My best friend's brother, Josh, graduated at the top of his class from the med school at the University of Washington, and ended up deciding to eschew offers from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, etc., to do his residency in psychiatry at Vermont so he and his wife could be close to her family to raise their kids. As he was getting into his residency program, he was asked to take and accepted a position in the military in the officer corps as an army psychiatrist. He deployed a few weeks ago to Iraq, and decided to take up writing a blog about his experiences and to keep in touch with people.

You can find his blog here.

It's interesting to me as a personal connection to the war, but I think it will also be interesting to have the unique perspective that he brings to the situation by virtue of his position.

shamroq 's birthday is tomorrow (physically, he's turning 73 - his emotional age remains stagnant at approximately 5 years old), so in celebration of his awkward stampede towards retirement, I thought it would be fun to take a retrospective look back at some milestone achievements and events throughout his life:

• July 9, many years ago - Ian is ejected, kicking and screaming from his mother's birth canal, at which time he immediately sprains his left knee and ceases kicking.

• January 5, 1978 - Ian utters his first word. It is "boobs."

• January 20, 1978 - Ian utters what is arguably his second word. It is "boobies."

• May 14, 1985 - Ian steps up to the plate for his first little league at-bat, takes a mighty swing and...sprains his back, putting him on the DL for the remainder of the next three seasons.

• August 10, 1992 - Ian utilizes a 2400 baud modem to log onto a local BBS for the first time. And immediately posts a dick joke.

• March 9, 1994 - Cast adrift in the churning waters of teenage angst and desire following five straight rejections in his bid for a prom date, Ian furiously pens the lyrics to three future hit singles: 1) Be Someone, 2) Inside, and 3) Hesitation.

• August 5, 2001 - Ian finally tricks a woman into going on a date with him, and immediately proposes marriage. For reasons that remain unknown, and to her ultimate regret, she accepts.

• February 9, 2002 - After a series of dates with his new fiancee, Ian finally touches his first real-life boob since he was weaned from his mother's teat at the tender age of 9.

• October 8, 2005 - Following a series of "premature" attempts, Ian finally manages to lose his virginity. And sprains his back in the process, putting him on the DL for the remainder of the next three seasons.

• January, 2006 - Ian launches himself into internet superstardom and starts a disturbing trend by creating a second blog at www.internetsensation.com, where his server crashes under the weight of 2-3 comments per post.

Please share birthday well-wishes and your own favorite Ian moments in the comments section.

Re: Italy - I was there along with some other friends to see our good friend Katharine get married to an Italian gentleman named Giampaolo. We flew into Rome, rented a car, and drove up the Italian coast, all over Tuscany, and then into Umbria where the wedding was held in a small town called San Terenziano.

Highlights of the trip included:

+Driving. Driving on the windy roads through the Tuscan hills and towns is basically like a theme park, given that the only rules enforced on the road are those of gravity. An Italian sports car would've been choice, but really the Fiat Panda handled like a dream, and got slightly better mileage while comfortably fitting three of us and our luggage. I have no complaints.

+Singing. I brought my travel guitar along, and at one hotel we stayed at, I took it down to the attached wine bar after dinner, where philedry and I entertained the owner and the locals with some tunes from internationally-known artists, such as the Beatles, Oasis, and U2. They enjoyed it so much that the owner gave us 1/3 off of our total bill the next morning.

+Food. I ate way too much, but I couldn't help myself because everything was absolutely delicious.

+Not being at work. Self explanatory.

More pictures:

( More large pictures... )

The rest can be found in the galleries here, here, here, and here.

I got back from Italy almost a week ago now, but with catching up at work, running errands, and starting to prepare for my upcoming rafting/backpacking trip to Montana, I hadn't really had time to get my pictures together and post any, so without further ado...

( Lots of large pictures...dial-up beware... )

More to come...

It's like Karl Rove himself coached Hillary before this debate.

A concise, and hilarious summary of the subprime mortgage debacle in cartoon form.

Except they left off the last part where the government funnels giant stacks of cash into the pockets of the investment banks who made tons of money off this for years for their own private profit, but don't want to pay for their mistakes so they foist the risk on the public ("personal responsibility" only applies to poor people).

