Pick your candidate

Got this one from David Byrne's ever-fascinating blog:

http://www.dehp.net/candidate/index.php

It's a Pick Your Candidate site where you check off how you stand on two dozen issues. Based on your responses, it tells you which candidate you should go for. It also has a sliding scale showing you how insane the other candidates are.

Kucinich in '08!

Errr...

The big letdown

I had the urge to get a huge oatmeal raisin cookie after lunch today.

When you haven't bought a cookie in about 14 years and you get one and it's a big, stale, tasteless piece of shit, you start to lose faith in the power of cookies to brighten up your day like they did when you were small.

Well okay then

My wife has a remarkable ability to forgive and forget. I come home last night and she's cooking in the kitchen. She turns around, says "Hi hon." and asks me how my day was.

She was more upset about me airing our dirty laundry than she was about anything else. Which means she'll probably be mad at me for writing about this also.

The Newlywed Glow

J and I had a gigantic blowout last night and this morning over a piece of furniture.

But not just any piece of furniture. Our brand new Crate & Barrel Harmony Media Console:



It is beautiful. It is expensive. It was a major pain in the ass to find, purchase, bring home, and install. And now, 4 hours after the long awaited homecoming, it is scratched. And my wife and I are not speaking.

It all started when we moved in together, almost three years ago, and she remarked that my floor-stand speakers had to go. They were huge and unsightly. Also, my TV stand was "bacheloresque." I didn't agree, but I did agree to getting a new one someday. So last week we were cruising Crate and Barrel and we came upon this lovely piece of walnut with sliding Chinese doors and a truly shocking price tag. But it was exactly what we were looking for, and we had some wedding funds left over.

We asked the guy at the counter if it was in stock. It was, so we decided to rent a Zipcar and bring it home. I reserved the car, picked it up, and got a call from J saying the guy was mixed up and that it wasn't actually in stock. We decided to take the car for a joyride anyway, since we had it for an hour and a half. It took us 45 minutes to get out of Manhattan, at which point it was time to return the car. Ridiculous. So we returned the car and decided to have it delivered.

After a series of phone calls spanning three days, we found that the delivery charge was $70 and J decided she'd go into work late one day to wait for delivery. But they couldn't promise us a delivery time, so I decided to have it delivered a few days later when I'd be working from home. Then my buddy Kevin offered to help us pick it up. Awesome.

So we picked it up, barely, in his tiny VW Golf, me scrunched up in front, and brought all 86 pounds of it home last night up three flights of stairs in one piece. Ecstasy.

I set about hooking up all of my various electronics with full digital 7.1 surround sound, over 175 feet of speaker wire and cable going every which way. J was not amused by the sheer mass of wires required for the job, and she was convinced there was a better way. Comparing the process to open heart surgery, I asked her to back off. She wouldn't. Things escalated.

Four hours later, everything was hooked up and we had to move our TV onto the new stand. The damn thing was so heavy that despite J's careful application of cardboard feet to the bottom, we managed to gently scrape it across the front of our beloved new dovetailed work of beauty. Neither one of us noticed, but J immediately tried to move my carefully placed front speakers and I freaked. She was sick of not being involved, so she left the room. That's when I noticed our fresh dents on the front. I freaked again. She was in the other room and declined to inspect the damage. We went to bed.

This morning, I decided that it was no big deal. People die every day, awful natural disasters strike, teenagers fail to make friends. Our problems were minor. But J did not share my optimism. We fought again. She blamed me for the scratches, I pointed out that there was a scratch on her end too, she said mine was worse, and I dropped the F bomb and walked out.

And that's where we are. I am now accepting advice and tips on the following:

1. making up
2. wiring speakers without using wire
3. repairing scratched furniture
4. marriage

Anyone?

Bud Selig is a world-class ass monkey, pt. 3

Bud thinks it's a good idea to take credit for blowing the whistle on steroids in major league baseball. Which is funny, since as the Commissioner of the MLB, he's the one who turned the other cheek as the profits and salaries ballooned...for 16 YEARS.

I personally don't care if baseball players take steroids or not, as long as they're not allowed to play in the MLB. If they want to shell out tens of millions to jacked up clowns like Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Dykstra, et.al., that's awesome. Just put them on a traveling circuit like the WWF or whatever it's called these days. Give them colorful, skimpy spandex and baby oil, call it the American Gladiator League, and keep the syringes right in the dugout for between-inning pick me ups.

Actually, forget about the game altogether. Just set up a home run derby instead of the normal nine-inning business. Put guys like Bonds against journeyman hacks, and put Pettitte and Clemens on the mound against some skinny white guys who can't hit, like the equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters against the team of stooges they always beat on purpose.

Or just give them huge duct-taped Nerf Q-tips, throw in some desperate-looking porn stars, call it "American Gladiators," and put it on Fox.





Or NBC.

iCan'tWait

MacWorld Keynote today. Last year Steve introduced the iPhone, so I'm not sure what to expect today.

The iBlog? i.e. something that can randomly generate the crap I usually write about without actually needing my help?

Or maybe the iSteve? A little automated Steve Jobs who could iBlog while making my life easier in other small ways like inventing programs such as iDoTheDishes, iPayTheRent and iKillTheUpstairsNeighbor?

Steve, don't let me down.

Back from the dead

Hi, it's been a long time. Not much to report. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year.

I felt like rather than expose my faithful readers to a whole lot of nothing, I'd just expose them to an absence of nothing, which is really something.

It didn't work. People are annoyed. I can't blame them.

So for better or worse, I'll try to keep this thing updated. For the next two weeks anyway - J and I are headed to Hawaii for our long-delayed honeymoon on February 1st. Two weeks is just about right for a commitment-phobe like me.

Keep the faith.