Recently, there has been a spate of deaths related to cancer, such as Mary Travers, Farrah Fawcett, and Patrick Swayze to name but a few of the most prominent cases.  The Patrick Swayze case is remarkable in that he survived the fight against pancreatic cancer for so long.   Pancreatic cancer does not have a very good track record with or without treatments, and unfortunately the life expectancy is only about 5 to 8 months.  However that number is a statistic that needs to be reexamined in light of new treatments.  (http://www.pancreatic.org/site/c.htJYJ8MPIwE/b.891917/k.5123/Prognosis_of_Pancreatic_Cancer.htm) That Mr. Swayze survived for twenty-two months with the disease is promising, though I do not know what treatments he may or may not have received.  Suzanne Somers, who also had a struggle with Breast Cancer, offers that Mr. Swayze was poisoned by chemotherapy.  If chemotherapy was indeed used, and the probability is very high, then yes, he indeed was poisoned.  That’s what chemotherapy is.  That’s why there are side effects.  To say that chemotherapy should not be used is irresponsible at this point until further non-chemical alternatives can be found, tested, and approved.

I know very little about pancreatic cancer, except that it affected my family doctor, one of my uncles, and countless other people around the world.  Personally, I lucked out in the cancer lottery by only getting Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which is supposedly easy to treat and cure comparatively (though I’m on my fourth recurrence and the “cure/treat” claim has yet to be proven to me).  I know about toxicity and toxic effects of chemotherapy drugs, as well as the detriments of radiation therapy.  I haven’t had any major surgeries, just minor ones to grab lymph nodes.  I know how the drugs made me feel, and I know what the drugs did to my body.  I am still alive after seven years thanks to the chemotherapy drugs and the skilled doctors who performed countless procedures on me.  My lungs and heart are weakened, my eyesight has degenerated, my bones more brittle, but those have not only to do with the countless drugs but also the effects of aging, albeit that aging process has been sped up.  However, if you put aside that, I know that I am alive and I thank chemotherapy for this opportunity.

I do not love chemotherapy.  In fact, I dread sitting in the comfortable leather chair with the liquid poison entering into my system.  Cancer needs to be defeated once and for all, and while there are effective weapons to do it, it creates a “scorched body” as it eliminates all reproductive cells.  Research has been going on for years to find better ways to cure the body, and I do agree with the Holisticators out there that natural means are needed to keep the body healthy, I do not see those natural means as any thing but a placebo right now.  It is important to stay healthy and eat a balanced diet and drink plenty of filtered, clean water.  Don’t put any more toxins in your body than necessary (which makes breathing, eating, and drinking in our world fairly precarious).  New methods, however, are being tested daily.  Doctors are increasingly searching for ways to lessen the toxicity while maximizing the effectiveness.  Vaccines, immunotherapy, monoclonal antibodies (also immunotherapy), stem cells, ways to boost the immune system are currently expanding and making huge exponential steps.  The treatments in the seventies have become third tier options, and the options of two years ago are being replaced with newer, more effective drugs or treatments.  However, holistic medicine is not anywhere near the top of board-certified doctors’ lists.  They may encourage use of these therapies as adjutant or complementary therapies, but by no means would a reasonable, logical, or sane person suggest that they be used alone.

During one of my previous recurrences, I was advised to “heal myself” with no other explanation.  I was also advised to bring more lavender into my life.  I am not sure what lavender would do other than possibly unblock a chakra or two, and I’m not entirely sure which chakra is connected to my lymphoma.  I HAVE meditated.  In fact, I meditate as much as I can.  I do believe that Eastern Medicine and sagacity of the mystics has its place in healing and as preventative measures, but the facts are firmly in Western Medicine’s corner for the curative aspects when dealing with life-threatening disease.  You can have it both ways if you deal with it in a logical fashion.  Pray all you want, but not for a miracle.  It doesn’t happen that way.  If it did, we wouldn’t need doctors at all, and health insurance would rely on how powerful your deity is.  However, I’m not saying don’t pray, either.  It’s as good as meditation for preventative medicine.

So while Suzanne Somer’s particular point of crazy is true, Patrick Swayze WAS poisoned by chemotherapy, as true to its purpose, but coffee enemas, juicing, and jumping on a personal trampoline are not ways to cure or treat cancer.  Crazy is not a treatment. Neither is placing a crystal over the affected area, applying oils, or meditating on a cure.  It’s a surefire way to increase your odds of dying a drawn-out, painful death.  Don’t accept one doc’s diagnosis, either, go to a second doctor for options, but be sure to know quackery from medicine.  Holistic medicine might not be as bad as snake oil, but the way it’s pushed it sure does resemble it.

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I’d Like to Ruin Television For You: 2009-2010 Season: The Weekend

The weekend, to me, doesn’t matter, except it means I get to hang out with my friends who work for a living and I get my kids all day and all night until sitter/school on Monday mornings. So I don’t have much time for Television, much less anything else. However, I have researched what to watch, what to DVR, and what to avoid for the Saturdays and Sundays of lonely nights alone, warming your hands by the blue heat of the television.

Saturdays are lean on the original programming side, because execs understand that normal people go out and do things on Saturday night, so they don’t try to lure us in with Touched by an Angel or Covington Cross. Well, they don’t anymore. Saturdays is for Football and Reality TV. ABC is no exception as it gives us Saturday Night Football. College football, which is way more exciting than Professional American Football, so says I. Being a Buckeyes fan, I have a feeling I won’t have a good time watching any college football this year.

CBS is all about Crime and milking the cow until she’s dry, bleeding the turnip, and getting water from that rock. Crimetime Drama, as they so pluckily call it, consists of RERUNS of procedural police dramas, such as CSI, CSI:NY, CSI: Altoona, etc. They then follow CRIMETIME DRAMA with REAL crime with 48 Hours Mystery, a documentary of true crime in a 48-hour period. It helped usher in the age of the Reality program. I’m not knocking any of the programming, except, that in one sense, I am. It’s nothing new or original or exciting, just the bland leftovers of yesteryear.

FOX shows TWO episodes of COPS (holy crapola, that’s still on?), with America’s Most Wanted at 9:00 PM. Nothing new, borrowed, or blue; just old.

