Square Dance: The other rap music.
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I wasn't a good student. Bad test scores. Didn't get into Hamburger University. Had to go to Hamburger Junior College for two years. Got my Associates Degree in Pickle Placement.
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I am a humanist, just as my cat is a catist. Only natural to back the home team.
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Ideals (revised) -- The truth. The whole truth. And nothing but the truth. Pick any two.
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Yogism: When you think about it, everything you could think of is there without thinking about it.
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Why? Why? Why is the moth attracted to the flame? What sends the lemming to the sea? What is the capital of North Dakota? Some questions are unanswerable.
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It takes 3,000 cows a year to make one season's worth of NFL game balls. Makes me wonder who trained 'em to run those sewing machines.
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Forgotten Historical Figures -- Michelangel'os brother, Tony, who painted the Sistine porch.
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Nearly half of all marriages end in death. No wonder divorce seems like the better option.
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Why dont they just train regular cranes to whoop?
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Rod McKuen: The most understood poet in America.
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Then she told me, "The sexual revolution has come and youre no Castro."
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PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE
If you were one of the 7 Dwarfs, which would you be?
Sneezy, Sleepy, Doc, Bashful, Happy, Grumpy, Dopey
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Snow White is all about drugs.
Snow White? Coker.
Dopey? Obvious.
Happy? X.
Bashful. (Paranoid)
Doc. The connection.
Sleepy. Downers.
Grumpy? Jonesin'.
Sneezy, Remember that scene in Annie Hall?
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If you were a character from The Wizard of Oz, who would you be?
-- Look out for the flying monkey people.
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And then I told her, "This isnt puppy love, this is *dog* love."
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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happy hour.
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She said: "My body is God's temple and my soul is the caretaker. Like a custodian of a church, ya know? And you don't let just anybody come up and stick his dick inside a church."
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My football career ended early, right after a tackling dummy stopped me three yards behind the line of scrimmage.
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I didn't make it as a terrorist. They sent me to blow up a car but I burned my lips on the tailpipe.
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She's raising money to build a drive-up window at the Eye Bank.
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Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most ferocious animal on earth.
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Elizabeth Taylor-Hilton-Wilding-Todd-Fischer-Burton-Burton-Warner-Fortensky (for those of you at home keeping score)
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Ban on aerosols! Riot squads armed with roll-on mace.
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I have a friend who says he's gonna quit his job to serve the Lord (but only in an advisory capacity).
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He told his dog to heel and pup stopped limping.
--
The best Christmas gift I ever got was a Deluxe Ant Farm With Ant Tractor, Ant Cows, Ant Chickens. A dragon fly as a crop duster
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Little Known Fact: Alligators wont eat you if youre carrying a flashlight. It all depends how fast you carry it.
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I used to work at a Japanese Fast Food place, where you took off only one shoe.
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Getting old isnt so bad. But when your memory goes, forget it.
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A Rousing Cheer for People with Short Attention Spans
SIS BOOM BOMBS AWAY!
COME AGAIN SOME OTHER DAY
CLOSE THE COVER ON YOUR MATCHES
COUNT YOUR CHICKEN WHEN IT HATCHES.
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She was looking for someone like her father: an old man who gives her money and sleeps with her mother.
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He's a very organized guy. I've seen him filing his fingernails. I usually cut 'em off and throw 'em away.
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Swanson Angry Man Dinner
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Swansons Cryogenic Turkey Dinner -- Pop it in the microwave, the turkey comes back to life.
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...they got together for a heart to heart talk and nearly froze to death.
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So ugly his mother got morning sickness after he was born.
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He told his kid about the birds and the bees. Kid told him about his wife and the mailman.
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When he was a kid playing in the sandbox, the cat tried to cover him up.
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Good taste is timeless, and good times can be tasteless.
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There are teddy bears. Why no teddy tigers? Teddy lions? Teddy iguanas?.
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A loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and a thou beside me in the wilderness.
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Bad Hangover. Tried to commit suicide by pouring milk over Rice Krispies.
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Cleveland Street is never in a good part of town.
