28293031 "I can't be Arsed" the greatest contribution England has ever made to civilization.

I like a lot of things about the English.

• I like how they all look like they just crawled out of coal-mines after 30 generations of living down there and only dreaming about the sun.

• I like their beer - nothing could be finer than a half-pint tour of London.. walk till you are tired, stop in a pub and have a half-pint of something tasty, then walk on. This was how I found the old Tate museum and the power house at Battersea.

• I like how the Germans always understimate the English, then end up surrendering to them.

• And of course the accents, to use an Amercanism, rock!

But most of all I like the phrase "I can't be arsed." Because it so sums up a sensible type of laziness.. not unconcious laziness.. rather, considered laziness. It implies that the utterer of the phrase is not lazy in general, in fact has reasonably thought through what he or she might gain by an activity and considers the rewards of an action not worth pursuing. It is not, like the Mexican laziness of "manana" a putting off of something.. it is saying that something will never be done. It is not like the Muslim laziness of "If Allah wills it" a surrender to the allegedly greater power of some wacky God... it is, instead, a surrender to the realities of Newtonian physics. It is a noble laziness.

I might write more but I can't be arsed..

27 Virtue: Steinbeck the Mass Murdering Republican

Worst definition of virtue I have ever come across comes from Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel (Written as a companion/aid to East of Eden). It goes like this:

"It is that quality of character which is pleasant and desirable to its owner and which makes him perform acts of which he can be proud and with which he can be pleased."

This definition of virtue is completely located in the head of an individual judging his own virtue. It is as self-referential as a Richard Simmons tape (or so they tell me). If you think about a mass murder you realize that mass-murder is pleasant and desirable to the murderer, and he performs acts of which he can be proud (Doubt that? Then why does he keep pieces in jars in his fridge? Same reason smart people keep that diploma; Same reason less clever people keep their special olympics ribbons; same reason Republicans keep their NRA memberships. He wants a timeless momento of his triumph over reason).

By this definition Adolf Hitler, Bud Selig, George Bush and any Tele-tubbie you like are virtuous.

I dunno, Steinbeck is creepin me out here....

It's only page 26, so I'll 'virtuously' give him the benefit of the doubt.

And since it is clearly the code of the day (Enron, Halliburton, Hefner, Los Angeles) I suppose I should be a signing up!

26 Three Things I Learned Today (Well, yesterday, but I typed them today)

1) Everyone who has a retirement ceremony says, at some point in their speech, "I told myself I wouldn't cry!" And then they do.
Pussies.

2) Pouring a 1-oz airplane vodka into a Bud Light in an aluminum can does not make a sophisticated adult beverage.

3) I can still eat an entire package of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (it's the cheesiest!)

Worse?

I'm still hungry and I want another drink.

And retiring is still for pussies.

141516171819202122232425 I Want an 80 Year Old Girlfriend.

After a normal week with my girlfriend I've just about given up. Not completely, I suppose, I've just altered my aims. I want an 80 year old girlfriend. This was GFs birthday week so I did all the stuff.. gift, dinner, cake, card, boinking. And it went well.

Too bad tomorrow came.

And then I had the same old girlfriend. I don't ask for a lot.. but please god--

• She shouldn't make a mess she can't clean up (well, nothing the adult pampers couldn't take care of)

• She should either know how to drive or be forbidden to do it.

• She should let me sleep

I think an 80 year old girlfriend would be just like that...

13 Spammer Names Update and Hatred of Everyone

Names Update: My good friend notes another fine name from a spammer: Huong Capone (which Googles exactly nothing) - Can't be sure if there's an extra vowel in the first name of a pornstar or if our new friend is an interracial gangster, possibly a rapper with crossover possibilities.I'm sure Dré is on it as we speak.

Hatred of Everyone: So I'm at home taking a screw the world day because I just can't face seeing another human. Last night I went out and was quite social. My parents came by and took me over to a mutual friend's house where we had a truly excellent dinner prepared along Atkins Diet principles.. some darn fine steak in there and I learned that I can, indeed, embrace the sweet potato. It was a wonderful social ramble, although I left a bit early to come home and do a bit of work... Listened to my new ipod (about more, probably, later) and cranked.

