The Dealer Folds

The ortho and I both looked at the black-and-white picture on the wall.

"So you can see the deterioration here, and here. Both the condyle and the acetabulum are involved. There's just not a lot left to work with."

I could see that. Yes.

Last year I began to notice some difficulty reaching my right foot.

Nothing sudden, or startling. But it got difficult to bend my right leg at the hip, and I found that I had to perform an odd contortion of waist and knee to do simple things like tie laces or trim nails.

Have I mentioned that I have this knee problem? I think so. It's my parent's fault. Really; I have a congenital knee malformation called "patellar subluxation"; my kneecaps look outwards, are turned towards the outside of my legs. This has caused the outside of the kneecap to wear on the outside of the knobby parts of the leg bones (the condyles) and has reduced the bony parts of my knees to a pretty tattered state. I can jog briefly, and walking is usually fine, but running more than a short distance will result in a sleepless night of sore knees and Motrin.

So I thought this might be some sort of complication from the knees. Until this winter, when the stiffness and loss of range of motion began to be accompanied by pain in my right hip.

It started as just a soreness after a hard day at work, or playing soccer with the kiddos. But by May it was a constant soreness than ranged from a barely detectable hum when I sat quietly or walked slowly to a startling sort of wince if I tried to run or kick.

Finally in June I went to see my internist.

Like every American today I can't just "go to the doctor". I knew perfectly well that I had some sort of skeletal problem; likely related to age, hard, use, and deterioration (which didn't stop me from occasionally indulging in lurid nightmares about bone cancer or some other gawdawful fright) but clearly beyond the purview of a general practitioner.

But - also like every American today - my medical life is controlled by a massive bureaucracy. Not a government agency that I could petition for relief, but an insurance company that operates like a Sumerian god; opaque, dictatorial, and random.

So to appease the Gods of Blue Cross off to Dr. Le I went.

I love Le. She's this shrewd, no-nonsense character that talks like a B-girl from a Vietnam movie.

"What you do? Mess this up?" she said, poking me in the hip. I winced.

"Yeah, doc. I think I got a bum part and I need to go to Third Shop for an overhaul. You know a good bone wrench?"

"You go see Doctor Langwire. He hip man, Portland Ortho. He check you out."

Sure enough.

So with my all-important referral slip in hand, I spent a sunny afternoon having my leg manipulated by a physician's assistant and getting an x-ray. Which the doctor and I were both looking at now.

"If you were 75 or 80 there would be no question." the orthopod looked me up and down, "I'd be recommending a new hip. Yours is among the worst I've seen, and that includes men in their nineties."

"But..." I already knew the but, having read the little "Total Hip Replacement" brochure, the one with the little old man on the cover.

"Hmm. Yes. But the level of activity possible with a replacement hip would be very restrictive for an active man in his fifties." The doctor paused and looked at the x-ray again. "And there's the issue of functionality; a replacement today would probably mean another before you were seventy. And second replacements tend to have complications, especially if the person, again, intends to remain active."

Complications.

Yeah, I'd read that, too. Hip replacements aren't what you tend to think; you don't go skiing the next week. They're really quite fragile, you have to be extremely careful about things like inverting your leg or the thing will dislocate. Dislocations run about 5-6%, and, remember, we're talking mostly about old gaffers in the seventies throwing a hipjoint out shuffling down the grocery aisle to pick up some stool softener.

"Honestly, doc; what would you do."

To give him credit, I think he really thought about it.

"Well, I'd lose some weight". We both looked down at the thickness around my middle. I like to think of myself not so much as...fat...but as "dense". But I'm fat; I've lumbered around 230-240 for the past decade, ever since my knees really packed in.

"And I think I'd exercise to the best degree possible. And I think I'd try and keep my original hip as long as I could. Because when it becomes too much to go on, you're going to lose a great deal of what you can do now, and never recover that. You will be able to walk again without pain, though. Which at that point might be worthwhile."