NBC gives us a documentary news program with Dateline NBC, which I watch when I remember to watch. Usually pretty good even if Stone Phillips’ voice makes my ears bleed. Just kidding, Stone. You keep doin’ what you’re doin’. They then give us ENCORES of shows they played earlier in the week. Trauma and Law and Order:SVU. I didn’t watch them earlier in the week, what makes you think I am going to give a shit about them on Saturday? Except to DVR Trauma. . . perhaps. I’ve been wrong before (oh have I), so maybe I will give Trauma a watch or two. I feel I will have to if my wife has anything to say about it (she also watches Ghost Whisperer and Two and a Half Men, so I am stuck).

SUNDAY

Oh, Lord, on this day of days to rest (if it were actually the day of rest, which it isn’t), please give me some of that sweet sweet pap of Sundertainment. And. . . Dammit!

ABC vomits out the same garbage as before, starting with America’s Most Horrible and Embarrasing Injuries, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (does it come with a fake Sears’ card?), Desperate (for ratings) Housewives, and Brothers and Sisters. And I watch none of them, neither should you. While DH used to have pretty sharp writing and wit, it has declined over the years. While last season did have some perky moments, it couldn’t keep my interest past five episodes.

NBC has NFL football, and unless the Pittsburgh Steelers (yeah, I’m one of THOSE!) are playing, I won’t be watching.

CBS shovels out 60 Minutes, which is still a great show despite Andy Rooney. On top of that is the Amazing Race, which used to be novel for a reality show, and is no longer. Follow it up with a helping of Three Rivers, a medical procedural drama in a fictional transplant hospital in Pittsburgh. I can see the titles now, “Kidney Beens”, “I Need a Heart from San Francisco”, “Give me my Spleen, Please!”, etc. I would not like it in a boat, on a moat, or with a goat. CBS caps off the night with Cold Case, which, again used to be a novel way of telling a story, but has grown somewhat stale – As with most network programming. However, creatives do face the trickiness of changing a show by adding more characters, creating implausible scenarios, or changing the structure of a winner, and by doing, taking a jump over that mighty shark.

FOX finishes up its NFL Sunday with a recap of the days highlights and immediately dives into Animation Domination, as it was called a few years ago. It sandwiches The Cleveland Show (a takeoff from Family Guy in which we follow the loveable Scrubs) between an ancient, toothless The Simpsons and the beat-a-dead-horse Family Guy. The Simpsons is probably my all-time favorite show. Of all-time. ALL-TIME. I used to be able to quote with the best of them. Alas, either I grew up (NEVER!) or the show declined in sharpness (say it ain’t so!). I believe that a mixture of both with a great heaping of competing with the faster paced LCD comedy of Family Guy did it in. Well, not did it in as in killed it, but accelerated the decline to what we have today. While it might never reach the heights it did in seasons two through six, it is still the smartest, funniest show on Sunday night. Oh yeah, American Dad also runs.

That’s it for this season, except for a quick rant I will do about midseason replacements, coming soon. I hope you enjoyed, or at least tolerated, this year’s I’d Like to Ruin Television for You.

You can hear a poorly produced audio version at brettfauver.multiply.com/music/

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Previously, on ER. . .

ILRT4Y readers would know what just happened.  What comes in this installment will be a bit of a softer side of the Waldorf/Brett persona, if only for a fleeting second or two.  Most of the “good” television (for major networks) displays during the evening hours of Thursday evenings, where armies of demons battle against strange time traveling events, dna evidence, and Michael Scott.  It’s truly a battle for the hearts and minds of the television viewing audience, and why they couldn’t have done this for a Tuesday or a Wednesday I have no idea, but I am sure some savvy marketing guru with a finger on the pulse of demography knows his shit very well.  All I have to say is Thank Hitchins for Hulu, Netflix, and the availability of some shows n Network Websites.  If I did not have these resources, my DVR would commit suicide with so much pressure with the options of what to record.  That’s silly, robots don’t have emotions, except for the few angerbots on talk radio, of course.

ABC, 1-2-3, baby you and me. . .  Give us the goods.  We get FlashForward, a mind-bender I think, based on the novel of the same name by Robert J. Sawyer.  It seems kind of “Lost-ish”, which could work for it or against it.  The premise is that a simultaneous event occurs, blacking out everyone for a period of time where they see their lives six months in the future.  During the blackout, people who are controlling things let those things go out of control, like planes, trains, and automobiles.  And monkeys.  Anyway, a lot of death occurs in the blackouts and the survivors are looking forward to seeing if those moments will really come true.  It would be cooler if we blacked out for 8 years starting in 2001, but what an incredible shock we’d wake up to today, although I don’t think there would have been as much of a mess.  Good cast, decent premise, I’ll give it a go and keep you posted.  At 9 and 10, ABC delivers two more shows that I won’t watch – Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice.  Or Young Doctors in Love.  Let’s just say that an episode of Spongebob Squarepants has more plausible plotlines than these two cockamamie meditations on doctors being in love.  If it weren’t for Kevin McKidd, who was wonderful in both Rome and Journeyman, two shows that ended before their time, I’d pan completely.  But I won’t, because it’s not the CW.  Lost comes back to us midseason, and if the rumors are true, I can’t wait to see the redesigned skylons and sleestaks.  Sounds like a greasy meal from Waffle House.  “I’ll have the Skylon and Sleestak Special.  Smothered and chopped, please.”

CBS is feh/meh for Thursday.  Survivor:S’morea is more of the same, only in the land of chocolate.  CSI gives us another year of living in the crime filled Vegas.  Good thing so many of the vics and perps spew their DNA around everywhere.  Hey, what happens in Vegas, can usually be picked up by intense UV light.  The Mentalist is good and funny, but I think the novelty has worn off and I suspect that this could be the year for Psych to really hit it big, much like Pepsi-Kona.  Overall, 2/3 ain’t too bad, but they are mostly around for the nights when the other networks are showing repeats and it’s too damn cold/lava-filled outside to do anything else but vegetate.