The free market rules!

For those of you who have been to Rome, what should I see/do/eat? I'll be there for a few days in May/June, sandwiching a weekend in the Umbria region for a good friend's wedding.

Middle school issues "ban" on intentional flatulence:

CAMDEN (Feb 4, 08): The Merriam Webster Dictionary definition for flatulence is brief: "flatus expelled through the anus." And while it's a natural bodily function, it seems some Camden-Rockport Middle School eighth-grade boys are taking it to new heights and allegedly making a game of seeing who can expel the loudest and grossest flatus.

According to this week's "Fire Cracker" newsletter though, an informal eighth-grade publication, the joke's on the boys as the penalty for "intentional farting" is now a detention.

"Strange, but true, thanks to a bunch of 8th grade boys, intentional farting has been banned from CRMS," the newsletter said. "It started out as a funny joke and eventually turned into a game. This is the first rule at CRMS that prevents the use of natural bodily functions. The penalty for intentional farting is a detention, so keep it to yourself!"

I'm not sure such a ban passes the smell test.  While "expulsion" would seem to be the proper remedy for such wanton outbursts, identifying the perpetrator would be difficult, given the long-established, yet contrary, rules of "whoever smelt it dealt it" and "whoever said the rhyme did the crime."  Additionally, even if you could finger the perp, how would you determine whether it was intentional in the absence of direct testimonial evidence that his or her finger had been pulled?  Furthermore, would the school cafeteria be guilty of entrapment on chili day?  Would it violate equal protection because, while it's facially neutral, it would have a disproportionate impact on young males under the theory that girls don't fart?  It's problematic, to say the least.

 

See Part 1 here (and be sure to check out the comments).




Mr. Big Bird





Teen Wolf Blizter





I think you can figure it out...

With the exception of Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and on occasion Reading Rainbow and/or 3-2-1-Contact!, I didn't really get to watch TV as a kid. My mom kept the T.V. in a locked cabinet (although I eventually found the key, and used to sneak into the den to watch Thundercats when I could get away with it), and my viewing was limited to the aforementioned shows plus a variety of videotapes we had on hand, such as a trio of Mercer Mayer stories that included "Herbert the Timid Dragon":



a few dinosaur documentaries my grandpa had taped for me, and a dubbed version of Mary Poppins with the kite-flying scene cut off at the end for lack of space (which meant I had a somewhat skewed conception of the film's denouement that was much more negative than I imagine Disney had originally intended).

More memorably, there was also a tape of two sets of Goofy shorts titled "Sports Goofy" and "The World According to Goofy." I found a couple of these on YouTube the other day, and they're still pretty great (although the "World" series contains a lot of the blatant racism Disney's older material is (in)famous for). See, e.g., the last scene in this short about sailing (skip to 6:15 if you don't want to watch the whole thing), where an unfortunate Goofy is launched out of a torpedo tube and proceeds to sink a series of slant-eyed Japanese submarines before shattering the red rising sun on the horizon:



The "Sports" ones were great though. This is what I imagine vengeance_is_me's home workouts are like:



Also good are:

Football

Hockey

Baseball

Golf

The understated, ironic humor of the old-timey narrator should play well to today's contemporary hipster audience.

A lot of people think Juno was too hip and "edgy" for its own good, which is probably an accurate assessment of the film, but all that aside, I really liked the song they played together at the end. I made a cover of it on the ukulele this morning, and since I didn't have anyone to sing with me I just did both parts myself:

Anyone Else But You.mp3

YouTube limits videos to 10 minutes in length, and The Chase: Part 3 clocks in at an epic 15 minutes, so I had to upload it to Google Video and wait for the approval process to clear. Filmed almost a decade ago now, here it is:

We had big, grand plans to film the fourth installment of our Chase series in widescreen, and edit it with fancy, professional effects, but thanks to a lack of time and the fact that everyone was starting to be "grown up" and had stupid stuff like "work" to do all the time, it got put on the back burner and was never completed. But I found this test sequence we did sitting around on my backup hard drive the other day, so I thought I'd dig it out and put it up:






I miss doing that kind of stuff.