I thanked the man, and walked out of the big, airy office in the old Pearl District brickstone building, and got in the work truck, and sat behind the wheel for a long, long time.


I don't want to make some sort of big tragedy out of this. I can do most things just fine. I have a terrific job, a wonderful family, I make a good life in a city I love. If you pressed my I'd have to say that the past nine years - my married life with Mojo and our kids - have been the best years of my life.

But my body is starting to fail me, and that's never happened before.

And I will admit; I abused the hell out of it, me, and the U.S. Army.

I threw it around, and piled heavy loads on it and told it to go past the point where it told me it was ready to stop. I made it bend and stretch in ways it didn't like, and hurled it against hard objects until it protested by swelling up and whining creakily. In my twenties, thirties, and forties I walked and ran further and faster than most Americans do in a lifetime; I climbed everything from hills to mountains, lifted and carried, squat, knelt, and sprawled. I played contact sports for my own entertainment that towards the end would see me with ice packs on both knees.

But every time I asked it to work or play for me, my body always responded. Not always gracefully - in fact, I'm to grace what Republicans are to compassion, an utter stranger - but always.

And now it's starting to just quit.

The doc was right. I'm not ready to become an old man, shuffling along at a slow walk for exercise, worrying constantly about making a sudden turn or sharp movement that will produce the instant screaming agony of a dislocated hip.

But the options are not good.

There's something called a "hip resurfacing" that offers a better joint architecture and a lowered chance of dislocation, and I need to look into it. And I'm not bragging myself when I say I have a pretty high threshold of pain, and I think I can go a fair bit before it becomes too bad for me to take.

Oh. And the last time I weighted myself I was down to 217.

So that's something.

But the damn plain fact is that I've been dealt a pretty shitty hand. I'm a 53-year-old man with the right hip of a sickly seventy-year-old. There's nothing I can do about it, and I can't even really whine about it, since it gave me a better run than most Americans before abuse and my fat ass packed it in.

It's the hand I have, and I just have to play it out.

But I don't have to like it.

And I don't.

daughter of Michelangelo

"It will never be those theater beauties,
Corrupt products of a worthless century,
Those feet shod in buskins, those fingers holding castanets,
Who will satisfy a heart like my own.I leave to Gavarni, the poet of chlorosis,
His babbling flock of hospital beauties,
For I cannot find among those pale roses
A flower that ressembles my red ideal.

What this heart, as deep as an abyss, needs
Is you, Lady Macbeth, a soul powerful in crime,
A dream of Aeschylus blooming in a climate of south winds;

Or rather you, great Night, daughter of Michelangelo,Who peacefully twists into a strange pose
Those feminine charms fashioned in the mouths of the Titans!"

~Baudelaire

The Ballad of Eskimo Nell, a Bawdy Verse

Be advised.

This is a VERY dirty poem.

I have loved poetry since childhood, and have read, and even written poetry, though the latter was so awful as to have earned me a deserved beating from Bulwar-Lytton and the guy who wrote the screenplay for "Gigli" together.

But I also have a rather bawdy sense of humor, which means my taste in the arts includes poetry as well as prose, song, and interpretive dance impolite as well as polite.This one is quite impolite. You are advised that it is neither safe for work nor the home and family, and the eyes of those of tender years should be warded from it lest they get the wrong ideas about men and women. And saloons.

And the poetry of Robert Service (in case you don't get the connection, go read "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" before reading further) as well as Arctic manners and mores.

This is me entertaining myself, and perhaps you if you appreciate a dirty joke well told. If you are of delicate constitution or douce temperament read no further!

For I now give you the 1982 Fort Bragg Rugby Club version of

The Ballad of Eskimo Nell

Gather 'round, you pimp and whore-y,
Gather 'round, and hear my story.

When a man grows old and his balls grow cold,
And the tip of his prick turns blue;
When it bends in the middle like a one-string fiddle,
He can tell you a tale or two.

