The Tory Party

Cucarachas

So-o-o-o I`m sitting in the computer lab at the North Carolina School of the Arts. It’s student orientation. Everybody here is twelve years old, though prolly because the high school students are here and the returning college students are not. I passed a flock of dance students and they were the tiniest, most nubile things you ever saw. In this very lab there are three tweens listening to “Yeah” on their little flat-panel Dells. (Ursher got the geek to make your booty go SHPAH.)

But I don’t want to talk about that now. What I want to talk about now is the apartment I`m living in. Specifically, that it has cucarachas. Not a lot — just enough to be interesting.

I like the word “cucaracha” better than the obvious alternative `cos it sounds kind of fancy, like something that might be served with rosemary and a cloth napkin. However I realize that using it may or may not be bitter wacky irony, since the specific ilk of cucaracha I am dealing with is German.

Oh, but what is the difference, you ask, between a German cucaracha and an American cucaracha? I`m so glad you brought it up:

So obviously I have the most dashing and rakish cucarachas possible. Tonight I think I may go back and we`ll have a Yuengling and talk politics. Alas, there are drawbacks to having any cucarachas at all, and the following practices have been introduced to my lifestyle:

• Shaking out clothes and shoes before putting on.
• Shaking out blankets periodically just for fun.
• Shaking out my pocketbook, briefcase, anything before taking it out to the car. My greatest fear is that I`ll eventually bring cucarachas back to my house in Durham, or even that I`ll get an infestation in my vehicle like David Sedaris’s dad. Eeeeee.
• Keeping my beloved Fiber One in a large resealable bag.
• Eliminating cardboard from my life. Hello, milk crates, my old friend…
• Once I get in bed for the night, that’s it. No last-minute trips back to the bathroom or kitchen for water. Nuh-uh.
• No more toast. I think this is what Ozzy was really writing about. There’s just no way to keep a toaster where there are cucarachas. If you have some advice in this department, I would be very grateful, because toast has heretofore been a dietary staple.

But they’re spraying on Tuesday (got to get Jake the dog out of the apartment for the morning) and I got Combat bait stations all over the place, so I ain’t too worried about it. No, Mister Cucaracha. I expect you to DIE!

Hurricane Ivan

Would you think I was crazy if I couldn’t help wondering whether the Bush evil empire was behind the string of hurricanes in Florida? That maybe they used cloud seeding to victimize Florida and make them grateful to Bush for federal disaster relief? It’s a lot more sophisticated than booting all the Michael Johnsons and Lawrence Williamses from the voter rolls.

I`m 85% joking here, but take a look at the hurricane map for 2004 so far (courtesy Weather Underground):

Wow, those paths are really similar. I put in Ivan as an inset, because when I tried to paste the path of Ivan into the main map *it almost exactly duplicated the path of Charley.* Eeeeee.

Let’s compare these paths to the map in 2003:

Wow. That, um, looks really different. No two storms took the same path at all. But let’s look at 2002 just for fun:

Hm — not *quite* as random. Maybe this was a test year? Conspiracies!!!1

No, we don’t have the technology yet. But we like the way you think, kid. Call us in 2008.

Heh heh heh — the Bush Administration Neck Fat Brigade. Get back to me on the discipline and accountability issue when you can climb a flight of stairs without sparking a coronary. I think we`d all be better off if these dudes did a little less bombing and a little more jogging. Owowow I am bitchy!

Name a Source of Stress. Survey Says…

Okay. I’ve been feeling kinda whiny lately about various things, and although I realize that my problems are self-imposed and really pretty trifling, and I have a huge safety net with my family and I ain’t going over the cliff any time soon, I feel I may whine at ANY MOMENT.

But everybody’s got problems — why am I the one who gets whine privilieges? So what I want to hear is:

What’s going on right now that’s stressing you out?

Anything is fair game. Bonus points for things that were stressing you out that recently got resolved.

Election 2004: What`s Going On?

