This Week in Nelson, volume 3, number 8

Fucking gorgeous weather outside today. I hope everyone in this corner of the world is enjoying it. This week we’ve got the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy (not the band), a cure for the common cold, a little college basketball talk, the speed of emotion and a whole new type of AIDS. Let’s do it.

Birthday shout-out to Gaus! And Corey! Or is Corey’s next week? It’s soon, that’s all I know. Two more dudes turning 30 as my own 3-0 fast approaches. Death is nipping at our heels, gentlemen (and ladies). Gird up your loins.

Books read this week:
-Still reading The View from the Seventh Layer by, Kevin Brockmeier
-Started reading Infinity Blues by, Ryan Adams

I’m still being really lazy with the reading. I need to get my head in the game.

Random out-of-context quotes of the week:
--“Can I wear the Scream mask? The mask from Scream? When I’m doing you from behind?”
--“You know, that’s how the plague started, back in the day. It’s from a little disgusting birdbath in someone’s backyard that rats made sex to birds in it and created a whole new type of AIDS.”

The O’Reilly Factor for Kids book quote(s) of the week:
-CURRENTLY UNDER RECONSTRUCTION. PLEASE EXCUSE OUR MESS!

Interesting news articles of the week:
-“It was a good week for an outdoor barbecue when a trailer truck on Utah’s I-15 spilled its load of 40,000 pounds of hamburger patties, and then two and a half hours later another truck on Utah’s I-84 spilled its load of beer.” (What a waste that it happened in Utah.)
-“Scientists have unraveled the genetic code of the common cold, making a cure possible within a few years. Teams of genetic scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and two other universities deciphered the genetic sequences of 99 strains of the rhinovirus, organizing them into 15 branches. They found that while these viral strains all have a different sequence of genes, they are remarkably similar in what researchers called ‘the guts’ of the virus. That offers a target for drugs that would block the cold viruses’ replication or impact on the body. ‘We are now quite certain that we see the Achilles’ heel, and that a very effective treatment for the common cold is at hand,’ researcher Stephen Liggett of the University of Maryland School of Medicine tells The New York Times. Pharmaceutical experts warned, though, that if development of such a drug is extremely expensive, drug companies might not commit resources because most consumers or insurance companies would decline to pay $50 or $100 for a cold cure.” (Go science! And why the fuck would it have to cost $50 or $100? Even if it’s expensive to develop, you could sell that shit for $20 and eventually you would make a fucking fortune. People aren’t gonna stop getting sick. Think about the future, people.)

Something(s) I’m tired of/ mad at:
- My car’s engine. It was struggling at the end of last week and the check engine light came on, so I had to take it in and get it overhauled, which cost a chunk of cash. Fucking cars.
-Medical billing. My operation was almost two months ago and I’m still waiting to find out how much it cost. I know the hospital charges were about nine grand, but the insurance company hasn’t hacked it down, yet, and I really want to know what it’s gonna take to be done with it.
-Being sick. I caught a cold last week, and while I’m a lot better now, there’s still some gunk in my sinuses. Both my cats had colds, too, which was weird. Can cats catch people colds? Can people catch cat colds? I just don’t know. But I would gladly drop a Jackson to be all better.
-Texas retiring Kevin Durant’s number. Not that I care that much, but that’s kind of fucking bush league. He was a great player, sure, and he won a bunch of awards, but he was also a kid who played for one year on a team that didn’t win either the regular season or tournament conference titles and didn’t even make the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament. Actually retiring his number, to me, that just says that Texas’s tradition as a basketball school is a joke.

Something(s) I’m delighted by:
-KU beating Oklahoma. Sure, Blake Griffin wasn’t playing, but I’ll still take the win and the sole possession of the number one spot in the Big 12. And Collins dropping threes like a fucking 3-point robot. We’ve still got Missouri and Texas at home, but those are totally winnable. I ask you to point out another team who lost their starting five from the previous year and still rocked the shit out of their conference the next year. We keep this up and we’ll have a pretty great seed come tournament time. Fuck yeah, KU.

