Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

PROMISES, PROMISES

i TOLD you i'd post something in the kitchen. go there now, print the recipe, and make it as soon as possible. best baked in a bundt cake pan. best served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

tomorrow, i'll write about god again. you don't think it's a coincidence that the cake recipe is in between two posts about god, do you?

by the way, that was not a rhetorical question about dogs and beano ... i need an answer: is it dangerous for dogs? i really, really need to know. really.

tomorrow, as is our custom with visiting bloggers, we introduce chucklehut to danny boy's pizza, the best on earth.

The End of Daylight Savings Time

The clocks in these parts were moved back an hour, meaning that we get an extra hour in the day. I used mine up.

I opine that it is not a real bad chore cleaning up dog puke at 4:30 a.m., actually, 3:30 a.m., when you consider the time change. Thinking that I was done with the job cleaning up dog puke on the wood floor and then stepping in more dog puke, this time, chunky stuff on the rug right by the bed that smooshed up between my toes and having to clean that up is one of the chores that old codger didn't tell me about when we got the beagle.

Then, for some unexplainable reason, I wandered down the stairs to the living room. Just how big is this fucking dog's stomach? Do beagles have more than one stomach? The fucking dog couldn't have eaten something between puking several times in the bedroom and puking in four places in the living room? How do I know the dog didn't eat anything? The stuff in the living room was still warm, just like the stuff in the bedroom.

So, now it's 5:30 a.m., actually 4:30 a.m., considering the time change.

I'm going to stay awake and see when the cable company moves the clock back on the digital cable box. And I'm going to go around changing the clocks to see if Stacey moves them back another hour in the morning. Oops, she woke up. Now, we can watch Nick at Nite together and see when the cable company moves the time back.

Do Their Votes Count?

Eight Nine more U.S. soldiers are coming home in pieces in body bags.

"... I see the United States mounting a treadmill that goes ever faster -- so fast it seems almost impossible now to get off. Yet I am convinced that we must get off that treadmill and that we can. The hour is late, but I believe this nation of ours has the brains, the know-how, the courage, the imagination to begin to extricate itself from a war we should never have blundered into." -- Reprinted from Congressman's Report, Morris K. Udall, 2d District of Arizona, October 23, 1967.

Same as it ever was.

AND THIS

i've been thinking about this idea of god a lot lately. mostly because of jen-o-rama. so i went looking for an e-mail that i had sent to semi-son, mark, in response to a question he asked me. disclaimer: it's kind of self indulgent, masturbatory crap. you've been warned.

"whoa. my philosophy is both much simpler and more complicated (maybe cuz it's not just a simple answer).

i believe that happiness is a choice. not a novel idea, i know. and not really a simple choice either. or an easy choice. cuz i believe you either have that capacity or you don't.

i think xxx is a perfect example of someone who doesn't have that capacity. in a way, that capacity is about what you value in life and also what gives you satisfaction. some people get real satisfaction out of the victim role / definition. it's not possible for these people to choose happiness. why choose that? happiness / the pursuit of self actualization is much, MUCH harder than just letting that victim role comfort and sustain you. and hear this: i think we all have parts of BOTH inside us. the trick is seeing and working on reducing those "bad" pieces.

and some people can only feel good about themselves if they can victimize others. not necessarily violently. this kind of person has to believe that he or she is better than others. they don’t accept poor/rich people, black / white / oriental people, non-christians / christians / muslims / jews / atheists, educated / non educated people, fat / skinny people, gays / straights, whoever is not like them. a lot of these people actually invoke their god to reinforce these prejudices. the ultimate irony. imho.

if what you value is love, compassion, goodness, charity, self-pride, integrity, and the pursuit / creation of those things, you're gold. if you try (you can't ALWAYS succeed every single day) to live your life looking at yourself and reminding yourself of those values, you can't help but be happy. you just can't. you'll fail on some level every day, but the pursuit and self-introspection define you.

notice i don't talk about god. for me, that's just who i am. my god is those values i mentioned above. i don't know if i see god as a kind of PERSON, i see god as those values. with a touch of a person added in cuz it makes it easier for me to talk to him / her.

