Twigs of Yonder

-I watch NBA games just about every night on NBA League Pass. It's cool to be able to see every game. But local announcers are horrible. They act like everyone on the home team is perfect and the other team is full of witches. I was watching the Bulls play the Blazers and the Blazers announcer yelled at one point, “Now that's what Joel Pryzbilla gives you!” He went on to talk about him like he's a Hall of Famer. He's averaging 2.0 points and 4.0 rebounds per game. Let's put things in perspective, local announcers.

-I'm in Houghton, Michigan right now. Not familiar with Houghton? It's about 16 miles south of Greenland. The Greenland Pizza Hut actually delivers to Houghton. They get an average of 250 inches of snow annually. No exaggeration. At the airport, someone said, “We're having a warm one.” I just looked up the temperature. It's 11 degrees, and “feels like” negative five. Toasty indeed.

I flew from DC to Minneapolis, and from Minneapolis to Houghton. I swear the second leg of the flight was on an old Russian WWII plane. It looked like this, except gray.

The wing had a sticker on it that said, “GE Jet Power,” but it looked more like a sticker you'd see on a dishwasher than a plane. Plane's usually don't have many stickers on them.

-One of my friends is getting his MFA in Creative Writing, with a concentration in non-fiction. He's currently being forced to take a poetry class. Neither of us understand poetry. Every now and then I may stumble across something and think, “Well, it doesn't suck.” For the most part, I have no reaction to it. Poetry is just a collection of words that does nothing. I realize that it speaks to some, but I don't get it. My friend read a couple of his classmates' poems to me. They were ridiculous. He wouldn't let me print them here. So, here's my imitation of one of their poems.

Twigs of Yonder

oh, twig twig, thy twig

how fly you

red brown grain knot, oh twig

crawl the sky, velvet

grey, full, over there

resources, no, hapless

don't

stop

earth, mother, what doth say

leave thy twig yonder

alf is on dvd

I can't say with confidence that theirs were better.

-I don't understand why global warming, and scientific advancement in general is a political issue, but it is. Check out this survey of congress from National Journal:

http://syndication.nationaljournal.com/images/203Insiderspoll_NJlogo.pdf

Someone's actual justification for not believing that global warming is caused by man, is “The only Inconvenient Truth here is that anyone can be a movie star, even someone as boring as Al Gore.” That's his argument. Also, Senator Inhoff, from Oklahoma, “disproved” global warming by reading a letter on the Senate floor which said, “Thank you for your remarks regarding global warming, Senator. You are now my favorite Oklahoman, ahead of Toby Keith.” THAT'S HOW HE DISPROVED 40 YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDIES! He thinks that if someone likes him more than Toby Keith, then global warming can't be happening. Half of Toby Keith's songs are racist, and all are jingoistic. Everyone should like a U.S. Senator over a racist singer.

Here's a story about certain climatologists being paid off to raise doubts about global warming. http://www.delmarvanow.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070206/NEWS01/70206001/1002

-I was driving late at night in Hoboken, when a woman walked in front of my car to cross the street. There wasn't an intersection or crosswalk to make her think this was okay. She didn't look back to say she was sorry. She just kept moseying. I was pissed. Then she got to the corner on the other side of the street, and I threw a glass bottle that hit her in the head. Just kidding. People put their trash out on the curb in Hoboken. There was a strong wind. And as soon as she stepped on the curb, a huge bag of trash that looked like it had been thrown, flew into her. She started screaming and ran down the street. Instant karma.

Two days later, I was waiting for two minutes to turn into a parking spot, with my turn signal on. Just as traffic moved up enough for me to pull in, the guy behind me went around me and stole the spot. When he got out of his car, I said, “Did you not see me waiting and starting to turn in?”

He said, “I thought you were turning into another spot.”

Then he ran off, forgetting to close his car door. So, I peed on everything in his car. Either that, or I closed his door for him. I don't remember which one.

-I was just informed that there is a hip-hop/r+b version of She's Like the Wind. Look it up. I just listened to the preview on iTunes. This might be the worst cover idea ever. People have covered awful music in the past, but this is a Patrick Swayze song. As you're listening to it, picture people in a studio for a couple days working on it, loving it, thinking that Patrick Swayze is a musical genius. That will make it even better.

While we're on the subject of music... I wrote last week that I hadn't listened to music on the radio in year. Four days later, I had to drive a moving truck that didn't have a CD player. The radio was so bad that I actually stopped on a Rod Stewart song once. It was either Chingy or “Downtown Train.”

-I caught a glance of a page of a woman's book on a flight. It was by Nora Roberts, who I think writes romance. The only sentence I saw was, “Still a hellcat, I see.” I know nothing about the book, but I want to know what made this person a hellcat once, and why they're still a hellcat, and how she can tell that he's still a hellcat. I want to know what a hellcat is. I also want to know someone that I can call a “hellcat.” I don't care what you say, that's good writing. She got me hooked after only five words and two punctuation marks.