I love my job, I really do.

My boss has a terrible habbit of chatting stream of conscious while giving no context what so ever. And these stories are repeated for months. Eventually you hear them enough that you can piece this fragmented, sloppy narrative together into something cohesive but still absolutely irrelevant.

For example.

She was someplace with some people. She may have been invited, she may have been trespassing. She may have known these people, they could be relatives. I don't know what purpose she had there, or really where that place was. But I do know they had delicious corn and that she put a frog in a plastic container to keep away from a child.


After hearing this a dozen times over the corse of the week I was able to figure out that she infact knew these people and that the corn was taken home as leftovers. But unlocking the mystery of this story yields no wisdom or quirky tale. They are all mundane and unrelated to what ever got her going in the first place. It is enough to wish power tools on your ears so you may never hear ever again.

Thankfully, I am scared of power tools.

But tonight I watched the documentary Grey Gardens and the charecters were just like my boss, two of them. Bat shit crazy, constantly chattering, and damned if you know what it is they are talking about.

Here is a clip.

crazy woman. Anyway, they turned this documentary into a musical. A Tony award winning musical. Here is a clip.

I need a real job.

A school district in Marlton, New Jersey banned a video to help teach diversity.

First, if you don't use your own community to discus diversity and instead look to a video to do it for you... well, you kind of missed the whole point. You might as well be talking about cyborg diversity in Renaissance Flanders.

Well, the video itself was dull enough. It was designed for elementary school kids to teach them about many different sorts of families: bio moms and dads, single parents, step parents, foster parents, and the one that launched a thousand ignorant ships: a same-sex couple.

When I said the video was dull enough, I should have said it was innocuous. It shouldn't have riled anyone up. No single mother took a swig of malt liquor and proclaimed "I am so glad my husband had an affair with a hooker and left me and the kids for dead." No foster parent took precious-moments Christian children and circumcised the girls and threw them into burkas.

"When does Evesham Township or any school have a right to show to my grandchildren something I believe to be morally wrong," asked one woman.

Well, if one considers the fact that same-sex couples merely exist morally wrong... but this is silly. As if the very fact that kids saw a same-sex couple carried with it a seal of approval on homosexuality itself.

Furthermore, what if I find math to be morally wrong? The onus for morality education is thrust on the schools when it serves tawdry little purposes and often flies in the face or reason and research. New Jersey has civil unions and certainly has same-sex parents recognized by law. And yet, they have to go! Abstinence education has never worked and is more dangerous than reasonable education, as documented by decades worth of research. Forget about our children's safety, it has to go!

And surly, when the school district voted to can the video 7-1 it was not out of any real concern that the video would turn New Jersey's youth into drug-addled sodomites, but because of fear of a law suit. One that the district would win but couldn't afford to fight. Our schools are held hostage.

Howdy,

This journal has nothing personal in it. It is a single youtube video that I enjoyed briefly while here at work.

enjoy your tuesday, chumps

Mitt Romney is wearing the Emperor's New Cloths.

Like Rudy he is a blue state Republican trying to win over the red state heartland. Doing so his song has changed more times than an ex-boyfriends mix tape.

Though I have to admire his pluck when criticized by Sam Brownback about his pro-choice record he retorted "I am tired of being criticized by people who have been pro-life longer than I have". However, the man is a goon who has been campaigning and fund raising so much he has no idea what the issues are or where he has and will stand on them. It is a sort of incompetence that would make me forget about the guy.

But you can't ignore him. He is beating the crap out of everyone in Iowa and is beating Guiliani by 4 points in New Hampshire. This guy very well might win the nomination. Damn.

The Massachusets Democratic Party has started the site Romney Facts which documents his changes. Not on small issues ether. From all right to gay marriage, to against it. From pro-choice to pro-life. These aren't from documents from Mitt's wild and crazy college days. No, the change happens in the same year, sometimes the same day in the case of gun control. It is an amusing site to look through.

This is nothing to say of the man who believes the use of contraception is tantamount to abortion and that a morning after pill is the very same as abortion. I wonder if he passed high school biology or if he just got the Cliff Notes bible?

On a side note, this video makes me so happy I could cry

Howdy,

I was looking to expand my blues knowledge a year or so ago when I was reading about Blind Willy Johnson. As a kid his mother rubbed lye in his eyes to get revenge on his father. He did survive childhood and married. But died alone of exposure in a rotten shack he was living in.

Now, one of his songs is on the Voyager spacecraft, reaching further and further distances from the earth. Perhaps intelligent life will find Voyager and they will hear one of the most beautiful expressions of humanity when they do.

Voyager Golden Record has an online copy of what must be the greatest mix tape ever made. In addition to Blind Willy Johnson it has Hindi music, pan pipe recording from the Solomon Islands, Bach, Mozart, Chuck Berry. The recording is immense!

