Two quotes:

“Listen! Read! Think! Calm down, relax, shut the fuck up.”

“…What business is it of mine?..Is it my business what other people read or watch on TV?  No, it’s not.  THANK YOU.  You see, when you talk these things out, they come a little clearer, don’t they?  They do; that’s called logic and it’ll help us all evolve and get on the fuckin’ spaceships and get outta here.”

Granted, the context here was about flag-burning, but the second quote rings true on anything you’re doing with your personal freedom that isn’t against the law and isn’t infringing on my freedom.

I felt compelled to explain my whole thing about gay marriage.

1) Yes, President Obama flip-flopped.  Big damn deal.  One, he’s a politician.  Two, he’s human.  I would like to think that he has had some kind of interaction with a LGBT group, or staffer, or close friend that allowed him to come around.  Maybe he has, maybe not.  But yeah, at its core, this seems a little calculated.  But I’m glad he had some balls.

2) It amazes me that the same people who will plaster their cars, trucks, RVs, ATVs, etc. with “Freedom” stickers will simultaneously publically come out and support denying rights to any subset of American citizens who have done nothing to have had those rights taken away.  And honestly, what could you do to have your ability to marry taken away?  Felons only have to check in and can’t vote.

3) It similarly amazes me that people who bellyache about how big government has gotten and demand that Washington leave the citizenry alone welcome the fucking government into their bedroom.  What?!

For the record, since they were born, in the quiet moments of rocking in the dark or getting to bed, I whisper my dreams for my kids to them.  First amongst those hopes?  “I wish you find love.  And I will love you no matter who it is.  Just, you know, as long as nobody would go to jail for it.”  And I think that’s more than reasonable.

lidstrom:

pierre mcguire can never just say “thanks” at the end of an interview

he has to do the equivalent of a verbal crotch grope

i’m surprised he doesn’t end on “i love you”

FUCK IT. FUCK TWITTER. LET’S JUST START OVER @iscoff @officialpizza @hipsterhugs @moe_riker @weedhitler @rigamarock — Not Foodnetwork (@FoodNetwark)

A fellow poster at a dying message board I haunt posted one of the “FoodNetwerk” tweets and also the link (http://favstar.fm/users/foodnetwerk).  I didn’tpee my pants, but that thing where you know you’d better make a choice about laughing/pissing pretty quickly did happen.

Take a second and read the other thing there too— theTwilightstory he wrote.

lost-carcosa:

I think my wife would quite like one of these, especially if it could also detect books, DVDs, collectibles, etc, etc……..

Mrs. Go-Away-Skips would also have a lawyer on retainer, methinks.

(via cartrunkent)

A few things before I start my own unique screed on the current playoff hockey series here. 

1) Philadephia, to my way of thinking, sucks.  Sucks.  The whole thing.  I’ve met the people, I’ve watched their teams, I’ve seen the parody ofIt’s Always Sunny In… and pondered what the hell kind of cardiac event a “Philly Cheesesteak” is.  Screw ‘em.  As we’ll see in a while, I don’t have to have a reason, much like Sid Crosby said: “I just don’t like ‘em.”

2) Pittsburgh will always have a soft spot in my heart, be it for sport or other things.  I defend the City of Bridges as though it were my own. 

3) I believe that…no, I’ll come back to this one.

OK, the games.

GAME 1) The ebb and flow here of “holy shit, they’ve really woken up the offense” and “damn, 3-0 after one?” to the eventual melancholy of the OT loss was…well, for a Pittsburgh any-team fan, it’s textbook.  I had the notion that the Pens just couldn’t have a big lead as it made their heads inflate at home.  That could— and does— happen in most sports.

GAME 2) My first symptoms of “You’ve Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me”-itis set in.  And I’m assuming “YGBFK” is a viral infection, as it spread with rapid force and for me to get it, it must be a virus since I’m on antibiotics at that point.  Sloppy play and another trademark Pittsburgh Sports-ism: keeping inferiors IN games you should be winning.  I still had some hope, though, that a 0-2 trail (and losing two at home) would shock theseprofessional athletesinto remembering the goddamn fundamentals of smart passing, soft hands, physical presence, and rink dominance they learned in junior hockey.

