I have the strangest dreams... ever!

Last night was a weird one... I lost track of time yesterday, between the Memorial Day beer drinking and grilling and my wife came home early and threw me off worse, and I wound up drinking a large iced coffee at like 8:00 and went to bed at 10. I fell asleep relatively quickly, woke up wide awake at 1:30 in the morning and was up and down all night. In the down times, I had the strangest dreams.

One dream I had involved me and the cast of the show House, M.D. (minus Cuddy, and thank goodness for that!) at an airport bar, which isn't too weird for me because I very often have dreams involving airport bars. In this one, I go up to the bar to grab a beer for me and House, and it costs $40. I start to complain that there's no way two beers costs $40, and then I turn around and House is drinking a beer out of a stein shaped like a 14" tall garden gnome. The bartender shrugged her shoulders and said "hey, he gets to keep the gnome" so I went ahead and paid for it. Foreman and Chase wound up carrying him outside while Thirteen tried to flag down a cab by flashing her Tron: Legacy costume at the drivers. Taub was in the corner of the bar with a hooker, so I guess he was finding his own ride?

We all hopped into a van, I was in the front seat. Then someone with a gun dragged me out of the van, and I woke up. I got up, took a couple of Tylenol, and laid back down. When I slipped back into dreaming, I was in a warehouse tied to a chair. I was being interrogated about something I can't remember, then I managed to get out of the chair and I kung-fu chopped the bad guys, took their guns, and escaped. I tried to shoot at people, but I ran into my semi-regular dream issue of not being able to get pistols to work properly. After that it was a bunch of parkour stuff, diving over picnic benches and rooftops and what-not. Then at some point I was being shot at, and I was able to erect a telekinetic shield around myself to block bullets. There was a grenade/bomb/missile explosion thing, and me and my whole shield were flung off a rooftop. Landed in an alley, ran into the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, and sat down to a giant bowl of noodles.

Yeah... I'm not feeling a bit rested. Not at ALL.

Joe's Rapture Report

So...

Harold Camping, apocalyptic preacher/con-artist (aren't they all?) has come out of hiding to say that yes, the Rapture did happen... spiritually. The world still ends in October, nobody fear/criticize/sue him.

What a load of shit. The whole thing, including the response to it from equally stupid/evil Christians. Christians are really mad, because Camping & Co. make the rest of them look bad. Well, no. Christians make themselves look stupid because they have stupid beliefs. Criticizing Camping for stating a date for the moronic delusion that they all believe in is like...

... is like...

...is like if a guy shows up at Times Square on New Years Eve in a bright pink chicken suit, a skinny tie,  platform shoes with live fish in the heels. He's screaming in French about how The Godfather is the best movie of all time while spraying people with Sumatran orangutan urine from a giant Super Soaker water gun. And then people criticize him for it.

Because chickens aren't pink.
Because skinny ties are so 1980s.
Because his shoes are unfair to the fish.
Because his accent is terrible.
Because the second Godfather movie was clearly superior.
Because Sumatran orangutans are an endangers species.

HE'S A LUNATIC IN A CHICKEN COSTUME SPRAYING PEOPLE WITH PISS, YOU MORONS! THE DETAILS DON'T MATTER!!!!!!


The Bible is a book of fairy tales originally created by an ignorant and evil pre-modern band of raping, marauding thugs in the Middle East, as a way of justifying the horrors committed by the ancient Hebrews. The New Testament is a book of fairy tales created when that group of lunatic raping murdering Jewish thugs got slapped down by the Romans and needed a mythical hero to deliver them from the horror of not being able to commit genocide anymore. Anyone who believes that any of that book is true or real or meaningful outside of references to real places (in the same sense that The Three Musketeers or Spider-Man comics are works of fiction that also contain real places and historical persons), anyone who buys into any of the mythical parts of any religion is exactly like that asshole in the chicken costume.

Except way too many of them spray people with bullets instead of ape piss.

Cool beans!

Oh, today was fookin' fun so far!

Got my amp tubes. It took me about 20 minutes to put the tubes in and put the amp back together. Sounds a hell of a lot better. Also got the sweetest new toy yesterday, a powered string winder:

You slap it on the tuning knobs, hit the button, and a quick second later your guitar strings are changed. Awesome! I changed the strings on both guitars, cleaned them up and did a quick adjustment on both of them in just under 45 minutes. New tubes, new strings, everything sounds great... maybe I can go a few more weeks without whining about buying a new amp.

I'm not kidding about building my own amps either. There's no reason I can't whip up some components, solder them together, and rock the fuck out! Here's what I'm looking at, as far as my thinking process goes:

1. The amp I want, the Hiwatt DR-504 Custom 50, costs $2800
2. The best American-made clone version costs $1800
3. A kit that you build yourself using identical/similar parts costs around $1250
4. If I shop around and find deals on the individual parts, I could probably get it down to $1000. 
5. Once I know what I'm doing, I can take an amp design and change it around to make it as close to perfect as my ears can hear. 

