Effluvia

A fascinating profile of - I kid you not - Ned Flanders.

Today's theme: London news.

Today's big story? Hospitals all across England have kept body parts (and sometimes whole bodies) without the permission of the deceased relatives. It makes for great headlines.

Speaking of English publications...an interesting article from The Economist about the Catholic Church .



Journal Roulette

A Frog's Life - I suddenly want to puke.



Siobhanorama!

Dear guy who mugged Siobhan,

If I ever catch up with you I'm going to rip your motherfucking head off and shit down your god damned neck. And then I'm going to do it to your mom.

You shouldn't mess with my people, homeboy. You're now on the list.

Sincerely,
Harold



The Coworkers
Ain't Cool Dep't.

Scrawled on the toilet seat cover dispenser in the men's room at work:

Cowboy Hats




01/30/2001
Soft Spots

The underwear I'm wearing right now? I took 'em straight out of the dryer this morning and put 'em on. Now that felt nice.




Friday night was all about slack. Sonya on the couch, me in the chair. I drank rum and tonic and watched Any Given Sunday. Thank God for football movies. Pacino was all worked up, and Oliver Stone thought he was making Natural Born Killers again, I guess, from the way he kept cutting back and forth. I like Quaid, too, so it was enjoyable.

About one-thirty I woke up, face down in Tom Clancy's latest. Sonya was snoring on the couch. It was time for bed.

Saturday morning - after Sonya called the House of Blues and ordered a couple of Duran Duran tickets, one to each show coming up next month - we went to La Peniche for breakfast. Big omelettes. We couldn't finish 'em.

We were driving out of the Marigny to go do some shopping when we passed a little goth family walking down the sidewalk. Mom was carrying a rottweiler pup and dad and the roughly ten year-old son were wearing matching motorcycle jackets. They were all wearing all black, of course.

"That must be kind of different, growing up goth," Sonya observed.

"What I want to know," I asked, carefully turning on to Esplanade, "is how do you rebel against that? Do you start wearing suits and telling your dad that Ronald Reagan was the greatest fuckin' president ever?"

"But you wouldn't say fuck," Sonya surmised, " your arguments with your father would be calm and measured. 'Father, I insist that Reagan was a fine president - our finest.'"

"And then you sneak off to your room in the middle of the day to listen to Rush Limbaugh," I concluded.

We shopped a lot on Saturday. I had one last gift certificate from Christmas to burn so I went to Borders and, being in an English Pop mood, got Blur's Parklife and a copy of NME.

Then the mall. I needed a new shirt to wear with my tuxedo. Done. Sonya looked for a dress, too, but not finding one, we went to...

...David's Bridal! Man, that place was packed with a bunch of women trying to find them some formalwear! With everybody pawing at the merchandise, loudly quacking in the local accent and generally being surly I thought Sonya wouldn't find anything but, showing the patience of some unknown Arbor Day Sale saint, the Wife managed to find four dresses that suited her. She found one that makes her look like (and I say this with complete objectivity) a Fairy Tale Princess. Sonyarella, if you will. And then she just walked in to the Aerosoles store at the Riverwalk and found shoes and a bag to match. I helped pick out some jewelry at Macy's, and the outfit was complete.

We are gonna look something sharp.

But that wasn't all for Saturday! Around nine we met up with a coworker of mine and her husband to go check out Whiskey Blue, the superhip bar at the W Hotel. It was very, very cool. Dark, blue lights, a murky bathroom thick with incense smoke, loud, downbeat music and sexy waitstaff. And expensive drinks. I was impressed. Then we found our way down the street and around the corner to the Ernst Cafe, ostensibly to play pool, but the upstairs wasn't open and there wasn't a pool table up there, anyway, so we sat and ate this pile of nachos and talked a bunch of crap. It was fun. Back at their house afterwards I played that snowboard game for the Playstation 2. It was very cool. Like a cartoon that you play! Then we went home and crashed.

Sunday was a post-late-night day, to be sure. Sonya played video games and read the paper, I worked on my Tom Clancy book some more. Eventually I went to the grocery store for supplies. There was a football game that wasn't nearly as interesting as the new episode of Survivor. That's entertainment. Sonya went to bed under our freshly washed comforter, taking the dog with her. The dog immediately became ill. Sonya leapt out of the bed and put the dog on the floor, calling for my assistance. I shoved some paper towels under the dog's muzzle before she yakked, making clean-up much easier. Nice save, Sonya.

Monday was my Day of Personal Maintenance. I had an appointment with the dentist first thing in the morning, and it did not go entirely the way I would have liked. It was just a check-up and cleaning, right? While my teeth cleaned up nicely and the x-rays looked good I was told that I had three soft spots on three of my back teeth. I, having never had a cavity, was totally unfamiliar with the concept of soft spots.

Which is exactly what they are. The dental hygenist would stick her little pointy scrape-scrape tool into the soft spot and the tool would stick in the spot for a second before it would pull free. It didn't hurt, but the sensation was gross. I was nervous through the whole cleaning, sure that the dentist would come in and start chiselling away at my mouth as soon as the application of flouride was over.

He did not.

"I don't want to fill them, because that would be making a hole in a healthy tooth..."

I agreed vigorously with this.

"...but if we let them go they're going to turn into cavities."

That didn't appeal to me at all.

"But I'm at the dentist right now," I insisted, "I want you to stop it from becoming a cavity! That's what you do, right?"

