Best $12 Tequila

The best $12 tequila is definitely Arandas. Made in Mexico by Mexicans.

You can taste the yucca, but it's not sharp or nasty. Good buy for $12.

That's too Bad ...

I was buying flowers for Barbara in a flower shop and I wanted to have them delivered because Barbara's cute when she pretends to be surprised. Wanted to have them delivered on the next day - a Sunday.

The flower shop lady (like 50'ish) says, "We don't deliver on Sunday."

I says, "Oh, that's too bad."

And she's like, "Our delivery guy works hard all week driving all over the place" and blah blah blah, for like five minutes.

So I thought her getting defensive was a strange way to react to my comment, since all I was trying to say for Christ's sake is that I wished they DID deliver on Sundays since for Christ's sake it's gotta be a big flower day, and all.

What the heck was she hearing me say? I'm a pretty big guy, maybe I'm fierce looking, maybe even a little thuggish.

"We don't deliver on Sunday."

"That's too bad. I'll have to kill you now."

"No no no please don't kill me, you know our delivery guy works hard all week delivering flowers to people just like you, please don't kill me."

I dunno, that doesn't seem too realistic. If I was laying down a death threat, I wouldn't want to hear about her delivery guy. That'd go more like this:

"We don't deliver on Sunday."

"That's too bad. I'll have to kill you now."

"No, wait a minute, we do deliver on Sunday."

Maybe she was some kind of Christian nutcase. The idea being that Sunday is their sacred day of rest so delivering on Sunday is really offensive.

"We don't deliver on Sunday."

"That's too bad, cause Satan needs the flowers delivered then."

"It is the sacred day of rest! Get thee behind me!"

Maybe it's like as the customer I'm her boss and as you know getting noodged by the boss is really annoying.

"We don't deliver on Sunday."

"That's too bad - you're really falling down on the flower delivery job here."

"We've been working really hard all week ... !"

"Sorry, you're fired. Get your things and go."

The really odd part was that Sunday was Mother's Day. How sacred and divine and sweet and worthy of extra reverence (and a little extra work, flower-wise) is Mother's Day ... !

It must have been something to do with hormones and relationships, because when I don't understand people that's usually the problem.

"We don't deliver on Sunday."

"That's too bad - you shouldn't be giving the delivery guy a day off just because you're having sex with him."

"Dammit, I want to get my brains screwed out on Sunday, that's MY 'Mothers Day', so leave me alone!"

The Establishment Strikes Back

Bill Clinton was our first black white President.

Barack Obama is going to be our first black Democratic Republican President.

Looks like he's going to surround himself with the old DLC Republican-Lite crowd - Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Not to mention some real Republicans like Gates staying on at Defense.

That's actually OK. He's not a guy who's all about principles. He's about policy and getting pragmatic stuff done. His policy is probably going to have a progressive flavor but what this is really all about is that the Establishment has been restored.

There won't be any insane wars. Only sensible ones. The neocons will get kicked to the curb. Our American Taliban - Southern-flavored Christianists - will not be setting social policy. The people who want to show that big, intrusive government doesn't function by making sure that the big government is intrusive and doesn't function - are now going to be gone.

The people in there now, in Washington, will be the people who believe in making government work.

That will be a huge relief. It's a shame that some principles (like obeying the Constitution and setting limits on Executive power) will be ignored, but I think we'll see some things happen which are good for this country. The old responsible Establishment has returned.

Think of Barack Obama as a moderate Republican kind of guy - the kind of guy who has the pragmatism, decency, and sense of civic responsibility that old-fashioned Republicans used to have.*

Then you won't be disappointed.

*Supposedly.

Mama I want my Dada

Who's your Dada?

That's right, Fafnir and Giblets are your Dada!

Giblet-flavored political-ish commentary:
http://fafblog.blogspot.com/

It's the lolcats of bovine-spongiform-encephalitis-suffering-punditry.

With pie.

Life, what's up with that?

Hey, how about life? You know how people are born, they live, and then they die? What's up with that?

Yeah. So how about breathing. In with the air, out with the air. All the time, can't make up your mind can you? You can't just hold on to the air you've got, you're always trying to get new air, like the old air wasn't good enough. What's up with that, huh?

Yeah. And eating. You're always eating. And then you crap it out, and then you're hungry again. I mean, why can't you have a meal and be done with it. There's always another meal coming down the turnpike, seems like.

Don't get me started on your heart beating. It's always in there, thumping away. Jesus, doesn't it ever stop? And not even changing rhythm, always lub-dup, lub-dup, couldn't it switch off for a bit, maybe dup - do - do - do - dup - da? Get a little calypso in there or something? Sheesh.

And yeah, so you have all these people going to all this trouble living and breathing and eating and doing all those things like driving around and making money I guess, and then at the end of it all, they're just going to lay down and die. I mean, get a grip, people.

extremely minor home improvement foulup #387

so we got some pretty good paint from Sherwin Williams ($$ not $$$ but not $ either or .$) and we got it in this one color and painted the living room and it covered up good and we got it in this other color and painted the bedroom and it was good.

and so my dottir's room was lite pink and therefore her request was for dark pink and we got that other paint in dark pink (Haute Pink if you must know.)

