Finally, it’s here. The day the whole world has been waiting for. A day of celebration. A day that epitomizes everything “American.” A day that, really, gives meaning to our pitiful existence on this planet, and reckons back to a better time, when men were men, women were women, and Presidents were white (and dumb). Yes that’s right, today is Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday.

From what I understand, Peggy Noonan has secretly had the Gipper exhumed, and will be spending the day bent over his open casket, fellating the shriveled husk of his once great member. Ronnie, we miss you and your jelly beans, and your open mic radio address hi-jinx.

Oh, yeah, and today is also Super Bowl XLV (pronounced, “Slev”).

Personally, I don’t think I could care less about the Super Bowl. If somebody I truly despised (like Dallas or the Eagles or something) was in it, or if there was an old AFL team playing, then it would be easy. Though some may call me stubborn (and I admit it’s a bit of a longshot), I think I’ll still have to root for the Jets.

I suppose for proximity’s sake, I could go with Pittsburgh. And Ben Roethlisberger looks kinda like Will Farrell, and I like Will Farrell. Then again, the guy who was the father on the Wonder Years just played Vince Lombardi on a thing on HBO that I didn’t actually watch. And I liked the Wonder Years (speaking of the Jets). And Ernest Borgnine once played Lombardi, and who doesn’t like Ernest Borgnine?

So I guess it’s a toss-up. And, as I get up at about 4AM these days, the odds of me staying up late enough to see what washed-up has-beens are performing at halftime this year (let alone the end of the game) are pretty low anyway (if I were you, I’d bet the ‘under’ on that one).

You may be surprised to hear that is snowed here last night. Yes, it’s true. In fact, by the looks of things, I’d say we got at least 12″ (maybe more like 18″) at my house, which fell on top of the freezing rain we had. This was rather unexpected, and I reckon I’d better get out there and clean things up before this balmy upper-twenties weather turns cold and down to single digits later on this week.

But not just yet. I think I need more coffee first.

I slept in late this morning, and now the weekend’s half over. Lots I ought to do today, and then, blip, it’ll be Sunday night and I’ll have to got to freakin’ work. This living for the weekend shit is getting old. I want the Star Trek reality, where they’ve solved all the piddly problems like poverty, starvation, & single payer health care, and have presumably harnessed technology to relieve the people of the burden of doing all the lousy jobs like picking up the garbage and snaking out the septic system, allowing everyone to pursue activities more in line with their inner, higher natures, like poetry, art history, astronomy, and smoking pot. Instead, 90% of us have to go to work and scrape by week to week, while the other 10% have enormous wealth, get the best access to everything the country has to offer, and huge tax cuts so they don’t have to pay for it. Goddamn it, I want food replicators, transporters, warp drive, and holodecks. Actually, just give me the holodeck, and I’ll pretend I have the rest.

It’s been yet another long week, but the light of an all-too-short weekend is starting to peek through from the end of the tunnel. And it’s actually supposed to be pretty warm over the weekend, which will give me a chance to widen the driveway back out again (it’s getting a little on the narrow side). Or maybe I can get some other shit done. I dunno, it’s hard to really accomplish anything in a crappy two days off – especially if you have to go and by materials with an ever-dwindling supply of cash. For instance, I really need to get my other computers over here to the “new” house, but first I need to build a desk in my new office. The plan is to build a ‘U’ shaped wraparound along three of the walls. I haven’t quite figured out what to use as a surface just yet. I was thinking of just using luann over plywood, but now I’m considering just getting some big ceramic tiles instead. I also thought about buying some fake granite laminate, but then I have to deal with gluing it down and trying to hide the seams and, well, I dunno. There’s a lot of fudge factor with tiles. Since the only way I’m leaving this place is feet first (and if the bank gets the sheriff to frog-march me out the door), I only have to please myself (and I’ve learned to settle).

