Ray Bradbury said, ""

In Which I Steal Jeff Goldstein's Thunder in a Mock Conversation Between Kos and a B.L.T.

Kos: Yeah, I know that. But you know how hard it is to find a kielbasa that freezes just right?

B.L.T.:

Kos: I thought so. Did you get the azure paint and speedo like I asked?

B.L.T. :

Kos: I'm waiting...

B.L.T.:

Kos: You never listen! (slams fridge door shut)

B.L.T.: For a minute there, I almost felt sorry for that androgynous little political prostitute.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 28, 2006 18:42 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
humor

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Out, out damn popup!

Update: With a little google-fu, I found out that ilead popups come from Nedstat and Web4u counters.

Prepare to die, saltinating crapulance!

If you don't see a popup, drop a comment.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 27, 2006 20:09 EST | Permalink | comments (5) |
blogging

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Woo hoo! Books! Music!

• the Artscroll Chumash
• Hazlitt's "The Failure of the 'New Economics'"
• Paganini's 24 Caprices played by Itzhak Perlman
• Joe Pass's "Virtuouso"
• Dick Dale & the Del-tones 61-76
  

Finally, I have my own copy of "Failure." For years I've been constantly and repeatedly checking it out of every library I come across. It is possibly the greatest fisking of all time.

The Dick Dale cd is surprising. You can hear Dick's music develop from Chuck Berry boogie-woogie intonations into full-on surf holiness. He wasn't always able to melt picks and blow up amps during solos...

Joe Pass and Paganini can make even atheists feel sanctified in their presence.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 27, 2006 18:06 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
music, books, religion, economics

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Alas, Acidman

A man I never met and whose words I read but recently, has died. I mourn for a man of whose life but for the blogosphere I would be ignorant, and to whose passing I would be indifferent. Due to the internet, no longer can a distant misfortune go unfelt.

Next time someone complains of the impersonality of technology, remember how you grieved over a perfect stranger's cat, or a distant and troubled man.

The world has gotten smaller.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 26, 2006 19:49 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
news, blogging

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Semi-random late night thoughts

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 26, 2006 00:03 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
humor, boredomblogging, blog nocturne

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Scary statistics

I was fiddling with my template (notice the Online Book of the Week under the banner?) when I decided to validate my code. At present, my page has 88 errors according to W3C Mark-up Validation Service.

I figured, if anyone knows how to design webpages, it'd be my lizardoid overlord Charles Johnson. So I checked out his page validation status. 383 errors.

How about the Howard Roark of web design, Travis Benning? 2 errors. Nice.

Wondering what the average number of errors is, I checked nine well-designed blogs and the website of North Korea (as a control). I chose a sample of ten, rather than the statistically more significant thirty, because I am a lazy bastard. Here are the results:

Atlas Shrugs	264
Right Wing Nut House	221
Basil's Blog	144
Ogre's View	482
Patterico	71
The Conservative Cat	NA
IMAO	721
Vince Aut Morire	387
Michelle Malkin	188
DPRNK Homepage	12

Ferdinand's site just said "failed," and didn't give any tally of errors. I will therefore assume he has only 1 error. The average then is 249.1 errors per site, with a standard deviation of 214.8 (calculated with Dr. Sriniva's Standard Deviation Calculator). The communist dogeaters of North Korea ostensibly wrote better html than any of the other sites, except Ferdinand's, by a factor of a between 5 (Patterico), and 60 (IMAO).

I don't know what to make of this. The aesthetic appeal of a website obviously has little or no connection to the validity of its code. The geniuses at Mozilla have obviously expended unimaginable effort teaching your lumbering digital moron with OCD how to ignore typos. And cats are again proved to be superior beings. But what to make of the Norks?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 25, 2006 02:08 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
blogging, discoveries, blog nocturne

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Woo Hoo! Books!