And one coat I put on really good and thick and slathered ... and #$%& the light pink is all coming through in streaks! And put on two coats and there were still suspect areas!

What's up with that? How come a light color covers up a darker color just great, but a darker color can't cover up a lighter color? How does that even make sense?

the living room and the bedroom only took one coat, going from darker to lighter ...

maybe there's some explanation having to do with your eyes perceiving light intensity on a log scale or suchlike.

or maybe "it" is out to get me and "it" is playing by "its" own rules without even worrying about what's "fair".

All You Zombies ...

OK, here's some deep thinking - an attempt to make your brain hurt like my brain hurts.

We humans are aware beings. We have awareness.

What kind of a thing is awareness? Does awareness really exist out in the physical world? Can you safely say a tree has just a tiny bit of awareness, a rock has almost none, empty space has zero, I have a lot?

What I'm getting at here is, Does awareness really exist? Maybe that is a dumb childish question. I certainly feel that my awareness exists (that's called "conscious experience"), but I'm not too sure that you have awareness.

I chewed on this for a long time and now I suspect that I am actually correct in thinking that I have awareness (that I am experiencing) but that this statement "Matt has awareness" is only correct for me. You, Joe the Experiencer, would correctly say that you have awareness, and I would correctly disagree that you had awareness (experience.)

Likewise, I think Joe probably should say "Matt does not have experience ..." It's unfindable and does not exist in Joe's description of the physical world - it's not perceivable. I propose that you actually have your own individual objective truth - Objectively, to you, you are experiencing. To you, I am, quite correctly, a zombie who displays many of the symptoms of an aware organism but doesn't quite have the disease of living awareness (after all, you're not experiencing my awareness now are you?)

To you, it's definitely true in your interpretation of reality that you are experiencing (perhaps because experience reality and interpreting reality are the same thing.) It's not soggy and dreamlike and semi-factual like most 'subjective' things ... dreams or leprechaun gold ... it always returns ... you undoubtedly do have a flow of perception.

You however do not have a flow of my perception. (Although maybe if I really talk your ear off ...)

Now this sounds terribly lonely and flimsy (you, poor Joe the Experiencer, are somehow making up existing, being alive, experiencing) but maybe it's not so bad.

From physics, it's reasonable to think everything is more or less being made up as it goes along. You can model an electron as a probability wave so that it doesn't actually exist until it interacts with something - and that something itself came to exist as a result of its interaction with the other electron and other things.

Point here is that just because experience is "made up" doesn't mean it's not as real as anything else.

And ... is experience really an isolating phenomenon? Maybe not, if you consider that the entire world is coming together to become your experience. Your experience is not that special for being you, it's special because it's the special place where the whole thing comes together. You're the 'party spot' for the universe (and that's as far as I'll go in a family blog.)

extremely minor home improvement foulup #386

The old Hot and Cold handles in the tub were the ugly plastic kind like you might have on your sink, with fake-crystal knobs with a plastic "H" or "C" insert.

Got new ones, handsome brushed nickel look, old-fashioned, the lever kind where you have this somewhat flared handle sticking out.

With some fear and anxiety, unscrewed the old faucet and handles (water-go-things).

I had not thought about one thing:
When you have two lever type handles, you expect them to both swing towards the middle when you want to turn one the water (one clockwise and one counterclockwise.) This is NOT the same action as twisting your typical sink type knobs, which BOTH twist clockwise to turn on the water.

So now we have these levers that turn wrong, since they inherited the old valves, and are therefore both clockwise and you can't even twist them towards each other if you try.

I will never get over this. I cannot take out the old valves, buried inside the tub as they are, and our bathroom is now permanently eccentric in a way nobody will notice until they take a bath.

As Condoleeza Rice said, "There is no ... There is no way anyone could have foreseen this kind of problem."

Wrong [Time] Track

According to some recent poll, more than 90% of Americans believe "this country is on the wrong track."

I have a slightly different theory.

I think we ended up in the wrong parallel universe somehow. We're on the wrong time track.

The end of the 90's were the "end of history" as Fukuyama said.

In this history, we always used to have some sort of reasonable President, whether Democrat or Republican, who was a middle aged or elderly white man, who would run things in a reasonable respectable sort of way, making decisions that some would agree with and some would disagree with (closer relations with Russia? more farm subsidies? fight Communism in this way or that way? ) It was a Time/Newsweek world ... it was boring. (Although perhaps not so boring for those "Communists" who got fought this time around.) It was the Establishment world.

Then around 2000, the gods (space aliens? lizard people? the Artist? the Programmer?) ran out of film or got bored or something, and decided to splice in a *new* movie. Terrorists blow up New York skyscrapers with jet planes! New Orleans underwater! America takes over an Arab country! Everything on Wall Street is worthless!

Lately ... since we failed to get the joke ... the Creator went from cheezy "B" action/disaster movie to complete absurdity.

