Agamemnon is feeling better and will pull through

Posted on May 15, 2021 by Steve

I was in tears pretty quickly. Agamemnon didn’t have something as simple as a stomach ache. The doctor told me he had gone number one for at least a couple days so his kidneys were backed up, his blood was full of Potassium and his heart was trying to cope. This is when I wished cats could speak English to tell me what was bothering them. Seems he had been hiding this from me until he couldn’t bear it much longer.

The great staff at White Rock Vet Hospital fixed Aggie up and he finally took a whiz through a catheter (or is it a CAT-theter?, pun intended since I was crying until I saw him as per the video). Seems I have adopted another special-food-needed cat like Molly. Way back in 2003 or so, she had a stone in her the size of a shirt button (a dress shirt). Until her untimely demise, I had to feed her more expensive food to prevent another kidney stone. Agamemnon will require the same except I probably should rename him Hank Hill, click the link to see why. He’s going to be bummed about the open buffet ending and scheduled feedings which leads to puking; cats inhale like dogs when they’re not allowed to nibble at will. Isis doesn’t seem to care but I’m worried she’ll want to eat his food. Miette, Nemo and Kuroneko always did. Somehow they can smell the higher fat content which we Americans know, fat is what makes our horrible diet palatable!

Speaking of Isis. She has been taking this in stride. I’m confident she knows something is amiss because she can nap in peace or roam without a spontaneous wrestling match. If Agamemnon died, she’d probably mourn a while. She was of aware Miette and Nemo’s permanent departure and may ponder Kuroneko moving out.

Aggie and I thank you all for your support and kind words. I hope to bring him home tomorrow. Then will come the uphill battle to pay for his care. No worries, I have pulled through worse crises.

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Agamemnon isn’t feeling well

Posted on May 14, 2021 by Steve

That’s a picture from last Summer when he was being a sweetie and napping near my desk. Today he isn’t himself. He didn’t greet me or rush to his food dish this morning. The poor guy is rather lethargic and cries in what sounds like pain every 20 minutes. My vet will be able to see him later this afternoon so I’m hoping for the best, he’s constipated or has some stomach issue from his overeating.

More as it happens but I know I will be in tears if my kitty has something much worse upsetting his overall well being.

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Belated Birthday to Jennifer!

Posted on May 14, 2021 by Steve

Ten days ago, Jennifer celebrated her birthday. It does annoy her that she has to share it with the Fourth be with You! She has a point. When I turned 13, all eyes were on the wedding of two inbreds in the UK yet this is now a permanent issue.

Going to Las Vegas was partially motivated by this little celebration. Our first full day was spent enjoying this and I’ll give highlights (not play-by-play) later.

I’m just glad we got to be together for this great occasion in the Party Capital of the US and probably in the top three on the planet.

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NIMBY forces won

Posted on May 13, 2021 by Steve

Before I left for vacation, we had an election on a series of propositions (aka governments not doing their job by blaming the electorate) and I wasn’t allowed to vote in anything because I live in unincorporated Pflugerville. The big one I had no say in was Prop B, the anti-camping ban being reinstated. Like numerous urban centers, Austin has an enormous homeless population thanks to our housing crisis (there’s no shortage, just greedy assholes), better weather, Republican indifference, NeoLiberal bullshit, fake Christianity and other factors. Many of the homeless are also mentally ill and if they weren’t originally, they probably are now since sleeping outside would drive anyone insane. Austin does have some shelters but obviously they’re overwhelmed like everywhere else and shelters are only the first stage in trying to cure an intractable problem.

The interim solution to handle the overflow was allow or ignore the growing tent cities under Austin’s I-35, MoPac and 183 overpasses, namely the huge one located in what we call the Whale Bones. The NIMBY forces came up with every excuse on why this needed to stop (property values, UT recruiting, appearances, etc.) while never addressing the actual problem: no affordable housing, shit wages and cuts to mental-health services.

They won fairly handily thanks to dark money from realtors, developers and other rich shitbags. Starting several days ago (5/11), the cops can now fine them $500 for every violation. Genius! Let’s penalize the homeless for something they don’t have! Eventually their unpaid misdemeanors will swell into felonies and then they can be arrested. I’m guessing another dark-money source was the private prison system our Neo-Confederate government is so fond of.