But, today, I woke up completely burnt out and loathing the prospect of seeing anyone. Cancelled all my appointments and stayed in.

I wonder if there is an iron-clad law of the "conservation of sociability" (a ridiculous thing I just made up based on Newton's 3rd law, a misunderstanding of Einstein's famous equation, and half a bottle of whisky) which says that as you turn energy to sociability, you run out of energy.

Or do people just suck?

Today's Music Du Jour of the Day (For Today): Buzzcocks: "Harmony in My Head"

Your thoughts are chosen your world is advertising now
And extravagance matters to worshippers of the pound

12 Lick Bush? Burn Bush? Whatever.. weed the effer out...

I have long hated what Bush ("the inferior" and who knew, after the first Bush, that it would ever be possible to say that?) is doing in this world. Particularly if by "doing in this world" you mean "continuing to breathe."

As time goes on I am more and more reminded of Jane Goodall's descriptions of silverback gorillas attempting to gain and maintain power. This association is not helped by the fact that so many pictures of George Junior actually make him look like some kind of hooting primate. But I'm also pretty much of a lazy sod and thus I really haven't sat down and organized my anti-Bush thoughts beyond the ordinary - that he's an idiot with a constitutional inability to change his mind once "God" (Cheney in shiny Kevlar outfit that Donald Rumsfeld designed) speaks to him. So I was very please to see this form letter show up on the patriot boy blog as it really sums up the "up the hill backwards" approach Bush is taking.

The rest of the story is pretty funny as well as this letter is the result of a moronic newspaper in Wisconsin actually soliciting pro-Bush letters to the editor. Even Faux News isn't this open about what they want to hear and report.

Who knew the cheeseheads were part of the international capitalist conspiracy?

11 SPAM and formality

I just noticed the first amusing thing about SPAM that I've seen in years. Some of the names attached to SPAM are positively Dickensian in nature. In the last couple of weeks I've seen:

Amparo Otero - No doubt a hot-blooded bullfighter

Fannie Beaver - Obviously a woman of ill repute

Twila Valenzuela -A ballerina of international fame before a criminally loose floorboard at the Metropolitan ended her career in a shredding of ligaments and dreams. Now, I fear, she drinks and takes lovers.

Gwendolyn J. Fowler - the wife of the powerful industrialist Gordon J. Fowler who made his first fortune at age 17 in the history-book futures market.

Thaddeus Padgett - whose name is so odd that it can't ever have existed.

Yvonne Dominguez - oh, wait! That's my actual girlfriend (no, really, I have one).

and so on..

And these are on my "hidden" personal email. The stuff I get at work is even better but, alas, all erased.

I find the increasing introduction of a middle initial particularly amusing, but I can't say exactly why. It could be because I'm Charles C. Montgomery III and I like to see other ridiculously formal names out there for abuse.

I suppose there are perfectly prosaic reasons for such names.

I imagine filters don't know exactly what to make of old Thaddeus while they recognize Rondal McDonald from the get-go and send him to the fryer. But in a world that is commercial enough, and coarse enough, I'm going to keep on enjoying what little things I can. Thaddeus Padgett, I raise this cocktail of Canadian pain-killers, Cialis, Viagra, and Human Growth Hormone to you.

But Thaddeus my friend, why don't you write me anymore?

8910 On the silliness of all this again.

Finally got this together. Don't like any of the free blogging tools and don't want to pay for a site that is essentially off mine. Not that I won't waste more than the $9.95/month in terms of the time that this stupid roll-my-own will cost. Still, this will somewhat reacquaint me with creating web pages and I think that it will be easier now that I have a template page with all the links built in. Next step, I suppose, is to put in "back" links so that if you use the calendar you can get back to the top of the page.

Oh, that and try to think of something, anything (!) worth typing about... how lazy I am.

4567 A lovely drawing:

3The incongruity of Punk Rock when you're way too old to die young, pretty young, or pretty....