Okay, I will pay attention to you now, The CW.  You have my attention with The Vampire Diaries and the waxing of Supernatural.  Kevin Williamson returns to the small screen.  He’s the guy responsible for Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Dawson’s Creek.  Yeah, that guy.  The guy responsible for the pairing of Cox and Arquette.  GET HIM!  It’s about twin vampires, one good and one evil.  Okay, I’m bored already.  Lemme guess, they are named Cain and Able?  No, actually they are named Stefan and Damon Salvatore.  Not like the Salvatores from The Great American Family Road Trip or whatever it was called, but close as in they were monsters, too.  The show has Ian Somerhalder and Steve McQueen (the grandson of Steve McQueen – the badass who can cross Europe on a motorcylce in five minutes), so. . . I don’t know what that means.  DVR it?  Sure.  A prelude to Supernatural’s possible last season.  I love this show.  I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s the music.  Maybe it’s the whole mythology of monsters, angels, and demons.  Maybe it’s the weird twists it takes.  Sure I can do without the campy episodes and the Linda Blair guest roles, but overall, I do like the show.  Yes, I know, it does have a degree of cheese and melodrama, and sure it IS just as bad as a daytime drama at points, but it knows that and it makes fun of itself, which is always a plus in my book.  They may not always get the mythology of certain creatures, creations, or legends right but that’s sort of the fun, the twists and turns.  I believe you can catch previous episodes online, Netflix, or even Hulu, so you might want to try to catch up a little bit.  Good news for Mischa Collins fans, he’s no longer recurring and is a regular.  More good news – Mark Pelligrino has been cast in a very cool role.  He’s that character actor who always seems to play a somewhat normal fellow with a psychopathic edge.  While I will probably be out getting my groove on or puking in a bucket thanks to chemotherapy on Thursday nights, I will give The CW priority.

Fox gives us the creaky old Bones, a show that jumped the shark two seasons ago, and Fringe, the non-X-Files show.  Meh and feh I say.  Meh and FEH!

NBC, the little network that abused us with bad shows on the promise of its past promises us funny Thursdays.  Can we forgive them for Boston Commons, Buffalo Bill, Madman of the People, Jesse or Stark Raving Mad?  My logic and reasoning screams at me not to, but my heart says yes, after NBS has reconciled its faults with the delightful ensemble comedies 30 Rock, The Office (which I daresay is as good, if not slightly better than Ricky Gervais’ original).  Parks and Recreation tries to capture the same spirit as The Office but sadly falls flat.  Community looks promising, though, without me explaining or giving any evidence.  I am going with my gut on this one.  And it’s a big gut.

FRIDAY
ABC’s got nothing of interest for me.  The Supernanny can bite me, I am raising my little monkeys just fine and I don’t care how others raise their children, just keep them quiet at the movies, the restaurant, and Walmart.  I don’t want to see the process, I want to see the freakin result.  Ugly Betty is still wearing those damn ugly glasses, and while slightly amusing, it’s not worth an hour of my time on a Friday night.  I’ve got important stuff to do.  Very important. . . stuff.  Where was I?

CBS is still trying to revive a dead show in the name of Ghost Whisperer.  I don’t even want to think about that damn show.  Until those ghosts are chasing Shaggy and Scoob through an abandoned mine shaft, I’ll pass on the James Van Der Pragh “reality Fiction” based bullshit nonsense.  Instead I’ll watch something on SyFy, which has just as much credibility as GW.  It makes me want to skip Medium, which moved from NBC’s ever shifting scheduling to CBS’s craparama Friday nights.  While I have a bit of a mancrush on Jake Weber (mostly for his turn in the remake of Dawn of the Dead with the running zombies) and on Patty Arquette (True Romance), I find the plots a little numbing, but not always.  It’s worth the space on the Tivo/DVR.  Then it’s NUMB3RS.  I get it!  There’s a number in the name!  So it’s actually pronounced NUMBTHREERS, like the movie SE7EN should have been pronounced SESEVENEN.  A cop and a mathemetician walk into a bar.  The bartender asks what can I get you?  The cop says a beer, the mathemetician says Pi!  HARDEEHARHAR!!!  LAFF RIOT.  Okay, so the show has nothing to do with that bad joke, but I thought I should ass it in anyway, for sake of nonsequity.

FOX brings in Brothers, starring Michael Strahan (former NFL “star”) and Daryl Mitchell with CCH Pounder and Carl Weathers.  Annnndddd, that is the extent of my knoweldge on that show.  ANYhoo, it comes on before FOX tries again with ‘Til Death.  Fox, come here, I want to tell you something.  There’s nothing you can do at this point.  I know, I know.  Under ObamaCare I am required to talk about end-of-life care, and it’s just ‘Til Death’s time to go.  We’ve done all we can.  We put it on hiatus, we juggled the characters, we added a token “funny” African-American character, we got rid of the annoying couple next door, we tried everything we could possible do to make it work, but the patient is terribly terribly ill, so we just need to say our goodbyes and try to make the sitcom feel as comfortable as possibly, mmkay?  In a surprise move, Fox greenlit another season of Dollhouse.  I’m surprised.  Don’t get me wrong, I like Dollhouse and most things Whedon.  I stuck through the first few episodes, waiting, like everyone else, for the good ones, and I’m glad I did.  I do want more Alpha, though.  Not as an occuring every week type of villain, but as a menace that lurks, kind of like a phantom.  Only not sucky.  Anyway, kudos to FOX for allowing Dollhouse to grow richer and develop into the show it should be.

NBC is Law & Order and Southland, two shows I wouldn’t watch with YOUR DVR.  Pheh.

Yeah, I know I skipped CW Friday’s, but with Smallville and America’s Next Top Model, there isn’t much substance, which is quite like this blog post.

I hope I got my quota of geekchic pop culture references in.  I know you’ll tell me

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Previously, on Battlestar Galactica. . .

We previewed, however quickly with such cursory glances, the Monday night schedule for Television during the 2009-2010 “season”. (It’s TV season, get out yer guns and blaze away at those fleeting plasmas!). In today’s episode, I try not only to make sense of Tuesday night for you, but also Wednesday evening, and I plan on doing it in ONE post! I know, I KNOW! You can scarcely believe it, you say you need EVIDENCE! Oh, ye of little faith. . .

