Lou Dobbs does('nt) have anal sex with goats

I saw the deer family again after work yesterday, I’m so dog minded that when I saw something large and buff colored moving out of the corner of my eye, my first thought was that someones dogs were out. It was only after Bambi froze that I realized they weren’t in fact, lose dogs. Great, big, loose dogs. Speaking of great big dogs, two great Danes chased Dogger away at the dog park last night, I was shocked that the Danes did that and I was also shocked that Doggger had the sense to turn tail and run when they told her to. Lou Dobbs loves Goats.

At work we were visited by a raccoon out in the parking lot. Two of the hysterics decided it must be rabid and were horrified when they learned they were not the first to spot Mr. Raccoon and that previous witnesses did not react in the same way. When I told them he lives under the generator they behaved like it was going to turn up under their desks! When I mentioned seeing the deer family they were aghast! That there were deer so close and that for sure they were going to give them lime disease, just reach out and get lime disease all over them. It’s the Lou Dobbs Hispanics=Leprosy argument. Did you know that Lou Dobbs contracted syphilis from an ongoing sexual affair with a goat? It’s true because I reported it, I said it so it must be true, it’s false, I know its false, but I said it. Just like Lou Dobbs does. Also, I never said Lou Dobbs had sex with a goat. It’s too bad its out there now, that Lou Dobbs has sex with goats, probably is right now but what can be done? I only said it for affect, like Lou does. Lou Dobbs has sex with goats.

With my reunion approaching like the speed of light (if you want to see time move on fast forward , arbitrarily decided you want to tighten up before some event) I have decided that I should start “eating better”, i.e I will eating fewer things that have the shelf life of insulation. I even bought some healthy snacks. I even ate some of the healthy snacks. I decided to take a really big step and bring some of the healthy snacks to work! I did bring them and I did eat Skittles for breakfast.

The carrots were right there though. And later on, I gnawed on a couple to kill time before I wanted to and go and get a soda. The good news is there is nothing at home to eat that is not baby carrots, pea pods and Healthy Choice microwave dinners. Did you know that apple sauce gets furry even if it lives it’s entire lifespan in the refrigerator? Lou loves the goats.

I had planned to whittle my lunches down to mere Happy Meals, to further my “eating better” regime. I walked into my McDonald's yesterday and the counter guy rang up my order before I had a chance to order. It’s was a nice bit of customer service, but it did not help my regime. I would have told the guy he jumped the gun but he seemed so pleased with himself for remembering my order that I couldn’t bring myself to take the wind out of his sails. The guy is a full time counter jockey, he has so few joys in life. If he can take pleasure from customer service, I’m not going to take that away from him.

Do you know what two great tastes that do not taste great together? Carrots and Envelope adhesive. Bleech.

Today in honor of “eating better” I on purpose left the coupon for free Burger King onion rings in my desk when I went for lunch. And even better, I drank bottled water this afternoon when I got thirsty instead of getting my 3pm soda – and I have a staff meeting today too, I am really feeling the burn now. No pain, no gain. Lou Dobbs luvs goats.

(The Good German is the good movie)

Paging Dr. Demento...

I was driving home from work and I was idly flipping through the radio stations and one of the stations that was not playing an ad, I was shocked of course, so I stopped and the station was playing a pleasant enough little ditty about some old boy talking in what passes for dirty on the radio these days to his gal, and it was okay enough. Bland. It fit right in to the cloying, red-state friendly, thoroughly right wing country radio of today. No mention of the flag or killing furners, so it could be worse, but perhaps it wasn’t over yet or I had tuned in late and missed that verse.

Every time you take a sip
in this smoky atmosphere
you press that bottle to your lips
and I wish I was your beer
and in the small there of your back
your jeans are playing peek a boo
I’d like to see the other half
of your butterfly tattoo

You know its Crazy but it’s all right-ish. I thought I’d heard it before. I wasn’t turning the station yet. And so the song rambled on:

hey that gives me an idea
lets get out of this bar
and drive out into the country
and find a place to park
cause I’d like to see you out in the moonlight
I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks
I’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers...

Oh Whatever. Blah, blah. Country-Lite. Somewhere Patsy Cline Is rolling in her grave. Hank Williams Sr., has been rolling in his grave for so long he’s now buried in China.

and I’d like to check you for ticks

What?!

I know the perfect little path
out in these woods I used to hunt
don't worry babe I’ve got your back
and I’ve also got your front
I’d hate to waste a night like this
I’ll keep you safe you wait and see
the only thing allowed to crawl all over you
when we get there is me

Did I hear “check you for ticks”? No, I must have just heard wrong.

cause I’d like to see you out in the moonlight
I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks
I’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers
and I’d like to check you for ticks oooh you never know where one might be
and oooh theres lots of places that are hard to reach

No, clearly, "Check you for ticks". Maybe it was an ad, maybe for Frontline or some other product, because it must be about some old boy and his dawg and it's kind of cleverish, in a wink, wink "It sounds like I'm talkin' about my girl, but I'm really talkin' about my dawg" way. Dogs do not commonly drink from beer bottles or have slutty peek-a-boo tats on their lower backs, but...

