Last night I went out with a friend from the Math department (algebraic geometrist) and drank a whole lot of beer and took some batting practice. It was such a great time, we’re doing it all over again tonight. The only problem was that the bats they have at the cages I go to (it’s part of a bar) only has youth bats. Today after watching the Illini lose and watching most of the Cardinals win, I decided to go do some shopping and get myself a bat. First I went to Meijer, where I picked up barbecue sauce, some Chaser, and some pasta salad. They weren’t selling bats, in spite of the 4+ aisles comprising the sporting goods section. Went to Dick’s Sporting Goods next door, but all the bats were far more expensive than I’d had in mind. While there I noticed that the ass of my pants had torn open. This displeased me, since I like these trousers and hate shopping for clothes. Went to Wal-Mart looking for a bat, no dice. Next stop was Target for some pants. I’ve heard from friends in St. Louis, one of whom a former girlfriend who’s apparently not on speaking terms with me right now, that Target is “the best store ever.” Unfortunately one of those people is apparently not on speaking terms with me right now. Not to mention Lilek’s glowing praise. On a whim, I figured I’d check out if Target has a sporting section. It did. And they stock low-price bats. So I got me a slick Rawlings Elite Stick official softball bat and some large adult gloves. Had a hell of a time getting new pants though. I’d been meaning to buy some jeans, I’ve always hated wearing them, but need to shake up this khaki everyday thing I’ve had going. They didn’t stock suitable khakis for me. I only like the wrinkle-free, non pleated kind; they didn’t have them in my size. I ended up getting some sorta green ones instead. Score 2 for the shake up campaign. It took a long time. On my way out, I saw and subsequently admired some really nice looking young women wearing those short-shorts with the cheeks hanging out the bottoms. I don’t feel guilty about that, my ass cheek was hanging out too, and no doubt they admired it in all it’s hairy glory. Who can resist a cunning linguist when he’s carrying a baseball bat? As a postscript, this webpage finally did me some good last night, aside from the benefits of keeping my friends and family appraised of my situation without spending nickles on long distance. I got a free beer! Like Nick says, “my two favorite kinds of beer are cold and free.” Beats the heck out of the occasional hate mail.

Apparently sleep won’t be coming to me anytime soon. In response, I went to work on one of the walls in the bathroom I’m remodeling. There was some fiberboard stuff serving as wallboard that was rotting away, and it looked terrible by construction site standards, so I tore it all down with my new wrecking bar. I pay some of my bills at the hardware store, that keeps my tool shopping costs down, since I only let myself get new stuff once a month when I pay the bills. Modest discipline to substitute for a wife, I guess. Back to my story… I tore down this rotted fiberboard stuff and found construction materials I’d never seen before. I expected either bare studs or lathe behind this nasty junk. What I found is hardwood lathe that’s jointed together with tongues and grooves. It really looks pretty nice, or it will once I clean all the dirt off of it. If I find this stuff throughout as I tear down the plastic walls that are up in there now, I might have to get real creative with this head. It could potentially be a very cool and rustic crapper.

It fooled me. Who’s is the formidable military being described here?

It’s way past my bedtime, but this is some funny shiznit. I haven’t been keeping up with the exploits of Buck the Marine. Last I heard, he was invading an alternate dimension to test out some of Condoleeza’s attack drones or something or other. That Frank J. is one funny twerp.

Unrelated, but read this. Won’t take long. Do it.

Dang blast! Izzy blew a save, giving up 3 runs in the ninth, and the Cards lost 7-6.

On another note, scroll down and keep your eye on the lefthand column of this page for some GWB2004 campaign news.

You Better Be Praying, Sucka!

I had the muffler re-attached Monday for the reasonable price of $86, including two new pipes. Now that my car is all fixed up, I can feel free to drive it around without being challenged to a drag race at every stoplight by teenagers. It had been a while and I was almost out of food, so I went up to the grocery store. On the way there, I noticed there was a Preying Mantis hanging out behind the windshield wiper. Hanging on for dear life is more like it. He tried pretty hard to hang on, using different techniques, like hunkering down behind the wiper blade, getting in front of the blade so he could press his spindly body against the surface perpendicular to the wind. Eventually, he decided to flee and started to crawl up the windshield. That was a bad idea. Still he tried to hang on, flattening out. His little eyes were pleading with me to stop and let him off. But I had couscous to buy and no time to lend a hand to every predatory insect I might meet, and a few blocks later, his hand (paw?) strength failed on him and he flipped up and over the roof. Poor little bastard.