i don't know, mark. we're human animals, gifted with LIFE. i like to think we're supposed to LIVE it. in the best way possible. for me that means loving and all that entails. i am also a bitch, and for some reason, i don't feel that that bitch part of me is anathema to those values. i'd have to agree that (if you're thinking it) the bitchiness is mostly arrogance. if you'll notice, i really turn that part of me on to try to get others (whom *i* have judged to have behaved in less than perfect ways) to see the error of their ways. yes, it IS a character flaw. AND a protective device, too.

i don't believe for me that in order to have lived a good and happy life that i have to be a rocket scientist or a nun. i'm a happy person, mostly because i'm happy with my values -- and i'm satisfied that i try to at least THINK about those values every day. i'm going to love my husband and family -- and i pray they'll KNOW they've been loved.

these lyrics are from the muppet's christmas album – yes, i know it’s weird how the muppets put it all together for me.

it's in everyone of us to be wise.
find your heart. open up both your eyes.
we can all know everything without ever knowing why.
it's in everyone of us bye and bye, bye and bye."

TGIWW , ETC.

The Cassini People -- Part II

There's all kinds of stuff allegedly happening up there in space. Or so they say. And they say that little insurgency over there in Iraq is going well, too. Who you gonna believe?

First off, we got what's revolving around Saturn ... the Cassini spacecraft, which, if you didn’t know, is loaded with plutonium, 72.3 pounds of plutonium-238, to be exact, installed in a thing called a radioisotope thermo-electric generator. Let’s not panic though, plutonium-239 is the type used in nuclear weapons; but, on the other hand, plutonium-238 is the most lethal substance known to man. Plutonium-238 is so toxic that less than one-millionth of a gram, an invisible particle, causes cancer. Inhaling the stuff invariably causes lung cancer. The funny thing about the plutonium was that NASA couldn’t buy plutonium-238 in the United States because nobody, not even the government makes plutonium-238. The manufacturing process is too dangerous, so NASA bought the stuff from Russia.

We got pictures coming from Titan, a moon out there orbiting around Saturn. It’s cloudy, but here’s a drawing from one of the top secret pictures that Sam, a close friend of mine, shared with me. He’s got one of those satellite dishes we hear about all the time. Obviously, I'd be in big, big trouble with the Kerry campaign if I posted the picture:

And here’s some good news in Physics, depending on your point of view. Isn't that how it works, though? There's always that point of view that changes your perspective. That's like part of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, I think. Or was that Hawk's Constant? I can never remember which is which; but isn't that just like physics, with those scientists always changing their minds. Anyway, some physics guys in Italy have "proven" that the Earth spinning around at about 1000 miles an hour causes a disturbance in the area, the "spacetime," around the Earth.

It's kind of like when you get some people together in a pool and go around and around and the water starts going around and around and eventually the current you've created drags you along. Well, it seems that things get dragged around the Earth a little ... about 9 miles an hour ... depending on how close they are to the Earth.

I'm just thinking that the Earth isn't just spinning around at 1,000 miles an hour; it's also traveling through space at about 65,000 miles an hour going around the Sun, that is itself spinning around. Then the Sun and the entire array of planets, moons, and other things that are in our solar system are flying around the Milky Way galaxy at a speed of about 486,000 miles per hour.

What does all this mean?

All the numbers make your head spin, but you know it doesn't mean jack-shit to anybody. It is one more thing on which to spend government money. How is this information, which will have "important implications for our view of the cosmos" going to benefit the inner-city mother of three working in an office as a filing clerk for $8 an hour without any health insurance or other benefits? Will the warped spacetime generate any significant disposable income for her?

I don't know. Maybe that is the question physicists should answer before they get their government hand-out and the money gets sucked into a black hole.

Sitting in a Mocha

Sometimes you have to take a shower in the middle of the day. Sometimes you go to Starbucks with your teenage son and Saffron gives you a free Cafe Mocha.

And sometimes you spill the whole 20 ounces right through the open window of the car and onto the seat that you're about to occupy. And despite the fact that the construction-type worker in the truck parked right next to you gives you a shirt (not the shirt off his back, the shirt off his foreman's back) to try to soak up the mess, you still have to sit down on a chocolatey wet seat because you're on your way to get the pizza you ordered for your wife and her co-worker.

Sometimes that happens.

Heather's Cool!

