My tete a tete with the former Prez...

Because most people don't get much of a chance to spend time with a president - former or current - I'm going to try and give you little glimpse at my glamourous life. Secrecy and tact precludes me from telling all, but rest assured I will be revealing the best parts to you guys.

I arrived early, as is my wont when I'm scheduled to meet with former presidents. It's just nice to get a lay of the land, so to speak, since it's already a bit intimidating to meet with a past leader of the free world. When I got to Wal-Mart - yes, I too wondered at his choice of meeting places, but who am I to argue? - I noted there was quite a long line of people clutching books, apparently hoping to catch a glimpse and maybe try to get an autograph. I'm not so hardened that I didn't feel for these people and decided to show my solidarity with the regular folk by standing in line with them.

What a lucky thing for me. I was able to meet Tom, the gay doctor, and his lovely friend, Whatshername. She really was lovely, but she was rather unfortunate in having a forgetable name. Anyway, Gay Tom, Whatshername and I had a wonderful time chatting in line. Tom even bought us all some waters and offered us some spud wedges, which he declared were fabulous. That's just how we are in Wisconsin, what can I say?

Anyway, we were having so much fun in the party aisle with the mini Magic 8 Balls, Sponge Bob party favors and Barbie balloons that the time got away from us. It hardly seemed like a minute more than two hours of standing in one place. Well, knowing that presidents are usually sticklers for punctuality, I was fixing to say my goodbyes to my new friends when the line started moving.

'What the heck,' I figured. 'Might as well just spend some more time with these folks. The former president can wait.'

We moved forward at a pretty good clip. Down the party aisle, around the front, and up the center aisle. It was a long line and it stretched back and forth around ten aisles. I was sorely tempted along the way by many wondrous items like dog biscuits and toilet scrubbers, but I had important people to meet, so I left the goodies behind for another trip.

Gay Tom and Whatshername walked with me. I think they were hoping to ride my coattails in for a little face time with the Prez.

An eager. young intern type took my books for me...clearly she recognized me and was doing a bit of sucking up. She passed my books to another aide and told her they belonged to me. The aide nodded knowingly...

I don't want to talk out of shop or anything, but since you guys are my blog pals...I'm going to include a complete transcript of my private conversation with the former President of the United States:

Aide: These are his.
Former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter: (looks up) Oh thank you.
Me: Thank you sir.
Former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter: Oh, well, thank you for coming out.
Me: Thanks for being here sir. Thanks very much.

Pundits will be reading what they want into that exchange, but I'm not going to stoop down there in the gutter with them.

Gay Tom, Whatshername, and I walked out together. We were, understandably, giddy from the heady experience.

'Wow...this line is still really long,' I said to my new friends.

'Well, thank god we weren't way back here,' said Gay Tom. 'These people are going to be here forever! Forever!'

I think a Sponge Bob flew by my head...

Forget degrees of Kevin Bacon...how far from porn are you?

Has anyone else noticed that the web has gotten sort of squeaky clean lately? What happened to the days of porn just popping up (or is that out?) while surfing? Are those days gone forever?

As an experiment, I will go forth and Goggle seemingly innocent words and phrases in an attempt to accidentally find some porn sites. Good god, the sacrifices I make...if you don't see me for a while...

Anyway, converse amongst yourselves...any funny porn popping up stories to share?

Okay...that's weird...but, I'll go anyway

In a bit of blog irony (would that be blogrony?) or some such thing, my plans for a quiet Thursday night sucking back a drink or two have just changed. Now, I'm going to try and shake hands with a real man.

A couple of days ago, Zombieslayer did a post on 'The Man' and I commented that no one in Bush Co. was likely to be shopping at Wal-Mart any time soon.

No...I'm not going to tell you Turdblossom was shopping for skivies in aisle six today. This is much better than that. Jimmy Carter is going to be signing his new book at the local Wal-Mart superstore. It's true...Secret Service has been through the place for the last week.

Whacked out...indeed...but I'm going to be there.

For some weird reason, the Milwaukee area has been a magnet for politicos of all stripes the last few years. During the campaign Bush stopped here twice and his wife came out once. Kerry made his stops here too. But this is the first time that a real President has been in the area since I've been here.

