perfidy

Oops. Did I say that out loud?

I'm sorry, but I always thought of Jenna Bush as the fat twin, not the blond twin. I don't know why, but I've only been able to remember how to tell the twins apart by their relative chunkiness to one another rather than by hair color. Of course, one day I noticed that one is weaselly-faced like her father and the other one has that weird wicked stepmother face where she's seemingly friendly, but going to slit your throat. Oh. I guess I haven't told you guys that white people kind of scare me sometimes because they look like reptiles. (I must have watched V on tv too much as a kid.) Mrs. Shrub distinctly lacks an upper lip which is what makes me think that about her. But I digress.

At any rate, the fat one is getting married to the scion of a prominent Virginia Republican family. Whoopdeedoo. Not sure why CNN is posting it as breaking news, but I do like the stupid haircut that boy has at a black tie affair. It's awful and Karl Rove should have done something about it. I am sure SOMEONE at the White House could point that boy to a decent hairdresser of Pennsylvania Avenue. Shit, I know a few people who can do a bang up fade with a pair of clippers for free. As always, I'm glad to oblige with a weed wacker. As I once told another fat twin, "Moppy hair only looked good on the Beatles, now get a haircut."

Color me giddy. Henry Rollins does an interview with Mother Jones.

I fucking love the guy. No, I can't stand the unibrow or the massive SEARCH AND DESTROY tattoo on the back. I tend to prefer my men clean and slightly pretty. But HOLY COW. I can still hear Salt on a Slug and Family Man in my head at the mention of his name.

Strangely I just saw Johnny Mnemonic the other day and I had the pleasure of Mr. Rollins' company onscreen. I thought he and Ice T were good in that film. You can see Ice T just starting to get the hang of acting.

Good stuff. Entertain yourselves, no don't get mad at me for reading Mother Jones. I was following a link about credit card use in the US and stumbled upon the article. And I'm still looking for the damned credit card article for my other blog.

Gogol Bordello, if you are even less cool than I am, is an amazing gypsy punk band out of NYC. It's a mix of klezmer and thrash punk. Or as I put it last night, it's punk music with an actual melody.

Everyone has their favorite, the violinist, the bass player, the lead guitarist, the dancers, etc.

I'd never heard their music till I went to the show. Everyone I know went last year and said it was by far the best show they'd seen in ages and no one had a bad thing to say about them, so when tickets went on sale, I bought them blind. It did not disappoint at all. I haven't rocked out like that in I don't know how long, at least a year. I haven't truly danced and thrashed like that in years. I can tell I should pop a Tylenol now because it's going to hurt.

My friend R, put it well:

Everyone, please STOMP extra hard for me, wear your combat boots, dance with big legs, and crowd surf! Then, tell me who won the concert!

I can tell you without a doubt, I won the concert. It was amazingly high energy, melodic, funny, exciting, electrifying.

There aren't that many US tour dates left. Most of them are on the West coast, but if you can go, GO! GO! GO! DAMMIT!

I just heard him on On Point via public radio, WAMU in DC.

I was really stunned and impressed at his enthusiasm, optimism and outlook. I don't think I have heard such an uplifting guy in politics since the OTHER guy from Hope, AR.

You gotta love a guy that lost over a hundred pounds. That's transformation.

Politically speaking, I am not wild about Mike Huckabee at all. He's pro-life and frankly I'm enough of a one issue voter that there's NO FREAKIN' WAY I'd vote for him because of that position alone. But I found him remarkably in line with my thoughts about the stupidness of the creation/evolution debate. His feeling is that he takes his kids to church to indoctrinate them about religion and doesn't expect school to align with religious views because kids learn a great many things at school but do not take all of them to heart. HEAR HEAR. Give your kids some credit and let them think on their own about God! After all the beauty of God's gift of free will is that when faced with the notion that God perhaps didn't create the world exactly as we know it, you can either reject or accept it.

All of his kids went to public school for all twelve years. He's a guy who puts his money where his mouth is and I'm all for that.

I didn't listen to all of it in detail because I was busy doing some other blogging, but the parts I did hear left me with a good impression. I mean, if I have to choose between evils, the guy is looking pretty good.

