Democracy v. Communism

Thank goodness the Cold War geo-political chessboard wasn't decided by breakdancing. Otherwise, we'd have received a serious smackdown by the Soviets.

Bad album covers

They're all over the internet--digital images of bad album covers. The imagery runs from outright laughable to what-the-hell-were-they-thinking. I thought I had seen all of the bad covers out there, but I found a few recently that deserve commentary.

Buy my record or I will eat you. Little David Wilkins, king of all the taverns. At first glance I thought perhaps he was British, but the lack of bad teeth indicated that he wasn't. Turns out he's from Nashville, Tennessee (go figure). Despite the fact the he's clutching his chest as a pork roast tries to make its way through his ascending aorta, this guy is still alive. He has his own website here, though the music that plays when the site loads has him singing about food. Stay away from the ham sandwiches, David. You remember how that worked out for Mama Cass.



When he's not beating his girlfriend or playing chicken with trains, RayBob here is making records. This is a true WTF album cover if I've ever seen one. I don't think I've ever heard his smash hit, "I Seen Her First," but it's a safe guess it was quickly followed up with his next smash hit, "You Sure Got a Perty Mouth." And that mullet...holy shit! If you've got more hair on the back of your head than on the sides, you're doing it wrong. Fail!





Let's make a record, Mr. Hat. Not since Mr. Garrison on South Park has there been such a successful man-puppet tag team duo in the entertainment world. Kind of hard to play guitar with a puppet on your fret board hand, isn't it, Don? Or are you Seymour? Fuck, guys, wear nametags or something so we know who's who! It's distinctly possible that the puppet has a better agent and thus wound up with top billing in this act.

That special feeling

One of the downsides of getting older is that some of your bad habits from your younger days begin to manifest themselves. In my case it has been my diet, or lack there of, which was made even worse during my college days when I had to eat what I could when I could, convenience over quality.

At my last doctor's appointment this past November he noted that my bad cholesterol was kind of high. Of course he recommended watching my diet (don't they all) and to start taking fish oil caplets for the Omega-3 compound that helps bring cholesterol and triglyceride levels down. The news worked out well, as I had braces put on my teeth just a few weeks before and my whole diet changed to accommodate them. In the time since the braces went on my teeth my weight is down about 10-15 pounds. On the down side of my doctor's recommendation were the caplets.

I've never been really good at taking pills, which bodes poorly for me if I ever become a celebrity. Fish oil caplets are horse pills, in my opinion. They're about three-quarters of an inch long, so the only way I'm going to be able to take a horse pill is by having one fired down my throat using a bolus gun. Compounding my problem swallowing pills is the brace-related wire that's on the roof of my mouth. Not being able to get my tongue to reach the roof of my mouth affects how I swallow not just pills, but food as well (pizza is an especially risky food for me).

An alternative to the fish oil caplets has been flaxseed oil, but I hadn't been able to find it in a form I could ingest. Until today, that is. The family and I traveled north to Commerce, Georgia, to get a gift certificate as a Mother's Day present for my mom at a store she loves to shop at. As we walked along the storefronts at an outlet mall, we passed one for a place called Vitamin World. On a whim I decided to go in and see what they had in the fish oil category. Once again, they had the caplets the size of horse pills. Damn! But wait...near the top shelf were bottles of flaxseed oil. At first glance all I saw were bottles of pills, but moving down one shelf there were bottles containing flaxseed oil in liquid and in ground form. Huzzah! Finally, flaxseed oil in a form I can take.

I grabbed a bottle of liquid off the shelf and made my way to the register. The Asian couple ahead of me in line seemed to be buying everything that caught their eye. Their final total was over $500. I can imagine that their breakfast each morning consists of a plate of pills and a cup of coffee; if they're hungry enough they'll chase the pills with perhaps some eggs or pancakes. Eventually I was able to shell out $13 for the bottle of flaxseed oil and leave the store.

I started reading the label once we got home and opened the bottle to see what the oil smelled like. No discernible smell, a positive sign as I was worried that it would smell awful. The label called for a teaspoon twice a day, preferable with a meal. I've already eaten, I rationalized, so I opened the bottle and grabbed a teaspoon from a kitchen drawer. No better time than the present, I thought. With some trepidation I poured the yellowish liquid into the spoon, put the spoon in my mouth, and....

Holy crap! For the record flaxseed oil really doesn't have much of a taste but the texture leaves much to be desired. It was like doing a shooter full of Wesson cooking oil. Blah! I grabbed for my water bottle to wash the residue out of my mouth. When they said flaxseed "oil" they weren't kidding. So now I'll be taking the stuff twice a day for a while. But why is it that everything that's good for you tastes like crap?

