Yeah, so, it gives a certain freedom, especially when the WSJ runs stories like this.

The first floor of Heathen Central has had a minor water stain in the ceiling for years, but we just noticed a new development near it — i.e., more staining. Obviously, somebody needs to look at this. Anybody local got a name we can trust?

Reply by email or comments. Thanks!

A co-worker just alerted us that our phone line was down, so we logged into the site while awaiting “help” from a CSR. This is what we found:

Uh-oh. In their defense, this is the first time ever we’ve experienced this, and we’re also able to MAKE calls, which is nice. We just can’t get any. So if you’re trying to reach us today, hit the cell.

“You gotta put down the duckie if you want to play the saxophone.”

Hang with it through the cameos, which include John Candy, Jane Curtain, Madeline Kahn, Pee Wee Herman, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Izhak Perlman, Paul Simon, Jeremy Irons, Rhea and Danny, and a smattering of contemporary sports figures.

About 2 years ago — well, closer to 30 months, but whatever — we got involved in a new startup, and as part of outfitting the office we bought a relatively cheap halogen desk lamp. You know the type; heavy black base, long skinny arm, small head, bright like the sun.

It was a nice option in the cold, sterile office we used to have (lit, of course, by fluorescents), and when the startup became more virtual and we started officing at home, it was a welcome alternative to turning on all 6 incandescent bulbs in the ceiling fixtures of our home office room.

It was warmer than it needed to be, but whatever. We liked it. Until one day, the bulb burned out, and since halogen bulbs are vexing and legion, we put off opening the lamp to determine what type to buy until this morning.

SIX screws later, we’ve got the head open, and that’s where the baffle part comes in: there appears to be no way to change the bulb on this godforsaken lamp. We have never seen a disposable $30 lamp before, but there’s a first time for everything. WTF? It never even occurred to us to ascertain if the bulb was replaceable because, quite frankly, that seems to us to be a core attribute of “lamp.” See below; in the red circle, you can see how the bulb housing is RIVETED to the metal platform; the underside of the platform is just wires. There’s literally no way to replace the bulb.

“Hey, y’all wanna go see ‘The HooHaa Monologues?'”

Daniel “Harry Goddamn Potter” Radcliffe starring in a production of that Citizen Kane of erotic horse-worship plays, Equus.

Modern Drunkard magazine has named Andre the Giant as Greatest Drunkard of All Time.

By the way, from Wikipedia, this is the best fact about Andre ever:

Actor Cary Elwes explains in his video diary of The Princess Bride that Samuel Beckett was a neighbour of the Roussimoff family while living in France. He used to give Andre a lift to school every day, since the boy was unable to take the school bus owing to his large size.

None of this is worth its own post, but:

• This morning, in response to this story, the CNN “American Morning” weatherdroid made appropriate Monty Python references.
• In the new category of largely miserable “business” hotels — which is to say, low-frills motels with kitchenettes you won’t use — the list of “shit we don’t have to give you” has apparently expanded past “restaurants” and “bars” to include “ice machines.” In response to one of the former, we picked up a half-pint of client whisky for a nightcap, but found we had no ice bucket. Upon consulting the front desk, we were cherrily informed that the kitchenette’s fridge had an icemaker we had but to enable to enjoy frozen water in 20 to 30 minutes. We suggested that perhaps at a hotel, we should be able to have ice whenever we wanted, and Charming and Cute Front Desk Girl agreed, whereupon we treked to the back-of-the-house kitchen, where she prevailed upon Gruff Kitchen Worker to supply me with ice forthwith. We received said ice in a plastic bag. We think we like the loud-as-a-goddamn-car-crash machines out on route 1 better, in retrospect.
• Said hotel has forced us to re-examine our theory of television choices varying inversely with hotel quality. In the past, we’ve found crappy hotels trying to make up for it with 40 or 50 channels, while nicer properties were able to get by with decidedly pedestrian cable packages. Here, however, we find both no amenities to speak of and a whopping two dozen options, mostly crap. Therefore, we figure it varies by rate, not actual quality, because these fuckers are charging a buck-seventy a night for this ersats palace.
• In Florida, ice can still form on your car windshield overnight, but it’s a way bigger pain to remove because, you know, FLORIDA.