I happened to be near the Apple Store yesterday. (Buying a geek book for work down the street from it.) I wandered in. The hype crowd had cooled down but it was still hoppin' for a cool summer evening. A Monday no less.

Now I know Buckethead is drooling over the phone, but I've been interested in it because I am looking for a laptop alternative. I hate blogging inside my house on a nice day. I would love to go to a cafe and blog over WiFi and check out the jarheads on PT runs. What good is living near the Pentagon if you don't get gym queen eye candy? (Really, it's like living in the Castro in SF again, except the men are straight and not quite as ripped.) But I digress.

I really want a laptop and was seriously considering a MacBook, priced the damned thing and everything. Looked at the refurbs, offered to buy one off a girlfriend who hated hers. (She and I are of the same ilk, no lifting your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. It wastes time.) But I thought maybe I should wait a see what this iPhone thingamabob is all about. You see, I have a 4GB Nano I won in a blog contest and I really don't use it. I have an indash 6-CD changer and usually that's enough music to last me months without a change. I even mislaid the thing for a few months because I just don't need audio white noise in my life. I abandoned my Palm V after I didn't have a desktop anymore to sync it to pull down articles from AvantGo and read them on the train and because I was a car commuter and didn't have the time to read anymore.

So here I am at the store. I looked at an iPhone and started to use it as instinctively as I knew how because a really great GUI doesn't need instructions. It should be intuitive and obvious. Right?

Well, I had heard a little about how the button gets you always back to the start page with your icons. I admit, it's a beautifully clear screen with great width, but it's about the size of my old Palm V and still feeling a bit large in the hand. (I use a KRZR right now, not crazy about it, but it's narrow, which I like.)

After about 30 seconds, I wanted to hurl the damned thing across the room. Luckily for Apple and its patrons, it was bolted down.

Excuse me, but this gadget was designed by men for men. Being the girly girl that I am, I keep my fingernails long. I like to scratch the itch. There's nothing more satisfying than bearing down and taking a layer of dermis off when you've got a terrible itch. Unfortunately, that precludes using this device. Period. End of story. I don't even need to proceed any further. If you are not a nail biter, you can never use this phone.

All the men around me thought it was the bomb. I glanced at their fingers. They were all effing nail biters. Shit. Even I AM a nail biter when I am bored at work, but I don't bite down to the quick. That's disgusting and makes your fingers bleed, an even worse biohazard. But of course their fat sausage fingers are greasy and skating right across the glass surface. The idea of that makes me nauseated and reach for the Windex.

All around me I heard was that it was amazing. Honestly, I don't think it's that great. It's still not going to replace a laptop and wireless connection for a person like me. Either I want a phone or I want a highly connective mobile device, but apparently what I really want is a sub-notebook about 4-6" across with a wireless card, and a full-size 110-key folding keyboard accessory. The Jesus phone doesn't cut the mustard at all. (I am seriously thinking of patenting that idea so if any of you are electrical engineers with experience in injection molded plastics, please contact me.)

I don't have chunky fingers and I was still mistyping out the wazoo. I literally had to hunt and peck with my ring finger (shortest fingernail) to type. The interface could not keep up with my speed. Also, for the auto guessing of words, I couldn't easily figure out at first which button would complete the fill because I could not accurately ascertain which one I was hitting. (Why does the return key actually do a carriage return after it autofills? That's crap. Auto fill with no line break.) I did try covering my finger with my shirt tail and typing, which was surprisingly effective, even through a couple layers of fabric. I hear that with gloves on, it's impossible to use, which sort of precludes outdoor winter use, say in front of a bar grabbing a smoke trying to get your friends to meet you inside in 15 minutes as they walk from the metro. (Who says the smoking ban in SF, NYC and DC sucks? At least you get clear signal outside!)

The other thing that really struck me as poorly done is that the screen automatically rotates the output for web browsing. Ok, that's pretty neat and a good idea. But when you use Safari and the top tilts 90 degrees to the right, that's great. I'm a righty and that instinctive for me. But when I was looking at the embedded YouTube application, IT TILTED THE OTHER WAY. Um, not cool to have to rotate it 180 degrees from the web browser just to watch video. That's insane. The Apple dweebie in the store insisted that I had done something wrong, however, a device should never automatically switch from one orientation to the other like that spontaneously. I should be able to set it to a righty setting and lefties should get their own setting. That's a pretty reasonable GUI expectation.

