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Caffles

Tired of the stresses of irrigating your neck with the morning coffee while simultaneously trying to shove down a decent breakfast?  Probably while you're also doing your make-up, straightening your tie, fixing your hair, texting, adjusting the radio and driving?  It's a pain, am I right?

Worry no more, breakfast eater, because the frozen, ready-to-eat breakfast product that will Pop YOU Up When It Pops Up is here - CAFFLES!!!  The newest product from Consumer FoodObjects, CAFFLES are pop-up toaster waffles with a full cup of coffee in each one!  That's right, when you eat a CAFFLE, you're getting a boost of caffeine - a rich hazelnut Arabica roast, to be sure - and a full serving of Yellow #5, TBHQ, eggs, Palm Kernel Oil, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, and many other essential breakfast ingredients.  Seriously, who's got time to eat a good breakfast when CAFFLES are around, and will do just fine?

Available in the following flavors in the American market (exclusively) as of February 2010:

Homestyle Colombian

Buttermilk & Blueberry

Leary's Maple Nut Crunch

Three Sugars

Goo Inside

Cardboard, like most frozen waffle products, and

Latte for Work!

Further questions about CAFFLES can be addressed to the promotional products and public affairs wing of Consumer FoodObjects, or relayed to us via the comments section of this website.  The only question left for you, the discerning breakfast consumer, is do you drink a CAFFLE or eat a CAFFLE?  Dreat?  CAFFLES, changing the verbs you use at breakfast!

People are Sheep

Now that I am at home all day, I have plenty of time (not really, but it's a different set of responsibilities I'm blowing off) to float about the 'net and see what incisive and intelligent things people are saying to each other via Tweets and Facebook comments about the results of the Senate election in Massachusetts yesterday.  The primary thing I realized?  I was happier when I didn't do that.

Putting aside for this entry any opinions I most definitely fucking have about what this result is or is not a referendum (a word useage that always disturbs me a little) on, what it says about Obama, his policies failed, stalled, and otherwise, the rabid GOP, rudderless & pansiated dems or "the blame game," and most nebulously, "the direction our country is headed," what bothers me the most about all of this is the way we as a populace allow ourselves to be manipulated into jingoistic home team idiots the day after.  Everyone's either 'woo' or 'boo', and virtually no one is having a conversation about anything that doesn't turn personal.

I'm not suggesting that we should all huddle around chess boards in atria surrounded by shelves full of books and engage in quiet, orderly discourse over brandy & cigars with a modicum of dignity and decorum in place - after all, past entries here would disqualify me for membership in that particular club - but I would like to see some middle ground between that ideal of measured free exchange and the personal "liberals are all faggot morons" and "republicans are reactionary and evil" crap I've seen today.  I don't know when it got this personal - was it the Reagan era?  Before that?  Nixon?  Was it when Camelot ended?  Someone older than me have an opinion?  Regardless, the simple fact is that most of these exchanges accomplish nothing other than to see who can shout "YOUR GUYS SUCK" loudest.  If that's all we're doing, then it may not be long before I opt out of giving a shit on the national level entirely. 

I always try to build my poisonous & nasty rhetoric on a foundational idea - a point I have to make, not just dogma or regurgitated claptrap.  I am not always successful, but I do try.  If I do attack someone personally, it's usually a head of state (who Jefferson and Franklin would encourage me to take the piss out of, if they could still talk, because chipping away at pedestals is important) or someone who goes personal first.  And maybe I could stop doing even that...but I doubt it.  I get tired of talking to people I agree with all the time, but I don't have the wherewithal to yell all the time anymore.  So yeah, America - any chance of us all just calming the fuck down for ten seconds and talking shit over without breaking out the gloves and glassware?!?

I'll see you at Feh.

Moved.

For those of you who thought that perhaps I and my family had fallen off the edge of the map - either in actuality or just virtually - this is not the case.  We simply up and moved to Murfreesboro, and it has been quite the challenge getting settled over the last twelve days or so.  Moving house is a laborious process, and in point of fact, ate up the better part of a month in the packing and planning and the actual relocating.  My TiVo just got righted today, and I still don't have wall hangings.  Max has had two days at the new school, and is recovering from a foot injury he got during the move - a smashed toe, complete with blood and bruising and swelling.  Abby's moodswings are epic events of scope and power - hopefully, some of that will die down soon.  Our routine is different, and as yet, ill-established.  Sleep is not a given.  Our new place is cool; more space for less money, and more amenities close by than even we expected.