UPDATE: My buddy Tyler, who played the lead in the Chase series, is currently doing stand-up comedy in Boston. Check it out:

We moved to Portland in the summer of 1988. By the time I had settled into school and made new friends, the city of Portland, a.k.a. "Rip City," was in the throes of Blazermania, going absolutely ape shit over the 1989-90 team that swept the playoffs until falling just short of the title, losing out to Isaiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, and the "Bad Boys" of Detroit.

The Blazers were certified hometown heroes. Jerome "Mercy" Kersey. Clyde "The Glide" Drexler. Kevin Duckworth. Buck Williams. Terry Porter, whose elongated bald head and wrinkled features made him look something like a cross between Alien and a Shar Pei:



And boy, did I hate them. Being the contrarian that I was, seeing everyone in town cream their jeans over this collection of upstanding basketball statesmen (when Jerome Kersey is the "dangerous" guy on your team, you might as well be called the V-Neck Sweaters) made me root for whomever they were playing, which is why I had a special place in my heart at that point in life for both the Pistons and, later, Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

What brought this to mind was seeing a clip of the Rip City rap song phenomenon "Bust A Bucket," produced in part by Portland's own Z100 radio station (home to the Morning Zoo and, on weekends, Casey Casem's Top-40). Fun fact: when I was 11 and she was 9, my sister and I were once interviewed on the Morning Zoo program by two incredibly perky hosts for a promotional story about our environmental non-profit group. Fun times. Anyway, here's Bust A Bucket, which was played approximately once per hour, on the hour, for almost the entirety of 1990:



This wasn't my first experience with a horribly-rapped and produced promotional song for a beloved sports team. That would be the Arizona Wildcats Rap, produced during their glorious run to the 1988 Final Four with a team that featured future NBA stars Sean Elliot, Steve Kerr, and Tom Tolbert, as well as future MLB star Kenny Lofton, and appearing on a "Road to the Final Four" video tape that I watched countless times on my grandparents' VCR in Tucson:



Steve Kerr was my hero back then, with his ridiculous 3-point shooting ability, and the fact that the U of A fans "adopted" him in a sense after his father was assassinated in Beirut, Lebanon during his early college career. Whenever he would hit a three, there would be a call-and-response of sorts between the announcer and the crowd..."STEEEEVVVEEE KEEEERRR!!!!"

"STEEEEEVVVEEE KEEEERRR!!!"

After my dad fixed a hoop to a beam in our covered back patio/carport, I took about three boxes of colored chalk and did my best to make a replica of the cactus-laced, sunset-framed Arizona logo like the one on the court at McKale center, made my own Steve Kerr jersey with a white t-shirt and magic markers, and spent hours taking threes and yelling "Steeeeevvvee Keeeerrr!!" whenever I would make a shot.

Kerr went on to become the most accurate three point shooter in NBA history. I gave up playing basketball in the summer before my 8th grade year.

The real magic starts around 2:20.

If you want an idea of how shitty the weather is here today, turn on the Bears/Packers game, where Brett Favre just said these were the worst conditions he's ever had to play in. I got suited up to go to the gym, stepped outside, and promptly stepped back inside. Looks like it's push-ups at home today...

Does anybody else remember watching this as a kid:



I don't know what made me think of it today, but now I really want to watch it again, and I can't find it on YouTube or anywhere else.

I don't get all this talk about why it's "out of bounds" to question a candidate's faith. If you believe something that's patently stupid, why would I not question that? Especially if you tell me your faith is going to "inform" your decision-making.

I watched a little bit of the Republican YouTube® debate on CNN the other night when the wireless connection at the Hyatt Regency in Columbus (circa 2001) couldn't handle both me and a few hundred farm convention-goers trying to log on simultaneously. I follow politics a lot less than I used to lately, partly because work has been really busy, and partly because I've become pretty tired of the whole enterprise in general.