One of my favorite surprises was Javanese Gamelan music. I was familiar with this style from a Japanese performing art group Genioh Yamashirogumi who achieved international fame for doing the soundtrack to the movie Akira. They are also famous for teaching themselves how to program MOOG synthesizers to play notes beyond our 12-tone scale. I thought Gamelan wouldn't sound the same without an armada of crazy MOOGs enhancing the sound only to realize that it was all about the Gamelan. Here is a video of such a Gamelan group.

For a bigger show, this is a children's performance group. It is 9 minutes long, but so freakin good!

But check out that golden record. You will be happy you did.

The sunny beaches of Capri, the well tanned sin of Rio, the underage in Thailand. What if you could take all these distant locations and put it into one experience greater than all of its components? What if you could do that right in your own back yard?

Yes, the future of vacation is now! Come see the exotic Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport Men's bathroom. The same location where Senator/ex-Senator/wait-wait-wait-give-me-one-sec-to-decide-Senator Larry Craig tapped his toes into our hearts.

Don't believe me that it is a tourist location? Via Seattle's The Stranger check out this holiday snap



Reminds me of the time I went camping in that ditch where Ted Kennedy killed that hooker.

kisses,

-James

To to do list for the weekend was kind of lofty, so I thought I would do a simple task to get my mind going. And that task was to save the world; you know, the sort of thing you do while sitting on the can or shaving your cat.

My plan is simple, effective, and will get you drunk ever weekend. That plan, is give everyone a giant plastic cup full of vodka.

I know, you are thinking to yourself 'why didn't I think of that?'. But that is how it goes with innovations that become the standard by which all innovations are judged.

You see, when I walk my dog I like to know that he is not going to get the shit cut out of him while walking. The dumb ass college kids, who do not think, like to get trashed on disgusting cheap beer and smash the bottles where ever they may while hunting poon-tang.

This angers me, and at first I wanted to poison their villages well, or turn their loved one into an exploding zombie. But just as Ghandi was not willing to unleash to cosmic dance of Shiva upon the British, so too must find a peaceful solution.

The deal is, you come to a city-run distribution center with your ID card and you get a giant plastic cup full of vodka. Inside that cup is more alcohol than the entire 12 pack of Milwaukee's Best that those dipshits break all over my neighborhood. There, you get drunk, you don't have to pay a friend to buy you your crappy beer (I'm looking at you Pabst Blue Ribbon), and you don't risk me chemically castrating you. This is what is known among people who hate being castrated as a 'win-win'.

So come on. You love to drink and you hate to have mutilated genitals. Wont you consider?

Want to see a British football team strip, get into the showers, lather up, and then play with their balls?

Well, what if you could learn about Testicular Cancer Prevention at the same time?

It is educating pornography for the British TV watching masses

Hello,

This is directed to the TV execs who surely read this journal regularly. I wanted to tell you my brilliant idea that will turn TV from the cultural dinosaur is has become into the cutting edge of entertainment.

It isn't a completely new idea, just a new paradigm for you to work from. The concept is simple, just combine two shows into a brand new one. Now, I am not talking about the infamous Love Boat/Knight Rider episode. Nor am I talking about the Charlie's Angels/Murder She Wrote cross over. That is the stuff of fanfiction masturbation. No, this is a simple concept who's many permutations will only raise the bar.

Fear Factory/Design Star.

If you are unfamiliar with either show let me brief you. Fear Factor is a horrible abortion of a show in which people test their limits to see how gross an item they are willing to eat or torment they are willing to endure. It is like Jackass with a budget and sobriety, an appalling combination. Design Star is like American idol, but with designers instead of singers. Let me show you the genius.

Permutation #1: Master Class

In this one BDSM masters compete to come up with the most innovative, humiliating, non-dismembering but painful torment they can put their slaves through.
"I'm sorry master Steve, but hot-gluing your slaves face to an ostrich's butt was more comical than humiliating. Goodbye."
Best thing is you can recycle contestants. This weeks master is next weeks slave if he isn't clever enough. It will really add to the show.

A spin off could be to see which slave can take the most punishment.

Permutation #2: Your Last 15-Minutes of Fame

Engineers get fired up to end the lives of five terminally ill patients. The idea is to create the most glamorous, show stopping yet humane murder machine to end the suffering of someone in desperate need of death.
"Ya know Phil, I really thought we would have a law suit on our hands when I saw that you would be using both a rotisserie chicken oven and all that chop meat, but now I can't imagine dying any other way."

Permutation #3: Who Wants to Eat a Millionaire?

This is a bit more like Iron Chef, only the variation in secret ingredient would be the dead millionaire's former profession. Will it be Blue Blood pudding with Oil-money vinaigrette?

In anticipation of problems surrounding cannibalism I have already begun research and development on a soy-based millionaire called ToFukinRich.

So what do you say TV execs? Can I rescue you from irrelevance?

.. I would find this video more awesome than it actually is; which is pretty awesome. If you can't taste the Donie Darko flava then you never saw the movie. And if you haven't you can hear some Bjork production qualities. Delicious.

Enjoy