Hallelujah

Lately I've been all worried and troubled and shit which has put a real damper on my ability to think. My coworker and I decided our inner lives were dying. I would have writer's block, but I'm pretty sure you have to actually be a writer for that. I just have block.

So last night, while I was lying in bed, I was praying that some kind of inspiration would strike me and, even better, that the heavens would send me some kind of sign that everything is going to be okay. Some kind of green sprout in my soul, or fairy lights.

I was hoping for something to write about. Or at least freaking think about.

And then, a miracle happened.

This morning I rolled out of bed and plodded into the bathroom. Warily, I looked up into the toothpaste flecked mirror and what did I see?

There, pasted into my eyebrow, was an enormous green booger.

That's right. A squishy ball of snot. It might have been mine, it might have been Dan's... The mechanics of its fated arrival two inches above my eye hardly bear thinking about. Especially if it's not even mine. Although I guess it sort of belongs to me now.

The point is, it was serendipity.

Because now, I've posted something. And I know there will always be something to post. Hallelujah.

Oh. No. He. Didn't.

So today, United States President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Um. I want this blog to be more sort of pygmy raccoons with irritable bowel syndrome and less sort of my useless political ravings, so I won't go on about this, but frankly I haven't noticed any Guantanamo-shutting or Kyoto signing or Afghanistan-resolving going on that would warrant such recognition.

Oh but wait. The press release says he won because he gave the world "hope for a better future," and for striving for nuclear disarmament. Ohhh. I see. I don't think sitting politicians should be able to get the Nobel Peace Prize anyway. That's like giving The New York Times a Most Indie New Blog Award or something.

Anyway, I voted for Obama and was pretty fucking excited about it, and compared to the last guy, Obama isn't so much a breath of fresh air as a mighty wind. Oh oops, that came out wrong. Now it sounds like I don't totally love him.

To prove my affection, I have posted pics of these quality paintings you see here by some painter named Dan Lacey that came from this website. Dan Lacey has a blog here. Dan must be kind of awesome, unless he isn't employing enough layers of meta-irony, in which case I don't really understand these paintings any more. Actually, I don't really understand them anyway.

platitudes are pointless. so fucking sue me.

Ask the hard questions.

Face your fears.

James Thurber, who drew these cartoons (and a bunch of others for the New Yorker and other publications and who also wrote), apparently once said:

All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

Which would be great, but it doesn't really cover the days where you feel more like you want to scrape out the inside of your head with an egg spoon and burn the contents before anything or anyone else gets infected. You have those days?

Rats, Otters, and Double Rats

A lot of interesting things happened in the news this week, which I would summarize and link to, but I'm pretty tired so actually I'd rather slow fuck a dalmatian. There is this, though:

It turns out over the last couple of years, crops in Bangladesh have been systematically ravaged by a plague of ravenous rodents, forcing some families to smoke and eat the rats. As a result, the authorities are offering an annual prize of a color TV to whomever catches the most rats and produces their severed tails as evidence. Which is AWESOME.

This week, Bangladesh has crowned a new champion rat catcher. According to the BBC, a certain Mr. Mokhairul Islam was awarded a brand new color television in Dakar, Bangladesh this week as a reward for reportedly killing some 83,450 rats. Which is just a Holy Mackerel number of dead rats, I think.

(When I read the headline I did think of the Pied Piper, but actually it doesn't seem like the rat catcher did any piping, nor did he steal any village children. Although someone else did, apparently.)

I was pretty stoked about the story. But then, as per fucking usual, my illusions were dashed on the rocks like a baby otter that got confused after its mommy was eaten by an enormous white shark.

"Mr Islam - a wealthy farmer who owns about 300 acres of land and six poultry farms near the capital - said it was a great honour to receive the award."

