Complaints

I said to myself all day I wasn't going to bitch blog about the following:

* the bus
* the scrub projectionists on weekends
* my drivers license
* Republicans

Instead, I'll just say this: I made it home before the torrential downpour started.

So, as Ice Cube once said, Today was a good day.

Deep Thoughts

My neighbor is a black dude from the Dominican Republic.

I'm a white dude from Colorado.

And yet we're both fans of the Nuggets and President Obama. It's...profound.

106 - 103 - Denver Takes Game 2 at the Staples Center

Ladies and gentlemen...we have ourselves a series. The Nuggets held on to win Game 2 and even the series at 1-1.
In other news, John Hickenlooper, mayor of Denver, had some zingers for the mayor of Los Angeles:

If the Nuggets go to the finals, [L.A. Mayor] Villaraigosa also offered to give Denver first dibs at buying the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed selling in light of the state's financial crisis.

Hickenlooper said he'd pass.

"We have a pro football stadium with a pro football team," he said.

Burn!

Some Pics

When I raked up the last bit of hay on my garden beds, I found this massively content earthworm just chilling out on top of the soil. You can tell he gorged himself on all that dirt and was just laying there saying, "Get me a bucket."

And I say, have at it.

Spinach!

How's that song go? Peas, peas, peas, let me get what I want? Lord knows it would be the first time.

Columbines in bloom. First in red.

Then in blue.

Then in deep red.

Lettuce go then, you and I, with the evening spread out against the sky...

But baby since I've bean loving you, I'm about to lose my worried mind. Yeah, oh, yeah.

Not only are the beans sprouting, but so is the corn.

And the chives are flowering.

Bus Drama

Obviously I need to get an earlier bus, or maybe a later one. This dude doesn't know what he's doing.

This drunk lady, a different one from the one with cirrhosis*, tumbled into the crowd during one of his nauseating stops and starts. Then she kept apologizing to me.

Don't apologize to me, lady. It wasn't my toes you stepped on. And it's not the smell of your breath that's making me sick either.

And it was standing room only on the bus. Except for the dude in the wheelchair, who was on the way to pick up his car from the shop. "They better have my car ready, man," I heard him say to his friend, "This is the last bus for me."

I wish I could say that.




* How do I know she has cirrhosis? I'm no doctor, but I can recognize ascites when I see it.

What a Dick

Question of the day: Why is Dick Cheney such a dick?

Today he was annihilated by President Obama in a speech-off. CNN covered both speeches live, which I don't really get. Obama gives a speech nearly every day; we don't need to cut live to every single one. And Dick Cheney was speaking in front of a conservative think tank, so who cares?

At any rate, Obama was making sense. Cheney...not so much.

Here's one line from Dick's speech that jumped out at me:
After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.

Please, Dick. You want credit for "keeping America safe" from 9-12-01 thru 01-20-09, but when it comes to 9-11 itself, it's nothing but excuses. "No one could have foreseen," "a pre-911 mentality," blah blah blah.

You want a pat on the back, Dick? Okay, but it also comes with a big raspberry for that one time we experienced, in your own words, "the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever." On your watch!

The Bus

Dear Bus Driver,

When I saw you checking out that drunk chick with cirrhosis, I wasn't quite sure what to make of you. But having ridden your bus a few times, feeling all the G forces as you SLAM on the brakes and SLAM on the gas, as well as the associated gastrointestinal effects, I have to say: I don't like you.

Signed,

A Reluctant RTD Devotee

Cop Watch Chronicles

I saw this police chase video on CNN and it was pretty infuriating. It's a year old, so consider this a bit of a delayed reaction.

It starts out as just your typical police chase. You can almost hear John Brunell narrating it. "That's when Birmingham Sheriff Joe Schmoe risked life and limb to poke holes in the suspect's devious plan with spike strips, only to be run over as the brazen copkiller slams on the gas and rockets away."

When I first saw the video, it looked like the brazen suspect intentionally went after the cop, and he sure as hells runs him over. But now I wonder if he was just trying to avoid the spike strips and the cop was just in the way.

It doesn't excuse anything, of course. You don't run from the cops. Period. But I think "dumb motherfucker" might be a better descriptor than "coldhearted killer." (I'm pretty sure the cop survived the incident.)

But as you can see if you watch the whole thing through, the video doesn't end with the cop being hit. The suspect eventually crashes out, thanks to a nudge by a cop trained to do these maneuvers, and his car goes rolling.

Then he pops the fuck out of the window. The proverbial "ejected from the vehicle," a rag doll of flesh and broken bones tossed out of all that spinning metal and shattered glass. He falls, seemingly lifeless, face down in a ditch.

And that's when the cops converge. The first cop is maybe five feet away from the suspect when he starts to take his first swing, and it's a big one, almost a diving blow, so emotional and uncontrolled that he slips in the mud and falls on his ass.

