After a stressful week at work that included the passing specter of layoffs (thankfully averted) followed by one night when I was at the office until 10:15 PM, as well as a busy calendar of late that’s left me feeling behind on a lot of household chores, errands, and projects, I decided to take today off and try to catch up. Or at least catch my breath.

I awoke this morning a bit later than usual, feeling atypically refreshed. There were blue skies outside, my adoring kitty Blackjack was at my feet, and I was all ready for a hot breakfast and a cup of good coffee, precursors to an excellent and productive day.

Savoring the warmth of the mug in my hand and feeling a mild sense of pleasant anticipation, I took my first sip of go-go juice. There was something… odd… about it. I took another sip. Odder still, but I still couldn’t place it. It was an aftertaste, something vaguely floral. And it seemed to be getting stronger, too. On the third sip, I started to think… lavender maybe? Yes, definitely lavender. Lavender with… ylang-ylang essences, whatever the hell they are… dish soap, in other words! I hadn’t rinsed the basket from the coffee maker well enough the night before and I’d just brewed an entire pot of Peet’s House Blend premium roast with lavender and ylang-ylang essences.

I may not be at work, but a Monday is apparently still a Monday.

It’s pedal-to-the-metal at the office this week, and I’ve been almost as busy at home with a little — okay, a big — renovation project that I’ll elaborate on another time. In the meanwhile, let me entertain you with this really awful sight gag/pun based on the unexpected juxtaposition of popular music and typography (whoever came up with this has a sick, sick mind):

We can thank Sullivan for this horror show.
And now back to the regularly scheduled grind…

I’d like to give a quick kudo to my friend Diane Olson, who I mentioned in passing during last week’s lengthy pity-party about my gout.
Diane is a copywriter at the ad agency where I work, but before that, she was a journalist and a staff writer for Catalyst magazine, a Salt Lake alternative monthly. She had quite a run there, stirring the muck, sticking it to The Man, earning a number of awards, and even having a creepy Silkwood moment or two while investigating what really goes on at Utah’s infamous Dugway Proving Ground. (Trivia note: Stephen King was inspired to write The Stand after he heard about some of the scary crap that happens out there.)
These days, Diane’s only work for Catalyst is a regular column called the Urban Almanac, a monthly compilation of timely factoids about what’s happening in the natural world right outside our patio doors, as well as tips for how readers can improve their gardens, their diets, and their connection to something more authentic than the suburbs. I know Diane gets a lot of satisfaction from her column, but she’s often said she’d hoped to do more with her writing (a familiar lament among us word-slinging types).
Just last week, quite out of the blue, as they say, she got a message from her editor at Catalyst; it seemed that someone from a local publishing house was trying to track her down. They want to turn Diane’s Urban Almanac into a full-blown book, an illustrated hardcover, no less. Whereas the Catalyst version is region-specific for SLC, the proposed book will be more global (or at least national) in scope… and they want it by October.
Diane is understandably over the moon about this, especially the way it just fell into her lap during something of a low moment, and I’m very happy for her myself. (Also a little jealous, but we won’t tell her that.) I’m already on the list for an autographed copy. And who knows… depending on when the finished volume hits the stands, it may make my Christmas shopping much easier this year!

Hi. My name is Jason, and I have gout.

If you don’t have any first-hand knowledge of the so-called “disease of kings,” consider yourself extremely lucky. I wouldn’t wish this shit on anyone, not even Dick Cheney, and my Loyal Readers all know how I feel about that guy. I can honestly say without exaggeration or hyperbole that I cannot imagine any pain worse than what I experience at the peak of a full-on outbreak of gout, except maybe a burn. A napalm burn, to be exact.

But Bennion, you’re asking, what exactly is this horrible affliction, and how can it be so horrible without having its own telethon?

Continue Reading…

Lileks made the following observation this morning:

Was amused to read that Kids Today have stopped blogging, more or less; they’ve moved the blurtage over to Facebook, which makes much more sense. The web is the Great Heaving Sea; Facebook is an auditorium. Tumblr is a flea-market. Blogs will either be for writers, or communities gathered around a particular ideology or subject, or ace aggregators who can spit out 30 unique links a day.