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My uncle has dedicated his live to devloping a sculpt-by-number kit.
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Time heals all wounds. Unless it gets infected, in which case time leaves a scab.
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Family Haircare Emporium Quartet Harmony.
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I'm in an Edna St. Vincent malaise.
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Which are you, a terrific roll in the hay or a turkey in the straw?
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I have trouble remembering three things: names, faces and something else.
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Just how many people in real life call a toilet the bathroom bowl?
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I tried to donate my body to science; science is contesting the will.
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I stayed awake last night trying to figure out the difference between Ricardo Mantalbon and Fernando Lamas.
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They claim Dr. Joyce Brothers knows a lot about boxing. No way. I decked her with three left jabs and a right cross.
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He was an only child, so had no playmates. Had to play with himself. Tried to go pro.
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Remember that kid in middle school who always showered alone after gym class? His mother was afraid he wouldn't like undressing in front of a room full of pubescent boys. My, how wrong she was. Turns out he really likes it now.
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I got these sleeping pills that promised, "You'll sleep like a baby." Wet my bed.
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Résumé entry: Goodyear Rubber, Akron Ohio. Blimp Folder
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In real life, there is no algebra.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Friday, November 24, 2006
There's a point here...somewhere
Turns out I have a friend who's turned into a paranoid neo-con right-wing-nut defender of George WMD Bush and the War on Terror, nee Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (remember that one?), nee the Quest against Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction, nee “weapons of mass destruction development program activities,” nee Axis of Evil, nee... hell, it's hard to keep track.
It's sort of like discovering someone you think you know has become a Moonie, or wants to tell you how L. Ron Hubbard got it right. Or is has joined AA or become born-again. It's like meeting up with an old bar-b-que buddy who suddenly says, “How can you eat pig?! A pig is an animal, just like your kitty! Could you eat your kitty?!” (To digress a moment, I probably could not bring myself to eat my kitty. On the other hand, if I ended up dead on the floor and he'd run out of Meow Mix, I'm pretty confident my fuzzy house-mate wouldn't have any compunctions about nibbling around on my carcass; after all, I've seen what he did to that mouse he brought in from the garden.)
Silly me, but I'm not all that afraid of Islamic terrorists. I figure, if I become as afraid of them as my friend, the terrorists have won.
They haven't, you know.
Not even close.
Except for my friend.
He's read a slug of right-wing neo-con websites that are probably on the Armstrong Williams gravy train and stuff stuff over Ted Stevens' tubes which comprise Boy George Bush's “Internets” that prove how diabolical Islam must be.
“Nothing in Christianity,” says my friend, “comes close to the hatred endemic to Islam,” he says.
Yeah. Except for all the admonitions of the Old Testament God against infidels, and Muth v. Frank (which tried to make homosexuality illegal in the United States, and the good “Christian” from Topeka who shows up at Iraq War veterans' funerals with signs that declare “God Hates Fags.”
And nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.
My personal observation has been that the folks who rationalize their terrorist attacks against their perceived enemies are corrupting their religion. If Osama bin Laden represents Islam, the Ku Klux Klan represents Christianity.
Sorry. I don't buy it.
I happened to win the genetic lottery by being born into an American middle-class, college educated, relatively-prosperous family. My parents had been raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition and taught me accordingly. I got an education and a keen perception of bullshit from my parents and teachers. I also got a little bit of idealism along the way. I still haven't been able to shake Buckminster Fuller's observation that all of us on this planet aren't just passengers, we're the Crew of Spaceship Earth.
We're all in this together.
You can resent your sister and have issues with your parents or shake your head and sigh at what your brother-in-law does, but you're all family come time for Thanksgiving Dinner.
There is an innate, basic instinct, I think, that may somehow occur to human beings that, for all our picayune differences, we've got more in common than we have that's different.
Except for the Nazarenes, of course. They're going to Hell.