To be fair, I need to start small and try not to electrocute myself or set fire to anything. But someday... yeah, someday.:)

Crap... change in vacation plans

Well, bad news. My mother-in-law isn't going to be house/cat-sitting for us while we're on the beach soaking up the booze sun. She's hurt her back somewhat seriously, and can't sit in a car for 7 hours to drive down here. Poor M-I-L, and hopefully this isn't anything serious, but until I know one way or the other I'm going to worry about ME right now. Poor JOE!

Also, poor Ginger! Ginger's going to have to spend the week in a pet prison. No sleeping in our bed with us, no patrolling the neighborhood for terrorist bunnies. On the other hand, she'll get her own little room with her own little outside play area, and a couple of hours of running around and maybe a dip in a swimming pool. So maybe not "poor Ginger" after all. Still poor Joe, $300 poorer to be exact. But what can you do?

Oh well... in the plus column I don't feel the stress of trying to do landscaping and the sort of ridiculous level of cleaning I felt like I had to do in order to feel good about leaving my wife's mom alone in my house for a week. A friend of ours is going to stop by once a day and check on the cats and clean the litter boxes, and while I'm sure he'll poke around and be a little nosy, he's a guy. He's not going to judge us if there are dust bunnies or unscrubbed bathtubs. I don't feel like I need to reorganize the refrigerator or leave food and snacks in the house for him either.

In the meanwhile, I'm waiting for my tubes to arrive. In a completely unrelated direction, really? Vacuum tubes? In 2011? Am I building a secret radio to transmit intelligence reports from behind enemy lines, so that the Allied forces can crush the Nazis, or am I just trying to play some guitar here? Yeah, vacuum tube-based guitar amps... and as a secondary goal of getting a degree in Electrical Engineering, I'm going to be able to design and build my own amps. Look forward to MoJoe Amps in a guitar shop near you!

Jeez, am I a guy who likes to cook?

Yeah, I'm a big fan of seasonings. I've been collecting the new McCormick Gourmet seasonings. I didn't even know you could buy dried jalapeno peppers! Plus other random brands and stuff. A couple of different kinds of curry powder, a couple of varieties of paprika, all sorts of stuff. Cinnamon sticks, ground cinnamon, smoked cinnamon, and even cinnamon sugar. You can find neat and interesting stuff for cheaper in the Badia brand over with the Mexican food... their poultry season is pretty much perfect.

You can do just about anything with food if you've got cool seasonings. Which is cool, because it makes it simpler to cook at home without feeling like you have to buy expensive ingredients or be bored with cooking and have to eat out a bunch. Between that and the new and cool frozen veggies... Green Giant Valley Fresh Steamers Healthy Colors varieties. That's a mouthful... a mouthful of YUMMY!

Tonight is going to be bacon-wrapped sirloin medallions, grilled onions and peppers, a bag of frozen veggies in sauce all over rice. You shake a little creole spice on the meat, a little herb blend and olive oil on the onions and peppers, sea salt on the veggies, and some adobo in the rice and replace the water with beef stock. Dinner is served!

The world SHOULD end tomorrow

It won't, because delusional people applying nonsensical numerology to ancient mythology can't make accurate predictions about anything... except, of course, human nature. Starting with the fact that we have always had stupid, evil, delusional people with us, and it's likely that we always will.

This week seems to be all about power and privilege, as I look out into the wider world beyond the mostly groovy shit in my own life. While goofballs are planning to be raptured up to their imaginary friend, my wife and I are happily counting down the hours until our vacation. Everything has been bought, all the reservations have been made, everything is set and ready to go. Unless the world ends, one way or another. It would be nice, in a way... I'd miss the vacation, but avoid the deep house cleaning required to feel comfortable having my mother in law house-sit for us.

So, in the spirit of avoiding housework for a few minutes, here's what's been going on in the world:

