Clown O' The Week: Spring Break Edition

This magazine has valuable "tips for travelers abroad."

I imagine the first tip is, don't leave your daughter unattended.

A B C

I've been tagged by both Katie Schwartz and Johnny Yen, and if it's rude to ignore a tag, how rude would it be to ignore two? I had no choice but to comply:

A- Available or Single?

-Available nearly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week--but only to MizBubs.

B- Best Friend?

-I've got a few good friends, but I've been unbelievably lucky to marry my best friend. Sounds hokey, doesn't it? But it's true.

C- Cake or Pie?

-PIE! Sweet potato pie, pecan pie, lemon chess pie, strawberry rhubarb pie, apple pie...I could go on about pie like Forrest Gump about shrimp.

D- Drink of Choice?

-Water, lots of it. Followed closely by strong coffee, bourbon, sweet tea and nearly anything served in a festive tiki mug.

E- Essential Item?

-A gun and a smile.

F- Favorite Color?

-Black

G- Gummi Bears or worms?

-Probably the worms, if they're the really tart/sour kind.

H- Hometown?

-Louisville, Kentucky. I miss the south, and I can't wait to move somewhere below the Mason- Dixon line in the next few years.

I- Indulgence?

-My entire life is one long indulgence. I can't even begin to list them.

J- January or February?

-January, I get to rest up from the holidays, it's a new year and I have a whole new crop of vacation days to use.

K- Kids?

-Two daughters, both fine young women. I spend my time alternating between pride at how wonderful they've grown to be, and sadness that they increasingly have very full lives away from their parents, thank you.

L- Life is incomplete without?

-Adventures and bold failures.

M- Marriage date?

-June 21, the summer solstice.

N- Number of siblings?

-Two brothers. I am the oldest.

O- Oranges or apples?

-Apples. You can bake them in a pie, and one of the best smells in the world is apples frying in butter with some bourbon and cinnamon.

P- Phobias/fears?

-Heights and falling, which is why I force myself to go on roller coasters.

Q- Favorite Quote?

”Only a country as mad as ours could be such a roaring success.”

-Norman Mailer, “Tough Guys Don't Dance”

R- Reasons to smile?

-Getting over on the Man.

S- Season?

-Summertime, and the living is easy.

T- Tag 3 people

-Miz Bubs, and anyone else with time to kill.

U- Unknown fact about me

-I am an art school dropout.

V- Vegetable you hate?

-None I can think of. Canned wax beans might come close.

W- Worst habit?

-Anger, procrastination, lack of follow-through, gluttony, sloth, profligacy.

X- X-rays you've had?

-Do MRI's and other imaging count? Dental, leg (broken fibula), hand (fractured 5^th metacarpal), knees, and abdomen.

Y- Your favorite foods?

-Biscuits and sausage gravy, gumbo, pie, barbecue (PORK, not beef!), raw oysters, any hand- rolled sushi, damn near any kind of pasta, noodle or dumpling, whether it's Italian or Asian, anything soaked in butter, fried, heavily seasoned with garlic or bacon.

Z- Zodiac?

-Read the book, haven't seen the movie. I heard it's good.

Sweet Dreams

Ignore the Christmas tree, and the snow in the background through the window. Just dig the understated cool and relax...

I apologize in advance

I was looking through my clown collection for something disturbing to kick off the weekend. This is what I came up with:

Ten Friday Randoms

Sentimental Journey—Esquivel

Love Will Tear Us Apart—Nouvelle Vague

Eat My Words—Marti Brom

La Julie Jolie—Edith Piaf

What Keeps Mankind Alive—William Burroughs

Fade Together—Franz Ferdinand

Sunglasses After Dark—Dwight Pullen

I Ain't Got Nobody—Fats Waller

Parque Industrial—Caetano Veloso

The Winner Takes it All—Abba

And you thought you had a bad day at work...

Yes indeedy, no matter how bad your day at work might be, it could probably be worse:

Man's penis caught in saw mill

TOM ZED, POLICE REPORTER

March 29, 2007 03:00pm

Article from:

A WORKER was injured this afternoon when his penis became caught in machinery at a northern suburbs saw mill.

The man, 30, was working at the Parafield Gardens Saw Mill at about 1.50pm when his crotch and penis became caught in the chain of a piece of machinery.

He was taken to the Royal Adelaide Hospital. It is believed his injuries are not life threatening but he initially suffered uncontrollable bleeding.