On that note, I feel like a should give a little shout-out to my K-State peeps for K-State sitting at fourth in the conference, despite also fielding a young team after a lot of major departures. I’ve always been of a mind that the KU/K-State rivalry is something of a fraternal one, that I always want to beat them head-to-head, and finish better than them, but that when it has no bearing on KU I’m always willing to give them my support, within reason.

Something(s) I found really kind of odd:
-That they made a new Street Fighter movie. And that it’s the only new movie coming out this week. Next week is Watchmen, though, so I’m actually going to have to go watch a screening for the first time since November. I hope I remember how.
-Today’s weather report told me that the wind today was “CALM at calm mph.” What’s calm mph? Is there an angry mph? Or an amused mph? How about sexually confused mph? How fast is that? Well science?

This Week in Answers to Your This Week in Questions This Week!
--“Why, when I need to make a payment directly to Capitol Federal, do I have to mail them a check, or take it directly to their HQ in Topeka? I mean, really. When I asked about making a payment over the phone with my Visa debit card, I was told “they don’t have the ability to process that sort of transaction by phone.” As in, they are unequipped to take my card number and run it through, charging the appropriate amount and settling the matter once and for all. And they’re a bank. Really?”
-Next time just tell them you’re Jewish.
--“How does one treat or cure vagina aversion?”
-I guess it would depend on verifying the level of vagina aversion, and then following the principle of feed a cold, starve a fever. Or is it the other way around? Either way, more or less vagina would be called for, depending on the severity of the condition. Perhaps some kind of confrontation therapy, like where someone who’s afraid of snakes is put in a box full of snakes, but with vaginas. Perhaps the answer is a new reality show, Vagina Factor. I’ll make some calls.

Caught the first couple episodes for some new shows recently. The new Joss Whedon show, Dollhouse, is pretty solid. I’m interested in it, for sure, but it still kind of needs to find its legs, I think. I’ll say the good thing about Whedon is that he always strikes an excellent balance between drama and comedy, and between action and character-driven narrative, and my one complaint about Dollhouse so far would have to be that the comedy isn’t so much a factor as of yet. The other new show I’ve been catching is East Bound & Down, that new HBO comedy with Danny McBride as a washed up asshole of a ballplayer, which is pretty solid funny. In fact, I kind of let it take over the quote section this week. Weird fucking show, but definitely good for a laugh. I think I’ll have to check out that new show Castle when it starts up in a couple weeks, too. I’m a big fan of Nathan Fillion, so I’ll see what’s up with it for his sake. Mostly I’ll just be glad when it debuts since it’s an ABC show and therefore ESPN is running ads for it fucking constantly.

Okay, the sun’s going down fast and I want to read a little before it gets too dark, so I’m going to leave you now. See you next week.

–> N.

This Week in Nelson, volume 3, number 7

All right, my laptop battery is dying, so let’s not delay. We’ve got implied vagina aversion therapy, a whole lot of lizard shit, and a questionable allotment of ad revenue. Let’s go.

Birthday shout-out to Gus! A birthday heads-up, Gaus turns 30 not this weekend but the next. If you like Gaus and/or aging and/or drinking and you are unfamiliar with his birthday plans, drop me a line and I’ll drop the science on you. Gus and Gaus!

Books read this week:
-Still reading The View from the Seventh Layer by, Kevin Brockmeier

I got shockingly little reading done this week. I have my reasons. Don’t worry about it.

Random out-of-context quotes of the week:
--“It scared me so bad that I stopped thinking about vaginas!”
--“Okay, so far our ideal party consists of: beer, fights to the death, cupcakes, blood pudding, blood, touch football, mating, charades, and yes, horse hunting.”
--“From here, the stars are a handful of white gravel on that asphalt in Illinois, a shock seeding of determined white rain on the windshield of a planet that’s late for its own wedding.”
--“115 across) Longtime beer brand” (The answer, of course, was “Pabst Blue Ribbon.” Huzzah!)

The O’Reilly Factor for Kids book quote(s) of the week:
-CURRENTLY UNDER RECONSTRUCTION. PLEASE EXCUSE OUR MESS!

