13 things

1. You're fat
2. Your husband is cheating on you
3. Who killed Kennedy
4. Lady GaGa's real name
5. The best place for a meatball sub in the Tri-Cities area
6. What it's like to be the sad man behind blue eyes
7. Why getting an online degree is easier than ever
8. The ending of "The Sixth Sense"
9. What happened in Vegas
10. Simple Green All-Purpose Cleaner is just water with green food coloring
11. These flowers I'm selling you are overpriced and ugly
12. Your lucky lottery numbers for today
13. I love you

Product Testing: Hormel Compleats Beef Steak & Peppers

Hormel Compleats are these little microwaveable meals that you don't have to refrigerate and you heat up at work and make you feel like an administrative assistant at an insurance company in Dayton, Ohio and taste like failure and sadness.

Here's what one looks like before you put it in the microwave in the break room and have an awkward conversation with a coworker who's getting her salad out of the fridge about just what the fuck you're about to put into your body:

Here's another picture of my Compleats next to a cool miniature skull I bought at Chichen Itza. You're not doing a very good job of warding off evil, Mr. Skull!!!!

BEEP. It's been 2 minutes. My Compleats is ready! Ouch, it's hot. Here it is!

MMMMM MMMMMM. Doesn't that look good? No, it doesn't. There are a lot of unfortunate things you could say this looks like, but "Beef Steak & Peppers" is not one of them.

It tasted like food of some type. I didn't gag or spit it out. Maybe "Santa Fe Style Chicken with beans and rice" will be better. Hey, it was only 210 calories! That saves me like 300 extra calories for beers tonight. I'd call that a win.

More proof we're truly fucked

I imagine it's possible to have a reasoned discussion about the federal budget. From what I can tell, though, there is no reason to believe that's going to happen.

I have to say that I'm more than a little apprehensive about the massive federal debt and the fact that Obama's FY 2011 proposes a $1.3 trillion deficit. I was equally apprehensive when Bush & Co. ran the debt up something fierce while claiming to be fiscal conservatives. We could have a conversation about why Obama has proposed the largest defense budget, even adjusted for inflation, since World War II, or talk about how we're going to have to eventually reign in entitlement spending. Those are all valuable conversations to have.

But we're not going to have those conversations. Yesterday, Obama said the following:

"You don't blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you're trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices. It's time your government did the same."

Now, one rational response to this would be "Mr. President, how do you reconcile the need to make tough choices with the fact that your budget proposes the largest deficit in history?" That would be a good question, a valid question, a question we'd like to hear the answer to. But that's not what happened.

Instead, the Mayor of Las Vegas got pissed because, you know, why should the President pick on Vegas by discouraging people from blowing their college funds there? And I turn on my fave right-wing radio and it's the same thing. I hear a guy call in and say something to the effect of "My wife and I just got back from Vegas and we had a wonderful time and I'll be damned if I'm gonna let this President tell me how I can or can't spend my money."

The next caller was - I kid you not - a woman who emigrated from Vietnam and has spent her life building a business in Vegas and wants to know why Obama wants her business to fail.

When this level of breathtaking stupidity finds a place in the national conversation, we all have reason to despair.

(If you're one of the right-wingers who only comes out to comment and tell me how wrong I am whenever I write about something political, spare me. The point of this isn't that Obama is great and Bush is bad or whatever. The point is that people will willfully misconstrue anything.)

Playing the numbers

As it happens, The Wife and I are gonna be in Boston Massachusetts the first week in April, and we've got our minds set on seeing a Red Sox-Yankees game at Fenway. Now, they open the season Sunday night April 4, but the game's at 8 pm and peeps will be drinking all day and I don't really want to go to a season opener with 40,000 shitfaced Bostonians plus it's really expensive so we're going to the next game, which is Tuesday, April 6, at 7:10 p.m.

So I've been scouting StubHub for tickets for the last week or so. When I first started looking, the cheapest tix on there were about $110 apiece. Now they've fallen a little, to $88 apiece (as of today). It's a little like playing the stock market. My gut is to wait a little longer and see if they go down some more. That's what I should do, right? I don't want to buy at $120 and then see better seats next week for $100.

Or we could just pay $362 apiece and sit in Field Box 48, Row J, but how about no fucking way.

Like you care, but after Boston, we're going to NYC, Washington, and Richmond, VA, so you've got that little travelogue to look forward to.

