Battlestar Galactica vs. Richard Dawson
Mark your calendars for October 21st as the day you will will be spending quality couch time hunkered down in your bunker taking in every single episode of Battlestar Galactica. Although the DVD isn’t out until October, Amazon has it for pre-order. It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since the show first aired, failed to find a market, went into syndication, and found a huge audience among kids who were looking for something to watch after Buck Rogers. I still have my Buck Rogers metallic trash can. According to Wired, in celebration of the 25 year anniversary of Battlestar, there looks to be a brutal mini-series that will be release sometime later this year.

If you were looking hard you could probably find yourself a Battlestar lunchbox over at
Lunchboxpad. I found the lunch box site via the Dublog. Also via the dublog is a rather interesting site of vintage antique wood cameras. I want them all.

Hey, while we’re blog hopping. . .there is a good dialog taking place over on the Hey Mercedes weblog on the music download debate. Bob Nanna, while blogging from his tour bus, pretty much nails it.

A good game involving mischievous toilet paper combat is laid out over at Textism and some folks have decided to re-enact old Match Game episodes for reasons I really can’t say. Although, whoever gets to play Richard Dawson gets the best part cause he was chronically drunk on that show and didn’t care who saw him in his saucy state.

I guess one could deduce from this post that I am also excited to catch VH-1’s, I Love the Seventies series, if only to hear stories about people and their 8-track collections.

Queer Eye for the C.O.P.S
The misses was in a state of disquiet trauma last night when I arrived home from the bar. It seems that moments before I landed home, she had come face to face with the ‘strangest thing she had ever witnessed in Uptown’, which is saying a lot as she is a veteran of the scene. Apparently, she had just settled into the couch for some quality Tuesday evening queer-centric reality television, when just a few feet from the East facing window of our humble keep, a well dressed and put together female of a late twenty something age, walked up close to our window lifted up her skirt and peed like a man all over the driveway. The fact that I was not at home to bear-witness to this event left me despondent the rest of the evening. All I got to see was the gigantic puddle.

Speaking of queer-centric reality television. I have a new reality television show that I would like to propose to the networks – specifically FOX. The show I would like to propose, would, like most other reality T.V., be a simple combination of already existing shows. Therefor, I know it would be a hit. My new show would be a combination of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy and C.O.P.S. with a little bit of American Idol thrown in to boot. Essentially viewers would watch a current episode of C.O.P.S and then be able to vote on which White Trash, glue-huffing, blood-soaked criminal would get to have the ‘Queer Guys’ come and straighten out their lives by giving their trailer home or garbage house a complete makeover. Let’s face it, these folks really need the makeover more so then the hapless people who get chosen for these makeover shows. Comedy will ensue when the “Queer Guys” tell their contestant that, “the scrawny guy on your kitchen floor huffing gas is just so 1984. . .and these blood and beer soaked wife-beaters of yours, well honey, it’s just so Children of The Corn II: The Final Sacrifice – they really must go.”

garden flower

Boggle Your Brains Out
Somehow in the course of a weekend of dog-sitting I ended up with a spot of poison ivy on my left hand. It itches like crazy and typing at the machine only makes it itch more. Fess is the dog. She’s named after the Boogie Woogie piano player, Professor Longhair. She’s a border collie and nuts as all hell. She herds cars indoors, pretending she’s herding sheep. She could do it ten hours a day. I take her for walks. The walks only slow her down. For her, a walk is relaxation time. Fess and I tested out lots of new music this weekend. We found that we both love the new Mars Volta record. She seemed to heard cars even faster and with more joy when The Mars Volta was on the hi-fi. Other than dog walks the weekend was a good one for catching up on work and drinking Mister Misty’s while playing championship games of Boggle. My best boggle word for the weekend was ‘monster’. I just checked, and the domain ‘boggleblog.org’ is available. Somebody should jump on that. Its got a nice ring to it.

Yesterday the misses won tickets to the sneak preview of the new Kevin Costner movie Open Range. Although she won the tickets on the StarTribune web site, most of the other winners at the packed theater had won their tickets through some country music radio station. The theater was filled with lots of big guys in ten gallon hats. As for the movie…well, if you’re a person who just can’t get enough hollywood patriotism and want to hear Kevin Costner’s reasoning for a ‘Just War’ – or – you are a person who likes a good two and half hour Marlboro Man commercial, then this is your movie. Luckily, all the actors were good, which made the movie tolerable. But if your going to make a western in the 2003, you have to come up with a new angle. Open Range went out of its way not to have a new angle, as if that was its stubborn statement, “Look here pardner, we going to do things the old fashion way and if you don’t like it well then there’s a gonna be some killin’s.” My guess is, this movie will be huge. It’s too bad Schwarzenneger didn’t have a role.

The Lost Souls of the Insect Generation
I bolted out of bed this morning after having one of those horrific ‘wake-up-snooze-fall-back-asleep-dreams’. The dream involved three oversized, translucent yellow, razor thin cockroaches with spindly foot-long legs making them resemble those bugs we used to make out of craft wire as kids. Only these cockroaches had a much more futuristic polished shell, as if they were the twisted ill-begotten invention of some out-of-work Apple designers. They were as big as a Sussex Spaniel but moved around with a frightening amount of speed and dexterity.

After a few cups of coffee, I felt better. I got the Dream Dictionary off the bookshelf. It said that insect dreams “usually represent small, nagging worries. Things that ‘bug’ you. Traditionally, they can represent relatives. How you handle the insects in your dream, tells you how to handle these worries.”