If Monday night seemed to be a less than pathetic waste of time, then Tuesday night will enable us to conserve energy by not turning on those devious appliances at all (though DVR’s and TIVO’s may be useful – but not for regular network programming). I shall start with ABC. They bring about a rehash from last season, Shark Tank, where budding entrepreneurs are subjected to the greediest, heartless investors known to man. Having lived through this embarrassment in real-life, I do not wish to watch even one minute on television, except perhaps, for a slight bit of shadenfreude. It’s like Dragon’s Den, or Tycoon, or any number of related series. However, it is only airing until November, when it is replaced by another rehashed series – V. The thought of this re-series simultaneously thrills and disgusts me. The thrill is that the original MINISERIES was very good, and made Marc Singer and Michael Ironsides household names (okay, that’s just a lie, and a bad one at that). The SERIES, however, didn’t die a quick enough death for me. I’m talking 1984 terms, too, when I was. . . twelve. Even I was savvy enough to know that the Visitors needed to have the reverb throat thingy. The producers simply blew it and I have been wounded ever since. Now that I am older and more “mature”, I find myself hedging, thinking it MIGHT be a good series, and I MIGHT give it a chance. On Tivo. I’ve always thought that remakes should be reserved for bad movies, and well, the 1984 V: The Series was as bad as it got (except for Cop Rock). So, in the spirit of forgiveness and of remaking horrible things, I will give it a few episodes. Of course, ABC will lose me with another hour of Dancing with the “STARS”, and I won’t return for the hour of Christian Slater squinting as an amateur detective trying to piece together crimes in ANOTHER Jerry Bruckheimer produced crapfest – The Forgotten. ABC can pretty much cram Tuesday night’s where the sun don’t shine, despite the possible stong offering of V (which includes Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk, both of Firefly “fame”).

CBS gives us the Mark Harmon NCIS, coupled with NCIS: Los Angeles, with Chris O’Donnel and LL Cool J. It’s like regular NCIS (which is an acquired taste) only in LA, with edgier, hipper NCIS agents, like the loose cannon Chris O’Donnel and the ultra-cool LL Cool J, investigating military crimes and misdemeanors . . . in LA. However, offsetting the ultra-cool and loose cannon we have Linda Hunt, the fantastic Elven actress from so many movies it’s impossible to name them all here. So, CBS gives us a full two hours of same-yet-different on Tuesday night’s, though I doubt any of the characters will utter anything as cool as David Caruso’s Horatio Cane. Ever. They then drop the ball with The Good Wife, which is about the wife of a jailed politician trying to make her own career with the baggage of that bastard hanging over him. It MIGHT be good if it weren’t for all of the true stories where this is really happening.

Fuck if I am going to say anything good about the CW’s Tuesday Nights. Since they did so well with 90210 last year, they brought it back with a re-envisioning of Melrose Place. I’m sure the skanky and crazy will be quadrupled due to inflation. Just do what I requested last year and give us two hours of new Firefly and Jericho. . .

FOX brings us two hours of So you Think You Can Dance, which was obviously inked by the studio that produced So We Fired All the Writers.

And NBC, in perhaps the biggest omen of their ratings for Tuesday night brings us more fatsploitation in The Biggest Loser. I’d rather watch David Hasslehoff eat a burger off of a sentient car. Feh and meh, I say.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT

So, while reading and scanning the lists of new shows on Wednesday evenings, I noticed I was becoming more and more depressed. I don’t know why, except that the “quality” of television programming has gone horrendously downhill, and I’m just talking about crap from the 80’s. As lame as it was “Buck Rogers” was still awesome for the time, as was Dallas, The Cosby Show, Cheers, Diff’rent Strokes, Night Court. . . I admit, there are some programs still worth watching, but I don’t think you’ll find them on Wednesday night craparama. Really, do yourself a favor and go check out the latest comedy by your local theatre troupe. Not only do you know where the money goes, you will undoubtedly have a better time than sitting in front of your 56” LCD screen, letting the electronic gremlins steal your soul.

ABC is having it’s way with sitcoms and leaving them cold and wet on the floor without so much as a reacharound. Okay, that was a little rough. But they aren’t even giving us tripe, they are giving us substitute tripe. They start off with another Kelsey Grammer snorer (Hank), claiming that he’s BACK (yes, because that FOX show meant nothing). He’s a bigshot exec in New York who suddenly needs to relocate to a small town in Virginia closer to his hee-haw family. HI-larity. Why yes that WAS sarcasm, thanks for noticing. They follow that formula with another formula of Patricia Heaton as a Midwestern mother of three living in Indiana in The Middle. Makes me want to vomit a word rant, but I shall not do that here, where space is limited. The saving grace of ABC’s Wednesday night schmaltz and crap smorgasboard is Modern Family, filmed like a documentary by a Dutch film crew. While I admit it looks enticing, so does dog food after a bout of starvation. It seems a bit like the Arrested Development style, which might be refreshing or horribly, horribly boring. Cougar Town stars Courtney Cox as a MILFY 40-year old divorcee on the prowl for some fresh, young meat. Yawn. Finally ABC brings us ANOTHER rehash of something old, Eastwick, based on the film The Witches of Eastwick, based on the Updike novel of the same name. I sense that it will be as tempting to watch as eating cherries after watching the 1987 film.

CBS gives us more of the same with The New Adventure of Old Christine, which I assume is what Cougar Town is based off of, Gary Unmarried, or Gary Unfunny, followed by more Criminal Minds still without Mandy Patinkin, and CSI: New York, which has Gary Sinise without the Horatio glasses or one-liners. So, with CBS Wednesday’s, it’s simply the same old thing, but to be fair, every other network seems to be doing it, too.

The CW can suck it with America’s Next Top Model and The Beautiful Life (TBL). I refuse to write a single word more on this topic. Just do what I requested last year and give us two hours of new Firefly and Jericho. . . (Yes, I admit it’s a ploy to get more internet traffic and links by the rabid)

Ugh, how infuriating. FOX give us more So You Think You Can Dance, followed by “the surprise hit of the summer”, Glee. Glee seems to be about singing, and high school students singing. From the advertisements and promos, I would think it to be a rip-off of High School Mucousals. However, I could be wrong.

NBC, please please save us from the mediocrity of the night! Please! I implore you! What? Mercy. . . A hospital drama. . . set in “Mercy Hospital”. . . How. . . inspired. (yes, that was sarcasm again, very good of you to notice). Wow. Well, what else do you have? Oh, really? Law and Order: Family Court? No? Just Law & Order: SVU. . . Followed by the Jay Leno canned goods. . . I’m. . . nonplussed. I’m also full of ellipses. What I’m not. . . is impressed. . . by anything on Wednesday nights. It looks like my TIVO and TV can get a rest and I think maybe I will read a book or have a family game night. Thanks, execs, for bringing our family back together mid-week! I’m beginning to realize the true impact of the writer’s strike.

NEXT: THURSDAY AND FRIDAY

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Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

The website for Grassroots Skeptics, my new volunteer organization, is now live. Please take a minute to go have a look.