What I would like to do is make these selfish pricks demonstrate their absolute, true colors by helping a charity buy an abandoned hotel or apartment building to use as a transition place. The first step to defeating homelessness and poverty is give these people a safe place to sleep, bathe and pull themselves together. Then heal them up while getting them back on their feet with a job and into affordable housing (another matter the developers are allergic to creating in their avarice). Sounds great until the NIMBY people bitch and bitch about how this place is near their posh homes in Westlake, Travis Heights or Hyde Park…quel dommage! Or worse, their taxes go up a little to pay for this! It will make them long for the days of how St. Reagan and his disciples solved it,…give these people bus tickets to New Orleans, Phoenix or Little Rock, let them be somebody else’s problem.

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Nein! (German D’oh!)

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Steve

Dave Attell once said he never wanted to take up jogging because joggers are always the ones who find the dead bodies. Well, this German jogger thought they found a dud grenade from WWII in a bag. The police-bomb squad got called out, examined the bag and were confident with 100% certainty that the contents were explosive in another way.

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We’re back from Las Vegas! (2021)

Posted on May 11, 2021 by Steve

More to follow as we all get back into the grind of life, aka working, living, cat care, etc. We did return last night but today is the decompression day. More highlights and other “missing” stories later. I decided to take a vacation from my site as well as giving you all a break on having to read this jazz.

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Officially on vacation, that is all

Posted on April 30, 2021 by Steve

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RIP Michael Collins

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Steve

I’m glad that when the show For All Mankind covered the Apollo XI landing, they kept the names of the real astronauts, including the late Michael Collins who would then be in the alternate universe’s Apollo XV (sic) disaster…spoiler alert, he survived. Rather sucks. Even in fiction the poor guy never got to walk on the Moon.

Others called him the forgotten astronaut since Armstrong and Aldrin got all the fame and glory. It just demonstrates their ignorance since Collins had the toughest job after the landing, making sure the landing module sync’d up and safely reconnected with the orbiter. Before that, not going crazy orbiting the Moon a few times by himself while the other two tried not to be the first people (known) to die on another “planet.”

Thanks for everything Mr. Collins. Your bravery, nerves of steel and small stature (astronauts had to be short back then to fit the cockpits and save fuel on their mass) helped push the human race forward.

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1996: Australia’s enough is enough moment

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Steve

I’ve forgotten how many shooting sprees the US has had just this year but 25 years ago, the Aussies had what was their worst on the Island of Tasmania. After that, they reformed their gun laws and now being gunned down by a crazy person, disgruntled employee or right-wing shithead redneck (a bogan) is closer to impossible. To add insult to injury regarding our nation’s bullshit response of “thoughts and prayers” lather, rinse and repeat via the NRA, the GOP and Blue Dog Dems, the Australian gun-law restrictions were enacted by the Liberal Party under John Howard. Now before the Ammosexuals and MAGAts in Amerika start going, “of course, Liberals did this!” we need to remind these morons that Down Under, the Liberal Party is the conservative/right camp (using the Economist‘s definition) and the liberal/left camp is the Labour Party. Plus a single-payer system of healthcare both sides are in agreement about. American Exceptionalism is better because why exactly?

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What CV-19 testing feels like

Posted on April 27, 2021 by Steve

I received my second Moderna shot three weeks ago but this reminded me of what CV-19 testing feels like! Well, the first time I was tested last year when the pandemic had more mystery, paranoia and fear around it. My nostrils burned for a few hours. The second time I was tested, medical professionals learned mouth swabs were accurate enough to figure out who was infected.

Despite being “immune” now, I will continue to wear my mask in public as per the CDC’s recommendations because I never, ever wanted to be tested again. I fear it will smart as much as finding out my old man is Darth Vader.

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The Love Toilet Beta

Posted on April 26, 2021 by Steve

Either way, we know it’s where Victoria Jackson’s career went after the Comedy Central show Strip Mall. Below is the final, marketable version advertised.

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Caillou grew up and…

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Steve

…remains the bane of parents!

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What an encounter with a “kid” giant could be like

Posted on April 24, 2021 by Steve

I need to keep this comic strip in mind since I was probably just as cruel to ants. It also brings up the debate about nature v. nurture regarding alignments in D&D, are most young giants (hill, frost, fire and cloud) naturally evil or do they pick up their stances from their parents and community?

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The Simpsons nailed it beyond my expectations

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Steve

You know you’re doing something right/well when it really, really pisses off the object of ridicule. Sure, Morrissey is low-hanging fruit for my generation (Gen X) and he probably isn’t too well known by Mills and Gen Z, but he continues to be an embarrassment for non-meat eaters, his countrymen and fans. I also didn’t know Benedict Cumberbatch could sing, let alone imitate the King of Whine.

