the list could go on forever

there are some things that, i believe, we should eliminate from our society. these are merely items or concepts. actually, the best thing to eliminate would be people [see: george carlin, god rest his soul (tee hee). that one was for you george, even though you can't hear me or read this]. i'm not realistically saying that we literally need to eliminate (destroy, kill, etc.) people from our country/world, though we all are allowed to have fantasies.. i am not a violent man; i swear. i think my fan base (just add "base"!) knows where i'm coming from over here.

--the penny
we've all probably heard this before, but i've actually been on this kick for about 20 years or so. hmmm.. business idea #1: do not invest in something that is certain to lose money. sounds easy, right? however, it costs more than a penny to make a penny.. and (drumroll, please), guess how these pennies from heaven are funded.. you and i, my dearies. just saw a few 1-cent pieces dated 2008.

--cliches & other overused/stupid sayings (i had a list a mile long a few days ago, but i'm blanking at the moment; i'll think of more and add them. i'm taking suggestions)
-what have you
-expect the unexpected
-only time will tell
-the extreme overuse/misuse of the word literally
-each and every (so not just each one but every one? right..)

--the ability to come out of retirement (directed primarily at professional athletes)
roger "HGH" clemens, brett favre, we know that neither of you have the ability to do anything else other than play your games. we also know that you are two of the best to play them and that you still have excellent ability. we know that you are aging and don't want to (none of us do). we know that you still have a dedicated fan base (as i do) who wants to see you play, no matter how old you are. we know that you can still make a ludicrous amount of money for playing a freakin game. all understood.

quitting a sports career and then quitting retirement is no surprise or cool thing anymore. do something philanthropical. it's hard to believe that the only thing that gives you enough satisfaction is playing. with the disgusting amount of money and free time you have, do some good! here's one: spend time with your kids.

i wonder about athletes such as tennis #1 justine henin-hardenne who just retired while at the top of the game. and annika sorenstam (what up, annika!), also one of the top stars, and the greatest female golfer of all-time. will they stay in retirement? only time will tell (ha!). annika left the door open to playing more tournaments in the future. but golf is a little different in that one can choose a few certain events each year and also remain physically able to play later in life.

i admire athletes who can leave at the top of their game (e.g. barry sanders) and move on and accept that it was a wise decision. i myself officially hung up my boots years ago. still retired.

--weatherpeople's precipitation predictions (i actually don't have anything against these guys)
sure, give us a general idea what the temperature will be, if we are in the certain path of a hurricane. just stop telling me there is a 25% or 60% chance of rain or snow or whatever. many times, these meterologists (sorry for calling you "weatherpeople") are incorrect. ok, no big deal. i don't hold it against them when they are wrong; i'm sure one day i could be wrong about something.

pay me half as much as a meterologist makes and i can take a minute or two each day to look at some fancy instruments and tell the public that there's a 50-50 chance of rain or no rain. either it will rain, or it won't. right? sounds like 50% to me. oh, also-- there's a 50% chance i'm talking out of my arse. either i am or i'm not. good thing for me that my arse is fluent in english.

yippie-kiyay,
mr. falcon

later, kobe. you should be in jail anyway.

i was in massachusetts this past weekend and wish i were still there. summertime weather? yes. attitude? sure. celtics? jesus shitting christ, yes! first championship since '86. i vividly remember watching ev'ry celtics/lakers matchup of the '80s, shooting hoops with my buddy mr. schroerer in his or my driveway, always playing as though we were different members of the team. he, the blond, was usually larry legend; i, the black-haired one (now black & white) was usually kevin mchale.. and we never lost. unfortunately, the professional green & white have been losing consistently for the past two decades.

recent championships: pats, check. sox, check. celts, check. bruins... ok now, it's about freakin time they did something. and i do not care about the new england (there's a new england?) soccer team (whatever they are called), even though soccer is my favorite sport.