GAME 3) I give up.  If we’re going to lower ourselves to 6th-line Goon Hockey then my Pens have truly lost their way.  It’s not 1976.  The game has changed.  I always have loved Cup hockey because of its focus on the end goal— winning the cup.  Superstar stories come and go and the playoffs in hockey as in most sports, are positively weird in that things happen then that happen never otherwise.   For a team like the Pens, so strong in so many aspects of the game, to take this frankly absurdist position of playing pinball hockey in and around their own net, having NO defense to speak of, and then resorting to having a goon like Aaron Asham to clean up their mess is so far beyond the pale I don’t know even how to react.

Here’s my 3) from above: hockey is a violent game, and a game where fighting is a part of said violence.  I explained it to a buddy on the golf course yesterday.  He was taking the stance that violence in sport has no place anywhere ever, citing his assertion that a good hockey fight was in no way different than the New Orleans bounty scandal.  My point was that hockey is non-stop, up and down, and in much closer quarters than football.  The benches are right next to each other, and as far as physicality is concerned, the game is all about hits and positioning.  Putting hulked up athletes in that situation is a pressure cookier— eventually it will end up in a fight.  I’ve said twice in my Facebook posts that I could see that there would eventually be some kind of fisticuffs in the series.  It’s goddamn Filth-filth-filth-adelphia here.   But it always struck me that a couple of scrums, maybe an all-out boxing match here or two at the most, was how it was SUPPOSED to be.  Get the blood boiling, throw some redshirt 4th-liner out, and get fired up.  Letang’s fight was brutal and silly, Sidney being just a dick of a bully, and most especially Asham’s despicable play?

These aren’t the Penguins I love.

I hope they come back to me.

Let’s go Pens…you’re fucking better than this.  Take that as whatever meaning you want.

Also, go ‘Wings. 

Here are a short list of things I wish people would consume so I could work parts of them into conversation, with Wiki links as approproate:

1) The Lost Room (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Room)… kind of a springboard into Warehouse 13, which doesn’t make the list only because I kind of lost track of it after the first season, The Lost Room was a 4-hour miniseries that was, I guess, envisioned as a more full-on series but axed.  Shame, really, as the concept is fantastically weird and the peek into this world we get from the miniseries leaves thousands of maddening loose ends. 

2) Anathem by Neil Stephenson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem)… mostly because I want to start calling people “Fraa” and “Suur” even knowing full-damn-well that Stephenson’s playing with “Brah/Bro” and “Sister” there. 

3) The Brothers’ War by Jeff Grubb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers%27_War)… I wish people could get past the fact that this is a Magic: The Gathering novel and just go with the story.  It’s really a cool interpretation on nonsensical world wars and has some amazing characters in it, including my personal favorite “along came a spider” moment/group: The Brotherhood of Gix.

3.5) Actually, I recommend people read all the Magic novels from The Thran through about the Invasion block.  Even Prophecy, mostly so you say you read a shitty book just to keep continuity.  The design team here did amazing with such a huge storyline spanning thousands of years.

Meh.

Urbian’s Retrocam App, b/w Fudgecan settings. Indian, MP0.0, rest stop

“I wonder why we’re fucked-up as a race?”— Bill Hicks

I told the nice 40something at Panera yesterday that I don’t mind the run-up to Christmas, even when I’m one of the morons who’s managed yet again to leave something unbought three seconds before the Fat Man comes down the chimney.  That’s at least organized chaos, some kind of…something…I can at least set my watch by: there’s the winter-coat-wearing planet of a woman apoplectic with rage over being charged full-price for an item she has a .03 coupon for; here’s an old dude parked across six handicap spaces with his yacht of a Cadillac; over yonder’s a douchebag with his trophy wife and accessory children, piling out of an SUV swollen to Dali-ian abusurdity all screaming at each other over eight different wireless connections.  I can handle ALL of those people with a merry, if determined, smile affixed upon my visage.

However…

It’s amazing to me what happens when the actual calendar holiday ends and people have the week between Christmas and New Years off.  Myself included in that “people” there…we lose our fucking minds. Now, I’m NOT off this week, which is both fine and sucky (and sine/fucky) depending on the toxicity of the serotonin flooding my brain at whatever time it happens to be.  I do vascillate— at times, knowing my clan’s all at home doing something fun with one or more of their Christmas gifts and generally NOT being at work comforts me or kicks me in the balls with loneliness.  I digress (no, not me).

