I Can’t be Tamed

In the list of things that I don’t care about, whether or not Miley Cyrus is too young to dress like a bimbo is right up there at the top. It’s big news on the entertainment shows and clogging the tubes of the Interweb, along with what is going to happen to the short dead black guy’s body. Which I also don’t care anything about a lot, so much so in fact that I can’t remember his name.

Children are the future!

Gary Coleman.  That’s him. The little creepy dude who was in that show. I don’t care at all what happens to his body, as long as I don’t have to keep tripping over the blasted thing. Make up your mind and get it out of here already, willya?

I also don’t give a rat’s ass about BP executives making idiotic remarks about “the little people” and suchlike. They’re goddamned foreigners, so what can you expect? I do care that they get the leak plugged and pay through the eyeballs to clean up their mess, but they can say any damned fool thing they want as long as they keep writing the checks.

I also don’t care if President Obama looks angry enough. That’s entirely unimportant to me. I do care that the Federal response to the catastrophe seems slow and disjointed, and that nobody has convinced me that we’ll be better able to handle the next such disaster that occurs (and there will be another one, you betcher). I totally care about that − to the extent that it makes me kinda nauseous to think about it.

But that leaves me little room to care at all about Miley Cyrus, Gary Coleman, or that Julianne Hough is going to star in the “Footloose” remake.

What?

Hang on a second. Julianne Hough is cute as a bug. Why the hell is she appearing in yet another bogus remake of another lame ’80s entertainment title? Julianne, you’re wasting your talents here!

Julianne Hough would look great in harem pajamas.

You should be appearing in a remake of “I Dream of Jeannie,” which is a brilliant ’60s entertainment title featuring a scantily-clad bimbette eager to fill her master’s every wishes. You’d be totally hot as Jeannie.

But I digress.

Miley Cyrus, you go girl! You’re a star and almost 18 years old, by which time your 15 minutes of fame will almost certainly be over, thank God. In the meantime, dress however you like. I just don’t care.

Julianne, call me.

Pool Party

Summer’s here at last in Southern Pennsylvania, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to open the pool. We have a 20 x 40 outdoor pool here on Chez Murphy, and every year in late August we cover it for the winter with an aging pool cover made out of equal parts fragile, fraying canvas and duct tape. The cover doesn’t do much to keep the leaves, frogs, mice and bugs out of the pool or anything, but at least we can’t hear them screaming while they drown.

Cheryl Burke lounging at a pool not unlike ours (in that they both can be found on the same planet).

Come early summer, we gingerly remove the cover, revealing a soupy mixture of goo not unlike week-old guacamole shot through with the decayed bodies of the aforementioned leaves, frogs, mice and dead bugs – sorta an algae terrine. Noms.

After uncovering the noisome stew, I totter off to the pool store to purchase several hundred bucks’ worth of chlorine, algaecide, PH rasiers and lowerers, hardness enhancers, diatomaceous earth, clarifiers, shock, and crushed garlic for the vampires lurking at the bottom of the pool. (Seriously. The pool is 12 feet at its deepest point: there could be a minibus down there and we wouldn’t be able to see it through the green murk.)

Upon returning I begin the ancient “dance of the chemicals,” part science, part religious ritual to a dead water god who didn’t much like me when it was alive. I gingerly clean out the nasty traps and reassemble the various pumps, add the magic elixir (around forty pounds of chlorine and other assorted chemicals that according to the Geneva Convention are illegal in warfare but which are totally suitable for unsupervised backyard use by clowns like me) and fire up the pump. It runs gamely for about half an hour and then grinds to a halt, choking on the sludge accumulated in the filter. I clean out the filter, add some more chemicals and start it up once more. Rinse and repeat.

If successful, buckets of dead algae gradually fall to the bottom of the pool or rise to the top in a thick scum. I clean the bodies out of the filters and vacuum the floor and eventually the pool is clean. Of course by then it’s late August, and it’s time to close the pool up again for the winter. It’s all part of the great cycle of nature out here in the wild.

Well that’s not totally honest. I usually get the thing clean after about a week, and we frolic about happily for the summer, carelessly exposing our pasty white bodies to a horrified world.

Would I recommend owning a pool to anybody else? Hell no – it’s far too expensive and far too much work – unless you can afford a Cabana-boy named “Ramon” to open and maintain it. Also he should bring you drinks with umbrellas in them and know how to give foot massages.

But I digress.

Anyway, that’s it for today: I’ve got to work on the pool. If I can’t rid it of all life by Sunday I’m calling in BP.

A Modest Proposal

Like many of you, I’ve been brooding about this whole BP “Oops we killed the Gulf of Mexico” thing, trying to figure out what should be done about it. I was betting on the super-cool diamond-saw-wielding robots to do the job, and now that they’ve failed, I’m pretty flummoxed.