This isn't the hardworking serf I imagined, attacking and killing 83,450 rats one after the other on a personal mission to pull his family out of the shit. No! This guy didn't lay away hardening rat tails in terracotta pots by his door-hole, painstakingly amassing a vast wealth of them, dreaming of the color television. And the glory, of course. If he had, it would have been pretty inspiring. Kind of like in The Pursuit of Happiness, with all the hard work and determination, but without any of the ridiculously good fortune.

No, the king of rats is not one of the deserving needy. This rat catcher is basically some wealthy chicken mogul who probably forced all of his minions to go out and catch vermin for him, probably as some kind of fanciful team-building exercise, and you know they can't say no because they're not allowed to unionize, and then at the end this asshole gets a color TV.

Which he probably doesn't even appreciate because, and I quote, he owns "about 300 acres of land and six poultry farms near the capital." I know one guy with one poultry farm, and he has at least three color TVs. His are flat, too. So while six might not seem like the hugest number of poultry farms out there, it's kind of a big deal.

And then I became even more skeptical (crushed, disillusioned) of this Mr. Islam and his alleged successes. Mr. Islam says that he and his team killed some 83,450 rats; however, a local official even went ahead and TOLD the BBC that "We couldn't count all the tails because of the stench."

Also worth noting is that our friend Mokhairul says that all the tail-gathering was done in February, but "other reports" say it took him eight months. Excuse me. That's a big difference. I don't know how resilient severed rat tails are where YOU live, but in my experience six months more or less would make a pretty huge difference to how rotten the things are.

Do Mr. Islam and his team (of SLAVES) expect us to believe that they harvested some 85,000 tails, which are made out of dead rat, in February and then they just held on to them for the next seven months? I don't even know why the person who wrote this (there's no byline) didn't just spell it out and write, "so the obvious revelation here is that Mr. Islam is a dishonest, lying cheat and someone should immediately go count the alleged tails or at least check whether some are actually dirty string." Oh please, Mokhairul and team. Enough already.

Anyway, even if that hideous lie about getting the tails in February WAS true, Mokhairul, you shouldn't get the prize. Because you just bought yourself a team to go kill rats FOR you. In fact, if you didn't kill at least 10,000 of those rats with your own hoe, or I say you should give the prize back.

Oh, and one more thing. I was googling for different stories on this rat killer king and I saw that the Dallas Morning News had posted the AP article on their website. Which made me pretty suspicious. The BBC is allowed to print dreck like this because they also print all the real news, all the time. But a summary search of Dallas Morning News website for "Bangladesh" shows that, since this summer, they've run an additional ONE story on Bangladesh, which doesn't even count because it was about how the tropical storm caused floods in India...and Bangladesh.

The Dallas Morning News carried the rat tail story, but has never covered the destruction that the rat infestation was wreaking on farms across the country.

Shame on you, Dallas Morning News. I know that you, like most newspapers, are in a falling sales/falling advertising downward spiral of doom that has forced you to make brutal cuts at the expense of common sense, knowledge, and our children's children, but STILL. More baby otters beaten into pulp by the driving waves.

P.S. The picture of the otter is from here. The picture of the rat is from here.

Thundernuts the Sea Cucumber

The same number of people who watch that show will read this blog, which is fair enough because just look at the size of this entry

Today was a long freaking day. At the end of it, on the tram home, I sat behind a woman who looked like an adorable button but who probably has tuberculosis because she was hacking and wheezing the whole way. It is arguably possible that she just has a cold, but I think at the very least it was swine flu, because this is the type of thing that happens to big-eyed old ladies with crinkly smiley faces just when you least suspect it. When the old lady coughed, the lacy thing that held her bun up vibrated, and she hunched her little button shoulders over and made tiny button fists with her hands.

I was fairly sad that she had consumption and I hoped that she had a husband and a daughter or a son to take care of her, but then I figured that probably her husband was already dead and her stupid ungrateful kids never write unless they're mailing her brochures for retirement homes that look like Santa's workshop in the pictures but where really they beat old people and make them thread tiny needles all day long in a poorly-lit room. I might be confusing retirement homes with sweatshops. Either way the old lady is pretty much screwed, because she has the wasting disease. (I'm not going to lie, I just looked that up. Did you know that tuberculosis is also called the King's Evil? Fact.)

