End of the World Party

  • by Drew

If it is all coming apart in May, I think I want to have party. Agood one. We can screen Until the End of the World and drink good wine waiting to see who gets left behind. I’ll make sure we invite a lot of our non-Christian friends…just in case we actually get sucked up into the sky. That way there’ll be somebody to clean up afterwards.

Okay, I know I’m riffing on this a lot, but anytime someone who doesn’t believe in science uses a calculator to come up with a significant apocalytic date I have to be…sceptical. Although I have to admit that the possibility of a pseudo-celestial location where acne treatment for our leading blond divas is a thing of the past…it just seems super fair, don’t you think?

The High Cost of the End

  • by Drew

Okay, so if the end is nigh and all that, can someone explain the economics of the thing to me? I’m already staggered by the fact that the “end of the world” peeps were able to get a short term lease on the billboard. I mean, in outdoor advertising I thought you needed at least a year-long commitment.

Actually, that’s a funny thought. Can you imagine the negotiations? The guy renting the billboard is like “Oh yeah, I’ll totally pay you in full in June. No problem.” It’s like Wimpy on Popeye: “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

“I’ll gladly pay you after the rapture for a world is ending billboard today.”

Come June they’ll be pulling all the lint out of their pockets: “Ooooh, my bad. I really thought it was ending this time. Turns out we just needed a good colon cleanse. The rapture ain’t coming for years.”

The End is Nigh

  • by Drew

Did you know the world is ending? Yup. Sometime in May. I know this because I saw it on a billboard. You may think I would have paid close attention and taken the date down…need I remind you I am a VERY safe driver? I don’t get distracted by things like cell phone calls and texts. Not even the imminent end forecast on a larger than life billboard takes my attention off the road.

Am I surprised? Not really. I’m starting to see that this was all predicted by the coming of the lard-butts and the rise of Walmartistan culture. Let’s face it, the best appetite suppressants are not at the forefront of the mind when the end is right over the horizon line. Why not chow down and bulk up because I don’t think they have high fructose corn syrup in heaven. Unless you eat the cheap generic store-bought brand of manna.

You can’t make it up

  • by Drew

I was in one of the big Department stores a few weeks ago. It was Target or K-Mart or some-Mart or other. One of those places where the stay-in-bed Moms (to borrow from Arrested Development) pseudo-shop in their designer yoga pants and Ugg (as in Ugg-leeee!) boots and get all blackberry boldwith their BFFs.

There was actually a pretty cute shirt for little girls. I even considered one for my baby girl, but they had no extra-super-tiny on the rack, so I had to move on. The design was a map of the United States with each state carved out and represented by its license plate. It was a cartoonish illustration, not photographic or anything, and had a youthful and almost sweet patriotic feel. Red, white and blue? Red, white and you, Baby! Best part, the caption: American Girl.

Indeed. So sweet. How could you not love this and want one for your daughter to wear every patriotic day of every patriotic week? Of course, being the schmuck I am, I had to take a look inside. Egads, what did I find? You guessed it – Made in El Salvador. I guess now we can even outsource the American Dream to save some scratch for the Ugg boot Moms.

Rock on on, little ladies.

I’ve said it before

  • by Drew

Yup. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I want me some Recreational Vehicle. Big time. I want to take to the open road at 25 miles per hour on the highway, the dull almost breeze in my hair, getting something like 4 miles to the gallon. I want a tin can bathroom with a chemical toilet and a queen mattress with a 70s porn hotel bedspread that slides out over the driver seat. Get me an rv insurance quotebecause I’m ready. Ready to criss cross America, from Wal-Mart to stinky Wal-Mart, living on canned beans and  the smell of scooter exhaust. Spring is almost in the air. Are you with me?

The Couch

  • by Drew

Do you know how hard it is to get rid of a couch. We tried donating one to the Salvation Army years ago when we were living in Connecticut. At that time, in that location, they would only do pickups every third week or so. After passing the initial round of questioning, not unlike a college interview, they agreed to consider our couch. The day they were to come by with the truck and pick it up, we humped it out onto the porch. We’re not talking super modern furniture or anything here, but it was a very nice couch with clean upholstery. We just didn’t need it anymore.

So, the first time we dragged it out onto the porch, I came home from work and it was still there. I called them up and found out the truck had broken down. I dragged the couch back into our kitchen (closest room to the porch, and there was no way I would drag the couch all the way back into the living room – there was no longer any place to put it and it had barely squeezed through the varied twists and turns).

About three weeks later I rescheduled pick up and dragged the couch out onto the porch again. Again, I came home from work and it had not been picked up. This time, when I called, I found out the truck had been in an accident and the pickup had been cancelled.

Several weeks later, I called to schedule pickup for the third time. I was otld the truck was indefinitely out of service and I should continue to call weekly until they were ready to pick it up.

That night, after several months of tripping over a couch in my kitchen, I broke out a saw and took the thing down to it’s component parts. It went out in a variety of trash barrels the next day.

