Vegas 2007: In the Hall of the Crimson Gans

Prelude: Make way for pirate jokes

Friday night, I sat in the Chili’s Too at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, eating dinner and waiting for my connecting flight to Las Vegas. I knew I was near the gate for the Vegas flight because a girl wearing a purple sequined tank top walked by. She may as well been wearing a sandwich board that said, “Follow me to Sin City.”

My cell phone buzzed with a text message from my younger brother, Tickle. He was already in Vegas with our youngest brother, Snake Anthony, our Uncle T, and our cousin, Youngblood. We were on the trip to initiate Youngblood into the Vegas club—he just turned 21, and as we did with Snake Anthony in 2006, we wanted to show him all the new and exciting ways he could lose hundreds of dollars and kill millions of brain cells.

“Where does a pirate vacation?” Tickle’s text message asked.

“Arrrgkansas,” I guessed.

“Arrrgentina,” he wrote back.

Pirate jokes before I even landed. It would be a good trip.


Never double-down against a guy named Elmer

Right when I got in, I sat down with the rest of my war party at a blackjack table against a dealer named Elmer—the same name as our grandfather (and Uncle T’s father). I wasn’t sure if this was a good sign or bad sign, because Grandpa Elmer was a broken-down drunk. I only knew my grandfather when he sat in the corner of his house in his pajamas, drinking coffee and listening to ballgames on a transistor radio. Elmer the dealer, however, was clearly a productive member of society and also seemed very friendly. So I took it as a good sign.

It was a very good sign for Youngblood. He wound up winning $1000 against Elmer. Uncle T, Snake Anthony, and I more or less broke even. Tickle was not tickled by Elmer, and a few of his Benjamin Franklins made their way across the felt to the house.

Tickle, while annoyed, vowed to rebound. “I’m the People’s Champ,” he said. I have no idea what he meant, but it was an assertion he continued to make all weekend.


To kill ya

I do not like tequila. Uncle T loves it. Whenever we drink with him, he preaches the Gospel of Good Tequila. I have had the good stuff with him, and even the good stuff seems like a bad idea to me. But when you’re in Vegas, the whole good-bad polarity is reversed, and you find yourself doing things like drinking more tequila in one weekend than you have over the past decade.

After our Elmer encounter on Friday, we hit the bar. I had already had a few vodkas and felt myself on the slow, pleasant journey from Buzzistan to Drunkerbaijan. Uncle T decided to buy us a ticket on the express train by setting us up with four giant shots of top-shelf bad idea. I assumed that the size and price would indicate we would sip this most demonic of demon rum, but Uncle T rocked back and downed it. The rest of us couldn’t let the oldest guy show us up, so we all threw our shots back.

There are few things worse than realizing, as you’re downing a shot, you can’t get it all down in one shot. I got half down my throat before I felt the Mexican napalm shooting up from my belly. I stopped with the other half of the shot in my mouth, waiting to be swallowed, which is not a happy place to be when you don’t really want to swallow what’s in your mouth. I managed to get it down and immediately got the pre-hurl saliva mouth. As Ralphie would say in A Christmas Story, “Oh, fudge.”

I stood, breathing deeply, fighting to pass from Code Red to Code Orange. Slowly my stomach returned to its seated and upright position.

Of course, this didn’t prevent me from drinking three more shots of tequila the next night. And yes, I am three years away from turning 40.


We obsess over Danny Gans, though we know not who he is

Danny Gans was plastered all over the Mirage. On the Mirage sign, inside the lobby, even on the chips, Danny Gans and his Osmond-white teeth smiled at us. “Entertainer of the Year,” boasted one poster blurb.

“Who the hell is Danny Gans?” we asked. We did not know.

We found ourselves talking about Danny Gans constantly. Our mantra for the weekend was What would Danny Gans do? We relayed sightings of him: in the men’s room, at the craps table, in line at Chipotle.

Stumbling into the Mirage buffet for dinner, we chatted up the cashier. “Does Danny Gans ever eat here? What’s his favorite dish? He seems like a crab cake guy, does he like crab cakes?”

She laughed at us, then said, “Actually, he calls in sick a lot.”

That random bit of information poured gasoline on the Danny Gans fire. Danny Gans abuses his sick leave—who knew he even had any? Did he accrue hours, or did he just call up and, Rick James-like, say, “I’m Danny Gans, bitch!” After all, he performed in his own Danny Gans Theater at the Mirage.

“So what happens when Danny Gans cancels?” one of us asked. “Does somebody else perform?”

“No way,” another replied. “How do you replace Danny Fucking Gans? You can’t substitute for him. If Danny Gans calls in, then the magic has to wait.”


The man who would have been king of YouTube

Our party grew larger on Saturday. Tickle’s friends, Trapper and Hawkeye, joined us. By day, they are respected professionals. Or at least professionals. By night, they are Tickle's companions in pranksterism.

We went to the club in the Mirage again on Saturday night. Trapper proceeded to hit the dance floor and conduct the single greatest night of Caucasian dancing I have ever seen. To fully appreciate it, you have to know that Trapper has a similar vibe to Steve Carell. He’s friendly looking, very hirsute, and seems very down to earth. But the minute his feet touched the dance floor, he started a four-part dance routine:

1. He would hop up to someone—male and female—and conduct a space-invading blend of grinding and vogueing. He had his hands down low, palms out, as if he was ready for some naughty business. We called this the Bad Cop move.


2. After anywhere from two seconds to two minutes, the object of Trapper’s attention would appear to get annoyed. He would immediately back off and throw his up hands in a no-harm, no-foul fashion. This was the transformation to Good Cop. He wasn’t really going to grind you, he was just playing!


3. When the person gave him the look of what in the hell are you doing—or verbally asked what the hell he was doing—Trapper put a finger to his lips and made a shushing motion.


4. Finally, he would hop away backwards from the person, but make a come hither motion with his shushing finger, inviting them to join him.

Trapper did this for at least two hours, pausing only to grab a new drink. At one point, he conducted a mammoth Bad Cop behind a guy, following him around the club, as close as his shadow, for a good five minutes. The man never suspected a thing.

I cannot really do justice to how funny this routine was. Talking about it the next day, we agreed that if we had been able to videotape it, Trapper would have been the King of YouTube. He would have entered that pantheon of YouTube gods: Lightsaber Kid, Crying Britney Spears Fan, Profane Asian Uncle. Inboxes around the world would have been flooded with FWD: OMFG ROTFLMOA at the Dancing White Guy! He would have been so popular, there would have been a Dancing White Guy backlash.

Alas, we did not have a video camera.


Hawkeye’s indecent proposal to Tickle

Tickle is one of those people who will do anything for a laugh, especially if there is a profit involved. He’s taken bets on if he could drink a gallon of milk in one sitting, ride all the way to Milwaukee in the middle of summer with the heat on, and even rub his face with Trapper’s sweaty boxers for 10 seconds.

Sunday night, Hawkeye dropped a prop bet bomb: would Tickle, right there in the bar, crap his pants for $400? Trapper chimed in that he would throw in $200 to make it $600.

Most normal people would immediately reject that bet. Tickle, however, is not most normal people. The bet would erase his losses from the trip. Negotiations began in earnest: How long would he have to sit there? Would he have to walk around? Would he collect if he was tossed out before the allotted time? I don’t think the Iraqi government worked as intensely on their constitution as Tickle, Hawkeye, and Trapper did on this Magna Crappa. After 45 minutes of haggling, they finally settled on Tickle pooping himself and either staying in the bar for 30 minutes or winning if he was thrown out before then.

“You’re not really going to do this?” I asked my brother.

“I could use the money,” he said. “You wouldn’t do it?”

“No way,” I said.

“Come on, name your price.”

“You can’t put a price on dignity,” I said.

“Would you do it for a million dollars?” he asked.

“Okay, yeah, for a million I would.”

“Then name your price.”

He had a point. “Five grand,” I said. “That would be enough that even if people were grossed out, they’d say, ‘Well, five grand is a lot of money.’”

The bet escalated. Trapper offered to match Hawkeye’s $400 and raise the bid to $800. As if that wasn’t enough, Snake Anthony moved from the don’t do it camp to throwing in $200 to make it an even thousand.

I know Tickle. At that price, it would take an act of divine intervention for him to not shit his pants at the Mirage bar. Uncle T decided to play the role of God. “Tickle, you are not doing this,” he said. He had protested earlier, but half-heartedly as he was amused by the negotiation process. Once it became clear that Tickle was going to do it, he put his foot down. After all, who wants to be the uncle to a nephew who craps himself?

Tickle finally called it off. I was mostly relieved, but I’d be lying if I said part of me wasn’t disappointed.


The People’s Champ is going to miss his flight

Tickle has missed more flights than everyone else I know combined. If he doesn’t miss the flight, he is always cutting it close. He had an 8 a.m. flight on Monday, and Tickle decided he was going to stay up all night with Hawkeye and Trapper rather than sleep for a couple hours.

Snake Anthony and I did not join him in this pursuit. We went back to the room, packed, and managed to crash at a reasonable 2:45 a.m.

Snake’s cell phone rang at 4:00. He ignored it. Then mine rang. “What?” I asked.

“I’m the People’s Champ,” Tickle slurred through the receiver.

“Go fuck yourself,” I said, closing the phone. It rang again.

“Tell me I’m the People’s Champ,” said Tickle.

I knew how this would go if I fought. “You’re the People’s Champ,” I said.

“Tell Snake Anthony I’m the People’s Champ,” Tickle said.

“Snake Anthony, Tickle is the People’s Champ,” I said to the other bed. Back into the phone I said, “Now fuck off.”

Tickle came back to the room at 5:00 and of course woke us up. He made a wake-up call for 6:15, then flopped into my bed next to me and started snoring.

When hammered, Tickle snores like Shemp Howard of The Three Stooges. There’s the exaggerated sawing on the intake, then some kind of yipping on the exhale. The only person I’ve ever heard snore like that, aside from Shemp, was my Grandpa Elmer.

After nudging Tickle did no good to stop the snoring, I put a pillow over his face. That woke him up. “Roll over and stop snoring,” I barked. He did.

