Doing unto others

Christian Faith Financial is a "payday loans & cash advance" site that helps you "the Christian way."

"Helping families with Christian financial assistance," says the site. They mean it too. "Elijah" is standing by in a very persistent pop-up box when you try to close the window. Call it a blessed cyberfoot in the door.

Maybe the money you get from these guys glows. Maybe "IN GOD WE TRUST" is in a bolder font on dollars that come from Christian Faith Financial than on regular non-God dollars. Who knows? The good thing about being endorsed by an entity such as God is that he doesn't make a lot of direct comment on said endorsement.

There's even a snappy biblical reference to assure you you're in hallowed territory, "Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good--Romans 12:21"

This development has put a new spin on what was heretofore one of my favorite terms: Holy shit.

Lunch in the middle of America

I had some deli roast beef that I had to use up. It was too shitty for regular sandwiches, so I made a packet of "brown gravy," toasted some bread and served up "open-faced roast beef sandwiches" for lunch.

They were exactly like what you get in one of those sleepy little diners in Ohio towns like Fostoria or Tiffin or Bucyrus.

You either know what I'm talking about or you don't.


You would think the goat would protest such a meal.


But he did not. My kid did not. We just sucked it up and ate the shitty sandwiches.


This is the middle of America, people.

There's isn't room for anything else today

Here's the songs I have on iTunes by him:

ABC

I Want You Back

Never Can Say Goodbye




Rockin' Robin

The Way You Make Me Feel

Human Nature

Do you think Farrah is bitching him out right now in the land of afterlife for taking all her press? Ed McMahon was used to being number two, so he probably got over it pretty quickly, but I'm not so sure about Farrah.

Ciao, Michael and Farrah and Ed.

Blue sympathy

I might be a libbity-lib, and he might be a rightity-right, but this sort of voyeuristic "journalism" just makes me cringe. What the hell is the point? And no, I didn't read it all, just enough for the cringing to start. Then I was moved to post this entry.

Hot potato

In my column this week, I give up the secret of a great potato pancake.

If you have something to say about it, you can comment on the article directly (via the above link), or you may tell me off here, or feel free to email my editor Frank Lewis at flewisATclevesceneDOTcom.

Ten things stay at home moms say in the summer

***

1. Go mow the lawn.

2. Turn it down.

3. As soon as your father gets home.

4. We can make Kool-Aid instead.

5. No.

6. Go play in the sprinkler.

7. Yes.

8. Well missy, I waited nine months for you.

9. I don't care who else is going.

10. Complaining about it won't make you feel any cooler.

***

Croc talk

Crocodiles and alligators communicate. Dig the "Courtship Bellow" of the alligator mississippiensis, which is similar to the courtship bellow heard in any college bar after 12 a.m.

Here is the page with links to all sorts of reptilian communiqués.

An Australian saltwater croc or "salty" can grow to 20 feet long and weight over a ton. Who said there's no such thing as dragons?

Crocs always look like they're smiling to me.

Alligators have been around for about 75 million years. Crocs have been around for some 210 million years, so I guess the crocs win.

I have eaten alligator. I have never eaten crocodile. I hope no alligator or crocodile ever eats an Erin.

La Dolce Vita

Leaving Las Vegas was just republished in Italy by minimum fax. It had been out of print there for some years. For any of my Italian friends who have not read the book, it is a very fine novel indeed.

Some months back, the publisher contracted me to write an epilogue, which I did. The contributor copies arrived a few days ago. Seeing John's work and mine back to back was so strange--and in a foreign language no less.

It was very difficult to write the epilogue without falling into a chasm of sentimentality. I tried to follow the model of Tim O'Brien, who so brilliantly scaled the Vietnam War by placing it next to a comic book and a packet of KoolAid in the short story "The Things They Carried." I took John's life, suicide and all the rest of it and scaled it next to his beloved Rolex and a handful of numbers.

Was it right or wrong? I'll never know. I just hope I didn't sully John's fine work.

Bobby Conn revisited

I have posted this YouTube before, but since it just gets better and better and better with every viewing, here it is again:



I can't decide what I love more, the wardrobe selections for the fantastic dancers, the announcer, the dancing adults (particularly the man holding the toddler), the set, Conn's fabulous make-up or the intensity of Conn's expressions throughout. The interview at the end is so so so worth the wait. I am completely ON after seeing this intrepid performance again.