Heidi Klum - another tragic victim of the BP oil spill.

But, after some consideration I’ve come up with a backup plan that is almost certainly foolproof – Japanese Yakuza Ninja Assassins. I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. You know, I assume, that the Yakuza are the Japanese mob? They’re those fanatically loyal psychos who do whatever is necessary to accomplish their tasks, primarily because if they fail they have to chop off one of their finger joints. So here’s my thinking. Suppose we hired the Yakuza to chop off one of the BP CEO’s finger joints every week that passes until the leak is plugged. Wouldn’t that be excellent? Wouldn’t that just motivate the living shit out of Mr. Hayward and his company?

If we want to do this, I recommend that we do it quickly, before BP’s huge-ass lobbying effort has time to further corrupt our beloved leaders in Washington, DC. Frankly I think we should lop off a finger-joint of every politician who has taken a campaign donation from those clowns, but we’d probably run out of Yakuza.

P.S. Maybe it’s time the US government developed the technology and expertise to plug huge gaping oil leaks in the ocean floor when oil companies screw up? I’m just saying is all.

Yes, I Almost Died.

It’s true. On Memorial Day, my wife and I took a jaunt into Northern Maryland in my beloved Honda Accord, returning after a bumpy hundred-mile journey to discover that my front right passenger tire was missing some three out of five lug nuts – the posts were totally sheared off. The mechanic could offer no good reason why this happened, but he was rather impressed that the wheel hadn’t come off during the journey. (Thanks, Honda!)

I suspect foul play.

Clearly, my fearless blogging has irritated someone to the point where they’ve decided to silence me. I’m thinking it’s probably Joe Lieberman or Sarah Palin. Though come to think of it, if Palin wanted me dead she’d probably just chew my face off or shoot me from a helicopter; this kind of cowardly backstabbing attack is way more Lieberman’s style.

Well, kiss my ass, Joe. It didn’t work! And remember: if anything happens to me, that picture of you and the country ham in the Motel 6 goes straight to the Huffington Post!

Cannibal Pygmy Goat vs. the Oil Slick from Hell

So I’m working on this novel. It’s about horrible monsters from beyond space and time ripping big gaping holes in the very fabric of reality, threatening mankind’s survival across the multiverse. I’ll probably be throwing in some Satanic horse poop too.*

It’s unfortunate that this novel bug has gripped me at this particular moment, because I’m already busier than a three-peckered goat (thanks for that expression, Ken Rolstron!). The project that I’m on at work is nearing completion and I’m grinding out steaming mounds of text at an alarming rate. Also, there’s this blog. I’m starting to regularly get tens of hits on it and I don’t want to kill my “Murfmentum.” It’s all quite exhausting.

Cannibal Pygmy Goat Monster will Eat Your Soul!

On the other hand, writing is a huge distraction from the news of the day, so I have very little time to be outraged by the crap people are pulling in the world around me. For instance, I’m hardly infuriated at all by the thought that BP may have purchased so much political clout that they’ll escape major penalties for their “little accident” in the Gulf.

See, according to this Newsweek article, BP has spent millions and millions of dollars in Washington DC on lobbying efforts to weaken Federal offshore drilling regulations and lower penalties. Also, over the years they’ve put a bunch of the “Beltway” elite – folks like Leon Panetta (current CIA director), Christie Todd Whitman (former EPA director under Bush II), and former Majority Leader Tom Daschle on their payroll. I’m sure that these Very Important Dudes serve in Very Important Positions, like “Director of Appearing in Photos in the BP Annual Report,” and “Special Liaison to Other Politicians Who Really Want to Get Grotesquely Overpaid Corporate Jobs After they Leave Office.”

With all of the dough they’ve spent on politicians, BP may get off with a wrist-slap and a stern talking-to on TV by angry-looking Senators (all of whom will have taken their campaign contributions over the years). This doesn’t piss me off even a little. I’m just too damned busy writing.

Now THIS is fucking scary!

But here’s what does piss me off. When writing a horror novel – even a zany and wacky horror novel like the one I’m doing, you have to think of really awful, terrifying things to make your readers’ skin crawl. And frankly, it’s hard to think of anything more horrible and terrifying than an oil slick the size of Puerto Rico headed toward people that are just starting to dig their way out from the effects of Hurricane Katrina. That’s the worst thing I can imagine – far scarier than the Cannibal Pygmy Goat Monster I was going to put in my crappy novel.

So now I’m just screwed.

Hey, BP: stay the fuck off of my turf, willya? You stick to what you’re good at – buying influence in Washington – and I’ll stick to what I’m good at – writing bad genre fiction and raging impotently at huge soulless corporations and corrupt politicians. Okay?

Unless you’re looking for new board members, in which case, let’s talk. Call me.

 

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*They say that you should write about what you know.