Went to the new Rosamunde on Mission and it was pretty fucking great. Unlike the Haight Street branch we all grew up in, this one has seats and they have fries and 21 beers on tap and shit like that.

Also stopped by Heart, a new wine bar/restaurant/art gallery thing on Valencia near 24th. Very sleek what with all the art and the wine in mason jars and what have you. Cool spot, although I can't see hanging out there for a long time and also they need more art. Still, interesting selection/variety of wines. Will do business again.

I don't know if "irony" is the right word, but...

The scene today, just moments ago:

Two protests in SF's Civic Center, about two blocks away from each other.

First, in front of the Federal Building, we have the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, of the repulsive "God Hates Fags" and "You Are Going to Hell" signs who show up at everything from college graduations to soldiers' funerals. I imagine they're in front of the Federal Building because of the Prop. 8 trial, but who knows? Hard to tell with people that fucked in the head. They've got their usual signage proclaiming how God hates you and wants you to go to hell. As it turns ourt, God hates almost everyone except members of the Westboro Baptist Church.

A couple of blocks away, in Civic Center Plaza, there is a sizeable group protesting the treatment of Christians in Egypt. They have signs like "Stop Torturing Christians in Egypt" and "Take Action to Stop the Killing of Christians in Egypt."

It's too much, isn't it? On one side of the street, we have a group of Christians spewing the most vile, debased hate against their fellow man, in the name of God. On the other side, we have a group of Christians asking that they not be hated and abused for their beliefs.

I get that the Westboro crowd and the Egyptian Christians have little in common (although certainly they have some beliefs in common), but I just wonder what someone who didn't know anything about Christianity would think. How can members of the same religion spew abuse and ask for protection from abuse at the same time?

There were a LOT more counter-protesters against the Westboro people than there were Westboro people. Good show, SF!

I just got Pavement tickets for the Greek Theater show in June

And I couldn't be more excited.



It's hard to describe my relationship with Pavement, one of my favorite bands of all time. On the one hand, I think of them as more or less permanently fixed in a certain time period - the 90's - although I still listen to their stuff regularly. Many, many of their songs remind me of very particular moments in time, not all of them good, but all of them memorable.

I never thought I would see them again live. 117 days away.

Here's where I give my BS opinion on the CBS Super Bowl abortion ad thing

So the kind of people that get agitated about stuff like this are agitated because CBS is apparently going to run a pro-life ad during the Super Bowl featuring former Florida QB and future NFL mediocrity Tim Tebow.

Apparently the ad is going to feature Tebow's Mom, who's going to say that doctors told her to have an abortion and she had the baby instead and it grew up to be Football Jesus.

Apart from Tennessee fans, no one should be that upset about this. For the vast majority of women, that fetus is going to become a Ritalin-addled behavior problem who blasts Cannibal Corpse after stomping into his room and slamming the door and knocking the Thomas Kinkade prints off the wall, rather than a monk-pure starting quarterback who writes Bible verses under his eyes and spends his spare time giving bone marrow to kittens.

But the bigger issue here is the fact that some TV ad during the Super Bowl isn't going to make any difference at all. First of all, how many pregnant women watch the Super Bowl to start with? And how many of them are on the fence about whether to get an abortion? "Hmmmm, I was going to get an abortion, but now that future mid-second-round draft pick Tim Tebow says it's a bad idea I guess I won't."

Look, women who want to have abortions in this country already have to deal with an unbelievable amount of shit, and it's getting worse all the time. Not only might a woman have to deal with a bunch of protesters screaming in her face, state legislatures keep enacting ever-more byzantine and abusive hoops that a woman has to jump through to get a legal medical procedure. Do you really think that a TV ad is going to be the tipping point?

Abortion is one of those things about which people already have their minds made up and rarely change their opinion. Have you ever had an abortion argument with someone that ended up with one person saying "Hey, you know what, that makes a lot of sense. You're right and I'm wrong." I doubt this ad is going to change anyone's mind either. And as long as CBS is willing to take ads from NARAL too, getting upset about this is a waste of time.

One side note. In that New York Daily News article I linked to above (where it says "pro-life ad" in the first para), the ad below appears on the side of the screen, or at least it did when I looked at the article. If you want to get upset about an ad, this one makes a lot more sense:

Yeah, losing 38 pounds in 2 months sounds realistic. For a POW camp.