The primary focus of this entry would have to be the moving odessey thanks that need to be handed out, though.  To Steve and Dawn the Cleaner and Eli the Hauler & Laloni, and to my former neighbors, Daniel, Jessica, and Heather, none of whom had to come out and did anyway.  To Borofolk Tim and Kenny and Corwyn, with the logistical mojo and outload muscle.  Special thanks to Ron for multiple box runs, and Mer, for being here on the last night there and the first night here.  Extra special thanks to Dale, for sticking it out on two seperate weekend days, lifting the last shit there was to be lifted, having a vase miracle, putting up with our crap all day, and for taking a fishwater bath with me.  Dale is the rockstar of our move, and in general.  Thanks also to Kat & Jennifer for kind attentions paid to our offspring, especially considering the circumstances, and to Matt & Cayce, for not having taken their moving blankets back yet.

Turns out, from what I hear, I got out right when I should have.  We'll see how the rest turns out.

Transitional Period

Things always kind of suck during a transitional period.  There's really only two things that make it even remotely okay, and both are internal realizations.

1. As a transitional period, it will, by definition, be over at some other point in the relatively near future.

2. Things will likely be better at this aforementioned future point, or you wouldn't be doing this shit.

My household is, at present, undergoing major transitional upheaval, just in time to ring in 2010.  By the second week of this month, we will have moved, my kids will both be in new schools, and I will be gainfully unemployed.  For the short term.  I'm not sure how long I can go without working, having only done it for a couple of brief periods since age 10, but I'm pretty sure it begins to eat my brain after only a short duration.  I might probably blog more, though.  After we move.  From now until we move, I make no guarantees, since I'm trying to sell the desk my computer sits on via Craigslist, and at some point, I have to move the computer.  And blogging will become dramatically less important as we begin moving in earnest.

Today was my last day of work for the company I've been working for since we moved back to Nashville, and it's sixteen years to the day since I was awakened with an emergency beeper (remember those?) message that changed everything forever.  Really, everything changes everything, but the big things are easier to pick up on when they happen.  Today, it's snowing - sixteen years ago, there had been a major ice storm.  The sense of finality I have currently is big and random, unconnected to actual events and unfinalized.  I can't get a grip on it.  I need to sleep and rest.  I need maybe slightly less perspective.

We're moving on Saturday, renting a truck and picking up a final paycheck tomorrow.  We'll be living in Murfreesboro - new place, new job, new schools.  Shaking things up just to shake them?  Not quite, but there is an element of change for its own sake.  When the future is too certain, I tend to hold it in contempt.

Boxes all over my house.

Avatar: Spoiled

All I can say is, "wow."

Wow - after all the hype, all the talk about the technology, all the talking head promotional run-downs of this being a 12 year project for James Cameron, the comments about this changing film forever - at the end of the day it boils down to the overwhelming sense of, "What a fucking disappointment that was."

I tried.  I really did.  At first, I was reluctant to see the thing because it sounded derivative of so much of not only other movies & stories (It's Dances With Wolves, it's Battle for Terra, it's District 9's evil twin, it's The Last Samurai, somebody read Joe Conrad in junior high) but also a thousand shared narratives within the human collective experience.  I got arm-twisted because some people who I trust(ed) had said good things about it, and because I finally had a night out, just me and my wife - a nice quiet SONOFABITCHING LETDOWN.  Here's a movie with something to say that you learned in elementary school, probably the first time you studied Thanksgiving.  And the message is dumbed-down, predictable, expository and simple enough that even the most learning disabled kid you know would likely pick up on it.  A ritalin kid being attacked by a chimp.  Once again, a thrillingly beautiful movie for the lowest common denominator.  And people are loving it.  Look around - I am severely out of step with most of America right now in absolutely hating this thing.  But I tried.  For about forty minutes I tried not to snicker at the "unobtanium" in the first act - tantamount to actually having a character named MacGuffin and expecting me to take that seriously.  I tried to get involved with the characters despite the fact that none of them is deeper than a desert puddle, but couldn't engage at all.  And I tried to enjoy the beauty of Jimmy's artificial, obviously about-to-be-raped world, but kept thinking, "pressure sensitive blacklight planet - you dreamed this up while smoking sherm" and found the whole thing not even laughable or simply ridiculous (though those are both true) but boring.  Boring is not a sin this film should have been allowed to commit.

