Yesterday, I added Possibility to my bathroom walls. Today, I added Swagger to my armpits while surrounded by Possibility. I'm a real sucker for Old Spice's new 21st-century-man names for their deodorants. Longtime fans will remember when it was Showtime in my armpits. I feel good.
I think Pharrell is the coolest, especially after watching this crazy video of him trying to convince two unimpressed employees of an airport McDonald's in Paris to open early for him. In fact, some of these dance moves are the same ones I make in the kitchen when I'm trying to persuade the wife to go get me some KFC. "C'mon let's eat, baby. Let's eat, let's eat, let's eat!"
In his defense, he had just arrived after a 16-hour flight from Malaysia. I just like KFC.
Twenty-four hours ago, Prince launched his new subscription site, LotusFlow3r.com. That means that Prince geeks around the world willing to spend $77 for the one-year subscription have already digested the digital versions of the three new albums and have complained they're not as good as the old Prince.
It's a tired old conversation I've had a million times, and if it weren't for being out of work and a somewhat responsible adult, I'd be right there with them today. I just couldn't justify paying that price this time. If only Prince was strangely connected to 2s, instead of 7s, we'd be in business. Or break it down and let me have a month's access for $6.42. I'd even pay $7.77, if he wants to go that route.
To ease my fears that I've somehow failed my musical hero by not giving him my credit card number to gain access to his "exclusive photos," I spent the day painting my bathroom a beautifully bland new color with a very Princely name, "Possibility," listening to classic and not-so-classic Prince, and dreaming about what kind of sexy little purple songs and videos he's going to release from the famed vault.
I got a little lightheaded and giddy. I hope it was the paint.
Joke Time!:
So why did I choose "Possibility" as the new hue for my bathroom? So I can say stuff like "I just had a Cheesy Gordita, so there's a 'possibility' I'm going to be in here for awhile."
Our Governor, the one that four years ago Time magazine named one of the five worst governors in the country, has sure been busy lately. Not busy trying to solve our state’s unemployment problem, economy problem, education problem, budget problem, teen pregnancy problem, or any of the myriad of other problems affecting us. Nope. Governor Mark Sanford, a sweetheart of a guy if you ever get a chance to meet him, has spent most of the first quarter of 2009 on cable television trying to save our troubled, failing state from being helped by the federal government. He’s been protecting us on CBS’s “Early Show” and CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer” and some other show with John King. He went slumming on the NBC family of liberal networks, appearing on MSNBC’s “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” and “Morning Joe,” as well as CNBC’s “Street Signs.” But the Governor appears to believe the Fox News network and its slate of journaltainment programs have the best chance of saving us from ruin. Just since January he’s been on “Fox News Sunday,” “Hannity,” “America’s Newsroom,” “Geraldo at Large,” “Cavuto,” “Glenn Beck,” and “Fox Business.” And those are only the appearances the Governor’s media kids found fit to post on his YouTube page. Remember this one? You won't find it on the Sanford channel:
I didn’t have the stomach or the time to seek out every instance of Sanford’s media blitz against the federal stimulus bill, which also includes an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal and a guest spot on “Ugly Betty.” I was too busy waiting in line at the unemployment office – excuse me, the South Carolina Employment Security Commission’s Workforce Center. You see, our state’s unemployment rate is now the second highest in the country at 10.4 percent, behind only Michigan at 11.4 percent, so the lines can be pretty long. In fact, since January 2008, South Carolina’s unemployment rates increased faster than any other state – a total of 4.7 percentage points by January 2009. What has Gov. Sanford done about it? What have our state legislators done about it? I have no idea. I wish they’d tell me. The only thing Gov. Sanford appears to be doing is talking on TV. He’s become the voice of the tiny minority of six or so governors – all Republicans – who have fought against the federal government’s stimulus money coming to their state unless they can decide how to spend it. