Thursday, March 13, 2008

I Hate Eliot Spitzer (and Other Assorted Ramblings)

Today's post is going to be like a shotgun. It's going to scatter its contents all across your brain. Let's just hope no one gets hurt. I'm pretty sure I'm packing rubber pellets today, but you can never be too careful.

I've mentioned it before, but I'm a huge fan of This American Life, a public radio show. I've only caught snippets of it on its regular Sunday night spot a couple of times, but I've got my podcast catcher set up to download it every Monday. You can download the previous week's show up until the point the next episode airs, but you can stream any of the episodes from their website. A good many of my readers are journalists, former journalists, and/or fans of The Onion, so this episode is a great place to start. The theme of that week's show was "Hard Rooms," and they take a look inside the editorial discussions at The Onion, present a comedy routine from a former journalist, which I found quite funny, and a couple of other great segments. Perhaps my favorite episode so far was the "Testosterone" episode, which took a really unique take on the essence of masculinity. I've never heard a bad episode, though, so any one you pick should give you a good feel for the show. Every episode takes a theme and then presents pieces, sometimes feature news, sometimes short stories, sometimes personal essays or other formats, that portray an aspect of that theme. Their take, presentation, or subject matter is often surprising enough to keep you thinking. It really just needs to be given a chance.

I'm a huge fan of Mitch Hedberg. In fact, that was quite the Hedbergian transition. I love the non sequiturs, surrealist humor, and paraprosdokian quips. I'm really not sure if his jokes would be anywhere near as funny if it were not for his distinctive speaking style, but I was listening to a bunch of his jokes last night (relistening for a lot of them actually) and there were moments when I was laughing so hard that salty water was squeezed from my eyes. I won't call them tears because tears are so totally not manly. It's a shame he died of an overdose three years ago on March 17 because corpses just aren't funny. Unless you pose them in humorous positions, of course. That would be quite humorous.

Reread those last three sentences with Mitch's voice in your head. It's really funny that way.

My chickens have officially re-entered the egg-laying season again. I've been getting at least three eggs a day for the last week and yesterday I collected nine eggs. One of them was malformed so Bubba got a nice little snack, but eight eggs in one day ain't too shabby. Right now I've got a carton of a dozen blue eggs, a carton of a dozen large brown eggs, and about half of a third carton of a mixed assortment. It's a little less consistent than what you buy at the store as the brown eggs are all large or extra large while the blues from the araucanas range from small to large. They taste awesome, though.

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer really pissed me off this week. I typically peruse Slate.com during some of my down time, which I've had a bit of this week since it was 9-weeks tests, but on Monday, Slate.com was blocked by the school's content filter. The reason for this frustration was Eliot Spitzer's having sex with a hooker. (I like whores!) About half of the articles on Slate for the past three days have been using words that one would expect more from a porn site and it was blocked for at least two days until yesterday when they finally published enough non-Spitzer articles to reduce the porn word to not-porn word ratio to a level acceptable to the site-blocker program. Last.fm has been blocked all week as well, but I'm not sure I can logically blame Spitzer for that one. I'm going to do it anyway. Mr. Spitzer: I hope you contracted HIV or at least a really virulent strain of syphilis.

My day started quite nicely today. I was able to tighten my black belt by a notch. I have lost about 10 lbs. since the first of February (true it was largely from being sick and not eating, but I've managed to keep up the good habits since), and had moved down the notch line on my brown belt for a couple of weeks now. The reason it stood out more today is because my brown belt is worn nearly every day, so it could have just been a product of the leather stretching. I've worn the black one maybe a dozen times in the past year and it was getting tighter until January, so I know it's the lost lipids and no just my fat gut stretching dead cow skin. Yay me!

That's pretty much it for today. I wanted to write about all of the above topics but either didn't have enough to justify a full post or either would be really boring for everyone else if I had dedicated an entire post to it.

6 comments:

Meaghan said...

Interesting about the eggs. I hate Eliot as well. Not a big fan of whores, but everyone has to make a living!

Sid said...

Ha ha ha. Wait why am I laughing? I deputy president was accused of raping an HIV positive woman ...

Mickey said...

If I were doing Blog365, I would have strung this into 4 or 5 posts. There's no rule that says you have to put up 1000 words a day, but I know your mind is just so damned fertile you can't help yourself, just like your loins.

Heh...loins.

Chris said...

I'm also a big fan of humor by means of the unexpected ending. Watching some Mitch Hedberg clips, I laugh at a lot of his material but can't enjoy his delivery style -- wobbling around the stage as if stoned out of his mind, which I think we can assume he was.

Chris said...

Jacob, to answer a question you asked weeks ago that I overlooked: I do not know a Greg (my last name) who is a physical trainer. He very well might be a distant relative, but I am not aware of it.

Jacob said...

Meaghan: Do you really find the eggs interesting, or is that the only positive thing you could think of to write? I'll perfectly understand if the latter is the case.

Sid: Ah, Jacob Zuma. At least he took a shower afterwards. I'd wonder how a politician with so many public issues could have a chance at continuing his political career, except we have George W and that mayor of DC who actually got re-elected after going to prison for crack cocaine.

Mickey: It wouldn't work that way. I've got to post everything that comes out at once at the same time. If I were to break this up I'd either end up with a backlog of posts (because if I don't write it when I think of it, I'll lose it) or I'd fall out of the habit and really start struggling when I ran out of broken up posts. It's better for all of us this way.

Chris: I kind of get the feeling that we're very similar people except I'm more willing to let my thoughts get some fresh air. Sorry, Meaghan. I didn't intend to give you nightmares.