Hey Linda - You a bitch.

First of all, let me get this out of the way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6FPadJvflU

Ok, so recently we've adopted a new animal. One day after band practice a couple weeks back, I noticed a little baby kitten running around the dumpster and since I'm not a heartless bastard, I begged Aimee to take her in. This took a substantial amount of posturing ("Sam, I'm pregnant. And I don't want some animal coming in here with diseases infecting the whole house with God knows what.." "Aimee, I'm pretty sure the animal isn't rabid or anything. It wasn't frothing at the mouth, flailing about in a deranged state..." etc. etc..). But in the end, she caved. I took her to the vet to have her checked out, but we didn't name her so they went with "Kitten Terito" by default. This could've probably worked, but we already have another cat named "Kitty Terito" to show our lack of a naming acumen. We thought long and hard for unusual names for our new pet: Elizabeth, Judy, Deborah, Andrea, Megatron, Destructorr, Fucker, Malaisia, Mary Todd Lincoln.. But I went to pick her up, I informed the staff at Sherwood South Animal Hospital that our animal now has a proper name. And with that, Linda Terito has officially joined our clan.

Since she has become one of us, we've been graced with many stories to tell of her acquaintance into our home. But one stands out more than others. We had to quarantine her into the hallway bath to slowly bring her along into our family; for both her personal protection as Kitty has been pretty much slapping the everliving shit out of her every chance he gets. But one morning before work, we opened the door and she was gone. Vanished. Missing. Linda had somehow inexplicably escaped her bathroom cell. This was rather shocking. I didn't think she had the size nor skill to turn the doorknob and open the door - or break a window, or make a rope out of her kitten toys, or chisel through sheetrock, or teleport. Regardless, Linda was no longer in this room.

We looked under every piece of furniture, I put on my jacket and cased the outside of the house. She's pretty small so maybe she'd darted out between our legs as we were cracking the door. Hell, maybe she'd taken one of the cars. At this point I really began to think anything was possible and had to check the keys on the keyrack by the back door to make sure they were still there.

I walked around the back yard yelling "Linda! Linda! Where are you?" So I'm sure this roused suspicion amongst the neighbors. They probably either thought that I was looking for a cat named Linda, or was otherwise a deranged old man suffering from some sort of advanced brain trauma or atrophy. But either way you look at it, Linda was gone.

After checking the attic, me and Aimee were perplexed. "WHERE IS SHE? WHERE COULD SHE BE?" "I DON'T KNOW!!!" We were just dumbfounded. Finally I looked at Aimee and said, "Maybe she was a ghost cat." And I was being completely serious. Aimee, also being completely serious, goes "That's crazy.. but I mean.. where else could she be? Maybe she IS a ghost cat."

So with that, me and Aimee together seriously thought about the most ridiculous thing the two of us have ever thought as a couple. But then something just dawned on me.. What about behind the countertops in the room she was actually in? I opened the cabinets. No Linda. But upon completely removing the bottom drawer, a little brown furrball cowered at the back of the counterspace. "LINDA!!!" She had contorted herself past the baseboard and found probably a 2" gap to crawl in. I just sat there and thought "Why would she do this?" but it's a little tough to put yourself in the mind of a 2 month old kitten. Then I thought about how the builder of the cabinets must have had reservations of building a childproof cabinet but he'd carelessly thought about the kittens and their plight in this world. That son of a bitch.

Anyways, if you've got nothing to do this weekend, go pull all the drawers out of the cabinets in your bathroom. Who knows what you might find?

Hipstamatic and the I-Fail App.

You know, I've always been down for reminiscing. Hell, probably a large portion of any current whimsings I have running through my head are largely reflective of some time in the past. And really, I don't know why I do that but it's always been my nature. When I was 10 years old, I was probably like "Things were so much better back when I was 8." But that's just the way it is.. so, hey.