At 5:30 the hotel phone woke me up again. It was Tickle’s friend, Smoke, who lives in Vegas. He had visited that night, left his cell phone in our room, and needed it back before we left. Tickle told him to meet him in the lobby at 6:30 and he’d give him the phone if he’d take Tickle to the airport. Then my brother fell back asleep and started snoring.

At 6:15, his wake-up call rang. I punched Tickle in the back. “Wake up, you’re going to miss your flight.” My brother did not budge. I decided to just get up and take a shower, figuring I could catch a ride to the airport with Smoke and get some breakfast. When I was all ready at 6:40, Tickle finally woke up.

My brother rarely worries about anything, but he went from passed out to full-bore panic. He had 80 minutes until his flight left, and the screening lines at Vegas are legendary in their length. Tickle threw all his stuff into his suitcase, making a giant ball of clothes that prevented the suitcase from closing. He had to take everything out and repack so he could close the suitcase.

By this point, Snake Anthony and I were doubled over laughing. We had talked all weekend about this moment, and now it seemed highly appropriate that Tickle was being punished by the Vegas gods. “You’re never going to make it,” I said as we finally left at about 6:50.

“I know,” he said with genuine regret. “And I only have one flight to catch because I took Allegiant. I’m going to get stuck here til tomorrow.”

“Oh no, you’ll get stuck here longer than that,” I said. “And you’ll be out of money. You’ll be on the Strip, offering to shit your pants for ten bucks.”

Smoke, however, came through big time. He drove like the People’s Champ to the airport. Tickle got inside at 7:15 and sprinted to his check-in desk. I left for mine, checked in, and headed to the very long security line.

Near the scanner, I saw Tickle ahead of me, his Bears cap pulled low, his face dragging with fatigue, waiting for the security scan to finish. He saw me and we pointed at each other. I watched him go through security in time to make his flight.

“That was a triumph of the human spirit,” I texted him. “You truly are the People’s Champ.”

And to think we’re probably going back in May for Tickle’s bachelor party.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What did we leave in Vegas?

10) Kids’ college funds.

9) Future paternity suit.

8) Old mob identity.

7) Healthy kneecaps.

6) iPhone loaded with password e-mails, contact information, pictures of our families, and all of our paranoia.

5) Every memory of what happened from 3:35 a.m. Friday through 10:13 a.m. Sunday.

4) Plenty of chances for blackmail.

3) Every last shred of dignity.

2) Faith in a just and loving God.

1) We’re not telling.

Note: the above are completely fictional and not at all a representation of what happened to a particular blogger this past weekend. Mostly.

Back tomorrow with a recap of this past weekend's trip.

Friday CJ Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

Vegas!

I leave tonight after work and depart for home on Monday morning. That seems like the perfect amount of time to spend there. My first trip, my brother Tickle and I went from Wednesday night to Monday morning so we could bet the two opening rounds of the NCAA basketball tourney. Way, way, way, way too goddamned long to be there, especially with Tickle, who doesn’t know the meaning of the word moderation. Last year’s trip was a day shorter but still managed to take at least two years off my life thanks to things like Red Bull and vodka at 3:30 in the morning.

This year, I’m in for a nice surgical strike. A little blackjack, a little poker, some craps if those first two things go well, and a restful day in the sportsbook on Sunday, soaking up the NFL and watching the Bears win (hopefully by more than 12 points). Plus I have meaningful Cubs baseball to wager on! Let’s see if the iPod sends me off on a high note.

1) “Do It Again (Live),” The Kinks. Day after day I get up and I say come on do it again. If that’s not my Vegas mantra, I don’t know what is. This is the live version from To the Bone that’s extra peppy. A nice way to kick off the weekend.

2) “Smells Live Teen Spirit (Live),” Nirvana. It’s on my cannot be overplayed list. I know that their popularity had a chummy backwash on the music industry, with any smelly teen from the Pacific Northwest getting a record deal from Geffen. But the music business has always stripped-mined trends until there’s nothing left, and I refuse to let that destroy one of the best songs of the last twenty years. I always get pumped when I hear the opening riff, waiting for Dave Grohl to abuse his drums like Jack Bauer interrogating a suspected terrorist during sweeps week.

3) “(What’s So Funny Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” Elvis Costello. Is there a better song for the post 9/11 world?

4) “Blizzard of '77,” Nada Surf. I was seven when this blizzard hit. I’ve never seen snow like that in my life (though that may change this year!). My dad and my uncle helped me build a snow compound in the backyard. Not a fort, a compound. I had a central igloo, braced with an old door as the roof, with trenches, walls, foxholes. The plows pushed snow into a mountain near the corner of our lot, and we played endless games of king of the mountain on it. That’s the kind of stuff I really miss from childhood, the irrepressible joy of just going out and playing in the snow.

5) “Olio,” The Rapture. I’ve written about how I let the chumpnozzles at Pitchfork talk me into buying this overrated album, but I do really like this lead off track from it. The layers of throwback synths, skittish hi-hat, and warbled vocals create a dark vibe that lives between paranoia and regret. If only the rest of the album had been as good.

6) “Wonderboy,” Tenacious D. I know Jack Black is overplayed, but this album is so in my wheelhouse. Hard rocking, smart assed, and full of references to sex, Satan, and more rocking. For God's sake, it has a song about Dio on it—I am powerless against something like that. No matter how annoying Black’s career gets, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for this CD.

7) “The Song Remains the Same,” Led Zeppelin. My freshman year of college, I think my dorm mates and I played Houses of the Holy more than any other CD. I know we drank to this CD more than any other. Nothing got us ready for the weekend like popping beer caps as Jimmy Page kicked this song off with one of his most hyper riffs. Plus it’s really fun to try and sing like Robert Plant does here when you’re loaded to the gills.

8) “Refugee,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The first time I ever heard this song, it was on Chipmunk Punk. Here's how you can spot a good song: even when sung in annoying, sped-up voices, the song is still good. One of Petty's best.

9) “Avenues & Alleyways,” Rancid. The strategically placed oi oi oi really pushes this to 11.

10) “Obstacle 1,” Interpol. Oh how they let me down with their new album. Luckily, due to its advanced sensors, my iPod knows this, so it’s pulled this gem from their incredible debut. Their rhythm section packs a huge punch here.

11) “Tell Her About It,” Billy Joel. No, no, stop, we’re not having this before a guys trip to Sin City.

11) “Neat, Neat, Neat,” The Damned. That’s better. It’s not like I’m afraid to air my dirty iPod laundry, but I can’t end with drunken Hamptons doo-wop on a weekend like this. The Damned, however, are perfect for Vegas: a loud, brash blur of energy and attitude.

Wow, I need a cigarette after that. I am now properly pumped for the weekend. I hope you have a great one, and I’ll be posting again Tuesday if my fingers haven’t been broken.

GOP-Harmony

Two men in suits appear on screen. Their faces are blurred.

MAN #1
It’s hard when you’re holding hands with someone at a prayer breakfast and wondering, am I feeling more than the power of Jesus?

Cut to another pair of men, also dressed in suits.

MAN #3
The guys I’d meet randomly would find out I’m a Republican and want to get into it about Bush. I’d tell them, hey, if I wanted to get into bush, I’d be home with my wife.

MAN #2
Yeah, I didn't hire you to be the speaker, I hired you to be the whip!

Cut to the GOP-Harmony spokesman.

SPOKESMAN
At GOP-Harmony, we put you in touch with conservative congressmen, party leaders, and “reporters” looking for someone special for at least 15 minutes. We use 29 distinct items to match you to the perfect liaison.

Some of the categories float by: Denial, Self-Loathing, Committee Memberships, Inseam

Cut back to #3 and #4, holding hands.

MAN #4
It’s not easy to find a man who’s into tax cuts, nation building, and bare-backing. (raises his partner’s hand) But I did!

MAN #3
I'd look like a real hypocrite if I used condoms—I’m chair of the Presidential Commission on Abstinence!

SPOKESMAN
With GOP-Harmony, you don’t have to worry about messy exposés or embarrassing mug shots. We rigorously check out all of our members, weeding out officers, agents, reporters, bloggers….

Cut to another pair of men. One is dressed as Ronald Reagan, the other as Nancy.

REAGAN MAN
Now I never have to ask, “Are you a cop or from The New York Times?”

NANCY MAN
Unless we’re role-playing! (laughs)

SPOKESMAN
And you have our GOP-Harmony Guarantee—none of the men you’ll meet are gay!

Cut back to the first two men.

MAN #2
When people ask me if I’m gay, I ask them, “If I was gay, would I be voting against gay marriage?”

MAN #1
Exactly! I just want to have sex with guys, not a relationship with them.

MAN #2
Thank you, GOP-Harmony!

Cut to the Spokesman.

SPOKESMAN
So what are you waiting for, a subpoena? Go online today to complete your confidential, fully encrypted GOP-Harmony profile. Act now and you’ll also receive our free, full color Congressional Page-a-Day calendar, the perfect way to get up in the morning!

Top Ten Wednesdays: What are we presenting to Congress?

10) New cover of "The Song Remains the Same."

9) Five ways to spot an undercover vice cop.

8) Bill to have Britney preserved as a national white trash treasure.

7) Resolution declaring Michigan Stadium a disaster area.

6) Toy-safety plan freed of lead paint, sharp edges, or small parts.

5) Theory that what’s undermining the black community isn’t violent rap music, but kids in the projects renting Brokeback Mountain.

4) New family values cockring that changes colors with your hypocrisy level.

3) White House idea to have Criss Angel transform Iraq into stable democracy on an episode of Mindfreak.

2) The elephant in the room that the elephants in the room want to ignore.

1) Presidential hindquarters for sniffing.

No top ten today

I'm going to put off the list until tomorrow. Just didn't feel very funny thinking about 9/11 today. I caught some of United 93 on cable last week, which I had never seen. The footage of the planes hitting is still chilling.

I had to go to work that morning, and I listened to ABC on the radio. I will never forget the sound of Peter Jennings's voice cracking as he said the first tower was falling.

As usual, The Lovely Becky says it better than I ever could.

Back tomorrow.