Cabin Fever

This from my homie Chris in DC on hurricane preparations:(from a hilarious email)

I realized tonight as I set out for the liquor store to buy a 30 pack of Busch that the only preparation I was making in lieu of the approach of Hurricane Isabel was, well, the purchasing of a sizable amount of alcohol. Not water, not batteries (I don’t have anything to put them in) or other supplies, but beer. The way I see it, beer has often served as a sanitary means of refreshment in times of turmoil and a polluted water supply.

Speaking of beer as a sanitary means of refreshment in times of turmoil, I present my review and plot synopsisof Cabin Fever:

Five childhood friends and recent college graduates have a cabin in the woods for a week. The main character is a young man whose childhood was taken away when an employee at the local bowling alley where he played went berzerk and killed his co-workers in cartoonishly grotesque ways. His need to regain lost innocence is projected on his attractive blonde friend who he planned to begin a relationship on this camping trip until he comes to find her innocence tarnished upon hearing her tales of masturbation and partying in Berkeley. The other characters are a hedonistic blonde haired dude and his stunning, superficial girlfriend; and a drunken joker.

Upon arriving at the cabin, Innocence Lost and Blondie go swimming, Sodom and Gammora hop in bed and commence fornication; and the Drunken Buffoon walks off in the woods to piss on leaves, drink beer, and shoot squirrels from the hip with an M-14 rifle. The story picks up with Drunken Buffoon accidentally shooting a diseased hunter whose dog he’d found dead and with his guts rotted out. The man survives the shooting, and then falls into a hole.

Later that night the diseased man comes knocking at the door, his skin falling off and looking for help. DB slams the door in his face upon being recognized and the man goes to steal his truck. To prevent this, they set him on fire and he runs off through the autumn woods to put himself out in the town’s drinking water reservoir. In this region, water flows uphill from the reservoir to the houses, and so anyone who drinks the water also drinks the Diseased Man and gets a leprosy/ebola type disease.

Hedon and Druken Buffoon had made a bet the night before that they would drink only beer and no water the night before, so they’re safe. Innocence Lost drinks tea, and assumedly the flesh eating bacteria cannot survive the boiling temperatures. Blondie, however, is wracked with guilt over burning diseased man and is comforted with a cool glass of standing water with a piece of DM in it. She is discovered to have the disease in a pretty repulsive scene where IL sexually assaults her in her sleep, and the friends make her sleep in a shed.

One by one all the rest of them catch the disease, except for the Hedon, whose self-love leads him to abandon his friends for a night of solo beer drinking under a bush. IL sinks into a violent madness and goes on a killing spree, at one point killing a local by punching a harmonica down his windpipe in an homage to “Once upon a Time in the West” and stabbing another local with a stick, a la “High Plains Drifter.” (Dawg! He had a lotta blood left in him!) All things considered, it was a fairly entertaining film, a teen slasher flick with respectable special effects. There is never an opportunity missed for a disturbing gross-out, from tales of masturbation involving dogs and buttholes and scenes of hot chick flipping hedon over for some naal peneteration, (misspelled that intentionally as I don’t wanna see myself high on google for that particular term) to very gory scenes of dead people and dogs, rotting hot chicks and old dudes, people drinking pieces of dead people, body parts strewn about, and sundry other nasty stuff. If you keep your sense of humor, you’ll have a great time.

One more point, I thought the idea of opening the movie with the scenes of the bowling alley murders was very effective. The murderer cracked a hole into his victims’ skulls with a ball-peen hammer. The theater was pretty empty, and for the rest of the movie, everytime the door was opened, I had the image of a deranged projector operator coming in with a ball-peen hammer and a bad attitude.

There you have it. I spoiled it for ya!

The Cubs are upset that Matt Morris wants the Astros to win the division if the Cards don’t. If I were them, I’d be upset that we (the Cardinals) let them (‘Stros) sweep us this past weekend. That’s what’s got me steamed. No matter how much I say I hate the Cubs, I’d rather see them make the playoffs than the Astros. I think they’d represent out division better with their incredible starting pitching (Prior, Zambrano, Wood, Clement as a long man), and I’m still pulling for the Red Sox in the AL, which would set up an incredible world series.