To be fair, my blog looked GREAT onscreen! So did my blogpal, David's blog (see the iPhone inputted comment I left there and the crappy typos). And PFBlogs.org. Three sites I would definitely visit if I had a mobile device. I have a PSP and I have tried to use WiFi to browse the web with it, but frankly it sucks. The iPhone is VAST improvement over that. The incoming sound over iPod headphones was ok. I didn't get a chance to hear back from anyone about how the phone messages sounded that I left for them. (Buckethead?)

OH. Word to the hygiene wise, if you wish to go to see this device, TAKE YOUR OWN HEADPHONES. It was vile to watch the unwashed masses use the the same headphones over and over. I happened to have my iPod in my purse and used my own self-defiled headphones, thank-you-very-fucking-cleanliness-much. I only wish I had Purell because I was touching that screen all over and was getting grossed out. I didn't want to put it up to my face to use lest my skin I break out from necrotizing faciitis. Really, you cannot be too careful around these Mac fans. While their brand image may be clean, oy vey, their clientele is not. And this is the NoVA, BMW-driving yuppie crowd. It was teh ick. And for those not in the know, I am not a clean freak, but basic public health demands some more caution. Thank god it came out in the summertime, because during flu season, it would be quite the vector for spreading germs. (Don't even tell me that these are special headphones with the mic in the cord, I don't care. It's gross. Do want me to breathe all over your food the next time we dine together?)

Ok, that's enough of my ranting. You get the point. I'm not throwing away money on this thing. I pity Buckethead who will probably shed tears of joy when he first gets it and the curse AT&T 6 months later for the poor service. (News tip, VERY VERY LATE on Friday afternoon, 6pm ish EDT, AT&T announced the purchase of Dobson Telecom, which will give them better coverage in flyover country, so in a year, complaints about spotty service around the US might actually be moot. I presume I will still not be able to get a signal from inside the anechoic chamber better known as my parents' home. I swear, the NSA doesn't even block radio signal that well. Only Verizon gets through there. Sprint, Nextel AT&T nothing. You have to walk down the driveway to the sidewalk to get signal.)

[wik] I really, really, really wanted to like this phone. I did. I really want to be one of the cool kids and I was hoping it would be suitable for what I want, but alas, it's not. I *heart* Steve Jobs and I'd give my left pinkie to go work at Pixar, even if that would slow down my typing, I'd do it. There's something hot about the turtleneck and the rimless glasses, but I bet he's another psycho behind the wheel of a black BMW, because he definitely is a megalomaniac.

Jericho Hill, one of the list mods at Get Rich Slowly forums went to the happy hour for PF bloggers I hosted last week. I extended an invitation when I saw he was from DC. My bad. He is a prime Casey Serin Hater, so he brought me up to date on Mr. Serin’s sad travails.

And all I could do is pray that God would not kill me for my schadenfreude.

JH then told me to visit caseypedia.com, the wiki for the Casey Haters. I fear I am one and will have to join this elite club of people who pay their bills on time and have integrity. How many of the ministers and their fine minions are secret Casey Haters as well?

It's people like Mr. Serin who ought to be jailed for fraud. Having worked a bankruptcy case for a fraudulent flipper in Baltimore, it disgusts me that people who get liar loans and then end up in foreclosure on multiple properties are going to bring the economy down with their stupdity. It's the greedy mortgage brokers and banks who need to tighten credit a little and exercise a little fiscal responsibility and stop idiots like Mr. Serin from even getting into the position of being irresponsible. I'd love to let him hang himself, but apparently he's quasi-homeless in Australia. Most likely he'll get a free trip back courtesy of extradition papers. (OMG, I hope so. That would be frickin' awesome! Eek. I am sure Mr. Serin would use those exact words to describe the experience of being violated in federal prison. It seems to be one of his favorite phrases.)

N.B. this is a modified cross post of something on Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge.

Do like beer?
Do you like to raise money for charity?
Do you like to drink beer to raise money for charity?

