Never Cook Bacon While Naked

Benjamin N. Cardozo

2009-07-15T13:56:00.003-04:00

He was the first Hispanic Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Wait... what?

Sonia Sotomayor is Peurto Rican. Ben Cardozo was a Portuguese Jew nominated by Herbert Hoover in 1932 to replace Oliver Wendell Holmes. Look it up.

This is why you should not take anything the mainstream media says without a grain of salt.

Fred Durst

2009-07-14T14:17:00.002-04:00

He sucks so much. He and Samantha Bee should get lost in the wilderness and get eviscerated by wolves together.

Why? Here's why...

Damn it.

Kristin Peripignano

2009-07-12T16:47:00.005-04:00

She's cool like that.

So, I'm gonna do some photo blogging today. Here is what I think is the peak of fashion...

And here is the cutest little girl in the world.

I hope all of you have a great work week!

Kim Arnold

2009-07-07T01:15:00.003-04:00

She is a good mother, an amazing woman, and the best thing that has ever happened to me. She can also have her moments.

Ok, so I am not yet tuned in to Violet. I can hear her scream when I am dead asleep, but I can't hear her fuss. Of course, I sleep farther away from her bassinet, so it may just be a matter of physics. In any event, I don't hear her when she is fussing.

I also tend to repeat many a social faux pas, much to Kim's aggravation. Let me set the scene.

A friend of ours posted an open invitation to go to the bar on Facebook. I saw that, and didn't feel like going out because I thought that that would be taking advantage of Kim while I had fun. So, I said some convoluted thing that involved a mention of Kim, me needing to help with the baby, and a suggestion for him to visit us at home.

Apparently, I use Kim as an excuse to not leave the house. A lot. And it angers her because she feels that it turns her into the bad guy. And she has told me this many times, at regular intervals.

I still do it. I do it thoughtlessly, not maliciously, but I still do it.

Moving on, I came home, and Kim was understandably upset. I tried to explain that I did not think that Mike would take my comment as a negative swipe at her, but Kim had the hurt and frustration of every other time I had done such things, as well as post partum hormones, to win the argument before I could even mount a defense.

Any way, I tried to let Kim know that I wanted to help her take care of Violet tonight so that she could take it easy... er. Note that I am writing this at 1:30 in the morning. Here's the reason I am writing this at 1:30 AM.

Kim heard Violet fuss, and tried to lightly awaken me before Violet began to cry. Once Violet cried, I was up. Groggy as all hell. Violet was hungry. So, Kim told me to feed her.

I can warm breast milk while barely awake. I can make formula while barely awake.

I can't mix formula and breast milk together while barely awake. Suffice it to say, it was not good.

Any way, after about three minutes, Kim got up and took control of the situation. Which she knew she could do. Because she knew that I would have to leave Violet crying while I struggled to get her food ready.

Kim set me up for failure. Which, by the way, she just apologized to me for.

Look, I am going to continue to screw up. I am going to continue to hurt Kim's feelings. But damn it...

I'm gonna keep trying to NOT do that.

Violet Grace Arnold.

2009-07-02T19:46:00.002-04:00

She was born at 2:36 PM on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009. She weighed 9 pounds, three ounces and was 20.5 inches long. She's beautiful.

:)

Billy Mays

2009-06-30T18:21:00.002-04:00

He died, but his spirit and his efforts live on.

So, you might have hated Billy Mays. That's ok. He didn't need your approval. He kept at it, and eventually made it big. Sure, he was loud. I remember waking up from a nap in front of the TV to his booming voice. His style was not for everyone.

But he created his own style, and he kept at it, and he eventually created an empire that will provide for his wife and family. Moreover, his pitching of the many products over the ten years he was on television have secured the jobs of many Americans and relized the dreams of many inventors.

He was an entrepreneur that helped give people a real shot.

I wouldn't mind if Violet grew up to be kind of like him. Oh, that's right. I am becoming a biological father tomorrow.

I have no idea what I am doing.

Luke, customer service rep from AT&T

2009-06-26T12:26:00.002-04:00

The following is an abbreviated, paraphrased conversation between myself and Luke.

LUKE: --uke,how may I help you today?

ME: Was it Luke?

L: Yes.

M: Hi Luke. I got an offer for your service, at promotional prices. I would like to know if you can make those promotional prices permanent. It doesn't make sense for me to switch providers and pay the same six months from now.

L: I cannot personally offer that, and those are AT&T guidelines--

M: Are these guidelines rules from like the FCC?

L: No.

M: Then they can be changed. If you cannot do it, I would like to speak to someone who can.

L: Unfortunately no supervisors that could authorize that are currently here, could I have your telephone number so that a supervisor can call you back?

M: (I give him my phone number and full name)

L: Thank you for calling AT&T. We value you as a customer.

