"i went back to ohio
and my city was gone."
--the pretenders

middle america is a very hearty place. i highly recommend youngstown and its environs. thank you gemmas.

CIAAAAOOOOOO!!!

adore antonio with me,
TR

p.s. everything's fine on the road to austin after 1 day. 550 miles down, 1650 to go.

this is to say: i am going. i'm taking cat with me.

sorry, kenlowcell, lear, annie, joss, and anyone else to whom i've broken a pledge. i swear we'll meet again.

love you all, and see you in the american southwest.

yee-haw.

yippie-ki-yi-yay with me,
TR

Christmas blog, Christmas blog, Christmas blog rock.

Wishing a merry one to all my folks, peeps, pueblo, and gente. To quote the great American sage Jerry Springer: Take care of yourselves--and each other.

Be merry with me,
TR

Excerpted from Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts:

"One of the most beautiful sights is a urine dump at sunset, because as the stuff comes out [in space] and as it hits the exit nozzle, it instantly flashes into 10 million little ice crystals, which go out almost in a hemisphere, because, you know, you're exiting into essentially a perfect vacuum, and so the stuff goes in every direction, and radially out from the spacecraft at relatively high velocity. It's surprising, and it's an incredible stream...a spray of sparklers almost. It's really a spectacular sight." --Russell Schweickart, Apollo astronaut

In space, as always, our truest selves are revealed, and astronauts reveal them to us.


Be awed with me,
TR

sorry i was absent over the weekend, not that anyone really missed the old mcblogovich. except for the hecklers.

just a quick observation:

what the heck happened to joe namath? did anyone see him during the pats game? he told the female espn correspondent (not lisa guerrero, the other one) that he wanted to kiss her -- twice. (that is, he told her twice that he wanted to kiss her, not that he told her he wanted to give her two separate kisses, or engage in kissing with her on two separate occasions, or as part of two distinct sessions. anyway.) i didn't know whether to think he had some mental degenerative disorder that i never knew about, or whether nobody at espn noticed he was blitzed (no pun intended), or they did and decided to go ahead with the interview anyway. either way, watching that segment was one of the most profoundly embarrassing moments for me as a viewer in the history of my tv viewing career. the strangest part--besides the obvious strangeness of the whole thing--was that the commentators didn't know what to say. one of them said, "that joe namath--such a happy guy," to which the other guy said, "oh, he's happy, all right," and then the second half kickoff was mercifully kicked off, leaving us all to wonder: what the heck happened to joe namath?

scratch your head with me,
TR

speaking of googling, i would like to host a google whomping competition on this blog, starting as soon as i enable my comment section here. for those of you unfamiliar with google whomping, it's an interweb game (not to be confused with interweb girlfriend) wherein a person tries to google two words and two words only and come up with just one hit (no more, no less. three is too many...). the words cannot be in quotes or otherwise googled as part of a phrase. just two words. of course, it's prohibited to make your own website in which you include two ridiculously rare words you just took from the dictionary. it's a game of wits, and a doozy at that. it might sound easy or lame to the uninitiated, but i encourage you to try it. it's surprisingly tough, but really engaging at the same time. for those of you who are receptionists or who hate the soulless corporations you work for, or both, or neither, and want to kill some time at work, google whomping is superb.

as for the contest rules, write me a comment giving me the words you used, the number of hits that came up, and the link to prove it (cut and past the address from the google page). the lowest number of hits at the end of three weeks (11:59:59 am central time on 9 january is the last possible second your post can be received by me), or the first one-hit wonder is the winner. the prize: i will lengthily and gratuitously sing the praises of the winning person, and that person may command me to publicly disclose the most humiliating fact he/she knows or can unearth about me.

i hope at least someone takes up my challenge. even if no one else is interested, i ask the enlow family as mental athletes(and physical ones, but most importantly mental for these purposes) par supreme to make this an intra-family match, with the winner gaining additional bragging rights at all family gatherings for the period of one year.