So pull up a chair and stand me a drink,
And a tale to you I will tell
About Dead-Eye Dick and Mexican Pete
And a harlot named Eskimo Nell.

Now when Dead-Eye Dick and Mexican Pete
Go forth in search of fun,
It's Dead-Eye Dick that carries the prick,
And Mexican Pete the gun.This Dead-Eye Dick and this Mexican Pete
Lived down by Dead Man's Creek,
And such was their luck that they'd had no fuck
For nigh on half a week.

Sure, a moose or two, and a caribou,
And a bison cow or so,
But for Dead-Eye Dick with his massive prick,
This fucking was mighty slow.

Dick pounded his cock on a jagged rock,
And he said, "I want to play!
I've been wanking a week by this fucking creek,
With no women coming my way!"

So, do or dare, this horny pair
Set off for the Rio Grande:
Dead-Eye Dick with his frightful prick,
And Pete with his gun in his hand.

Then, as they blazed their noisy trail,
No man their path withstood.
The virgin bride, her husband's pride,
A pregnant widow stood.They roared the strand of the Rio Grand
From midnight to blazing noon.
When to slake their thirst and do their worst,
They sought Black Mike's saloon.

The swinging doors they pushed back wide,
And two fearsome weapons flashed free.
"According to sex, you bleeding wrecks,
You'll drink or you'll fuck with me!"

Now the boys knew of the fame of our hero's name
From Cape Horn to the Arctic stars;
So with nothing worse than a muttered curse
Those cowhands sought the bar.

The girls they knew of his playful ways
Down there on the Rio Grande,
So forty whores pulled down their drawers
At Dead-eyed Dick's command.For they saw the finger of Mexican Pete
Move on the trigger grip,
So they didn't wait; at a fearful rate
Those whores began to strip.

Now, Dead-Eye Dick was breathing quick
With lecherous grunts and puffs,
For forty asses were bared to view,
And likewise forty muffs.

Now forty bums and forty quims,
If you can use your wits,
And if you're slick at arithmetic,
Makes exactly eighty tits.

Sure, eighty tits are a gladsome sight
For a man with a raging stand.
They may not be rare in Berkeley Square,
But they are on the Rio Grande!

His phallic limb was fighting trim.
As he backed and took a run,
And made a dart at the nearest tart,
He scored a hole in one.

The lady he bore to the dusty floor,
And there he filled her fine,
And though she grinned, it put the wind
Up the other thirty-nine.

Deadeye Dick was finished quick,
And flinging the first aside,
He was making a run at the second one,
When the swinging doors flew wide.And entered in to that Hall of Sin,
Into that Harlot's Hell,
Strode a lusty maid who was unfraid:
Her name was Eskimo Nell.

By this time Dick had got his prick
Well into number two,
When Eskimo Nell let out a yell.
And bawled to him; "Hey, you!"

Dick gave a flick of his muscular prick,
And the girl flew over his head.
He then wheeled about with an angry shout -
His face and his bollocks were red.

With a lustful leer he said, "Look here,
Just get into the queue:
I've got to mate with thirty-eight
Before I get to you."

But Eskimo Nell, she stood up right well
And looked him dead in the eyes;
With utter scorn she sneered at the horn
That rose from his hairy thighs.

She drawled her scorn at his rampant thorn
In accents clear and cool:
"You sorry shrimp of a Yankee pimp!
You call that thing a tool?"If this here town can't take that down,"
She sneered to those cowering belles,
"There's another cunt that can do the stunt,
But it's surely Eskimo Nell's."

She dropped her garments one by one
With an air of conscious pride,
And as she stood in her womanhood,
They saw her Great Divide.

It is fair to state it was not so Great
As Deep as opposed to Wide;
And viewed from without, it left no doubt
Of the tensile strength inside.

