It's too hot to type (my ass sticks to the chair)

I haven’t blogged in awhile. So what. No one reads the damn thing, anyway.

Besides it’s summer, and I got the blues -- or maybe it's a heat rash. It’s been over 90 every day for a week and hasn’t rained in a month, like Arizona suddenly was added to the Midwest.

This weather is only for skinny, white rich kids who can sit by the pool all day, not fat asses like me whose body composition is 30 percent candle wax.

I’m tired, cranky, gas is $2.33 a gallon, the air was orange Monday night, and if I’m not mistaken the NBA is still playing basketball.

No, wait. That ended. I’m confusing Manu Genobli for Tom Cruise, who won’t shut up, the fucking moron Scientologist. Anyone who believes the souls of space aliens are imprisoned on Earth and the cause of all our woes should really shut the hell up about pretty much anything.

And I should stop swearing. Everytime you curse an angel breaks his wings. That’s what I told a coworker who has a potty mouth. She swears like she’s in a David Mamet play. At least her clothes fit -- unlike somebody else who sits way too close to me.

Speaking of disturbing images, what’s up with that commercial with bears wiping their asses with toilet paper and dancing around trees, which seem to serve as some sort of woodsy toilet? To which demographic does this appeal? Why do I keep getting haunted by this? Maybe Cruise is right. Maybe cartoon bears are space aliens, too, with dingleberries.

Speaking of animals, I learned from TV news that dogs supposedly can detect cancer by their sense of smell. So, can they tell if they have it? Is that why they sniff each others butts? It really makes you think.

Thinking isn’t something too popular these days. Case in point: Guantanamo, or Git-Mo, as the kids call it.

My thoughts on prison torture: Does it really work? Plus, right before 9-11 we pretty much had our heads up our asses. Then, all of a sudden, just a few months later they round up all these people, as if we knew all along they were bad asses.

Hasn’t it crossed your mind that Afghans who were pissed off at their neighbors, for, let’s say, not having them over for dinner, or for being an asshole in general, just convinced some dumbass spook that Akmahd was down with Osama?

And when you pretty much cart away people from a country as poor as Afghanistan, wouldn’t a better, more fun form of fucking with them be to kill them with kindness?

Show them the best America has to offer. Get ‘em laid. Get ‘em drunk. Take ‘em to Disney Land, the Grand Canyon, Macy's. Expose them to central air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and the all-you-can eat buffet. Just keep ‘em away from reality TV -- that will piss off anybody with half a brain.

But hey, that wouldn’t be frat boy thinking, would it? Guys who make other guys eat donuts off each other's dicks to join their little clubs run too much of America, America. And if they do this to their closet case friends, imagine the fun they have with foreigners.

Speaking of bad thoughts, I went to a couple neighborhood parties over last weekend. I was introduced to this old guy whom I was told used to live nearby. Someone asked him what he’s been up to since retiring, and he mentioned traveling a lot, primarily to Mexico and Thailand.

Thailand is a 31 hour trip, he said, and it takes him a few weeks to get his bearings. But he goes for a few months each winter.

Why? Because you can buy anything you want there.

Wait. Like Chuck Berry sang, Can’t you buy anything you want here in the USA. Oh. Now I get it. Ick.

And the old guy has a German accent, which made it all seem creepier.
I’m glad he moved -- and that I have no kids.

Thank you for swimming in my stream of conscious. Be glad it’s not a retention pond. According to masters of the obvious local newspapers, those aren’t very safe places for taking a dip.

In other related news, studies show bathing in a mix of duck shit, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer and road runoff is probably bad for your health.

In other words, you may not need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows, but some news editors think you’re that goddamn stupid.

Of course, people do sometimes drink that much. There’s the story, oh keepers of the fourth estate -- how to keep people from doing stupid shit when they are drunk.

Oops. Another angel is in a cast.

In parting, I leave you with a brief history of time. Here goes: .,:

Think about it.

P.S. That new pretty boy they have hosting Nightline looks like:

A) A gay porn star
B) A reptile in human guise, like in that old horror movie
C) Shepard Smith (wait, that’s the same as B)
D) ABC’s homegrown proof of cloning

Top 100 Americans: More TV stupide

So there's this cable show where people vote American Idol style for their favorite Americans.

Not going out on a limb here, but without looking at the list I'm going to assume it's at least 1/4 celebrities. Ben Franklin, Oprah Winfrey. Abe Lincoln. Madonna. What's the difference?

A kiss is still a kiss, an icon is an icon, by any means necessary.

I don't really give a flying fuck about the results of this show. What do we know about history, anyway (myself included)?

But if we're gonna go with the Cult of Personality motif, my own favorite American story: Orson Welles.

I don't even know that much about him: Eccentric. Larger than life. Genius. Pain in the ass. Lard ass. Still trying even after Hollywood pretty much gave up on him. Fucked over. Ripped off. Brilliant.

And ultimately a sort of sad story.

http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue6/steinmeyer.html

I made up a Michael Jackson joke

Sure, it's a week late, but here's my very own Michael Jackson joke:

So, after his trial Jackson is planning a comeback album. He's recording cover versions of some of his favorites, including his take on the Elton John classic, Don't Let Your Son Go Down On Me.