In today’s mail — the paper kind — here at Heathen World Headquarters, we received a flier for Twin Peaks Ranch, which is apparently a ritzy development in the Hill Country.

We’re wondering if every lot comes with its own Laura Palmer mystery, or do we have to share one?

Tattoo humans or livestock.

Yet.

Unhappy with the posting frequency? Consider how difficult it is to post when surrounded at all times by fine, fine rum.

We’ll be up to our old tricks next week.

Happy New Year.

Kirk Douglas issued the following press release on the occasion of his 90th birthday:

My name is Kirk Douglas. You may know me. If you don’t … Google me. I was a movie star and I’m Michael Douglas’ dad, Catherine Zeta-Jones’ father-in-law, and the grandparents of their two children. Today I celebrate my 90th birthday.

I have a message to convey to America’s young people. A 90th birthday is special. In my case, this birthday is not only special but miraculous. I survived World War II, a helicopter crash, a stroke, and two new knees.

It’s a tradition that when a “birthday boy” stands over his cake he makes a silent wish for his life and then blows out the candles. I have followed that tradition for 89 years but on my 90th birthday, I have decided to rebel. Instead of making a silent wish for myself, I want to make a LOUD wish for THE WORLD.

Let’s face it: THE WORLD IS IN A MESS and you are inheriting it. Generation Y, you are on the cusp. You are the group facing many problems: abject poverty, global warming, genocide, AIDS, and suicide bombers to name a few. These problems exist, and the world is silent. We have done very little to solve these problems. Now, we leave it to you. You have to fix it because the situation is intolerable.

You need to rebel, to speak up, write, vote, and care about people and the world you live in. We live in the best country in the world. I know. My parents were Russian immigrants. America is a country where EVERYONE, regardless of race, creed, or age has a chance. I had that chance. You are the generation that is most impacted and the generation that can make a difference.

I love this country because I came from a life of poverty. I was able to work my way through college and go into acting, the field that I love. There is no guarantee in this country that you will be successful. But you always have a chance. Nothing should interfere with it. You have to make sure that nothing stands in the way.

When I blow out my candles — 90! … it will take a long time … but I’ll be thinking of you.

For the third time in 31 Christmases we’ve shared on this earth, Brother Heathen and Chief Heathen gave each other the same present at Christmastime.

(Tom Waits latest this time around; prior events were for a stuffed ET toy, ca. 1982, and an excellent Leatherman tool last year.)

Merry Christmas, buddy.

Merry Christmas, Heathen.

Via CNN, from the AP:

More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

Mom and Dad have got some ‘splaining to do.

Remember the Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time we linked back in 2004? It was a National Lampoon piece at the time, and it’s still friggin’ hilarious. Well, ol’ Tom seems to have forgotten that, but it’s surfaced again at the author’s site, and the original author turns out to be SF man-of-the-moment John Scalzi.

Enjoy!

Sue me. We grew up with a veterinarian for a father.

• Pandas
• Talking Pugs

Enjoy.

We were just able to work the phrase “dromedary teat” into conversation as something other than a non sequitur.

Go Heathen!

Here at Heathen, we like art. Some dude at the Guardian does, too; in fact, he’s put together a list of 50 pieces you should see before you die, which seems pretty reasonable.

Of course, we’ve seen only seven of them:

• Pollack’s One: Number 31, 1950 (MoMA, New York)
• The Rothko Chapel (Houston)
• Van Gogh’s Starry Night (MoMA, New York)
• Jasper Johns’ Flag (MoMA, New York)
• Matisse, The Dance (Hermitage, St. Petersburg)
• Manet, The Dead Torero (National Gallery, Washington)
• King Tut’s funerary mask (currently in Cairo, but we saw it in New Orleans)

Laura Lemay’s husband was in a bad biking accident on Saturday, which is scary and awful. He’s ok, but he was riding without ID, which isn’t. Ms Lemay’s now a believer in always having something with ID on it now (as is her husband), but the more interesting idea came late in the post.

