I saw someone (sorry, forgot who) mentioned that new show "Hit Me Baby One More Time" or whatever it's called, and that you get to *vote* on which washed-up relic was the best during the episode. It's getting so that you can't have a program anymore without a viewer vote. Before you know it, on "The L Word" you'll be deciding who gets to eat who.

Posted by: Ted at 07:35 AM | category: Square Pegs
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1 *Before you know it, on "The L Word" you'll be deciding who gets to eat who.*

Seriously, that's when you'll be seeing a rise in demand (ahem) of 3-D goggles.

Posted by: dawn at June 12, 2005 11:42 AM (Dh1V0)

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Our next blogger get-together will be on June 25th at the Prince William County Stadium to watch the Washington Nationals farm club play the Baltimore Orioles farm club. This could be the start of a long and heated rivalry.

I'll be there for sure, and I believe the rest of the family is in this time too. Rob & Big Hair have confirmed as well.

Last time we got a block of seats and they were pretty darn good at only $9.00 each. We had a great time, so c'mon out!

Posted by: Ted at 09:44 PM | category: Square Pegs
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Something that really irritates me is when listening to a song and coming across something like this:

"I can't stay on your life support, there's a shortage in the switch" -- Pink, Just Like A Pill

I love that song, really I do. But I cringe every time I hear "shortage in the switch". I realize that the tune flows better with that phrase, but c'mon, it's not slang or idiom, it's an intentional misuse of a word that makes it nonsense. You can have a short in a switch, but not a shortage.

Nitpicky? You bet.

Need another example? How about in Maria Muldaur's Midnight at the Oasis. A very sexy song with a wonderful melody, sung by a singer with a great voice for it, and the word play and imaging is excellent. Oasis, sultan, camel, sheik, belly dancer, nomad, and so on, right up until the line:

Come on, Cactus is our friend

Cactus?!?!?!?! Where the hell did the cactus come from? I thought we were in a thousand and one Arabian nights, not a Roadrunner cartoon. You say cactus and I'm picturing the American southwest or Mexico. Your romantic camel just became a burro refusing to budge for no damn reason while Gabby Hayes mutters "dagnabbit". Talk about a mood breaker.

What about you? Got some song lyric that just grates on your nerves?

Posted by: Ted at 05:57 AM | category: Square Pegs
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I'm *still* getting comments and email about my posts on stripper music. If you Google "Stripper Music", Rocket Jones comes up #1.

No idea what I'm talking about? Follow that link and read the comments, then let everyone know what your favorite music is to watch and/or dance to.

Posted by: Ted at 06:06 AM | category: Square Pegs
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I don't think I've mentioned my view of the whole spectacle.

When that much money is involved, I start with the assumption that everyone is lying. Since I can't see for myself the mannerisms and reactions of the parties involved, forming any opinion would just be shooting off my mouth.

I have to trust the system to do the right thing.

Posted by: Ted at 05:20 AM | category: Square Pegs
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That probably should be Dad Bachelor instead, to put it into the right order.

My wife Liz needed a break, so she left from work on an overnighter out of town (tomorrow is her day off). She had enough travel points for a freebie at one of the hotel chains, and is now, even as we speak, pulling the handle on slot machines and maybe even placing a bet or two on the ponies.

I'll probably do something similar this fall, 'cept I'll head south to spend the weekend launching rockets down in North Carolina. She's got her ways of burning money. I've got mine.

Mookie has been agitating for a party. Her birthday parties always suck because in July everyone is out of town for the summer. This year she came up with the idea of a birthday/end-of-school party, to be held in the afternoon of the last day of school. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and two fake heart attacks on my part, she whittled the guest list down to 50.

The next battle was over the venue. Her idea (and not all that bad) was to have the party in our backyard and the common area behind our house. The stopper there was the certainty of neighborhood crashers, some who would probably be taking full advantage of the chance to case my home for a later, unsupervised, visit. Nope, our house was out for that many kids.

We suggested checking into pavilions at some of the local parks, and this afternoon Mookie and I drove to one close by and looked around. Even if it was too late to reserve a pavilion for next friday (as I suspected), there was still plenty of room to spread out blankets and toss frisbees and footballs and kick around the hacky sack. We found the number for the park office and she made the call.

