Happy Halloween

Law enforcement quote of the week: Halloween Edition

"Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul."

"Beat 'em or burn 'em. They go up pretty easy."

"Yeah, they're dead, they're all messed up."

-Sheriff McClelland, unknown county in rural Pennsylvania, commenting on an outbreak of zombie attacks.

Five Things You Don't Know About MizBubs

1) I am not a girl-genius.

2) In 1979, I rode on Ozzy Osborne's tour bus. Unfortunately, I didn't know who he was at the time.

3) I used to teach Sunday School at our church.

4) I once used paper towels and strapping tape to bandage a drill injury on my hand. I subsequently received 7 stitches.

5) An ancestor, Abraham Clark of New Jersey, signed the Declaration of Independence.

After the party

I learned a valuable lesson after the party last night. That lesson is, don't apply liquid latex close to your hairline, or on your sideburns. It will hurt coming off.

On a brighter note, I now have a couple of truly disgusting flaps of bloody latex, complete with fake beard hairs stuck to them, in a plastic bag.

Looks like some lucky coworker is going to get a surprise on his desk in the next couple of days.

Hubbub

There was plenty of that today. Running around, all three of the Bubs girls sewing like crazy to get ready for the big Halloween party tonight. This is what our dining room looked like late Friday night. It looked even woolier by Saturday afternoon.

A friend of ours throws a really great Halloween party every year. We have three big social occasions every year, and this friend throws two of them--Halloween and New Year. We do 4th of July. Anyway, MizBubs ended up cancelling her trip to Iowa this weekend and we were able to go to the party together!! YAY!

More to follow.

The dangers of pole dancing, Part II

In this lesson we learn about gravity:

The dangers of pole dancing

After reading about the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Set controversy, I wondered if we, as a society, were facing an epidemic of pole-dancing danger. So I took on the task of googling pole-dancing and its variants. After hours and hours of looking at pictures of pole dancers, and watching countless videos of pole dancing, I am now ready to make my report.

Put briefly, pole dancing is indeed dangerous, especially for the untrained, young and possibly alcohol-impaired. Popular Science has an interesting illustration of the physics behind a pole dancing mishap. A young woman narrowly escapes serious side-boob exposure only to learn, the hard way, what a fulcrum is:

After Pat's Birthday -- A letter from Kevin Tillman

For those of you who don't remember, Pat Tillman was a safety with the Arizona Cardinals. After September 11, he walked away from his $3.9 million contract and joined the United States Army, along with his brother Kevin (himself a major league baseball prospect.) Both brothers became US Army Rangers and served in Afghanistan, where Pat was killed in 2004. It turned out that Pat was killed by friendly fire, and the Pentagon kept the truth from his family and the public until well after his memorial service.

His brother Kevin left the Army in 2005, and has now spoken out as a fierce critic of the war in Iraq and of the current administration. You can find the original letter here. I've reprinted Kevin's letter in its entirety:

…

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman

5 things you don't know about me

1) I used to have a pretty good singing voice before the Army.

2) I have a horrible raging temper (but it's gotten better.)

3) I cry easily at movies.

4) I used to have a friendly relationship with a black rhinoceros, and she'd let me pet her on her prehensile upper lip nearly every afternoon.

5) I never proposed to MizBubs.

Friday Random Ten: October 27

It's that time of the week again. On your marks, get set...shuffle:

1) Astro Zombie – The Misfits

2) Hold the Fort – IWW Rebel Voices

3) Bukowski – Modest Mouse

4) I’d Tell You But – Anti Flag

5) Temple of Love – Sisters of Mercy

6) It Coulda Been Me – Social Distortion

7) Grand Coulee Dam – Woody Guthrie

8) Autonomy – The Buzzcocks

9) Fall of Because – Killing Joke

10) Poison Pen – Bauhaus

Post your list on American Idle and see what the rest of the hep world is doing on a Friday morning.

Just in time for the holidays

Ah, the spectacle of the declining imperial power that is Great Britain.

Evidently our exports of MTV and Jerry Springer must've really triggered something dark and horrible in the British psyche. How do I know this? Because British store chain Tesco is advertising this toy:

Peekaboo Pole Dancing Set.

Sure, it says "adults only" on the website. But you find it by searching under "toys and games." Karen Gallimore, righteously indignant British consumer, is pissed off.

Maybe Lulu can find a way to work this into her unique school fundraiser idea.

New Orleans Horror Story

This is a photo of 28-year old Zackery Bowen and 30-year old Addie Hall of New Orleans. They met during Hurricane Katrina, fell in love, and over the next year engaged in a volatile love affair.

On Wednesday, October 18^th, Bowen jumped to his death from the Omni Royal Orleans hotel in the French Quarter. In his pocket was a suicide note; the note also directed officers to go to his apartment on Rampart Street, above the New Orleans Voodoo Spiritual Temple.

