Cats: Well, at least they're good for something.

If loving LOLCats is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

These things, once just a joke among internet geeks, are now becoming a bonafide phenomenon. Check out an article about them here:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/silverman/4862013.html

And if LOLCats rock your world like they rock mine, go here for more:

www.icanhascheezburger.com

Tastiest. Watermark. Ever.

Relevant message. Relevant place. What else do you need?

We've got your back, and the shirt that's on it.

One of the more inspiring news stories I've read this year. It's good to see what solidarity and mutual support can do to change the world. I'm certainly happy I've had the luxury of great family, friends and mentors (educational, professional, life-essional) that have allowed my to shape my life.



CAMBRIDGE — Two students at Central Kings Rural High School fought back against bullying recently, unleashing a sea of pink after a new student was harassed and threatened when he showed up wearing a pink shirt.

The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up.

The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.

"It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something," said David.

They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday — even the bullied student had one.

"I made sure there was a shirt for him," David said.

They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. David and Travis figure about half the school’s 830 students wore pink.

It was hard to miss the mass of students in pink milling about in the lobby, especially for the group that had harassed the new Grade 9 student.

"The bullies got angry," said Travis. "One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We’re glad we got the response we wanted."

David said one of the bullies angrily asked him whether he knew pink on a male was a symbol of homosexuality.

He told the bully that didn’t matter to him and shouldn’t to anyone.

"Something like the colour of your shirt or pants, that’s ridiculous," he said.

"Our intention was to stand up for this kid so he doesn’t get picked on."

Travis said the bullies "keep giving us dirty looks, but we know we have the support of the whole student body.

"Kids don’t need this in their lives, worrying about what to wear to school. That should be the last thing on their minds."

When the bullied student put on his pink shirt Friday and saw all the other pink in the lobby, "he was all smiles. It was like a big weight had been lifted off is shoulder," David said. No one at the school would reveal the student’s name.

Travis said that growing up, he was often picked on for wearing store-brand clothes instead of designer duds.

The two friends said they didn’t take the action looking for publicity, but rather to show leadership in combating what they say is frequent bullying in schools.



To all those out there who helped me - from the couple who gave me life to the guy on the corner that helped me pick up the books I dropped all over - thank you. You have truly made a difference in the life of at least one person on this earth, and for that you should be acclaimed.

I AM IMPORTANT! Said the speck of dust.

I spotted this piece on a forum where there were lots of folks saying that they believe that this advertisement, and many other pieces of art, ads, etc, like it predicted the events of September 11th, 2001.

I think it's more likely that the ad men and women behind the pieces, like most ad men and women, were merely trying to communicate a message relevant for the time (in this case, the early 1980s) with little concern for what the future held.

This piece is a good reminder that we in advertising are, in the grand scheme of things, supremely unimportant. All that we do is temporary, dependant on the present and rendered obsolete by the future. I think many inhabitants of this big ball of dirt, myself included, might do well to realize this fact more often.

I'm going shopping. Mind if I take the Suburban?

I had a half-drunken conversation with a few close friends this weekend about the state of the Union.

We've decided we're going to hell in a handbasket, and possibly a lot sooner than we thought. Oil prices are as high as they've every been, yet so has the percentage of Americans driving V-8 powered vehicles. We spend too much. We save to little. We focus on what we have instead of what we know.

In short, we're stupid, we're shallow, and we're increasingly both individually and nationally in debt.

And all the while lots of young men, including a few that I've had the pleasure of knowing before their deployment, are dying so that we may procure even more oil to fuel our stupid, shallow, indebted populace.

America: Fuck No.

Blimps: Laying waste to humanity at 3 miles per hour.

This has got to be one of the funniest stories I've read in a long, long time. Check it out.


THE HORROR OF BLIMPS

Last week while travelling I stopped at a Zany Brainy store and saw that they had a blimp for sale. It's called Airship Earth, and it's a great big balloon with a map of the Earth on it, and two propellors hanging from the bottom. You blow up the balloon with helium put batteries in it, and you have a radio controll indoor blimp.

I'd seen these things for sale in Sharper Image catalogs for $60-$75. At Zany Brainy it was on clearance for $15. What a deal!

Last night my wife was playing tennis and it was just my daughter and I at home. I bought a small helium tank from a party store, and last night we put the blimp together.