goin' back to cali

oh, our good friend, medicinal marijuana.. so looked down upon. but why? but not as looked down upon as recreational marijuana. i know when i have smoked, i get all fired up to commit some heinous crimes. like sitting on my couch. and eating. and playing video games with my friends. and being nicely, amicably mellow. man, we should be locked up. i think i'll turn myself in.

i've never been to california. maybe i should go before too long: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/us/09pot.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

so is it completely out of the question to deny people with cancer a chance to live with slightly less discomfort? come on.. i myself get frequent severe headaches; i also have trouble sleeping. my "medicinal" weed helps quite a lot actually with both. there's only so much ibuprofen and acetomeniphen my stomach and liver and kidneys can take.

do you believe in god? well, did she place cannabis in the earth for us to avoid it when it makes a lot of us feel better? true, there are certain things that grow from the earth that we are to avoid: poison ivy/oak, poisonous shrooms, brussels sprouts, etc. but those don't make us feel good anyway (just kidding about the sprouts- i love them actually, though a lot of people do not). what about aloe? it grows, and it feels good when you rub it on your skin. but should it be illegal? maybe so... i'll send around a petition.

but smoking cigarettes is cool, right? they do it in movies, though not as often as they did in the past. i've known a handful of people whose lives have been shortened directly because of smoking cigarettes. i've known no one who has become sick from smoking pot..

i happen to live in the state run by (scuse me while i vomit) tobacco giant, philip morris. i gag ev'ry time i drive by their compound on i-95. so people love their cigs a little more here than most places, even at what i originally thought was a respectable university. check it: http://www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=17152

smoke 'em if you got 'em (marijuana cigarrettes, that is). and share; we all share. much love.

yippie-kiyay,
mr. falcon

you dolts... grow a pair.

so hillary is giving her support to barack. cool. bout time? perhaps. whatever, no big deal. did she screw up your life by holding out? nope. so shut the fuck up about it. i always hear about this anti-hillary vote; i know of multiple people, even some members of my own family (all staunch republicans) who voted in their democratic primary just to vote against hillary (they live in traditionally red states). but when i have prodded them, i have never received a legitimate answer explaining why they loathe her so much. i hear, "a woman should be president, just not that woman." right.. why?, i ask.. no answer.. nothing.. so my logical inference is that these people in fact do not want a woman to be president. i also have heard, "hillary is the devil." well, actually, that post has been filled; dick cheney's the goddamn devil.

good piece here: http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/woman-in-charge-women-who-charge/?ex=1213416000&en=ecfd6e0b648807bb&ei=5070&emc=eta1

if i may put it tritely, tis sad that we (in 2008!) still look down upon women (see also: the bible). true, she is ambitious, maybe more so than most of us, but which politician is not? they all go around telling how smart they are, pausing in their speeches for the audience to applaud them. politics..

so what's the deal with hating hillary? do you really think her ambition is empty (see: w)? really? she's not a republican. oh, ok, she's much, much smarter than you. that's gotta be one reason. is it bill? (this is directed at those of you who think w is a better president than bill.) yeah, it would really be a shame to have two (2) extraordinary intelligent people in the white house, trying to quiet the shitstorm that has engulfed our country. it would be two more intelligent people than we have now (i would probably think laura bush is intelligent if she hadn't married that fuckin guy).

gotta go.. tough to write at work. moral of the story: bite me, hillary bashers.

ps- i didn't vote for her in my state's primary.

man u. reigns supreme!

i just ducked out of work for half an hour to watch the overtime and penalty kick shootout in the finals of the uefa champions league (and to chug a couple beers). manchester united, my favorite team in the world as far back as i can remember, just defeated chelsea in an all-premier league final. what an amazing finish, although i do not believe a match of that magnitude should be decided by penalties. of course, i'm the only one reading this who cares about "real" football, so i guess i should stop rambling. i'm just really pumped. that is all.

hit me with your best shot

so i almost got hit by a car yesterday.. on a not oft-used road in the parking lot of a shopping center.. as i was in a crosswalk..yeah..