She stubbed out the butt of her cigarette
On the end of his gleaming knob,
And so utterly beat was Mexico Pete
That he quite forgot his job.

She seated herself on a table top,
Where someone had left a glass.
With a twitch of her tits, she crushed it to bits
Between the cheeks of her ass.She flexed her knees with a supple ease,
And spread her thighs apart.
With a friendly nod to the mangy sod,
She gave him the cue to start.

Now, Dead-Eye Dick knew more than one trick,
And he meant to take his time,
For a woman like this was orgasmic bliss,
So he played the pantomime.

He flexed his asshole to and fro,
And made his balls inflate,
Until they looked like the granite knobs
On the top of a palace gate.He blew his anus inside out,
His scrotum increased in size,
His mighty prick grew twice as thick
And reached almost to his eyes.

He polished it up with alcohol,
Then, to make it steaming hot
And finish the job, he sprinkled the knob
With a cayenne pepperpot.

Then did he neither start to run
Nor did he take a leap,
Nor did he stoop, but with a swoop
Made a steady, forward creep.

As a marksman might, he took a sight
Along his mighty tool,
And his steady grin as he pushed it in
Showed a calculated cool.Have you ever seen the pistons
On the mighty C.P.R.,
With the driving force of a thousand horse?
Well, then you know what pistons are.

Or, you think you do, but you've yet to see
The ins and outs of the trick
Of the work when its done on a non-stop run
By a fellow like Dead-Eye Dick.

But Eskimo Nell was no infidel,
As good as a whole harem
With the strength of ten in her abdomen
And the Rock of Ages between.

With nary a scream, she could take the stream
Like the flush of a watercloset.
Now she gripped his cock like a Chatwood Lock
On the National Safe Deposit.

But Dead-Eye Dick would not come quick,
He meant to conserve his powers,
For if he'd a mind he'd grind and grind
For sixteen solid hours.

Nell lay a while with a subtle smile,
Then the grip of her chasm grew keener,
And a squeeze of her thigh then sucked him dry
With the ease of a vacuum cleaner.She performed this trick in a way so slick
As to set in complete defiance
The principal cause and basic laws
That govern sexual science.

She calmly rode through the phallic code
Which for years had withstood the test,
And the ancient rules of the classic schools
In a moment or two, went west.

Right here, my friend, we come to the end
Of copulation's classic:
The effect on Dick was sudden and quick
And akin to an anaesthetic.

He fell to the floor, and he knew no more,
His passions extinct and dead,
Nor did he shout as his cock fell out,
Though 'twas stripped right down to a thread.Then, Mexican Pete did leap to his feet
To avenge his pal's last spasm,
With a jarring jolt of his blue-nosed Colt,
He rammed it up Nell's chasm.

He rammed it hard to the trigger guard,
Then fired two times three,
But to his surprise, Nell closed her eyes
And smiled in ecstasy.Said Eskimo Nell, "You've rung my bell;
I'm ready to explode.
Oh Pete, my sweet, can you repeat?"
Said he, "I've shot my load".

She looked him down with a lowering frown,
Then "Too bad," she said, "for you,
I might have guessed that that was the best
That you two sad bastards could do."

"When next, my friend, that you intend
To sally forth for fun,
Buy Dead-Eye Dick a licorice stick,
And yourself an elephant gun."

"I'm going back to the frozen North
Where the peckers are hard and strong,
Back to the land of the grinding gland
Where the nights are six months long."

"It's hard as tin when they put it in
In the land where spunk is spunk.
Not a trickling stream of lukewarm cream,
But a frozen, steaming chunk.""Back to the land of the grinding gland,
Where the walrus plays with his prong,
Where the polar bear wanks off in his lair,
That's where they'll sing this song."

"Back to the wild and the icy North,
Where man and beast turn blue,
Where even the dead lie two to a bed
And the rotting corpses screw."

