You Be the Judge

A few months ago I spotted what may or may not be George Clinton in my hood. I walked in front of him to make sure, then I snapped this pic with my old camera phone. I didn't speak to him because, well, because he's George Effing Clinton and you just don't go up to him unless you've got something to say (or some free pot). And I was coming home from work (wearing a tie!) and I didn't want him to think I was a narc. Although my friend's band opened for him and P-Funk several times, I don't know him personally and I didn't have any free pot for him, so I settled for taking this secretive picture from behind rather than approach him from the front and start talking to him like kind of yuppie with a freaky man crush.

I was telling a friend the George Clinton story last week and showed the picture to prove it, but (maybe because of the small screen on my phone), my friend doubted it was the man from the mothership and instead insisted that I had snapped a picture of a really weird homeless guy. So I'll leave it to you imaginary people to decide:

Return of the Mouse Commandos

The Fortress has been mice free for a year and half. I hoped that by killing all of them with the precision that only someone like me that is 1/4 German and all ninja could do, that it would forever deter others from ever trying to come back. Unfortunately, mice have a short memory. I don't think I cook enough in the fortress for a mouse to survive on my leftovers, but I do live in a townhouse (unless you are trying to kill me, in which case I live on a farm in Kansas) which makes it difficult to avoid invaders because they could come from either house next to me.

I saw one the other day. I dug through my stuff for the mouse traps that I hoped I'd never need and I caught one a few days ago and another last night. But I noticed a strange thing...on a couple of the unsprung traps, the traps were still in place but someone had eaten the peanut butter out of them, but not sprung the trap. Mad skillz, yo!!! I loaded them up with peanut butter again in the hopes that the mouse will get cocky and then I'll get him.

Also...some a-hole put a car with no plates in my driveway. We know how I feel about that. I kicked it a few times (not kidding) , and left a nasty note on it and promptly called the cops to have it ticketed and towed. I don't think the cops will do anything about it (when have they ever done their job?) but we'll see.

Free Plug Fridays...on a Tuesday

I usually wait until thursday to plug stuff for which I don't get paid, but one of the things I'm plugging is on thursday, so the effort will be useless if I do it on friday, unless you have a time machine...but if you had one of those, I am sure that you have better things to do with your machine, like travelling backin time to kill the scientist who came up with the idea for the super particle accelerator in switzerland that may destroy the earth.

Date Number One: This is a little independent film that I saw a couple of years ago. I like to support independent film makers and this film in particular because it's got 3 short stories in the movie and one of them is about a guy who dresses as a ninja, going on a blind date. The director told me that it was VERY low budget (like less than $20,000, including the camera equipment) and sometimes it shows. But if you're interested in storylines and good dialogue instead of fancy lighting, sound and special effects, then go see this movie. If you want special effects with no storyline and crappy dialogue, then have fun renting the last three Star Wars movies on Netflix. Anyway, there is a FREE SCREENING in Silver Spring on Thursday. That's right, I said free. I know a lot of you are thinking "if it's free, it's for me!!!", but you should check this out because it's a good movie, not because it's free. Just because something is free, doesn't mean that you'd want it. If I was offerring free kicks in the nuts, would you want that? huh? Huh? that's what I thought...anywho...Click THIS LINK to get the details.

Redbelt: this a new film by Pulitzer Prize winning author David Mamet. Those of you who know Mamet's work know that he's a great writer and his plots usually have as many interesting and exciting twists as a yoga class at an all Girls Catholic School. MMA buffs will like the cameos and bit parts by a who's who in the martial arts communtity. (Randy"Captain America" Couture, Jean Jaques "I was born with one hand, but I'll still kick your ass" Machado, Dan Inosanto, "Judo Gene" Lebell (a/k/a the guy who choked Steven Seagal unconcious, at which time he uhhhh lost control of his bodily functions and soiled himself), Ed "Al Bundy" O'Neil, Enson Inoue etc.). Whenever someone tells me that people are not as dumb as I think they are, I look at how many people will go see a movie like this or this when they could be seeing Redbelt or some other movie with a non-formulaic storyline and I think I'm right again.

Grrrrrrr....

Someday someone will invent a device that allows you to punch someone in the face over the telephone. When that day comes 1) he or she will be very, very rich; and 2) I will buy the first device (even if it's still in Beta testing).

Yes...it's one of those days, and no, I can't give specifics. But now I judge Russell Crowe less harshly for throwing a phone at someone in NY. I'm not saying what he did was okay, just that now I get where he was coming from.