It's sort of like discovering someone you think you know has become a Moonie, or wants to tell you how L. Ron Hubbard got it right. Or is has joined AA or become born-again. It's like meeting up with an old bar-b-que buddy who suddenly says, “How can you eat pig?! A pig is an animal, just like your kitty! Could you eat your kitty?!” (To digress a moment, I probably could not bring myself to eat my kitty. On the other hand, if I ended up dead on the floor and he'd run out of Meow Mix, I'm pretty confident my fuzzy house-mate wouldn't have any compunctions about nibbling around on my carcass; after all, I've seen what he did to that mouse he brought in from the garden.)
Silly me, but I'm not all that afraid of Islamic terrorists. I figure, if I become as afraid of them as my friend, the terrorists have won.
They haven't, you know.
Not even close.
Except for my friend.
He's read a slug of right-wing neo-con websites that are probably on the Armstrong Williams gravy train and stuff stuff over Ted Stevens' tubes which comprise Boy George Bush's “Internets” that prove how diabolical Islam must be.
“Nothing in Christianity,” says my friend, “comes close to the hatred endemic to Islam,” he says.
Yeah. Except for all the admonitions of the Old Testament God against infidels, and Muth v. Frank (which tried to make homosexuality illegal in the United States, and the good “Christian” from Topeka who shows up at Iraq War veterans' funerals with signs that declare “God Hates Fags.”
And nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.
My personal observation has been that the folks who rationalize their terrorist attacks against their perceived enemies are corrupting their religion. If Osama bin Laden represents Islam, the Ku Klux Klan represents Christianity.
Sorry. I don't buy it.
I happened to win the genetic lottery by being born into an American middle-class, college educated, relatively-prosperous family. My parents had been raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition and taught me accordingly. I got an education and a keen perception of bullshit from my parents and teachers. I also got a little bit of idealism along the way. I still haven't been able to shake Buckminster Fuller's observation that all of us on this planet aren't just passengers, we're the Crew of Spaceship Earth.
We're all in this together.
You can resent your sister and have issues with your parents or shake your head and sigh at what your brother-in-law does, but you're all family come time for Thanksgiving Dinner.
There is an innate, basic instinct, I think, that may somehow occur to human beings that, for all our picayune differences, we've got more in common than we have that's different.
Except for the Nazarenes, of course. They're going to Hell.
On Science and Religion on a Saturday Afternoon
I'm a lapsed agnostic; I'm not sure what it is I don't believe in.
It seems to me that religion exists to explain the inexplicable. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the good die young? Why is there injustice? Why do some things sometimes somehow work out?
Thing is, a long time ago, there were a lot more things that humans hadn't figured out a way to explain. And we humans are cursed with wanting answers. If we don't have answers we tend to make up answers. There's truth in myths and lessons in fables; truth in made-up answers.
Science came along and decided to look for answers that weren't made up. Scientists took the earth out of the center of the universe and shattered a lot of other myths over the years but didn't necessarily take the underlying truth away from myths and fables. We all appreciate the lesson of The Tortoise and the Hare, even if there wasn't an actual race; we understand the tragic implications of indecision even if there never was a real-life Hamlet; whether there really was a Job and God and Satan sat back and yanked his chain, we understand (or, at least contemplate) the point of the story.
I can understand people who need to think that a wise and good man might have been unjustly executed 2,000 years ago and that his spirit and love (in the form of his teachings and examples and parables...metaphors) live beyond the tomb. I can appreciate how Siddhartha Gautama might have discovered and taught and lived enough universal truth to become the Buddha. God or fate or happenstance or something might have pulled the Hebrews' fat out of the fire often enough for some people to pay attention. The bottom-line Truth therein remains inexplicable, and that's why there's religion.
If there is a God, I kinda figure He'd work his miracles on a larger scope than, say, Tinkerbelle. If a moment is like a thousand years to the omniscient, omnipotent, everlasting universal "god," digging the Grand Canyon is something He could do over his lunch hour, not with a wave of His magic wand.
And maybe, just perhaps, science is a systematic method to understand how His magic wand really works.
