I'm drooling.

SRSLY.

I'm on vacation in the Hill Country this week. I'll try to moderate comments when I can, but I may only be able to check in every day or two. Meanwhile, I've pre-loaded a post for every day.

So far, though, I'm noticing more Obama stickers on Prius than on any other vehicle. I think it's interesting how eager they are to remove all doubt and press home the point that they are members of the witless protection program. Sometimes it's better just to keep one's mouth shut.

I'm having a great time with friends, but feeling a little fragile in the heat, actually. I've vowed to just take it easy and see how I'm feeling from day to day. One friend brought along her little dog, so Praline has a buddy to play with this week. I've got posts-pre-loaded for every day, but I'll try to pop by and see how ur durrin.

Here's another video - The Heinrich Maneuver - from the new Interpol cd.

Have a great week!

More yummy goodness from Miss Shirley Q Liquor.
Remember to lift up that lid. Look under there.

Here is your Saturday Fuzzy:



If you don't think that's cute, there's something wrong with you.

SRSLY.

Don't hate me just because every day is take-your-puppy-to-work day at my job.

When I started hearing about the foot-filled athletic shoes warshing up on the shores of the Canadian coastline, I thought of body integrity identity disorder.

If you've never heard of BIID, you may want to stop reading now and go forward with your life of happy innocence.

Sometime in the past 10 years or so, I started hearing rumblings that there are actually folks who feel they would be more complete if they had a limb or hand or foot amputated. Yeah. Wannabe amputees. And they don't just want to be-- they find a way to make it so.

Anyway, when I heard that tenny-shod feet were washing ashore, at first I thought it must be a med-school student prank. Once about 10 years ago or so, some students at a local med school left a couple severed limbs in one of those coin-catcher baskets at the toll plaza of the Dallas North Tollway.

Cute.

The problem with a prank like that is that although it's sensational and and will get a bit of attention, very few people will see the handiwork on display, so what's the real point?

So, yeah, I thought of medschool students for the foot-shoe thingie. But then it dawned on me that if there is a whole cult of amputee wannabe fetishists out there, then wouldn't the shoe prank thingie be a jolly way to dispose of the unneeded parts? Yeah, sick and weird, but to my way of thinking, that would be in keeping with the wit of someone who feels they'll never be whole until their body is diminished by an appendage.

I figure that if you live long enough, life will present you physical challenges aplenty without you inviting extra impediments. Anyway, maybe it's all just wishful thinking. Maybe it's just that it's more fun to think about some imbecile wilfully hacking off their own foot than to consider some reprobate who is ready willing and able to cut off the feet of another human being.

In any case, I don't get it.

Shirley Q Liquor is the cutest thing. I loves me some Shirley!


I hate when store clerks have a bad attitoove.

Go tell it, Shirley!

A woman came in for an apartment last year. Her locator called me first to see if I had something available immediately which had not been painted or cleaned, as the client was highly allergic. Well, yeah, it just so happened I did. So this woman (I'll call her AB, short for allergic bitch) comes in and bounces and giggles that she's found the perfect place and yes, it absolutely will do, will be the one and only perfect place for her on the planet forever and ever hey men.

She submitted an application, I vetted her credentials and approved her, and she came in to sign the lease, effective immediately. I asked her to consider simply doing a 30 day trial lease, the end of which she might renew for a full 12 month lease at the same low rate, but that way she could be sure. No, no, no, this was right, she just knew it and against my instincts, she signed a full year lease.

So, that night, it turned unbelieveably cold. The next morning, my voice mail had a message from AB sounding like death warmed over saying she had a turble turble reaction to something in the HVAC system.

Goody goody gumdrops.

I was secretly SOOOO pleased she didn't stay. I KNEW she would be a difficult resident even under the best circumstances, so I let her out of her lease, charged her rent for the time the apartment was off the market, and sent her refund check within 30 days as per contract.

About 45 days later, she called me, wondering where her check was. Well, we'd mailed it weeks before... Could we cancel that check and re-cut it? I said yes, but we'd charge a fee for stop payment on the check, etc. SHe said "yes, please do" and by the way, when we sent it out, we needed to send it to a different address this time.

So she apparently had moved at least twice in the interim since she'd been at my place. Talk about dodging a bullet. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

No offense to anyone who has deathly allergies or anything, like shellfish or peanuts or whatevs, but people like AB make Mr. Darwin's point for him, IMHO.

Someday Massah gonna set me free.

I don't believe it!
There she goes again!
She's tidied up and I can't find anything.
All my tubes and wires and careful notes
and antiquated notions, but it's poetry in motion.
Thomas Dolby, She Blinded Me With Science



Okay, the gas thing has been in the news a whole bunch lately, including helpful tips from Barry Hussein Obama (Holla!). He recommends we all get tune-ups. *ahem* I'll get back to that in a minute.