I'm trying to be high tech. Really I am. It is the 21st Century. If you don't want to read this whole post, and I know Mark will think it's too fucking long, or if you don't want to read about kinky shit, skip over the next five or six paragraphs.

Perhaps, if I would have continued on that Physics/Chemistry/Auto-Mechanics course of study I was on in high school instead of opting for the Social-Science/Psychology/Thrill-of-victory, agony-of-defeat, human-drama-of-athletic-competition path, things would might have been different, and there would be flying cars today.

But I have a laptop with a broken "7" key (Can you hear the weeping steel guitar with that country song lyric?). And I have a Samsung ABCDEFG I-700 Pocket PC, which is a combo of everything one might need in the early 21st Century, a telephone, calendar, address book, camera, digital recorder, internet explorer, GPS locator, calculator, word processor, poop scoop, computer thingy, and, as my better half said to the Verizon Wireless tech support guy on the phone, "his life blood." I wanted to be able to access my e-mail accounts and send e-mail from this fucking "device;" so, I downloaded the Verizon Wireless "Wireless Sync" software at a Verizon Wireless guy's suggestion for my laptop and bought the upgrade for the MS O/S on my Pocket PC to allow me to use the software from Verizon to do the whole e-mail thing. I installed the programs and did all the stuff I was instructed to do. I mean, hey, I hung in there and did not take shortcuts ... I even called for help. That was Wednesday afternoon.

I thought that I was doing pretty good on the technical thing, but the e-mail program didn't work. I did not have the patience to stay on the phone for ten minutes Thursday night with Verizon Wireless technical support, let alone the 5 hours Stacey worked through the problems with five different people at Verizon Wireless Technical Support. She was done at ("We never stop working for you.") about 12:30 Friday morning ... I did buy her something Friday morning, by the way.

And I ran the sync program that I always ran. And in the morning, I checked my schedule on my Pocket PC and every appointment I had on there for every day was fucking gone. But this is the new Billy-boy ... I did not get upset. I figured something weird happened, and I'd sync up and restore all the data on my calendar from my laptop. Modern technology ... isn't it wonderful? After court and after my excursion through the jewelers' place, I sat down at the laptop and clicked on the calendar in Outlook and found that I didn't have any appointments ever again, no deadlines, no end-of-the-month tasks set up by my organizational guru, nothing. And my billing stuff -- gone into a black hole. Thank you very much, Verizon Wireless we-never-stop-working-for-you and Physics.

Friday night, while Stacey was getting more vociferous with the Verizon Wireless techiesnumbskulls phone answering people, I decided to call Samsung, since I had talked to one of the tech support people there earlier, to answer a question. I got hooked up to Heather.

She answered my question, even though I wouldn't answer some of hers and was somewhat rude. And she also pointed out some problems that had cropped up with the wireless sync program with other customers. Stacey was on hold with Verizon Wireless, so I let her talk with Heather, since, I admit this candidly, I'm not as good with computers as I am with electrical repairs and cutting implements, and I waited on hold on the other phone. I eventually was connected to Robert (Bob, probably the same Bob that sits in his basement in his underwear and sends spam comments to blogs all over the world, but he calls himself "Robert" in this application), who thought that he could do no wrong and that Heather didn't know about that which she spoke. And that I was a blithering idiot ... who needed Prozac, Lipitor, casino-gambling, debt-relief, Protactinium, and ... which is not something to say to someone who is just somewhat more stable than Richard Cheney.

Heather, it turns out, wanted Robert's phone number to discuss the deleterious effect that "Wireless Sync" had on Microsoft Outlook and how to undo the result. She called Robert on a three-way conference, Stacey participating, but got some poor dude named John, who represented all that was Robert about Verizon Wireless. Heather pummeled John into submission, turning him into the cowering, whimpering mama's boy, as soon as he answered, so that he lay there with his legs up in the air begging to have his belly scratched and wanting to lend any type of assistance he could, just to keep from being severely traumatized by not one, but two wild women (I thought I heard Stacey say at one point, "Yo, John, make me a sandwich, bitch!). He did. And he finally decided that maybe there might be something to what Heather was saying .... apologizing profusely for all of the problems Verizon software caused from the Dark Ages to the present time ... acting with civility.

