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Home Depot Honors Fallen Soldiers With Great Prices On Tools
Hats off to The Onion. This is the tackiest thing I've seen in a long time.

Go Blue!

Now here's an odd fact--38 of the 43 U.S. Presidents have had blue eyes, yet we blue eyed types currently make up only 16% of the U.S. population (down from 50% in 1900). Maybe I'll enter the 2012 race.

Smells Like Teen Spirit?

I noticed a display at WalMart the other day suggesting that Tom Brady wears the same aftershave as I do. However, said aftershave lotion has not made me 6'5", athletic, and able to have my way with supermodels. Dang! I have to wonder whether other NFL players snort and giggle as they walk past the Stetson displays at their local stores. Probably not, given the way the Patriots are playing this season. The product Brady advertises seems to work well with my natural skin scent, and I have an odd ability to sniff out such things. But I don't think it would do well for me to go around telling other men (or women, for that matter) that they should use product that is more/less citrusy, woodsy, powdery, musky, etc., to complement or mask their natural scent.

My daemon

I haven't seen The Golden Compass, and I probably won't. Nevertheless, I submitted information to determine my daemon--a sort of shape-shifting alter-ego. Let me know whether you think it fits.

A Christmas Tradition

I've made a point of eating at least one box of Cap'n Crunch's seasonal cereal since I first discovered it in the late 1980s, in the years that I've been able to find it at the local grocery stores. In law school in St. Louis, I lived in a three-person apartment. One of my roommates--Bob--was so bitchy about his atheism that he had a hissy fit when someone suggested that we put up a tiny Christmas tree. We shrugged it off and didn't put up a tree. However, a few days later, I was at the grocery store and saw a display for Christmas Crunch. One of the few things Bob and I had in common was that we both ate large amounts of cereal, so I bought a box--my first Christmas Crunch purchase--and placed it in the pantry next to his cereal boxes. Even a box of cereal with an allusion to Christianity annoyed Bob; thus, I had my revenge. Anyhow, the very best Christmas Crunch came along a year or two thereafter, when they put a packet of frosting in each box. It was ridiculously sugary--crunchberries with frosting on top--but, damn, it was tasty!

Southerners Without Accents

The website AmIAnnoying.com had this to say about North Carolina native son Michael C. Hall ("Dexter"):

He's a Southerner without a trace of a Southern accent (therefore he must be at least a little pretentious).

A few months ago, gentle reader/actor Cajun Boy was turned down for a role because a casting director said his imitation of a Cajun accent was inaccurate. Now, given Caj's origins in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, my guess is that he nailed the accent perfectly. As for me, when I started law school in St. Louis, some of my new friends asked where my Cajun accent was. I didn't feel like explaining that 1) my ancestors were from England and Scotland, and the British were the historic oppressors of the French-Canadian Acadians, so it would be most odd for me to have a Cajun accent; 2) people in other parts of Louisiana have other Southern accents--and then there's New Orleans, with it's own unique speech sounds; and 3) I grew up in Oklahoma, which is only kinda sorta in the South, though my parents were from Louisiana. So I said I just never acquired a Southern accent, which is probably all I should have said in this post.

There are some prominent individuals from the South who lack accents. Faux news commentator/presidential candidate Stephen Colbert (South Carolina); Fox news commentator Shepard Smith (Mississippi); hot actress Reese Witherspoon (Tennessee); and scorching hot actress Mary Louise Parker (South Carolina) come to mind. Some of them probably never acquired an accent; others probably worked at ridding themselves of theirs.

I think we Southerners Without Accents need to band together. Sure, we're humble men and women of the people just like everyone else, and not pretentious in the least, but we don't sound like the other people in our community. Perhaps we should have annual meetings at each others' yacht clubs and listen to each others' melodious, unaccented, speaking voices.

All-American Kids

I have returned

Thanks to gentle reader Cajun Boy, we now know what Shaquille O'Neal's party bus looks like. I wish I had one of those, painted just like Shaq's.

Bad Hippy

A San Francisco resident set fire to the Burning Man several days ahead of schedule, and he has been arrested for arson. He apparently acted alone, and not as part of some organized counter-counterculture effort.

Don't Mess With Texas

The Redneck Games near Athens, Texas, resulted in 54 arrests this week. Anyhow, I can't believe that this cultural event wasn't more widely covered--it's like an East Texas version of Woodstock, only with beer instead of acid.

Childrens' TV ain't what it used to be

The former narrator of Thomas the Tank Engine speaks to Dora the Explorer over the telephone.

My Celebrity Look-Alikes

Well, I'll flatter myself that I look like Michael Rosenbaum and Val Kilmer, though, of course, I look like neither of them. They probably matched me up with anybody who hadn't taken a shave in a day or two. I had the idea for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at a 4th of July Picnic a few years ago, only to have the idea stolen telepathically by Nirvana, so I'll take Kurt Cobain too. That's why I always wear a tinfoil hat in public, btw, it keeps rock bands from stealing my thoughts. Alec Baldwin's phone tapes might be inexcusably mean and stupid, but he was good as the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine. Hey, didn't Team America, World Police, whack Alec Baldwin anyway? But Mary Kate Olsen? WTF?