"Back to the land where men are Men,
I'll say 'Terra Bellicum,'
And there I'll spend my worthy end,
For the North is calling: 'Come!'"Then Dead-Eye Dick and Mexican Pete
Slunk away from the Rio Grande,
Dead-Eye Dick with his broken prick,
And Pete with no gun in his hand.

When a man grows old and his balls grow cold,
And the tip of his prick turns blue,
And the hole in the middle refuses to piddle,
I'd say he was fucked, wouldn't you?

In Praise of Women II: The Feast of Valentine

Back in January I posted a brief discursion on the subject of women as they appear to me speaking both as a man in general and this man in particular. I wanted to talk about how I perceive the differences - and similarities - of the genders, starting with the notion that we are somehow fundamentally more different than similar.Because this seems to be a very common male assumption, the notion that we're some sort of raging red Martian, all hair and tumescence, and they are some sort of silky Venusian, wanting us to use a napkin and put the seat down afterwards. Or, more simply, that there IS an "us" and a "them", and (since we're male and something like 6,000 years of Western civilization has told us that we are the lords of creation and masters of all we survey) "our" way must and always shall be better.Hell, some jackhole even made an expensive commercial about it:But I cannot find in my personal experience any real systematic evidence that women and men are somehow different at the cerebral level. For every stereotypical "manly" man I have known men with a surfeit of the "womanly" virtues: talkative, intuitive, emotionally open and sensitive to nuance, romantic to the point of foolishness. And for every "womanly" woman I have met another who is shrewd, calculating, opportunist, direct, rude, callous, efficient or gruff.

I find that women's minds are interesting as the people within them are interesting. I find female fools no more bearable than the ones with chest hair; I find smart, witty, gifted women interesting and likable for reasons having nothing to do with their reproductive capacity or their silhouette.

But...this is where the difference creeps in.

I have many men friends whose company I find entertaining, enjoyable, stimulating. And while I enjoy spending time with them, that's as far as it goes.But a woman whose company is enjoyable also has the ability to make me desire a more intimate companionship, and therein lies the mystery.

Because, while I can appreciate the beauty and grace of a man's body it does not bring about anything more. But I find the simplest things about the physicality of women delightful.It may be the strength of her fingers, or in the shining fall of her hair. It may be in the way she laughs, or the play of expression on her face. Many women are more gracile and finely made than we males are, and I have always enjoyed the more gently rounded point of shoulder and fullness of hip, the slimness of ankle and wrist. The lush curve from ribcage through the hollow of waist into the rich embonpoint of thigh and buttocks is heartbreakingly beautiful; the soft swell of bosom and belly is an ancient fertility made flesh.(I should add here that I have been...I have to use the word "accused", although I don't really get it as an accusation...accused of liking a certain fullness to a woman's appearance. Well. I'm not the product of a culture that finds obesity alluring, but I will simply reply that I revel in a woman that looks like a woman. After all,Women come in many shapes, sizes, hues and dispositions. If you treasure women, I insist that there is nothing intrinsically unpleasant about any one of them.)

A woman, just like a man, can make herself unpleasant with anger, pettiness, or greed. Of course she can. Gluttony can bury her in grossness; vanity or social fear can waste her away to a frightful and ugly thinness. But from the time the menarche has ripened her into woman's estate until senescence shrivels her sexual appeal into barrenness, I find that there is something I find winsome, something appealing in every woman who combines a heart, a soul and a wit.

And I find it a little sad and a lot more enraging that we - particularly here in the industrial West - have made a fetish of some sort of skinny but buxom, depilated, glossy, mindlessly available sexbot. As if the physical appear of a woman should be restricted to and aroused only by some anorexic swimsuit model's silicon-inflated frontispiece.