Other media outlets, oddly an Irish one, were really critical about this episode. They mostly focused on the tired, moldy chestnut we all know about how The Simpsons has lost its relevance and/or it hasn’t been any good since (insert season number here). The only thing I could ever agree on is that picking on Morrissey in 2021 was a weird choice.

However, Lisa getting swept up in the Smiths 34 years after they broke up isn’t much of a stretch. Her character is alienated from the mainstream and yet alienates those around her. She is caught up in her own ego as all teens go through (myself included), aka the phase in which everybody is stupid and wrong, only I know what’s best. There might be an equivalent act today yet Morrissey remains the champ of such people, namely vegans, before they learn to dial back their rhetoric amongst us omnivores.

The episode was personal to me too. No, I was never anything resembling a Smiths fan during their heyday but I lived with one. Chris was my second roommate at Marquette and he was quite fanatical about them. We originally met as interns at WMUR and he turned out to be the neighbor of my established friends Paul and John at McCormick Hall. Chris loved to play the current album (The Queen is Dead) and tell me about the live show he’d seen the previous Summer and how the lyrics were personal to him, blah, blah, blah. I was, “OK. The songs are pretty good, a tad on the whiney side and there’s one with a weird helium-voiced person singing” but I knew my place being a “country mouse” from North Dakota. I readily admitted to my ignorance on what was “cool,” since I didn’t have access to the better music thanks to geography.

Several months later, I learned how Smiths fans didn’t have a sense of humor. Chris played the new single “Ask” on our WMUR show and I broke out laughing at the bridge when Morrissey was singing, “If it’s not love, then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb…the bomb that will bring us together.” To me it was a dark, fatalist joke amplified by Morrissey’s Dudley Do-Right voice. Chris was annoyed, for I didn’t “get it.”

The following school year, Chris also read a little too into the lyrics in what would be the band’s swansong, Strangeways, Here We Come. He was also having some girlfriend problems and weirdly thought this situation wasn’t a coincidence, maybe Morrissey was clairvoyant? Didn’t matter. Chris dropped out the following semester for reasons I don’t want to share.

As for Morrissey, the jokes Simpsons writer Tim Long authored just kept landing a flurry of hilarious blows at the singer. Namely what an insufferable racist he is. Morrissey denies this while talking shit about the Left-leaning The Guardian; One cannot be a member of the UKIP party and say they’re not racist with a straight face any more than a Klansman in America. Long then went one better by having his parody character aging into a fat guy who loves to eat meat and fires sausages at the crowd while plugging his latest solo album titled Refugees? Again?

Thanks Simpsons staff for making an episode which feels like it was written just for me. I seriously hope Chris saw it too and laughed as hard as I did.

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RIP Jim Steinman

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Steve

I think only Meat Loaf fans were super familiar with Jim since he was the primary writer on Bat Out of Hell but his main speciality was ballads. Great examples are the two he authored for Bonnie Tyler: “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and “Holding out for a Hero.” Air Supply used his help too. Then he was supposed to team up with Def Leppard yet it didn’t go well and they made the 12-million-seller Hysteria with Mutt Lange.

Normally, Jim’s style of music wasn’t my thing, I couldn’t stand “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” for it was a staple of Midwestern radio, some weddings (as a mean joke) and some club in Milwaukee thought it was danceable. He still gets a nod from Picayune for contributing to the larger over culture of Western Pop music and for producing what I think is the most iconic songs that scream, this is what Goth is! In 1986-87, he worked with Sisters of Mercy on their breakthrough Floodland which had the hits “This Corrosion” and “Dominion/Mother Russia.” Lead singer Andrew Eldritch said it best on what Jim did, “We needed something that sounded like a disco party run by the Borgias, and that’s what we got.” I couldn’t have said it better myself in what those hits sound like. They continue to sound great 30-plus years later.

Reuniting with Meat Loaf was inevitable as they did Bat‘s sequel and had a conspicuous hit throughout 1993, “I Would do Anything for Love (But I Won’t do That).” It was a tie between this and “Bohemian Rhapsody” on what would make me want to put knitting needles in my ears. I remember the hit was also a lazy punchline for David Letterman.

Thanks for everything Jim. I may not have liked everything but you were an unusual musical artist who proved that sometimes, giving a pop song a dramatic, over-the-top flair can be cool.

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