play with me,
TR

maybe for the first time in the history of the internet-- actually, i'm pretty damn positive of this, but you never know--you can google the phrase "alpo and eddie bob" and get a hit. two hits now, actually. and that's all thanks to this blog. you can thank me by showering me with excessive praise or $20 bills (a five-bill minimum applies). alternately, you could scratch my back for 45 minutes.

thank me with me,
TR

sometimes it's hard for me to tell how dorky it is for me to listen to as much npr i do. at times i think it's not that dorky, since it's just about the best way to get serious news that i know of, and i really like to be well-informed. but sometimes i catch myself laughing a little too hard at car talk, or knowing a few too many answers to "wait wait don't tell me" or wishing a little too hard i were rich enough to go on one of those "citizens of the world" tours with sylvia pojole (sp?) to fiji and the ukraine, and it stops me: this is pretty damn dorky.

tune in with me,
TR

How great is target? it always has everything you need and more at sickeningly, mom-and-pop-store-annihilatingly low prices, just like walmart. but target's way cooler than walmart. there an ironic vibe to the place, a very hip sort of air that says, in a tone not quite sarcastic but pretty cutting nonetheless, "sure. you can find bargains here. sure." you feel slightly uncool for not quite grasping exactly what it's trying to say, but also much cooler just being around it. kinda like dennis miller. the thing i really don't get, though, is the red theme. i get the obvious connection--bullseyes, the center of a target, are red--but why an all-red color scheme would help sales is beyond me. it's always seemed a little creepy to me, really, especially the red christmas trees in the commercial that's been on tv lately. it's like how shopping would be in hell. "chimney-sweeping logs, sir? of course, aisle 14, just past the pool of boiling blood and to the left of the bottomless pit. yes, ma'am? certainly, we have yanni cds. you'll find them--in fact that's all you'll find--in the music section, not far from the food court. look for the giant rotisserie filled with writhing, roasting sinners. you're welcome, and have a great day. and remember: here in hell, we're burning to serve you!"

repent with me,
TR

There are those among you who assume--wrongly, wrongly, so terribly wrongly--that because i missed a day, i have abandoned this blog. i have not. i return to say this: sometimes, people have lives and friends and the electronic self-worship known as blogging has to take a back seat to actual human interaction. consider this: sometimes people fast--they don't eat for a day, or even longer. would snide hecklers cackle that the faster had quit eating? probably. but they would be just as wrong as they are in this case.

have faith, ye of apparently little.

stay with me,
TR

p.s. without noticing, i've stylishly abandoned capital letters except in strategic locations, a la cyrus circa 8th grade. i must be too cool for school.

ONE MORE THING:

Does anyone remember when Clinton Becker and I used to draw that comic strip Alpo and Eddie Bob on Mr. Effinger's white board way back in sixth grade? (Steiner and kenlow, you guys are my only readers, and you better remember. You just better.) Remember when Alpo told the pope to "bless this"? Remember how Mr. Effinger told us to tone it down?

Censorship is among the worst evils this sad world knows. Alpo and Eddie Bob were the Yossarians of their era, unafraid of organized religion, presidential inquiries or sell-out middle school social studies teachers. They defied the common-sensical logic of the sheep-like masses and their monomaniacal overlords, and dared to bear indignant witness.

I mourn the disappearance of those brave soldiers of the army of truth, and as I lay in bed each night, when I'm not wondering how many peak minutes I have left on my phone this month, and who it was that carved "Abe and Tucker 69" into the picnic table all those many years ago, and why I have two little patches on either side of my mouth where hair won't grow which prevents me from styling my beard in many more ways than I am able to do--when not thinking of any of these things, I wonder where Alpo and Eddie Bob are*.

Come back, boys. You were only cans of pet food but what cans you were.

What cans you were.