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was the guy for a moment there, until he sounded like a dumber version of Howdy Doody/Kenneth the page delivering the Republican response to President Obama’s address to Congress a couple weeks ago. So, now it’s our boy Sanford’s turn on the stage – a former Goldman Sachs/Wall Street guy everybody thinks is just posturing because it will look good on his conservative resume when he decides to run for President in 2012. Not so, says Mark. “I’ve got a 15-year pattern of doing exactly this type of thing,” he told the Associated Press. By “doing exactly this type of thing,” he means doing nothing but talking about how the government should do nothing. He’s basically a libertarian, like Ron Paul, but with a little less Crazy-Eye. Sanford believes we should just sit back and let the business people figure it out for us. We can trust those guys on Wall Street to save us. “The best bailout of the American economy is an unfettered entrepreneur,” Sanford said on one of his recent cable appearances. Kind of like Bernie Madoff was unfettered, I guess. “The ultimate in stimulus is people going out and working each day, starting a business, dreaming about starting a business, working within a business,” he said. And that would be great, but 10.4 percent of his constituents can’t do anything but the dreaming. As conservative columnist David Brooks pointed out following Jindal’s awful national speech, the no-government-is-good-government ideology is the wrong plan of attack for the Republicans during this current financial crisis. “The idea that the federal government has no role in this, in a moment when only the federal government is big enough to do stuff… to ignore all that is just a form of nihilism,” said Brooks. Our frugal governor may just continue to ignore it because he has bigger things on his mind – like selling the family’s home, a modest, simple little shelter on Sullivan’s Island with six bedrooms and five toilets for $3.5 million. Imagine trying to do that in this market. Somebody better set aside a little bailout money for the Sanfords.
One of the great joys in life is reading to my baby, but while we have stacks of books around the house, she has a select few that she wants to read over and over. It can get pretty boring, so I find myself deeply studying the details of every picture and getting increasingly disturbed by what I've found hidden on the pages of these supposedly innocuous picture books.
I'd like to share some of my discoveries with you.
Mama Bear's Secret
If you read "The Berenstain Bears Visit the Dentist" once, you'd probably come away thinking it's just a sweet little tale to help allay any fears kids might have about visiting the dentist, but read it 50 or 60 times and you might pick up on some of Stan and Jan Berenstain's hidden clues about the Bear family's history.
Just look at Dr. Bearson's face as he invites Sister Bear to hop into the chair. I imagine it's the same come-hither look he gave to Mama Bear at the swinging key party he held years earlier at his Bear Country condo, about seven months, in fact, before Sister Bear was born.
That's right, I looked it up. The gestation period for bears is about seven to seven and a half months.
It all makes sense, because seven pages into "The Berenstain Bears Visit the Dentist," Mama Bear gets a little nostalgic when Brother Bear teases Sister Bear that Dr. Bearson might yank out her loose tooth.
Mama Bear says with great knowing in her voice that "Dr. Bearson doesn't yank. He's very gentle and very careful."
And witness the sad, longing look she gives Dr. Bearson as they leave his office. She's obviously thinking about that drunken, honey-soaked night of passion, and maybe even pondering what could have been, as she heads back to her mundane existence in a treehouse on a sunny dirt road in Bear Country, and a lifeless marriage to a dumb, lazy husband who has the most difficult time giving up his vices in "The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food" and "The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV."
Dora and the Drifter
The Dora the Explorer series is great for toddlers. We learn essentials like the alphabet, numbers and colors, and a little Spanish, too.
The trouble with this independent little bi-lingual dynamo is not that she spends too much time with her monkey friend, Boots, who we know from recent news stories could turn on her at any moment and try to rip her face off, but that she's allowed to explore some pretty dangerous locales like jungles and forests with no adult supervision.
Fortunately for Dora and her absent family, run-ins with that sneaky Swiper the Fox aren't reason enough for social services to place her in protective custody. A foster home is the least of Dora's worries, though, if the events in "At the Carnival" are any indication of her safety.
In this story, Dora and Boots are on a quest to secure eight yellow tickets so they can win The Big Piñata, filled with toys and stickers and treats. It sounds innocent enough, except to complete the journey they must avoid being plied (I learned that word during the last Michael Jackson trial) with ice cream and cotton candy into compromising positions with an assortment of lurking carnies and drifters.