I got a couple books today at my favorite used bookstore:

• Milt & Rose Friedman's "Free to Choose"
• Paul Johnson's "A History of the Jews"
• Don Marquis's "The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel"
• David Foster Wallace's "A Compact History of Infinity: Everything and More"
• Arthur Caplan's "The Sociobiology Debate: Readings on the Ethical and Scientific Issues Concerning Sociobiology"
• Dean Koontz's "The Taking"
• Arthur Bining's "The Rise of American Economic Life"
  

I can't believe I found Archy and Mehitabel. My sister introduced me to them when I visited home in April, and I got hooked. George Herriman's illustrations of Archy the revolutionary cockroach and Mehitabel the feline flapper were once the symbols of the 20's. If you were cool, you carried around a copy of the New York Sun in one pocket, and the American Mercury in the other. If you weren't quoting Mencken, you were sharing Archy's latest missives.

Here is one of Archy's poems, "Certain Maxims of Archy." Don't mind the E.E. Cummings lack of capitalization or punctuation: Archy was a cockroach, and can be excused for not being able to use the shift key. Cummings, being a human, cannot.

 

live so that you
can stick out your tongue
at the insurance
doctor

if you will drink
hair restorer follow
every dram with some
good standard
depilatory
as a chaser

the servant problem
wouldn t hurt the u s a
if it could settle
the public
servant problem

just as soon as the
uplifters get
a country reformed it
slips into a nose dive

if you get gloomy just
take an hour off and sit
and think how
much better this world
is than hell
of course it won t cheer
you up much if
you expect to go there

if monkey glands
did restore your youth
what would you do
with it
question mark
just what you did before
interrogation point

yes i thought so
exclamation point

procrastination is the
art of keeping
up with yesterday

old doc einstein has
abolished time but they
haven t got the news at
sing sing yet

time time said old king tut
is something i ain t
got anything but

every cloud
has its silver
lining but it is
sometimes a little
difficult to get it to
the mint

an optimist is a guy
that has never had
much experience

don t cuss the climate
it probably doesn t like you
any better
than you like it

many a man spanks his
children for
things his own
father should have
spanked out of him

prohibition makes you
want to cry
into your beer and
denies you the beer
to cry into

the old fashioned
grandmother who used
to wear steel rimmed
glasses and make
everybody take opodeldoc
has now got a new
set of ox glands and
is dancing the black bottom

that stern and
rockbound coast felt
ike an amateur
when it saw how grim
the puritans that
landed on it were

lots of people can make
their own whisky but
can t drink it

the honey bee is sad and cross
and wicked as a weasel
and when she perches on you boss
she leaves a little measle

i heard a
couple of fleas
talking the other
day says one come
to lunch with
me i can lead you
to a pedigreed
dog says the
other one
i do not care
what a dog s
pedigree may be
safety first
is my motto what
i want to know
is whether he
has got a
muzzle on
millionaires and
bums taste
about alike to me

insects have
their own point
of view about
civilization a man
thinks he amounts
to a great deal
but to a
flea or a
mosquito a
human being is
merely something
good to eat

boss the other day
i heard an
ant conversing
with a flea
small talk i said
disgustedly
and went away
from there

i do not see why men
should be so proud
insects have the more
ancient lineage
according to the scientists
insects were insects
when man was only
a burbling whatisit

insects are not always
going to be bullied
by humanity
some day they will revolt
i am already organizing
a revolutionary society to be
known as the worms turnverein

i once heard the survivors
of a colony of ants
that had been partially
obliterated by a cow s foot
seriously debating
the intention of the gods
towards their civilization

the bees got their
governmental system settled
millions of years ago
but the human race is still
groping

there is always
something to be thankful
for you would not
think that a cockroach
had much ground
for optimism
but as the fishing season
opens up i grow
more and more
cheerful at the thought
that nobody ever got
the notion of using
cockroaches for bait

The other book I'm going to enjoy is David Foster Wallace's. His account of Georg Cantor's exquisite lunacy and the development of transcental infinites is quirky mathematics at its best. I read it through a library last year, and have been itching to get it.

