid-90's) that could have been a transcription from an episode of Oz.  The word "bitch" was used several times.
• I'm pretty sure I mimicked a Hispanic (an Hispanic??) accent at one point toward the end of the show as well.  I'm not positive.  I was pretty drunk by then.  See what I mean?

I'd say it wasn't our proudest moment on air so far. But that's what makes it so damn funny!  Well, at least the two of us were laughing at each other.  There's that.  We did manage to talk about baseball for a bit in there as well, if the racism isn't enough for you.

Check us out on Talkshoe or iTunes.  We like to racism, bro!

*I think I stole that line from Kevin.  Not sure.  Either way, I'll give him the credit.

I'm not the biggest advocate in the world for abolishing any particular state's death penalty laws. I probably should be more concerned, but with everything else that is going on in this country and world...well, sometimes it's easier just not to think about some things.

I don't believe in the death penalty myself.  Not in this day and age.  Although I do get outraged by senseless crimes against children, and I've often thought that those found guilty of those particular crimes should be killed on the spot. But that's just frustration and emotion doing their jobs. When I calm down and really think about it, well...I just don't really feel that death as a punishment is something our government should condone.

And the biggest reason for feeling that way?  What if they were wrong?  They being the prosecution.  What can be done when we put an innocent man or woman to death? How can we fix an absolute wrong?

Like I said, I usually don't think about these things.  The death penalty was reinstated in New York in the mid-90's, but it was ruled unconstitutional in 2004.  And no amount of worry on my part is going to change the mind of lawmakers in Texas or Florida or any of the dozens of states that currently use the death penalty as a punitive measure.

I don't think about it unless it happens to come up.  And, while reading about Governer Rick Perry and his presidential bid, I came across the case of Cameron Todd Willingham.  A man convicted of arson and the murder of his children back in 1992.  Willingham was tried, convicted and eventually put to death in Texas in 2004.  One of the 234 executions that have been carried out during Governer Perry's tenure in Texas.

What if they were wrong?

It's a long article, but a chilling one.  Do yourself a favor.  Take 15 minutes out of your life to read that, then think about how it was possible for a government to put this man to death.  What if they were wrong?  What if they didn't care that they were wrong?

It's depressing as all hell...

PS - This isn't really about Rick Perry's candidacy.  I don't really have an opinion on him yet, or not an opinion I feel like sharing as of yet.  It's just something that came when I was reading about him.

Todd Snider and Doc Ellis know all about it.  Hell, you should too!

This episode may be one for the ages.  Let's hear what the Colonel has to say about it in his weekly email:

I was talking about this the other day with a friend of mine.

For a while there, back in the mid-80's, Robert Palmer seemed like the coolest guy in the world.  I don't know if he was the coolest guy in the world, he just...ya know...seemed that way.  This was during the Power Station/Riptide years.  Or year, to be more exact.  1985. 

Hell, he was so cool while with Power Station that he even made a couple of the clowns from Duran Duran look cool themselves.  No offense intended for those of you who like Duran Duran.  OK, maybe a little offense.  I'm just saying that the guy absolutely exuded cool for a brief period of time there.  Cool with a capital "holy crap, those women dancing behind him in that video are really hot".  In a distant, robotic, European kinda way.  But hot, right?


It's not like Palmer came out of nowhere.  I remember some of his solo stuff playing on MTV prior to his breakout turn with Power Station.  "Looking for Clues" and "Johnny and Mary" from his Clues album were early MTV staples (kinda) in 1981.  Check 'em out below:



OK...the first one is kinda odd. White hallway with a bunch of dudes dressed up in animal heads.  Seems like a nightmare straight out of The Shining.  Ugh...shivers.  The second one is odd too.  In an artsy, European kinda way. 

But Palmer?  He was cool in those videos.  Not nearly as cool as he would seem in several years, but you could see it coming.  Almost.

From there he did his Power Station stuff and Riptide.  Then Heavy Nova came in 1988 and he copied his "Addicted to Love" formula for the video for "Simply Irresistible".  Suddenly he wasn't so cool anymore.  After that, well...he seemed to lose his cool completely.  I don't know if he actually did, but it sure seemed like he did.

I have no idea where this came from or what I'm trying to say.  I guess it's that "cool" is a tough thing to define.  And that it's fleeting.  That's what happened to Robert Palmer.

But back in the day?  He was the bitch's bastard!*

*Stolen gleefully from Jack Warden in Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead.  That starred Andy Garcia.  He knows a thing or two about seeming like the coolest guy in the world.  For a fleeting moment, that is.

Been a while since you've seen the kitties.