What? Didn't I just say Bush was here twice?

Yes, I did...and I stand by my statement that this will be the first real President stopping here during my time here. Bush might be your president, but he's not mine. In fact, I've decided to dismiss him as a spoiled, rich, bastard who's not even worthy of my scorn. You can keep that 'man of faith' and any god he worships.

Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, is someone that I can respect.

I might not think of him as the best President of my lifetime, but I believe he did a respectable job when in office and a more than respectable job when out of it. He has always been candid about his faith and he backs it up with actions. That quietly commands respect, if you ask me.

So, while Junior stands in front of carefully-orchestrated, mocked-up scenes of rebuilding after disasters, Jimmy Carter has been busy actually pounding nails in houses for the poor. Junior talks about his faith with a bull horn, and Carter quietly earns the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

Anyway, you can call Carter a peanut farmer, say he's not a savvy politician, even say he seems a bit goofy...but in my book he'll always be a man for trying honestly. Bush...well, he'll never be a real man, no matter how many troops he commands or how loud he proclaims his hollow faith. A real man is honest and has character...and you can't buy those things.

So, I bought Jimmy Carter's new book.

I'll be standing there in line. And if I get to see the guy and have my book signed, I'll leave happy knowing that I've seen a real man...

For your weekend pleasure...

Because there's no better time than the weekend to enjoy a little cigarette square dancing...

See, just another reason to love the Archive.There are some pretty cool things over there. Including old movies, concert recordings, cartoons, and lots more. Fun times and a great resource if you're into stuff like that.

Hedy Lamarr...smart and beautiful

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." - Hedy Lamarr

I love Hollywood... but I really love old Hollywood. So, since Zombieslayer has the hot women of today covered, I'm going to look back at the hot women of yesterday.

First up - Hedy Lamarr. I never knew just how hot she was until I read a biography on her. After that...I was enamoured.

Hedy Lamarr - or rather, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler - was born in Vienna, Austria in 1913. She did some German and Czech movies and gained worldwide buzz after doing a now-famous nude scene in a movie called 'Extase.' Hollywood came calling soon after.

She played sultry roles in Algiers(1938), Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), Tortilla Flat (1942), White Cargo (1942), and many others. She was known as 'The Most Beautiful Woman In Films.'

All that makes her plenty hot in my book, but she was also very smart which makes her downright smokin'.

During the war, Lamarr met an avant-garde musician, George Antheil, at a party and they started talking. Legend has it that she was so interested in their conversation that she left her phone number written in lipstick on his windshield. Perhaps that's true - perhaps not.

What is true, is that the two did continue to talk and came up with a system for alternating a radio signal over a series of 88 frequencies in order to prevent it being jammed. Known as frequency hopping, it was intended to be used for torpedo guidance. Lamarr received a patent for it in 1942. The navy didn't use it in that application, however, it was later used in military communication applications and was first applied in action during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is the basis for cel phone technology today and is known as spread spectrum technology.

Also, despite being born in Austria, Lamarr was a strong supporter of the Allied war efforts. She has the distinction of raising the most money at a single event to sell war bonds. She raised $7 million dollars.

Anyway, she was beautiful and smart...a deadly combination.

"Perhaps my problem in marriage--and it is the problem of many women--was to want both intimacy and independence. It is a difficult line to walk, yet both needs are important to a marriage." - Hedy Lamarr

Why do we love to hate beautiful women?

First off, an open-ended question - why do we both exalt beauty and despise it at the same time? This is something I've wondered for a long time, but was reminded of when recently reading a biography of Rita Hayworth which reminded me of Hedy Lamarr. It got me thinking about our cult of beauty and the dark flip side that goes with it.

Let me narrow it down a bit though, because I'm already having trouble with rambling here. Why doesn't our society allow women to be intelligent, accomplished and beautiful? Or rather, since there have certainly been many women who have been all three, why does our society discourage women from being all three at the same time?

I'm actually most interested in why it is that women are particularly bad about this. There's often talk about men having all the control and setting unrealistic expectations for women, wanting to keep them in the kitchen, and so on, but I believe that it's other women who most actively fetter ambitious women, particularly if they are attractive and intelligent as well as ambitious.