Thompson is all wax and no wick. He may sweat Old Spice and piss gravitas when he's set up with a pre-selected question, but in the debates his answers have been empty, leaving supporters wanting more. For having been hailed as the savior of a party with a litter of nothing but runts, he hasn't quite turned out to be the big dog people had hoped. Perhaps he spent a little too much time deciding whether he would run, and not quite enough deciding what he'd have to say about things once he did.



If there were a cartoon depicting the Republican candidates trying their hardest to out-torture a detainee vis-a-vis their rivals, it would provide a fitting complement to the above. In a somewhat sadistic spectacle, the whole elephant crew (with the exception of McCain), took the stage at a debate a few weeks back to do their best Jack Bauer impression, pandering to the basest of instincts of those for whom "patriotism" means waterboarding and genital shock therapy for the increasing universe of "traitors," i.e. anyone whose boot shifts from the party line by the merest of millimeters.

I'd like to write this off as merely shoring up a particular sub-category of the constituency, but was saddened to see that this sort of rhetoric has a much wider appeal among the party faithful - witness the real-time opinion-tracking of the CNN depate, where you could watch the hive-mind doing it's best to process complex sentences (rarely) and respond favorably to the proper buzz-words (Reagan! Tax cuts! Unicorns!). Two of the lowest points in the night included Senator McCain informing the dinner party feasting on a giant hunk of torture that they actually weren't supposed to be eating it, and it may even cause indigestion. Booooo! said the crowd, and his favorability fell like a feather in a vacuum.

The second sad moment occurred when Mike Huckabee responded to an immigration softball lobbed across the center of the proverbial plate, ready to be smashed out of the park with some good old amigo-hating; instead, he took a swing with his Bible bat an whiffed so mightily Casey himself would be jealous. Huckabee stated that we ought to show compassion to our fellow man no matter where they come from or the color of their skin. A former pastor and probably the most well-versed in the verses among his fellow apostles, Mike didn't seem to realize that the King James seems to have been supplanted by the King George, where God makes war, not love, and compassion has been reclassified as one of the three deadly sins, (gun control and voting Democrat being the other two).

Huckabee, however, did make a pretty good showing for himself otherwise, to the extent that I think he's now ahead in Iowa, quite the surge if there ever was one. Part of this has come from the rapidly failing fortunes of America's Favorite Mayor®, who has, by all accounts, been having a No Good Horrible Very Bad Week, the most damaging aspect of which is likely the revelation that he spent a good chunk of NY taxpayer dough bussing around his botoxed love bunny, Judy Nathan:



"I can't move my forehead!"

This scandal, if it continues to balloon, may spell the end of Rudy's hopes to be the Hillary-beater he always thought he'd be. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

UPDATE - Seriously LOFL:

I broke out the microphone and recorded a couple of songs earlier this evening, two of which I wrote quite a long time ago back when I still had the idea in my head that I might try making a career in music. It's been awhile since I played/sang, and I felt pretty rusty, but I'll share the results anyway.

Wrote this almost 10 years ago now:

MiscellaneousRambling.mp3

This one is probably about 6 or 7 years old:

Metaphor.mp3

And finally, this one was written by Lucinda Williams, from her album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, which you should look into if you don't already have it:

Jackson.mp3

For comparison, the original, which is obviously better: Lucinda Williams: Jackson.mp3


Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving.

This is a very exciting time.

vengeance_is_me:


calamityjake, where you at?

This is well worth a read:

"Daniel Levin is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican. Now recall Michael Mukasey’s suggestion that he didn’t know what waterboarding was? Levin took a logical approach: he decided to experience it firsthand. And he came to a conclusion that, in my mind, shows unacceptable flexibility in accepting the technique. But how did the Bush White House react to this? It was swift and simple: Levin was forced out of office.

...

Senior officials of the Administration were manipulating the issuance of opinions in the Justice Department to shield themselves from criminal prosecution."

At one point I interviewed to intern at the OLC.  Kinda glad I didn't end up there during the Bush administration.

Legality aside, I'm kind of sick of the way that the war-mongering, 24-watching, George-Bush-taint-licking neocon crowd continues to assert that torture is "necessary" and often even desirable in the face of the current terrorist threat-du-jour, and that anyone who disagrees or shies away from these tactics is being soft or cowardly.  It's quite the opposite, really.

