Christmas Week at Rancho Non-Sequitor

Life moves at a different pace in the week between Christmas and New Years at Rancho non-sequitor. Yesterday, we had our annual trip to the Sears to get the picture of the kiddies done. The Dear One figured out quite by accident that the only sane time to go and do this was the day after Christmas, when the Sears has the relative peace and quiet of a I-81 trailer meth lab the day after a Hank Williams Jr. concert. The family tradition then calls for a trip to our local pizza place, followed by a trip to Barnes and Noble for the kids to start using the gift cards they got from relatives. All in all a good day.

More coming later: a review of the alt-history masterpiece The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (which created the whole new sub-genre of the memoir as alt-history); a resounding bitch-slapping neener to the dubious fools and tools in my profession who fell hook, line, sinker, and Vanguard of the Proletariat membership card for the whole FBIGestapo Interlibrary loan story (what should have tipped other people off to the utter bogosity of the story were 1. the idea of a college library not having multiple nay dozens of copies of the works of Mao, and B. the idea of a kid from the UMass system ordering a book through ILL instead of just accessing it off of the internet.)

A quick glance around the blogroll: the Colossus has way too much time on his hands, modifying Madden 06 so as to play the Notre Dame Bowl Game ahead of time. Modifying Madden is a sacrilege! (It's heartwarming to know we are #2 on Google for "Madden 05 Lesbian Bar fight cheerleaders")Plus, it's not like it's something culturally useful like creating new scenarios for Age of Empires: the Conquerors or something.

Pity poor Beth who has faced up to the darkest depths of her addiction to those unmerciful drug lords at Creative Memories----to paraphrase Steppenwolf, gawd damn the scrapbooking pusher man!

The first step, Beth, is to admit you have the problem---we're just happy you realized it before you swallowed the kool-aid.

Just because it's a religious holiday doesn't mean the incessant slime sewer of celebrity gossip dries up: Oprah flipped the bird. Which reminds me of one of my favorite jokes an aircraft engineer friend used to tell: they were designing a new windshield for a jet aircraft and wanted to test that it could survive collisions with birds, so they bought a large canon like device to shoot a bird carcas at the appropriate speed at the window to see if it would not break. For fear of getting into trouble with environmentalists by using live birds, they decided to use turkey carcasas--safe, and plentiful. They put my buddy in charge of it because he was just out of college and, well, who the heck wants to clean up after it, right? After about a month, and several dozen busted windscreens and some serious cost overruns to the company, the director of the program finally came to the floor to see what was causing the failure. Watching the test---loading the turkey, shooting it out of the cannon at the plane mock-up, busting through the window, creating a hell of a mess, he took one look at my buddy and said, "You f*&^%&*^ dumbass----THE TURKEY IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEFROSTED!"

I don't know why that joke always cracks me up.

And last for now, Red has a great roundup on the birthday of film great Marlene Dietrich.