M: Thank you for your customer service.

****

Either Luke is a lying bastard, and needed to get me off the line as soon as possible, or I am going to get a call before five o'clock.

Krissy Face

2009-06-24T10:50:00.004-04:00

She is doing a photo 365 project at her blog. http://ferrtileblog.blogspot.com is the address. Be there or be square.

So... Kim gave me a shirt that says "autistic kids rock", along with an illustration of an autistic kid rocking... in a corner. I rather like it, but I don't think I should wear it to work. Some of our patrons are autistic as well, and I really don't want to hurt their feelings, especially since I am representing the commons.

Kim feels that if anyone were to be offended, the fact that I am on the autistic spectrum would mitigate the effects.

What do you guys think?

Logan Galang

2009-06-23T02:01:00.002-04:00

He is the son of one of my dearest friends, and is one day old.

So... I'm doing the yoga. It's an introduction into Hatha Yoga, by the way, Cassie. I like the stretching, and the balancing, and the pushing myself aspect of it. The whole Ann Arbor hippie vibe... well, it's all right. I mean, I can dig the whole "take it easy while at the same time engage your presence in the universe" sort of thing, and yoga is thousands of years old for a reason. I don't know. I suppose my working-class back ground is keeping me from buying into it without examination.

Any way, We did the poses and the stretching and the breathing, then the corpse pose. Then, our instructor sent us out to observe our wooded, pastoral campus for twenty minutes, and then draw what we saw after wards. I mean, I am digging it... but I really want to ridicule it at the same time.

Kim and I are doing ok, I think. I love her very much, and I am trying to be the guy. I don't know how well of a job I really am accomplishing though...

Michael Reynolds

2009-06-11T16:07:00.002-04:00

He build passive solar homes that use sustainable building materials. You can find his work at earthship.net.

I think I am going to save up to buy the water reclamation kit for this house. That ought to save us a bundle...

Samantha Bee

2009-06-08T23:50:00.002-04:00

She is an asshole.

Samantha Bee gained marginal fame on "The Daily Show" as a "Chief (whatever) Correspondent". Any way, she is trying to turn that fame into cash through commercial endorsements. So, what? That's what entertainers are supposed to do, right? How does this make her an asshole?

She tried to make me eat shit.

See, whats she is dong nowadays is going about the country to "Hidden Valleys", some of them towns, some of them golf courses, and feeding people Kraft ranch. Obviously, since these are commercial messages, the people of the Hidden Valleys all love Kraft ranch dressing. No big surprise, and the whole "Hidden Valley" connection is a sideways swipe at the leader of the ranch dressing market. It seems clever enough for an entertainer's endorsement, right? Well... there's just one small problem.

Kraft ranch dressing tastes like shit. It is what I would feed terror suspects if I wanted them to suffer. I would shake a bottle in their face, and the motherfuckers would strap themselves down and throw water on their faces.

Samantha Bee, if you ever read this, let me be absolutely clear. I hope you get lost in the wilderness and break your leg. I hope that you have to drag yourself and your necrotic, gangrenous limb through thick brush for days. I hope that when you do find a clearing, it is populated by a pack of starving wolves, and that the last thing that goes through your mind while they are tearing at your flesh is, "someone thought this was a just punishment for my sins".

I hope all of that happens, because you tried to make me eat shit.

Ron Paul

2009-06-08T14:26:00.001-04:00

So, have you seen these "action text" things before? They're pretty sweet.

Cassandra Ciardi

2009-06-05T16:26:00.008-04:00

She is thought provoking and intellectual.

Ok, I am going to preface this by saying that I vomited a couple of comments on Cassie's blog, and now I am trying to clean up that mess. Cassie's words will be in purple, while mine will be the standard for this blog.

Many of your statements and self presentations are hypocritical which bothers me a bit but far, far less than your emotional style of debate, which is what I suppose leads you to be so very rude. I don’t like to argue that way. I don’t see a need to insult. Perhaps you have mistaken my not attacking you for being too weak to do so or maybe you just think bullying is winning. So perhaps, in this post, I think I might indulge in a little of it since time and time again you have not afforded me the courtesy of manners. I will try to stick mostly to facts though.

As will I.

First you say there is no such thing as a free lunch, and in the very next sentence you say we have universal healthcare. The two sentences after that I haven’t a clue what you are even talking about. So, I’ll stick to the first two.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and we do have universal health care. It just sucks, we pay too much for it, and we expect our government to reform a system that took two hundred and thirty or so years to get where it is... in two or four years. What I mean by universal is that the most homeless person in America can walk in to a hospital and expect to be treated... and that most homeless of persons WILL be treated. I highly doubt that you want a system where that is not true.