Cry with me,
TR

*It's a little known fact that when Che Guevara's body was released to his family after his murder by the CIA and the Bolivian army near Vallegrande on October 9, 1967, in his thickly matted beard, unbeknownst to his Western bourgeois capitalist assassins and their third-world pawns, was discovered a scrap of paper containing a diary scrawled in a near-microscopic script. It details his final days of flight and evasion from his eventual captors and killers. Near the end appears the following phrases: "El final ya se me acerca; ya estoy viendo el puesto de sol con que se acaba el dia de mi lucha. Ahora les toca a otros a continuar en mis pasos, en los mismos pasos de Fidel, de Lenin, y de tantos otros sin nombre que han bregado para liberar al pueblo y hacer que broten la paz y la justicia por toda la tierra como debe tambien brotar el trigo del cual hacemos el pan de cada dia--el pan que cada hombre merece como un derecho inherente. Me da pena tener que dejar esta vida--tantas cosas nos quedan por hacer--pero me consuela el pensamiento de que por algun lado, esas dos latitas tan fuertes, tan dedicadas, tan heroicas, siguen la revolucion."

Red Foreman--despite being a character on a controversial sitcom, "That 70s Show" (controversial in the sense that some people love it and others value it on the level of a dog's choad)--is very funny, as the following quote can testify to: "If the U.S. government decides to stick a tracking device up your ass, you say 'thank you' -- and 'God bless America!'"

Beautiful.

I would like to take this opportunity to shout out to Lizzie Kendrick and Josh Nuggs*, who are the other two charter members of Team Nugglicious. They are incredible, po.

That's it, probably for today. Satisfy yourself if you want more by rereading that funny quote and pretending it's the first time you're ever read it. Repeat as necessary.

Laugh with me,
TR

*Actually, Josh's real name isn't Nuggs. It's something else, but I forget the something else. So I've chosen the name Nuggs because it has to do with the name of the fictional team to which we belong. Josh, if you see this, forgive me my memory. No te pongas asi, hueon.

Ok, now that the preliminaries are over, I'd like to make the following observation about my character: I have an alarming and unintentional habit of shouting things at the TV which are diametrically opposed to my nearest and truest beliefs. For instance, on 24 the other day--one of my favorite shows--a mole within CTU (the government counter-terrorist unit that the show's protagonists work for) was discovered and taken into custody. My reaction to this was to urge the good guys to "torture that [expletive]*." Now, I stand firmly against any sort of violation of civil liberties and disagree very strongly with any notion that the ends justify the means. And yet there I was, howling for our favorite spooks to tear out the traitor's nose hairs with needle-nose pliers. Similarly, although perhaps not so similarly, whenever my Patriots (who are fantastic, by the way) have some poor quarterback on the ropes, scrambling from Tedy Bruschi and Willie McGinest and any number of other defensive beasts, I have been known to urge those hounds to rend said quarterback limb from limb. And yet of course I am a peaceful man who wouldn't wish anyone to actually harm anyone else. in a football game or otherwise. So there's this apparent contradiction between deeply held convictions and gut response to televised instances of violence, real and imagined. Am I a monster? A product of a society that has commodified and marketed violence to me and my peers since we were impressionable youngsters? Has a sort of conditioning taken place deep in my psyche that primes me to react with instinctive aggression in certain situations, while allowing me to live an unsuspecting and tame mental life the rest of the time? I haven't the foggiest.

While I sort it all out, though, go ahead and see what that [expletive] knows. And make it painful.

please don't hurt me,
TR

*I need to read the terms of service of this site to see if I can post cusswords. (I know, I'm a wuss.) If I can, I will edit this entry to include the exact term. If not, use your imagination.

Think of "Hey Ya" by Outkast, then read the following:

Alrightalrightalrightalrightalrightalrightalrightalright.

Welcome to one blog among many.

One nation under the blog.

The truth is, I sold out and started this blog at the behest of kenlowcell and astein. blame them. and my own massive ego. and my craving for fame.

adore me,
TR