In other news, I’m trying a new (new to me, anyway) online pet food supplier called Petflow where you can schedule deliveries (which they seem to call “flows”). They sell the higher end, organic/human grade type food which we switched to back during the whole Chinese melamine thing, and it’s ungodly expensive. We actually use it to supplement our home-cookin’. The price for a 30# bag of what I get is a fair amount less than what they charge at the pet food store, and they offer $4.95 flat rate shipping (free over $65 or something, which isn’t too hard to do – I ordered dog cookies too). Got the first shipment yesterday, and it seems to be what it’s supposed to be (intact, not expired or anything). You can add/edit/delete the items, how often it ships, etc., whenever you want (so you can go from a heavy flow to a light flow, I guess – or no flow at all, even), and then the shit’s delivered to your door, which is a lot better for me and my swiss-cheese brain than discovering I’m out of food with a couple of hungry dogs giving me “the look.”

So, if any of you dog or cat type people are interested in it, check out the prices to see if they have what you use, and see how the prices are. And, if you use this link, I get $50 or something. And you get, well, I dunno what you get. Something really, really good, I bet!

Of course, I’ve only just started with it, so don’t blame me if it turns out to suck. But, so far, so good.

OK, time to go get ready to be a good little Eloi (though I look more like a Morlock) and face the day.

I take real exception to the Farmer’s Almanac for their characterization of our weather here as “the worst.” This is clearly a case of looking at statistics on paper, and then passing judgement on a place based on some sort of Florida standards or something, without actually ever having seen it. Oh, sorry, we don’t have brown, shriveled-up grass (and people) that crunches when you walk on it, and we don’t have giant mutant cockroaches that we call “palmetto bugs” in an attempt to fool people into thinking they aren’t giant fucking cockroaches. Yes, we do get a little snow around here, and, sure, when it snows nearly every day you get some clouds, but the beauty of the snow in the trees and on the hills never fails to fill me with awe. When I’m out on the tractor plowing the driveway as the sun begins to poke its orange head above the horizon, and the little herd of a half dozen or so deer that live in our woods go leaping across the corn field, the last thing I feel is gloomy. I mean, if living inside a picture postcard or a Normal Rockwell painting is the “worst,” then go ahead, do your worst – it’s OK by me. So, screw you, Farmer’s Almanac^*. You forecast like an astrologer does a horoscope – vaguely worded with enough thrown in to cover your ass no matter what happen. Give me the woolly bear caterpillar any day.

Fran Tarkenton is 71 today. I guess you either know who he is, or you don’t. I haven’t seen him in a while, but I bet he’s in pretty good shape, because for every step forward he takes, he runs about 100 yards sideways.

Today is yet another dental day for me. Far from dreading it, I actually look upon these days as a welcome diversion from work for an hour or two. This should tell you how much I’m loving work (just kidding, I love my job and intend to keep working well past the day I can retire, which is about 13 years, 2 months, 28 days and 11 hours from now – not that I’m counting).

But (sadly for diversion purposes, but happily in terms of money I don’t really have to throw away on personal health) other than a follow-up in a week to test the quality of my interstitial brushing techniques – it should be the last dental date for a while – assuming isn’t having a Shivaji Jayanti 2-for-1 sale or something.

The next phase of my dental care is supposed to be the replacement of the two crowns I have, which he says weren’t very well done. I’m not sure what my cut of the expenses on those would be, but I think I saw that they go for $925 each, and typically my insurance only seems to pay 50%. Looks like my cut of the expenses on these will be $325. Sadly, I just don’t have a grand $650 to drop on getting them replaced right now. Not unless they break and fall off and start to hurt. And even then I’d have to think about it.

Beyond the crowns, he wants to install implants to replace two of the teeth that have gone missing. I think these go for $2,000 each. Since these are in the back someplace and I’ve long since learned to live without them, there’s NFW that’ll ever happen. I’d sooner buy a backhoe for my tractor (or, better yet, a mini excavator; if you’re looking at getting me an early Christmas present, please consider a Bobcat 328, and don’t forget to add a thumb for the bucket so I can pick up trees and stuff – I have some serious trailblazing to do come spring).

Oh well, time to do my due diligence and make sure my teeth are all that they can be before I go in.

Have a good one.

