Watch Your Undercarriage!

From time to time, advertising does yield up (unintentionally) some pretty sage advice. For instance, this from a brochure I am working on:

Prevent large foreign objects from becoming entangled in your undercarriage.

Fox News Porn

Made the rounds last week. Maybe you have seen it. The Fox News Porn video.

Weekend Round Up

My wife Jenda makes this killer trifle. Feast your eyes. And one of the best things about the trifle are leftovers ... leftover rum, Godiva chocolate liquer (sp?). With the help of leftovers, I have thankfully maintained a steady buzz since Thursday.

Got Naomi Klein's new book in at the library, and Greg Palast's latest as well. Either one sure to put me in the dark place, but informed in the dark place is better than ignorant in the dark place.

Finally, discovered (again thanks to my wife Jenda) a little record shop down by Kent State called Spin More Records. A nice guy there named Brando burned a bunch of tracks from old vinyl to CD for me -- 80's stuff that I have not found anywhere on disc: Aztec Camera, Let's Active, Water Walk, Triffids. Ah, those were the days my friend.

P.S. This week's Keith (see Gallery) looks like a cousin.

Phantoms

I revised this post based on R.J's take. I think he is right (see below.) Rudyasferatu.


I couldn't put my finger on it until now ... Rudy has always reminded me of someone ... same gnarly ass comb over and everything

Animals in the News

Squirrel crisps in Wisconsin. And Andrex the Wee in Britain.

Study Shows 'Mericans Reading Less

RIF ... Reading is Fundamental, or so we used to think.

This can't be true? American's reading less?

With hot stuff like this? How can it be

Boys in Swooping Haircuts are Bringing Me Down

taking pictures of themselves oh no! ...

so says The Format. Wow, here is a band, relatively new from what I gather, that plowed right into my heart. Dog Problems, their second and most recent album is just fantastic. (Not so in love with their first) Check out Dog Problems samples where you can .. lots of different clips on Youtube ... varying quality. Snails, Dog Problems, On Your Porch are wonderful tracks. Such damn fine lyrics.

Oddly enough I stumbled onto them when I was looking for kids tunes on zooglobble.com. They have a track called Does Your Cat Have a Mustache on a compilation CD and the song is unbelievable. Changes melody, tempo about four times. Rare for a pop song where I come from.

Riffing on Pup Part II

What’s in a name? No end of fun for someone like me. (You should see me chase my tail) Lately, I have been making up regal British sounding names for Otty.

Lord Ottimer of Doo

Ottington Sedgewick

Ottimus Bandersnatch

P.S. Finally taught him to speak last night -- using carmel corn. Maybe now he will have some opinion on all this name game stuff.

Ooo Ooo That Smell

My smell memory is extremely powerful. More than touch, image, sound, smells call up moments, places, moments in those places, more forcefully than any other sense.

Now and then I get a whiff of some kind of sagey/butterscotch smell I associate with the hills in El Granada, CA and it drives me crazy. I have to stop where I am and wander around rubbing leaves then smelling my fingers trying to indentify the source. And nothing makes my heart pound like ocean/beach smell. The Great Lakes have always been a way to cheat geography and get the ocean buzz without the travel.


SNIFF

"Beautiful my desire, and the place of my desire."
--Roethke, The Rose

*
The back room in my Grandma's house held years of junk. It was basement level. After rain the floor flooded & became greased with mud. I always liked having an indoor room with a mud floor. There were two bird cages, the perches coated with droppings hard as old paint. Honed flints were pinned to the thin, brass-colored bars. Beneath the cages, stacks of spoiled magazines, each binding furred with white fuzz. The back room: muddy & rank as frogs in a jar on a hot day. I swear it was sinking.

*
Ours was a centennial farm & the barn carried every year of its history. The gray wood stale to the fiber, the main floor carpeted with chaff fine as grain & hundred year old corn-cobs shrunken to cigar-size. Dark inside. The barn's breath seemed scented with old dung, pig & rabbit, gone earthy & hardened beneath the chaff. Many times I just stood inside, breathing.

*
My mother's pink hands after canning; the faint, soapiness of unscented candles.

Funnier by the Minute

Aw shucks, they grow up so fast.

Seems like only yesterday my son Whit was making up jokes like:

when the tree fell over the bushes were silly.

This weekend, he made this up:

Q: What do you call a highway with no toll booths?

A: A freeway.
I love comedy.

Barbie Beware

Long before Chucky, there was this murderous little gal. I wonder if any of you elderly folks like me remember the Night Gallery episode the doll is from? I tracked it down and showed it to my son - still very creepy. I am going through a monster movie phase again and watching quite a few horror flicks. Some awful, some not so.

Tattoo

Here's an original (kind of) Van Gogh.
Took about two hours longer than it was supposed to (4 altogether) and I nearly fainted twice between the smoke, the heavy metal and the repetitive stabbing into my shoulder bone, muscle. Thank God for Dr. Pepper and Hershey bars. The sugar kept me in the game.

I got it back in Madison in 98 in memory of my son Rainer. So it's faded a bit now after so many years. You can find it on my right shoulder and in the summer, despite being completely not built for tank tops, I wear them so I can show it off.

I recently got a few vaccinations as part of the approval process for some volunteer work with kids and the nurse said she felt bad about sticking a Van Gogh. And then we laughed a little.

Hoppin Frog & Southern Tier

99 bottles of beer on the wall ...
Here are two of my newest discoveries. Hoppin Frog brewery, right here in Akron, and Southern Tier out East. Both have a make-your-eyes-roll with delight selection of ultra hoppy brews and other desirables.

I still love Stone IPA and Arrogant Bastard out of San Diego, but there's enough of me to go around. So, if you love the micro brews, look for these beauties on a shelf near you.