I think the Bears just fumbled again

Chicago has a huge sports fan diaspora, as millions of people who have moved away from the Windy City still maintain their accents, love of pork products, and biological sports affiliations. Go to any Cubs, Bulls, and Bears away game, and you'll probably find a good number of Chicago fans in the stands. Looking around Qualcomm Stadium this past weekend as I attended the Bears-Chargers game, at least a quarter of the stadium cheered for the visiting Monsters of the Midway. In our section, I sat next to a man who had moved from Chicago to southern California in 1979. He was still pulling for Chicago even after soaking up two decades of West Coast sun, resisting the easy temptation of jumping on the Chargers bandwagon now that they no longer suck. And he still talked like a Super Fan.

The game was a typical Bears game. The defense played outstanding football, keeping the Chargers from doing much of anything on offense for the first half. The San Diego fans got quiet pretty quickly as the Bears shut down the NFL's best player, running back Ladanlian Tomlinson. "I guess this isn't a Nike commercial!" I yelled at the surrounding Charger fans, referring to LT's recent TV spot where he ran roughshod over the Bears. At one point as the Charger fans behind us got pissed about San Diego's conservative play calling. I turned around and said, "I thought you guys fired Marty Schottenheimer." There's nothing like marching into another teams house and running your flag up their pole. Chicago was up 3-0 at the half, and I thought if they could score a TD when they got the ball to start the second half, they could probably win the game, and we'd be chanting "Super Bears, Super Bowl" with the other Grabowskis.

Of course, that would involve the Bears offense actually scoring. Instead, they shit the bed, fumbling twice in the second half, and also turning it over on a goofy punt that hit a Bears player. The Chargers are too good to not capitalize on that many mistakes, and they finally managed to score 14 points and win 14-3. Grossman didn't play very well but he was definitely not a first-string goat compared to the butterfingers running backs.

The Charger fans gave us a good ribbing as we left in our blue and orange regalia. They were pretty nice--at Soldier Field, I am sure much would have been said about the sexual preferences of San Diego fans and their mothers. At Qualcomm Stadium, it was mostly, "Too bad, Bears fans," with "Bears suck" being about as bad as it got. One guy said, "Hope you enjoyed the weather," which I couldn't help but laugh at.

As we walked out of the stadium, we spotted a Bear fan sitting on the curb. He was shirtless, his torso completely covered in blue and orange body paint. He spotted us in our Bears shirts, shook his head, and took a mournful drag on his cigarette. That pretty much said it all.

At least the weather was great.

Friday CJ Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

I have no secret that I have an unholy love for a certain professional football team from Chicago. Last year’s Super Bowl run also left me with an offseason hangover that has been ringing since February. Getting so close to winning the Super Bowl, only to come up short, bothered me more than all the 6-10 seasons I’ve watched over the last decade.

But the NFL season has begun anew, and I find myself ready to pop two Alka-Selser and cheer for my Bears again, even if a little part of me dies every time Rex Grossman throws into double coverage. Normally, I would be firing up my Sunday Ticket, thanking The Lovely Becky for being an understanding football widow for the next 18 Sundays (plus playoffs), and yelling at the TV.

Tomorrow, however, I head out to sunny San Diego to scream for my team in person. My dad managed to score tickets to the Chargers-Bears game, and I’m going with him and my brother Tickle (yes, his real-life nickname). The weekend after that, Tickle, my other brother Snake Anthony (not his Christian name), and I will join my uncle and cousin in Vegas, where I will gorge myself on sports betting until I can either fit no more money in my pockets or my thumbs get broken. Needless to say, I'm just a tad excited.

On to the iTunes....


1) “Save a Prayer,” Duran Duran. Really funny this came up—this played last night at the restaurant/bar TLB and I went to. "So which Duran Duran member was your favorite?" TLB asked with dead-panned Tiger Beat enthusiasm. I agreed with her that John Taylor was my favorite, because he was the one who could really play and he was really cute. Wait, the last one was only TLB. Seriously. Okay, so he was attractive, that doesn’t mean anything.

2) “Deliverance,” Opeth. And now for something completely different…You know what can really wake you up on a Friday morning? Double-bass blast beats and Cookie Monster death metal vocals. My brother Snake gave this to me. He likes dis Swedish metal, jah, because it captures the icy agony of life and is very fun for him to plays on his guitar and drums. Actually, Opeth write very good music, a lot of delicate, moody, minor-chord stuff. They even sing very beautifully during the slow passages. It's when the Jolt Cola passages hit and the Cookie Monster vocals kick in that I can’t take them seriously. D is for Death, that's my destiny; D is for Death, that’s my destiny; D is for Death, that’s my destiny, Death- Death-Death starts with D.

3) “Whatsername,” Green Day. The last song on American Idiot: The George W. Bush Story. I am glad that this album was a huge hit, not just because it’s an hour of catchy, energetic pop punk, but because a blatantly political album came along to break up the Tony Keith American flag toga party. There were some good indie acts writing overtly political songs after 9/11—Sleater-Kinney and Ted Leo, for instance—but there was no “Ohio” or “Fortunate Son” being played on the radio as our Executive Branch used the Constitution like Depends and got defensive when we asked where that smell was coming from. So it was nice to see the guys sticking their middle fingers in the apple pie win a Grammy.

4) “You Do Something to Me,” Paul Weller. It is funny how a man who once snarled you think I know nothing of the modern world? can sound like Burt Bacharach in his old-rock age.

5) “Shambala,” Beastie Boys. Speaking of coming a long way from waving your 20-foot inflatable penis around.... A cool little instrumental that combines wah-wah Shaft guitar with those chanting Benedictine monks. Our little Brass Monkey is all growns up.

6) “Shake That,” Eminem. So, in an effort to add some wheat germ to my Wonder Bread music collection, I loaded up on some rap music over the summer. I will be the first to admit that I am not the target demographic for Detroit’s angriest white boy. And yeah, "Stan" is a pretty awesome song. But really, if you’re going to write a blatant song about sex like "Shake That," decades after a lot of people more talented than you have drawn water from the same well, you better bring madder linez than I get more ass than a toilet seat. The rotting corpse of Bon Scott could drool out a better zinger. Plus, I will never be able to take Eminem seriously after seeing 8 Mile. It was so obvious he wanted to ride a purple motorcycle and get Apollonia to jump in a freezing lake.

7) “Anytime,” Neil Finn. He and/or Crowded House would have been huge if they hadn’t been Hobbits. New Zealand has produced a lot of terrific music that no one outside of New Zealand has heard, that I would have missed if my friend Paula and her trusty compatriot T-Wise Middy hadn’t left the Shire for Iowa and brought their awesome collection of Kiwi music with them.

8) “Stand in Silence,” …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. Grendel just saw these guys in Amsterdam (lucky bastard). It’s not enough for him to have amazing beer, legal weed, and centuries of culture around him, he also has to have good bands coming through all the time. Trail of the Dead have, however, left a trail of diminishing returns since making the incredible Source Tags and Codes in 2002. They more or less have written the same kind of song since then: start out with a peppy beginning, slow it down, add a lot of extra crap you don’t need like horns and sound effects, and then return to the main movement. Still, I would trade in a lot of beaver pelts to get them to play the UP.

9) “Generator,” Bad Religion. Then again, it is possible to keep writing the same song over and over and still be good.

10) “Bottle Rocket,” The Go! Team. I’m a little more hip to this hoppin. One of those songs you can instantly groove to, with a good rapped female vocal that reminds me of Neneh Cherry. I will be listening to more from them.

11) “Point A to Point Blank,” New Bomb Turks. I love going out on a high note, and this is a getaway car of a song, floored from the second the drums start. Like Trail of the Dead, the Turks have one great album (Scared Straight) that got me to buy more of their less-great albums. But when stuff like this launches me into the best football weekend of my life, it's money well spent.

Have a great weekend. If you happen to watch the game and see a guy in a Bears shirt running on the field to tackle a Charger player returning Rex Grossman’s fifth interception of the day, that might be me. Especially if that man has no pants on.

Interview excerpts from the new Bush biography

This week, Robert Draper's Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush was released. The book revealed a number of unknown facts about the president, including that his desk is damp with tears. Here are a few other excerpts from Draper's interviews with the president.

On the Vice President
"I had a hard time calling the Vice President 'Dick.' Heh heh, there's two funny words in that sentence. Whenever I said his name, I would giggle, and he would get mad at me like dad always did in church when they would say not to covet your neighbor’s ass. Heh, heh. At first I tried calling the Vice President 'D.C.' But then I’d ask where D.C. was, and the staff would look at me like I had two heads. Which would be cool, to have two heads. Could get twice as much thinking done. Anyway, it took a year but then I figured out why the 'D.C.' thing caused confusion.

"So I tried to associate 'Dick' with a word that doesn't make me laugh. I tried 'Duck.' I would say 'Dick,' but think 'Duck,' and that would keep me from laughing. But I said 'Duck.' And this was right after 9/11, so Dick hit the floor of the Oval Office. That made me laugh harder than when I called him 'Dick.' So I just call him 'Dick' now. I finally stopped laughing at it around the 2004 election."

On homosexuality
"Sometimes I envy gay guys. I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Having a wife and two daughters, there are times when I think it would be heaven to be surrounded by men. I think of all those hands, wrapped around thick branches, pulling hard until that pesky brush gives way. Who couldn’t use some of that? But then the icky thoughts come. That’s why we can’t have gay marriage. "

On sobriety
"When do I miss drinking? Hell, when don’t I miss drinking? I can smell that whiskey you had for lunch. Oh, you had a Jack and Coke two weeks ago? Must be that sesame deprivation, makes me smell harder. Heh, heh.

"The first thing I’m going to do when I’m done presidenting is fall on the wagon. No, it’s not fall off the wagon. The wagon is what takes you to the bar."

On Iraq
"Why Iraq? Because we couldn’t attack France. I’m just kidding, I love that long bagel bread they make. Seriously, we had to attack Iraq because…hold on…boy, PowerPoint takes a long time to load, don’t it? Okay, we had to attack Iraq because they had WMD. Aw, crap, this is the old file. Uh, it was, uh, Manifest Destiny."

On Europe
"Everybody says we should be more like the Europeans. Well, what have they ever done?"

On bipartisanship
I could get so much more done if the Democrats would stop bothering me. Imagine if I was always over your shoulder, telling you what you can and can’t write. Now replace 'over your shoulder' with 'fulfilling my legal obligations as elected representatives of the people,' and 'telling you what you can and can’t write' with 'what is and what isn’t illegal.' Pretty annoying, ain't it."