Apparently, there DO BE in fact a free lunch, and GM is chowing down on that mofo. THAT is hypocrisy. You advocate handing money out to GM because their workers’ children might not be able to go to college (oh, and you better believe I’m coming back for that estrogen tidbit) and then try bitch slapping me for looking for a free lunch. You have the wrong bitch here my friend – I am actually okay with the idea of socialism. Switzerlandize my ass. It is this current oligarchy bullshit that runs up my ass sideways.

I was imprecise, and you read more in to my rhetoric than I do. I really do forget that my words can mean different things to different people. No, the soup kitchen that GM is currently catering is not "free". GM will have responsibilities that it must meet, and we the taxpayers ought to be very vocal about having those responsibilities laid out very clearly. At the same time, we taxpayers had better put up or shut up. GM is not going away, and the market forces that would have let that happen don't exist anymore. So, we will either have to punish this current administration at the polls, which given the sad state of the GOP is not really an option... Or we can invest in our investment. By the way, I do not consider you to be an intolerable woman under any reasonable metric.

As to our universal healthcare, I am psyched to find out we have cuz I can stop paying my $160 a month for that shit. There is no universal healthcare. There is critical care, you are correct about that. Let me illustrate the difference – if I didn’t have healthcare I paid for they would have cut off my leg. That is NOT an exaggeration. They talked about cutting it off anyway – it would have been the most direct way to save my life and stop the infection. Because I had healthcare we went through nearly 2 years of other alternatives. I pray it doesn’t happen to you or yours but you truly haven’t a clue what you are talking about. Check the statistics about how many people have lost everything because they didn’t have healthcare or even adequate healthcare. Then check the statistics on how many of them live in Michigan – maybe if a sufficient number of them are your friends and neighbors you might give a fuck.

Yes, our universal care program is shit. It is, however, universal. Universal does not mean "good", and anyone who uses it to imply that is a weasel fucking bastard. See, that is the problem with text-based communication, and why I am such an insufferable pedant. I am a poor communicator to begin with, and thoughtless to boot. As for whether or not I care... you know I care. I apologize for somehow implying that I didn't. I really am glad Kim is here to point these things out to me.

Better yet, ask the UAW to drop their healthcare, including pension care. That will cut their pay by quite a bit and allow a greater budget to keep more jobs. Just tell ‘em they already have healthcare.

Obviously, that is absurd. However, it does bring up a good point. Honda, Toyota, Hyundai... their domestic workers do not have to bargain for such things because they are a part of the South Korean and Japanese social safety net. Japan and South Korea actually DO have "good" universal health care. The Honda and Toyota plants in America offer health care plans without a union contract in part to not have to worry about unions, but also because their parent corporations can afford it due to a government subsidized cost structure.

I actually am not that attached to Massachusetts – don’t speak for me. And I can promise you that if there was no work for me here I would move my ass because I signed up to live in a free market society. You know where I would LOVE to live – Hawaii. I bet a lot of people would so the government should create and / or relocate a lot of jobs to Hawaii so all of us who live there can go.

You didn't sign up for a "free market society". That's Somalia. You signed up for a constitutional democratic republic that allows a free-ish market because of its obvious benefits, and uses the power of the state to mitigate its costs. Sometimes, you disagree with how it does that, but you also realize that this is as good as it gets without moving to Canada.

It's cold in Canada.

Honda is not subsidized by their government. There is a complicated conversation to be had about the way that they have fluctuated the value of the yen and the advantage that that might present (notice how I can be honest even when it doesn’t serve to prove my argument). However, as I have pointed out to you before our country already assists American car companies – we enforce ‘buy American’. Also, when the big three were trying to push our patriotic buttons they pointed out that they produced in great volume for the military. Well, Japan doesn’t have an active military. Oh, and our military, they don’t pay wholesale. So if we do talk about the yen issue then we need weigh it against the money the big three gets from the government.

Ok, we must both come to an agreement as to what we understand the phrase "government subsidized" means, or we will just keep talking past each other. I think I have expressed what I mean by that phrase pretty well, though. Any way, please expand what you think is and is not "government subsidy".

But all of that is meaningless anyway because most Americans WANT to buy American and if the big three had offered us anything worth buying . . . . we . . . would . .. have . . . *bought* . . . it. Hell, I’m a pinko socialist and I WANT to buy American but I can’t afford to, maybe I could if I was UAW.

Why a self-proclaimed "pinko socialist" would be blaming the UAW... a workers union, for the failure of GM is beyond me. Any way, you will probably be able to buy American very soon.

I will edit this as the night goes by.

****

A continuation of this conversation...

Your 47 dollars is probably right because you said “without benefits” – if you had responded to what I actually said and not tried to bastardize it into a point you could easily argue you would have notice I said “(the above of 80/hr is inclusive of benefits and pension plans, car stipends etc.)”. But okay – 47 – still not sure that I see why assembly line work is worth 47$/hour. I’m open though – show me why. Seriously, convince me that that is a reasonable salary. I don’t see it. The median income in the United States is 43k / year – less than half of the UAW. The median teacher’s salary in the US – 42k/year. The average teacher’s salary in Michigan is about 55k.

