rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

yesterday, on my day off, I went over to CVS and got some mouse traps.
for I have a mouse. he is a bastard, and I will get his ass.
after spending 15 minutes figuring out how to set the mouse trap, I baited it with peanut butter and stuck it in a corner where it’s been leaving droppings (yes. mouse shit). this morning came around and I was eating a giant bowl of Cheerios and reading the paper, when it dawned on me that I hadn’t checked the trap.
it’s kind of weird, hopping across your kitchen, giddy to find a dead mouse. it had a definite feel of Christmas morning, only more morbid.
anyway, the peanut butter had been ever so lightly removed from the trap, and it hadn’t been sprung. it appears that this mouse has a soft touch.  the little motherfucker. I’ll scalp him yet.

I’m taking the GRE on Thursday.
I don’t even want to think about what my score’s gonna be. it will not be low for a lack of studying; against all odds, I’ve actually done that. but it certainly hasn’t been easy, and my dread has increased as the day has grown closer. shit, I’ll be honest, I don’t even know why I’m taking this fucking thing. I just want to see what kind of score I’ll get. what I’m capable of.
well, that’s not true. I know why I’m taking the test; it’s because I signed up for it about a day after I found out the job is going away and I was in a panic. meanwhile, I haven’t applied for new work in over a week, and it’s bordering on mid-November. and I need a goddamn haircut.
and I haven’t even bothered to acknowledge that the Senate is now considering the passage of the first meaningful health care reform legislation in decades (but Vinegar Joe Lieberman will probably bravely fuck that up, anyway). and I haven’t acknowledged the Republican sweep in Va last week. and I haven’t run in four days. and Brandon fucking Marshall got 11 fantasy points for catching 11 balls in a losing effort last night against the Steelers, so that asshole Smith gets another goddamn win in the Buffalo Wild Wings league. everything is going to shit.

big day for the commonwealth tomorrow. if you live in it, you should go vote, for your choice for governor, state rep, city council, county supervisor, or whatever.
if you aren’t registered, well. you’re a jackass. I mean that. what the hell is your goddamn problem, not being registered to goddamn vote? you have a civic duty, you dumb son of a bitch. exercise it.
but, yes. go vote tomorrow. I know who I’m gonna pick, and I bet you know who I’m gonna pick, too, but I’m still up for sale. I like 5th Avenue bars, and Reese’s Pieces, but well-reasoned political arguments will work in their stead.
so, if anyone feels so inclined to weigh in on one of the only statewide elections to take place in the nation tomorrow, you’ve got about seven hours before now and when I walk down to the polling station in the morning (9:30 am) in which to make me rethink my plans.
I really hope you go out and vote tomorrow. but what I’m also trying to do here, half-heartedly and much too late, is engender political discussion, at the expense of my own ballot.
I will get nowhere. most of you don’t live here. but if you do, be warned, asshole: I am not easily bought.

and so, the congressional hissy fit goes on.

Upstate Republican, Pushed Out, Backs Democratic Rival

so the rundown, because I know all of you dirtbags won’t bother to click on the above link: Obama nominated a Republican congressman from upstate New York to be the Secretary of the Army. that guy said, “yeah, okay. sure.”
so there’s a special election on Tuesday to decide who will man this vacant seat until next year’s midterms.
as such, it’s the only race for a house seat this year. and what makes this race for an upstate New York congressional seat interesting to, you know, people outside of upstate New York,  is the fact that it had three major contenders in it. up until this weekend, that is.

