Bad Dog!
First and foremost, welcome back, people. I hope you and yours had as relaxing and fulfilling a Labor Day long weekend as we did here at the Pops household. We spent our holiday weekend as a family, as we always do, tracking down bail-jumpers and delivering them to the sweet public justice they thought they'd escaped. I highly recommend it. You, your spouse and your kids beating the absolute bleeding shit out of a suspected felon who jumped bail in exchange for a piddling bounty nowhere near representatively recompensatory when we factor in the risk and the travel expenses for five people... well, there's just no substitute. I'll take it over family therapy any day.

Secondly, I'm coming to you all live from my happy little post-eating laptop. Why would I risk writing my precious, precious blogpost on something that has a habit of swallowing giant chunks of previous blogposts whole before they ever see the light of the blogosphere? Because nobody should ever buy an Nvidia 6600GT 128 MB PCI-Express video card, that's why. The goddamn thing died on me. I wrote to the company (EVGA) about some problems I was having with it and they immediately told me it was a problem with the card and they would be only too glad to replace it for me... for the second time.

At least this time the bastards offered to pay my shipping for me. So fabulous, great. Like that's supposed to soften the blow. Now I'm down to one single outlet for my blog with no redundancy. With no video output, my desktop is useless, meaning this little cantankerous laptop is the only conduit between a hungry world at large and (mostly) daily fresh Bucket. If something were to happen to the laptop... you know what, best not to even think of it. Worst case scenario, really.

...

We spent a lot of time in Orange County this weekend. We went to another Angels game on Friday night. Every Friday home game is "Big Bang Friday Night", which means they have a fireworks show after the game. My wife forbid me from explaining to my oldest boy the depth of meaning behind the subtle double-entendre of "Big Bang Friday Night". She thought it best just to let them wonder what it was Daddy was giggling about every time "Big Bang Friday Night" was mentioned. And then she most likely spent some time in private prayer hoping that most of my genes were at best recessive.


On Saturday, we spent much time and $3.00+ gasoline driving around south OC looking at condos and condos and condos. Then we thought: hey, you know what's cheaper than a condominium in Irvine? Laminate flooring! And then we thought: hey, you know what's cheaper than laminate flooring? No laminate flooring! The same shitty, beat-down apple-juice-stained carpet we have right now is practically free! And if you just neglect to ever clean it, it's also maintenance free!

So here we are with all of our debt in the same gilded box we always keep it in. The good news is we don't as yet have to buy it a bigger gilded box to fit it in. As of this moment as I type, we have decided not to feed it no matter how much it begs us. The furry bastard is all purrs and cooing and promises of a better life to try to sucker you in to throwing it something, but once you do, it always turns all surly and unresponsive and has your electricity cut off right before the new fall TV season starts.

No sir, not us. We're not falling for that again. If there's anything I can say with absolute certainty about Mrs. Pops and myself is that together we're at least as clever as an anthropomorphized representation of unpaid interest-bearing debt of our own creation. That and we're really, really hot.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.77


Pops


PS- Best contrasting headlines ever from my Yahoo! News setup.


Katrina death toll may be 10,000 as Bush vows help. Followed immediately by: Cycling champ Armstrong engaged to rocker Sheryl Crow. For some reason, I just laughed and laughed. Come on, everyone knows if you're going to follow 10,000 dead Americans in the most horrendous human catastrophe on US soil in anybody's lifetime, you at least need to counterbalance it with some gossip-sheet heavy-hitters. Your TomKat, your Brangelina, even a Bennifer II if you're in a bind... somebody with a combine-able nickname. Lance and Sheryl? Totally disrespectful.

Hey: Sherylance. Oh hell, I just thought of that. I retract everything I just said. Not just the PS, I mean all of it.
- posted by Pops @ 9:35 PM