^* Note, I don’t actually give a shit, and do plenty of bitching about the weather myself, though given the fact that we don’t have hurricanes, tornadoes, or earthquakes (not that earthquakes are technically ‘weather’, I suppose), I can think of worse places.

You know the drill. Some kind of bullshit about gathering around at the rather erotically named “Gobbler’s Knob” and seeing shadows or not seeing shadows and spring being in six weeks or “right around the corner” (which I think means in six weeks, because we’re lucky if we see spring ’til May around here). What the f*ck the poor woodchuck has to do with it is beyond me. Can’t they just say if it’s sunny this morning it’s one thing, and if it isn’t it’s the other (or, more accurately, that it really doesn’t matter either way)? But then I guess Brian Doyle Murray needs the work.

As for us, the good news is we’re not gonna get as much snow as they said we were, ‘cuz this big monster storm that doesn’t look like all that big a deal to me is tracking farther north than they thought. The bad news is that’s because we’re starting out with sleet and freezing rain first. Oh boy. So, all we’re looking at right now is a measly 8 inches or so. We’ll never get to 200″ this way.

Still, I really wish I could just go back to bed, or spend the day puttering around the house, but, sadly, no. As they seem to do whenever the weather geeks predict a life-threatening storm, the powers that be sent out the obligatory e-mail yesterday, detailing how you’d get shit-canned if you even thought about not coming in to work today (unless you get killed in a car accident on the way in, in which case they’ll let it slide – this time, as long as you get your supervisor’s approval).

Governor Andy announced his budget proposal yesterday, and, as expected there are cuts aplenty. In addition to reducing the State workforce by about 9,800 people (apparently via attrition, though, as opposed to outright layoffs), he wants some pretty harsh cuts to public school funding (which will force NYC’s Mayor Bloomers to lay off 21,000 teachers – but not really) and medicaid (which will cost the place I work at $36 million in State and Federal funds). No tax on rich people, of course.

So, now we’ll see what the State Legislature comes up with. What with the mood of things right now and the budget deficit, it’ll be pretty hard to restore any funding, though I suppose there’s always room for tax cuts for the wealthy. We’ll see. I could use a tax cut myself, as I’m starting to wonder how I’ll save up enough money to pay the school taxes come September.

But, hey, I’ll worry about that in seven months or so. Right now, it’s time to worry about plowing the driveway and getting to work without being the first candidate for layoff due to attrition.

Ah, February. Or, as we call it here, “snowy season.” And, as the folks down there in Punxsutawney, PA prepare a syringe full of woodchuck sedative and clean out Phil’s hole (so to speak), it appears that a little weather event is getting ready to head our way. And, my goodness, the national media sure are making a big deal out of this one, calling it perhaps the “worst” of the season. Although we were able to sit by and watch as the last couple of storms dumped a bunch of snow on other places, it looks like there’ll be no such luck this time around, though hopefully we’ll be spared the ice that’s supposed to hit south of us (ice sucks).

Anyhow, today shouldn’t be too bad, with, they say, about four inches, as the warm air ahead of the storm gets pushed into our area and hits the cold that’s been around for the past couple of days. That should start, oh, any time now by the look of things. Tomorrow, though, will be the big pain in the ass, as the storm proper moves out of the midwest and over us. Right now, they’re talking about a major mess for the ride in to work tomorrow, and another 15″-20″ or so on top of whatever we get today (on top of the 115 inches – which is actually about half a foot short of our average annual snowfall – we have already).

Should be fun, though, as Sue mentioned the other day, it’s getting tough to find a place to put all this stuff. It’s a lot easier for me up here in God’s country, of course, where I don’t have sidewalks to worry about, but still, the snow piled along my driveway in most places is as high as my tractor bucket will reach – taller than I am. This storm looks like it’ll be the wet heavy stuff, too, so it’ll be harder to deal with. I just hope the roof can hold it all (there’s already an awful lot piled up there). Maybe it won’t be as bad as they say (they tend to exaggerate sometimes). Just in case, I reckon I’d better fill up my gas tank today. Maybe even get some diesel.

