smacky and bucky

We had a great time last night. Met up with another couple at a restaurant across the street from the theater and had dinner. I ordered a beer and it was the size of a Big Gulp from 7-11. Seriously, it was at least three beers in one glass. If I hadn't forgotten my phone, I would have taken a picture of it, with a small child standing beside it for scale. It was odd, for sure. I guess they catered to the fancy young DC law firm crowd, who has the money to eat at fancy places but still want to get f-ed up like they used to. The bar area was packed with people in their early 20s dressed in office clothes. (Note: Looking at the scene made me very happy not to be single and looking.)

The food was just okay. I had Cuban salmon, which means it had a spicy crust and came with red beans and rice. I'm not especially picky about red beans and rice, but I'm definitely in the camp of: "The longer it cooks, the better it tastes." The beans were too firm. They had been cooked that day. Compare it to a bowl at a real Cuban place, where the beans started simmering last Monday, and damn, you will taste the difference.

The show was very funny. Opening guy had a few funny lines, and he was brief. Gaffigan was hilarious. The couple we were with had seen him six times(!) and said the show was at least 60% new material. They got in the line in the lobby after the show to get something signed by the man, while we decided not to wait an hour for that and headed home.

One large glass of water and two Aleve to head off a possible hangover (thanks, college training!), and all was right in the world. I didn't drink too much, but we boys at the table did top off dinner with 12-year-old scotch, and to be honest, I'm no connoisseur of the "adult" beverages. I'm rarely more ambitious than a beer or a glass of wine, so when I have something like that, I feel like a kid someone handed a glass to and is watching to see what I'll do. It was smooth, but until I move to a cabin in Alaska, I don't see myself becoming a regular scotch sipper. It doesn't get cold enough here to warrant more than the occasional "fire in the belly."

Tonight we are meeting up with some friends for a night in the big city. Woo hoo! Dinner, drinks, and a show in DC! We're going to see Jim Gaffigan. He is so freaking funny. Here's his bit on Hot Pockets:

It's a camera phone pic of something I received in the mail yesterday. It's 33 years old and cost me $2.50. Shang-Chi (the fellow in red) is facing off with only his bare hands against a seven-foot giant wielding a Samurai sword. Oh, and they're balanced on a tightrope 50 stories in the air!

Who said you can't put a price on awesomeness? No one, probably. I'm probably the first. And I don't even mean it, because you can put a price on it: That price is $2.50!

I'm feeling a little out of it this week, kind of tired, a bit skittish. Weird feeling. So I'll just post some phone pics.


I take my phone with me when I walk the dog (I mean, when the dog and I take walks together), and I noticed this the other day. Apparently a tree grew around those wires at some point, and when they cut the tree down, they had to leave a rather substantial piece of it. The wires hold it suspended about 15 feet in the air.








And a couple of pet pics, since they were keeping me company while the wife slept off her illness.



I believe ghostbuster Peter Venkman warned of cats and dogs sleeping together. It's completely innocent. We're not breeding any mutants here.

Wednesday morning (about 20 minutes after my optimistic last blog post, in fact), I received a call and had to go to the emergency room (visit #3 in ten days). L had driven herself to the ER with a fever and abdominal pain. Kidney stones. Hooray! They sound like the worst. Anyway, long story short, she stayed overnight and I went to pick her up Thanksgiving morning when the last of the blood tests came back and we were allowed to leave. She slept most of the next 24 hours.

Friday she was feeling much better, thanks to good meds. We had our traditional Thanksgiving (for just us two this year) Friday night. Turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, two kinds of pie... Yum. (And yes, my wife, newly out of the hospital, made everything. She is amazing. I told her we could do it next week when she was feeling 100% better, but she was determined, and she sent me on errands to buy things to keep me from helping in the kitchen, I suspect.)

The rest of the weekend has been watching DVDs (both the British and American versions of The Office, finishing a book (The Accidental Time Machine, which was VERY good), and taking walks with the dog. I did a tiny bit of Christmas shopping, just because I was already out and we're doing Christmas the weekend before the actual holiday with my family, so we need to finish purchases for them.

