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I suck at blogging anymore. I need to get back to this at some point...

Oh yeah, OSU kicked ass today, which, after this off season, was pretty fucking refreshing.

And this:

Goodbye

So busy...hoping to get back to posting soon...

Until then, here's a clip of the last Iced Earth performance with Matt Barlow singing before he retires and is replaced by Stu Block.

Guns

Penguins

Also, I stumbleuponed across this. FTFA:

The winner of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Molly Ringle of Seattle, Washington. The author of one published and two soon-to-be-published novels, Molly Ringle only writes bad fiction when she fails at good fiction. She'd rather not say how often this happens. She lives in Seattle with her family, and her vices include uncalled-for moments of sarcasm, excessive consumption of Nutella, and an unladylike avidity for the raunchy films of Mel Brooks[.]

Molly Ringle is the 28th grand prize winner of the contest that that began at San Jose State University in 1982. She is also the second consecutive Washingtonian to win the contest, last year’s being David McKenzie.

Here's the sentence that won Molly the prize:

"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

You're welcome.

The Onion

House updates and pics forthcoming...probably next weekend or so. Busy as all hell right now, as one might expect.

But in the meantime, a few random thoughts first:

1. So, Bloodsport happened to come on to the channel I had been watching when the previous show ended. This is an absolutely horrible movie. The acting is laughably bad, so it at least has unintentional comedy going for it, but at the same time it seems to take itself seriously which just makes you sad. And Jean Claude Van Damme has way too little clothing on at times. And no naked chicks - at least not on cable. This movie sucks.
2. Fuck bugs. This house is great, but the bugs are annoying. One of my cats has killed a couple grasshoppers, and I've killed like 7 or 8, inside the house since we moved in. But the gnats, mosquitos and other bitey fuckers outside are the really annoying ones. We're having the yard sprayed this week. I hope that kills a whole lot of these annoying assholes. We believe the people who lived here previously must have been hippies who didn't want to hurt the bugs. Well, fuck that shit. We're right next to a golf course, so the land is really healthy. And so, therefore, are the bugs. But their days are numbered if I have any say in the matter.
3. I have to mow the lawn for the first time tomorrow. That should be fun.
4. We had Verizon FIOS installed earlier this week and, for the most part, I'm pretty happy with it so far. We had some communication problems with customer service related to changing some of the details of the service we ordered, but the product itself has been great. The big thing that annoys me right now is that there doesn't seem to be a Page Up/Down feature on the remote so you have to scroll through the guide one channel at a time. Annoying. But, otherwise, this is much better than my last few experiences with Cox Communications.

And, also, this shit reads like it was written for The Onion. FTFA:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), a leading advocate of shrinking entitlement spending and the architect of the plan to privatize Medicare, spent Wednesday evening sipping $350 wine with two like-minded conservative economists at the swanky Capitol Hill eatery Bistro Bis.

It was the same night reports started trickling out about President Obama pressing Congressional leaders to consider changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for GOP support for targeted tax increases.

The pomp and circumstance surrounding the waiter's presentation, uncorking and decanting of the pricey Pinot Noir caught the attention of another diner who had already recognized Ryan sitting with two other men nearby.

Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, was at Bistro Bis celebrating her birthday with her husband that night. When she saw the label on the bottle of Jayer-Gilles 2004 Echezeaux Grand Cru Ryan's table had ordered, she quickly looked it up on the wine list and saw that it sold for an eye-popping $350, the most expensive wine in the house along with one other with the same pricetag.

Feinberg, an economist by training, was even more appalled when the table ordered a second bottle. She quickly did the math and figured out that the $700 in wine the trio consumed over the course of 90 minutes amounted to more than the entire weekly income of a couple making minimum wage.

"We were just stunned," said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter later the same evening. "I was an economist so I started doing the envelope calculations and quickly figured out that those two bottles of wine was more than two-income working family making minimum wage earned in a week."

She was outraged that Ryan was consuming hundreds of dollars in wine while Congress was in the midst of intense debates over whether to cut seniors' safety net, and she didn't know whether Ryan or his companions was going to pay for the wine and whether the two men were lobbyists. She snapped a few shots with her cell phone to record the wine purchase.

Feinberg knew if the men were lobbyists, or worked for a firm or company that employs lobbyists, then paying for such expensive wine would be a violation of Congressional ethics rules barring members from accepting anything of value from lobbyists.

Members can also run into trouble if they accept more than $100 per year from anyone - even a friend.

"Basically, you have a situation in which the person who bought the meal says I bought it on the basis of a personal friendship and if it's under $100, you have to show the history of the relationship and some degree of reciprocity," said Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center.

If the gift is more than $100, House rules require members to obtain written determination from the Ethics Committee on whether they can accept it or not.

After ending their meal and paying the check, Feinberg decided to give Ryan a piece of her mind. She approached the table and asked Ryan "how he could live with himself" sipping expensive wine while advocating for cuts to programs for seniors and the poor. Some verbal jousting between Feinberg and the other two men ensued. One of the two men said he had ordered the wine, was drinking it and paying for it. In hearing how much the wine cost, Ryan said only: "Is that how much it was?"

The clash became especially heated when Feinberg asked the men if they were lobbyists.

"F---- her," one of them replied and stood up in a menacing way, according to Feinberg's account. Feinberg said her husband then "puffed out his chest" in response before the manager and a waiter came over and Feinberg decided she had said her piece and it was time to leave.

Ryan does not dispute most of the details of Feinberg's account, although he told TPM the two men are economists, not lobbyists, and characterized Feinberg as "crazy" and possibly drunk. For her part, Feinberg said she believes the economist at the table who got out his seat to challenge her was the one intoxicated.

"It was my birthday, and I'd had half a bottle of great wine with dinner," she wrote in an e-mail to TPM. "I wasn't drunk, but I was certainly emboldened to speak my mind."

That's what constitutes journalism over at Talking Points Memo? Ha!

Metal Baby

Yesterday

So, yesterday, we bought this:
















Some of the rooms could stand to be painted. And I didn't include pictures to the pink/grey bathroom upstairs or the teal/yellow bathroom in the basement that need to be torn out and redone, but otherwise it's fantastic.

Sorta excited. Sorta scared. And I can't really believe this is our first house. Hope we don't run it into the ground!