ambling, minding my own bidness (good thing i was paying attention), a car comes toward me without slowing down. literally, with one more step, i would have been clipped. i've been run over by a car before, so you may think it was my fault, but no way, man. (oh no, flashback!) maybe five years ago, i was hanging out with some people and my ex. we were imbibing a bit, and for some reason after ev'ryone was gone, we began to argue. this was not an infrequent occurrence, as she had a penchant for picking ridiculous, pointless fights (i have no recollection of the content of this one). while flying off the handle, she ran out to her car and started it.

against what i felt like doing at the moment, i followed her and stood at the passenger door, talking her down, whatever. unbeknownst to me, she had put the car into reverse and set her foot on the brake. well, at one point she decided to take her foot from the brake of the idling car (don't really know if she planned to drive or if she was going to get out of the car). i was knocked over by the open door of her jeep and hit the ground in a millisecond, at which point the front right tire ran over my right foot/ankle, slowly, so it twisted my foot against the driveway, thus tearing the ligaments in the top of my foot and in my arch. um..ouch. i had previously torn ev'rything in that ankle and broken it as well years ago. didn't walk right for over a year.

x-rays showed no breakage (good). her dad, a doctor, wrote me a nice prescription for some percocet (better). now i'm with someone that doesn't own a car and probably wouldn't run over me with her bike (best).

so this car in this shopping center crosswalk? as it approached me (i did expect it to stop or at least slow down. lesson: don't trust people; they're stupid), i quickly reacted by sticking my foot out to distance myself from the car by more than a couple inches. i suppose with the combination of my surprise and disgust my decidedly heavy right foot left a sizable dent in his driver's side back door. i stood there, in the middle of that crosswalk, dumbfounded, that someone would nearly hit me, receive damage to his car, and simply continue to drive away. did he even notice? or did he realize that he was obviously in the wrong and not want to deal with any potential consequences? yeah, that's probably it. but at least he will be somewhat inconvenienced; i left the situation feeling just fine. karma, man. i don't believe in it, but karma, man.

lenny: nothing like revenge for getting back at people.
carl: vengeance isn't too bad, either.

lates,
moi

anyone have a razor?

i was hanging out with my good friend, mr. walnuts, last nite. we were sitting on his roof sipping some earl grey tea at the end of the nite. we chatted about all sorts of stuff, but something he said (mostly) stuck with me (please excuse my hazy head). we were talking about, i don't know, something boring like work. i mentioned the itch. you know, that time in a job or relationship (not this time!) or whatever when one wonders what more is out there. there's this thirst for knowledge and truth that just doesn't die in some of us. in some, it dies a painful, often quick, death; in others, it never existed in the first place. some of those people become quite content with their lives with the absence of change, and that's fine. others like me sometimes want to explore more, though i occasionally fear that my sense of adventure is fading away. i admit i crawl into that hole that is my private life and hide sometimes for longer than i should. but if i don't always fulfill my desire to move somewhere far, far away, i find a lesser way to change things up a bit.

i've had somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 jobs in 4 different towns in the past 11 years. i like variety. i do not fear change (my hair on my head and on my face change with regularity, for example). on that note, why do people fear hair? i've been treated significantly differently (definitely looked down upon) when i have a beard, when i rock the faux hawk, when my hair is a tad shaggy. who says i have to be clean-cut (which i am sometimes) to do my job well or to be a friendly guy? screw you, uptight beardists!

mr. walnuts concisely reminded me that it takes a significant level of maturity to realize accept the way that we are, especially if it's not accepted by many, and if it takes us, even slightly, out of our comfort zone. doesn't sound so deep and meaningful, but it feels that way. i might think he were merely trying to make me feel better if we weren't like-minded about much.

my friend, mr. poussee, who has been commuting 3 hours (90 min. each way), mon-fri, for 9 years simply because he was not really comfortable moving. fair enough, he's my good buddy and there's no way i look down on him for that, but i definitely don't understand it. i should say that i'm glad he's been around; we always have a good time, especially when there's a driving competition between him and my alter ego, mr. courvee. my porsche 959 rules!