I’m not sure what he was reading, and I must admit I’m not very aware of what’s hip and happening these days, so I’m wondering… is this true? Has blogging been revealed as just another fad that’s nearly run its course? I have noticed that many of the personal blogs I visit seem to be petering out, and I’m painfully aware that my own output has fallen in recent years. Also (and this is possibly unrelated), I’ve noticed I don’t get near as many comments as I used to. But I’ve attributed that to people’s circumstances, i.e., I assumed everyone was busy, not that they’re losing interest in blogs. Certainly my interest isn’t waning. This silly little virtual kingdom seems to fill a genuine psychological need for me, and I get pretty cranky when I can’t find enough time in my day to keep up with it to my satisfaction.

I have become pretty active over on Facebook, but that’s hardly an adequate substitute, at least for me. Facebook is like sending a postcard to let someone know your latest port-of-call on that big road trip; it’s a form of contact, maybe it’s even a little revelatory, but it’s hardly a conversation.

I don’t know what Tumblr is.

And despite the best efforts of my friend Gillilan, I simply have no interest in Twitter. The 140-character limit strikes me as arbitrary and too constraining, and I don’t see how it could allow anything but the most superficial of observations. (Hmm, there I go talking like one of those mythical “writers” again.) I hate the text message-style abbreviations that seem obligatory in that medium (again, it’s the 140-character limit). Hell, I don’t even like the terminology associated with Twitter. The name itself, and the verb “tweeting” are so cutesy-poo, and I hate cutesy-poo. If anything, Twitter is what strikes me as faddish, not blogging. But then, the arbiters of cool never seem to consult with me on these things, and I know I’m almost always the last one clinging to things that everyone else has long since abandoned.

So tell me, Loyal Readers, is blogging on the way out, aside from a handful of specialized sites and a few long-winded die-hards like myself?

May I just briefly mention how really frakkin’ weird I feel every time I think about the fact that I’m actually walking around in the year 2010?

It’s the curse of being a Gen-X sci-fi fan, I guess. Thanks to all the silly stuff that obsessed me as a kid and a teen, there are certain dates that hold a powerful resonance for me and probably don’t faze ordinary people in the least: 1999… 2001, of course… and now 2010. Still to come are 2015, 2019, and 2029, the Year of Darkness, in which Skynet comes up with its dastardly plan to end the human resistance once and for all. In the case of that one, I think I’ll forgo my usual lament that the real future doesn’t match the cinematic version…

Hear ye, hear ye (I’ve always wanted to say that):

My lovely Girlfriend, who has slaved tirelessly and with very little recognition for a wholesale carpet dealer for the past 10 years, was this afternoon elected to the position of Vice President of the Utah Floor Covering Association, an industry trade group concerned with, um, floor coverings. And the industry that trades in… floor… coverings. Ah, hell, the truth is I have no idea what the UFCA actually does, but I imagine I’m going to be learning much more about it over the next year. Anne has already informed me that I’ll be required to make myself available as her arm-candy for occasional functions, and she will likely be doing some business-related traveling as well. (The travel may or may not include me, depending on our respective schedules.) And, as if all this wasn’t exciting enough, she will most likely ascend to the presidency itself in only a year.

I’m very proud of her. I don’t know that this is going to be a game-changer or anything, but it’s bound to be a very interesting experience for her, and a good resume’ builder. And besides, “Madam Vice President” has kind of a sexy ring…

I had such plans for my annual holiday break. I was going to blog. A lot. I was going to sort through a couple thousand digital pictures I’ve taken over the past year and be brutal and efficient about deleting all the sub-par ones, and then I was going to Photoshop those that needed it and post the whole lot of them to Flickr. I was going to set up the digital picture frame my parents gave me for Christmas a year ago, and I was going to send long-overdue and just plain long emails to several people I haven’t contacted for a while. I was going to give my house a thorough cleaning, and go through my clothes and pull out a bunch of stuff I no longer wear and give it to charity, and I was going to sit in the sun streaming in through the window and read a fat novel and sip hot cocoa. I was going to listen to a whole mess of podcasts I’ve got saved on the computer and go to some movies, which, believe it or not, I haven’t really managed to do for the past couple months. I thought I might even take a nice drive up to Park City one afternoon and try breathing some less-smoggy air for a change. And when all that was done, I was going to actually write… not the lame-o crap I do around here all the time, but real writing, creative writing. Fiction, in other words, the stuff I used to think I was going to spend my life making.