I’d like to see you out in the moonlight
I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks
I’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers
and I’d like to check you for ticks

oh I’d sure like to check you for ticks

Ticks. A song on the radio about some old boy checking his human girlfriend or some bar slut he would like for a girlfriend, at some point in the future, after he checked her for ticks. I assume after he checks her for ticks, he can take her home and she can become the Queen of his double wide trailer, and later, after she leaves him for good, he can go back to that bar and Bubba can shoot the jukebox.

lyrics from Smart Lyrics. Com

Is it Tuesday all ready?

I'm going to need a few days off to recover from my few days off. All thyat relaxation is hard work... I went to the beach . I had a wonderful time. Work sucks ya'll, it is so not the same as sitting on the beach.

I got a new toy and you dog people out there need to get one too. My new toy is called a Shedding Blade

It works like charm! Dogger had very recently been brushed very thoroughly and was relieved of a lot of loose fur at that time. I casually went over her a few hours later with my new toy, you know just to see if she would tolerate my new toy, she did, yay! but you should have seen the hair this thing took off her. Piles of fur.



There was so much hair, it formed itself into a full grown chow! I am only barely kidding. In the future I use this tool outside - that much loose fur. I couldn't believe it! I had seen one being used at the dog park and it looked kind of interesting and it made me curious, but damn! these things work well. If you have a dog or even a very furry cat, you need this. I got mine cheap at Petco- shedding brushes can be very expensive , up to $14, but I got mine for $7 and it has a cushioned handle and everything. It is not adjustable, if that is an important function for you, but others are, just do a little shopping around first.

Friday Cat Blogging



Have a great holiday weekend!!!! I am beach bound so I'll see ya'll again Tuesday. Today is also the 30th anniversary of Star Wars premiere.

FYI

For all three of us out there that were/are fans of Studio 60, it returns with new episdoes tonight at 9 central/ 10 eastern on you NBC affiliate.

The American people stay broke and the Bushies stay Rich

Critics Assail Big Oil at Hearing

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones) -- Oil companies have grown too big and powerful, and it may be time for a new trust-buster in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt to break up the monopolies, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday at a congressional hearing.

"America's families are getting a raw deal, while oil companies make out like the robber barons of Roosevelt's time," Schumer said, as he opened a hearing into the oil companies' market power at the congressional Joint Economic Committee.

Bush Threatens Veto of Gas Gouging Bill

The White House, in a formal statement of administration policy, said the legislation amounted to price controls that would hinder oil companies and retailers from responding to market signals, potentially worsening fuel shortages.

Crude, Fuel Inventories Rise

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- U.S. crude inventories unexpectedly increased last week, according to data released Wednesday by the the U.S. Department of Energy.
Crude oil stockpiles rose by 2 million barrels to 344.2 million barrels, compared with an average survey estimate of a 200,000-barrel draw.

Gasoline Up 12 Cents in Week to Record

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones) -- Gasoline prices in the mid-section of the United States surged last week, pushing average U.S. retail gasoline prices up by 12 cents to a record $3.26 a gallon last week, the Energy Department reported Monday.

Other people suck

Rant

In a perfect world Drama Dog’s people and I would work out a visitation schedule for the park. They could have the Friday and the weekends and say Monday and I’ll take T-W-TH. I think that would work out. Maybe we could share Fridays, because sometimes Fridays are good days at the park. Maybe on Fridays they could keep their dog to heel the whole time, instead of letting it wander at will - See how much they have fun that is. Welcome to my life, assholes.

And then also, the people we’re both friends with wouldn’t have to choose who to hang out with and I wouldn’t have to get my feelings hurt because they didn’t choose me, but most importantly, Dogger would be able to roam to her hearts content. Because the dog park is supposed to be about her enjoying herself and not really about me enjoying myself. Even though I am the one who drives us there.

Tuesday night, I thought enough time had passed that Drama Dog and Dogger could be around each other, Drama Dog is a pissy little bitch has a long memory and wouldn’t let Dogger be. All Dogger did was wander over to say HI to Drama Dog’s people because Dogger is fond of them - more than I am at this point , and Drama Dog went into attack mode and Dogger reacted because no one likes being snarled at. DD’ s people did not make it better by picking up Drama Dog and pissing her off more. Yeah, my dog might have been barking, but your dog was snarling. And then I had to apologize? !@#$%^&!!! . I think DD needs to be punished for her behavior every once in a while not picked up and cuddled when she attacks other dogs - note, DD is not a small dog. It’s like “Way to give positive reinforcement to your dogs shitty behavior!”. They have a second dog and it and Dogger have always gotten along fine, I think the new dog has issues and they aren’t handling them very well. It’s not my dogs fault that their dog has emotional problems. I like DD’s people, and prior to DD we would sit together and talk and have a good time, but now I am always glad when they are not there. They and DD totally ruin my dog park mellow and make Dogger sad.