yippie-kiyay,
mr. falcon

can this guy write about anything other than religion or grammar? ja wohl, el presidente. eventually.

so why is there such obsession and infatuation with religion and knowing what someone's religious and spiritual beliefs are? and why are so many lightning fast to judge? didn't the bible say something like "judge not, lest ye be judged?" i don't know for certain. i never got past the parts that said to stone the gays and rape the women.. why can some of us not just be? for example, what if a jew ran for president? a buddhist? or god (which god? i dunno) forbid, a muslim? they would have no chance. though there is a chance that a black guy with a weird (to many americans) name may (he better) be elected el presidente. i'll get off this religion thing, ok?

some letter written by albert einstein is being auctioned for a 5-figure price. it concerns some of his views on religion. good enough. in this composition, einstein calls religion the "product of human weaknesses" and the bible "childish." here's where it is http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24598856/?GT1=43001 (the article, not the letter -- my german is a bit rusty). the most complex german i know is: dein atem riecht wie hollisches sauerkraut. there should be an umlaut over the o in hollisches, if it's even spelled correctly. and i know those germans capitalize their nouns - that's why i stopped taking german; my lone german professor couldn't understand my anti-capital letter stance. the sentence that stuck in my memorie means "your breath smells like sauerkraut from hell." no offense.

i found the einstein article on msn.com along with a few other articles that i did not read because i couldn't stomach getting past the headers: "britney on last night's mother" (i think video clips were ready to roll as well), and "is the idol audience dwindling?" and you know what? i bet thet more people clicked on those two smaller side-headings than the top articles on einstein's letter or the thousands dead in myanmar and china. oh, britney.. oh, idol.. when will you both disappear? pop culture, celebrities -- excuse me while i go vomit. i'm not claiming to be too good for such things (well, actually, yes i am); there just happens to be so much more out there. i watch tv, and i understand the desire, and seemingly necessary need, to unwind mindlessly in front of the idiot box when i arrive home from work. but i'd rather watch almost anything than reality tv and the freakin babies on all of them (i guess you have to be a cryer to be selected to be on any of them) or some crappy show just because it has some really unintelligent, untalented chick who makes plenty of bad decisions. fascination of the abomination? i suppose that's part of it. other reasons? don't let me keep going.

more often than not i find myself watching some form of news (guess that means i've gotten old), especially countdown with keith olberman on msnbc. he's my favorite person to watch on tv. great rolling stone article on him here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13559914/the_most_honest_man_in_news

so, yeah, i watch msnbc - i'm a bedwetting liberal. don't know what that means, but i've been saying it for years about left-wingers and think it sounds better than the trite "bleeding heart" (better a bleeding heart than none at all - ah, an oldie but a goodie). to each his own, i know. seriously i do. some people live for that excrement that is produced by that fox noise/fixed news channel... so you know how cable channels are roughly bunched according to genre? sports channels are clustered; same thing with news channels, right? well, in the (surprise, surprise) exceedingly conservative town of augusta, georgia, the same concept applies.. sort of. the news channels are grouped in the 20s or 30s somewhere. msnbc is well-hidden at channel 176, a channel many cable subscribers do not receive. coincidence? nope.

my current read: lynne truss's eats, shoots and leaves. my rant last week on the semi-colon (;) convinced me i finally need to read it. and my life partner (hello, life partner) had it handy. i'm only about 50 pages into it, and it just gets my goat. not a day passes in which i don't see some painfully obvious misuse of some punctuation mark or some mistake of simple grammar. brutal, man.. then i ask myself why i read such things if i know they're going to make me angry. i'm a peaceful man! sidenote: i hate exclamation marks also, but you see that i was getting worked up and had little choice but to use one. the book itself makes me quite happy; just thinking about "cd's and dvd's" or someone in his "20's" for example, makes my head swim, as i know it does to lynne truss.