How petty! How truly, grimly, limply unimaginitively small! To - not just forget but actively deny - that the magic is not in some sort of perfect pink-tipped parabola of some laboratory-crafted, airbrushed idealized paradigm of a breast, but in the glance from under her jumble of dark bangs, in the imagined tang of the sweat of hard work you know you'll taste when you press your lips to her temple and feel the fast, hard pulse beneath that tells you her heart has sped to match the rhythm of your own.That the magic isn't in the touch of some flawless expanse of marble thigh or arch of fatless back, but in the play of the light upon the imperfect skin of the one whose intimacy makes you gasp and shudder, whose nearness only makes you burn with the need to extinguish the last atom of distance between you, to be around and within and encompassed by the scent, the touch, the rough, smooth, cool, lambent heat of the woman whose simple existence sets you alight as balefire in the night.There IS a difference between men and women. And the difference IS primarily physical, and the sad thing is that we men, generations of us, have spent those generations building ourselves idols to a rag and a bone and a hank of hair and worshiping it without a hell of a lot of us ever remotely understanding what it is about that woman that seduces us.

Or being too simple to ever get past the obvious...

Sometimes I wonder how we ever manage to succeed in finding women to spend any real time with us at all.


And on the feast of St. Valentine I should add to my own love:"'TIS true, 'tis day; what though it be?
O, wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because 'tis light?
Did we lie down because 'twas night?
Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,
Should in despite of light keep us together."

J. Donne

Da mi basia mille, amadis, da mi basia mille.

In Praise of Women I: Inside Out

I promised my friend Lisa that I'd talk a little about my thoughts on men and women. Several of you, wise counselors that you are, warned me off the idea on the grounds that anything I said would constitute fighting words for someone and that the subject was too loaded to be safely handled, rather like an old Soviet shoebox mine, or a family crime, or an angry puff-adder.

It's a chilly Sunday night that promises to become a chilly, rainy Monday morning, the small child is cuddled in her bed in the back of the house,

the big one snuggled up to mommy our big sleigh-bed in the front bedroom, and I'm here with my couch-bed (no, not one of those awful Castro Convertibles but the beamy down-stuffed chesterfield in the front room) and my computer, thinking about the women in my life and women in general.

For what man doesn't? It starts with our mothers - even for those of us who never crave another woman, she is there. that all-encompassing feminine godhead of comfort, love, often correction, sometimes wrath. Then we pass on to sisters, perhaps, and neighbors, soon classmates or playmates, enemies, friends, passersby, marked or not...monkey-girls to our itchy little monkey-boys. We mock them, tease them or ignore them, but for our childhood they are merely strangers that look softer or rounder than we do.

Until that time where our testicles descend and their ovaries ripen and our glances become overbold, or hesitant, or shy, or speculative.

And then we embark on a lifetime of precession, that wobbling, toppling motion of heavenly bodies that turns the axis on an axis; hoping, fearing, dreading, craving and wishing to be craved. Dizzy, bemused, frustrating and frustrated, trying to sort out our feelings from our knowledge, our hopes and desires and fantasies from our understanding of reality and probity.

In many ways, we never do return to that prepubescent serenity, that solid understanding that boy-things and girl-things are just different and never to be confused. Perhaps the final arrival of senescence dims the hormonal and emotional din...I don't know. Certainly many of the old people I've talked to evince a version of the same man-woman double helix I've felt for almost forty years, that almost every man I know has felt and feels. It's not as simple as the old joke about coming out at birth and spending a lifetime trying to get back in - although there's some truth to the stale canard. It's spending a lifetime with this woman, these women, the other half of you, the yin to your yang, the other side of the spinning coin, and trying to understand her and her effect on you.

Aside from the images of the hunt, perhaps the oldest effigy we men created was of a woman. We've prayed to her, feared her, courted her, raped her, loved and desired her, treasured her, trashed her. We try and know her, often think we have encompassed her...and then realize that we know nothing about nothing, or that our comprehensive understanding is the merest skim, a glittering pool a thumbnail's thickness deep.

But the oddest thing is - we often insist that she is "different" inside, that her very thoughts are alien, that she thinks and reasons in ways, that she believes in things, that no man shares and cannot comprehend.