/Rant

Okay. Moving on. Deep Cleansing Breaths. I am going to chill out on that and remember I’m going to the beach this weekend.

I bet you think I didn’t go to the District Convention. I did. I drove an hour up there and back I didn’t get lost. I did find that Sanford’s downtown was significantly larger than I had thought it would be though. I kept thinking I must have gone past the “historic red brick” court house. It wouldn’t be hard, as it turns out, much of downtown Sanford is made up of “historic red brick” structures, there was even a “historic red brick” car dealership. It would have been cool if it was still a car dealership, but somewhere a long the way they bricked in the display windows. The name of the dealership was still carved into the ... I want to call it the storefront but that isn’t the right word. Anyway, you could easily loose the historic red brick forest for the historic red brick trees. I finally found the court house and the convention went well. The keynote speaker rocked the house and I stayed rocked because I ducked out before the resolutions were read. I haven’t got time for the pain. I stuck around for that once time and decided that it fell into the never again file.

I read them though, and did you know that the Chatham County Democrats hate George W. Bush? Or at the least the folks who show up for their precinct meetings do. The other 9 counties in the district didn’t call for the “End of Mercenary Deployment” , Wake and two others asked for the “orderly redeployment and withdrawal from Iraq” . No others passed resolutions for impeachment. Chatham County passed six virulently anti-war/anti-Bush administration resolutions. Wake passed resolutions calling for the release of school bond funding and to oppose I-540 as a toll road.

Ringing in my ears

We had a winner in the “please beat me to death as I am so stridently annoying I must be killed” sweepstakes. We have a number of doors in the building where I work. I will do my stewardess impersonation for this - We have exits at the rear of both hallways as well as exits here and here and here and here.

We have a lot of doors. If one needed to flee from this building and did not? It would not be the building fault, the only problem might be that the flee-r could be over whelmed by the choice of possible exits and passed out from having to make a choice of so many possible options.

Not all the doors are created equally. Not all the doors come equipped with door bells – although most of them do have bell boxes. Strangers coming to the building never use the doors that do not have bells. How do they know? You can’t tell when you walk up to the door whether or not it has a bell, you really have to look and despite the fact that we have many doors, from the exterior of the building they aren’t really close to each other. We have one door that remains unlocked during the day and nobody uses it. The front door, the big entry door, right in the front of the building, the one that looks like you should use it, But no, when all else fails, when the bells go answered, they go bang on the sealed door that doesn’t even have a door knob and hasn’t been in use since the Eisenhower administration.

So. The sweepstakes had started. The bell is ringing away and since it is not sounding directly over my desk, I am not answering the door.

And it keeps ringing. I ignore it.

And it’s still ringing.

Ring! pause, RING! pause RING DAMN IT pause and by this time there are people in the hallways checking doors and trying to figure out where the ringing is coming from. We are not successful.

We could have gone down to the end of either long hallway and explored the possibilities that the ringee was not at the closest doors. We could have. We didn’t. I am sure however that we “looked” down the long hallways and failing to see someone standing directly in front of the doors, decided there was no one there.

Ring! pause, RING! pause RING DAMN IT pause

Now, if you were expecting a delivery of some sort. You had asked someone to bring you something and you were waiting for that something and you heard a door bell ringing, would you not think “I wonder if that could be my Thing I asked for and am expecting? Hmmm, could that be a possibility? did I tell them where my office was and which door was the closest to it, Hmmm? But more likely what I am waiting for will fall from the sky, through the ceiling onto my desk. Yes, that sounds probable.”

If you thought this way and you ignored the Ring! pause, RING! pause RING DAMN IT pause? You would be the winner of our “please beat me to death as I am so stridently annoying I must be killed” sweepstakes.

Ga$ Prices

Can't live with it, can't live without it, can't kill it. Gasoline, it's too expensive and every cent we give them goes right into oil companies pockets. Call bull shit on "exploration", "political instability", "bad weather". The price of gasoline isn't dependent on anything except greed. The oil companies are just better dressed drug dealers and they have us right where they want us, jonesing and desperate for their product.

Stop the Price Gouging

The Cemetery Code II

AS we discussed yesterday, the Victorians were very into hidden meanings and codes. partly because they were utterly repressed and partly because they didn't have TV yet. The days were long, we communicated with each other by the way we held our fans. Directness was not a virtue.