Sins James Cameron is allowed to commit: Getting Jessica Alba on TV motorbikes, casting Bill Paxton over and over and over again until America believes he is talented, drowning my evil twin.

And neither is rampant narrative and visual unoriginality.  The "lush and convincing" environment of Pandora is lame.  It looks great, sure - like you were selling 3D CGI to people who had never seen it before ("I have here, in my wagon, the answer to all your three dimensional needs!") - like a really advanced version of those stoner VHS tapes we had when C was in college.  Oh, and throw in some bioluminscent animals for good nature.  For the kids' toys.  Also, giant trees and noble, graceful blue people.  Who sparkle like Meyer's vampires.  And the blue people should ACTUALLY BE ABLE TO PHYSICALLY LINK TO ALL THE CREATURES ON THE PLANET, just in case some brain donor in the audience misses the point that we've carved into the end of this massive, unwieldy three hundred million dollar hammer.  That big point about being linked to nature and all.

Bad story, bad characterization.  I thought story was king, but then I have been naive about a lot of things.  There is no story here.  There is preaching, but not even in the interesting, black church on a Sunday way.  More the white Protestant non-holiday Wednesday night kind of way.  Flattest hollywood characters you have seen since the Police Academy movies, I shit you not.  One dimensional people in a nth-dimensional world.  Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver are wasted in their roles as hardass soldier and hardass researcher, respectively, and Zoe Saldana's a lot more used in Star Trek than here, where she's essentially a foil for the plot itself, inexplicably falling in love with the schmuck on a rope played by Sam Worthington.

I just don't get it - I heard people talking about what a "fun" movie this was.  Which part?  The violent rape of the planet?  The screaming death?  The corporate/military bullshit?  The Bambi-level lecturing about connections?  Or was it when it was over, and you left?  'Cause that was a fun part for me.

I'm also amused by the Mc-tie-ins this naturalistic film has.  And that the crowning achievement of all this tech is to explain how great and cool nature is, and how you're wrong to war on it.  Back to nature, with your soda in one hand, popcorn in the other, and 3D glasses stuck to your bastard head.

So, yeah.  I hated it.  I think it's a bad movie.  It's a pretty movie, but it's a pretty, bad movie.  There's nothing original going on here, you've seen it all before.  The only thing to be impressed with is that they were able to animate stuff you've seen, and they've done that before, too.  So if you're really into being impressed by other folks' skills at fucking with your eyes, then still - don't go see Avatar.  They've already got $800 million worldwide, they don't need your fucking coin.  The movie sucks, it's childish and stupid and full of holes, and you'll lose IQ points just looking at it.

Of course, you've all already seen it, and I am too late.

The 12 Days of the Dead of Christmas

(from an idea jointly by me and Max)

On the 12th day of Christmas, my zombie gave to me;

twelve shattered doorframes,

infectious extremity gnawing,

a Fela Kuti album,

a Rob Zombie hoodie,

a statue of Simon Garth,

ingested puffer powder,

a Michael Jackson video,

five living brains!

four human fingers,

three hacked computers,

two mixed drinks,

And a dead partridge in a dead tree!

Here's hoping that each and every one of my readers has happy and relatively undead-free holidays!

A Unifying Force

I was supposed to be going over to Kroger's for sausage, celery & low sodium chicken stock.  You can tell it's the holidays - we're making food we don't normally make.  Casseroles.  Everyone secretly loves a casserole, if only because you can take it back out of the fridge a dozen times and slowly eat away at it.  Anyway, Kroger.  I hit the doors of the store and right angled around the Starbucks kiosk-blot when I heard the cheering crowd white noise coming from the big flatscreens in the little cafe area they put in when they removed the photo finishing counter at the end of '07.  I glanced up at the screens to see 1:43 left in the fourth quarter, Titans and Dolphins tied at 24.