Just look at the sketchy guy leaning against the fence, lasciviously sipping his drink and scouting the scene for stray children he can coax into the dungeon he built under his dead grandma's house.
"Hey, little girl, I'll help you win the big piñata," he says. "You've just got to come with me to my van, where I've got a bunch of yellow tickets. The monkey will have to stay here, though. They'll rip your face off."
Bi-Curious George
The only reason H.A. Rey's Curious George would rip your face off is if he was curious about what was underneath. For that reason, George is a favorite at our house. We've read the inspirational compilation "Curious You, On Your Way!" hundreds of times and I like the old-timey, simple pictures. It's a nice reprieve from the super-bright illustrations in the Dora series and it's obvious Rey didn't have to censor himself to conform to today's mores and values. If he wanted to draw a bunch of people smoking pipes, and he apparently did, nobody cared.
I was surprised, however, to see that freedom extended to the depiction above of two gay sailors walking arm in arm (they appear to be missing hands) down a busy sidewalk in the middle of the day. I know it's New York, but still, this was way ahead of its time.
As they search for a motel room in which to explore their passions on their weekend pass, it's a good thing George seems distracted with other curiosities, because I think the military's don't ask, don't tell policy would throw him into a frenzy that would leave no face unripped off.
If you've never heard Ricky Gervais' series of podcasts with Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington, you should. They used to have a great segment called "Monkey News." It ended when Karl declared they had covered all the monkey news there was. But on Tuesday this story came out about a chimp at a zoo in Sweden who was discovered gathering stones in anticipation of throwing them at people later in the day.
I laughed hard at tonight's 30 Rock with thereference to Pepsi's long-lost lemon-lime soda, Slice, specifically Diet Slice. I guess it's called Sierra Mist now.
Tanya Morgan, the rap group that brought Can You Dig It? worldwide acclaim after an interview appeared here with producer Von Pea, is giving a sneak peek of their upcoming album, Brooklynati, with the release of a new track, "So Damn Down."
The sound is very polished and smooth, a big step up from last year's gritty EP, The Bridge.
They're marketing the album with a pretty elaborate site for the imaginary city of Brooklynati (one member's from Brooklyn, two are from Cincinnati), complete with links for shopping, restaurants and public services, filled with inside jokes for fans of the group.
I just finished the day's second bowl of Cherrios and raisins after vacuuming two month's worth of Goldfish crumbs and dead skin cells from the groove where glass meets wood on the coffee table -- and who knows how many months' worth of popcorn seeds and hairpins from the couches -- when I decided that today needs to be therapy day for Can You Dig It? It feels good to have clean grooves, but it's only a momentary feel-good. I have to fight against curling into a ball on my clean couch and whining about how depressed I am. Instead, I'd thought I pull the computer over to me and moan about it on here.
Of course, the economy remains in the shitter and NPR's insistence on finding a million different stories every day to illustrate it doesn't help, but that's not really the problem. Everything else is the problem. Let me give you some sound mental health advice. If you're not feeling too chipper, don't read Push by Sapphire. The movie version was the big winner at Sundance this year and my wife had read it, so I gave it a shot. It's about an illiterate black girl growing up in Harlem in the 1980s with a father who molests her, impregnates her twice and infects her with HIV. Oh, and her mother's abusive and her first baby, which she had when she was 12, has Down syndrome.
It's really a great book, just not fun, and I need fun.
I went to Michael Jackson for fun.
After posting that video a couple weeks ago showing Michael getting up on stage with James Brown, I was inspired to dig up some old songs -- some pre-Thriller, Jacksons-era jams like "Shake Your Body Down to the Ground," "Blame It On the Boogie" and "Lovely One."