Yesterday I met one of my oldest friends EVAR for lunch, commemorating both Yuletide Compulsory Meet/Greeting and his birthday.  He’s a good dude, armed each holiday with a flask bottle of Jameson’s for me at the least.  But I’m sitting there, right, at Panera Bread feeling the oddest combination of the following things:

• ANGER: There are so MANY people in this particular restaurant who have NO reason to be.  They don’t know what they’re ordering, they’re not ACTUALLY ordering anything but taking up table space, etc. generally just making the 65 minutes between patients I’ve alotted for this food-intake that much more difficult.  Plus, no shit, the manager’s name is “Kayleena.”  While a fine play in “Making Shit Up” rules for Scrabble, that is not a fucking name. 
• REVULSION: There are ugly people surrounding me.  To be clear, it’s not just the collection of creepbag old dudes talking the most banal and inane college football dreck possible, each sporting the badges of “aged” in grotesque collections of receding hairlines, pus-colored hair, liver spots, sagging everything, and decades of smoking cough/voicing.  Nor is it simply the unfortunately-dressed larger family, who have chosen Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot-esque puffy down outerwear to…accentuate(?) their metabolic nutritional disasters and make me— a pathetic sack of fat atrophy— look adonis-like.  But these people sicken me.  All of them.
• HUNGER: Seriously…where the fuck is this guy?
• LONELINESS: See above.  Panera was one of the first places we took both kids for our “infant outings” after they were born to get us over our fears of having days-old children in our cars.  Ever since, going there alone seems like…I don’t know…drinking alone on a Tuesday lunch hour in a truck stop strip club or something.
• MORE ANGER, compartmentalized in the next rant.

Overall, I am flummoxed by the generation between myself and my parents, those with Tweens now.  Especially the women.  I get that people want to deny that that they’re aging.  This amazes me.  From the time we’re, what, like 3 we want to be a “big (gender)” and lust for being older: old enough to go out ourselves, drive, date, smoke, rent porno, go to the bar, buy guns, vote, rent a car, get married, buy real estate etc. ad nauseum.  Then, just when shit starts getting good, there’s this giant screeching halt for some of these girls.  By 35, they convince themselves that glitter in their hair, skinny jeans, ugg boots and down vests MUST be a good thing for them…since their daughter’s wearing it and OF COURSE they’re not old.  No.  Not old at all.  Nope.  Clearly they reached biological adulthood and went into stasis.

I’m 32, OK? 

At this point, I get to do the parenting thing.  I’m responsible for lives outside my own.  If I want something, I can go get it eventually.  I know about the Tooth Fairy, Santa, and Easter Bunny and DIG my role with the same.

I remember me at 23.  I fucking hate that guy now.  Why on earth would I want to go back to drunk, short-sighted, horndog nerd me when I can be someone’s Dad and, at the end of the day, climb into bed satisfied next to the woman I love with the kids 50’ away?

Overall, though, we’re doomed…the youth addicts are in charge.

Since I got into a car wreck the beginning of November, I’ve been in a rental van with just FM radio to make the between-patients driving…exist.  When the Penn State stuff broke, I started listening to ESPN radio.  I am now unable to be in the car without some idiotic sports punditry to keep me company.

The focus this week has been the annual pants-wetting panic attack that is a determining college football champion.  Here’s how a game nerd like me gets it straight:

1) REDISTRICT: The various conferences now are about as meaningful as the electoral college is in politics these days.  I get why they were arranged but they’re useless now.  Make this simple: divide the US into four— NE, SE, NW, SW.  Done.  Now, there’s gerrymandering to be done for sure here and this is where I will admit complete ignorance with regard to Div 1 population density.  The one that pops to mind would be my “NE” conference— how many actual D1 teams are there in the New England area?  I don’t know.  In my own little very-flawed idea, we rig “NE” to include North Carolina to pick up NC, NC State, Duke, Wake Forest etc.  Again, I don’t know how things line up like that, but that’s the thumbnail sketch.  The biggest thing is that there’s no complete bullshit districting like how Duke ends up in the “West” for basketball March Madness.  That’s…what the fuck IS that?  Not in my football.