Also, is it just me or is everyone sick of the whole Obama vs. Hillary thing. Every 3 days there is another primary that is "crucial" for each of them to win the nomination. It's like watching Indiana Jones escape from one death-defying predicament after another, each more dangerous than the last, except that instead of being filled with adrenaline-packed action sequences it's boring, montonous and filled with ill-fitting suits and overweight bald, male political comentators in their late 50s and early 60s. And what's with all the American flag lapel pins? Was there a sale at the americana isle of the DC Walmart?

The night is made for infomercials

If each of us has some kind of internal clock that tells us when to wake up and go to sleep, then the warranty on mine must've expired. Either that, or it was manufactured in Turkey by illiterate toothless hillpeople who were hired to make it when the factory relocated from Vietnam because the hillpeople were willing to work for ten cents an hour less than the barefoot former vietcong in southeast asia. Damn you outsourcing!!!

Yesterday, I was supposed to call someone at 10pm. I put my head down for a nap at 6 and woke up at 2:30 am. Sadly, this has been happening a lot lately. I wish I could blame the drugs, but I haven't been taking any. If I had, I would have an excuse that would eventually become an interesting anecdote that I could tell my future grandchildren. "Stay away from drugs, kids. Lots of people die from using drugs, and some of them, like me, sleep for inordinately long periods of time and wake up feeling no aftereffects, except for a feeling of restedness followed by feelings of Catholic guilt, which are completely undestandable since I've been haunted with them since my traumatic parochial school years."

I think I should stop with the Catholic jokes since I haven't been to church in a good long while. I did attend Catholic schools when I was younger. The tuition covered unlimited helpings of guilt and an exceptional education in math, english and science. Before anyone makes an inappropriate joke, I should mention that alhtough I attended Catholic school, I was never molested by a priest...they charged extra for that. Moving on...

I have a list of things to do around the house and I keep meaning to get around to them, but lately I've been falling asleep and waking up at really odd hours and I don't think my neighbors will apreciate me running my table saw at 4am. So I've been doing what everyone does at 4 am. Watching infomercials. I've decided that I'm thinking about doing the p90X exercise program. Because the first step to actually doing something is to think about it; so for a while I've been thinking about thinking about it, and yesterday I decided to think about it. There are only a couple of metaphysical steps in between that and actually doing the exercises. Some of those before/after pics are pretty impressive. But it probably requires a lot of effort. We'll see how I feel after today's nap.

Speechless

There are very few things that leave me speechless. I'm a lawyer, so words are the tools of my trade. Like a carpenter's hammer, a surgeon's scalpel or a trophy wife's breast implants, words are what I use to earn money to keep a roof over my head. So it's not often that I forget how to use them.

However, yesterday I was driving to my meditation class and I saw the funniest thing i've seen since Superbad. I whipped out my cell phone, snapped a picture of it and emailed it to my friend with the only words I could think of to mock it: "HAHAHAHAHAAHA!

When I first bought a phone with a camera, I hoped that one day I would find a use for it, but it stayed in my pocket eager but without a purpose, like the condom in a high-school kid's wallet. "Someday" I kept thinking..."someday." Well, yesterday was like the prom for me. I almost crashed my Ninja Lite Armoured Assault Vehicle at the site of THIS:


A guy in his early/mid 50s, bald, with a reallllly bad comb over, driving a T-bird convertible. As he drove the comb-over would flap wildly in the wind, then at every red light he would stop and fix it back in place. As if all it needed to stay in place and look like a normal head of hair was to be patted down one last time.

With his Ray Bans on and his convertible he was making eye contact with the 20-something cute girl in the next car. (why aren't men in their 50s attracted to women their own age?) In his mind I'm sure he felt like he was Tom Cruise in Risky Business. But the girl was kinded of creeped out by someone her dad's age looking at her sexually; and I had this reaction: HAHAHAHAHAhAHA!!!

I drove up next to him and thought of rolling down the window and saying something, but all I could think of was: HAHAHAHAHAAA!!!

It's been 24 hours now, and I finally know what I should've said to the guy:

1. Sir, you're comb-over is not fooling anyone. I advise you to sell that car and invest in some hair transplant surgery, it will be worth it;
2. that girl is probably younger than your daughter, just because you are attracted to her, doesn't mean she's attracted to you;
3. If you want to keep the car and can't afford hair replacement surgery, why don't you just shave your head bald. White guys with a shaved head look 100x better than balding guys. Just make sure to be a little tanned so you don't look like a cancer patient...a old cancer patient with a nice car who likes creeping out young girls.
4. If you don't want surgery or shaving your head bald, try a hat! srslykthnxbye.
5. HAHAHAHAHAAHA!!!