So I stopped.  Dead in my tracks, hands in the pockets of my sweatshirt, all in black with my hat pulled down to touch the top of my glasses.  Next to me was a petite woman in her 40s, done up still from church, a little too much make-up, nice smell.  Behind her were a couple of the guys from the meat counter, white coats and logos.  Seated at the tables were a homeless guy in a rotting Michelin-man-type winter coat, a skinny Korean kid with a Mario Brothers hat and girl pants, and a matronly black woman with a bright red Christmas sweater on and two pre-teen boys in tow.  Others gathered - a tall white guy in a banker's tie and black London Fog coat, a teenage girl with a "visitor" sticker on her tan coat, and a huge black guy with a scarred nose and his iPod headphones still in.  The point is, it's a melting pot all walks of life kind of thing going on.

And we cheered together.  In overtime, the Titans intercepted and Rob Bironas kicked a 46 yard FG FTW 27-24, and a collective gasp went up and then changed into scattered claps and cheers, some verbal exclamations.  The Titans won after ditching an 18 point lead, then pushing into OT, and keeping us as fans on the edge.  It has been a difficult season to be a Titan fan, but when it works, it works well, and today it brought people together in the grocery store, closer than they would normally tolerate, with a singular interest.  There were some handshakes, joking and nervous laughter as we all broke up to the image of the players hugging each other on the field, and the experience was over.

Except that I put it here.

Others & Those Like Them

The whole rest of the world gives me a headache.  A consistent stabby thing that moves around the back of my head like a boxer in ballet shoes, fucking with my ability to feign interest and civility.

I get so blasted tired of "conventional wisdom", established conversational rules and interactive order based on cowardice and the inability of my fellows to think things through or be even and direct with one another, like grown ups.  Confrontation, apparently, is hard.  Honesty is even harder.  And they almost got to me, today, just like last Friday.  I was one quiet, thoughtful moment away from the abyss - I almost cared what they thought of me, and then it hit me: They don't matter sweet fuck all.  They're empty, flawed vessels, just like me, except, in many cases, dumber and less aware.  More paranoid, if such a thing is possible.  More focused on the minutiae of things, missing the forest while staring at the same petrified fucking tree for days waiting for a change to come.  Not just tunneled vision - earthworm vision.  Naught but dirt ahead, hole behind.  Thinking that they have earned respect, and believing that they are in control.  No one is truly in control, and these least of all.  So - we must invite them to shut the fuck up occasionally.

I have lost patience.  Again.  Time was, I could smack someone in the head when the world got me frustrated.  Or have a drink or seven.  I don't really drink anymore, and smacking motherfuckers is far more problematic on the back end than it used to be.  The only solution now seems to involve putting up with the shite until your higher brains cry "uncle," and then shaking things up by laying your big, scary cards on the table and making everyone else do likewise.

So I did that a couple of times today.  Picked a "fight" because no one else was going to do it, and frankly, because the status quo (such as it was), to my mind, was far more costly than the flinging of verbal jabs.  One fox is among the chickens, and the coop is as yet quiet, the other created a series of awkward conversations filled with repetition and jabbering.  Have I accomplished anything?  Well, you know people - they fucking suck, so probably, all is for nothing.  I feel briefly better, though.  The catalysts for my frustration have received their boon of the blunt end of my expansive tact and negotiation skills, and the most egregious parties served what they produced.  So much better then me trying to blend into mall traffic on the Friday before Christmas and taking it out on passers-by or some misbegotten bell ringer.

Or the unfortunate readers of my blog.  Good night.

Pimpin'

"Verily, it is said that the man who pimps his friends enobles the world entire."