Also coming today is Hurricane Andrew. Not weather, of course, but the budget proposal from our Governor. Among other things, he’s expected to call for 10,000 layoffs of State workers, and “true” cuts (in the past, cuts were calculated as reductions in increases, whereas he wants to reduce existing funding) of 2-3% in school aid and medicaid. This, combined with legislation that passed the NYS Senate yesterday and will now head to the Assembly, limited property tax increases to 2% or the rate of inflation (whichever is less), means tough times ahead for schools and hospitals.

Andy has pledged not to raise taxes on Wall Street millionaires, though, so that’s good. Rich people have had it awfully tough lately, and we want NY to continue to be the kind of place where a man can open a chain of dry cleaners and then move on up to a deluxe apartment on the East Side.

Speaking of which, it’s Sherman Hemsley’s 73rd birthday today. It’s also Elvis’ little girl’s 43rd birthday (or was it his wife – it’s hard to keep track, and he did like ’em young, but since he’s been “dead” for over 33 years now, I’m guessing she was his kid – and now that I think of it, wasn’t she “married” to Michael Jackson for a while?). Well, whatever, happy b’day to Lisa Marie Presley. And it also the birthday of the Frank Buckles, who, according to Wikipedia, is one of the last three World War I veterans in the world, the last living American veteran of World War I, the oldest verified World War I veteran in the world, and the second-oldest male military veteran in the world. In other words, he’s old. 110, to be exact.

Yep, that’s old.

Crap, it’s cold out again. Like 1° at the moment, and it’s not supposed to get a whole helluva lot warmer today, either. That, and there’s more snow coming. Like, “double digits” coming tomorrow and especially Wednesday. Oh boy. Not that I’m one to complain, of course. Well, not so much about the snow. In fact, we might as well go ahead and set a record this year. No point in wasting the 115 inches we’ve had so far, and for a measly 85 more, we can hit the 200 mark for the first time ever. I’m not too crazy about the cold, though. You know how us old folks get. Everything seems to hurt when it gets below about 15° or so, and as I was out tidying up the driveway late yesterday afternoon, it was cold and windy. Sucks.

So, apparently there’s something or other going on over in Egypt, which is one of them A-rab countries, but not one of the bad ones, ‘cuz they haven’t caused any trouble in quite a while (if you don’t count that Mohamed Atta guy). Not bad for us, anyway (which is all that counts), but not too great for the Egyptians, I guess, as they do not seem at all happy with their President.

This, of course, creates quite a dilemma for the US government. On the one hand, we supposedly espouse the virtues of democracy and all that. But that’s assuming they elect the people we want them to, and that their population consists of a small but wealthy class that makes for good consumers, and a vast underclass that exist to be a source of cheap labor. It’s OK for them to have elections, as long as they play ball the with our corporations, don’t allow any of this populist uprising horseshit, and – of course – don’t mess with Israel.

You may recall we weren’t terribly amused when democracy reared its ugly head in Palestine, and they elected Hamas (once Dubya realized that was a political party – or, as we call it, a terrorist organization – and not that paste they make out of chick peas).

Egypt hasn’t really hassled anybody since Nasser (except they won’t let us open up and explore the Hall of Records that Edgar Cayce said was under the Sphinx, and will answer all our questions about Atlantis – the bastids), and they’ve played nice with Israel.

Plus we do a fair amount of trading with them (we send them corn, and they send us natural gas and sand – a win-win). So we don’t want the people over there picking some government that isn’t gonna play ball with us, and is gonna stir up all sorts of trouble.

Especially since most of “the people” over there are poor and really can’t be trusted to do what’s best – for us.

This uprising by “the people” is also apparently a bit disconcerting for the “People’s” Republic of China, which has blocked anything related to ‘Egypt’ from its intertubes.