Thoughts About Home Prices and Shark Attacks

Unless you run a drug smuggling ring, human trafficking operation, or some other criminal enterprise like a church, the purchase of your home will probably be the biggest financial decision you ever make in your life. That's why the news about the housing market is so depressing. It's like getting married in Vegas to a hot girl and then finding out that she used to be a man. Okay, maybe not exactly like that, but the sense of disappointment and dread are probably similar. Again, this is just an assumption since I've never been married to anyone, let alone to someone who used to have a penis.

But when I see house prices in DC (in my neighborhood, since I'm too lazy to look elsewhere) the prices don't seem to be coming down a whole lot. Well, it seems that the news was exaggerating how bad the housing market is. To make a boring story short:

1. the housing numbers that the news keeps quoting are coming from only 20 cities, some of which are doing much worse than the rest of the country;
2. the decline in REALLY EXPENSIVE houses is included in those numbers so it makes it look a lot worse than it is (like if you average your salary and Bill Gates' salary and then came up with a number).

So, in a way this is like the Shark Attack scares. A few weeks ago I saw on every news channel a story about a guy who was attacked and killed by a shark in South Africa. Now I try not to pay attention to these types of stories because

1. I don't live anywhere near the beach, so unless a shark is gonna come out of my toilet and try to bite my junk off, it doesn't really concern me;
2. if you're taking surfing vacations all over the world when I'm here working, then I don't have a lot of sympathy for you, even if you get eaten by a shark.

But the real reason I was thinking about this (besides procrastinating) is that shark attacks aren't very common. You're 10x more likely to die from a coconut falling on your head than you are to die from a shark attack. But people don't worry about dying from falling coconuts because the news only focusses on shark attacks, because, lets face it, sharks have huge teeth and are really scary; coconuts...not so much.

Same thing with the housing market. Some people overpaid for their houses in some parts of the country, but that doesn't mean that people everywhere are going to suddenly stop buying houses and living in their cars. It's not the end of the world.

If you want to worry about something, then stop thinking about sharks and housing prices and start worrying about the earth being destroyed by a black hole that could be created in a particle accelerator in Switzerland. Coincidentally, the Mayans had an advance system of math that calculated the movement of the planets until the year 2012. They stopped at 2012 because they believed that's when the world will be destroyed. Freakkkkkky.

Dog Update

Well, I didn't mention it before, but my foster dog got adopted. I miss the goofy mutt, but in a way it was good to have my life back. Plus, the guy who adopted him lives next to a dog park (which is great for the dog) and he's going out of town a few times this summer and asked if I could dog sit. Which is awesome for me. That's like breaking up with an ex and having her get married, then having the husband ask if you could sleep with his wife while he's out of town, then drop her off when your done. Well...it's not exactly like that, but it's still pretty freaking cool.

In the meantime, to get my dog fix, I have been taking care of a new dog for a few days while the real foster dog person lady is out of town.


"Hi, I'm Beatrice. I'm not as cool as Ninja's previous dog because I have short stubby legs and am afraid of everything. You'll know when I'm afraid of something like a loud noise, because I will cower in a corner and pee on your hardwood floors. Plus, I'm a little chunky so I'm hoping that Ninja will take me on his training regimen which involves running a half mile in the morning and bragging about it the rest of the day. He says he runs two miles on the treadmill at Gold's Gym, but if that were really true, than I wouldn't be the only chunky one in the house. Plus, he made me watch The Dog Whisperer with him and started telling me about how he's the pack leader. What-the-fcuk-ever!!!"

Yeah, so I think this dog was abused before because she's really jumpy and got terrified when I picked up the broom to start sweeping. So I stopped sweeping. It's not like a need an excuse to avoid working, so when a legitimate one comes up, why not take advantage of it?

Another weird thing about this dog is that it's a girl dog. I didn't think about this until yesterday, but all my dogs have been boy dogs. So when I gave her a belly rub yesterday, I noticed something was missing....the penis! I don't think there's a big difference between boy dogs and girl dogs (except for the whole penis thing), but one thing I noticed is that girl dogs pee funny. Boy dogs lift their legs like they're about to execute a roundhouse kick; girl dog's just sort of squat like they are about to jump through a hoop. Boy dogs also like to mark their territory...a lot. If I take a boy dog out for an hour long walk. He will be peeing on stuff for the full hour. And even if he runs out of pee (which almost never happens), he still lifts his leg and tries to mark his territory. It's like he's marking it with his chi. A girl dog only goes a couple of places and uses the peeing process to empty her bladder, not make some kind of statement about it's role in the heirarchy of dog society.

Anyway, that's all for now. Which would you prefer, a girl dog or boy dog?