so you have the Democrat; some guy who is only notable because he’s a Democrat. and then you had (note: had) the Republican; an assemblywoman named Dierdre Scozzafava, who had originally taken the nomination with the blessing of the local GOP establishment. and then you have a guy from the Conservative Party. now I don’t purport to know how this dude entered the race, but his name is Doug Hoffman, and he appears to be a Real American Hero.
Hoffman is purportedly running on a platform that places him firmly on the far right (though I can’t confirm, because his goddamn awful website keeps on freezing my browser), and has picked up endorsements from groups like the Club for Growth, the National Organization for Marriage, and Fred fucking Thompson.
well, if there’s one thing I learned from watching hordes of morons stomp circles into the National Mall during the poorly focused “tea party” rallies this summer, it’s that if you get people on the fringes of any political movement worked up, they’re bound to go out and create more of a stink than they actually merit. meaning to say: there’s lot of dumb assholes from around the country throwing money at this Hoffman cat because he’s ultra-conservative. and they think that his election will serve to put Republicans elsewhere on notice to nominate more conservative conservatives.
so they scored a small victory. after weeks of getting outspent by the Democrat on her left (Bill Owens is his name) and the Hoffman on her right, trailing both badly in the polls, and being hammered by national conservative organizations for supporting gay rights and legal abortions, Dierdre Scozzafava dropped out of the race on Saturday. she didn’t endorse Hoffman, but rather just bowed out, and told her supporters that they were free to support whoever they wished.
she wasn’t very happy about this. Michael Steele at the RNC issued some sort of condescending statement about how Scozzafava had committed a selfless act by getting out of the way, and immediately endorsed the other guy. and the conservative campaign danced a jig. she had, like, 15 percent of the vote, and that would give them a leg up on the “Nancy Pelosi democrat,” as they call Owens.
and then today, in a nice little “fuck you” to the conservatives, Scozzafava went ahead and backed Owens. that keeps the race between the conservative and the democrat decidedly undecided a day before the polls open, and to those in the know, it also says to the Republican civil war is straight rollin’. and that this contest in upstate New York will be a barometer, of sorts, on what kind of direction the party should be taken in. 
if it’s true that we’re witnessing a very public internal spat, then I’m all for it. the GOP could stand a few more years of doubt; those assholes have been voting in block formation literally for decades. Republican leadership has used dumb, traditional-family-values bullshit to push through tax breaks that reward the exorbantly wealthy and promote a painfully simple foreign policy for about 25 years. and now they’re tripping over themselves as to who’s going to lead. well, now, despite demographic shifts that indicate you can’t win at the polls by exploiting nationalism and xenophobia any longer, the Republican party has to wrangle with that seething base it has relied on for so long. during which, as a house divided, they’ll probably continue to fail. 
I hope this bloodletting lasts for another decade. nothing could help the country more than watching Republicans have a vicious, hurtful and time-consuming backyard wrestling match among themselves for a good while longer. maybe they’ll emerge as something I, you know, would actually vote for.

I’ve got the monday night football game on. Aarti is asleep. the Redskins offense is flailing around in a pile of suck, and I keep waiting for them to do something — anything —  to show a little life, and … and, as I type, they move the ball 30 yards on two plays. Jason Campbell isn’t that bad. say what you will, but he doesn’t seem to be a shitty quarterback. he’s just throwing to Santana Moss and Antwaan Randel El, and there’s nobody blocking for him. which is they key thing here. the line, which has suffered injuries, is paper-thin, and he’s … jesus. they just fumbled the snap on 4th down on the goal line.
the Washington offense is awful, and makes it easy to forget the D, that plays pretty well considering the fact that they’re always on the field. anyway. the DC media is gonna go nuts tomorrow.

so I’ve been listening to two songs a lot recently. I was thinking about saying I’ve been listening to three, because three seems like a more appropriate number for some reason, but that’s bullshit. I couldn’t even think of a good one. but it probably ‘mother’s dead’ as sung by Elmo Williams.
but anyway. the two songs are:

‘going out west’ by Tom Waits, and
‘the guns of brixton’ by the Clash.

both of these songs, are quite … masculine. Waits sounds like he gargles whiskey and paint thinner, and the Clash suggest going out shooting with the cops. I listen to these songs as I drive to work. I think about these songs when I sit at my cubicle, the one they’re moving me from in a few weeks. and I almost wish I had a record and worked in a machine shop, or something. yes. this is stupid, and condescending. I understand.

