Phone cam round-up

Clamato's right next to the Frank's Kraut Juice, ma'am.

Hello. My name is Elsie May and this is my sister Ellie May. We come to life after dark and eat your children!

Road dots.

Giant eyeball on a stick.

I heart you too, road.

~~ooooh ... the rare and mysterious cigarette carton pyramid~~

How should I drive in neighborhoods where they can't stand the little darlings?

Um. Sounds great, but can you direct me to the PartyHeavy?

How I Learned To Get A Head In Life.

I get the pretzels. You get the red ones. We split the wavy thingers.

I'll have some antique Hungarian pastry and one American flag to go.

My! What a huge rubber you have!

Scooters and I love it.

Suitcase fabulon.

Weird weeds.

Oh beautiful day

"The United States is the only advanced country that doesn't required paid leave. If anything, the United States is in the dark ages when it comes to maternity leave."

Surely this is the voice of some rabid leftie feminist! Surely this dangerous socialist rant comes from the likes of Rachel Maddow, Stephanie Miller or (gasp!) Gloria Steinem.

Uh-oh. 'Fraid not, righties. That would be Fox New's conservative darling Megyn Kelly.

Confidential to conservatives: before you go ranting on about entitlements and workers rights and big gov, make sure your nose is clean--immaculate even. Because championing the benefits of said entities that only apply to you will get you slapped with the hypocrite label pretty damn fast.

Who cares? I just love it when righties go leftie. Yay!

So welcome, Megyn, to the land of liberalism. I wish you luck on your fight for maternity rights. After all, with a name like Me GYN, it was written in the stars.

For a more complete (and I daresay entertaining) diatribe, behold Jon Stewart as he properly exposes this silly little broad for what she is:

We're gonna roll this truckin' convoy 'cross the USA

That, children, is CW McCall doing a musical segment on something called a talk show in 1976. The funny box he's touching is called a CB radio. This was the Mike Douglas Show and it was different from talk shows like you have today. Don't tell anyone, but Auntie Erin has that very song, Convoy, on her iPod.

Other people who had the old time talk shows were named Dinah Shore and Merv Griffin. People talked on the talk shows while sitting on chairs that were lined up just so:



A lady named Betty White was always on talk shows.

Why yes! That's the very same lady as the one in the Snickers Super Bowl commercial.

Now children, let me tell you something about Dinah Shore that is sort of grown up. Dinah Shore may look all prime and proper in the short video we just watched, but she was doing some very naughty things with the man sitting next to her when no one was looking. His mane is Burt Reynolds.



That was from the Merv Griffin Show, which was on TV when Jesus was still alive. Look! There's Betty White again!

No, that's not a trick. Mr. Griffin is really smoking a cigarette indoors.

Scary things like that used to be on TV all the time, but that's enough of my stories for tonight. You children change into your jammies and I'll go and fix up the cocoa. Then we can all watch Jersey Shore before bed.

* * *

American splendor

So you pass under the arch announcing the Santa Monica pier and stroll upon its thick timbers past the hot dog stands and guys fishing and skeeball booths. Kids lick ice cream cones and point at the old indoor carousel. Carnival-style facades, with their gingerbread and racing lights, hide oily compressors and pulley works. The trickery does not fool you, but you let it fill the world with possibility nonetheless--if only for a night.

The lazy Ferris wheel traces circles of light amid the roller coaster and the Scrambler, which looks exactly like the one that thrilled you some 35 years ago in a humble park 2400 miles away from where you stand right now. You sigh.

"Come on, kid, let's ride the Ferris wheel."

And then you float up into the purest American ether, with the Pacific breeze billowing your hair and its waters rolling far below. You ride the vertical circle to its crest. The Santa Monica mountains sculpt the horizon before you as the ocean reaches for the end of the world behind you. You sink down. The dusky sky illuminates the bluffs of Santa Monica as they nobly define the western edge of this troubled and beautiful land.

You travel again and again around this ethereal circumference. The three other people in the gondola, to whom you are so deeply connected that even the word love seems inadequate, swoon along with you.

The smooth glory rolls on until it comes to an end in our realm of time, but you will carry it deep inside you from now on. In doing so, you quietly defy your mortality. The tears well inside of you. The American dream spills over you.

You realize you have never understood the word rare until this moment.

Drilling, baby, drilling

Behold the lead story in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer Metro section: Oil and gas drilling in Ohio sinks to low level, but boom expected soon.

