byrneunit

I try not to get overly political up in this muther, but that’s less from a lack of desire to express political viewpoints and more from a lack of desire to formulate a well-thought-out opinion that doesn’t involve as much profanity as I generally choose to use.

That said, I heard something on “On the Media” on NPR today that I could not let slide. Read all about it here, at The Talent Show, where politics lives.

After failing yet again at NaBloPoMo, you say? (I believe that may have been a record for me. Three days?)

Well I will tell you. I have been tending to my newest and best hobby. No, not getting rejected for jobs for which I am deeply qualified. The other hobby:

Celebrity Hair Model Mervyn Musgrove

A good pal has a magical bassett hound named Mervyn, and I don’t exactly know how it came up, but at some point I decided that combining Dirty Dozen star Lee Marvin and bassett hound Mervyn Musgrove (Lee Mervyn!) was seriously the best and funniest thing that had ever happened. This led to the magic you see before you. And much, much more.

I hope you’ll enjoy this constantly updated gallery of Mr. Musgrove’s work, and that you’ll take this as a cautionary tale about why it’s bad to lose your job. If you are an Actual Celebrity, Mr. Musgrove can be reached through the talent agency of Leonard Sportsinterviews and Associates.

Though it doesn’t directly relate to heroes or heroism, I noticed this on several of our cereal boxes not long ago and was overcome with the sad hilarity of it. There are certain items or concepts that are inherently hilarious when you precede them with the word “Free,” and haircut is like 19 of those things.

I mean, all I’m saying is maybe some things you should pay money for.

So the theme for NaBloPoMo this month is “Heroes.” Not the godawful show, but the broader concept. My feelings on the former are honestly more clear-cut than those on the latter; the concept of heroism, for example, did not start sucking goat balls two episodes into the second season.

Here’s the part where I lazily and rhetorically ask, “What makes a hero?” I just now spent nearly eight minutes thinking about this, and from this I can assure you that this is, indeed, a tangled matter. For me, anyway. For starters, I think it’s not just my inner 15-year-old that thinks everything’s bullshit: I really do think there’s an empirically valid case to be made against the seventh-graders in charge of our national media outlets, and the idea of heroism they’re pushing. But it’s not an obvious one.

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What have I been up to? I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to. Spreading misery, that’s what.

Gus did maybe not need that much of a bath, in retrospect. The whole thing got started because Smudge’s dandruff was off the fucking chain, to the point where she became enraged whenever she’d see a Head & Shoulders ad in one of Gus’s Ladies’ Home Journals. Erin wisely took action with an ingeniously purchased harness (she started with a cat harness, but thanks to Smudge’s attitude of fattitude she was forced to exchange it for a CORGI HARNESS) and a bottle of cat dandruff shampoo.

It sure did work on Smudge, I can tell you that much. Why not expand our frontiers, Erin thought? Gus’s lower back/butt area is looking a little greasy, isn’t it? Let’s see what that’s about!

It’s about Gus being damp for like, literally an entire day. It’s also about his butt still looking kind of greasy afterwards.

BUT! Erin deserves high marks for initiative. Which is why she’s Hero #1 in my latest failed attempt at NaBloPoMo. Attagirl, honey.

I know this is old-ish news, but it’s been recurring to me so many times that I feel the need to talk about it. It keeps roiling around in my head because it’s without a doubt one of the most humorously perfect headlines I’ve ever heard:

Sham-Wow Guy Arrested For Punching Hooker in the Face

I don’t even feel like I ought to comment on it further, lest I detract from its simple beauty. (Bearing in mind that, duh, one should not punch hookers, though frankly I can see how it could devolve into fistacuffs when anyone starts biting your tongue and won’t stop.)

Well. It appears we have some catching up to do.

E’s Grandma finally jumped ship after a valiant and mostly unresponsive three weeks in bed. The length of this eventually put E in the awkward position of simultaneously being sad to see her Grandma go and kind of wishing she’d go ahead and do the thing. Not that her family isn’t great, or that seeing our remaining friend in Tulsa night after night wasn’t great, but three weeks with nothing to do and no wireless Internet to do it with will grate on a girl, I hear.

As for effects of the same on the guy, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t kind of revel in it a little. (I mean, look, my options were that or mope around the house for the entire month of February, so I don’t feel that guilty about it.) Oh what, oh what did I do with 21 days of complete absence from responsibility? Drank, mostly. One week I went out to breakfast five days in a row, until by Saturday, which I might otherwise set aside for breakfast with actual other human beings, I found myself actually dreading yet another day of rich delicious diner breakfast. I think I had a small bowl of granola just to shake things up.

