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?
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:
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!
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:
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.
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?
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.)
Alabama had a creampuff (41-7 over Louisiana-Monroe) this weekend, but these results are worth a cocktail or two:
Honestly, we have no idea why ND always gets rated so highly in the late summer, only to get smacked when they bother to play real teams. They squeaked by unranked Ga. Tech (14-10) in the first week, legitimately beat Penn State (another poll darling), and then got their asses handed to them today. And they don’t play another ranked team until USC in late November. Between now and then, they’ll entertain such powerhouses as Purdue, Stanford, UCLA, and the Armed Forces Trifecta. W.T.F? If they stay ranked, it’s only because Lou Holtz has some deal with the devil.
The tickets to “Pretender Island” are ready for the Irish and the Miami Hurricanes, as ESPN put it. (The Canes dropped to Louisville, of all people, 31-7.)
Did you know it was still possible to rent telephones from Ma Bell? And that it costs $29 a month per set to do so? And that some 750,000 Americans still do? How much do you want to bet they’re all retirees like this woman?
Do the telco folks just not have grandmothers?
We don’t mean to say it’s evil that they offer this service. Obviously, that’s not the point. The point is that you can buy a phone in any given month for less than thirty bucks, and they know this, and they further must know that nobody renting phones has given this any thought at all, and that they’re probably all pensioners who just don’t know any better. This is known as “fucking your customer,” and it’s the sort of thing telcos can get away with because, historically, they have no competition to whom you can take your business if they piss you off.
If you’re in Japan, do not go on a game show.
I remember shaving.
I remember I was naked, hunched over my sink (the left one), still damp from the shower, face half covered in Barbasol. Craning, probably, to mow the recalcitrant part of my neck.
I remember getting half done and absently turning off the bathroom fan so I could hear Bob Edwards on the clock radio. I remember thinking his voice sounded funny. I remember realizing he was saying words that didn’t make sense, or at least words that I didn’t want to make sense. Some planes had crashed. Into a building, maybe? I kept shaving. Then, in the midst of discussing Bush’s first remarks on the attacks, he started stumbling over his words. Bob Edwards never stops; he’s a radio pro.
[That was] President Bush speaking this morning in Florida; he is on his way back to Washington now cutting short his visit to Florida where he was to promote his education programs this morning reading to elementary schoolchildren. The President may be the only one in the air at this hour; the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded air traffic in the United States because of reports that these planes that crashed into the World Trade Center (pause) today (pause) reports that these, uh, these planes were hijacked so the FAA has grounded these, ah, air traffic.
One of the Towers of the World Trade Center appears to have completely collapsed.
I stopped shaving and went downstairs to the TV, the absurd boom TV I won in an employee referral raffle scam before my firm started circling the drain sometime in summer 2001 (fuck you, Texaco). The story was set by then, and the only plot point yet to fire was the collapse of the second tower. I watched for a while before heading back upstairs to finish getting ready for work.
Which is weird. I guess the scale of the thing hadn’t really sunk in. It never occurred to me to stay home. At some level, I guess I wanted to be with my friends in the office — drain-circler or no, I still worked with a great group of people (this would last only another month, before bankruptcy and purchase and layoffs and office closure came in October).
About half the office was in; those with families and children and commutes were staying at home, but plenty of us were huddled around the TV in the break room, or perpetually reloading Cnn.com. The phones got lots of use; we had an office in downtown Manhattan, and wanted to make sure our friends were safe, too. We got lots of email. Rumors flew. Most were bullshit.
Midmorning, I got a call from Rob, one of my oldest friends. He’d been en route from Austin to visit our mutual friend Jack in Hawaii when the grounding order came, and was therefore stuck in Houston. “I’m in a cab; what’s the address of your house?” I had him come to my office instead, where I gave him the keys to my Porsche and instructions to come back in an hour. For some reason, I couldn’t leave yet.
Nothing happened in that hour. Rob came back. I left work — nobody was working — and we went for food. It was a beautiful day, cloudless and cool and dry. Chinese Cafe was open, bless them. After lunch, somewhat desperate for something to do, we went over to Rice, Rob’s alma mater, hoping for cheap alcohol. It felt like that kind of day. Neither campus pub was open yet, but there was no shortage of shell-shocked students. We went back to my house and caught Branagh’s “Henry V” on cable just in time for the St. Crispin’s Day speech. Nobody had any more interest in cable news, especially since it was already clear there’d be no new information. The girl I’d been kind of dating drove in, unwilling to spend the day alone in her apartment. My roommate came home; his girlfriend Lindsey came over. The five of us went to eat at a bar and grill around dinnertime, and we saw Carl. He looked somewhat worse for wear; an analyst for Merrill-Lynch, he knew the building, and I’m sure knew people who worked there. We drank. We went back home. We watched another movie (“Withnail and I”). Lauren went home. We all went to bed.
Rob stayed most of the week, sleeping on the couch, until his girlfriend could drive over and pick him up. Nobody I knew did any real work for a while after, but I’ll be damned if I can remember anything much else from that week.
Weirdly (or not, depending on how you look at these things), soon after 9/11 I started long-distance dating Mrs Heathen, who was living in DC at the time. We’d been emailing all summer, reconnecting (we’d been friends in college, but lost touch) and when I got busy at work and took too long to reply, she chastised me. I wrote her an actual physical letter as sort of a joke apology and mailed it during the first week of September. When she finally got back to her house after dealing with the Washington of September 11, my letter was the only item in her mailbox.
So here we are. Tell me what you remember, if you want.
We might’ve watched some of the FSU-Miami game tonight, if you hadn’t decided to put EIGHT SEPARATE FUCKING PICTURES onscreen at once. We honestly don’t know how long it lasted, but just a brief exposure to this nightmare was enough. (Honestly, we’d be happiest if both teams lost.) What is this, TV for meth addicts? Jesus Tapdancing Christ on a Segway, people, it looks absurd on our TV — 55 inches! — so we can only imagine how sucktastic it’d be on a smaller set.
From “Business Card Best Practices“:
7) Be different. One of my favorite cards? Matt Mullenweg’s. It says simply “1. Go to google.com. 2. Type in ‘Matt.’ 3. Press ‘I’m feeling lucky.'” (It also has his phone number on it).
(Yes, it works. Mullenweg created a popular blogging system called WordPress.)
It’s a cheap shot, but it’s still funny as hell: Denis Leary on Mel Gibson during color commentary at a Red Sox game. FanTAStic.
Frequent traveller Joey Devilla reports that the Brits are confiscating PENS at the gate — not at security, but at the gate, as part of the boarding process:
Another thing they don’t tell you — in fact, they don’t tell you until the search at the gate: they won’t let you bring a pen onto the plane. I only lost a ball-point pen which I’m pretty sure came from Tucows’ office supply closet. Others were less fortunate; in the bin where confiscated pens were being collected, I saw a at least a dozen “executive” pens, including Crosses and Mont Blancs. If you’re accustomed to carrying an expensive pen, do not take it with you!
Without pens, we had nothing with which to fill out the immigrations and customs forms required for international flights arriving at their first port of entry to the United States. We ended up — all 172 of us — sharing the chief flight attendant’s pen, passing it from row to row. (Emph. mine.)
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Operation Eden, one year later.