We lost our thousandth American yesterday. I don’t know how many Iraqis, which is a shame, because our people and their people have something huge in common: none of them had anything to do with terrorism. None of them had anything to do with the attacks on September 11. None of them had anything do Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, the USS Cole, Al Qaeda, Osama or anthrax. All of them were totally innocent of all the crap that happened to us while Bush has been president, and yet all of them died.

BartCop wrote something that really drove this home for me: one thousand families saw a government car pull into their driveway. That must be a bad feeling.

And Bush still hasn’t been to a funeral.

Some people don’t like the way the left has been keeping track of the death toll. They think it’s morbid. They think it’s better to trust President Bush and look away when another American dies in Bush’s stupid awful endless war. They think we *like* keeping track. They don’t get it. We count because we have to. We count because so many are dying that the newspapers don’t put it on the front page anymore. We count because if three Americans were killed last night and we can’t be bothered to know about it then something worse than war is going on.

Bush’s war (send a tiny force into Afghanistan and a huge force arbitrarily into Iraq) is a failure. Bush’s economic policy (big tax cuts for the super-rich and big deficits for everybody) is a failure. Bush’s education policy (give money to the schools that do the best on tests, so the troubled schools get worse and the successful schools get better) is a failure. Bush’s health policy (more money and less hassle for drug companies and corporations, and less money and more hassle for individuals) is a failure.

But somehow Bush’s campaign is making this election about Vietnam. And SOMEHOW KERRY IS NOT WINNING ON THIS ISSUE!

I don’t have caps big enough to express this. For some reason, Kerry let Bush decide what the speeches and the ads and the news stories were going to be about, and it was going to be about Vietnam. And Kerry didn’t so much as clear his throat about how broke, stupid and sick the average American is getting.

Then, for some reason, on the issue of Vietnam, between a draft-dodging, daddy-assisted dude gone AWOL from a posh cushy National Guard unit and a swift boat sailing decorated volunteer hero, THE HERO IS LOSING!

God in heaven, does Kerry not want to win? I was in Iowa for the caucus, and I remember in January he wanted it pretty goddam bad. He mortgaged his house. He gambled everything. Hell, he missed enough goddam votes in the Senate. But now he’s acting like he can’t be bothered to throw a punch.

I`m a little upset about it.

But…

I hear from his campaign that he’s laying low on purpose — that he’s got some massive ace up his sleeve and he’s going to annihilate the Bush campaign when the time is right. Maybe he does. I don’t know much. Maybe the only way to topple the Rove-mobile is to surprise it and give it no time to regroup.

Maybe there are new documents confirming Bush’s long absence from his National Guard unit. Maybe there’s a piece on 60 Minutes at 8 PM tonight about it. Maybe the tide really is going to turn.

Cross your fingers.

Exchange Between Dirty Hippie and Dad

dear boredom and tony,

today during taser instructor training at the highway patrol academy dad got “tased” for 5 seconds which gave dad the following deep thoughts:

1. it is better to tase than to be tased.

B. after being tased, you do not have an enemy in the world…except for people who protested the war you were still in. such protests include throwing away medals your men won for you and posing with the enemy on their antiaircraft weapons. if you get dad’s drift.

III. therefore, dad believes that EVERYONE should be tased.

4. people given the death penalty who have been tased will always choose lethal injection over the electrical chair .

E. the immediate post-tasing period includes what is knowed as euphoria. you know, due to not being tased any more.

VI. it is possible to shout “goddam” 300 times in five seconds.

7. don’t never pick up no wet electical wires while standing in no water.

heart dad

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Tony is weirdly jealous of dad getting tasered. There are not a lot of tasering opportunities in Tony’s line of work.

Tony respects the Marine mentality due to Marine mentality kept Tony in bagels and runing shoes for 20+ years. Still, Tony prefers the guy who was a butt in 1974 to the guy who was a butt in 2004.

Also, George W. Bush might have protested the war too if he had had any other interests besides hookers and coke.

Herat,
Tony