An abbreviated list of things that frightened me as a child:
- being nuked by the Soviets (‘cause you know that Somerset County, Maryland would have been the first to go if WWIII started)
- the video for the Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger”
- lightning and tornadoes
- “Green Eyed Lady” by Sugarloaf
- Halloween
- any dark rooms in our house
- being abducted in a mall
- Lou Ferrigno (both as the Incredible Hulk and as Bruce Banner)
- Satanic cults that would abduct children and ritually sacrifice them (thanks to the fundamentalist Christian school I went to as a kid for scaring me with things like that)

Fun with Hotmail:

One of the reasons I stubbornly cling to my hotmail account is for all the wacky, fun spam you receive. So I thought I'd share a few of my favorite spam subject titles in a little segment we like to call Fun with Hotmail. (italicized comments mine)

a small penis shows through the pants (Just screams sexy, don't it? You're lookin' small and flaccid today, baby!)

first fukc (Shoddy spelling or an unnecessary attempt at self-censorship?)

an orgasm is just the beginning (Uh, you sent this to a guy, so that's not really true.)

Monkey Business (I clicked the link here. It's nude photos of Gary Hart.)

Sheep Love Videos (It's either bestiality pr0n or a statement of fact about the viewing habits of sheep. Sheep love videos, but prefer DVDs for the added features. And don't get them started on having to buy Godfather III in the Godfather series box set.)

S-H-O-C-K AND A-W-E.. lnwtmrv qlmsgulc bv oil (You know a phrase has officially been overused when you start seeing it in spam e-mails. And dig the subtle jab at the oil companies at the end. What's next - "EXPAND YOUR PENIS BY THREE INCHES AND FREE MUMIA"?)

WUWT, part the second:

- The outrage in some quarters that Avril Lavigne didn't know who David Bowie was or any of the '77 era punk bands or whatever. Why should she? She's not in the same tradition as those guys - she's not making any pretenses about "authenticity" besides a few pseudo-punk marketing gestures that anyone over the age of 15 should be able to spot. Besides that, the whole idea behind this canonization of 60's/70's rock is kind of ridiculous. I like a lot of that stuff, of course, but the idea that you must listen to something or be thought of as ignorant is rather stifling. Do we really want the last 50 years of music and pop culture boiled down to a must-read
(or -view, or -listen) list of 100 things? Honestly, one of the things I love most about pop culture is the fact that it's okay to like what you like without the sort of intellectual defense that you often have to mount in "serious" culture. It would be a shame if that self-seriousness found its way into pop music appreciation.

- Sports figures speaking out for the war. (I'm talking about David Robinson in that last article.) I'll make you a deal, right wingers of America - shut up the pro athletes and we'll put a muzzle on entertainers speaking out about politics. No backup catchers spewing rhetoric, no Barbra Streisand. I think this is one cause we can all rally behind.

- The new early 1950's nostalgia craze sweeping the country. Blacklists. Duck and Cover. Crypto-fascist nutcases with repressed sexual hangups in charge of the nation's law enforcement. I would provide more examples, but I have to go down to the frat house and swallow a few goldfish, then watch a rigged quiz show on the DuMont.

Wow. Writer's block is bad enough, but when you can't even come up with inane entries into a blog that no one reads, you know you've sunk to new depths. So some scattered thoughts while I try to come up with something (marginally) more cogent and interesting:

- The war. I'm against it, because I see nothing good that can come from the whole enterprise. (Yes, getting rid of Saddam is good, but we'll just install some weak pro-U.S. Shah type who'll be overthrown by militants after our national attention span moves to the next great evil.) I keep trying to find a positive spin (maybe it won't last too long, maybe the American Empire supporters in the White House will be thwarted, etc.) with no success. And the insufferable "you support this war or you're a baby murderer" line of propaganda is being pushed by the usual suspects on the right. At least I live in a somewhat more liberal part of the country now. If I still lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the sheer weight of all that flag-wavin' and God Bless the USA-singin' would probably send me into the welcoming embrace of Noam Chomsky.

- Music. Haven't bought or listened to much new stuff. Maybe it's just me, but this seems to be a particularly weak year for new music so far in the genres I like these days. Plus, I'm perennially six to eight months behind the times when it comes to music buying. In any case, there's so much good stuff from the last three decades alone that I'm unfamiliar with. I've listened to a lot of Stereolab and the Go-Betweens lately - critic's favorites that I had never really paid much attention to until recently. I've also been playing Morphine's "Cure for Pain" a lot - true, they only wrote one song, but it was a pretty good one, and they nailed that urban lowlife/boozehouse/depressive genre as well as anyone since Tom Waits' early albums.

- Books. Mostly reading up to take the CPA exam in May (which I will fail, and fail hard). Also reading William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," which I'm appreciating more now than when I read it in college. There's something about forced reading (and, even worse, forced discussion) that always sucked the life out of reading for me. Now I don't have to worry about what line of bullshit I'm going to spew out for my next paper or class presentation, so I can just enjoy the material on its own merits.

I think it's time to officially declare that the rich comedy vein of having white people talk like black people has finally been tapped out. "Bringing Down the House" and "Heads of State" - both of which look horrible despite starring the likes of Steve Martin and Chris Rock - have officially killed this whole routine. Every hack comedy writer now thinks that getting old white people to say "fo shizzle my nizzle" or something is a sure recipe for Instant Laffs. So let's all pour a 40 on the curb for Herbert Kornfeld and move on with our lives. Here's some suggestions for new wacky affectations for the desperate comedian:

- 19th century Russian dauphins
- Bulgarians
- members of Styx cover bands
- process servers
- TV weathermen
- grizzled prospectors
- lawn furniture salesmen
- Mormons

Most of my co-workers live in Fairfax County, Virginia. For those of you not familiar with the DC metro area, Fairfax is the richest county in the area and one of the richest counties in the country. There’s a certain snobbery that most of these people have about Fairfax County, as if it were a perfect Valhalla with no crime and dirt and trash and everybody’s happy and perfect and so on. (Compared to the rest of the DC area, which is apparently a gigantic crack house.)

Sure, Fairfax County is clean and safe - but it’s also incredibly antiseptic and dull. It’s like a gigantic outdoor mall. It doesn’t feel lived in or have any sort of character. Give me suburban pseudo-cities like Bethesda or Alexandria, or the somewhat sleazy charm of PG or Montgomery County.

I was filling up my car in Beltsville the other day. I was surrounded on all sides by the staples of lower class suburbia - a porn shop, a liquor store, a run-down gas station/beer/sub shop, one of those late night cash-your-checks places. Some guy pulled up next to me and offered me a free stereo. If you live in a place as boring as Fairfax County, you miss out on wonderful experiences like that.

Inspired by Freedom Fries, here’s my first attempt at a McSweeney's-esque piece:

Other Anti-French Alterations to American Culture

Schoolkids required to sing “Where is Thumbkin?” instead of “Frere Jacques”

Champagne renamed “Overpriced, Pretentious Fermented Grape Beverage”

LeBeau edited out of all Hogan’s Heroes reruns

“Croissant” now pronounced like it’s spelled, just ‘cause it pisses those frogs off

All hot dogs will be served with Gulden's instead of French's (sorry, but we must make sacrifices in war)

All Pepe LePew cartoons include new scene where the female cat with the white stripe knees Pepe in the balls and belittles his manhood

Mardi Gras renamed “Tits ‘n Vomit Week”