From the "You Can't Make This Shit Up" file

Yet another congressman from Florida was caught in a homoerotic sex scandal that will make your eyes water. Granted, it is just a state representative, not a US representative, but still, it is hilarious. It is rep. Bob Allen (R-Merret Island) of Florida... Florida, what do they put in the water down there?

Apparently rep. Allen was in a public bathroom and solicited an undercover cop, offering to give him a blow job for $20. Yup, you folks in Merret Island have rep. who moonlights as a $20 hooker. He is being arraigned sometime tonight.


Allen is married and has a kid and says the whole thing is a big misunderstanding. Hm, he must be refering to his marriage.

Marvelous, couldn't possibly get better than a Republican politician offering a $20 blow job to an undercover cop behind the backs of his wife and kid, right?

Oh, it gets so much better.

Check out his MySpace-esq profile on the Florida House of Representatives page.

Look at his recreational Interests at the bottom of the page. And if you are too lazy to click that link then I wont give you the punch line. It is just too funny of a treasure to give, but to simply point the way.

Good night, and save those pennies for you congressman.

Who is this crazy man?

I was raised a Catholic in as much as a wining, pretentious, sophomoric gasbag of a child can be. But, somewhere in this deeply secular heart (anatomically correct, for science) beats a little boy love for that church. I mean, the pomp, the robes, the half naked savior dangling from the walls; it is a drag queens apartment writ large. There is a bit of comfort in repeating the occult rituals, much like the pleasures of waking up, brushing your teeth, and urinating.

But who the hell is the Ratzinger cat?

I suppose there is something to be said for the workings of the worlds oldest, uninterrupted monarchy. But, being a winning, pretentious, sophomoric gasbag of an adult, I feel damn responsible to do so. So here it goes.

Pope Ratzy has issued a decree on July 7th allowing for much broader use of the traditional Tridentine mass. This isn't just a mass in Latin, it is so much more. You might not be aware of it if, like most sensible people in the world, you are not fluent in Latin. But you and your buddies pray that the Jews may 'crawl out of darkness' and presumably into the incandescent light of the one true momma church.

Why do this? To bring a smattering of super conservative Bishops who reject the Vatican Council II (that council in the early 20th century that gave the church a much needed updating thanks to the complaints of the Protestant Reformation just a few years prior beginning in 1517). Wonderful, nothing like a little anti-semitism to crash through the gates of 21st century ideals (enlightenment ideas more specifically, 1600's-1804).

Ya, but picking on those darkness dwelling Jews is an old routine, a song and dance we are tired of. Can we get back to some more of that hot Christian on Christian violence?

oh yes we can!

In another decree the pope has declared that all Christians who are not catholics are not fully christian. That their Eucharistic celebration is false, and that their church is a fatally flawed and wounded church. I am paraphrasing, but it was pretty strongly worded.

So much for religious toleration. Wait.. this is worse than that, so much for inter-faith dialogue. How do you work with someone who claims such superiority over you? All in a ploy to bring back the middle ages loving Catholics.

I can't wait for a reconstruction religion like Druidism to go back to wicker man burnings. If only we could be so keenly focused on the distant past.

as per (e:libertad)

Transformers: The movie: The review: The RIDE!

    Let me preface this by saying that I am not a transformers fan. The toys were cool but I had Go-bots instead and preferred the Thundercats cartoon.

    Transformers the movie is the most enjoyable shitty movie in theaters. It is devoid of plot, dialogue, anything that remotely resembles a movie. It is a 2 ½ hour special effects circle jerk. But, you at least get to participate in the circle, so it isn't all that bad.

Spoilers ahoi.

1)    Los Angeles is not 30 minutes from the Hoover Damn by car. Even by transforming alien car. Las Vegas is. But you didn't show Las Vegas.

2)    No, you did not backwards engineer all that technology from Megatron. The car predates the 1930's. Megatron (for some reason) is some alien jet, not a car. The jet engine was developed by the Germans in the 1940's, not America.

3)    You are telling me that you had the technology in the 30's to transport a cagillion ton robot from Antartica to the Nevada/Arizona border all the while keeping him frozen? No.

