Presenting The 380-Ton Explosives Blunder, or When al Qa Qaa Hits the Fan. Of course, the people in power take no responsibility - you think they'd start now?

Weird ass dreams abounded this weekend. The weekend was one part grueling (about 14 hours on the road, going to and from Camarillo) and two parts fun (a friend of G's got married and G was a bridesmaid, which ends a streak of 4 weddings we've attended since July), but perhaps the road food of choice - turkey jerky and Pringles - affected my dreamscape.

First dream, Saturday morning: I was living in an apartment with a few other guys. One was the guy who played Gareth on The Office. Another was Artie Lange from the Stern show. None of us liked each other at all. There was a big party going on in the apartment. I was back at school in Santa Cruz, fretting over a couple of classes I was going to fail.

Second dream, this morning: I was at the house where my pal Dan's parents live. They were having a problem with their neighbors, who had a collection of exotic animals they kept as pets. For some reason, the neighbors were instructed to get the animals by everybody's favorite irascible televangelist, Dr. Gene Scott. Dan's parents were making some sort of soup or stew outside, and a baby elephant (dressed in what I think was decorative East Indian garb) came over and put its trunk into the (huge) soup pot. Later on, I was eating bison stew. I'm not sure if the buffalo was poached from next door, but I had my suspicions. Damn tasty, though.

Jon Stewart wasn't really funny on last Friday's Crossfire. But he was correct - shows like Crossfire are wanky works of political hackery that do very little good. Tucker Carlson seemed aghast that Stewart didn't want to play ball and get in a pseudo-intellectual food fight, and the fun began from there. And Stewart's right - Carlson is a dick. Mainly for dismissing a lawsuit handled by John Edwards as a "jacuzzi case," when the truth was it was a defective pool drain that sucked most of the intestines out of a little girl, who now lives with a feeding tube. Talk about dishonesty.

What all the lefty political bloggers are raving about: this article from yesterday's NYT magazine. It scares me as a "reality-based" person to consider what guides our government nowadays.

The Rude Pundit School of Winning Political Rhetoric is back in session.

One other thing I forgot to mention: I find that I have a huge collection of not-quite-empty pads and notebooks of plain paper. Can't seem to finish one before I move on to the next. Somewhat emblematic of the unfinished projects that have dotted my life.

Paper shredding as catharsis. I've been going through a ton of detritus and personal effects that have been squirreled away in my bedroom - amazing how much one can amass over 18 years in the same living space. I've just finished getting granular on a bunch of mementos that were in a small chest that's been shoved in a closet. Scraps of paper and such, mainly from high school, also from college.

Amazing how something can trigger vivid memories, sometimes fond, sometimes painful - a collection of smart-ass quotes from the high school newspaper staff, programs and other clippings from college productions like Equus (egads, what a mindfuck that show was, on- and off-stage - and no, I didn't get nude, I played the guy who owned the stables) and J.M. (Peter Pan) Barrie's The Twelve-Pound Look (my first play in college, in a production that encouraged loud, angry, feminist audience response). I kept those things.

And then there was the stuff I fed to the cruel but fair Shredder of Bastardized Feng Shui. Ticket stubs - to Springsteen in '85 (Born in the USA tour at Oakland Coliseum), to the first Bridge School benefit in '86, to the '87 National League Championship Series (Giants vs. Cardinals - Cards in 7, the ratfinks). They sat forgotten in a neglected chest in a dusty closet.

And then there were the writings. These were harder to get rid of, but painful to read because of the bad earnestness. A short story from the 8th grade, "Truth, by Louis Kipilman II" - I was named after my grandfather, who died a year and 2 days before I was born, but he didn't have a middle name and I did, so being "the 2nd" was an apocryphal affectation that only a wanky kid would use. The suffix had a lifespan shorter than the ham-fisted story.

And the love poems. Oh man. I wrote a few that I handed off via a go-between to an absolutely gorgeous woman in my junior year of high school. She was a senior and so very much out of my league. It was the first time that I realized I could write things that could touch and affect other folks. She wrote back (via the same go-between) telling me how wonderful my poems were, and if she only knew who I was. Then I lost my sanity for a day, revealed myself, and learned that reality is not a John Hughes movie and that hot girls in high school will break your geek heart 10 times out of 10, no matter what stirred them on the page or how sweet the roses smelled. It was a great and terrible time in my adolescence... and wonderful memories to keep, but the evidence goes.

Interesting contrasts I see, feel and remember. As I continue to pack - and like most everything I do, it's lingering and overanalyzed in parts and utterly imperfect - I'm stoked to leave the nest, and sad, and nervous, and hopeful, and mourning, simultaneously.

Growing pains. At 32? At 32. Ain't that a bitch?

From the Get the Artist a Spell Checker, Stat! Department:

Reached at her Miami studio Wednesday by The Associated Press, Maria Alquilar said she was willing to fix the brightly colored 16-foot-wide circular work, but offered no apologizes for the 11 misspellings among the 175 names.

"The importance of this work is that it is supposed to unite people," Alquilar said. "They are denigrating my work and the purpose of this work."

Hey, muralist - was the purpose of your work to denigrate Van Gogh and Michelangelo by misspelling their names? And wouldn't you think it'd be important to get the names right since, oh, it's a mural for a goddamn library?

Just when I fuckin' bought an XM radio in July... Stern's going to Sirius. Oh well, at least it's not 'til '06. Unless a) there's a buyout on his Viacom/Infinity contract (though I doubt Sirius has the cash) or b) XM continues to trounce Sirius in market share and buys them out. I'm hoping for b), 'cause I don't wan't to lay out the cash for a sat-radio switch and I think XM has better programming.

Why I love the blogosphere: Rude Pundit meditates on the elasticity of Dick Cheney's sphincter. Now it's time to get me some breakfast.

This is hilarious. Why were people complaining that there was only 3 hours of Republican National Convention coverage on the broadcast networks? All we needed was the couple of minutes distilled in this QuickTime movie.

Big ups to Brennan Houlihan for putting it together. Says Brennan, "No there was no audio tweaking. Everything was as they said it. There were no repeated clips either. They really said those things that many times. In fact, there were even more instances of these words that I didn't use because the camera had cut away to audience reactions." Egads.