smacky and bucky

Damn! Aldo don't play that game. Hard to get is one thing, but if you are too coy, Aldo will just start smacking on you until you come around. As a child, Aldo loved a kitty "too hard" once. It tried to run away and he loved it to death. The cycle obviously continued into adulthood. Run Mary!

Aldo, do you really think this is the best idea, confronting Mary angrily? Is violence the best course of action? What would Rex Morgan, M.D. say?

Shut up, Rex.

You scored as Jack. Hey there, Jack! You are a top notch doctor who can solve anything. Although you get overwhelmed with everyone's problems you still solve them without a second thought. Everyone loves you! Kate 50% Jack 50% Boone 38% Sun 38% Michael 38% Shannon 38% Locke 38% Sawyer 31% Sayid 31% Charlie 31% Claire 19% Which "Lost" character are you? created with QuizFarm.com

As you can see, it was a toss-up between Kate and Jack. It actually gave me a tiebreaker question: Choose which most applies to you: (A) You had a troubled childhood. (B) You help others before you help yourself.

I said B, because my childhood was 100% normal and trauma-free. And I do help people, but mostly if they're up in my face and obviously need a hand, like an old lady trying to get her bag into the overhead compartment, or a kid struggling to open a popsicle wrapper. I don't go out of my way to find it very often. But I have a healthy guilt complex that makes me do things from time to time like offer to help a neighbor pull up wet carpet, or cut limbs off a tree, when I really don't want to do it.

We went to a Wal-Mart out in the country somewhere, and I found an Avengers t-shirt. The shirt has a drawing of the first classic line-up: Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Giant Man, and Wasp.

I haven't actually worn the shirt yet, but I realized I could do this:

What's becoming a regular Friday feature in this little blog maybe three people visit more than once (and a rather large number stumble on by accident and leave after three seconds), today I'll share what I consider the Greatest Thing Ever! (for this week, anyway).

This week, I give you the following awesomeness:

That's right. Soon, all of us who follow the exploits and adventures of Mary Worth's favorite stalker can proclaim our love with a shirt, soon to be available on The Comics Curmudgeon. The shirt includes the immortal Aldo comeback: I refuse to believe that you prefer to be alone! Hopefully by the end of this storyline, we can make a list of the top ten Aldo pick-up lines, including the persuasive Your words may say “no,” but your eyes say “yes”! What woman could resist that line, I ask you?

Here is some damn good advice to heed as you're planning your weekend activities:


Just get it in the right order and everything will be fine, okay?







Finally, if things start to go bad this weekend, remember this piece of advice:


That action will help you out in most situations: bar fight, pushy date that won't take no for an answer, unresponsive date that doesn't want anything to do with you, unplanned public speaking engagement, wedding toast, eulogy at a funeral, taking care of the neighbor's dog, etc.

Yesterday evening I fed the animals and headed to Old Town Alexandria around 5. The dinner reservation wasn't until 7, but I hadn't wandered around those neighborhoods in years and decided to take the opportunity to do so. Laura was at a get-together at a knitting shop down the street from her office. On Wednesdays the store has a wine & knit, or whatever it's called, so she was going to meet up with me at dinner. I seemed to recall a record store on a second floor, but when I found the place, it was now an art gallery. Bummer. With quite a bit of time to kill, I walked 15 blocks up the street to a comic shop, and bought my first comics in a year or two. Good timing too, because Frank Cho just released issue # 37 of Liberty Meadows. It's been two years since issue # 36. He was a bit distracted making a lot of money drawing Spider-Man and other assorted titles for Marvel. I also picked up the final issue of JSA (before it's needlessly started over under the title Justice Society of America), a Union Jack trade I didn't know existed, a DC Secret Origins comic with a full-color reprint of the first story of Jack Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown, and Marv Wolfman's novelization of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Wow, that was fun.