On elocutionableness
"People like to make fun of my speeching, and you know what, that's okay with me. I didn't get elected for my good looks."

On being sad
"I cry every day. But not because of my job. No, somebody signed me up for these Google Alerts, so I see all the mean stuff people say about me. I cry when I read search hits from george bush douchebag and bush monkeyfaced fucktard. That hurts more than people think, and I don't even know what fucktard means. I’m not made of stone. Am I? No, you’re right, it’s bone. Always had a problem with rhymes.

"You know what hurts even more? When I have the Secret Service track down who writes that stuff. I don’t want to do it, and I wouldn’t have to if they would just write things like george bush swell guy. I wish we could live by what Martin Luther King once said: 'Can’t we all just get along?'"

On reaching your dreams
"I am living proof that if you work hard and learn from your mistakes, you’ll get ahead.

"Had you going, didn’t I? Heh heh heh!"

Top Ten Tuesdays: How are we celebrating our birthdays?

Special extra we're so old today edition!

12) Tapping foot to signal the next stall that we’re ready for a birthday spanking.

11) Wishing that Scarlett Johansson would leap out of the cake.

10) Watching Mr. Burns leap out instead.

9) Arranging naked detainees to spell Happy Birthday.

8) Having leather mask unzipped for the whole day.

7) Receiving thoughtful extra kickback from Halliburton.

6) Unwrapping subpoena from grand jury.

5) Drinking an Old Style for every year we’ve lived.

4) Getting treated for severe alcohol poisoning.

3) Popping two Viagra and cruising the retirement home for widows.

2) Looking over shoulder to see if that’s a breeze or the icy grip of Death.

1) Being as horrified about our new age as Dante was about the same number in Clerks. (severe profanity alert)

And just to clarify things, yes, I am another year closer to death today....

Friday CJ Random 11

It's one more random than 10!

Man o’ man, I have been working for the weekend this week.

Speaking of which, last weekend The Lovely Becky’s parents were in town. We walked down to the lovely Marquette harbor to check out the Seafood Festival. The Festival was really just an excuse to pitch tents, fry whitefish, and drink beer. But the highlight was the band playing when we went down. They were the classic classic rock bar band, pounding through covers of songs that constantly pound out of stations called Rock 101.

They started playing Loverboy’s, “Turn Me Loose,” which I recognized in an embarrassingly short time. (I can name that guilty pleasure in two notes.) "Wow, bold choice to go with this over 'Working for the Weekend,'" I said to TLB. The band launched into Styx’s "Too Much Time on My Hands," which had the unexpected effect of making me pine for Tommy Shaw’s singing. But then what did I hear? The opening da-dada-dada-duh-duh-duh riff of "Working for the Weekend." Two Loveboy ditties in the space of three songs. I don’t even think Loverboy play their songs that frequently any more.

I also realized that Neko Case, who at one point was supposedly playing here this weekend, is not. However, who didn’t cancel? The lead singer of Warrant, conducting a solo tour/puppet show.

That's the music scene in da UP. Thank God for iPods...

1) “On the Bus Mall,” The Decemberists. The anti-Loverboy.

2) “Wish You Were Here,” Pink Floyd. One of the few Pink Floyd songs I really enjoy. Probably because it sounds like it was played by humans with beating hearts. A lot of their stuff is creative, but always feels a bit robotic to me. We understand how notes are put together to form music, but we can never understand this thing you call...soul. BOOP!

3) “Cicatriz ESP,” The Mars Volta. The return of the wank. It thrills me that the kids are digging guitar solos, time signature changes, and 10-minute songs again. There’s a little “space journey” at the end that’s begging for the Laserium treatment.

4) “Gospel,” The National. Like Spoon, another group that’s getting assloads of praise that they completely deserve. This is a delicate, melancholy closer from their latest album, Boxer. So good I have no jokes.

5) “Crawl,” Alkaline Trio. My favorite song that could be officially classified as emo. It wants to cry on someone’s shoulder and then punch it.

6) “If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day,” Robert Johnson. I think Satan added the extra “e” in Judgement when he gave Robert Johnson these songs in exchange for his soul. Terrible speller, the Devil.

7) “I’m Broken,” Pantera. It’s bad when you see Guitar Hero notes for songs that aren’t in Guitar Hero. I’m actually not a big fan of Pantera. Their music makes me think of piston lube and dirty fingernails.

8) “I’m Slowly Turning Into You,” The White Stripes. I dig the thump of Icky Thump. I’ll say this for Meg White: she plays to her strengths. She is the Oates to Jack White’s Hall, seemingly superfluous, yet completely essential.

9) “Bringin’ on the Heartbreak,” Def Leppard. Here's me bringin' on the ridicule: I love this song. Def Leppard always got lumped in with the hair metal bands, and they certainly had the split ends to join the club. But there really was a good rock band under those bangs.

10) “Ball and Chain,” Social Distortion. Jailhouse rock written by someone who has been in the jailhouse. When you've been shivved by life or beaten with a rolled-up bar of soap by love, this is the song to play.

11) “Love Reign O’er Me,” The Who. Luuuuvvvv! The triumphant closing of Quadrophenia, and a triumphant closing to any Friday 11.

I hope none of you have to labor too hard this Labor Day weekend.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What's making us so fat?

Special supersized edition!

13) Rapid advances in cheese-to-dough delivery systems.

12) Day-to-day food pyramid is more éclair shaped.

11) All these illegal immigrants willing to eat half of what Americans do.

10) Dannon’s new bacon-on-the-bottom yogurt.

9) Climbing rates of telekinesis.

8) School cafeterias replaced by rows of Pez dispensers.

7) Thought we had been going to the gym, but turns out it was our Second Life selves.

6) Coco Puffs gateway to much more cuckoo breakfast cereals.

5) Forced by General Tso to march to buffet for more of his chicken.

4) Scarfing whole Meat Lover’s pizzas just to spite snooty vegan sister.

3) Divine punishment for ancestors’ support of slavery.

2) Hollywood’s constant portrayal of obesity as glamorous and chic…no wait, it’s the jumbo popcorn with extra butter and a gallon of Mountain Dew for just a quarter more.

1) Would find out if it didn’t require getting off the couch.

Friday CJ Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

Nothing gets your Friday started like finding out you have no hot water. Turns out that even though we turned on the electricity, we didn’t turn on the gas. We probably should have figured that out but we thought the power company did both. Anyway, the gas company came over today, grabbed the meter, and shut us down. TLB called them, and initially they said they wouldn’t be back here until the 30th. Holy frozen nutsack, Batman! TLB managed to wrangle them down to Tuesday. The water heater guy, who came over because we thought that was what had busted, laughed. “They can come over and shut you down the same day, but not turn you on.” Damn skippy.

Oh well, at least now I can get a Lake Superior experience without leaving my house.

1) “Finest Worksong,” REM. Document was one of the earliest CDs I ever had. When I had this in high school, my bedroom was in the front of the house, near our living room. One day my mother was napping on the couch, and I cued this song up and blasted it—it has a sudden opening with full thudding drums, bass, and guitar. I am lucky I didn’t kill her. Reaction: not amused. Now I always have the association that "Finest Worksong" almost got me locked up for mom-slaughter.

2) “Clover Over Dover,” Blur. You know what more rock songs need? Harpsichord. Hearing that instrument combined with Damon Albarn’s heavy English accent makes me think this was recorded in a drawer-ing room.

3) “Sweet Marie,” Crooked Fingers. There’s a real “Tide Is High” feel at the beginning of this Chipotle-flavored ditty. The vocals are so throaty I’m not sure they ever reached the singer’s mouth, and instead opened up his Adam's apple to escape.

4) “Limelight,” XTC. I raided my friend’s music collection over the summer, and I grabbed a lot of bands like XTC that I missed when I was younger because I was too busy listening to Dio. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Okay, there’s a lot wrong with that.

5) “Mongrel…” DJ Shadow. A fellow UC Davis alum—w00t! This is the first of a two-part song, with the other being “Meets His Maker.” So that’s kind of prog. Cool, reverberated guitars and keyboards with DJ Shadow’s traditionally thick drum beats.

6) “What Is and What Shall Never Be,” Led Zeppelin. I wish the what shall be part of the title had been applied to The Honeydrippers.

7) “Paranoid,” Black Sabbath. Here’s what always impresses me about this song: it’s hard for songs this old to still sound really heavy. But there’s a low growl to this that still feels menacing. And Ozzy sounds pretty paranoid, probably because he sold his soul for rock and roll. That’ll keep you up nights.

8) “Bad Boy Boogie (Live),” AC/DC. Here’s a similar situation: with today’s fuck-it-I’ll-just-let-them-bleep-this-shit-out recording styles, it’s also hard for rock’s early bad boys to still sound bad. Not so with Bon Scott. His vocals remain rough and tumble, but with a lot of charisma. This live version fucks up the song a bit with that other 70s staple, guitar wankery.

9) “Gloria (Live),” Van Morrison. A classic with the classic break-it-down-so-the-audience-can-clap bit. It's cut from the same cloth that “Louie Louie” is, but I always liked this song better.

10) “Knuckles,” The Hold Steady. Speaking of dated, this song has lyrical references to Right Said Fred, Sunny D, and Five-Alive (yes, the breakfast drink that tasted like five fruits mixed in antifreeze). But this song also brings it in the classic Hold Steady classic rock style, where the keyboards twill and the guitar chords windmill. With that kind of backdrop they could recite lyrics about Nu Shooz and Big League Chew for all I care.

11) “You Belong to Me,” Elvis Costello. Keyboards are like hands. No matter how much work you’ve done on the rest of your body, your hands tend to give your age away. As good as early Elvis Costello songs are, they keyboard sound will always be stuck in the 80s. But when the rest of a person is a knockout the way this track is, you can live with old hands.

Have a good weekend!

Rummy in Retirement

6:17 a.m. Wake up from a hot dream involving Lynnie Englund, nipple clamps, a Sears Die Hard battery, and a Super Soaker.

6:18 a.m. Change shorts.

7:02 a.m. Down Irish coffee and Percocet

7:30 a.m. Take call from New York Times about resignation letter surfacing.

7:34 a.m. Deny writing resignation letter.