So I'm listening to "Ain't it Fun" by Cheetah Chrome and the other lads in the Dead Boys. Lyrics like "ain't it fun when you know you're gonna die young" are easy to bellow along to, but at some point if I think about what I'm singing I feel a little bit silly. I think about how Stiv Bators died, underneath a car and it seems almost stupid. Anyway I'm way too old to die young, in fact I'm past the age that the idea of dieing young even appears sexy when it is applied to other people. It's pretty obvious I'm gonna die on the downslope and, barring radical new discoveries in plastic surgery, looking pretty bad as well. I'm not gonna die young, I'm just gonna die. And that's God's own truth. And then, of course, there is the problem that there is no God, so it's just the truth. And then.. well, then it's time for a beer... or several.

But, after risking the wrath of the RIAA to attain it, I guess I'll continue to play the song. ;-)

2 Is Depression the new Melancholy?

I just want to write something about an idea that came into my head while reading the awfully strange 2blowhards website and then I get Googlasoured (half Googled, half soured, and half a dinosaur making, in all, half a wit).

How? I looked melancholy to see what it really is and I came across a piece of academic half-wittedness which makes clinical schizophrenia seem like the only logical way to deal with life:

The history of melancholy is the history of a double significance: at once
individual and societal, subjective and historical. Melancholy is first of
all a specific and individual experience of a particular kind of psychic
suffering, rendered at different moments in its history into the languages
of humoural theory, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It is also a
concept under the sign of which poets, philosophers and historians have
sought to understand their own historical epochs.

First off, the math confuses me -- it really seems like they have two double significances (whatever that is) in the first sentence. But one never knows with the academic folk. Second, hopping from Galen to Freud to Foucault (or whoever) and leaving out.. oh who.. who? Ah, the people who lived life day to day? Seems a bit... dare I say it?..... Academic? On the other hand, the next time I do come up with a concept? I'm heading over to the sign-shop or the astrologers, depending on how melancholy I am at the time.

Anyway... I'm wondering about depression and its role in day-to-day life (other than subsidizing legalized drug dealers like Pfizer and Glaxo Smith-Kline -- who you can tell are not a US firm by the hyphenated name). It seems like the Buzzcocks lied and everyone is not happy nowadays. But now people are now happy to be depressed... that it has become a badge of courage, a proof of creativity that does not require actual creation of anything, and, for lack of a better phrase, a comfortable winge.

Christ, look at the webpage of every adolescent in the world and you'll see it was never a more depressing time. In the "old days" however, if you were dumb enough to tattoo every square inch of your body with sub-jailhouse-tat quality ink and then pierce any part of your body that did not contain a vital organ? Well, you'd quite sensibly have been burnt as a witch. Gave the folks something to do on Sundays (pre-football) and kept the gene-pool quite a bit cleaner.

I dunno... I was gonna talk about melancholy and depression, but I guess I got derailed by the internet...

1

Scrap 1: The Dominion of Heresy and Herefords......

GOD, MAN, AND DINNER
A recitation by the right brother Pedro Picasso on the occasion of God's Ascension to the Sizzler

Brothers and Sisters, I come here to speak to you of apes and apostasy, Of heresy and herefords.… and the sub-humans who deny them as part of the Lord's bounty

I speak to you today of the sins, lack of contrition, and eventual consignment to the burners of Hell, so similar to the burners of the lesser Saint McDonald, of those who refuse to eat meat. Today my brief must be broad, for I broadly, and in brief, argue for the soul of man. The man who proudly accepts his God-granted dominion over the plants and animals.

Really.

It's in the Bible.

Check it out!

It's hard to believe that any God-fearing soul could imagine man's dominion over the plants and animals without also imagining the slightest bit of marination, pan-searing, and perhaps a sprinkle of salt being scattered on top of the neatly butchered flank of something tasty. Yet word is that amongst some of the minions, dominion has been reduced to the salad bar. The kind of people who would look at a steak and then turn to something like, say, the apple-tree and eat that first apple.

This is heresy.

Ask Adam and Eve. (more....)

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