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It’s that time of year again! The official listings are out for the new Television season, and if you’re anything like me, then you are simultaneously frothing and salivating over the garbage and secret delights coming in over the transom. My job here, as the guy who ruins TV for you, is to give a quick rundown of the best and worst that TV is offering we few, we happy few, we groundlings of the idiot box. I haven’t seen any of the new shows, but if there is one thing I know, it’s that the Large Hadron Collider won’t destroy the Universe™ anytime soon — that and what’s bad in entertainment.

First up, I begin our venture through the boob tube land by visiting the “Monday Night Lineup”. It doesn’t seem too much different from last year’s appalling dung-heap of LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) funny business. ABC gives us another round of the mindnumbingly number of the mind Dancing with the “Stars” (quotes mine), with some “Stars” I’ve never heard of, nor care to see Foxtrot across my new TV screen. Tom DeLay. . . Really? I’ve already seen his soft-shoe and his tap-dance and I wasn’t impressed then. Perhaps his prison stint has loosened him up, so to speak, but it still won’t get me watching that crapulated mission to fucktacular nonsense. Hmm. I think I should trademark that phrase. Anyway, it’s more of the same shit, different season. If I want to see a politician sing and dance, I’ll watch Charles Durning’s turn as the Governor in Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (Ooooooh, I love to dance a little sidestep!) A whole two freakin’ hours of that inner-taint-ment (okay, I promise no more ridiculous and awkward punnage). It’s followed by Castle, which has my semi-approval if only to keep Nathan “Cap’n Tightpants” Fillion’s career alive. The woman that is in the show with him is pretty cute, too. However, that’s not a reason to watch the mostly formulaic rehash of Moonlighting. Yes, yes, I know it’s not Moonlighting, but it might as well be – although they’d never be able to pull off Taming of the Shrew.

CBS continues its trend of mediocre to good comedies, starting with another season of Ted Moseby (Josh Radnor) trying to find “The One” that he speaks of in Bob Saget’s voice to his uninterested children in How I Met Your Mother. It’s actually a quite good show, despite being a comedy of situations, and the ensemble is strong. It also helps that I have a crush on Neil Patrick Harris (mostly for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long blog), Alyson Hanagan (the whole Willow thing and, well, things she’s done with a flute), and Cobie Smulders (what’s not to love?). Josh Radnor reminds me of a good friend I had during Elementary and High School, and Jason Segal reminds me of one of my college roommates. So they’re both cool with me, too. On after HIMYM is a new comedy featuring Greg and Dharma’s enjoyable Jenna Elfman in a role not suited to her. The whole premise is highly convoluted about her getting pregnant by a friend and moving in for a platonic relationship but her party girl friends don’t want her to settle and she’s also being pursued by her ex and that friend she had the accidental kid with is still a kid himself. It’s really a mashup of bad ideas, much like most other CBS sitcoms. It would be just thirty minutes of wasted time waiting for the next funny show to come on, but it is followed by the Charlie Sheen-Jon Cryer show Two and a Half Men, so it’s much longer than that. In last year’s “I’d Like To Ruin Television for You”, I managed to say that it was actually a funny comedy, and I know I lost points with some of you on that. After watching a whole season, I retract those statements and renounce the show. . . except the end title cards with Chuck Lorre’s bits of wisdom. One thing I can assure you, in HD they are more readable, and when they are more readable, they are 76% funnier. It almost makes up for the lost 28 and a half minutes that precede the cards, but oh well. CBS does redeem itself at 9:30 PM with The Big Bang Theory. It is a pop culture geek phenomenon that I willingly and most assuredly rate as last season’s funniest show, as well as the best of all shows last season. Looking over the microwaved meatloaf and coagulated mac and cheese that the execs call new, I can prematurely proclaim them to still keep that title. If you haven’t watched, do yourself a favor and Netflix the first season. If you don’t think it’s even remotely funny, then you probably are not doing yourself any favors by reading my tripe, either. CBS plunks down its Monday night anchor with Horatio Cane taking off and putting on sunglasses in CSI:Miami. The most unwatchable of the three.

Fuck if I’m even going to mention CW’s Monday night schedule.

Fox gives us another season of HOUSE, followed by another season of HOUSE with Tim Roth. Oh, and Jennifer Beals is on the show. I’m kind of beyond House, now. I’ll watch it in repeats, but I won’t bother to DVR it. Lie to Me*, the House with Roth, appeals as much as plantar’s warts and reflux. So, Fox is a skip for Monday night.

NBC gives us another installment of Heroes. Honestly, if it weren’t for Greg “Grunny” Grunberg’s sexuality, his incessant cries of “Yowsa!”, and his underplayed, (and unfortunately underutilized character), I’d give up entirely. I’m extraordinarily tired of the Petrelli good/evil plotlines, the Sylar good/evil plotlines, the Hiro losing his power plotlines, and the Claire-Daddy issue plotlines. I guess I am tired of the tired old plotlines. The most interesting story line they played was one that never played out – with the alternate version of the future. That dystopic look was awesome and they should have gone balls-out with it. Instead, they wimped out. I’ve pretty much given up on Heroes. I don’t know if I can swallow another volume. Sorry, Grunny. If it turns out to be good, I’ll get it on Netflix or On Demand or something, but I won’t waste my Monday DVRing on it ever again. I’ve been duped too many times. I think there is another show on after that – yes, Trauma. Trauma is a drama (hah) about paramedics. I think I saw this before – it was called Emergency! or Third Watch or something like that. Really, I have no use for that show. If I want to see real heroes I’ll go talk to some firefighters or volunteer EMT’s in my own town. They are far more entertaining anyway. I’d also include Jay Leno’s show in the Ten spot, but I refuse to acknowledge his existence until Andy Hallet is properly honored.

So, that is the schmaltz and shit filled Monday evening, and by this blogger’s reckoning, Monday night is owned by CBS, but barely. My advice is to tape/DVR the two best things on that night (and my vote goes to How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory) then go out and dump some money into the economy or volunteer at a soup kitchen. Either way, you are in for more entertainment and excitement dodging H1N1 than sitting on your couch wasting your brain on TV. My brain is fired just talking about one day of the new season, so the next six will have to come in installments. I know, you’re quivering with anticipation. . . like Jell-O™ (brand gelatin).

NEXT: Tuesday Night belongs to the Visitors. . .

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Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

So my estimation that I would return here after the bar exam was slightly exaggerated. Fortunately for you, this isn’t the standard “OMG I’ve been so busy” post, where I list all the various things that have been distracting me, and make vague (and finally fruitless) promises to start blogging again. Instead, I’m going to regale you with tales of my new “big project,” which is – unlike almost every idea I’ve ever had – actually taking off.