This, people, is why we have the Internet.

It's Hoosierboy's soapbox

As promised in the comment section of this post:

Not related at all, so you can delete this if you like. I am OK with that.

What do you make of this poll? I guess I was right when I said conservatives are not as dead as you think.

Link to Gallup Poll

pokety poke poke with the sharp stick, baby. (insert smiley graphic that I really hate here) --Hoosierboy

That 40 percent polled called themselves conservative is a very interesting statistic to be sure. So why did the righties get pummeled in the last two elections? The article asserts the following:

There is an important distinction in the respective ideological compositions of the Republican and Democratic Parties. While a solid majority of Republicans are on the same page -- 73% call themselves conservative -- Democrats are more of a mixture. The major division among Democrats is between self-defined moderates (40%) and liberals (38%). However, an additional 22% of Democrats consider themselves conservative, much higher than the 3% of Republicans identifying as liberal.

The devil's always in the details. There's hella more conservative Democrats than there are liberal Republicans. And the further to the right the elephants lumber, the smaller the party is going to get. Where are all the moderate Republicans? Simple. They're voting Democrat.

Can you say Colin Powell?

The naked truth

Back in this post, I noted meeting David Lee Morgan, a local sports writer and author of a number of books including LeBron James: The Rise of a Star. David and I were seated next to each other for a book fair back in April. The day-long event might have dragged, but we ended up laughing our heads off.

I quickly learned David is far from a one-dimensional man. Case in point: he participated in Spencer Tunick's 2004 installation here in Cleveland and wrote about the experience for the Akron Beacon Journal.

When I first blogged about David, I was unable to find his writings about the Tunick event online. He has since forwarded me his article with permission to post it, which some readers had asked about. Here are links to high resolution copies with more photos and complete text:

David Lee Morgan on Spencer Tunick part one

David Lee Morgan on Spencer Tunick part two

I just love the picture above taken by Bob DeMay for the Journal, which accompanied David's article. Dig the expressions on everyone's faces. They're just regular guys, only naked, which according to David, was pretty much the way it was that day. After a while, he told me, people pretty much forget about being naked.

Hm. Maybe we should all go buff right now.

Thanks, David!

Phone cam round-up and Great Freight

Hurry up and get born so's I can shoot ya!


Drill baby drill! on one side of the street.


Don't drill baby don't drill! on the other side of the street.

Please note, dear reader, that your humble hostess has actually endured the consequences of DRILL BABY DRILL in her own goddamn backyard and had absolutely no warning or choice in the matter.


Fabulous footwear from the terrifying Great Freight outlet store.


Fun stuff!


Always posh, always smart: the cosmetic department at Great Freight.


The Clamato juice was brown. Huh?


Savvy shoppers know that volume is the way to value when it comes to hair care products at Great Freight.

Let me out of Great Freight!

Conserving in America

I'm driving with my kid in my 2003 Mini Cooper, which I purchased when gas was about $1.30 a gallon.

"There's another Mini," she says. "How come there's so many Minis around here?"

"Because this part of town is more liberal than our part of town," I say. We are in Cleveland Heights, close to Case Western Reserve University, about 20 miles away from our White Wonder bread suburb on the city's South side.

"Aren't you a liberal?"

"Yeah."

"What's that have to do with cars?" she says.

"A lot of liberals drive small cars in order to conserve gas," I say. The Mini gets anywhere from 30 to 40 MPG depending on any number of things. "You don't find many liberals driving big cars unless they have a pretty good reason."

"You mean big cars like Dummers?" she says.

"Exactly," I say. "Big cars like Dummers. A lot of your conservatives like your Dummers."

"Don't Dummers use a lot of gas?"

"Yeah," I say.

"Then why would a conservative drive one?" she says. "Shouldn't a conservative conserve? I mean, you conserve everything, so you're a conservative, right?"

"It's the terminology. I'm a liberal, but I conserve. A lot of your conservatives don't like to conserve. That's the irony of the thing, kid."

She considers this for a minute and says, "They ought to call those conservatives the wastetives."