There police found the remains of Addie Hall. Bowen had strangled her on October 5^th, had sex with the corpse, then dismembered and cooked her remains.

...

I have always loved southern Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, from my first visit there in 1998. I love the premium that New Orleans residents place on hospitality and having a good time, but what really fascinates me is that just beneath all that “laissez les bon temps rouler is a deep undercurrent of decay, madness and horror.

This story has it all: a good-looking but dissipated young couple, thrown together during a devastating hurricane, both drifters (he moved from Los Angeles in 1996, she from Pennsylvania) who ended up in New Orleans working in the hospitality industry (he as a grocery delivery man for Matassa'’s and bartender at Buffa's, she as a bartender at one of my favorite clubs, the Spotted Cat.) This being a New Orleans story, there are drugs, guns, booze, sex, and voodoo.

Addie Hall told friends she had been abused as a child. Zackery Bowen claimed he served in the Army in Bosnia and Iraq, and, when drinking, would mutter darkly about the government "“messing him over." No one has been able to confirm his military service yet, and my bet is that, if he even served at all, he got bounced out during training. The couple stayed in the French Quarter after Katrina, refusing to evacuate, and became local celebrities. Hall ensured extra police presence around their apartment by flashing her breasts at passing police cars.

They both look familiar to me; I can'’t decide if it's because I actually ran into them during our travels, or that they just look like so many other young people you run into in the French Quarter or Faubourg Marigny.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has complete coverage, including background, photos and video, here.

More fun with google

A frighteningly accurate portrait of my interests and hobbies emerges from the most recent batch of google searches leading to the compound. I can only hope that visitors from Korea and Germany now have a more complete understanding of the glory that is my America.

Wisconsin lawsuits venereal disease

biggest bubs

emu (in Korea, Sprawling Ramshackle Compound is a leading source of information on emus)

Chicago marathon winner slip video

Germans want to know "have you ever"

hurrican katrina alligator attacks

"licking the flesh"

educators

hypnotizing lizards

Halloween is coming...

This is what the front of the compound looked like in the rain the other night. I hope we have a few more nights like this before Halloween...

Thanks for the costume ideas. Right now I'm trying to decide between two easy ones:

Dead cowboy--I already have the clothes and zombie makeup; MizBubs suggested I go with a noose around my neck as a dead rustler.

George Hamilton--I go and get spray-tanned to a dapper yet ridiculous dark brown, dye the hair black and wear a white terrycloth robe.

Blue Monday

Lord I'm in a funk this morning, and for no good reason. Part of it is that I have to spend the afternoon and evening interviewing applicants for an open detective position, and I'm not looking forward to it. Also, MizBubs is going out of town next weekend, which--aside from the obvious loss of consortium I'll be suffering--means that I have to come up with a new costume idea for the Halloween party. We were going to go as Lizzie Borden and her father, and I got some really, really good gore makeup planned, but alas, it is not to be.

I should at least feel satisfied that I finished the fence repair this weekend, and the damaged tree is down. MizBubs, girl genius, rigged a climbing harness and some improvised safety headgear for me and held the lines steady so I could get to the high limbs safely, scampering to and fro like a lemur with a chainsaw. Then she applied ice, soothing words and beverages as needed.

Here are the before and after pics. The main section of replaced fence is just above and to the right of the stump in the "after" photo.

OK, so I'm "it"

I don't post here often, as you know. Bubs "tagged" me to complete this questionnaire, so here it is.

1) Would you bungee jump?
I would jump off a perfectly good bridge why?!!!

2) If you could do anything in the world for a living what would it be?
I'd be a reclusive archaeologist somewhere accessible only by pack animal, and then only during the dry season. Maybe I'd be queen of the world, if I could be a remote and distant queen...

3) Your favorite fictional animal?
The selkie. I think I understand them.

4) One person who never fails to make you laugh?
My daughter Hannah. And my daughter Nora, too, when we say the same thing at the same moment, which is often.

5) When you were 12 years old what did you want to be when you grew up?
A reclusive archaeologist somewhere accessible only by pack animal, and then only during the dry season. Or Yoko Ono's replacement.

6) What is the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?
I put my right hand on top of Bub's.

7) Have you ever gone to therapy?
Yes, but not for long. I know what's wrong with me better than anyone. And if I can't remember it, I don't want to know...

8) If you could have one super power what would it be?
Solving everyone's problems, so I wouldn't have to worry about them.

9) Your favorite cartoon character?
Bugs Bunny, but I feel more like Elmer Fudd.

10) Do you go to church?
Bubs said "Not as often as I should. But I mean well." I agree. I think about God a lot, and I think we have an understanding.