Interesting news articles of the week:
-“It was a good week for either R. Sathis Raj or Sabarish Raj, Malaysian identical twins who were freed by a judge in a death-penalty case because police were unable to say which of the brothers had been caught trafficking drugs. ‘I can’t be sending the wrong person to the gallows,’ said Judge Zaharah Ibrahim.” (Man, I need me an identical twin.)
-“A 13-year-old Russian girl wrote to President Dmitri Medvedev to ask for a pet guinea pig and was forced by officials to apologize for wasting the president’s time. After newspapers reported the incident, Medvedev sent over two guinea pigs.” (Putin would have totally had her killed.)
-“Daniel Bennett, a British doctoral student, was heartbroken when janitors at Leeds University threw away a 77-pound bag of lizard dung he’d collected over seven years. ‘To some people it might have been just a bag of lizard shit,’ Bennett said, ‘but its loss altered the course of my life forever.” (Okay, so, I can see how janitors would have been like, “lizard shit? Let’s toss it,” but I can also see how they should have been “77-pounds of lizard shit? Is there a dinosaur in the lab? Maybe someone’s saving this for something.” And why did he need so much lizard shit that he’d been saving it for seven years? When was he going to have enough? What was it for, especially considering that freshness apparently wasn’t important? So many questions!)

Something(s) I’m tired of/ mad at:
-My laziness. I’m doing a poor job of wrapping up my thesis. I’m working, but not at the pace I should be. If you see me around town, and I’m not working on my thesis, feel free to give me shit. Perhaps your shame will aid as a motivating tool. Perhaps not. I just need to get things squared away so I can get the wheels in motion for my exam, which the graduate secretary alerted me is something that should be scheduled in the near future. Damn you time for continuing to move forward!
-The fact that I heard today the state of Kansas is canceling tax refunds this year and the fact that I’m not sure if my return was processed before the deadline. It’s only $70, but if I’d known when I was doing it I wasn’t going to get any money, I’d have spent less time on it. And I did my taxes as soon as I’d received all the forms I needed (a Saturday) and mailed it out as soon as I could after that (the following Monday), so cut a brother some slack.

Something(s) I’m delighted by:
-Eating pretty much normally again, without worry. Well, I’m still trying to eat more healthy than I did pre-gall bladder catastrophe, but it’s nice to be able to make a conscious decision about whether something is healthy or unhealthy, not whether it will cause hours of debilitating pain. My mom even made me a chocolate pie, which, her chocolate pie is one of my all-time favorite things and I was pretty much unable to have any when she made it around the holidays. So good. And to eat Pizza Shuttle again is fucking awesome. And Five Guys. And wings. And Averill Follies at Perkins. Food is fucking awesome, no getting around it. I have witnessed the downside of overdoing it a couple times, though, which isn’t a big deal, but a little shitty. I won’t get into it here, save to say that “shitty” is a proper adjective. I’m gonna get me some K fry for dinner here soon. Huzzah for food!
-Chuck! What with my dissatisfaction with Heroes, Chuck has totally become the show I enjoy most on Monday nights. It’s a fucking romp. Check it out if you haven’t, it comes recommended.

Something(s) I found really kind of odd:
-That Sprite commercial where dudes keep jumping into each other and turning into a shower of Sprite. I’ve already discussed this with a few of you, so I won’t examine it to death, but what the fuck? It bugs me for several reasons: why do people want to be showered in Sprite? Why do people want to die to become Sprite? Why does Sprite want to insinuate that their product is made of people? But I find it more odd than maddening because: who are the ad wizards who came up with this one? Who are their bosses who thought it was good and okayed it to be produced? Who are the focus groups that responded favorably to it? Who are the executives who were impressed with it and shelled out money to put it on the air? Who are these people?

This Week in Answers to Your This Week in Questions This Week!
-I got nothing. The questions are a two-way street. Those of you who aren’t Neuty and Gaus need to step your game up.