A willingness to inflict cruelty in violation of the laws and principles upon which this nation was founded, through which we supposedly derive our political and moral authority, and sink to the lowest common denominator in the face of the threat posed by terrorism is not a sign of strength, but of desperate weakness.  If these people were actually as strong and confident as they imagine themselves to be while they play G.I. Joe behind the keyboard or in the confines of a corporate television studio, they would instead advocate a policy of marshalling our considerable resources to meet the threat while retaining the core principles that might distinguish us from our enemies.  The enthusiasm with which a substantial number of administration officials and their conservative followers cast principle aside in the face of even a modest threat only speaks to their base cowardice.

In a debate the other night, Mitt Romney stated:

"And I hear from time to time people say, hey, wait a second. We have civil liberties we have to worry about. But don't forget, the most important civil liberty I expect from my government is my right to be kept alive, and that's what we're going to have to do."

As Stephen Colbert aptly noted, that ought to play well in New Hampshire, where the state motto is "Live free or die do whatever it takes so we don't die..."

As a kid, I wanted to be, among other things, a shoe designer (fun fact: my first word was "shoe"). I used to sketch shoe designs in grade school, most of which were incredibly unrealistic (hover shoes, for example, and one time even a pair of rollerblades where one side had a set of edger blades in place of the wheels, so you could roll on by and edge your lawn), and a couple of which were my take on popular contemporary shoes, like the Reebok Pumps, or the Air Jordans.

I remember when the Nike Air first came out, and how completely amazed I was by the concept. For some reason, the "A I R" stitched on the back of the shoe represented some sort of magic, some amazing technology that would propel my vertical leap to previously-unheard-of heights (I actually had the highest vertical leap in my freshman gym class at high school, although I think I pretty much plateaued at that point). I was then, and still am to an extent, a total sucker for marketing and packaging. I had an incredibly active imagination, and, with a child's naiveté, no reason to doubt the claims of the companies that produced these products. One example I can still recall is from when I lived in Tucson: we had been on the way to a barbecue at my grandparents' house, and stopped to get some gas at the local Exxon station (this was pre-Valdez). There was some sort of placard embossed with an agressive looking cartoon tiger next to the pump containing the phrase "Put a tiger in your tank" or something along those lines. Upon arriving at the party, I went up to my aunt and uncle and informed them that the reason we had gotten to the party so quickly was because we had tiger gasoline! Rowr.

Getting back to the shoes, soon after I became aware of the existence of Air, I pestered my mom to take me over to the Nike factory outlet store so I could get a pair of my own. It was one of those "but I need these" moments, and I think I had to contribute a substantial portion of my own money to the purchase. I ended up with a pair of cross-trainers (embarrassingly enough, it turned out in retrospect that they were women's cross trainers that had ended up in the men's section by mistake, but they were one of the few pairs that 1) fit me, and 2) were affordable, so I may have bought them anyway given how completely obsessed I was with the idea of owning and using the Air), wore them right out of the store, and actually had my mom drop me off a couple blocks away from home so I could test them out by running/sprinting the rest of the way.

I can't remember if it was after I got the Airs or a subsequent pair of Reebok Pumps, but I called my best friend over to have a jumping/dunking comparison (he had also recently acquired a pair), and we spent a good hour or so measuring our vertical leaps with and without the new shoe technology. Whether or not the results bore out our hypothesis, I can't recall.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was in school with the daughter of, and eventually became family friends with, the guy who has actually designed all the Air Jordans, and is now the VP of design and special projects at Nike. Wandering around the internet the other day, I stumbled upon this interview he gave a few years back on his experiences and design philosophy:



It was an odd, and fantastic, convergence to hear Tinker talk about the conception of the design/product that excited me so much as a kid, connected with the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, which I recently visited and loved. And I can definitely see the connection now:

A few random items.