It’s called Grassroots Skeptics. It’s a volunteer organization to help skeptics find, start and manage groups of reason-minded folks at the local level.

In case you’re new here, I try my damnedest to live a life grounded in reason and critical thinking. I try to understand arguments, weigh evidence and research things, instead of relying on kneejerk, biased opinions (my own included).

The idea behind Grassroots Skeptics is to take that philosophy and turn it into outreach. Rather than sit around patting myself on the back for being super smrt, I want to use my energy to help people understand why reasoning skills are so necessary, and how they can learn to think critically a little more often.

There are a lot of local skeptics groups meeting all over the place, providing social support for skeptics, and conducting outreach and education in their communities. But most of them are kind of operating in a little geographic bubble. My big – and hopefully not insane – idea is to get them working together a little bit more, sharing idea and strategies, and making it easier for them to connect to new members. If they can get advice and guidance on how to tackle a particular issue, instead of starting from scratch, maybe we can make their outreach a little more effective.

It’s a lot of planning and coordination and information gathering right now, but we’re getting a lot of positive feedback. The response has really been gratifying; now, I just have to turn that into useful action.

Our first big milestone is the rollout of our new website, at http://grassrootsskeptics.org. We’ve got a sad little placeholder site right now, but we’ve got a shiny, feature packed version (almost) in the tubes and ready to launch. The new site goes live on Friday, September 4th. If you’ve got any interest in the future of mankind, or if you don’t hate babies, swing by next Friday and take a look.

In the meantime, you can hook up with Grassroots Skeptics on Twitter and Facebook, and get more information through our sign-up sheet, or by email to GRSkeptics@gmail.com.

So I hope you’ll come check out the site next Friday. And forgive my lack of blogging activity. I’d love to say that I’ll be back soon, but I think we both know that’s not true. Don’t make me lie to you, baby.

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Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

These little interstitials are about the only thing keeping me from hijacking a bus and driving it through the front window of a dynamite factory, so you’re going to have to put up with them, at least for the next week or so. After that, I’ll either have time to put together a proper post, or I’ll be curled up in a ball somewhere trying to figure out how I’m going to pay my student loans by begging for change at the bus stop.

• I think I’ve discovered a heretofore unrecognized pattern in my behavior. Stress makes me apathetic. The more tense I get about something, the harder it is to give a rat’s ass about it. I think my brain has a built in “who gives a fuck?” valve, to prevent me going apeshit.
• There is no easy or convenient way to move from one house to another, short of setting all your accumulated stuff on fire and starting over. And replacing it all gets expensive.
• Things law school has taken away from me, #703: the ability to skip a software license agreement without feeling guilty. Nobody actually slogs through the entire End User License Agreement after downloading the newest version of iTunes. It borders on the physically impossible; by the time you’ve finished reading the last EULA, a new version of the software will be ready to download. But after three years of law school, I can’t help feeling a little ashamed of myself when I skip the text and click on the button to (falsely) indicate that I have read and agreed to abide by the onerous terms.
• It’s amazing what a difference 20 minutes can make re: the density of assholes and elbows on a morning bus. When I take the 7:30 bus, it’s packed all the way into Center City. This morning, I dragged my swiftly sagging ass out of bed earlier, and made it onto the 7:10. There were half a dozen of us. I was able to read my outline without holding my bag on my lap, or worrying about socking somone in the kidney when I turned a page.
• I had a dream the other night that consisted entirely of reading emails from a Twitter friend with whom I’ve never actually exchanged email correspondence. They were entirely mundane and unexciting, and yet the whole thing was the emails on the screen. I neither looked away from the monitor, nor switched to another task. Which is how I know it was a dream; IRL, I’m switching between windows like a hummingbird with a meth habit.
• At the urging of dispensary owners, the city of Oakland is planning to tax medical marijuana. Hopefully this will vindicate the claim that taxing marijuana sales would provide a significant boost to government budgets. Not that this would be enough to get this country to abandon its insane prohibitionary fervor, but it might be a start.

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Bar exam, bar exam, blah blah blah bar exam. Blah blah bar exam, blah bar, blah exam. Bar exam, blah blah BAR EXAM! B-b-b-baaaaaaaaar eeeexxxxaaaaaaaaammmm. Bar exam.

• I listen to my iPod on the bus to work, and then whatever shitty lite rock song is playing at the corner store where I buy my bagel invariably gets jammed in my brain like a barbed fishing hook all day. Today’s ear-syphilis was that Natasha Bedingfield song that appears to be about a lazy author standing outside in the rain. It actually isn’t a bad tune, but it was utterly ruined by 18 months as the backing track for every commercial that was even vaguely woman-themed. It feels as though my brain is trying to sell me hygiene products with ribbons of pink lotion in them.
• My post-bar exam project is gathering steam. The biggest problem now is that I find myself making notes and brainstorming about it when I should be studying. As though I needed to make concentrating more difficult.
• If you start a group that has regular meetings, don’t assume that everyone will just know when you meet. If you start a local chapter of Ball-fondling Enthusiasts, and you don’t make at least a cursory attempt to get the word out, you waive the right to get pissed off if someone organizes a meeting of Testicle Ticklers that conflicts with your meeting time.
• You know you’re a new parent when the sexiest thing your spouse can say to you is “the baby is asleep.”
• Also, if you’ve recently gotten to work before noticing that you have spit-up on your shirt.
• Scotch exists on a continuum of quality that varies, from terrible to transcendent, more wildly than perhaps any other drink.
• If you simultaneously release your crappy homemade movie on YouTube for free, and a video-on-demand site where people have to pay to watch it, nobody is going to watch the paid version. Entertainment consumers do not exist for the sole purpose of sending you beer money. If you put a trailer on YouTube, you might convince a few people to pay for the full movie. But only if it’s, you know, good. (Chances are that it’s not.)
• If we’re all created in the image of god, god must have a remarkably fluid morphology.
• In fact, god must be like the end of Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White” video. Only not dominated by thin, attractive people.
• Now that we’ve moved, the people on the new bus I take to work are, on average, far more attractive than the people on my old bus. Then again, I’m spending most of the ride with my nose buried in an outline, so my gaze may just be coincidentally lighting on better looking people when I happen to glance up.
• After you move a clock radio, you should always check its settings before you go to bed. Otherwise, you’re liable to wake up 45 minutes late because the radio station is no longer tuned in, the volume is turned almost all the way down, and you’ve been sleeping with a gentle whisper of static.