I started marathon watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer from beginning to end again recently, as I do from time to time. Goddamn I love me that show. While I would still testify to Congress that The Wire is probably still the best show ever made, Buffy is a close second, and is probably still number one in my heart. That’s just science. And it makes me angry when I look at how they handled cliffhangers, plot twists, character arcs, surprise deaths of characters, personal relationships, and balancing both real and supernatural themes as well as drama and comedy, and I realize that no show I’ve seen since has done as good a job with all that. Some have come close (The Wire, Lost, Battlestar Galactica), but I still have to give Buffy the title there. The people who do Heroes seriously need to sit down and watch some Buffy.

On a side note to Dave, have you tried to develop that film from when we met James Marsters, yet? I’m still real interested to see if those pictures come out.

All right, the battery is really going, so I’m signing off. See you next week.

–> N.

This Week in Nelson 3.6 Addendum

I realized later that while shouting-out to Gaus for his robo-murder research I should have also shouted-out to Mick for bringing the whole issue to my attention in the first place. Mick, consider yourself shouted-outed-at.

This Week in Nelson, volume 3, number 6

Yes, yes. It’s that time again. Time to penetrate your mind vagina with my word penis. But no other mental orifices, because word sodomy is still illegal. Despite my many letters to Congress.
This week we’ve got car wash conspiracies, NPH, a nefarious honeypot scheme and the best fake movie tag line ever, so let’s get going.

Birthday shout-out to ???????? I realize last week I should have dropped the shout-out to Hilary, and didn’t, so belated birthday shout-out to Hilary! I am fighting a losing shout-out battle, I realize that, but damn it, I can’t give up now. We’ve come too far. I am shout-out committed. And I’m still waiting on birthday dates from most of you. A-hem.

As a birthday side-note, I wanted to plant the seed in everyone’s heads that I will be turning 30 on the 1st of June. Unfortunately, that’s a Monday, and therefore not optimal for going out in a drinking way. But Saturday, May 30th is. So go ahead and mark your calendars now. Reminders, plans, blueprints, government secrets and experimental dress patterns to follow as the day approaches. No excuses, people. You’ve got three and a half months advance notice. We could plan D-Day in this time. Three D-Days. So don’t be surprised if we participate in an amphibious landing on Normandy beach. There better not be any German sunbathers that day. I’m just saying.

Books read this week:
-Still reading The View from the Seventh Layer by, Kevin Brockmeier
-Finished reading Smoulder by, Mark Cox

I’m still digging the Brockmeier short story book, despite my slowness at finishing it. He actually had a story that’s a literary fiction choose-your-own-adventure. Mind-blowing. The Mark Cox book was good, too. It’s his first, and I must say I like his second book better, but this one was well done, too. It’s always weird to read somebody’s earlier work later, because you can see more clearly a lot of times how they’ve polished voice and style over time. Like when I finally read Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan and realized what a continental shift Mother Night was in his style. I think his first two books (Sirens and Player Piano) are almost unrecognizable, or at least, if someone gave you a snippet of any of his other novels, I think you could identify them as Vonnegut pretty easily (if you’re familiar with him), where as those first two it would be difficult to say. These are the kinds of things I think about. When I’m not thinking about robots.

Random out-of-context quotes of the week:
--“Sure, I’m a lawyer, but that’s only because I took the bar exam in Alaska and they only have, like, four laws, and most of them are about when you can and cannot kill . . . seals.”
--“Boy, I hope those two don’t eventually have a showdown that pits family against justice.”
--“You haven’t heard anything until you’ve heard a French-speaking disc jockey say something in Chinese.”
--“How does that feel? A taste of your own dick medicine.”
--“There are monsters under New York City and only one man can stop them. One man with a pump. Bruce Willis IS Dig Dug!”
--“5 Down) Senate committee that censures its members for screwing interns and such”
--“What’s better than ass and gravy?”
--“This man is a comic genius.”
“I have been called the black Wayne Brady.”

The O’Reilly Factor for Kids book quote(s) of the week:
-Yeah, I’ve got no O’Reilly quote again this week. I’m afraid to say the O’Reilly Factor for Kids may have run its course a bit in the eight months I’ve been quoting it for you. However, I have a plan. Watch this space. Things are in the works.