I then made my way back toward the restaurant, stopping at Hallmark to get a card for Laura's dad and stepmother. I found a "going away" card that plays Hit the Road Jack when you open it. They laughed, so mission accomplished. The card store had two kittens in a big cage by the register. The woman told me they foster parent kittens from the King St. Shelter, and 26 cats had been adopted this year by people seeing them in her store. Yay! That was nice. I also saw a very cool Star Trek Christmas ornament. It was the transporter, with Scotty, Kirk, and McCoy. It plays the transporter sending and receiving, and flashes lights in sequence. Take a look at it on the Hallmark site here. Scroll down and click on "View Video" under the picture and you can see a clip of it in action. Might need it for my desk at work.

Dinner was at The Warehouse Bar and Grill. I had the seafood sampler, which included lobster tail stuffed with crayfish and crabmeat, shrimp, and scallops. More of a binger than a sampler, really. But since they were moving at the end of the week, we had to linger and get dessert too, so I had pecan pie with vanilla ice cream and a cup of coffee. What a meal...

We got home around 10 and I got a few pages into a comic before having to go to sleep due to the rich seafood and sweet melted butter running through my arteries.

Good times.

The woman that wants to buy our house (but needs to sell her condo first) came to Sunday's open house, making the number of times she's visited the place either seven or eight. When she heard we lowered the price on our house, she lowered the price on her condo. We're all really motivated. We just need to find a couple of buyers.

I watched opening day coverage of the World Series of Poker main event on ESPN last night while reading. The event concluded several weeks ago, so everyone knows who ultimately won the final table and the $12 million. Kind of silly for ESPN to delay coverage for so long. Oh well, it's still fun to watch. A lot of big names went out the very first day, including some who had won the event in past years. This year over 8,000 people ponied up the $10,000 entrance fee to give it a shot. Can you imagine paying $10,000 and losing the first day, or the first hour (as many did)? $10,000 for less than an hour. Does even the highest price prostitute charge $10,000 an hour? Seems like a silly way to spend that money. It's all because the last few years amateurs have won the event, so now every shmuck with a weekly home game thinks he or she can be champion. I enjoy playing but I have no such delusions. I'd be sucked into going all in against Phil Helmuth and get spanked on national television. I wouldn't last a day against pros.

We're going to dinner with Laura's dad and stepmother tonight. They're moving to North Carolina before the end of the week, so they wanted to get together one last time. Considering she wasn't speaking to her father when I first met her, our relationship with her father has gotten downright friendly. If you can't picture how she felt about her dad when I first met her, it was something like this:

Well, okay, not that dramatic. I just wanted to post a part of today's Mary Worth. She's given up being polite and is now three seconds away from macing poor Aldo.

But the first year we were married, my wife had a standing order in our house that if her father called, she was at the grocery store. The lie only got awkward when he called at 9PM. "Um, yeah, she had an urge for ice cream. Yeah, that's why she went to the store so late..."

Now we all get along, and they're moving, so it will be a non-issue in less than five days anyway.

Actually, I can't complain about yesterday. It was better than this woman's day, I'll admit that. She had a gun on Rex Morgan, and I cropped out the last image: A swat guy pulling the trigger on a machine gun with a big BLAM! sound effect. Yeah, her day is about to get worse.

I simply forgot to put on bug repellent and the mosquitoes ate my legs from knees to ankles at the other house as I trimmed the hedges. I also mowed the lawn at the house where we currently reside, so I kept myself busy until about 6:30.

I'm reading the final title in Stephen King's Gunslinger series. Volume VII was just released in paperback late last week. I still have 850 pages out of 1,000 to go, so please don't spoil it if you know what happens.

Well, too bad. I'm going to tell you anyway! Laura and I, one of your more antisocial couples, actually made friends with another couple over the weekend! This is huge, because most of our friends have moved away, gotten married, had a child, and dropped off the face of the Earth. Outside of family, our list of social engagements looks like a nun's. To have another couple to do things with is awesome. And the guy's into a lot of geek things I'm into, and the girl is freaking hilarious. Yes, we're excited. Losing friends is a drag, and making new ones in the real world ain't like school. You don't just meet people on the bus.