This has been one screwy year. I guess it will go down as our "roll with the punches" year. Can't believe it's almost December.

It's scary when your spouse is sick and you're powerless to make it better. Very f'ing scary.

Last day of work this week. Yay!

Laura and I are celebrating Thanksgiving by ourselves this year. We decided the idea of visiting either family and dealing with the traffic, just sounded hellish. So we finished the grocery shopping last night for the ingredients for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for two, most likely with leftovers enough that we won't have to leave the house until next Monday.

Thanks for the kind words yesterday. Hospitals just drain your spirit. It's like waiting for a subway train for 12 hours. Then when it arrives it's full, the doors don't open, and it goes slowly sailing by. Uck.


For the record, I believe this is the THIRD time these Mary Worth pics have graced my blog. Sometimes only identical Mary Worths can accurately express how you're feeling.

Labels: hospitals suck, Mary Worth, thanksgiving

Another six-hour visit to the ER yesterday. Too tired to blog about anything, and I just came home and went to sleep anyway.

Notice the clock in the left margin of my blog? Good.

Last night on Amazing Race, the teams had to go to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (after they figured out where the hell it is!). That's where I lived for over two years! You can read the show recap here. The teams had to get a taxi from the airport and catch the train. I never took the train in Burkina, since the bus was so much cheaper (yep, the folks on the train with them probably had some money, compared to others in the country anyway).

On the train, a couple of blond chicks (Shana and Jennifer) made derogatory comments about the heat, the flies, the smell, how dirty the country is, etc. They really came off as assholes, especially since this was followed by footage of the others teams totally enthralled with everything they saw. And if Shana and Jennifer ever took the train from DC to New York, they'd see that the area around the tracks in Baltimore is as filthy (if not more so) than Africa. It's because no one willingly lives near railroad tracks, so that area is a dumping ground.

It was great seeing the teams go into a school and either teaching 10 words of English to a student or learning 10 word in Mooré. That's one of the larger local languages in Burkina (there are at least 60 different local languages), spoken by over 5 million people. I still know some of it: N segena (pronounced "en SEG-e-na") means "I'm thirsty." I know a few other phrases I'll teach you sometime if we meet in person (they're a bit "blue").

I was happy to see a lot of girls in the classroom. Many girls in Burkina aren't allowed to go to school because they have to stay home and help the moms. In a lot of these villages, you still have to get water from a well and bring it home in buckets. Imagine that for a second...

I had never watched Amazing Race before, and while I don't plan on watching it for the rest of the season, I'll catch next weeks, because they're still in Burkina. The good news is the show isn't exploitive. It's several notches above "reality" television, so if you must watch one, it's the one to catch.

In other weekend news, I completely rearranged the furniture in our living/family room at the wife's request, and for about an hour Sunday morning I thought I had torn something in my chest, as lifting my left arm sent shooting pains down my side. Luckily it went away, most likely the result of using muscles I simply never use anymore, what with my desk job. The new layout called for moving the satellite wire to the television, which meant drilling a new hole in the floor and seeing where it came out in the basement. It wasn't nearly as much work as I feared. Oh, and we gave each other an early Christmas gift and bought a new television for the newly configured room.

Oh, and the pic above. I used to ride by that globe every day on my bike.Yes, traffic is insane there! I think you can click on the pic and see a huge version of it. Go ahead and do it. See the big building way back in the back of the pic? It's the presidential palace. I was riding by the front gates once and an ostrich appeared at the bars of the gate on the inside and basically barked at me. Scared the crap out of me, as I just caught a flurry of movement in the corder of my eye as it ran to the gate. Yep, he has a pet ostrich.

This has been a pretty long week. I didn't mention that I spent most of last Saturday in the emergency room. I didn't mention it because I wasn't the patient and it seemed a little more personal than I want to go into here, which is ironic since a blog is supposed to be a journal for recording thoughts. I'll just say that hospitals have made a good deal of money from the insurance companies of various members of my family this year. And we're lucky to have health insurance at times like that. The good news is that every family member who has been to the hospital this year is now home recovering, including the one from Saturday.

