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