This Week in Nelson, volume 3, number 13

Hello. That’s all, just hello. It’s just nice to be polite. This week we’ve got an important mixology secret revealed, the continued march of science, the English handling an enormous penis, the Statue of Liberty losing her damn mind and the onset of a disturbing death lottery.

Birthday shout-out to Mick! It’s a little early, maybe, but his birthday will happen before the next This Week in Nelson, so it felt like the time. And Mick is awesome. Partially because he listens to This Week in Nelson read aloud by a robot voice, but there’s other reasons, too. Like his meteorological skills. And his gentle touch. Go Mick!

It’s still two months out, but here’s another quick reminder to keep Saturday, May 30th open for the early celebration of my 30th birthday (which is actually Monday, June 1st). Just keeping it in your heads (and hearts), and hopefully your calendars (and loins).

Books read this week:
-Finished reading Captain Freedom: A Superhero’s Quest for Truth, Justice, and the Celebrity He So Richly Deserves by, G. Xavier Robillard

I highly recommend Captain Freedom, especially to those of you in the habit of reading comic books who want to read a satirical novel about a superhero. Funny, funny stuff.

Random out-of-context quotes of the week:
--“The Academy of Heores and Villains is a conservative group with little sense of the modern era. They battled gangsters with tommy guns, and when they flew, they could muster only fifteen knots an hour, uphill both ways, in snowstorms, during Martian invasions.”
--“NPR doesn’t even have a Sexiest Man of the Year award. It’s like a third-world country.”
--“The trick to the Rob Roy is the bitters. Not any bitters, but the bitters extracted from the tears of a fourteen-year-old girl who’s been dumped hours before the eighth-grade dance because her boyfriend has fallen for her best friend who is so totally not good looking.”
--“I made her come so hard she hiccuped.” (This one isn’t so funny, but it’s a direct quote from someone I know, and it impressed me. I guess it’s kind of funny, too.)

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:
-“An Italian doctor this week continued performing brain surgery while having a heart attack. ‘I’m not a hero,’ said Claudio Vitale, who had angioplasty after he finished the operation. ‘I couldn’t leave at such a delicate moment.’” (I just wonder, was he the only guy who could perform this surgery? Cause, I would think that brain surgery requires a certain amount of delicate skill, the kind of skill that could be disrupted by one’s heart ceasing to function properly. Then I noticed that his name was Vitale and I wondered if he was performing surgery screaming “Yeah baby! I’m cutting into a brain! This is awesome with a capital A! Oh no! My heart stopped! This is gonna be a real buzzer beater right here! Yeah baby!”)
-“It was a bad week for feminism after a poll found that 25 percent of young women questioned would rather win first prize on America’s Next Top Model than the Nobel Peace Prize. Half said they’d marry an ugly man if he were rich.” (This sounds kind of bad, but maybe they should have asked if they’d marry a man they didn’t love if he were rich. And besides, it’s not like Tyra Banks hands out the Nobel Peace Prize. Am I right, ladies?)
-“The McInnes family of Hungerford, U.K. discovered this week that 18-year-old son Rory had painted a 60-foot penis on the roof of the family home to see if it would show up on Google Earth. A helicopter pilot noticed, and when flummoxed father Andy McInnes asked Rory why there was a giant penis on the roof, the teen said, ‘Oh, you’ve found it, then.’” (Way to maintain your Britishness even in the face of a giant roof penis, McInnes family.)
-“A Florida eighth-grader was suspended for three days this week for farting on the school bus. Jonathan Locke ‘passes gas on the bus to make the other children laugh and it is so stink [sic] that you can’t breathe,’ said the bus driver on a complaint form. Jonathan’s father said trying to prevent eighth-graders from laughing about farts was probably futile, and the boy said the fart in question wasn’t even his. ‘It was a kid who sits in front of me.’” (U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! Did you notice the kid’s name? The plots for Lost are getting out of control.)
-I don’t want to go through the trouble of including the articles, but I read this week that science has developed both a cure for peanut allergies and a new coating for cars, i-pods and furniture which, when scratched, will repair the scratches itself by simply being exposed to sunlight. Go science!

Something(s) I’m tired of/ mad at:
-The clusterfuck that is the Broncos. In three to four months we’ve lost Shanahan and Cutler? What the fuck? I am both tired of and mad at this.

Something(s) I’m delighted by:
-The new Decemberists album, The Hazards of Love. I love the Decemberists in general, but it’s a hell of an album. All the songs, while still distinctly their own animals, are still interconnected and bleed together, like a Floyd album, and it jumps from folksy ballads to hard rocking, from plaintive love songs to confessions of grisly murder. All with their typical language which resembles a Victorian-era revenge film. It’s kind of like what they did with the multi-part second track of The Crane wife, or with their EP The Tain, but expanded into a full length album. I’ve been listening to it in the car all week. Love it. Highly recommend it. Highly recommend the Decemberists in general, but this album is particularly the bee’s knees.
-Little shout-out to the TV show Chuck for making another Spies Like Us reference. I respect those that respect Spies Like Us. Also, big ups to How I Met Your Mother for having a major plotline revolve around Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon and an actual Teen Wolf appearing in their episode. It’s like the zeitgeist is located in my brain.

Something(s) I found really kind of odd:
-So, on south Iowa, they have a place that helps you with taxes, and so they have someone dressed up as the Statue of Liberty waving at cars out by the street. That wasn’t the odd part. That’s become kind of standard. Although the idea that the Statue of Liberty represents trustworthy tax help is kind of odd, but still, that’s not the odd thing I’m talking about. The odd thing was that on Monday the Statue of Liberty girl was playing the fiddle and dancing a jig by the side of the road. For hours. She was there when I went to get lunch and she was there when I went home. That was odd. Visually and conceptually. Right?

This Week in Answers to Your This Week in Questions This Week!
--You asked none, but still, here’s my answer:
-No, that would not make a good marinade. That would be a reckless course of action that flies in the face of both the intricacies of social etiquette and the laws of God and man. Don’t do it! Please, no!

A quick shout-out to the KU women for making the final four! Sure, it’s the NIT, but still, well played, ladies.

This is kind of only a question for some of you, those who play Madden 09, but does your copy of Madden have a hard-on for the Chargers like mine does? I’m in the playoffs of my third season playing Superstar mode, and for the third year I’m playing against the Chargers. They’re the only team in the AFC to have made the playoffs all three years I’ve played. What’s up with that? Does Phillip Rivers’s mom work at EA?

Finally, I’d like to pour a little liquor for Andy Hallett, who played Lorne on Angel and died yesterday of heart failure. That’s two series regulars from Angel dead now, and begs the horrifying question, who’s next?

Death surrounds us! Keep your doors locked and your helmets on at all times!

Until next time.

–> N.