For many of us in Ohio, the boom has already begun. Here's what it looked like yesterday about a half mile from my house:



All of the houses in that video were built when municipal laws prohibited drilling in residential areas. A few years ago, state legislation usurped home rule and now you can erect an oil derrick just about anywhere in Ohio.

The regulations governing the wells are strange and convoluted. You have to amass 20 acres of mineral rights (for most wells) in a collective "pool." They have to be contiguous, but that's about it. Hence, a property owner may have no say about a well going in 100 feet from their property line while someone a half mile away is in on the royalty pool. Add the phenomenon of horizontal drilling and things get really twisted. I was obliged to learn about all of it for this in depth feature I wrote in September 2009.

A voice enters the vid at about 1:20, but it's not the fellow walking towards me in the frame. It was a man who pulled up to the intersection of the side street next to where I was recording. The man pictured in the vid, however, seemed a bit miffed by my presence. As I was leaving he yelled this at me:

"This is good for everyone. This benefits everyone."

An operating well a few miles from the one in today's embedded video.

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Praise the Lord!

SO worth tolerating the commercial--and God knows I don't even go to church.

Los Angeles vol. three: the hole ablution

Brilliant in design, the house soap for the Hotel Shangri-La is an ovoid ring, which maximizes surface area while minimizing product volume.

For it is, is it not, the surface area of the soap that produces suds?

Obviously it is, with the rounded edges of the bar producing the highest lather volume as they interact with the palm, and the flat center of the soap producing the least.

Hence, the Hotel Shangri-La provides guests with a product that delivers 100 percent full-size bar satisfaction (even 150 percent satisfaction if one were expecting a puny hotel bar) with only 50 percent of the end product. And that estimation doesn’t even take into account the unusual contour shaping of the bar and hole. Not only does it provide untold lather production, it is pleasing in the hand—almost erotically so.

Doth someone profess said soap to be chintzy?

In the hotel application, nothing could be further from the truth. For even the most vigorous bather would not use an entire full-sized bar during a short stay and at the very least would lather it down to a sliver that might be the size of a regular hotel soap, which is (almost whimsically) approximately the size of the hole in the Shangri-La bar.

Behold the epitome of waste minimization with virtually no performance expense—pure poetry.

The authoress apologizes for not listing manufacture and ingredient information for the soap. Alas, being so beside herself with excitement at just being at the Hotel Shangri-La, the authoress did not retain the soap packaging. She did, however, find this link and believes the graphic shows the same product distributed in the Hotel Shangri-La.

The readership will note that the authoress’s life is like this all of the time.

For those interested in seeing what the Hotel Shangri-La really looks like, the authoress can attest that these photos don't lie.

* * *

A glimpse inside Bachmann's world

Alisa Harris, author of the forthcoming Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith From Politics, gives a chilling view of life inside conservative Christianity for CNN in My Take: I could have become Michele Bachmann:

Newsweek’s latest cover calls Bachmann the “Queen of Rage.” I can testify to the rage her beliefs inspire, a rage that is focused inward - on protecting the sanctity of an iron-clad worldview, battling all the heretics who dare to believe something different, and seeing life from the bunker of a besieged and victimized faith.

I recommend the entire article and would love to hear from any members of the readership who can shed some insider's light on the conservative Christian culture.

* * *

Los Angeles vol. two: Venice Beach

A big man going one way on the Pacific.

Rasta cheeks.

Dude!

Had to give him $$ before he'd let me take this pic.

She didn't ask for any $$.

Porch garden and I love it.

Bill the commenter's family vehicle.

My kind of front lawn.

California dreaming?

He played "Speak Softly Love" (the theme from Godfather). Unusual soundtrack considering the scene.

Peek-a-boo.

Wonder what Marilyn would think of that (click to enlarge).

Happy Cronk beacheronis.

Last picture and Venice Beach was fun. Now be on the lookout for (groanville) whackadoodle jokes.

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Lightbulb schmightbulb

Although the following assertion is going to rile certain portions of the readership, I'm putting it out there anyway:

Bellyaching about having to use energy-efficient light bulbs is pure candy-ass.

CODE ORANGE NEWS ALERT: Using your incandescent light bulbs to heat your house is dumb dumb dumb. You go to touch a light bulb that's been on a few minutes? You burn your candy-ass fingertips? You just proved my point.