It's been about four years since he was acquitted of those dirty charges and I was ready to dance again. Then some Internet searching brought me to the site for Julien's Auctions, which is holding Michael's big garage sale in April. It's sad for him that he has to sell all of his weird crap, but it's depressing for me that I don't have the money to buy any of it. You don't know how bad I want his "Hotflash Air Hockey" table listed on page 13 of Volume IV, "Amusements, Arcade Games and Disneyana." I like that term, "Disneyana." I need more Disneyana.
The catalog would be good enough for me, but the $400 signed copies are already gone. You can still get me the $100 five-volume set, though. Just flipping through them online is a treat. I've always dreamed of seeing the King of Pop's octagonal cement planters and now I can thanks to his personal financial crisis.
I had read a few weeks ago that Michael was seriously ill, maybe that was actually what piqued my interest again -- the thought of him dying. If so, that's really depressing.
Thankfully, it seems he's healthy enough to do some shows in London, which he said will be his last there. The press conference was a real downer, with Michael doing some strange posing, but his speaking voice sounded like it had lost its 1980s pixieness. At least nobody can make fun of him for that anymore. The sleeping with children jokes are still on the table. And feel free to throw in a "Jesus Juice" reference if you care to.
While we're on '80s pop sensations, I might as well talk about my musical hero, Prince. He's releasing a 3-CD package at Target this month for just $11.98. That's sort of exciting. Something to look forward to, until the day two weeks later that I put it back on the shelf under the stairs with all of his other 21st century work.
But wait! He's also launching a new site that promises to include a vast collection of full-length concerts from the Golden Age of his career. There are rumours, as there always are when he starts a new site, that it might also include official copies of unreleased songs from the same era, many of which stand up to his best work.
The cost to access the site? Some are saying $77 a year. Should an unemployed househusband spend that kind of money? Yes.
Now, back to being depressed.
* The other night on the local news I saw a tween-age girl wearing a Confederate flag shirt at an anti-Obama rally.
* I'm burned out on Facebook. Too much time spent reading what you're up to. I'm tired of you. Sorry 'bout that, it's really about me getting busy living offline, said the man blogging about being depressed.
* It's going to be 80 degrees this weekend. We're going to have a picnic. Sounds good, right? Wrong! It means it's only a matter of time before I spot some dude with his cellphone belted to his jean shorts. That might send me over the edge.
Last night's 5.5-inch snowfall proved I've completely lost touch with my hardy Midwestern roots.
We don't get a lot of snow in Upstate South Carolina, so when we get any trace amount we're completely incapacitated. Schools close, government offices close, dentists and barbecue restaurants close, and everybody and their youth group contacts the local news channels to have their business and church added to the ticker for a day's worth of free advertising/evangelizing.
So, once we realize our Monday morning Knitters for Critters meeting at First Baptist has been canceled, we're free to get out drive on unplowed streets.
We South Carolinians don't have a lot of things it would make sense to have (adequate public schools, etc.), and it doesn't make sense to have a fleet of snow plows, so we really don't have them. They do have a little sand to toss on the bridges, but that doesn't stop the normally stupid and reckless NASCAR wannabes from driving just like they always do. They get into wrecks and we hear how the snow made some redneck's Camaro crash on the sandy bridge, strewing Mountain Dew cans across three lanes of traffic.
It's just not safe to drive around these people, so we stay at home the best we can.
It wasn't too long ago that we'd sit back and laugh at how dumb it was that the Southerners would crowd the grocery stores at the first sign of a flurry to stock up on bread and milk, just in case we're trapped for days and they have nothing but dry cereal and empty toasters. But there I was yesterday, in a line five-buggies (that's what they call carts down here) deep, getting bread and milk. We actually needed bread and milk, and it was a baguette, but still I felt like a fool.
Then the snow came in big hunky flakes and I wanted to play in it. I made the family get bundled up in our Southern winterwear, which was pretty pitiful. The kid has a winter coat, hat, boots and mittens (which she calls her "minions"). The wife has a dressy peacoat and a bunch of scarves. I have my Great Grandpa Montgomery's fall jacket from Sears, a winter hat, some garden gloves and a pair of 8-year-old Nike hightops. I haven't had working boots in about 6 years.