OK, cryptic comments aside, I am looking forward to not doing much. Wife pointed out that I need a haircut (indeed I do) so I'll do that during random errand time Saturday morning.

Oh, last night I read the issue of Power Man and Iron Fist that guest-starred Rom. Rom vaporizes a prostitute, and Power Man and Iron Fist are hired by her pimp to get revenge. Let me repeat that. Hired by her pimp. When Power Man confronts Rom, he describes the dead prostitute like this: "She was friend to any man with money, and enemy to no one!" I suppose there are worse ways to be remembered, but ladies, if you're remembered like this, you were a whore. A friendly, popular whore, apparently, but still... Oh, and of course we know that Rom didn't really vaporize a prostitute. She was really a Dire Wraith, an evil shape-shifting alien that looks like this:
That's right. She really looked like that. Men (and apparently a LOT of them, based on the pimp's distraught reaction to her death) paid money to have sex with this. Yum.

The story is recapped in Chris's Invincible Super-Blog.


Vaporizing alien hookers...

It's a living.

A giant magazine-sized comic about bad-asses in costume beating the crap out of anonymous bad guys. Originally a buck. Yeah, I have a small stack of these coming. Mid-70s awesomeness.

Received a large box from UPS yesterday, with a complete run of ROM inside. I'm going to be busy for a while...

I was looking around for a ROM pic for this post and stumbled on a fantastic blog: Plaid Stallions: Mocking the '70s one catalog page at a time. It's awesome on so many levels:

(1) A look into what was considered fashionable in middle class America 30+ years ago.
(2) Full-color spreads of the toys of the 1970s! We used to love receiving the Sears "wish book" every fall and staring at the pages of new toys coming out: Star Wars, GI Joe, etc. I don't think Sears even makes a Christmas catalog any more. I remember the catalogs always sold multi-packs of figures, such as the 4-packs of Star Wars figs on this page.
(3) Snarky comments: Because, it is MOCKING all this too.

Just go see it. Wes Anderson is back. I need to see it again when it's released on DVD, but my initial impression is it's his second-best film (Rushmore will always be first in my heart). Don't bother watching the trailer online, just go see the film. You'll appreciate it more having seen or heard nothing about it. Like me.

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While I'm on the subject of quirky things I love, dig this:

Without even knowing what the music is like, don't you want to hear it, just based on this kick-ass cover? It's a French new wave band called Oui Oui.

I discovered them recently. Their music makes me feel like I'm in my own personal Wes Anderson film.

I found the video for their song "Les Cailloux" ("The Stones"). If it doesn't make you smile, perhaps you are a zombie. Seek medical attention!

This post is going to be a little disjointed...

• Gearing up for a three-day weekend (we get Monday off for Veterans Day). Staying in town.

• I had figured Lost was safe from the writers' strike. It's been so long since the show last aired, and it's not scheduled to return until next February, when it is supposed to run for an uninterrupted 16-episode season. Well, even though we're only days into the strike, it's affecting Lost already. They've completed eight of the sixteen shows, but... well, here's a quote:
  

Damon Lindelof: "Yes. And that's the thing, we really planned out the three seasons of 16, 16 and 16...so the idea of having to come back and maybe do a 24-episode season, and that would be season five is just...I can't look the fans in the eye and tell them that we're executing the original plan anymore." (From E-Online)

• Remember what happened to Jericho after taking only one month off? It got canceled. How many viewers will return to Lost in February, after almost a year off? And if it's only eight episodes and ANOTHER year off, how many will care in spring 2009?

My wife gave me the third season of Doctor Who last night, out of the blue, just for the heck of it! I was watching it on my laptop, with the laptop on the coffee table and me sitting on the sofa with one of the cats beside me. When the theme started, the cat turned to the screen and watched the entire intro, unblinking. I guess she's a Who fan too.