Yes, I know the curly bulbs aren't the most aesthetically appealing. Yes, I'm pretty sure you can buy good-looking energy efficient bulbs. No, I haven't researched said topic. Yes, we still have some hotbulbs* in our house, including five above the kitchen table on a dimmer and four in my bathroom, also on a dimmer. Yes, my family eats in low light. No, I don't put my makeup on in low light (I'm 46 years old for chrissake). Yes, the heat from the bathroom bulbs makes me crazy in the summer (no AC) and guiltily indulgent in the winter (the thermostat is set to 64 [day] and 60 [night]). Yes, I have to find energy efficient replacements for these fixtures. Yes, I realize this yes/no format is cloying. No, that is not me featured in today's graphic.

Our electric bill averaged $73 over the past 12 months. Kiss my ass.

And it doesn't end there. We** used to replace the bulbs over kitchen sink about every three months. Now it's every three or four years. How beautiful is that you silly candy-ass righties?

That said, even I have my limits when it comes to conservation.

The Goat (from behind the newspaper last night): They've got a light bulb that costs forty bucks and supposed to last 25 years.

Me ( hovering over my jigsaw puzzle): Really? (long pause) Dunno, though, hon.

The Goat: What?

Me: We might not live that long.

The Goat (he's nine years older than me): We're pushing it, huh?

Me: Yup.

##

*Hotbulbs? Dear Lord, please tell me I've just coined a new word.

**The readership will note the Goat's objection to the authoress's pronoun selection in this sentence.

##

Los Angeles vol. two: Armed in California

Your humble hostess thought that this photo would please the conservative portion of the readership, plus it is yet another non-labor intensive post. As the readership may have surmised, your humble hostess is in a bit of a lazy pattern of late. Having returned from a blissful vacation over the weekend, the ramp-up has been slow to say the least.

Actual content will eventually return to these pages, so please stay tuned.

* * *

The only "whackadoodle" in the room

Governor Kasich:

As a lifelong Ohio resident, I am disgusted and furious over your referral to residents of California as "whackadoodles." I may disagree with your politics, but you represent the state of Ohio and its residents nonetheless. Your "whackadoodle" reference, which I heard on Fox News and also saw on YouTube in a talk you gave at the Columbus Athletic Club, is inaccurate and juvenile. You disgraced your office, yourself and your constituents.

At the very least, an apology is in order. Until then, the only whackadoodle in the room, Governor, is you.

Sent to Governor Kasich on August 9, 2011

* * *

Bill the commenter on vocals

From the email introducing this video:

For some reason I just wanted you to see that commenting on your blog is not the only time I make a fool of myself.

--Bill the commenter.

Yeah, yeah. Who cares? The chicks DIG him!

* * *

Los Angeles vol. one: Santa Monica Farmers Market

Miscellaneous post that does not earn a AAA rating and runs on

-This way cool Springbok puzzle cost me $0.25 at Unique Thrift and it had all its pieces. SCORE!

-I didn't truly understand anything until I was 40. Will I say one day that I didn't truly understand anything until I was 60? Maybe you don't really know anything until you're dead.

-Saw the last Harry Potter and found it entertaining. Don't pay extra for 3D. There's only a few good (mediocre?) 3D moments and oodles of lost 3D opportunity. Methinks they only put this version out there for a money grab.



That said, the new real 3D is sort of freaky. The people look like they're right in front of you. I'm a little uncomfortable to think what this means for the adult film industry. eek!

-Okay, already, I admit it: I'm sort of a digital hoarder. I save every damn email and podcast and silly pic. I would be utterly lost without my spotlight and detest having to empty the trash.

-The Goat (with smug irony): "That's the word for me: established."

So that's what they're calling it these days, huh Goat? Established? Yeah, yeah.

-Time to end this silly post, so here' a pic of the established Goat running.

Miss Pernod

The shoe post

Walking around the house, I noticed the shoes. They're everywhere. How many shoes are in this house? Hell if I'm counting. You want to count your shoes? Go on and count your shoes. I'm not counting shoes.

But the shoes really torqued me. All these shoes. It's ridiculous. It's dumb. But what are you going to do? Throw away your shoes? Then you'd really be a tool. Some dumb broad throwing away shoes. Who could stand it?

But I had to do something, so I decided to take pictures of them.

Bejeweled shoes, flip flops (not mine) and the outside tennies (mine).

Goat shoes.

All Goat, save the hint of LL Bean boot under the one dark Goat boot. Them's mine.

All Lil' O'B.

Mine.

Mine. They look like they might walk away all by themselves. Imagine having to chase your own shoes. Not good.

 

Mine again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Guess who?

This isn't even all the shoes. there's plenty more where this came from.

Good Christ, enough is enough. I'm done thinking about too many shoes.

Hey Goat, wanna go out for dinner?

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