* * *

Wastetive: An American "conservative" who fails to actually conserve anything. The wastetive twists the noble concept of freedom into a selfish and childish lifelong tantrum that swirls around the wastetive's own overblown sense of entitlement and sentimental pining for an obsolete perception of the American Dream shaped wholly from conspicuous consumption.

A wastetive complains about having to drop his or her beer can into a different trash can than their Whopper wrapper and will often refuse to do so. They drive their gas-guzzling SUV to work all by themselves, clogging up the highways while feeling smugly "safe" within their giant steel box whilst their exhaust pipe pours out toxic fumes that poison our future. Many wastetives choose to delude themselves into believing that there is nothing toxic about vehicular exhaust fumes. To them, I ask this: how about you load up the Escalade with your wife, kids and dog Spoofy, park it in your three-car garage, close all the doors and fire up the ignition?

No? Gee, why not?

Oh yeah, everyone will be DEAD in about an hour. Will you believe the fumes are toxic then?

Although a wastetives will never conserve anything on their own, they whine and moan whenever someone else suggests that they pay more for their gluttonous ways via taxes or (gasp) legislation. In such a case you will see wastetives do what they do best: use more than they need. But in this case the resource will be words. No one can gas on like a wastetive who is afraid someone will ask them to conserve.

A wastetive demands that they must have everything they want! while a liberal only takes as much as they need.

Fortunately, the idiotic way of the wastetive is finally garnering proper recognition. No one much likes the wastetives except the Saudis. The wastetives fund a lot of the Saudis' operations and are even building a glittering city in the middle of the desert courtesy of the wastetives. It's called Dubai. Yes, the Saudi's really love the wastetives.

Until the wastetives learn their lesson, the rest of us will just have to tolerate them.

Per request

And I daresay worth every bit of 2 minutes and 58 seconds. Not sure what's most to love here, Astrud's hair bow, the audience or the guy on the xylophone.

Intermission

Your humble hostess is otherwise engaged in drudgery. Actual content to return soon. Until then, here's a photo of a raw chicken and it's terrible innards.

Happy birthday Cole Porter

A long road with a Wolf and angry Erin that eventually leads to a safe sex haven edged in violet blue

A good way to tell if you're a dried up gasbag is if you're one of the people complaining about how much sex and pornography there is on the Internet.

I have a lot of problems with Wolf's assertions in that article, which I've blogged about before, but that she's worried the vagina is losing its "exchange value" really frosts me.

Wolf, you dumb broad, did you really say that? Do you actually think that photos of vaginae devalue them? I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you didn't mean showing guys your puss will no longer get you daisies, dinners and diamonds, but let me give you a code orange news alert anyway: Most heterosexual men are as enthusiastic about vagina photograph number 1000 as they were about vagina photograph number one. Guys just love these things; can't get enough of them and never will.

Another problem I have with Wolf's article is that she refers mainly to college students throughout.

Huh?

Does anyone have good sex in college? Hell no. Even if it is good sex in a technical sense, it's often immature. The 18 - 22 often does not assign proper value to sex because they still don't fully understand it, at least I didn't. They're kids!

(Yes Virginia, there really is an upside to getting older: YOU GET BETTER IN THE SACK!)

Wolf: "Well, I am 40, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer. Our younger sisters had to compete with video porn in the eighties and nineties, when intercourse was not hot enough. Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene."

O'Brien: Well, I'm 44 and Wolf, you're full of shit. Here's my advice to the unnamed young women Wolf claims are badgered into sexual activities because of porn: Babygirl, if you don't want to do it, don't do it. Say NO and kick the asshole out. When you find the right lover, you'll want to do plenty.

I'm sorry, but you cannot blame Internet porn for men pressuring women for sex. That is simply moronic. There has always been sex pressure. You either cave into it or you don't. There is much more to say on that topic, but I'll save that discussion for another post and (finally) get to some sex.

Here's the skinny, people: Porn or no porn, there is never enough good sex. You can categorize sex into as many slots as you like but in the end, they all fall into one of these:

1) bad sex

2) mediocre sex

3) okay sex

4) good sex

5) great sex.