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So I just heard that I did not get the awesome part time writing job that I was convinced I had landed. According to the guy who interviewed me, I was a close runner-up for both of the open positions. Economic conditions being what they are, however, unusually qualified applicants applied for both slots, and wound up nudging me out.

It’s hard not to feel bitter. Three years of law school, and I’m back working part time at the place I left to go to law school. But I don’t have time for self-pity. The bar exam is in 10 days, so I’ve got to cram every law ever into my head in the next week or so.

So I thought I’d let you all pity me, instead. Leave your condolences, or your “stop your whining” remonstrations in the comments.

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Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

The bar exam looms ever larger, like a long zoom from orbit to the surface of a planet. To help me maintain my increasingly fragile sanity, here is another mishmash of thoughts and musings that have been sloshing around in my brainmeats between attempts at re-reading my Contracts outline.

• There is a charter high school between the bus stop and work. There are two flags hanging in its front window, reminiscent of the championship banners professional sports teams hang in their stadiums. They tout the fact (and I wish I were making this up) that the school achieved “Adequate Yearly Progress” in 2007 and 2008. Huzzah for mediocrity! Seriously, if that’s the standard for big ass banners these days, then I need to get to the big ass banner store ASAP.
• I once had the idea to start a line of “Big Ass” merchandise, selling oversized versions of everyday objects. It started during that period in the 90s when people were wearing those jeans with legs so wide you could smuggle farm animals in them. I was going to sell “Big Ass” jeans, and move on to t-shirts, powertools, truck tires, and anything else that was amenable to gross oversizing. Once again, the lack of start-up capital proved to be my undoing.
• At work, I just added a title to our inventory called The Facesitter From Ipanema. Aside from being an awkward jape on the title of the bossa nova classic “The Girl From Ipanema, ” it raises an obvious question. If a woman is straddling your face, coercing you to perform cunnilingus by the threat of asphyxiating you with her buttocks and thighs, does it really matter what town she’s from?
• Speaking of adequate progress, I spelled “asphyxiating” right on the first try. Hello, big ass banner store? Yes, I need to add something to my order.
• How much dust has to accrete on a mug left in an office kitchen before it is considered abandoned and available for common use? I use visible discoloration as a guideline. If the dust alters or obscures the color of the mug, then, if I clean it, I feel entitled to use it.
• Sadly, I forgot the second “c” in “accrete.” Cancel my big ass banner order.
• Getting used to where the light switches are may be the most prickly, annoying thing about getting adjusted to a new apartment. If I turn on the light in the hall closet instead of turning out the light in the living room one more frickin’ time, I’m going to puke on someone.
• I am putting together a project for after the bar exam is over. It is, by virtue of its size, a necessarily collaborative venture. I will have to lock my inner control freak in the closet for awhile.
• I always have the best ideas when I’m far too busy to possibly develop them adequately.

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Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

A small selection of thoughts that I’ve been accumulating as I study for the bar exam and move house in the same month. My brains are constantly on the verge of a complete work stoppage.

• The toilet paper in our office manages to be simultaneously as abrasive as sandpaper and as diaphanous as tissue. If I were a materials scientist, there’d be a research paper in there somewhere. (It’d probably be more comfortable to wipe with, too.)
• As I get older, I am slowly drifting to the west. At the current rate (assuming an average life expectancy), I am going to die somewhere just east of Pittsburgh.
• I have an irrational dislike of URLs that contain more than two words. Syllables don’t seem to matter, but a three-word website address will make me (mentally) throw up in my mouth a little bit.
• Bananas are tasty and nutritious. However, you have to eat them in the 45 minute window between green and overripe. Although if you miss it, it’s a good excuse to make banana bread, which is also yummy.
• Incidentally, I sometimes start typing the word “banana,” and I forget to stop.
• Bananananana. (EDIT: It turns out I unconsciously ripped off this bit from Demetri Martin. Whoops.)
• My favorite legal term that sounds dirty but isn’t: “attenuation of the taint.”
• An old friend recently suggested that I should be friends with his wife on Facebook. Except she doesn’t like me. The three of us shared an apartment back in the early 2000’s; we had some personality conflicts, and she’s treated me with polite but unmistakable disdain ever since. Which is fine, really. I’m sure that living with me wears the shine off of whatever minimal charm I possess pretty fast. I try to be friendly and respectful on the rare occasion when I see them, so as not to exacerbate the situation needlessly. But I’m not laying awake nights bemoaning her distaste for me. The whole thing is passing curious. Has my friend not noticed that his wife is unimpressed by my shenanigans? Or have I misread the situation, mistaking some sort of general prickliness for individual dislike?
• I have a minor fascination with the variability in the ways that people gain weight. Some people just expand all over, while others seem to concentrate it all in one region. There was a woman on the bus yesterday morning who had a fairly normal torso perched atop a vast expanse of buttocks and thighs. She looked like an apple with an action figure sticking out of it.
• My weight gain is all happening in my midsection, while my limbs are as skinny as ever. They’re like four bendy straws jammed into a potato. Luckily, there is a comfortable sheath of fat growing around my heart, so I feel like I’m being snuggled from the inside.

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Me too! [Insert big, fat frowny face.] But there’s good news! We are not alone, and I hope to prove that on Saturday, July 11.

TAM 7 will be reaching its climax Saturday evening, with parties galore… So why don’t those of us who are stuck in the TriState area get together for drinks and banter? There are so many skeptics in the area that I have yet to meet, so this is as good a time as any!

I was thinking Sugar Mom’s in Old City. Drinking Skeptically with Skeptic Philly meets at Tattooed Mom’s on South Street, so I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. To avoid confusion, we’re planning on Sugar Mom’s. Now I know some of you will be in atTAMdence, so I’d like for as many of us as possible to get out for an evening. Just think of all the fun they’ll be having in Las Vegas without us! We can have fun, too!!

You don’t have to be a drinker. I’ll be sitting there with a Shirley Temple [They're good - don't hate.]. Just come and hang out for a while with really cool people. They’ve got arcade games, a pool table and lots of really cool stuff to look at, and if you really need extra motivation, I’ll see if I can save the bumper car seat for you. I said it – bumper. car. seat.