A company spokesman said the man's injuries were not serious.

"He got caught in the log moving mechanism on one of the saws," he said.

Freak of the week

This week's Freak of the Week goes to 24 year old Garth M. Flaherty.

Mr. Flaherty was caught with 93 pounds of women's panties and bras, and was charged with multiple counts of burglary and theft. Police were able to link Mr. Flaherty to specific items of underwear "based on the unique descriptions from a couple of women" according to the story. The police are unsure if the stolen undies will be returned when the case is disposed of; here's a quote from Commander Tennant:

"Would you really want them back?" he asked. "I would say not."

First runner-up goes to an unknown Michigan woman, identified only as "Melissa", who walked into a frat house during dinner, stripped naked and masturbated. She left before the police arrived, presumably to return home to feed her pet caimans and ferrets.

Melissa didn't win first place because, according to the article, she appeared to be under the influence of drugs. Award-winning freak behavior should be the result of dark compulsions only dimly understood by the freak, not the result of some cheap high.

And now it begins

What a difference a little congressional oversight makes. Fresh from the Bloomberg.com website:

Gonzales Aide to Take Fifth About Prosecutor Firings

By James Rowley

March 26 (Bloomberg) -- An aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will invoke her constitutional right to refuse to testify before a Senate panel investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, her lawyer told the committee.

Monica Goodling, who helped coordinate the dismissals as the attorney general's White House liaison, will invoke her Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, her lawyer said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She will refuse to be interviewed by committee lawyers and decline an invitation to testify at a public hearing, said attorney John M. Dowd, citing the ``legally perilous'' environment of congressional probes.

The Future, the way it used to be!

This is the first installment of a new feature here at the compound:

The Future, the way it used to be!

Today we feature the Ampex home videotape recording unit, featured in a 1966 newspaper story. Ampex also had a fancy model that came as part of a massive console television. The console model came with a pert blonde who would sit and stare longingly at the screen for hours on end.

The portable home model shown above was a huge improvement over the 1956 model pictured here.

Sunday morning coffee

The big news is that we spent the better part of Saturday afternoon dealing with dog fur.

Rio is a wonderful Shepherd/Husky/Rottweiller mix; we adopted her from some of MizBubs' family who couldn't keep her any more. I love having a big dog around again (our standard poodle Dougal MacDuff died a year ago in February) and she gets along great with our two terriers.

Anyway, now that spring is here Rio is in full shed. We've never owned a big shedding dog and I'm amazed at how much the fur flies. The good news is that our house is, oddly enough, cleaner since we've had her, because we have to vacuum and dust more often. The plucky and industrious MizBubs has taken on the majority of the grooming chores and she's got a heck of a way with that metal comb. Here's the output of a half hour of grooming:


Nature and human frailty continue to vex us. Tuesday was a beautiful day in the Chicagoland area, and my day started great. MizBubs and I both had the day off, we got to laze in bed like people on the welfare, and then I ran 3 miles and exorcised a week's worth of tension. Late that afternoon a nagging little cough started, and by early Wednesday morning I was doing my best Doc Holiday impersonation, feverish and hacking. Damned illness used up the rest of my days off. (Side note: I watched Gunfight at the OK Corral on cable while recuperating, which explains the Doc Holiday reference. Kirk Douglas looked damn good as a gunslinger dying of tuberculosis, but what really struck me was the fine quality of his pomade. I've got some good hair, but I would not have looked nearly as good as Kirk Douglas if I'd had to get in a gunfight this week.)

I went back to work Friday, God knows why, and after making it through the day decided to use some comp time and take this weekend off. Now our youngest is sick, sicker than I was, and having one sick kid and a semi-sick grownup alters reality to the point that you can feel like you've really accomplished something, as a household, because you cleaned up the dog fur.

There's always an upside, though--sometimes you're even lucky enough to see it. We got to catch up on some movie watching this weekend, a rare treat for all of us to be in one place for so long. We watched Idiocracy (it had its moments, but was no Office Space), The Prestige, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Devil's Backbone. I thought Stranger Than Fiction was surprisingly good, and really sweet, which was nice. Really enjoyed The Prestige, made extra-interesting by the presence of ultra-cool Michael Caine and an odd David Bowie as Nicola Tesla. Finally, The Devil's Backbone. What a good movie. Best ghost story set during the Spanish civil war I've ever seen.