Superpower Stamps

I went downstairs to the post office this morning to mail my federal income tax return. The USPS is selling D.C. Comics superhero stamps, and now Batman adorns my annual submission to the IRS.

New blog subtitles?

Some friends--including some of the gentle readers of this space--directed your humble correspondent's attention to this fun title generator. I don't know which one to use as the subtitle for this blog:

1. The Objectification of Deviance and the Oral in Randy's Puddle of Nothing
2. Corpses as Objectification: Savaging Alien Autobiography in Randy's Puddle of Nothing
3. Poetics and Madwomen in Puddle of Nothing: Randy Deflowering Lesbian Violence
4. The Testicular Reclaiming The Bourgeois: Randy, Puddle of Nothing and Capital
5. The Outrage of Semiotics and the Bourgeois in Randy's Puddle of Nothing

Childrens' Television Tourette's?

Two happy Teletubbies
sitting in the Sun--
one pulled a knife;
the other, a gun.

I blurted this out around 5 a.m. today, while watching a video with my son, A, as my alternative version of a cute little poem. Over the years, I've developed something akin to the sudden verbal outbursts popularly associated with Tourette's Syndrome. I suppose that's a way we grown-ups make our kids' shows bearable, though I think childrens' television generally is much better than it was when I was a kid.

Yesterday, DW and I showed an old Disney video to A. We just looked at each other, laughing hard as we recalled my alternative version from years ago of the following song, which, on the video, features Donald Duck parading a group of kids through Disneyland. I didn't sing it, and neither of us had to say a word. My alternative version changed only one word; anybody who spent his or her childhood in LDS Sunday School and Primary should get it pretty quickly. DW still thinks it blasphemous:

We're following the leader, the leader, the leader
We're following the leader wherever he may go
We won't be home till morning, till morning
We won't be home till morning
Because he told us so

Tee dum, tee dee
A teedle ee do tee day
We're out for fun
And this is the game we play:
Come on, join in
And sing your troubles away
With a teedle ee dum
A teedle do tee day

We're following the leader, the leader, the leader
We're following the leader wherever he may go
We won't be home till morning, till morning
We won't be home till morning
Because he told us so

DW and I had dinner tonight with an old law school buddy of mine who I hadn't seen since graduation. He and his fiancee took a cruise from New Orleans last week and got back today. We went out with the two of them on our way back from dropping A. back at school. It's always nice to reconnect with old friends, and those New York accents are wonderful to hear.

Hey, youse guys

People occasionally ask me why I don't speak with a Southern accent. I don't know; I just don't. I just took a quiz, and it could be that I'm taking on a bit of a New Orleans accent--a unique sounding speech that is vaguely similar to New York-speak:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast   Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Midland
Boston
The South
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

White and Nerdy

Damn, this is funny. And yes, that's Donny Osmond.

Wrong Way Candidate?

Today I saw a bus with "Chris Bell for Governor" plastered on the side of it. Mr. Bell is the Democratic nominee for Governor of Texas. The thing is, I saw Mr. Bell's bus traveling east through Louisiana. This can't be a good thing two days before the election.

I also saw a bumper sticker on a car promoting the concept of "toughlove." The symbol on the sticker was a heart with a fist inside it. A fist? Yeah, that's what I associate with love.



We had a bit of a rough weekend with Adam. He wasn't feeling well, and he just wasn't himself. However, we had fun celebrating his eighth birthday. Also, we used photographs of some of his favorite places to let him know where we were going, and he seemed to pick up on the idea. Because we had Adam's individualized educational program conference early Friday morning, we headed up on Thursday and played with Toby on Thursday afternoon and evening.

Gentle Reader Andy from Austin and family were our houseguests last weekend. We had a nice time, and I think I gave the M. boys a run for their money. It was so much like playing with Adam and Toby that it was like second nature. I also appreciated that the M. boys kept talking about wanting to meet Toby and Adam and play with them. Hopefully that will happen some day in the not-too-distant future. It's nice to know that our boys have people who genuinely want to be in their lives.

Tag!

From Ann, from Vegas Joe:

The Rules of this tag game are:
1. Grab the book nearest to you...no cheating!
2. Open to page 123.
3. Scroll down to the fifth sentence.
4. Post text of next 3 sentences on to your blog.

(b) Arbitrations. Cite as court cases if adversary parties are named and as administrative adjudications if they are not. The arbitrator's name should be indicated parenthetically. Thus:

--Kroger Co. v. Amalgamated Meat Cutters, Local 539, 74 Lab. Arb. Rep. (BNA) 785, 787 (1980) (Doering, Arb.).

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, 123 (18th ed. 2005).

Funnies

The commentary on these terror-alert icons is hilarious. Any readers from Austin, Texas, might find a little surprise.