Life is good.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 24, 2006 19:53 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
books

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Three creepy journeys and a soggy one

As Dane Cook said, we all have a creepy co-worker. Mine is named Dennis.

Warning: foul and excessively creepy language.

In most respects, Dennis makes every other man who ever lived look like a metrosexual. Even Graumagus. If he was in a room with Ted Kaczinski, the conversation would go like this:

Ted: (in a gravelly madman voice) I distill my own urine into kerosene!

Dennis: (in an even rougher voice, but with a nasal tinge similar to a duck's quack) Pussy.

Ted: I once sat in a pool of my own filth in a hunting blind for two days just to catch the perfect buck!

Dennis: Aargh. Wimp.

Ted: I once accidentally cut off my finger while trying to fillet a fish in the middle of nowhere. I added the little bastard to the griddle and ate like a fucking king!

Dennis: Crybaby. Do any of these fingers look like they're my own? (displays his hands, each finger of which is an ungodly and lethal protruberance)

Ted: Ever piss off a grizzly bear just for the sheer fun of it?!

Dennis: (throws Ted down to the ground and gouges out his eyes with his talon-like fingernails) Does the pope shit in the woods?

Dennis's job has slowly driven him insane. On any day one may see what looks like the bastard child of a Yeti and a porpoise chasing people around screaming "HUSTLE!" even on activities which do not readily lend themselves to hustling (like waiting for a trailer to finish loading),  or pulling out rubber bands and threatening to castrate his coworkers like pigs. If not engaged in these favorite activities, he enjoys acting unnecessarily defensive in mundane things. For instance, I recently had this conversation with him:

Me: You bring your dog to the Children's Hospital on the weekends? That's a nice thing to do.

Dennis: Yeah I bring my dog to the cancer kids so they can pet her and feel good. Got a problem with that?

Me: I said it's a decent thing to do.

Dennis: It's not like I bring in a puppy and bite off its fucking head in front of the sick little kids...

Me: I didn't say that.

Dennis: You better not of. I can snip your balls off right now...

Me:

Dennis: Damn right.

Me: What type of dog do you have?

Dennis: A poodle. Her name is Daisy and she's a lady.

I mention Dennis not so much for his peculiar behavior at work, but for the extraordinary creepiness he has displayed when charitably giving me a ride home (actually, a ride at least two blocks from home for good measure).

The first time he gave me a lift was a memorable one. He had invited me that day to help castrate pigs with him on his friend's farm over the weekend. He put on a Christian Rock station, and in between songs described in vivid detail his castrating technique. "I can pick up two pigs in each hand. You gotta lift them up so Frank can snip their balls off. They squirm around and try to bite you, it hurts like hell. We can do over three hundred pigs a day. C'mon, do pigs with me, Tom." I politely refused, not wanting to wake up in a cold sweat after a Silence of the Pigs nightmare.

The second time was even more creepy. As he drove, he would yell, "How good is my memory? Look at this, I've never once been to your house since the last time, but how fucking close am I?" Throughout the ride he mentioned at least half a dozen times that he had not been to my house since, each time rendering the possibility that he had been spending nights crouching in the bushes outside less and less implausible.

The third time surpassed both previous rides in sheer creepiness. He had a soft-rock station playing "Butterfly Kisses" and tapped his toe-fingers on the dashboard along with the rhythm, singing occasionally, while describing his temper. "Tom, if you see my...butterfly kisses after bedtime prayer...  face go beet fucking red, stay the fuck away from me. I mean it. That means I might rip off your fucking head right... I must have done SOMETHING RIIIIIIIGHT! ... there. You never saw me angry. Don't."

I mention all this because today, Dennis gave me a ride "home" that wasn't creepy at all. During the ride.