11) What is your best childhood memory?
Summertime, walking to the train station with my Poppy (grandfather) to watch the 10 pm train, then get a chocolate-dipped Dairy Queen cone.

12) Do you think marriage is an outdated ritual?
Oh no. Marriage is truly sacred, and a backbone of western society. Like Bubs, I think gays, lesbians, and all people should have the benefits and responsibilities contained in marriage.

13) Do you own a gun?
Well, I claim Bubs old revolver, a Smith and Wesson .357. I do enjoy that weapon!

14) Have you ever hit someone of the opposite sex.
I tried to hit Bubs once before we married, but he was too quick for me. He did deserve it, though!

15) Have you ever sung in front of a large group of people?
Yes, and I'm sure I will again. It's not pretty, though.

16) What is the first thing you notice about the opposite sex?
Eyes. Definitely eyes.

17) What is your biggest mistake?
The jury is still out on my biggest mistake. Let's just say there are lots of contenders!

18) Say something totally random about yourself.
I love glam rock.

19) Has anyone ever said that you look like a celebrity?
When I was young, I got lots of free drinks in gay bars for looking like Judy Garland.

20) What is the most romantic thing someone of the opposite sex has done for you?
Some guy whisked me off to Memphis for my 40th birthday, and then my sister and her husband met us there for the weekend. That was awesome!!!

21) Do you actually read these when other people fill them out?
Oh, totally!

22) Is it wrong not to tag anyone?
I don't know. I'm still learning the etiquette.

So, I don't know if this was particularly edifying, but I had fun!

Domestic Bliss

Sunday afternoon on a lovely day. MizBubs was busy with our youngest daughter, working on a rag doll costume for Halloween. Abba Gold was playing in the background, and after cleaning the kitchen I was cooking up a pan of apple brown betty. Then I noticed Duffy, my terrier mutt, intently working on something. That something turned out to be a field mouse, in his death throes. Duffy dropped it, briefly, and Jack (our rat terrier) darted in and grabbed the struggling rodent away from Duffy. Jack proceeded to do a few victory laps around the house until I could open the back door and let them both out with their shared kill.

I will now, forever, have "Take a Chance on Me" in my head as the soundtrack for mouse killing and Sunday baking.

I'm not running the marathon

Not this year, anyway. And I'm depressed because I'm not.

This year was going to be my third Chicago Marathon. I ran in 1999 and 2004, and I was really looking forward to running again this year. I was going to be lighter and faster than the other two times. Unfortunately a visit to the emergency room and a surprise surgery kind of put the kibosh on my training this summer. Right now I'm just taking pleasure in the knowledge that I don't have to be out of bed in 4 hours and standing in the 40 degree rain, waiting to run 26.2 miles. Matter of fact, by the time I drag my bourbon-soaked ass out of bed, the race will be finished.

Just wait till next year.

ADDED AT 12:12 PM:

Congratulations to Robert Cheruiyot of Kenya, this years Chicago Marathon winner with a finishing time of 2 hours, 7 minutes, 35 seconds. Hope his head feels better.

At 12:12 there's still thousands of runners crossing the finish line, and they'll continue crossing until 2:00 pm. Good luck to all of them--to finish is to win!

Educators, take note

Bill Crozier is an Oklahoma Republican running for state superintendent of education, and he has an idea.

He proposes putting old, thick, textbooks under the desk of each student in every school. Why? So that the used, thick textbooks could be used to defend students against gunfire in the event of a school shooting. To demonstrate the merit of this idea, he produced a poorly-filmed, rambling unedited bit of video showing him and some friends shooting an AK-47 and some handguns at a variety of old textbooks.

You can read about him by clicking that first sentence, or watch his entire video here.

There's some more innovative thinking going on just south of Mr. Crozier, in Burleson, Texas. The Burleson school district has enlisted the services of British Army Major Robin Browne's company, Response Options, to provide training to its faculty and students. Students and teachers are being taught that "getting under desks and praying for rescue from professionals is not a recipe for success". Instead of cowering, students and teachers should immediately go on the offensive, swarming and attacking the school shooter. And maybe braining him with a thick, used textbook.

Friday Random Ten: October 20

It's that time again. Thanks to Dale for turning me on to this little diversion. You can also check out the results, and post your own lists, at American Idle. Without further ado, here's today's playlist:

1) Hog Maw Stomp – Fats Waller

2) Babalu – Ima Sumac

3) All the Way Down – Voltaire

4) Rush and a push and the land is ours – The Smiths

5) Son of a Gun – Nirvana

6) Nine While Nine – Sisters of Mercy

7) Victoria’s Escape – Corpse Bride soundtrack

8) I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Everyday – The Pogues

9) Please Don’t Tease – The Donnas

10) 100 Ways – Rob Zombie