There are other places on the Internet, you know.  People doing stuff besides me.  Many of them are maintained - so to speak - by compadres of mine, fellow travelers on this meager width of band we all share.  As a holiday treat (and indeed, in some cases by request) I would take this opportunity to provide you with some links to some other folks you should check out:

First off, go read what Brett Turley has to say over on Blithering Idiots.  By his own description, his blog is "my personal forum for political commentary, expose' of social injustice, and demonstration of just how awkward reality really is."  Brett's older & wiser than I am, so you should check him out.

Now, with the holidays coming up, you need to go buy something from Kat's Kats.  There're cats for every occasion, and because it's Cafe Press, you can get them on virtually anything.  Sign up for her email list and get shiny special things in your inbox.  Things that purr.

More beautiful things to look at can be found on both Cayce Callaway.com and Amy Jester Photography.com.  Go there and hire them to make you and your event look prettier than it was in a way that lasts longer than your spotty memories of the thing.  Also, for several different kinds of things, head over to That Oliver Guy Productions.

If you're tired of looking at stuff, go listen to something.  Check out Nashville bands The Coolin' System and Atomic Blonde.  Or you know, if you're in the frozen Northeast, go see Arjuna on New Year's.

These are all brilliant people doing good work that should be better and more widely appreciated.  Follow the links, enjoy stuff, buy things, read.

Oral Roberts, 1918-2009

Oral Roberts died yesterday at the age of 91.  Ninety-one years.  Conclusive proof that God didn't want him in paradise any more than many of us wanted him on Earth.  You can almost picture God keeping Oral here, then God nips out for a nap and some cheese crackers, and Oral dies while he's not looking.  And St. Peter gets the blame.  Or so I would assume.

During the early years of my life, I concluded that televangelism was ridiculous and disgusting, and made a mockery of anyone who believed that they had a personal relationship with any deity.  Here was church recast as the Home Shopping Network; just send in a faith gift of your last few ducats, and we'll shoot you this lovely scrap of blessed prayer shawl and some redemption.  Courtesy the USPS.  Ernest Angley was the first one I noticed, with his shoe lifts and toupee, healing deaf kids (BA-BA) and preaching that Jesus cures AIDS.  He was a target for my derision when I was still in single digits, and not just because he's the proud owner of the Cathedral Buffet Restaurant.  He is Pride personified, the walking embodiment of egotism writ large.

If Angley is Pride, the Bakkers were Greed.  Jim and Tammy fucking Faye.  They wore too much make-up, had fancy clothes, slept with their secretaries and the fucking name of their organization sounded like an exclusive club that I wouldn't have been allowed into.  Like you weren't going to heaven without a special card in your wallet.  They built a theme park with a water slide and used it as a tax deduction.  'Cause that's what Jesus would have done.  They were suburban white ambition coupled with an entitlement that came from on high and run riot over television and the higher ideals of faith in doctrine.  And, of course, they fell.  You can't come on your secretary's face, take pictures of it, and then expect to be treated as holy.  You know who wouldn't have done that?  Almost anyone.

I don't remember when I first became aware of Oral Roberts, but I know that my awareness of him is simultaneous with thinking that he was a crackpot lunatic continuing the grand legacy of emotionally crippled men of a more expensive kind of cloth.  This is an individual who claimed to have had a visit from a 900 foot Jesus telling him to build a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma and cure cancer.  In His infinite, or at least, 900 foot, wisdom.  That ranks right up there with Moroni and Mother Teresa muffins, to be sure, but Oral didn't stop there.  His evangelical and rhetorical fire drove him to extort his flock for 9.1 million dollars, lest Jesus "take him home."  He became almost a parody of himself, pulling millions from the organization he founded, using the Jesus as a Business model that's been so popular in recent years.  He founded a university based on the Christian No-Fun Doctrine - no smoking, no drinking, no swearing, no dancing, no fucking - and his son later defrauded it of millions.  Other than being a semi-successful businessman, a heretical joke, and the Uncle Milty of televangelism, it's unclear to me why Oral Roberts matters at all.  But I'll leave you with this quote, representative of the lack of clarity and perspective possessed by some Christians:

"Other than Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr.—and maybe Jerry Falwell—it would be hard to name a different religious leader of more importance," Grant Wacker, professor of Christian history at Duke University Divinity School.