boys and girls... ACTION!

why we haven't left the house all week.

The worst thing I have ever done

Repeat – This is the worst thing I have ever and am not proud of the following:

I go to Tyson’s Corner Mall once a year. I get a note from my parents to miss school on a December weekday and do all my Xmas shopping in one majestic sweep. So a few years back I was riding the escalator and began to feel an uncomfortable rumbling in my stomach. It all happened so fast. A silent, relieving wind was broken. But good lord was it was deadly. Embarrassed, I glanced around hoping no one was nearby.

Unfortunately, there was. A five year old boy was on the step directly behind me. His head was right there. Directly in his face.







I’m no prude. But the City Paper putting that headline in newspaper boxes around town is worse than an adult farting in the eyes and mouth of a five year old boy.

hello world.

things K and I have IM'd about today:

- skunk calling/skunk population control
- tent cities
- rigging mailboxes to humorously snap on postman's fingers/potential of being sued for such a prank
- tiny dogs
- Family Guy stereotypes
- Marion Barry
- how to spell "ecstatic" correctly
- lawless hobo wars
- Danish pop stars from the 90s AND Dee-lite
- Jewish weddings
- Mail fraud

really tempted to use some sort of fleetwood mac lyrics for a title here

Coming back from the beach, we had a brief conversation re: Infinite Jest:

The G: You should really read this, it's pretty funny.

The N (glancing at my book): I've already gotten to that part.

The G: Oh. Huh. Well, let's talk about it. Tell me about the characters.

The N: Well, there's a son. And he has problems with his parents.

The G: How many sons?

The N: Well, two maybe. Two sons. Right! And, uh, a daughter!

The G: Two sons and a daughter, okay. What are their names?

The N: Junior. And they have a dead dad.

The G: Right. Where do they live? What country do they live in?

The N: All over the place! They live internationally! And one of them lives with their mom on a tennis..... ranch. They ranch. And play tennis!

The G: Right. Ranching. And what else happens? What's the major underlying, recurring plot point?

The N: Um, that parents and children don't get along.

The G: Right, right. Let's pick a random character, shall we. Who's Poor Tony Krause?

The N: He's a dog.



. . .




Next week, we ask the N to elaborate on Sophie's Choice.

no disrespect to your wife, buts its amazing you ever got that oven jockey to uncross her honeysticks for you

Once upon a time, our house was a regular deathtrap. You had yourself two sets of stairs of regulation height, knives of various lengths, ceiling fans spinning at unpredictable speeds, boiling pots of tomato sauce, 20 pound mirrors insecurely positioned in showers so they easily fall and impale feet with their sharpened corner, etc. You know, the standard bunch of ways your average homeowners could kill or maim themselves.

When we got BD a few years ago, we automatically added the very real possibility of severe animal poisoning. Especially since our dog exhibits the shark-like curiosity of exploring the world with his mouth. Unfortunately, he also exhibits the dog-like tendency to swallow everything that he puts in his mouth. Mostly, its garbage. That’s not a weak metaphor. Our dog eats a ton of garbage and most of it is made of stuff that the canine digestive system isn’t designed to dig handle. Like plastic or fireworks or two entire boxes of frosted Mini-wheats. But we adjusted and got safer. These days, our trips to the vet are by appointment and not the type that required stomach pumpings.

Now, though, every goddamned thing in the house is a giant fucking red flag hazard* and will cause instant death or hugely debilitating injuries. Electrical outlets? Let’s lick our fingers and put them in there. Bookshelves? Paperback are boring so let’s pull these hardback copies of Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest on our heads. Scissors? We should put them in our mouths and open and close them quickly. And who made irons extremely hot, heavy and pointed with a convenient chord to pull?

And then there are peanuts. Obviously, humans have known that peanuts are the deadliest substance on earth ever since the first caveman stuck a sharpened stick into the Georgian soil and it detonated like Petersburg. We measure radioactivity in units of Carvers in honor of George Washington Carver and his tireless attempt to discover a way to make x-rays out of peanuts. Every schoolchild knows he died after absorbing a fatal dose of Carvers when inventing the peanut butter bomb that latter flattened Tuskegee, Alabama. It’s the reason that we, as a nation, worship Ronald Reagan since he was the only man capable of driving that terrible peanutmonger Jimmy Carter out of our nation’s capital.

We roll the dice everyday by even having that single jar of peanut butter in the house. But I have a wife who is forever falling asleep while chewing gum and we need the peanut butter for Bubble Yum hair extraction. It’s a risk we take to live in the modern world. (we also store our bleach in brightly colored sippy cups.)

But now it’s “news” that if you feed someone small bits of peanuts over the course of a few years they will develop immunity to the poison. Isn’t this the standard operating procedure for minimizing the effects of harmful allergens? I’ve been ingesting little bits of iocane since 1987 and have successfully warded off every poisoning attempt by my enemies. Or so I assume. I don’t see why peanuts would be any different.


*I’m aware there should be a comma in there somewhere. But I’m content with the thought of a giant being fucked by a hazardous red flag.

Nationals Paaak

Besides the time I got to play Guitar Hero with Aerosmith, all my run ins with the city of Boston have been negative. It’s mostly due to the entirety of the city’s highway system being underground causing one’s GPS to be less than ineffective. This arrangement has caused many a visitor to that fair city to get lost on the way to the airport and miss their fantasy football drafts. I think that’s why the Feds demanded an investigation into the Big Dig. Or at least why I demanded one.

On Wednesday, we went to the Fenway-on-the-Potomac to see the heroic Boston Red Sox play our local minor league team for charity. We’d been warned that the crowd at Nationals Park would be 10-1 in favor of Boston fans but that may be an understatement. There were a lot of pinkish, heavy-set woman with thick-necked boyfriends in Celtics jerseys. It was fantastically difficult to listen to.

If my calculations are correct, 30 years of ballpark visits has allowed me to see every team in the league. Boston was the last on my list. And it afforded me a chance to see Kevin Youkilis up close.



Yep. There is no other ballplayer in America that looks more like Wooly Willy, the magnetically-powered beard toy. You can get yours today at your favorite Cracker Barrel waiting area.

Also, why is the Dupont Circle stop so much better lit than the other stations?

I rode the red line 6 times yesterday. Three things to note:

1. Tourists are actively avoiding the last cars in the trains. I overheard them acknowledging out loud that it makes them uncomfortable. It’s most obvious at stations like Gallery Place-Chinatown where the escalator deposits riders at the end of the platform and forces you to walk the length of the train to get to the front.

2. It may have just been the series of trains I was on, but now that WMATA has temporarily suspended the automatic train operation system I find the ride to be much smoother. Twice, while engrossed in the babyish pages of Infinite Jest, I hadn’t even realized we had pulled into the station until the train stopped. The manual drivers seem to have a more controlled style of gradual braking. It was like flying a Thai Airways, if you know what I mean.

really enjoying

- funny women

- this, which i think i've mentioned before but is cool enough that it deserves a second look.

- june