The sayings of Uncle Vinny

So, last night was my 3rd try at hosting Hopvine trivia, and it went pretty well… but I have to remember a few things:

• Always bring a tie-breaker question! I have one somewhere, but I didn’t bring it tonight. I was getting nervous going into the last round, because two teams were tied for rounds 3 through 5… yikes. I was going to have to make up a trivia question (or questions!) on the spot, and you know that was gonna suck:  “Um… name the, uh, last 3 people to, uh, be mayor of Seattle.”
• Do your doggone research, dummy! I messed up on whether George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion or My Fair Lady. I’m a total dimwit… My Fair Lady is the movie based on his play Pygmalion. Damn! I thought I was being all crafty by referring to the Greek play Pygmalion.
• Do more research! People caught me flat-footed when I wasn’t sure whether (a) Hindi when written down becomes Sanskrit, or (b) whether the same characters in Hindi are also used for Sanskrit. I was pretty sure (a) was bullshit, but I wasn’t sure about (b).

Anyhoo, people had fun, I had beer and everyone went home without punching me! Hooray!

GBS would approve of that part, anyway…

Here’s BHO tonight in his North Carolina victory speech:

This primary season may not be over, but when it is, we will have to remember who we are as Democrats – that we are the party of Jefferson and Jackson; of Roosevelt and Kennedy; and that we are at our best when we lead with principle; when we lead with conviction; when we summon an entire nation around a common purpose – a higher purpose.

Blarg! OK, I’m on board for Jefferson, Roosevelt and the over-admired Kennedy… but Andrew Jackson? I can’t remember ever hearing any Democrat say how proud they were to be in the party of Jackson. To me, he’s known mostly for slaughtering Indians, and secondarily for being a blunt, stubborn jackass. Granted, a quick skim through Wikipedia shows that I have a lot to learn about ol’ Hickory, but still… color me surprised.

While we’re poodling around with the bygones of American politics, try this on for size:

And if that isn’t weird enough for you, try this one. I don’t know much about Adlai Stevenson, but these are awful ads, poorly conceived and executed. Both are insubstantial, but so is this Ike ad I mentioned earlier, and it’s a bundle o’ fun!

Ok, that’s enough pigheadedly uninformed blogging for tonight. Toodle-oo, ducklings!

Ok, just what the heck is going on here:

“I’ve lost track of how many towns we’ve been to,” she said of herself, Bill and Chelsea’s efforts. “I’m telling you, my husband is going to visit every place where two or more people gather in North Carolina before Tuesday.”

For those of you who didn’t go to Sunday School, my guess is that HRC had a brain fart and accidentally implied that her husband is God Almighty:

“Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven. “For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.”

–Matthew 18:20

Sigh.

Gmail and my work email account keep my inbox mostly free of spam, and I don’t get much junk mail via the US Post Office, either. But ever since I’ve lived in Seattle, I’ve been getting these dumb mailers every week… you know, the ones with the Franklin Mint crap and the Safeway crap and the KFCChampionWindowsBartellsOreckVacuum crap…

So! It turns out it’s easy to get off the Seattle Times list, just call 206-652-6587. The RedPlum.com people make it a little harder, but I tracked down that number, too: 888-241-6760.

Yes, this means I won’t be scanning the streets for lost children, and I won’t be alerted to sales on cashews from Rite Aid… but I think I can live with that.

Hello, trivia fans!

I have good news and I have bad news.

The good news: The earth is not currently expected to plunge into the sun, roasting us all in an agonizing hellish blaze.

The bad news: Hopvine trivia has been downsized! It’s now once a month on the 2nd Tuesday of the month. I’m alternating with Lucien, the other hoster, starting Tuesday the 13th of May. (You should go check out Lucien’s site, by the way — he shoots people!)

This is happening because the Hopvine owner found he wasn’t making as much money during trivia nights as on other nights… so if you’re playing, please be drinkin’! I’ll try to write questions that induce an urge towards bacchanalianism.

You deserve a song to celebrate:

This is, uh… not safe for work, but it’s really funny. If you aren’t familiar with Jonathan Coulton, you’ve been missing out! Possibly the best way you can spend a dollar today is to give it to JoCo and listen to his cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back.

In utterly unrelated matters, please go read this short little post by Matt Yglesias. What’s the absolute best case scenario for how Iraq might turn out in 10-12 years? Probably a hell of a lot worse than how things have gone in Columbia recently, given all the head starts we’ve got there, relatively speaking. I’m about halfway through his excellent little book, and I’ll write something about it after I finish. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for an insightful (and short!) foreign policy book, you could do a lot worse.

I sat down with God and a bowl of phad kee mao last night to get his reaction to the extended Democratic primary, Amy Winehouse’s rehab issues and the upcoming rending of the space-time continuum when the Large Hadron Collider goes live later this year.

Uncle Vinny: Hi God! Thanks for agreeing to the interview.

God: …

Uncle Vinny: Oh shit. Is this a bad time?

God: …

Uncle Vinny: Should I call back later?

God: …

Uncle Vinny: You’re not fooling anyone, you know.