First I need to quote someone brilliant on the subject of tune-ups. Namely: me. From a blog post about a year and a half ago in which I waxed bitchtastic over crap screenwriters/set dressers/prop people get utterly wrong in filims:

Then there's Billy Bob Thornton's (horrid, in my opinion) much ballyhooed Monster's Balls. At one point, the inveterate racist BBT has come around to realizing that he's attracted to Halle Berry, whose husband he's just executed at the penal facility at which he works. He has a real Barney Fife moment when he takes HB's car to a mechanic for repair. As he's walking away from the
garage--the big man--BBT sends all credibility(?) to hell when he says to the mechanic "Be sure to check those plugs and points." [THIS would be a reference to what was referred to as a tune-up] Now, her car is a late 80s/early 90s ride of Asian extraction. All production passenger cars are made with electronic ignitions these days, and there ARE no points. Made after the 1970s? Pretty much
no points in that dog. The points to which he would be referring if the car had points, would be breaker point distributors. The bps controlled the flow of the 20-40 thousand volts of electricity from the battery and ensured they were distributed to each spark plug at the right time. Advent of electronic ignitions mean that points is one less thaing Billy Bob Thornton has to worry his purty little haid about. Someone shoulda told him.

Actually, I have to add a little bit here. I confess that upon reflection, I've gotten more chuckles' worth than the price of the rental on this movie just remembering BBT's Barney Fife moment of hiking up his britches and manfully saying "be sure to check the plugs and points.". Maybe BBT knew what he was doing, knew his audience would know and that he was being ironic. Some people call it a mower blade, I call it a sling blade/Some people call it A Simple Plan, I call it an uncomplicated plan/Some people call it change, I call it the antichrist.


Yeah, and someone shoulda told that asshat B.O. (I'll just call him body ordure, if that's okay wit choo), too, while they were at it. There's an old joke about not flying off the handle when you're full of bull. If Mr. Smarty Man is so wise, so all-knowing and so frelling brilliant, how's come he's going around telling people they can save gas by performing maintenance which was obsolete before many of his biggest fans were even born??? Bamalamadingdong may as well have advised us to improve mileage by checking our cars' hooves and refilling its oat bag every 10 miles. Yes, Obama fans-- the tune-up comment was on that very order of stupidity. Be embarrassed.

The irony is it's not un-heard of for some mechanics to be un-scrupulous in their dealings with a gullible public. How many garages do you suppose have added the new service of tune-ups to late-model vehicles in the past week? Oh, but I'm being mean, aren't I? Maybe Obama's just advising tune-ups because he's been paying for tune-ups himself for the past 30 years. He's a man who covers all the bases, real and imagined, and he wants to do the same for the highest office in our nation. Who are we to hold that against him? In fact, let's just cut to the chase: let's skip the nightmarish redux of a Carter presidency and put Obama to work for Habitat for Humanity. I'm even cool with the Nobel prize nomination for him and all that if we can just skip the horrors of a B.O. presidency in the interim.

Yeah, you know what? While we're at it, we can save gas by quitting our jobs, staying home and living off the gubmint. But if we do that, who'll pay for the free ride all his supporters are expecting?

Break's over. Back on your heads.

I've had the puppy for two weeks now, and it's been great.
She's growing so fast and she's more active every day. I'm really lucky to be able to take her to work with me, though, so she doesn't have a lot of time in isolation.

I still miss Valentine, too, and I think of her every day, but it's been great to have my heart warmed by this furry little dynamo. There are similarities and there are some fun contrasts, too, but I suppose it's too soon to say they are even that different from one another. Praline is not quite at the age yet that Valentine was when I got her, and she was one of a litter, whereas Miss Praline was a one-off and had no siblings, so she was very much hand-raised from the git-go. Valentine, while warm and cuddly, had a devil-may-care aloof quality which is the opposite of Praline. This may simply be a puppy thing, but outdoors or in strange places, Praline definitely doesn't want me out of her sight. Considering what escape artists this breed usually produces, I'm hoping that's a trait which continues as my girl grows up.

It's funny to me now that I had the thought of going 6 months or longer without a dog. I don't ever want to live in a house without a dog, again. :)

This is SO awesome!

How they roll in India...


smoking Indo, sipping on gin and juice, laid back and text messaging with their mind on their money and their money on their mind.

Sometimes, when you least expect it, someone amazing will appear before your very eyes.