Another benefit of being relatively house-bound is having the opportunity to catch up on some organizing and household paperwork, and boy did I benefit. The thrifty, thoughtful and selfless MizBubs realized, while going through her stuff, that she's racked up some serious thank you points on her credit card, and she's never redeemed any of them. She also told me I needed some new clothes (it's so sweet how she wants me to look nice). The end result? Yours truly is the lucky recipient of a couple of Macy's gift cards. Woot! Yes, I know I said I'd never patronize that store since those New York bastards killed Marshall Field, but I figure it's poor form to refuse a gift from my bride just because I'm angry at corporate America. And I finally had time to fill out the rebate forms for our cell phones, which, at some hopefully not too distant point in the future, will put $200 in our pockets.

Ah, cell phones. I finally have my own cell phone (not the electronic leash provided me by work) and all the girls got rid of their Virgin Mobile service. It had been years since I'd done any cell phone shopping, and back then I found the process of comparing various service plans to be maddening. That's really how MizBubs and the girls ended up with the Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go phones: none of them were big talkers, and they just needed phones for emergencies. Now we're all busier, and the girls are older, and it was time to look again.

I found this place on the interwebs. Pay attention, because if you ever want to switch services or get a new phone, this place is GREAT:

LetsTalk.com

You enter your zipcode and up pops a list of all the plans available in your area. You're able to go through and compare them side-by-side, without having to bounce around through all the individual carrier's websites. We ended up with a plan from T-Mobile (whose service has been fantastic) and 4 Motorola Razr phones. The phones were free, and after the rebates I'll make money from the deal, and they threw in two Bluetooth headsets for free. And, if it matters to you, LetsTalk.com is an American company, and their call center and customer service is all right here in the US of A.

Good news!

Strindberg and Helium is back! Strindberg and Helium has been around for several years, but most of the site had been inaccessible for the past year or so because of some arrangement with Comedy Central. Now there's no longer any Comedy Central link on the page, and you can once again view all four films.

The films chronicle the interaction between grim Swedish playwright August Strindberg (here's a quote: "When they say Christ descended into Hell, they mean that he descended to earth, this penitentiary, this madhouse and morgue of a world") and a cheerful pink balloon sidekick named Helium.


I think my favorite is Absinthe and Women.

For many are called, but few are chosen.

"For many are called, but few are chosen."
-Matthew 22:14

And some who are chosen, it seems, become clowns.

A few weeks ago I put up a clown training video, and it opened a door for me into a world I knew nothing about: the world of Christian Clowning.

The door opened while I was looking through some of the YouTube links to try and find out more about that clown training video. I found out, for instance, that there is a website called GodTube (the "t" in tube is a big cross) that has many, many inspiring videos. I found websites where you can get clown ministry skits to use for free. Skits like "Beating Hearts", described as "an unashamedly pro-life skit for 6 clowns." You can find all that, and more, on the website Clown Ministry.

There are websites devoted to Christian Clowning Resources; there are websites for individual performers like Kingdom Karactors (if clowns aren't your thing, they also make and sell puppets!)

But it's not all yucks and poignancy in the world of Christian clowning. There is controversy.

In January, the Milwaukee Catholic Herald featured a cover story about a Pallottine priest named Fr. Greg Serwa. Fr. Serwa, in addition to his regular duties, also appears and ministers as Stripes the Clown. Here's Fr. Serwa on his ministry:

"As a priest, you’re always dealing with things that are important to people’s lives. You have to be real gentle with people. The same can be said for clowning; little kids can be quite frightened of clowns.”

Well, this feature provoked a somewhat angry response in the "Off The Record" section of Catholic World News:

Putting aside the fact that many people are creeped out by clowns, it's hard to see the point of foregrounding this kind of story as part of vocation promotion. ... After all, do we want to entice into the priesthood the kind of 22-year-old male that would be attracted by Stripes?

Finally, I stumbled onto an organization called Clowning 4 Christ. Clowning for Christ hosts a series of 2-day conferences around the country. The next one will be in Cincinnatti, Ohio, in April. There's a clowning competition, and workshops on hospital clowning, marketing your clown show, and "mime juggling."

Now, I don't know, personally, if a Clowning for Christ Clown Conference would be as much fun as Jesus Camp or Hell House, but I'd like to find out.