Let me tell you, it's quite a blimp. It's huge. The balloon has like a 3 ft diameter.

We blew it up with the tank attacched the gondola with the propellors, and put in batteries.

Then we balanced the blimp for neutral bouyancy with this putty that came with it, so it hangs in the air by itself neither rising nor falling.

It was easy and fun, and then I blew up another balloon and made Mickey Mouse helium voices for my daughter.

My three year old girl loved it. We flew the blimp all over the house, terrorized the dog, attacked the fish tank, and the controls were so easy my daughter could fly.

Let's face it, blimps are fun.

Alas, the fun had to end and my daughter had to go to sleep. I left the blimp floating in my office downstairs, my wife came home, and we went to bed, and slept the sleep of the righteous.

At this point it is important to know that my house has central heating. I have it configured to blow hot air out on the ground floor and take it in at the second floor to take advantage of the fact that heat rises.

The blimp which was up until this moment a fun toy here embarked on a career of evil. Using the artificial convection of my central heating, the blimp stealthily departed my office. It moved silently through the living and drifted to the staircase. Gliding wraithlike over the staircase it then entered the bedroom where my wife and I lay sleeping peacefully.

Running silently, and gliding six feet or so above the ground on invisible and tiny air currects it approached the bed.

In spite of it's noiseless passage, or perhaps because of it, I awoke. That doesn't really say it properly. Let me try again.

I awoke, the way you awake at 2:00 AM when your sleeping senses suddenly tell you without reason that the forces of evil on converging on you.

That still doesn't do it. Let me try one more time.

I awoke the way you awake when you suddenly know that there is a large levitating sinister presence hovering towards you with menacing intent through the maligant darkness.

Now sometimes I do wake up in the middle of the night thinking that there are large sinister and menacing things floating out of the darkness to do me and mine evil. Usually I open my eyes, look and listen carefully, decide it was a false alarm, and go back to sleep.

So, the fact that I awoke in such a manner was not all that unusual.

On this occasion I awoke to the sense that there was a large menacing presence approaching me silently out of the gloom, so I opened my eyes, and there it was! A LARGE SILENT MENACING PRESENCE WAS APPROACHING ME OUT OF THE GLOOM, AND IT COULD FLY!!!

Somewhere in the control room of my mind a fat little dwarf in a security outfit was paging through a Penthouse while smoking a cigar with his feet up on the table, watching the security monitors of my brain with his peripheral vision. Suddenly he saw the LARGE SILENT SINSITER MENACING FLOATING PRESENCE coming at me, and he pulled every panic switch and hit every alarm that my body has. A full decade's allotment of adrenaline was dumped into my bloodstream all at once. My metabolism went from "restful sleep mode" to HOLY SHIT! FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE OR DIE!!!! mode" in a nanosecond. My heart went from twenty something beats per minute to about 240 even faster.

I always knew this was going to happen. I always knew that skepticism and science were mere psychological decorations and vanities. Deep in our alligator brains we all know that the world is just chock full of evil and monsters and sinister forces aligned against us, and it is only a matter of time until they show up. Evolution know this, too. It knows what to do when the silent terror comes at you from out of the dark.

When 50 million years worth of evolutionary survival instinct hits you all at once flat in the gut at 200 mph it is not a pleasant sensation.

Without volition I screamed my battle cry (which is indistinguishable to the sound a little girl makes when you drop a spider down her dress (not that I'd know what that sounds like,) and lept out of bed in my underwear.

I struck the approaching menace with all my strength and almost fell over at the total lack of resistance that a helium balloon offers when you punch the living shit out of it with all the stength that sudden middle of the night terror produces.

It's trajectory took it straight into the ceiling fan which whipped it about the room at terrifying velocity.

Seeking a weapon, I ripped the alarm clock out of its plug and hurled it at the now High Velocity Menacing presence (breaking the clock and putting a nice hole in the wall.)

Somehow at this moment I suddenly realized that I was fighting the blimp, and not a monster. It might have been funny if I didn't truly and actually feel like I was having a legitimate heart-attack.

On quivering legs I went to the bathroom and literally gagged into the toilet while shaking uncontrollably with the shock of the reaction I'd had.