There's a recent report that the human genome project has discovered that humans and chimpanzees do *not* share 99% of their genetic codes; maybe only 96%. I'm bracing myself for the wave of faithful who'll cite this discovery as an "admission" that science doesn't know all it thinks it does.
That's the difference between religion and science: religion has the answers, science has the questions.
Religions cling to "answers," while science continues to ask questions. Scientists are humanity's Three-Year-Old, constantly asking, "Why?" We all know how annoying three-year-olds can be. Religionists are the good-but-frustrated parents who stop and say, "Because I said so."
I suspect Neanderthals thought they'd achieved the height of human understanding, what with their mastery of fire and ability to look at the sun and figure the mastedons were migrating this way. I suspect that every generation of humans tends to think *they* have achieved all there is to know. The only people who won't will be scientists, the damn little three-year-olds who persist on asking "Why?"
It seems to me that religion exists to explain the inexplicable. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the good die young? Why is there injustice? Why do some things sometimes somehow work out?
Thing is, a long time ago, there were a lot more things that humans hadn't figured out a way to explain. And we humans are cursed with wanting answers. If we don't have answers we tend to make up answers. There's truth in myths and lessons in fables; truth in made-up answers.
Science came along and decided to look for answers that weren't made up. Scientists took the earth out of the center of the universe and shattered a lot of other myths over the years but didn't necessarily take the underlying truth away from myths and fables. We all appreciate the lesson of The Tortoise and the Hare, even if there wasn't an actual race; we understand the tragic implications of indecision even if there never was a real-life Hamlet; whether there really was a Job and God and Satan sat back and yanked his chain, we understand (or, at least contemplate) the point of the story.
I can understand people who need to think that a wise and good man might have been unjustly executed 2,000 years ago and that his spirit and love (in the form of his teachings and examples and parables...metaphors) live beyond the tomb. I can appreciate how Siddhartha Gautama might have discovered and taught and lived enough universal truth to become the Buddha. God or fate or happenstance or something might have pulled the Hebrews' fat out of the fire often enough for some people to pay attention. The bottom-line Truth therein remains inexplicable, and that's why there's religion.
If there is a God, I kinda figure He'd work his miracles on a larger scope than, say, Tinkerbelle. If a moment is like a thousand years to the omniscient, omnipotent, everlasting universal "god," digging the Grand Canyon is something He could do over his lunch hour, not with a wave of His magic wand.
And maybe, just perhaps, science is a systematic method to understand how His magic wand really works.
There's a recent report that the human genome project has discovered that humans and chimpanzees do *not* share 99% of their genetic codes; maybe only 96%. I'm bracing myself for the wave of faithful who'll cite this discovery as an "admission" that science doesn't know all it thinks it does.
That's the difference between religion and science: religion has the answers, science has the questions.
Religions cling to "answers," while science continues to ask questions. Scientists are humanity's Three-Year-Old, constantly asking, "Why?" We all know how annoying three-year-olds can be. Religionists are the good-but-frustrated parents who stop and say, "Because I said so."
I suspect Neanderthals thought they'd achieved the height of human understanding, what with their mastery of fire and ability to look at the sun and figure the mastedons were migrating this way. I suspect that every generation of humans tends to think *they* have achieved all there is to know. The only people who won't will be scientists, the damn little three-year-olds who persist on asking "Why?"
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Things I've Learned from My Cat
Take plenty of naps.
Stretch slowly and thoroughly before you get up from your nap.
Be curious.
Take delight in play.
Look others in the eye.
Know how to be quietly alone.
If you want love, let people know about it.
When you get love, let em know you appreciate it.
Groom yourself regularly.
Be confident in your ability to climb.
Amaze people with how high you can jump.
If you fall, land on your feet.
When shit happens, be quick to bury it.
Stretch slowly and thoroughly before you get up from your nap.
Be curious.
Take delight in play.
Look others in the eye.
Know how to be quietly alone.
If you want love, let people know about it.
When you get love, let em know you appreciate it.
Groom yourself regularly.
Be confident in your ability to climb.
Amaze people with how high you can jump.
If you fall, land on your feet.
When shit happens, be quick to bury it.
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