He just dropped me off five miles up Main Street ("Tom, when we get to the stoplight, jump out of the car and go left. I gotta to get home in time. Does your metropass have your picture on it? See ya monday!") from where I live,  right in time for a tremendous rainstorm to start. He dropped me off in Amherst, a community in which there are no homeless because the cops round up anyone slightly dishevelled and shoot them out of cannons into the neighboring buroughs.

There I was, after an eleven hour workday at a humid freaking garbage dump, in hostile and meticulously landscaped territory. The storm began, and I was quickly soaked. I wrapped my backpack up in a shopping bag to keep my paycheck and books dry, and started walking through well-kept neighborhoods full of lawn jockeys, granite lions, and well-kept people jogging with umbrellas. By the time I caught a bus home, the day's grime had washed off me, and I looked more like the victim of an unfortunate douche accident than a bum.

What the hell was Dennis up to? Therein lies the creepiness.
Show post

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 23, 2006 19:30 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
scruffy work

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

The Nocturnal Bloggers

I've always been a nocturnal blogger. When I started blogging, it was a matter of both preference and biology: I love the night and I drink too much coffee. Now, my 5:30 am to 7:00 pm workday, four-hour sleep schedule is actively pushing my blogging (and other activities) into the wee hours.

Any blogger who has had insomnia knows the dismal feeling that accompanies surfing one's blogroll at 1:00 and hoping in vain to find a new entry by someone similarly afflicted. Or the feeling of posting at 3:00 am, and despite knowing that no one will read it for at least six hours, still checking for comments.

To remedy this, I propose a blog federation of the insomniac. A celebration of sleeplessness. I'd call it either "The Nocturnal/Night Bloggers" or "Midnight Bloggers." There are but three rules for membership:

1. You must blog after 11:13 pm at least once a week in order to join.
2. These posts, to be eligible, must not be solely of the "gee, my belly-button looks funny" variety. Unless your belly-button really is that interesting (don't click that link if you plan on eating ever again).
3. After joining, bloggers will post their daily/weekly caffeine intake somewhere on the page. I'll design a sidebar display and some form of reward for the most heavily caffeinated.

If you're like me, you will have noticed that all the big blogs pretty much shut down by midnight. Guess what this means: this blog federation will probably consist of small, underappreciated blogs. If you're a sleep-deprived Lizard or Insect in the Ecosystem, even a small increase in readers can help you on your ascent to the Bear (PBUH).

Drop a comment if you're interested, or if you have a suggestion about the name. I'll post more about this later.


Update 2:07 am:

Here is my first idea for the artwork:



Any suggestions? Different name? Bigger font? Different background?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 22, 2006 22:28 EST | Permalink | comments (5) |
blogging, blog nocturne

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Lotsa Lotsa Kosalots*

So, Kos got caught with his pants down, coordinating a secret talking points and tactical email list. So he got caught doing exactly what every liberal since Hillary has claimed about conservatives. What's wrong with organizing followers into a dogmatic whole so strong that even the ostensible founders can be called traitors to the cause? It worked so well for Stalin and Napoleon (the pig, not the man)...

Jeff Goldstein, on the first link, does an excellent job of dissecting the liberal fascination with gleichshaltung. But he leaves out a key element: how liberals live their lives will reinforce this trait. Consider three examples:

1. Liberals are among those people who never escape from college. Anyone who has ever stepped foot into academia has observed how stringently, on all levels, information is regulated in a curriculum any deviation from which is punished.

If you disagree, ask any child what he'd get in "social studies" if he condemned primitive cultures as cultivators of horrific misery, or Hoover's interventionism as lengthening the Great Depression. Ask any graduate student in anthropology what grades or social reaction from her peers she could expect if she judged practices like Islamic female genital mutilation and Islamic "pleasure marriages" as immoral. Count the number of conservative professors nationwide, in any field.

Since liberals are openly opposed to home-schooling, it is safe to assume that for sixteen or more years much of their waking lives are spent in an environment both of centralized information and opposed to intellectual diversity. Is it any wonder that years of being told what to think have left them institutionalized, much like long-term ex-convicts who find themselves unable to urinate off-schedule?