Interesting news articles of the week:
-“Google Earth’s satellite imagery of the U.S. vice presidential residence in Washington D.C. was once again available uncensored after having been obscured by pixilation for the last few years while occupied by Dick Cheney.” (Finally, my vice presidential residence high society jewel heist plan can be put into motion. Damn you, Dick Cheney, for making me wait!)
-“Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit erected a six-foot statue of a shoe in honor of Muntazer al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush on his final visit to Iraq.” (It seems to me this is both funny and kind of a sad commentary on the state of Iraq that they actually made a statue of a giant shoe. I’d like to know what it’s made of. Did someone carve a shoe out of marble? Cause that would actually be kind of awesome.)
-This isn’t a news article, but I read that 16% of Americans religiously identify themselves as “atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’” which, while broadly defined, is more people than those identifying themselves as Jewish, Muslim and Hindu combined. I just found that interesting, the idea that while people are talking about us becoming a post-racial society noone is really talking about us becoming something of a post-religious society.

Something(s) I’m tired of/ mad at:
-Washing my car. I’ve washed my car three times in the last month because we keep having weather alternating between gorgeous, 60s-70s where it’s a nice time to wash the car and then cold as fuck where we get snow and my car gets wretchedly filthy. I’m thinking climate change is a conspiracy by car wash manufacturers. Damn you, brush-less wash!
-KU losing to Missouri at the last minute after leading the whole game. That was a kick in the fucking junk. Fucking hate Missouri more than anyone or anything.
-Presidents addressing the nation at primetime. I love Obama, and the economy is serious business, but why can’t addresses be an hour earlier so they don’t preempt shit? I don’t know, I feel like I’m being whiny, but what’s the difference between an address at 6 and one at 7 (central time)? None that I can see. And while I watch pretty much everything that isn’t sports on DVR or online, so commercials I catch few and far between in primetime, I did think it was funny how the networks were bitching about the address costing them millions in ad revenue to talk about economic stimulus, and how it was kind of an odd double-standard.
-Heroes. I still enjoy it okay, but I just don’t know any more. I don’t think I understand a single character arc on that entire show. And while I like the premise of this newest storyline, it would be better if it had happened back during the height of the Guantanamo Bay, War on Terror, NSA domestic-spying Bush days, not the present, and if it didn’t kind of reek of Marvel’s Civil War storyline of a couple years ago. And, I still have one big question about the last storyline (for those of you who aren’t caught up, skip down to the Something I’m delighted by). So, Papa Petrelli was the big bad guy, and they kill him by shooting him in the head. How? He took all of Peter’s powers, so he had Claire’s power, so how does one bullet kill him? Makes no fucking sense.

Something(s) I’m delighted by:
-So, I watched Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog back when it was an i-tunes download, but I recently picked up the DVD and watched it a few more times, and that motherfucker is brilliant. The funniest, saddest 30-minute supervillain musical you’ll ever see. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Seriously, if all you do is download it and watch it, it’s only two or three dollars, but the DVD has a regular commentary track and Commentary! The Musical!, which is a second musical dubbed over the whole thing. Watch it! Watch it and bask in Whedon’s continued unflinching genius.
-Neil Patrick Harris. Between his Harold and Kumar bits, How I Met Your Mother and Dr. Horrible, that man has become a national treasure in my eyes. Seriously, the plot of National Treasure 3 is just going to be Nicolas Cage trying to hang out with NPH.
-30 Rock and Lost! Those shows are fucking better than ever. Love them. That Generalissimo episode of 30 Rock was fucking sweet, and Lost, now that they’ve got the end in sight to build toward, and all the crazy time warp shit, is a fucking freight train of awesome. My one question is, a lot of these characters have shown themselves to be fairly literary. How come, when they’re trying to explain the time travel shit, someone doesn’t just explain it Slaughterhouse Five style? It seems fairly apt, especially in that episode last season where Desmond was literally “unstuck in time.” I don’t know, it just made me think.