I met the most extraordinary man at lunch yesterday at Mama's Daughters' Diner on Irving Boulevard. I walked in and was seated in my usual section at a table for 8 and across from an older gentleman.

We exchanged hellos and I asked how he was doing. He said fine and asked me how I was, and I said I have a new puppy. Then the convo was off and running. He asked about Praline, and then reminisced about a particularly fine little terrier his family had some decades before. He said the terrier figured out how to do flips for treats with absolutely no training. Smart little scamp, he was. Then he talked about a boxer they'd had for years named Smudgy for the black area around his face.

I noticed his disabled veterans cap, and wondered if he'd served in WWII, but didn't ask. He said he used to eat at MDs' every day for breakfast and lunch, but now he only goes to his company once a week since he retired and comes in to the diner slightly less frequently than that. I asked what line of work he was in, and he said he had a graphic design/typesetting company.

He told me he once worked for a company that moved his family around frequently, and they rented an old house on Saranac street in Rochester NY. He said the house was from the late 1800s and was immaculately kept, stately and quite grand. The family told him they hadn't really figured out what to do with all their mother's stuff in the house, so he and his family were free to keep whatever they wanted there. He called them up and told them they surely would want to keep all their mothers' gold and diamond jewelry, and oh, but could they keep the one nice chair in the living room. He told his wife to check the underside of the cushion and make sure it was in good shape. She pulled it out and beneath it was an envelope stuffed full of a lot of cash and stock certificates and such. Again, he called them up and said what he'd found, and they said "oh, we were wondering where that was!" His wife and her friend put on some satin movie-star style gowns they found from the 30s or 20s, and they strapped on their kids' toy pistols and holsters and he took photos. His eyes twinkled when he remembered that. He said they've been married 62 years.

They'd bought and sold 8 houses over the years, but he and his wife moved into an apartment where they've been happy as clams ever since. I mused there's a whole lot to be said for being able to call someone else and tell them it's their problem if your toilet is malfunctioning. Again, the grin, the twinkling eyes at the joy of not having to either do the plumbing himself or pay a technician for same. He said there were only a few older people living at these apartments, but that the management took really good care of them, being on the spot with repairs and response to any concerns they had. I told him that was how I try to do my job, and he said he could tell I was good at it, that I am personable and communicate well, and that I could probably do any of a great many number of jobs well. He talked about an MIT study which developed a vocational aptitude test. At some point, he mentioned he'd had more than 600 people working for him, and that the ability to relate to people was essential to motivate people and help them stay on track. I think (if I may flatter myself) he's someone who has the kind of varied interests and natural curiosity I have, although I'd not place myself in the same league intelligence-wise. He was completely unpretentious and unassuming and yet here I knew right away he's one of the most remarkable people I'd ever met. I didn't want the lunch to end.

He told me his name is Potthoff, and once his wife met someone and told them it was pronounced like "take the pot off the stove," and when she parted company from that person, they said "it was nice to meet you, Mrs. Stove."

Cute.

Anyway, the conversation was lively, and most engaging, and for once I really listened and stifled the urge to interject or chase rabbits. I learned some things.

I at last asked what branch he'd served in, and he said he was in the Seabees with the Navy, and joined in late '45, and was due to be in the first wave to invade Japan. (Mental calculation told me he must have just married before he went into the service and to an uncertain future). He said those bombs saved his life. He said they had their chops all set for the loss of a million Americans in that effort. Staggering. I said those bombs saved countless Japanese lives, too. He said indeed they had, that the Japanese would have fought down to the last man. We talked about adapting and he mentioned the Japanese idea of rather than being rigid and inflexible like the oak, they aspired to be like the willow and achieve strength in their ability to bend with the stressors of life. He mentioned the impeccable quality of their cars and electronics. We agreed that it's a great thing to learn from mistakes and move forward from them.

Anyway, it was a great conversation, and I felt so energized by having met him. He suggested if I want to change careers, that I might look into advertising. I'm going to give that serious thought. Anyway, as we'd wrapped up the meal, I noted where Barbara had placed his check on the table. I picked up mine, and when his hand was not near his check, I picked it up and said "I am buying your lunch." He said "oh, my, I can't let you do that" and I said "I insist. This lunch is a very small thing and I am in your debt. Thank you for serving our country." I gave him my card, and took his email address, and I said I hope we can have lunch again sometime. We smiled warmly, shook hands again.

I've got a lot more to learn.

Guy Ritchie-- goes on a who-knows-what-fueled rant about the evils of sugar, saying it kills more people than does crack cocaine.

Oddly enough, his wife is about to launch into her next global gambol which is called the "Sticky & Sweet Tour."

*ahem*

Is this an oblique dig at the Mrs?
Odd.