Half an hour later we were in the park office and I was signing the contract to reserve the largest pavilion for the entire day. We got it for half price because it was a weekday ($20 bucks and some change - cheap!), and we were about 15 minutes ahead of a cub scout leader who also wanted it. Maximum of 50 kids, no alcohol, no live band or DJ, all the usual stuff you'd expect.

So that was the "dad" part. The "bachelor" part isn't that my wife is away until tomorrow night, it's because I had a bowl of corn flakes for dinner.

Posted by: Ted at 07:22 PM | category: Square Pegs
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What the hell happened?

I remember when you'd have a barbeque by throwing some hot dogs and burgers on the grill and lay out a bowl of baked beans, another of potato salad, and maybe some cole slaw and pickles. Then Atkins came along and the meat disappeared instantly while everything else went untouched. So you adapted and grilled a ton o' critter-du-jour and maybe a few veggies alongside. Now it's like the pendulum swung back the other way while I wasn't looking.

We've been eating a lot of salads lately, because that's what we do in the summer. I might cook up a burger or chicken breast each, but just as often we'll forage from the salad bar in the fridge.

We've also had quite a few visitors over for dinner recently, but apparently they're all on the anti-Atkins diet and nobody bothered to warn me. Going through the fridge this morning, I found Italian sausages, marinated chicken breasts, pork roast and a big bowl of leftover Chicken Mo Fo. I'm not a fanatic about wasting food, but throwing out that much would be ridiculous.

For lunch today, I'm having a bowl of meat. For dinner tonight, we're having leftovers.

Posted by: Ted at 06:09 AM | category: Square Pegs
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Driving past Ikea, an employee wearing the standard blue and yellow work outfit was waddling through the crosswalk, and not being brisk about it. Sitting there, waiting for said employee to clear the street, it occurred to me that since Ikea gives everything some odd name, he probably works under a sign that says "Rolypoly".

Posted by: Ted at 12:09 PM | category: Square Pegs
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Last night was my wife's late night at the office, and she had errands to run afterwards. When she walked in the door, she handed me a grocery bag full of things, dug a piece of paper out of her purse, dropped it into the bag and commanded me to "Bake!"

It's some kind of cookie that one of the nurses brought in. Liz loved it so much that she got the recipe and stopped on the way home to get the ingredients. I'm thinking Thursday evening, since it's supposed to rain then. I'll let you know how they turn out, because they do sound yum.

Posted by: Ted at 06:08 AM | category: Square Pegs
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1 Looking for testers?

Posted by: dawn at June 07, 2005 07:35 AM (Dh1V0)

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This makes sense:

It's infinitely better to work with nature than to work against it - just as it's better to work with the grain of the wood. -- Dame Jill Knight

Then again, so does this:

There is nothing that great about nature. Nature is full of diseases; it's full of failures. Almost every organism that's born on the planet fails - doesn't make it to reproductive age. Humans are rather better than that - most of us do make it to reproductive age. In fact many of us reproduce. That's a great achievement, and that's an artificial achievement. If you leave it to nature, all you get is a lot of dead babies. -- Oliver Morton

Hmmmm.

Posted by: Ted at 04:49 AM | category: Square Pegs
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1 Well, that Oliver Morton guy's a real ray of sunshine huh?

Posted by: shank at June 06, 2005 08:22 AM (+H1yK)

2 How about this:
It is best to toward life and health, whichever way that goes.

Posted by: Rachel Ann at June 06, 2005 08:55 AM (Jgwqx)

3 Ollie sounds like he's auditioning to be Kevorkian's chaplain.

Posted by: Ted at June 06, 2005 09:35 AM (blNMI)

4 I bet Oliver Morton is would be big on human enhancement, or cyborgs y'know, then we'd be ultra perfect, screw that bag nature.

Posted by: Oorgo at June 06, 2005 11:35 AM (lM0qs)

5 It's a process as medical knowlege expands. My dad got a new knee last month, fifty years ago that kind of joint replacement was science fiction. We've moved towards the scary future in such tiny incremental steps that Shelley's Frankenstein happens every day in operating rooms all over the world. In her day it was horror fiction. Add better nutrition and biochemistry, and I'd argue that compared to a century ago we already *are* ultra-perfect.

