Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Less Interesting Than Liver Night on the Food Channel
My thanks yet again to Tom Herbst for filling in over the weekend. He'll be back. The Mrs. and I are back from rural western Iowa, where our cell phones didn't work, and where they practically rolled up the streets at 3:00 on Sunday afternoon. The fact that this nearly made us crazy tells us we've been living in the city too long, apparently.
Advance excerpts from Bush's speech tonight are out--and the whole thing makes me wonder why the hell he's bothering, and more to the point, why anybody at a TV network thinks dousing the nation with yet another bucket of such bilgewater is more valuable than showing I Want to Be a Hilton. In case you were thinking of watching it, here's a list of 10 things you can do that would represent a better use of your time:
My thanks yet again to Tom Herbst for filling in over the weekend. He'll be back. The Mrs. and I are back from rural western Iowa, where our cell phones didn't work, and where they practically rolled up the streets at 3:00 on Sunday afternoon. The fact that this nearly made us crazy tells us we've been living in the city too long, apparently.
Advance excerpts from Bush's speech tonight are out--and the whole thing makes me wonder why the hell he's bothering, and more to the point, why anybody at a TV network thinks dousing the nation with yet another bucket of such bilgewater is more valuable than showing I Want to Be a Hilton. In case you were thinking of watching it, here's a list of 10 things you can do that would represent a better use of your time:
1. Write and mail a check to some organization the wingnuts would oppose--Save the Atheist Gay Whale Stem Cell Researchers Social Security Preservation Caucus and Medical Marijuana Cooperative, for example.The best pre-speech commentary I've seen comes from the Rude Pundit, who suggests that Bush is in the position of a man caught having sex with his wife's stuffed animal collection: there's absolutely nothing he can say that's going to convince anybody that things are going to be OK if we just stick with him. Over at Best of the Blogs, they've been assembling a drinking game.
2. Call your mom.
3. Pick your nose. (At least you'll have something to show for it after you're done.)
4. Pick your friend's nose.
5. Reorganize your CD collection in an entirely new way--by height of performer, for example, or autobiographically, like Rob did in High Fidelity.
6. Clean the little spout on the bottle of dishwashing liquid.
7. Make your neighbors think you're having sex while watching the speech. "Hard work, baby!" "Give me some more of that democracy on the march!" (It is not necessary to watch the speech to do this. Or to have a partner.)
8. Call your local TV station's news department and ask if their refrigerator is running.
9. Watch your favorite movie on DVD, but choose a foreign language audio track.
10. Blog.
11. Drink.