Once I get an idea of how many of us there will be, I’ll figure out the rest of the deets (time, etc) and update. We’ll probably want to get there not-too-late, as it’s Old City and it gets crazy on the weekend.

Who’s in?!

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

Okay kids. Studying for the Pennsylvania Bar Exam, getting ready to move into a new apartment and helping to raise my infant daughter are kicking my ass. I’m sure that the lack of regular activity around here hasn’t escaped your notice. Based on the response to the few posts I have managed to cobble together, I don’t think anyone has been too devastated.

Given all that, I think it’s time to make it official. Suburban Panic and I are going on hiatus, at least until after I take the bar. And I’m doing it right, too. I’m uninstalling my Twitter client, ignoring Facebook and Livejournal, unsubscribing from most of my podcasts and purging all but the most vital channels from my feed reader. I may pop up once in awhile (here or on Mario Kart Wii-Fi), but only sporadically, and never for an extended period of time.

In the meantime, I’m keeping a small room open in the back of my brain, where I’ll be haphazardly storing ideas about what I’d like to do with the site once I’m not staring down the barrel of the most important test I’m ever likely to take. If you have suggestions for things you’d like to see, or things you’d claw your eyes out to avoid looking at, feel free to leave them in the comments. For urgent matters, I am available by email at oskar[at]suburbanpanic[dot]com.

See you in August.

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

In the beginning was the Cause. And the Cause was without purpose or agency. And the Cause was neither Good nor Evil. Rather, it just Was. Immediately thereafter came the Effect. There was neither intention not design, yet the Effect followed inexorably and inevitably from the Cause, because that is How Things Work.

The Effect in turn became a cause, which begat another effect, which became a cause and begat another effect, and so on and so forth. A mind-boggling number of causes (and effects) came and went. Things continued along like this for an Exceedingly Long Time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

This is a collection of random thoughts. They’re both too short for a real post and too long for Twitter. Some of them might also be too big for me to devote the time to explore them thoroughly, but that would be admitting that I can’t do everything at once.

- The National Bone Marrow Donor Program is having a donor drive. Until June 22nd, they are covering the $100 cost to add new donors to the registry. It’s free, and the life you save could be Waldorf Van Buren’s.

- Suburban Panic supports the brave citizens campaigning for democracy in Iran. There were obviously some serious shenanigans going on with the vote counting. That said, we need to at least be prepared for the possibility that a legitimate recount will end with a numerical victory for Amhedinijad. I’m not saying that the ballots couldn’t have been stuffed as well, just that the issue might not be resolved by simply counting the votes.

- Even in cool weather, the combined body heat of two adults and one dog warms up our bedroom pretty quickly, and we wind up having to turn the air conditioner on at night. Why don’t we just open the windows? Because random people - sometimes gaggles of adolescents, sometimes adults on cellphones - often wander down our street shouting obscenities at odd hours. I am so looking forward to moving.

- The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund put out a call for volunteers during Wizard World Philadelphia. I should spend the weekend studying, but I sent them an email volunteering for Saturday. I haven’t heard from them yet, sadly. Here’s hoping they get back to me. Why no, I hadn’t thought about how awesome it would be for me, a recent law school graduate, to network with a group that assists with legal defense for comic book artists and writers. Why do you ask?

- There is a woman who rides around our neighborhood selling produce from her car. She announces her presence (and her wares) with a megaphone or loudspeaker of some sort. She has various seasonal specials, but she is always selling (in her apathetic, nasal monotone) “red ripe tomatoes, red ripe strawberries, red ripe bananas.” I am sorely tempted to flag her down and buy something, just so I can see what a red, ripe banana looks like. My feeling is that a banana that is one cannot be the other, unless something is very, very wrong, either with the fruit or your color vision.

- Wiley Drake is praying for the death of President Obama. I’ve said it before; Drake sincerely believes that his actions can cause the death of another human being. There’s a strong argument that he should be imprisoned for conspiracy to commit murder.

- My daughter’s pediatrician has been talking about a clicking sound in her left hip since she was born. After her two-month appointment, he sent us for an ultrasound. After the scan, the tech told us that the radiologist said everything was normal. At her four-month appointment, our pediatrician still hadn’t received the ultrasound report from the hospital. When he finally got a copy, it said that there was a minor, but clear, dysplasia in her hip. Isn’t ”dysplasia” intended to be specifically distinct from ”normal”  I do not know in what universe these words are synonyms, but it must be a confusing place, populated by people with elaborate leg braces that they are forbidden to talk about.

- We went to an orthopedist today, who sent us back for another ultrasound. This time, when they used the word “normal,” we were able to follow up with the orthopedist, who presumably knows that dysplasia isn’t. We were assured that all is right with her hip, and given the green light to exhale. A follow-up x-ray will happen at six months, but nothing else is necessary. I suppose now is as good a time as any to admit that, if she had been required to wear a brace, I was planning to brag incessantly about my cyborg baby.

- My video lecture has loaded. Back into the study hole.

EDIT: Holy crap, the woman lecturing on essay writing looks like she’s about 17. Good advice, but MAN I feel ancient.

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

• U.S. flexes funding power to squash WHO report showing that we’re complete morons about drug use and prevention. (The correct spelling of  ”prohibition” is S-T-U-P-I-D.)
• Simon Singh, who knows something on the subject, on how UK libel laws are stifling science. (I think by “stifling” he meant “beating with a brick.”)
• Remember the ozone hole? It’s still there, and it’s preventing the ocean from absorbing C02. (I expect that my childhood home in South Jersey will have an ocean view someday.)
• Pastor Wiley Drake prays for his god to kill the President of the United States. (And atheists are immoral scum.)

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

This is just a note to let those of you who follow our Livejournal feed that we’re now offering a new option to get Suburban Panic content on LJ. The current syndication feed is okay, but it’s got some flaws that glare like George Hrab’s head. Posts only last a few weeks before they disappear into the ether; I often miss comments beause there’s no option to get email notice when you leave them.

In order to make your experience more friendly, I’ve retrained my old personal journal to mirror the website posts. The posts will stay there as long as Livejournal contines to exist (so we’ve got at least a week until the hamsters eat all the bubble gum and twine). And I’ll get emails when you leave a comment, so I can respond before senility sets in (again, you’ve probably got about a week).

Suburban Panic supports freedom of choice; you can stick with the syndicated feed, or add the new journal version to your friends list. (If you were already friends with lbbastard, you’re all set.) Either way, thanks for reading.