2. Liberals are among those people who can't find jobs or maintain families. Is it any wonder that a child who grows up with a bureaucrat instead of a father, and a mother who gains her livilihood by filling out a profusion of government forms, will come to regard responding "incorrectly" as a risk? If the government is employing you to breed children and watch TV, it is a damn fool who'd badmouth the boss. The good slave is cheerful towards his master.

3. Liberals like jobs that involve controlling the lives of the unemployed, fatherless, and vulnerable. If you get paid to filter the ranks of the unfortunate for those few who meet the criteria for your helping wisdom, it would be foolish to point out that you cannot play G-d with the lives of others. Also, since welfare by definition cannot be managed through the profit-and-loss system, it must be managed by means of bureaucratic commands. If one's working life involves the execution of orders for which there can be no evaluation but the judgment of superiors, is it surprising that the rest of one's life will be seen as a matter of command rather than results?

*Reference to this Rathergood animation.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 22, 2006 20:11 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
politics, blogging

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

I can't believe I found this!

Holy crap!

Look at this! A professor whose webpage contains:

• A page devoted to denouncing the evils of socialism
• Links to Hayek's "Origins of the Rule of Law" and "The Socialist Roots of Nazism"
• Links to Tocqueville on liberty
  
• A page on Islam which includes sections on dhimmitude, jihad as barbaric-savagery-against-innocents rather than "peaceful inner struggle," and excerpts from Bat Ye'or on the Armenian Genocide. It also contains a comparison of Jesus ( "a man of peace who preached love, repentance of sin and forgiveness") with Muhammad ( "a ruler, a military commander, a warrior, a plunderer and a thief"). It even includes a "responsa" from Islam.com on its current Sharia position on pedophilia (guess whether the religion of the Great Pedophile and Annointed Schizophrenic Butcher has kept true to its founder).
• A defense of conservatism

Dr. Jansen is one of the few anti-idiotarian professors I've ever seen. Too bad he was smart enough to stick with hard science: he entered one of the few areas in academia where one can still get a real education, but avoided the very areas most in need of a sane mind. Damn, but he'd be an interesting guy to meet.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 20, 2006 18:59 EST | Permalink | comments (6) |
politics, islamomisia, discoveries, anti idiotarians, libertarianism

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Woo Hoo! Books! Music!

I'm basking in the modest wealth my $7.50/hour job is providing me, so tonight I brought some joy from Amazon.com:

• An Artscroll Chumash
• Henry Hazlitt's "The Failure of the 'New Economics'"
• George Reisman's "Capitalism: a Treatise on Economics"
• Joe Pass's remastered "Virtuoso"
• Itzhak Perlman's recital of Paganini's Caprices
• Dick Dale and the Del-Tones' "Greatest Hits '61-'76"

I have some other items in my shopping cart for next month:

• F.A. Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty"
• Ambrose Bierce's "The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary"
• Martin Gilbert's "The Holocaust"
• Murray Rothbard's "Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market"
• "Charlie Parker for Guitar: Note For Note Transcriptions and Detailed Performance Notes for 18 Bebop Classics"
• The Soundtrack to "Six-String Samurai"

Life is good.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 19, 2006 19:00 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
music, books

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Shedding the cocoon

During the eight months I've been out of the blogging loop, I've been drastically delinked and have devolved into a reptile. Since these scales itch like hell and I hate the taste of flies, I need a plan with which to seize back whatever blogospheric fame I once had. To rise like a phoenix and begin kicking hippy ass anew.

One of the joys of getting older is gaining the ability to look back at yourself in ever more recent intervals and wonder why you weren't drooling and stumbling over your own feet. In the months I've been gone, my ability to eviscerate hippies has almost certainly improved in style and technique. Think of me like Joe Pass after he got out of Synanon, except without the pesky heroin addiction and the godlike guitar-playing.

