Wha..? bahaha!

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

It's been a great weekend of sorting through everything and throwing out what I won't use. Will I really wear that shirt again? I also thinned out the links on the right panel here, only keeping the enduringly funny stuff.

I find this kind of sorting to be a metaphor for the internal cleanup. Which habits are we clinging to that no longer fit? What out-of-date assumptions rule our waking mind? Hmm... and a metaphor for being sick (I'm better today).

This weeks link, Build a Better Bush, is politically neutral and a suitable nod to this week's RNC. It's also a fun waste of about 90 seconds.

It’s My Birthday, yay rah whatever!

by Oggy the kitty, Guest Blogger



I turned 17 today. Have you really thought about what that means?

At 17, I should be driving a car. This would probably be great fun if riding in the car didn’t make me lose control of my bowels.

As a teenager of this age, my body would be coursing with hormones and I’d be wearing tight dresses and driving boys crazy. Given that my entire reproductive system was surgically removed, I mostly lack the motivation for such things.

When I was born in 1987 Ronald Reagan was President, Martina Navratilova ruled at Wimbledon, Jean-Luc Picard took command of the Enterprise and Cher delighted audiences in Moonstruck.

To really understand what it’s like to be me at 17, you should imagine yourself at age 84. And let me tell you, being 84 sucks. The other day I walked all over the house looking for my collar, only to realize I’d been wearing it on my neck the whole time. Sometimes I have to look at the tag just to remember who I am. I still enjoy eating and sleeping like I used to, but now nothing makes my day better than a good bowel movement.

Hear me now and believe me later – turning 17 is no party! You take a pill in the morning, a pill at night and your IV for chronic renal failure will turn the bathroom into a real live chemistry lab.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for Law & Order reruns on TNT. That Jerry Orbach makes me tingly.

Links-o-Plenty

What better is there to do when you're sick but to blog?? Is it sweeps already?!

Several really great links have come my way lately and I wanted to do my part to share them with the world. Be sure to click BACK on your browser so you can see them all, each one is worth a click for different reasons.

First, there's mine... I don't know if this is really true, but theres this wonderful story about a secret project that was to use bees as gun ammo. This is almost as good as that audio weapon I read about a couple years ago.

Next, from my pal Mac, there's this very convincing Sinatra parody that was obviously done on Howard Stern. Regardless of what you think of Stern, this little ditty is pretty funny in an un-pc kind of way.

From Stu, I received this link that tells a strange story with beautiful, albeit creepy photos. Admire the photos yourself, then read on to discover what you may have missed. This is chilling.

Finally, check out this hilarious Billionaires for Bush site. My thanks to Angel over at Temporary Sanity.

Mmm... phlegm

I've just returned from UC Irvine where we did three interviews for our psychology production. This included an interview with Elizabeth Loftus, easily a top female psychologist in the country for her work on debunking repressed memories. She was wonderful.

But I awoke this morning all sinusy, my voice gone and a terrible cough. Now Oggy and I are two peas in a pod (she continues to improve, by the way) laying in bed convalescing. Starve a cold and feed a fever, but what if you have both of them??

You can get over this, dude... Suddenly all the anecdotal home remedy advice I ever got floods back at me in a blended mash. Tons and tons of vitamin C tea with lemon and two aspirin bowl of chicken soup single piece of garlic swallowed whole zinc lozenges twice a day oscillococcinum under the tongue at bedtime Emergen-C packets and three words echinacea, echinacea, echinacea.

Wasn't this also the concoction to cure a hangover?

Hell, I'm starting to eye Oggy's refrigerated pink antibiotic. It looks like yummy Kool-aid.

Cat Nears Escapes Death

It’s been a difficult weekend. Oggy the kitty had one of her episodes and last night I was on deathwatch.

Through a combination of hairballs and old age, she gets constipated and won’t keep food or water down. Given her kidney problems, I feared they would shut down and she’d pass away during the night without even a whimper.

Based on a friend’s recommendation, I took her to "LA Pet Clinic" on Melrose yesterday. This little bandaged shack looked like an hourly motel on the outside, but the vet inside was really superior. But a caution about their help. The first girl I dealt with told me Oggy was “FiV positive.” FiV is the kitty equivalent of AIDS. Needless to say, I had several minutes of panic before the vet came in and said this was not true. The assistant also had Oggy’s temperature at 96 degrees, which the doctor said would mean my cat had died several minutes ago.

After careful examination, the vet says I need to inject fluids under Oggy’s skin every day for the rest of her life. I agreed to this, of course, but nearly fell over when I saw the set up. I thought I’d just be putting the needle in, pressing the plunger and letting her run away. This is a complete set up for an IV like you’d find in a hospital! I’m not good with needles, but I'd better get good now.

She is nibbling at her food today and even purred when I rubbed her so hopefully she’s out of the woods and will make it to her birthday this week.

I can't find the CD for my digital camera, but there are some pics I wanted to upload. Another time...