Put ICE in your damn phone. ICE is short for “In Case of Emergency.” This meme was spread around the net last year as the number you program into your cell phone for emergency personnel to call if they find you unconscious n the road. Eric thought this was an urban legend. Soon after Eric called me on Saturday I got a call from the group ride leader who had picked up Eric’s cell phone and started noting down numbers to try to find someone to notify. The random number method eventually works, sure, but ICE is much more direct. I’ve got ICE in my phone, and as of this morning Eric has it in his. My phone also lets me add longer notes to the address book entries so my ICE also has my name and blood type. Put it in. OK, one more lecture: hug your family today.

This meme is new to us, but you can bet your ass we’ve put ICE in the Treo just now. We suggest you do the same. You never know when it might help, and the cost of doing it is pretty damn low.

Nearly eight pounds of Dashiell Reed McGhee just joined the world, the second child and first son of Patrick and Diane, and first sibling of Hadley. God bless ’em, every one. We have it on good authority that all 4 are doing fine.

Thanks to several trips and several delays, we now know where a hidden power outlet is in the terminal C bar in the Jacksonville airport.

Today, we are six.

Been a fun ride so far, eh?

As Joey says, Sacrilicious!

(Definitely click through. Seriously.)

So, we were trolling through our RSS feeds today and, in a popular blog from Utah we found a picture of our friend Chris from the blogger’s collection of shots from a CNN taping about Time’s Man of the Year, of all things.

Weird.

SeasonShot is shotgun ammo made of spices. Their tagline: Shoots. Kills. Seasons.

Late last week, our friend Xta posted a fine appreciation of life and living over on her site. In it, she mentions some monks who wake each day with the thought “today, I die,” to encourage them to live as well and fully as they can in each day they have. She had a serious health scare a bit ago, but came out fine — and with a renewed appreciation for this mortal coil:

Now I’m living as if each day is my last, because it could be. It could be yours. Really. And if it is: what do you want to do?

Of course, what falls out of that test may well turn out not to be so great, so be careful with the application of “Today I Die”:

I mean, it can’t possibly be healthy for my body or mind to spend each day sobbing uncontrollably and trying to eat as many Carl’s Jr. Western Bacon Cheeseburgers as I can before nightfall.

Heh.

Airport screeners suck; they couldn’t find 20 of 22 dangerous test items.

But you still have to take your shoes off.

The Mississippi coast is still a wasteland, and many folks are staring at their second Christmas without a home. One House At A Time wants to fix that. Check it out.

Twice lately we have encountered boneheaded customer service reps who asked us for information most companies insist they’ll never, as a point of policy, ask for: our username and password. Late last week, we had a billing question for Macromedia Breeze, and after a long dialog attempting to convey what we needed (we’re not sure if the problem was language and stupidity on the other end of the phone, but “we need a detailed billing report” was apparently beyond her), the rep insisted that in order to get the data, they’d need both our site username and password. Um, no.

Then yesterday, whilst travelling, we discovered we had lots of voicemail. We weren’t sure what the PIN was for the manual dial-in number (usually we just use the web page), so we called Vonage — only to be told that they only way they could reset the password for us would be for us to provide them with our username and password.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot? It’s never a good idea to give up passwords to anything — even game companies know this; Blizzard makes a point of making sure all its players know that no Blizz employee will ever ask for your password. We wonder what the hell made Adobe and Vonage miss this day of Security 101.

Heathen are decamping to Galveston for the weekend. Amuse yourselves.

Go check out Skidboot.

Or, at least, he points us to a picture that does:

Don’t you hunger in the depths of your soul for more Mr. T content on teh Intarwub? Well, hunger no more, for we have located the Mister T Visitor Guide to Los Angeles.

Have a party where the word “jeroboam” is used.