And just how many of all those planned activities do you suppose I accomplished? Well… I managed to do a couple of memes for the blog. Yay me.

So what did I do over the break? I visited friends on Christmas Eve. I had a very rare stress-free Christmas Day with my parents. I spent an afternoon with my buddy Jer, who I only see a couple times a year because he lives in Vegas, and I enjoyed the annual reunion dinner with The Dudes, i.e., my buddies from the old multiplex days. I also enjoyed a New Year’s Eve video party with a different subset of friends I like to call The Usual Suspects. (Geeks that we are, the evening’s viewing selection was 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Of course.) And then I did penance for that party all the next day. (I’ve decided that champagne doesn’t agree with me; every time I drink it, I end up with one of those headaches that sits right behind your retinas and threatens to explode your eyeballs any time the treacherous daylight sneaks through a chink in the window blinds.)

I helped The Girlfriend’s parents organize and store their Christmas decorations, and was rewarded with a little road trip out into the hinterlands for lunch at one of those small-town greasy spoons I love so well, a place called the Stockton Miner’s Cafe (sorry, no web presence that I could find). I hung some framed photos that have been sitting on the living-room floor for several months. And I managed to see a movie, Guy Ritchie’s take on Sherlock Holmes. (For the record, I liked it. Well, I liked the story and the performances, at least — people who are screaming about revisionism don’t know their Holmes — but I am never going to get used to the modern way of putting together an action scene. Undercrank the camera, freeze for a moment, then overcrank and smash cut to something else, all shot in close-ups so you can never see where anything is in relation to anything else… ugh. The action in Sherlock is a lot more intelligible than the messy fights in those damn Bourne movies, but I still long for a nice steadicam shot once in a while.)

And all that stuff was great, it really was. But now, as Ray Liotta says at the conclusion of Goodfellas, it’s all over, and I’m back at work in the comma mines and feeling like a tremendous failure for not crossing off a few items on that “to-do” list…

In response to ABC News’ exclusive photos of the explosive rig worn by the so-called “crotchbomber” — who failed to bring down Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, but did manage to burn the hell out of his own legs and, presumably, genitalia — Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing remarked:

What better way to round out this scorched and shitty decade than to gaze thoughtfully into the charred, soiled underpants of a stranger. A troubled young man who seems to have hated America only as much as he hated his own junk.

I wholeheartedly concur. This entire decade has been pretty much end-to-end suck. Don’t believe me? Check out Newsweek‘s retrospective video (not embeddable, unfortunately) and refresh your memory. From hanging chads in 2000 through 9/11, the Iraq War, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and government-sanctioned torture; the PATRIOT Act; the TSA and its increasingly ridiculous “security measures”; the break-up of the space shuttle Columbia; Hurricane Katrina; the rise of reality television and the belligerent vapidity that came with it; the general bellicosity that seems to have infected even the simplest public discourse; increasingly corrosive and seemingly intractable political partisanship; a truly frightening resurgence of religious fundamentalism all across the globe, and the outright renunciation of science by a shockingly large percentage of Americans; the proud-to-be-ignorant anti-intellectual attitude displayed by far, far too many people in a country that used to value education and expertise; the crashing economy; all the talk about global warming and peak oil; the general sense that The World As We’ve Known It is coming to an end; and a constant societal undertow of fear, uncertainty, and disillusionment, all leading up to the recent death of Patrick Swayze (which, even though I haven’t blogged about it, really bummed me out) and finally this dumbass with the bomb in his shorts. Not to mention the inexplicable popularity of Napoleon Dynamite and Family Guy. Is it any wonder that I am ever-more consumed with nostalgia with each passing year, if this is the 21st century?

On the positive side, I read somewhere that Google Books now has a fine selection of back issues from the old Weekly World News tabloid, so that’s something at least. Bat Boy, save us from our despair!