There's Wolowitz...looking like he doesn't give a fuck about anything.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He's a good soul, even if he likes to wake me up three times a night so I can pet him.  Little fucker.  He loves to lay down right there in front of the box fan.  And he is our only cat who actually likes the air conditioning in the bedroom.  He's a cool customer.  Get it?  Err...


It's just impossible to take a good picture of Gogo.  She's really one of the most gorgeous, interesting looking cats you're ever likely to see.  But she never, EVER sits still.  Always a blur of motion.  Which is why she tends to look more like Bill the Cat in pictures than the pretty kitty she really is.  This is her spot all day long.  Next to me on the desk on her lambskin.  She's also our most vocal cat.  Which is wonderful when she is sitting right by my ear and she decides to yell at me for attention.  


Bennington sure looks surprised in this photo, doesn't he?  Well, that's how he always looks.  A constant expression of surprise on his face.  Like life is constantly throwing unexpected twists his way.  Here he is laying on a snack table over by the screen door.  That's where he likes to perch himself during the day.  And he's way too large to actually fit completely on the table.  Half of his body is usually hanging off somewhere.  Then he stretches and falls off.  We all laugh.  Especially the other cats.


Ah, Bootsy.  Bootsy, Bootsy, Bootsy.  Seems like the only time he's interested in us humans is during feeding time in the morning at at night.  Then he's all up our asses.  I had to snap this picture of him underneath some furniture because he disappears during the day.  He knows he can get away with all that behavior because he's so fucking adorable.  And this is the doucher that had crap all over his ass last week.  Do ya think he appreciated me cleaning him up?  Wouldn't think it from how he treats us.

Meow.

For a while there, I was a fan of James Patterson.  You know, the guy who wrote all those Alex Cross novels that were bestsellers.  After the first three or four of them, I started to get a little sick of the guy.  Besides the Cross novels, he was writing 2 or 3 other books each year.  Extremely prolific.  But his writing began to suffer in the process.

And let's face it...he wasn't a great writer to begin with.  And maybe it was the fault of the editor not doing their job properly.  Who knows.  All I DO know is that I started noticing mistakes, poor grammar and blatant plot screw-ups pretty soon after he began churning out all that work.  So I stopped reading him.  I figured if he (or his editor) couldn't spare the reader the time to spit out a well-written product, then I couldn't spare the time to support his work.

The same thing happened with Clive Cussler at some point as well.  For me, at least.  I mean, Cussler is formulatic to a fault.  But it's that formula that makes his Dirk Pitt stuff so entertaining.  On a beach.  In the summertime.  But it got to a point where I was finishing the book in my head after only reading a small fraction of it.  Not a lot of surprises there.

Lately, I've been reading a bunch of Lee Child.  His Jack Reacher novels.  I'm currently up to "The Enemy", a prequel novel set in 1990 published in 2004.

And I'm just now starting to get sick of his formula.  And some of Child's obvious weaknesses as a writer are starting to show.  Making his characters seem oh-so-prescient by having them predict the future military struggles in the Balkans and Iraq.  Yeah...Reacher is a God amongst men, but he really didn't need to make him any more omnipotent than he already was by using simple hindsight. C'mon...

And then there is this little passage about the M1A1 Abrams tank:

The M1A1 Abrams is like a shark, evolved to a point of absolute perfection.  It is the undisputed king of the jungle.

Now, I don't even want to get started on giving the word "perfection" a qualifier like "absolute".  Not sure the ideal of perfection can have degrees, but whatever.  I'm sure I've done the same thing many times over.

No, it's the mixed metaphor of the tank being "like a shark" and "it is the undisputed king of the jungle".  OK, the first one is a simile and the second one is a metaphor.  Whatever.  But my point is this.  How does Dell (or Random House or whomever the publisher might be) let something like that get published in the first place?  I mean, it's a simple matter of replacing "jungle" with "ocean" or "seas".  Something!

Ugh...I put down the book as soon as I read those two sentences.  I'll probably pick it up a bit later on tonight.  Because I really want to see what happens.

But Lee Child?  You're on notice, son.  You had better get your shit together.

Or else!

In my opinion, there are three kinds of people in the world.

1. Those who return their shopping cart to the proper designated spot for shopping carts after they unload their groceries into the car.

2. Those who make some kind of minimal effort to at least make sure that said shopping cart isn't blocking a parking spot or parked precariously near a vehicle.  Where it could slam into that vehicle with just the slightest breeze.

3. Those who just leave their shopping cart wherever the fuck they want to leave that shopping cart.  Because they are done with it and fuck everyone else.

I'm really not a fan of one of those types of people.  I may or may not wish brain cancer upon them when I go to my dark place.

My dark place isn't very nice.

PS - I guess there are technically FOUR kind of people in the world.  Some people don't do the grocery shopping at all.  But I assume they go to Home Depot or Target or some kind of super store that requires a cart.  I haven't figured it all out yet.  I'll let you know when I do.