This is why we are faced with electing a Lincoln-esque black president named Barack Hussein Obama. Our villains are, um, eponymous with our hero? Christ, why not just call him Barack Saddam Hussein Obama bin Laden.

We got unstuck from our time track and are now just veering wildly in this unnamed decade (the Oughts? Why not the "Could-Bes"!)

I think it is time to get the joke and start laughing, otherwise, in an attempt to get the yucks out of us, "They" are going to pull our leg so hard next time it will come right off.

Please put out at least a chuckle, so that we can avoid something really bizarre like the "Paper Doll Plague" which makes people become two-dimensional and die by falling into sewer grates ... or whatever! Let's just please not provoke "Their" creativity any further.

Pumpkin Persecution

Our neighborhood is a very neighborly neighborhood.

Our neighbor, Selena, used to be an event planner. I think this is like being a community organizer, except that you organize people for unserious reasons.

She is probably the reason that a pumpkin basket showed up on our doorstep a couple of weeks before Halloween. It had candies and little toys and other Halloween fun things in it. It had a xeroxed sheet attached, "Here is a Pumpkin Basket for your Children ... Copy This, Put it in your Window so People know you Got a Basket... And Make Two more Pumpkin Baskets With this Note and Give them to Houses with Children Too!"

Doing the math quickly, I realized that due to exponential growth, within a short time the Earth would covered with Pumpkin Baskets (although probably not before Halloween.)

My wife Barbara couldn't get mobilized into making more Pumpkin Baskets. She was shy about trying to find a pumpkin-basket-less house and sneaking up to it and depositing a Pumpkin Basket. Plus, she was a bit lazy about finding miscellaneous Halloween treats - not to say that's her job, of course - why wouldn't it be my job to make 2 Pumpkin Baskets and find two Pumpkin-Basket-less households (with children!) to deposit these Pumpkin Baskets at? And the copying, we don't have the ability to copy things right at our house. All in all, it just seemed too difficult, and after all (due to the built-in exponential growth) the Pumpkin Basket plan obviously had room for a few shirkers in it here and there (as long as not more than half of Pumpkin Basket recipients were shirkers like us.)

So we gave the treats and toys and suchlike Halloween-related novelties to our kid and put the notice in the window (so people would know we had been served) and kind of forgot about it.

A quick scan seemed to indicate most people had gotten a Pumpkin Basket ...

Then a couple days later another Pumpkin Basket showed up at our doorstep.

And then a couple days later another Pumpkin Basket showed up at our doorstep. I guess people sneaking up to your house to deposit a guerrilla hospitality action basket are too preoccupied with being sneaky to look for a fairly clearly posted Pumpkin Basket notice in your window.

I didn't really want to participate in a Pumpkin Basket chain-pumpkin-basketing. But I feel kind of bad that we had the social failure of not propagating a pumpkin basket - not even one - when we got three. This always happens to me. I have gone down in Social Fail again.

I just hope nobody is tracking these pumpkin baskets somehow. I will always be aware, when facing my neighbors now, that there is an outside chance that they know I have committed Pumpkin Basket Ingratitudeness. I hope it doesn't show on my face.

We have received charity (in an unserious way) and given none.

This made me want to perhaps do something fun for other people. Like sending random people Halloween Boo-quets. But this could be a problem with married women on our block: "Who the hell is sending you flowers for Halloween, honey?!?"

In a mistrusting marriage, that could be the end.

"Yes I am Lame"

I would like to have a bumper sticker on my car which says "Yes I Am Lame."

This helps other drivers understand what is happening when I am making a three-point turn in the middle of the road.

"What the HELL is his problem?"

"Oh yeah ... see his bumper sticker ... he is lame."

Why I'm not a Writer

I would be a really awesome writer, except that my characters would have no motivation. I could describe everything they did or thought in wonderful detail, except that it would be very dull. They would just sit around going "Hm." "Hmm-hmm." Maybe with accents: "Ach-hem" or "ouah".

I just couldn't unfairly burden my characters with wanting to do something.

That's because what I want most, personally, is to have a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and a dull magazine like Newsweek. I want to savor being on the edge of boredom.

Actually doing something seems completely over the top and excessive.

But I could probably write something about as a long as a paragraph.

That's about as much as you possibly want to read, anyhow.

My theory is that only the first line - the first half sentence - of an email actually gets full attention. The second line gets scanned for keywords. The third line might as well be French (if you are an English speaker (and not Canadian.))

So I hope to find an audience for my blog whose extreme laziness in reading perfectly matches my own unwillingness to write anything long.

It's about Me

Of course, it is all about me. I am an obsidian mirror which I gaze at. I am not a crystal ball.

In any event things are always occurring to me, which I want to share with you. It's all about you. I need you.

Songs of Junk

This blog is random noodling of things which happen to me or I speak of. Think of.

The world is kind of random too.

The world is dreaming. It sings songs. It sings songs which are about stuff, just put together. Junk. Songs of junk.

Here is some of my junk.