Everyone is trying to get to number 5 and everyone has spent time on squares 1 - 4. If you do cave into pressure or have some bad sex, so what? Lesson learned. Move on. Try to do better next time. Over the long haul, our sex lives are riddled with mistakes and imperfections. That's how we get to the Elysian fields of number 5.

I've been running this blog for 3 1/2 years. I write about lots of things including sex. The searches that bring people here often make me wax tender. They want to know how to make women climax, how to perform successful coitus and cunnilingus, how to fondle and stimulate women. They're searching for diagrams of women's genitalia, information about the G spot and the female orgasm. Whether or not I've helped any of those customers, I have no idea. I'm no sex expert. The heaps of bad online porn and sex sites out there are mostly nowheresville, but here is one sex site that is top notch:

violet blue :: open source sex

There you will find online sex the way it's supposed to be. It's loaded with sexy pics, fun stuff, great links and really good sex advice, like why you need to be careful when choosing (ahem) sex accessories. A little bird emailed me blue's URL last night and I was stunned I hadn't seen it before. So get a glass of wine and settle in for some top-notch sex surfing (oh yeah).

The big ol' bad Wolf and her ilk can huff and puff all they want, you've got a safe haven in violet blue's house and Erin's house as well.

The Point

I was six in 1971 when ABC first aired the animated version of Harry Nilsson's The Point as Movie of the Week. I barely remember it. Maybe later tonight I'll watch it in its entirety courtesy of YouTube. Until then, here's an excerpt featuring the Rock Man, which is chock full of great lines like this:

"Us rock folks are impervious to heat. We stay cool."

Noah's ark

I am reading one hell of a book.

The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian chronicles the end of the world. How's that for an ambitious premise?

A biblical deluge covers the earth with a sea seven miles deep. The only survivors are those who were inside a children's hospital during the storm and subsequent flood. The hospital building turns into a magical floating vessel full up with humanity, including as much sex and blood and bone as anyone can handle, maybe more.

It's not often when an author earns character names such as Father Jane and Ishmael, but Adrian does within these pages. This is top-shelf literary fiction, but with none of that literary arrogance I detest. I'm about halfway through the 600-page tome.

I cannot think of a succinct ending sentence for this post, so this will have to do.

Godspeed

I've lost many people in many different ways. After a death, people say the most inane things.

"It was a blessing in disguise."

"He's finally at peace."

"He went the way we all want to go."

They mean well, but for those left behind, there is no good way to lose a loved one. The relief one feels at the conclusion of a long and harrowing illness is riddled with guilt. The profound grief and shock that accompany a sudden death are emotionally debilitating and can put you down for months or years.

Hence when I heard the report this morning that officials say there is no chance anyone surivived the Air France Flight 447 crash, I crumpled inside for the loved ones of those on board, sentenced to a prison of terrible hope that some impossible Cast Away scenario saved their daughter/spouse/father and that they're managing along somehow talking to a soccer ball named Wilson.

No matter how the monolithic and inarguable the facts before them are, they will have hope. I know I would. Grief is surreal. It bends you. It twists the space around you. It squeezes time.

And then one day, in a month or year or decade, the hope will leave. Maybe it will go violently or perhaps it will dissipate gradually; but one day it will be gone and the tragedy will be new again.

I am sorry. I am so sorry.

Mowing on a Rainy Day

In my column this week, I muse on the nuances of mowing the lawn.

And if you hop over there, yes, that is a picture of me at age 12; and yes, that really is how much smoke used to come out of that miserable old mower.

If you have something to say about any of this, Scene's new website has a user-friendly comment section and you can comment on the article directly (via the above link), or you may tell me off here, or feel free to email my editor Frank Lewis at flewisATclevesceneDOTcom.

Chelada taste test

Junior Godfather

My kid had a school assignment for which she had to create a fantastical creature. She took some old stuffed animals and cut them up in order to sew together a conglomerate horse/dog/frog.

The proceedings were charming and successful, but the aftermath was a bit surreal:


She's carrying the horse head around with her now. But she's not the only one with an affinity for plush decapitated horses.

That's what it's like to be a parent. You're just doing your daily junk and the next thing you know, you've got an amputated plush horse head on your kitchen table.

I shouldn't complain. It wasn't nearly as messy as the original.