Last night, depending upon your own particular criteria, may have been the best episode of Just Talking to the Cornfield ever!

Lemme explain...with bullets:

• We both were drinking. A lot! I was sipping on some Jim Beam while the Colonel did the right thing and drank some apple pie moonshine from Junior Johnson and Piedmont Distillers.  There was, of course, some stumbling and bumbling.  Mostly on my part.
• We talked about porn and fluffers.  Not in the context of porn and fluffers, but kinda in the context of porn and fluffers.  What's a fluffer?  Dear God, don't make me type those words here.
• We talked about the statistical probability of gay players in the major leagues.
• Totally unrelated (maybe), we also talked about our favorite gay crushes in baseball.
• Don't judge us!!!
• Okay...judge us.  Just do it, ya know, with some freakin' heart.
• Oh yeah...we also talked about some baseball.  A very little bit.  For about 2 hours. Yeah.

Listen in on Talkshoe or find us on iTunes.  You know you wanna!

I haven't seen an episode of True Blood since Season 1, so I missed the one from last summer that featured a song by Cary Ann Hearst.  "Hell's Bells" is the name of the tune, and it's really freaking good.

Seems like it became quite popular after being featured on that HBO show.  I didn't know that, but we've been listening to it for quite a while now anywho. And she's from Charleston, SC...so we dig.

Check her interview on NPR a few months ago below.  And then a few videos featuring her music, including the video for "Hell's Bell".  Dig times two!

Here's what I want to know.

Looks, er, okay.  I guess.

Has anyone out there tried the Chicago-style hot dog from Sonic?  To be more specific, has anyone out there who knows and loves Chicago-style hot dogs tried the Chicago-style hot dog from Sonic?

And if you have, is it worth driving 10.64 miles to get them?  Before you answer, please note that there is literally NOWHERE around where I live to buy Chicago-style hot dogs.

Hmmm...maybe this should have gone on the food blog. 

...another distraction to waste tons of my time.

Was watching television yesterday and came across a commercial for a new service offered by our local cable provider.  On one of the channels I didn't know existed, there is a game channel hosted by TAG games.


Bejeweled, Tetris, Texas Hold 'Em, Beach Solitaire, Sudoku games, word puzzles and daily trivia/puzzle games.  A bunch of stuff. And I hate to admit it, but they all look great.  And they all work just as well with our TV remote. AND you can play against other customers in your area.

As if there weren't enough distractions on the Internet, now I've got to deal with this!  Ugh!

Not a lot of sleep on a Sunday night leads to an overall crappy Monday.

The cats made it even worse.

First, Wolowitz and Bennington tagged-teamed me all through the night with furious need of attention.  I don't really understand it.  I know that cats are nocturnal by nature, but they usually let us sleep through the night.  But Wolowitz has lately started a routine where he comes in to the bedroom and yells at me. Never at Gia...just at me. Then I have to make room for him on the bed and pet him until he falls asleep.  Which has the opposite affect on me.  But I have to do it or else he just keeps yelling at me.

When Bennington realizes that I'm awake, he comes in and decides it's time for some petting as well.  And he's got this kneading thing that he does...and he does it forever!  Like an hour or so.  Crazy!  I think I got about 2 hours of sleep in total. 

If that wasn't bad enough, I'm home alone during the day working and Bootsy comes walking by me from the laundry room where we keep the litter boxes. And he is wafting a certain...odor.  One that is thoroughly unpleasant to my nostrils.  He either took a nasty crap and just dragged the smell with him, or...

Yup...his ass is covered in shit.

He's been fighting a little cold these past few days, and sometimes it affects his digestive system in horrible ways.  That's what happened today.

That's how I found myself typing the words "best way to clean a cat's ass" into Google today.

How was your Monday?

Hmm...not so sure.

There has been a rash of videos recently posted on Youtube and other sites claiming to be footage of UFOs or alien spacecrafts or whatever you want to call them.  Lately, the deal has been one video from a specific angle and then another from a totally different angle at the same place and time showing the same...ahem...event.  Then maybe even ANOTHER video from ANOTHER angle.

There are hoaxes, and then there are elaborate hoaxes.

I spend the requisite amount of time studying them and deciding that they are fake before I find out that they actually ARE fake, but I do it anyway.  For my own benefit.  Right now these fuckers are batting .000, but it ain't stopping them.

You know when I'll believe that the "event" is real?  When I see it with my own gorgeous blue eyes.  Or even as a live feed on CNN.

And then I will gladly shout in my best Will Smith impersonation "Welcome ta Earf!"

Right before they kill me and everyone I know.

How's your day going?