Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: May 2008
Addicted to Cracked
Cracked.com, that is. Check it out.
It all began with this image,
which hails from this photoshopping contest (oh, yes, I am humbled). The squirrantula, reposted at Leet Geek, led me to this article on the coming zombie apocalypse, which in turn left me spiraling down the gravity well of the black hole that is cracked.com.
It was inevitable. I woke up at 5 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went to the gym and tired myself out before my day even began. Then I saw all of Del Norte and Curry Counties in my office (weeeell . . . 26 people, total) came home & made dinner & here I am, vegging out, looking at creepy animal photoshops.
The Ten Most Sexually Unappealing Craigslist Postings, that killed a half an hour right there.
I’m hopeless. Someone put me out of my misery.
D.
O’Reilly’s meltdown
Before viewing Bill O’Reilly’s four-letter hissy fit on “Inside Edition” (from, what? fifteen, twenty years ago? And why did it surface only now? Not that I’m complaining), you might want to chase all toddlers from the room. Unless, of course, you’re like Karen and me, and you consider it your God-given duty as parents to make sure your kids learn to swear with accuracy, and not shame you with embarrassing diction errors, such as
Mommy, I’m sorry I slammed the oven door and shitted up your souffle.
Back to Bill-O. His meltdown seems to revolve around his ignorance of the phrase, “to play us out.” As in, “And now we’ll welcome Sting to play us out with his new hit, Roxanne.” (Whatever. I’m guessing here.) Since he didn’t understand the words, he refused to say them. He eventually figures it out and that seems to make him madder still; especially since his producer has made him play the guessing game, and didn’t cue him in when he first expressed his incomprehension.
I’m not in broadcasting, but to me, “play us out” sounds like straightforward broadcasting slang. I would guess (correctly) that it meant, “end this segment on a musical number.” Indeed, if you google “play us out” and ignore references to the O’Reilly itty bitty baby tantrum, you’ll find straightforward examples like this or this. From that last link,
:51 – John and Jeff play us out of this hour with Blue Minor.
My suspicion? O’Reilly soon figured out what the words meant, but by then he had already betrayed his ignorance. He knew he had shown himself up as a dummy, and worse, he knew his producer knew it, too, as well as all the stage hands. And he had compounded the problem by getting a little angry.
Any sane man would have used self-deprecating humor to limbo out of the situation with a few shreds of self-respect. But not Bill-O. He has to turn it into someone else’s fault — namely, his writer. There’s something gravely wrong with these words, something so foul about them his tongue snags on them in take after take until, finally, he has to do it his way, with his words. At that point the video goes silent, but it doesn’t take a lipreader to see that the profane hemorrhage doesn’t stop. He throws his pen with a force that would do any scalpel-throwing surgeon* proud, rips off his coat, and storms away.
I’ve said before that at the core of every over-achiever there’s a little boy (or girl) with serious self-esteem problems. This O’Reilly video provides good support for that hypothesis, don’t you think?
This is a man whose ego is paper thin.
D.
*Me? Never. Ever. Not cool, and if there’s one thing I aspire to be, it’s the Fonzie of Surgery.
Edited to add:
Here’s the REMIX.
No points for subtlety: Triumph of the Twit.
Radiofrequency uvulopalatoplasty for snoring
Yeah, you read that title right. Sometimes I feel motivated to make a public service announcement. Not often, but sometimes, and tonight’s the night. And since the chances are pretty good you (or your spouse) snores, I figure I won’t lose too many of you with a relatively serious post.
This first bit is for my malpractice insurance carrier:
I am NOT offering medical advice; I am merely providing information. Read the disclaimer. It has flashy things and animated buttons to keep you entertained.
Another note: my victim patient, Jeannie, has given me permission to use her images in these blog posts. Wasn’t that nice?
Look, she’s even smiling about it.
Follow me below the fold for a discussion of snoring, obstructive sleep apnea, and the use of radiofrequency uvulopalatoplasty to successfully treat snoring.
Junk, Part Deux
Last week, I cleaned out the outer third of our obscenely excessive RV garage in order to create room to clean up the rest of the RV garage. Here’s what I began with this morning:
And here’s where we are seven hours later (with Jake’s help):
Unfortunately, that “clean end” of the garage?
. . . now looks like this.
It’s not as bad as it looks. Everything is neatly sorted into “keep,” “sell,” and “rocket into the sun” piles. Getting this mess to disappear will be relatively easy.