If you answered yes to any of those questions and live in Norfolk, VA, please go to the 2007 Summer Ghent Bar Tour! They raise money for the Make a Wish Foundation. Last winter's tour raised over $14,000.00, blowing their goal of $8K out of the water.

And don't click on the Ashtin and Braden link. You'll see two totally adorable little tykes who are really sick. Once you see them, of course you'll donate money!

I am sure you all know by now, but Young Miss Hilton is going to jail!

More schadenfreude for me!

I love the pictures of her crying. Save it for the runway or your big acting break.

Someone toss her a sandwich to shut her up.

Mommy? Mommy? How OLD are you that you still need your mommy? You never should have moved out of your mother's house.

I am certain your parents are still so very proud of you, your sex tape and your irresponsibility.

************

Fortunately, I've never had a DUI in my life. Yes, I admit to probably driving when I shouldn't have. But I also plan my drunk-drunk so that I am relatively sober by the time I leave the nightclub/restaurant/house party/picnic. We all know the rules, stay to the right, stay between the lines and drive the speed limit.

She's under 30 and thin as a the finely etched lines of copper interconnect on a 300mm wafer. Her birdlike-metabolism should have her right stone sober in 30 minutes!

What kind of idiot still gets a DUI these days? On top of all that, she could afford a freakin' driver or take a cab! Sheesh. I can't AFFORD to do 45 days in jail or the legal fees for a lawyer, therefore I sober up!

I have zero sympathy. Don't f*ck with the law. You had your chance. You do the crime. You do the time.

Dumbass.

I love a good sex scandal, probably way more than the next person.

I had to hear about Jessica Cutler from an Assistant Attorney General outside of the United States. Sex blogging is more his thing than mine (Reading them, not writing them) and he's the kind of naughty boy who'd get sucked into this sort of tale. (No pun intended.) We love public drama overspill like this. We're terrible people, which is what makes us so fun.

Anyhow, apparently she's filed for bankruptcy because she struggling to pay her bills due to a $20 million dollar lawsuit from her former paramour. He's a complete idiot for having sex with her in the first place because she's really kind of ugly. I've seen pugs with cuter faces, but who am I to compare since she's looks like a B or a C-cup in her Playboy shoot and last I checked I'm still wearing a tightly packed A. (And that's only when I'm retaining water like a dyke in the Netherlands.)

She was dumb to use their initials anyway. I give them names like 'The Chemist', 'Valentine', 'Italian Wonder Boy'. It keeps people guessing and makes men paranoid that I'm writing about them. Of course, some I don't make up, like 'Wolf'. (Of course he bites!)

Hat tip to Udandi Andi!

Riding Rockets, Mike Mullane

I'm sure this book was all the rage on boyblogs when it first got published. Buckethead likes to tease me like he's from Planet Arrested Development, but I know he's not that bad. He's not an astronaut and lacks The Right Stuff. Being an astronaut either takes being a special kind of pig or else a really ginormous brain. Since we are neither, Buckethead and I will have to stay grounded on earth.

As for Mike Mullane, USAF Ret., he's got IT. The Right Stuff. The Goods. The cojones. That "cocky bastard something" gives him the gumption to walk up to Bo Derek on a beach and start basically hitting on her in front of her husband. Same again with putting his arm around Christie Brinkley at the Super Bowl. He's got the golden wings of an astronaut. The book is about his journey into space. THREE TIMES. That's three more times than the rest of us yahoos.

More than being an insider's take on becoming an astronaut or about NASA, I was fascinated by his perspective on the Challenger disaster and the lessons learned from it as an organization. While I would love to go to Mars and the Moon, I'm not sure how I will feel about being vaporized in space. Nor do I feel like I'd survive the space vomit syndrome that's common up there. When I was a kid, I'd throw up in the car after about 10 minutes, before my pop could even get onto the PA Turnpike. (We lived right next to an exit.) I doubt I'd pass the Vomit Comet or the 15-minute enema. (And that duration was **VOLUNTARY**)

This guy isn't some saintly man going up against The Big Organization in some David and Goliath story. Even though he's completely arrogant, he retains his humility enough to tell you that he went to see a shrink and buckled while fighting the organization and it's mercurial and cryptic managers. I could never work for guys like Young. I'm too chatty and their stony silence and inability to look you in the eye would bug the crap out of me. I must not want to go into space that badly. But I do like to blow things up and things that go boom.

