A schediastic hootenanny

And at some point, I probably will.

If you're easily amused and have a tenuous grasp on reality, a fun way to pass the time is to insert MODOK into your daily life. Like for example, when you're at Burger King, and you've been waiting in line for sixty-seven minutes because the guy can't read the festive icons on his register, just imagine that he is a Mental Organism Designed Only for French Fry Making, and has been flustered by being called upon to perform other duties. Or if you're stuck in traffic because even though you live in the Midwest and your city gets a thousand inches of snow a year, people all forget how to drive the second a flake falls from the sky, you could think about how if you had one of those nifty little Sedgway MODOK Transporter units, you'd show them, SHOW THEM ALL.

Michelle Malkin: Cultural product of ignorant ghetto Negroes not worth examining in school.

Ben Shapiro: Lieberman a vile traitor to God’s chosen people.

Gary Aldrich: I’m fine with homos as long as they shut up about it.

I went to the little workout place for the first time in a long time last night. I've missed it, to tell you the truth. Jogging on a treadmill while looking down at every six-year-old girl in Albany Park learning to ice skate is an inexpressable pleasure, and not in a sex pervert way but in a "haw haw lookit them little girls fall down" way. They took out the stereo, so I can no longer annoy fellow fitness enthusiasts with blaring Mr. Dibbs records, but they have put in a couple of new machines and, best of all, a HEAVY BAG!

I learned last night that I can run for longer than I used to be able to; I'm still pretty strong; and I can walk home wearing shorts in the insane 4-degree weather and not die. Alas, I did not learn that if you haven't worked out in a long time you should ease back into it, or else you will have a heart attack, and also blow out every muscle in your right arm.

Dammit! I need that arm to masturbate!

Like most things that are awful and unpleasant for no reason, it is said of the ungodly winters here in the Big Town that they "build character".

WELL LET ME TELL YOU I MUST HAVE MORE GODDAMN CHARACTER THAN 'CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS' BY NOW THEN.

I walked to work today with a La Croix in my pocket, and when I got there, it was frozen.

So my pals gave me these "Honeybelle tangelos" last night. They're some kind of crazy genetic-engineering/cat-dog blend of a grapefruit and a tangerine. AND HOLY SHIT ARE THEY TASTY. Yes they are. They're insanely juicy and make you look like a drooling idiot when you eat them but they are delicious and easy to prepare.

Apparently they are only available in the month of January. Mmmm, horticulture. Or agriculture. Or botany. Whatever.

How insanely juicy are they, when I say they are insanely juicy? If you put one in the freezer, you get sorbet.

One of the guys who came over to install our supercable yesterday had to get at the back of our TV, which was interfered with by the location of our PSX2. As he was moving it, he asked the Roommate if he could see which games we had. She cheerfully agreed.

"Oh,", he said, noting that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was on top of the pile, "I have this one. I got bored with it after a week."

"Yeah?" she inquired.

"Yeah," he said. "There's only so many hookers you can screw, you know."

BACK AWAY SLOWLY, SUPERCABLE MAN. JUST WALK AWAY.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that in the cultural vernacular, they're inevitably accompanied by the the words "nutty" or "crazy".

Which is perfectly understandable; most conspiracy theories, indeed the vast majority of them are both nutty and crazy. At the very least they're ill-thought out and sorely lacking in evidentiary appeal, and at the very worst you can't get ten words into them without hearing the words "alien", "Freemason" or "Jew".

The problem is, there are sometimes conspiracies. People in the government often, well, CONSPIRE. And they conspire to do things that are often very bad. And worst of all, they conspire to cover up the evidence that they did those bad things. The problem is, there's a continuum of conspiracy theories: you start at one end with the utterly nutty (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or David Icke's giant space lizard theorum), proceed to the seemingly sensible but nonetheless horseshit (the innumerable JFK assassination plots, the notion that Paul Wellstone was assassinated) to the stuff that actually turned out to be a conspiracy (the Enron scandal, for example, or the Tuskeegee experiments). And since there's no middle ground, they all get lumped into the "nutty conspiracy theory" category.

And this leads to a sort of shortening of patience, so that if the theory turns out to be correct, it's as if conspiracy fatigue sets in, and no one really cares anymore. A perfect example of this would be the "Star Wars" program: Reagan's people initiated it. For years, critics claimed that it was completely unworkable -- misguided, overpriced, unwise, and scientifically unfeasible, if not outright impossible; they noted that it would also hugely enrich the defense industry, which was (and is) one of the GOP's key demographic. The Reagan team stuck to their wildly successful game plan of lie, deny, ignore, and it worked. Eventually people stopped caring about all the voices crying boondoggle. By the time the '90s rolled around, and it turned out that the critics were right -- key SDI tests were faked; the system was and always had been unworkable, and its creators knew it; and the defense contractors got fat off technology they knew was junk -- no one cared anymore. There was no outcry at all, no demand for accountability. And now, President Bush is calling for a new commitment to SDI, just as if the old one wasn't a bunch of crap.

Is this all just leading up to a lame link? It sure is. Behold, for what they are worth:

Top 10 September 11th Conspiracy Theories.

BARTOLO COLON! JORGE NUNEZ! FLASH GORDON! ARMANDO RIOS!

Waaaaaoooo! That's right you heard me. Step back, suckas. White Sox are ready to fly some heads.

Amazing trivia "fact": Bartolo Colon looks exactly like Chico Marx.