The Sporadic Curmudgeon

One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces, the 1924 Ennis-Brown House in Los Angeles, is in imminent danger of destruction. The house has become so damaged by the recent rains that it must be closed to the public, which also closes off the only revenue stream available for the restoration. If you’re interested, you can help.

Medicine is a high-stress field, and sometimes things just happen between colleagues. A tough day at work, meaningful glances exchanged over the EKG machine, and before you know it she’s taking her meds orally. Afterwards you’re both quiet, and as you return to the ER you suspect that the two of you would get on with your lives, never acknowledging that this little tryst ever occurred.

What you were not expecting, of course, was that she would save your ejaculate in her mouth, inseminate herself with it, and then sue you for child support. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this takes “crazy ex” to an entirely new level.

I wonder how she explained why she was carrying a turkey baster around in her purse?

On another day like this, a long time ago, I was humming across the bridge out of Louisville, Kentucky, in an old Chevy and three or four good ole boys who worked with me at a furniture factory in Jeffersonville, Indiana…the tires were hissing on the wet asphalt, the windshield wipers were lashing back and forth in the early morning rain and we were hunkered down in the car with our lunch bags and moaning along with a mean country tune on the radio when somebody said: “Jesus Christ. What are we doing going to work on a day like this? We must be goddamn crazy. This is the kind of day when you want to be belly-to-belly with a good woman, in a warm bed under a tin roof with the rain beating down and a bottle of good whiskey right next to the bed.”

Horrible news. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in the head tonight. He was 67 years old.

This is just awful.

A Swedish woman preparing a meal for her family found a penis in a bottle of Turkish ketchup. The errant tubesteak is that “of an adult if human”, and is described as “medium sized.”

Viktoria Ed said she was lucky enough to discover the organ before putting the sauce on her bread rolls, unlike her husband Stefan and their children, Madeleine and Simon.

That’s disgusting. Ketchup on bread rolls? Good God.

My friend Nadja has written from a suburb of Stockholm to inform me that some Swedes put ketchup on absolutely everything, including pancakes and fillet mignon. She also says the bread involved was not rolls, but a sort of wheat tortilla called tunnbr�d, meaning “thin bread”. So there you go.

Having actually witnessed Swedes eating rotted herring in cream, I’d say their fondness for ketchup is probably just self-defense against the national cuisine. (Rotted herring, or s�rstr�mming, isn’t a cute name for something edible, it’s exactly what it sounds like: chunks of rotten fish floating in milk. With the skin on. Yummy!)

I’m a huge fan of low-rent 1950s American pop culture. I love tiki bars, pink flamingos and Googie architecture. But most of all I love those oddball out-of-the-way attractions scattered across the back roads of the country. I’ve been dragging my family to these tourist-traps for years.

But there’s one attraction I don’t think I’m ever going to visit, mainly because I can’t afford the inevitable therapist bills: the Vent Haven Ventriloquist Museum in Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky.

Visit the site and look for the clown dummy; you can’t miss it. Just look at that picture. Now imagine it moving its mouth. Holy Mother of God. Has HR Giger ever come up with anything one-tenth as scary? I mean Jeez, I was just surfing the web, minding my own business, when I ran across that. I’m going to have to sleep with the light on tonight.

So naturally I had to share it with all of you. Sweet dreams!

(I tried to link directly to the picture but they don’t allow external links to images, as is their right.)

Some dip in North Carolina is selling a ‘Jesus Brick’ he noticed in his fireplace two years ago. After the recent Father, Son and Holy Toast frenzy, he decided to cash in. At last report the bids had reached $500 on eBay.

Look. Lots of people other than Jesus have worn beards: George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare, even the Evil Mr. Spock from that alternate universe. If a random blob happens to resemble a vaguely-caucasoid guy with facial hair, that doesn’t mean it’s the Son of God sending you secret decoder-ring messages.

The brick in question, in fact, looks more like another world-famous icon with a huge following, at least to those of us even slighly familiar with 20th Century history and pop culture. That ain’t Jesus, my hyper-religious chuckle-headed friend. It’s Che! Viva la Revolucion!

Instant Karma’s gonna get ya. A UK family hired a hit man to take out a neighbor, but the drive-by shooting failed miserably when the bullet passed through the intended victim’s arm and hit one of the conspirators in the penis. The account is somewhat garbled, so it’s not clear which member of the Anderson clan got the high-velocity circumcision:

Newcastle Crown Court heard how William “Ike” Anderson, his father William “father Billy” Anderson and uncle Thomas “Tommy” Anderson hired gunman Arthur “Arty” Pattinson to shoot and kill Stanley Creswell.

But, as the bungling gunman took aim and fired, the bullet passed through intended Mr Creswell’s arm, through a garden gate and into Anderson’s groin, causing an injury to his manhood.

Pattinson 43, had been hired to kill Mr Creswell, 37, following a feud with “Ike” Anderson, 30, over £60,000.

What is clear is that one of them will now be known as “Stumpy” Anderson.

For once, some political news I can report without sarcasm: Kinky Friedman has announced he is running for Governor of Texas in 2006 as an Independent. He has also announced that if he wins, the first thing he’ll do is demand a recount. The most likely Republican contender will be the odious Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a woman who’s engulfed Texas in darkness for far too long.

I’ve been a fan of the old reprobate for many years; his mystery novels are about as entertaining as it’s possible to be and not run afoul of postal regulations. (And don’t miss his audio books: he reads them himself. His rendition of A Blast From The Past provided a lot of laughs during a cross-country drive through the South a few years ago.)

As everyone now knows, the Texas Governorshoodship is a stepping stone to the White House. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see plant a shitkicker boot on that stepping stone than the man who wrote, “I could imagine a number of things that would look good on her. One of them was myself.”

My plan for this morning was to upgrade my version of WordPress to 1.2. Alas, after backing up I ran the upgrade script and it threw a fatal error. Seems that there are some important files missing from the distribution.

I checked the scripts, and there are database changes involved. The errors did not inspire confidence. I don’t think I’m willing to risk modifying my databases only to have something else go wrong leaving me with a dead website. I’d debug it myself, but that’s what I do for a living and I sure as hell don’t feel like debugging on my day off. I”m a huge fan of WordPress, but I’ll wait to upgrade until they get these issues straightened out.