These are just some of the drool educing holes that a simple trip to wikipedia could solve. (For example, I just verified the local of the Hoover Dam.) Some other things that made no sense.

    The thing with these giant sentient robots is that they are "Robots in Disguise" It is the most memorable thing about them. They pick an object and learn to transform into that object and back into a giant robot. Deception, stealth, they are like three story tall ninja robots. So why is it that we had 15 minutes of five robots fumbling around in the act of sneakery? Did you just miss the sneaking around part of your nature?

    The coolest character is Starscream. He is sniveling. He is a would be usurper. (My first name means 'usurper' so I feel a kinship) And he had one line in the whole movie. That is less than the main characters stupid best friend who played a comical role for all of three minutes on screen.

    This is the biggest problem. There are no characters in this movie. There are CGI sequences and explosions, and dull pedestrians who continue to walk across the street with their shopping bags as Las Vegas/Los Angeles gets blown up around them. Each of the autobots get about one line in the movie: they introduce themselves. Even Optimus Prime can't seem to remember their names either. He is moved to pronouns as his thousands of years old friend's dead body is in his arms. Who are these creatures? I have no idea, and the many, many interesting dynamics that have been fleshed out in the 20 odd years of Transformers could have made a compelling film but instead... shit just blew up for 2 ½ hours.

    2 ½ hours? Ya. That is a long film. There is 20 minutes worth of footage about computer hackers that could be cut out. The films one black character, though not guilty of any crime, tells police officers to stay off the carpet, his grandma doesn't like anyone on the carpet, especially police. Yup, the obese black family is constantly having police over because... you know, they are black and all. I wont get into the sexism either.

Transformers is a great big fat advertisement for GM cars, Sprite, the Xbox. The bad guys are jets and tanks and junk because they are brandless. The good guys are GM because... well, because we are xenophobes.

And for the love of Christ Michael Bay, shaking a camera around like you have Parkinson's does not make the scene more action packed; it makes us unable to see the colossi battling, which is the only redeeming part of the film.

No story, no characters, plot holes and still enjoyable some how. I recommend a drinking game to ease your way through it. Otherwise you better be a fanboy.

Howdy,

The Francis Bacon exhibit opened at the Albright Knox in early May and I was so ridiculously excited to see it. But the heavy burden of careless weekend possibilities would keep my Fridays sacrosanct. Monday would come along and I would drive to work past the gallery and slap myself on the forehead for missing it yet again. But today I got lucky.

If you doubt the relevance or power of painting, waltz on over to the gallery and take a look. My stomach turned, I felt incredible anxiety, I laughed out loud. It was one of the most emotional experiences at an exhibit I had felt in a long time. Even if you don't like art, check it out, you may be a convert.

Another treat though was I got to see my first Albert Ryder. I have been to the gallery a dozen times in my scant three years here and if it is in their collection I have never seen it. The man was insane. He would fire off a painting and be off onto the next thing, never finishing his paintings with a sealant (or whatever it is they use). He was a very prolific man but very few of his paintings remain. The ones that do are all cracked and chipped, having been posthumously finished. Even through cells of paint could be smushed together to form a seamless painting, the quality it lends his work is outstanding. You can see Winslow Homer in his dark, sparse seascapes with waves like overturned storm clouds. Marsden Heartly's landscapes are almost derivative of Ryder.

Please, stop by and see Bacon and the Ryder. You will be glad you did.

What to do, what to do.

The owners of most of the homes on my block live on those homes. They aren't sleazy slum lords who live on Long Island and rent until the house burns down in a bong-bloomed blaze. There are just a couple of houses filled with obnoxious college students.

Now, I may not be a spring chicken (I am an human worm android infact) but I remember those college days of carefree parties and a foolhardy sense of immortality. Loud parties with Jock-Jams soundtracks are understandable. They are the very stuff of youthful indiscretions we laugh at when older and wiser.

But for the love of dog anus, must you break beer bottles all over the place?

I don't know? Who cleans up broken glass infront of your house. Well, it is close to the curb so the garbage men must pick it up, right? Maybe our slumlords who last visited Buffalo when steel plants were open and 'talkies' were the wonder of motion pictures.