I applied to two jobs this weekend, and spent three hours today studying for the GRE. I did this at the public library. when I was done, I putzed around in its catalog. I like the library.  I appreciate it. this is thanks to mom, who is library crazy. it rubbed off on Mar more, I think. she’s gonna be a librarian, after all.
so I picked up ‘Nickel and Dimed’, which you may or may not have heard of. a woman, who works a series of awful jobs in order to describe how much it sucks to live be working poor in this country. the more I think about this kind of reporting, the more my skepticism grows — of the writer, not of the opinion she (on the outset) appears to be defending. you can’t really say you’ve experienced minimum wage poverty until you’ve really lived it, not as an experiment you undertake during your fucking sabbatical. but even with that said, I’m willing to give the book the benefit of the doubt. I will pick it up, and give it a shot.
what my problem is: I never read half of what I come home with from the library. I don’t know why, I really should. every time I turn on the television, I feel bad about it. about neglecting the pile of books that I slowly chip away at.  so I think, that in the next life (or apartment), I will not have cable. nothing but bullshit on it anyway. like, for instance, right now ‘Resident Evil’ is on. because it’s the week before Halloween, they’re showing Resident goddamn Evil. which is an unbelievable shovelful of bullshit. there are hundreds of scary movies out there, and not all of them are expensive to get the rights to, and the best cable can come up with is a mediocre video game flick.
you should be ashamed of yourself, cable. you could have played something worthwhile.
like, for instance, ‘Alien.’ the first one.
it’s like the anti-Star Wars. ‘Alien’ came out in when, ‘79? and I think ‘A New Hope’ was only a few years before that. so when people thought of science fiction, they probably thought of the space opera tip. giant muppets and magic knights and shit like that, which rule and are loads of fun. but ‘Alien’ is not like that at all.
it’s dark, and dingy, and the only dozen-or-so people in it hate their goddamn jobs, and live in a poorly-lit hell of a cavern of a ship. it sucks, they want to go home, and they don’t want to have any kind of close encounter, which is what they get, in a gruesome way. ‘Alien’ is Star Wars where the wookiee instead looks like a dragon and eats you.
anyway, I bring up ‘Alien’ because I’ve got it coming on Netflix. Aarti has not seen this, and I’ve been talking about scary movies all damn week since plans to go see ‘Paranormal Activity’ fell through. I got to feed the scary movie beast. because I, as you can see, am a hopeless romantic.

and, to close: everyone’s favorite semi-crooked half-assing-it congressman from northwest Indiana is really representing the Region well, giving it some good publicity. he even made the front page of the Washington Post yesterday morning! he’s making moves. getting shit done. drawing everyone’s attention, for all of the right reasons.

it was announced the other day at work that the copy desk is gonna get shipped to Lynchburg in a few months. consolidating the desk. a move that must save my corporate overlord money, in some way, because that’s the reasoning behind all of their moves. probably just fewer mouths to feed, if you’ve got every ‘community’ newspaper (a term used to imply being below a certain circulation) in the state using identical pages inside. well, not identical. they’ll all be a little different; they’ll be able to swap out specific advertisements in different cities, things like that.
anyway. that means a couple of things: first, the newspaper I’m at will continue to disentigrate into a bureau. a room with maybe half a dozen reporters, a photographer or two, and a couple of editors to wrangle them. and it means in about five months, me and the other three people who have my job title will either be invited to work in Lynchburg (home of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University), or find something else to do, be it school, work, travel. you may call this relocation of resources. I call it getting laid off. 
potato, potato.

what’s this about potatoes?

even if the position is extended to me — I doubt it will be, and I hope not to be around long enough to find out — I’m not moving to Lynchburg. I won’t dance around this, and this will surprise probably no one; I hate my job. moving to Lynchburg to do the same thing I do here for very little compensation, in a locale unfathomably shittier than the one I’m in now, is not an option. the Canadian said he’d rather be drawn and quartered. which I said was a little harsh. but you get the idea.
so if I’m definitely not moving to Lynchburg to continue to march down this mediocre career path, it means I got to find something else to do. 
well, I’ve been in slo-mo job search mode for about two years now, with nothing to show for it. maybe I’m being a little hard on myself (as in, I’m sure there are people out there with worse situations), but it’s not like I have the most outstanding resume. I’ve had work as a goddamn copy editor. and I don’t know what your job description is like, but mine started out as something grand, and then I made the mistake of hiring on at this paper, where they could have trained monkeys fill this position (hence its impending move to Lynchburg).
in the end, though, I”m not even that upset; like I said, I hate my job. ‘hate’ with a capital It Fucking Sucks. so, in a few months, I won’t be doing it any longer. that’s a good thing. now I get to do something else, hopefully something worthwhile.

sunshine and lollipops

so what am I gonna do? was it Locke who said, “who the fuck knows?” I signed up for the GRE, I’m gonna take it in a month. maybe that was stupid, maybe I should have given myself more time, but I don’t have an awful lot of that until unemployment arrives, and if it does, school starting not much later would be nice. so I’m trying to get moving. I’ve also been sending out resumes left and right, but that’s not going to get me anything. and, I’ve got a couple of other ideas floating around in the hopper, which at this point are just ideas, and aren’t worth being detailed here.
so what’s it going to be?
Bueller?

I’m about to youtube the hell out of this post.