I can't do this right now... I'll be be back.

Martha Stewart

2009-05-21T10:18:00.002-04:00

She's the kind of felon that you would let near an axe.

Ok, so I am working on the back yard on Thursdays and Fridays. Last week I removed a great deal of rocks and paver stones from the side of the yard, which will be turned in to a garden. First, I have to till it, though.

I will post pictures later today.

Kate Beaton

2009-05-13T09:13:00.002-04:00

She is a webcomic artist from Nova Scotia, Canada. She produces "Hark! A Vagrant", which is very funny if you are willing to learn about the Crimean war, Diogenes, and the massacre at Glencoe, among other things.

You can find her work by clicking this sentence.

So, last night we had dinner with Andrea's mother and her friend at the Outback Steakhouse at Five Mile and Middle Belt. They are from England, and yesterday was the day before their flight. Andrea, as you know if you read her blog (and you should, she's wicked cool) is moving to Texas in a few months. She is following her husband who has taken a job with the border patrol. His last full day here is the sixteenth of May.

I will miss them dearly.

My friend Ron is becoming a father in the same week as I am. I am slowly but surely moving towards my degree. The economy is shit.

I have no idea what I am doing.

Captain Scott "Scooter" Altman, USN

2009-05-11T14:11:00.002-04:00

Captain Altman is the commander of STS-125, the current Atlantis space shuttle mission servicing the Hubble Space Telescope.

Now, I have made it clear that I have a soft spot for the space shuttle, and I don't like the Orion spacecraft that will replace it. Be that as it may, I am excited at the idea of human space flight. It really is one aspect of humanity that makes us different from any other living creature on earth. Assuming that we can get over this financial slump, my daughter could see commercial settlements on the moon and Mars, and if she wanted to, go to them.

That is some serious shit.

A Scottish Cab Driver

2009-05-05T08:34:00.004-04:00

Dude, he'll never pay for another drink in his life.

Kim Arnold

2009-05-01T13:16:00.003-04:00

She did not fall in love with a man who knows how to lay concrete well.

From Steps you can step upon

These next photos are where Kim came in and saved me from myself.

From Steps you can step upon

So, there you have it. I hope I am a better blogger than a concrete layer.

Russell Wiener

2009-04-24T21:35:00.001-04:00

All right, time for an angry post.

This sentence links to a blog post. About Russel Wiener, and his dad, Michael Savage Wiener.

Read it, and make your own choice.

Dyna Girl

2009-04-23T14:32:00.002-04:00

I have never met her. I only know her through the parts that she chooses to display on her blog. That being said, those parts are poignant, beautiful, and thought provoking. She is a good blogger.

This sentence is a link to her memorial of a good friend of hers.

I will most likely never meet Digital Dan's wife or her children. I will pray for them.

Good luck to all of you.

Mark Hergott

2009-04-22T08:34:00.002-04:00

I don't know what the hell I am doing, and I am doing a bad job of it.

Oh, and this is a link to a tree frog that glows.

Arnold SchwarzenBeef.

2009-04-10T12:52:00.002-04:00

(There would be a video here if you weren't reading this on Facebook)

I am posting this because this is Good Friday, and I am going to eat the hell out of some beef next Friday. Cassie, I may not be the best Catholic, but I give up things during lent out of a real affection for Jesus. He suffered in the wilderness, and then he said to not be dicks to one another. I find that to be pretty cool.

Any way, whether you are Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic, Lapsed Catholic, a skeptic, a Wiccan, a Jew, or anyone else (I would have to type out hundreds if not thousands of sects to do this justice), I wish you blessings as they are revealed to you.

I mean it.

Abraham Lincoln -or- Electric Six.

2009-04-09T16:13:00.001-04:00

What? They're from Detroit.

Fred Mcfeely Rogers

2009-04-07T09:17:00.002-04:00

Fred Rogers was the closest thing to a living saint that I have ever experienced in my life. This supremely kind and calm man taught millions of children the simple joy of sharing and caring for one another. Now, Kim is right... I do tend to dwell on the dark and the negative. Indeed, I honestly think I would be worse if it weren't for Fred Rogers. Which is why this video is so upsetting to me:

I am all for free speech and unpopular thought, but that is libel. I can't begin to express the utter disapproval I have for Fox News.

It's ok to have a point of view. It's not ok to libel Fred Rogers. This will not stand.

This will not stand.

Baby Animals

2009-04-06T12:41:00.002-04:00

Baby Malayan Tapir

Baby Tree Kangaroo

Ok, internet. Which one is cuter?