Comic posted Thursday, Oct. 14, 2004

Posted: 9:06 am, Thursday, October 14, 2004

I have this awesome German army jacket that I've been wearing for years. It has the name "Boecker" stitched onto it, and the jacket is usually referred to as such. For some reason, I have decided that in the universe of Five Bucks to Friday, this jacket is Jen's and not Ron's. I bought this wonderful piece of clothing for about seven bucks American in Rome seven years ago now. No real point to this story, but you should know by now that there's no real point to most of my stories.

Including this one. I mentioned last week that I bought an iPod, and, as I predicted, have started to talk about it like it is a child. This effort is not helped by the fact that 2.0 anthropomorphizes her home electronics (the computer is Jackson, her iPod is Marcel)(Pollack and DuChamp - she's an art history student, what can I say?), and I am encouraged to do the same. So, my iPod is named Polly (short for pollywog - I am a one-trick pony, what can I say?). Whilst in Rome (ah! a reason why this story came up!), the Verve were the band du jour in Europe, and Bittersweet Symphony was nigh inescapable. If you recall the video, Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft (no relation to our esteemed Attorney General, although I hear Richard is kind of a wanker, too) is walking down a crowded street, bumping into people the whole time while staring straight at the camera and singing. Not exactly Michael Jackson's Thriller as far as excellence in videos, but not bad, all the same. Anyway, so, on Tuesday, as I was walking with Polly down a crowded Fifth Avenue on my lunchbreak, to light a candle at St. Patrick's and pray for the Sox (I am not kidding), it was all I could do to keep from shoulder checking everyone I walked past.

Told you, no real point there.

Andrew W.K. posted a new crop of Ask Andrews. Andrew discusses the futility of telling someone to keep it real, waxes poetic on the St. Louis Cardinals and rainy days, and counsels someone who recently gave up drinking. Because Andrew W.K. is who you want to go to for advice on that.

So I get back from lunch yesterday and check my Juno account - I've more or less abandoned it since getting gmail, but I still get Michael Moore's newsletter there and he's been pretty active the past few weeks, so I check it from time to time. Sitting there was something from "amyaxene" with an attachment. Basically anything with an 'x' in the person's name and with an attachment, I assume is porn, someone selling me Valium, or a virus, but then I notice the subject line and it's an eVite. My friend CK forwarded an eVite to me from a friend of hers, I figured maybe she had also given her friend my address and I was actually on the eVite list, now, so I open it.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT, it's a wedding invitation. My buddy Starky is getting married. Starky is one of my three best friends from high school, and I'm finding out about his wedding through an eVite. What the hell? Is this what we, as a society, have come to? Hell, MNP, you haven't formally sent out invites yet, right? Evidently, you don't have to! eVite covers it! When I die, you can all expect an eVite to the funeral from 2.0.

In the same vein, though, again, holy shit. Starky is getting married. This is the kid who at one point was speaking about becoming a missionary pilot down in South America, and who joined the Marines about a month into collitch.

So, am I going to the eVite wedding? Can't say. I've broken it down to the good and the bad of the situation:

Good - Stark is one of my best friends from high school; it's in San Diego in December.

Bad - Stark's not horribly sentimental and may not even notice if I'm there; it will doubtlessly be a dry ceremony, since Stark's Baptist.

Anyway, onto the presidential debate. Normally, I'd talk about baseball, but with the Red Sox bound and determined to make the worst Goat Fuckers' starting rotation in over a decade look like a Hall of Fame induction class (sorry, couldn't come up with a better metaphor), and my eyes constatly splurting blood because of it, I'm giving the ALCS a pass. So, the final debate was last night and I'm actually writing this in the morning, so I figure I'll address that. Wonkette does it better than me, but that's her shtick, so it's a good thing she did. Anyone see when the foam actually fell from Bush's face? That was amazing. "Buggy and horse days," that tremendous "Paygo" joke that probably cost some poor presidential aide his life, the No Child Left Behind being a jobs act (good, because it's failing tremendously as an education act), and Bush's facial expressions - all things I'm not going to miss come November 3rd.

All in all, a horribly boring debate. Two of the three were pretty boring really - thankfully, the one that wasn't was the one where Kerry killed him and Bush started talking to people who weren't there. I'll never understand why Kerry didn't kill him in the other two - especially afterwards, when the guys on PBS (guy who looks like a basset hound and some guy from the NY Times that wears a bowtie) said that Bush's best points of the night were on education. What? Education?! His education record is horrible! Bush kept playing up the fact that we need kids to be able to read and write in the inner cities. OK, this is true, but it's kind of like how Sadaam tortured people worse than we did in Iraq. Um, we're America. I think we can set the bar a bit higher. Functional literacy is a start, but I really have a problem with you limiting your case study to the inner cities, Bush. For one, it plays to a latent racism. Bush trying to make it sound like he gives a fuck about black people by beating the crap out of this hideously underfunded No Child thing while not coming out and just admitting that the entire public education system in this country is fucked like Paris Hilton, bleh, Kerry, where are you on this? Also, John, memorize where the Bush quote about not caring where Osama was from March of '02. Because it happened (page 2 of article). Maybe if they could have Powerpoint presentations and cue up audio and shit.

Also, was Kerry's part of the debate corporate funded? I need to look into Blue Cross/Blue Shield, it's evidently top-notch coverage.

Moving on, local demigod Bill O'Reilly likes it kinky. I hope this makes it to court, and I hope his masterpiece Those Who Trepass is admissible as evidence (check out the review from March 22, 2004 by yours truly, on an especially boring day at the office, pre-Five Bucks era).

Moving on, holy shit, it's Doonesbury strips about John Kerry. From fucking 1971! These are making the rounds on conservative sites, even though I don't really find them to be that damning of Kerry. I guess I should hate him because Trudeau thought that he (Kerry) was a self-impressed preppy? Who can tell with these people.

James Hart for Congress - evidently, this is real. Which scares the living fuck out of me. Tried finding polls on the 8th District, but couldn't. I'm going out on a limb and assuming he's not going to beat the incumbent, but that could be quite the limb. Whole bucket full of crazy on that site. Oh, OK, just found something from someone who did more homework - this guy's the Republican nominee because he was the only person who challenged the incumbent as a Republican, and even local GOP leaders are embarrassed that this is happening. Wow. Still, the very existence of people like this make me doubt the future survival of the human species.

One last thing, and this is a strange decision of mine, assuming that I'm reaching people that somehow Doonesbury doesn't, but Doonesbury this week is running urls for articles written by (famous) conservatives detailing their problems with Bush. Anyone out there arguing with a conservative may want to nab a few quick talking points from these guys. If you can speak their language, I dunno, maybe you can get them to realize that he's not conservative, not patriotic, and no damn good.

bullfrog