No, we won’t tell you what it means, either (it’s an old college joke (you sort of had to be there at the time (HDANCN?))).

Gawker reports that the woman who owns the apartment in which Cory Lidle tried to land this week is also the same woman who was seriously injured by a six-story Cat in the Hat balloon at the 1997 Macy’s parade.

Cursive writing is disappearing, in part because most schools no longer even do handwriting instruction beyond “write legibly.” Only 15 percent of the handwritten essays from the 2006 SAT were in cursive

We’d like to take this opportunity to stick our tongue out at our elementary teachers who for some reason found handwriting far more interesting and important than, say, reading, or science. We always saw it as a waste of our time, and treated it accordingly.

Dom ’96 goes excellently well with year-old wedding cake, which, contrary to rumor, was actually delicious in its own right.

When we saw the link, we were sure it was a joke; who in their right mind would make chocolate chip pancake wrapped sausage on a stick?

The answer? Jimmy Dean, of course.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to go eat a 1-pound hamburger with some goats.

After 9/11, the Feds hastily assembled a “no-fly” list, which seemed like a reasonable thing at the time — but then some idiots got in control of it. Now, 5 years on, it’s clearly a bad joke. Anybody with a name on the list (i.e., who shares a name with someone on the list) is going to get hassled like crazy every single time they fly, and the list contains such unusual names as “Robert Johnson,” “Gary Smith,” and “John Williams.” Also on the list? The president of Bolivia, as well as 14 of the 9/11 hijackers who are, presumably, unlikely to be a problem again.

Guess who’s not on the list? The 11 supposed British terrorists who were under surveillance for months prior to their (impossible, can’t-possibly-work) plot’s disclosure.

The Feds, of course, don’t care:

“Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list,” says Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since 2003. She regrets the trouble they experience, but chalks it up to the price of security in the post-9/11 world. “They’re going to be inconvenienced every time . . . because they do have the name of a person who’s a known or suspected terrorist,” says Bucella.

That’s like something out of Brazil, honestly. This Bucella woman clearly needs some time alone with a CIA interrogator and a clue-by-four. Idiot bureaucrats can relate anything to security, so it’s highly unsurprising this dufus mentioned 9/11 in explaining why every Robert Johnson who tries to fly in the U.S. gets the third degree. How, exactly, does this serve security, Bucella? Dollars to donuts you’ve never given it any thought.

There’s more, if you have the stomach for additional evidence of our government’s malignant ignorance, here. We found the story at Metafilter.

BoingBoing points us to this NYTimes article on hidden rooms of the decidedly non-panicy variety.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one.

Some nutbirds got married at Bryant-Denny Stadium a couple weeks ago. The bride wore crimson.

The New Orleans Saints returned to the Superdome tonight for the first time since Katrina with a 23-3 rout of the Atlanta Falcons; they began by going up 7-0 in the first minute and a half — as the kicking team. The Saints are now 3 and 0, and have their first Monday Night Football win since 1998. By the way, at 3-0, they’re one of the top 5 teams in the NFL at this moment (only the Colts, Bengals (!), Seahawks, and Bears can match them; the Chargers are also unbeaten, but have only played twice).

Who Dat? Who Dat?

Good News!

You get a New Yorker in the mail just before leaving for the airport!

Bad News!

It’s the Style issue.

Based on actual American mortality figures since 1995, this chart shows how dangerous terrorism really is. All of the following are more likely to kill you than Al Qaida: Falling, accidental poisoning, drowning, the flu, a hernia, or being shot by law enforcement.

Think on that last one a bit.

(Via BB.)

Polls are out. Ohio is still on top, but number 2 with a bullet is Auburn (on the AP; USA Today has ’em at 3, which is where AP puts USC).

Notre Dame is still overrated at 12 (AP)/13 (USAToday). The Hurricanes are out of the top 25 on both polls.

(Before anyone whines: yes, we went to Alabama (22 on USAToday, unranked on the AP; this is soft, since they’ve not played a real game yet), but we did it on money our dad earned on an Auburn D.V.M., so we win either way.)