Steve surmises that the Chinese are either preparing for an actual or a threatened invasion of North Korea. I had speculated wildly on that possibility back in January. For me, it’s a long post, so if you don’t want to read it, I’ll sum up: when the reservists get rotated out of Iraq (something that should happen real soon), we should announce that they’re en route to Korea, setting the conditions for an even greater concentration of NorK military strength on their Southern border and weakening the Northern approach to Pyongyang. In secret, the reservists would go for R & R and debriefing in Australia. The Chinese could then rapidly invade North Korea and hopefully take out the command and control before Seoul gets shelled to the ground, then handle the occupation, reconstruction, and eventual withdrawal to win trust and influence throughout the region, much as we are doing with Iraq. Such a scenario also would reduce the potentially devastating effect of mass migration of refugees into South Korea, but I doubt the South Koreans would ever consider going along with such a risky plan in spite of the justifiable fear of such a situation in the event of North Koreas inevitable inertial collapse. I also exposed myself for the amateur that I am. It was also SDB who wrote: “Amateurs discuss strategy and tactics, professionals discuss logistics.” Guilty as charged. I also suggested in that post that Taiwan might be on the table in exchange for the permanent end to the Korean situation. I definitely don’t agree with that anymore.

I got my DSL issues figured out. I’d taken my router out of the network, since I didn’t really need it anymore and as a conservative guy I don’t like wasting electricity, or wastefulness in general, like opening a new bottle before finishing the last one. I guess something hinky in XP didn’t realize the router was gone and couldn’t figure out where to send uploads. Frankly I don’t get it, but it works…

I’m glad I didn’t see it then, but here’s the political cartoon that the French newspaper Lemonade ran on 9/11. Found that linked from Pave France.

Also read this column from a year ago by Jim Cramer of Kudlow and Cramer, the only news program I can stand watching. Then read this post about Yoko Ono. I believe when Jim writes of history recognizing a certain group of ideological holdouts as fools or worse, he’s referring to her and her ilk.

Here’s two fine links for you to play with. First, the hot sheets turn up evidence that The Bass is conscripting an army of Haitian zombies to invade south Florida. Secondly, I got me one of the new Missouri quarters last night and found this page after failing to describe the design in text over IM. Be the biggest dork in town! Bookmark the page and check daily to keep up-to-date on the latest and greatest twenty-five cent piece! Have the most exciting news at the water cooler when Arkansas comes out!

The Man in Black died this morning.

Lileks has some good words to say for today. So does Green. And of course, VDH.

Added some new blogs. MapChic is an accountant and cartography enthusiast, who oddly doesn’t have such a comprehensive map link as I do, to the U. Texas map database. Dave Barry is the funniest sumbitch around now that the Happy Fun Pundits have found better things to do than make me laugh.

My DSL is screwed up. I can’t upload large files, so I can’t move pictures, can’t post more than a thousand words, and can’t republish my template from home. Bites. I just finished up tearing out those walls in the can and cleaned up all the drywall and the rest of the mess. It’s looking good. I hope to finish up the demo work in there in the next week or so, and then start on drywalling and putting down a new floor. Also gonna go with a pedastal sink to open up even more space. And ceramic tile. Maybe a new tub…

I’d missed it, since I don’t regularly read The Lemon, but this bit on The Lifestyle of a News Story is pretty fucking hilarious.
Found it at The Wasted Times

Read this whole article. It’s about Col. Rick Rescorla, who fought in Ia Drang and died in the WTC two years ago tomorrow. I’ll excerpt a portion, because I like this sentiment:

“You should be able to strip a man naked and throw him out with nothing on him,” he told Hill. “By the end of the day, the man should be clothed and fed. By the end of the week, he should own a horse. And by the end of a year he should own a business and have money in the bank.”

Found at Cold Fury.

Some pretty sound blogging advice is to never write about someone you are seeing until you have developed a fairly serious relationship. It’s an especially bad idea to write that you aim to score with your cousin. Scroll down to the last few paragraphs of the bottom post.

I started demolishing my main bathroom tonight, and it’s a whole lot more satisfying than even taking batting practice. There’s little more joyous than taking down a hated wall, tearing into its guts with a 22 oz. Estwing hammer and glorying in the ensuing cloud of drywall dust. Big mess though, lotsa nails. I should have the demo all done after work tomorrow. For now, go read this article. It mentions in passing Gen. Petraeus, about whom books will be written for centuries.