Then, together, Heather and Stacey worked through the deleting of programs, re-loading of other programs, and re-configuring to get things in order. While stuff was loading and deleting, during the pauses in the action, so to speak, Stace and Heather talked about work, family, Starbucks, and some personal stuff.

Heather got the e-mail flowing and helped try to recover lost data, much of which I did find on account of her.

Heather at Samsung somewhere down there in Austin, Texas, rocks!

She didn't want flowers, but here they are anyway.

P.S. -- And by the way, Verizon came through, too, with some nice toys, due to some complaining by my IT Department (Stacey), so that now if you send me an e-mail, I can get it anywhere in the world!

Thanks again, Heather!

Make It a Crime

I was going to write about a client whose excuse for missing the driveway to the gas station by 20 feet and hitting the power pole was not her blood alcohol reading three-and-a-half times the legal limit but the fact that she got new glasses 4 hours before and couldn't see clearly, but that kind of thing happens every day; and it's not every day that every little kid's favorite
school event, Halloween, is canceled. I dressed up as a bum hobo itinerant wanderer with a dirty face and disheveled clothes every year. I suppose that was rather insensitive of my mother to allow me and help me to portray that kind of derogatory stereotype, which might have been offensive to hoboes everywhere.

Gone are the days of witches and wizards.

And the days that fellow artist, Kurt Vonnegut, predicted in his short story, "Harrison Bergeron," are fast approaching. I, for one, will have my headphones tuned to selected works of John Cage.

LIVING LA VIDA MOCHA

ok. i KNOW this is crazy. the fact that i KNOW it means we’re really not crazy, right? RIGHT?

i remember the moment i tasted my first starbucks mocha. jax had a hockey game, and i needed something warm to drink at the rink. there is a starbucks about ¼ mile down the road. i honestly think it was our first time inside a starbucks. we had resisted for a long, long time. against our principles, we said. pffft. principles, schminciples. but that day, that moment... honest to god, i turned to bill and said, “oh no, we’re in trouble.” i gave him a taste – he wasn’t impressed. just like non-wine drinkers cannot taste the subtle (or not so subtle i’m guessing) nuances in a fine glass of wine, he just didn’t get it.

i worked hard over the next year to “turn” him. he tasted every mocha i had. i’d point out the smokiness of the coffee blend that morning. or the dark chocolate flavor of another morning. mochas are like snowflakes. each unique. each a special little flower.

and then one morning, he said, “wow! that’s good!” and i let him have my mocha. his first. another special moment.

since that day, bill has taken off on his own journey of coffee blend madness. insanity even. he’s worked his way through three espresso machines. finally this summer, he got the espresso machine of his dreams. i was able to talk him out of converting the bathroom off the kitchen into his own separate little espresso bar (just kidding); but we did build our own little area at the end of the kitchen counter (not kidding).

we’ve gone crazy over flavored syrups and sauces (thanks a LOT, kimberly!).

it’s an innocent little hobby, right? RIGHT?

the first picture is the “area” from the front.

this is the menu board on the back of the cupboard.

1,106 1,110 Dead, 7,532 8,016 Wounded in Action

"Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties." -- George W. Bush to Pat Robertson, when told to prepare for death and dismemberment if Iraq were invaded.

I Love Gas Stations

I called Matt on Friday morning to see how life and learning was going. He was driving to campus and made a stop while he was still on the phone with me. I overheard this conversation:

Girl Voice: [garbled] cell phone. [garbled] while pumping gas. [garbled]

Matt: What are you talking about? [to me] She's telling me I'm going to blow the place up because I'm talking to you. [to her] That's an urban legend. Can't happen. It's been proven.

Girl Voice: [garbled] need to get off the phone, sir!

Matt: Are you a physicist?

Girl Voice: No, but I have worked in the industry for many years.

Matt: Well, you're wrong.

There you have it, folks, ... from someone who has "worked in the industry" ...

Halloween House Explained

one or two several dozenhundredtens of thousand e-mails came in asking about the photo of the house with the Halloween decorations. It is not our house -- if one more person asks me that question, I will not post the picture of the heathen decorations that are displayed at Christmas and Chanukkah at the very same house from huge Homer Simpson to 17-foot Santa.