At this point, it's no longer a police chase. It's payback time.

The good news: Five cops were fired. And the suspect got 20 years.

Choose Your Battles Wisely

This shit cracks me up.

WASHINGTON - Republican Party leaders are trying to avoid a public confrontation over a GOP-led effort to rename the Democratic Party the "Socialist Democrat" party.

Yes, the GOP is fighting itself over an effort to make name-calling official.

You could almost hear the AP stringer laughing as they composed these lines:

Party Chairman Michael Steele and others say the party should also drop the renaming resolution and focus on more serious problems. To avoid a party dispute over the renaming, Republicans were trying to compromise on milder language that would simply criticize Democrats for what they call socialist tendencies.

What a bunch of immature hucksters.

They are literally debating a resolution to make name-calling official. And then when party leaders look down their nose with a WTF face, they say, "Oh, alright...we won't call them socialists. We'll just say they have socialist tendencies."

Oh, God. What's next, a resolution to call Obama "President Poopyhead?"

I love the last line in the article though:

"The fight reflects a divide between Republicans who want a more centrist message and party hardliners. "

Ha! Is that all it takes to be a "party hardliner" these days? Calling people names?

This is why it's easier these days to be a conservative Democrat than a moderate Republican. If today's GOP had their way, there'd be no such thing as a moderate Republican!

Nuggets Lose Game 1

Shortly after the game was over last night, I heard some of my neighbors hooting and hollering in victory. I wondered if I hadn't given up on the game early, so I went back and checked the score.

Nope. Apparently my neighbors are Lakers fans.

Here's my amateur analysis. If the Nuggets hadn't missed so many free throws, they would have won.

Consider: They missed 12 free throws. And they lost by 2 points.

So while I'm disappointed, I'm also slightly encouraged. This is not going to be the blow-out we've come to expect from a Nuggets-Lakers playoff series.

Dancing With the Reruns

Ya know, network television might want to reconsider their love-affair with reality TV programming. Last night I took a break from cleaning the house and sat down with the remote control for a few.

On one channel, they were playing Dancing With the Stars, then on another they had Deal or No Deal. Man, I don't want to watch that crap.

Dancing With the Stars? It should be called Dancing With the Mildly Famous People. No one on that show is a star...that's why they're on Dancing With the Stars. Stars have shows of their own.

And Deal or No Deal? Not even the presence of all those beautiful women opening suitcases makes me want to watch it.

But the true problem for the networks isn't that they're producing shows no one wants to watch. I'm the exception to the rule, because millions of people DO watch those shows and do enjoy them. The problem is how many of those millions of people are going to watch this stuff in re-runs?

Seinfeld's last episode wrapped a decade ago, but Seinfeld is going to playing somewhere at least once a day for the next twenty years. I mean, I never saw The Jeffersons, All in the Family, or Charles in Charge when they were on primetime, but I sure saw plenty of episodes in syndication.

But they probably won't run Survivor or American Idol reruns. Do you really care to relive the Justin-Kelly drama all over again? Do you miss William Hung that much? Or Sanjaya?

These shows are completely and utterly disposable. Great for ratings...the first time...but with little to no appeal later.

So I ended up watching Rick Steves tour France on PBS, which was a re-run from several years back, and let me tell you, it was just as good as it was the first time.

Tale of the Tape

According to the fancy-smancy bike computer I got this weekend, I rode 2.247 miles this morning and burned 155.9 calories. I don't think either number is accurate, but I'm going to field test it a few times and see how it all averages out.

If indeed this is the case, I'm looking at riding a little under 5 miles a day, burning a little over 300 calories.

It's not so depressing when you think of it that way. Ah, mandatory minimums. Keeping hardened criminals like me off the streets. (Bitter? I'm not bitter. I totally support the right of the state to fuck people over for the lamest of reasons.)

Ick

Don Rumsfeld used to decorate the cover sheet of his daily intelligence briefings with glorious pictures of war...and bible quotes alluding to the righteousness of the cause.

This much-talked-about GQ article implies it might have been done to manipulate an uninformed and religious president, but who knows? Maybe Rummy himself is a true believer too.

To me, and I know I'm an atheist so my views don't count, but it all seems to be a little inappropriate to bring overt religiosity into the Department of Defense or war imagery into religious worship. That's seems disrespectful to both church and state.

I've got to hand it to GQ though. Their story, a long one, was good, although I doubt it will sell magazines. Weirdly, they put their stamp on the cover pages and assembled them into a slideshow. Yes, they put their stamp on the cover pages, announcing to the world, not authorship...not ownership...just simply, "I scanned these."

Then they made it so you couldn't copy them as jpgs. So I took a screenshot and made my own image. Maybe I should sign it just so everyone knows I took this screenshot.