If we were honest, we'd admit that we often think of her as soft, sentimental and a little foolish. Some of us go even further, and insist that her brain is fundamentally different from ours, that she is good at "emotional intelligence" and not at the hard sciences, that the reason that Nobel winners and conquerors are overwhelmingly male is determined by the genitalia more than anything else.

I have no honest idea whether there is some sort of physical difference inside men's and women's heads. I have no studies to cite; frankly, I am skeptical of attempts to "measure intelligence". Somewhere I recall reading that Jared Diamond did a little test of the observational, assessment, and decision-making tasks required of an average day and concluded on that basis that it required more critical thinking skills to succeed as a tribesman in the mountain forests of New Guinea than it did to work arbitrage at Goldman Sachs. (Which, since its publication several years ago quite a number more of us would agree with now than then...) Context is crucial, as is background, and the society surrounding us. And, besides, this isn't a blog about science, or anthropology, or gender studies. It's just me, maundering.

And in my experience there is as much or more variation between the way individual women think than there is between men and women.

There are women who fit the "traditional" (read "the way most well-fed Caucasian Christian Westerners think") female stereotype of the foofy sort of person, all emotion and reaction, more at home with love stories and gossip than firearms or sports jargon.

There are also women who would kill you with a smile, who would jack the blade up underneath your sternum and watch your eyes cloud over with no more emotion than satisfaction.

In my experience women can work, play, think and discuss everything from sports to music to art to war to children. Their imaginations are as barren or as rich as anyone's. Women can be gentle, artistic, passionate, soothing. They can also be fierce, boorish, brutal and stupid.

I have had conversations with women about means of killing and I have heard them expound lovingly on explosives. I have put my shoulder to a load alongside a woman who cursed and stank as badly as I did.In short, I find there nothing about women that suggests that they somehow think and act fundamentally differently than I do.

And yet...

...there are ways that women ARE different. Some delightfully so, some distressingly so, but different, all the same.And that is the subject of our next post.

2008 in Video

So now you've seen Little Miss in her very own video, what else calls to us through the magic of the electronical Internet?

(Maggie Jochild over at Group News Blog had a great idea for Christmas Day: publish the videos she most enjoyed through 2008. In the polygamous tradition of success having many parents, here's my purely personal collection of "My fave videos" in no particular order.)

Where the hell is Matt Harding? Make sure you go here and watch the HD version. Just because.


srv reminded me of this: the dancers of the China Disabled Person's Performing Art Troupe perform the Dance of the Thousand Hand Guanyin: I posted this before and Blogger deleted it because of a "terms of use" violation, which gives me a "what the fuck" violation, since YouTube still has it up here and it seems like a personal use. I think it has to do with the terrific mix the YouTube poster made of Steely Dan's "Bodhisattiva", which blows away the lame mysterious East music used for the original performance. So if Blogger deletes it, again, follow the link and check it out. The troupe - and "vickieburns3", the poster - totally rock.


This is one I share with Maggie: OK Go performs "Here It Goes Again" on the synchro treadmills: "It starts out easy, something simple, something sleazy, something inching past the edge of reserve.
Now through the lines of the cheap venetian blinds your car is pulling off of the curb"

Better than Disney on Ice. On dope.


The video that did - as far as I was concerned - the simplest and best job of defining John McCain as a candidate: Like hope, only different...


I love Carly Simon. I love her voice, I love her goofy, widemouthed smile. And I love this song, a cross between a gospel choir and a Women's Institute singing a paean to the Greed Is Good Eighties: Two thoughts: First, I would have Sigourney Weaver's babies if she asked me to. Don't fuck with me about the how; for her, I'd figure out a way. Second, Carly, what's with that spastic little "dance" you're doing between 2:50 and 2:57? Are you goofin' on us, or is that really how you dance? Cause if it is, girlfriend, we gotta talk.