I have done one of those Time magazine cover map thingys for you along with the numbered key. Now, stop e-mailing me about the house ... I will answer any other questions you may have about any other subject from ab irons and aliens to, well ... zygotes.

1. Ghost w/ gun 2. Lighted pumpkin 3. Ghoul popping out of pumpkin 4. Ghost 5. Rabbit w/ scarf sitting on pumpkin 6. Pumpkin 7. Ghost behind tree 8. Three pumpkins stacked up 9. Pumpkin w/ witch hat 10. Mailbox on post 11. Witch on broom 12. Big-ass pumpkin 13. Purple thing 14. Three more pumpkins stacked up 15. Four pumpkins fucking stacked up. 16. Two-legged Tooth Ghoul 17. Witch waving 18. Companion witch with broom 19. Spooky headstone 20. Ribbon on tree 21. Rock 22. Waving ghoul w/ smiling pumpkin head 23. Ghost 24. Pumpkin 25. Scary Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man 26. Rocket J. Squirrel 27. Lamp pole w/ green hand coming out of it 28. Ghoul on roof 29. Ghost w/ Kerry for President Shirt 30. Some kind of monster 31. Green Giant Skull 32. White VW Beetle w/ black "The Who" sticker on the back bumper 33. Alien head sticking out of ground 34. President Bush 35. Chipmunk in tree 36. Another goddamned ghost 37. And another ghost 38. Moustachioed ghoul with horns and arms 39. Fucked-up ghost 40. Chicken ghost 41. Rock under which Osama bin Laden crawled 42. Little green ghost 43. Another fucking pumpkin

Beware of Bath & Body Works

Took a trip to Bath & Body Works. Okay, so it's one of those things a real man doesn't do. Wanna make somethin' of it? Tell me when and where, and I'll be there to kick your ass.

I'm trying to be helpful here, with my tip of the week. I have a lot of shopping experience to lay on you all. They got these little tester spray bottles all over the place -- three on each display counter on the sides of the store. Here's the thing ... one of the little silver spray testers is labeled "Bartlett Pear." This could, I thought, actually replace the lime-coconut stuff I'm currently using because I like pears.

But here's the thing. Do not spray Bartlett Pear Home Fragrance on your hand. It doesn't smell anything like pears until about six hours later after you've washed your hands 25 times. They should really mark those little tester bottles so people who need reading glasses can see what they really are ...

Mafia Bob

I would like to meet Bob, a consistent commenter on this website and on our cooking site, upon which we have not been diligently working. I've been deleting his comments because ... well, I think that he is advertising products and services, which is not the purpose of the website.

It seems that Bob has varied interests. I know that he is into poker, particularly something cxalled "texas hold 'em." I haven't watched any poker championships, but I think that's what they play; and I wonder if Bob is one of the participants.

More recently, Bob is touting the fact that he runs a "home based business." I would be more impressed if Bob had hyphenated "home based," as hyphenation is grammatically proper; so, I can conclude that Bob is not anal-retentive about his grammar and usage.

From a couple other recent comments, I assume Bob is in the lending business because he has urged me to "Consolidate debt."

Bob has also championed the advantages of taking Cialis, Viagra, Fiorcet, Vioxx, Oxycontin, Fentanil, and Tramadol.

I would like to contact Bob, but with every comment, he leaves a bogus e-mail address. My guess about him is that he values his privacy and does not wanted uninvited intrusions upon his personal life.

I've been acquainted with people like Bob, not that I count any of them as friends, mind you, or as business associates.

Secretive. Home-based "business." Gambling. Drugs. Loan-sharking.

Now that I have read this over, I really don't want to meet Bob. I don't want anything to do with Bob.

IT'S BILL'S BIRTHDAY!

billy's 51 today! you might think 51 is a lot of things, as do i. let me tell you what 51 is NOT.

Terrorism 101

It is not against the law to bury a 105 mm shell casing from a rocket launcher so that it is sticking partially out of the ground in your brother's backyard to play a joke on the paranoid, Republican brother.

When your brother, in a panic, calls the police and five police cars, three fire trucks with full complement of firefighters, the police chief, the fire chief, two ambulances with four EMT's, three multi-jurisdictional bomb squad vehicles full of bomb squad guys, two FBI agents, a U.S. Army personnel transport with eight fully-armed National Guard members show up and two fighter planes are ready to go at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to combat a possible terrorist threat, you get charged with a felony.