Laura's mother invited two former coworkers and their spouses to visit for the weekend at the river. Her mom said that the couples were closer to our age than hers. Saturday morning I got up and drove into town and got a haircut, returning around 11. We decided to go next door and introduce ourselves to the visitors. They were already in the pool and had opened the first bottle of wine. This is a good sign. Turns out all four visitors are no more than five years older at the most. And they are a hoot. We laughed the entire weekend. And they live in Silver Spring, so they're no more than a 20 minute drive away from our place in DC.

As I was just out picking up a sandwich, a woman I have never seen called a name I didn't catch (not mine) and waved to me. I glanced around to confirm there was no one behind me (there wasn't), and just smiled and waved back. I'll let her figure out later I'm not who she thought I was. Or maybe I have my own stalker who just made herself known to me.

One or the other.

I went over the the HOUSE THAT WON'T SELL to mow the lawn. I walked up to the front door and inserted the key. I check the inside over when I first get there, making sure everything is okay and looking to see if any realtors left cards. As soon as I entered, I knew something was wrong...

The temperature on the downstairs thermostat said it was 84 degrees. Uh-oh. Went to the upstairs master bedroom, where the thermostat said it was 87 degrees. UH-OH. The air conditioner was set for 72 degrees. I went up to the attic and checked the compressor. It was running, and there wasn't any water in the drain pan, so there wasn't a clog or a leak anywhere. I changed the filter, just in case, though it didn't need it.

Reaching the end of things I could think to do, I closed up and mowed the lawn. Muttering to myself about how last Thursday the house was freezing inside, and now it was boiling. Something broke in the last six days. (sonuvabitch...)

When I got home, my wife said she was off all day tomorrow, so she could meet the repairman at the other house if I made an appointment. Called the company that installed the thing two years ago and they said someone could come Thursday morning. They'll call 30 minutes before they arrive, so she can swing over there and won't have to spend the entire morning in the hot house.

I was pissed, but my wife was calm and said it's not a big deal. So once again, we complement each other by taking turns freaking out.

I guess it's just another annoying event that pops up in daily life and all you can do is deal.

Speaking of unpleasant surprises:

Aldo's back! Her side trip to the hospital for spiritual cleansing was all in vain. When you see someone you'd rather avoid, what do you normally do? You think to yourself "Oh, crap..." or maybe you mutter it under your breath. Well, Mary's past that point. She's five feet from the guy and yells OH NO! Any pretense of politeness is out the window now. It's on, Aldo. It's on!


Thursday afternoon update: The A/C had a bad capacitor. The only capacitor I know of is the flux capacitor, which we all know is what makes time travel possible. I don't think the air conditioner uses the same kind, or I'd take the house back three years when the market was still hot and sell it the first weekend! They didn't charge us for the replacement part (since they installed the thing), which was nice, but we still paid for the service call. At least it's done.

Oh! And I'm far from alone in my fascination with Mary Worth. The media has a hold of the story now: "There's Just Something About Mary..."

Mary's reaction to being stalked? "Sheesh!" That woman is 10 pounds of tough in a 5 pound bag.

The good: Submitted a vacation request this morning for September 5-8. We already get Labor Day off, so with those four vacation days and the week bookended by weekends, we'll be starting September with a nine-day holiday. Laura's sisters are flying in from various parts of the country to visit.

The bad: Home sales in Virginia are down 24% from last year, and last year we didn't sell that house. We need to get rid of that damn thing. I'm trying to schedule it so only one of us is manically depressed about the situation at a time, and this week it's my turn.

Been away for a while. Not having fun, don't worry. I've been going through a series of misadventures, coupled with illness.

Friday morning, 6:30 AM, I was happily on my way to work. Alas, it was not to be. Five blocks from my house I got a flat tire. No problem, I think, I can change a tire. I get the spare and jack out of the trunk and encounter my first snag: no lug wrench. You need the lug wrench to remove the lug nuts that hold the tire. Rats. I walk the five blocks back to the house and borrow the lug wrench out of my wife's car. Turned around and walked the five blocks back to the car. I started to remove the lug nuts when I hit snag number 2: One of the four lug nuts is a strange shape. The wrench doesn't fit on it. What the hell? It's now 7 AM. I call into work and leave a message on my supervisor's voicemail, telling her I'm calling in sick. (Don't tell, okay? I didn't have any more personal days, and I had over a month and a half of sick days after three years of never taking one.)