• I'm driving to pick up some cleaning supplies, and I'm listening to NPR: Nice, Polite Republican radio. Diane Rehm and her panel are talking about American foreign policy, and a caller asks about the issue of sovereignty. Rehm and her panel address the issue by saying that America's interests don't always coincide with America's values. None of them even give lip service to the idea that if self-interest always trumps values, then you don't actually hold those values in any meaningful way. So, at least for this group of people, America lacks any values besides its interests. Nice to know, wonderful to see that there's no reason to even consider any other way as long as you're strong enough to get your way.
• I guess that's why Dominique Strauss-Kahn, resigned head of the International Monetary Fund, felt like it was perfectly acceptable to "allegedly" sexually assault a maid at his fancy hotel. She's from Guinea, and the IMF has been raping Africa for years, so I guess Strauss-Kahn thought raping her was just part of the job. Certainly, his defenders assert that he cannot actually be guilty. After all, he's rich. Rich people don't get convicted of raping poor people, so it is just like it never happened. And, BTW, how dare they arrest and incarcerate a fellow millionaire? Who do those police officers think they are? He's a VERY IMPORTANT MAN!
• Other VERY IMPORTANT MEN, "God" bothering Catholic priests, have released a report on the decades-long sexual assault of children. In order to pretend that the Church hasn't been coddling and supporting pedophiles, leading to much wider abuses than needed to happen if they had come clean up front? They've redefined pedophilia so that victims over the age of 10 don't count. I guess it isn't pedophilia in the Catholic faith to rape 11 year-olds, and somehow those children must be asking for it or encouraging it somehow. At this point, anyone who remains a Catholic is a piece of shit in my book, period. I'd respect you more if you joined the KKK, since the KKK doesn't go around RAPING LITTLE KIDS AND THEN MAKING EXCUSES FOR IT!!
• Holy shit(pun intended) this pisses me off. I want to use all sorts of profanity. What I shouldn't do is use gender-specific terms, however. I'm declaring a temporary moratorium on the use of words like "cunt" on account of it is fun-but-lazy, and the laziness takes away the fun. There's no reason to invoke someone's maleness or femaleness when they're wrong. If they're wrong and you're right, you can make a case and even be insulting towards them without making it sexist. Also, you can make insults ass-centric, since everyone's got one and they're all full of shit. :)

Anyhoo... the toilets are calling. I guess I need to scrub them. Can the world go ahead and end now?

I just really like this

From Abstruse Goose:

There's nothing more useless than financial assholes, when there's real need for work to be done. Somehow, they have convinced themselves and the world that their worthless parasitism is more valuable than teachers, police, doctors and nurses, and pretty much anything else. They produce nothing, and take a percentage in exchange for their nothing.

"Damn dirty Jews!"

Apparently that's why some people hear when anyone says anything remotely negative about the policies of the current government of Israel. This is a pet peeve of mine, and not just in relation to Israel and Jewish folks. I'm generally pissed off when people take a legitimate and specific criticism and pretend that the critic said something bigoted in order to avoid addressing the criticism. Very pissed off in fact. Leads me to call people cunts and stop talking to people. Goddamned right-wingery!

So. For instance, poor Helen Thomas. She was a presidential correspondent since 19-fucking-60. She was forced to retire last year for daring to say that immigrants to Israel who are occupying Palestinian lands should go back to Europe and America. She didn't call for the destruction of Israel, or express anything remotely like an anti-Semitic viewpoint. She was fired, and nearly universally castigated by her peers for daring to say anything negative about Israeli policy towards Palestinians and illegal Israeli settlements.

More recently playwright Tony Kushner("Angels in America"), who happens to be Jewish himself, was denied an honorary degree from City University of New York, because of the complaints from an extremist pro-Israel trustee. Apparently, Kushner is a self-hating Jew, because he advocates for a secular democracy in Israel, versus the current government that is based on racial/religious privilege for Jews and second-class citizenship for everyone else. They don't call it a "Jewish state" because they have a deep respect for separation of church and state. And for some people, it isn't enough to state disagreement or reaffirm support for Israel. They have to silence any critics of the most extreme behavior of Israel's government and citizens. Non-Jews are automatically anti-Semitic if they aren't right-wing racist assholes. Liberal Jews, including those in Israel who oppose the current treatment of Palestinians, are accused of self-hatred.


The wonderful human being who called for revoking the honorary degree? He's Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, a right-wing extremist scumbag... votes Republican, of course. He's compared Kushner to Jews who assisted Nazis during WWII. Because you know that calling for liberal secular democracy in Israel is just like participating in the Holocaust. Wiesenfeld has also expressed the view that comparing Israelis to Palestinians is a case of "false equivalence" because Palestinians "worship death for their children [and] are not human." Lovely human being. A real credit to his peeps. 


In this case, a batshit cretin right-winger might actually get his comeuppance. There's been some actual pushback, and Kushner will get his honorary degree after all. Wiesenfeld might lose his position as a trustee, although I'm sure that he'll land on his feet with some wingnut welfare tossed his way. He might could get a job with Fox "News" even! Of course, Kushner is lucky because he has fame, fortune, and political connections of his own to counter the smear campaign against him. Helen Thomas, icon of an insular and increasingly subservient press corps, was not so lucky.