Medical ethical debate isn't a new thing. It happened with germ theory, it happened with blood transfusions and organ transplants. Yesterday's crime against nature becomes tomorrow's commonplace.

Posted by: Ted at June 06, 2005 07:44 PM (+OVgL)

6 Ah yes, we may live longer, we may have cushier lifestyles, but I ask you, are we happy? Has our science crushed crime, poverty and racism? And how many extra fellow-humans can we kill in one fell swoop with our ultra-perfect science?

Sure I may be happier as I sit watching easily accessible porn and eating nachos, and if I live to 100 I'll probably be alive in some nursing home screaming obscenities and shitting my pants, all because science kept me alive.

Posted by: Oorgo at June 07, 2005 11:28 AM (lM0qs)

7 Now who's being a ray of sunshine?

Posted by: Ted at June 07, 2005 11:31 AM (blNMI)

8 lol! I never claimed to be an optimist.

Posted by: Oorgo at June 07, 2005 01:37 PM (lM0qs)

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Credit where due. Sometime late this morning we lost internet service at the house. When I got home around 1pm I did the normal routine (reset the modem, reset the router, reboot the PC), but apparently not in the correct order or something. A call to Comcast and the help desk technician helped us get back up and running in less than an hour.

I also note that they've gotten used to the idea that many people hang routers off their modems. Time was, they'd have you disconnect everything so that only your PC was on the modem. Now they assume you're using the router and deal with it in a generic way.

Comcast has been extremely reliable for us over the last several years, and although fixes haven't always been this quick and easy, they've gotten it right sooner or later. Your milage may vary, but based on my experiences I'd recommend them.

Posted by: Ted at 02:46 PM | category: Square Pegs
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I'm pissed off right now. Mookie has spent probably 40+ hours as a student volunteer doing stage managing work for a show put on tonight by her school choir, including 12 hours just in the last few days.

Burney, the choir teacher, didn't see fit to say thank you to her or the other three kids who ran the stage and handled lighting and cues. Not even a mention in the program. He did give the kids what they took as a veiled threat before the show about not screwing it up.

The title of this post is Google-bait. I want anyone who looks for "GarField" or "music" or "choir" or "Burny" to find this.

Mookie would probably say something like, "Mr. Burny, you suck.", because she's too polite to flat out call you an asshole. But I'm not.

In fact, the phrase "ungrateful cocksucker" comes to mind.

Posted by: Ted at 10:32 PM | category: Square Pegs
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I'm tired of those lame Bush's Baked Beans commercials. I bet that I could dice that canine traitor fine enough that nobody would know the difference between salt pork and salt Duke.

The more I hear about it, the less I want to see Star Wars. I'd spend the entire movie snickering and mocking the lame-ass names that pepper the franchise. I almost retched over the original Luke "Skywalker", and it's gone downhill in a hurry from there.

The family of "Deep Throat" may cash in on fame. Surprise, surprise. He wasn't the hero a lot of people were hoping for, he was a disgruntled employee getting even for being passed over on a promotion. In hindsight, being capable of that kind of treachery makes me believe that it's a good thing he was never put in complete control of the FBI. I'm not defending Nixon and what that gang of nimrods did, but it's now obvious that he wasn't the only asshole involved either.

Speaking of, damn Bush for causing those homes in California to fall off that mountainside. I bet global warming or nuclear winter or something eco is the cause of it.

Posted by: Ted at 05:34 AM | category: Square Pegs
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Our next blogger demolition derby get-together will be on June 25th at the Prince William County Stadium.

The Nats Kory Casto just ended a streak of eleven straight games where he hit a double. The MLB record is seven games, held by several players. And who says there's no excitement in single-A ball? Heck, they even sell beer!

The Prince William Cannons Potomac Nationals will be playing the Frederick Keys. Last time we got a block of seats and they were pretty darn good at only $9.00 each. We had a great time, so c'mon out!

Posted by: Ted at 05:40 AM | category: Square Pegs
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Ace, among others, has cowbell.

Random Nuclear Strikes has Professor Booty (not safe for work).

What'cha think, a little Rocket Jones bouncy-bouncy for special occasions?

Posted by: Ted at 03:56 PM | category: Square Pegs
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Posted by: Ted at 05:18 AM | category: Square Pegs
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1 I'm still not cancelling the dial-up I have for backup.