So anyway, after my incredibly exhausting day of being a normal professional grown up, all I wanted to do once I got home was sit down and chill out. So I threw my keys and my bag on the couch, and kissed Daniel hello, and then I fell to my knees and slowly keeled over, and then my body melted into a thin soup and I seeped into the cracks in the parquet. That's what it felt like I should do. Actually, Daniel handed me a glass of wine and I curled up next to him to watch TV. Even though going to the gym and working on my novel (I don't have a novel) would have been more righteous, I was digging the wine and the couch. And the TV.

Only, you know what was on TV? C.S.I. . If you've never seen C.S.I., even by accident, then either you have a really fancy cable package or you actually spend your evenings stretching and reciting poetry. Since no one will ever read this, it's probably important for me to explain that C.S.I stands for crime scene investigation (I'm pretty sure), which is a terrible title, but then they just turned it into a snazzy acronym, which adds some zip but is confusing, because it could stand for just about anything. Crackheads snore ickily. Anyway, I shit you not, this episode was about some guy who hung himself at a ritzy rehab clinic with a rope that some depressed brat had knit together out of dental floss because she was raped and on heroin and was planning to hang herself. Also, in the end it turned out someone else killed the guy because he was beautiful but gay, and the killer just set it up to look like a dental floss suicide. No, seriously.

Then on another channel was a detective show that is about people who are raped and then murdered under extra fucked up circumstances, because normal murder is so yesterday. So then Dan and I skipped to a kids' channel which had some show about how to make super fun rabbit faces out of cream cheese toast and raisins. Then we found some movie that was just starting.

Which turned out to be about a group of Russian prostitutes that thought they were selling out to become strippers in a foreign land, only it turned out that actually their pimp stole their passports and then sold the women to a bunch of fat, ugly old men. It's on right now. It's twenty minutes in and I just watched a scene where one of the girls has to pee but now she's locked in a room, so she's banging on the door screaming, and then her new fat ugly owner opens the door and says, "You pee, then we have sex?" and she screams "Sex no!" and there are tears running down her face, and then he screams: "NO SEX, NO BATHROOM!" and slams the door in her face and locks it, and she sobs and sobs and, finally, pees in her pants.

I don't want to harp on this, but for real. What is wrong with television? I don't actually want to tell you what I do for work in case one day an actual living person reads this, but basically I get to hear about fairly depressing things all day long that make you want to save the world with an enormous silvery-white sword of awesome righteousness, and kill all the bad guys, but you can't because we don't live in that world. Instead we live in the movie where mostly the bad guys win most of the time, and all of the people that are totally cheering for the good guys have to savor a couple of rare victories that are sweet but relatively short-lived, like a tic tac.

Given all of the perfectly fucked up shit that goes down worldwide on an hourly basis, you'd think that most people, like me, would want to go home and watch well-crafted dramas about unicorns and dinosaurs and ancient Amazonian tribes that probably even still exist somewhere. TV could be so fabulous. Entertainment would consist of hour after hour of cute furry animals engaged in witty conversation. Sometimes, when that's too much, there would be a channel where you could watch a koala bear suck on a cheerio until it turns to mush. Thrillers would be whimsical beetle adventures. (I just realized that this is basically what children's tv is like, only clearly is really isn't most of the time, because the only children's show I found was about making a frightening bunny face out of cream cheese and raisins and celery, which probably tastes like cream cheese with raisins and celery. Gross.)

Anyway, in my happy universe, shows wouldn't skim their feel-good factor off of my hopelessly middle class superiority complex which is based solely on the fact that I don't know anyone as fucked up as the guy who was murdered in a fake dental floss suicide.

But obviously, no one else wants to watch Mongolian tea rituals and pygmy shadow puppet dramas about horned lizards. Which, to conclude, is what all the wine is about.

P.S. This blatantly cribbed photo comes from this site