Something(s) I found really kind of odd:
-The Denny’s commercial where the banana octopus sings about loving pancakes. It also delighted me, but not as much as it weirded me the fuck out.

This Week in Answers to Your This Week in Questions This Week!
-“So, with Brett Goddamn Favre retiring (again...), what’s the appropriate way for people to jerk him around like he did us (the fans) so many times? Can we pretend for 10 years he’s in the hall of fame, only to tell him he’s not, but he is, but he’s not, until someone’s head explodes (probably Peter King’s)?”
-First of all, kudos for including Favre’s middle name. Secondly, I would have to say we institute some kind of elaborate Crying Game, Madame Butterfly sort of situation where he is seduced by a beautiful foreign woman who either breaks his heart or turns out to be a dude, or both, leaving him emotionally wrecked. Or, we have the Farrelly brothers continually contact him about There’s Something About Mary 2 and keep scheduling shooting days with him that are pushed back again and again. And perhaps they finally do keep the shooting date which ends up being a scene where he acts with a beautiful foreign woman, where we institute the other idea. A double-tranny-whammy, if you will. And then we blow up Peter King’s head just as a punctuation, Scanners-style. I’m good at plans.

On a side note, I have to say my favorite part of the last year’s Brett Favre saga was watching the rollercoaster ride of emotion it was for Mike Greenberg on Mike and Mike.

Special historical shout-out to Gaus for doing the research on the first robot murder for me! Hooray for Gaus! Hooray for history! Hooray for robots!

And now I’ve got an intricate sexual trap to contact the Farrelly brothers about and a jewel heist to finish planning, so I will leave you again, until next week.

–> N.

Disturbing magician's sex poem

Nothing Up My Sleeves

I hover above you like a plague
of birds ready to descend
and rend your tributary
flesh as ancient oracles
await to divine what fate
your blood describes
for Thebes.

Still, you, like a magician’s
assistant lie frozen helpless on
your back, smiling bleached
teeth upward at the ceiling
so the crowd suspects
nothing, your eyes calm
heartbeat at adagio
patiently prepared to be
dismembered.

A piece of history

Apparently, January 25th was the 30th anniversary of the first human being killed by a robot. I'm guessing in self defense. Go history!

This Week in Nelson, volume 3, number 5

69 dudes! That’s right, for those of you keeping score at home, this is week 69 of This Week in Nelson! Please enjoy it with your face buried in the crotch of someone you love. This week we’ve got the Superbowl, ancient Chinese secrets, dumb motherfuckers and prophecies of the future. No time to waste. Let’s do this thing!

Birthday shout-out to no one I know of. Although apparently it was Mimi’s birthday last week, so belated birthday shout-out to Mimi! Ryan/Chad, feel free to convey my shouting-out.

Moustache shout-out to Andy Stowers who is rocking the dopest cop stache in town right now. Visit him at the Pig and bask in the golden rays of awesome emanating from his face!

Victor Continental update: Apparently last time I fucked up the dates by a day. The show will be July 17th and 18th (Friday and Saturday) at Liberty Hall at 10 pm. Mark your calendars! For real this time! Further details to come! Stay ever vigilant!

Books read this week:
-Still reading The View from the Seventh Layer by, Kevin Brockmeier
-The Romantic Dogs by, Roberto Bolano
-Started reading Smoulder by, Mark Cox

The Bolano book is his poems. I was a big fan of his short stories, and he mentions poetry a lot in those, and always identified himself as a poet, so I figured they were worth a look. There’s a blurb on the back of the book that says: “With Bolano, we encounter not only ‘fist-fucking’ but ‘feet-fucking’ in a poem that also mentions Pascal, Nazi generals, Shining Path bonfires, and a teenage hooker.” To live up to that blurb would be difficult, but Bolano performs admirably.