The Victorians created a culture around death. Public mourning, elaborate funerals and huge monuments to the dead were all very popular at this time. If you wanted an enormous monument and they all did - all the better to display the piety and affluence of both the deceased and yourself - white marble was pretty but very soft and not at all weather resistant or you could go with a very hardy but also very hard to carve granite - available in expensive gray, very expensive pink and the most blingy of all, the black amex card of it's day, black granite .The Victorians didn't just have funnerals they staged events. Things got expensive.

So. Manufacturers started to create cheaper alternatives so that you didn't necessarily have to be be affluent to appear affluent. Not everyone could afford all this pomp, but because appearance was everything, cost conscience survivors could purchase a monument such as this one. What do you think this lovely stone appear to be made of?



Not made of stone, it is made of Zinc.

The woman who this remembers died in 1878, it has never had to be cleaned. These monuments don't rust, grow moss or wear down. This form of memorial didn't catch on and in some cases was banned - because many communities and cemeteries saw them as "cheap" . They fell out of favor as WWII began and the industry had to shift to the war effort.

Anyway. Modern Death.

We still die. But, instead of focusing on our deaths, today we prefer to focus on our lives - even in death.

Today's stones are smaller, more uniform and less elaborate. We prefer to spend our money differently, again, focusing more on the living - why spend thousands on a monument when there are grand children who need college funds? This is a huge change from the Victorians where the culture was much more focused on the foreverness of their deaths then on brief lives. Their stones say very little directly about the decedent and mosly quote a handful of mournful scriptures.

Today, we quote anything we want to. We quote ourselves, we quote our loved ones:



And the images and messages we chose can be anything we want



Literally.



We all have to go, maybe not yet.



But some of us will have enjoyed ourselves more than others. Would you rather have your friends stand somberly around your grave and weep or would you prefer when they visit that they remember the good times?



The Victorians did it with more pomp but we do it with more pep.

Ga$ Prices

The Cemetery Code

Have you ever wandered through a cemetery and said to yourself "Damn. A hundred years ago everyone sure died young" , and yes if you read the markers a lot of children lived "4 years, 3 months and 11 days" , or they lived through childhood only to die in childbirth. Men lived long enough to be killed in war or by diptheira/yellow fever/cholera/TB/tetanus or influenza. It was a tough time.

I took a walking tour of the very lovely Oakwood Cemetery. It was established in 1867 and went on to serve the cities early notable movers and shakers after they stopped moving and shaking. The other cemetery, the city cemetery, was founded in 1799 and served mostly the less notable and their slaves - it is also noticeably less garden-style. Today Oakwood Cemetery (garden-style) is the permanent home for some 20,000. Jesse Helms will be buried there, John Edwards' son is.

On the tour we learned that the modern cemetery got it's start in 1804 in France. Prior to this cemeteries were located outside of town and were seen as unhealthy, scary places to go, as is illustrated by Raleigh's city cemetary. The Cemetery as a destination for the living came to this country in 1834 in Boston and to Raleigh in 1867.

Your average Victorian grave marker tells a story, in code, For example:

She is not flipping off her survivor's. She is pointing up to let us know that her soul has gone on to heaven. If this was a cleric's grave they would have used two fingers. The book is the bible.



Unlike today, the Victorians didn't do much personalization of the stones. They mention only the deceased faith in God and very little else. Christian imagery is everywhere in their stones. The cross is an image you see everywhere. The cross with five points to symbolize Christs wounds, there are also crosses with three points to symbolize the trinity.

Not all symbolism was strictly religious in tone, see the broken chain, symbolizing the death as breaking the family chain.



The childs hand pulling back the curtain is to illustrate the veil between the worlds, also draping was a sign of mourning. Note the roses. A bud was used to signify a baby, a slightly opened bud a small child and a rose in full bloom for an adult.



Ivy was used to symbolize fidelity or devotion



While two hands, one with a feminine sleeve and the other masculine was used to illustrate marriage. Often, two hands both masculine were used but to symbolize greeting God.


The stone with a drape over it was used to symbolize the families grief at home. Victorians often covered mirrors, photographs and portraits after a death the signify they were in mourning. Also, the coffins were kept at home and draped with blankets. The wealthy used expensive, heavily embellished blankets for this. The blanket pictured is one such drape. I think that the heavy blankets of flowers we cover the coffins with at burial is a version of this practice.



Not all symbols were figurative. Some were more literal, this child's grave features not only an empty cradle but also another Victorian funerary image, the empty chair.



I know this sounds like the most depressing thing ever and why on earth would I do it? Because it was fun. I like history, I'm a busy body and I like finding out other peoples stories. It was very informative and entertaining and I hope you this little tutorial. Tomorrow? Modern death.

HAPPY SUNDAY !!!!!!!