People:

scottbateman turned me onto Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. Some seriously hot shit:



~~~

Places:

-A New York real estate blog captions the latest renderings from the YVES Chelsea development project.

-Portland gets humped by the media, including a real-estate based story from tomorrow's NY Times, and a recent article on the amazing restaurant scene there (the "apricot cornbread with maple ice cream and bacon" dessert at Le Pigeon really is the most amazing thing I've tasted in a long time). I don't blame you, media. Portland is hot, and you can't help yourself. I'll probably be moving back there myself in a couple of years, even though I've really been enjoying Chicago.

~~~

Things (that have been stuck in my head recently):

-The Manamana song:



-I woke up the other morning with the part from Hey Ya where Andre 3000 is going "alrightalrightalrightalrightalright..." stuck in my head, and it stayed there through the early afternoon. Not the rest of the song, just that part. I had a lot of champagne the night before, but I don't see a connection.

-The theme song from Astronaut Jones (thanks, stremph!):



Things (I've enjoyed recently):

-The chorizo chilaquilles at Flo.

-The crispy ginger calamari and the scallop ceviche at Sura.

-Marc Hebrart champagne:



-The new Mac OS X.

Things (I could really use):

-A little more free time, especially in the evenings. Working past 7 almost every night = no time for the gym = to quote vengeance_is_me, "fatty."

-A personal assistant to run my errands for me (see previous item).

From the 10 Most Improbable Celebrity Fistfights:

" The final straw was Jagger' unscheduled wake-up call to Watts during a band meeting in Amsterdam in October 1984. Richards and Jagger had gone out boozing, returning to Richard' room at five in the morning. Watts was fast asleep. Nevertheless, Jagger dialed his room, bawling "Is that my drummer? Why don't you get your arse down here?"

Watts reportedly got up, shaved, got dressed in a custom-made Savile Row suit, put on a crisply knotted tie and freshly shined shoes, came downstairs, and-in Richards' words-"dished him out a great fucking right hook." Jagger was knocked into a plate of smoked salmon, and Richards had to grab his leg to prevent him from sliding along the table, out the open window and into a canal 20 stories below. "Don't ever call me 'your drummer' again," Watts told Jagger. "You're my fucking singer.""

It's a shame we can't clone Henry Waxman and Russ Feingold* and have them pretty much take over the entire Congress.









*See: (1) Lone vote against initial Patriot Act; (2) First senator to call for specific Iraq withdrawal timeline; (3) Advocates universal health care; (4) Advocates legalizing gay marriage; (5) Very pro-environment; (6) Has declined a pay raise every year he's been in elected office; (7) Not a "tax-and-spend" guy - frequently returns appropriations money to the Treasury and cuts down pork-laden bills.

A: On the contrary, the NILE is the longest river in Africa.

If you laughed at that, you might like this.

Is this woman spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise?

Much like the British conserved gas during the war, I might have asked myself this same question and saved some money by not heading to Europe (the exchange rate is a real kick in the balls at the moment). And I almost didn't make it. My initial flight out of Portland was delayed because prior mechanical issues caused the flight crew to arrive extremely late the evening prior, and some sort of bogus FAA regulations require pilots to get a certain amount of sleep before they fly again. The delayed flight was made much more pleasant by being seated next to Halitosis Man, whose breath smothered the row like a moldy blanket. Also discomforting was a front-page article in the Wall St. Journal detailing the epidemic of lost luggage currently underway at Heathrow, where I would only have a few hours to gather my things and make a connecting flight to Edinburgh, our first stop on the trip.

( Here be more... )

All in all, it was a very cool city. A couple more pictures.

Next stop: London.

Hey, pugofwar, check out what I found in London:

SCORPIO:

"Of all the signs in the zodiac, you routinely enjoy the most interesting problems. No one else can compete with your talent for dreaming up original sins, either. I expect that in the coming weeks, you'll once again assert your mastery in these two areas, leaving the rest of us muttering in amazed awe as we behold the beautiful, stinking, useful, hellacious, intriguing messes you stir up. Congratulations in advance for the resourcefulness and courage I know you will summon from the abyss of your subconscious mind. "

Once again, my attempt at satire is put to shame by reality. vengeance_is_me, you'll be happy to know there's a comprehensive resource for your budding hobby.

A very happy birthday to my mom, one of the greatest people I've ever known.