I walked back to the house and my wife was just starting to wake up. I got her sister's number from her and tried to reach her to talk to her husband (it's his car, you see.) The phone goes directly to voicemail without ringing. It continues to do that until 8, when she turns her phone on. I explain the situation and she hands the phone to her husband. He explains that they are lock nuts, and the dealership installed them about a month ago, and the "key" and the lug wrench are in the trunk, or perhaps the glovebox. I walk five blocks back again and check the car, removing everything and lifting up the carpet to check. Emptied the glovebox, checked under the seats. Nothing. Call him back and he says the dealership must have forgotten to put it in the trunk. I walk five blocks home again and check the internet for the nearest dealership. There's one about ten miles from the house. They say they can remove the lock nuts with the "master key" they have, but it might be an hour before they have time for someone to do it.

I walk six blocks to the nearest auto parts store and buy four regular lug nuts and a can of "fix-a-flat." Walk eight blocks total back to the car. I put the "fix-a-flat" stuff in the tire and it gets about 75% full. Enough to drive on, but not too far. I drive slowly to the dealership. It's about 9:45 AM now.

I explain that I had called and want them to remove all four lock nuts and replace them with the regular lug nuts I brought with me (this post might win an award for most uses of the word "nuts.") I wait about 20 minutes and someone comes out with a pneumatic drill and the master key, removes all four lock nuts and hands them to me. I put them in the center console. He also puts air in the formerly flat tire to get me home. I end up getting home a little before 11 AM.
And that was Friday.

Over the weekend I was sick. I caught a cold somewhere, somehow. Congested, runny nose, etc. The weather was beautiful, but I felt like crap and slept a lot.

This morning I drove to a tire place and got there when it opened at 7 AM. Left the car and walked fifteen blocks to my office. Worked through lunch, busting ass to finish a project and get it to production. Finished at 2:59 and left at three to walk fifteen blocks back to the tire place. The car now has four new tires.

So between work, illness, and tire trauma, I haven't had a moment to blog. Now I'm slightly less congested, $573.83 poorer (my brother-in-law has fancy sport tires in a weird size and a lot of places don't carry them. Isn't that nice?), and my hands are cramped from typing so much, both at work and this right here.

Hopefully a little calmer and happier this week.

One hundred degrees of awesomeness. See them all here.

Wow. Found this and had to share. According to the site, it's a free comic distributed in Pennsylvania liquor stores to warn pregnant women about fetal alcohol syndrome. Care to guess what year they did this? Would you believe 1980?

You can read the entire thing here:

Put down the bottle, Baby-mama.

I'd like to see an entire line of "Rex Morgan, M.D. Talks..." comics. The possibilities are endless...

Rex Morgan, M.D. Talks...

...About Your Hemorrhoids!

...About Your Tiny Penis!

...About Your Breath!

...About Dating Your Ex-Wife, If You're Cool With That!

Stumbled across this book the other day and picked it up. The debut novel from A. Lee Martinez received a favorable comparison to Douglas Adams, so I decided to give it a shot.

Plot set-up, no spoilers: Duke is a werewolf. Earl is a vampire. They're beer drinking rednecks traveling in a pick-up truck. They stop at a diner in the middle of nowhere. Zombies attack the diner. Duke and Earl decide to investigate and become the unlikely heroes in a war between the diner owner and her unknown attacker, a high school student who is dabbling in the black arts and raising the dead on weekends. Then there's Cathy, the ghost in the cemetery next to the diner. How does she fit in to this? And why are strange things happening at the mini-golf?

It's goofy, but the characters are likeable, and the plot moves along at a nice clip. Like Adams, Martinez plops normal people into bizarre situations and the humor comes from the characters' reactions.

Weekend was okay.

