What's grosser than gross?

This dude who seduced and married his own daughter, is what.

Epithet, schmepitet

George "Macaca/Who, Me a Jew/User of the Word that Cannot be Named" Allen once put a severed deer's head in somebody's mailbox. Admittedly, it's not quite as bad as the scene in The Godfather with the horse head, because you wouldn't be waking up with head parts all over your sheets and jammies, but still, imagine checking your mailbox, hoping for an Entertainment Weekly, and instead you stick your hand into Tete de Bambi.

I can already sense the 2008 presidential campaign is going to be awesome.

Giving thanks, for reals

We used to sometimes have Thanksgiving with family friends who made everybody go around before dinner and say what they were thankful for, like, out loud. I always felt squirmy, and roiled by the opposing urge to devise something clever and ironic to say, and the sense that I should muster up something sincere-sounding. Not because I wasn't sincerely thankful for various things, don't you know; just because, being a product of my generation and all, it felt tacky to express such things without a nice shiny coating of irony.

So, yesterday our house got robbed (I guess the technical term is burgled), and all of a sudden this long-standing impulse was obliterated. I all of a sudden felt completely non-ironically grateful for all kinds of things: that the T&A kitties were still here and were unharmed; that the burglars didn't take my Gram's ring; that they removed items neatly, without making a mess, because that made the whole transaction seem much more polite; that all of our stuff wasn't destroyed in a fire or hurricane. When Mr. T&A described how the police officer had told him that, if this were a murder investigation, they would send the leaf that was mysteriously located in the middle of our bed to the lab for analysis (which then led him to detail his involvement in the search for Chandra Levy's body, and to boast that he had recovered part of her finger), but that since it was a burglary they wouldn't bother to send the leaf anywhere, I felt overwhelmingly thankful that nobody was out combing Rock Creek Park for my finger.

So, kidlets, that's it--just feeling pretty good about things. Have a good weekend!

P.S. Plus, Verizon finally made our internets work. Yahh! In the spirit of this post, I won't even remark on the fact that this took them nearly a month and that their "Surf tonight!" ad campaign is a steaming pile of crap. Thanks, Verizon!