7:35 a.m. Deny having ever served as Secretary of Defense.

8:33 a.m. Call cable customer service about a mistake on the bill.

8:34 a.m. Assure "Dave" that pay-per-view order of Back Door Nurses 7, 8, and 9 was a mistake.

8:35 a.m. Explain to Dave that it pretty goddamned easy to keep making the same mistake over and over again.

8:43 a.m. Call NSA to get transcripts on Dave.

8:51 a.m. Call Dave and read pages 2, 3, and 12.

8:52 a.m. Thank Dave for removing the charge.

8:53 a.m. Order pay-per-view of Boobies of Mass D-Cuption 4.

9:57 a.m. Confirm next week’s hunting trip with Vice President Cheney.

10: 11 a.m. Fetch quarry for hunt by setting out food over Drifter Pits near railroad tracks.

10:30 a.m. Work on memoir chapter, “I Was Right on Iraq.”

11:30 a.m. Check CNN to see if right on Iraq yet.

11:33 a.m. Smash television.

11:55 a.m. Head out for outdoor cookout to welcome Rove into the Bush Whacked Club.

12: 13 p.m. Stop man for directions to nearest grocery store.

12: 14 p.m. Refuse to believe he doesn’t know where nearest grocery store is.

12:58 p.m. Finally believe he doesn’t know after he loses consciousness. Close car trunk.

1:07 p.m. Drop man off near county hospital. Leave message on his forehead that reads, “Die, honky! -- Sincerely, Nation of Islam.”

1:11: p.m. Down Mountain Dew and Percocet.

1:15 p.m. Argue with grocery store clerk that he did in fact receive a $20 bill. Inquire as to his registration status with selective service.

1:17 p.m. Pocket change from a $20 bill and original $20 bill.

1:29 p.m. Apologize to Bush Whacked Club for being late. Act surprised when they point to blood on shirt. Recite deer cover story.

1:31 p.m. Insist that one package of wieners should be more than enough to pacify the hunger of three dozen people.

1:40 p.m. Put Rove into headlock until he agrees that he’s not hungry any more.

3:45 p.m. On the way home, stop at Department of Defense. Remember not to wear DoD letterman jacket this time.

3: 49 p.m. Burst into Robert Gates’s office and suggest another hiding spot for Iraqi WMD: Barack Obama's backyard.

3:50 p.m. Awkward silence.

3:57 p.m. Down Percocet and Percocet.

6:34 p.m. Wake up on doorstep again. Curse self for still wearing DoD letterman jacket.

7:00 p.m. Check TV about being right about Iraq.

7:01 p.m. Wonder how television got smashed in.

7:20 p.m. Return TV to Best Buy. Argue with clerk that the television has been broken since it was delivered four years ago, but have been too busy to return it.

7:30 p.m. Drive home with new television.

8:03 p.m. Notice still not right about Iraq.

8:12 p.m. Begin new chapter of memoir, “Why Being Right About Iraq Is Overrated.”

11:35 p.m. Grab G.I. Joe doll and head to bed.

11:57 p.m. See faces of thousands of soldiers asking why they were sacrificed for an enormous lie.

11:59 p.m. Down warm milk and Percocet.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What did we change on Wikipedia?

Special extra truthiness edition!

16) Expanded list of Founding Fathers who were furries.

15) Removed Dick Cheney from the “List of undead serving in Bush Administration.” Again.

14) Rejected edits to “List of undead serving in Bush Administration” due to objectivity concerns.

13) Relocated entry on Guantanamo to an undisclosed directory.

12) Reduced Nickelback entry down to one word: Sux!

11) Fixed all the typos after President Bush edited his entry.

10) Added an “Iraqi WMD” subsection to “Fairy Tales.”

9) Undangled all the chads from 2000.

8) Appended the list of the types of poles with, “Heh, heh, you said pole!”

7) Aborted any mentions of Jenna Bush’s possible pregnancy.

6) Elaborated that while it may seem like the Republican Congressman was soliciting sex in a park washroom, he was actually working undercover to expose the homosexual menace.

5) Deleted entry on Pittsburgh Steelers by accident, causing entire team to disappear in a puff of smoke.

4) Detailed how we would have killed Nicole Brown Simpson if we had written the entry on killing Nicole Brown Simpson.

3) Concluded that global warming will have one excellent outcome: life will indeed become a beach!

2) Created entry for Circle Jerk at the Square Dance, “the funniest blog in the universe.”

1) Added self to “List of people who’ve blown Wikipedia editors.”

Friday CJ Random 11

It's one more random than 10!

Sweet fancy Moses, has it been almost a month since I’ve done this? Sorry for the light posting over the last few weeks. Between moving and vacation and trying to keep up with work between those two things, I’ve been stretched in 20 different directions the last month. But now I’m settled in and ready to rock!

The beauty of working at home is that now I can play my tunes as loud as I want. Which is usually not real loud, since I am working and have to devote at least half of my brain to that pursuit. However, I have a pretty nice set of Klipsch PC speakers with a punchy subwoofer in my home office, so I can go to 11 when needed. And for those of you who missed it, TLB has a nice picture of the view out of my home office.

1) “Four Horseman,” The Clash. I should start every Friday with The Clash. This is a lesser song from London Calling, but just hearing Joe Strummer picks me up. He could be raging about a grocery list and still get me going: Eggs and bacon and blue-ber-ries! I need you to pick ‘em all up puh-lease!

2) “It’s too Bad,” The Jam. What’s all this then? Is me iPod feelin’ a bit English this morning? I’ve sung the praises of The Jam before, and I’ll say it again: along with The Clash, they were the best band to come out of the UK punk scene. They figured out that you can’t stay stuck in three-chord monte for an entire career (otherwise you turn into The Ramones), but that you can channel your inner, spitting 18-year-old even when you learn how to play well and write terrific songs. Like “Four Horseman,” this isn’t A-list Jam, but it has a shimmering guitar in the chorus and a good drum beat.

3) “Phenomenal Cat,” The Kinks. Blimey! Another UK song. Depending on how you look at it, this song is either about the decline of the British Empire, or about a fat, lazy cat. Either way, we haz cute UTube cat videoz with this song!

4) “Demons Are Real,” Guided by Voices. British Invasion by way of Dayton. It has one of my favorite GbV lines: Deliver this message to the one I love the most / I’ve lost all my money to a 300-pound ghost. Probably their best song under one minute (and with GbV, there are a lot of those), with a half-crazed/half-tuneful vocal from Robert Pollard.

5) “The Group Who Couldn’t Say,” Grandaddy. There’s a retro synth that sounds like a Australian didgeridoo played as a bass synth by Flock of Seagulls. I mean that as a compliment. The lyrics here are a dry and wry take on the music business, with a nice “unit shifter” reference.

6) “Don’t Make Me a Target,” Spoon. The current hot shit indie rock album du jour. Which, frankly, it deserves. A lot of indie albums, while having a lot of soul, lack the kind of craft that you used to get on the great 60s-80s rock albums, where everything in the mix is exactly where it needs to be. And the big albums today that have that craft often have so much of it, there’s no room left for soul in the mix. This is one album that really has both. Although their band name always makes me think of The Tick’s battle cry of “Spoon!” I hate my brain sometimes.

7) “The Long Black Veil (Live),” Johnny Cash. Is there any artist today of Cash’s stature who would perform at a prison? I can’t see any major musician—rock, rap, or country—pulling into a place like Folsom and delivering a performance like this.

8) “When the Pin Hits the Shell,” Drive-By Truckers. Okay, maybe the DBT would do it. This song takes a slice of melancholy, places it between two thick slices of sad, spreads on the guilt, and fries it up in a hot pan of shame. And the same God that you’re so afraid is gonna send you to hell / is the same one you’re gonna answer to when the pin hits the shell. I’m not even a big Southern rock guy and I love their music. That’s the sign of a great band in my book.

9) “No Wow,” The Kills. No joke, I bought this thinking it was The Killers. It was also my loss because The Kills do not kill—boring lo-fi garage band stuff. This song is pretty good, though, a cross between The White Stripes and early PJ Harvey. You could do worse.

10) “Bad Luck, Blue Eyes, Goodbye,” The Black Crowes. From their hugely underrated album, Southern Harmony and Musical Companion. Chris Robinson the person annoys the living shit out of me, but his vocals get through my skin in a good way here. Soulful rocking and perfectly arranged so you can feel every cell of blood pumping through their hearts. Their first album really ripped off their 60s and 70s influences, but this one is a blueprint of how you can turn your influences into something fresh and remarkable.

11) “I,” Bad Brains. Now ist die time on Circle Jerk vere ve slam! Who needs caffeine on a Friday morning when you have Bad Brains? Some of their stuff is too hardcore for me, but this hits that sweet spot of fast, heavy, and raging.

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!

Top Ten Tuesdays: Why are we resigning?

10) Thought it would be nice to use soul for a while before having to turn it over to the Devil.

9) Fled the ship once the water reached our second chin.

8) Couldn’t resist dream opportunity to smear a woman and a black guy in next presidential election.

7) Need time to prepare pre-indictment itinerary for fleeing the country.

6) Felt that after getting the nation to vote for a moronic, inexperienced, deceiving simp twice, there were no mountains left to climb.

5) Wanted to be able to arrange anonymous restroom blowjobs as a private citizen.

4) Couldn’t take one more mispronounciated word from the boss without committing suicide with the sharp corner of a Webster’s dictionary.

3) Plan to start a pro wrestling career with Rummy as The Denial Duo.

2) Who cares, is there cake in the West Wing breakroom?

1) Realized that after six years of our turds blossoming, we’re too stinky to keep working.

Open for business

Have you ever taken one of those vacations where you need a vacation after the vacation? You spend your time “off” running from place to place, with an agenda full of to-do lists, must-see attractions, and general knee-bent-running around business, until enjoying the attractions themselves becomes less important than crossing them off your lists?

I just returned from the opposite of that vacation.

Every summer, I vamoose with The Lovely Becky’s family to the beaches of North Carolina. We rent a house by the ocean on a fairly quiet island. I have made it a habit to leave everything behind when I go: work, the Intertubes, e-mail, even writing. Instead, I head into the surf, crack open books, crack open beers, and generally let myself completely relax for one week out of the year. No other vacation ever leaves me so prepared to stop being on vacation.