“So I got that going for me, which is nice.” – B. Murray

Well I won’t dwell on that one cause I don’t like the idea that I’m representing my relatives as giant translucent cockroaches. And what if I killed the bugs in my dream? Does that mean I want to off my relatives?
Well, maybe a couple – but for the most part they’re all good people.

If it’s true that I’m worried about small, nagging things, then I think I know what might be at the root of the problem. It has been ‘buggin’ me for a few days now. It’s got nothing to do with Kobe Bryant, nor the crazy reality television/American Idol type situation that’s taking place in the California Governors race. Nor does it have anything to do with the horrendous fact that my country has attacked and taken over two other countries in the last two years. What’s really got me clutched and upset is the fact that Teen Pottery Barn is selling a set of four individual pillows each with a single letter, that, when combined, all spell out the word “punk”! It’s truly maddening. Let’s face facts. Punk has been dead for decades now. So to exhume and prance its corpse around the innocent and brightly decorated bedrooms of our children…well that’s just inhuman. It’s the work of insects. Insects that must be destroyed.

Four Nursing Homes
I read a great passage from the book The Music of Failure, by Minnesota native, Bill Holm last night. In the book he recounts a few poetry gigs that he and a few other poets lined up at nursing homes around Southern Minnesota. I thought I’d share two of them here this morning.

CANBY

Poets read in the bad wing. a spastic sits up front trying to eat squiggly orange jello without much success. He aims for his mouth but hits his ear. Jello spreads in streaks down already stained pajamas. I read something cheerful. An old man shuffles in from the side with wax paper stuck to his bare foot. The paper squeaks onprairie the tile floor as he walks. He tries to grab the microphone from me. . . .
“What’s goin’ on here? I got somethin’ to say. . . .”
The nurse comes up, embarrassed, and slides him away, wax paper and all. I look down at orange jello, wondering what revelation I missed that would do me any good at ninety.

DAWSON

The poets read. There is a faint stink of excrement, ammonia, scented candles, and sugar cookies. She sits quietly for the first stanza, but then screws up her toothless face. . . .
“Shit! It’s all shit! They’re crazy, crazy! Why do we have to sit here and listen to this shit!”
The dignified Norwegian lady sitting next to her is so used to boredom that she would sit quietly listening to the Congressional Record read in Urdu by a computer. She has survived sermons for ninety years, after all. She reaches discreetly for her ear to disconnect her hearing aid.
The crank goes on: “Shit! Nothing but shit!”
She will do no such thing as go gentle into that good night. She gets louder and crankier during my poems. I like her even better. I want to kidnap her, first to Minneapolis, then New York, and wheel her to committee meetings, cocktail parties, congressional hearings, celebrations of mass, and serious cultural occasions. I may even marry her.

The Road to Breakfast is Paved with Idiots
Checkout the Worth1000 Photoshop Contests results for propaganda art. The first one is for Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. I went to get ‘donuts’ and coffee this morning. I was very tired when I walked into the bakery. I wasn’t fully in control of my words and actions. Standing in line in front of me was a very chipper young blond dude who was wearing a maroon dress shirt with a silver blue tie. When asked what he wanted from the case he happily replied, “I’ll take the two girls on the patio to go”. In what must have been a half second, I confirmed that indeed there were two girls enjoying breakfast on the patio and then for some reason I actually said the word “Idiot” out loud to the back of this guys blond head. It was one of those moments that had I not been so sleepy surely the filter between my brain and mouth would have been working a whole lot better. He turned on his heals and gave me a shit-for-brains kinda look. I shrugged my shoulders and asked for two plain glazed and a large coffee to go.

Vintage Woods
I’ve decided that a man can’t have enough hobbies or collections of things. For that reason I have decided that I will focus the rest of my energies for this decade to become the midwest’s largest collector of vintage golf clubs. Specifically, vintage woods that are actually made of wood. This all came to a head last night in the a southern suburb of our fair city, when I walked out of a place called The 2nd Swing, arnold palmerthe proud owner of an old Arnold Palmer 3 wood. The folks at the store considered the club junk and sold it to me for $1.99.

I own a set of vintage clubs already. They are a bit short for me and not perfect but the aesthetic is what’s important. The woods are all real woods and they have a sweet airplane logo on them followed by the letters PGA set in a Trade Gothic Bold Extended type. The airplane helps you aim the club properly. The gold bag is real leather and bright red to boot.

The desire to amass a collection of vintage woods meets two of my key criteria when deciding to become the Midwest’s largest collector of anything. One, the old school design aesthetic and craftsmanship are all top notch and, two, nobody wants ’em and you can get ’em for cheap. I’m so turned off by these new oversized clubs that are as big as a VW bug and look as if they were constructed with recycled aluminum cans. These clubs are popular for the single reason that they have way more forgiveness than older woods. So like many other items in the current American retail market they allow for less discipline and focus when considering your approach. The old woods demand a more concentrated swing and closer attention to be paid to club selection. It’s very similar to the reason that MLB doesn’t allow aluminum bats. So, if you see a nice mahogany fairway wood sitting around your parents basement. Send it to me: c/o The Golden Bear Vintage Golf Woods Association.

Terror Futures Market Closed
Well that didn’t take long. Only 24 hours after I posted about the Terrorism Futures Market, the story has bounced all over the world and come back to slap the Pentagon straight across the face. In effect, they have pulled the plug on the terrorism market. I guess the idea market (a.k.a the internet) started selling short on the idea early. Sadly, by the end of the day, the Pentagon had little more then a grotesque pile of tax payer funded flip charts and coloring crayons to show for their work.