As one of the people who has written on the subject has suggested, maybe Kushner could write a play about Helen Thomas and how she was forced out of her decades-long career for daring to say something intemperate about Israel. Could be worth watching, unless of course it gets shut down too. 

Sorry I've been so quiet

Really, I've got not much to say. Plus, I've been feeling down since I ran out of money to buy new shoes and gadgets every three days. Not "down" down, but sort of was a little high with the "its Xmas every day" feeling, and this is the inevitable hangover. Not to worry, I'm mostly over it. Could use some milk though.

It is weird though, because I think my kids have been trying to take care of me. I used to think of cats as being aloof, but the three I've got have been giving me extra attention. Some of that has been to get their food bowl filled more quickly, but I'm going to pretend that some of it is love and concern for me. :) Ellie especially has been all over me, specifically in the mornings. She hops onto the bed, butts me in the face with her head a few times until I open my eyes and look at her, and then she curls up into a ball against me and falls asleep in a purring ball of hair.

Even as I'm writing this, she's milling about my feet and looking for some scratches. Yikes...

In other news, Republicans still hate women, poor people, and Democracy. Thank goodness you can always count on some things.

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the Fourth be with you!!!

I loves me some Star Wars, can you tell?

This is all I have to say about Osama, and the general American cowardice/stupidity over terrorism:

From Digby:

Indeed, the people who compared this to Hitler and proclaimed al Qaeda the greatest threat the world has ever known were a bunch of bedwetting panic artists who should never be listened to again --- clearly they have no grace under pressure and can't think clearly in an emergency.

To any sentient being, a motley group of terrorists with box cutters was never an existential threat to the United States of America. It just wasn't. It was a problem, maybe even a big one, and there was certainly the possibility that the US would be more like Europe and the rest of the world going forward and would have to deal with this particular form of violence from time to time. But existential threat? Ridiculous on its face.

And yet many of the right's political and intellectual leadership(and yes, much of the left's as well) basically threw up their arms and started running in circles, screaming and rending their garments, demanding that we start indiscriminately shooting at someone in order that they feel protected from the boogeyman who was coming to kill us all in our beds. Iraq was the result. It was, in retrospect, a deeply embarrassing time for America. And, frankly, deeply disrespectful to the memories of those who died on that day, particularly the first responders who acted like the calm, responsible adults you look to in a crisis.

And they institutionalized the frenzy almost immediately. They created groups like AVOT ("Americans for Victory over Terror") and embarked on a hysterical campaign of fear and paranoia, the remnants of which may be with us forever. Remember?

*snip*

These paranoid patriots were good for something: they helped bin Laden tremendously by growing his legend and creating the illusion among thousands of would-be terrorists that they had cowed the mighty US. Again, not the thoughtful actions of serious leaders.

And it did result in their fondest dream being finally realized -- we now have a vaguely fascistic, national security state more powerful, intrusive and secretive than ever before. Huzzah. There's a "victory" for you.

Who gives a shit if Osama bin Laden is dead. He was a non-factor in my life, the same way that terrorism was never an existential crisis for America. You know what has been a decade-long crisis? Fucking cowards who wet the bed over any threat of anything happening, and the manipulative, cynical politicians who took advantage of that crisis to damage America possibly beyond repair. Shame on all of them. Terrorists couldn't have had better partners than Bush and now Obama, and 99% of the government and the media, who have combined to bankrupt the country both financially and ethically by pushing for and cheerleading multiple illegal and useless wars in the Middle East. Those wars have the sole purpose of making chickenshit idiots feel better knowing that brown people are dying... and who cares if they attacked us or not?

Who cares? Who cares if some Iraqi woman gets gang-raped by the fundamentalists who have taken advantage of  the chaos and lack of leadership to commit crimes that they would never have gotten away with before? Who cares if Afghan weddings get carpet bombed by American planes because they can't tell the difference between a redneck-style party with guns being shot into the air and a group of evil terrorists? So what if drones and bombs and tanks and guns kill tens of thousands of civilians, and make a million or more people into refugees? At least all-American John and Jane Smith can feel comforted that "something" is being done, along with the hard work they are doing by sticking a "support the troops" magnet on their SUV. A made-in-China MAGNET, not a sticker. Wouldn't want to mess up the paint job, after all. Gotta keep your priorities straight.

Now I guess we'll hear about this for the next week. Fox "News" will claim victory for Bush over something that happened in 2011, while blaming Obama for policies and problems that date back to 2007. Donald Trump will say something angry, stupid, and possibly racist. Everyone else on Fox "News" will say something angry, stupid, and certainly racist. The rest of the media gasbags will take the opportunity to avoid dealing with even the normal superficial issues that they waste time with, and just go all bin Laden, all the time.

Well, until some pretty white girl goes missing, and then the entire media will shift to THAT non-issue.