This year was fairly uneventful, unlike last year’s Adventures in Skim Boarding. No sharks, no dolphins, no real drunkenness. There were a couple amusing moments:

We showed my in-laws the video for Dick in a Box. They had never seen it, so TLB fired up YouTube and played it for them. As the video rapped through its first couple of verses toward its namesake chorus and Justin Timberlake popped the lid on a box attached to his crotch, my mother-in-law said, “Wait, what’s in the box?” Only someone so completely unaware of the punchline could have delivered that question with such perfect comic timing.

The other amusing thing was seeing a young man—a seemingly heterosexual male who appeared to be there with his girlfriend—with a lower-back tattoo. Now, having lived in a Big Ten college town for six years, I’ve seen this lumbar lure quite a bit. And not once, whether it was at a bar or at a fiction reading or at church, have I seen a guy lean over and reveal an ornate arrow leading to his ass.

Most straight men, at one time or other, obsess over appearing gay. I am not too bad about it. I freely admit that I like shopping, Project Runway, and using fancy salon products in my hair. But seeing a lower-back tattoo on a guy? It's practically screaming I want you to look at my hiney and then make sexy time.

It was…well, confusing. He seemed perfectly straight, splashing around with his female companion. He had no other tattoos, just this one. His girlfriend had no matching tattoo which might explain some drunken couples excursion to the tattoo parlor that lead to an inky bond between them. Was there some O. Henry-esque story here, where he got the tattoo on a bet to raise enough money so his girlfriend could have her lower-back tattoo removed, only to learn that his girlfriend sold her hair to raise the money so that her boyfriend wouldn’t have to get a stupid lower-back tattoo? I would have asked him, but I also considered that he might have gotten it in prison, and I'm...well, a guy who likes to get home from shopping in time to watch Project Runway.

Anyway, I had no really embarrassing pictures of me this year, but in downloading the pictures from the trip, I did find this one, from an earlier jaunt to Lake Geneva with TLB’s college friends.



Yes, that’s me with a pitcher of piña coladas. Yes, I am chugging straight from it. Yes, I graduated from college fifteen years ago. But hey, I was on vacation in Wisconsin. I was just trying to fit in.

And let me tell you, after that, I needed a vacation from the cold headache alone.

Vacation

In the American working tradition of working like a dog so you can spend one goddamned week not working like a dog, I had to bust my behind before leaving for vacation. In my haste, I forgot to put up the Gone Fishin' sign. I'll be frolicking on the beaches of North Carolina this week, soaking up as much sun as I can before the icy grip of winter crushes my heart this winter. I don't have a very large Intertube into the series of Intertubes, but I will probably put some posts up this week if I can get connected.

My only tale so far is that I got to play a Nintendo Wii for the first time. I never could have imagined moving your hands around like you're boxing or bowling could be so much fun. My marriage may be doomed. Unless I can get TLB to play the boxing game with me. That could be very therapeutic.

Regardless, the regular irregular blogging will resume next week. Hope you all can get outside and enjoy yourselves.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What's the FBI finding in our homes?

10) Illegal cryogenic facility with half-frozen head of Walt Disney.

9) Half-empty vial of Holy Spirit (may cause seizures).

8) A bunch of hypodermic needles scratching Hank Aaron’s broken record.

7) Secret copy of the Zapruder film showing JFK being shot by Waldo.

6) iPhone with YouTube clip of us filming dog fights while also conducting phone interview saying we’ve never been to a dog fight.

5) A dozen 9mm handguns, a fifth of Jack Daniels, and a box of porn, all perfectly legal. Sorry to have bothered you...wait a minute, what’s this? An ounce of weed, downloaded MP3s, and a gay marriage license? Up against the wall, pal!

4) What was left of Billy Bob and the dipping sauce.

3) Why nothing? Nothing at all! We haven’t been anywhere near your house! Why would you even think such a thing? It’s the blue one on the corner, right?

2) Internet tubes totally clogged with a truckload of bribes.

1) Nothing a call to the Vice President can’t fix.

So long and thanks for all the pork

Sorry for the lack of updates. The Lovely Becky and I have finally relocated to da UP. Last week was kind of a blur of farewells, last-minute stuff to do at work before I relocated my office to my house, and the actual move. I had a lot of random things I considered writing about, so I decided just to write randomly about things I did:

1. Met three blog friends and plotted the takover of teh Internets wound up joking and drinking like we were old friends by night's end. The Internet--it's not just for boobies and cute animal photos with snarky captions. It's also a mechanism for meeting cool new people for completely nonsexual reasons.
2. Had a conversation with friends about how much of one's penis has to penetrate for sex or "intercourse" to take place officially. My answer: 50% or more. The penis can only count in whole amounts. And yes, I've given TLB an excellent set up for a comment joke.
3. Realized I was completely, utterly, bat-shittingly wrong about The Minutemen. I watched the documentary on them, We Jam Econo, with my friend Bob. It was like the scales fell from my eyes while pogoing to Damascus. I've been playing Double Nickels on the Dime religiously all week.
4. Realized I was almost as wrong about The Simpsons Movie before I saw it. I thought it was going to be an aimless gag fest like the show has been the last few seasons. Let's just say they brought their A-game. Dianosis: hilarious!
5. Enjoyed Bob singing to his son every night, so much that I am thinking about having him podcast it for me.
6. Enjoyed the five-star accommodations Bob and SER provided while we were inter-moving refugees. We arrived to find not only that we had our own bathroom adjacent to our bedroom, but also robes and bottled water wating for us in said bathroom. We cannot thank them enough for putting us up and making our transient status so wonderful.
7. Felt very sad to leave Iowa City. I thought about writing a long, probably overly sentimental post about leaving. But I realized that I could sum up how I felt pretty quickly: it's the most fun I've ever had anywhere. The friends we made and the experiences we had were life-changing. Leaving was tough, but leaving will never change what we got out of living there.
8. Realized that even though I hated to leave, I was excited to embark on a new adventure with TLB. We are a team, and this move is great for her, which makes it great for me.

So that's it. We're setting up shop and moving onto Chapter 8 of the TLB/Brando story. As much as we loved Chapter 7, we have to keep turning pages to finish the whole thing.

And besides, I think Chapter 8 is when the threesome finally happens!

Top Ten Tuesdays: What changes are we making to Catholicism?

10) Introducing supersize communion option with 30% more salvation.

9) Changing guitar mass to Guitar Hero mass

8) Trying to add more life to mass by using a dead language.

7) Hiring P. Diddy to produce new "Rappin' Rosary" album.

6) Switching to more efficient metric system for confession penance (venial sin=1.52 Our Fathers).

5) Selling indulgences from Church to pay for indulgences of Church.

4) Relabeling “Protestants” as “Protes-Can’ts-Go-to-Heaven.”

3) Granting lifelong absolution from meatless Friday to anyone who doesn’t press charges.

2) Telling souls in Limbo, “You don’t have to go to Hell, but you can’t stay here.”

1) Excommunicating progress.

Friday CJ Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

Tis my last weekend in The IC as an IC'er. So sad. But hey, what better time to play music than when you need a pick-me-up? On to today's playlist...

1) “It’s Only Rock and Roll,” The Rolling Stones. I am definitely more of a Beatles guy than a Stones guy, but it’s hard not to groove to this song. I like it when the list starts out with a classic, the way a good live show should.

2) “Seven,” Sunny Day Real Estate. The original emo kids who combined Robert Smith moping with punky ass kicking. This is a really good song, in part because it’s chock full o’ drum fills. I can never get enough drum fills. Other things I love, I can maybe get full of. Schnitzengruben? Fifteen is my limit. Sex? It doesn’t happen very often, but there are those times when I have to say Baby, please, I am not from Havana. But more drum fills? I’m like Oliver Twist: please, sir, I want some more.

3) “Ever Fallen in Love?” Buzzcocks. They took the buzzing energy of The Ramones and added a great British pop sensibility. “Orgasm Addict” is still my favorite (surprise) but this is a close second.

4) “Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86,” The Police. They went Al Qaeda and blew themselves up with this terrible remake. All full of awful, from the cheesy drums to the plodding pace to the vocal deliveries. Should have been called "Don't Come so Close to Making Me Hate You '86."

5) “Stella Was a Race Car Driver and She’s Always Down,” Interpol. First things first, a great song from one of the best new bands around. It has a skittish verse followed by a strong, heavy chorus. Good stuff.

Second: earlier this week, Pinko and I got into a disagreement about Interpol and what makes them awesome. It doesn’t matter who’s right* and who’s wrong**. Instead, it illustrated one of the top five things the Internet was designed for:

1. Porn
2. Coordinating military counterstrikes after a nuclear war has severed central communications
3. Funny cat photos
4. Debating popular culture with religious-revival fervor
5. Spam

6) “The World Stops Turning,” Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. He delivers awesome bursts of catchy, politically charged rock. One of my favorite artists to work out to, like listening to an energy bar when I need a boost. Which is quite frequently since I'm often weighed down by too many schnitzengruben.

7) “Keep the Car Running,” Arcade Fire. I’ve said it before: great group, terrific album (Neon Bible). But I had the misfortune of seeing a rerun of their Saturday Night Live performance. They played great, they sounded very good, but their lead singer committed two of the biggest rock sins in my book. During their first song, he played an acoustic guitar that had a political message on it, which is so Michael Stipe wearing 20 different slogan T-shirts to the MTV Video Awards. You want to get political, please do, but say it, don't spray paint it.

Then, at the end of the song, he smashed his perfectly good guitar into smithereens. Kids, listen up: smashing your instruments is over. It’s like swinging, a once-rebellious action that now just leads to a lot of head-scratching and irritation. Don't be a fool, protect your musical tools.

8) “To Live Is to Die,” Metallica. I’ve never soured so much on a band the way I soured on them. By the time they released Load (of Poop), they had transformed into the asses they had once tried to stick metal up. But this song is before that happened, a tribute to their deceased bass player (crushed by a bus!), a heavy, shifting nine-minute instrumental that floats my boat (shocking for me, I know). Around the 5:00 mark there’s a transition that leads to a weepy solo, before the band punch each other in the shoulders to keep from crying and start rocking again.