No live-blogging tonight. I might hold myself in high regard, but even I realize that watching me yawn is about as much fun as watching horseshoes rust.
D.
He doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.
Michelle Duggar is pregnant with number 18, which means it’s time for me to unleash more Duggary goodness. If you read that article, you’ll note that Michelle decided to break the news to her kids on the Today Show.
Guess she could have been more tactless. Guess she could have announced on Maury Povich.
Media junkies. Since the Duggars wanna be the rock stars of extreme fecundity, I thought I would give them a few glamour poses . . . a chance, perhaps, to catch Hollywood’s eye.
See you below the cut.
New arrival *updated*
I think I beat Kate to the punch: I’m the first kid on the block with my very own Stonebreaker.
I’ll scan in the cover art this evening. Here’s the front. The back has identical cover art.
Back copy:
SEX GAME
It began with “innocent” coffee-break couplings between overworked nurse and doctor—Velma Edwards and Surgeon Michael Gregg—both unhappily married. It burgeoned into a deadly triangle of ruined reputations when Dr. Alan Loerb wanted to make it a threesome.
It snowballed to tragedy when a drunken auto accident mutilated the beauty of Sylvia Benton, in whose arms Velma’s husband had sought solace.
But the real blast came when Irene, Dr. Gregg’s swinging wife, brought in her pistol and her young lover to blow the lid off!
Their passionate embrace—reflected in the bell of the good doctor’s stethoscope. How steamy is that?
D.
It’s all over but the crying
Garbage, It’s All Over But the Crying . . .
It’s all over but the crying
Fade to black I’m sick of trying
Took too much and now I’m done
It’s all over but the cryingBaby we’re done
From Karen: “Except with Hillary, it would be, ‘It’s all over but the screaming.'” Hissssssss!
D.
Something to consider
From my son:
Dust
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Please improve this article if you can. (May 2007)
More later. I’m watching the returns.
D.
Sweat it out
A question for the women in the room: In high school phys ed, did y’all strip naked for showers? Purely an academic question, naturally, since you never know when I might have to write a scene featuring high school girls in a locker room setting, and I wouldn’t want to get it wrong, would I?
Well, we stripped. It began in junior high, and I’m not sure what the point of it was. Lord knows it wasn’t necessary. We didn’t get all that smelly. At the time, I considered it a rite of passage, or perhaps a hazing ritual. We dissected cadavers in med school in small part to learn anatomy, in large part to overcome the taboo of not cutting people open with sharp implements. So what was the point of getting naked with a bunch of other guys? For what part of adult life did that prepare me?
This is no small point. Like girls, boys mature at different rates. In my 10th grade gym class, side-by-side in the locker room we had a boy who lacked the slightest poof of pubic hair (NOT me, so get that out of your mind) alongside a fellow I’ll call The Donkey (also not me, but if you want to think I’m lying, I won’t argue with you).
The Donkey once told the story of how his girlfriend had broken up with him, but had wanted him back within the fortnight. Implicit was the suggestion they had been sexually active and her dalliances elsewhere had not matched up. We all shook our heads knowingly. With clothes on, we would have figured him a BS artist, but in the locker room, we trusted the evidence of our eyes.
I used to wonder, and perhaps worry a little, about the prepubescent kids. The Hairless Ones. To me, this would be more profoundly disturbing to the adolescent male psyche than girls comparing their breasts’ Tanner Stages. Some girls never get past a Tanner 2, yet they’re just as feminine as a Tanner 4. But the guy with the Tanner 1 prick really does have something to worry about. His whole sexual future depends on making progress. If he’s thirteen and hairless and surrounded by a bunch of Tanner 2s and 3s and even a well endowed 4 (The Donkey), why shouldn’t he worry?
It’s not the worst part about PE. The worst part is war ball. Nevertheless, it ranks up there if you’re one of those Tanner 1s. So I’ll ask again: why was this necessary? Admittedly, I have to get nekkid around the guys in my gym’s locker room, but we’re all adults. It ain’t the same dynamic.
Maybe it’s that old life lesson that the world isn’t fair. I learned early on that some kids were richer than me, cuter than me, stronger or faster than me, more talented than me. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it always would be. I would never be the star quarterback, no matter how much I willed it, and I would never run a mile in under nine minutes. I would never play guitar like Peter Frampton, play chess like Bobby Fischer, or look good with an assault rifle like Patty Hearst.
And I would never, ever be hung like The Donkey.
D.