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.