One day, I will be in Florida to watch a rocket launch. I'm going to make one of my old skating buddies fulfill his promise of letting me watch a launch from his house in Cocoa Beach. He and his wife are both NASA rocket engineers. It's their life's work. How lucky they are to be a part of greatness.

If you're a guy, DON'T READ THIS BOOK. You'll find out how much of a man you ain't. (Ross, being Canadian, isn't even a contender.)

FreeMoneyFinance is going scold me for getting a pet, but I got a pet. It just sort of happened to me.

My co-workers were smoking outside when a parakeet landed on the shoulder of one of them. Apparently this little guy is trained and very social. He likes to perch on your finger. They decided to bring him inside because a hawk was circling overhead. For some reason bright turquoise parakeets make easy targets. Go figure.

I told the woman who had him on her desk, “It’s going to eat through that box in a hour. Let me know and I’ll go buy it a cage.”

Sure enough, by 10AM today we were at a pet store getting a whole rig for the damned thing. $70 bucks of little blue joy. The lady at store told me to come back in a few days once he’s stopped freaking out and she will clip his talons and wings for me.

I DON’T NEED A PET!

I’m too nice to let him get killed by a hawk or live in a cardboard box. The plan is to leave him in the office till Wednesday when I can take him back to the pet store for his grooming and then home on Wednesday night. (I HAVE PLANS FOR DINNER TONIGHT! I AM TOO SELFISH AND IRRESPONSIBLE TO KEEP AN ANIMAL WHICH IS WHY I DON’T ALREADY OWN A BUNNY!)

I have seen other parakeets. I am a sucker. I bought a large cage for it so I can get him a friend in a few weeks. Birds are social animals and I don’t want him to get too unhappy being all alone in my apartment for hours when I am out with my singleton social life.

I AM GOING AWAY THIS WEEKEND! I DON’T NEED A PET!

Thank god one of my friends is a pet sitter. She doesn’t really sit for birds, but will refer me to her friend who owns a bird.

THIS IS TERRIBLE.

But he’s kind of cute, even if he’s already pooping all over the cage.

Once he gets settled, if the pet thing doesn’t take with me, I will give it away free to a good home. I want to make sure he’s healthy before giving him away to another family. Wouldn’t want it to infect any other birds they might have.

*sigh*

I am a sucker. I think it’s tattooed on my forehead.

Oh sweet Jesus, please don’t let me turn into a pet/cat lady. I really don’t need this.

(It does not help that a family in DC on Craigslist is giving away their parakeet because its mate was “murdered” by the family cat. I’m thinking in a month, that might be a good one to rescue and keep mine company.)

[This was crossposted from MFC. FWIW, I did post lost/found ads on Craigslist, Petfinders and a specialty site called 911 Parrot Alert. I will give it a month, but the lady at the Fairfax Humane Society thinks a week is fair.]

Surely the flags at work and the post office are not half mast for Jerry Falwell

I'm not one to dance on anyone's grave. But you can bet your bippy I'm going to have a good time steppin' out tonight. It's a capella music after all.

[wik] Nifty! I found out why flags are half-mast today. Try this link They will be half-mast around my office till Thursday dusk when flags should be taken down. But our maintenace staff doesn't seem to get it. Oddly the Quaker school I went to did. They ran it up every morning and pulled it down every afternoon. Makes me sad to see a flag moulder in the dark at night.

Dang. I can't find the best quote by Michael Bloomberg on his chances of being elected President of the United States. The gist of it is that he's a short, Jewish, divorced New Yorker. Words which he has used to describe himself. He's got the goods and the gumption to stir up the pot. Virtual biscuit to anyone who can find the original citation. Wikipedia doesn't have it anymore.

Personally, I've met him, talked to him about non-trivial issues, and he's a jackass. But a very smart and competent jackass. I'd vote for him. He's exactly the centrist-Republican that kept me registered as one in Pennsylvania through all my years of college. (Being a Democrat was political suicide where I came from, closed primaries and old-money Republican domination.)

Hat tip to Kingsland Report for the Washington Times article. (However, I think Rev Moon is crazy, so take their reporting with a grain of salt.)