Unbeleivably, both my wife and daughter had completely slept through the incident. When I decided that I wasn't having a heart attack after all I went back into the bedroom and found the blimp which had somehow survived the incident.

I took it to the walk in closet and released it inside where it floated around with the air currents released from the vents in there. I closed the door, this sealing it in, and went back to bed. About 500 years later I fell asleep.


***

At about 7 am my wife awoke. She had been playing tennis and wasn't aware that we have assembled the blimp the previous evening, and that is was now floating around the the walk-in closet that she approached.

The dyndamic between the existing air currents of the closet and the suction caused by opening the door was just enough to give the blimp the appearance of an Evil Sinister Menace flying straight towards her.

This time the blimp did not survive the encounter, nor almost, did I, as I had to explain to my very angry spouse what motivated me to hide an evil lurking presence in the closet for her to find at 7 am.

I can order replacement balloons on the internet but I don't think I will.

Some blimps are better off dead.

Another Slap at the OSHA folks.

I especially appreciate the guy up on the lifted forklift. You couldn't make me stand there for $1,000.

OK, maybe I'd do it for that much. I am just a poor entry-level minion after all.

Why should I buy a Bentley?

Oh. I'll take two, then.

Go Green.

I attended the Kansas City Irish Festival over the weekend, and had a rollickin' good time drinking Pale and rockin' out to The Elders, whose song-writing I typically find to be just OK. One song this weekend, though, I did find to be well-written and, as is the norm with The Elders, wonderfully performed in front of a crowd of 20,000 or so crazy drunk Irish Kansas Citians. Here it is:

Right With The World

When the river flows up to the mountain
When the crooked turn into the curled
There’ll be plenty too many for countin’ my friend
When everything’s right with the world

When we ride off into the sunset
When the hero comes home with the girl
We’ll be ridin’ with queens in their long limousines
When everything’s right with the world

Not a word will be spoken in anger
We will hold every loving cup high
We will look our old enemies straight in the eye
As we drink to you and I

When the presidents fold up and go home
When the flags of the battle are furled
We’ll tear down the temples of concrete and chrome
When everything’s right with the world

When the arrows all fall away harmless
And the slings have already been hurled
We’ll unravel the road that we traveled from home
When everything’s right with the world

When the rumor turns into a reason
And the ghosts of rebellion have swirled
We won’t need any proof to follow the truth
When everything’s right with the World

Have a listen here. Track 5 on "Racing the Tide".

Thoughts from a Royal poet.

Dan Quisenberry pitched in two World Series. He invented the submarine sinkerball. He was the most devastating closer in the American League for some of the greatest Royals teams in history. In 1998 he was the 15th person and the first relief pitcher inducted into the Royals Hall of Fame. The Quiz is a Kansas City legend.

And yet I love the man for his words.

After he retired, Dan Quisenberry started writing. I still don't know why he didn't start earlier. His poems on baseball, his battle with brain cancer and sunny Sunday afternoons touch me in a way that poetry never has. They truly inspire and enrapture me.

Here are some of my favorites.

Old (G)love

mushy leather
burnt brown
light cracks
saddle creaks
your strings held up well
mine have too
we look trim enough
to still play

you protected me
Wilson A2000 XL
only glove I really liked
though I flirted with others
you were the one for me
I love your dark center
your womb
rich as Iowa soil
tight feel to my left hand
a worker's glove
you brought slap shots
stinging in my palm
but I knew where they were
so I could grab them quick

now you look so small
do you shrink like old men
stiff and less flexible?

me too

we're both on the shelf
but you still look nice
and holding you
feels so right



Vicissitudes of Love

glancing at her husband
of twenty-nine years
his nose in the sports pages
she thinks
dosomethingsaysomethingbreathedammitIcan'ttakethis
anymorelife'swaytooshortIgottabebetterthan
boxscores

he drops the paper, says
"the redsox are out of it,
let's go to the hills and pick blueberries"
and she thinks
Iloveyousomuch



And finally, Vocations

my attourney said
"we've gotta get you a job"
"get some structure into your life"
oh, I see
but poetry doesn't grow
in concrete
or in straight black and white lines
and besides that
I don't think well with a suit on


I can't figure out which I would rather be: As skilled as the Quiz, or as inspired. I think probably the latter.