My current plan: fisk often, fisk hard, and get a cat and a camera so I can resume catblogging. On this ascent of the Ecosystem, I will try to stay out of blogging alliances as long as possible. I figure if word of mouth brought fame to Dizzy and Bird in California, it is good enough for me.

I plan on doing some warm-up fisking for the next couple days to get me back to speed. As for the cat, I've got to decide whether to get a kitten or a morbidly obese terror.  A kitten is highly photogenic, but I've been hankering to get a cat that can put the fear of G-d into a pitbull.

Drop a comment if you've got a feline suggestion

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 18, 2006 19:55 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
blogging, cats

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

The future of web design

If you've got some hours to spare, check out Gorillaz.com

It's an immersive, engrossing, and endlessly interesting format. It's the closest thing I've found to Tom Clancy's web concept in his "Netforce" series.

Imagine what could be done if someone designed a program to make such a mapping simpler, more flexible across media platforms. Imagine what you could do with a website that allowed the user to fully immerse in the data, in such a natural way. Text could be represented in book format, with pages constantly changing texture  and lighting as do real books. Audio and video feeds could be seamlessly embedded.

Finally, imagine what such a site would look like designed by someone even stranger than the Gorillaz geniuses.  A virtual memory palace expressed by each warped inhabitant, the internet could become even more like a magnificent city-scape.

Ten years ago, pictures were a huge thing online.  Now we scoff at pure text pages. Ten or twenty years from now, I predict that sites which have not taken advantage of broadband capacity and improved memory space will be similarly scoffed at. So what if your page requires over 2 GB and can only be appreciated on pipes with at least 54MBPS? At one time, a 20 MB page over a 1800 baud connection was ungodly huge.

If you know of any other such sites, please let me know.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 18, 2006 15:30 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging, predictions, discoveries

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

My Father...

My father was raised Protestant, became a member of a commune in which he met my mother, went through a decade of atheism, and then became a Born Again Christian.

My father embraced pseudo-science, listened to the Art Bell Show, and fantasized about storing energy for intergalactic starships in vats of salt water. He believed he had seen several UFO's in an octopus-shaped formation dancing through the night sky. This did not stop him from being able to describe the functions of mechanical components or the nature of fluid-mosaic cell membranes.

My father wore a headband, smoked biddies, had many drinking stories from his adolescence, listened to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix for inordinately long periods, and could doodle an image of the "Reservoir Monster" that could terrify a four year old.
My father grew up in an affluent section of New Jersey. Within a year of moving to the Catskills, he acquired a wardrobe consisting of camoflauge, shirts with the sleeves ripped off, hunting caps, and shit-kicker boots. He also became a CB radio enthusiast and sprinkled phrases like "breaker, breaker" and "10-40" into everyday conversations. He once used house paint to "camoflauge" my mother's Lincoln while she slept. He created burn-barrels on whatever property he lived on, and delighted in shooting at them. He created new ammunition for his guns, testing it by tying a string to the trigger and having me pull it. When I was about five years old, he let me shoot a twelve-gauge shotgun.

My father worked as an engineer/technician for a plastics manufacturing company, an auto-mechanic, a caretaker for the mentally ill, a manufacturer of fire engines, a carpenter, and an electrician. He was unemployed for three years while my mother took 19-credit semesters, worked full-time, and supported two kids.

My father befriended the insane, the hopeless, and the interesting. His friend "Dead John" was named so because a rumor spread for almost a year that he had died, when he hadn't even moved out of the small town. This rumor ended when my father and some friends brought a Hallmark card over to the home of his presumably grieving mother, and were greeted by the deceased man. Dead John was a hypochondriac who believed the government gave him MS by using Agent Orange in Nam (Dead John had not been in Viet Nam). If you went to his house for a chat, he'd end up having you do little chores for him for six hours while he ranted about Masonic conspiracy theories and the healing benefits of silver water. He scrawled the initials "YHWH" all over his house, including his mailbox, in the belief that it would protect him. He once zapped the hell out of his eye with a UV sanitizer light he had found, because he read online that UV light can kill micro-organisms. His friend Charlie lived on Welfare, only worked once that I am aware of, yet took yearly vacations to Florida. His friends Ronnie and wife Brenda succeeded in reducing whatever home they lived in to the squalor normally found in inner city ghettoes, replete with rotten chicken parts and the unmistakably unique stench of ghetto. His friend Ken looked exactly like a child-molesting used-car salesman, but his appearance never seemed to scare the people on his ice-cream truck route.