Friday a friend stopped by and we hung out. Saturday I ran some errands, mowed the other lawn and trimmed the bushes. Damn house is still on the market.

Done and grungy a few hours later, I decided to make a side trip to a used CD place on the way home. I hadn't been to this place in over a year, since we moved to the other side of town. Enjoying the air conditioning (a cooler day meant it was still in the low 90s), I ended up picking up five used CDs:

• Grant McLennan (one half of the Go-Betweens): Horsebreaker Star
• Gram Parsons: G.P. and Grievous Angel (both his albums on one CD)
• Jamiroquai: Dynamite
• Julian Cope: Floored Genius 2: Best of the BBC Sessions
• Split Enz: The Best of Split Enz

Nice mix of some of my '80s faves, one with 2006 dancy stuff, and a classic one from the early '70s.

Saturday night I went to dinner at the neighbor's house. I had helped remove carpet and padding and she wanted to feed me as a reward. Obligated to go. The meal was fine. Her boyfriend was there (and two people in their 60s shouldn't be described as "boyfriend and girlfriend," but I don't know what else to call them. He supports Bush and the war, she doesn't, but I refused to break the tie. I changed the subject.

Sunday I watched The Life Aquatic. Wes Anderson's fourth movie, and the first not cowritten by Owen Wilson. It's also my least favorite of the four. I don't know if that's a coincidence or not. This was the second time I had seen it, and it was better the second time.

It was my nephew's eight birthday, so we sent him a gift card (I know, how original... but when I was eight, getting to pick something out was always better than getting something I didn't want). Called and said happy birthday and ended up talking to my sister for an hour. Our longest conversation in at least a year. We live in different states, she's older, had two kids, and we don't have a lot in common. So the long conversation was a nice surprise.

Sunday night we had Lebanese food (Humus, taboule, etc.), yum. We watched two TiVoed episodes of Dead Zone, and I'm still surprised and happy there is a show even vaguely scifi my wife likes.

And to answer some questions about the last post: Yes, I read Mary Worth. It's 10 pounds of crazy in a 5 pound bag, and yes, "Mary's Hot Cocoa" is a euphemism. It comes from a conversation I had with De about the July 1 Mary Worth strip, in which she asks her "boyfriend" Jeff if he wants to come up for "some hot cocoa." This being July in California (and I spoke with a friend in L.A. recently and she said the temp was 104!), we decided "hot cocoa" had to be a code term for some sort of dirty, hot lovin'. Thus, Aldo Kelrast wants Mary's Hot Cocoa. His antics over the weekend (Begging to be her "backdoor man," he whines, "Is he the jealous type? He doesn't have to find out! I won't tell if you won't!" and what woman could resist that offer? Then on Sunday he stands in his apartment, rubbing his hands together and thinking, "Playing hard to get, are we Mary? That just makes the chase more exciting for me!") just confirm that he's a freak, and won't stop until her head is hidden away in a bowling bag in his closet.
==========

I obviously don't think too often about who stumbles across my blog and why. If I cared about "hits" I'd link to porn or discuss politics all the time. But for a lark I checked the stats for the first time in about a year, and discovered a few things:

Under search terms, my blog was NUMBER ONE out of 21,000 on Google for “Barnacle Cut infection” for a story about what happened to me in August 2005.

Other search terms that led folks to my blog in the last week:

“soap opera handcuffs” (for my discussion of Mary Worth and her stalker)
“photos of julliet lewis” (yep, even with her name spelled wrong. I think it was a Scientology rant)
“kill a car battery” (for the VW Beetle saga)
“vw trunk zombie” (Um... no idea. Maybe both terms appeared in the same post, but aren't related.)
"aldo kelrast" (Mary Worth's stalker, duh!)

Today I give you a link to something genius. Something that proves I'm not the only one obsessed with the current Mary Worth storyline. For your reading pleasure:

Stalker Aldo: To the tune of the Eagles' "Desperado"

Slight change of plans this weekend. My wife's friend has to work, so they aren't going to the river. My Solitary Weekend Spent On The Sofa In My Underpants (or MSWSOTSIMU, for short) is now going to have an audience. Of course since I already accepted that elderly neighbor's dinner invitation, I still have to go alone to that, while Laura hides out in our house. Sheesh.