Thank GOD for Fallout 3, which my friend Lee loaned me and which I have apparently played one hundred and one hours of since he dropped it in my lap mid-vacation. I’m not gonna figure out how many nights me playing the game ’til 3 a.m. that translates to; I’ll just say that the habit did indeed develop while I was at leisure, and that I’m having a hard time making it go away.

Ah yes, why was it that I stayed here instead of going back to Oklahoma with the rest of my family? To look for jobs, of course, and to theoretically interview for them. Ho, ho ho. Ho ho. Ho. This brings us to the job hunt, which is going about how you’d expect it to go if you weren’t expecting much. I should amend that; up until about two days ago, I honestly thought it was going really fantastically, and was almost certain I was on the cusp of something I could make an actual career out of, rather than just another job I hated and went to because I had credit card bills to pay. This wasn’t baseless; the first interview went well, and the second went even better, I thought.

The last two words of that last sentence are the death knell of happiness, is what I’ve learned. Clearly I need to stop thinking things, as this only leads to surge after surge of crushing disappointment and nonexistent self-worth. In fact, I hereby decree I will no longer think anything about anything, and will proceed to stare contentedly into the distance for the rest of my days, occasionally pausing for bouts of Taco Bell. This is good. I like this plan. I’m excited to be a part of it.

So yeah, the short answer to all this is, simply, Fallout 3. Is what I’ve been reliably doing. In fact, I daresay I’ve made it my job to play Fallout 3.  It may screw up the following day by leaving me woozy and under-rested night after night, but by god, it’s not going anywhere any time soon.

Reports of Erin’s grandmother’s death were, it seems, momentarily exaggerated. She’d been gradually sliding downhill since her husband died a couple of years ago, and at some point it was determined she had leukemia (??? which apparently isn’t that uncommon in older people, and is not necessarily an immediate death sentence? but still?), so she’s been in and out of the hospital for a while. This time sure looked different, though: She’d been in and out of consciousness for a week, seemed to be in pain when she was awake, and was, I guess, just generally not doing so well. Sensing an impending funeral, ELB and HGB hopped a reasonably priced Southwest flight to Tulsa to help her mom in any way she could. (Primarily this would involve applying grandchild whenever possible.)

Except there was one thing: Apparently during what appeared to be her last week on the planet, E’s grandma’s doctor was out of town. He got back into town Monday, took a look at the grandma in question, and determined that A) she was in pain because she’d been in bed all week, and b) she’d been delirious because she was doped up all to hell on industrial-grade pain medication. (This might also explain why she’d been in bed all week, and thus in pain: because of the treatment they were giving her for her pain. If someone in charge of reforming health care could read this and mull it over, that would be great.) So a day later, having been prescribed a quart or two less morphine and advised to get up and walk around, grandma got sent home, apparently feeling much better. Nyahaaa! Suck it, death!

Except that there’s the whole leukemia thing. The transfusions they’d been giving her aren’t doing her any good anymore, so they’ve cut them out, and so she is terminal, still, only now she’s at home. Which is much better for all concerned, in particular whoever’s paying for a week and a half in the hospital. They expect she’ll have a couple more weeks.

So, yes. Chalk another one up for modern medicine. At least E doesn’t have to be back at work or anything. Henry will miss a few shifts down at the box factory, but I think I can cover for him.

So Henry has taken a shine to “Imagination Movers,” and I’ve sort of stumbled after, as is frequently the case. I had initial misgivings about, mainly because of this guy’s soul patch, but the show won me over pretty quickly, in no small part due to the equal measure of brilliance and hotness of the supporting cast.

See, next door to the movers’ warehouse (or inside it? I’m kind of unclear on whether one party is a tenant or landlord or vice versa) are the super cute Nina and her Uncle Knit Knots. The guy who plays Knit Knots is quitely brilliant on a variety of levels. Knit Knots’s thing is that he’s incredibly boring: His business involves stapling and stacking paper all day, and his entire office and wardrobe are beige. Part of it is that the writing is really good, but Douglas Fisher’s delivery just knocks it out of the park. It’s frustrating that there’s no video of him playing the part anywhere on the Internets (or even of him playing a minister on an episode of “Melrose Place”), because it’s really something you have to see to get the full effect of. So basically what I’m saying is that you should totally take my word for it, which is a statement that contradicts nearly 95 percent of what I’ve ever written on this blog.

Oh yeah, and in further praise of the movers, their first album was called “Juice Box Heroes,” and if that isn’t just this side of brilliant, I don’t know from brilliant.

So apparently during the final minutes of the Super Bowl last night, viewers in Tuscon were treated to a mysterious 30 seconds of straight-up pornography.

Because I am both lazy and giving, I hereby invite you to craft as many jokes including the phrases “tight end,” “end zone,” and — as a friend of mine honest to god heard Madden say one time — “going straight up into a tight red zone,” as you see fit.