My father took a vow to drink a 40 oz. beer every night, in addition to his normal alcohol intake. When my sister last saw him, he was pushing a shopping cart crammed full of beer cans and bottles to a Walmart return counter.

I haven't spoken to my father in almost seven years. Recently I found out that he has now disappeared into the hills of North Dakota (or possibly Utah). But the man taught me that life can be sublimely weird, warned me through his alcoholic behavior not to ever touch the stuff, and serves as a beacon of abnormalcy to the twists and turns I might face in life. And he instilled in me some part of his enormous crush on Janis Joplin. So wherever he is now, he should know that he has helped keep me sober and humorous.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 18, 2006 10:59 EST | Permalink | comments |
hick life

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

Pookleblinky Returns!

My decisions and the vicissitudes of life have tumbled me about, landing me upon a mountain of trash in Buffalo after months of poverty and stagnation. For now, the garbage I handle is that of Buffalo's East Side, not the figurative waste that one finds in academia.

After months of dirty, grueling labor under the constant far off vision of my goals, I have learned five things of which I am sure no other man under forty understands:

1. No one under forty knows anything. Ignore everything a young man says about religion, philosophy, and life. Including myself.

2. Only listen to happy people talk about religion. Everyone finds something to grab onto when depressed, whether Jesus after their wives leave them or socialism and Jew-hatred after failing as a Viennese artist. Find me a poor and lonely man, and I will show you some book he has seized upon as possessing the meaning of life. The difference is akin to that of a man who drinks champagne on a joyous occasion, and a man who slouches upon a bar stool at two a.m. trying to forget his day. The former has counted his blessings and has found a way to increase them, the latter ignores his blessings and drowns them along with his misery. Any man can go to church and pray when his life seems a shamble, it is rare to find him so holy when his family is healthy and his job secure.

3. It is an act of blind arrogance to pray for oneself or others to receive jobs, money, health, and love. If you cannot recognize the blessings you already possess and give praise for them, why should G-d give a shit about the blessings you want? Count your blessings before listing additional ones. Considering how enormous a gift a pulse is, it is the least one can do.

4. There are few things a man can and must do before he dies, and all of them result in his being an interesting grandfather.

5. It is no good to tell a man to be slow and sure of speech and action. It does much better to remind him that one day he will die, and thereafter be unable to prevent the people he has angered from urinating on him.

I return to the blogosphere a man more hopeful, only slightly more wry, and somewhat less likely to go into a Genghis Khan berserker mood when faced with a "Consumption Function." I have also learned how to make the fluffiest matzah-balls on earth, and will challenge anyone who doubts this to taste my fluffy matzah-balls.

Life has been good to me, but it sure drives that lesson hard.

After a week of 16 hours overtime in a dirty, dangerous, backbreaking job, a paycheck may be taken for granted and snatched up as an entitlement without a thought to what a magnificent thing it represents. That is why I have made sure to recognize it as a blessing by this prayer each Friday (followed by a good cigar):

Thank you, G-d, for giving me the ability to earn my own living. Without this blessing, I would be no better than an animal.

Thank you for placing me in a country in which I am free to do so. Without this blessing, I would be no better than a Russian.

Thank you for giving me the ability to recognize these blessings. Without this blessing, I would be no better than a liberal.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 17, 2006 09:11 EST | Permalink | comments (6) |
blogging, hick life

Comments open but moderated. I reserve permission to kill spammers on sight.

This site is a member of WebRing. To browse visit Here.