Black, his codpiece made of leather.

You probably know him only from his debased performance as "Bean". But "Blackadder" is Rowan Atkinson's greatest creation: Hugh Laurie does a hilarious turn here as the eeeeevil German master of disguises. "Such a disappointment for a girl..." But the best bit is the first 1:30, where Blackadder plays charades with his Spanish torturer. "Ah, a scythe..."


This really shouldn't be in here - it's really just an audio track with a slideshow. But I love the Jason Wade cover of this wonderful old Chilton Price song so much, I hunt it up and listen to it while I'm writing or doing similar computer chores at work: Lovely.


Ever since the first humans domesticated the cat, feline observers have been trying to decide the nature of the cat's natural prey: the human baby and toddler, or the black bear (Ursus americanus). Well, here's visual evidence - it's BOTH: Not sure what I love so much about this. The Presidents of the United States "Kitty" is a kick-ass tune, the multiple cat-crashes and baby attacks...but the "cat chases bear" clip is...well, watch it and tell me what you think.


The classic: Sarah Palin and two other turkeys: The best thing in this is the little guy - let's call him Olaf - running the turkey butchering machine. He keeps looking at her and then off-camera right, like his boss is standing there miming "Kill! Kill the fucking turkey already! Don't...don't look at her, just kill the goddam turkey!!" You can almost see Olaf thinking "I dunno if this is such a good idea..." No, Olaf, it wasn't. But it wasn't YOUR idea that was the problem...


I ran across this guy in an odd way: idly watching the (truly mediocre) Meg Ryan vehicle "French Kiss". But at one point the soundtrack brings on Paolo Conte's "via con me" and the screen turns a little bit magic:


Another love I share with Maggie: the "bouncing balls" Sony commercial: Just because it looks cool.


I've always had a real fondness for the beautiful harmonies of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, here performing "Rain": And we here are all hoping for some rain, I should add. Enough snow and cold; let's return to our regularly scheduled Oregon winter.

And of course, here's me own self, in the Jib Jab video of Campaign 2008:

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Hope you enjoyed. Back this weekend with more domestic bliss! And then it's on to 2009, and the Return of Politics.

Say what...?

The other day I was stuck in traffic - and no, not the day from the post below - and I was jammed in behind a Japanese-made, steel-and-glass tribute to one of Oregon's great traffic traditions, Let's Move Left And Drive Really Slow In The Passing Lane. I finally gave up trying to pass to the right, threw up my hands and shouted at the guy's bumper:

"You're slower than a day without bread!"

Maybe it was because I had SO much time on my hands that I started thinking about that expression, my verbal SOP for anything painfully slow. It's an odd phrase; IS a day without bread slow, and why? Where did I pick it up?

For the "day without bread" line I can remember exactly where I picked it up - from a coffeetable book I had as a junior high age kid about "Famous Sieges" (see, I was already a War Nerd, even at 14) In the article about the Siege of Turin there was a delightfully oddball little story about a Piedmontese sapper by the name of Pietro Micca. The story was that Pietro and his squaddies were preparing some demo to explode a party of attacking Frenchmen and the other guys were moving like pond water. Pietro shoved the ragazzi della scimmia back down the tunnel shouting that they were slower than the aforementioned day without bread and fired the det cord, blowing himself and the Frenchies out of the world and into legend.

For some reason I really liked Pietro's frustrated slogan, and I've used it for 35 years now.

So now I wonder...am I wierd? Am I the only person who does this, picks up off-kilter tags and phrases out of books or movies or quotations and recycles them?

Do you? And if you do, what is it/are they? I'm really curious; drop me a comment and let me know - what's your "day without bread"?

Ballroom Blitz

Because it's Monday.

Because it's 6 a.m. and I'm on the road to Lincoln City and it's raining.

Because sometimes you need to be loud and goofy.

Because I love these flicks because they're loud and goofy.

Because...well, just because.

Happy last week of April.