When your lawyer offers that you pay the overtime of all of the personnel involved, which comes to a bill for about $2,600, and tells the prosecutor that inasmuch as nobody was hurt and that this unplanned emergency exercise proved the essential readiness of all of the agencies involved in combating terrorism, then the charges should be dismissed because there was no actual criminal intent, but simple stupidity, and after much discussion and numerous calls to the police and fire chiefs and bomb squad boss, if the prosecutor finally agrees that the proposal sounds reasonable, as long as you pay the court costs, which amount to $132, then don’t say okay except that you don’t want to pay the fucking court costs.

You are definitely inviting your lawyer to shove the evidence down your throat.

Around Town With the New Harmonic Balancer

Some people carve a couple of pumpkins for Halloween. Some people put up a ghost made of a white sheet on the old lamp post. Some people put little cut-outs of green-faced witches on brooms in the front window. The people at this house don't believe in sweating the small stuff:

Posted by Bill at 09:49 PM | Comments (10)

Sick of It All

We were driving around, dodging orange barrels, construction vehicles, S-U-fuck-V's, and little 15-year-old numbskulls doing wheelies on 16-inch bicycles. Then my sister-in-law called, not the one with the stuffed dog, the other one. She's going to watch a football game down at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny. Whatever. She said she was going with some chick we never heard of. At least, that's what she was telling her old boyfriend, with whom she broke up. She didn't want to hurt his feelings about this other guy, I guess.

Anyway, while all this is going on, I'm thinking back to the glory days ... y'know, I invited the Boss to the J-dogg's party, but he played so damn long at the concert for Kerry that things were all over by the time he called ... well, my cousin's girlfriend called my cousin and said she wasn't going to be able to make it and she was supposed to bring the Boss back to the party ... well, we had a great time anyway. Missed it, Bruce!

Anyway, while this was going on ... the wheelies and the S-U-fuck-V's, I was wondering about the state of the fucked-up world. It reminds me of the carpenter ants we had in the old house on Lake Road, where they'd come out at night and have battles in the living room on the off-white Berber carpeting, evidence of which was billions of little carpenter ant body parts strewn across the living room. People are supposed to be smarter. The gas crisis of the early '70's brought about smaller and more fuel-efficient cars. Science ... well, where the fuck did you go?

Where are the flying cars? Where are the robot spaceships that are pushed by solar wind? Where is my fucking robot butler that will let the dogs out at 3 in the morning?

Did You Know ...?

Having been in trial for a couple days, and having gotten ready for the J-dogg's graduation party, which was a major success, before that, I haven't been keeping up with what is going on in the world.

DID YOU KNOW:

"Why May Not That Be the Skull of a Lawyer?"

"... what kind of rational person would attack his own lawyer?"

Does he really want an answer to that question? He must have just passed the bar exam and is still learning the facts of the practice of law.

As Dick the Butcher, killer extraordinaire, once said, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

Flat Tires and Flight Attendants

The judge threw out my client's lawsuit today. Under most circumstances, I would be very upset; but if you knew what the case was about, you would think that I was fucking nuts for representing tne kid. Another lawyer asked me to try the case, which I love doing. Sometimes, the facts aren't there. We gave it a shot.

All I know is that the kid's mother will be second-guessing one of my decisions from now until doomsday. Now, I'm not going to really talk about what she asked me; but if we assume that she works for an airline as a flight attendant, she would have asked if she should wear her flight attendant's uniform and sit in back of the courtroom. Why? Because that would be more ... ummm ... business-like. You know. Still trying to figure that one out.

So, when the white VW with the black "The Who" sticker on the back bumper revolted and picked up a flat tire this afternoon, I wasn't too upset. I jacked up the front right end and got the lug nuts off without any problem once I figured out which way to turn them. I can tell you this right now -- it's either clockwise or counter-clockwise -- one of those ... I think. I did get them off, and I did find out after I got the third one loose that they all turn the same way -- it's either clockwise or counter-clockwise -- one of those ... I think. That's probably in the instruction booklet somewhere, but all I found was something about 600 pages long divided into 28 different sections entitled "Owner's Manual." That tome was no help at all.