I guess Tricky Dick was just misunderstood

Bad news at the Chicago Tribune today. Like they did a few weeks ago with a mobster they misidentified Deep Throat in a photo. Turns out a young editor mistakenly ran a picture of Linda Lovelace instead of Mark Felt's.

Even more absurd (but true in this case): the asshole right wing nuts who’ve been all over cable calling the Watergate source a traitor. So a guy who leads a couple reporters to the truth, however ugly, is the bad guy? What kind of rabbit hole did these creeps (and I use the work creep in the Nixonian sense) crawl out of?

It’s pretty goddamn funny that these wing nuts are all over Deep Throat, so to speak, while they hardly got upset when one of their buddies, Robert Novak, outed a diplomat’s wife as a spy.

Getting a lot of hard news isn’t pretty. That’s just one of the reason’s the so-called-reality show allegedly being planned about the day-to-day operations of the New York Daily News is a bad idea. That, and that the boss there is way too much like Ricky Gervais on The Office.

Reporting should not be thought of as sexy, or fodder for some stupid TV show, especially real investigative journalism and not that celebrity shit or a lot of the way things are covered, which is to say rewriting press releases or attending meetings.

Because real hard core journalism is about finding out about people screwing over other people. That means those involved often lie or shade the truth, and the reporter’s job is not just to play “he said, she said,” but to find out what really happened.

Sometimes that involves talking to people who don’t want to be identified for various reasons, sometimes political, sometimes personal and not usually altruistic.

What matters is what really happened. But it a world where:

> Hollywood changes reality to make movies based on a true stories,

> Products are always new and improved

> Ted Koppel gets berated for merely reading the names of the war dead on Nightline

> And where the White House says “so what if there were no weapons of mass destruction”

As a philosopher put it, reality is getting buried in bullshit.

Breakfast Club '05: Ban the studded belt

So I went to see a band in which a friend of mine’s son plays, Forgetting Montgomery, a three piece, one of those post-punk emo type units. The name comes from a girl they all new, which is so wimpy, and thus, emo.

I told them it would be a better name for a neo-soul group, as in let’s forget about Alabama. Their old name was Self Control, which seems like it would be about jerking off, which is a much better topic for a navel-gazing emo band.

First things first: Kids, stop shopping at Hot Topic. It is not cool. It is in a mall, and malls were never cool. And stop wearing those wide studded belts that come in white or silver.

Irony or not, it is so Bowie-meets-the Sex Pistols. At Hot Topic. Plus, its androgynous, and since all of you are dressing like its 1977, with an apparent aversion to soap, it’s hard enough as it is to tell the boys from the girls.

And stay off my lawn!

As for the band, I must say I enjoyed it. I can’t recall that last time I saw a group where the guitarist was the quiet one and the bass player did all the talking. Never mind. The Police just came to mind, and man who wants to do any thinking about Sting?

The drummer, he did the screaming. No harmonies, just an occasional screech, like he was really mad at his parents.

The animated bassist/lead singer is a cherub who reminded me of Ross the Intern on Jay Leno’s show, but for the fact the singer apparently is straight as all his songs are about girls and girls not liking him anymore.

But they are all only going to be juniors at a Catholic high school next year, so it’s not a bad start. The last big thing out of the same school is Alkaline Trio, which has members who dabble in Anton Lavey’s brand of the occult. Go figure.

The crowd was upper middle class white suburban kids, so it was all very Breakfast Club ‘05, which is fine by me.

How dangerous can rock be if mom and dad are in the crowd, anyway?

The band after them was some college rock outfit from Buffalo called Bensin that is touring the country in a bus that looks like something left over from the shootout in Waco. They all had those stupid white studded belts on, too.

They barely made the show, the aforementioned Partridge mobile having broke down on the way from a gig in Denver.

They had a synthesizer, but made poor use of it, adding cheese doodle riffs, like something from a Styx album, with Fred Durst-like power chord guitar work. They were very proud of the fact two of their songs have been picked up by a video game.

Once they get a ring tone deal, they’ll be on their way.

And the award for the worst writing of the week goes to...

I read this in a suburban Chicago newspaper:

"With a collective sigh of relief, Carpentersville’s board on Tuesday hired Mundelein-based Mechanical Inc. to end the hard water agony that’s dogged the village for four months.

But all the news wasn’t good. It won’t be until October or November that Carpentersville residents will see soft water trickle from their faucets again.

That surprised trustees who have been telling angry residents the white scales on their dishes would be a thing of the past come mid-August, as they’d been told by public works Director Bob Cole two weeks ago."

PEOPLE, there is a war going on, and people are starving to death, and there is
a whole continent set to be wiped out from AIDS.

In light of that, hard water is not "agony that's dogged the village." Anger should be reserved for more important things than spotted dishes. And sighs of relief are
for when your son comes home alive from combat duty.

Until real problems cease to exist, reporters should stop writing about
minor ones with such hyperbole. Save the dramatic language for when it matters.