But something that's kind of currently irking me is this app people have on their phones called 'hipstamatic'. It's essentially a lens filter of some sort that distorts colors in your cellphone's camera giving it this old school kodachrome vibe. It also takes the edges of the photo and applies this thick black border like an old photo. So it basically makes the picture look like it was taken in the late 60's or 70's. And look, that might be all neat and shit now - but think of the ramifications., You're attempts at being indie and smarmy are going to confuse the hell out of future generations, and that's just bullshit!

"Oh look, it's a picture of Daddy back when he was a baby. Wait.. no, that's me. Wait, no - it's you. Wait. No. NO! FUCK! I DON'T KNOW WHO THIS IS!!!"

::throws photo album at wall, storms out of room, party ruined::

It's just human nature. Back in the 90's, we all dressed like hippies from the 70's. In the 00's, we all got on the 80's retro craze. When Clinton was in the White House, people were all like "I miss Reagan." When Bush was in the White House, it was "I miss Bill Clinton..." When George Washington was elected president, all the colonial peeps were like "I miss the sweet oppression we got under King George". But I imagine anyone who was vocal about that end was shipped back to mother England as a loyalist.

I wish there was a way to send hipstamatic users back to the 70's. They'd be like "Oh this is so great" for a day or so. Then they'd start looking for the interwebs and all people would be able to lead them to would be a gigantic unix mainframe somewhere. And then they'd be like "WHAT HAVE WE DONE!" but it would be too late. They'd have to find new ways to waste time. New ways to blog.

They should invent new apps that we can download to make things even more retro. Like you download a copy of a phone book instead of being able to google search that shit. Or you could a download a song but in turn, it downloads the first 8 songs on the album like a cassette and you have to just scan through it to find what you're looking for. Or maybe an app that makes your cellphone completely worthless and nonfunctional.

The i-fail. New from the appstore.

Shut the shit down. Sam's having a kid.

First there's this...

Then there's this...

And then there's this...

to be continued.

The Box Part One

Here's something I found the other day!

Before you get started here, I'm going to warn you about something. This is probably going to be a multi-part message that could go on for awhile. If you have something to do, it might be best to not get involved. But alas. Ahem. I was about to sit here and write another typical blog like I always do. It involved me sitting at Jason's Deli the other day, and wondering what would happen if I took my plate and just slammed it on the floor. Then what if I got up and walked to each table people were sitting at, and then just slammed their plates to the floor. What would their reactions be? I'm sure the staff would be kind of perplexed, the first plate probably being not too unusual, the second probably getting their attention, and on and on. I'm sure that within the fifth plate, they would be on the phone with the police but I don't know their policies so who knows what could happen. But that's typical of what I like to write about. I'm feeling a little waxing poetic is in order. I'm wistful. I'm sad, amused, missing childhood but glad to be out of it at the same time. I'll elaborate. Aimee and I are selling our house. This isn't anything out of the ordinary because we like to move. But the only prob is that it involves me grabbing my "box". I have one box of shit that I've pulled around from my parents house to every apartment and every house I've ever rented or owned. It spans my entire life. There is an Easter card from my late godmother from 1983 and a few baby pictures of me. There are comic books, novels that were required reading from high school. CD's, cassettes (Billy Joel's The Bridge), broken Casio SK1 keyboards, ribbons for 4th place at father/son campouts, etc.. my zipperbag from 8th grade, broken cymbals, little tear-out posters of Spider-Man, the X-Men, and (I’m not kidding) Metallica. There are SEC football team pennants, a drum head that Judge Genius signed, including the names of the band members, god, period blood, and coincidentally “Gay-Metallica” which I suppose were to be Metallica’s gay counterparts. (I think this might have been in the St. Anger days when Metallica did get pretty gay). There is a BR Advocate article about Mrs. Randy Marrs and her battles with breast cancer, and I have every single note that every girl ever wrote to me in there. Not any from Aimee though because those are all in my nightstand. This is a box of old stuff, obviously nothing current. Anyways, that is all I can really remember for now, so like I said – this was part one. I will write a part two next time I go through THE BOX!