I changed tires before, but never on a car made with precision German engineering. I figured that the American cars I had driven before were different, since I didn't even have to loosen any of the lug nuts on the right front wheel of my Pontiac Sunfire to get the wheel off ... I was driving the fucking machine of death on Interstate-77 at the time when the right front end hit the pavement, and I saw in the side view mirror the tire bouncing over on my right and behind me. It's tough to steer an American car with one front wheel on and one front wheel bouncing into the path of a tractor-trailer accelerating down the entrance ramp, especially when you know that the trucker is taking aim, trying to hit the tire into the passenger seat of the Pontiac Sunfire convertible with the top down ... they get points for that, I think.

Yeah, clockwise, counter-clockwise, whatever. I got them off. The real problem was that the aluminum wheel was stuck to the axle. There's some kind of chemical reaction with the aluminum and the steel axle -- something like that.

I saw that happen in a movie once -- with Robert Lansing -- where the pesky scientist, played by Robert Lansing, of course, shows a dumb scientist, who happens to be his brother, how to stick together a gold bar and a silver bar.

So, that's how I know what happened with the wheel and the axle ... and oh, yeah, Robert Lansing ... he turns maniacally evil because he ends up going through walls and stuff himself, but doing so sucks the life right out of him, just as you would expect (but in the movie, he didn't have common sense and never figured out something like that would happen until it really happened), and he ends up sticking his hand into other people, women, mainly, sucking the life out of them and re-invigorating himself. The genius of the film-maker ... it's hard to believe, but this whole thing with Robert Lansing was a metaphor for sexual promiscuity and the AIDS epidemic and all that ... or maybe not.

Anyway, the damn VW wheel would not come off. Sitting on the curb in a parking lot with all kinds of SUV's driving by, kicking the damn wheel, trying to loosen it, I felt pretty silly ... like Robert Lansing felt when he finally ran out of energy and got stuck in a wall ... a real dumbass.

Then I remembered the trick. I put the lug nuts back on, being careful to turn them the correct way, either clockwise or counter-clockwise, but didn't tighten them all the way. I had to unjack the car, then I backed the car up and drove it forward, back and forward a few times across two parking spaces. Jacked it back up. Voila! The damn wheel came right off when I took the lug nuts off.

There's nothing quite like a law school education.

Use the Assets At Your Disposal

I started a trial. The other attorney made a smart remark after one of my witnesses answered one of his questions -- I guess not the way the other attorney thought it should be answered. I objected and moved to strike the "extraneous comment." The judge halted the trial and ordered us into chambers. He accused the other attorney of "being chippy." He pointed his right index finger at me and said, "You might practice law like that where you come from, but you don't act that way here."

So, I don't really know what I did; but he put me in a chippy mood:

**Star-Spangled Banner Ring**
Me: Hello.
Lady: I'd like to speak to Matt, please.
Me: He's not here.
Lady: Is there a better time to reach him?
Me: No.
Lady: Does he still live there?
Me: No.
Lady: Can you tell me how to reach him?
Me: I didn't catch your name, lady. Who's calling, again?
Lady: My name is Nancy. I'm with Volunteers for Bush.
Me: I'm not at liberty to give you that information. Perhaps, you can call the CIA and get the information under provisions of the Patriot Act.
Lady: Okay.
**Click**

Comment on Bush-Kerry Debate I

I have two disjointed thoughts on the debate last night between John Kerry and George Bush the Lesser. There are many of you who will claim that all of my thoughts are disjointed, and I'm sure that you will be able to discover much support for that notion; but here are my two thoughts.

Number One: George Bush the Lesser did not disprove to me that he is, by far, one of the dumbest people in the entire world. There are some entertainers who, during interviews, reveal that the ability to memorize a script does not require the intelligence of more than a moron -- if there's a cue, then the line is spoken. I saw that happen time and time again.

Number Two: As we all know, Bush the Lesser was a cheerleader. Obviously, he didn't play well with the other children; and in my experience, those kids, like Georgie, watched professional wrestling on their black-and-white televisions. He was rambling about Iran. I thought that ayatollahs ran things over there in Iran, but Bush was saying that he was in touch with the Moolah's people. Now, that did ring a bell; and now we know just what a loon the guy really is.