Breakin' & poppin'

Listen my children and you shall hear, a nightmarish tale (or video in this case) from the 1980s: actor Alfonso Ribiero hawking his "Breakin' & Poppin'" video. Welcome to Hell, kids, and it's only $19.99 plus shipping and handling.

Countdown

Five weeks. Thirty-five days. Eight hundred and forty hours. Fifty thousand and four hundred minutes. That’s how long before the family and I head off to New York for my first visit there in thirty years (I’ll spare you the weeks/days/hours/minutes break down of thirty years). But who’s counting? I am! It was roughly this time back in 1978 when my dad received a phone call from my uncle letting him know that my grandmother had passed away. Funerals are never fun for twelve year olds, and it's not fun to visit a place under such pretexts.

So I’m looking forward to going back to Long Island to visit old stomping grounds, hanging out with family, visiting Manhattan. My daughter insists on seeing the city and I’m okay with that—any opportunity to let her see the Empire State Building &Times Square, and dine on authentic New York thin crust pizza (not the crap that passes for NY style cuisine around here). What I'm really looking forward to is shooting pictures in Manhattan, especially the many examples of architecture to be found there. It'll be hard not to overwhelm my Flickr account after the trip is over.

At the same time I’m a little nervous about the trip. This will be the first time I’ve been to Long Island as a licensed driver, so some of my time of late has been trying to learn the major routes in order to navigate around the place. Although I’ve driven in the very scary traffic around Atlanta on a number of occasions, I’m wondering how well I’ll do in New York traffic on LI. I do plan on avoiding the Long Island Expressway if at all possible, and riding the railroad to travel into Manhattan. My maternal grandfather and my great grandparents are buried in a cemetery in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. I’d like to go pay my respects but I don’t know what kind of neighborhood is around there.

Nonetheless, this will be a good trip. And it’s only five weeks away!

LOL (Ha, ha)

The funniest thing I've seen in a while on You Tube. It's a clip from Detroit's Fox affiliate of one of their on-air talents reading text messages sent by Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to his chief of staff, Christine Beatty (despite the fact that he's married). Kilpatrick is facing multiple felony charges of perjury, misconduct in office, and obstruction of justice. The only thing missing from the reading of these text messages is a softcore porn soundtrack.

Luck of the one-quarter Irish

Hello, blog. I've been neglecting you again and I'm sorry. Life's been busy lately and, well, it's been hard for me to see the humor in things. Not to mention there hasn't been much time to take a simple idea and try to develop it into a full blog entry. No promises, but I'll try to do better.

Life's been kind of a drag of late, but it hasn't been without its surprises. Work has been really friggin' busy, as it usually is at the end of a semester. But everything seemed to hit at once this time and I can't figure out why. Actually I can. The usual housekeeping stuff I have to do at the end of a semester normally keeps be busy enough for a while, but this semester we had the extra bonuses of a faculty third year review, another faculty member starting the process for promotion and tenure, and a spousal hire for someone being offered a job in another department. It's times like these when an effective department head can offer leadership to get things done in a timely manner. Unfortunately, we lack that sort of thing here. I've said it before and I'll say it again: my boss is a nice guy, but he's a dink. I hesitate to use the term "empty suit," but I can't think of a more apt description. And as my boss is in his last year as head, I fully expect him to be "phoning in" his job as he writes more books while he can still use the department as a cheap marketing firm. The end result will be I'll wind up being the defacto head while only looking forward to a whopping $600 raise next year, which, after taxes and increased fees on campus, comes out to around $210. And I don't even get a kiss and dinner before I get screwed.

On the other hand, some of the faculty around here have been very kind to me. I get along quite well with them so that's often not a big deal. But what they did for Administrative Professionals Day was very cool, even if I think it was a bit too much. On the phone one morning a few weeks ago with one of our faculty members I was asked what I wanted for Admin Profs day. Jokingly I blurted out, "A Playstation 3." When the next question was how much they cost, I insisted that I was just kidding and that I'd have one of my own next year. And what should be delivered to my office a few days after April 23? Yeah, a Playstation 3. I work with some good people.

My family ancestry is three-quarters German and one-quarter Irish, and I'll gladly take the luck that comes with the one-quarter of my lineage. Sure, my life will get even busier over the next year but at least it comes with job security. And at least I'll have some shoot-em-up games on the PS3 to take my frustrations out with.