I just don't know. So let me put it plainly.

If you want to hit on a girl, don't spit on her. If you want to try and get a girl interested in what you have to say, don't punctuate your diction with spittle.

I went out last night and there's always that overeager guy. He's dominating the dancefloor and thinks he's just a funboy extraordinaire. He IS the party.

He is THAT guy too. You all know him. He knows all the words. He can tell you what albums they're from. He knows what year they were released and the who was TIME's Man of the Year cover that year.

Well sweaty, nasty, Mr. Life of the Party, I just had effing surgery. I don't really feeling like throwing down, so please don't try to talk to me and get me to shake my moneymaker on the dancefloor. Take a hint. I didn't take to your invitation the first time. Did you have to come back for a second and third? Did you have to get to the point where a bouncer had to ask me if you were being creepy? Just quit being creepy the first time. Nothing has changed in 3 minutes, no matter if Sisters of Mercy just started playing and that's THE shirt I'm wearing.

Yes, you almost drove me out of the club, while one of my DJ acquaintances was in the middle of an amazing set. If I was interested in the power trip of having you tossed out, I would have done it. But in my mellow old age, I just run from you, the walking biohazard.

Ok. We all know that I'm THE seething ball of estrogen here at the Ministry, but you'll have to indulge me my girlish shrieks over the star of Shaun of the Dead, Simon Pegg. I saw him LIVE AND IN PERSON not 5 feet away from me on Friday night. No. I didn't rugby tackle him down asking him to marry me, but he wasn't much bigger than me. I could have done it if there weren't a table and some chairs in the way.

This weekend I saw a sneak preview of Mr. Pegg's new film, Hot Fuzz. I absolutely adore Shaun of the Dead and have a right dead crush on our hero, Nicholas Angel. After all, he can leap fences like nobody's business, and the handspring stunts in the greenhouse, set my heart a flutter. Two gun, Johnny Woo action with Nick Frost. It's more than a girl can bear. Yes, he's a twit. A fascist adherent to the law, but the film is hilarious.

In a word, BRILLIANT.

It will be opening in the US soon. Meanwhile, any of you minister lads have his original show, Spaced on DVD?

Check out the sexy clean lines on the new BMW M3 concept car! OMG. Sorry Ross, you can take your 5-series and drive it into the drink. THIS is the car to have.

I confess, I actually can't really drive an M3. I've tried. I'm so used to soft Japanese clutches, that I don't lay off the clutch and feed it gas quickly enough to keep from stalling. I stall out pretty badly. (Granted that was a test drive in a friend's car almost 8 years ago when I didn't drive regularly.)

But I so totally want this car, or the M3 SMG. The paddles are kinda nifty. I was sitting in one the other day and thinking, "This is a year's worth of my salary. BUT HOLY COW is it nice." I mean, if I had to take a machete and kill the cow they were going to use to make the leather seats, just to get this car, I would. I know the other ministers would help out, just for a chance to take the car on the track. (HELL YEAH!)

This is one MEAN looking car. That stare you down, glare at you over the tops of the glasses, and tell you to get the fuck out of the way mean. In a 'I broke my nose in a fight' mean kind of way. (I can't say I like the bump on the hood. It's exactly like a broken nose.)

This is the PERFECT SPECIMEN of what I need to conquer the left lane of the Dulles Toll Road with my "Smart Pass". Who's smart now muthafucka?

Hat tip to fellow PF Blogger, Hazzard of Everybody Loves Your Money for the link.

As my friends like to say, Sieg Mapgirl!

Thank you dear Ministers for this lovely opportunity to rant and rave, thus sparing readers of my other blog from my less than genteel opinions of the world.

For a misanthrope, it means a lot when I say, "Awwwww. I love you guys." Because really we know that it's a lie and I secretly hate men.

I promised Buckethead that I'd write about budgeting for zombies. He didn't specify how, but I assume he actually meant zombie defense and not care and feeding. First of all, let me tell you that Shaun of the Dead had it wrong. Never toss your old vinyls. You could sample that shit and be the next DJ Dangermouse. But I'll get to that later. Right now, the game is just to get out of the hot seat and stick someone else with it.

Now where are the cabana boys to bring me a Guinness?