Random out-of-context quotes of the week:
--“I ate all my chili, Dad. Can I have some wine?”
--“When it comes to Rod Blagojevich and his hair, the sky’s the limit.”
--“Now that’s a sophisticated fucking taco.”
--“Let me just borrow from W.C. Fields: The news in the anticipation of our death as a political party is misspent. And premature.” (That was newly elected RNC Chairman Mike Steele. I feel the need to break this quote down. First of all, the actual quote he butchers is from Mark Twain, and it’s “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” a response he made to a false obituary. To my knowledge, and I did some research to check, though a lot of people have referenced it (and much more correctly) over the years, W.C. Fields never did. There was W.A. Rogers, the political cartoonist for the tabloid New York Herald, who drew a cartoon in 1912 of the G.O.P. elephant being buried alive in a ditch while saying the Mark Twain quote, but that’s the closest thing I could find to what he may have thought he was referencing. What a resplendently dumb motherfucker. Mindblowing. Sorry, I have a problem with people being stupid about Mark Twain. And speaking.)

The O’Reilly Factor for Kids book quote(s) of the week:
-I let O’Reilly have the week off so I could focus on leaving countless sexually explicit hate voicemails on the Sean Hannity hate-line. Just kidding. I only left two. But they were pretty classy, I assure you.

Interesting news articles of the week:
-“A former British Ministry of Defense official revealed that the Royal Air Force has fired upon UFOs several times ‘with little effect.’ Nick Pope said RAF planes had had numerous encounters with mysterious aircraft, and had only fired when a UFO was ‘deemed to be a threat.’” (At what point is a UFO deemed to be a threat? And if you observe it to the point where you can make a determination as to its intent, shouldn’t you be able to give a fairly accurate description of it? Damn, British pilots. Your egos are writing checks your bodies can’t cash.)
-“A Florida company is scrapping plans to sell a doll named after murdered toddler Caylee Anthony. The 18-inch ‘Inspirational Caylee Sunshine Doll’ was to retail for $29.99 and would sing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ just as 2-year-old Caylee was known to do. In response to public outrage, Showbiz Promotions canceled the doll, insisting that it had simply hoped to raise awareness of child predation.” (Wow, America. Just wow. And check out the name of the doll. Did they outsource that to a Japanese ad agency? Inspirational Caylee Sunshine Doll! Super Happy Sing Time!)

Something I’m tired of/ mad at:
-Motherfuckers not paying their taxes. Seriously, pay your fucking taxes. Cause someday, the President’s gonna ask you to be on his cabinet, and you’ll say, yes, of course, and then the news is gonna be all, like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Motherfucker didn’t pay his capital gains taxes when he inherited his dead father’s collection of bejeweled cockrings. Then the President looks like an asshole. Seriously, pay your fucking taxes.
-Motherfuckers not knowing what a camera phone is. Seriously Michael Phelps, there’s these things that everybody over the age of five has in their pockets that they use to make phone calls and take pictures of things they want everybody to know they saw. Like a record-breaking Olympic gold-medalist taking bong rips at a house party. I mean, it’s a sad world where we can’t take bong rips wherever we want to, but that’s the world we live in.

Something I’m delighted by:
-That I can take bong rips at any house party I want because nobody knows who the fuck I am. Until thirty years from now where the President wants me to be on his cabinet, and someone comes forward and says, “hey, check out this picture of Nelson taking bong rips thirty years ago.” And I’ll say, “Yeah, but at least I paid my taxes. And pot’s totally legal now, so let’s go take my Senate Confirmation bong rips so we can get to work on that new treaty between us and our robot allies so we have their full support in defeating the rising zombie army.” The future is gonna be CRAZY!

Something I found really kind of odd:
-My vision of the future. Because there’s no way it takes thirty years for the zombie apocalypse to begin. It’s coming people! Repent! Repent, for the hour of our doom is at hand!