I don’t break ground on the internet.
I have the same cycle of Web sites that I hit constantly, that get my steady business. I am not trolling at its depths, seeing all of the weird and wonderful things that it has to offer. I visit the New York Times. BBC.  al-Jazeera from time to time. an entire host of jackass political and sports blogs. and, of course, Youtube.
oh, youtube. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be capitalizing when I spell your ridiculous name. now, allow me to veer off on a short screed: what the fuck is a ‘you tube’? other than a reference to the giant cache of cell phone videos that some douchebag computer programmer designed 2005 and titled as such because it sounded cute and catchy. now it’s in the global vernacular. just like ‘googling’, which can be defined as “What passes for investigative journalism these days.”
here’s another one: ’pwn’. that’s pronounced, I believe, pow-en. there’s no real definition for it, because it isn’t an actual word — there isn’t, end of story – but rather a typo.
but yes, youtube. youtube is fucking great. I’d say I use it most as a jukebox, but there’s the occasional video of the bored North Korean zookeepers pitting wild animals against each other for sport; or the obese person losing their balance gracelessly; or the simple movie trailer; the distraction that keeps you sane when your boss is advocating carpet bombing as a legitimate foreign policy and wistfully reminiscing about the nonexistent decline of police brutality, all without a hint of irony. 
and then, there’s the drug commercials.

the what?

I suppose you could watch any kind of commercial you’d like online. why you would willingly do that is beyond me; commercials are far and away the worst thing about … shit, everything. they are mind numbing, everywhere, vacant and constant. but instead of unfocused broadsides against an easy target like consumerism, I’ll try and stay more on target. stick to pharmaceutical advertising.
I don’t know how much television you watch. my apartment isn’t very big; basically two rooms. and if I’m here alone during the day, I ususally have the TV on. I’d bet I watch more than most people. I sure hope I do, in a for-the-good-of-mankind way. but I get basic cable, which is around 70 goddamn channels. and, my apartment is chronically disordered, so I can’t always find the remote. which means that a lot of commercials get flash-seared into my subconscious each and every day, and are left to haunt and litter my memory for years to come. five, eight eight. two, three hundred. empire. 
of course, there entire fields of study devoted to advertising research, and the reasons we buy what we buy, all of which could prove me wrong, but I defiantly won’t admit that they leave a lasting impression on me, unless they’re really fucking stupid (see here), or full of eyebrow-raising detail. in that second instance, that’s where you’ll find most of your drug commercials.
here’s a homework assignment for you to do: the next time you’re sitting on your bum ass in front of your television watching the latest bourgeois bullshit Bravo has rolled out to keep your mind humming at a nice, flat ‘duh’ tone, bust out a pad and pen, and count the number of times you see a prescription drug commercial in a thirty-minute period. I’ve never actually done this, just so you know. but I’d bet you’d be surprised by the results.
they’re frequency, I think, is interesting, simply because of what they’re selling. it’s not shitty Coors Light, not Honda Accords, not even financial products (another term that makes me want to light something on fire), but drugs. specifically tailored chemical combinations that you willingly put in your body to modify your health.

we call these subheads at work

I’m a complete amateur when it comes to economic theory, but I guess the principle that the lure of profit is a powerful incentive for innovation would naturally extend into health care. into anti-inflammatories. into curing erectile dysfunction. into soothing your asthma, lowering your cholesterol, to making your body function better — or more in the way that you want it to. 
okay, fine. for the purposes of this blog post, I’ll accept that incentivization is the most assured way toward medical progress progress. so, to sell more pills to make us all better down the road, pharmeceutical companies roll out generic fixes with copyrighted names, and expensive campaigns to get you to the buy them. but in every one of those ads, there’s that 15 or 20-second spot where the actor doing the voice-over extolling the virtues of Plavis or Symbicort or fucking Viagra has to get all serious on a motherfucker and read through the laundry list of things that could go wrong inside your body if you were to take one of those goddamned pills.
drugs are good things, of course. it’s just, when you combine advertising with a set of serious health risks the seller is bound by law to acknowledge, the results are unintentionally hilarious. case-in-point: Yaz.
this is all I’ve really been getting at, these Yaz commercials. no, not that Yaz (jukebox!). I’m talking about the contraceptive, the one you’ve known about, despite not having ever really thought about, for the last year or two. Bayer hawks this thing on the TV an awful lot, and they don’t seem to be very good at it. for instance, here is a Yaz commercial (nevermind the bullshit the uploader added for comedic effect) where three attractive young women sit around an inviting rooftop lounge and discuss the latest cure-all birth control pill that everyone’s doctor is recommending. you know. girl talk.
in the middle of their conversation, one of the ladies makes sure to cover the risks you’re shouldering should you decided to actually eat this bullshit. no advertiser in their right mind would willfully submit to this, obviously. Bayer has to do this, because the FDA makes some hard and fast rules, and this is one of them: you got to tell the idiots who will eventually buy what you are selling what awful things could happen to them should they decide to take your product. so, in true advertising form, the drug commercial will attempt this in the most unobtrusive way possible. you’ll get a collage of beautiful people doing active things, of bright graphics, while a pleasant voice talks about blood clots, thoughts of suicide, and internal bleeding, and if you’re listening, how Yaz includes something that increases potassium and may send your kidneys right down your small intestines and out the back door.
all of those feints got tossed out the window, however, after Bayer released an ad that FDA determined was misleading. and was made to release another, explaining away its earlier ads, and the result is one long, money shot.
so very grotesque, yet so very worth it. I hope you enjoy drug commercials as much as I do.