Oklahoma!

So I was watching a show on the Biography channel... Or maybe it was on some other channel but the show was called Biography. Or something like that. Either way, the show was about Dana Plato, st'ar of tel'vision's Diff'rent Strokes. So a few th'ngs occurred to me as I was watching this. First of all, Aimee was watching Lost which essentially banished me to other realms of the house. I ended up in one of the spare bedrooms sitting indian style on the floor, with a beer and in a t-shirt and underwear just to give you the visual. You know the story of what happened to Ms. Plato, right? Otherwise you should stop reading this before I ruin it for you. I mean, she was a child star of 80's television so she's obviously deceased like everyone else who was on TV in the 80's. And everybody knows that if drugs or alcohol didn't kill them before 2000, they were just gassed in a gigantic chamber shaped like a big TV so they all got their due. Don't you worry about them...

But something that was interesting was during all the little montages of her going on different drug benders, they would show the same grainy stock footage of someone chopping up cocaine on a mirror, followed by an ashtray with lit cigarettes in it sitting next to a rocks glass filled with some copper colored liquor, then a closeup of someone dragging on a cigarette, then someone rolling a joint and then they'd finally move on as the narration continued about her eventual spiral into death. But that was when it hit me. WHO SHOOTS ALL THAT STOCK FOOTAGE? Is there a company who just shoots stock footage of car crashes, hookers walking down the street, airplanes taking off, people doing drugs?Could we make an entire film with nothing but stock footage?

As the show continued, they'd show the cast of Diff'rent Strokes, with the logo font of "Diff'rent Strokes" which got me thinking, "What was wrong with the 'e' in 'Different'?" I wondered if they left the 'e' out of the scripts for this show. There as no 'e' in Dana Plato's name. Nor in Conrad Bain's, who played Mr. Drummond. Did Todd Bridg's or Gary Col'man take offense? Was it because they were black guys? Was this a conspiracy, and did Dana Plato have to die to finally get it all covered up?

Anyway, she died in the back of a Winnebago from an overdose of Soma and Vicodin in Oklahoma...thus proving my theory. Anyone who has ever experienced fame on television, who ends up in an RV in Oklahoma is going to die. And that's just fact.

The Super Bowel

I know it's not spelled that way but boy! What if it was? Super Bowl 44 is in the books and yes, this one took on a little more importance to me because it involved my chummy school yard cheer skidoos, the New Orleans Saints. And yes, they won. We celebrated by getting blackout drunk, and I ended up sitting at the bar demanding Danny make me "A Metallica Shot!" "Um, what's in a Metallica shot?" "I DUNNO... JUSS MAKE ME A FUGGIN' METALLICA SHOT!" For the record, the all new and hastily improvised Metallica shot is basically Goldschlagger and Jager. While I didn't vomit, I came violently close. I then went on to have conversations with people I don't remember, but the Saints hath woneth, so what doth it matter?
Something worries me a little though. Could this be an end-0f-days phenomenon? I mean, I'm not the most religious card in the deck, but naming a sports team after an angelic servant of the Deity (or as wikipedia defines it, A person officially recognized, especially by canonization, as being entitled to public veneration and capable of interceding for people on earth) seems like it might be a little sacrilicious. And with the whole 2012 bullshit quickly approaching, could this spell doom for us? I feel vindicated for being such a fan of them for so long, finally seeing them win the ultimate in sports lore. But, was I kind of comforted by seeing them be eternal cellar dwellars? I kind of resonated with them. I mean, I kind of feel like I've been marred as this seeming forever loser of sorts. Now I can't relate. They're champions to my chump.
But for the moment, I will toast them and bask in their glory. For all the years of watching some grainy highlight film from the great past, with some historic runback or reception constantly happening with a hapless Saint chasing after them, finally this franchise gets theirs. Congratulations to the Saints. You guys did it, and its well deserved.

So here it is. Metallica Shots all around, please!