Much like De's recent trip to the Morrissey concert, this Hydra agent has a hidden soft side. When not on duty, he puts on his headphones and grooves to "Control," the soundtrack to the new film about Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis. A mix of Joy Division tunes and new instrumental music from New Order (Joy Division minus Curtis, if you didn't know), the Hydra stooge can pour his angst into his blog between beatings from Captain America, Winter Soldier, or any number of third-string heroes that can still kick his ass.

It's amazing what a psychological advantage an extra hour gives me. We did so much this weekend. Saturday morning we went to the Apple store and picked up Mac OS X Leopard. Wife wanted it for her Mac, so I loaded it onto mine as well. Just starting to read about what it can do.

I had a 30% off coupon, so I hopped over to Barnes & Noble and picked up Soon I Will Be Invincible. Review forthcoming.

Saturday afternoon I watched some Doctor Who and Torchwood episodes while finishing The Hard Way by Lee Child. Great book, though I'm part of a handful of his fans that knows Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso isn't surrounded by jungle, but is on a plateau with few trees and sandy soil giving way to desert in the north. It's fine though, because it is such an exotic sounding place, I understand why he chose to use it (and I'm aware of what a picky geek I sound like for pointing that out).

Sunday: Extra hour! We went to Whole Foods in the morning and got lots of fresh, exotic items. Had a great lunch, then I went up the street to the mattress place and bought a bed frame, moved the patio furniture into the garage for winter storage, raked up a bag of leaves in the backyard, and we watched a couple episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (got the DVD of seasons 1 and 2 last week).

Oh, last geeky thing I did: I ordered a full run of Rom, Spaceknight. The comic (the entire run, I think) was written by Bill Mantlo. I ordered it because it's something I've wanted to read for over a decade, and Marvel either can't or won't bother clearing the red tape necessary to reprint the issues in a collection. (Final proof of this is in the newest trade of Power Man and Iron Fist, in while it collects issues #50-72 and #74-75. Yes, it skips issue #73. Why? That issue features Rom. Apparently Marvel can't even reprint any issues in which this character appears, not just his own title. LAME!)

I learned only this morning that Rom writer Bill Mantlo, "suffered a debilitating injury while rollerblading in 1992. The long-time Marvel writer suffered severe head trauma when he was struck by a car on a New York street. He currently resides in a brain injury rehabilitation nursing home (link here)." A tribute magazine called MANTLO: A LIFE IN COMICS, was published this year. All proceeds go to paying Bill's healthcare bills. You can read more and order a copy HERE. I ordered one.

Oh, and if you're in Portland, Oregon, you can makes plans for the upcoming Rom: Spaceknight Art Show and Benefit Project, opening December 6. Details HERE. There are plans to publish the art in a comic book-sized book at a later date. A collection of Rom art would be awesome! Again, proceeds go to Mantlo's medical costs.

One older woman in particular: Siouxsie Sioux. She turned 50 this year, and she still looks breathtakingly beautiful.

And she's talented too! I picked up her new CD Mantaray, last night, and recommend it to everyone. She has a new writing team and backing band, and they've helped her create one of the best albums of the year, that gets better and better with repeated listens.

First single is called Into a Swan (She's newly divorced! I wonder if she needs a younger boyfriend who is what one would picture if you imagine the complete opposite of goth...)

Yeah, we were the adults this year, handing out candy to the rugrats that stopped by.

The only fun part about that is silently ranking the costumes the kids are wearing. One was AMAZING. Boy about 8 in a full-size Gumby costume. A giant foam thing, nice enough to be a rental or something. Do kids know who the hell Gumby is, in this century? Props to the parents for getting it for him, and for convincing him to wear it!

One toddler in a stroller was dressed in a crocodile costume. Had a croc head on her head. Very cute.

Cutest was probably the little girl in her brother's hand-me-down costume. He was dressed as a Transformer, and she was dressed as Spider-Man. No mask, just this Spider-Man suit with the built-in muscles. It was too big for her and made her look like a little sumo.