I used to work in an office where there was a girl who was very attractive. Okay, she was beautiful. There was no arguing it either; she was beautiful. She was also young, wore mini-skirts and happened to be very intelligent. The first two things were held against her and the last was seldom acknowledged. Even now, I suspect that two of my friends from that office will be reading this over the weekend and smirking a bit. They know who I'm talking about and will likely relate my line of questioning to the line of the afore mentioned mini-skirts.

Anyway, what always struck me was that the people who had the most derogatory comments were always women. You didn't have to listen hard to hear the unspoken, 'I can't wait until you get married and have kids, we'll see how perky you are then...' in every exchange.

I can't count how many times I heard how slutty those mini-skirts were. Of course, they weren't called slutty, they were called inappropriate. (Inappropriate for your fat ass, was my usual unspoken thought.) But never once did any of those women take the 19-year-old girl at her first 'grown up' job aside and tell her this directly. It was just easier to be snide in the break room I guess.

Oddly, the people who had no problem acknowledging that she could be smart and beautiful were the men who worked in the same department as her and another girl - who also happened to be smart and beautiful - who spent most of her time in the same office area.

The story isn't a sad one though. She figured that she was being mocked and the length of her skirts increased and eventually turned into slacks, she mostly just ignored the other women, did her work and finished the college education that she was paying for herself, and is now the controller of the U.S. office of a German solar energy company. She's 25 years old.

So, why is it that we continue to believe that a woman can't be beautiful, smart and completely competent all at the same time when, clearly, they can be?

Proud to be an American?

Does this make anyone proud to be an American? Maybe it does and I missed the memo about how to be a true patriot.

So, just who are the terrorists? We're fighting a 'war on terror' - but guess what, we're the ones resorting to terror.

And does it seem just a bit disingenuous that an administration that will reveal the identity of a CIA operative for political gain in one breath, will refuse to comment on whether or not they're operating secret interrogation facilities around the world because they don't want to jeapordize CIA operations?

Oh yeah...makes me proud. Think I'll go roast some babies or something.

More fun with logs...

Since I compulsively check my logs for fun...

Seeing some of the places people are from is a bit like seeing an exotic stamp on an envelope in your mailbox. For those of you who have forgotten, stamps were twee little stickers that we affixed to envelopes back when people used to mail things and get letters in the mail.

Some of the fun places I've had show up in my logs lately are:

• Whitehorse, Yukon Territory


• Old Wives, Saskatchewan


• Westfield, New Zealand


• Eindhoven, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands


• San Jose, Costa Rica


• Pune, Maharasta, India

There are also the regulars who make my day complete. Joe from Columbus, Eileen from Cincinnati, Laura in Chicago...I just love to see Greendale, Detroit, Greenville, International Falls, New York, Sacramento, etc...all the places where my blog buddies reside. I'm always glad when people stop by and make the world a little less lonely.

And on an always festive note, here are some of my new favorite searches that got you here:

• pictures of moldy fruit


• green tea frap sucks


• double suck


• mall girls


• thongtastic


• why does the thong have a triangle


• sawing a zip to a fabric


• 80s mullet + photos

*If you're the mysterious person from Old Wives...leave a comment...the suspense is killing me!

**Any hot Russian girls...well, you know...

All Hallows E'en...sort of

It was a bit odd to be out and about since I've been a recluse for a while, but it was nice to get a round warm 'welcome backs' and 'where the hell ya beens.'

I bailed on the costume thing this year. It was enough effort to go out be sociable. I'm sort of bummed though, since I like doing up a good costume. Had a good time nontheless.

Here's some shots of the fun, courtesy of my friend Nick and his camera. He's the leprechaun.

It was probably a 90% costume wearin' crowd at the Brazen Head Pub here in West Bend. Lots of fun was had by all. These are the things that can happen if you're single. And yeah - it really can be that kind of bar...and often is...



















There you have it...just another night in the WB. Mmm hmm, that's right...West Bend, where people love Halloween and girls have just gotta flash. (That might become our new slogan.)

Request...