So much for charity.

Brats

  • by Drew

Can I take a moment and make some paternal complaints? The kids are into video games. They love them. They have handhelds, they play wii and Internet based games, they recently even discovered games you can play with the remote on cable. Like I really need my 8 year old bragging about his Tetris prowess. Dude, I OWNED that game in college. I can totally bury his butt. Of course, then he cries, so I have to let him win…or at least give a good show of competing.

Anyway, my complaint is this: why are my boys incapable of putting the damn games away. Specifically with their handhelds or the wii. I am so sick of finding wii sports resort under the living room coffee table with the booklet from Mario Kart and the weird PS3-ish case our used copy of Lego Batman came in.

Meanwhile, my 19 month old baby girl can satisfactorily deliver an heirloom china cup across a thirty feet of hard tile from Mommy to Daddy on a whim. And then she’ll rearrange the tupperware on the shelf in the lower cabinet so everything fits and close the door. Is this a genetic thing? Is it ingrained gender type stuff? I don’t know, but if you could bottle it I’d have my boys drinking it by the liter on a daily basis.

Bumper Faith

  • by Drew

Here’s something that’s been troubling me for a while. A couple weeks ago we went to Sam’s Club to see if there was anything we might want that would justify a membership at Sam’s Club. I mean, let’s face it the discounts just aren’t there any more, not even on the meg-ginormous packages of mac and cheese and toilet paper. Still, it is a compelling place.

In the parking lot I saw a pickup with some bumper stickers that really confused me. Actually, it was one bumper sticker and a few other visual accouterments that suggested (at least to me) that I might be very wrong about my role and the role of a creator in our little, limited, microverse.

First off, there was a huge bumper sticker that read “Jesus is the Answer.” Fair enough, I mean, they didn’t provide the question, but in your favorite Douglas Adams-y way, you can run down that little convo in your own mind. What gave rise to my confusion was the portrayal of two bathing beauty naked chicks alongside the Jesus sticker. I’m not talking art prints or even remotely tasteful presentations of the female form. These were the classic shiny metallic stickers depicting a buxom female with ample posterior, seated, with her head thrown back and her boobs pointed squarely at heaven.

Maybe the question is something like “who is your heavenly pimp?”

History

  • by Drew

The great thing about historical fiction, like that presented in the Outlander books is that a reader needn’t worry about the issues that plague us in the modern day. It’s actually pretty fascinating in the Outlander books, because the primary female character starts in the first book as a nurse from World War II who accidentally goes back in time in Scotland, and ends up a few years before the Stewart rising in the Highlands. She later returns to the modern day and becomes a doctor. then, 20 years later she heads back in time to find her true love, who is also 20 years older. It’s very sweet, really.

And when she goes back to the 1760s or so, she does so with a lot of modern medical knowledge, much of which is somewhat useless. Sure, if you want to treat Mesothelioma with a bleeding by leeches or maybe a pill made of pulverized horse droppings and spider webs, yeah…there are shops for that, but a proper pharmacy…not so much.

One of my favorite passages in the fourth book is when the Doctor, Clair, is trying to grow penicillin. She leaves out dozens of slices of bread, hoping against hope that one of them with naturally develop the mold that we know as penicillin. Of course, her greatest barrier to success is neither circumstance nor bad luck. It is a combination of vermin (rats, mice, roaches and other pests) and her nephew eating her starchy ersatz petri dishes off the kitchen counter.

Titular oops

  • by Drew

I realize that in my last post I never actually explained the title. This is a common failing of mine. Sorry. The thing is, in historical fiction from the couple decades before the Revolutionary War, there may be no need for apidexin reviews, but there was one key substance that needed serious, regular abuse. Sort of.

What was that? Well, in the Scottish portion of the books it is definitely whiskey. And since a “modern day” character in the narrative hits the Lagavulin in a passage, nodding towards the time traveler for introducing him to such spirits, I’m thinking the whiskey they hit is seriously peated, smoky and killer in flavor.

I’m listneing to the audio version of the fourth book right now, Drums of Autumn, and the crew is in the colonies, roughly a decade before the Revolutionary War. They have developed a little community thanks to some land grants, and a handful of Scottish ex-pats that survived the Highland Rising are there. Out primary character, Jamie Frazier is, among other things, running an illegal still and making some serious white lightning in the style of old school scotts whiskey. It’s illegal because of the crippling British taxes on spirits production (one of our Revolutionary inspirations, of course) and he, being a Highlander, really f-ing hates the British. More than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson combined. I’m just wondering at what point he’s going to skip out on paltry wheat and go for a corn mash, successfully inventing bourbon.

I wouldn’t even mind if that’s how it played out. I guiltily love these books so much (even knowing they would be super duper chick flicks if they were movies and Hugh Grant would end up playing the bad ass Scott) that I wouldn’t mind if this dude was actually portrayed as the inventor of Bourbon. It beats the Jim Beam/Booker Noe assertions that their family did it, after all.

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