What we would do outside in the snow, I didn't know. We don't have a sled. I tried the Rubbermaid lid trick, but both the snow and my body were too wet and thick to slide anywhere. We made it to the edge of the driveway before our child, who I remind you had on the most weather-appropriate clothes, started saying, "Go back, go back!" like we we were on the verge of being drawn into some haunted Indian burial site. It was just the mailbox.
We went back inside and waited it out until morning. At first the wife thought she would have to go in to her office at 1:00 p.m., so I went out like the burly Midwestern hero I am to scrape the snow and ice off her car. I lost two teeth from the scraper before deciding to just lift the huge chunks of snow off the car and toss them into the driveway.
Had I still lived in the Midwest, I would have realized that wasn't the best method of disposal because our 5.5 inches quickly turned into about 7.5 inches before my Southern eyes. We don't have snow shovel. Nobody does. It's the freaking South.
Now, I'm craving Arby's and can't get out of the driveway for fear of being stuck in melty snow. Cheddar Melty.
The snow will melt this afternoon, leaving a lot of wet roads that will freeze once the sun goes down tonight. The news people are already warning that there'll be a bunch of "dangerous black guys" on the roads tonight, so don't drive if you don't have to. They're so racist down here. I seriously doubt there'll be more black guys on the road. They stay home in the cold just like black gals, white guys, brown guys, purple guys.
Oh! Black ice. Not black guys.
I love that joke and wrote this whole damn thing just to use it.
Yesterday, I added Possibility to my bathroom walls.
Badmuva in fur and heels/LIFE magazine
Not so, says Mark.
If you read "The Berenstain Bears Visit the Dentist" once, you'd probably come away thinking it's just a sweet little tale to help allay any fears kids might have about visiting the dentist, but read it 50 or 60 times and you might pick up on some of Stan and Jan Berenstain's hidden clues about the Bear family's history.
Bears Visit the Dentist," Mama Bear gets a little nostalgic when Brother Bear teases Sister Bear that Dr. Bearson might yank out her loose tooth.
The Dora the Explorer series is great for toddlers. We learn essentials like the alphabet, numbers and colors, and a little Spanish, too.
The only reason H.A. Rey's Curious George would rip your face off is if he was curious about what was underneath. For that reason, George is a favorite at our house. We've read the inspirational compilation "Curious You, On Your Way!" hundreds of times and I like the old-timey, simple pictures. It's a nice reprieve from the super-bright illustrations in the Dora series and it's obvious Rey didn't have to censor himself to conform to today's mores and values. If he wanted to draw a bunch of people smoking pipes, and he apparently did, nobody cared.
I laughed hard at tonight's 30 Rock with the reference to Pepsi's long-lost lemon-lime soda, Slice, specifically Diet Slice. I guess it's called Sierra Mist now. 
Tanya Morgan, the rap group that brought Can You Dig It? worldwide acclaim after an interview appeared here with producer Von Pea, is giving a sneak peek of their upcoming album, Brooklynati, with the release of a new track, "So Damn Down."
Let me give you some sound mental health advice. If you're not feeling too chipper, don't read Push by Sapphire. The movie version was the big winner at Sundance this year and my wife had read it, so I gave it a shot. It's about an illiterate black girl growing up in Harlem in the 1980s with a father who molests her, impregnates her twice and infects her with HIV. Oh, and her mother's abusive and her first baby, which she had when she was 12, has Down syndrome.
It's been about four years since he was acquitted of those dirty charges and I was ready to dance again. Then some Internet searching brought me to the site for Julien's Auctions, which is holding Michael's big garage sale in April. It's sad for him that he has to sell all of his weird crap, but it's depressing for me that I don't have the money to buy any of it. You don't know how bad I want his "Hotflash Air Hockey" table listed on page 13 of Volume IV, "Amusements, Arcade Games and Disneyana."
Last night's 5.5-inch snowfall proved I've completely lost touch with my hardy Midwestern roots. 