This Week in Answers to Your This Week in Questions This Week!
-“My friends and I received the moon fortune as well (“Maybe you can live on the moon in next century”). They think the implication is that the reader will have a long, awesome life. I believe it is an insult, the Chinese equivalent of telling someone to take a hike, but a hike not yet technologically possible, suggesting some sort of undesirable future-hike. Obviously, the Chinese plan on turning the moon into an old-folks home. Can you verify this?”
-To my knowledge, there are two valid interpretations. The first is in fact an insult, a polite Chinese way of telling someone to take a flying fuck at the moon. The second is much more likely and far more diabolical. As everyone knows, China has been secretly ruled for the past 800 years by a shadow government headed by the immortal Dr. Fu, a nefarious master of science, kung fu and dark wizardry. It is a little known fact that he possesses hidden lairs in the Chinese countryside, in a hollowed-out volcano, on an uncharted Caribbean island, at the bottom of the sea and in the basement of a P.F. Chang’s in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The next logical step in supervillain hideouts is a moonbase, which intelligence gathered over the last six years tells us is in fact Dr. Fu’s ultimate agenda. So, the implication of the fortune is actually that there will in fact be an operational moonbase in the not too distant future and that the reader of the fortune may soon be indoctrinated into Dr. Fu’s Blue Dragon Society, either as a lowly henchman, a scientist, or another person with a specific skill set which the Doctor can twist to his own mad ends, and that said reader will find himself stationed on the Doctor’s moonbase to further whatever machinations the Doctor has upon the lunar surface. To that effect, receiving this fortune has a bittersweet connotation, at best.

Speaking of Asian people, has anyone else played this game Hidato? It’s another one of those Japanese non-math number puzzle games, like Sudoku. It’s pretty sweet. It’s a puzzle that kind of has a crossword construction with a bunch of random numbers scattered around it and a lot of blank spaces and you have to fill in the blanks with numbers so all the numbers progress around the puzzle in order, from 1 to whatever, where each number touches the number before it and after it horizontally, vertically or diagonally. It’s a good time. Check it out if you like puzzles. There’s books, and places on the internet, and if you get the LJW there’s one every Monday in that weird “Go” insert. I recommend it.

That was a pretty sweet Superbowl on Sunday, from what I remember through the haze of PBR and corndogs (awesome corndogs, Dave!). A hell of a fourth quarter. But damn if the refs didn’t fuck up the end of it. I admit I was pulling for the Cardinals from an underdog, hadn’t won a championship since 1947 when they were in Chicago, I like Kurt Warner standpoint, but ultimately I had no dog in the hunt. The Steelers winning was fine by me. But two things happened at the end there that bugged me. First, Santonio Holmes not being penalized for using the ball as a celebration prop. It’s not a rule I agree with, I like touchdown celebrations, but it is a rule, and for as many penalties as the refs were calling all game, the fact that they didn’t call that is kind of bullshit. So, the Cardinals should have been fifteen yards further downfield than they were. And then, the Kurt Warner “fumble” with five seconds left which looked pretty clearly like an incomplete pass, which has been called an incomplete pass before under much more dubious circumstances. And I don’t necessarily have fault with them calling it a fumble on the field, but you absolutely have to review that. A fumble with five seconds left in the Superbowl, even if it’s the most clear-cut, obvious fumble in the world, it’s the last five seconds in the Superbowl. You have to review that play. Even talking to Brent, a huge Steelers fan for those who don’t know, after the game, he admitted he had kind of a sour taste in his mouth over winning on that play without it even being reviewed. And not to say it cost the Cardinals the game. They still would have had to throw a pass into the end zone with five seconds left to win, which is an unlikely outcome even with Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald, but still, they should have had that opportunity, and ultimately should have had it with fifteen fewer yards to go. Great game. Bullshit ending.

Went and caught Taken with Loren on Monday. I watched the movie Taken in the presence of Loren. There isn’t a movie called Taken with Loren. At least, not yet. Pretty good stuff. Liam Neeson was badasstastic. Apparently he’s equally able to kill droids with a lightsaber as he is to kill Albanians with all manner of things. It was a good time. And it was nice to actually see a movie again. It had been, like, two and a half months. On a side note, IMDB lists Taken’s main Plot Keywords as: Spit In The Face, Abduction, Held At Gunpoint, Kicked In The Crotch, and Female In Bra And Panties. I love the Plot Keyword section at IMDB. It’s always fucking hilarious.

All right. We’ve gone on for long enough, so I’ll see you next week.

In the meantime, your fucking taxes. Pay them.

–> N.