You park like an a$$hole

My friend Dena turned me on to this site a couple weeks ago. Consider this a public service announcement, a small attempt to encourage more considerate behavior in others:

You Park Like an A$$hole

YPLAA encourages readers to send in photos of egregious parking, and they thoughtfully include a sample citation here. Print out a few of them and start your own politeness campaign.

OK, another musical interlude

When it's time to snap out of it, what better way to do it than shaking your ass to the fine musical stylings of Sir Tom Jones?

And now, a brief musical interlude

Courtesy of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds:

I believe the children are our future

Meet Andrew Riley. He's 13 years old, has a bowl haircut, likes playing basketball, and, according to Athens County, Ohio prosecutors, has committed 128 crimes, mostly felonies. Here's the response from one of his neighbors:

“When we did find out who it was, it sure didn’t surprise me any,” said Tammy Glick, who said neighbors had suspected the 13-year-old of breaking garage windows and stealing bicycles in recent years.

This link features a video that includes a brief interview with Andrew's "stepfather" James Blake. Mr. Blake expresses his bafflement, and seems to blame birth order for Andrew's problems:

"He's our oldest, you know. He's our first born and he's been through a lot."

Please remove me from your mailing list.

This was a strange weekend. I don't do a lot of hands-on work with bodies much any more, but I got involved in two death investigations this weekend. The guy in the car yesterday, and today was an 80 year old man who shot himself while his girlfriend was in the next room.

The place my victim and his girlfriend lived in was a clean little one-bedroom condo with a balcony. The place is newer construction, and had nice oatmeal carpeting throughout. The walls were still bright landlord white, but covered with artwork.

You get a vivid picture, sometimes, just standing in someone's home and looking around at their stuff. The guy today had served in 3 wars--WWII, Korea and Vietnam. They had bookshelves along one entire wall of the living room, full of interesting volumes, and you could tell he'd traveled. He had shadow boxes on the wall showcasing his military achievements, and had several antique pistols in another. I liked this guy, and I respected him.

He had Alzheimer's and was failing physically as well. We recovered 11 different prescription medications. Not only did he need a walker, but his equilibrium had gone to the point that someone needed to practically hold him by his belt to keep him upright while he used it. Everyone described him as being a very proud man, and he'd grown increasingly frustrated at his physical weakening and at his failing memory. According to his girlfriend, he was trying to find something and was looking through paperwork and books. As he looked for whatever it was he was looking for, and couldn't remember, he became more and more upset.

While we were there we noticed books removed from the bookshelves; some were placed on the floor in small stacks, and some were placed in a brown paper Trader Joe's bag. There were 15 or 20 envelopes, some open, of junk mail on the floor in front of the sofa. It looked like someone had been going through them and tossed them there.

The girlfriend told us that he suddenly walked into the bedroom, and then she heard the gunshot. She looked up and saw him on the floor, and she called 911. There was no doubt he was dead.

After we finished with the scene, and his body had been removed, I did one more walk-through of the condo. I hadn't noticed this before, but there it was, a note in a typewriter on a table between the living room and the kitchen. It wasn't a suicide note, but I thought that, given the scattered mail on the floor and girlfriend's account of my man's agitation, it was an indicator of just how angry and frustrated he was.

There was only one line typed near the top of this page. I can't replicate the exact typos and improper capitalization, but it read:

pLEASE Remove ME from YOUR mailing liST.

What I learned today...

Here's what I learned today:

If you have a body slumped over in the front seat of a car, and rigor mortis has set in, it can be pretty difficult to remove that body from the car. Specifically, it can be difficult to remove the body without banging the head against the steering wheel, causing the horn to sound repeatedly. And watching a corpse head repeatedly sounding a car horn, while the air fills with the smell of dead body poop, is, at once, tragic, embarrassing and pretty hilarious.

Return of the Random Ten

James Bond Theme—Monty Norman Orchestra

Pasties and a G String—Tom Waits

Walking on the Sun—Smashmouth

Red Hot—Billy Emerson

Flat Tire—Johnny London

Bourbon Street Jump—Raymond Hill

Blues Waltz—Ripley Cotton Choppers

Your Time Now—Fats Waller

Your Southern Can is Mine—White Stripes

Green, Green Grass of Home—Tom Jones

Welcome to Eau Claire, Wisconsin!

Welcome to Eau Claire, Wisconsin--one of the 100 Best Communities for Young People!

And, according to this story, one of the 100 best communities to set your johnson on fire with lighter fluid when you're drunk!

Oh, and yes my friends--alcohol was involved.