Of course, we’ve got more important things to worry about over here – bath salts. Yes, bath salts (and plant foods). Now Chuck Schumer has jumped on the salt wagon, and he’s looking to enact a federal ban on the synthetic substances Mephedrone and MDPV. Apparently you can get really wasted on this stuff, or something. And it can kill you. So they say, anyway. Having seen ‘Refer Madness’ a time or two, I’m not really ready to take “their” word for it (I mean, they’d have you believing LSD was bad for you, too) – though I’m not rushing out to sniff up (or whatever you do with it) a box of bath salts to test the theory, either. Not until I run out of carpet deodorant, anyway.

It’s amazing what people will do to catch a buzz (back in the porn theatre I mentioned the other day, one guy used to come in once a week, sit in the front row, and huff about six cans of K2R Spot Remover – now there’s a great way to spend your day off).

Of course, if they’d just make pot legal, people wouldn’t need to jump through all these hoops just to get high and forget the fact they have to go to work in the morning.

Speaking of which, where the hell did I put my tube of model glue?

You probably saw this the other day, but Tracy Morgan got himself into “hot water” after being goaded into saying that “Sarah Palin is good masturbation material.” Although I don’t share that opinion (hey, there’s a world wide web full of suitable inspiration for those purposes, and I think even a cursory Google search would provide you with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of better material. Still, to each his or her own, and I don’t really understand why poor Tracy (who, I hate to break the news to the professionally offended out there, is a comedian) is in trouble for his remarks. Palin is lucky that anybody thinks of her in that, ‘cuz that’s pretty much all she has going for her. Plus, her candidacy – if she actually runs for anything again, which I found doubtful – and, hell, the whole teabagger “movement” is really just an exercise in autoeroticism anyway.

One person who would definitely agree with Tracy Morgan is Jimmy McMillan, who you may remember as “The rent is Too Damn High” candidate for NYS Governor – whose candidacy was so successful (other than the part about actually winning) that he’s thrown is hat into ring for the 2012 presidential election.

Love her. Constitution. American citizen. Exercising the right to privacy. Free speech. Haters — those who don’t like Sarah Palin. That’s what they are. Sarah Palin: I love you because America gives you the constitutional right to do whatever you want to do as a woman. And people don’t think you can do because you’re a woman. They try to make a mockery out of you. But you stand up for your rights and stand strong for your rights. And don’t let anyone try to cut you down. Not only are they talking about Sarah Palin. They’re talking about me.

So, perhaps all you folks out there who think that Sister Sarah’s appeal only extends to old white guy, you’d better think again.

Of course, I think Jimmy may play for both teams, with his eye on President Obama.

McMillan urged Obama to call him up on the phone and…he called [the President] “a good-looking young guy” that he admired.

“I’m coming after his black ass,” he said of Obama.

Oh well, I slept in late this morning, and have a lot of work to do. Plus, this freakin’ MacBook is being a pain in the ass (not unusual – I really don’t see how people say these things are any better, but well, I don’t wanna start anything; they all have their quirks), so I guess it’s time to get this Sunday started.

I hate the thought of going to work tomorrow.

Have a good one.

Is there anything more annoying than people who put random quotes in their e-mails (typically as e-mail ‘sigs’) that they think are really fucking clever, and they imagine all their recipients will nod knowingly as they read them, blurting audibly, “that’s so true” – and we’re so impressed by your having included it at the end of your “LOL, this is really funny, make sure you have your sound turned on” e-mail that you forwarded to me and 200 of your closest friends without even bothering to put us in the BCC field)? Yes, of course there is. But I’ll bitch about ’em anyway.

One that was passed along recently as, presumably, “inspirational” was a quote attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (so right off the bat you know it’s gonna be bullshit):

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Yeah. Good luck gettin’ off the island with that boat, Professor. Out here in the real world, you want a boat, you better frickin’ get some people that know how to design one, and then some goddamn worker bees that can actually get the material and put the goddamn thing together.

If you’re not familiar with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (and, really, why would you be?), you might figure that he’s a sailor or ship builder or something. No, he’s a dead French author and aviator, known for writing about, well, flying. And he flew reconnaissance flights for the French Air Force in WWII (the big one), during one of which, his plane disappeared in the Mediterranean. They even put him on a 50 franc note (which would be worth about ten bucks, if they still had francs).