So the dentist proposed putting a sealant on my teeth, something else I'd never heard of. Apparently this is like a clear-coat for your teeth, keeping the food and whatnot from getting jammed up against decay-prone teeth and turning a soft spot into an actual cavity. I immediately made the appointment, even though I would have to pay for it myself - my dental insurance doesn't cover sealant if you're over eighteen. It's mainly a procedure done on children's teeth.

I don't care. Treat me like a child. Just save me from having to get a fucking filling.

I called Sonya and told her about it once I got home. Surprisingly, she'd never heard of sealant. It's surprising because Sonya had more dental work done before she was eighteen than most people have in their whole lives, and she knows the business. She recommended I call Dr. McGee, her lifelong dentist back in West Memphis, and get his opinion.

Which pretty much agreed with what my new dentist told me. So I'm none to pleased, but I intent to fight the good fight against the creeping rot in my mouth. Plenty of milk, brushing twice a day, no more Altoids (and that, friends, is a sacrifice).

Oh, yeah. The dentist also said he wanted to pull my wisdom teeth.

"They're already starting to cause some crowding in your other teeth," he said.

I explained to him my nonaggression pact (borrowed from Jamie Zawinski) I had with my wisdom teeth - they cause me no pain, I won't have them pulled. And we'd worry about that after my soft spots were taken care of, okay?

Here's a question for my legion of readers who must also be dental professionals: what's the deal with my wisdom teeth? Jesus! You people treat my wisdom teeth like they're the Holy Grail of dentistry - a prize to be obtained at any cost. Personally, I think it's a racket. I mean, sure, if your wisdom teeth are causing you agony, yeah, you gotta get 'em pulled. But mine? They're just sitting there, buried deep in my gums, not making no trouble, and every dentist I've ever seen wants to yank 'em.

I saw my sisters come home from having their wisdom teeth pulled, both of them gibbering and raving from the drugs and the pain. I've read about what having your wisdom teeth pulled is like. I'm not interested.

Luckily, the trip to the eye doctor went much better. My eyesight hasn't deteriorated at all since my last trip to the eye doctor, some three years ago. This is still a pleasant surprise, since my sight went steadily downhill all during high school and college. And I got me some hip new Hugo Boss frames, too. My round John Lennon glasses - after over a decade of faithful service and countless new nose pieces, arms and lenses - will finally be retired.

Then, driving home from the eye doctor, I heard a song on WTUL. It was by Godspeed You Black Emperor, a band I'm unfamiliar with except for their ridiculous name. All of it was pretentious art-rock bullshit about the end of the world, recited over monotonous music. But the last line went:

"I looked in my wallet, and it was full of blood."

And I thought that was pretty cool.




Sonya, on the drive home today, heard the following songs on the cool new eighties station:

Rio, Duran Duran
Wanted Dead or Alive, Bon Jovi
Shadows of the Night, Pat Benatar

And then, when she got out of the car, she heard Mr. Roboto by Styx!

This generated a discussion about Pat Benatar songs.

"Shadows of the Night is her best song," I said.

"You're wrong," Sonya said, "it's Love is a Battlefield."

Hmmmm...that's a 1-1 tie on Pat Benatar's best song. To settle this, we must consider the videos.

Both of these music videos were "storyline" videos, in that a story was told in the course of the video. In the video for Shadows of the Night, Pat Benatar is an American pilot in World War II. She and a brave group of companions infiltrate their way into a Nazi stronghold. One of the Nazis is played by Bill Paxton. Pat and her buddies plant a bomb in the Nazi hideout. The Nazis are alerted to the Americans. Pat and Co. make it to their planes and fly off, shooting down numerous Nazi planes as the stronghold blows up.

Strong points:

  • Nazis die
  • Bill Paxton

For Love is a Battlefield, Pat plays a headstrong young woman who leaves home. The independent young person leaving home was a staple of early music videos. She goes off to some anonymous big city where she becomes a whore. However, she and her fellow whores rise up against their evil pimp and dance in the streets! They dance and dance, then Pat goes home to her family, a sadder and wiser person.

Strong points:

  • Young-person-leaves-home trope
  • Whores

The video for Love is a Battlefield also contains a shot of Pat's father yelling something along the lines of "if you leave now don't you ever come back" or "I don't have a daughter!" or something like that. This was the first use of a spoken line played over the music in a video. True story!

Therefore, Love is a Battlefield is the winner, being the more historically important artifact. Now you know.




So I was walking the dog this evening, and we were, like, a block away from Magazine Street. Roxy is, as usual, poking along, smelling everything, and I'm cool with that. No hurry, right? So we come to this big pile of leaves by the sidewalk, and Roxy goes to sniffing them. She sniffs and sniffs, and then she plunges into the leaves, head first. She writhes and wiggles. I know this can mean only one thing: she's found something really stinky.

I jerked her away, but it was too late. Her right shoulder was covered - caked - with green, foul-smelling shit. You could see the little stink-lines rising off of her. I walked her home and directly into the bathroom, where I bathed her. Stinky, stinky dog. Now she smells like baby powder, and I think she thinks she was punished. Not a bad dog, but a bad-smellin' one.

And I don't know why she did it, either. She walks by dog poop all the time. The grass along the sidewalks all around our building is liberally sprinkled with dogshit. Roxy may sniff at it, but she never wallows in it. Dumb dog.




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