I had a 20% off coupon for a CD at Borders, so we went yesterday evening and I browsed the aisles, not sure what to pick up. I ended up choosing Savane, by Ali Farka Touré. Review snippet from Amazon: The great African guitarist and bluesman Ali Farka Touré's final solo studio album was recorded in his native Mali toward the end of his life, when the artist knew his days were numbered. He spent his last years in his home village of Niafunké, concentrating on farming and family matters, jamming with local musicians in the evening. This impassioned, roots-drenched, mostly acoustic valedictory finds the Maestro's stalking rhythms and high-noon-at-the-crossroads, dusty desert-to-delta vocals in no less than life-summing form.

Southern blues from the edge of the Sahara desert in Africa. Perfect music for these 100 degree days. I'll post a review over the weekend. I know you can't wait!



And just so we're clear...
















Okay???

Grrface is right, rape isn't funny. But Mary Worth, a fictional senior citizen, having a stalker with a bowlcut, a mustache, a tiny red Pee Wee Herman bowtie, and the last name Kelrast (Stalker)? HILARIOUS...

From De:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your Blog/Live Journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag five people.

So... A guy with one hand in his pocket looks armed and dangerous. A guy with both hands in his pockets looks relaxed and lazy. No threat. I took a breath and walked back into the room, noisily.

(From Persuader, by Lee Child. The book I happen to have with me today.)

I'm skipping step 6, as De tagged most of the people I know. I don't have a lot of friends, sorry! Chain letters and e-mail forwards die with me too. I don't pass that stuff on. I usually check Snopes.com and send the link to the person that sent the forward to me, and I gently explain that it's an urban legend and he/she shouldn't pass it on without checking into it first.

We've all known people like this at some point, right?






I'm referring not to Margo, whose carefree attitude, though seemingly harsh, is actually refreshing, but to Tommie, the person who simply cares too much. Cries watching news reports, cries seeing roadkill, gets passionate in any sort of discussion to the point that a conversation about the films of Gene Hackman will likely end in tears and hurt feelings. (Yeah, OK, so Margo is sort of a bitch, but that's how she rolls. You don't like it, don't live with her.)

In the comments section of my last post, Grrrface asked, "You read Mary Worth?" She sounded a little disbelieving, as if reading a 60-year-old soap opera comic was silly. Well, let me put it into context before the last shred of indie cred I had is gone... (I'm being sarcastic, as I'm not even sure what "indie cred" means. Does it mean I start hating my favorite band after they get a major label deal and the public discovers them? Because I've always thought that was silly. If you love a band, why not let them succeed?)

Anyway, I started reading Mary Worth online recently because of The Comics Curmudgeon. He analyzes the daily comics, with hilarious results. And the comments section of that site is gold. I almost spit Dr. Pepper on the monitor after reading this gem about Ms. Worth:

I'd give anything for a panel immediately after the now inevitable sexual assualt on Mary Worth's person, where she stares into the "camera" nearly catatonic, her hair askew and her lipstick smudged and says simply "Hells bells. I forgot the eggs."

I know it's not polite laughing at old lady rape, but since this is a strip running in family newspapers, it will never come to that point. So the sick part is the writer clearly wants you to take it to that point in your mind. Mary Worth has a stalker. Stalkers don't take no for an answer. Stalkers don't "turn good." However this is resolved, the only realistic ending would be Mary Worth in tears (or dead) and Aldo Kelrast in handcuffs.

Do you understand my sick fascination now?

The site also takes panels out of context so you can see how bizarre they really are, such as...


To whom is Randy (from Judge Parker) giving this advice? I imagine he's with some crack whore, he is her very first customer, and he's explaining how he like's it. He's obviously standing above the person, looking down at her with a leer.

The "Harvard Law" sweatshirt just reinforces that opinion.