As far as what he knew about ships, I don’t really know. But I think it’s telling that he came to live in (and love) the desert. Probably after he couldn’t find a fucking boat.

Anyhow, Antoine failed to support Charles de Gaulle’s free french forces at first, which led Chuck to intimate that Antoine was in cahoots with the Nazis, which led to Antoine getting really depressed and hitting the bottle a lot, and there’s speculation that he committed suicide by ditching his plane into the Mediterranean Sea.

Whether it was suicide, an accident, or he got shot down, it’s probably safe to assume that, as he hit the water, he was filled with a sense of the endless immensity of the sea.

Too bad he didn’t have a fucking boat.

It was 25 years ago today that the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up seventy-something seconds (if memory serves) after liftoff. This was one of those “you’ll always remember where you were” moments for those of us who were around at the time, and we were treated to the replay ad nauseam for weeks, so that even if you weren’t watching the launch live (launches having become rather passe at that point), you felt as if you had been.

Like most people, I was running porn movies at the time. OK, maybe there aren’t actually a whole lot of people who can say that. Back 25 years ago, perverts had to pay $5 to go sit in a dark, musky-smelling movie theatre to watch porn back (though the porn home video market was on the rise, so to speak), and this is where a budding young projectionist such as myself got his or her (yes, we had a “her,” who I eventually took under my, um wing for a while, but the less I say about her the better, ‘cuz you never know when somebody you’re married to will read this stuff) start in show biz.

So, anyhow, I was up in the booth, doing my thing, which was typically reading, because – contrary to what most people think – you didn’t actually have to stand there watching the movie the whole time (good thing, as I used to work from 9:00AM – 10:30PM Mon-Fri and 10:00-4:30 on Sat, and I’d have gone insane in about a week). Though – as this was back in the days of film reels – you did tend to get know the changeover parts pretty well. But, whatever else I was doing, I had the radio on in the background, and thought I heard something to the effect of “…space shuttle exploded.”

Huh?

Clearly, I hadn’t heard that correctly. You have to understand, this was NASA and the space shuttle, and things just didn’t explode. Not since Apollo I – which, coincidentally, happened 44 years ago yesterday, which I doubt anybody bothered to even make note of, and which didn’t actually explode, but caught on fire, killing Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee, and, anyhow, they fixed that. So when I heard that, I did something I tried never to do – I left the booth and went downstairs.

I tried never to go downstairs because it gave me the creeps down there and, while I’m sure it was purely psychosomatic, my flesh used to feel as though there were little tiny bugs crawling all over it. And that was just in the lobby – no way in hell I’d ever have sat in one of the seats.

Anyhow, I went down to talk to Jimmy (nice enough guy, but talk about creepy; he had one of these eyes that used to kind of drift over and look at some point behind you and over your shoulder, so that you always got the feeling that somebody was sneaking up on you) who had the honor of selling tickets, and who also had a teevee in his cage (I would occasionally come down and watch the ticket booth for him while he used the rest room; those of us who worked there would of course use the ladies room, because there’s no way you wanted to be in the mens room with one of our customers, and, well, we didn’t get a lot of ladies in our establishment – except for the working kind), and I found out that, yes, the shuttle had indeed exploded. Nobody knew the fate of the crew, but watching the launch video replay, it seemed pretty apparent that nobody could have lived through that (of course, much later, we learned that they actually were alive – if not conscious – until they hit the water at over 200 MPH).

Most people probably remember Challenger because it was the fist time a non-Astronaut – 37-yr old NH schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe – was supposed to go up into orbit. I remember it for Judy Resnick, who was kinda cute and had a shitload of thick dark hair that looked really cool floating around in zero gravity.

And of course we all became experts in ‘O’ rings in the weeks and months to come following the accident (much as we’d become foam tank insulation experts in 2003 after Columbia disintegrated upon reentry – the eight anniversary of that coming next Tuesday).

So, anyhow, not that anybody asked (or cares), but that’s where I was half my life ago when the shuttle blew up.