9) “Shatter,” Liz Phair. Speaking of career suicide, she went from awesome to Avril within 10 years. I don’t blame any artist for wanting to reach a wide audience—if you didn’t want people to notice you, you wouldn’t be on stage—but I never understood Phair’s utterly unsubtle attempts to be a radio friendly unit shifter. However, she will always have the astounding Exile in Guyville, which this is from, one of those great singer-songwriter albums where she fully displays her naked soul (and part of a nipple if you look closely at the cover).

10) “Dreams,” Fleetwood Mac. One of my favorite songs, a perfect blend of music and vocals. Rumors is one of those albums that shows you can be unbelievably popular and deliver the artistic goods.

11) “People of the Sun,” Rage Against the Machine. Another of my go-to workout bands, but sometimes they get me a little carried away. I can’t tell you how many muscles have been pulled because of “Guerilla Radio.” Usually it goes like this when a good Rage song comes on...

Me: Aw, hell yeah, bring that shit, boi! Let’s put some more plates on this mofo.

My back: Yo, yo, yo, you can’t lift that much, yo!

Me: Why you always hatin’, back? Quit oppressin’ my weight liftin’ dreams like the machine Rage is ragin’ against. Yo.

My back: Aight, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m goin’ have to pop one in your latissimus dorsi, dawg.

Me: Agh! I’m gonna need like traction and shit. Damn, back, you’re always right!

My back: Word.

Bonus video: I get infected with this song periodically, and one of my brothers e-mailed it to me this week. So once again I’m going around singing it. If you haven't seen this video, it will change your opinion of Justin Timberlake forever. I won't mention the title if you haven't, so you can enjoy the full joke, but it's not work safe.



Have a good weekend.

*Me
** Pinko

Top Ten Tuesdays: What defective products have we purchased from the Chinese?

Special extra dangerous edition!

11) Trident Gumm, the only gum made from actual tridents!

10) TiVo that only records government propaganda

9) Soylent Puppy Chow

8) Chinese water torture kit that delivers relaxing forehead massage

7) Steel wool jockstraps

6) General Tso’s Tastes-Just-Like-Chicken

5) Not-So-Brite Toothpaste

4) Finger traps made from recycled glass shards

3) The all-wheel drive Destructo with optional driver’s side body bag

2) Fisher Price’s My First Human Rights Kit (missing a few pieces)

1) Misfortune Cookies that predict grizzly death*

*probably from Chinese products

Fox News Family Feud

A game show stage shrouded in darkness. An ANNOUNCER speaks.

ANNOUNCER
Today, two groups of Fox News personalities will square off on the most Fair and Balanced game show in America....Fox News Family Feud.

The lights go up. There are two families. The Conservatives include SEAN HANNITY, GRETCHEN CARLSON, BRITT HUME, JOHN GIBSON, and MICHELLE MALKIN. Across from them are the Liberals, with only ALAN COLMES present.

ANNOUNCER
And now, let’s give a big welcome to your hostess, a lady who’s got more balls than a major league batting practice...Ann Coulter!

ANN COULTER strides out in a pants suit.

COULTER (adjusting crotch as she walks on stage)
Welcome to Fox News Family Feud, the show that reports what we decide to tell Fox News viewers! Let’s meet our families!

She walks over to the Conservatives.

COULTER (to Sean Hannity)
I know this handsome devil very well! Ladies and gentlemen, Sean Hannity!

Couler reaches over to kiss him on the cheek, but Hannity grabs her and tries to kiss her lips. Coulter shoves him off.

COULTER
Sean! Don’t make me spank you!

HANNITY (low)
Please do! I’ve been so bad.

COULTER
Just introduce your teammates, you boot licker.

HANNITY (composes himself)
From Fox & Fiends…(slaps his own cheek) sorry, Fox and Friends, the lovely Gretchen Carlson.

CARLSON
Hi! I heard Hillary is actually part of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell!

HANNITY
Next to her, the legendary Britt Hume.

HUME (twitching)
Grr…Mexicans!

HANNITY
Author and host John Gibson

GIBSON
I’ve written a new book, The War on Christmas in July: Why Liberals Hate Our Summer Retail Sales.

HANNITY
And finally, the one-and-only Michelle Malkin.

MALKIN (twitching)
Grr…Muslims!

COULTER (moving to the other side of the stage)
And over on my left, Alan Colmes, playing for the Wusses.

COLMES
Ann, how many times do I have to correct you? It’s pronounced “liberals.”

COULTER
Here we go. Wusses go first. One hundred Fox News viewers surveyed, top five answers on the board. A number of high profile Republicans have been caught in sex scandals. What encouraged them to engage in these affairs?

COLMES
I’ll say their suppressed sexual desires.

COULTER
You would say that….show me suppression of sexual desires.

There’s a BUZZ as the answer board flashes a big red X.

COULTER
Nice try, four eyes. (Moves to the other side of the stage.) Okay, conservatives, here’s your chance. What pushed these Republican congressmen down the path of sexual perversion?

HUME
Mexicans!

HANNITY
Not yet, Britt! (to Coulter) We’re going to go with Clinton’s Penis.

COULTER
Show me Clinton’s Penis!

The board DINGS and the top answer, with 100 responses, is Clinton’s Penis.

COLMES
Wait, if that’s 100, what are the other four answers?

The board turns the other four spots over, all of which are blank.

COULTER
All our viewers had the same answer, Alan. We just wanted to fool you. Okay, next question, for the Conservatives. One hundred Fox News viewers surveyed, top five answers on the board. Why are our borders flooded with illegal immigrants?

HUME and MALKIN (together)
Mexicans!

COULTER
Are you sure? Think really hard about your answer.

HUME
More Mexicans!

MALKIN
No, wait...the answer is Clinton’s Penis!

COULTER
Let’s see Clinton’s Penis!

The board DINGS and Clinton’s Penis is the number one answer, with 100 responses.

COULTER
Tough break Alan, but I’m sure you would have given me some nonsense answer anyway. Here’s your last shot. You have to get points here to get to the bonus round. One hundred Fox viewers surveyed, top two answers on the board. Why is John Edwards such a Brecht girl faggot pants?

COLMES
Is that really the question!

COULTER (checking her cards)
Oops, you’re right, that’s a draft of my next column. Here’s the actual question. Who was responsible for 9/11?

COLMES
Osama bin Laden.

COULTER
Show me Obama!

The board DINGS and the second spot is Barack Obama with 49 points.

COLMES
I said "Osama. "

COULTER (shrugs)
Yes, our judges accepted that, too. (Walking to Conservatives, who huddle together in a conference.) Okay, Conservatives, one more answer left. What’s it going to be?

HANNITY (breaking huddle)
We’re going to go with...Clinton’s Penis!

COULTER
Flash me Clinton’s Penis!

The board DINGS and Clinton’s Penis is number one with 51 responses.

COULTER
Since the Moonbats managed to score some points, they qualify for the double-bonus round. Conservatives, who’s going to go against Alan?

HANNITY
I’ll do it. I’m used to kicking his ass.

Hannity and Colmes square off in the center stage.

COULTER
This next prize is a big one. Johnny, tell them what they’re playing for...

ANNOUNCER
The winner of this round will receive...The White House!

A picture of The White House flashes on screen.

ANNOUNCER (cont.)
You’ll receive four to eight years in the most powerful political position on Earth, where you can spy on Americans, start wars, and treat the Constitution like a roll of Charmin.

A Diebold voting machine shows on the screen.

ANNOUNCER (cont.)
This fabulous prize is brought to you by Diebold, makers of fine electoral “voting” machines! When you need to win, you need Diebold!

COULTER
Sean, play or pass?

HANNITY
I’ll pass.

COULTER
Alan, here’s the question, and the top two answers are on the board. What is the greatest threat to American security in 2008?

COLMES (sighs)
Ugh

COULTER
Ten seconds. Right answer gives you the White House.

COLMES
(pauses) I can’t believe I’m going to say it, but...Clinton’s penis.

COULTER
That a boy! (to the board) Unleash Clinton’s penis!

The board DINGS and shows Clinton’s penis with 49 responses.

COULTER
Oh, close but no White House cigar! Sean, here’s your chance.

HANNITY
Wow, for once I agreed with Alan. But if it’s not Clinton's Penis, it must be...(snaps fingers) Hillary’s Penis!

The board DINGS and turns over Hillary’s penis with 51 responses.

COLMES
That’s preposterous, how can a woman have a penis!

COULTER
Oh, let me show you, my peg boy! (She grabs Colmes's hand and presses it to her crotch.) That’s all the time we have. Tune in next week when the Conservatives square off against five scarecrows playing for the Liberals!

Friday CJ Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

It’s Friday the 13th, the universal day of bad luck. Usually I ward off any potential misfortune on this day by doing something else that’s supposed to bring bad luck, like multiplying two negative numbers to get a positive. So after I took a shower this morning, I toweled off with a black cat.

1) “ Ambulance” TV on the Radio. An a-cappella song with a nice dum-dum-dum bass vocal and good harmonies. I’m not a huge fan of these guys, but I do like how they get creative with their vocals.

2) “Hemispheres,” Rush. Oh sweet Jesus. Eighteen minutes, six parts, and an album cover that’s even too fruity for Toucan Sam. The song describes a battle between Apollo (the god of reason) and Dionysus (the god of love and emotion) for control humanity. They fight until a guy who went through a black hole in a song on the previous album asks why they just can’t get along. There’s also a gong.

Trying to maintain any semblance of cool while saying you like this is like charging a German machine gun nest while armed with Nerf arrows. But I do like the music, especially Alex Lifeson’s guitar playing. So just fire away while my Underoos are caught on the barbed wire.

3) “Off the Record,” My Morning Jacket. A great song that manages to be catchy and unpredictable. It starts with a bouncy reggae rhythm which leads into a poppy chorus. Then the second half makes a left turn at Albuquerque into a hazy, druggy jam. The only thing it needs is some Greek mythology.

4) “As Wicked,” Rancid. This is the punky opposite of "Hemispheres," and yet I love it equally. I feel a battle brewing....