This week's link is wonderfully random. I say if your own parents would never sit for photos like these, then yeah, his parents really are cooler than yours.

Alien vs. Mr. Hanky??

While looking for a new weekly link I found this very bizarre story about a Tiny Humanoid creature found in Chile.

I couldn't help but wonder if this was a promotion for Alien vs Predator (you know, AVP). Be sure to scroll down to see all the pictures. Very creepy.

Happy Rebirthday??

I neglected to give any comment about my selection of Genetic Savings and Clone for this week's link. It's amazing to think that we've gone from some jiminy-cricket sideshow sheep cloning to the actual banking of human and pet DNA for legitimate rebirth. And this company is boasting the birth of its cloned kittens.

My cat Oggy turns 17 next week. Weird that I could send some of her DNA off to Sausalito and have her born again to some assembly line momma cat in a lab cage who just squeezes out kittens that aren't hers over and over.

I wonder... what if I cloned Oggy's clone, then cloned that clone, doing this over and over? Would I eventually have a kitten that recognized me at birth and automatically knew where the litterbox was? Or what if I had her fetal clone inserted back inside her -- allowing Oggy to give birth to herself?

Uh-huh, you stoners out there work on that one for a while...

Cloning a cat for science is one thing, but there's something kind of sick about cloning your own pet. My cloning Oggy would be a HUGE projection of my abandonment issues, not to mention a total disregard for her memory.

But the real reason I'd never do this is my deepest fear: that her clone will grow into a gargantuan evil mutant that shoots laser beams from her eyes and ravages Tokyo.

If that sounds far fetched, look again at the picture of the guy with the puppy on the Savings and Clone homepage. At first glance it looks like the dog is licking the guy's face as if saying "Thanks for bringing me back, I wuv wu all over again!" Actually the cloned mutant puppy is sucking the guys brains from his temple. That guy's not smiling, he's wincing in agony at the utter horror of his worst nightmares come true.

"What have you done?!" the puppy is saying.

"What have you DONE?!?!"

The Day I Went Legit

I’ve been using iMesh for the last couple of years and downloading whatever music I wanted. A long time ago I was able to justify it because I would usually buy a whole cd based on the download of one song. That got more difficult in the last couple years due to my massive debt. Just as well, most every song I downloaded recently was one of those that blanked out every ten seconds or so.

iMesh, like those other programs are dirty beasts. They plant all kinds of scumware and spyware on your computer and my 1998 desktop was plagued with pop ups and other problems.

Now, the hard drive on that comp gave out. Computer guy says recovery of my files will cost between $1500 and $3000! Bah!

No thanks, I’ll just start over. (I’ve lost all my addresses, so if you're reading this and know my codos address, please email me so I'll have your address)

But no more iMesh for me. My days of music piracy are over. Today I downloaded the iTunes downloader onto my laptop. Of course the song I was looking for by a group called Kasabian was not listed so I haven’t spent a cent yet.

But I’m aching to spend a buck on a great tune!

Strange Days Indeed!

At work yesterday I pondered the disappearance of a coworker.

"Oh, Lou's been out sick all week," someone said. "She's got that Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease."

She's got what???????

"Yeah, kids get it all the time and she picked it up from her son. It's highly contagious."

Didn't they slaughter a bunch of British cows who came down with that and burn their carcasses? If our company project manager has it, should I be ordering chicken at McDonalds next time?

When it comes to disease names, Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease is pretty over-the-top. I think it's the Hand part that makes it sound so ridiculous. My guess is they had to add "Hand" so that the illness would not be confused with Foot in Mouth Disease, which my grandmother once accused me of having. That story involves an interrogation after a tin of chocolate cupcakes were stolen by burglars. Let's not get into that now...

It's also possible that they wanted all the infected body parts inside the name of the disease, kind of like saying facial herpes. If so, I hope Lou doesn't come down with Hand, Foot, Mouth, and Ass Disease. I think if the disease progresses that far then the medical community should jump to the acronym. HFMAD is much more tasteful.

Yes, yes, strange days!

Pets on the Net

The invention of Dogster and Catster now allows pets to set up shop on the web. Ya, pets'll be IM'ing each other in no time!

Bush Pledges to "harm our country"

Today President Bush told the press that his Administration will "never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people."

Bwahah!

"The Daily Show" can't make them up that good!

Thoughtlets 2: The Sequel

Every now and then, there's not enough to fill a whole blog entry -- just half-thoughts and observations.

-- There are lots of headlines about Abu Ghairib soldier Lynndie England in the press. But do headlines like "England Portrayed as Disobedient" and "England Abused Iraqis for Fun" reflect poorly on the nation of Great Britain??

-- The Democratic National Convention is now one week behind us and I didn't post one time about it. Good for me! I loved Kerry's let's "take back the flag" message. I'm not an angry liberal. I'm not! I'm not!

-- Speaking of blogging, what's it take to get Michael Moore back to his blog?