2) SIMPLIFY SCHEDULES: Your schedule is 12 games, The end; 4 are out of conference and don’t count towards stragiht-up post-season elligibility.  Those 4 are used in tie-breaks only.  This is your fun/weird pair-ups like Ohio State/Youngstown State in my hometown.  The 8 remaining are in your conference.  Again, for rankings and tie-breaks, here’s your rundown:
A) Six Conference Wins to be post-season elligible
B) Win-Loss in 8 Conf. games
C) Record points, similar to Hockey: 2 for a win; 1 for road or overtime loss
D) Points scored
E) Points against
F) W-L in 4 out-of-conference
G) Points, like in C)
H) Scored in out-of-conf
I) Against in out-of-conf
If there’s still a tie or no clear ranking, the disputed teams play a non-credit “win and in” game— one half under college football’s OT rules.  This can be “win and in” for the 8-Seed or to determine who’s 1 vs. 2.  In any event it’s another game the campuses can charge admission and TV time for, so there’s a revenue stream for them that doesn’t completely annihilate the players.

3) BRACKETS: The top eight in each division go to a one-shot round of 32 like in March Madness.  The NE/NW and SE/SW winners play in the current “BCS Bowls” and the North/South champs face off in the Rose Bowl.  Those pairings there aren’t set it stone, but you get my meaning.

4) ALSO-RANS: Miss the round of 32?  Here’s the who-gives-a-damn bowls for you…you still get notice for playing well enough to be post-season-elligible, but it’s just the fun of a normal bowl game.

Now shut the hell up.  This doesn’t extend the season to insane levels and still runs shorter than the NFL.  Plus, keeping conference play at least REASONABLE for travel keeps the “student athletes” at least KINDA near their classrooms.

Not the epic I promised you, but still loads of fun.

Note: the following is not a complete blanket endorsement for the supplement melatonin, but rather is just my experiences with it.  Anyone having trouble sleeping should weigh the pros and cons of any kind of use of synthetic sleep aides and consult their doctors.  Seriously.  Don’t fuck with brain chemistry lightly.

That said.

The last few weeks had not been good ones for my REM cycle, circadian rhythms, etc.  It was always a case of the morning coming FAR too soon, and me feeling like I was hauling a full-scale replica of an elephant made of uranium and lead pianos.  I adjusted when I tried to go to bed, watched what I was eating/drinking before bed, limited computer stuff before bed to no avail.

A family member suggested I try valerian root or melatonin, both of which were allegedly really good for this kind of deprivation nonsense.  I’d tried valerian in the past but the shit made my stomach just up and revolt, a full on acidic version of Occupy GA,S’s esophagus.  Plus, the stuff I got?  You had to take like four pills.  That’s WAY too much.

It was with more than a little trepidation that I approached more sleeping pills.  Then, I got horrifically miserable with a chest cold.  Seriously.  I sounded like a derp-tarded canada goose honking around until I started tasting iron in my mouth after prolonged cough jags.  At Walgreen’s, waiting for my prescription, I saw some supplement drink in the Vitamin Water milieu that suggested it helped you relax and sleep.  Why not?

What followed was not a high or a buzz.  It was, without sounding too simplified, a low.  The “snake’s ball-bag” of lows.  And I loved it.  15 minutes after finishing this drink, my body just went 16-tons heavy in my recliner and there, draped in a giant fuzzy cotton blanket of awesomeness, I slept like Tyler Durden after testicular support group.

Game on, melatonin.

Over the last week or so I’ve taken the “one a night” pill about 10-20 minutes before going to bed.  That same calming heaviness repeats right on schedule with no aftereffects of groggy mornings (if I’m a good boy and get to bed at a reasonable time) or sleepwalking or whatever.  And it’s quality sleep, too.  I am OUT.  Cold.

The only thing I notice?  My already crackhead dreams are like 500% more vivid.  And all the greatest hits are there: dorm life, bizarre complexes that’d give MC Escher a simultaneous boner/tumor, people masquerading as their waking-world counterparts (my redhead wife was a tall, fat blonde the other night, e.g.).  It’s like HD dreaming.

Like I said, it’s not a high, and I’m not tripping out.

I think I’m just dreaming REALLY hard, and to prep myself, my mind races for the five or so minutes before I slip under.  Like mach seven.

Bottom line: supplements are what you make of them, and from what I’ve seen, melatonin’s the shit if you’re being stupid about sleep.

Man.

I wish I’d discovered trolling Omegle like months ago.

It’s better than a crack sandwich made of psychotherapy with creamy meth mustard.

unknownskywalker:

Superhero illustrations by Liam Brazier