Uncle Vinny is known throughout the galaxy for his moxie and gumption when it comes to dealing with cat pee. Ask any Maori tribesman, Uranusian(*) hat salesman or Proxima Centaurian semi-pro cricketer how to deal with your naughtily peeing kitten, and he/she/it will send you straight to yours truly.

This makes it sound like I’m a man beset on all sides by cats and their pee, but it’s not true! I’ve had a few little troubles over the years with Rei and Six, but mostly they are angels who desire only a few things in life:

1. Food
2. Water
3. A lap to snuggle in
4. A laser pointer dot to chase, and
5. A clean place to pee

On those few occasions where I’ve failed to provide #5, Rei-Rei lets me know by peeing somewhere and getting huffy. I’ve been trained pretty well, but I have some technology on my side for when things Go Wrong.

The coolest trick in my arsenal is also the newest, and it’s the impetus for this dumb blog post. It’s a little UV flashlight that I got from The Blacklight Shop. The next time your cat pees where it shouldn’t, douse the area with Petastic, and then wait until dark to use your blacklight to see if you’ve got all the spots. You might not be able to see or smell the bits you missed, but they light up like a Christmas tree under the UV… it’s kinda pretty, in a God-dammit-my-house-is-filthy sort of way. If you get every bit of that pee chewed up by the little enzymes in the Petastic, kitty will be less likely to pee there again. (Oh, and go clean the litter box, dummy!)

For fun, run around in the dark with this flashlight and check out all the old stains in your carpet. In a future blog post I’ll report on whether Petastic is strong enough to remove the stains on my carpet from before I moved in… the carpet looks clean, but yuck, there are a lot of old splotches here and there. I’m guessing a lot of them are food stains and such, but who knows? If my cats can smell all those old stains, they must be pretty annoyed. Hopefully I can make a dent.

(*) Dear ducklings: Please tell me how to refer to someone who lives on Uranus. Thank you!

At least one person has told me that he enjoys reading my byzantine World of Warcraft posts, even though he doesn’t know anything about the game, so here I go with another one…

As some of you ducklings might recall, I took Viv (my priest) to another server back in October in order to more deeply sample the rich life-affirming ore that is a slot in a semi-serious raiding guild. For several months we had our way with various pixellated monsters, obtained fabulous pixellate prizes and generally had a grand ol’ non-pixellated time. Sadly, that guild went up in smoke (fuller history here), and I was suddenly popped out of my thrice-weekly raids, my late-night mining circuits, my purposeless Auction House scanning, etc. What to do?! Join another guild? Raid more? Raid less? PvP?

The answer turned out to be: “Get a job!” The meltdown happened about the time I was due to start my new job, so I just let ol’ Viv collect dust while I went about rejoining life in the salt mine. (Oh, and somewhere in there I bought an xbox 360, which I’m guessing you’ll hear more about later.) Just a few weeks ago some old friends encouraged me to move her back to my old server so we could hang out. “No raiding!”, I vowed. “Sure, whatever!” they winked. The name “Viv” was already taken on Dethecus, sadly, but now she has a new name: Puttanesca. Saucy, no?

We now have a sketchily-balanced 3v3 arena team, and today we went 7-3 — a huge improvement over last week’s horrifying 2-8. The difference in my play this week is twofold:

* I respecced away from heavy Discipline to a more traditional healing Disc/Holy build; if I really worked at it I think I would be a better arena priest with Pain Suppression, but let’s be honest: I’m an old dog, and PS is a new trick. Plus, I just like pumping out big heals more than I like extra survivability. Her resilience is almost 400 now, so she’s pretty tough.

* The title of this post, “LOS! LOS!”.  I’m really trying to learn to think more about Line of Sight while playing, especially when my thick head figures out that there are hunters shooting at me. “Hey, this would be a good time to hide!” I think… Today we got placed a lot in the Blade’s Edge arena (the one with the bridge), so instead of going up top to get slaughtered like usual, we hung around at the bottom with the big helpful pillars. That worked pretty well…

Anyhoo, it’s nice to hang out with friends again, and gathering arena points is always a joy. Puttanesca picked up some Season 2 shoulders last week, so now she looks pretty goddam badass:

Badass for a sweet-tempered girl dwarf, that is. 

I keep reading these articles that offhandedly remark that Obama is black, therefore blah de blah de whatever. People, he ain’t black. His father was black, his mother was “caucasian”, or Kansan, or white, etc. I know I’m glossing over tens of thousands of Ph.D. theses here, but what the hell do we even mean saying that someone is some color or another?

If a Pennsylvanian says “Oh, I kinda doubt my neighbors will vote for Obama because he’s black,” really they’re saying that even “being 50% black” is too black. Ew! Blackness, it is icky! Reminds me of rappers and angry people, make it stop, etc. Gee, what if BHO was 10% black? Still too black for ya?

So anyhoo, if anyone ever makes a reference to Obama’s blackness in conversation, I’m going to try to remember to say, “uh-uh, he’s a white guy“, just to see what happens. Plus, my vanpoolers remind me that I should be using the word “solid” more often; we want it to re-catch on the way “right on” seems to have re-caught on. Personally, I want people to refer to this decade as “the naughties”, but no one is game for that, evidently. Maybe Wikipedia can help?

(In other news, I had a fabulous date tonight! Hi Laura!)