I’m watching the Monday Night Football game. Green Bay is getting stomped by Minnesota.
I just witnessed what would be serendipitous in almost any situation. the Packers just challenged the ruling of a fumble on their own 1-yard line. they were contending that no, it wasn’t a lost fumble. the ball was lost and recovered by the opposing team in the end zone, resulting in a safety. a safety, Green Bay said, was the right call.
they were right. the call was overturned, and they gave up a safety.
so their options were they give up the ball on their own goal line, or they admit to a safety. now, they’re pretty much fucked, though I suppose they could overcome 16 points in about four minutes. I doubt it, but anything’s possible. but they sure look awful doing it. 

but of course, they do it against the Vikings. I hate Green Bay. I hate Brett Favre. and I hate the goddamned Vikings. if some freak tornado could hit the Metrodome right now, I would be a happy man.
but hey, someone has to win this game, I suppose.

When it comes down to it, then, Russia simply matters more to the U.S. than do Poland and the Czech Republic, despite Poland and the Czech Republic being friends and Russia not.

–  in the Atlantic

this is a fascinating article on the United States’ recent decision to scrap the star wars missile plan that would’ve put missile sites in Poland and a radar station, I think, in the Czech Republic. we’re deferring to Russia, to gain a harder line against Iran, at the expense of friendly democracies in eastern Europe.
that must’ve been some conversation they had at the state and defense departments they had about this situation.
I supported this decision. I still do, economically. but, I suppose an argument can be made about it being ethically questionable, in a geopolitical kind of way. assuming geopolitical ethics exist.

look at this.

if that’s not one of the cooler things you’ll see today, I don’t know what is.

tonight was awful tough. the newspaper recently went through a design update recently. I may have mentioned this, I’m not sure. and its width shrunk — permanently — and it is taking some getting used to, apparently.
but, oh well. let’s us waste time talking about football.
the Hoosiers lost a game by three in the closing minutes against Michigan on Saturday — and on the road, no less — and that was a bummer. Chicago won by six which makes them 2-1, and not too bad. we’ll break Favre yet, we will.
and I had mixed results in the fantasy football thing this week. this is important news, I know. but everyone except my man DeSean Jackson rolled over and left me hanging. my team in Dave’s league is looking pretty ratty right now. I might have to force a trade with one of those junkie sports vultures. they’re all Buffalo Wild Wings employees. they bartend and watch Sportscenter for a living. how am I supposed to compete with that, goddamn it?
anyway. this week, brother, sister-in-law, his buddy from Charleston, and cousin plus one are coming to town for the U2 concert. this is on Thursday. jesus. I need to clean.
so yes, I’m going to see U2 this Thursday, that’s pretty cool. I haven’t actually given this a whole lot of thought, to be honest; I don’t listen to U2 an awful lot, but they’re still an act worth seeing if you get the chance. maybe they’re getting a little old. oh well. they’re still alive, and a lot of people still hate Bono, which adds to his relevancy, I suppose.
now, I can’t imagine that the above reads like a thrilling endorsement of a band I’m about to go see. maybe not. but, I will say that over a nearly thirty year career, they’ve got enough music piled up that they’ll put together a good setlist. I have high hopes for this. so I’m pumped.

alright. I swear, to god, I’ll start writing more. I don’t know what’s slowing me up. this blog’s sucked for a while now. if we’re giving out grades I’d give myself a C. maybe a C+. the pretty pictures of me and the galaxy make for good wallpaper. but I need something to write about, with authority.
the Bears via ESPN isn’t working. so, until I get over the writer’s block, thank god for the Chicago Tribune.