From time to time, I'm moved to tears. This is one of those times. I'm both saddened and heartened at the same time. Saddened by a tragic loss, just one of many that happen every day. And heartened that someone I know - if even only by way of the computer and blog exchanges - is doing something about it. I'm moved by his compassion.

Please, just follow this link and decide for yourself whether or not to get a bit involved. For any who don't know him, Michael is legit. He's a caring man who is doing what he can to help this young Chinese woman out.

Here comes the calm...

There's through road about a block from me - it's a main road, but not a real busy road - and a few minutes ago there was a frantic burst of traffic. It's nearly died down. Anywhere else, I wouldn't have noticed. Or, if I did notice, I wouldn't have instantly understood.

See, it's quarter till and the Packers start playing at noon.

You may think I'm kidding when I talk about Packers' fans, but I'm not. They are a different breed indeed...

Whenever I say this, there's always someone who says something like, 'Yeah, Bears' fans are nuts too,' or 'The old Browns were like that...'

There's no comparison though. You don't hear much about Cheeseheads Gone Wild because fans here aren't like that. There's no rioting when the Packers win a Superbowl, there's no shootings when they lose... Heck, there aren't even big brawls when the occasional Detroit fan shows up at Lambeau Field - good-natured heckling, but even that is followed by a round of beers for all.

No, this goes way deeper than that.

Right before I started this post, I was counting about a car a second in short bursts followed by a lull that coincides with the traffic light two blocks away. Just now, there were three cars in five minutes. This is not poetic license either. For the next two hours, the streets will be empty. If you need to do any shopping, now is the time to go.

When I first moved here, I used to jokingly say that I was expecting to get pulled over for driving while the Packers are on. That might be an exaggeration, but there were more than a handful of people who asked why you would be driving while the Packers were on.

I figured out that I could probably get away with any driving infraction on the planet if the Packers were on the telly...

'Do you know why I pulled you over?'
At which point, I lean over and turn the radio up. It's tuned to AM...and the Packers.
'Oh...I'm sorry sir.'
'It's okay officer...we've got the ball back...and I'm headed home for some Fondu and the second half."
This is the spot in the game where Brett Favre inexplicably rifles the ball into oblivion and the eager arms of whatever Vikinglionsaintetc defender is farthest from any Green Bay receiver (you may laugh, but it happens nearly every game). The cop groans. I groan. He's about to cry, but manfully keeps it inside.
'Well...'
The cop doesn't finish, but I can hear what he means...
'You can go...If you want to run down some innocent pedestrians, I won't stop you... Hell, if they're wearing a Vikinglionsaintetc sweatshirt, I'll come out and pin a jaywalking ticket to their cold, dead bodies...'
He doesn't say this, of course, but you can tell he's thinking it.

Anyway, the streets are now as empty as... (I was going to insert something about Bush or the Republican party here...you know...something about emptiness and Bush's brain...or empty like a Republican promise...or as empty as the Republican party is of unindicted leadership...but that would have been a cheap shot and, frankly, I've got a game to watch).

No, really...I've got to go...

Thought for the day...

In case you were wondering, adding chocolate ice cream to your coffee does not make it a mocha.*

* The preceding experiment was done at nearly sea level using African coffee beens and generic chocolate ice cream. I don't believe that using premium ice cream would have improved the results. Feel free to try it yourself, but I would recommend that you just take my word for it...

And this is for Eileen alone...she does nice things for people

Okay, here you go Eileen... The origins of your super awesome (and as yet undefined...) superpowers. I always knew weird shit was happening in that darkroom. This means, of course, that John Hart will also have superpowers. It remains to be seen whether he will realize it and then whether they will be used for good, or evil. That's certainly something to wonder about...

Just a little lovin' for my friends Eileen and Josh...

Everyone should be a comic book hero... Now, if we only had some actual super powers. Or at least interesting lives.

At least I'm aware that Eileen is alive. Numbed by endless album listening perhaps, but alive nontheless. I think I merely dreamed of a friend named Josh...it was so vivid too, right down to his undying love for Taco Bell and U2...weird little details that made it all so real.

So, this is just a little comic book cover for my friends - real and imagined - just to let you guys know I still luvs ya...even if you've disappeared into the whirling vortex of big city livin'.