-- I received a box today from Hawaii that I'd shipped to myself. When I opened it it smelled like bad breath! Geez! I must have had the special halitosis vegetable plate with a side of onions the night I went to Fed Ex!

-- Anyone know the cheapest place to buy the SCTV Network Vol. 1 DVD? I want to get it before my pals come into town for the Labor Day weekend.

-- Finally, I accidentally typed "amazone" to get the above and it took me to the French version of the same. Weird.

In-Flight Blog...

** This entry is written while in transit from Honolulu to Los Angeles.

There’s something about being on an airplane that makes one introspective. It might have to do with the fact that on this plane ride the VCR ate “Hidalgo” the in-flight movie (I watched them pry it out with a screwdriver, magnetic tape dangling like a party streamer). I and my cabin mates are forced to sleep, read magazines or just think (really think) about where our lives have been and where they are headed. And that’s reason for this soul-searching in-flight composition.

As a quick side note, an Australian woman two seats down from me is talking about her upcoming vacation in Los Angeles. I’m so used to associating the Aussie accent with the “Crocodile Hunter” that it sounds quite odd coming out of such a sweet female voice.

I lean over several others and get her attention.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Would you be able to do me a favor?”

“What’s that?” she says happily.

“Would you please say the sentence: “That dingo ate my baby”?

Okay, so I didn’t really do it, but the idea of asking her made me chuckle.

But then I think that maybe it’s not so funny. This might make her angry, or worse, cause her to start balling hysterically.

“A dingo really did eat my baby!” she’d cry.

I don’t know nuthin’ about Australia. For all I know, dingoes are pacing outside the maternity ward of Australian hospitals, sniffing the air and licking their chops. It’s probably a culturally sensitive topic and not a safe thing to joke about at all. My self-censorship probably saved me from being the plane pariah. What a fall from grace this would be since yours truly has the responsibility of being the uber male of the exit row.

That’s right. In the event of an emergency, I will leap into position, muscles flexing, pull the proper handles and allow everyone on the plane to leap to safety. This assuming, of course, that leaping out will be safe. Heaven forbid there is a fire involved, perhaps right on the aircraft wing (assuming the wing is still there).

Then again, with all of our flight being over the Pacific Ocean, there is the likelihood of a water landing. As I think about it, if the plane is submerged, my pulling off the exit door might elicit some panic as tons of salt water (and probably sharks) would start pouring into the aircraft. But how was I supposed to know that removing the exit door would be a bad thing in this particular circumstance? Suddenly I feel my exit row briefing was woefully incomplete. They want me able-bodied, and I have to THINK too??

Regardless, I am in charge of the aircraft’s starboard side exit door. I cannot be responsible for those unlucky sobs on the aircraft’s port side. They are on their own! The gentleman there appears to be in his 70’s. I’m not sure he could renew his driver’s license, much less lead the exit door brigade.

But hey, good luck with that! The Aussie tourist will be on his conscience.

I saw something on “20/20” years ago about a plane crash where the survivors had to use their exit door. After watching this, horrified, I’ve been wracked with fear that someone will do what occurred on that flight and throw the exit door in the aisle, leaving the rest of us climbing over it and losing precious seconds that could save our lives. Since then, I trust exit door duty to no one but myself.

When most people get their seat assignments and hear the term “exit row” they just assume it’s all fun and games. They daydream about the extra legroom, easy access to the lavatory and those cool tray tables that “transform” out of your armrests. The responsibilities of life and death just whiz past them.

If they would stop for an hour or so to really obsess about the possibilities, they would know that if we do crash, the strangers around them will suddenly be the most important people in our lives for the rest of our living days.

It’s true. If I and my travel mates survive a plane crash we’ll suddenly be alienated from our own families, instead seeking the comfort of those who survived with us. We’ll meet first in the presence of psychologists, then have each other over for bittersweet Christmases and Thanksgivings, punctuated by our tear filled reminiscing about the guy in 21E who urged us to leave him behind. “I can’t make it,” he said as sharks bore down on him from the overhead bin. “Save yourself!”

“It’s a good thing Cody was there,” the Aussie woman will tell Diane Sawyer. “Heaven brought us an angel when he put Cody in the exit row. Lord knows that old man on the port side was of no use at all. It was all about the legroom for him.”

It might even be reasonable to think that the lovely Aussie tourist and I would fall in love and be married. Every day I would look into her eyes and see myself reflected: the hero of flight 266 who guided all of the starboard side (coach only) to safety by being a beacon out the exit door.

In me, she might find the strength to have another child, replacing the baby she lost to the dingo all those years ago.

Wait a minute, where was I?

Oh yes, I was reflecting on life… Well, crap, what happened to the laptop battery??

I’m not sure why, but on long flights like this I often feel quite satisfied with myself and yet a little sick at the same time.

Is the VHS for “Hidalgo” really trashed? Did they try that thing where you take the tape apart with a screwdriver and rethread it?