Posted by: CGHill at May 31, 2005 12:54 PM (ZaLsE)

2 You are obviously secure in your masculinity.

Posted by: Ted at May 31, 2005 02:05 PM (blNMI)

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Over the holiday weekend I finished reading Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, a fictional story about an interesting lady. It was written in 1722, four years after his classic Robinson Crusoe.

What amused me though, was the title of the work as presented on the first page:

The Fortunes & Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whoerof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and dies a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.

Ms. Flanders (not her real name, we never learn that) is an extraordinary character, and despite the gruesome litany of her exploits given above, she's not an unkind person and is easy to be sympathetic to. The place of her birth, Newgate, was a prison of the day, where her mother was under a sentence of death.

An excellent read, once you get into the flow of the archaic writing style and vocabulary.

Posted by: Ted at 04:57 AM | category: Square Pegs
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Rachael and I were talking about blogs and blogging the other day, and she mentioned how many of her friends have Live Journals that they use as a place to vent and rant.

If you've ever spent any time skimming through Live Journals, you'd come away with the impression that half the teens in America are Columbine-capable manic depressives with a severe death wish.

Rachael admitted to being worried about some of her friends that she doesn't see very often, because she reads their Live Journals and expects them to be seriously screwed up in the head. Then, when they get together she's a little freaked by how normal and happy they are.

That's the problem with blogs in general. Your place to rant and rave or bare all or throw out wry commentary is nothing more than a mask. Intimacy is simulated by the details and personal nature of one's posts, but we're all just looking at the face the author wishes us to see. When you don't understand that or forget, then you get a very skewed perspective on who a person is and what they're really like. Little wonder then, that not only is it almost impossible to adaquately explain what blogging is to someone who's never heard of it, but that the whole blogging phenomenom is so misunderstood by pretty much everyone (media, politicians and even bloggers themselves).

Posted by: Ted at 07:09 AM | category: Square Pegs
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1 Well we'll just have to test you theory when you come through CT and lunch with Spork and I!

Mwuahahahaha.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at May 29, 2005 08:01 AM (ics4u)

2 unfortunately, for my co-workers and my family, I'm pretty much the same all the time.

Posted by: Derek at May 29, 2005 09:57 AM (iY1/W)

3 I'll bring the grated strychnine.

Mwuhahahahaha!

Posted by: Tuning Spork at May 29, 2005 04:18 PM (Rl1kU)

4 I just hope you guys aren't too disappointed when you find out that I'm really a short asian lady with thick glasses and a thicker accent.

Posted by: Ted at May 29, 2005 04:53 PM (+OVgL)

5 I already had you pegged as looking like Edna Mode, just not as masculine.

Posted by: Rob@L&R at May 30, 2005 10:29 AM (rZxIa)

6 I think that it was you who, when I had Caterwauling dot com running, was shocked to find out that I'm pretty blase and quiet in person. Everything I wrote on the blog was true, and the rants were real. But that was only one side of my personality. Hell, I got so much vitriol out of my system online that I didn't have any energy left to drop-kick a Care Bear in a toy store.

Posted by: dawn at June 01, 2005 03:06 PM (jFpDX)

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Peeps, I'm taking a couple of days off for an extra-long weekend. This is my first real time off since last August.

I'm not doing anything special, just some down time. I've got a long list of little things to do around the house which I may or may not bother with. Rocket Jones falls into that category, so if you don't hear from me for a few days, well, you know I'll be back soon enough.

In the meantime, go visit Alien Loves Predator. Really. I had tears from laughing so hard.

Posted by: Ted at 07:11 AM | category: Square Pegs
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1 I have a ton of crap to do around the house too, but I'm still blogging.

Wuss!
Girly Man!
Mama's boy!

Oh wait...
I haven't even answered my comments let alone posted!

Oh GREAT!

Thanks a lot Ted.
Now I'm a girly man too!
I hope you're happy now!

Man, you're a bad influende on me

Posted by: Tricia at May 26, 2005 08:38 PM (lRTFS)

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Female: I hate having my period.

Me: Look at the bright side.

Female: What bright side?

Me: In school, you never had to go do a problem at the black board while sporting a boner.

Female: *snort*

Posted by: Ted at 07:28 PM | category: Square Pegs
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