5) “Changes,” Yes. Today, on this mystical Friday the 13th, two gods fight for control of one man's playlist: Punkus, the god of attitude and keeper the Three Mystical Guitar Chords; and Proggus, bringer of extended solos and harbinger of abrupt time signature changes. They fight a titanic struggle, with Punkus launching wave after wave of two minute burts of catchy fury, while Proggus returns fire with double-neck guitars behind towers of synthesizers. Back and forth they go, until our hero, the god Chillus, arrives. He waves his Rod of Chillin’ and cries out, “Silence!”

To be continued....

6) “Welcome Home,” Coheed and Cambria. And Chillus did wave his wand, and said “Behold, I give you Coheed and Cambria, bringers of punky energy and deliverers of proggy noodling. See how they combine these two elements and deliver the majesty of rock with the mystery of roll without making you choose between the two styles. Verily, you do not need to be an either/or cobag, cobag.”

And Chillus was right. And yea did Fuse play the videos of Coheed and Cambria, and lo how the emo kids and metal kids bought their records. And the gods looked down and said it was pretty good.


7) “September,” Ryan Adams. And we’re back with a quiet, beautiful, and sad song from Ryan Adams about a man remembering how his love died after being turned to stone by Medusa.

8) “Surf Wax America,” Weezer. A dark little ditty about a surfer dude who makes fun of people who have to go to work, then gets crushed beneath a wave and drowns. Maybe my favorite song from their debut album.

9) “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (Live),” Bob Dylan. This is from the Concert at Philharmonic Hall album. It’s funny, on every track, the audience lets Dylan play a few bars, then claps. I’ve never seen that happen at shows, yet it happens so regularly here, I figure it must have been the style of the time. Do people still do this, or is it a quaint old custom like pipe smoking or saving yourself for marriage?

10) “Low Low Low,” James. I have to credit The Lovely Becky for getting me to look past their hit “Laid” and digging to this album. Good, catchy Britpop.

11) “Overkill,” Colin Hay. An acoustic version of my favorite Men at Work song. I downloaded after seeing him sing it on an episode of Scrubs, a show which balances sentimentality with rapid-fire bursts of sarcastic dialog. That seems like an appropriate coda to this week’s list.

I'm currently in the studio working on next week's list, an 11-part concept post about the eternal struggle between Cuddlus, the God of Romance, and and Bonerisus, Bringer of Erections. I'm just trying to figure out where to put the gong.

Hope to finish something and post this weekend, but until then, drink up! It’s happy hour someplace.

Top Ten Tuesdays: How are we beating the heat?

Special extended heat wave edition!

12) Getting out of the kitchen and back to Arizona.

11) Crying frozen tears on wife's very cold shoulder.

10) Launching massive nuclear attack to trigger early winter.

9) Commuting heat from boil to simmer.

8) Going commando and straddling the air vents in the office.

7) Enjoying the air conditioning in the unemployment office.

6) Injecting actual ice water into veins.

5) Replacing current marital aids with Freeze Pops.

4) Refusing to deliver temperature readings to Congressional committee.

3) Scarfing latest Ben & Jerry’s flavor, “Chunky Freon.”

2) Renting lakeside timeshare in the Ninth Circle of Hell.

1) Fighting the heat in the desert so we don't have to fight it over here.

Eight Is Enough to Fill My Blog With a Meme

I just flew in from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and boy are my arms tired!

I am back in The IC (for those of you scoring at home) after moving to the UP. The Lovely Becky and I have work stuff going on here this month, so even though we have obtained a new house in our new home town, we are back in our old home town for a couple of weeks, staying with our friends SER and BH and their new wee one, S-to-the-Ren. SER and BH demonstrated remarkable adorableness today by singing Beatles songs to S-t-t-R, including "I'm Only Sleeping" to put the little lad to sleep. Those are the sorts of things that maintain my faith in humanity.

While exhausting, the trip went pretty well. We took a couple days off to go to Lake Geneva for a quick, drunken vacation with TLB's college friends. The closing on the new house went smoothly, but the people we bought it from mistakenly thought they had a self-cleaning kitchen, because much of it looked like it hadn't been cleaned since the Iranian Hostage Crisis. We fought grease with elbow grease and managed to get the counters back to their natural white. I almost caused TLB to add coffee stains to the floor when I portrayed a character, Mr. Lightswitch, thanking me for cleaning him. Oh, thank you so much, I was trapped under all this grime, and now I can see again! I said in a squeaky voice. And thank you for cleaning my true love, the dishwasher! Yes, being married to me is the gift that keeps on giving.

Right before I began my four-state Upper Midwest tour, Jennifer had tagged me with a meme. I have to name eight (hopefully) interesting, random facts about me. I was dreaming when I wrote this, so please sue me if it goes astray....

1) When I was in seventh grade, I was in a group called The Glazed Chickens. Not a rock group. Not a comedy group. Just a group of dorks like me. There were seven of us, divided into ranks. The head guy was the Archgiglioid. My best friend Tom was the Vice Giglioid. I don't remember what my title was, which means it wasn't that good. The regular people outside the group were Sheep. People that we didn't like were either Sub-Sheep, Sub-She-Sheep, or Sub-She-Sheep-Execretement. At one point, our principal heard about us, and thought we were some kind of gang. She actually asked Tom about what we did, like we were running drugs or starting fights.

2) The gang thing was especially funny because the only thing The Glazed Chickens ever did, besides label people, was write The Joke Book. We had a green Mead notebook, emblazoned with our mascot, this goofy cartoon character called Derange-O the Clown, and we wrote every single joke the seven of us had ever heard. If they weren't directly lifted from books like Truly Tasteless Jokes, they were in that same vein. We categorized them by subject: Sex Jokes, Religious Jokes, Leper Jokes, and so on. We had a chapter on Helen Keller Jokes, and whenever Tom and I happen to mention The Joke Book, we always remember this joke:

What did Helen Keller say when someone gave her a cheese grater?

That's the most violent book I ever read.

I really wish I still had The Joke Book, but when the principal started investigating our gang activities, we destroyed it because we worried we would get suspended or expelled. Let's just say we weren't a very tough gang.

3) I once traveled from Iowa City to Virginia to see Rush in concert. It was the Rush 30th anniversary tour, and I wanted to go see them with Tom. We are both big Rush fans, so much so that no matter what song they would have played from the 17 albums they had released by that point, we probably would have known all of the words. Anyway, as we were enjoying the concert, I heard the first acoustic notes of "The Trees," one of their old classics and one of my favorites. As soon as I recognized it, I let out a very loud, "Fuck yeah!"

Tom, every bit as much of a Rush nerd as I am, turned to me and asked, "Did you just say, 'Fuck yeah'?" As if he was asking me if I had just wet myself.

"Yeah," I replied meekly. At least my pants were dry.

4) I have gone skinny dipping twice. The first time was in high school in San Diego. My friends and I were at a party at Mission Beach. One very drunk friend suggested that the group of us -- five guys -- go swimming. Naked. We had to be hammered because, despite being at an age where guys are very wary about appearing "gay," the suggestion didn't sound the least bit gay to us. Off we went, off came the clothes, and we jumped in the water and swam around for a bit. After about a half hour, we headed back to the party, our clothes sticking to us because we had not thought about drying off ahead of time. In the interim, the police had shown up and busted up the party, throwing some of the drunker kids into the backs of the squad cars. Our little naked excursion had probably saved us from getting busted.

The second time, TLB and I were at a wedding in Tampa with a bunch of her friends from college. We were all staying at a hotel right on the beach. One friend in particular, Todd, was always promoting some type of nude activity. The combination of booze, post-college nostalgia, and beach led to all of us taking him up on an offer to go skinny dipping. About a dozen of us stripped and piled into the water under the moonlight. Todd, however, thought TLB had kept on her swimsuit and called her on it. My quite naked wife bounced up above the water line and said, "Do these look like a swimsuit to you?" That's just one reason (or is it two?) that she's my soul mate.

5) I have alluded to this before, but never fully confessed it: I was a pretty serious Republican until the 1992 election. All through high school, I was a staunch Reagan supporter, and in fact got pretty annoyed with TLB when she would wear her "I survived the Reagan Administration" button on her jacket. I once got into an argument with a very liberal friend about how China's human rights record should not affect its Most Favored Nation trading status. I voted for Bush in 1988.

So what turned me around? A lot of things, such as studying the CIA in grad school and living in New York City. But honestly, it was when I realized that the Republican Party was the party of John Lithgow in Footloose, and I would much rather be Kevin Bacon, driving around while cranking Quiet Riot and trying to get it on with the preacher's daughter.

6) I have never seen The Godfather. I really don't know why, but it's my biggest popular culture gap.

7) I went through the Second City comedy writing program in Chicago. For a year, my classmates and I wrote sketches each week and brought them in, eventually using our best stuff to create a show that students in the acting/improv program performed. Pack for the Afterlife was the closing sketch and song for the show, and hearing people laugh at my stuff was one of the greatest feelings I've ever had.

8) Circle Jerk at the Square Dance was originally the title of a novel I was writing, about a group of people putting on a sketch comedy show. The structure allowed me to insert sketches into the story, such as The Osbournes Animal Planet. I eventually reached a point where I realized the novel was never going to work, got very depressed about ditching the novel, and wound up not writing for a while. The wise TLB suggested I start a blog, partly as an outlet for the comedy bits that filter through my head, but also to get me out of my creative funk. I struggled with what to call it, until she said, "You should call it Circle Jerk at the Square Dance."

You see, I married her for her mind as much as her moonlit bosoms.

I'm not going to tag anyone since so many have done this one. Back with a Top Ten on Tuesday, and hopefully a couple new sketches I thought of while I was on the road.

Top Ten Tuesdays: How are we celebrating our independence?

10) Exercising right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of bratwurst.

9) Giving People magazine the names, numbers, and photos of all the CIA agents we don't like.

8) Returning copy of How to Survive as the Sweetheart of the Cell Block to the G. Gordon Liddy.

7) Requiring all new American flags to be made by extinct American textile workers.

6) Balancing system of checks on our non-Executive Branch middle finger.

5) Showing the fierce, noble American spirit that resisted tyranny by blowing up a bunch of illegal shit in our backyards.

4) Offering American flag ball gag to all dungeon customers.

3) Forcing the President to watch Born on the Fourth of July until even he can see the parallels.

2) Watching fireworks show that explodes into a brilliant representation of an undisclosed CIA prison.

1) Smothering it with cheese.