I mean, do you notice that your frat paradise is right next door to a home full of children? Too bad little billy fell off his skateboard and shredded his face on your sidewalk.

Well, accidents happen. They do. But clean it up.


Soon, very soon. There will come a time when I will pick up glass and beer bottles. And it will go to a place you never knew you loved so dearly.

You know what I find super cool about our Independence day?

Other nations celebrate their independence with the day they stormed a Bastille, or lopped off some head, or won some battle. But here in America, it is the day we signed a document a year after the fighting had begun.

Our independence is linked not to the comings and goings of power and the nation state, rather it is indelibly linked to a set of ideas. Ideas that even the founding generations found contentious and are even debated to this day. Women, for example, are not constitutionally made equal to men and an amendment to such has been debated in congress nearly every session since the 1920's. In a sense, this revolution is still going on. Not being made of armies and generals there is not point of 'mission accomplished'.

In terms of how we recognize our nationhood we are a nation of ideas; other nations are those of wars.

So why in the name of fuck's ugly grand daughter are drunken men throwing little colorful explosives in the air?

Or, more importantly, why are they doing it before it is dark out? You can hardly see them and are scaring the neighbors dog.

Have a few more beers, wait a few more hours, and when your alcohol thined blood is dripping on the floor of the local emergency room remember, those bullets fired and lives sacrificed do not make our nation. But the freedom to blow up your beer bottle in your hand does.

Good night, and Hern bless America.

A clip from the movie Groove Tube



goodnight

Apparently New York state health insurance sucks!

They covered my hospital trip minus $50 no problem. But the ambulance ride which cost more than the ER and resulted in a mis-diagnoses is not covered by it. Ya, apparently the unconscious diabetic with low blood sugar is having a bit of a drug overdose... When there are no drugs to be found.

What annoys me is that the insurance is for low income people, such as myself. I guess if taking the bus to work is good enough so is taking it to the hospital for a gun shot wound.

My medicine costs less than my monthly bill. The total I will spend this year on medicine, doctors visits, and my one hospitalization will all cost less than what I pay them, and I am an expensive guy to insure. So, well, I guess they would loose too much money paying for ambulance services. After all, if they are still making money off someone expensive like me imagine how much they are pulling in on perfectly healthy specimens.

I feel like I am paying a mob boss protection money. Only, he isn't threatening to break my legs. He is letting me know that on the off chance that I do break my leg, saw off a finger, get hit by a car, I am shit out of luck if I don't pay him.

Well, to put it as succinctly and poignantly as possible, fuck you.

I love dinner parties.

The crushing weight of social awkwardness which keeps me up at night pondering if it was rude to say hello to a neighbor two houses down while on his porch. Is there some sort of neighborly veil that separates the world of men and the world of porch dwellers? But at dinner parties. I can hold a glass and make a joke about Sri Lankin foreign policy in poetic form.

So, last night we had our landlords up for dinner. Not quite enough to make it a dinner party. Which reminds me, having my computer and only speakers in the office does no good for dinner music three rooms away. A good time was had by all.

I wanted to document a few things I was cooking. Most of the pictures I have taken lately are odd little abstractions, and I honestly needed the practice of... you know, making sure my subject was in focus. It is a lot easier to take an arty picture when no one has any idea what the heck it is you are photographing.

But, it must have been a sign from above that I am to continue snapping away the schmaltz I love so because our guests arived early. So I had to put the camera down and get all hard core kitchen wife on dinner.

The braised onions would have looked really cool. But they are all eaten now. The pork roast was a giant hunk of meat with rosemary and bit of garlic poking out of a crevice, so it wasn't that photogenic (it did look a bit like my uncle Pete though, no offense uncle, just after dropping it on the floor it had a mustache and a sexist joke).

So, here are a couple money shots of the asparagus before it was roasted.

goodnight.

Howdy,


I was planning on editing my Theremin post down to just facts, after all it was just a crudely constructed fiction around little snippets of vaguely related fact. And then I found this video.



Enjoy children