it's funny how one's mind can wander when merely sitting down to write a few sentences and how those few sentences can turn into 5 or 6 paragraphs. the voices in my head are much more jumbled than the words written here. i just hope they're moderately readable.

later skaters,
mr. falcon

props where props are due

i recently read christopher hitchens's god is not great: how religion poisons everything. in an eloquent and, more importantly, well-researched manner, he writes what tumbled madly through my head as a kid as my parents fruitlessly tried to raise me catholic. man, they could have spent their energy on something infinitely more productive.. hitchens's writings come with my highest recommendation. for you bible thumpers out there, it is merely a different perspective. for heathens like me, it scratched me right where i itched. i'll even go way out on a limb and say he's a better writer than i am. what i wrote in my last post was made better because of having read his book.

i'm a people too

my aforementioned life partner sent me this earlier:

A quote from George H.W. Bush: "No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God."

so is this man-made character titled "god" hovering over our nation? are we even one nation? why are we constantly so divided? far too much of this division is based solely on religion. for millennia, far too many atrocious wrongs have been done in the name of religion. can anyone tell me about some heinous acts performed in the name of atheism? get back to me on that question after your extensive, fruitless research. ok.. i'll stop (for now) before i really get going.

all i can say about the above quote is that i hope i don't get deported. with this whole obsession about illegal immigrants and how they're totally ruining our country, i fear for my existence in this country. wait.. actually, i didn't immigrate to the (semi-)united states of america; i was born here. but i dunno; i'm not one of those lawmaker people, so i guess my future is uncertain. my parents are gonna be pissed.

as far as my being a patriot.. well i do love my country, believe it or not. while i think that the government in general is pretty fucked, i'm thankful for a relatively uneventful upbringing. and i do know that i owe part of it to being born & raised in america. i just choose to recognize that america is not all-powerful and should not be involved in all global matters. does that make me unpatriotic? methinks no. people need to realize that a free-thinking person such as me (or barack obama, for example) is no less patriotic or american simply because i don't agree with the majority and blindly believe in a concept fabricated by imperfect humams, or because i don't wear a flag pin.

so basically, i think i can call myself a patriot. i cannot, however, call myself a nationalist. this slight difference in vocabulary, i believe, is where the perceived conflict lies among many americans. i can consider america to be the greatest country in the world if i like (i've never lived anywhere else, save for a summer in france, so i do not state this as fact). but i do not believe that we should be exalted above all other people in other nations. ok, that's enough for now.. i hope my tangents occasionally cross paths.

my high school mascot was the cavalier, and i didn't like that very much. but i think i like it better than patriot, especially if i'm not considered one. it took me a long time ti admit this: i'm a cavalier, damnit!

yippie-kiyay,
mr. falcon

i am the intelligent designer (of this blog)

so this is it huh.. i started my own blog and i have nothing of consequence to say. identical genitals you may inquire? don't know what it means or how my life partner even came up with it (we don't have identical genitals; they're opposite actually). but long before this pointless blog we found it amusing. i figure we will probably be the only two people reading any of this nonsense anyway, as much of what i say is for her and my own amusement (hi baby).

i almost never write with any sort of form. e.g. i detest capital letters, and i choose when i want to use punctuation. ordinarily i fancy myself a rather strict grammarian (taught english for several years), but unless i'm writing for a class (got my degree & that's enough for me), i don't care so much. i do, however, think that the semicolon gets a bad rap. i find it misunderstood (notice semicolon usage here); not enough people know how it's supposed to be used. the primary usage nowadays by these youngsters is in those freakin emoticons (can't believe i just used that word). in that vain a semicolon has become a pair of eyes in which one is winking ;-) so i guess it's ok for now until my dear friend makes a comeback as the 2008 (or 2009 -- i'm not picky) punctuation mark of the year. i just realized i use parentheses quite a bit.. note to self: fewer parentheses, more semicolons.

my updating of this page will no doubt take time, as my apathy more than occasionally oozes out of me.

later,
moi